The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Everything happened pretty fast,” I said. “Who was driving?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, smiling as he handed me my copy. “We don’t give out personal customer information. You never know who might be suing who, right?”

  “Just curious,” I said. “When do you think I can have my truck back?”

  He looked at the calendar on the wall behind him as he counted on his fingers. “Friday, maybe, if all the parts come in. More likely not until next Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Peachy,” I said, dismayed. With luck and hard work, I would be at home, sleeping in my own bed by this Tuesday night. I needed the truck to haul things I was taking with me. Now it looked like I would have to rent something bigger than the van Guido drove from the airport, or hire a hauler. The next problem was getting my truck picked up and stored until I could get back up and fetch it. I could ask yet another favor of Lyle and Roy, but I was loath to. That big truck would be a pain to handle on the narrow streets of their San Francisco neighborhood. Maybe I could impose on Beto to pick it up and keep it for a little while.

  As I folded the paperwork I saw the signature of the policeman who released the car. I asked, “When was Detective Halloran in?”

  “He left just before I called you.”

  Bill wrote my name in big red letters across the top of my work order and dumped it into a rack on the wall behind the desk. As he did, I saw the name atop the work order filed just ahead of mine.

  I thanked Bill, and left.

  Kevin was waiting for me outside in the parking lot. He opened the passenger door of his unmarked city car and said, “Get in.”

  “What happened to please?” I said as I passed him on my way into the car. He just shook his head. He looked like hell, unshaven, edgy, but in his situation, who wouldn’t? Beto told me Kevin had just signed his wife into rehab. When was the last time he’d had a full night’s sleep?

  While he fumbled for his seat belt, he asked, “What’s the bite for your repairs?”

  I pulled out my copy of the estimate and handed it to him. The amount on the bottom after the dollar sign made him blanch.

  “Have you filed a repair claim with your insurance company yet?” he asked.

  “It’s taken care of,” I said.

  Slowly, he turned toward me. “Is that a yes?”

  “I called my agent yesterday. She got the incident report from the Highway Patrol and gave approval to the dealership to make the repairs. Other than waiting for the repairs to be done and paying the deductible, I’m finished.”

  All the blood drained from his face. He started to say something, but his eyes filled and he looked away.

  “Take your time,” I said, pulling a tissue from the box in the console and handing it to him.

  He blew his nose and drew a couple of shaky breaths, started the car and drove out of the lot. At the first red light, he reached behind his seat, grabbed a blue three-ring binder and handed it to me.

  “This what you want?” he asked.

  I looked at the binder’s spine, saw the name TRINH “TINA” ­NGUYEN BARTOLINI, the date of her death and her case number. When I texted Kevin earlier and asked for the investigation log—the murder book—I now held in my hands, I had expected a big argument, and for legal reasons there probably should have been one. But with no whining, bribery or cajolery, he had brought me the original old-style, paper-and-ink murder book that was assembled by the detectives who originally worked Mrs. B’s case over thirty years ago. The paper was yellowing and smelled of dust and maybe some mildew. I could see finger marks and penciled notations, and foxing on the edges of pages thumbed by detectives one year after the next ever since. No digital file could ever have the authenticity this hard-copy record bore.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The crime scene,” he said. “Indian Rock Park. Okay with you?”

  “Fine with me,” I said, scanning the log of evidence collected by the coroner: gunshot residue, blood type, fingernail scrapings, hair, pubic hair, sexual assault kit, bullet(s), clothing. The coroner’s narrative report and a diagram followed.

  Even though the Deputy Medical Examiner’s choice of words, meant to be objective—just the facts—revealed no emotion, I found it difficult to remain detached. I kept seeing Mrs. B as I had known her in life and as I saw her in her coffin, dressed in white, as serene as a Botticelli angel. I had witnessed autopsies where case-hardened medical examiners wept, but still wrote their reports with bland objectivity. Nowhere did the report on my lap mention that Mrs. Bartolini was a beautiful young mother when she died, or that her death affected an entire community. Had Alameda County Deputy Medical Examiner R. Suzuki known how special my friend’s mother was? Was she handled with dignity? Or was she merely the next victim in the assembly line of victims to be dealt with?

  The medical examiner’s report said the cause of death was a through-and-through gunshot wound to the chest. The victim had a large contusion and abrasions on her right hip, contusions on the right shoulder, contusions and abrasions on the right temple area. The injuries were consistent with a fall onto a hard, flat surface. Carpet fibers found in the hip abrasions suggested she was unclothed when they occurred. Though there was evidence of recent sex, and semen was collected, there were no vaginal or anal contusions, abrasions, or tearing. No tissue was found under her fingernails. The blood inside her mouth could have been her own.

  Kevin stayed on MLK, Jr. to Hopkins. I didn’t look up until he took the hairpin loop to connect with Indian Rock Avenue so fast I had to grab onto the hand rest to stay upright. I said, “Careful, Officer, you’ll get a ticket.”

  Finally, a trace of smile crossed his face, but it wasn’t much. Something was up with him, and I had a very bad feeling I knew what it was.

  Kevin pulled over near a park entrance, got out and waited for me. I brought the murder book along, opened to the plastic sleeves that held the Polaroids taken of Mrs. Bartolini lying among the boulders nearby.

  According to the first homicide investigation report, Mrs. B’s body was discovered by a mailman who stopped on his route during his lunch break to fill his water bottle at the fountain near the park sign. But because there are no rest rooms in the park, before he filled his bottle he went between some boulders to relieve himself, and that’s when he saw her.

  Feeling a little queasy to be standing on the spot where she was found while looking at photos of her body, I turned to look down across the Bay, saw that the sun had already dropped into the fog bank obscuring the Golden Gate. It was late in the day, already cooling off. The rocks around us would radiate accumulated heat for hours after the sun disappeared. Mrs. Bartolini had been found before noon on a cool but sunny fall day. She was lying in the shade, but the rocks around her would have been warm.

  I looked back and forth between the Polaroids and the place.

  “Kevin, what time did we head off for school in the morning?”

  “Around eight, I guess.”

  “Mrs. B died some time between then and just before noon, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “When she saw Beto off that morning, she was wearing a powder blue shirtwaist dress and low-heeled black pumps.” I held the coroner’s evidence log for him to see. “According to this, when she was found she was wearing a white blouse and nothing else.”

  “Okay.”

  “It isn’t a blouse.” I pointed at the button placket visible in the Polar­oid close-up of her chest area, a bloody mass speckled with black gunpowder burns. “It’s a man’s shirt.”

  As he looked at the photo, he fingered the placket at the neck of his polo shirt, checking which side the buttons were on. He said, “I’ll be damned.”

  “According to the medical examiner, Mrs. B was naked on the bottom when she fell or was pushed. At some point, and in some order, she had intercourse, put on a man’s shirt, and was shot in the chest.”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Where is the sh
irt now?” I asked.

  “In a sealed evidence bag locked up in my office.”

  “Is there a laundry mark? Maybe remnants of fluids from more than one person?”

  He glanced askance at me. “How much do the TV people pay you to snoop, Sherlock?”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “I’ll send the shirt to the crime analyst and ask him to check it out.” With the back of his hand, he wiped away sweat running down the side of his face. “See anything else?”

  “Lots of blood on the shirt, but there wasn’t very much blood found here in the park,” I said. “She was murdered elsewhere and dumped. It wouldn’t take a very strong person to carry her because she barely weighed a hundred pounds.”

  “That we know, but no crime scene was ever determined,” he said. “You think you know what happened?”

  “I have some ideas,” I said. “How long can I keep the book?”

  “You can’t keep something you never saw,” he said. “It’s an open murder case and that’s a confidential police document. Besides, I don’t ever, ever want Beto to get a look at what’s in there. I keep the book.”

  I looked around for a boulder in the shade to sit on. “Then give me a minute with it, okay?”

  “Take your time.” He started up the steps that were cut into the face of a granite tower. “Whistle when you’re finished.”

  I opened the book and began reading the investigation reports. Mrs. Bartolini’s body was identified by Patrol Officer Ray Gutierrez, who knew her because he frequented the Bartolini Deli and because he and the victim attended the same church. The police captain who responded to the scene dispatched Officer Gutierrez to collect Father John and to go with him to inform Bart of his wife’s death. Bart took the news as expected, hard, and was driven home from his place of work by Officer Gutierrez. Father John stayed with Bart while Officer Gutierrez went to the school to pick up Beto. Father John was worried enough about Bart’s state of mind that he summoned the family physician, Dr. Benjamin Nussbaum, who administered a sedative. Any questioning of Mr. Bartolini was postponed until, in police-report-speak, “such a time that he was not under the influence of sedation.”

  The first conversation between Bart and the police happened three days after the murder. Bart went by the police station to retrieve his wife’s wedding ring so that she could be buried with it, and stayed to answer some questions posed by Detective Charles Riley. According to the interview summary, he was at the deli all that morning. His lovely wife had no enemies. Period. I could hear what my late husband, Mike, would have to say about the softball questions Chuck Riley lobbed at Bart, who should have been his first suspect. But Mike worked detectives in great big, occasionally murderous Los Angeles, and not in relatively peaceful little Berkeley. Kevin had already told me that his department didn’t get much experience working homicides. Everyone in town knew Mr. B, and knew that he doted on his beautiful young wife. But still...

  What happened to Beto? I flipped through the pages but found nothing except that when the police left the Bartolini house that evening, Beto, Father John, Doc Nussbaum, and Dr. Brian Halloran, the head counselor at the high school—Kevin’s father—were “inside the residence.”

  “Hey.” Kevin’s shadow fell across the book. I looked up and spotted him leaning over a ledge about fifteen feet above me. “Did you know there’s a cross chiseled on the rocks up here?”

  “I saw it the other day,” I said. “But I don’t remember seeing it before.”

  “Me either.” He started down the steps. “Last time I was up here I think I was with you. We wouldn’t have seen it though, because it was dark when we came up to watch submarine races.”

  “Uncle Kevin,” I said, ignoring the remark. “When did you and Beto become such great friends?”

  “It started then.” He indicated the book on my lap as he walked toward me. “Old Bart was a basket case after Mrs. B died.”

  “I remember. The report says your dad was at their house that after­noon.”

  “Father John asked Dad to go over and talk to Beto, to make sure he had what he needed. They decided that because Dad was a school counselor and Mom was a nurse, they’d be able to look after Beto until Bart could pull himself together, so Dad brought him home. He stayed with us off and on for maybe a year, until Aunt Quynh got out of Vietnam and contacted Bart. There were a lot of crazy rumors going around. Dad wanted me to make sure the kids at school weren’t...”

  He searched for a word. I said, “Kids?”

  “I was going to say little shits.” His color was better than it had been when he picked me up.

  “That’s when you started walking to school with us.” My shade had disappeared so I got up and moved into the shadows cast by the rocks.

  He followed me. “Yeah. I’d walk him over to your street and meet you guys, make sure you didn’t stop to rumble with any more bullies on the way to school.”

  “I keep seeing Father John’s hand in our lives,” I said, leaning my back against the rough, warm stone. “He’s the keeper of everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets. I wonder how he can sleep at night.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t.” Kevin fell quiet, his focus on something far, far away. “Maybe that’s why he’s sick.”

  “You’re not going to say Father John is dying for our sins, are you?”

  “No.” The corner of his mouth came up in a semblance of a wry smile. “Dying from the weight of them, maybe.”

  “Kev?” I put my hand on his arm and waited until he looked down at me. “You ready to tell me why you decided to show me the murder book?”

  There was a fresh breeze coming in off the Bay, and we were in the shade, but he broke out into a sweat again and seemed to have difficulty breathing. I was afraid he would pass out. I put my hand against his cheek and made him meet my eyes.

  I said, “Beto told me you signed Lacy into rehab last night.”

  He shook his head. Choked with emotion, he managed to say, “I committed her on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. Danger to herself and to others.”

  “Namely, a danger to me?”

  “You had it figured out, didn’t you?” he said.

  “After overhearing what you said to her last night when you manhandled her out of the Bartolinis’ backyard, I started to wonder,” I said. “But it wasn’t until I saw your name on the work order for repairs to a certain shot-up silver car that I actually knew.”

  “That crazy bitch,” he said, dropping his head into his hands for a moment before he straightened up and faced me. “Yesterday afternoon, I went over to the dealership to make sure your truck was locked in a secure area until the ballistics techs could go over it. And there was Lacy’s car, already parked at the body shop. She shot off her own side mirror, for chrissake.”

  “The good news is, Lacy is a lousy shot and no one got hurt.”

  He let out a long, labored breath. “My career is over.”

  “Oh, sweetie, lots of cops have crazy wives.” I patted his shoulder. “If they all got fired when their wives spun out of control, there would be no one left to write tickets. You’ll get through this, Kevin. Just tell me you haven’t done anything really stupid yet, like filing a false report or making anything disappear?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Does Lacy have a psych history?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Then get her a good lawyer and let it all play out, Kev,” I said. “It’s up to the Oakland PD to file charges, and so far they don’t seem inclined to get overly involved. Your insurance company will probably pay mine off and then cancel your coverage, but that’s the worst they’ll do.”

  “I’ll have to file a report with my department,” he said.

  “Do what you need to do,” I said. “I won’t press charges, Kevin. You didn’t need to try to bribe me with the murder book, but I’m glad you did.”

  He let out a long breath, one he may have been holding for the last day. “Know a good lawy
er?”

  “Uncle Max will,” I said. “He’s at the house now. Take me back to my car and then you go right over and talk to him.”

  “Are the Lopers on patrol?”

  “Of course they are, but surely you haven’t forgotten the secret way into my backyard?”

  He laughed, a big, full-chested ha-ha-ha that verged on sobs. Without warning, he pulled me against him and held me in a tight bear hug.

  “God, Mag, I’ve missed you.”

  “Just don’t flip me, Kev,” I said, my face pressed against the front of his sweaty polo. “And don’t tickle me. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He set me on my feet and released me. “Not this time.”

  As he drove us back down the hill, I turned toward him. “Yesterday, no one knew where Jean-Paul and I were going, not even us. So, how the hell did Lacy track us down?”

  “She followed you,” he said.

  “All day? Impossible. I would have seen her.”

  “How many silver cars do you think were out there on the freeway yesterday? Would you notice one little piece-of-shit Focus?”

  “Maybe not. So, has Lacy been lying in wait for me?”

  “She didn’t have to,” he said. “You know where her folks live, right?”

  I nodded. “Across from Beto.”

  “The other night, when I picked her up from your house, I took her to her parents’ house because I didn’t want my daughter to see her like that. She had it in her head that I was hanging out with you. When she saw your truck go by on Saturday with a man driving, she assumed it was me. So she grabbed her dad’s gun from a drawer in the front hall table and lit out after you.”

  “And stuck with us all afternoon?”

  He nodded. “All afternoon, probably dogging you, waiting to get a good shot. This isn’t exactly pickup country so your truck wasn’t hard to follow.”

  “It wasn’t me she was shooting at, though, was it? It was you.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Hell hath no fury?” I said.

  “Crazy jealous bitch?”

  “Hey, Kev?”

  “Mmm?”

  “The other night, when Lacy was pounding on my front door because she thought you were inside with me, what if the door had been unlocked and she had been able to come in, and if she’d had her dad’s gun with her then, what would she have done?”