Till The Old Men Die (The Jeri Howard Mystery Series Book 2) Read online

  I knew about the nightmares because I spent the next few nights with Dad at his condo in Castro Valley. The first time he cried out in the early hours before dawn, I roused myself from the daybed in the second bedroom and padded across the hallway to Dad’s room. He turned on his bedside lamp and ran a hand over his face, assuring me that it was nothing.

  “You had a bad dream.” I touched his shoulder, wanting to banish ghosts.

  “I keep seeing it,” my father said. “Imagining how it must have happened.”

  “Try not to think about it.” The words sounded foolish even as I spoke, but I didn’t know what else to say. Dad sat up, propping himself against a pillow, and ran a hand through his hair. He seemed embarrassed, as though a sixtyish college professor wasn’t allowed to have bad dreams after finding the body of a friend.

  It’s okay, Dad, I told him. Remember all those nights you came to my rescue? When I was a kid, the wind often blew the bare branches of a tree against my bedroom window, an odd rattling sound that sent shivers up my spine as I watched the moon shining through the curtains onto my patterned wallpaper, creating shadows that seemed to take on life. The tapping noise and the shifting light summoned the ghosts and ghoulies who crept out of my closet or slithered from under my bed. When I cried out in the night, it was usually Dad who turned on the light and sat by my bed until the specters went back into hiding.

  Now it was my turn to sit by the bed and watch my father slip back into uneasy sleep. I leaned over and kissed the top of his head, where his red-brown hair was thinning, feeling protective, as though I were the parent and he the child. He’s such a gentle, scholarly, sometimes unworldly soul who believes the best about people until he is convinced otherwise. As a private investigator, I’ve seen a lot more of the ugly side of life and people. That doesn’t mean I’m used to it. But it doesn’t shock me the way the sight of Lito Manibusan’s corpse shocked my father.

  He kept having dreams, and for the next few days he talked about Dr. Manibusan’s murder, the way people do when they’re trying to work something out of their system. He and his colleagues at Cal State attended the funeral that next week, held on the day the professor would have returned from Hawaii. Then Dad didn’t talk about it at all. He had participated in the public rituals of grief, and now it was time to put away the feelings and get on with life. A very grownup thing to do. It’s how we cope with death and other tragedies.

  But things like murder have a way of creeping out of the closet, like my long-ago ghosts. Now, as I sat here in Dr. Kovaleski’s office, I saw a hint of the lines and shadows I’d seen on my father’s face that weekend four months before, when he found Dr. Manibusan’s body. I feared that for him the woman claiming to be his friend’s widow brought with her the old nightmares.

  “It’s all so very odd,” Isabel Kovaleski was saying. I tore my eyes away from Dad and turned my attention to her.

  “Odd doesn’t quite describe it,” I said. “With the right combination of guts, bravado, and timing, she just might have pulled it off. Guts and bravado she may have, but her timing —” I shook my head.

  “Nevertheless,” Dr. Kovaleski said, “we really must look into this incident. I’ve talked it over with Dean Cleary, and he agrees. Lito’s personnel file listed a nephew as his next of kin, a Mr. Alejandro Tongco of Union City. I met him at the funeral, but I must say I don’t remember what he looks like. He and another man — a brother, I think — came to the department the week after the funeral. They donated all of Lito’s books to the university, packed everything else into boxes, and took it all away. More important, the money from Dr. Manibusan’s pension plan was distributed to the beneficiaries he listed. If this woman really is the surviving spouse, and does have a legitimate claim, we need to be certain. We should locate Mr. Tongco as soon as possible. Perhaps he can shed some light on the situation. But I tried to call him at the number listed in Lito’s personnel file and I got a recording saying the phone had been disconnected.”

  “So you want me to find him,” I said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult. I don’t buy this mystery woman’s story at all. If she really is Mrs. Manibusan, why hasn’t she sicced a lawyer onto the university? That would be the logical thing to do. No, she’s after something, and I don’t think it’s a slice of Dr. Manibusan’s pension. Whatever she wants must be in the professor’s files. She thinks she can get it by posing as his widow.” I turned to my father. “You told me someone was seen prowling around your office last Wednesday. Could it have been this woman?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “I didn’t see her, but Nancy Calderon did.”

  Nancy Calderon was a clerical worker, a part-timer who was working that day. Summoned from the departmental office a few doors down, she repeated her story. While Dad was briefly away from his office last Wednesday afternoon, Nancy glanced through his open door and saw a woman rummaging through the stuff on my father’s perpetually untidy desk. The woman mumbled something about a research paper and made a hasty departure. “She was in her thirties,” Nancy guessed, “Asian or Latino. Her hair was tied up in a red kerchief, but of course I could see her bangs. They were black. Couldn’t see her eyes, though. She was wearing dark glasses.”

  “Interesting,” I said.” Did she look at all like the woman who was just here?”

  “It’s hard to say. The woman I saw was short, but she was wearing baggy blue sweatpants and a big T-shirt, not dressed up like the lady who was here today.”

  “This is a commuter campus,” Dad pointed out, “with all sorts of people attending classes. But she was definitely not one of my students. Not in any of the classes I have this quarter.”

  Dr. Kovaleski sighed. “I wouldn’t have given the incident much thought, but the following night someone tried to break into the History Department office. Then on Friday, Dolores Cruz appeared.”

  “Tell me about the attempted break-in.” There wasn’t much to tell. On Thursday, as evening classes ended and the students dispersed, a professor leaving his office at Meiklejohn Hall looked down the corridor and spotted someone trying to open the door to the History Department office, across the hall from Dad’s cubicle. Challenged, the intruder bolted for the nearest stairwell.

  “Man or woman?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t tell. We’ve been having a crime wave on campus,” Isabel Kovaleski explained. “Robberies and assaults. Purses stolen at the library, offices burglarized. A math professor was mugged last week after a late class. So I don’t know if these incidents here are separate or part of the whole. You should talk to the director of the campus Public Safety Department.”

  “I will. It would help me if you’d talk to other members of the staff, to see if anything else has happened that might focus on Dad or Dr. Manibusan — phone calls, other unexplained visitors. As for Dolores Cruz, did you get a good look at that piece of paper?” I asked Dr. Kovaleski.

  She shook her head. “Not really. She never let it out of her hand. She claims it’s a marriage certificate, that they were married in Manila last August.”

  “The hell of it is, Lito did go to Manila last August,” Dad said. “That surprised me. He’d been planning to spend the break between summer and fall quarters in the central valley, interviewing Filipino immigrants for his book. Then he dropped by one night, gave me his extra key, said he had to go to Manila instead, and would I water the plants and take in the mail. He was gone two weeks, back in early September in time for fall quarter. I don’t know why he went to the Philippines. Research, I assume. And he still had family back there. But getting married —” Dad shook his head. “It’s out of character. If Lito had married, he would have told someone. He’d have changed the beneficiaries on his pension, because he took care of things like that. Besides, he was so broken up after his wife died of cancer, I just can’t see him getting married again, let alone so suddenly.”

  Behind her desk Isabel looked troubled. “I don’t know, Jeri. Perhaps we’re making too much of this because of the
way Lito died. It could be nothing, merely a nuisance.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t think so. I remembered the calculating brown eyes in the angry face. Dolores Cruz hadn’t been able to get what she was after by posing as Dr. Manibusan’s widow. But most plotters have contingency plans. The woman reminded me of a sleek and scrappy terrier with a bone in its mouth. Whatever she was looking for, I had a feeling she wouldn’t quit worrying the bone until she found what she sought. “The nephew cleared out the professor’s office, and probably the professor’s house as well. So Alejandro Tongco has all the professor’s personal effects.”

  “Not all,” Dad said with an embarrassed frown. Dr. Kovaleski and I looked at him, surprised. “I have something. Or I thought I did. I didn’t even remember it until after I talked to you last night, Jeri. But I looked everywhere, my office at home, my office here at the university. I can’t find it.”

  “Can’t find what?” Isabel Kovaleski and I asked simultaneously.

  “A brown envelope, five by seven inches, addressed to me here at Cal State.” Dad sketched a shape in the air and told us he’d received the envelope in the mail five days after Lito Manibusan’s murder, on the day of the funeral. When he opened it, the first thing he pulled out was a brief note from the professor, asking Dad to keep the envelope in a safe place.

  “I was about to leave for his funeral. You can imagine how I felt,” my father said, running a hand through his hair. “It was eerie. I was so upset, I didn’t even look to see what else was in the envelope. I just closed the flap and tossed it aside. Now I can’t remember where I put it.”

  “You stashed it in a safe place,” I commented, teasing him a bit. It wasn’t the first time Dad had gone into absentminded professor mode and misplaced something.

  “Or put it in Lito’s office,” Isabel added. “Maybe it got packed up with the rest of his things.”

  “Could be.” I stood up to leave. “In that case, it might still be in Dr. Manibusan’s files. When I locate Mr. Tongco, maybe I’ll find the envelope as well.”

  Two

  WHEN I LEFT MEIKLEJOHN HALL I TOOK WITH ME a recent issue of a history journal containing an article written by the late Dr. Lito Manibusan, his last published work according to Dad. My father had also unearthed a photograph of his friend, a color snapshot taken last year at some History Department function. In it, a compact Asian man looked unsmilingly into the camera, his dark brown eyes intense and serious. He had been near my father’s age, with a few wrinkles around his eyes and his short black hair threaded with silver. The professor held a glass of wine in his right hand, but he didn’t look as though he was enjoying himself. Dad said the photograph was taken right after Mrs. Manibusan died.

  I had met the professor, of course, since he and Dad were such good friends. I thought the snapshot was a good likeness of the man I remembered. The only time I’d seen Dr. Manibusan smile was while his wife, Sara, was still alive. I had met her, too, a short, round-faced woman whose gentle humor contrasted with her husband’s more sober mien. They had no children, and together the two of them seemed to be such a perfectly matched pair that I understood why her death sent the professor into a long black tunnel of grief and isolation. That made it all the more bizarre that Dr. Manibusan would suddenly get married last August — to the unlikely Dolores Cruz — and then not tell anyone.

  The university’s Department of Public Safety was located in the basement of the campus library. I gave my card to the patrolman on duty and asked to see the director. He picked up a phone and punched in a number, talking briefly to the party on the other end of the line. A moment later an interior door opened and Cal State’s head cop favored me with a penetrating gaze and an economical greeting.” Jeri Howard? I’m Chief Martini.”

  She didn’t offer her hand. Instead, she pulled her door wider and motioned me inside. As I stepped past her into the windowless office, I gave her a quick once-over, guessing she was in her late thirties. She was a couple of inches shorter than my five feet eight inches, looking trim in her crisply tailored uniform. She had straight black brows over brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a long, prominent nose. Her black hair, silver at the temples, was combed straight back from her face and tucked behind her ears, where tiny gold balls decorated each lobe. The only ring she wore was a plain gold wedding band.

  At the front of her orderly desk I saw a large ornate penholder decorated with the globe and eagle insignia of the United States Marine Corps. The brass plate was inscribed to Master Sergeant Elaine A. Martini on the occasion of her retirement from the Corps, five years ago. Next to the phone was an eight by ten color photograph in a silver frame, showing Martini looking somewhat softer than she did now, in a blue knit dress and a smile, standing with a dark, broadshouldered man in a Marine Corps warrant officer’s uniform. She and the man stood behind two teenagers, a boy and girl who looked like amalgams of their parents. Based on the ages of the kids and her Marine Corps retirement date, I revised my estimate of Elaine Martini’s age upward.

  “Good-looking kids,” I said.

  “Thanks. Have a seat, Miss Howard.”

  I took a chair and she sat down as well, lacing her fingers together on the surface of her desk as she regarded me with those direct brown eyes. “Dean Cleary tells me the History Department has retained you,” she said in her low, no-nonsense voice. I sensed that she didn’t particularly like the idea of having an investigator on her turf. “I gather it has something to do with a woman claiming to be Dr. Manibusan’s heir.”

  “Yes, it does. I’m sure the university has procedures for handling such claims. For now I’m simply going to locate Dr. Manibusan’s nephew, since he’s no longer at the address listed in the university records. I stopped by because I wanted you to know I was in your jurisdiction. But I am curious about the attempted break-in at the History Department and the woman who was seen in Dr. Howard’s office. Possibly that person was the same woman who showed up today. Her name is Dolores Cruz, by the way.”

  “Maybe. But she sounds like a crank to me. I’ll check to see if we have a student registered under the name Dolores Cruz. I take it you want to look at the reports on both incidents.” She let me read the paperwork, a bit reluctantly, I thought. But someone, probably Dean Cleary, had told her to cooperate, so she did. There wasn’t much in either report, though, beyond what Dad and Dr. Kovaleski had told me.

  I gave her the license plate number of the Thunderbird Dolores Cruz had been driving, just in case it had come to the attention of the campus police. “The way this woman drives,” I told Martini, “she must have some tickets.”

  After leaving the Cal State Department of Public Safety, I retrieved my car and drove down the hill to the flatland, through Hayward to the Nimitz Freeway. I headed north along the east shore of San Francisco Bay, past San Lorenzo and San Leandro to downtown Oakland. In the foyer of the Franklin Street building where I have a third-floor office, I encountered my friend Cassie Taylor, stylish as usual in one of her lawyer uniforms, a blue linen suit and high-heeled pumps.

  “How do you walk in those things?” I asked. “It’s six blocks to the courthouse.”

  “That’s why I’m not taking the stairs.” She punched the button and we waited for the elevator to lumber its way down to the first floor. I’d been reading the first page of Dr. Manibusan’s article, a scholarly study on crime and Filipino immigrants. “I know someone from the Philippines,” Cassie said, glancing at the title as the elevator arrived. We stepped aside while it emptied of occupants, then got in. Cassie pushed the button for the third floor. “A photographer, Felice Navarro. She’s a member of our East Bay professional women’s group. The one I’ve been trying to get you to join.”

  Cassie had cajoled me into attending a few of the group’s monthly luncheons. I’m a professional, but as a private investigator I feel little in common with the doctors, lawyers, and corporate types in suits and briefcases who make up a majority of the group. Still, it’s a good place to make
contacts. At the meetings I had attended, I handed out my business card and as a result got several cases from women attorneys who wanted to hire a woman investigator.

  When we arrived on the third floor, Cassie headed for the front suite of offices occupied by the law firm of Alwin, Taylor, and Chao. My own office was opposite the elevator, a long, narrow room with J. HOWARD INVESTIGATIONS lettered in gold on the wooden door. Once inside, I set the history journal and photo on my desk and walked to the back of the office to open my lone window. It looks out at the flat roof of the building next door and, beyond that, the steel girders of a new building going up several blocks away, an indicator of Oakland’s much-promised urban renaissance. The new construction blocked what used to be a view of the freeway. If I were on a higher floor, I might have been able to see a sliver of water, the estuary separating Oakland from the island city of Alameda. The window and the water’s proximity at least gave me some light and the hope of a breeze on this hot day.

  I unfastened the top button of my striped cotton shirt and stood for a moment, watching the heat simmer off the surrounding buildings. It was early May and northern California was heading into another summer of drought, the winter snowpack below normal and the rains of March and April insufficient to fill the reservoirs and meet the needs of the growing Bay Area population. So we were back to water rationing and mandatory cutbacks, short showers and bricks in toilet tanks.

  In the back corner of my office a square wooden table holds my coffee maker and various other supplies. Tucked under the table is a little refrigerator. Now I opened it and took out a bottle of mineral water, running the chilly glass over my perspiring forehead. I twisted off the metal cap and took a swallow. Moving back to my desk, I checked the messages on the answering machine. One call was from an insurance adjuster who frequently hired me to investigate claims. The remaining calls were from people I didn’t know — prospective clients, I hoped.