She nodded. I thought for a minute as she wept silently, taking a tissue from her purse, wiping her nose.
"When I told you I'd narrowed the hunt down to two friends of Candira's, I showed you their files, and you memorized the names and addresses. You went to Patsy's apartment, no . . . you had Consuela go." She nodded. "Consuela told Patsy about the two names, Sharon Dean and Magdallena Mason, and Patsy remembered Magdallena's name, right?"
She nodded again. "Yes. Patsy remembered her mother calling once, trying to borrow money to bail Magdallena out of jail. That's when she figured Magdallena must have been her mother's real partner. I offered Patsy money to cooperate."
"With Candira dead and Magdallena dying from AIDS," I continued, figuring it out as I went, "Patsy showed up at Magdallena's apartment, waving the promise of fifty grand, plus whatever you were offering, and convinced Magdallena to go along with it. She must have been the other burglar; her story was too convincing. All Magdallena had to do was add the part about Candira firing the two shots and laughing about it afterward. The stuff about Tommy was true; he did set it all up."
"I never suspected Tommy," she said.
"And finding Magdallena when I did couldn't have been better timing—I guess you just got lucky on that. If I'd found her sooner, the trial could have stopped, they could have investigated further, maybe found a way to kick Magdallena's story, and the pawnbroker's. Now, even if the cops or the DA do find out, there's nothing they can do. Double jeopardy. You can't be retried." I shook my head.
"The only one I can't quite figure out is Oscar Appell. How did you find him?"
"I went to school in Berkeley. I rented an apartment that he owned years ago. He and his wife became like surrogate parents to me. He called me a few days after William's death, offering his help. I've had him lined up since a month after the burglary."
"How much did you pay for all this?"
"I promised them a hundred thousand apiece, Patsy, Magdallena, and Oscar."
"And they can't ever say anything about it or they'll go to jail for perjury and obstruction of justice."
She stood there a minute, sobbing.
"I have to go. I can't stay here with you knowing I betrayed you," she said when she could speak. "Please don't hate me, Francis, I was desperate and I was afraid."
"You could have told the truth, called it self-defense."
"Oh, yeah, they would have believed that in a New York minute." She cried some more. My heart was melting, and I didn't need that right now. "I'm going Frank, but I love you," she said. "Call me when you decide what you want to do. Call me soon, please don't make me wait. I'll live by whatever you decide."
"I'll have Arnie drive you back to the house," I said. "I'll arrange for four guards around the clock, off-duty cops I'd trust with my own life."
She threw her arms around me, still sobbing, and kissed my neck. I held her tight. I didn't want to but I couldn't help myself. We went downstairs without speaking, where I turned her over to Arnie after checking the street in all directions. It was dark and empty. I turned and walked back up the steps to call for security on the Farragut mansion.
I'd taken only five steps when I heard the shots. Five of them in quick succession. I grabbed the .380 from my ankle holster and leapt back down the five steps, hitting the bottom one awkwardly and twisting my ankle. Throwing open the door, I saw Tommy Rivera standing with his back to me, his arms stretched out toward Arnie, who stood facing him with his hands up.
Colleen was on the ground, her blood running down the steep hill in tiny rivulets.
Rivera was crazed, screaming. "I'll kill you, you bitch, for what you did to me, I'll kill you!"
I pointed it at the middle of his back, screaming, "Drop it, Rivera, or I'll kill you, so help me God I'll kill you."
He started to lower his gun. I was desperate to get to Colleen. Tommy lowered the gun to his side, then suddenly sprinted down Lombard Street. I couldn't shoot him in the back.
Arnie and I met at Colleen's side. By then people were screaming out of their windows, hysterical, calling for police. Several people had already stepped from doorways.
She wasn't breathing: he'd gotten all five shots in her chest. Her hair was soaked with her own blood. An old doctor who lived across the street came running with his bag.
I told Arnie to stay with her until the ambulance arrived, and then I went berserk.
I ran after Tommy Rivera.
He had almost a full block's lead on me when he turned left on Grant, heading toward Broadway. He looked over his shoulder and saw me, turned, pointed his gun. I ducked into a doorway, and he took off again.
His gun was a chrome-plated detective's special with the heavy magnum frame and a three-inch barrel. I knew he had only one bullet left.
My only thought was not to draw his fire and not to fire until I had a clear, safe back drop and wouldn't kill an innocent person.
Tommy ran like a crazy man, but I was crazier, and I had longer legs. I sprinted after him, ignoring the pain in my twisted ankle, and on every stride I must have gained six inches. When he turned right on Union Street, his lead was down to half a block. He turned left on Stockton, then left on Green Street.
He bumped two people on Green, sending one sprawling into the street, the other crashing into some trash cans. They both looked dazed but unhurt as I ran past, not that I would have stopped. But the impact slowed him down. By the time he turned right back onto Grant Avenue, I was only a hundred yards behind and gaining.
He ran into a small crowd of people, jumped up on the steps of the Savoy Tivoli, aimed his gun. I didn't see him until just before he pulled the trigger. I threw myself to the ground. The bullet hit the wall of a bakery a block away, harming no one. A few dozen people ducked, screaming.
My hands and knees were banged and bleeding, and it took me a second to get going, but the adrenaline rush was even stronger.
Tommy zigzagged back and forth across the street but I was getting closer with every step. I suddenly realized he might have reloaded the gun while I was down. Twenty yards separated us when Tommy hopped the curb in front of the Caffé Trieste at the corner of Grant and Vallejo.
He turned and pointed his gun at me. Diving forward so I would have an upward angle and wouldn't hit anyone in the restaurant behind him, I fired three times before I hit the ground. The first two shots hit his chest; the third, as he was falling, entered under his chin and exploded through the top of his head.
He fell backward through the Trieste's picture window with a horrendous crash, landing on two female chess players, who screamed hysterically.
When I got to him there was pandemonium inside, people begging me not to kill them. I pocketed my gun and pulled out my ID.
Tommy was dead.
So was Colleen.
I identified her body at the morgue four hours later, after signing my statement at Central Station a block away.
Chapter 38
There's a place I go when I need a little peace and quiet, a walking meditation, a chance to get away from myself. It's on a hill overlooking the Presidio, the Bay, and my bridge. It's hard to be selfish there, or to lie to yourself or to wallow in self-pity.
Sixty-two Fagens are laid out there, sort of a horizontal family tree going back to my great grandparents, Arthur Fagen and Millicent DiPolito, and ending with my parents.
There is a church in the Mission that employs poor and homeless people by giving them flowers to sell. On the way I had stopped and bought sixty-two bouquets with the money I received from Colleen. I gave Father Ramirez fifty thousand, a tithe of my share of the one million, and asked him to split it among his poorest and most hard working. I lit a candle for Colleen Farragut before I left. Then I lit ten more.
I had to take my stakeout vehicle, the Firenze Plumbing van, to haul all the flowers. One by one, I laid each of the bouquets on a little granite headstone. I don't think in all of my life I had ever felt so many conflicting emotions at one time. Not sin
ce the night I met Colleen.
Out there in the city, a firestorm was brewing such as they had not seen since April 18, 1906. Every day the Clarion was publishing excerpts from the Farragut diaries, edited and introduced by Zane, revealing greed and corruption dating back almost to the Civil War. That morning's edition had carried an account of a police hit squad carrying out the murder of a reformist police chief in 1905.
The DA's office might soon need an accountant to tally the indictments that were mounting up against Calvin Sherenian and Bruce Bearden. Bearden, Inspector John Naftulin, and Supervisor Helen Smidge had already been charged with murder one in the deaths of Charles Simcic and Lynne McBain, with Assistant Coroner Michael Wentworth charged as an accessory. Thanks to another detailed Farragut entry, homicide inspectors were reexamining the alleged suicide of Flynn Pooley, and it was expected that it too would be added to the debit on the Smidge-Bearden-Naftulin balance sheet.
Smidge had been hauled out of City Hall in handcuffs, in front of the largest cheering crowd of her pathetic career. While pinning conspiracy to commit murder on her for the killing of Mayor DiMarco seemed impossible, blackmail, pandering, bribery, and extortion indictments were being added daily to the roster of charges against her. An imminent indictment against Smidge and Calvin for helping to rig the trial of Warren Dillon was the hottest topic of downtown gossip.
Helen Smidge was using the Nixon defense, screaming that she was the victim of political snipers from the jealous left. Smidge would inherit the cell at Frontera that had once awaited Colleen Farragut, unless they gassed her, which seemed unlikely.
In the middle of it all was Zane Neidlinger, a shoo-in for a Pulitzer, six-figure book contracts swirling around him. After thirty-one years of hard work, he deserved it.
For myself, relief and vindication had given way to an overwhelming sense of irony. When I was a good cop, I was run off the force; now that I had been duped by a client, I was the hero of the city. I had exonerated myself, reclaimed my honor by freeing the person who had actually killed William Farragut. Only Consuela, her brother, and I knew the real story. I couldn't even tell Zane.
The ultimate irony was that I didn't care. I didn't care that Farragut was dead, I didn't care that Colleen had shot him. Greed and inhumanity had gotten their just rewards, finally. Colleen, perhaps thanks to some twisted poetic justice, had gotten hers.
If there was a hero in the whole sordid affair, it was the most unlikely one: Lynne McBain. An independent autopsy report showed blunt instrument trauma and rope burns on her wrists and ankles, indicating she had been tied in a chair and beaten. She had never given her final abusers my name, never tipped them off to my investigation. The entire story pivoted on her last, courageous act. Perhaps she had something to prove, as I did.
I wanted to tell Arthur and Bunky and Francis Paul and the eight other cops laid out at my feet that the war was over, that we had won, that we had been right all along. The Farraguts were as bad as we thought, and then some.
I'm not sure they would have accepted that. The price, they might have said, was too dear—justice betrayed, justice deceived. I could live with that. I had done my best and the bad guys were headed where they belonged. The crusade was over.
Someday I would take my place next to them, in a little plot already picked out and paid for by my parents, near a tall, thin redwood. I liked the view from my spot, I liked knowing that I could rest for eternity instead of haunting old lady Farragut or a drafty Tudor-style mansion moaning where're the diaries, where're the diaries? We had come in together, the Fagens and Farraguts, and we would go out together.
With me a piece of the family history would end, the parade of cops, the line of city dwellers, a long line of people who had loved this city and were willing to pay almost any price to protect it.
I looked out over the mouth of the Bay to the Pacific beyond. In a will Colleen had written years earlier, she bequeathed half of her money to homeless and abused children, the other half to be split among her six sisters. I don't think she ever expected it to be three hundred million—at least, not until she put the two bullets into William.
She had also requested her body be cremated and scattered over the Pacific. I'd taken her sisters out in my boat to scatter her ashes, a tearful, solemn affair. Two of the women had gotten seasick on the way back.
Colleen's stepfather, sweetheart to the end, had filed suit against the Farragut estate from his cell at San Luis Obispo Men's Colony, claiming he was deprived of his lawful share. He was there doing two to ten for molesting a twelve-year-old girl. The judge would get a big laugh out of that one.
The hardest part was telling the story to Eileen Farragut, as I had promised, and having to leave out the truth about what really happened. I had not cried until then, but seeing Eileen's tears did me in.
When the coroner performed his autopsy on Colleen, he found out that she was three weeks pregnant. The media was having a field day; the father was Calvin, Bruce Bearden, Tommy Rivera, myself, or the ghost of her late husband, depending on which tabloid you read.
I missed Colleen. I don't know if I could have loved her and lived with her knowing what she'd done, but I would have tried. I had known her exactly one month to the day when Tommy Rivera killed her, and she had changed my life forever.
I wondered if the baby would have been a boy or a girl, if maybe, by some slim chance, the line of Fagen city dwellers and police officers died with her instead of with me.
For the first time in my life, I needed to leave the city. In a few hours, a moving truck would take all my belongings to storage. My sister in Mill Valley was renting the house to a friend at the University of California Medical School.
That evening I would be on a flight to Italy, en route to Valtournache in the Italian Alps, near the Swiss and French borders.
I would live in the small stone and timber house where my mother had been born. I'd always imagined living there someday, but never quite this early, never under circumstances like these.
On our last night together, Colleen and I made plans to live in that house after the trial. It would have been a wonderful place to raise a child, to sit on our front porch and watch the stella alpina bloom, the ibex grazing at the foot of Monte Cervino, the Italian side of the Matterhorn.
I had found the love of my life. But with every great love, there's always a hidden agenda, a chink in the armor. Either they leave the cat dish in the sink or they killed somebody. In every case, the crash is as painful as the ascent was delirious. The guy who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all didn't say it the morning he got the news.
I knew one thing for sure, that I was finished being a private detective for a while, at least until the storm blew over. I'd fulfilled the Fagen agenda, the destiny I had dreamed of and abandoned until the night I met Colleen at the Opera.
I didn't think it would be so hard to give it all up, to leave it behind for awhile.
Colleen was going to be a tough act to follow.
Bohemian Heart Page 23
