A Credible Threat Read online

  “So everyone was back by the first week in January.”

  Rachel nodded. “All of us getting geared up for the next term, and Martin back in school. The phone calls started about then. But I couldn’t tell you exactly when.” Rachel took another bite of her pancakes. “But we told you all of this when you were over at the house last Friday. Now you’ve been to see Marisol at the counseling center and you want to talk with me. Digging a little deeper?”

  I looked at her steadily. “Whoever is making those calls has some connection with one of the people who lives in that house. I’m trying to figure out what that connection is, and who it’s with. According to Nelson, he and Ben weren’t even aware of the calls until Friday, when the plants were destroyed.”

  “You don’t believe them?” Rachel asked.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said, a smile twitching on my lips. “I’m suspicious of everyone and everything.”

  “But why do such a thing?” Rachel countered. “Though I’ve considered that one of my housemates might be responsible, I haven’t been able to cast any one of them in the role, at least not for long. Let’s face it, we’ve all got a pretty good place to live. Sasha doesn’t charge us an exorbitant amount to live in her house. And she could. It’s hard to find accommodations so close to campus. We’re a fairly congenial bunch. Even if Marisol snipes at the guys.” She shrugged. “Marisol snipes at everyone, me included. She’s always got a mad on about something. That’s just Marisol.”

  Rachel lifted another forkful of pancakes to her mouth. I wasn’t as quick as she to dismiss the possibility that one of the housemates was behind the calls. What she said was correct. As near as I could tell from my investigation thus far, the calls had come at times when not all the residents of the house were there. Should I believe Nelson and Ben when they denied knowledge of the calls?

  But as Rachel pointed out, a motive for one or both of them to do such a thing was unclear. It appeared that the only time Nelson and Ben were routinely in the main house was mealtime. Their apartment had a tiny, barely adequate kitchen, which allowed them to at least prepare coffee in the mornings. As far as partaking of meals, even though Nelson seemed to live on takeout, both claimed they preferred the interaction with the other residents of the house in the big kitchen.

  My next line of investigation, the one I was pursuing now, was that the caller was someone known to one of the housemates. “Have you been able to cast anyone you know in the role of anonymous caller?” I asked Rachel.

  “Back to men,” she said. “Marisol said she told you about the guy she was involved with in high school. But that’s hardly recent.”

  “Maybe not.” I’d already put the wheels in motion, trying to find Peter Dace. If he’d stalked Marisol before, that made him a good candidate for the current role of stalker. But there was another possibility. It could be someone she encountered at the counseling center, a disgruntled boyfriend or husband. Marisol and I had discussed that prospect before I left Las Hermanas on Saturday afternoon. Other than that man she’d mentioned Friday night, she had not been immediately able to think of anyone who’d hassled center volunteers because of their work with battered women. Marisol told me they were all on a first name basis, clients and counselors alike, and last names rarely came into play. Still, there was a chance that a man whose wife had left him because she got some counseling would track down one of the counselors. Marisol said she’d think about it and write down any names that occurred to her.

  “There’s that guy who’s been hassling Vicki and Emily,” Rachel said. “He’s called the house several times. If you ask me, he’s the one. Vicki said he accosted her Saturday when she was at the library.”

  “Mr. Macauley is definitely on my list. What about you, Rachel?”

  “Me?” Rachel smiled. “I don’t have any men in my life, Jeri. At least not right now. And I haven’t had a relationship that ended badly enough for the guy to want to harass me.”

  “What about men you don’t know? You said earlier that you volunteer for escort duty at a local abortion clinic. And that anti-abortion pickets had targeted the doctors and some of the other employees. Let’s consider that possibility.”

  It was, however, fraught with the same drawbacks as Marisol’s counseling center. A doctor was an easier target than a volunteer, as Rachel had pointed out earlier. Doctors were in the phone book, with first and last names. With that information, I could find out where my target lived. Anyone could.. But the volunteers at the battered women’s center tried to keep communication between themselves and their clients on a first name basis. It was safe that way. I was sure it was the same way with Rachel’s clinic escort duty. Why go to all the trouble to pick one volunteer, find out her name, then find out where she lived? But there were some seriously obsessed people in the anti-abortion movement, as Rachel’s next words pointed out.

  “It’s worth checking,” she said. “A doctor in Dallas got a civil judgment against a bunch of anti-abortion protesters last year because they were stalking him. And that guy in Boston, who shot and killed the receptionist, just because she was there.” She shook her head. “Some of these people are quite sincere in their opposition to abortion, for religious or whatever reasons. However, my impression is that a lot of the men who show up at these protests simply hate women. They’re using the anti-abortion movement as a vehicle to express that hatred. Usually they target the clinic staff, not the escorts. But it’s possible someone could fixate on me....”

  “You thought of something,” I said as Rachel frowned.

  “Yes, I did.” She looked thoughtful. “The last time I was at the clinic, I’m sure I heard one of the protesters call my first name. I think it was a man. What if he found out my last name, where I live, my phone number? Particularly after Sasha had the number changed. Now, that’s creepy, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said.

  Rachel now looked troubled. She finished her pancakes and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I’m on escort duty tomorrow morning. You could come to the clinic, do a little surveillance. But I’ll have to clear it with Tate. He’s my escort partner. I’ll talk with him and call you.”

  Our server appeared at the table and I asked her to box up the rest of the omelet, which had defeated me. When she brought that, and the check, I examined the total and pulled some bills from my wallet.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” Rachel told me as we stood. “Hope our conversation was helpful.”

  Not as helpful as I would have liked, I thought, as we parted on the corner of Domingo and Ashby. I watched Rachel stride briskly down Ashby and felt as though I’d barely scratched her surface. I still didn’t know much about her, or any of the people who shared the house on Garber Street. I headed for downtown Oakland and my Franklin Street office, where I was about to remedy that lack of knowledge.

  Eleven

  MUCH AS I ENJOYED USING MY MODEM TO SURF the Internet, I was of the opinion that there were still aspects of investigation that required old-fashioned leg-work, such as tracking down and interviewing witnesses. And surveillance, or as I sometimes called it, hanging out on street corners. I was sure my mentor and former employer, retired investigator Errol Seville, would agree.

  I stuck the box containing the remains of the omelet into the little refrigerator tucked under a worktable at the back of my long narrow office. Then I wrote myself a note that read, “Take leftovers home.” Otherwise the box would sit there, forgotten, contents growing mold, until I began to wonder what was causing the smell.

  I made a pot of coffee. While the water dripped through the grounds, I checked my answering machine for messages and returned calls, setting up several appointments. A fellow P.I. in Eureka had completed some work I’d asked him to do and faxed me his report. I poured myself a mugful of coffee and sipped as I read through his information, then called him with a few questions. Once satisfied, I wrote out a check to pay him, stuck it into an envelope, and tossed it into the baske
t that held my outgoing mail.

  These tasks completed, I moved to my filing cabinet and dug out the folder I’d started on this case. Then I switched on my computer and cruised onto the information superhighway. I had a brief twinge of regret that I was about to infringe on the privacy of the people who lived in the Garber Street house. Especially since Vicki Vernon was one of those people. But I told myself it was a necessary step. The need to track down the harasser outweighed the privacy issue.

  Besides, I had the feeling something bad would happen if I didn’t find this guy.

  I was looking for signposts, something the housemates had in common that might point to the person in their lives who was making those phone calls and who had taken what appeared to be such pleasure in destroying the lemon tree and the rest of the plants. But so far in my talks with them, I hadn’t found what I sought. They all came from different backgrounds, different places, different interests. The only thing they shared was their status as students at U.C. Berkeley and the house on Garber Street.

  The first person to go under the microscope was Sasha Nichols. My assets check, and an earlier trip to the Alameda County Courthouse, confirmed that she did indeed own the house on Garber Street. Free and clear, as a matter of fact. The mortgage insurance held by her parents had, on their deaths, paid the outstanding balance owed on the house. It was worth quite a bit in the current real estate market, despite its somewhat lived-in condition. That was no doubt due to what real estate agents call “location, location, location.” Close to the U.C. Berkeley campus and in the Elmwood district, the assessed value was enough to impress me, particularly since I couldn’t scrape together enough for a down payment on a condo.

  Professor and Mrs. Nichols had bought the place after California’s Proposition 13 went into effect, so the property taxes on the place were higher than they would have been had they owned the house for a longer time. Since Sasha was a full-time student with a young son to support and a household to maintain, I could see why she felt the need to take in roomers.

  The Volvo she’d been driving on Saturday must have belonged to her parents as well, since my credit check didn’t yield any information about outstanding loans to any financial institutions. She had a credit card that she managed to keep paid down, although it showed an upward surge at Christmas. So had mine, I reminded myself as I reached for the coffee mug at my elbow.

  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I ran a check on Sasha’s former lover, the Haitian émigré who was Martin’s father, to see if there was any indication that Etienne was currently in the Bay Area. Eight years ago he was driving a BMW that had collected quite a few unpaid parking tickets, in locations ranging from San Francisco to Carmel. Then he’d unloaded the BMW, gotten himself a Porsche, and moved to Southern California, where he’d taken to speeding through West L.A. He hadn’t netted any tickets lately, though. After being cited for driving 100 miles an hour on the road to Palm Springs, Etienne had either left California or he’d cleaned up his act. This avenue of my investigation appeared to be a dead end, but I wasn’t yet ready to discount him entirely.

  Sasha had an undergraduate degree in sociology from Berkeley, obtained as a part-time student over a period of about seven years. After her parents died, she decided that what she wanted to be when she grew up was a lawyer. She took the LSATs, scored high, according to Vicki, and won entrance to the university’s law school. She was now in her third and final year of study.

  I’d done some actual legwork on Sunday, after taking Dad to the airport. That research included a trip to the Oakland Public Library. There, I’d scanned microfilmed issues of the Oakland and San Francisco papers. I made copies of articles about the January hate mail incident at Boalt Hall and the subsequent demonstrations in favor of affirmative action. Now I opened the folder on my desk and reviewed the articles.

  A flyer had circulated at the law school, lauding the recent conservative turn in national politics as well as the current anti-affirmative action mood in state politics. Sasha had given me a copy of the flyer itself, and what I read made me want to hold the sheet of paper carefully between finger and thumb before depositing it in some garbage heap where it belonged. With crude racist and sexist epithets, the flyer denigrated women and minority students at the law school. A pro-affirmative action demonstration was quickly organized by the African-American law students’ organization. As president of the organization, Sasha Nichols was quoted prominently in several of these accounts.

  But the incident occurred in mid-January. All the housemates seemed to agree that the phone calls had started the first week in January. Could they be connected with the Boalt Hall business? When the anonymous caller finally spewed forth words on Saturday, he’d used the same ugly language printed on the flyer, and more.

  I recalled the old rhyme I’d heard so many times in my childhood: “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.”

  Not true, I thought, shaking my head. Words can be painful and brutal, carving their power viciously on one’s psyche. Particularly words full of venom, which deliberately underscore the fact that people are different. I thought of all the things that make people different—skin color, ethnicity, immigration status, or the shape of one’s eyes, religious beliefs, sex and sexual orientation, even age and youth. These days people seemed to be focused on differences rather than similarities, looking at the things that separate us rather than concentrating on the ways we are all alike. I hope we don’t destroy ourselves before we realize that we’re all in this together.

  Destroy. I tapped a pencil restlessly against a notepad. Words, while they can hurt, are often a precursor to action. Instead of my computer screen I saw an image of the firebombed interior of a Sacramento city councilman’s house, a cross burned on the lawn of a family in San Leandro. I recalled the gay man who was beaten to death a few years ago on a San Francisco street. The baseball bats and epithets were wielded by a couple of young punks who, according to the mother of one of them, just didn’t like homosexuals. As though that excused murder.

  The angry white male is as much of a stereotype as the affirmative action baby. Nelson Lathrop certainly didn’t fit the stereotype. He appeared too laid-back to be angry at anyone. When I’d interviewed him over the weekend, Nelson seemed quite open. He told me he grew up in Menlo Park, the oldest of three children, in what he described as “your basic intact upper-middle-class nuclear family.” His father worked in the computer industry and his mother was an elementary school teacher. Nelson was a sophomore at Cal, studying engineering. Despite the goofy demeanor, he had a brain and knew how to use it. Getting into U. C. Berkeley, the flagship of the state university system, wasn’t easy. Nelson confessed he’d graduated first in his high school class. From what I could see, or couldn’t see from my empty computer net, he hadn’t been in any trouble since he turned eighteen.

  The fact that Nelson’s parents were comfortably well-off and had put money away for his college education meant that he didn’t have to get a job to make ends meet, like his roommate in the garage apartment. Ben Winslow, a history major, was attending Cal on a scholarship, but even with the addition of a student loan, he was still stretched for money. He’d told me his widowed mother in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district couldn’t give him any financial help. In fact, he was trying to assist her any way he could. She had his younger brothers and sisters to look after. He’d lived at home and commuted to Berkeley the first year he was in school, just to save money. But the time spent commuting and the boisterous and noisy atmosphere at home had taken a toll on his grades.

  The garage apartment was a godsend for that reason, but in order to pay his share of the rent and other expenses, he’d taken a job as a server at Marquessa, a restaurant on Oxford Street. The tips were great, he said, but working four nights a week cut into his study time.

  “I do what I have to,” he’d told me with a shrug. “Besides, this lets me give my mother a little something, to help her out.”

&n
bsp; My computer queries on Marisol Gallegos netted me little information. Marisol had stayed out of trouble and she paid her bills. After our conversation at the counseling center, she’d told me she was the first of her family to attend college. All her sisters and brothers had married and gone to work as soon as they got out of high school. In her opinion, she was considered the family oddity because she hadn’t taken that path.

  Marisol also had a scholarship, her focus sociology. Her mother was born in Los Angeles, her father in Mexico, though he came to this country as a child with his farmworker parents. He’d worked for years in a factory in an industrial part of East Oakland, between Hegenberger Road and Ninety-eighth Avenue, until the corporation that owned the place shut it down in one of the “restructuring” waves that had swept over the workforce in the past decade. He hadn’t been able to find another job so he set himself up in business as a handyman, repairing whatever machinery and small appliances came his way. Marisol’s mother waited tables at an Oakland restaurant.

  My fishing expedition on Peter Dace, Marisol’s old boyfriend, netted me an address and phone number in San Jose. Now I punched in the digits. An answering machine confirmed that there was someone named Pete living at the address. I hung up without leaving a message.

  Dace had been attending Chabot College in Hayward when Marisol Gallegos met him seven years ago. The relationship ended three years after that, but Dace had apparently hassled her for nearly a year afterward. Marisol said she didn’t think he’d graduated from the two-year college, and a phone call to the administrative office at Chabot confirmed that Dace hadn’t obtained any sort of degree or certificate. The last address they had for him was in San Jose.

  I picked up the phone and called Norm Gerrity, an investigator colleague with an office in San Jose and plenty of contacts in that police department. When he called me back he had what I needed.