A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 3: Murder Alfresco Read online

  “Health food,” said Sunny. “Hardcore.” She opened the bottle of pink wine and carried it and the baguette out to the deck. Rivka followed with a cutting board heaped with the rest of the food they’d bought. They sliced the papaya in half. The light made its naked orange flesh unspeakably beautiful, and the hold of glossy black seeds shone like caviar. Sunny tore off a piece of baguette and loaded it with cheese.

  “Salmon?” said Rivka, holding a dish of smoked fish out to Joel.

  “No, thanks. I’m a vegetarian,” he said.

  “No meat at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “How can you stand it?” said Rivka. “I would lose my mind if I had to face a lifetime without bacon, not to mention all the other succulent parts of the noble pig.”

  “To the pig,” said Sunny. “Long may he reign.”

  “To our delicious friend,” said Rivka.

  “What did it?” asked Sunny, turning to Joel. “Did you just wake up one day and decide not to eat meat?”

  “You could say that. I’ve been vegetarian since I lived in Japan. We went out to dinner one night at a very expensive sushi restaurant. The best in town. Their specialty was a certain kind of fish that they kept alive while they flayed it, right there at the table, so it would be really fresh. I had a mentor at the time who I considered very wise. I told him about how upsetting that dinner was for me, and he suggested I perform an experiment. He said I should go to the open-air market and buy two live sardines. Just two tiny little fish. One I should keep until I was really hungry, then I should kill it and fry it with some nice oil and lemon and eat it. The other I should again keep until I was very hungry, then I should take it to the harbor and set it free. The idea was to see which of the two gestures made me feel better. The first sardine was great, especially since I was so hungry, but the second one changed my mind. I’ll never forget seeing it shoot away into the water. I’ve never eaten meat since.”

  Sunny stared at the bread and cheese in her hands. “I had a dream kind of like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dreamed I was eating a fish that was still alive. It was looking up at me while I cut into it.”

  “Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something,” said Joel.

  “Maybe the fish is,” said Rivka.

  “When did you live in Japan?” said Sunny.

  “Three years ago, after Heidi and I broke up. I sort of needed a change of scenery.” He put down the guitar and refilled his glass of wine. “What do you suppose happened to her, anyway? Do you think we’ll ever know?”

  “She ran into somebody bad,” said Sunny. “She crossed paths with the wrong person.”

  “It sounds like you believe in pure evil.” He leaned toward her, his eyes growing intense. “I mean evil for evil’s sake. Not accidental badness or ordinary malice or anything understandable. Do you?” He didn’t wait for her to reply. “Because I think it does exist. I’ve seen it, and felt it.” He sat back in the canvas chair and savored his thoughts. “I’ll tell you something. I used to play football in high school. The coach was a big disciplinarian and ran a tight ship. He wouldn’t let us drink or smoke or even swear. If he found out we did, we were off the team, no questions asked. It was all about strength and discipline. We thought of ourselves as a kind of elite corps, and we took pride in our clean living. I played defensive end. It was my job to break through the line and bring down the other team’s quarterback. What you realize pretty quickly in that position is that you have to be aggressive, not just to win, but to keep from getting hurt. Collisions are not equal. One person delivers the blow, the other takes it. That was lesson number one: Always make the hit. If it looks like you are going to be involved in a violent situation, make sure you are the perpetrator of that violence, not the recipient. The other lesson was that the sensation of colliding with another body hard enough to rattle your bones and addle your head starts to feel good after a while. It sounds funny, but it’s true. That shock of collision is painful at first, but over time it starts to feel good. Pretty soon you crave it, like a drug. Every once in a while I still get that hunger to crush an opponent, hammer him into the ground, and feel the crunch of bones and pads giving way underneath me. I think that’s the nature of evil. When you start to crave that kind of power and release.”

  “That sounds more like testosterone than pure evil,” said Rivka. “Or maybe some very old instinct being woken up. The inner Stone Age hunter. I think of evil as having to do more with coercion. The guy who tackles you to hear your bones crunch is a badass. The guy who tells you he’s your best friend, then seduces your wife and teaches your kid not to trust you, that’s evil.”

  “What I can’t figure out is how they overpowered her,” said Joel. “She was in great shape. It would have taken somebody strong.”

  “Maybe they didn’t overpower her,” said Sunny. “She was more likely tricked or drugged. Or maybe they had a gun. It’s old-fashioned, but it still works. The gun is the great equalizer.” Sunny studied Joel Hyder. She had a growing list of questions in her head for him, but she didn’t want to put him on his guard. The trick was to get to them little by little. She decided to start with an easy one. “Why’d you two break up anyway?”

  Joel yawned. He put down his wineglass and picked up the guitar. He played it softly. “We just seemed better as friends. I’m a decade older than her, plus some. At the time, we thought that mattered. I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “I think it matters,” said Rivka. “I broke up with my last boyfriend for that reason. You have different priorities.”

  “What about recently,” said Sunny. “Was she seeing anybody?”

  Joel closed his eyes and rearranged his feet on the lip of the tugboat’s deck. “She didn’t have what you’d call a boyfriend, per se. For some reason, she didn’t consider the guy she was seeing as boyfriend material. He seemed to be away most weekends, for one thing. She’d see him on Wednesday afternoons, Monday nights, like that. She never talked about him much.”

  “He was B list,” said Rivka.

  “Maybe even C, but there was nobody in the A and B slots as far as I know,” said Joel, “and I think I would know.”

  “Maybe he was the one calling the shots and she was his B-list girl,” said Sunny. “Did you ever meet him?”

  Joel shook his head. “All I know is his name was Mark.” He scowled. “Aren’t you guys boiling? You should go upstairs and find some shorts. I saw a pair hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom and there’s sure to be another pair somewhere.”

  “That’s just a little too weird,” said Sunny.

  “It is really hot,” said Rivka.

  They climbed the stairs and found two pairs of board shorts without looking very hard. They changed out of their jeans and reemerged on the back deck, barefoot and wearing straw hats from the collection on the wall.

  “That’s better,” said Joel. “You look good in her clothes. Jeans are a crime on a day like today.” He went on softly playing the guitar, humming along occasionally. After a while, a neighbor started to play the piano. They could hear the notes as though the piano were directly in front of them. Joel put the guitar aside. A parrot screeched.

  “That’s Chopin,” he said.

  “I think it might be Mozart,” said Sunny.

  “I mean the parrot. The woman who plays the piano puts her parrot outside when she practices. His name is Chopin.”

  They sprawled on the back deck listening to the music. Rivka yawned and got up to investigate the rattling, metallic sound interfering with the piano’s notes.

  “It’s shopping carts,” she said. “People pushing shopping carts up and down the dock.”

  “They leave two of them at the entrance,” said Joel. “For carrying groceries and garbage and anything heavy.” The sun got hotter and the relaxed, foggy feeling from the wine gave way to a sticky lethargy.

  “I could use a shot of espresso,” said Sunny. “I’m so sleepy.” Joel
heaved himself upright. “Me too. All there is is green tea. You guys must know Heidi didn’t do coffee.”

  Rivka glanced at Sunny.

  “I knew she took good care of herself,” said Sunny, “but that kitchen is stocked with serious health food.”

  “She was hardcore. No meat, no dairy, no coffee, no refined sugar.”

  “Wow.”

  Joel pressed a finger to his forearm, checking for sunburn. He went inside and they heard his muffled voice from the front deck, apparently making a call. He came back with a bottle of sunscreen. “It’s getting late. Should we go for a canoe ride before we take off?”

  “Definitely,” said Rivka.

  The canoe was turned upside down on the dock directly below the sun deck. They flipped it into the water and climbed aboard. Joel and Sunny took up paddles while Rivka arranged herself in the stern, trailing a hand in the water. They paddled out to the end of the dock and into the channel, then explored the next dock over.

  Joel suggested they make a loop, paddling between houses. They glided past downstairs windows almost at eye level, catching glimpses of a bedroom, a man at work at his desk, a woman putting away laundry. At the dock, they ducked down, lifting up wires as they slipped underneath with just enough room between the water and the wooden beams. At Liberty Dock, they chose a wide passage a couple of houses down from Heidi’s. One house had all the curtains drawn. In the other, the man who liked to take out the trash was sitting stiffly on a couch watching cartoons with his sweater still around his shoulders and his headphones on. Sunny looked away, embarrassed to have invaded his privacy.

  They paddled back out to the main channel and swung around the tip of Liberty Dock and back in the other side. They spotted the police officers standing at the tugboat’s door about the same time the police officers spotted them. Sunny stopped paddling.

  “Don’t stop,” said Joel softly, without turning around. “Just keep paddling, slowly, like nothing is wrong.”

  Rivka sat up, turning to face the group of officers now watching the canoe’s approach.

  13

  They could hear the police knocking on the door while they hastily pulled the canoe out of the water and turned it upside down on the dock. Joel Hyder led the way inside. He opened the front door and stepped outside, closing it behind him. Sunny and Rivka went upstairs to change. A moment later, they heard Joel come back in. He shouted up to them from the living room. “They want to see you both. And they need IDs.”

  They gathered their shoes and socks from the sundeck and hastily put them on. When they joined Joel outside, he was trying to remember the name of the person he’d spoken to when he called the police to ask for permission to come out to Heidi’s house. The officers were listening, but they looked skeptical.

  “Let’s just see if we can reach Heidi’s father before we do anything else,” said one of the cops. He turned to Sunny. “And you are?”

  She introduced herself and handed over her driver’s license. “Is this your current address, in St. Helena?”

  “It is.”

  “And you were acquainted with the deceased?”

  Sunny nodded.

  “How did you come to be in her house today?”

  “I came with Joel.”

  “You came with this gentleman. How do you know Mr. Hyder?”

  Sunny blinked. “We met this morning. At the beach.”

  He ran the same questions by Rivka, who provided identical answers. The two officers conferred, then the talker told them to wait while he went to make some calls. His partner stayed behind to make sure nobody went anywhere. He and Joel struck up a conversation about surfing, something the police officer had always wanted to try. It was hot and there was nowhere to sit on the front gangway. Sunny was bathed in sweat by the time they heard the sound of the other officer’s heavy boots clomping loudly up the dock. He handed them their IDs.

  “I wasn’t able to reach Mr. Romero to confirm your authorization.” He made eye contact with each of them. “That means I’m going to have to ask you to get your things and leave. If you can confirm the family’s authorization in writing, you can come back later. Otherwise, if I catch you out here again, I’m going to have to cite you. What I’m going to do now is give you a warning. You only get one, and this applies to all three of you, so no more visiting unless you are in the company of a family member or have written authorization from the current owner of the property. Do not remove anything from the property other than what you brought with you today, even if you believe it to be your own possession, as this house and everything in it is still part of an ongoing homicide investigation. On that note, if I wanted to, I could get real nasty about this, and if I get called out here again, rest assured I will do so. For now, let’s just pack up, move out, and lock up.”

  “Who called you this time?” said Joel.

  “They chose not to identify themselves.”

  “Ah, one of our bolder citizens.”

  The officer finished filling in the blanks on the forms on his clipboard and handed them each a citation. “We’ll wait while you get your things.”

  They locked up, stowed the key under the planter, and walked down the dock followed by the two policemen. There were mercifully few witnesses. Only the preppy trash guy was outside, hosing off his front step. He gave them a friendly wave as they went by, oblivious to their police escort.

  In the parking lot, Sunny and Rivka said a terse good-bye to Joel Hyder within earshot of the two officers and walked to the truck. Sunny was about to back out when she saw a white truck pull into the parking lot behind them. Dean Blodger, stone-faced and staring straight ahead, drove past, the Pelican Point Harbor logo on the side of his truck nestled in a circle of arched type. Sunny stared after it.

  “Did you see that?” said Sunny.

  “What?”

  “Dean Blodger driving a white pickup truck with a circular black logo on the door.”

  “Who is Dean Blodger?”

  “The harbormaster we met this morning. He’s driving a truck exactly like the one I saw on Wednesday night.”

  “I thought you couldn’t remember anything about the truck.”

  “I remember it was white and had a round logo on the door. That could be the truck.”

  “Nine out of ten work trucks are white, and logos are either circular or square. It’s like looking for a medium-sized dog with brown fur.”

  “But this white truck belongs to a man who knew where Heidi lived. I could tell for sure if it had its lights on. What time is it?”

  “Not late enough to wait around until dark. I vote for getting out of here before things get even more complicated. I’m too fried to deal with the police again, or Dean Blodger, or even Joel Hyder, who must be sitting in his car right now wondering who the hell we are and what we really want. He knew we were lying. Anyway, if that is the truck, we know where to find it.”

  Sunny drove out to the freeway and headed north. She floored the gas on the old truck to little effect going up the grade between Mill Valley and San Rafael. Rivka slumped in her seat with her knees propped up against the dashboard. They chugged up a second hill and over the other side. “I think the harbormaster must have called the cops,” said Rivka in a sullen voice.

  “Joel Hyder also made a phone call,” said Sunny. “If the harbormaster were concerned enough to nark on us, he would have done it right after we got there. And if he did, it wouldn’t have taken the fuzz four hours to respond. Whoever called did it right about the time we left for our canoe ride.”

  “Like around the time Joel made his call.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if the harbormaster didn’t mind us being there initially,” said Rivka, “but after a while he figured it was time for us to clear out?”

  “Maybe, but it seems like a stretch. Another option is a stakeout. There could be somebody watching the place. If I were law enforc
ement, I’d watch to see who comes by snooping around. It’s a cliché that criminals return to the scene of the crime, and clichés always have some truth to them. Steve explained it once. He said that crimes rarely go exactly as planned, assuming they are planned at all, so the perpetrator almost always has to rush or improvise at least part of it. That opens up the possibility of mistakes. Imagine if you committed a serious crime and wondered afterward, ‘Did I leave the stove on? I know I turned off the iron, but did I leave clothes in the dryer?’ They can’t stand it. They have to go back and check.”

  “If they were watching, why did it take so long for them to bust us?”

  “Maybe someone is just swinging by periodically to check things out,” said Sunny. “Let’s leave that for the moment. There’s something else. I wonder if Steve knows about that key under the aloe vera. If everybody knew she kept a key outside, anybody could have made a copy. Or let themselves in and waited inside. For all intents and purposes, she did not lock her door. Also, that upstairs window looks like it’s always open.”

  “You’d need a ladder to get in that window, and if you used a ladder, somebody would see you,” said Rivka.

  “Somebody tall and strong enough to pull themselves up might be able to do it.” Sunny turned off the freeway and headed east toward Sears Point. “But they’d have to be small. Joel would never fit through that tiny window.”

  “Why would Joel want to climb through the window? You don’t actually suspect him?”

  “I don’t know what to make of any of this right now, but all that talk about evil and crushing bones was a little off.”

  “His friend was just killed. I think it’s a little harsh to accuse him of murder just because he said some strange stuff.”

  “You liked him!”

  “I didn’t like him, I just don’t think he’s a murderer. He seemed like an okay guy to me.”

  “I wonder how much of this Steve has turned up. I mean, does he know about Dean Blodger’s truck? And Joel Hyder? And the guy Heidi was seeing on the down low?”