Still, she was his mother, that was the bottom line. He was not going to just put her away. Well, it would take a lot of thought before he did.
“You keep things under control, okay, Mrs. Hernández? Call me if it’s a real emergency. I’ll be home the usual time.”
* * * *
Over the next couple of days the case of the copped comics moved along in routine fashion.
Terry Patterson filed his claim forms.
Lindsey looked them over and phoned Comic Cavalcade.
Patterson answered the phone. “Did I fill everything in right, Mr. Lindsey? The forms were a little complicated.”
“You did ’m just fine, Terry. You really going to push on with this? I warn you, there’s a stiff penalty for insurance fraud. Don’t take my word. Ask a lawyer. Ask that cop, that what’s-her-name.”
“Officer Plum, sir. I don’t have to ask. I believe you, Mr. Linsdey. I really do. But this is no fraud, everything happened the way I told you. This is an honest claim.”
“Well...” Lindsey let that hang for a while, then he said, “You understand contributory negligence, Patterson, don’t you? A rusty hasp and a two-bit padlock don’t constitute exercising reasonable care and responsibility.”
“Your company inspected the store when they issued the policy, Mr. Lindsey.”
Damn! “All right,” Lindsey sighed. “We’ll process the paper, Patterson. But don’t hold your breath till you see a check. There’s a lot of investigating that needs to be done.”
He counted to five and laid the receiver on its cradle, then walked to the window and gazed out at the traffic headed toward the freeway. Where had the pleasant, slow-paced Walnut Creek of 1960 gone? If he had wanted to live in a city, he’d have sold the house and bought a condo and moved Mother and himself to San Francisco. Who needed traffic jams and exhaust fumes and punks in Walnut Creek?
Walnut Creek was no longer the sleepy little suburban haven it had been when he was a child. But even as long ago as then, the town had already grown from suburb to commuter’s bedroom community. Over the years, Walnut Creek had continued to change until it had become the bustling, noisy city of today, complete with tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, and traffic jams.
He shook his head and walked back to his desk to call Officer Plum at the number on her card. He got Berkeley police headquarters: That should have been obvious, he told himself. Officer Plum wouldn’t go handing out her personal phone number to people she met in the line of duty.
It took him four tries to reach her, and even then she couldn’t take the call and promised to get back to him. Later, she told him she’d been out on cases. He felt stupid. Had he expected her to be assigned to the Comic Cavalcade burglary full-time?
Lindsey would have preferred not dealing with a Berkeley claim. The town, he thought, is too weirdly mixed. Too many leftover hippies and remnants of 1960s radicalism. The university and the thousands of students it draws. And the street people—every time he walked on Telegraph Avenue—as seldom as he could arrange!—there seemed more of them: filthy, pathetic derelicts. Where did they all come from? You didn’t see that in Walnut Creek, that was for sure!
Away from the University there were black neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods, old money that lived in huge mansions in the hills and vagabonds who slept in the parks. Even some heavy industry was still left, but it was slowly dying, being replaced by a whole section of new, high-tech enterprises.
No, it was all too mixed for him. He felt more comfortable when things were clearly defined. Berkeley was definitely not his kind of town.
Lindsey checked his pocket organizer, found his note concerning Ridge Technology Systems, and looked up their phone number and address in the Oakland-Berkeley directory. He reached for the phone to call George Dunn, Terry Patterson’s contact at the company—then changed his mind. An unannounced visit might be more productive than an appointment.
As far as Lindsey was concerned, he knew all he wanted to know about Berkeley. But when Officer Plum returned his phone call she responded to his demand for effective service with a lecture on the city and its problems.
Mainly she told him that she wasn’t putting too much time or effort into solving the Comic Cavalcade burglary. She made it very clear that some eighty-year-old dowager, who happened to be the widow of a distinguished ex-Chancellor of the University of California, had higher priority with the burglary squad than a comic book store run by a twenty-six-year old ex-hippie dropout.
In a way Lindsey could sympathize, but that wasn’t going to save International Surety’s quarter million bucks—nor would it make the name Hobart Lindsey shine at Regional.
He hung up in disgust and redialed, asking for the commander of the felony squad, one Lieutenant O’Hara.
Now there was a cop! Who could ask for anything better than
Lieutenant Joseph Francis Xavier O’Hara!
O’Hara invited Lindsey to come into his office for a little chat, so Lindsey drove to Berkeley for the second time in a week.
O’Hara’s office was upstairs in the old building that housed the Berkeley Police Department. He looked up and grunted. “Understand you’re dissatisfied with the conduct of one of our officers. Is that right?” O’Hara was in civilian garb. He had his coat off and his revolver on his hip. Lindsey said, “Not exactly. Officer Plum seems to be a conscientious worker. I just don’t think she’s very interested in this case, Lieutenant.”
O’Hara already had a file folder on his desk. He opened it, pulled a pair of rimless glasses out of his pocket, and slipped them onto his nose. “Officer Plum seems to have conducted a correct investigation of this crime.”
“What about fingerprints?”
O’Hara turned a couple of sheets of paper. “They found plenty. Some of them were even clear enough to use. Let’s see, we found Terrence Patterson’s, Janice Chiu’s, A. Lincoln Morris’s—that’s the staff of Comic Cavalcade. They were very cooperative in giving us samples for comparison.” He gave Lindsey a deep look.
“We found a great many others, presumably belonging to customers. We found several belonging to Professor Nathan ben Zinowicz from U.C. Those were on file with the state, you know. They’re printed when they get a teaching credential—part of the old loyalty check. Law’s still on the books. And we even found a couple of yours, Mr. Lindsey. Checked them with your company’s bonding people. You aren’t the burglar, are you?”
Lindsey’s jaw dropped. He started to get red, then realized that O’Hara had been jibing at him—as well as establishing his subordinates’ efficiency.
O’Hara raised his face from the papers. “We found a lot of others, but none that seem to lead us anywhere. So...” He closed the folder and tossed it back onto his desk.
“What do you do now?”
“It’s an open case,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we keep the case on our open list, and if anything further develops, we pursue it.”
“That sounds like hooey to me.”
O’Hara looked at Lindsey and glowered. “What do you want us to do?”
“I want you to work on it. This is going to cost International Surety a quarter of a million dollars if those comic books don’t show up!”
O’Hara