To Play the Fool km-2

by Laurie R. King

  “The pathologist doesn’t seem to have much to say about the weapon,” Hawkin commented. He had put his glasses on to look through the file.

  “There wasn’t much to say. No splinters, no rust or grease stains, no glass splinters. A smooth, hard object about two inches in diameter. Three blows, though the first one probably killed her. Could’ve been almost anything. What’s your interest in her, anyway, to drag you down here in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s related somehow to the body that was cremated in Golden Gate Park,” Hawkin replied.

  “No kidding? I read about that. And I used to think we had all the loose ones rolling around here.”

  “We have our share. Can I have a copy of all this?”

  “Sure. Here, you take any duplicates of the pictures. If you want copies of the others, let me know and I’ll have them printed. Let me go turn the Xerox machine on.”

  Kate turned the car toward the mountainous Highway 17 and began climbing away from the sea. The morning traffic was light, the rain had stopped at some time during the night, and Kate drove with both eyes but only half a mind on the road.

  “It was the newspaper story,” she said abruptly.

  “What was?”

  “Her picture was in the Wednesday paper. The article quoted her as saying she’d seen John talking with a stranger from Texas, she seemed to think we should let Sawyer go because of that. Two days later, she was missing.”

  For a long time, Al did not answer. Kate took her eyes off the road for a moment to see if he had fallen asleep, but he was staring ahead through the windshield.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “We don’t know anything about the woman. It’s a little early for jumping to conclusions.”

  Silence descended on the car. Kate had been tired earlier but now, boosted by two cups of stale coffee from the doughnut shop Hawkin had spotted just before the freeway entrance, she felt merely stupid. She followed the road up and out of the hills and into San Jose, where the freeways were always busy.

  Nearing Palo Alto, she spoke again. “I’ll drop you at Jani’s, then?”

  “No, go on to the City. I changed my mind; I want to be in on your group meeting this morning with Sawyer.”

  “I was thinking we’d probably cancel it,” said Kate, surprised.

  “This is all the more reason not to.”

  ♦

  TWENTY-SIX

  ♦

  … Something happened to him that must remain

  greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and

  selfish men whom God has not broken to

  make anew.

  The interrogation had been scheduled to begin at ten o’clock. Kate and Hawkin were back in the city by then, but they did not join David Sawyer in the interview room at ten. At eleven o’clock, he was still by himself in the room, his hands in his lap, his lips moving continuously in a low recitation. Twice he had glanced at the door, and on the third time he caught himself and made a visible effort to relax. Since then he had appeared to be in meditation, his long body at ease and his eyes open but not focused on any object.

  At 11:20, the door opened. Hawkin came in first, followed by Kate. Both of them looked clean and damp, though their bodies and eyes betrayed a sleepless night.

  There were three vacant chairs in the room, but neither detective sat. The man in the jail garb blinked gently at them and waited, and then the third figure came through the door and he instantly got to his feet, his face shut-down and hard, and made as if to sidle past his old friend to the door, looking accusingly not at her but at Kate.

  Hawkin put out a hand to stop him. “Please, Dr. Sawyer,” he said quietly. “Sit down.”

  Sawyer’s head came around and the two men gazed at each other while the old man, alerted by some nuance of tone, tried to gauge what lay behind the words. He studied Hawkins’ stance and eyes and looked down warily at the manila envelope Hawkin held in his hand before he accepted the detective’s unspoken message: Before, we were acting out a game. Before, we had time to play with animosity. The game is over now.

  The message that said: Bad news coming, David.

  “Please,” Hawkin repeated quietly.

  After a long minute, without breaking their locked gaze, Sawyer moved back to the table and lowered himself into his chair. Only then did he look at Kate, sitting poised to take notes, and then at Eve Whitlaw, and when he took his eyes from her and turned back to Al Hawkin, on the other side of the table from him now, he drew breath and opened his mouth.

  “No,” interrupted Hawkin, one hand raised to stop Sawyer from speaking. “Don’t say anything yet. Listen to me before you commit yourself to speech. I’ve been told you’re very good at listening.” Hawkin waited until the older man had slowly subsided into the plastic chair. He then leaned forward and, choosing his words carefully, began to speak.

  “Five and a half weeks ago, a man was killed in Golden Gate Park. A number of your friends decided to cremate the body, in imitation of a similar cremation you had supervised three weeks earlier, that of a small dog. The attempted cremation confused matters a great deal, but eventually it proved to have no direct connection with the man’s death.

  “You, however, attracted our suspicions from the very beginning. You would not answer our questions, you had no alibi for the time of death, and you seemed to have something you were hiding. On the nineteenth of February, you fled from Inspector Martinelli and a woman who could identify you. And then when a person who lives near the park told us that you were in the vicinity at the general time the man was killed, and in a state of agitation, the case against you seemed fairly tight. It appeared that you had been blackmailed by the man John and finally hit him in the head in anger. No, much as I would like to hear what you could come up with by way of a response, I’d really prefer if you would just listen.”

  Hawkin slouched down in the chair, playing with the clasp on the envelope that lay on the table between them.

  “However, I don’t think you killed him. I know you could have. I know you have a short temper, for all your years of saintly behavior, and you could easily have lost it and swung at him with that stick of yours. But I don’t think you would have been capable of standing by and waiting for him to die. And I don’t believe you could have broken the skull of his dog three weeks before that. And I know damn well that you were in custody eight days ago and that therefore you could not have committed the murder of your friend Beatrice Jankowski.”

  It took a moment for the information to lodge in his mind, but when it did, the effect was all Hawkin had aimed for: Shock, profound and complete, froze David Sawyer’s hands on the edge of the table, kept him from moving, stopped the breath in his body.

  “Yes. I’m very sorry,” said Hawkin, sounding it. “Beatrice died last week. Inspector Martinelli and I just identified her body a few hours ago.” He pushed back the flap on the envelope and slid the photograph out onto the table, pushed it across in front of Sawyer, and withdrew his hand. The old man stared uncomprehending at the black-and-white photograph of Beatrice Jankowski’s face that had been taken on the autopsy table just before she was cut open. She lay there calmly, her eyes closed, but was very obviously dead.

  Sawyer closed his own eyes and his hands came up to his face, pressing hard against his mouth and cheeks as if to hold in his reaction—vomit, perhaps, or words—but he could not hold back the tears that squeezed from beneath his closed eyelids, tears utterly unlike the simple, generous, childlike stream he had cried so freely on the first occasion Kate had seen him. These were a man’s tears, begrudged and painful, and he clawed at them with his long fingers as if they scalded his skin.

  They all waited a long time for him to take possession of himself again. Even Professor Whitlaw waited, as she had been instructed, though she palpably yearned to go and comfort him. They waited, and eventually he raised a bleary red-eyed face from his hands and accepted the tissue that Al Hawkin held out to him.

&
nbsp; Hawkin then sat forward until his arms were on the table and his face was only inches from the stricken features of the prisoner.

  “Dr. Sawyer, you had nothing to do with the deaths of your son and the wife and children of that madman Kyle Roberts. You believe you did, because grief has to go somewhere, but the truth of the matter is, you were in no way responsible.

  “Beatrice Jankowski’s death is a different matter. You know who the dead man was, and you know who killed him. You may even know why. You wouldn’t tell us because of this vow of yours. You figured the man was such a miserable shit-filled excuse for a human being, his death was hardly a reason to break your vow. You played God, David, and because you wouldn’t answer our questions a month ago, because you distracted us and slowed down the investigation, he came back. He heard a rumor that Beatrice had seen him, he probably read the interview in the newspaper where she hinted that she could identify him, so he came back for her. He killed her, David. He broke her skull and he cut those distinctive rings from her fingers and then he stripped her naked and dumped her body down in the mountains, because you had made up your mind to be noble in prison rather than answer our questions.”

  Although she had been briefed on what to expect, Professor Whitlaw started to protest. Kate stopped her with a hand on her arm, but it was doubtful that either Sawyer or Hawkin noticed.

  “Tell me, David,” Hawkin pleaded, nearly whispering. “You know who did it, you know why,- you even know where he is—you were headed for Texas when they picked you up in Barstow, weren’t you? You know everything and I don’t even know what the dead man’s name is. David, you have to suspend this vow of yours. Just long enough to give me the information I need. Please, David, for God’s sake. For Beatrice’s sake, if nothing else.”

  Kate saw David Sawyer’s surrender. With a jolt made of triumph and sorrow and revulsion at Al Hawkins superb skills, she could see the old man succumb, saw the moment when he buckled off the only thing that had held him together through ten hard years. His mouth opened as he searched for words, his own words, a foreign language spoken long ago.

  “I…” he said, then stopped. “My name… is David Sawyer.

  Eve Whitlaw stood up and went to him, taking up a position behind his chair, her hands resting on his shoulders. He raised his right hand across his chest to take her left hand and, fingers intertwined, he appeared to gather a degree of strength, then continued.

  “You know… who… I am. You know… about Kyle Roberts. I… do not need to say anything about… that. You need to know about the man who died. The man… you know as John… was sick. Mentally. His mind and his… spirit had become twisted. He… enjoyed… power over others. He was rich.” Sawyer stopped and with a visible effort pulled himself together. His tongue, so easy and fluent with the complex thoughts of others, seemed unable to produce a sentence more complicated than a four-year-old’s. When he resumed, his words were more sophisticated, but each phrase, occasionally each word, was set apart by a brief pause.

  “John was actually a very wealthy man, and he… left his home and his business to… wander. There are others like him on the streets. Not many, but always a few who choose the nomadic way of life for… various reasons, rather than falling into it. He did not change, though. He was—he had been a cutthroat businessman, in land speculation and development. He was proud of his… shady dealings. When he came onto the streets, he remained… sly and manipulative. In many ways, I believe he derived more pleasure from controlling the… destitute and the downtrodden than he had from breaking his business rivals.

  “When I came to San Francisco in August, a year and a… half ago, I…” He seemed suddenly to run dry of words. It took a moment with his eyes closed, while he searched for the source, before they began to flow again. “I met John. He had only been here a few months himself. I knew immediately that there was something… wrong with him, and as I watched him move among his friends—and they were friends, real friends—I… felt he was like a jackal, watching for weakness in the herd. I… avoided him as best I could, and we went our separate ways. Until November, All Saint’s Day, when one of his victims tried to commit suicide.

  “The man recovered, but something had to be done. So, I offered myself to John. I allowed him to think I possessed a great and awful secret that would… devastate me were it to become known. There was such a secret, of course, but I greatly exaggerated the effects of public knowledge to make it more… appealing to John. I… dropped hints to encourage him to concentrate on me. I did not stop his… activities entirely, but I… became his main focus.”

  “How much did he find out?” Hawkin asked quietly.

  “I do not think he knew the entire story. He would make guesses, and I would react, you see? He knew there had been deaths, in an academic setting. He knew I felt responsible for those deaths. I believe he hired an investigator, a man was asking questions about me, about eight months ago. But no, I think he would have let me know in… clear ways had he known the full truth.

  “It succeeded, in distracting him from others. The most… unpleasant part of the affair was his increasing sense of intimacy with me. Not physically, of course, but emotionally. He took to confiding in me, as I said, recounting the details of his past business coups. He thought it amusing to take something from another, even if he did not actually desire it. He told me a long story once, how he had stolen away the wife of a rival, saw them divorced, and then refused to marry her. He preferred to destroy a thing rather than see it in the hands of another. A very twisted man.”

  He stopped again, allowing his head to fall back against Eve Whitlaw’s shoulder.

  “Can I get you anything?” Kate asked. “Coffee? A glass of water?” He smiled at her with his eyes and shook his head minutely before looking back at Hawkin.

  “I hope you are recording this,” he said. “I’m not going to tell it twice.”

  “We’re recording it.”

  “Good. So. That was John. You needed to know.”

  “What was his real name?”

  “John was his middle name. Alexander John Darcy, of Fort Worth, Texas. I thought of him as John Chrysostom, who was called ‘Golden-Mouthed.” Now I will tell you what I know about his death.

  “John had a brother who lived near Fort Worth. The two men had been business partners until John left. His leaving created many difficulties for the brother, whose name is Thomas Darcy. John was greatly amused at the problems. Deals were suspended and money was lost because his signature was unavailable.”

  As the fluency returned to David Sawyer’s tongue, Kate was aware of other changes, as well. His posture in the chair had become an awkward slump. His right hand remained intertwined with the professor’s, but his left hand wandered up and down, feeling his shirt front, plucking at his trouser legs. And his face—she was briefly reminded of the Dorian Grey story, for as Sawyer’s features relaxed from the attentive and thoughtful pose she had always known there, they aged, becoming almost grim with the sense of burden borne. With a shock, Kate realized that the man in the chair across from her was no longer Brother Erasmus.

  “A few months ago, John found out two things. First, a piece of land that had been left him and his brother jointly— worthless scrub,” he called it—was now surrounded by town and a freeway and had become very valuable. Then he discovered that sometime before, Thomas had begun the legal process of declaring his missing brother dead. John was almost dancing with pleasure at the thought of confounding his brother’s plan.“

  “He told you these things?”

  “Everything. I was safe, you see. I had to listen, and he knew I would not tell the others that, for example, he had money and an apartment he used sometimes. He knew I disapproved of everything he did. Perhaps you could even say I detested it. He felt my reaction, and it gave him wicked pleasure. Yes, wicked is, I think, the word for the man. Not evil, simply wicked.”

  “What did he do about his brother?”

  “He played games with
the telephone at first. He called Thomas, hinting at who he was. Finally he came out in the open. They hadn’t been in touch for five years or more. Thomas was at first shocked, and then he became angry and said he thought it was a hoax. John told him where he was. Thomas flew out here in—I don’t know. September? October? He also drove out once, a month or so later. John kept him dangling for weeks, offering to sign the deed papers, then withdrawing.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  “Once. I saw him several times.”

  “Could you describe him, please?”

  “Your sort of build, Inspector Hawkin, only shorter. He wore heeled boots, glasses. Brown hair going gray, tan skin, stubby little hands.”

  “Did he wear a hat?”

  “The first time I saw him, no. He was dressed as a normal businessman. The time he drove out, he looked like a cowboy, with snakeskin boots and a hat with a turned-up brim—a cowboy hat.”

  “Do you remember the make of car?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “How did you know he had one, then?”

  “John described it. He said it was big and ostentatious because his brother had a small… sexual organ.”

  “Did he smoke?”

  “Thomas or John?”

  “Either.”

  Sawyer thought for a moment. He looked now like an tired old ex-professor on the skids, and it would have taken a considerable leap of the imagination to place him in a black cassock.

  “John smoked cigars, expensive ones, from time to time. I never saw him with a cigarette, although he carried one of those disposable lighters. I don’t remember about Thomas, but I was only with him about ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Think about it and let me know if you come up with anything.”

  “He may have been a smoker, come to think of it,” Sawyer said, sounding surprised. “His hands—they were tidy. Small, fussy hands. But the nails were discolored, yellow. Like a smoker’s.” The pauses between his words were becoming brief, more sporadic. His speech was almost normal, but he looked so tired.