21
IT WAS ALMOST midnight and Cain was driving alone, Golden Gate Park just a shadow on his left. He could see the rain on his windshield, the shutter-flashes of electricity from the Muni bus in front of him. He hadn’t heard back from Chun or Grassley, and Lucy still wasn’t picking up the phone. He’d turned on his police scanner, just for the company of the other cops’ voices.
There’d been a holdup at the corner of Geary and Van Ness. Two suspects fleeing on foot, and four units responding. A stabbing at the base of the Bay Bridge, but the victim was sitting up in the ambulance and talking. No need even to alert Homicide Detail.
Cain switched off the scanner. Maybe it was better to listen to the rain. But even without the scanner, his head was buzzing. The CSI teams had taken truckloads of evidence from the house, and nearly all of it would be useless. They’d taken less from Castelli’s City Hall office, and while some of it might help fill in a picture of the man before he died, nothing explained why or how the shots were fired. Useless information was worse than none at all, because he’d waste weeks figuring out if he needed it or not.
Cain knew he was at an impasse until he could look at the lab results.
Tonight, at 850 Bryant, he’d gone around the building to lean on the forensic lab chiefs. Only the ballistics crew had been cooperative, Dr. Revchuk and his two interns promising a striation report within three days. But otherwise, he’d gotten nothing. No reduction in the waiting times, no bump ahead in line. Six weeks for the toxicology, which had to go to a CHP lab in Sacramento. That put them into March. Three weeks for fingerprints, and nearly the same for DNA. No one could even give him an estimate on the document analysis.
Standing next to his car in Lucy’s driveway, listening to the hood tick as it cooled off, he looked up at the front of the house, scanning for lights inside. Nothing, except the faintest glow from the living room. He smelled the air and caught a hint of wood smoke, and then he understood.
He went up the steps and put his key in the lock. There was a shadow on the doormat, and that stopped him from going any farther. He touched the object with his foot but couldn’t identify it in the dark. He clicked on his flashlight and crouched.
She’d left a pair of tennis shoes on the doormat. Women’s shoes, size six. He’d seen them in her closet but never on her feet. Now, in the LED glare of his light, he saw why she’d left them outside: they were caked with mud. In the mud were broken leaves and blades of cut grass. He stepped inside and closed the door after himself, then leaned against it with one hand while he took off his own shoes so that he wouldn’t wake her.
He found her asleep in an overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace. Her head on the armrest, one palm under her cheek. Legs curled up onto the cushion, and half her body beneath a tartan blanket. He tiptoed upstairs and knelt at the safe to put his gun away. Then he came back downstairs, socked feet silent on the wood floors.
The fire she’d built was mostly burned down to embers, piled high around the andirons and casting their shadows out into the room. He sat on the carpet in front of her and used the poker to stir up the flames. He looked around for another log to put on, but there was nothing. She’d burned through all the wood she’d found, and the fire in front of him was the last of it. She must have used that afternoon’s edition of theExaminer as tinder, but she’d saved the front section. It was on the floor next to her chair, and even in the soft light he had no trouble reading the headline.
SUICIDE!
CASTELLI TAKES OWN LIFE
It had probably gone to print and been on the stands before Dr. Levy even made her first cut. Cain pulled the paper over and held the front page to the firelight so that he could read the story. There were no official sources; everything was anonymous. But enough people had seen Castelli where he’d fallen that the two reporters were able to paint a clear picture of the scene. They even had two crucial facts that Cain would never have allowed out. The mayor’s hands had field-tested positive for gunshot residue, and Mona Castelli’s hands were clean.
The one thing missing was a reason—not even a guess at one. The Examiner’s reporters hadn’t written a word about the blackmail notes or the photographs. Either they didn’t know about them or they were waiting until they got a little more.
Cain set the paper down and leaned his head back until it rested against Lucy’s shins. After a while, he felt her hand reach out of the blanket and stroke the top of his head. He took her fingers and held them against the side of his neck.
“Should we go up to bed?” he asked. “It’d be more comfortable.”
“All right.”
She didn’t move to get up, though. He turned around to look at her and saw the fire’s glow reflected in her eyes.
“Where’d you find the wood?”
“In the park, under the eucalyptuses. And in the redwood grove,” she said. “Fallen branches—nothing thicker than my wrist. I broke them over my knee and put them in a bag.”
“They must’ve been wet,” Cain said. “All this rain today.”
“I had to use two newspapers to get them going.”
“How long were you out?”
“Four hours,” she said. “Five, maybe. I wasn’t feeling good. I thought a walk would help. I read in the book that I’m supposed to walk. But it was so cold, I thought a fire would be nice.”
“They’ve helped before—the walks, I mean?”
“You knew?”
“I’d guessed.”
“Is it okay?”
He wasn’t sure if she meant the walks or how she hadn’t said anything about them.
“I think it’s great,” Cain said.
“Okay.” She sat up and pulled the blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. “It’ll be cold upstairs—you should’ve seen it down here when the fire was going, when it was really going.”
She started for the stairs and he followed her.
“I’m sorry I missed it—that I was so late.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I saw the paper so I knew where you were.”
“Still.”
“Did they get it right?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably they did.”
Now they were going down the hall. There weren’t any lights, but it didn’t matter. He was close enough behind her that he could feel the warmth coming from beneath her blanket. He undressed at the foot of the bed. Lucy dropped her blanket and then took off her T-shirt, the high school one she usually slept in. She came up to him and he ran his hands gently along her clavicles and down her chest—
“Careful, Gavin,” she whispered. She always whispered when they were this close. “I’m sore.”
“I’ll be careful—I’m always careful with you.”
“I know you are.”
—and then his fingers were tracing down her ribs to her stomach, finding the curve that was just beginning to swell from beneath her navel. It was too small to see, this bump. But with his hands, he’d know her body blindfolded. He didn’t need to see it to know the ways she’d grown. She put her hands on his and pressed them gently to her skin.
“Do you remember how we got here?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you do that again?”
“Of course I can.”
Cain was back in the office by four a.m. He’d stopped at a café on the drive down and picked up two large coffees, and now the paper cups were scalding his hands. He set them on the desk, then picked up the folder on his chair. It was two inches thick and had a routing memo stapled to the outside from the SFPD printing shop—the photos from Castelli’s house.
He took the lid off the first of the coffees and sat down to study the photographs. After a while, he got out a notebook and started writing, wanting to record the things that weren’t in the pictures but were still in his memory. The way the room had smelled when he walked into it—a mixture of spent cordite and drying blood. Closer to Castelli, there’d been an almost visible haze of bo
urbon fumes, the angel’s share rising from his pores.
If he’d put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, what had he been thinking in that last second? The girl, clawing at the coffin lid in the dark? Or maybe he’d only been thinking of himself. He’d seen the second set of photographs; he must have known he couldn’t escape what was coming for him. He would have kept tabs on her grave, would have known about the exhumation order.
Everything pointed in one direction, and the Examiner’s headline had it right. Suicide. But there’d been two shots, and he still didn’t know what to make of the note Castelli left in Melissa Montgomery’s inbox: Get Cain. He needs to know. Why would he leave a note like that if he’d planned to shoot himself? If he knew he’d die that night, and he wanted Cain to see the second set of photographs, he could have just left them on his desk.
Cain pulled out the photo of the mayor’s medicine cabinet. Half the Ambien and tramadol were missing, but the Viagra was unopened. In the next photo, of Castelli’s desk, there was the bourbon, nine-tenths empty. Castelli might have been able to drink most men into their graves, but he’d gone through nearly an entire bottle between ten thirty and midnight. He would have been reeling. Blackout drunk. With that much bourbon, he might not have known what he was doing. Instead of a suicide, they could be looking at an accident. Mona said he wasn’t a gun person, but that didn’t make it true. Castelli might have pursued any number of fascinations behind his locked door.
Picturing it was easy enough.
He comes home, finds his wife gone. He’s alone, finally. All day, he’s been holding everything back. His rage at the blackmailer, at Cain. He’s thinking about the photographs, he’s remembering the way Cain dumped his drink and pushed him into his chair. He goes into his study and locks the door. He gets a bottle of bourbon and his gun.
He drinks. One glass, two glasses. He pours more.
He wipes his mouth on his shirtsleeve and coughs into his elbow. He sits in the chair and he holds the gun, and sometimes he points it at his black reflection in the window and imagines the blackmailer standing there. He spins around in his chair and somehow the gun goes off. It blows out the M section of his dictionary, but he hardly notices.
He pours one more glass.
The bottle tips over when he sets it down, but he’s drunk so much of it now that the bourbon can’t spill from the raised neck. He drinks. He sets the glass down and uses both hands to hold the gun. As it comes up toward his face he sees three barrels, six barrels. Then just black. He closes his eyes. He’s so drunk now his thoughts aren’t conscious. They’re more like the shadows that sometimes float behind his closed eyelids after too many flashbulbs go off at once. Unbidden, unconscious.
He’s passing out in his chair, but he could be anywhere. He’s an undergraduate, walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Nothing in front of him but the future. He sees a sweep of blond hair from the corner of his eye.
There’s an easier way out, the blackmailer had said. An unmoored thought, something drifting in a current. It goes by and he hardly notices it, but his fingers must have heard.
Bang.
Cain put the photographs back into the folder and looked at his watch. Five a.m. and still dark outside. He took out his cell phone and dialed. It was early, but that was okay. He wanted to keep Melissa Montgomery on her toes.
“Good morning, Miss Montgomery,” he said. “Did I wake you?”
“What do you want?”
“How often did Castelli drink?”
“Every day.”
“That’s not what I mean—how often did he drink himself stupid? A bottle, two bottles in a sitting.”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“You never saw it?”
“I saw it, but I don’t know how often he did it.”
“When’s the last time you know about?”
“Over a year ago. We were in Beijing—the China-Pacific trade conference. I’d just broken it off with him, and then in the hotel he rang down and had bottles delivered to his room. I had to sign the bill.”
“You broke it off with him?”
“I told you already.”
“You told me you’d stopped. That it was only sometimes, but you’d stopped more than a year ago.”
“We stopped because I stopped it.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Right now, everything matters.”
“All right.” From her end of the line, a door opened and shut. Now he could hear wind. She must have stepped outside to have a more private conversation. He’d forgotten she lived with a roommate. “I broke it off because I’m not stupid. Because a married politician who fucks his chief of staff isn’t going anywhere, and if he didn’t go anywhere then neither would I.”
“That’s what you told him?”
“Yes.”
“And then he went up to his room and drank himself blind?”
“That was the last day of the conference for us. He didn’t leave his room again until it was time to go home.”
“Okay,” Cain said. “What about Mona?”
“What about her?”
“Could she match Castelli, drink for drink?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Melissa said. “I tried not to spend time around her. You can imagine why.”
“That’s all I’ve got for now.”
He hung up and pulled the lid from his second cup of coffee, then started on the folder of scene photos again. He thought about Melissa Montgomery’s story and where to fit it into everything else he’d learned. Castelli’s public image was armored and ironclad. Tall and fit, he’d lean on a podium and bully anyone who asked questions he didn’t like. He was rich, he was tough; his star was rising in the east. But his foundations couldn’t hold him. He could be knocked off-balance. He’d strayed from his wife and gotten dumped by his mistress, and he’d reacted to it by locking himself in a Beijing hotel suite and drinking. There was the image, and then there was the man—and the man was vulnerable.
22
HE SPOTTED CHUN and Grassley coming up the Embarcadero toward him, and he waited for them in the long morning shadows, too tired to move toward them and too cold to take his hands from his pockets and wave. He looked over his shoulder to check the clock at the top of the Ferry Building. He’d ask them to meet him at seven thirty. Ten minutes late wasn’t bad, considering the short-fused warning he’d given them.
“I didn’t call you last night,” Chun said once they’d reached him. “You told me to check in, and I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“You’re okay, so it’s nothing. How’d it go?”
“Pretty good. He told me—”
“Let’s get breakfast first,” Cain said. “It’s what we’re here for. We’ll find a quiet table.”
The only quiet place to eat in the Ferry Building turned out to be a bench on the seawall out back. They sat together, drinking their coffee and looking through the iron guardrail at Yerba Buena Island. The falling tide’s current ran against the wind, so that the bay’s dark water was disturbed with a steep-sided chop.
“They met the week before school started. This was their freshman orientation—August 1984,” Chun said. She bit the horned end off her croissant and swallowed it with a sip of her coffee. “They didn’t have classes together. Dennis Herrington was premed, a focused kid. Castelli, not so much. But they lived in the same apartment complex. Two doors down from each other.”
“They were friends?” Cain asked.
“They were friendly, but that didn’t last. How did he put it? Harry Castelli was a decent kid when they met. But then he started hanging around people who gave Dennis the creeps.”
“Pi Kappa Kappa,” Cain said.
“Castelli was pledging,” Chun said. “It was banned from campus, so everything was underground. It wasn’t a fraternity so much as a secret society. They partied at a house off Grizzly Peak Boulevard.”
“Herrington went?”
&n
bsp; “Once, but they never invited him back. He didn’t know why—he just didn’t make the cut.”
“That was when?”
“Fall semester, their freshman year,” Chun said.
“This house where they partied,” he said. “Did he give you the address?”
“He did, but it’s not there anymore—it burned down in 1989,” Chun said. “Christmas 1989. I looked it up last night. The firemen found five bodies. Two were Berkeley students, and the other three they never identified.”
“Arson?”
“There were empty gas cans in the kitchen. It wasn’t just arson—it was premeditated homicide. The bodies were bound up with baling wire.”
“I remember that,” Cain said. He’d been in middle school, on the other side of the bay. He’d seen it on the news, read about it in his parents’ Chronicle all through Christmas break. “They never made any arrests. They didn’t even have a suspect.”
“None,” Chun said. She took another bite of her croissant and held her fingers over her mouth as she chewed it. “Herrington told me about the house—the thing was a mansion. Ten bedrooms, twelve baths. A pool, two hot tubs—one inside and one upstairs, on a balcony. There was a basement with a full bar. A library, a billiards room. Art on the walls, none of it crap.”
“A lot of money, is what you’re saying.”
“Piles of it,” Chun said. “And this wasn’t the house Pi Kappa Kappa used before it got kicked out of Cal. That one’s still there; I’ve seen it. It’s your typical frat house—a clapboard piece of shit, with fake Greek columns and weeds for a yard. The Grizzly Peak place was something they picked up after they went underground.”
Chun wadded up the waxed paper bag that had held her croissant and put it into her empty coffee cup.
“There were two other things,” she said. “A block from their apartment was a park, with a basketball court. Castelli played pickup games there. Herrington used to cut through the park on his way home from class.”
The Dark Room Page 18
