San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  They listened to what I had to report without interruption. When I finished, there was a long silence. Then Sylvia put a hand over her eyes and said, “How she must hate us to do a thing like this!”

  Ernest tightened his grip on his wife’s shoulder. His face was a conflict of anger, bewilderment, and sorrow.

  There was no question of which emotion had hold of Gary; he smashed out his cigarette in an ashtray, lit another, and resumed pacing. But while his movements before had merely been nervous, now his tall, lean body was rigid with thinly controlled fury. “Damn her!” he said. “Damn her anyway!”

  “Gary.” There was a warning note in Ernest’s voice.

  Gary glanced at him, then at Sylvia. “Sorry.”

  I said, “The question now is, do you want me to continue looking for her?”

  In shocked tones, Sylvia said, “Of course we do!” Then she tipped her head back and looked at her husband.

  Ernest was silent, his fingers pressing hard against the black wool of her dress.

  “Ernest?” Now Sylvia’s voice held a note of panic.

  “Of course we do,” he said. But the words somehow lacked conviction.

  I took out my notebook and pencil, glancing at Gary. He had stopped pacing and was watching the DiCesares. His craggy face was still mottled with anger, and I sensed he shared Ernest’s uncertainty.

  Opening the notebook, I said, “I need more details about Vanessa, what her life was like the past month or so. Perhaps something will occur to one of you that didn’t this morning.”

  “Ms. McCone,” Ernest said, “I don’t think Sylvia’s up to this right now. Why don’t you and Gary talk, and then if there’s anything else, I’ll be glad to help you.”

  “Fine.” Gary was the one I was primarily interested in questioning, anyway. I waited until Ernest and Sylvia had left the room, then turned to him.

  When the door shut behind them, he hurled his cigarette into the empty fireplace. “Goddamn little bitch!” he said.

  I said, “Why don’t you sit down.”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, obviously wanting to keep on pacing, but then he flopped into the chair Sylvia had vacated. When I’d first met with Gary this morning, he’d been controlled and immaculately groomed, and he had seemed more solicitous of the DiCesares than concerned with his own feelings. Now his clothing was disheveled, his graying hair tousled, and he looked to be on the brink of a rage that would flatten anyone in its path.

  Unfortunately, what I had to ask him would probably fan that rage. I braced myself and said, “Now tell me about Vanessa. And not all the stuff about her being a lovely young woman and a brilliant student. I heard all that this morning—but now we both know it isn’t the whole truth, don’t we?”

  Surprisingly he reached for a cigarette and lit it slowly, using the time to calm himself. When he spoke, his voice was as level as my own. “All right, it’s not the whole truth.” Vanessa is lovely and brilliant. She’ll make a top-notch lawyer. There’s a hardness in her; she gets it from Ernest. It took guts to fake this suicide …”

  “What do you think she hopes to gain from it?”

  “Freedom. From me. From Ernest’s domination. She’s probably taken off somewhere for a good time. When she’s ready she’ll come back and make her demands.”

  “And what will they be?”

  “Enough money to move into a place of her own and finish law school. And she’ll get it, too. She’s all her parents have.”

  “You don’t think she’s set out to make a new life for herself?”

  “Hell, no. That would mean giving up all this.” The sweep of his arm encompassed the house and all of the DiCesares’ privileged world.

  But there was one factor that made me doubt his assessment. I said, “What about the other men in her life?”

  He tried to look surprised, but an angry muscle twitched in his jaw.

  “Come on, Gary,” I said, “you know there were other men. Even Ernest and Sylvia were aware of that.”

  “Ah, Christ!” He popped out of the chair and began pacing again. “All right, there were other men. It started a few months ago. I didn’t understand it; things had been good with us; they still were good physically. But I thought, okay, she’s young; this is only natural. So I decided to give her some rope, let her get it out of her system. She didn’t throw it in my face, didn’t embarrass me in front of my friends. Why shouldn’t she have a last fling?”

  “And then?”

  “She began making noises about breaking off the engagement. And Ernest started that shit about not footing the bill for law school. Like a fool I went along with it, and she seemed to cave in from the pressure. But a few weeks later, it all started up again—only this time it was purposeful, cruel.”

  “In what way?”

  “She’d know I was meeting political associates for lunch or dinner, and she’d show up at the restaurant with a date. Later she’d claim he was just a friend, but you couldn’t prove it from the way they acted. We’d go to a party and she’d flirt with every man there. She got sly and secretive about where she’d been, what she’d been doing.”

  I had pictured Vanessa as a very angry young woman; now I realized she was not a particularly nice one, either.

  Gary was saying, “… the last straw was on Halloween. We went to a costume party given by one of her friends from Hastings. I didn’t want to go—costumes, a young crowd, not my kind of thing—and so she was angry with me to begin with. Anyway, she walked out with another man, some jerk in a soldier outfit. They were dancing …”

  I sat up straighter. “Describe the costume.”

  “An old-fashioned soldier outfit. Wide-brimmed hat with a plume, frock coat, sword.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “Youngish. He had a full beard and wore granny glasses.”

  Lee Gottschalk.

  * * *

  The address I got from the phone directory for Lee Gottschalk was on California Street not far from Twenty-fifth Avenue and only a couple of miles from where I’d first met the ranger at Fort Point. When I arrived there and parked at the opposite curb, I didn’t need to check the mailboxes to see which apartment was his; the corner windows on the second floor were ablaze with light, and inside I could see Gottschalk, sitting in an armchair in what appeared to be his living room. He seemed to be alone but expecting company, because frequently he looked up from the book he was reading and checked his watch.

  In case the company was Vanessa DiCesare, I didn’t want to go barging in there. Gottschalk might find a way to warn her off, or simply not answer the door when she arrived. Besides, I didn’t yet have a definite connection between the two of them; the “jerk in a soldier outfit” could have been someone else, someone in a rented costume that just happened to resemble the working uniform at the fort. But my suspicions were strong enough to keep me watching Gottschalk for well over an hour. The ranger had lied to me that afternoon.

  The lies had been casual and convincing, except for two mistakes—such small mistakes that I hadn’t caught them even when I’d read the newspaper account of Vanessa’s purported suicide later. But now I recognized them for what they were: The paper had called Gary Stornetta a “political associate” of Vanessa’s father, rather than his former campaign manager, as Lee had termed him. And while the paper mentioned the suicide note, it had not said it was taped inside the car. While Gottschalk conceivably could know about Gary managing Ernest’s campaign for the Board of Supes from other newspaper accounts, there was no way he could have known how the note was secured—except from Vanessa herself.

  Because of those mistakes, I continued watching Gottschalk, straining my eyes as the mist grew heavier, hoping Vanessa would show up or that he’d eventually lead me to her. The ranger appeared to be nervous: He got up a couple of times and turned on a TV, flipped through the channels, and turned it off again. For about ten minutes he paced back and forth. Finally, around twelve-thirty, he checked his wa
tch again, then got up and drew the draperies shut. The lights went out behind them.

  I tensed, staring through the blowing mist at the door of the apartment building. Somehow Gottschalk hadn’t looked like a man who was going to bed. And my impression was correct: In a few minutes he came through the door onto the sidewalk carrying a suitcase—pale leather like the one of Vanessa’s Sylvia had described to me—and got into a dark-colored Mustang parked on his side of the street. The car started up and he made a U-turn, then went right on Twenty-fifth Avenue. I followed. After a few minutes, it became apparent that he was heading for Fort Point.

  When Gottschalk turned into the road to the fort, I kept going until I could pull over on the shoulder. The brake lights of the Mustang flared, and then Gottschalk got out and unlocked the low iron bar that blocked the road from sunset to sunrise; after he’d driven through he closed it again, and the car’s lights disappeared down the road.

  Had Vanessa been hiding at drafty, cold Fort Point? It seemed a strange choice of place, since she could have used a motel or Gottschalk’s apartment. But perhaps she’d been afraid someone would recognize her in a public place, or connect her with Gottschalk and come looking, as I had. And while the fort would be a miserable place to hide during the hours it was open to the public—she’d have had to keep to one of the off-limits areas, such as the west side—at night she could probably avail herself of the heated employees’ lounge.

  Now I could reconstruct most of the scenario of what had gone on: Vanessa meets Lee; they talk about his work; she decides he is the person to help her fake her suicide. Maybe there’s a romantic entanglement, maybe not; but for whatever reason, he agrees to go along with the plan. She leaves her car at Vista Point, walks across the bridge, and later he drives over there and picks up the suitcase …

  But then why hadn’t he delivered it to her at the fort? And to go after the suitcase after she’d abandoned the car was too much of a risk; he might have been seen, or the people at the fort might have noticed him leaving for too long a break. Also, if she’d walked across the bridge, surely at least one of the people I’d talked with would have seen her—the maintenance crew near the north tower, for instance.

  There was no point in speculating on it now, I decided. The thing to do was to follow Gottschalk down there and confront Vanessa before she disappeared again. For a moment I debated taking my gun out of the glovebox, but then decided against it. I don’t like to carry it unless I’m going into a dangerous situation, and neither Gottschalk nor Vanessa posed any particular threat to me. I was merely here to deliver a message from Vanessa’s parents asking her to come home. If she didn’t care to respond to it, that was not my business—or my problem.

  I got out of my car and locked it, then hurried across the road and down the narrow lane to the gate, ducking under it and continuing along toward the ranger station. On either side of me were tall, thick groves of eucalyptus; I could smell their acrid fragrance and hear the fog-laden wind rustle their brittle leaves. Their shadows turned the lane into a black winding alley, and the only sound besides distant traffic noises was my tennis shoes slapping on the broken pavement. The ranger station was dark, but ahead I could see Gottschalk’s car parked next to the fort. The area was illuminated only by small security lights set at intervals on the walls of the structure. Above it the bridge arched, washed in fog-muted yellowish light; as I drew closer I became aware of the grumble and clank of traffic up there.

  I ran across the parking area and checked Gottschalk’s car. It was empty, but the suitcase rested on the passenger seat. I turned and started toward the sally port, noticing that its heavily studded door stood open a few inches. The low tunnel was completely dark. I felt my way along it toward the courtyard, one hand on its icy stone wall.

  The doors to the courtyard also stood open. I peered through them into the gloom beyond. What light there was came from the bridge and more security beacons high up on the wooden watchtowers; I could barely make out the shapes of the construction equipment that stood near the west side. The clanking from the bridge was oppressive and eerie in the still night.

  As I was about to step into the courtyard, there was a movement to my right. I drew back into the sally port as Lee Gottschalk came out of one of the ground-floor doorways. My first impulse was to confront him, but then I decided against it. He might shout, warn Vanessa, and she might escape before I could deliver her parents’ message.

  After a few seconds I looked out again, meaning to follow Gottschalk, but he was nowhere in sight. A faint shaft of light fell through the door from which he had emerged and rippled over the cobblestone floor. I went that way, through the door and along a narrow corridor to where an archway was illuminated. Then, realizing the archway led to the unrestored cell of the jail I’d seen earlier, I paused. Surely Vanessa wasn’t hiding in there …

  I crept forward and looked through the arch. The light came from a heavy-duty flashlight that sat on the floor. It threw macabre shadows on the waterstained walls, showing their streaked and painted graffiti. My gaze followed its beams upward and then down, to where the grating of the cistern lay out of place on the floor beside the hole. Then I moved over to the railing, leaned across it, and trained the flashlight down into the well.

  I saw, with a rush of shock and horror, the dark hair and once-handsome features of Vanessa DiCesare.

  She had been hacked to death. Stabbed and slashed, as if in a frenzy. Her clothing was ripped; there were gashes on her face and hands; she was covered with dark smears of blood. Her eyes were open, staring with that horrible flatness of death.

  I came back on my heels, clutching the railing for support. A wave of dizziness swept over me, followed by an icy coldness. I thought: He killed her. And then I pictured Gottschalk in his Union Army uniform, the saber hanging from his belt, and I knew what the weapon had been.

  “God!” I said aloud.

  Why had he murdered her? I had no way of knowing yet. But the answer to why he’d thrown her into the cistern, instead of just putting her into the bay, was clear: She was supposed to have committed suicide; and while bodies that fall from the Golden Gate Bridge sustain a great many injuries, slash and stab wounds aren’t among them. Gottschalk could not count on the body being swept out to sea on the current; if she washed up somewhere along the coast, it would be obvious she had been murdered—and eventually an investigation might have led back to him. To him and his soldier’s saber.

  It also seemed clear that he’d come to the fort tonight to move the body. But why not last night, why leave her in the cistern all day? Probably he’d needed to plan, to secure keys to the gate and the fort, to check the schedule of the night patrols for the best time to remove her. Whatever his reason, I realized now that I’d walked into a very dangerous situation. Walked right in without bringing my gun. I turned quickly to get out of there …

  And came face-to-face with Lee Gottschalk.

  His eyes were wide, his mouth drawn back in a snarl of surprise. In one hand he held a bundle of heavy canvas. “You!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I jerked back from him, bumped into the railing, and dropped the flashlight. It clattered on the floor and began rolling toward the mouth of the cistern. Gottschalk lunged toward me, and as I dodged, the light fell into the hole and the cell went dark. I managed to push past him and ran down the hallway to the courtyard.

  Stumbling on the cobblestones, I ran blindly for the sally port. Its doors were shut now—he’d probably taken that precaution when he’d returned from getting the tarp to wrap her body in. I grabbed the iron hasp and tugged, but couldn’t get it open. Gottschalk’s footsteps were coming through the courtyard after me now. I let go of the hasp and ran again.

  When I came to the enclosed staircase at the other end of the court, I started up. The steps were wide at the outside, narrow at the inside. My toes banged into the risers of the steps; a couple of times I teetered and almost fell backwards. At the first tier I
paused, then kept going. Gottschalk had said something about unrestored rooms on the second tier; they’d be a better place to hide than in the museum.

  Down below I could hear him climbing after me. The sound of his feet—clattering and stumbling—echoed in the close space. I could hear him grunt and mumble: low, ugly sounds that I knew were curses.

  I had absolutely no doubt that if he caught me, he would kill me. Maybe do to me what he had done to Vanessa …

  I rounded the spiral once again and came out on the top floor gallery, my heart beating wildly, my breath coming in pants. To my left were archways, black outlines filled with dark-gray sky. To my right was blackness. I went that way, hands out, feeling my way.

  My hands touched the rough wood of a door. I pushed, and it opened. As I passed through it, my shoulder bag caught on something; I yanked it loose and kept going. Beyond the door I heard Gottschalk curse loudly, the sound filled with surprise and pain; he must have fallen on the stairway. And that gave me a little more time.

  The tug at my shoulder bag had reminded me of the small flashlight I keep there. Flattening myself against the wall next to the door, I rummaged through the bag and brought out the flash. Its beam showed high walls and arching ceilings, plaster and lath pulled away to expose dark brick. I saw cubicles and cubbyholes opening into dead ends, but to my right was an arch. I made a small involuntary sound of relief, then thought Quiet! Gottschalk’s footsteps started up the stairway again as I moved through the archway.

  The crumbling plaster walls beyond the archway were set at odd angles—an interlocking funhouse maze connected by small doors. I slipped through one and found myself in an irregularly shaped room heaped with debris. There didn’t seem to be an exit, so I ducked back into the first room and moved toward the outside wall, where gray outlines indicated small high-placed windows. I couldn’t hear Gottschalk anymore—couldn’t hear anything but the roar and clank from the bridge directly overhead.