Certainly Max Harper received some strange phone calls. But she wasn't a cop, she was a private citizen. How could this call tonight have any connection to a police informant?
Whatever the truth, that anonymous call, just after the murder, had given her a deep and lasting chill.
It wasn't as if she knew her neighbors, as if any of them would be concerned about her safety. Certainly none of them would have her phone numbers handy.
"So, you have another date? You want to hurry on through dinner?"
She looked at him blankly.
"You've been staring out at the street like you're waiting for a lost lover."
"I had a phone call, coming down. He wouldn't give a name. Said that when I left the apartment I was followed. I didn't want to tell you, and spoil the evening. He described a slim man driving a gray hatchback, said he'd been parked above the apartment apparently waiting for me. It's probably some nut call, but…"
Clyde's expression startled her. His face flushed but he didn't seem exactly surprised. "What the hell. You don't need crazy phone calls on top of everything else."
"It made me a little nervous, that's all," she said quickly. She wiped some water from the table with her napkin and unrolled the blueprints, weighting them down with the chip and salsa bowls. Clyde leaned over, studying the drawings. She had presented the floor plan and several elevations. The vaulted ceiling of the new room was impressive, both from the street and from within.
But even with the excitement of the promised addition, Clyde's mind remained on the phantom snitch. His thoughts about the tomcat were not charitable. Did Joe have to upset Ryan? Probably the car Joe saw had been some neighbor or visitor pulling away, and Joe had let his imagination run. Damn cat had to mind everyone's business. And what was he doing near Ryan's place? Or, in Ryan's place? Involuntarily Clyde glanced out through the pierced wall, himself, at the slowly passing cars, wondering if someone had followed her-and that message to Ryan wasn't the only phone call Joe had placed tonight.
Just before Clyde left the house Max had called, on his way from San Francisco to Sonoma. The snitch had been in touch, the same unidentified voice that contacted Harper periodically. Max always filled Clyde in because those calls made Max nervous. The snitch had never been identified, the caller refused to give his name, and he did not fit the profile of most snitches- he sure never asked for payment.
The bottom line was, Joe Grey could not stay off the phone.
And now, tonight, had the snitch gone too far? He had told Harper that the San Andreas address for Curtis Farger was a fake, that Curtis had been staying with an uncle up there. How could the tomcat know such a thing, so soon after the bombing? Know more about the young prisoner than did either Garza or Detective Davis, both of whom had questioned Curtis?
This time, Clyde didn't see how Joe could have a solid source, for either call. So he saw someone driving down Ryan's street behind her. Probably some guy running down to the store for a bottle of milk or a six-pack. Joe had to be snatching at whirlwinds, clawing at unreliable "facts" that would only serve to muddy the investigation. Clyde didn't like to think that of Joe.
Certainly he'd underestimated Joe in the past; but these calls just seemed too far out-scaring Ryan, and maybe sending Harper on a wild-goose chase. And there was nothing that he, Clyde, could say to Harper to stop him from wasting his time. That was my tomcat calling, Max, and this time, I gotta say, he was way off base.
Right.
Clyde did not stop to examine his perplexed anger, or to consider that it grew precisely from his own increased respect for the small hunter's skill. Deeply irritated with Joe, wanting only to dismiss the matter, he concentrated on the blueprints.
The first stage of the work to update his modest Cape Cod cottage called for converting the smaller of Clyde's two bedrooms into a stairway and storage closet, the stairs to lead to the new second floor. Ryan planned to jack the tilting roof straight up to form two walls of the new upstairs. She said this was the fastest and most economical approach, and it was a concept that made sense to Clyde. The new master bedroom would have a fireplace, two walk-in closets, a compartmentalized bath, and a large study with a second fireplace. Both fireplaces would have gas logs but could be converted easily to burning wood. Neither Clyde nor Ryan had mentioned that the suite was admirably set up for a couple.
The waiter appeared. As they ordered, Clyde glanced out through the wall again, to where Ryan's truck was parked. Several tourists were passing, glancing into the cab as people seemed compelled to do, peering into empty vehicles.
"It'll take only a day to raise the roof," Ryan said, "once we have the end walls off. A few days to build and sheath the new roof and new end walls. Then we'll be dried in and it won't matter what the weather does." Or if I go to jail, she thought. "My uncle Scotty will be coming down to work on the job. My dad's brother."
Clyde nodded. "Dallas calls him a red-faced rounder of an Irishman with a Scotch name and the mind of an insanely talented chess player."
She laughed. "Scotty loves analyzing the smallest detail, sorting out every possibility. It was from Scotty I learned to love all kinds of puzzles-that's what made me want to be a builder. When I was little he taught me about space, the uses of space. I learned to design from Scotty-silly games a kid loves, that teach you to look for all possibilities in how you arrange and use space."
She looked at him solemnly. He didn't teach me about finding a dead body in your space. What kind of puzzle is that? She said, "Dallas called Harper. He and Charlie are coming back, canceling the cruise."
"Yes, Harper called me just before I left the house. They were on the road, going to stay somewhere in the wine country tonight then spend a day or two in San Andreas, see if they can get a line on what the boy was doing up there."
"Some honeymoon."
"Dallas said you talked with the kid again, in jail. What do you make of him, now?"
"He's difficult to read. Maybe scared, maybe just hard-nosed defiant. It's ugly to think about a ten-year-old kid without conscience, but it can happen. Or maybe," she said, "maybe he's trying real hard to protect his grampa."
"You think the old man set the bomb?"
"His son's in prison for running a meth lab. The fact that Harper couldn't make a case against Grampa may have left the old boy feeling like he had to do a little payback."
"Pretty heavy payback. Have you wondered if the kid, when he was up in San Andreas, had anything to do with copying your truck keys?"
"It's possible. That was the first thing Dallas asked me. We both had keys, Scotty and I. I suppose mine could have gone missing for hours, and I wouldn't notice. But that's…" She shivered. "If that's the case, who got him to steal them?"
Clyde buttered a tortilla. "Whatever they find out about the boy, looks like the department's stuck with him for a while. Harper said juvenile hall can't take him, he'd just talked with Dallas. The fire they had last month destroyed most of the building, and the temporary quarters aren't that secure. Juvenile authorities want Curtis to stay where he is."
"When Max called, did you talk with Charlie too?"
He nodded. "She had lunch with Kate Osborne yesterday in the city while Max made some phone calls and kept an appointment-a couple of Dallas's buddies on San Francisco PD," he said softly. "They'll be checking, unofficially at this point, on Rupert's connections in the city."
"The girlfriends," she said. "That's encouraging."
He nodded. "The girlfriends, and their male companions. Maybe they'll turn up a jealous lover or two, find something they can run on."
"I hope." She touched his hand. "I feel shaky about getting through your job without the grand jury coming after me. If you want to…"