A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “Just as Gary and her parents suspected.”

  “Yes. I’ve covered the entire area around the bridge. There are absolutely no witnesses, except for the tour bus driver who saw her park her car at four and got suspicious when it was still there at seven and reported it. But even he didn’t see her walk off toward the bridge.” I drank some more grog, felt its warmth, and began to relax.

  Behind his thick horn-rimmed glasses, Hank’s eyes became concerned. “Did the DiCesares or Gary give you any idea why she would have done such a thing?”

  “When I talked with Ernest and Sylvia this morning, they said Vanessa had changed her mind about marrying Gary. He’s not admitting to that, but he doesn’t speak of Vanessa the way a happy husband-to-be would. And it seems an unlikely match to me—he’s close to twenty years older than she.”

  “More like fifteen,” Hank said. “Gary’s father was Ernest’s best friend, and after Ron Stornetta died, Ernest more or less took him on as a protégé. Ernest was delighted that their families were finally going to be joined.”

  “Oh, he was delighted all right. He admitted to me that he’d practically arranged the marriage. ‘Girl didn’t know what was good for her,’ he said. ‘Needed a strong older man to guide her.’ ” I snorted.

  Hank smiled faintly. He’s a feminist, but over the years his sense of outrage has mellowed; mine still has a hair trigger.

  “Anyway,” I said, “when Vanessa first announced she was backing out of the engagement, Ernest told her he would cut off her funds for law school if she didn’t go through with the wedding.”

  “Jesus, I had no idea he was capable of such . . . Neanderthal tactics.”

  “Well, he is. After that Vanessa went ahead and set the wedding date. But Sylvia said she suspected she wouldn’t go through with it. Vanessa talked of quitting law school and moving out of their home. And she’d been seeing other men; she and her father had a bad quarrel about it just last week. Anyway, all of that, plus the fact that one of her suitcases and some clothing are missing, made them highly suspicious of the suicide.”

  Hank reached for my mug and went to get us more grog. I began thumbing through the copy of the morning paper that I’d moved off the chair, looking for the story on Vanessa. I found it on page three.

  The daughter of Supervisor Ernest DiCesare apparently committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge late yesterday afternoon.

  Vanessa DiCesare, 22, abandoned her 1985 Honda Civic at Vista Point at approximately four p.m., police said. There were no witnesses to her jump, and the body has not been recovered. The contents of a suicide note found in her car have not been disclosed.

  Ms. DiCesare, a first-year student at Hastings College of Law, is the only child of the supervisor and his wife, Sylvia. She planned to be married next month to San Francisco attorney Gary R. Stornetta, a political associate of her father. . . .

  Strange how routine it all sounded when reduced to journalistic language. And yet how mysterious—the “undisclosed contents” of the suicide note, for instance.

  “You know,” I said as Hank came back to the table and set down the fresh mugs of grog, “that note is another factor that makes me believe she staged this whole thing. It was so formal and controlled. If they had samples of suicide notes in etiquette books, I’d say she looked one up and copied it.”

  He ran his fingers through his wiry brown hair. “What I don’t understand is why she didn’t just break off the engagement and move out of the house. So what if her father cut off her money? There are lots worse things than working your way through law school.”

  “Oh, but this way she gets back at everyone, and has the advantage of actually being alive to gloat over it. Imagine her parents’ and Gary’s grief and guilt—it’s the ultimate way of getting even.”

  “She must be a very angry young woman.”

  “Yes. After I talked with Ernest and Sylvia and Gary, I spoke briefly with Vanessa’s best friend, a law student named Kathy Graves. Kathy told me that Vanessa was furious with her father for making her go through with the marriage. And she’d come to hate Gary because she’d decided he was only marrying her for her family’s money and political power.”

  “Oh, come on. Gary’s ambitious, sure. But you can’t tell me he doesn’t genuinely care for Vanessa.”

  “I’m only giving you her side of the story.”

  “So now what do you plan to do?”

  “Talk with Gary and the DiCesares again. See if I can’t come up with some bit of information that will help me find her.”

  “And then?”

  “Then it’s up to them to work it out.”

  The DiCesare home was mock-Tudor, brick and half-timber, set on a corner knoll in the exclusive area of St. Francis Wood. When I’d first come there that morning, I’d been slightly awed; now the house had lost its power to impress me. After delving into the lives of the family who lived there, I knew that it was merely a pile of brick and mortar and wood that contained more than the usual amount of misery.

  The DiCesares and Gary Stornetta were waiting for me in the living room, a strangely formal place with several groupings of furniture and expensive-looking knickknacks laid out in precise patterns on the tables. Vanessa’s parents and fiancé—like the house—seemed diminished since my previous visit: Sylvia huddled in an armchair by the fireplace, her gray-blonde hair straggling from its elegant coiffure; Ernest stood behind her, haggard-faced, one hand protectively on her shoulder. Gary paced, smoking and clawing at his hair with his other hand. Occasionally he dropped ashes on the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, but no one called it to his attention.

  They listened to what I had to report without interruption. When I finished, there was a long silence. Then Sylvia put a hand over her eyes and said, “How she must hate us to do a thing like this!”

  Ernest tightened his grip on his wife’s shoulder. His face was a conflict of anger, bewilderment, and sorrow.

  There was no question of which emotion had hold of Gary; he smashed out his cigarette in an ashtray, lit another, and resumed pacing. But while his movements before had merely been nervous, now his tall, lean body was rigid with thinly controlled fury. “Damn her!” he said. “Damn her anyway!”

  “Gary.” There was a warning note in Ernest’s voice.

  Gary glanced at him, then at Sylvia. “Sorry.”

  I said, “The question now is, do you want me to continue looking for her?”

  In shocked tones, Sylvia said, “Of course we do!” Then she tipped her head back and looked at her husband.

  Ernest was silent, his fingers pressing hard against the black wool of her dress.

  “Ernest?” Now Sylvia’s voice held a note of panic.

  “Of course we do,” he said. But the words somehow lacked conviction.

  I took out my notebook and pencil, glancing at Gary. He had stopped pacing and was watching the DiCesares. His craggy face was still mottled with anger, and I sensed he shared Ernest’s uncertainty.

  Opening the notebook, I said, “I need more details about Vanessa, what her life was like the past month or so. Perhaps something will occur to one of you that didn’t this morning.”

  “Ms. McCone,” Ernest said, “I don’t think Sylvia’s up to this right now. Why don’t you and Gary talk, and then if there’s anything else, I’ll be glad to help you.”

  “Fine.” Gary was the one I was primarily interested in questioning, anyway. I waited until Ernest and Sylvia had left the room, then turned to him.

  When the door shut behind them, he hurled his cigarette into the empty fireplace. “Goddamn little bitch!” he said.

  I said, “Why don’t you sit down.”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, obviously wanting to keep on pacing, but then he flopped into the chair Sylvia had vacated. When I’d first met with Gary this morning, he’d been controlled and immaculately groomed, and he had seemed more solicitous of the DiCesares than concerned with his own feelings. Now his clothing
was disheveled, his graying hair tousled, and he looked to be on the brink of a rage that would flatten anyone in its path.

  Unfortunately, what I had to ask him would probably fan that rage. I braced myself and said, “Now tell me about Vanessa. And not all the stuff about her being a lovely young woman and a brilliant student. I heard all that this morning—but now we both know it isn’t the whole truth, don’t we?”

  Surprisingly he reached for a cigarette and lit it slowly, using the time to calm himself. When he spoke, his voice was as level as my own. “All right, it’s not the whole truth. Vanessa is lovely and brilliant. She’ll make a top-notch lawyer. There’s a hardness in her; she gets it from Ernest. It took guts to fake this suicide . . .”

  “What do you think she hopes to gain from it?”

  “Freedom. From me. From Ernest’s domination. She’s probably taken off somewhere for a good time. When she’s ready she’ll come back and make her demands.”

  “And what will they be?”

  “Enough money to move into a place of her own and finish law school. And she’ll get it, too. She’s all her parents have.”

  “You don’t think she’s set out to make a new life for herself?”

  “Hell, no. That would mean giving up all this.” The sweep of his arm encompassed the house and all of the DiCesares’s privileged world.

  But there was one factor that made me doubt his assessment. I said, “What about the other men in her life?”

  He tried to look surprised, but an angry muscle twitched in his jaw.

  “Come on, Gary,” I said, “you know there were other men. Even Ernest and Sylvia were aware of that.”

  “Ah, Christ!” He popped out of the chair and began pacing again. “All right, there were other men. It started a few months ago. I didn’t understand it; things had been good with us; they still were good physically. But I thought, okay, she’s young; this is only natural. So I decided to give her some rope, let her get it out of her system. She didn’t throw it in my face, didn’t embarrass me in front of my friends. Why shouldn’t she have a last fling?”

  “And then?”

  “She began making noises about breaking off the engagement. And Ernest started that shit about not footing the bill for law school. Like a fool I went along with it, and she seemed to cave in from the pressure. But a few weeks later, it all started up again—only this time it was purposeful, cruel.”

  “In what way?”

  “She’d know I was meeting political associates for lunch or dinner, and she’d show up at the restaurant with a date. Later she’d claim he was just a friend, but you couldn’t prove it from the way they acted. We’d go to a party and she’d flirt with every man there. She got sly and secretive about where she’d been, what she’d been doing.”

  I had pictured Vanessa as a very angry young woman; now I realized she was not a particularly nice one, either.

  Gary was saying, “. . . the last straw was on Halloween. We went to a costume party given by one of her friends from Hastings. I didn’t want to go—costumes, a young crowd, not my kind of thing—and so she was angry with me to begin with. Anyway, she walked out with another man, some jerk in a soldier outfit. They were dancing . . .”

  I sat up straighter. “Describe the costume.”

  “An old-fashioned soldier outfit. Wide-brimmed hat with a plume, frock coat, sword,”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “Youngish. He had a full beard and wore granny glasses.”

  Lee Gottschalk.

  The address I got from the phone directory for Lee Gottschalk was on California Street not far from Twenty-fifth Avenue and only a couple of miles from where I’d first met the ranger at Fort Point. When I arrived there and parked at the opposite curb, I didn’t need to check the mailboxes to see which apartment was his; the corner windows on the second floor were ablaze with light, and inside I could see Gottschalk, sitting in an armchair in what appeared to be his living room. He seemed to be alone but expecting company, because frequently he looked up from the book he was reading and checked his watch.

  In case the company was Vanessa DiCesare, I didn’t want to go barging in there. Gottschalk might find a way to warn her off, or simply not answer the door when she arrived. Besides, I didn’t yet have a definite connection between the two of them; the “jerk in a soldier outfit” could have been someone else, someone in a rented costume that just happened to resemble the working uniform at the fort. But my suspicions were strong enough to keep me watching Gottschalk for well over an hour. The ranger had lied to me that afternoon.

  The lies had been casual and convincing, except for two mistakes—such small mistakes that I hadn’t caught them even when I’d read the newspaper account of Vanessa’s purported suicide later. But now I recognized them for what they were: The paper had called Gary Stornetta a “political associate” of Vanessa’s father, rather than his former campaign manager, as Lee had termed him. And while the paper mentioned the suicide note, it had not said it was taped inside the car. While Gottschalk conceivably could know about Gary managing Ernest’s campaign for the Board of Supes from other newspaper accounts, there was no way he could have known how the note was secured—except from Vanessa herself.

  Because of those mistakes, I continued watching Gottschalk, straining my eyes as the mist grew heavier, hoping Vanessa would show up or that he’d eventually lead me to her. The ranger appeared to be nervous: He got up a couple of times and turned on a TV, flipped through the channels, and turned it off again. For about ten minutes, he paced back and forth. Finally, around twelve-thirty, he checked his watch again, then got up and drew the draperies shut. The lights went out behind them.

  I tensed, staring through the blowing mist at the door of the apartment building. Somehow Gottschalk hadn’t looked like a man who was going to bed. And my impression was correct: In a few minutes he came through the door onto the sidewalk carrying a suitcase—pale leather like the one of Vanessa’s Sylvia had described to me—and got into a dark-colored Mustang parked on his side of the street. The car started up and he made a U-turn, then went right on Twenty-fifth Avenue. I followed. After a few minutes, it became apparent that he was heading for Fort Point.

  When Gottschalk turned into the road to the fort, I kept going until I could pull over on the shoulder. The brake lights of the Mustang flared, and then Gottschalk got out and unlocked the low iron bar that blocked the road from sunset to sunrise; after he’d driven through he closed it again, and the car’s lights disappeared down the road.

  Had Vanessa been hiding at drafty, cold Fort Point? It seemed a strange choice of place, since she could have used a motel or Gottschalk’s apartment. But perhaps she’d been afraid someone would recognize her in a public place, or connect her with Gottschalk and come looking, as I had. And while the fort would be a miserable place to hide during the hours it was open to the public—she’d have had to keep to one of the off-limits areas, such as the west side—at night she could probably avail herself of the heated employees’ lounge.

  Now I could reconstruct most of the scenario of what had gone on: Vanessa meets Lee; they talk about his work; she decides he is the person to help her fake her suicide. Maybe there’s a romantic entanglement, maybe not; but for whatever reason, he agrees to go along with the plan. She leaves her car at Vista Point, walks across the bridge, and later he drives over there and picks up the suitcase. . . .

  But then why hadn’t he delivered it to her at the fort? And to go after the suitcase after she’d abandoned the car was too much of a risk; he might have been seen, or the people at the fort might have noticed him leaving for too long a break. Also, if she’d walked across the bridge, surely at least one of the people I’d talked with would have seen her—the maintenance crew near the north tower, for instance.

  There was no point in speculating on it now, I decided. The thing to do was to follow Gottschalk down there and confront Vanessa before she disappeared again. For a moment I debated
taking my gun out of the glove-box, but then decided against it. I don’t like to carry it unless I’m going into a dangerous situation, and neither Gottschalk nor Vanessa posed any particular threat to me. I was merely here to deliver a message from Vanessa’s parents asking her to come home. If she didn’t care to respond to it, that was not my business—or my problem.

  I got out of my car and locked it, then hurried across the road and down the narrow lane to the gate, ducking under it and continuing along toward the ranger station. On either side of me were tall, thick groves of eucalyptus; I could smell their acrid fragrance and hear the fog-laden wind rustle their brittle leaves. Their shadows turned the lane into a black winding alley, and the only sound besides distant traffic noises was my tennis shoes slapping on the broken pavement. The ranger station was dark, but ahead I could see Gottschalk’s car parked next to the fort. The area was illuminated only by small security lights set at intervals on the walls of the structure. Above it the bridge arched, washed in fog-muted yellowish light; as I drew closer I became aware of the grumble and clank of traffic up there.

  I ran across the parking area and checked Gottschalk’s car. It was empty, but the suitcase rested on the passenger seat. I turned and started toward the sally port, noticing that its heavily studded door stood open a few inches. The low tunnel was completely dark. I felt my way along it toward the courtyard, one hand on its icy stone wall.

  The doors to the courtyard also stood open. I peered through them into the gloom beyond. What light there was came from the bridge and more security beacons high up on the wooden watchtowers; I could barely make out the shapes of the construction equipment that stood near the west side. The clanking from the bridge was oppressive and eerie in the still night.

  As I was about to step into the courtyard, there was a movement to my right. I drew back into the sally port as Lee Gottschalk came out of one of the ground-floor doorways. My first impulse was to confront him, but then I decided against it. He might shout, warn Vanessa, and she might escape before I could deliver her parents’ message.