So I’d listened to Helen Alvarez’s tale and written down all the salient facts and agreed to interview Margaret Abbott. Mrs. Abbott’s woes had begun three months ago, when Allan and Doris Patterson and the City of San Francisco had contrived to steal her house and property. The word “steal” was Mrs. Alvarez’s, not mine.
It seemed the Pattersons, who owned a real estate firm in the Outer Richmond, had bought the Abbott property at a city-held auction where it was being sold for nonpayment of property taxes dating back to the death of Mrs. Abbott’s husband in 2000. She refused to vacate the premises, so they’d sought to have her legally evicted. Sheriff’s deputies declined to carry out the eviction notice, however, after a Sheriff’s Department administrator went out to talk to her and concluded that she was the innocent victim of circumstances and cold-hearted bureaucracy.
Margaret Abbott’s husband had always handled the couple’s finances; she was an old-fashioned sheltered housewife who knew nothing at all about such matters as property taxes. She hadn’t heeded notices of delinquency mailed to her by the city tax collector because she didn’t understand what they were and hadn’t sought to find out from her nephew or Mrs. Alvarez or anyone else. When the tax collector received no response from Mrs. Abbott, he ordered her property put up for auction without first making an effort to contact her personally. House and property were subsequently sold to the Pattersons for $286,000, about a third of what they were worth on the current real estate market. Mrs. Abbott hadn’t even been told that an auction was being held.
Armed with this information, the Sheriff’s Department administrator went to the mayor and to the local newspapers on her behalf. The mayor got the Board of Supervisors to approve city funds to reimburse the Pattersons, so as to allow Mrs. Abbott to keep her home. But the Pattersons refused to accept the reimbursement; they wanted the property and the fat killing they’d make when they sold it.
They hired an attorney, which prompted Helen Alvarez to step in and enlist the help of lawyers from Legal Aid for the Elderly. A stay of the eviction order was obtained and the matter was put before a superior court judge, who ruled in favor of Margaret Abbott. She was entitled not only to her property, he decided, but also to a tax waiver from the city because she lived on a fixed income. The Pattersons might have tried to take the case to a higher court, except for the fact that negative media attention was harming their business. So, Mrs. Alvarez said, they “crawled back into the woodwork. But if you ask me, they’ve come crawling right back out again.”
It was her contention that the Pattersons were responsible for the nocturnal “reign of terror” against Mrs. Abbott out of “just plain vindictive meanness. And maybe because they think that if they drive Margaret out of her mind or straight into her grave, they can get their greedy claws on her property after all.” How could they hope to do that? I’d asked. Mrs. Alvarez didn’t know, but if there was a way, “those two slime-balls have figured it out.”
That explanation didn’t make much sense to me. But based on what I’d been told so far, I couldn’t think of a better one. Margaret Abbott lived on a quiet street in a quiet residential neighborhood; she seldom left the house anymore, got on well with her neighbors and her nephew, hadn’t an enemy in the world or any money or valuables other than her house and property that anybody could be after. If not the Pattersons, then who would want to bedevil a harmless old woman? And why?
Well, I could probably rule out Spike the psychotic cat and the malevolent spirit of Mrs. Abbott’s late husband. If old Carl’s shade really was lurking around here somewhere, Helen Alvarez would just have to get herself another detective.
I don’t do ghosts. I definitely do not do ghosts.
3
Helen Alvarez and I left Mrs. Abbott in her Boston rocker and went to have a look around the premises. Starting with the rear porch.
A close-up examination of the back door revealed no marks on the locking plate or any other indication of forced entry. But the lock itself was of the unsafe push-button variety: anybody with half an ounce of ingenuity and a minimum of strength could pop it open in less than a minute. The cat’s three bowls—water, dry food, wet food—were over next to the washer and dryer, ten feet from the door. Easy enough for someone to slip in here late at night, dose one of the bowls with poison, and slip out again after resetting the lock button.
From there Mrs. Alvarez and I went out into the rear yard. It was a cloudy day, with a biting wind off the Pacific—the kind of March day that made you wonder how much longer winter was going to hang around before spring finally kicked it out. The daffodils and some other flowers in narrow beds that ringed a small patch of lawn didn’t know spring was a slow arrival this year; they gave the yard some color under the gloomy sky. The beds and the lawn were neatly kept—Mrs. Alvarez’s brother Leonard’s doing, now that age and frail health had forced Margaret Abbott to give up gardening.