Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  Two days later, I graduated. The day after that, I left for my summer job in Berkeley. For weeks, I waited for some man in a uniform to come and arrest me for putting the king of Diamond Lake High in the hospital.

  That uniform never appeared. I returned to Diamond Lake a bare handful of times over the next few years, but that ended with my mother’s funeral. I never laid eyes on my tormenter again. I let his name and his acts fade into obscurity—until thirty years later, when a yearbook photo explained the complicated reactions that had been stirred up, first by driving past the high school’s new addition, then in talking with Chief Ruckart.

  That kid in the letterman jacket was Mark Fields.

  IX

  Mark “More Apps Than Apple” Fields only came onto the Bay Area scene during the past decade. I’d never seen him in person, his photographs were of a thinner man with a beard, and his name was generic enough that it didn’t rouse my long-buried memories. Though I did have to wonder if the software billionaire ever thought about his teen-aged humiliation at the hands of a lesser mortal: a girl, one who barely registered on his gorgeousness meter, who’d got lucky with a chunk of pipe.

  In truth, we were both damned lucky. I’d been amped up enough that night to swing for the bleachers—and with that thought came the nauseating sensation of my bat hitting something that was not a softball. It was amazing I hadn’t killed him outright.

  But nobody had ever come to question me. I’ve had my own personal experience with being knocked out, in a case long ago, so I knew Fields himself might never be sure what had happened to him that night. His friends must have taken him to the hospital, and they’d have told him who was responsible, but had any of them ever reported it to the police? Well, I’d never been summoned home for questioning, never been confronted by his angry father, so—no, they probably had not.

  Rather than admitting a girl had bested him, he may have used the I-walked-into-a-door defense. No doubt his buddies teased him for a while, before letting him go back to his life—maybe just a little bit wary of girls who said No .

  The sounds of the library trickled back to my awareness. I blinked, and turned the yearbook page. Though I did watch for that face, in the images that followed. I finished with 1981, glanced up at the clock, and turned to 1982. School dances, nerdly faculty, fundraisers, and the Homecoming court. Two pages of yearbook staff, four of after-school clubs, and half a dozen artsy photos of classrooms at work. Then sports, again mostly boys, and heavily slanted toward football. No Mark Fields, oddly enough, despite his earlier achievement of a letterman jacket—which I was pretty sure were only given to underclassmen good enough to make a varsity team.

  I felt a stir of uneasiness. Had I hit him so hard I’d ruined his high school career? Oh, come on—this was Mark Fields, one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. Whatever I’d done to him didn’t slow him down much.

  On to the class of 1983. More pages, more happy young faces. Artistic close-ups of keyboards and drawing pads, a teacher in a paisley tie, couples at a school dance, an assembly with a US Senator, a shot of crowded bleachers, a group of —

  Wait. I turned back, to the crowd at a basketball game. Yes, those were my sister’s heavily painted eyes, distinctive even in a sea of excited faces, looking down from a seat high in the stands. But she was not with Lisa Ferraro.

  The boy beside her, at the end of a group of other boys, was a head taller than Patty. And though she, too, sat at the end of a row of girls, their proximity did not look like mere chance. His head was bent down so close to hers, speaking in her ear over the noise, that their dark hair seemed to blend. His arm was not across her shoulders—did teachers monitor against displays of affection, back in 1983?—but they were so close, it might as well have been.

  I couldn’t make out his face, just a shiny black jacket that had to be leather, and a full head of equally dark hair. I picked up my phone to take several shots of the image, making sure they were very clear.

  Nothing caught my eye in the remainder of the volume. Nor did I find anything among the uncaptioned shots of 1984, other than the glimpse of a tall girl with light hair who might have been Lisa Ferraro. I returned the yearbooks to their shelf, thanked the librarian, and walked back across the little park to the police station, immersed in thought.

  * *

  Al, almost inevitably, was in Chief Ruckart’s office, the two men deep in a consideration of the Giants versus the A’s. But an old, taped-up evidence box on the floor beside him showed that he’d been busy, so I did not give the boys too hard a time over their waste of publicly funded salaries.

  After a final exchange of pitcher stats—Madison Bumgarner versus Sonny Gray—Al tossed me the keys and scooped up the box, following me to the parking lot. I opened the trunk so he could lock his burden inside, and got behind the wheel.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  “Pretty much what you’d expect from what began as a crime scene and got downgraded to an accident.” He fished out his phone to check for texts, put it away. “They started with logbook, photo records, names from passing cars, and the rest. And then about ten the next morning, it all came to a halt. They swept up, packed away the signs, put away their cameras. Though they did develop all five rolls of film—they’re in the box, so we can print them up. Oh, and I told Ruckart we’d bring it all back when we’re finished. Sorry if that means another trip down here for you.”

  “You signed for the evidence?”

  “Absolutely. Though he didn’t seem too keen on getting it back—I think their storage is getting full.”

  Signing for evidence preserved a chain of custody—though considering how long this had been treated as an accident, the chances of finding anything to change that were small. Still, habits die hard.

  “Also, you can draw a line through about half the names in the original report. Including, it turns out, Joseph Weber, who died a couple years ago.”

  “Thirty years, that’s what you expect.”

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Some names to follow up. A girl Patty worked with on a stage production, her art teacher, that kind of thing.” I told him about Lisa Ferraro, and about the boy in the leather jacket, high in the bleachers with my sister during the final weeks of her life. “Oh, and I discovered that I knocked out Mark Fields one time. The Mark Fields.”

  “What, the tech guy? How the hell did you come to do that?”

  “He went to Diamond Lake High the same time I did, though a couple years behind me. He and his buddies cornered me one night after I’d publicly turned him down, and thought they’d get back at me for the insult. Nothing drastic, just a dose of ritual humiliation, but I got my hands on a length of pipe. He didn’t believe I’d use it. Until I did.”

  The silence from Al’s side of the car went on. I glanced over and saw a peculiar expression on his face. “What?”

  “The kid was out for a gang-bang and just you forgot about it? Didn’t you turn him in? What kind of a childhood did you have, anyway?”

  “Oh jeez, Al, it was nowhere near that serious. For me, that is—he may still have headaches.” I decided not to mention Fields’ absence from the sports pages for the remainder of his high school career. “Like I said, he thought he’d feel me up to prove he could, I didn’t let him, game over. Plus that, I left town right after and life got busy. So yeah, I just forgot.”

  “Well,” he said, after a minute. “Remind me never to sneak up on you.”

  “Better believe it,” I agreed. “So, how do you want to divvy up the next steps?”

  While I drove, he compiled another list and marked off who was to look into what. It was dark when I dropped him at his house and continued up the Peninsula. But once in San Francisco, I did not head directly home.

  Instead, I went past Building 606—the SFPD crime labs, down in Hunters Point—to sign over the evidence box, noting that I had removed its envelope of photo negatives. Those I took to the Hall of Justi
ce photo lab, asking for two sets of prints. Then finally, after the end of a very long day, I drove home.

  My dinner was cold, but my family was still awake: that counted as a win in my book, any day.

  X

  When Lee and Nora had both gone up to bed, I retrieved Patty’s R-rated postscript page from my locked file cabinet. Reading it, now that I’d caught a glimpse of my sister’s world, my half-serious thought that she’d been out to shock her older sister grew stronger. The PS had been in her final letter, written eighteen days before she died. And since the high school basketball season started in late November, that blurred yearbook image of a boy in a leather jacket would have been taken about the same time.

  (But why did the boy have to wear the cliché black leather? If it had been denim, or plaid, or a sweatshirt, I wouldn’t keep picturing my sister tucked under the possessive arm of The Fonz.)

  Patty’s loopy scrawl read:

  Dearie KC,

  Meant to send this last week and it got buried so heres an update before I send it off. Mostly I might have a new after-school job, a dumb office place but it’s less hours and MORE PAY!! than the theater, so yay for that. And the hours are after school instead of nights and weekend which is like TOTALLY SICK cause I got OTHER THINGS TO DO DURING THE NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (nudge nudge wink wink) and no I’m not gonna tell you about those OTHER THINGS TO DO cause you’ll get on the bus and come right down here and give me a lecture like The Ma does and god noze I got plenty of lectures from The Ma. (You know I hate you for going off to Berkeley without me, right? Right? And how are the hippies there in Berzerkeley, honeybun? Smokin dope right? Whattabout that history exam you spent your WHOLE CHRISTMAS VACATION on—you manage to scrape by? Cause wouldn’t it be the shits to flunk out and have to come home to The Dump haha. Which is why I’ll be passing ALL MY CLASSES when report cards come out, not like that’s work haha.)

  Anyhoo off to do OTHER THINGS for a while and fling this into the mailbox, but just so you know that your sister is being TOTALLY GOOD heres a sweet pic of the SECRET FRIEND of mine that I’m doing all those OTHER THINGS (!!) with, or anyway a pic with a PART of him…

  Yer notty sis P

  ​ The photograph was a Polaroid, for obvious reasons. I have a vivid memory of it falling out of the envelope onto my dorm room floor—and being grateful that I hadn’t opened the letter in public.

  The Polaroid showed a tattoo of ornate Gothic letters reading KISS on the left and MY on the right. Between the two words lay the hairy cleft of a pair of male buttocks.

  I’d been outraged, that was for sure—both at the image itself, and at the idea of this thing in close proximity to my kid sister. That I remembered—as well as the determination to go back down to Diamond Lake for a long, stern talk with Patty about everything from birth control to self-respect. The sort of talk a mother ought to have, but I knew wouldn’t happen from ours.

  But the next time I rode into town, Patty lay cold inside a wooden box.

  Had the boy in the leather jacket come to her funeral? I remembered Mother, closed-mouth with what the priest took for grief but which I knew was a fury of disappointment. And some of Patty’s friends had been there, the girls bare of makeup, the boys plucking at borrowed neckties. Had one of those anonymous mourners been the owner of those buttocks?

  Now, at the age of 52, the photograph struck me as sad. That Patty would end up with a boy whose idea of a joke was to drop trou for his girlfriend’s camera. Who didn’t have the nerve to introduce himself as her boyfriend at the funeral—but then, her own sister had failed her, too. I wasn’t experienced enough to be alarmed by the phrase “secret friend”, but I should have heard the urgency, should have responded by storming down to give her hell.

  Though as I studied the faded image, I found my mouth twitching. I could just see Patty’s grin of mischief as she wrapped the page around that picture and sealed the envelope. The same grin she wore when I’d find Thed Bear in a Chatty Cathy pinafore, or embroidered with a scarlet lipstick smile, or wearing a girly necklace. The Polaroid of a boy’s ass was just the sort of thing she’d invent, knowing how crazy it would make me.

  Of course, there was also the yearbook photo of Patty with Leather Jacket, his posture suggesting intimacy. Had I any reason to think it was the same person? Maybe I could simply tell myself it was a prank—Patty’s way to move our Thed Bear competition into the grownup world, what might have been the first in a long line of elaborate adult jokes.

  ​ I slid the picture back into its risqué postscript and put them away, to a place where Nora wouldn’t see either for a very long time. And then I went up to bed—carrying with me the unfortunate image of The Fonz hiking up his leather jacket to show the KISS MY ASS tattoo across his butt. Lee was still reading when I came in, and I ended up telling her about the photo and what my brain had done with it, which made her laugh and let me forget about this case that wasn’t a case, at least for a few hours.

  * *

  The next day was full, first with things I’d put off in my preoccupation with Diamond Lake, and then with a near-fatal shooting that turned out to be an idiot discharging his handgun inside a cement garage, aiming at a rat but having the bullet ricochet into his leg. I spent part of my weekend dealing with the immediate fallout from this, and the rest of it with Lee, since Nora was off in Tahoe with friends.

  Bright and early Monday morning, twin parcels from the photo lab arrived. I sent one to Al’s accident reconstruction guy, then firmly locked the other set in my desk to look at later, since I had an appointment to interview the rat-shooter’s wife. The shooter was going to be discharged from the hospital the next day, and the Department wanted to make sure this wasn’t going to be a habit—and when the fed-up woman led us to a back room and a virtual private armory of firearms, grenades, and strange explosive devices, all neatly labeled and none with a license, that took care of the rest of the day.

  I did not take the photographs home with me that night.

  Tuesday morning, with the rain washing down over the dirty Hall of Justice windows, I carried the package into an unused interview room and shut the door, to go methodically through them. Five rolls of film that the Diamond Lake police had taken that day, nearly two hundred images of catastrophe, twenty-six of them showing my sister’s dead body—and in the end, they told me nothing I had not known from the sample I was given in Diamond Lake.

  Glass on the road. A trampled rag. The gouge in the tree. Dark fingerprints in what looked like odd places. Patty trapped under the pressed-forward seat, her arm stretched out. One photograph showed her limp fingers, revealing a chip in her incongruously pink, girly nail-polish.

  I went through them all a second time before I packed them away, then sat in the silent room for a long time, head in hands.

  I put the package back in my desk and told my partner I was going home sick for the rest of the day. I drove out to Ocean Beach, deserted in the rain, and walked up and down the sand until my raincoat failed and I felt that I might be able to face my family without breaking down. At home, I took a very long, very hot shower. When Lee and Nora came home, I told them we were going to dinner and a movie, school night or not.

  Their exchange of glances showed they knew something was up. And their silence proved that they had already agreed not to ask. Instead, during dinner we talked about nothing much and everything important. In the dark theater, I sat between them, holding their hands from time to time. At the end of the night, neither of them asked what was wrong.

  I am so incredibly lucky, to have such women in my life.

  XI

  Wednesday, one week after Al and I had met up for lunch at Toby’s, he sent me a text just as I was dropping Nora off at school.

  Car guy wants to see me at 9. You free?

  By “car guy” I guessed he meant the reconstructionist. I sent back:

  Pick you up at the station?

  And received:

  8:40

  Unless he’d ne
ed a car during the day, Al tended to travel in on the commuter train. Parked up the street, I could tell when the train got in: a surge of young tech workers with phones, followed by a second tide of blue collar workers with lunchboxes, and Al.

  I negotiated back into traffic and said, “Your accident guy is fast, if he’s done a complete reconstruction already.”

  “Nah, just a prelim. But he owes me some favors, so he took a quick look before he does his full-scale write-up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing yet, just the offer to meet. He’s a funny guy, always wants a face-to-face or a phone call. I indulge him when I can. You didn’t have anything this morning?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t move. Where are we going?”

  He gave me an address not far from the department’s own crime labs, a nondescript office building in the corner of an industrial area. To my amusement, the walls inside were covered with elaborately framed, artistically shot photographs of distorted front ends, tangled skid-marks, and huge vehicles in impossible positions.

  “That you, Al? Be with you in a jiff,” called a voice from somewhere.

  “No ru—” But Al’s reply was drowned by a crashing noise that trailed off into the reverberations of a spinning hubcap.

  The man who came out, brushing his hands together in a gesture of satisfaction, looked like something from an old movie. Shorter than I, white hair all on end, scarlet bow tie, pink shirt, and brown corduroy pants. And, as I knew I’d see before I looked down, socks with sandals.

  “Al, lovely as always. And you, my dear, we met once, I do believe, although it was long, long ago. The Impala shoved over the cliff up in the headlands. The one that caught on its rear axle? We were on opposite sides of the case.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, having no memory of car or man. “Kate Martinelli.”

  “Of course you are, and I’m Ray Schulman. Al, you’re looking well, the walking regime seems to be doing you good, I ought to join you but you know how it goes, too much to do here, you’d never know I’m theoretically retired, would you—but I’d die in a week without this to keep me on my toes, now where did I put your file?”