‘This Jeffrey Elliot’s turning into a daily feature.’ Hardy came over and stood with his arm around her.

SUSPECT ARRESTED IN OWEN NASH MURDER

by Jeffrey Elliot

Chronicle Staff Writer

Police yesterday arrested May Shinn, the alleged mistress of Owen Nash, for the murder of the local financier. According to the arresting officer, Sergeant Abraham Glitsky, Ms Shinn had purchased a ticket to Japan after the discovery of Nash’s body on Thursday on a beach in Pacifica, and was attempting to leave the jurisdiction after she had agreed to remain in the city.

Although Glitsky refused to go into much detail regarding the evidence collected thus far, he did acknowledge that a search of Owen Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, had revealed traces of blood and a.25-caliber Beretta handgun registered to Ms Shinn. Additionally, a slug, imbedded in the wall of the boat, was recovered. The gun had been fired twice, and Nash’s body contained two wounds. The Ballistics department has not yet conclusively identified the gun as the murder weapon, although Glitsky conceded he thought the possibility ‘likely.’

The article picked up on the back page, but Hardy was already at the telephone. ‘That’s what I like,’ he said, ‘when I follow the comings and goings of my dear friends and professional colleagues by reading about them in the newspaper.’

‘What are you eating?’ Glitsky asked. ‘It sounds great.’

Hardy swallowed his sausage. ‘You forgot my phone number, Abe. I’ll get it for you.’

‘On Friday night? Come on. I got done talking to Elliot around nine-thirty, ten. I thought I’d call you this morning.’

‘What were you doing talking to Elliot?’

‘My car went out again. He was at the Hall. He gave me a lift home.’

‘What a guy,’ Hardy said.

‘He seems like a good kid.’

‘I know he does. Nicest guy in the world. Is she out of jail?’

‘I doubt it. I guess it depends who she calls. A good lawyer might find a judge to set some bail, get her out today.’

‘And when do I talk to her? Did she do it?’

After a minute Glitsky answered. ‘I don’t know. She might have. No alibi. It’s her gun. She was getting out of Dodge, and she bought her ticket to Japan after Nash was identified, after the paper had it.’

‘No alibi?’

‘The famous I-was-home-alone-all-day. When’s the last time you were home alone all day, no phone calls, no nothing? I didn’t want her going to Japan.’

‘You think I ought to go down and see her?’

‘Hey!’ Frannie gave him the eye. ‘Martinez,’ she whispered. ‘The elusive martini, remember?’

In the normal course of events, there was a skeleton staff at the Hall on weekends. The D.A.‘s office was officially closed. Courtrooms were not in use. Of course, there was still police work and people getting into and out of jail, which occupied the top floors until the new one in the back lot was completed. A clerk was on duty twenty-four hours a day to let people out if a bondsman met bail. Defense attorneys came and went. There were visitors.

Hardy had parked in his usual spot under the freeway, promising an unhappy Frannie he’d be home by noon for their foray into history. You didn’t want to drink martinis before noon anyway, he had told her. She told him she wasn’t going to drink martinis for seven or so months, and in any event, she had gone along with this idea just to be with her husband, brother and daughter and have a relaxing time together, which seemed to be becoming less of a priority for him day by day.

You thought you had trained yourself. You’d traveled far enough along your own rocky path to some inner peace that you had come to believe you couldn’t go back -events would never control you again.

Then they took your clothes from you. They gave you a yellow gown that smelled like Lysol and put you in a small barred room with a sullen young black woman and a toilet with no seat, the whole place, beneath the disinfectant, smelling like a sewer.

You threw away your phone calls on the man who’d been your lover’s attorney. ‘You ever need help – I mean real help – and I’m not around, you just call on the Wheel. He’s your man.’ He would come down and get her out. He was a lawyer and knew about these things. But he wasn’t at the number Owen had given her. No one had answered, and now there was no one to call and she was alone.

You spent the night in fear, waking up sweating in the still heat, the smell of yourself, of the other woman who didn’t talk, who sat on her mattress with her back against the wall. A clanging wake-up and a meal of cold powdered eggs, the regimented shower, the indifference of the women guards.

She swore to herself that she would not let them take her so easily, but it was difficult finding a mechanism to deal with it, to keep the loss of herself under control. She felt her will eroding, and she knew that’s what they wanted. To turn her into a victim again.

She’d really believed she was through with that for good. If Owen had done anything for her, it was that. She would not be a victim. That was something she could control.

She sat cross-legged on her mattress and closed her eyes. If she did not have a physical shrine, she would create one inside herself, even here. She had been this close to despair before. It was the day she had met Owen…

Alone in a darkened corner at Nissho, an exclusive Japanese restaurant near the Miyako Hotel in Japan-town, a thick winter fog out the windows, she had sat contemplating her death. She would use seconal and alcohol, starting with a small bottle of sake. After lunch she would walk slowly back up to her apartment and sit by her window, watching the fog, and drink the bottle of Meursault. She would disrobe and take a hot bath. She would swallow the pills and draw the clean silk sheets up over her naked body. And she would go to sleep.

That was where life, after thirty-four years, had led her.

She could not have said precisely where she had failed, or which failure had marked her Rubicon. Should she have tried harder with her family? Tried to communicate more and break the icy bonds of reserve? There had been two sisters and a brother, living with her parents in a square and empty house under the flight path to Moffatt Field in Sunnyvale. Passive. ‘Remember, we are Japanese.’ Her father never able to get over his internment in Arizona during World War II, when he was a boy, snatched with his whole family from his home. The excuse for his whole life – ‘We will never belong.’ Harboring the hatred and disappointment in who he was, who they all were, doling it out to her mother, to his children, to May.

Starting college at Berkeley, glad to be rid of them, letting the family fall away. Running out of money in the first semester, taking a job selling shoes to gaijin with their huge feet; marrying Sam Hoshida, ten years older than she, because his landscape work got her out of the shoe store.

Another semester in college then, with Sam supporting her. Another year with a man who grew quiet and bitter as he came to know she was using him. Wearing better clothes, becoming conscious of her beauty, other men making her aware of it.

There was a teaching assistant, then, a half-Japanese, Phil Oshida, for whom she left Sam, for love. They married and she miscarried three times in two years; she could never have children. He hated her for that, felt pity and hate, trying to disguise them as love. She thought that was where the big fall had begun – when the only person she’d ever let herself care for gave up on her.

She got her meaningless degree in political science and her second divorce. She was a shell, empty and used up at twenty-four.

The first time it happened, she hadn’t planned it. She had gone to Hawaii for a one-week vacation, her first vacation from her meaningless job at the Bank of America. Of course, as always, she was on a budget – the package was a round-trip ticket, hotel and one meal a day. She let a student on Christmas break from USC buy her an ice cream near the beach. He was big and built and blond and all-American and told her he liked her bathing suit. Could he buy her dinner? He had lots of money. His parents lived on Hilo. Next day he asked her if she’d like to go with him over to his parents’ house. He was straightforward. He was going back to school in a week, he had a girlfriend, so no commitments, but they could have a good time.