The Color of Light (25 page)

Paramedics swept in with their gear
and went straight to work on Kevin. One of them pulled me aside, looked deep into my eyes and asked, “Are you injured?”

“No.” I was covered with blood, as were Max and Jean-Paul. Pointing to Duc, I said, “I think that one is beyond your help, but the rest of us are fine.”

He bent over Duc, put a stethoscope to his chest, felt his wrist for a pulse and shone a light into his eyes. The sergeant in charge checked on Kevin first before he asked about Duc.

“Goner,” the paramedic said, draping his stethoscope around his neck as he got to his feet. “Call the coroner, have him send the meat wagon.”

Within a surprisingly short time, Kevin was on a gurney with an IV in his arm, a blood pressure cuff and a heart monitor attached, and a wide pressure bandage around his chest. Everyone inside the house stopped what they were doing and made way for the paramedics to wheel Kevin out. Jean-Paul and I followed them as far as the front door.

“Is that Kevin?” Chuck Riley, out on the lawn with a clutch of other neighbors, rushed toward the gurney but was pushed back by an officer wearing riot gear. “Is that Kevin? How can that be Kevin?” He appealed to the cop to let him through. “Hey man, that's my boy. Let me—please let me—”

The cop didn't seem moved by Chuck's plight. But Chuck kept at it until the ambulance doors slammed behind Kevin's gurney and lights and sirens started up again. As the ambulance drove off into the night, Chuck seemed near collapse.

The sergeant let out an ear-splitting whistle to get the crowd's ­attention.

“There's nothing to see here, folks,” he yelled out. “Please go back to your homes and let us do our work.”

The neighbors, roused from their beds, some still in pajamas and slippers, drifted off home. Chuck stubbornly stayed behind. He took a step toward the front porch, saw me in the bloody shirt, froze for a moment, and then screamed out, “What did you do to Kevin?”

The sergeant stopped him cold, got in his face and ordered him to go home or he'd be arrested for interfering with an official investigation. I was curious to see what Chuck would do next, but after hearing murmurs riffle through the crowd:
“Maggie's covered in blood”, “I heard Kevin's practically living here now”, “Is Lacy out of rehab?”
I took Jean-Paul's arm and stepped back inside.

Most of the policemen took off when the ambulance pulled out. Two stayed to watch the front of the house, and four more, counting the sergeant, were inside protecting the crime scene. After all the chaos of the last half hour, the house settled into an eerie silence. There was nothing to be done until the scientific teams and the detectives showed up, except wait. Staying at a distance, I looked around at the rubble the paramedics left behind: the clothes they cut off Kevin, a heap of bloody bath towels and used dressings, and the disposable wrappings torn from various medical paraphernalia. Amid the mess, I saw the butt of a gun, one of the Colts. I leaned close to Jean-Paul, nodded toward the gun, and asked, “Is that Duc's or Dad's?”

“Duc's,” he said.

I went up to the sergeant and asked, “You're in charge here?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “You're the resident, right? We'll get to you when we can.”

“I thought you'd like to know that the shooter's gun is there on the floor.” I pointed at it.

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“And I would like to know, what the hell kept you? For nearly ­fifteen minutes you had an officer down and bleeding. Where the hell were you?”

He blushed a furious red. “We got swatted.”

Jean-Paul came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “What is ‘swatted'?”

“It's been going around and I guess it was our turn,” the sergeant said. “We got a couple of calls that there was an active shooter at the Marina, hostages taken. There was a big party down there earlier tonight, the Chamber of Commerce, so all the bigwigs in town were there. We called up SWAT, paramedics, fire, put the hospitals on alert, and...” He didn't finish the list. “It was all a prank. Probably some fraternity guys having a kegger.”

I nodded toward the still uncovered corpse of Khanh Duc. “You might want to check that man's phone records.”

“You think he made those calls?”

“All I know is, in the middle of the night, a man dressed in black and carrying a gun crawled under my house to get inside. And you guys were busy somewhere else when he did it.”

“Do you know him?”

“I met him once,” I said. “His name is Khanh Duc. He grows roses.”

“Sir, if you please.” Jean-Paul opened his arms wide to show his blood-saturated front. “May we clean up a bit?”

Max, listening in, scowled but didn't say anything.

The sergeant looked at the three of us and at the bloody bath towels and the rolled up duvet. “You get all that on you taking care of Halloran?”

“For fifteen minutes,” Max said crossly.

I leaned closer to the sergeant and said, “There are a lot of men here. I'd like to put more clothes on.”

He shrugged. “Go ahead. We're setting up the crime scene now so it would be better for you to be somewhere else. The detectives will be here soon to talk to you, so don't be too long. And don't wash the clothes, okay?”

“Fine,” I said, taking Jean-Paul by the hand. “Thank you.”

We wasted no time getting upstairs. Uncle Max followed us into our room.

“You know the sarge is going to take a hit for letting us wash,” he said. “He should have waited until we'd been checked for gunshot residue first.”

“Oui,”
Jean-Paul said, slipping his arm around my waist. “But I prefer not to start a diplomatic firestorm. Maggie, will you join me in the shower?”

I smiled at him and said,
“Oui.”

“See you downstairs,” Max said, retreating.

“Max?” I called after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned to me. “You never said why Kevin was here?”

“I'll tell you later,” he said. “We need to get cleaned up before the detectives get here and stop us.”

Max was already downstairs when Jean-Paul and I went back down. The big man himself, the police chief, had arrived, and he didn't look at all happy. I heard Max tell him, “Don't be too hard on the sergeant for letting us clean up. I didn't fire a gun, neither did my niece. And the boyfriend has diplomatic immunity so you can't talk to him unless there are representatives from our State Department and his government present.”

Jean-Paul squeezed my hand. I leaned close to him and whispered, “Is that true?”

“Not exactly, but it sounds good, doesn't it?”

The three of us were taken into separate rooms, Max and I for questioning and Jean-Paul to be out of earshot so that what we told the detectives about the events of the evening wouldn't taint his own account, if the legalities of that ever happening could be sorted out. Jean-Paul volunteered to be sequestered in the kitchen so that he could start a pot of coffee; the chief thought that was just a dandy idea.

The chief, Tony Wasick, a good-looking man in his fifties, conducted my interview himself, in the dining room with the big doors closed.

“Miss MacGowen, what the hell has been going on here?” he asked, clearly piqued. “The body count from this address alone over the last two days has doubled my murder rate for the year so far. Throw in the burglary call overnight Thursday, and that makes your house the scene of the biggest crime wave we've had in Berkeley since I became chief five years ago. I know who you are and I know what you do. Have you pissed off some mobster with one of your TV shows and he's come gunning for you? Are you up here hiding out, making life tough for me and my guys?”

“I'm sorry, but no,” I said. “My mom moved into a smaller place, and I'm only here to clear out the family house for her. Whatever is behind all the mayhem belongs entirely to you.”

“To me?” Like the rest of us, Wasick had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and he looked like it. The first whiff of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen distracted him for a moment. He turned his attention back to me. “You want to explain that?”

“I can only speculate,” I said. “There seems to be something in this house that someone wants very badly. And I believe it has something to do with the murder of Trinh Bartolini over thirty years ago.”

“The Bartolini case. Jesus.” He let out an exasperated breath, paced off a tight half circle. “When I heard Kevin was shot at your house, and that his father-in-law was out front getting froggy, hell, I figured it was a personal thing. Never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with the Bartolini case. Talk about lost causes.”

“Kevin?”

“No, the Bartolini case,” he said. “There's just not enough evidence left from the original investigation to work with. But Kevin won't let it go.”

“Kevin has new evidence,” I said. “Your crime lab found DNA from three people on Mrs. B's shirt,” I said. “That's major evidence.”

“Sure.” Wasick did not sound convinced. Or maybe he was just tired. “And thirty years later, what are the odds we'll find those three people?”

“The odds aren't bad,” I said. “The victim's son will give you a sample so you can segregate her DNA. For the other two, you might begin with the man who broke into my house tonight.”

He thought that over before he wrote something in his notebook. “The coroner will get a sample from the guy.”

“Chief Wasick?”

He cocked his head, looked up.

“What do you know about Chuck Riley?”

“That knucklehead?” He lifted a shoulder. “Not a lot. I know he was on the force for a while, but that was before my time. Now he works security at a bank in town.”

“You know he was the original detective on the Bartolini case,” I said. “If the Bartolini case is, as you said, a lost cause, is it because Chuck Riley botched the investigation?”

He smiled. “Who's asking the questions here?”

A uniformed officer came through the kitchen door carrying two mugs of coffee. Grateful, Wasick wrapped his hands around a mug and blew on it until it was cool enough to drink. Revived a bit, he spent the next hour having me tell him, and retell him, about the shooting and the break-in and anything I knew about Larry Nordquist and Khanh Duc.

“Are you making a film about the Bartolini case?” he asked.

“No, absolutely not.”

“But you've been going around town asking questions about her,” he said. “If you're not making a film, why would you do that?”

“Because that's who I am,” I said. “And that's what I do.”

“Too bad about the film.” He managed a little smile as he closed his notebook. “That was my only shot at being a movie star. And now you tell me it's
pfft
. Gone.”

“You never know, Chief,” I said. “Are we finished?”

“For now.” He picked up his empty cup and headed toward the kitchen for a refill. With one hand on the door, he paused. “There will be more questions later. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you let us handle the media swarm gathering on your front lawn. We've had enough excitement for a while; let's not invite a circus.”

“Suits me,” I said.

He saluted me with his cup as he pushed through the swing door and went into the kitchen.

I opened the dining room's big double doors and looked out. Duc's body still lay in the hall outside the door to Dad's den, but someone had covered him with a yellow plastic sheet; his feet in black sneakers stuck out of the end. While I was with Chief Wasick, the crime scene technicians had arrived and gone right to work. I looked at their handi­work with dismay. Wherever bullets had lodged in the old lath-and-plaster walls, there were now foot-square gaps. Two big pools of blood, taped off, were soaking into the bare oak floor, the one under Duc still slowly oozing outward. Forget the simple house cleaning scheduled for later that morning. Now I needed to find bio-cleanup specialists to take care of the blood and a handyman to repair the walls. More time, more money, I thought, feeling guilty for even considering the practicalities of the aftermath created by that horrific night. I was sorry about Duc, though what happened to him was his own damn fault. I was deeply sorry for Kevin's pain, but I'd had a message that he was out of surgery and was listed as stable so I could crawl safely away from the edge of panic and give in to the inevitable letdown.

A young woman technician swept past me, headed for the heater access hatch in the far corner of the dining room. She knelt on the floor and began dusting the hatch and the area around it for fingerprints. Duc wore gloves when he came in. But had the intruder Thursday night? Was Duc the intruder?

The tech caught me watching her. “You shouldn't be here,” she said.

She was right, I was in the way. It would have been nice to be able to go upstairs and take a nap, but the stairway was blocked off by crime scene tape because Jean-Paul had fired down at Duc from the top step. So I collected my computer from the kitchen counter where I had left it charging the night before and went out to the front porch and curled up in one of the big wicker rockers. There were four uniformed officers in the yard, so I felt safe.

When Chief Wasick asked me the inevitable question about making a film about Mrs. B's murder, I'd almost said, “My dad already made all the film that needs to be made on that subject.” But it would have been a flip comment from an exhausted interviewee, so I kept the thought to myself.

Eight months ago, when I found out about Isabelle, I said that I would never make a film about discovering the truth about my parentage. Too close, too personal, potentially too hurtful to people I love. But, in two weeks I was leaving for France to make a film about Isabelle's family and their farm estate in Normandy. It won't be a film about discovering Isabelle, but she, and my dear dad's infidelity with her, cannot be ignored. Given time, I might find an angle to the Bartolini case that would make a good film subject. I wasn't taking bets on that film ever happening, but I began to think about the little collection of Super 8 movies I found locked in Dad's desk just the same.