To Play the Fool (13 page)

"We definitely have to see her again. She knows more about the
victim than she was willing to tell us last week. However, if you want
to go tonight you'll have to take someone else--Tom called
in sick, I have to stand in for him on a stakeout."

"Hell. If this flu goes on we'll have to put out a white flag, ask the bad guys for a cease fire."

"We could make it another time, or I can ask around here for somebody to go with you. What's your preference?"

Kate thought for a moment. "Would you mind if I went by myself?"

"Martinelli, you're not asking my permission, are you?"

"No. I just wondered if you had any objections. It might be
better anyway if I went alone,- she might talk more easily."

"That's fine, whatever you like."

"Where's your stake-out?"

"The far end of China Basin."

"The scenic part of town. Dress warmly. We don't want you coming down with this flu, too."

"Yes, mother. Talk to you tomorrow."

Kate sat for a while staring at Lee's books until gradually
she became aware that the voices she had been hearing for some time now
were not electronic, but indicated a visitor. She wandered downstairs
in hopes of distraction and found Rosalyn Hall, wearing not her dog
collar but an ordinary T-shirt with jeans and looking to Kate's
eyes eerily like a defrocked priest. She was standing in the hallway at
the foot of the stairs, putting her jacket on, and Kate greeted her.

"Kate, good to see you again. As you can see, I took you at
your word that Lee might be interested in the project, and wasted no
time."

"I'm happy to do it, Rosalyn," said Lee.

"It's been tremendously helpful. I didn't know how
I was going to pull that section together. I'm so grateful I ran
into Kate the other day,- I'd never have had the nerve to ask
otherwise. So what did you think of Brother Erasmus?" she asked
Kate, her eyes crinkling in humor.

"He's an experience," Kate agreed.

"I've never really talked with him, but I've heard
a couple of conversations, if you can call them that. It's sort
of like listening to a foreign language; you get a general sense of
what people are talking about, but none of the details."

"It's a challenge for an interviewer all right."

"I can imagine. I saw him again the other day,- he sure manages to get around."

"In Berkeley, you mean. Yes, I knew he was back there."

"Well, actually it was over here, down on Fishermen's
Wharf last weekend. At least, I assumed it was him, though honestly I
hardly recognized him, he looked so different."

"Why, what was he doing? Why did he look different?"

"He was performing, like that juggling act he does sometimes,
but a lot more of it, and other things. Sort of clowning, and some
mime, but weird, a little bit creepy, and his face was
painted--not heavily, like a clown's, just a really light
layer of white on one side and a slight darkening of the other
half--he looked like he was standing with a shadow across half of
his face. And he wasn't wearing his cassock--he had on this
strange outfit. Well, it wasn't strange, just sort of not right.
He was wearing those sort of dressy khaki Levi's, but they were
too short for him, and a striped T-shirt that had shrunk up and showed
a little wedge of his stomach, and a pair of white athletic shoes so
big, he kept tripping over them. Oh, and a watch. I've never seen
him with a watch before."

"What day was this?"

"Saturday. I had a friend visiting, and you know how you only
do the touristy things when friends and family come. I thought
she'd like Ghirardelli Square."

"And that's where you saw him?"

"Across the street--you know that park where the vendors
set up? Necklaces and sweatshirts? Lots of times street performers
wander up and down there. Isn't that where Shields and Yarnell
got their start?"

Kate had never heard of Shields or Yarnell, but she nodded her head
in encouragement. However, it seemed that was about the sum of the
report. After a bit more fussing and arrangements for the next phase of
the grant application, Rosalyn hugged Lee and then left.

"Nice woman," Lee commented, her wheels purring after
Kate on the wood of the hall. Kate turned and went into the kitchen to
stand in front of the refrigerator.

"Did I have lunch?" she called to Lee. Nothing in the gleaming white box looked familiar.

"Once, but who's counting?" Lee answered. Kate
fingered the increasingly snug waistband of her trousers and settled
for an apple,- Jon's cooking had its drawbacks.

"I'm going to have to be out tonight," she told Lee.

"I've been surprised you haven't had more calls at
night," Lee said in resignation. "I expected it, with you
back on duty."

"Yes, I've been lucky. It's been
quiet--nobody feels like shooting anyone in the rain. But I need
to talk to one of Brother Erasmus's flock, and Friday's one
of the few times I can find her without a search."

Sentient Beans was your typical Haight coffeehouse, self-conscious
about its location and the sacred history of the district in the Beat
movement and the Summer of Love. In this case, however, it was without
the superiority of age, for its even paint and the cheerfulness of the
furniture within gave it away as an imitation, set up by people who in
1967 would have considered an ice cream cone a mood-altering substance.

Still, it was a harmless enough place, and discreetly notified
customers that the venerable Graffeo Company had deigned to supply it
with French-roast coffee, the smell of which grabbed at Kate when she
opened the door, a heady aroma, sharp and dark and rich as red wine.
She ordered a latte and watched with approval as the man assembling it
tipped the coffee over the steamed milk with a flip of the wrist rather
than using the effete method of dribbling it cautiously over the back
of the spoon to create multiple multicolored layers in the glass, a
drink filled with aesthetic nuances but, to Kate's mind, lacking
the pleasurable jolt of contrast between milk and coffee. Reverse
snobbery, Lee had called it once, admiring on that distant occasion her
own tall glass with at least nine distinct strata.

"Have you seen Beatrice tonight?" she asked as she paid.

"She'll be down in a bit," said the man, and
slapped Kate's change down on the wooden bar. She picked up the
dollars, tipped the rest of the change into the tips mug, and found a
seat at a table with the surface area of a dinner plate. There was a
guitarist at the far end of the L-shaped room, a woman all in black,
with perhaps a dozen gold loops running up her ear and one through her
nose. She was attempting classical music, with limited success: The
notes kept burring and her fingers squeaked as they moved along the
strings. However, the flavor was there, and Kate did not mind waiting.

Twenty minutes or so later, the guitarist took a break, and shortly
after that, Beatrice came through the bar area and into the room, a
ten-by-twelve artist's pad in one hand and a small tin box in the
other. She sat down in the point of the L and without fuss opened the
box, took out a black felt-tip pen, and began to sketch the person
sitting in front of her, her pen flashing across the page in sure,
quick gestures. In a couple of minutes, she put the cap on the pen,
tore the page off the pad, and put it on the table, then stood up and
moved to another vacant chair and another face. A mug marked for the
artist had joined TIPS and FOR THE MUSICIAN on the wooden bar, and as
people left, they tended to put some change and the occasional small
bill in Beatrice's cup, even those who had not been sketched.

Eventually, when Kate had finished her second latte (this one
decaffeinated) and was beginning to think she would have to approach
the woman, Beatrice finished her dual portrait of a pair of nearly
identical bristly-headed, metal-and-leather-clad punks, reached across
her drawing on the table to pat the girl's black leather sleeve
affectionately, and then took her pad and tin box over to Kate's
table. She opened both and began to sketch.

"Hello, dear," she said. "I thought I might see you one of these nights."

"Hello, Ms. Jankowski."

"Beatrice, dear,- call me Beatrice. I always feel that when
someone calls you by your last name, it's because they want
something from you. Either that or they want you to know they are
better than you. Funny, isn't it, something looks like respect
but underneath it's a power trip. Do they still use that phrase,
I wonder? My vocabulary is so dated, it's coming back into style.
You need a haircut, dear. What's your name, by the way?"

"Martinelli. Kate," she corrected herself with a smile.

"Just Kate? Not Katherine?"

"Katarina," she admitted. Beatrice looked up from her drawing, both hands going still.

"Oh that's very nice. Katarina. It sounds like those
beautiful little islands down south, near Santa Barbara, is it? Or San
Diego? Kate is too abrupt. Do you have a middle name?"

"Cecilia," said Kate patiently.

"Katarina Cecilia Martinelli. Your mother was a poet.
There's power in names, you know," she said, going back to
her drawing. "Last names are safe, generic, but when you give
someone your first name, you give them a part of yourself. What about
your partner?"

"Al? You mean his name? It's Alonzo. Hawkin, and I don't know if he has a middle name."

Beatrice stopped again, to gaze in an unfocused way at the shelves
over the bar. "Alonzo," she repeated softly. "Oh my.
I am such a sucker for a pretty name. Other girls used to fall for eyes
or a lock of hair, but I would just melt at a melodious name. My three
husbands were named Manuel, Oberon, and Lucius. Of course, they were
all bastards,- you'd think I would learn. I don't think
Alonzo would be a bastard though, do you?"

"No, but he's already spoken for." Kate exaggerated his marital status slightly for Al's own benefit.

"I figured he would be." She flipped the page of her
sketchbook over to a fresh one. "But this chitchat is not why
you're here, is it?"

"No."

"It's about that odious man."

"John? I'm afraid so."

"Oh, why can't you let him just... be dead?" she said crossly.

"Because if we let the 'odious' people be killed, where would it stop?"

"Oh, dear. You are right, I suppose. Very well," she said, turning to her pad again, "ask away."

"Do you know anything about John's history? Where he was from, what he used to do?"

"He never talked to me, not that way. I don't think he
much liked women, certainly not to talk to. Not that he was gay, but a
lot of men who sleep with women don't much like them."

"Did he sleep with many women?"

"Don't sound so surprised. Just because people
don't have beds doesn't mean they lack sexual
organs," Beatrice said, primly amused.

"Beatrice, I'm a cop, not a nun in a cloister,"
Kate reminded her. "I was surprised because the way you've
described him made him sound unattractive. Were other women attracted
to him?"

"He was presentable enough, and certainly kept himself cleaner
than a lot of the men do. I found him repulsive, true, but he could
have a very glib tongue when he wanted to bother, and many women fall
for a clever line even more than they do a pair of shoulders or a
handsome face. I'm sure he got his share of female
companionship."

"Who in particular?" Kate asked, but Beatrice's
lips went straight and she bent over the pad. "The homeless women
in the park? Wilhemena?" Beatrice snorted. "Adelaide? Sue
Ann?"

Kate tried to remember the names that had cropped up, but Beatrice
shook her head. "Did he have lady friends in the area,
then?" Kate asked, and thinking she saw a slight hesitation in
the moving hand, she pressed further. "One of the women who has a
house near the park? Or someone who works here?"

"Shopkeepers. He liked shopkeepers," Beatrice admitted.

"What kind? Bookstore, grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop--Beatrice, please tell me, I need to know."

Beatrice pursed up her mouth and rubbed her lips with the side of
her thumbnail, a portrait of anxious thought. It wouldn't do for
a woman living on the margins, dependent on the goodwill of her
settled, more fortunate neighbors for what degree of comfort she
managed to achieve, to offend them. Kate realized this and waited.

"Antiques," she finally muttered. "Junk really,
but pretentious. I saw him inside the antique store on the corner of
Masonic one morning before it opened. He kissed the owner,- she let him
out. He didn't see me."

"Is she the only one?" Beatrice shot her a look full of anger and closed her pad.

"I'm sorry," Kate said. "Thank you for that.
I'll talk with her, and of course I won't tell her where
the information came from. Is there anything else you know about
him?"

Beatrice did not open her sketch pad again, but neither did she stand up and leave.

"Horses," she said suddenly. "He once said
something about quarter horses, I think it was, one day when the
mounted police went by. I suppose he was from a farming community of
some kind, between the horses and the drawl."

"Drawl?" asked Kate sharply.

"Yes, he spoke with a drawl. Didn't you know that?"

"Nobody's mentioned it that I've heard."

"Oh yes. I mean, it wasn't strong, like Deep South, but
it was there. Texas, maybe, or Arizona, though it sounded like
he'd lived in cities for a while."

Kate thought for a minute. "You said you'd once seen him
in a car with someone." Beatrice did not respond, but flipped
open the sketch pad and thumbed the cap off her pen. "When you
made your statement downtown," she elaborated. When the woman
merely turned to a clean page and began to run her pen up and down,
Kate's interest sharpened. So far this evening, Beatrice had
shown little of the blithe, slightly disconnected stepping-stone
quality of the earlier interview: Was it back, and if so, what had
brought it? "Do you remember saying that?"