City of Whispers

by Marcia Muller

  Inspector Fielding was through with me, so I headed for my car, a black BMW Z4 that used to belong to my best friend and sometimes operative, Rae Kelleher. Rae was also sort of family: she was married to my former brother-in-law—Mick’s father—country music star and record producer Ricky Savage. Ricky had a horror of car accidents—both his parents and Rae’s had died in them—and when he’d met Rae she’d been driving an ancient Nash Rambler, appropriately called the Ramblin’ Wreck. He’d ridden in it only once before buying her a yellow Miata. A string of other cars, each one speedier but safer than the last, had followed yearly, and Rae had sold this latest to me last spring. My good luck: the Z4 had had fewer than five thousand miles on it when I took possession. I’d already added a couple of thousand.

  Now I drove to Lincoln Park, at the northwest edge of the city. The Legion, a sprawling, colonnaded beaux arts building that took its name from the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris, loomed on its rise, beautiful but forbidding. Or perhaps that was only my overactive imagination kicking in: from the late 1860s to 1908 much of the surrounding land had been Golden Gate Cemetery, a potter’s field. Although most of the bodies of the indigent or unidentifiable had then been relocated south to Colma, I remembered a grisly 1990s newspaper story about how coffins and skeletal remains that had been missed were unearthed during seismic retrofitting of the art museum.

  It was nearing the museum’s closing time. I parked and went up to the entrance. The lone ticket-seller—a woman whose pearls and cashmere sweater set suggested hers was a volunteer position—let me know immediately that I’d made the right decision in coming out here. She remembered Darcy well.

  “He asked me where the cemetery was, and at first I didn’t understand which one. But then I remembered the old potter’s field that was relocated to Colma in… I don’t know, a long time ago. But he said that wasn’t the cemetery he was looking for. He started to become agitated—frankly, he didn’t look as if he was feeling very well—and then the woman stepped in. A girl, really, from my perspective.” Her eyes, in their webs of wrinkles, twinkled. “In her early to mid-twenties.”

  “Color of hair? Any distinguishing features?”

  “Blond hair, not too clean. Her features were nothing outstanding. She was dressed as shabbily as he, but she was polite and very well-spoken. I gave her a list of other cemeteries—we keep them for people who are trying to decide where to inter their loved ones—and they left.” She paused. “I felt sorry for them. He was crying, and the girl couldn’t get him to stop. She said something to him… oh, what was it? These senior moments!”

  “Take your time. I have middle-aged moments.”

  “Young woman, those are simply periods of distraction or forgetfulness. Keep your mind active, and you won’t end up like me… oh, yes! Now I remember: the girl said, ‘Laura told you that Gaby was dead and buried under a coral tree.’ ”

  “Laura who, did she say?”

  “No, just Laura.”

  “Are you sure the second name was Gaby? G-a-b-y?”

  “Or b-b-y. Yes.”

  “Does the name hold any significance for you?”

  “No.”

  “What’s a coral tree?”

  She smiled. “Interesting you should ask; we have one at our place on Maui. You usually find them in tropical or subtropical climates. Sometimes they’re called flame trees, for their bright red flowers. They’ve been known to grow in this area, but they’re very rare.”

  A coral tree in a cemetery. Laura. Gaby.

  Not much to go on.

  Mick Savage

  Colma, San Francisco’s necropolis.

  Sometimes called the City of Silence. Seventeen cemeteries, plus one for pets. The dead outnumbered the living by thousands. The number of memorial parks had burgeoned in the first decade of the 1900s, when San Francisco evicted all existing cemeteries from the city limits—greed for valuable real estate predictably trumping common decency.

  Mick’s lead to Colma had begun with a call from Shar: Darcy and the woman he’d been with on Chestnut Street had gone to the Legion of Honor, inquiring about cemeteries. Apparently someone named Laura had told Darcy that someone named Gaby was buried under a coral tree.

  If that was a bona fide lead, he’d give up sex for Lent next year. As if that would ever happen…

  A challenge, but he wasn’t going to give up without an all-out effort. He and Shar had long ago made a pact that when he performed the near-impossible, she treated him and a companion to dinner at a restaurant of his choice, provided it was within the city limits—damn, no Paris or Tuscany—and he’d had his sights set on The Sea Witch for months now.

  Mick pulled his bike to the curb and went into a coffee shop. Ordered an espresso and asked the guy behind the counter what he knew about local cemeteries. The guy said he’d only lived there a week, had come up from LA to be near his sister. Mick went to a table, took out his BlackBerry. Searched for a cemetery with a coral tree. Nothing.

  Okay, Gaby. Short for someone named Gabrielle who might be buried here? Try it. Several Gabrielles and Gabriellas buried at Cypress Lawn, Holy Cross, and the Italian Cemetery. Dates of death ranged from 1905 to 1999. One Gabriella at Crystal Springs Memorial Palace, died in October 2008—Gabriella DeLucci.

  Palace. That fit. Now, if a coral tree was growing on its grounds…

  Mick ran a quick check on Gabriella DeLucci. She’d died in 2008 at age eighteen. The cause of death was strangulation by person or persons unknown.

  He went to the files of the SF Chronicle: on October 17, 2008, Gabriella DeLucci, heiress to an old San Francisco banking fortune, had been strangled, her body dumped near Elk Glen Lake in Golden Gate Park. There were a few more mentions of the murder over the next few months, and then nothing more. Next he checked Unsolvedmurders.com; the case had never been closed.

  He’d check out the cemetery for her grave.

  It was nearing five when he arrived at Crystal Springs Memorial Palace Cemetery. Perched on a knoll, it was incongruously close to a middle-class residential area that backed up on San Bruno Mountain State Park; the gates—rusted iron, hanging crookedly—were still open. He left his bike beside them and walked in on a rutted dirt track. There was a stucco building to the right, but it was shuttered and locked.

  Nobody around but us graves.

  He began wandering among them.

  Old stones, going back to the mid-1800s. But no well-known local family names, such as Flood, Halladie, Crocker, or Sharon, were represented. Some graves with faded plastic flowers in urns; others with cracked headstones and weeds growing up around them. A few old wooden grave markers, too weathered by the elements to read. Mick moved slowly, looking for Gabriella DeLucci’s name.

  Florence, beloved wife of…

  Charles, our baby, aged two days…

  Herman, devoted husband…

  Matilda, angel mother…

  Aurora, sleep in peace….

  And then he saw the tree. Many spreading branches like an oak, and so short that some of them brushed the ground. A few brilliant red blossoms among its dark green leaves. He went over there and ducked into its shade.

  Gabriella’s marker was polished gray marble, a small slab flat on the pebble-covered ground. No urn, no flowers, nothing but the signs of infrequent maintenance. He knelt beside it, brushing away dried grass. Only her name and birth and death dates. No sentiment lost there.

  After a moment he stood and looked around for the graves of other DeLucci family members, but he found none.

  Now why was that? And come to think of it, why was Gabriella buried here? Seemed like an Italian Catholic family of prominence would have preferred Holy Cross or Cypress Lawn. Crystal Springs was small, a repository for the bones of the modest in financial and social standing—not a fitting resting place for members of families such as the DeLuccis.

  Mick returned to Gabriella’s grave. Squatted down and studied it. In a crease between the headstone and the dry earth lay a
plastic object. A twisted red-white-and-blue drinking straw that looked as though it hadn’t been there very long.

  Odd thing to turn up in a cemetery, he thought.

  And then he remembered what Mira Rasmussen had told him about Darcy’s grabbing a handful of red-white-and-blue smoothie straws on his way out of The Wiring Hall.

  Couldn’t be. Or could it?

  And if Darcy had been here and left the straw, why?

  Sharon McCone

  In my office at the agency I rested my eyes from the computer monitor’s glare. The pier loomed cavernously around me, silent, cold in spite of the baseboard heaters. Strange creaks and moans emanated from its far reaches. Out by the Golden Gate a foghorn bellowed. The fog would not come in tonight, I knew from long experience, but would hover offshore, close enough to set off the horns’ deep-throated cacophony.

  It was on a night like this that I’d been shot. I’d been on the catwalk outside my office, alone at night on a minor errand. Then I’d had the confrontation with the unseen intruder, the flash came from his gun—and I’d awakened to a different world, an altered life. Strange how less than three minutes could change your life forever.

  Had something like that changed Darcy’s life too? For Saskia’s sake I hoped not.

  I’d spent much of the early evening on my computer, trying to get a lead on him, but my skills weren’t nearly as sharp as Derek’s or Mick’s, and all I’d accomplished was to frustrate myself and magnify my fears.

  In many ways Darcy was such an innocent, and innocents wandering the streets of this city often came to bad ends. He had been at the Palace of Fine Arts at some point, but had he seen the dead woman? Fled? If so, to where? And what about the woman he’d been with?

  And why, dammit, wasn’t Mick keeping me informed?

  I called his cell. No answer. Left an impatient message on voice mail.

  On an impulse I called Inspector Chase Fielding. “The dead woman at the Palace of Fine Arts,” I said without preamble, “have you identified her?”

  If my call surprised him, his response didn’t reveal it. “It was an easy ID: she was released from city jail yesterday, after doing two months for possession. Her name was Laura Mercer. No permanent address.”

  The ticket taker at the Legion of Honor had said something about the girl who’d been with Darcy talking about a Laura: “Laura told you Gaby is dead and buried under a coral tree.”

  Fielding said, “That name mean anything to you?”

  Laura was a common name, popular for several generations; there didn’t have to be a connection. And I didn’t want to discuss my half brother’s disappearance with the authorities—not yet.

  “I know several Lauras—none of them with the surname Mercer. It was an overdose, right?”

  “Appears to have been. We’ll know more when we get the autopsy results.”

  Next month or two. The coroner’s office was understaffed and overworked.

  “How old was she?” I asked.

  “You saw her.”

  “It’s hard to tell with druggies.”

  “The court records say thirty-two, although she looked fifty. May I ask what your interest in her is?”

  “I found her body. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Well, you think of anything else, be sure to let me know.”

  The instant I ended the call with Fielding the phone rang again. Mick, finally.

  “I’ve found out a bunch of stuff that we should go over tonight,” he said, “but I’m on my way to Sea Cliff—Rae invited me to dinner and I promised her I’d come. And the battery on my laptop’s losing its charge and I forgot my power cord, so I need to use her computer to verify some additional facts. Should I come by the pier or your house later?”

  “Neither. I’ll call Rae and ask her to set a third place at the table.”

  Rae’s and Ricky’s house was huge and, like most others in the exclusive neighborhood of Sea Cliff, it was built close to its neighbors, but tall hedges and lines of yew trees gave it privacy. Its three stories descended the bluff to a sand beach where it was nice to lie in the sun, although the water was too cold for swimming and the undertow wicked. There were six bedrooms on the house’s top floor, an enormous living space on the second, and on the first a recording studio and what the adults privately referred to as the Hellhole—where Ricky’s younger children stayed when they came up every other weekend from their mother’s and stepfather’s home in Bel Air to visit. Tonight the house’s lights were muted.

  Ricky was in New York for a few days, I knew, for talks with the head of a foundation he supported about organizing a nationwide concert tour to benefit breast cancer research. His older kids—Chris, Mick, and Jamie—were off pursuing their adult lives; the younger three—Brian, Lisa, and Molly—were at home with their mother and stepfather down south. And Rae was alone.

  Well, except for the housekeeper and security staff. Mrs. Wellcome—a name both Rae and I found highly suitable and amusing—should by now be in her suite watching Jeopardy! Normally there was a security guard on duty: Ricky had a number of times been the subject of celebrity stalkings. As I got out of the car, a new guard whom I didn’t recognize stepped from the shadows, identified himself, checked my ID, then allowed me to go inside.

  Rae was in the living room, applying a match to the logs in the pit fireplace. When she sensed my presence she turned, smiling. She was short and slender with a mass of red curls falling to her shoulders, a sprinkling of freckles across her upturned nose—a feature that most people called “perky” and that she hated. Ricky had often told her that if she disliked it so much she should have cosmetic surgery—God knew they could afford it—but Rae had a horror of botched face-lifts, especially since one of her former teenage idols had emerged from one looking oddly lopsided.

  “Mick’s in my office, using the computer,” she said.

  “He tell you anything about what he’s looking for?”

  “No. Secretive as ever.”

  She provided wine, we settled in front of the fire, and I filled her in on the case.

  “You’re not sharing this information with the police, I take it,” she said when I finished.

  “Not yet.”

  “Did Saskia specifically ask you not to contact them?”

  “No. But she has a long history of cleaning up Darcy’s messes. He’s really damaged, and she feels it’s her fault.”

  “Maybe tough love is in order.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not my decision to make.”

  “Are you sure he’s so damaged, and not just intent on pissing everybody off? You know my history.”

  I did indeed.

  Rae’s drunken parents had died years ago in a fiery crash on the Pacific Coast Highway down in southern California. She’d only been eight years old, but they’d left her alone at their tiny house near Calabasas to take in a concert at the Topanga Corral. They must’ve hooked up with some other drunks and headed down to the coast; her father had lost control of their old VW bus and run head-on into a fuel tanker. Rae had been the only one home when the highway patrol officers arrived.

  Her paternal grandmother in Santa Maria had grudgingly agreed to take her in—until a “suitable place” could be found for her. No such place materialized, and Rae lived in her grandmother’s inhospitable household until her graduation from high school.

  Did not live harmoniously, however. She’d been a devil as a child, out of control as a teenager. Anything she could do that would drive her grandma crazy was a worthy pursuit: her preferred manner of entering and exiting the house was by her bedroom window; sometimes she sneaked in boyfriends bearing beer; rock music and marijuana smoke filtered under her door; at meals she was sullen and silent.

  Well, she sometimes claimed she’d been an ungrateful child, but from the first her grandmother had let her know she was an inconvenience she’d just as soon be rid of. “Your father’s daughter but twice as bad” had been her favorite phrase.

  There
was the clatter of footsteps in the hallway, and Mick came into the room bearing a sheaf of papers. “Give me some of that,” he said, gesturing at Rae’s wineglass. “You have anything to nosh on?”

  “No, but Mrs. Wellcome’s chicken casserole is in the oven and the salad’s crisping—”

  “Fuck the casserole. And the salad. Going over this is more important.”

  Rae fetched him a glass of wine and a bag of salt-and-vinegar Kettle Chips.

  “Okay,” he said. Between sips and crunches, he proceeded to lay out the events of his day.

  When he finished, I said, “This girl that Darcy was with at the Legion of Honor—we need to find out who she is. Also the one named Laura they’d apparently been talking to. Could be Laura Mercer, the woman I found dead at the Palace of Fine Arts today.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “What about the other woman they mentioned—Gaby?”

  “That was tougher. You wouldn’t believe how many Gabys, Gabrielles, and Gabriellas there are—and have been—in this world. But indexing them to a palace, a cemetery, and a coral tree narrowed the field, and I came up with one local possibility. I don’t see what connection she might have had to Darcy, but there must be one because I found this on the grave.”

  He held up a red-white-and-blue straw, twisted into a little noose.

  I closed my eyes, rejecting the evidence. But Darcy had that history of twisting small objects when under stress, and he’d snatched a handful of such straws from The Wiring Hall.

  Mick went on, “At Crystal Springs Palace Cemetery there’s a grave marker under a coral tree—one of the few such trees in northern California, according to my research—and the name on it is Gabriella DeLucci.”

  “And she was…?”

  “An heiress who was murdered two years ago.”

  Gabriella DeLucci, Mick explained, had been the product of wealth and privilege: her great-grandfather Lorenzo DeLucci had emigrated from Sicily in 1841 and made his way west, arriving in time to stake a claim in the Sierra Nevada gold-mining country near Placerville. The vein that he tapped into was rich, and three years later he traveled to San Francisco, a town that had intrigued him upon his arrival in California, and used his gold-field proceeds to establish the Miners’ Bank. DeLucci prospered, married into a well-to-do family, and settled into a Nob Hill mansion, high above the rough-and-tumble of old San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast. He fathered one son, Lorenzo Junior.