In the living room I eased the woman into a recliner chair. She started to bring her hands together, then stared down at them. They were shaking violently. She looked up at me, tears welling in her remarkable blue eyes, and then she lowered her head and forced her hands into a trembling grip. She said, “He’s…dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, some hours ago.”
She made a strange noise-half sob, half sigh. I looked down at the top of her head, where her hair was artfully twined into a loose braid. Tendrils had escaped it and trailed down, making her look bedraggled and vulnerable.
I said, “Are you all right?”
“I…yes…no. oh God, I was so afraid it would come to this.”
“You mean Mr. Goldring’s death?”
She was silent.
“Is that what you meant?”
No response. I looked around the room-which was obsessively orderly in comparison to the office downstairs-for a telephone. There was one on an end table next to the couch. I started toward it.
The woman raised her head. When she spoke her voice had a sharper edge of alarm. “What are you doing?”
“Calling nine-eleven-”
“No!” She stood, started toward me, then turned and rushed toward the staircase.
“Come back here! You found Mr. Goldring’s body; you can’t just leave-”
“Please!” She turned, clutching the railing for support. Her face had been very white, but now a flush-almost a rash-was spreading up from her neckline. “You don’t understand. There might be publicity, my name in the papers. I can’t have that, especially after this….” And then she bolted down the stairs.
I went after her, but she was faster and had too much of a head start. By the time I reached the front porch, she was jumping into a white BMW parked down the block. I ran down the steps and caught its license plate number-1 GDJ 326-just before it pulled out of Stillman into Third Street.
“One GDJ three two six,” I said aloud. It sounded like a curse. I turned and walked toward the building, repeating the numbers and letters over and over until I could find my purse and write them down. The purse was on the kitchen counter; funny, I didn’t remember leaving it there. I grabbed it without looking at Rudy Goldring’s body and started toward the living room to make my call.
But halfway to the door something caught my eye: a worn, fringed, tooled leather pouch of the sort that I’d last seen Bob, the derelict doorman, carrying. It was lying on the floor in front of the sink, not more than two yards from the body.
The senior member of the Homicide team that caught the call was named Gallagher, Ben Gallagher. I’d known him for a long time. When I’d met him he’d been an owlish, somewhat awkward young man who admired me extravagantly-although silently. In the years since then, he’d worked Vice and Burglary, then been reassigned to Homicide; he still looked owlish, mainly because of the round glasses frames he favored, but the awkwardness was gone. He probably still admired me, because his eyes shone when they first saw me, but his silence was now enforced by a wide gold wedding band.
I waited in the living room while Gallagher examined the death scene and dealt with the medical examiner and lab technicians. When he’d finished, I told him what had happened since I’d arrived at the building, including my encounter with the frightened woman and the make and license plate number of her car. Ben took notes, then held up the fringed leather pouch, now encased in a plastic evidence bag.
“This belong to her?”
“No, to the derelict who sits on the steps downstairs, I think. At least he was carrying one like it last Friday.”
“Considering its contents, that makes more sense. Eighty-three cents, a switchblade knife, and no credit cards don’t really go with a lady who drives a BMW. Now tell me about this derelict.”
“Rudy Goldring called him Bob. The man acts as a sort of doorman for him, in exchange for beer. He’s medium height, has grayish hair and a beard, was wearing old army fatigues when I saw him.”
“Standard derelict description.”
“Well, yes. I didn’t pay that much attention to him, to tell you the truth; he looked pretty much like all the other derelicts you see in this area.” That, I thought, from someone who’d recently been scornful toward a radio talk show reducing the homeless to statistics! I concentrated on Bob, trying to remember something that would distinguish him. Gallagher waited.
After a moment I added, “He seemed fairly well-spoken. Polite. When he opened the door for me, he acted like a butler. Oh-and he eats dinner at St. Anthony’s. I know that because Goldring reminded him it was time for him to get in line, and he went off in that direction. Maybe the people there, or the woman downstairs in Goldring’s offices, can tell you more about him.”
“Maybe.” Gallagher finished making his notes and looked up at me. “Now tell me what you’re doing here.”
Because Rudy Goldring had hired me through his lawyer, my implied contract with him provided for confidentiality. But Goldring was dead, and from Gallagher’s questions I gathered the police would treat his death as a homicide, at least initially. That invalidated the presumption of confidentiality, so I told Ben about the job.
When I finished he said, “We’ll trace this Frank Wilkonson, see what he has to say about Goldring. Most likely it’ll be irrelevant to what happened here.”
“You think Goldring was murdered, then?”
“It’s highly possible. The M.E. says there are signs he was involved in a struggle-bruises, the condition of his clothing, that sort of thing. The way it looks now, I’d guess it was manslaughter-a quarrel that got out of hand. Maybe he cut off the derelict’s beer supply, or something like that.”
“What about what the woman who was here said to me-that she was ‘afraid it would come to this’?”
“She could have been speaking about the derelict. It’s not the wisest thing, you know, taking one of those people under your wing. Anyway, we’ll locate her, ask her what she meant.”
Gallagher closed his notebook and stood. “We’ll need a formal statement; you know the procedure. You still with that same outfit?”
“All Souls? Yes.” I stood, too, and gave him one of my cards.
Gallagher studied it, then looked back at my face. His eyes were a trifle wistful now, and I wondered if he was remembering the old days, too. What he said confirmed it: “You ever see the lieutenant?”
He meant Greg Marcus, my lover back then. “We have dinner occasionally, but that’s it.”
“Funny, I always thought the two of you would get it together.”
“So did we-once.” I looked at my watch. Six-thirty. I’d told Rae I would meet her at the Remedy Lounge an hour ago. “Is it okay to use the phone?”
“Sure, Goldring won’t mind.” Ben raised a hand in farewell and left the room.
I stared at the empty doorframe. It wasn’t a remark he would have made in earlier days, nor one that I would have accepted-not without anger and protest. But the years had tempered our reactions; now we both wore carapaces of cynicism. It was the only shield either of us had against the pain, the only armor that made it possible to go on.
I turned away toward the fern-filled front window. Foggy dusk enveloped the city, early for September, a forewarning of a long, dark, hard winter. As the shadows lengthened, my depression deepened. For me, San Francisco had always been a brightly lit city, and that illumination mainly came from its good people. But lately it seemed the lights were going out; one had been snuffed here today. The loss of Rudy Goldring’s kindness and warmth-even though I’d experienced it for less than an hour-filled me with a painful emptiness.
I forced myself to go over to the phone and call the Remedy Lounge. Brian, the bartender, told me that Rae had left about fifteen minutes before, after asking him to tell me I should call her later. No, he said, she hadn’t been upset with me. In fact, she’d spent the time drinking beer and talking with one of the regulars, Joey Corona, who owned an auto body shop further out on Mission.
Brian’s words made me smile. I pictured Rae’s rusted-out old Rambler American; knowing her, she’d probably sweet-talked Joey into a cut-rate repair job.
The thought was comforting. As long as men were available to be sweet-talked into things, and as long as women were willing and able to do that…well, things couldn’t be all that bad….
Or could they?
SIX
I didn’t want to go home, not yet. There was nothing much there to eat; my cat had taken to wandering and probably wouldn’t be there to greet me; the place’s continual and usually interrupted state of construction (I’d recently begun enclosing my back porch to turn it into my bedroom but had run out of money) made it decidedly inhospitable. Besides, I still felt depressed-not a deep funk, but a prickly discontent, underscored by an odd clear sorrow-and I wanted to be with people who would understand. Jack Stuart, Rudy Goldring’s attorney, would surely be one of those, and if the police hadn’t already contacted him, he deserved to be informed about the death. I drove to Bernal Heights and All Souls.
It was after seven when I parked at the apex of the triangular playground. All along the street, windows glowed faintly through the fog. The buildings in Bernal Heights are mainly single-family homes, with a sprinkling of two- and three-flat dwellings. The people who inhabit them are a mixture of working-class families, neo-Yuppies, and oddballs like the folks at All Souls. I looked into the windows of the nearby houses and saw a family eating from trays in front of a TV, a couple setting a candlelit dinner table, and a string quartet practicing next to a grand piano whose lid was littered with wrappings from McDonald’s.
It was quiet inside All Souls. I shed my coat and, out of habit, tossed it on the desk chair in what had once been my office. Then I continued to the kitchen. No one was there but Hank and Jack Stuart-the man I’d come here to see. They sat at the round table by the windows, wineglasses in hand, deep in conversation. When I came in, they both glanced toward the door, and when they saw the look on my face, their expressions went from glum to concerned.
Hank said, “Shar, what’s wrong?”
In spite of my own preoccupation, I realized with a shock that he looked terrible. I couldn’t remember having seen Hank so drained and tired in a long, long time. I glanced at Jack; his eyes moved from me to Hank, then back. I thought I caught a warning there: Don’t say anything to upset him.
I heeded it. “Nothing much. I need to talk to Jack, that’s all.”
Hank has known me long and well; he can sense when I’m engaging in half-truths. But that night he seemed to want to believe me. He nodded and drained his glass, looking slightly sick after he swallowed, then stood. “Well, I’ve go to be getting home, anyway.” To Jack he added, “Thanks, guy,” and walked unsteadily toward the door.
My own concerns had momentarily been pushed aside by anxiety for Hank. I turned to Jack, my mouth open, about to form a question. He shook his head-Hank was still within hearing-and guided me into the other part of the kitchen, where a jug of Gallo’s cheapest stood on the drainboard of the sink. He picked up a glass of dubious cleanliness, filled it, and handed it to me.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Rudy Goldring’s dead.”
He went very still for a few seconds, then his mouth twitched at one corner. “How?”
“He fell and hit his head on the stove in his kitchen. The police suspect homicide-an accident during an argument.”
“Argument with whom?”
“You know the derelict who guards his front steps?”
“My God, not Bob. When?”
“This morning, between ten and noon, I’d say. Judging from the degree of rigor-”
“You were there at his place?”
“Yes, I…oh hell.” Suddenly I felt queasy and lightheaded and annoyed with myself. “Look, let’s sit down.”
Jack motioned at the table, and I took my favorite place, facing the window beyond which all the marvelous lights of downtown San Francisco blaze. Only they didn’t blaze tonight-they were fog-smeared and dim. And they weren’t marvelous, either. To me in my present mood, all they represented was the greed of the developers who were overbuilding and ruining my city.
I looked away from them, at Jack.
He was the newest addition to our staff of attorneys, had come to us about a year before. We’d long needed an expert on criminal law-which was Jack’s specialty-and with the departure of Gilbert Thayer, and unpleasant young man who had looked like a rabbit with a stomachache and acted like the proverbial serpent in the grass, we’d also had a place for someone who could handle contracts. Unlike the universally despised Gilbert, Jack fit in perfectly. He was a veteran of the same poverty wars-Los Angeles branch-as Hank and Anne-Marie and the other senior partners. He and Hank had carried on a correspondence for a number of years and were in perfect accord as to how a law cooperative should function. When Hank had heard Jack wanted to relocate because his attorney wife had received a good offer from a prestigious Montgomery Street firm, he’d hastened to ask him to join our staff. Jack had accepted just as eagerly and had plunged into the work as if he’d been with the co-op since its founding. He related well to the clients; was as enthusiastic about his contract negotiations as his criminal cases; and seemed as much at ease wearing his three-piece suit to a meeting in a boardroom as he was wearing his jeans and wool shirts to a conference in the back room of a laundry.
After six months, however, the Stuart marriage had crumbled, and Jack had moved into one of the rooms on the second floor of All Souls. No one said much about it, but I gathered the marriage had been shaky for some time and simply hadn’t stood up to the stresses of a major move and two job changes. Jack himself seemed kind of lost. In his spare time he wandered about the house looking for people to talk to; he kept starting books and then setting them down half-read, until they gathered dust and someone else put them away. Those in the know told me that such listlessness and inability to concentrate were common afflictions of the newly divorced, and I had no doubt that Jack would snap out of it soon-especially considering the amount of TLC being lavished on him by the rest of the staff.
Now he ran a hand through his thick gray hair. His lean, bony face blanked as he tried to absorb what I’d just told him. He let his hand rest on top of his head for a few seconds, then placed it on mine.
“Did you find his body?” he asked.
“Sort of. I had an appointment to deliver my report to him an-”
“Are you okay?”
“Depressed, but I’ll manage. It was a shock-but then it always is.”
Jack took his hand away and reached for his wine. “Are they certain Bob was responsible?”
“No, but his pouch was at the scene. You know-that fringed leather thing he carries.” I sampled my wine and took odd comfort from its bitterness. “Did you know Rudy well?”
“Not too well, but I liked him a lot. What I handled for him was his business affairs-contracts with suppliers, the sewing union-so the situation didn’t really invite closeness.”
“Did he tell you much about the job he wanted me for?”
“Hardly anything. What was that all about, anyway?”
I explained, then added, “You’ll get a better picture when you read my report. Tell me-had you drawn up a will for him?”
“No, but there is one. I don’t know if Gilbert Thayer handled it, or Hank.” Hank is our specialist on family law; most of the attorneys refer their clients to him for such work.
“Speaking of Hank,” I said, “have you noticed he hasn’t been looking too well lately?”
Jack hesitated. “Yes, I have.”
“The two of you were talking pretty seriously when I came in. Do you know what’s wrong?”
Again he paused. “Oh hell, there’s no reason you shouldn’t know-you’re a better friend to either of them than I am. Hank’s got trouble at home. That’s why he was talking it out with me-because I’ve just been through it.”
“Tr
ouble at home? But it’s so soon! They’re not thinking of getting a divorce-”
“No, God no. They’re both just at the stage of acknowledging that things have gone wrong.”
“But how?”
“They’re both very set in their ways. Hank’s used to living casually-too casually, probably-like everybody does here at All Souls.”
“Anne-Marie used to live here. She was that way, too.”
“Then, yes. But once she bought that two-flat building over in Noe Valley, she developed her own way of doing things, and Hank’s having trouble adjusting to it.”
“Adjusting to what?”
“Well, nightly candlelit dinners. Weekly social evenings with the couple who rent the upstairs flat from them. Chores done on a regular basis. You know. It’s nothing against Anne-Marie. Personally, I’d love that kind of life. Did love it. But Hank…”
“I see.” I’d always envied Anne-Marie her beautiful home, and I’d enjoyed many an elegant dinner there, but I could understand why her life-style might be incompatible with Hank’s offhanded-face it, sometimes slovenly-existence.
“She has everything systematized,” Jack went on, “even down to who does what. She does the laundry, Hank cleans the bathroom. She cooks, all the time, and he misses making his spaghetti and chili. Each is responsible for buying different things: she pays for the paper goods and cleaning stuff and meat; he’s supposed to take care of vegetables and staples and liquor.”
“Good Lord, how do they do their grocery shopping?”
“Two carts.”
“When I used to shop with my boyfriend, we could hardly control one cart between us! What does Hank want to do about this situation?”
“Nothing, so far. Like I said, he’s just at the bitching stage. Frankly, I think part of the trouble is that he misses All Souls.”
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