The Breakers by Marcia Muller

Author:Marcia Muller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

“So that’s what’s been going on,” I said to Mick. We were at a sidewalk table at Angie’s Deli, drinking wine and eating nachos. I’d first told him about Ma, then everything about Chelle’s disappearance.

Mick’s face scrunched in thought. He looked good—tanned, his blond hair longish and sun streaked; the deep lines around his eyes that I’d noticed before his vacation had softened. Those lines had been caused by a combination of disappointments and outright catastrophes. Early last year his longtime live-in partner Alison had left him—and left the house they’d been restoring on Potrero Hill feeling empty and cold. Next, just before Christmas, the house had been vandalized by a group of white supremacists—an action directed at me, but they were too stupid to get the address right. Finally, in April, he and Derek Frye had lost potential funding for a project that, as they put it, would “set the tech industry on its ear.”

But now Mick looked as if he’d put all that behind him.

“Chelle,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s gotten herself into such a mess. Or her parents.”

“What’s your take on it?”

“Well, there’s the extortion ploy. The Curleys—do they have money? I mean, they travel a lot.”

“They travel on cut-rate tickets and deals at hotels.”

“What about Chelle?”

“Strictly hand-to-mouth. She urges owners of rundown properties to sell cheap, gets bank loans cosigned by her parents, begs long escrow periods from people.”

“Does she deliver on her promises?”

“So far as I know, yes.”

“What bank does she deal with?”

“Bank of America, I think.”

“D’you know if she has a passport?”

“My guess is she does.”

“Well, that’s all recoverable information. The Curleys give you permission to search their house?”

“By the time I thought of that, they’d vanished.”

He rubbed his chin. “We could go to the cops, try to convince them that they have probable cause—but they might not believe us, and even if they did, they’d be the ones doing the searching, without knowing what they were looking for.”

“Do we know?”

“No. But if we found it, we’d recognize it.”

I caught his drift.

“How’s the Church Street neighborhood these days?” he asked.

“Quiet. I sold the lot where my old house was to a guy who wants to build condos on it, but he lost most of his money on a bad investment last spring. The Halls—on the other side—spend most of their time in Lake Havasu City.”

“That’s where they moved London Bridge to, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What a travesty. Okay—the three houses across the street?”

“I don’t know anybody who lives in them now, and they don’t know me.”

“Okay, how about having an on-site look? How’re you about that?”

I frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Are you ready and willing to break and enter the Curley house once the sun goes down?”

I smiled. “It won’t be B&E—I have a key to the house. Have had it for years.”

6:55 p.m.

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