by Mark Coggins
Stockwell grunted. “And I can explain the Jodie part if you’d quit waving your straw around like a fucking fairy wand.”
Duckworth straightened in his chair and set his shoulders. He passed the straw over Stockwell like he was doing an incantation, said, “Turn to shit.”
Stockwell sighed. “You guys really belong together, you know that? If you believe Jodie, Bishop blackmailed her into helping. Her dad’s a Federal Appellate Court judge. She says Bishop threatened to tell pops that she was HIV positive. The old guy was freaked enough over her lifestyle and Jodie couldn’t bear him knowing the AIDS shit too. By the way, she claims it wasn’t only AIDS and the software theft that prompted Bishop to get revenge.”
“What else was there?” I asked.
“Get this: she said that Bishop was in love with McCulloch. She said the final straw for him was when he heard that Terri and Hastrup were seeing each other.”
I thought that through while Stockwell finished his hamburger in two bites. “And McCulloch?” I asked. “How did she die?”
“The how of it is pretty straightforward. It’s the why I’m not sure about. The autopsy report says she died from a heroin overdose, complicated by the presence of ketamine and alcohol in her system. Well and good. What I can’t tell you is whether she did it on purpose, by accident, or-”
Duckworth jumped in. “Or whether Bishop and Nagel killed her. I’ll bet you anything that’s what happened.”
Stockwell shrugged and began a mopping-up operation with a wad of napkins. “It’s possible. But Jodie says no, and we can’t find any evidence to tie Bishop or Nagel to the heroin and the K.”
“Did the SFPD interview any of the street people in the Tenderloin?” I asked. “Maybe someone saw McCulloch scoring the stuff.”
“You know the high regard in which I hold the San Francisco cops. They say they made the rounds and that no one saw her. But that don’t mean squat when it comes right down to it.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not. Anyway, my vote is accidental. There’s not much point in Bishop engineering a frame for McCulloch if he’s going to turn right around and kill her. Might as well have done that in the first place. As far as her doing it on purpose, she wasn’t the type. She was much tougher than Hastrup, for instance. As a matter of fact, I think she liked being HIV positive. I think she delighted in the idea of dominating men, humiliating them during sex-and ultimately-killing them.”
“Sounds like just the kind of gal you want to take home to meet mom and dad,” said Stockwell.
“Yes, but think about it,” said Duckworth. “There’s not a single person involved in this who you could honestly say was blameless or untainted. Not Teller-he willingly helped Bishop. Not Jodie-she was in it too. Hastrup was McCulloch’s pawn. Bishop and Nagel are obviously out. The landlady’s out. Even Dale Pace is out. Every one of them is dirty in some way.”
I looked out the window at a blonde woman sitting in an idling car in the drive-up line. She was nobody I knew, but the blonde hair got me thinking. “You’re wrong about that, Chris,” I said. “There’s one person who’s clean. Margaret Teller.”
LONELY KNIGHT
I CALLED HER THAT AFTERNOON. I GUESS I had some idea of asking her out, but when I inquired how she was doing the conversation got away from me.
“I’m fine, Mr. Riordan,” she said. “I mean, August, of course. It is very thoughtful of you to call. We buried Roland two days ago, and while I am sure I will go through many more phases of grief, at least I am past the anger. At least I no longer blame everyone in the community for his death.”
I said that was good.
“Good? Yes, you could say that. However, the anger was a companion in many ways. It gave me strength to fight off loneliness and this dreadful feeling of an inevitable fate. So, I will miss the companion, but as I said, I value the progress.”
The line was silent while I fought for something to say. Margaret Teller let me off the hook. She said:
“Just today I was thinking back to the night of Roland’s death. I realized I knew something bad had happened-even before the police had phoned. There was a kind of sign. A harbinger, I guess it’s called. I was in the living room reading my book, and all of a sudden, a picture crashed from the wall. No one had touched it for days, or even weeks, I’m sure. Yet it simply fell from the wall. It was not a picture that Roland particularly cared for or admired, nor had I some unexpressed mental association of it to him, but when I thought back to the night I remembered its falling filled me with anxiety.” She laughed awkwardly. “I suppose you think that’s silly. I suppose you think it was only a coincidence.”
When I finally spoke, my voice cracked like a teenager’s. “No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think you went looking for it-after the fact. If it hadn’t been the picture, you would have remembered a broken glass or a watch that stopped. Those kinds of things happen every day-even when there are no other events of significance. You went looking for a sign to reassure yourself that there’s an underlying order to the world. But there is no fate, Margaret. There is no destiny.
“Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. He was right, but not in the way he meant. God doesn’t play dice with the universe because the universe doesn’t need him. The craps table is set up and running. Whether or not God put it there is besides the point.”
To this day I still don’t know what possessed me to say that. I knew this was not the way to win Margaret Teller’s heart.
There was a long pause. “We are very different, Mr. Riordan,” she said finally.
“I thought you liked different. I thought that was why you married Roland Teller.”
“Yes, and you see what it got me. I disagree with you about fate. I know what mine is now and I see there is no purpose in fighting it. Brad Wilford asked me to marry him yesterday and I consented. I belong with him and people like him.” A beat went by. “I don’t think you should call me anymore, Mr. Riordan.”
Later that afternoon I went to the bank. With everything that had happened in the past week, I had never found time to cash Bishop’s retainer check. I was too late. The cashier informed me that Bishop had stopped payment on it.
I was determined that the case not be a total bust so I drove out to the section of King’s Mountain Road where I lost my hubcap and got out of the car to hunt for it. After an hour of searching I found it wedged under a thorn bush, half filled with brackish rainwater and drowned crickets. I tossed the crickets over my shoulder for luck, and polished up the hubcap with my handkerchief.
Squinting down at my reflection in the bright metal I said, “You and Kieseritzky.”
About the Author
Mark Coggins’ work has been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others.
His novels Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) respectively, both in the crime fiction category.
He lives in San Francisco. Visit www.markcoggins.com for more about Mark and the other novels in the August Riordan series.