have anything they can make stick?” Tice, Marvia Plum knew, was a top-flight hitter. Arrested many times, never convicted of anything worse than a couple of petty youth offenses.
“There was an Illinois warrant, I think they’re going to squeeze hard this time. But that’s up to the DA out there. But get this—Tice had an airline stub for a return flight from Oakland last Friday AM.”
“And Szymanski and Campbell got it Thursday night. And Tice is a shotgun specialist.”
“You got it.” Yamura spoke with a smile in her voice.
“You want me to fly out there?”
“Maybe later on. Not yet. Tice hates to talk to anybody, you know that. And we can’t do anything on the strength of an airline stub. Keep working this end. This was just something I wanted you to know.”
Marvia hung up the phone and climbed into bed. She wasn’t sure whether the phone rang just before or just after she had closed her eyes. It was Dorothy Yamura calling back.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“Unh?”
“Fredi Muhammad’s dead.”
“Fredi? Feelgood Fredi, the biggest female dealer in the world of dope?”
“That’s the one. And get this—she was sampling her own wares. I thought she was too smart for that, only the bottom-rungers do that. But she must have made a mistake, and it looks like the same stuff that killed Latonia Jones.”
Marvia burrowed into her pillow, but the phone was still at her ear. “Marvia?”
“Super-intense smack laced with strychnine?”
“You think it was an accident? Or was somebody out to get Fredi?”
“I don’t know, Marvia. Sweet dreams, sweetie. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
* * * *
In the morning, Marvia worked Telegraph again. She wore her uniform, gun and badge on display. Some citizens stood and gaped at her, others gave her a wide berth. Passing Woodstock West, she saw both Mistress Moonflower and Star Lotus inside the store. They wore similar outfits: filmy blouses and billowy skirts. Both were barefoot and wore jingling anklets. Moonflower was berating Star Lotus over something.
At the A-to-Z 24-Hour Market a mile south of campus, Marvia got lucky. A clerk remembered Otto Timmins. “Poor old rummy,” was the way she put it. “Never stopped talking about the navy. What war was he in, I guess Vietnam. Yeah, he used to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin and cruising on the Mekong Delta.”
“Why would anybody kill Timmins?” Marvia asked.
“Well, he was kind of obnoxious. I just felt sorry for him. But he smelled bad and he used to collar people with his war stories and then ask them for money. If they didn’t give it to him he could get really hostile. Sometimes even if they did.”
“Just that?”
“And he used to scare children. He told me he loved them, but he used to lurch over and want to pet them or hug them and they’d scream and their mothers would hustle them out of his way. Manager made me bar him from the store but he just hung around outside panhandling and driving away customers. She said she didn’t want to do it either, but the owner made her. You know, Cora Kelly? Big time real-estate operator, she owns a lot of places and has other people managing them for her. But I felt sorry for the guy. Poor old guy.”
Marvia laid a bill on the counter. “Give me a cup of coffee, hey? Nice and hot.”
The clerk complied.
“When was the last time you saw Otto?”
“Well, it was the day before he was murdered. That’s why I remember it. It was—” She turned to a calendar with a picture of a female rock-climber perched triumphantly on top of Half Dome in Yosemite. The picture hung just below a big display clock with an advertising logo on it. The logo featured a blue dolphin drinking a stein of beer. “—see, I pulled the graveyard shift that night, and I got home and climbed into bed and turned on the radio and there it was on the early morning news. So I thought, poor old Otto, poor old guy. I know a lot of people figured, good riddance, but I thought, poor old guy.”
“What time did you see him, the day he was killed? Was he alone? Did he say or do anything you thought was unusual?”
“I remember there was a customer here, he started hassling her for money and I was going to throw him out but she made a gesture with her hand, like this, you know, like, it’s okay, so I backed off.”
“What did she look like?”
“Slim build, sharp features, nice figure for an older woman. You know, slim, must be good genes, huh, look at me and I must be half her age.”
“Right. What else? Distinguishing marks, hair, clothing?”
“It was a chilly day. She was wearing a quilted vest, I remember that. And her hair—looked like steel wool. I never saw hair like that before. Must feel really interesting. Kind of a turn-on.”
“Anything else? What did they do? What did they say to each other? Did they leave together?”
“That’s it. He asked her for money and she stopped and looked at him, I remember that. I mean, people didn’t like to look at Otto. He was a little too weird, you know? Just—not nice, that’s all. But this woman looked at him, and she leaned over and said something in his ear, and she walked out of the store. And Otto stood there, I remember, looking at the clock and moving his lips, like he was counting the time. Then he grunted something like, ‘Okay, it’s time,’ and he went out of the store.”
Marvia sat on a bench outside the A-to-Z making notes in her pocket notebook. The woman with steel-wool hair…that hair was Ceejay Harker’s trademark. And Ceejay was one of the country’s top female hitters. No, that wasn’t it. She was one of the country’s top hitters, gender of no concern. She was a woman of a certain age—the records disagreed on what that age was—and she stood at the top of her field.
Had Parker Tice shotgunned Bill Szymanski and Robin Campbell, and Ceejay Harker put a .22 slug into the base of Otto Timmins’ skull? Two top hitters for two trash-level hits? Did that make sense? But if that was the case, then what about Latonia Jones and Fredi Muhammad? Was that just a coincidence, or was that killing—make it those killings, now—connected with the Szymanski-Campbell and Timmins incidents?
Maybe it was just a coincidence, but Dorothy Yamura was famous for her dislike of coincidences. They made her nervous, she said, and she drilled it into her subordinates not to trust coincidence, but to look for the underlying connection.
Marvia Plum walked back on Telegraph. Near Woodstock West she ran into Star Lotus. The young woman was in tears. When she spotted Marvia she started to turn away, then spun around—Marvia could see she was wearing low-top boots, at least she wasn’t walking the street barefoot—and ran toward Marvia.
She was running past Marvia when Marvia reached out and caught her by the arms. “What’s the matter? What happened?”
Star Lotus looked at Marvia
