The Simeon Chamber (38 page)

Sam had not been blessed with a full night’s sleep since the morning of his last visit to police headquarters and Fletcher’s office.

That was almost two weeks after the discovery of the journal and the confrontation on the beach. With the deaths of Raymond Slade and Louis Davies, Fletcher had closed the file on the Paterson murder and had lifted the ban of confidentiality on the evidence.

For some unknown reason Sam had humored a vexing sense of curiosity, and in a small room off of Fletcher’s office he’d spent 483

the better part of one morning reading the field notes of the officers who’d responded to the scene and examining the evidence that had not previously been released by the police.

He fiddled with the small audiotape cassette, snapped it into the portable recorder that Fletcher had loaned him and pushed the “Play” button. He picked up the police report and resumed his reading. The electronic beep signaled like a metronome every five seconds, alerting the caller that their words were being recorded.

“San Francisco Police Department.”

Several seconds passed in silence, punctuated only by the repetitious beep.

“Hello, this is the San Francisco Police Department.”

“Hello.” The woman’s voice was tentative. Sam laid the report on the desk and listened. “I’d like to report a crime.”

“Yes.” Again several seconds passed.

“Is it a crime in progress?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll have to speak up, ma’am. I can barely hear you.”

“It’s the apartment down the hall.” The voice was stronger now, clearly audible. “I think a woman may have been killed. I heard a loud crash and screaming. Then a tall man ran from the apartment. It was dark. I couldn’t see his face. I’m afraid to go down there.”

“The address, ma’am?”

He listened as the caller gave Pat’s apartment address.

“We’re dispatching a patrol car immediately. You should stay in your apartment. Lock the door. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have your name please?”

There was a click on the tape as the line went dead. Sam listened in stunned silence as Angie hung up the phone.

The blank end of the tape hissed its vacant tune into the recorder’s speaker for several minutes before Bogardus reached over and turned it off.

It took him almost an hour before he could compose himself sufficiently to casually enter Fletcher’s office and return the tape recorder and the file. For several minutes alone in the small room he toyed with the thought of erasing the conversation, but 485

concluded it would only make the tape more obvious. Besides, it was sure to be preserved on a master tape at least for a while. No, it was better to allow them to send the entire file to some shelf in a storeroom to gather dust until the day came when in the natural course of bureaucracy the evidence in the murder case of Susan Paterson would be purged, consigned to some furnace or shredder.

For three days following his visit to Fletcher’s office he turned the old house upside down until he found what he was looking for. It was shut away in an abandoned tool box once belonging to his grandfather, under the workbench in the basement. The yellow neoprene gloves spattered with lye, the residue of some commercial oven cleaner, were still stained with Pat’s blood, and underneath in the box—the nicked wooden handle of the butcher knife that Angie had used to kill her. Rolled tightly in the section under the top tray of the box and stained by grease and motor oil was a legal-length manila folder. As he pulled it from the box the file flipped open and something fell from the folder to the concrete floor. Sam peered down at the glossy eight-by-ten photograph of Raymond Slade. He had found the Davies file. Susan Paterson, always prepared to the point of compulsion, unknown to either him or Carol had carried it to her death. Pat had taken it that day on her sojourn to the Jade House and it had been with her later at her apartment as Angie lurked in the shadows near the front door.

It was funny how the human mind worked. If anyone had accused Angie of the crime a week before he would have said they were crazy. But after hearing her voice on the tape the clues all flooded to the front of his consciousness—his missing key ring with the key to Pat’s apartment that he’d not used since they broke up, the keys he remembered seeing in the hospital but could not find when he left. He finally found them—in the top drawer of Angie’s bedroom dresser. The book that lay open marked with a piece of tissue on the pine table of the apartment in the basement, the book on hand-to-hand combat from his childhood collection—

Sam pulled it from the shelf and opened it to the tissue. A bold subtitle halfway down the page read: 487

Knives—Silencing the Sentry

Beneath, in a text that mimicked a scholastic style, were reported the virtues of the “kidney thrust”—a blow so lethal that the victim died within seconds, unable to utter any sound as a result of shock and the excruciating pain.

It was almost as if she’d left a trail for him to follow—desperate signposts saying “See what I’ve done? See how much I love you?”

He remembered how after finding the toolbox in the basement he’d gone outside into the backyard and dropped the gloves into the fifty-gallon drum and watched as the flames consumed them. Four days later he disposed of the knife in a pile of scrap metal in an auto wrecking yard.

In a way he could console himself with the thought that at least indirectly Slade had been responsible for Pat’s death. Angie had clearly seen her opportunity in the havoc that was wreaked on Sam in his apartment. She had gleaned enough information from Carol to know that following that initial attack her son and those around him were in continuing danger as a result of the parchments. It was a perfect cover for her crime.

The presence of the Davies file at Pat’s apartment that afternoon must have appeared as an act of serendipity to the old woman, since its disappearance would only serve to intensify the focus of suspicion elsewhere. When Slade butchered Symington with a blade at the castle, Angie must surely have believed that she had been born under a lucky star.

In the seeds of her insane act Sam finally came to terms with the restless pursuit of vengeance that had so clearly marked him. He knew now the terrible price to be exacted when retribution was allowed to dominate reason.

He stared vacantly at the physician across the desk and listened to what he already knew.

“In cases like this the prognosis is guarded at best. She’s clearly experiencing manic episodes, having obvious delusions, some steeped heavily in religiosity. She continues to talk as if she’s been commissioned by God to act as an avenging angel. How long has this been going on?”

“I’m not sure. I’m afraid I haven’t been as close to her in the last few years as i should have been.” Angie had engaged in 9

periodic bouts of incoherent babble ever since he’d confronted her with the contents of the toolbox.

Then for hours she would be lucid, speaking as if nothing had happened, able to blank the episode completely from her consciousness. Sam knew that he was crippling the prospects for a complete recovery by withholding from the psychiatrist the facts surrounding Pat’s death, but the physician could not be trusted with the secret that he alone shared with Angie. EPILOGUe

The small group of scholars milled about on a bluff behind a private residence halfway up Mount Tamalpais waiting their turn to peer through the tiny port of the engineer’s transom. Wind off the bay whipped up small clouds of dust.

Tables had been set up and waiters poured champagne and wine into small plastic cups as groups of men and women carried on animated conversations. The Navigators’ Guild was elated. At last the work of a generation of historians, sailors and scholars had been confirmed. There was no question. The map and the physical description in the journal were precise. History could now dispose of all doubt as to the location of Drake’s encampment on the sweeping beach below the bluffs at the estuary. The fiery English captain had careened the Golden
Hinde in the shallow waters of the sheltered estuary just as the Guild had theorized and written about in its monographs.

Sam Bogardus moved up toward the transom and leaned over to peer through the eyepiece. With a slight twist he adjusted the ring on the near side of the telescopic device and 1

squinted.

Nick and a coterie of scholars from the university faculty had struggled with a transliteration of sections of the journal for nearly two weeks and had pieced together Drake’s movements during his month-long stay at the point of land he had called “Portus Novae Albionis”—his Nova Albion. He had captured a small Spanish ship in Mexican waters on his sojourn north during the early part of May 1579. With the Golden _Hinde careened in the shallow waters of the estuary for repairs, Drake had used this smaller ship and a handful of trusted seamen, presumably on a scouting mission to reconnoiter the coastal area south of Drake’s Bay. For five days this ship and its small crew disappeared in the fog-shrouded coast off the Golden Gate. When Drake and his retinue finally returned it was on foot, overland from the east. They had planted twelve tons of precious gems, gold and silver at a site charted with uncanny precision in the journal. It was a cache that Drake planned to retrieve on a later commission from his queen—a master stroke of brilliance, his insurance for yet another mission to the New World. Drake had scuttled the small Spanish ship in the waters of what he described as “a large inland sea.” Without knowing it, Francis Drake had discovered San Francisco Bay.

At first a yellow blur, the image of the stucco-covered granite-and-brick walls of San Quentin Prison five miles away across the valley slowly came into focus. Sam twisted the eyepiece of the transom just slightly. The bleak monolith stretched along the peninsula to its tip at the water’s edge, the high walls covered in rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire.

After discovery of the journal, using its precise directions geologists had attempted a number of test bores in the area beyond the prison walls. Except for several fragments of rotting jute cloth and a trace of wax from the remnants of a candle, they had come up empty. As with much of the area surrounding San Francisco Bay, San Quentin Point was geologically unstable, subject to the forces of liquefaction with the slightest shifting of the earth’s crust. Heavy metals or stones caught in a churning stew of bay waters mixed with fill would be 3

scattered and drawn downward perhaps hundreds of feet before the swirling mass solidified.

History would never know for certain if the American legacy reputed to have been abandoned by Drake in his own journal really existed. But for Samuel Bogardus there would never be any doubt.

History’s cruel irony, he thought. The point of land so prominent that an English seafarer could find it on a return voyage was too conspicuous for the state prison board to ignore two centuries later. Drake’s original peninsula now lay blanketed by millions of cubic yards of earthen fill, its tip buried under the walls of the state’s maximum security prison—and with it Drake’s treasure, lost forever.

THE END