To Play the Fool (19 page)

She got up and walked into the kitchen, where she stood on the stool
to splash water onto her face, then dried it with a kitchen towel and
came back to the table.

"We all assumed that he had gone somewhere and killed himself.
He was very nearly dead already. And then today I see David Sawyer
looking like an old derelict and acting the Fool for tourists, and he
runs at the sight of my face. And," she added a minute later,
"he is somehow involved in a murder. Yet another murder. Oh,
poor, poor David."

Holding her threadbare dignity around her, she stumbled down from
the tall chair and walked away down the hallway. A door opened and
closed. Kate blew a stream of air through her pursed lips and looked at
Hawkin.

"I could understand if someone had bashed
him
--Erasmus,
or Sawyer. I've seen two good solid motives for killing him in
the last few hours. But as for him killing someone else, I
haven't seen anything."

"John was a blackmailer," said Hawkin quietly.

"And he found out about Kyle and threatened to tell the other
street people, so Erasmus bashed him to keep him quiet? I can't
see it, Al. Sorry."

"He ran."

"From her, not from me."

"She knows who he is. She'd give you the motive and ID
him. Maybe if you hadn't been there he would have lured her off
to a quiet corner and whacked her one, too."

She leaned over the table to study his face, but it told her nothing.

"Are you serious, Al? Or are you just playing with this?"

I'm mostly trying it out for size, but I will say that
I'm not too happy he made a run for it. I don't like the
idea of him skipping town."

"Okay, you're the boss. Do you want to put a call out
for him tonight or wait and see if he shows up in the park
tomorrow?"

"We can wait. Meanwhile, see what you can find out about this
Kyle Roberts thing. Where's Sawyer's wife now,- was it
really an open-and-shut murder/suicide,- did Roberts have family that
might want to even things up a bit?"

"Such as a five-foot-eleven white male with a Texas accent who called himself John?"

"Such as. You know anyone in Chicago?"

" 'Anyone' meaning anyone on the police department? No."

"I don't, either. Well, I met someone at a conference
once, but he and I had differing views on such things as
search-and-seizure and putting down riots. He wouldn't give you
the time of day. What about Kenning down in Vice? He had a brother,
didn't he?"

How, wondered Kate, could I have forgotten either Haw-kin's
phenomenal memory or his personal-touch method of getting information?
When they had worked together before, she had tended to turn to the
computer,- Al depended on someone's cousin Marty who had been
mentioned at the last departmental ball game.

"I'll ask," she said. Computers didn't have it all.

"Well," he said, "I don't know that we can
do anything else here. You want to start the background search on him?
I'd do it, but I'm testifying in that Brancusi case Monday
and I need to go over it carefully. It's going to be a
bitch."

"No problem, I'll get it going. Except--how about
you call Kenning and ask for his brother's name? He's
probably home watching the game, and you're more likely to know
when it's over than I am." She grinned at him and he,
unembarrassed, grinned back.

"Paperwork, you know?" he said. "I only turn on the tube for the noise."

"Sure, Al. Have a beer for me, okay?"

"Talk to you later. Thank the professor for the tea." He
let himself out, and a minute later Kate heard a car door slam and an
engine start up. She picked up Sawyer's book on fools and began
to leaf through it, waiting for Professor Whitlaw to emerge, but she
had barely started the introduction before the door opened and the
professor came down the hall.

"I apologize," she said. "As I said, it was a
shock. Now, please tell me what I may do to help my old friend."

"Er, I don't really know."

"I must see him again."

"I'll let you know when we find him." They owed
her at least that much, Kate figured, but something in her voice
alerted the professor.

"You sound as if you have some doubts about it."

"He may go to ground for a few days," she said evasively.

"You don't think it'll be more than that, do you? He won't run away completely, surely."

Kate always hated this sort of thing. With a suspect, you knew where
you stood: Never answer questions,- don't even act as if you
heard them. With a witness, just evade politely. But with an important,
intelligent, and potentially very helpful witness, evasion created a
barrier, and she couldn't afford that.

"Professor Whitlaw, we don't know what to expect, and I
doubt you could help us any in figuring it out. I'd say offhand
that the David Sawyer you knew is gone. He's Brother Erasmus now,
and Brother Erasmus could do anything."

"Not murder, in case you are thinking of him as a suspect. Not as David Sawyer, and not as a fool."

"I hope you're right. He's an appealing character."

"That hasn't changed, at any rate. Perhaps there's more of David there than you think."

"We shall see. Thank you very much for your help with his
identity. And I take it that you would be available for assisting in an
interview with him?"

"That's right,- you said he was difficult to communicate
with. I had forgotten, in all the uproar. Yes, certainly, I shall be
glad to help. Perhaps I'd best brush up on my Shakespeare."

"That reminds me--the name of his son. You said it was Jonny, I think?"

"Short for Jonathan, yes. Why?"

"The first time I met him, he seemed to be trying to explain
himself to me and Dean Gardner, and he said something about vanity, and
Absalom, and he also said that David loved Jonathan."

"Odd. Isn't it Jonathan who loved David?"

That's what the dean said. He seemed to think it was very
unusual for Erasmus to change a text." Although, come to think of
it, he had done so again that day. Surely the Lewis Carroll poem told
us, Speak roughly to your little boy?

"I'm sorry, but I find it difficult to imagine a fool who is so structured in his utterances."

"Imagine it. But if as you say his son was named Jonathan,
then perhaps he was trying to tell us that he believes his
'vanity' led to the death of his son. That's very
close to what you've just told me, which proves that he can
communicate,- he can even change his quotations if he wants to badly
enough."

"Oh dear. I'm afraid I'm getting too old for this
kind of mental gymnastics. I shall have to think about what
you've told me.

"That's fine,- there's nothing more you can do
now, anyway. You have my number, if you think of anything. Thanks again
for your help. I'll let myself out."

He suffered fools gladly.

It was dark outside but still clear. Kate got into her car and drove
to the Hall of Justice. By the time she arrived, her bladder was nearly
bursting from the cups of tea she'd drunk, and she sprinted for
the nearest toilet before making her way more slowly to her office, the
coffeepot, and the telephone. It was Saturday night, although early
yet; business would pick up soon. Her first phone call was to her own
number.

"Jon? Kate. I'm going to be stuck at the office for a
while. I hope not too long, but don't hold dinner. Oh, you
didn't, good. Are you going out? Well, if you decide to, give me
a ring and let me know who's there instead, okay? Thanks. Oh, I
hope not more than a couple of hours, maybe less. Fine. Right.
Bye."

Then the computer terminal and the other telephone calls, and when
Al called with Kenning's brother-in-law's (not brother,-
Al, unusually, had gotten it wrong) name and home number, she called
through to the Chicago police, found that the man was on duty the next
morning, and decided that little would be gained by bothering him at
home on a Saturday night. There was no trace of David Sawyer on the
records-- hardly surprising, since David Sawyer had virtually
ceased to exist a decade before.

There was not much more she could do tonight, so she gathered her
coat and made her way to the elevators, deaf to the ringing telephones
and shouts and the scurry of activity. She stepped aside when the doors
of the elevator opened and two detectives came out, each holding one
elbow of a small Oriental man in handcuffs, with dried blood on his
shirt and a monotonous string of tired curses coming from his bruised
mouth.

"Another Saturday night," she said as she slipped through the closing doors.

"And I ain't got nobody," sang the detective on
the man's left arm. The doors closed on the rest of the song.

Outside, in the parking lot, Kate was seized by a feeling of
restlessness. She should go directly home, five minutes away, let Jon
have his evening out, but she'd told him two hours, and it had
been barely forty minutes. Time for a brief drive, out to the park.

Erasmus--Sawyer--no, Erasmus--habitually spent
Saturday with tourists and then Sunday in the park, roughly four miles
away. Did he walk? Was he already in the park now, bedded down beneath
some tree? Where did he keep his stash, his bedroll and clothing, the
small gym bag Dean Gardner had fetched from the CDSP rooms and which
had been returned (with its contents of blue jeans, flannel shirt, bar
of soap, threadbare towel, and three books) when Erasmus had been
turned loose after making what could only loosely be called his
statement?

Kate got into her car and turned, not north to home but west into
the city. She drove past the high-rise hotels and department stores and
the pulsing neon bars and busy theaters into the more residential areas
with their Chinese and Italian restaurants and movie theaters, the pet
stores and furniture showrooms closed or closing, until she came to the
dark oasis that was Golden Gate Park.

The park held over a thousand acres of trees, flowers, lawn, and
lakes, coaxed out of bare sand in painful stages over patient decades,
wrenched from the gold-rush squatters in the 1850s and now returning to
their spiritual descendants a century and a half later, for despite the
combined efforts of police and social services and parks department
bulldozers, a large number of men and women regarded the park as home.

Kate drove slowly down Stanyan Street and along Lincoln Way,
cruising for street people who were not yet in their beds. At Ninth
Avenue, a trio of lumpy men carrying bedrolls leaned into one another
and drifted toward the park. She turned in, got out of her car, and
waited for them under a streetlight.

"Good evening, gentlemen," she said. Astonished, and
suspicious, they stumbled to a halt, eyeing her. "I'm
looking for Brother Erasmus. Have you see him?"

"She's a cop," one of them said. "I seen her before."

Kate reached into her pocket and drew out a five-dollar bill that
she'd put there a minute before. She folded it in half lengthwise
and ran it crisply through her fingers. "I just hoped to talk
with him tonight. I know he's usually here in the morning, but it
would save me some time, you understand."

" 'S tomorrow Sunday?" asked the second man, with
the slurred precision of the very drunk. The others ignored him.

"He don't come on Sa'day," stated the third man. "You have to wait."

"Do you know where he is tonight?"

"He's not here."

"How do you know?"

"Never is."

Kate had to be content with that. They hadn't told her
anything, but she gave them the five dollars anyway and left them
arguing over what to do with it, spend it now or save it until
tomorrow. All three had looked to be in their sixties but were probably
barely fifty. She turned to look at them over the top of her car, three
drunk men haggling in slow motion over a scrap of paper that
represented an evening's supply of cheap wine.

"Where did you serve?" she called on impulse. They
looked up at her, blinking. The third man drew himself up and made an
attempt at squaring his shoulders.

"Quang Tri Province mostly. Tony was in Saigon for a while."

"Well, good luck to you, boys. Keep warm."

"Thank you, ma'am." The other two men
automatically echoed his thanks, and she got into her car and turned
around and reentered the traffic on Lincoln Way.

In the next twenty minutes, she gave away another fifteen dollars
and got more or less the same answer from a woman with darting eyes who
pulled continuously at her raw lips with the fingers of her left hand,-
from a sardonic, sober elderly gentleman who would not approach close
enough to take the contribution from her hand but who picked it up from
the park bench with a small bow once she had retreated,- and from the
monosyllabic Doc, whom she recognized from the initial interviews.

Satisfied, she left the park, intending to go home but then finding
herself detouring, taking a route slightly north of the direct one, and
finally finding herself in front of the brick bulk of Ghirardelli
Square, still lighted up and busy with Saturday night shoppers. Oh
well, she was nearly home,- she would only be a little late.

There were four shops that Erasmus might have slipped into that
afternoon, plus two blank and locked doors and a stairway up to the
main level of shops. Two of the shopkeepers had at the time seemed
merely harassed and innocent on a busy afternoon, one of them had been
with a woman who was contemplating an expensive purchase and had not
seemed the sort to shelter an escaped fool, but the fourth-- Kate
thought that she would have another word with the fourth shopkeeper,
smiling behind his display of magic tricks and stuffed animals.

She parked beneath the NO PARKING sign in front of the shop and
strolled in, her hands in her pockets. The man recognized her
instantly,- this time his amusement seemed a bit forced, and he was
flustered as he made change for the woman who was buying a stuffed pig
complete with six snap-on piglets. Kate stood perusing the display of
magic tricks until the customer left and he was finally forced to come
over to her.