To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  He had visitors, too, over the next couple of weeks. Those of the homeless who could work up the courage to enter the daunting Hall of Justice came for brief visits: Salvatore once, the three Vietnam vets once each, Doc and Mouse and Wilhemena twice each. Beatrice came four times in the first six days after he had returned to the jail. From Sawyer’s other worlds came Dean Gardner, who visited regularly, and Joel, the grad student who had given Erasmus rides to Berkeley. There was a steady stream of others from the seminary, professors, staff, and students, and from Fishermen’s Wharf, the owner of the store that sold magic supplies and the crystal woman.

  Brother Erasmus even had his own newspaper reporter, who had adopted him and argued with his editor about the newsworthiness of a jailed homeless man. Ten days after Sawyer had been brought back to San Francisco, the reporter’s efforts paid off with a full-page human-interest story in the Sunday edition on homeless individuals, one of whom was Erasmus. Photographs and interviews of the homeless men and women connected to him, and of their more settled neighbors, succeeded in drawing a picture of the homeless population as a community of wise eccentrics. The feature spread resulted in a great deal of cynical laughter among those responsible for enforcing the law, a flurry of letters to the editor in praise and condemnation, a brief increase in the takings of the panhandlers across town, and even more visitors for David Sawyer.

  It was a popular article, and two days later the reporter submitted another, smaller story, this one looking at the murder case itself in greater detail. His editor cut out half the words and changed it from an investigative piece to one with a greater emphasis on the people involved, but still, there it was in Wednesday’s paper, with interviews of five of the homeless, a review of the facts, and photographs of Erasmus, Beatrice, and the colorful Mouse.

  The guards grumbled at the number of visitors they had to handle for this one prisoner. However, they did not stop bringing him plates of food their wives had made and snapshots of their dogs.

  The only person Erasmus flatly refused to see was Professor Eve Whitlaw. Everyone else he listened to, smiled at, prayed with, and presented with a pithy saying to take away with them, but the English professor from his past, he would have nothing to do with. She tried twice but not again.

  During the weeks after David Sawyer’s arrest, Kate had been immensely busy, not only with the case against Sawyer but with another investigation that she and Hawkin had drawn, the lye poisoning of an alcoholic woman (who had looked to be in her sixties but was in fact thirty-two), which could have been either accident or suicide but was looking more and more like murder. It involved long hours of interviewing the woman’s large and predominantly drunken extended family, and it left Kate with little time to spare for Erasmus, safe in his cell.

  It was over a month since the murder, and Kate felt the Sawyer case slipping from her. She had neither the time nor the concentration to pursue it further, and she was uncomfortably aware that she might let it go entirely but for the continued entreaties of Dean Gardner and Professor Whitlaw. She came home late on a Monday night, aching with exhaustion, cold through, and hungry, and found a series of five pink “While You Were Out” slips lined up for her on the kitchen table: Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw, Rosalyn Hall, Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw.

  Fortunately, it was too late to return the calls. However, she no longer had much of an appetite. She poured herself a tumbler glass of raw red wine, drank it up as she stood in the kitchen, filled up the glass again, and took it to bed.

  Things looked rosier in the morning, as she lay with Lee’s arm around her shoulder while they drank their morning coffee.

  “You see,” Kate was saying, “what I had hoped to do was assemble enough quotes of my own to meet him on his own ground. I even got a book of quotations and started it off—‘The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself’ and ‘I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,’ that kind of thing. But I can’t do it. I just don’t have time to memorize the whole damn book.”

  “You saw the notes, that Eve and Philip Gardner called?”

  “I did. I’ll call them later.”

  “She’s only here for another month, did you know that?”

  “So she told me. About six times. I don’t know what I can do, Sawyer won’t see her.”

  The phone rang.

  “Oh hell, it’s not even eight o’clock.”

  “Let the machine get it,” Lee said, but Kate was already stretched across to the telephone.

  “Yes?” she demanded. “Oh, Al. Hi. Yeah, I was expecting someone else. What’s—Who?” Kate became quiet and listened for a long time, unconsciously disentangling herself from Lee’s embrace until she was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “What do they think about her chances?” she said finally, listening again. “Okay. Sure. Do you have someone at the hospital? Good. See you there, twenty minutes.” She hung up and went to the closet.

  “That wasn’t about David Sawyer, was it?” Lee asked.

  “David…Oh. No, it’s another case—fifty suspects and now one of the family decided he knows which of his cousins did it and so he took a shot at her early this morning. Several shots, through the wall of her bedroom, and one of them hit her. They’re all nuts, the whole family. No, I won’t bother with breakfast.”

  The shower went on and, after two minutes, off again. Kate emerged, her hair wet but her clothes on, kissed Lee absently, and left. Lee listened to her lover’s feet on the stairs, the familiar pause in front of the closet while the wicked gun was strapped on, then the front door opened and closed. A car started up on the street outside, where Kate had left it instead of rattling the garage door late last night, and she was gone. Lee sighed and set about the laborious business of the day.

  Not that night, nor the next morning, but the following day over dinner the conversation was resumed.

  “You know what you were saying the other day about trying to put together a bunch of quotations to throw back at David Sawyer?” Lee began.

  “Fat chance of that now. There’re two more members of that woman’s family in jail now; they were going at each other with chains in the dead woman’s front yard. There used to be a rose bed. Do they give prizes for the most dysfunctional families? This crew would take the gold.”

  “I was wondering if there would be any reason you couldn’t have Philip Gardner and Eve do it for you? Come up with zinging quotes, that is.”

  “He’s still in jail.”

  “I know he’s still in jail; is there any reason why you can’t have a conference of half a dozen people? Using the two of them as translators, like you thought of before, only in two-way translation, into and out of Erasmusese?”

  “There are problems in allowing civilians—friends—in on an interview,” Kate said slowly.

  “Insurmountable problems?”

  “I’d have to talk to Al,” Kate finally said.

  “Do. Because if you have to argue with him using his own language, you’d better have someone who speaks it as well as Philip and Eve do.”

  “You’re right. In fact—no, maybe not.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking that he and Beatrice seem very close. If she’d be willing to help us, it might make it less adversarial. I don’t know if that would help or not.”

  “I think it would be a good idea.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Al about it. I could probably find Beatrice before Friday night, although I suppose we’d have to do the interview on Saturday anyway to work around Dean Gardner’s schedule. I’ll talk to Al,” she said again finally.

  Al agreed, with strong reservations but a willingness to try anything that might loosen David Sawyer’s guard. Philip Gardner agreed; Eve Whitlaw agreed. The conference was set for ten o’clock on Saturday morning, regardless of whether Beatrice had prior commitments.

  But when Kate went to Sentient Beans on Friday evening to talk to the homeless woman, Beatrice was not there. Beatrice had not been there the week before, ei
ther.

  Kate stood listening to the angry young owner, feeling the cold begin to gather along her spine.

  Twenty-Four

  Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body.

  “You scared her off.” The young man behind the wooden bar was gripping the latte glass as if he were about to throw it at her. His name was Krishna, but he had obviously been named after one of the god’s more violent manifestations.

  “Could you explain that please, sir?” Kate asked politely, keeping an eye on the glass.

  “You probably did it on purpose. That’s harassment. You could tell her nerves were bad.”

  “Are you telling me you haven’t seen Beatrice Jankowski since the night I was here? That was nearly a month ago. I’ve seen her since then.”

  “She was in once,” the man said grudgingly.

  “Twice,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. The woman herself appeared, carrying a tray of clean cups, which she slid into place beneath the bar. She was very small, with hard, slicked-back unnaturally black hair, at least a dozen loops and studs in her ears and one through her nose, and kind, intelligent brown eyes. Kate recognized the guitarist from the night she had come here. “We didn’t see her last week, and we haven’t seen her since then, but she was in a couple of times after you were here.”

  “How do you remember when I was in? One face on a busy night.”

  “I noticed you. Beatrice talked about you. But we were a little concerned last week when she didn’t show, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for her in the neighborhood. She’s not around.”

  “You haven’t filed a missing-persons report?”

  “For a homeless woman? Who’d listen to us?” snorted the man.

  The woman answered Kate as if he—her husband?—hadn’t spoken. “I decided that if she didn’t come in tonight, I would report her missing. I called the hospitals, but she’s not there. My name is Leila, by the way.”

  The man turned to her, his grip on the glass so tight now that white spots showed on his knuckles. “You called the—I thought we agreed—”

  “Oh, Krish, of course I called. What if she was sick or something?”

  “But she was here two weeks ago?” Kate asked loudly, to interrupt the burgeoning argument.

  “Just like always,” Leila said.

  “And she said nothing to indicate that she would not be here?”

  “No. In fact, she said, ‘See you next week, dear,’ just like she always does. Did.” Leila was worried now, taking police interest as evidence that something was very wrong.

  “I wouldn’t be too concerned, not yet. I just wanted to pass on a message from a friend of hers who’s in custody.”

  “Brother Erasmus?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “Not personally. Though I feel like I do, since she talked about him all the time. She went to see him in the jail.”

  “I know. But not for a while, apparently, because he was asking about her,” she embroidered.

  “How long? Since he’s seen her?”

  It was in the small beat before Kate answered that she acknowledged her own apprehension.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’ll have to check.”

  The stark possibilities lay there, and nothing Krishna or Leila could add changed them any. Finally, she asked for the use of their telephone and began to cast out her lines of inquiry.

  The logs at the jail revealed that Beatrice Jankowski had last visited David Sawyer on Wednesday the ninth of March, two days before she had not appeared at Sentient Beans to wash her clothes and sketch the customers.

  A call to the morgue confirmed that there were no unclaimed bodies in San Francisco that remotely matched Beatrice’s description.

  Al Hawkin was not at home and had not yet arrived at Jani’s apartment in Palo Alto. Rather than beep him, she left brief messages at both numbers, on his machine and with Jani’s daughter Jules, and then went back out into the coffeehouse, where she found Leila cleaning the tables.

  “Did Beatrice leave anything here?” she asked.

  “Probably. There’s a little cabinet in the back we let her use.”

  “Does it lock?”

  “There’s a padlock. We kept one key, gave her the other.”

  “Just the two keys?”

  “That’s all.”

  “May I have the key, please?”

  Leila let a cup and saucer crash down onto the tray. “Oh God. What did you find out?”

  “Not a thing. I’m not going to open the cabinet, and I’ll give the key back to you if Beatrice turns up. I’d just be more comfortable keeping it in the meantime.”

  Leila dug into the deep pocket of her baggy black silk pants and drew out a fist-sized bundle of keys. She flipped through it, unhooked a cheap-looking key, and handed it to Kate. “There’s nothing much in there. Her sketch pad and box, a few clothes, odds and ends.”

  “It’s good of you to let her use it.”

  Leila actually blushed. “Yes, well, I’ve been there myself, and she’s getting too old to live out of plastic bags.”

  Kate opened her mouth to ask if Beatrice slept here occasionally, then closed it again. Time enough for questions that might compromise the insurance and zoning. She merely wrote out a receipt, pocketed the key, thanked Leila, and went back out to her car.

  In the Homicide room, at her desk, on that Friday night, Kate sat for a long time and stared at the telephone. She did not want to pick it up. She wanted to go home and rub Lee’s back or watch some inane musical video or listen to Lee’s voice reading from a novel. She did not want to make these telephone calls because she was afraid of what she was going to learn, and when she learned it, she knew whom she would blame.

  Kitagawa and O’Hara came in then, speaking in loud voices, and in order to avoid having to talk to them she picked up the receiver and tucked it under her ear. She began to look up the telephone numbers and then made her calls.

  After the fifth call, a faint hope began to stir: Maybe she had been wrong. Alarmist. But the optimism was premature: At the seventh morgue, this one in Santa Cruz, they had a Jane Doe, Beatrice’s size, Beatrice’s age, with Beatrice’s hair and eye color. She’d been found four days ago up in the hills, by hikers. Dead at least three days before that. Not pretty. Sure, there’d be someone there all night.

  Kate sat and rubbed her eyes, hot and gritty and wanting nothing but to close for a long time. Too late to phone Lee, let her know she wouldn’t be in? Yes, it really was. Lee used to sleep very little—four, five hours a night. Now she needed eight hours, or she ached. Sometimes took a nap. Why are you thinking about that? Kate asked herself. Christ, this is a shitty job.

  Phones had been ringing on and off. Now Kate heard her name called, and she automatically picked up the receiver.

  “Martinelli. Oh, Al, thanks for calling. Sorry to wreck your weekend. Yeah, she disappeared, but I think I found her. The Santa Cruz morgue. Yeah, I know. I’m going down to see her. Want me to call you from there? You don’t have to come. You’re sure? You promise Jani won’t hate me? Well, leave her a note; maybe you’ll be back before she wakes up. I’ll leave now. Right. Bye.”

  It was like old times, driving a sleeping Al through the rain into the Santa Cruz Mountains. This time, however, their goal was not the forest site of three murdered children, their first case together a year earlier, but the sterile, temporary repository of one elderly woman.

  When Kate rolled to a stop and pulled on the parking brake, Al woke up, ran his hands over his face, and bent forward to look at the windshield. “It’s déjá vu all over again,” he commented.

  “How about next year, come March, we arrange a case that takes us to Palm Springs or something?”

  “I’ll put in a voucher for it tomorrow. Do you know where—”

  “Through there.”

  Into the cold, inhuman space that smelled of death, up to the body, leaning over the gray face: Yes. Oh yes: Beatrice Jan
kowski.

  “I hadn’t realized how old she was,” Kate said bleakly.

  “She had false teeth,” commented the morgue attendant. “Taking them out makes anyone look shriveled up. Is her family going to want her shipped, do you know?”

  “I don’t know if she had a family.”

  “We’ll hang on to her for a while, then.”

  “Do you have a copy of the autopsy report?” Al asked.

  “I don’t think so. You’d have to check with the investigating officer. I think that was Kent Makepeace. I can tell you it was homicide.” He reached down and turned Beatrice’s head to one side, revealing the damage beneath the clotted gray hair on the right side of her skull, between the ear and the spine. “Somebody hit her, hard.”

  Twenty-Five

  Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.

  The mere fact that an identity had been given to a body in the morgue hardly justified rousting the investigating detective out of his bed at four o’clock on a Saturday morning. Even Al Hawkin had to admit that. So he and Kate found an all-night restaurant and ate bacon and eggs in an attempt to fool their bodies into thinking it was a new morning rather than a too-long night, and at six they made their way to the county offices. At 6:30, Hawkin succeeded in bullying an underling into phoning Makepeace. At seven o’clock, they were in his office being shown the case file.

  “That’s right,” he was saying, fighting yawns. “Completely nude, no false teeth, not even a hairpin.”

  “She wore several rings,” Kate commented.

  “That’s in the path report. Couple of nicks on her fingers, scratches that showed where the rings’d been cut off her postmortem. Her hands were so arthritic, I’d guess he tried to pull them off and couldn’t get them over her knuckles, so he had to cut them. She was also moved around after death, a couple of rug fibers and marks on her legs, probably transported in a car’s trunk. Nothing under her fingernails but normal dirt—she didn’t scratch her attacker, no defense marks on her hands, nothing. About the rings, though.” He sounded as if he was beginning to wake up, and he took a large swallow of coffee from his paper cup to increase the rate of coherency. “We did a ground search, especially up and down the road. Among the crap they picked up was a ring. There should be a photograph here somewhere.” He dug back into the file, flipped through the glossy photographs of the nude woman sprawled in the leaves, gray hair snarled across her face, and pulled out the picture of a large fancy ring with a cracked stone. He laid it on the desk between them.