Night detective. It had a nice ring.
“Anyway, I talked to the detective. You would have liked her. First name Isabel. Cute little chica. Make you forget about Patty.”
“Will you stop that shit!” I pulled off my suit jacket and threw it on the floor. It would have to go to the cleaners anyway.
His eyes followed the garment’s flight, then fixed his gaze on me again. “Grace’s body was found on the concrete by the pool. It was a straight fall and she landed on her head. Massive trauma, loads of blood. She was handcuffed from the back, nude, and no real note was left, like our guy said in the office yesterday.”
“What do you mean ‘real note.’ ”
“I want you to read the reports. Hang with me and I’ll give you the overall run-down. So the uniforms that initially respond go upstairs and the door to the condo was locked. The manager lets them inside.”
He folded one brawny brown calf over the other and told me the cops found no sign of a break-in. The lock was a deadbolt, so nobody could simply close the door behind them and cause it to automatically lock. It had to be secured from the inside, as if Grace had done it, or from the outside with a key. The only ones with keys were Zisman and his wife. She wasn’t in San Diego on the twenty-second. There were no signs of struggle. Grace’s purse was there with a hundred dollars in it, her keys, and a brand-new cell phone.
I said, “The handcuffs didn’t arouse suspicion?”
“Sure. But sometimes people who want to kill themselves bind their hands so they can’t change their minds. I’ve seen those calls in Phoenix. That was the case with that girl in Coronado, although she used rope and not cuffs. SDPD thinks the same was true here. Kimbrough had Isabel demonstrate how a person could do it. Then walk to a balcony and go over.”
“Where’d Grace get the cuffs?”
“Apparently the former quarterback likes bondage. They used them during their playtime.”
I tried to ignore his bulk in a bathrobe lying in a bed where he had had some “playtime” of his own. This was something I did not want to visualize or even contemplate.
“Does he own this condo?” I asked.
“He did. It’s for sale now. He was away at his boat when Grace killed herself and the alibi’s good. The owner at the slip next door saw him there during the time of the suicide. Zisman told the cops she was his girlfriend and she’d been feeling depressed, but he had no idea she might do something like this, yada-yada-yada.”
“And they believed him?”
“Zisman is a reserve police officer in Phoenix,” Peralta continued. “He showed his badge and identification. That might have bought him a little professional courtesy the night Grace died. He cooperated fully. I’m sure he was scared shitless this would make the papers or television and the missus back in Arizona would find out.”
I told him newspapers usually didn’t report suicides out of concern that there might be copycats. Grace had died at night, with no television news choppers in the air.
“So Zisman walked?”
He nodded. “There was no evidence of his involvement. No probable cause to hold him, much less get an indictment. If they arrested every Arizonan who had a mistress stashed in San Diego, they’d have to build a new jail.”
13
It was nearly five but Peralta wanted to go out again. He had scheduled a meeting with a real-estate agent to see the condo.
I changed into casual clothes, a light-blue shirt and cargo shorts. The Python was too big to carry, which was why I had invested in a Smith & Wesson 340PD Airlite, an eleven-ounce, snubnosed.357 magnum that slipped easily into the right-side pocket of the shorts. I stashed the Glock that I had confiscated from America’s Finest Pimp in a drawer. Who knew how many unsolved shootings or homicides it was connected to? I would deal with that later. Peralta was out of the robe, thank goodness, and in tan slacks, dress shirt, and blue blazer.
We walked ten blocks down Broadway toward the waterfront. The condo was hard to miss: more than forty stories, right across from the beautifully restored railroad station, with its blue Santa Fe railroad sign on the roof. In the lobby was a watchful concierge and, sitting on the edge of a chair with perfect posture, an auburn-haired, middle-aged woman who exuded perkiness. The Realtor. We made introductions and she took us up the elevator to the nineteenth floor.
We must have looked like the oddest gay couple she had ever dealt with.
“I have so many clients from Phoenix,” she chirped. “This is the place to be.”
The deadbolt turned with decisive effort and opened onto an empty living room. The condo hadn’t been staged for the sale. What most stood out was the handsome hardwood floor. And then the view, of course. Asking price: $599,000.
I let her walk Peralta through the rooms and wandered off by myself to the balcony. It was amusing to hear her calling him “Mike” in nearly every sentence. Nobody but Sharon called him Mike. But he was as convivial as could be, a skill he had learned over the years while wooing voters. Not that he had needed to put on a front. His record as sheriff was spotless, with crime down, jail conditions excellent, response times across the county top-notch, and his history professor solving high-profile old cases. All that didn’t matter when his opponent ran against him claiming he was soft on illegal aliens. I pushed that out of my mind, opened the glass door, and stepped outside.
The view of downtown and the harbor was not as stunning as you could get for one or two million bucks on the upper floors, but it would do. If you had the money to escape the summer hell and dust storms of Phoenix, San Diego would be about as close to heaven as you could get.
The sun had burned off all the clouds and was now angled to throw the city into enchanting relief. The water was flawlessly blue and full of pleasure boats, which were dwarfed by the carrier at its mooring on North Island. The Navy kept the Nimitz-class carriers there because they wouldn’t fit under the bridge that connected San Diego to Coronado, even though it soared 1,880 feet, a blue arch, across the channel that led to the Pacific Fleet’s base.
I drove that bridge many times but was glad not to be going over it this trip. I was glad not to make connections between Grace Hunter and the suicide at the Spreckles Mansion. As I got older, I didn’t like heights, didn’t like bridges. I didn’t like being on this balcony with the restless wind, distorted and accelerated by the other skyscrapers, flapping against my shirt. San Diego didn’t really get earthquakes. A small fault line ran through Rose Canyon east of La Jolla, but otherwise it was pretty safe. That made me happy, nineteen stories over downtown.
At the edge, I looked down on the pool. A party was going on and the people looked very small. As I recalled, a body fell at thirty-two-feet-per-second, accelerating as it went down. It was a long damned time to contemplate death, to wonder if you’d made a big mistake.
What desolation must this young woman have felt to want to kill herself, sure that the terror of the fall and the pain of impact would be brief, and then nothing, comforting oblivion. If that was what really awaited us. Who really knew? I reached under my shirt and ran my finger along my totem, Robin’s cross.
“Hey, babe…” The video of Grace on the flash drive was vivid in my mind. The confident, teasing voice and smile. It fit perfectly with Tim’s description of a young woman who started her own business, however illicit, and was the consort of men who would pay thousands for her company. Would that same woman commit suicide?
I stared down at the concrete for a good five minutes.