by Susan Dunlap
“Okay. You were right, Robin was planning to leave. She said she was in a hole financially, she was afraid they’d take the car. I just let her transfer the Porsche as a favor.”
She shook her head. “No, Carl, that story’s not going to work. The police will ask just how closely you were involved in Robin’s plans. They’ll want to know where that car is.”
The cup quivered in his hands.
Kiernan dragged her chair closer and rested her hand on his. Hartoonian was a scientist who dealt with figures, analyses, rules that define the game. But now he was in a game he didn’t understand, that had rules he couldn’t dream of. “Carl, Robin hit a man and left him for dead. Every bit of evidence suggests she killed her deckhand,” she said, inflating the facts. “And you, her good friend, the friend she was in radio contact with, picked her up on the beach, didn’t you? Carl, you could be charged as an accessory.”
Hartoonian slumped back. “Robin’s alive? I don’t believe it. She would have called me.”
“Carl, the truth!”
“Okay, I do know she’s alive. But I don’t have any idea where she is.”
She took the cup from his hands and set it on the floor. “The police aren’t going to believe that any more than I do. Suppose Robin is in your back room right this minute.” She watched his face; his sunken eyes did not change expression. “If she didn’t turn to you, then who would she have help her? Dwyer Cummings?”
He laughed weakly.
“He was her most faithful customer. She made a big effort to accommodate him.”
“She thought he was a fool.”
“Because he told her business secrets?”
He laughed again. “Not intentionally,” he muttered, almost to himself.
“Not intentionally.” She’d ponder that later. Now she chose her words carefully. “Carl, you picked Robin up after Early Bird sank.” When he didn’t protest, she said, “When did she call you?”
He picked up the mug and stared down into it. Kiernan found herself rooting for him, hoping he had been merely swept along by love, lust, yearning, whatever.
“She sounded like death,” he said slowly. “She didn’t call from the boat. She made it to a phone on shore.”
“But you knew that she had been out in the storm.” Again, she made it a statement.
He nodded. “She called a couple times, said it was bad, said she might need advice and that I should stay around. It was so bad out there, no advice was going to do her any good. When it’s that bad, luck’s all that counts.”
“And then it must have been hours after that last call from the boat before she called again?”
“Forever. I was sure she’d drowned. God, I was so relieved to hear from her. I nearly got pulled over three times speeding down there. And when I saw her she was sitting against a dune with her survival suit draped over her legs, shaking all over. I was sure she had pneumonia.”
“And you brought her back here?”
“Carried her in.” Kiernan could picture him bent over Robin, holding out a mug of tea. She could imagine Robin’s long red hair lying knotted, brine-coated on the pillow.
“Carl, where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She was here for six days. I went to the bakery to get her a cranberry-cornmeal scone—she was crazy about them; when I got back she was gone.” He glared at Kiernan. “And in case you ask, she hasn’t called or anything since. Just left. Like checking out of a hotel.”
Kiernan guessed. “And took the Porsche?”
“Right. Looks like you know her better than I did.”
“Carl, we all make mistakes about lovers. The lucky ones don’t marry them.” He scowled; just the expression she would have had if someone had made that smarmy comment about her affair with Rosten.
She walked out, feeling at once excited and disappointed. Robin Matucci was alive! But she was no closer to finding her. Well before she took Delaney on his last trip, Robin had bankrolled her disappearance. Did she murder Delaney? Did she deliberately take him out in the Pacific to kill him?
Kiernan called the grocery in Big Sur and left a message for Maureen: Robin in good health, has driven off.
As soon as she put down the phone she regretted the tone of that message. Too uncertain. And, dammit, she wasn’t uncertain. She was sure Robin killed Delaney, and just as sure now that the evidence was where she first suspected, on Delaney’s body. Marc Rosten was not going to withhold it any longer.
34
IT WAS 9:25 A.M. Kiernan circled through the morgue parking lot. Both the coroner’s spot and the one labeled Rosten were empty.
The rain had stopped. Now the air merely hung thick and damp, clouding the windshield as she sat thinking. Could Rosten still live in the same Victorian flat he’d had as a medical student? Upstairs in his brother’s building? The flat overlooked Dolores Park, near the warm, sunny Mission District. Twelve years ago it had been a wonderful place. Now it would be a find. She stepped on the gas.
The south side of Dolores Park, 20th Street, was halfway between Bryant Street and Dixie Alley, where Olsen lived. She paused in front of the Victorian. Every parking space was filled. One thing that hadn’t changed in twelve years. Even back then finding a parking spot across from Dolores Park would have been the equivalent of a spontaneous cure for leprosy. The block-long park was deep in shadows now, its hilly knolls rolling sharply together like an excess of breasts, with trees sprouting out of the cleavages. Kiernan shook her head. She’d forgotten how she and Rosten had laughed over that observation as they lay on a blanket in the park. Even then they’d admitted that was a sure sign of punchiness.
Shaking off the memory, she yanked the wheel hard to the right and pulled the Jeep into the driveway, blocking the sidewalk.
The Victorian had been repainted. Then it had been violet with brick red and navy trim. Now, in a more conservative decade, it was beige with eggshell and peach. She ran up the steps and checked under the name for the upper flat. “Rosten.” She pushed the bell, and stood tapping her foot, again recalling that day when Rosten’s brother appeared at his door. Momentarily she felt the hollowness that had numbed her when he’d said Rosten had left. But only momentarily. Now the memory stoked her anger. She clenched her fist to keep from jabbing the bell.
The building had been built nearly a hundred years ago to house offices. During some renovation the two front rooms, which faced the street and park, had been joined by the demolition of their common wall. Rosten’s bed had stood in the turret corner, its own corners poking awkwardly into the round wall. A small tiled fireplace was almost forgotten on an interior wall. The proportions had been all wrong.
She strained for the sound of footsteps, realizing that she was listening for Rosten’s own quick-descending steps of twelve years ago.
Standing here on his porch. It was a moment she might have played over and over again in her mind, slotting in possible scenarios, dancing around the edges of how she’d feel. But she had never intended to be here again, and she had never permitted her speculations about Rosten’s departure to reach this stage. She had buried him as if he’d been a body signed off after postmortem. “What if was a game she had not allowed herself to play. She’d paid the price for that control, as had lovers who’d come after Rosten.
The door opened. Rosten stood there, his brown curly hair still wet from the shower, cord-clad legs apart. His expression of surprise hardened into something else. “You don’t lack for chutzpah! You force your way into my office—”
“You left me no choice!”
He put a hand on the door. Before he could shut it, she pushed it back and stepped inside. “There’s no avoiding me this time.”
“I don’t need to put lip with this—”
“Yes, you do. We’re talking murder here. Delaney was murdered. You blew the autopsy.”
He blinked hard as if he’d been slapped. “There was nothing out of line with that postmort.”
“Then why did you decide
it was worthwhile to send someone to the wharf to check Delaney’s locker? You didn’t do that when you got the body.”
“I didn’t know there was a locker then.”
“And since then, while Delaney lay in the crisper, someone just happened to drop by and mention it? Come on!”
Rosten took a step back, an uncommon move for him, she recalled. She could remember him saying, “Never give ground.” “Who just happened to tell you about it?”
“That is protected information.”
“Oh? Then I’m sure it’s recorded in the Delaney file. When that becomes public information, as it will during the murder investigation …” His dark eyes narrowed but he didn’t speak. She was surprised how vividly she remembered his moves. And this expression that meant he was bluffing. She took a long breath to calm herself. “Marc, you can tell me about it now, off the record, or you can wait and—”
“Watch you get revenge? A woman scorned?”
She smiled. “Right. Whatever your reasons, you were a shit. Twelve years I never thought about you, never let myself feel the fury. I’ve got a lot of control—”
He laughed. “I don’t exactly recall—”
“All that anger’s still waiting. It would be a pleasure to put it to a good cause like this. So you take your pick: Be straight with me now, or give me reason to have every reporter in town calling you. The question is: How did you find out about the locker and what was in it?”
Wind rustled the leaves of the plane trees out front. A motorcycle screeched around the corner onto 20th Street. Rosten leaned back against the wall, his forehead creased with lines that had been only vague shadows years before. There was no hint of those bursts of enthusiasm she had loved. And the soft, chocolate depths were gone from his eyes. Now they were merely opaque shields against the world.
“I got a helpful citizen call.”
“From whom?”
Rosten shrugged. “Just a message. No name. I sent one of our investigators to see what was there.”
“Didn’t you wonder who would send you down there?”
“I deal in facts. I don’t waste my time on questions I’m not likely to get answered.” He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall.
So stubborn, she thought with the frustration she’d felt years ago. And so innocent. “Look, Marc, there’s something major—big money, big power, big fear: something—connected with this. My client has been threatened. Delaney was murdered, and the guy I’m working with, Olsen, was kidnapped. He’d be dead by now if I hadn’t found him. Someone has a big stake in this game, and you are walking through the playing field blindfolded.”
“Blindfolded. Shit, I’m not naïve. Maybe it was too rural around the coroner’s office where you worked, but here we do get murders.”
“You get murdered bodies. You don’t deal directly with their killers. That’s like confusing the restaurant with the slaughterhouse.” She reached out to put a hand on his arm, but stopped herself. Marc Rosten wasn’t Carl Hartoonian and that comforting gesture would not work with him. “Marc, I’ve been doing this kind of work for three years. When they’re pressed, people forget the rules the rest of us play by. And if you’re a decent person, it takes you a long time to realize that people can be as sleazy, as vicious, as casually dishonest as they are. I’d hate to think that you could grasp that in a few days.” He frowned. He was coming to a decision he didn’t want to face. She remembered that look from the Yallin case. She even remembered the case name! Patient with an inoperable tumor and two bad choices Rosten didn’t want to offer. He’d had that look before he left, too.
“This is the most dangerous kind of investigation, Marc. There are a lot of people connected with the case. None of them seems vicious enough to commit murder. But people are dead, and someone, probably someone we trust, killed them.” She started to say “your life is no more valuable to a killer than theirs,” but caught herself. That wasn’t the tack to take with Rosten. Playing her hunch, she said, “Someone is using you, Marc. And other people could die because of you.”
Outside, the J-Church streetcar clattered along the track. She could almost hear it rattling the windows upstairs as it had done every ten minutes during the day, every fifteen at night. It made her shiver as she had back then, lying under the sheet listening to the metallic clatter, water running in the washbasin in the bathroom next door, waiting for Rosten to finish shaving a small circle around his mouth so it would be smooth and soft when he kissed.
She took a deep breath, pushing away the memories that crowded in. She called up the picture of Delaney lying on the slab, his occipital bone clearly visible through the raw edges of scalp, his fingers down to the carpals and metacarpals, the skin eaten away halfway to his elbows. It had the desired result. To Rosten, she said, “Shall we go upstairs and discuss this case?”
He didn’t move. Neither did he stop her as she started up the long carpeted staircase. At the top, she turned sharply right and walked along the familiar white hallway. The decorative tin wainscoting was still there, its design muted by decades of paint.
She paused in the doorway to the big front room. No longer was it the bedroom/study of the old days, with the big bed in the round corner, Rosten’s old pine desks, two of them lined next to each other under the side windows, and the mismatched collections of chairs strewn like half-read books around the room. They’d designated those chairs: the Chair of Pathology, the one with the weevils in the cushion batting; the Chair of Anatomy, with no cushion at all; the Chair of Radiology, stunning design, but one likely to collapse under weight, merely an image of a chair.
Now the round corner housed a circular couch and the rectangular section of the room a green leather sofa, an antique marble-topped chest, and large empty places that bespoke furniture removed and not replaced. The walls they had covered with anatomical sketches were now a mix of watercolors and oils, all in tones that highlighted the green of the sofa. It was, she thought, a room that would have pleased Dwyer Cummings. A room to which the Rosten she had known would have passed through without offering a glance.
“So,” she said as he walked in, “what was in Delaney’s locker?”
Rosten shook his head. “Nothing worth the expense of sending a man to the wharf. Sweats, rags, sweaters, extra pair of shoes. Just what you’d expect for a deckhand.”
She dropped onto the sofa. “Start from the beginning. You got the body, did the postmort, and then what?”
He strode across the room and stopped in front of her. “Don’t come in here and demand—”
“Marc, it’s too late. You screwed up the autopsy.” She couldn’t restrain the rush of pleasure that it gave her to watch him cringe, the one man who had refused to support her in a similar situation. She said, “I know how that is. It’ll catch up with you. Unless you face it now.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Marc, I’m not out to get you.” Well, only incidentally, only briefly. “I’m here to protect my client.”
He sat in the far corner of the sofa, but he didn’t look at her. A streetcar clattered by. Rosten turned toward the window.
“If you are still the man I knew, Marc, you are thorough, conscientious, responsible. Even in med school, when you were so exhausted you had to force yourself to eat before you fell into bed, you never called in sick and made someone else cover for you. You never shorted your patients when they needed answers. I don’t believe you’d do a slipshod job on an autopsy. But I, of all people, know it’s possible to misconstrue a finding, to miss a clue that someone else might have discovered. With all these people asking about Delaney, it’s easy to see why you’d have second thoughts about the autopsy. What’s worrying you about it?”
He swallowed hard. Suddenly he looked up. “Okay. There were two things, neither of which seemed at all unusual when I wrote the report, and which indeed may not be. The first was a subdural hemorrhage in left anterior, proximal temporalis muscle.”
“The blow to the s
ide of the head. What about contrecoup injury? Were the blood vessels on the right side of the brain broken?”
“There was no contrecoup. Do you think I’d miss something like that?”
“No. But didn’t you expect there would be one? If that subdural hemorrhage had come from a blow Delaney got being bounced around in the boat there should have been a contrecoup. But there wasn’t. Delaney wasn’t moving; he was standing still, and something hit him. Somebody struck him hard enough to cause that hemorrhage.” She caught herself before he blurted out: Didn’t you find that significant? Obviously, it had slipped by him. “Maybe if we took another look at—”
“You’d love to get a real crack at Delaney’s body, wouldn’t you? Even after five days in the Pacific, it wouldn’t bother you, would it? God, I never saw anyone so fascinated with decay. There were times when you just about made me sick.”
“I did?” she asked, amazed. “You never said that then.”
He laughed uncomfortably. “It would have sounded unmanly, or at least unsuitable for a medical student.”
“And here you are acting coroner.”
“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm.
She closed her eyes and let her breath out slowly. She could feel the frustration that numbed her body when she’d finished her residency at the San Francisco coroner’s department and moved to a more rural county, knowing that, without the latest electron microscopes, the gas chromatograph to detect chemical elements in the blood, without access to the most sophisticated equipment, there would be conclusions she could never make, findings she would miss. “Once I would have sold two of my limbs for the chance to be coroner of the city of San Francisco. To have the equipment you do, the staff, the variety of cases. It would have been the next thing to being God.”
He shook his head. “God of the dead. You see it all here, all when it’s too late to do anything about it.”