Free Where Echoes Live by Marcia Muller Page B

Erickson. Address in Barbary Park in San Francisco. Lots of plastic: American Express, Visa, Master Card, department stores. Blue Shield health plan I.D.”
    â€œHave you ever heard of him?”
    â€œNo.” He continued to search the wallet.
    The match I held burned my fingers. I dropped it into the water, lit another, and stared down at the dead man’s face.
    Michael M. Erickson. A San Franciscan, like me. Barbary Park was a newish residential development in the financial district—town houses perched atop a few floors of offices and shops and linked to the nearby Golden Gateway and Embarcadero Center by pedestrian walkways. Perhaps not a prestigious address by the standards of the city’s social mavens, but an expensive one. Here in Vernon, Erickson was about as far from his usual milieu as he could get. As far from life as anyone gets …
    I shuddered, feeling the sense of horror and futility that violent death brings.
    Ripinsky whistled suddenly. Said, “Hel lo! ”
    I dragged my gaze away from the dead man. “What have you found?”
    â€œHidden pocket inside the cash compartment. Second set of ID.”
    â€œWhose?”
    He looked at me. In the instant before the match in my fingers went out, I saw his amazement.
    â€œAsk and ye shall receive,” he said. “Meet Mr. Franklin Tarbeaux.”

Six
    The sheriff’s detectives who came down from the Mono County seat at Bridgeport were Dwight Gifford and Kristen Lark. Gifford, a taciturn man in his mid-thirties who had the look of a bodybuilder, seemed to be compensating for premature baldness with his boar’s-bristle mustache. Lark was younger—late twenties—and possessed of incredible nervous energy. Her slender frame was in constant restive motion; when she spoke she barely paused for breath. Her blond curls looked as if they were charged with static electricity; even the freckles across the bridge of her upturned nose appeared as if they might suddenly shift alignment. At first I thought the partners badly mismatched, but as I watched them work I realized they functioned exceptionally well together.
    The man from the county medical examiner’s office determined that Michael M. Erickson, a.k.a. Franklin Tarbeaux, had been shot twice in the chest at close range with a small-caliber weapon. He couldn’t yet accurately estimate the time of death, but he did confirm that the body had not been in the lake very long. “And it didn’t drift far, either,” he added. “There’s not enough current, even at night when the wind kicks up.” While the lab crew set up floodlights on the dock, the two detectives, Ripinsky, and I pushed through the crowd that deputies were holding at bay on the balcony and went into the restaurant.
    The band had taken an enforced break, and the dining-and-dancing section had emptied. The lounge was still full of drinkers who watched the proceedings below through the windows. The owner—Bob Zelda, a chubby little man who bore not the slightest resemblance to the exotic Fitzger-aldesque creature I’d vaguely imagined—had offered Lily Nickles and her dancing partner asylum in his office. Gifford went back there to question them, and Ripinsky and I talked with Lark at a table in a corner of the dining room.
    She asked good questions, homing in on the salient facts with precision; in an interview situation, she managed to restrain her natural restiveness, and she listened well, catching nuances and probing when necessary. While Hy explained about the second set of I.D. the dead man carried and about Franklin Tarbeaux’s connection to the Transpacific land deal, she took careful notes. Then she looked at me.
    â€œYou’re here in a professional capacity?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWorking for who?”
    â€œThe Coalition for Environmental Preservation.” I went on to tell her about the events that had prompted Anne-Marie to ask me