Danielle and I stared at him.
“They’re illegal aliens,” Monk said.
“Have you been possessed by Randy Disher?” I asked.
“Why do you say that?” Monk replied.
“They’re broke,” Danielle said. “Their personal bank accounts are nearly depleted and they’ve reached the spending limit on their credit cards.”
“That’s not nearly as interesting a lie to be living as the others,” Monk said.
“We’ll have to tell them to work on that,” I said.
“Phil lost his job as a sales rep for a pool equipment company four months ago,” Danielle said. “He leaves the house each morning in a jacket and tie but spends his day sitting in an easy chair at a Barnes and Noble in San Rafael doing crossword puzzles.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“We traced his credit card usage,” she said. “I also put him under surveillance.”
“You can do that?” Monk said.
“I can’t but you can,” Danielle said. “I hope you don’t think that I abused your authority.”
“I didn’t know I had any authority,” Monk said. “What else can I do with it?”
“Let’s concentrate on the case,” I said. I didn’t want Monk thinking too hard about the resources that were available to him or he’d assign Intertect’s operatives to watch the streets for people spitting out their gum on the sidewalks. “Does Carol know that he’s out of work?”
“The bank accounts and credit cards are all under his name, so the statements go to him,” Danielle said. “So it’s possible that she doesn’t. But I do know that they’ve been living on the money her father has been giving them from his savings and stocks.”
“What are they worth?” I asked.
“The combined value is nearly one million dollars,” she said. “Now that Peschel is dead, they can add the one-point-five-million-dollar life insurance payoff to the pot.”
“Not if her husband killed him,” Monk said.
“Phil certainly had a strong financial motive for murder,” Danielle said.
I nodded in agreement. “And he knew better than anybody exactly when Carol and the kids were going to be out of the house that morning.”
“So would anyone who looked at her refrigerator,” Monk said.
I was surprised that Monk had noticed her calendar on the refrigerator, but I shouldn’t have been. He notices everything, even when it appears he isn’t paying any attention at all.
“I wouldn’t rule Carol out as a suspect just yet,” Monk said. “She might have known that her husband was out of work. The two of them could have planned the murder together.”
“But they were already living off her dad’s money,” I said. “What did they have to gain from killing him?”
“Taking care of him was a burden,” Monk said. “And there was the danger posed by his warts.”
“What warts?” Danielle asked.
“Carol told us at the wake that he was covered with them,” Monk said.
“She wasn’t being literal,” I said. “ ‘Warts and all’ is an expression.”
“That means he’s covered in grotesque, blistering tumors created by a highly contagious virus.”
“It means she loved him despite the fact that he wasn’t a perfect person,” I said, then turned to Danielle. “Maybe you could elaborate on that.”
She explained that Peschel dropped out of high school and drifted up and down the state, working as a manual laborer in agriculture and construction for a few years, before landing back in San Francisco, where he did all kinds of odd jobs, like taxi driver, short-order cook, ditchdigger, and, finally, bartender at a Tenderloin dive called Lucky Duke’s.
Along the way, Peschel built up a police record of minor offenses, like assault, petty theft, and drunk-and-disorderly conduct. He also did some “debt collection” for Bobby Fisset, a big racketeer in the city during the late fifties, early sixties.
In 1967, Peschel met Clara, a salesgirl at Capwell’s department store, and got her pregnant. They were married a few months before she started showing.
“How did you find out all of this?” Monk interrupted.
“For starters, the police maintained a confidential file on him.”
“If it was confidential,” I asked, “how did you see it?”
“Nick has sources in the SFPD,” Danielle said. “I also looked at all relevant federal, state, county, and local records and, posing as an obituary writer for the Chronicle, I interviewed Carol Atwater for details on his early life.”
Monk nodded, impressed.
I hoped he wasn’t drawing any comparisons between her efforts and mine on his behalf. I’d never done any research like that for him. For one thing, I wouldn’t know how to begin. For another, she had resources I couldn’t hope to match.
Even so, I felt a pang of insecurity and a cramp of jealousy. I tend to internalize my anxieties.
Danielle continued briefing us on what she’d learned: Lucky Duke’s luck ran out in 1970 and he was stricken with throat cancer. Peschel took over running the bar. And when Duke died nine months later, Peschel borrowed money from Fisset to buy the business from Duke’s widow and rename it Bill’s Tavern.
To pay off the debt, Peschel let Fisset use a back room at the bar to run a private poker club.
After Fisset was gunned down outside of Alioto’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf in 1973, Peschel secretly gave the police tips that helped nab the shooter and avert a mob war.
“By working in the Tenderloin for years and associating with Fisset, Peschel established his street cred with the low lifes and criminals,” Danielle said. “They saw him as one of them.”
“He was,” Monk said. “And warty, too.”
“By helping the police catch Fisset’s killers and prevent a lot of bloodshed, he earned the trust of the police, who showed their gratitude by making him a paid informant and turning a blind eye to his various nickel-and-dime illegal activities to make ends meet.”
Something didn’t make sense to me. “If the tavern was such a dive, and Peschel was scratching and scraping for money his whole life, how was he able to sell his business for enough money to retire with his wife to Florida?”
“He sold the tavern for thirty-five thousand dollars,” Danielle said. “He became rich off of his InTouchSpace-dot-com stock and the sale of his Florida condo.”
“How did he luck into buying shares of InTouchSpace before it went big?”
“Word on the street, I guess,” she said.
“He was on the wrong street for that word,” Monk said, shrugging his shoulders. “Something doesn’t fit.”
“So what’s next?” I asked.
“We talk to the suspects,” Monk said. “But we don’t touch them under any circumstances.”
“Why not?” Danielle asked.
“Warts could run in the family,” he replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The surveillance footage from the Dorchester Hotel was delivered by Lansdale to Disher’s desk on several CDs. The lobby, all the entrances and exits, the stairwells, and the elevators were covered by cameras. The various floors themselves were not.
“What kind of half-assed security system is that?” Disher said.
“I asked them the same thing,” Lansdale said. “Their reply was that they are a hotel, not a Vegas casino, and this isn’t a totalitarian state.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“They’re cheap and irresponsible,” Lansdale said. “But nobody could have gotten in or out of the hotel without being caught on camera.”
“Unless they climbed up the face of the building and entered through Braddock’s window.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“Never rule out any possibility, even if it’s impossible,” Disher said. “The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible. Why aren’t you writing that down?”