One Through the Heart (7 page)

‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, Inspector. Now if you tell Marion I said this it’ll end a long friendship. But you do what’s best for Ann, that’s what’s important. The truth is bigger than us.’

‘What was Ann like?’

‘What was Annie like?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was adorable as a young girl, troubled as a teenager, and then remarkable as a young woman. We used to guess at what she would grow up to be.’

‘Did you guess history professor?’

She had a low laugh with a little rasp to it. ‘No, I sure didn’t. Marion thought she would make a good lawyer. She was never argumentative but even when she was little she was quite incisive with her questioning. Annie needed answers the way the rest of us need food and drink. She had a tremendous imagination. She might have made a great scientist. I’ll be frank, I’ve read what she wrote and I don’t think there’s anything earth-shattering there, but I believe Annie had a quality of empathy that’s rare and that history came alive for her.’

‘The things that happened generations ago she could visualize as having happened today. I remember her describing the battle at Little Bighorn when Custer attacked the Indian camps thinking he would overrun them and burn and shoot and kill, and then discovered there were many, many more braves than his scouts thought. Annie told the story of how Custer fell back and the desperation of his men as the warriors trapped them. Annie couldn’t have been more than twelve, and it was at dinner with Marion, Annie, and me, and Frank who is dead now.

‘I could smell the greasy grass and hear the ponies and the Sioux on their horses racing up the river bank and Custer’s men marching in even as at his flank soldiers fled into the woods. Annie took us there. Like a movie you get completely into, but it was just her voice and the way that she spoke you just believed she was there and had seen Custer with his long gold hair and buckskin. It was eerie.’

‘Did she think she was there?’

Cecelia coughed. She cleared her throat. ‘What an odd question, but in a way I think she did. And really, though, that’s true. When she described Custer on his hands and knees, shot through the side, and bleeding from his mouth with his hair falling alongside his face, watching as they closed in and did to him what he swore he would do to them . . . It was as I said, frightening, as if she was standing there when it happened. It frightened Marion too. She got up and left the room. She didn’t want Annie studying history or anything to do with the history of the tribes. Marion wanted nothing to do with that. There was nothing good in it, but Annie was after something that was back there. If she thought there was something to find, she wouldn’t quit. I don’t know if that answers your question. It probably doesn’t. Please don’t tell Marion I called you.’

Raveneau wouldn’t. He laid the phone down and thought about what she had said.

C
eleste sounded out of breath and the cell connection was poor, but she was happy to be home. Raveneau heard airport noises and guessed she was just off the plane and walking toward baggage.

‘I’m back. Where are you?’

‘Leaving the Hall.’

‘Do you want to meet me at M33?’

Raveneau shook his head at that. He still didn’t get the name change. She had a name that fit her bar/restaurant and after an up and down start it looked like Toasts was making it in San Francisco, a bar that served crostinis and small pizzas and artful salads, but was earning its rep with mixed drinks. A month ago she told him she was changing it to M33, which to Raveneau sounded like a new combat gun or possibly a rock group. He didn’t get it.

He and Celeste had an unusual relationship but a good one, or mostly good, and it had been a couple of years now. They lived separately with no talk about changing that. She slept over. He slept over. Mostly it was Celeste coming to his place, but both with keys to each.

But for the last week she had been with her sister in Michigan who insisted she should break off the relationship because it hadn’t progressed to marriage. The sister flew out last year to assess him and then put a timetable on things for Celeste.

At Toasts Celeste started from zero, and now the place was busy midweek in early October. But it was also a warm night and people were out. A hot offshore wind blew from the north-east. They sat outside in the wind and he looked at her face and the warmth there as she reached across the table for his hand.

‘What’s up, big guy? I’m home but you’re quiet.’

‘I’m thinking about Albert Lash.’

‘I wish he’d write more books.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

They talked about Lash’s books and he skirted around the Coryell investigation. They ate salad and two small pizzas and drank and talked and would have left together if not for a text from Brandon Lindsley.

‘
Can I call u now?
’

Raveneau texted back and his phone rang.

‘Do you want to meet them tonight?’

Raveneau glanced through the glass to the bar where Celeste was talking with her chef. He was looking at her as he answered, ‘Yes.’

‘There’s a bar called Grate’s Place. It’s south of Mission, I’ll text the address. I didn’t fake anything. They know who you are.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘There’s no reason, I just didn’t know how you wanted to do it. They’re taking my word about you being into Ann’s writings and that’s really why they agreed to meet. You’ll need to know your stuff. Two of them are super serious about everything she wrote. Have you read any of
Death Cathartic: Spiritually Reconciling the Genocide of the US Western Expansion
? That’s their bible.’

‘It’s my favorite book.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘What time are we meeting?’

‘Ten o’clock.’

‘See you there.’

R
aveneau arrived at Grate’s early. When he was last here it was a deli serving office buildings that ringed three sides of the courtyard. He liked it more as a bar though it wasn’t his kind of bar. It was trying too hard. He ordered a Pilsner – a Trumer – and then waited for Lindsley, who came in a few minutes later. Lindsley threaded through people, made his way over.

‘That wood table through the window there is where we usually sit. Let me get a drink and then let’s go out there.’ He adjusted his glasses. ‘We can talk out there.’

‘How often do you meet these guys?’

‘Used to be once a week.’

‘What is it now?’

‘Lately, I’ve been missing the meetings.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Can I get a drink before we do this?’

‘I’ll see you outside.’

Raveneau walked out to the table but didn’t sit down yet. The hot valley wind was still blowing and it was more sheltered in here, but the wind reached around the corners. It shook dry leaves from a tree in a metal planter. He had looked forward to being with Celeste tonight, but needed to do this and didn’t see any reason for subtlety with the three men who were supposed to meet them. He still didn’t know what to make of Lindsley.

The table was a heavy wooden picnic table painted a dark green and now he and Lindsley sat with their backs to the still warm stucco wall of the bar and watched the other three arrive. The one leading was a wiry man of average height and younger than Lindsley. His name was Attis Martin and his handshake was moist and soft, but his eyes were focused and hard as he sized up Raveneau.

The second man seemed to be a woman, although this was one of the few times Raveneau wasn’t sure. His or her name was Ike Latkos, and she sat to the left of Attis and close to him. She didn’t give her name and let Attis introduce her as did the third man, whose name at least for tonight was apparently an inside joke that the rest got, including Lindsley. Attis introduced him as John the Baptist, and Lindsley giggled. He was dark-haired, square-shouldered, and in his mid-thirties with the look of a former soldier who had seen too many things.

When no one volunteered it, Raveneau asked, ‘Why do they call you John the Baptist?’

John stared, didn’t answer. Neither did anyone else, and Raveneau leaned back against the wall and waited for Attis. He was clearly the leader. When Attis was silent, Raveneau said, ‘Her murder is an active case again and I need your help. I’d like to get phone numbers and email addresses from each of you. I need a way to get in touch with you.’

‘You already have our names,’ Attis said and reached and put an arm around Ike’s shoulders. ‘Have to warn you, Ike likes to change names and John doesn’t use his last name anymore. John has stripped out the things in his life he doesn’t need.’

‘What about you? Have you stripped out the things you don’t need?’

‘Soon.’

‘How soon?’

Attis didn’t answer, and Raveneau turned to John. ‘Whose idea was it to call you John the Baptist?’

‘Mine,’ Attis said.

‘Is that because he recognized you?’

Attis didn’t like that much, but that was OK with Raveneau. This meeting wasn’t what he had hoped for and felt contrived and staged and as he got a text from la Rosa now he stopped to read it. Attis Martin didn’t like that either.

He wrote back: ‘
With them now
.’ He typed the address of Grate’s Place and dropped the phone back in his pocket after sending it.

‘Sorry,’ he said to Attis. ‘Where were we?’

Attis sent John the Baptist in to get drinks, another vodka Collins for Lindsley, two vodkas on ice for Latkos, and sparkling water for him. The conversation wandered around the Coryell investigation and the bomb shelter coverage on local TV where reporters questioned Raveneau’s belief that the bone find wasn’t evidence of a serial murderer at work. Experts consulted also questioned SF Homicide ruling out serial murder.

John returned with the drinks and nothing for himself. He took the same seat at the end of the table and adjusted the long coat he wore over a T-shirt and black jeans. His face was pale and drawn as if fasting, his focus on Attis. It was quite a crew.

Attis asked, ‘Are you one of us?’

‘Is this where I show what the aliens implanted in my neck?’

‘I’m asking if you believe in the Boundary.’

Raveneau nodded and regretted now letting Celeste go home alone so he could be here. He glanced at John the Baptist and knew he wouldn’t be talking at all tonight, so that left these two and really only Attis, who so far spoke for all of them.

‘You’re talking about Ann Coryell’s Boundary idea?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think she meant a boundary like a fence. She was communicating something about how memories are passed on and how a society has a personality and being that exists as our collective consciousness. We all contribute to it, and what we contribute individually outlasts our lives. She was writing about how unanswered things get passed on.’ Raveneau took a drink of his beer.

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Maybe, but here’s the thing, I’m working her murder, not an interpretation of her work. Brandon says he knew her. What about you? Did you know her?’

‘What if I told you I’ve been to the Boundary? What would you say to that?’

‘That you were a decent guy and we had a drink together but sometime before I met you you fell too hard on your head.’

Attis smiled. He lifted his right hand and reached across the table to fist bump Raveneau. ‘You’re right about me. I’m crazy. What do you think about page twenty-nine?’

Raveneau was ready. He’d trolled the Internet. He saw once, twice, five, a dozen times the mention of page twenty-nine in her thesis. He read the commentary. It was where she speculated how successive generations were connected. She believed history wasn’t a series of events but one ongoing event and that the repetitive nature of our struggle to understand ourselves as a species, the recurrent wars, patterns repeated, was manifestation of unconsciousness awareness of our spiritual incompleteness. She called religions mythology but our spirituality our one true thing.

For her, the settling of the American west was a tragic chapter in that struggle. She acknowledged atrocities on both sides, but the defeat of the American Indian tribes included a pattern of broken treaties, a soul defiling reservation system, and knowing genocide by a far stronger force. That was the unanswered thing carried forward that she believed had to be answered.

‘She left it to us to interpret how genocide gets answered,’ Attis said, ‘and that gets us to the Indian Wars and the American western expansion.’

‘Now you’ve got my attention,’ Raveneau said.

‘It’s why we’re here. I invited you to get your attention.’

‘Is that right?’

‘What better witness than someone who has read Coryell and better still a homicide inspector? It’s perfect.’

‘OK, you’re communicating something important and I get that, but I’m a little slower than you, same as I can’t interpret her writings as clearly, so spell it out for me. Are you preparing to do something?’

Attis stared then glanced at Lindsley who sat motionless, no more shifting of his shoulders or adjusting his glasses. Latkos picked up her second drink. She gave him a sly smile as Raveneau asked Attis if he was by any chance missing an iPhone.

‘A phone threat was made,’ Raveneau said. ‘We get some surprising and sometimes off the wall threats from time to time, but I can’t remember hearing another where the caller threatened to make the people of San Francisco pay for America’s nineteenth-century western expansion. It just doesn’t come up that much. Do you know what I mean?’

‘It doesn’t come up, but it never went away.’

‘Ann Coryell shunned violence. That was one of her problems with the religions of the world. She wrote about a non-violent cleansing, talking it through, acknowledging what happened. But again, I’m not here to interpret her. I want to find her killer. I want to know why.’

‘She knew she had to die.’

Attis held out his hands as if balancing weights in each. ‘There’s living and there’s dead and each has a place and the places have a boundary between them that can be crossed and sometimes recrossed but only if our consciousness is kept in a heightened state. You have to remain very aware just at the moment you’re right on the edge of dying. If you do, you can cross over with awareness, and if you have the awareness then you’re free to touch both sides. She’s around us right now and you’re starting to frustrate me. I’m trying to help you see, but your questions are blunt and your vision narrow. You were brought here because Brandon said you understood her and now you’re making Brandon look bad. You were given an opportunity and you’re wasting it.’