by Pascal Scott
“For me,” Emily had begged. “Please.”
What was it about Emily? Why was she impossible to resist? Stone took off her boxers, and for her fortieth birthday, she let Emily touch her where no one ever had. Emily. The truth was that despite the years that separated them, for the first time in her life, Stone felt at forty that she had finally found someone for the long term. If she stayed on course, she could take early retirement from State at fifty, just ten years away. Fifty. Christ, how did that happen? Forty was one thing, but fifty! That was old. Emily would be building her own career by then as a professor of women studies. Stone could be a house husband until she figured out what to do in the next phase of her life. A new role for Stone, something entirely different from what had come before. The thought was scary and appealing and disturbing all at once.
But of course that would never happen now. All that was gone. It was hard for Stone to believe that fourteen weeks had passed since Emily’s disappearance. Stone had counted each one. Twelve weeks since her body was found on the beach. Fourteen weeks since she left for work and never came home. Those were the markers for Stone. For everyone else, it was the earthquake. Before the quake, people in California joked about living on the fault line and the inevitability of the big one. After the Loma Prieta, the joke rang hollow.
No one felt that hollowness more than Stone. No one understood grief except the grieving, Stone thought. Other people could sympathize, they could pity you and offer their condolences. But only the grieving knew the feeling of being overwhelmed, the hopelessness of loss. Stone felt as if her heart had been ripped out of her chest. Her heart was still beating, but her flesh had been severed and the veins were pumping out her life blood. Sometimes Stone felt that she couldn’t stand the pain a minute longer. Sometimes she thought about joining Emily. Stone had never considered suicide, even as a teenager. She couldn’t believe she was thinking about it now. She had always loved life. Even when life had gotten tough, she had coped by getting tougher. But this was different.
On Saturday, January 20, Stone drove to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a cold San Francisco morning, clear, windy, and sunny. She parked and began walking north on the span. Despite the temperature, a couple of female joggers bounced by in sleeveless shirts and shorts. Before Emily’s death, Stone would have looked, but now Stone barely noticed them. At the first tower, she stopped and went to the orange rail. Leaning over it, Stone looked down to the choppy Pacific two hundred forty-five feet below. Jumping from the bridge was like diving out of a window from the twenty-second floor of a high-rise. Concrete and water were both unforgiving places to fall.
Stone looked up from the waves and out, east to Alcatraz, north to Marin and Sausalito, and then south to the city. It was a beautiful city, the most beautiful city in the world to Stone, although she hadn’t traveled much and couldn’t really judge. A workaholic, that was what Emily had called her. It was true. Stone had accrued vacation time from her job that she had never taken. That was another thing that would never happen now. They would never travel together. They would never see Paris. They would never see Lesbos. They would never.
Stone looked down into the abyss.
Chapter Eleven
Dory was solid on one thing at least. Zoe Martinelli was lovely. With olive skin, full, red lips, dark eyebrows, and deep-set brown eyes, she was what Marcus would have called a “clothes horse,” a beautiful frame on which to hang beautiful clothes. Her hair was long, like waves of a black sea that ended in unexpected ringlets, little upside-down question marks. Stone liked femmes with jet black hair. And femmes with golden hair. Or red hair. Or brown. She appreciated Anglo beauty and African beauty and the beauty of the Mediterranean woman. Zoe had that Mediterranean beauty. She looked like a Roman statue. If Stone hadn’t been so lost in her grief, she would have been looking at Zoe in a different light. As it was, the main thing Stone saw as Zoe walked toward her was the potential answer to the question that wouldn’t let her sleep. What happened to Emily?
On January 20, Stone had walked away from the suicide rail of the Golden Gate Bridge, back to her truck parked in the lot on Lincoln Boulevard, and had driven home to make a desperate call to Coppola Investigations. Even though it was a Saturday, Zoe had called her back within two hours, sensing the desperation in the voice left on the office’s recorder. Zoe had been sympathetic but professional on the phone, suggesting they meet in person after work on Monday at Café Flore on Market at Sanchez. A class act, wasn’t that what Dory had called her? When a tall, curvy woman had strolled into the café on royal blue heels in a matching high-waisted, pleated pants suit, Stone had known who it was. Stone stood from behind the polished-wood table where she had been seated as Zoe surveyed the room. Their eyes met. Zoe’s eyes softened and smiled, then the smile went to her lips as she glided forward.
“Stone?” she asked.
“Yes,” Stone replied, moving around the table to pull out her chair.
Zoe slid into the seat in an effortless movement, like someone accustomed to having males behave like gentlemen in her presence. Stone went around the table and reseated herself.
“Did you have any trouble finding the café?” Zoe asked, picking up a menu.
“No. I’ve been here before. Mabel’s is just down the street.”
“Mabel’s?”
“The bar.”
Zoe looked over the menu at Stone. “I don’t go to bars.”
Stone laughed. “Martinelli? And you don’t drink?”
Zoe gave her a disapproving look. “I didn’t say I didn’t drink. I said I don’t go to bars.”
“Sorry,” Stone corrected herself. “Ethnic stereotype. I should know better. I get that myself sometimes.”
Zoe looked her up and down. “Because you are?”
“Irish and Mexican, half and half,” Stone replied.
“Interesting.”
“Martinelli,” Stone repeated. “You’re not from the wine Martinellis, are you? The Martinellis of Sonoma?”
“Guilty as charged.”
A waitress appeared to take their order. Zoe had a glass of Pinot Grigio and a spinach salad. Stone ordered a Bud and a chili relleno crepe “extra hot.” Stone felt a little guilty about the beer but wasn’t quite ready to give it up just yet. But soon, she promised herself.
Zoe opened the concealed carry handbag in her lap, took out a shiny silver pen and a small spiral notepad, and flipped through its pages. How’d a roughneck like Dory ever score a girl like you? Stone was thinking. Dory must have been good in bed. Or maybe Zoe had a weakness for short, plain-speaking butches.
“Emily Bryson,” Zoe read the name from her pad, then looked into Stone’s eyes. “Tell me your suspicions about Emily’s death.”
“Wow,” Stone said. “You get straight to the point. Okay. I suspect murder. Everybody is trying to convince me that Emily threw herself off the bridge. Emily wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have done that. Somebody murdered her.”
“Murder is a strong word,” Zoe said.
“It was her job,” Stone responded. “I know it had something to do with the club.”
“The club?”
“The Kitty Club. Emily was an exotic dancer.”
“Oh,” Zoe said, her voice tightening.
“She was also a student,” Stone hurried to add. “She was working on her master’s at State. She was almost finished. All she had left was her thesis on the relationship between exotic dancers and sexual identity and power dynamics.” Stone heard herself repeating Emily’s words.
“Sounds…” Zoe searched for an adjective. “Erudite.”
“Yeah, erudite,” Stone agreed. “She was going to go on and get her PhD and then teach. There’s just no way she killed herself.”
The waitress brought their drinks. Zoe sipped her white wine. Stone drank her beer out of the bottle.
“Here’s another thing,” Stone added. “They never found her car. Her van. She drove this old hippy-dippy VW van that she bought
off some aging acidhead in Santa Cruz. The police never found the van. If she drove herself to the bridge after work that night and jumped, where is the van? Why isn’t it in the parking lot or somewhere near the bridge?”
“That’s a reasonable question,” Zoe responded.
“That’s what I thought. I asked Detective Murphy, and he told me Emily probably left the keys in the ignition and somebody stole it. He said that’s what suicides do. He said there are rings of car thieves who chop down stolen vehicles and sell the parts. He did check, and the van hadn’t been impounded by the city.”
“Who is Detective Murphy?” Zoe asked.
“He was the detective assigned to the missing person case, the one I filed last October.”
“With the San Francisco Police Department?”
“Yeah,” Stone answered. “Somebody stole Emily’s van, I’ll agree with that part. But whoever stole it knows something about her death. It has to do with the club, I’m just sure of it.”
Zoe nodded. “Then I suppose the Kitty Club is the place for me to start. I’ll talk to the owner and the other dancers.”
“Good,” Stone said. “Except there’s this neighbor of mine upstairs. It’s a long story, but I know he’s been taking pictures of Emily on the sly.” Stone caught her mistake. “I know that he was taking pictures of Emily.” It still seemed unreal that Emily was dead.
“Oh?” Zoe said.
“Yeah, I found out over Christmas when I cat-sat for them, for him and his wife. He’s some kind of semi-pro photographer—mostly nudes—but I also discovered that he had been taking photographs of Emily coming and going. He even followed her to the Kitty Club.”
“Really?” Zoe said. “That is interesting. Then I’ll need everything you have on Mr…. ”
“Ketchum. Rick Ketchum.”
“Mr. Ketchum. I’ll start with Mr. Ketchum and then I’ll talk to the women at the Kitty Club.”
“The Kitties,” Stone provided.
“The Kitties?” Zoe repeated. “The Kitties. Right.”
Zoe sipped her wine, considering something. “This is an indelicate question, Stone, so please don’t be offended,” she began. “But I need to know. Did Emily have other lovers? Other than you?”
Stone twisted the commitment ring still on her finger. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Well,” Stone began. “We talked about it, and I let her know that I required her to be faithful to me as long as we were together. And I promised that I would be faithful in return, of course. But…”
“But?”
“But Emily was indoctrinated in her women studies classes at Santa Cruz into believing that monogamy is a quote, repressive tool of the patriarchy, unquote. I think she agreed to be faithful just to please me. Emily was young. It’s harder to say no to sex when you’re young. So it’s possible she had other lovers, although I like to think that she didn’t.”
Zoe closed her notepad and returned it and the shiny pen to her handbag. “Do you have any questions for me?”
Stone thought about it. “Not really,” she said. “Except maybe about your past. Like, how’d you get into this line of work?”
Zoe smiled broadly. “You could say I fell into it naturally,” she replied. “Mom was an investigator for the public defender’s office in San Francisco before she married Dad. After that, she was a homemaker. Dad helped run the winery with his father and brothers. I suppose I was a little spoiled growing up. I had no real direction in life until I took a year off from grad school to do an internship in the public defender’s office in the city.”
“Which college?” Stone always asked about alma maters. That was what happened when you worked in education.
“The University of San Francisco,” Zoe said.
“Catholic,” Stone said.
“Jesuit,” Zoe corrected. “The school, not me. I’m a lapsed Catholic. In any event, I was studying process philosophy, but my father kept urging me to get more involved in the family business. He said philosophy was fine, but it wasn’t the real world. I tried the wine business and found that it just wasn’t for me. That’s when my mother suggested community service. I took a year off from my studies and did my internship with the PD’s office.”
“That’s about as real as it gets,” Stone said.
“It was. And that’s when I got hooked on investigation.”
“But you didn’t want to get your license?”
“No,” Zoe said. “I went back to USF and completed my degree. Dad was right, though. There really isn’t much you can do with a master’s in philosophy, so when an entry-level job with the public defender’s office in San Francisco opened up, I applied. At the same time, I began working on my hours toward a PI license. I got the job, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wouldn’t like being a public defender after all. I didn’t like the caseload and the overtime and the burnout that seemed to come with the job. So I compromised. I went to work for a private investigator as an office manager—Coppola Investigations—and that’s where I’ve been ever since. It’ll be five years in April, and it suits me just fine. Regular hours and a little sleuthing on the side is enough for me. Plus, this business can be pretty disheartening at times.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“Not to sound too erudite myself, but Socrates said that the mass of humanity goes through life sleepwalking. I was like that until I did my internship. That was a turning point for me. A year in the public defender’s office cured me of my naivety. I saw some pretty disturbing things while I was there.”
“Your loss of innocence,” Stone said.
“That’s it,” Zoe agreed. “There’s that point in our lives, isn’t there? That point where we lose our innocence, and our world changes.”
“There is.”
“I imagine Emily’s death was your loss of innocence.”
“It was,” Stone replied and paused. “Does it help, being philosophical?”
“It does, as a matter of fact,” Zoe said. “It gives you perspective.”
“You said you were studying some kind of philosophy at USF.”
“Process philosophy, that was my focus. I followed Alfred North Whitehead pretty closely, much to the dismay of my professors.”
“They didn’t like, uh, what was his name?”
“Alfred North Whitehead. No, he’s not exactly beloved by Catholics. He was Episcopalian, actually. Jesuits worship Aristotle. And Thomas Aquinas, of course. But I got by because I used Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit philosopher, as a starting point. De Chardin had a lot in common with Whitehead in thinking of reality as a process rather than as a substance like Aristotle or as an idea like Plato.”
“Wow,” Stone said. “Gorgeous and brilliant.”
Zoe’s eyes smiled, but her mouth curled into a teasing grin. “I did not hear you say that, Stone.”
“What?”
“That line.”
“It wasn’t a line! It’s true.”
“Oh, Stone. I’ll bet when you’re in your groove, you have more lines than a Jackson Pollock.”
“Huh?”
“The painter.”
“Oh.”
“Never mind. I’m teasing you. Thank you. That was very sweet.”
“You’re welcome.”
Stone hesitated. “One thing I don’t get, though. What’s with the psychic stuff? Dory said you were studying at Psychic Pathways. You don’t seem like the sort of woman who would go in for that sort of… ” Stone was about to say crap but censored herself. “…thing.”
“I don’t?” Zoe asked. “I wonder what sort of woman you think I am,” she added but then continued before Stone could reply. “I can see that you’re left-brained. I am, too, which is why I need to consciously remember to nurture the right side of my head. That’s why I remain connected to the church. It helps me stay in touch with my intuitive self. Psychic Pathways is another way I’m learning to trust my intuition and to feel my way t
hrough situations instead of habitually thinking my way through them. I’ve actually found that I have a natural inclination toward psychic abilities. My grandmother read the tarot cards in her village in Italy. I’m Italian on both sides. They say the gift is matrilineal.”
Stone was doubtful.
“Let me rephrase this for you,” Zoe said, trying again. “If you had a toolbox and there was a tool in it that you never used, wouldn’t that be wasteful? Impractical? Psychic abilities are just another tool in your toolbox.”
“Hmm,” Stone said. “I see your point.”
“I’m going to use every tool I have to find out what happened to your Emily.”
By the time they had finished their meal, they had agreed on a plan of action. Zoe would start by following Rick Ketchum and talking to the Kitties. Stone would meet with the city’s medical examiner to review the results of the autopsy. Zoe reached across the table and covered Stone’s hand with her own. Stone realized suddenly how much she had missed a woman’s touch.
“We’ll do this together,” Zoe promised.
For the first time in four months, Stone felt the strange sensation she recognized as hope.
Chapter Twelve
Rick Ketchum had no criminal record, according to the background check Zoe ran on the Coppola Investigations computer. But he did have a secret. Zoe sat in her jade green MG Roadster on the park side of Church Street, across from the Victorian where Stone and the Ketchums resided. Zoe had raised the top on the 1974 convertible that had been a graduation gift from her parents. Now a thunderstorm was blowing in along with the usual morning fog, and a drizzle of rain had started falling. Zoe used a tissue to wipe the condensation from the inside of the driver’s side window. The outside glass was dotted with drops that looked like clear, flat crystals.