The Simeon Chamber (14 page)

“So?” Nick looked up at Murray.

“Well, it’s not an easy form to mimic, as you can imagine. Hell, most of these people spent thousands of hours during their early childhood learning the form. It was ground into them. There probably aren’t a half dozen people alive today who could copy the form without detection for a paragraph, let alone four pages the length of those parchments.

“And if that’s not enough, come over here.”

Murray led Nick around to the other side of the table. He turned on an overhead lamp and pulled the book closer to the parchments that were spread on the table.

“Here, look at this.” Murray pointed to a large photograph of a handwritten letter reproduced in its entirety.

“This is a letter that Drake sent to the Earl of Essex several years before his voyage around the world. It’s in the Italic form, but you can see that it was probably written quickly and without the usual pen lifts you’d see in a more scholarly writing. You’d expect the classic letters of the Italic form to be vertical and well-rounded in shape. But when written rapidly and without pen lifts between the words, it has a tendency to develop a slant and rounded arches in some of the letters. See the h and the m?” Murray pointed to the letters. “They developed points and more angular lines like these.

“This is the sign of more casual prose, a rapid business letter,” continued Murray. Without turning from Nick he reached up and pulled a single page of the parchment to the edge of the table under the light. “Like these letters here.” Murray pointed to several h’s, m’s and n’s. The similarity between the letters in the book and those on the parchment was striking even to Nick’s untrained eye.

“If you want my opinion,” said Murray, “the two documents were written by the same man.”

“Can you be absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely, without any doubt? No. But if a client were asking for my expert 5

opinion regarding the provenance of these documents, I’d have to say they were written by Drake.” He paused briefly. “There is a way to be certain, however.”

“What’s that?” asked Nick.

“A form of radiocarbon dating of the ink and paper.”

“But that would require destruction of some of the parchment, wouldn’t it?”

“Two years ago I’d have said yes. But there’s a fellow up at U.C. Davis who’s developed a new method of carbon dating using a cyclotron—a particle accelerator. As I understand it the process provides a reading of the molecular structure of the paper and ink and requires only microscopic scrapings from the article itself.”

“Has it ever been used on ancient writings?”

“The project at Davis has been well-guarded, but news leaked out a few months back that they’d somehow gotten their hands on a Gutenberg Bible and were busy breaking down the structure of the ink. Modern manufacturers have never been able to replicate the ink used by Gutenberg. It contained some of the finest pigments ever put on paper, but the chemical formula was lost with the printer. It’s believed that companies would pay a fortune for the original formula. Why not let me send some scrapings up to Davis and let them take a crack at it? Hell, they’ll probably be able to tell you not only the age and composition, but whose greasy fingers have touched them during the past three hundred years.”

Ten minutes later Murray had taken minute scrapings from each of the four parchments and deposited them in separate vials, labeling each. He carefully rolled the parchments and placed them in a long tube, capping the end with a plastic disk.

“You really shouldn’t fold these,” he said. “The parchment will take some abuse, but after a while it will begin to crack along the fold.”

Nick took the tube from Murray. “For the time being I think we should keep this to ourselves.” He remembered the look on the face of Jasper Holmes when the Englishman finally realized the parchments were part of the Drake journal, and he shuddered.

“Thanks, Tony. I think you’ve 157

given us the confirmation we needed. I suppose I’ll hear from you on the radiocarbon process?”

Murray nodded.

Nick turned and headed for the door.

Murray could sense some urgency in his friend’s behavior. He also knew from the state of the parchments that they had not come from any modern museum. They had been folded rather than kept flat and had not been treated with the usual preservatives employed by professional museum curators.

“Nick,” Murray looked up from the table.

“I haven’t asked you where you got those parchments. I’m not sure I want to know. You realize how valuable they are?”

“Yeah, I think so,” said Nick.

“Take care of them. And Nick, take care of yourself.”

Nick nodded and headed out the door into the late afternoon sunshine.

The gnarled cypress trees, dwarfed and twisted by the eternal Pacific winds, offered an eerie backdrop to the small group gathered on the expansive lawn under a gray and dreary sky. An Episcopal minister, his shoulders draped by a canonical stole, spoke in hushed tones over the coffin that was layered in wilted carnations and long-stemmed roses.

“Grant, we beseech thee O Lord, that the soul of your departed servant, Susan Elizabeth Paterson, be committed to thy tender love and mercy, that she who has passed out of this life may by thine intercession and the intercession of all thy saints come into the fellowship of eternal bliss …”

Roses. They were always her favorite. A dozen, in a box a yard long, was her reparation of choice whenever they fought.

The patented eulogy droned on as Sam’s mind replayed the events of the preceding two days, the late afternoon telephone call at the hospital from Carol, the uncontrolled sobbing and finally the resonant voice of Jake Carns on the line. When Carns’s voice faltered and hesitated, Bogardus steeled himself for the worst.

Instinctively he thought of his mother—Angie’s gone. But when Jake finally told him, “It’s Pat. She’s been murdered,” Sam’s 159

body went limp in the bed, his arm with the telephone receiver dropped onto the sheet, and for more than a minute Jake’s words spilled like milk from a pail into empty air.

An anonymous telephone call to the police —a woman had heard peculiar noises coming from the apartment. Moments later a tall man, his face lost in shadows, left by the front entrance. The woman, refusing to give her name, hung up, and the police rushed to the scene. In the chaos that erupted after the cops called the law office, Jake had gone to Pat’s and identified the body. Sam pried the details from a reluctant Carns two hours later when they met at the hospital. Bogardus struggled with the grotesque mental image of Pat sitting with her legs sprawled on the floor, her upper torso pitched forward like a rag doll in the center of the entry hall. An arc of coagulated blood curved from the corpse to the door.

The minister closed his book and removed the vestment from his shoulders, moving toward an elderly woman with her face draped by a black veil.

For all that they had nearly become related by marriage, Sam had only met Karen Paterson, Pat’s mother, one time. It had not been an auspicious introduction. She was straitlaced, of conservative New England stock, and had worn her resentment on her sleeve when she discovered that her daughter and Sam shared living quarters.

Bogardus took one step toward the woman then stopped as her head and shoulders convulsed in a spasm of grief and the sounds of sobbing were heard over the hushed tones of the minister. He would convey his condolences later, perhaps in writing.

“The cops have any leads yet?” Jake Carns had wandered through the dispersing mourners and come up behind Sam who turned and shook his head in reply.

“Well, you can’t expect miracles in two days. But you can be sure they’ll push hard.”

Jake was right. A prominent attorney, an attractive woman killed in her own apartment—

the story was still front-page news two days after the crime.

Carns was a burly man with gentle eyes and a large head that seemed to explode from powerful shoulders. His hands and fingers had the size and delicacy of softball gloves. They 161

had made a lasting impression on Sam’s chin the first time the two men had met nearly a decade earlier. An interest in competitive boxing, a holdover from Sam’s days in college, had moved him in the direction of amateur bouts in his late twenties. Though Carns was ten inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier, Bogardus had challenged him to a sparring match. Jake had wanted to decline, but the boisterous Bogardus left him no honorable avenue of retreat in the crowded gym. Carns decked him two rounds in, but later formed a quick affection for the young lawyer.

Since that first meeting the law firm had hired Jake on numerous occasions to serve process in divorce cases on husbands whose interests ran toward punching their wives. Pat once remarked that the appearance by Carns at counsel’s table in court was worth more than any temporary restraining order a judge could issue. “It’s magic, something macho that only men could understand,” she’d said. “Court-ordered contempt or a ten-day jail term are concepts of unfathomable abstraction to the average wife-beater. But one icy stare from the intimidating Carns and they know they’ll get the shit knocked out of ‘em.” It was vintage Susan Paterson. No sugar-coating. God, how he would miss her.

After his father died Sam always took relief in the fact that life permitted one consolation. The faculty of human memory allowed him to replay the best moments of their lives together in the privacy of his own thoughts. While it carried some consolation for the loss, at times it also tortured him with images of lost opportunity, moments of love and affection unspoken and now gone forever. Mercifully there had been but few of these between father and son. But he could not say the same for his relationship with Pat. It had been littered with wasted possibilities, squandered moments of intimacy when his pride had prevented him from telling her how he really felt. Those moments now echoed like hoofbeats as they stampeded through the emptiness left by her death.

“How you holdin’ up?” Sam felt the weight of one of Carns’s meaty hands on his shoulder. A bulge appeared under the arm of Jake’s oversized sport coat. Sam knew it was not a wallet.

“Good.” He lied quickly before his voice cracked. 3

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Sam smiled, a kind of signal that released Carns from any further obligation, and he wandered off in the direction of Nick Jorgensen. He’d already asked too much of Carns. With news of Pat’s death he’d gotten Jake to deliver clothes to the hospital and together the two men had walked out without the formality of a physician’s release. Sam would have to go back to the hospital and face the music in the afternoon, for the hospital safe still held the wallet, watch and keys that he hadn’t seen since that first day when he came to in the hospital bed. Jake had provided nearly round-the-clock security for him and Nick, both of whom were camped in a basement apartment at Angie’s house in the Colma section of Daly City. If there had been any question in his mind, Pat’s murder had resolved it. Someone was after the Davies parchments, someone who was prepared to kill for them. Sam was taking no further chances. He’d shut down the law office, canceled all client interviews, sent Carol home and had all business phone calls forwarded to a friend’s office. Two other lawyers, friends from law school, were handling the firm’s workload.

In the two days since the murder Sam had spent hours reconstructing the events leading up to Pat’s death. Carol had confirmed that on the day of the murder Pat had left the office headed for Chinatown and the Jade House. Less than three hours later she was dead in her apartment.

The limousine carrying the immediate family pulled away from the curb and wound its way through the labyrinth of weed-cracked cemetery roads toward the highway, followed closely by several other cars.

Beyond the coffin Sam heard the sobbing of a woman and turned to see Angie, her head bobbing on Carol’s shoulder as she cried. It was a shameless display of hypocrisy that passed within seconds.

The old lady managed to summon complete composure by the time she and Carol reached the car twenty feet away.

Angie was wearing a sheer black gown that Sam was certain he’d seen her wear to bed on occasion.

In her hair was a single silk flower, its petals frayed around the edges. In the last year his mother’s attire had run the gamut from bag lady to the height of 1930’s fashion. Looking at her Sam couldn’t decide if she was 165

ready to retire for the night or head for a cocktail soiree at the Cotton Club.

“I’ve got cold meats, French bread and hot coffee at the house. You are coming over?” Angie’s inquiring expression passed from Carol to Jake and then to Nick. Sam couldn’t help but think that Pat, if she were looking on from some exalted vantage point, would be amused by the fact that Angie would use her funeral as an occasion to entertain.

The invitation was accepted by a series of silent nods and shrugs as Sam and Nick headed for Sam’s car parked several hundred feet down the road.

“Samuel Bogardus?” A thin man with a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth leaned his butt against the fender of Sam’s Porsche.

Bogardus looked at him but didn’t reply.

“Are you Sam Bogardus?”

“That depends who’s asking.”

The man reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a small leather sheath. He flipped the cover to reveal a gold shield. “Sergeant Mayhew, S.F.P.D. We’d like to talk to you about your partner’s murder.”

Sam wondered what had taken them so long.

Then it struck him. Since his unannounced departure from the hospital he’d not been easy to find. It must have looked suspicious as hell, though hospital records would establish that he was flat on his back in the bed at the time of the murder. “Anything specific?”

“Just background questions—for the time being.”

“I’m afraid I’m tied up right now.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“I’ve got a meeting.”

“Break it.”

There was only the briefest hesitation on Sam’s part. His experience with the public defender had taught him to force the state to commit early. Besides, if the focus of suspicion had already centered on him they’d have hauled him in without asking. “I can’t. I’m afraid I’m not available until the day after.”