I hadn’t thought of that. I said, “You’d better alert the receptionist.”
“Don’t worry, I will. See you tonight.”
I put the receiver down, and sighed, and looked at Eberhardt. He was still on the phone. I sighed again and looked at my watch. 10:40. Most of the morning shot already. Tom Washburn was paying me good money, and all I was doing was hanging around here, stewing about Ray Dunston and feeling sorry for myself.
Eberhardt cradled his handset and said, “That was a guy I know on the San Jose cops. Ed Berg. He never heard of the Church of the Holy Mission or the Moral Crusade.”
“Terrific.”
“But it won’t take him long to find out. I told him if nobody’s here when he calls back, leave a message on the answering machine and one of us’ll call him back.”
“Right. You got anything pressing today, Eb?”
“Nothing that won’t wait. Why?”
“Take over that insurance investigation for Barney Rivera, will you? I want to get moving on the Purcell thing.”
He shrugged. “I figured,” he said. “It’s personal with you, right? Because you were there when it happened. You’re glad Washburn showed up this morning and hired you.”
“Maybe. A little.”
“Just don’t let it get too personal, paisan. You make waves somewhere, there’ll be trouble. There always is.”
“It’s not that personal,” I said.
“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that one before.”
I got my hat and moved to the door.
Eberhardt said musingly, “What do you suppose God thinks about guys like Dunston? You know, religious nuts that claim they got a pipeline Upstairs. You think He finds ’em comical?”
“No,” I said. “And neither do I.”
He frowned. “What if they do have a pipeline, some of ’em? Guys like Falwell. What if they’re delivering the right message?”
I didn’t answer that; I didn’t even want to think about it. I went out quietly and shut the door.
There are some things you just have to take on faith.
Chapter Five
The first place I went was to the Hall of Justice. Ben Klein was in and willing to talk over an early lunch; I spent twenty-five minutes with him and a tuna salad sandwich in the ground-floor cafeteria. He had no objection to my investigating Tom Washburn’s theory, but he made it plain that he thought it was a waste of my time and Washburn’s money.
“A tie-in between Purcell’s murder and his brother’s death was one of the first things we checked out,” he said. “I told you that before. There’s just no evidence that Kenneth Purcell’s death was anything but an accident.”
“From what I understand, more than one person had a strong motive for knocking him off.”
“Sure. His wife and his daughter, among others; nobody seemed to like him much. But the world is full of assholes, and how many of them get wasted by people who don’t like them?”
“Not many, maybe,” I admitted. “But some do.”
“Not Kenneth Purcell. Everybody at the party was with everybody else: all nicely alibied for the time of his death.”
“Somebody else, then. Somebody who wasn’t invited to the party.”
“Theoretically possible. But again, no evidence to even suggest it.”
“That real estate business of Purcell’s-what put it on the shady side?”
“He was brokering for foreign interests,” Klein said. “The kind with dubious ethics and political orientations. You know, buying property under his own name without telling anybody he was using foreign capital; helping unscrupulous investors from countries like Lebanon, South Africa, the Philippines get into positions of financial power in this country that they wouldn’t be able to if property owners and legitimate brokers knew who they were. He peddled influence, too-arranged for high-powered legal representation for his clients.”
“Could his brother have been mixed up in that?”
“No. Not powerful enough. We’re talking big money here. VIPs.”
“Sounds like the kind of business where you could make a lot of enemies,” I said.
“Absolutely. But it’s also the kind of business where the lid is screwed down tight. The feds might be able to unscrew it, given enough time and provocation; the authorities in San Mateo County couldn’t, and neither can we.”
“What about the missing snuff box? Any chance of an angle in that?”
Klein shook his head. “Purcell apparently had it on him when he went off the cliff. The body got beat up pretty bad on the rocks before it was recovered; San Mateo figures the box got ripped loose and lost.”
“Washburn told me the dingus was valuable. How valuable?”
“Fifty thousand dollars in the collectors’ market.”
“That much? Lot of money for a snuff box.”
“You’re telling me. One of a kind item, though, made out of gold and dating back to Napoleon’s time. So Eldon Summerhayes says.”
“Who’s he?”
“Owns the Summerhayes Gallery, up on Post Street. He deals in rare snuff containers, among other items. He and his wife were at the party.”
“Other dealers and collectors there too?”
“Two other collectors. Purcell got them all together so he could gloat, evidently; he’d just bought the box.”
“From?”
“Nobody seems to know. He kept his source a secret.”
“Illegal deal, maybe?”
“Maybe. But there doesn’t seem to be any way it could tie in to his death, or to his brother’s. And those other collectors he invited are blue-chip citizens.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you figure the guy Washburn talked to on the phone was just a crank.”
“Probably. Or somebody with a bright idea on how to make a fast buck.”
“Either way, Ben, why would he wait six months? Why not make the call within a few days of Kenneth’s death?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Klein said. “But don’t forget the same thing applies if the caller really did have knowledge that it was a homicide. Why wait six months?”
Good question either way. And one of several weak points in Washburn’s theory. I said, “Nothing in Leonard’s effects to indicate he ever talked to the guy?”
“Nothing.”
“Or what might have happened to the missing two thousand?”
“No.”
I asked him about Kenneth Purcell’s wife and daughter. He smiled wryly. “A couple of sweethearts, those two,” he said.
“How so?”
“You’ll see when you meet them. I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by tipping you off ahead of time.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Can I get a list of the people at the party? Names and addresses?”
“I don’t see why not. Come upstairs with me after we finish.”
So I went back upstairs with him, and he gave me a computer printout of the list. He also gave me the address and telephone number of the Moss Beach house where Alicia Purcell now lived alone, the name of the attorney who had handled Kenneth’s legal affairs, and the name of the guy that Melanie Purcell was living with on Mission Creek.
I thought about asking him to let me look over the complete file on the Leonard Purcell homicide, but I didn’t do it. Cops don’t mind helping out private detectives now and then, if you maintain a good professional rapport with them, but they get testy if you hang around and ask too many favors. They have to slog along assembling facts on their own; they figure you ought to be doing the same thing. In the detective business, there is no such thing as a free ride. Or, for that matter, a free lunch: I had paid for Klein’s, and gladly.
Kenneth Purcell’s attorney, Lawrence Rossiter, had a suite of offices on the twentieth floor of a newish high-rise in Embarcadero Center. Both the offices and the address were impressive, and so was Rossiter himself: sixtyish, graying, with a beautifully groomed walrus mustache and the kind of courtly manner you seldom find these days in any lawyer under the age of fifty. He kept me waiting less than fifteen minutes before he had his secretary usher me into his rosewood-paneled inner sanctum, which was another point in his favor.
He was helpful, too, although he made it clear from the start that he was willing to discuss the terms of Kenneth’s will only because it was in probate and therefore a matter of public record. It was due to clear probate, he said, in less than two weeks.