To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  She talked with Molly, a seventy-one-year-old ex-secretary who lived off a minute pension and spent her nights behind an apartment house in the shelter that covered the residents’ garbage cans. Some of them left her packets of food, she’d received a blue wool coat and a nice blanket for Christmas, and yes, she knew Brother Erasmus quite well, such a nice man, and what a disappointment he wasn’t at the service yesterday. A couple of the others had tried to lead hymns, but it just wasn’t the same, so in the end she’d just marched down the road and gone to a Catholic church, although she hadn’t been to a church in twenty years, and it was quite a pleasant experience. Everyone had been so nice to her, welcomed her to have coffee and cookies afterward, and what do you know, as she got to talking to one of the girls who was serving the coffee, it turned out that they needed some help in the office, just three or four hours a week, but wasn’t that a happy coincidence. It’d mean she could buy a real dinner sometimes, such a blessing, dear.

  Then Kate talked with Star, a frail young woman with the freckles of childhood across her nose and a curly-haired four-year-old son who leaned on his mother’s knee as she sat on the bench, his thumb in his mouth and his eyes darting between Kate and the hillside behind them, where three small children in Osh-Kosh overalls and European shoes giggled madly as they lowered themselves to the ground and rolled, over and over, down the lawn. Star’s hair was lank and greasy and she had a cold sore on her mouth, but her son’s hair shone in the wintery sun and he wore a bright jacket. Star had lived on the streets since her parents in Wichita had thrown her out when she was four months pregnant. Her son Jesse had been born in California. Her AFDC was screwed up; the checks didn’t come. So they’d been in shelters the last few weeks. Yeah, she knew Erasmus. Funny old guy. At first she stayed away from him, thought he was weird. After all, an old guy who wants to give a kid a toy, a person has to be careful. But after a while he seemed okay. And he was really good with Jesse. He gave him a party for his birthday back in November, a cake for God’s sake, with his name on it, big enough for everyone in the shelter. And last month when Jesse had a really bad cough, it was just after the AFDC screwup, Brother Erasmus had just handed her some money and told her to take Jesse to the doctor’s. Well no, he hadn’t said it like that; he talks runny, kind of old-fashioned like. But he had said something about doctors, and it was a good thing they went, because it was pneumonia. Jesse could have died. And she was sorry Erasmus wasn’t here yesterday, because she had wanted to talk to him. It was sort of an anniversary—a whole year she’d been clean now. Yeah, she didn’t want Jesse growing up with a junkie for a mom. And what if she went to jail—what’d happen to him? And there was a training program she thought she might start, wanted to talk to Erasmus about it. Well no, he didn’t really give advice, just sometimes in a roundabout way, but talking to him made things clearer. Yeah, maybe she’d sign up anyway, tell him about it next week.

  Star was seventeen years old.

  Kate saw her three army buddies from the other night, two of them lying back on their elbows in the grass with their shirts off, the third one curled up nearby, asleep. Yes, they had missed Erasmus yesterday, especially Tony. He got really wild when the Brother didn’t show, started shouting that the old guy’d been taken prisoner, that they had to send a patrol out to get him back. “Stupid bastard,” commented the veteran with the collar-to-wrist tattoos, not without affection. The other one shrugged. Nightmares last night, too, and now there he was, sleeping like a baby. Maybe it was time to head south. Not so cold in the south, get some work in the orange groves. If she saw the old Brother, tell him the infantry said hi.

  She looked down at the sleeping Tony as she turned to go. His coat collar had slipped down. Behind his right ear, a patch of scalp the size of Kate’s palm gleamed, scar tissue beneath the sparse black hair.

  Mark was next, a beautiful surfer boy, lean tan body with long blond curls. Kate wondered what the hell he was doing still loose, but there he was, looking lost beneath the bare pollarded trees in front of the music concourse. Sure, he knew Brother Erasmus. Brother Erasmus was one of the twelve holy men whose presence on earth kept the waves of destruction from sweeping over the land. Every so often one of them would die, and then a war would break out until he was reborn. Or a plague. Maybe an earthquake.

  Then there were Tomás and Esmerelda, standing and watching the lawn bowling. They were holding hands surreptitiously. Esmerelda’s belly rose up firm and round beneath her coat, and she did not look well. Sí, they knew who Padre Erasmus was. No, they hadn’t seen him. Sí, they had an enormous respect for the padre. He wasn’t like other padres. He had married them. Sí, verdad, an actual ceremony. Yes with papers. Did she want to see them? Here they were. No, of course they had not filed them. They could not do that. Tomás had been married before, and there was no divorce in the Catholic Church. Sí, the padre knew this. But this was the real marriage. This one was true. And to prove it, Tomás had a job—working nights. And they had a house to move into on Wednesday. Small, an apartment, but with a roof to keep out the rain and a door to lock out the crazy people and the addicts and thieves, and there was a stove to cook on and a bed for Esmerelda. Tomás would work hard. If it was a boy, they would name it Erasmo.

  Three of the men she talked with would not give her their names, but they all knew Erasmus. The first one, shirtless on a bench, his huge muscles identifying him as recently released from prison even if his demeanor hadn’t, knew her instantly as a cop and wouldn’t look at her. However, his hard face softened for an instant when she mentioned the name Erasmus. The second man, hearing the name, immediately launched into a description of how he’d seen Erasmus one night standing on Strawberry Hill, glowing with a light that grew stronger and stronger until it hurt the eyes, and then he’d disappeared, a little at a time. Kate excused herself and walked briskly away, muttering, “Beam me up, Scotty” under her breath. The third man knew Erasmus, didn’t like her asking questions about him, and was working himself up into belligerence. Kate, unhampered by bedrolls and bulging bags, slipped away, deciding to stick to women for a while.

  “They love him.” Kate threw her notebook down on the desk and dropped into the nearest chair. Her feet hurt; her throat ached: Maybe she was coming down with the flu.

  Al Hawkin pulled off his glasses and looked at her. “Who loves whom?”

  “The people in the park. I feel like I’m about to book Mother Teresa. He listens to them. He changes their lives. They’re going to name their kids after him. Saint Erasmus. God!” She ran her fingers through her hair, kicked off her shoes, walked over to the coffee machine, came back with a cup, and sat down again. “Hi, Al. How’d it go in court?”

  “The jury wasn’t happy with it. I think they’ll acquit. The bastard’s going to walk.” Domenico Brancusi ran a string of very young prostitutes, a specialty service that circled the Bay Area and had made him very rich. He was also very careful, and when one of his girls died—an eleven-year-old whose ribs were more prominent than her breasts—he had proven to be about as vulnerable as an armadillo.

  “I’m sorry, Al.”

  “American justice, don’t you just love it. I was looking at the stuff your friend in Chicago sent.”

  “Did it come? Was there anything?”

  “Two blots on Saint Erasmus’s past. A DUI when he was twenty-five—forty seven years ago—and then ten years later he plead guilty to assault, got a year of parole and a hundred hours of community service.”

  “Any details?”

  “Not many. It looks like what he did was pick up a chair in a classroom and try to brain somebody with it. They were having an argument—a debate in front of a class—and it got out of hand. The gentle life of the mind,” he commented sardonically.

  “Damn the man, anyway,” she growled. “Why the hell did he have to run off like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “Why did he run?”

  “Oh Christ, Al
, you’re not going to go all Sherlock Holmes on me, are you? ‘The dog did nothing in the night,’ she protests. ‘Precisely,’ says he mysteriously.”

  “You are in a good mood, aren’t you?” observed Hawkin. “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “Now you sound like my mother. Yes, I had a couple of hot dogs from the stand in the park.”

  “There’s the problem. You’ve got nitrates eating your brain cells.”

  “Since when do you care about nitrates? You live off the things.”

  “No more.” He placed one hand on his chest. “I am pure.”

  “First cigarettes and now junk food? That Jani’s a powerful woman.”

  Al Hawkin stood up and lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. “Come on, Martinelli,” he said. “I’ll buy you a sandwich and you can tell me about the Brother Erasmus fan club.”

  Eighteen

  Some might call him a madman, but he was the very reverse of a dreamer.

  It was now two weeks since John had been killed, thirteen days since his funeral pyre had been lighted, and Kate woke that Tuesday morning knowing that her case consisted of a number of details concerning a fine lot of characters, but the only link any of it had was a person she would much prefer to see out of it entirely.

  Kate had been a cop long enough to know that likable people can be villains, that personality and charisma are, if anything, more likely to be found attached to the perpetrator than the victim. She liked people; she sent them to jail: no problem.

  But damn it, Erasmus was different. She could not shake the image of him as a priest, but it wasn’t even as simple as that. She had, in fact, once arrested a Roman Catholic priest, with only the mildest hesitation and no regrets afterward. No, there was something about Erasmus—what it was, she could not grasp, could not even begin to articulate, but it was there, a deep distaste of the idea of putting him behind bars. She would do her job, and if necessary she would pursue his arrest to the full extent of her abilities, but lying in bed that Tuesday morning she was aware of the conviction that she would never fully believe the man’s guilt.

  Well, Kate, she said to herself, you’ll just have to dig deeper until you find somebody else to hang it on. And with that decision, she threw back the covers and went to face the day.

  Her hopeful determination, however, did not last the morning. When she arrived at the Hall of Justice she found two notes under the message clip on her desk. The first was in Al Hawkin’s scrawl, and read:

  Martinelli, you’re on your own again today, I’m taking Tom’s appointment with the DA. Back at noon, with any luck.

  —Al

  The other had been left by the night Field Ops officer:

  Insp. Martinelli—3:09 A.M., Tuesday. See the woman 982 29th Ave., after 11:00 A.M. today. Info. re the cremation.

  At five minutes after eleven, Kate was on Twenty-ninth Avenue, looking at a row of pale two-story stucco houses with never-used balconies and perfunctory lawns. Number 982, unlike most of its neighbors, did not have a metal security gate in front of the entrance. It did have a healthy-looking tree in a Chinese glazed pot sitting on the edge of the tiled portico. When she pressed the doorbell, a small dog barked inside, twice. She heard movement—a door opening and a vague scuffle of footsteps above the noise of traffic. The sound stopped, and Kate felt a gaze from the peephole in the door. Bolts worked and the door opened, to reveal a slim woman slightly taller than Kate, her graying blond hair standing on end, her athletic-looking body wrapped in a maroon terrycloth bathrobe many sizes too large for her. Kate held out her identification in front of the woman’s bleary eyes, which were set in rounds of startlingly pale skin surrounded by a ruddy wind-roughened forehead and cheeks. Ski goggles, Kate diagnosed.

  “Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. I received a message that you have information pertaining to the cremation that occurred in Golden Gate Park two weeks ago. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

  “Oh no, no. I was up. The friend who was watching my dog just brought her back. Come on in. Would you like some coffee? It’s fresh.” She turned and scuffled away down the hallway, leaving Kate to shut the door.

  “No thank you, Ms….?”

  “Didn’t I leave my name? No, maybe I didn’t. I’m Sam Rutlidge. This is Dobie,” she added as they entered the kitchen. “Short for Doberman.”

  Doberman was a dachshund. She sniffed Kate’s shoes and ankles enthusiastically and wagged her whip of a tail into a blur, but she neither jumped up and down nor yapped. When Kate reached a hand down, Dobie pushed against it like a cat with her firm, supple body, gave Kate a brief lick with her tongue, and then went to lie in a basket on the lowest shelf of a built-in bookshelf, surrounded by cookbooks. Her dark eyes glittered as she watched them.

  “That’s the calmest dachshund I’ve ever seen,” said Kate.

  “Just well trained. Sure you won’t have some?” She held out the pot from the coffeemaker. It smelled very good.

  “I will change my mind, thanks.”

  “Black okay? There isn’t any milk in the house, none that you’d want to drink, anyway.”

  “Black is fine. Do I understand that you’ve been away, Ms. Rutlidge?”

  “Skiing. I’ve been in Tahoe for the last couple of weeks, I got back after midnight last night. It was stupid to call at that hour, I guess, but somehow you don’t think of the police department as working nine to five.”

  “The department works twenty-four hours. Some of us are allowed to sleep occasionally. How did you hear about the cremation?”

  “I was reading the papers. I’m always so wired when I get in after a long drive, especially at night, there’s no point in going to bed, since I just stare at the ceiling. I make myself some hot milk, soak in the bath, read for a while, just give myself a chance to stop vibrating, you know? So anyway, I went through my mail and then started leafing through the newspapers—the neighbor brings them in for me—and I saw that article about the body being burned, the day I left.”

  “You left for Lake Tahoe on the Wednesday?”

  “Early Wednesday. I like to get out of the Bay Area before the traffic gets too thick.”

  “You didn’t see any news while you were at Tahoe?”

  “I was too busy.”

  “So you read about it at—what, one or two this morning?”

  “About then. Maybe closer to three.”

  “What made you think to call us?”

  “Well, the first papers were really general, and aside from the fact that it was so close to here, I didn’t really think about it. I mean, I don’t know any homeless people.”

  Kate made some encouraging noise.

  “Then for a couple of days, there wasn’t anything, or if there was, I didn’t see it—I wasn’t reading very carefully. Then on Monday, there was another article, with a picture, and as soon as I saw the man, it all came back to me.”

  “Which man was this?”

  In answer, the woman stood up and went out of the room. The dog raised her sleek head from her paws and stared at the door, attentive but not concerned, until Sam Rutlidge came back with a section of the paper, folded back to a photograph. She laid it on the table in front of Kate and tapped her finger on the bearded man who was standing on a lawn in front of about twenty other men and women, reading from a book.

  “Him. I saw him coming out of the park, not far from the place where they…burned the body the following morning. I saw him Tuesday morning. And he seemed really upset.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About quarter to ten. I had an ten o’clock appointment and I was running late because of a phone call, so I was in a hurry. I usually go up a block to the signal or down to Twenty-fifth to get onto Fulton, but I was in such a rush and it would’ve meant turning the car around and there was a truck down the block, so I just went straight down to Fulton and turned left as soon as I could.” She glanced uncomfortably at Kate the defender of law and order. “I’m a careful driver; I’ve n
ever had a ticket. Looking back, I know how stupid it was, to shove my way in when the traffic was thick and the pavement was wet from the fog, but as I said, I was in a hurry and not thinking straight. I cut it kind of close, and one of the cars slammed on its brakes and honked at me as I moved through his lane to the outside lane.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “I’m not with the traffic division.”

  “Yes, well. It was stupid. I wouldn’t have hit the car, but I did scare him, and he went past, shaking his fist out the window at me. And then I saw that man.” She pointed toward the newspaper. “I noticed him because he seemed to be shaking his fist at me, too, but as I went by, I could tell he wasn’t even looking at me. He’d have had to turn his head to see my car, and he hadn’t; he was looking straight ahead.”

  “What was he looking at?”

  “Nothing, as far as I could tell. He was coming out of the park on one of the paths, not quite to the pavement, and he was holding that big stick of his, shaking it, sort of punching it into the air as he walked along.”

  “You’d seen him before?”

  “Oh yes, he’s a regular in the park. We call him ‘the Preacher.’ ”

  “ ‘We’ being…”

  “There’s a group of us who run three times a week and then go for coffee. We tend to see the same people.”

  “Did you ever talk with him?”

  “The Preacher? Not really. He’d nod and wave and one of us would call hi, but nothing more. He struck me as kind of shy. Always neat and clean, and polite. Which is why it was so odd to see him behaving that way. I mean, some of the street people are really out of it; they really should be on medication, if not hospitalized. Of course, thanks to Reagan, we don’t have any hospitals for the marginally insane, only for the totally berserk. But I don’t need to tell you that.”