A Credible Threat Read online

  Nelson’s blue eyes moved around the room and settled on Sasha. “I don’t like the idea of somebody hassling my roomies.” His grin returned, this time wry. “It makes them all tense and snappish, and they take it out on me.”

  Three

  AS I WAITED FOR THE SIGNAL TO CHANGE at the corner of College and Ashby, I watched the neighborhood residents going in and out of the shops and cafés. The sidewalks of the Elmwood district’s main shopping area were crowded this Friday evening in March. Café Roma was filled with people talking and sipping espresso. A few doors beyond that, the marquee of the old Elmwood Theatre announced a double bill of two of my favorite Audrey Hepburn movies, Roman Holiday and Sabrina. I’d have to call my friend Kaz to see if he wanted to join me at the movies tomorrow night.

  The traffic light changed from red to green and I continued past Ashby, driving down College Avenue toward Oakland. I watched the taillights of the car in front of me as I sifted through my impressions of the place Vicki Vernon now called home.

  The household seemed chaotic to my eyes, but I was an outsider. I was sure that once I looked past my initial impression of disorganization, it had a rhythm all its own. I recalled what Vicki had told me about the living arrangements in the Garber Street house.

  Rachel had the longest tenure as a tenant. She was older than the others, in her mid-twenties, a political science graduate student who was also a teaching assistant. She’d lived in Sasha’s house for three years. Her seniority had earned her the master bedroom upstairs, the one with its own bath. Marisol, a sociology major, had lived there about eighteen months. She, Vicki, and Emily had the other three second-floor bedrooms and shared the big bathroom. As Nelson had told me earlier, he and Ben shared the single-car garage, which had been converted into a tiny apartment, with a living room, kitchenette, and bath on the first floor, and one large bedroom on the second.

  Sasha Nichols had taken over half of the house’s first floor. She’d expanded the first-floor bathroom, adding a shower, and turned the former living room, her father’s old office, and the enclosed back porch into an apartment for herself and her son. According to Vicki, Sasha’s parents had died about five years ago, within a year of each other, her father of a heart attack and her mother of cancer. In order to keep the house where she’d grown up, Sasha began taking in roomers.

  No one had said anything about Martin’s father, I realized. Was he in the picture at all?

  Living in the Berkeley brown shingle with all its occupants was not the sort of living arrangement I would enjoy. Except for the time I lived with Sid, first as lovers and later as husband and wife, I’d never had a roommate. Unless you could count Abigail, the fat brown tabby who’d been with me through it all, and Black Bart, the half-wild kitten who’d joined the household in December.

  I prefer living alone, not having to check in with someone every day, making my own rules. I understood the necessity of roommates, though. Living anywhere in the Bay Area was expensive, and Cal students often had a difficult time finding housing. Sasha’s house was in a great location, with its proximity to the campus and AC Transit line 51. It appeared that most of the people who lived there had found their own congenial rhythm, though I was sure Marisol would be just as happy if Nelson would go away.

  Farther down College Avenue I crossed the boundary that divided Berkeley from Oakland and continued on past the Rockridge BART station, bustling with commuters who’d gotten off the trains on the elevated platform and were streaming down the stairs and escalators to the parking lot and the sidewalks outside the station. Many of them stopped at the Rockridge Market Hall shops, to buy bread or produce or fish for the evening meal, or to have coffee or a drink with friends.

  Someone in the Garber Street house was being harassed, maybe even stalked. The events the housemates had described didn’t seem random. If the phone calls represented the start of that harassment, the destruction of the plants was definitely an escalation of hostilities. Who was behind this? I wondered. And for what reason? I had a range of possibilities to choose from, all very good possibilities. Before leaving the house, I told the residents I’d do what I could to find out who was responsible. For Vicki’s sake, I told myself. It might as well be for Vicki. That’s why she’d turned to me for help. From the others, I sensed varying degrees of reluctance.

  Stalkers are a frightening feature of the modern landscape, I thought, as I turned right from College onto Broadway. Maybe they were always out there, like sexual harassment and environmental damage, and we are more aware of them because of the huge amount of information that gets thrown at us every day. Stalking is an insidious, scary crime, and sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any defense.

  I recalled the most recent case I’d read about in the newspapers, unfortunately all too familiar in its similarity to other such cases. It involved a woman who lived in Oakland, not far from my own apartment in the Adams Point area. She’d ended her marriage three years before, but her ex-husband continued to harass her. She got phone calls, complete with heavy breathing and silence, like the ones the occupants of the house on Garber Street were receiving, only the ex-husband would call fifty or sixty times a night. She got an unlisted number, but it only slowed the ex-husband down for about a week. He followed her, her friends, anyone she dated. He drove up and down her street, parked outside her apartment building. Then his phone calls changed, from heavy breathing to whispered death threats, and he violated the restraining order she’d obtained.

  But even restraining orders could be merely paper shields. There was a woman several years ago in Richmond, north of Berkeley. She’d obtained a restraining order, more than once. In fact, she’d done everything the experts recommended. She’d gone through counseling with her husband. When that failed, she divorced him. He kept invading her home and beating her, so she went to a women’s shelter and got restraining orders to protect herself and her children. She even had him jailed after a violent episode, but it didn’t work. He broke into her home with a semiautomatic rifle. She and her teenage son were gunned down but survived. The two local cops who came to assist were shot and killed.

  Right now the Oakland case was in the newspapers because the ex-husband was being prosecuted under California’s antistalking law. It was the first one in the nation, passed in 1990 after an actress was stalked and murdered, and it became the model for laws in other states. Some people felt it didn’t go far enough, though, and the law was amended to give it more bite, to allow the prosecution of stalkers who intend to instill fear.

  Penal Code Section 646.9 calls it “a credible threat,” meaning a verbal or written threat, or one implied by a pattern of conduct, with the intent and ability to carry out the threat to cause the target to reasonably fear for his or her safety. The language wasn’t supposed to be gender specific, but the statistics showed overwhelmingly that most victims of stalkers were women, harassed by ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends. Sometimes the problem was to get police and judges to take the crimes more seriously. But sometimes the cops did respond strongly, and in the Richmond case, two of them died.

  The actress who was murdered was tracked through state motor vehicle files. Access to those had since been tightened, which made my job of finding information more difficult, but not so difficult that I couldn’t get what I looked for. Privacy and anonymity are hard to come by in this technological age. At the urging of George, the computer consultant down the hall, I’d recently upgraded my office computer to include a modem, and I could now dial into all sorts of databases and do the sort of electronic information gathering he used to do for me. The computer just made it easier, though. Information is out there, public record, for all to find if they know where to look. If I want to know how much Sasha Nichols paid in property taxes, all I had to do was walk over to the Alameda County Assessor’s Office and look through the microfiches available to the public.

  I’d worked on a stalking case several years ago, when I first became an operative for the Errol Seville agen
cy. Errol was my mentor, a private investigator I’d met while I was working as a paralegal for a downtown Oakland firm. I was bored with legal research, and when Errol told me he needed a female operative, I jumped at the chance. I’d worked for Errol for over five years, until he retired, sidelined by ill health. That’s when I set up my own shop. It was about the time Sid and I broke up.

  Come to think of it, I’d met Sid while working on that stalking case. I smiled at the memory, a bittersweet smile, thinking of all that had happened since.

  Broadway to Twenty-seventh, then to Vernon and up the hill to Adams Street, and my one-bedroom apartment. As I crossed the courtyard I noted the cream-colored blossoms on the lemon tree, planted in the small square of dirt under my front window. Through the slats of the vertical blinds I saw Abigail sprawled on the back of the sofa. At the sound of the key in the lock, she leaped down and came to meet me, tail up, imperious meows in greeting.

  I looked around for Black Bart, the interloper who had joined us in December. He was nowhere in sight, but the door to the hallway linen closet was open. There was something wrong with the latch, something I never seemed to get around to fixing. As a result, Black Bart had discovered that a paw hooked underneath the door opened it with ease. As I went through the hall on my way to the bedroom, I looked into the linen closet and saw him crammed into a crevice between two stacks of towels, an inky black spot on a background of green and yellow terry cloth. His head was tucked under his paws, but when he heard my approach he brought it up and I saw the white mask over his wide yellow eyes. He stared at me warily, still wild despite my attempts at domestication.

  Black Bart, named for a famous California outlaw, was a feral kitten who’d showed up on my patio before Christmas, hungry enough to gobble the cat food I left out for him, and scared enough so that it took me days to catch him. Once I had, he’d spent a lot of time hiding from Abigail, who, after ten years as a solo cat, was not thrilled at the prospect of sharing quarters and human. They’d warmed up to each other sufficiently to romp now and then, but Black Bart still wasn’t sure about me. I was the person who put the cat food in the bowls morning and evening, and my feet were nice to sleep on at night, but whenever I moved to stroke the kitten’s jet fur or pick him up, he shied away.

  I didn’t think Black Bart was going to be a lap cat.

  Four

  I WENT BACK TO THE GARBER STREET HOUSE Saturday morning. I wanted to meet Ben, the resident who had been working the evening before, when I first encountered the housemates. And I wanted to ask Sasha Nichols the question that had occurred to me after I left.

  It was about eleven when I parked my Toyota in a tight space about half a block from the brown shingle house. The sun was bright today, a welcome sight after two days of off-and-on rain that turned the East Bay hillsides a fresh green enlivened with the yellow of wild mustard. As I walked toward the house, I saw Martin, a small figure in red and blue, playing alone near the curb. He held an orange plastic contraption that on closer examination turned out to be a toy spaceship. The little boy was carrying on an intense conversation with himself, until he saw me. Then he stopped and stared at me as though I were an alien descended from another planet.

  “Is your mother home, Martin?” I asked.

  I thought I saw him shake his head, then he bolted for the walk leading to the front porch, which by now had been swept clean of yesterday’s debris. In fact, there were new additions, a couple of bright red geraniums bravely ensconced in clean clay pots, set on either side of the bottom step. Emily Austen knelt in a patch of dirt to the right of the front steps, transferring purple and yellow pansies from their plastic nursery containers into a long redwood planter box.

  “Can’t let the vandals get the best of us,” she said with a smile when she saw me. “I went to the nursery first thing this morning.”

  Her long brown hair was pulled back from her face and tied with a scarf. The tiny gold earrings in her lobes caught the sun as she moved. She mounded potting soil around the last pansy, then stood up and brushed soil from the formerly white gardening gloves she wore, then from the knees of her faded blue jeans.

  “Vicki’s not here. She’s studying over at the library. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

  “It’s not Vicki I came to see. I want to talk with Sasha. And Ben.”

  “Ben’s probably still asleep.” Emily nodded toward the driveway that led back to the garage apartment. “He works nights and doesn’t usually get in until past eleven. It may be noon before he surfaces. As for Sasha, she had a ten o’clock meeting over at Boalt. I told her I’d keep an eye on Martin till she got back. I expect her soon, though. She and Martin have plans this afternoon. Don’t you, Martin?”

  The little boy had been hovering on the other side of the porch, his wide eyes taking it all in. He didn’t respond to Emily’s question. Emily smiled at him, then turned to me. “He’s shy. Could you help me with this box, Jeri? It’s heavy.”

  “Sure.” I grabbed one end of the redwood planter and together Emily and I carried it up the steps. “Where do you want it?”

  “Along the railing, to the left of the front door. That way it will get the afternoon sun.” We set the box down where Emily indicated. “Thanks,” she told me as she removed the gardening gloves. She stepped back to examine the newly planted flowers, head tilted to one side. “Perfect. I like pansies. They’re so cheerful.” She turned and went back down the steps, picked up the trowel she’d been using to repot the flowers, and put it and the gloves into a large basket that held other gardening tools. Then she rejoined me on the porch. “Would you like some coffee? I’ve got a pot going in the kitchen.”

  “I’d love some.” I’d already had plenty of coffee that morning, but sharing a cup with Emily would give me a chance to learn more about her. At least that’s what I hoped.

  “I’d like you to play in the backyard,” Emily told the little boy, “so I can watch you.” Martin nodded and trudged up the stairs to join us as Emily pulled a key from the pocket of her jeans and unlocked the front door. Once inside, Martin ran ahead, through the living room to the kitchen. By the time Emily and I entered the sunny room with its oversized table, he was outside, on the back deck, running his plastic spaceship along the top of the railing.

  “You really do keep an eye on him,” I said. “Most people would let him play in the front yard. It looks like a nice safe neighborhood.”

  “Not these days, with all those stories about strangers snatching children off the streets.” Emily opened a cupboard, took out two mugs, and poured coffee into both. “And not with all this stuff happening. It’s got us all edgy.”

  “Have there been any more phone calls?” I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Yes.” Emily joined me at the table, her fingers tracing the design carved into the back of one of the chairs. “Last night. After you left. Rachel answered the phone.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked, leaning forward.

  She gave me a look with those deep blue eyes of hers, and I saw that wariness I’d seen earlier, which made me wonder whether Emily was keeping something back. She glanced outside to make sure Martin was still in view, then arranged the chair at an angle so she could keep one eye on the child and still see my face. She sat down and put the mug on the place mat in front of her.

  “I don’t know what good it would do,” she said finally.

  “If the people in this house don’t tell me what’s going on, I can’t find out who’s making those phone calls.”

  “That’s a tall order, isn’t it?” Emily sipped her coffee. “I’m sure you’re a good detective, but there are five of us living here in the main house. How can you find out which of us is the target? Or maybe we all are. Maybe it’s just some random idiot dialing a random number. He never says anything. He’s just... there.”

  “I don’t think it’s random. And neither do you. Not after he took the trouble to find out the new phone number after Sasha had it change
d.” I noticed we were both referring to the anonymous caller by using the male pronoun. The caller could just as easily be female.

  “What happened to all those potted plants yesterday makes it look very personal,” I continued. “Don’t you agree?”

  Emily didn’t say anything. Her eyes moved from my face to Martin, still playing on the back deck. “Chopping the top off that lemon tree was a particularly malicious touch,” I continued. “I’m sure the call last night wasn’t random. He wanted a reaction to the plants.”

  “No one has given him the satisfaction,” Emily said. “We just hang up.”

  “But it’s wearing thin, isn’t it?” She nodded, a brief up-and-down movement. “Then help me out, Emily. I’ll ask you again. Is there anything going on in your life that makes you think you might be the target?”

  She frowned, then we both looked up as footsteps thudded on the back steps. I glanced outside and saw Martin smile as the newcomer brushed a hand across his curly head. Then the back door opened and a young man entered the kitchen. He was short and barrel-chested, his torso straining the white T-shirt he wore. Khaki pants and a pair of sneakers completed his ensemble.

  “Is that fresh coffee I smell? I hope?” he boomed as he made a beeline for the coffee maker on the counter. He helped himself to a mug of coffee and leaned against the counter, savoring the first mouthful. He smiled at Emily and looked inquiringly at me.

  “Jeri, this is Ben Winslow.”

  “So you’re Vicki’s friend, the private eye.” Ben’s brown eyes looked at me appraisingly from his dark face, then he crossed the linoleum and held out his hand for a shake that was quick and firm. “Nice to meet you. I didn’t know about all these phone calls, not until Nelson told me. Gonna have to get on Sasha’s case for not telling me. How long has this been going on?”