To Play the Fool (27 page)

"That's right," he was saying, fighting yawns.
"Completely nude, no false teeth, not even a hairpin."

"She wore several rings," Kate commented.

"That's in the path report. Couple of nicks on her
fingers, scratches that showed where the rings'd been cut off her
postmortem. Her hands were so arthritic, I'd guess he tried to
pull them off and couldn't get them over her knuckles, so he had
to cut them. She was also moved around after death, a couple of rug
fibers and marks on her legs, probably transported in a car's
trunk. Nothing under her fingernails but normal dirt--she
didn't scratch her attacker, no defense marks on her hands,
nothing. About the rings, though." He sounded as if he was
beginning to wake up, and he took a large swallow of coffee from his
paper cup to increase the rate of coherency. "We did a ground
search, especially up and down the road. Among the crap they picked up
was a ring. There should be a photograph here somewhere." He dug
back into the file, flipped through the glossy photographs of the nude
woman sprawled in the leaves, gray hair snarled across her face, and
pulled out the picture of a large fancy ring with a cracked stone. He
laid it on the desk between them.

Kate peered at it. "It looks like one of hers. I'd have to ask her friends to be sure. Where was it?"

"Whoever dumped her pulled off the main road down this dirt
road." His finger tapped a long-range photo that showed Beatrice
as a mere shape in the corner. "He couldn't go any farther
because of the gate, but you can't see the place from the road.
The ring was on the left side of the road going in, where it might have
fallen when he opened the driver-side door. If it was in his pocket,
say, and fell out. Of course, it could've been there for a week
or two." He sipped at his coffee, then added, as if in
afterthought, "There was a partial on the ring, halfway decent.
So let us know when you have prints on a suspect. Other than that, we
didn't find a thing. Wasn't raped or assaulted, no signs
that she was tied up, just a sixty-odd-year-old woman in fairly good
condition until she ran into a blunt instrument."

"The pathologist doesn't seem to have much to say about
the weapon," Hawkin commented. He had put his glasses on to look
through the file.

"There wasn't much to say. No splinters, no rust or
grease stains, no glass splinters. A smooth, hard object about two
inches in diameter. Three blows, though the first one probably killed
her. Could've been almost anything. What's your interest in
her, anyway, to drag you down here in the middle of the night?"

"It's related somehow to the body that was cremated in Golden Gate Park," Hawkin replied.

"No kidding? I read about that. And I used to think we had all the loose ones rolling around here."

"We have our share. Can I have a copy of all this?"

"Sure. Here, you take any duplicates of the pictures. If you
want copies of the others, let me know and I'll have them
printed. Let me go turn the Xerox machine on."

Kate turned the car toward the mountainous Highway 17 and began
climbing away from the sea. The morning traffic was light, the rain had
stopped at some time during the night, and Kate drove with both eyes
but only half a mind on the road.

"It was the newspaper story," she said abruptly.

"What was?"

"Her picture was in the Wednesday paper. The article quoted
her as saying she'd seen John talking with a stranger from Texas,
she seemed to think we should let Sawyer go because of that. Two days
later, she was missing."

For a long time, Al did not answer. Kate took her eyes off the road
for a moment to see if he had fallen asleep, but he was staring ahead
through the windshield.

"You don't agree?"

"We don't know anything about the woman. It's a little early for jumping to conclusions."

Silence descended on the car. Kate had been tired earlier but now,
boosted by two cups of stale coffee from the doughnut shop Hawkin had
spotted just before the freeway entrance, she felt merely stupid. She
followed the road up and out of the hills and into San Jose, where the
freeways were always busy.

Nearing Palo Alto, she spoke again. "I'll drop you at Jani's, then?"

"No, go on to the City. I changed my mind; I want to be in on your group meeting this morning with Sawyer."

"I was thinking we'd probably cancel it," said Kate, surprised.

"This is all the more reason not to."

...
Something happened to him that must remain

greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and

selfish men whom God has not broken to

make anew.

The interrogation had been scheduled to begin at ten o'clock.
Kate and Hawkin were back in the city by then, but they did not join
David Sawyer in the interview room at ten. At eleven o'clock, he
was still by himself in the room, his hands in his lap, his lips moving
continuously in a low recitation. Twice he had glanced at the door, and
on the third time he caught himself and made a visible effort to relax.
Since then he had appeared to be in meditation, his long body at ease
and his eyes open but not focused on any object.

At 11:20, the door opened. Hawkin came in first, followed by Kate.
Both of them looked clean and damp, though their bodies and eyes
betrayed a sleepless night.

There were three vacant chairs in the room, but neither detective
sat. The man in the jail garb blinked gently at them and waited, and
then the third figure came through the door and he instantly got to his
feet, his face shut-down and hard, and made as if to sidle past his old
friend to the door, looking accusingly not at her but at Kate.

Hawkin put out a hand to stop him. "Please, Dr. Sawyer," he said quietly. "Sit down."

Sawyer's head came around and the two men gazed at each other
while the old man, alerted by some nuance of tone, tried to gauge what
lay behind the words. He studied Hawkins' stance and eyes and
looked down warily at the manila envelope Hawkin held in his hand
before he accepted the detective's unspoken message: Before, we
were acting out a game. Before, we had time to play with animosity. The
game is over now.

The message that said: Bad news coming, David.

"Please," Hawkin repeated quietly.

After a long minute, without breaking their locked gaze, Sawyer
moved back to the table and lowered himself into his chair. Only then
did he look at Kate, sitting poised to take notes, and then at Eve
Whitlaw, and when he took his eyes from her and turned back to Al
Hawkin, on the other side of the table from him now, he drew breath and
opened his mouth.

"No," interrupted Hawkin, one hand raised to stop Sawyer
from speaking. "Don't say anything yet. Listen to me before
you commit yourself to speech. I've been told you're very
good at listening." Hawkin waited until the older man had slowly
subsided into the plastic chair. He then leaned forward and, choosing
his words carefully, began to speak.

"Five and a half weeks ago, a man was killed in Golden Gate
Park. A number of your friends decided to cremate the body, in
imitation of a similar cremation you had supervised three weeks
earlier, that of a small dog. The attempted cremation confused matters
a great deal, but eventually it proved to have no direct connection
with the man's death.

"You, however, attracted our suspicions from the very
beginning. You would not answer our questions, you had no alibi for the
time of death, and you seemed to have something you were hiding. On the
nineteenth of February, you fled from Inspector Martinelli and a woman
who could identify you. And then when a person who lives near the park
told us that you were in the vicinity at the general time the man was
killed, and in a state of agitation, the case against you seemed fairly
tight. It appeared that you had been blackmailed by the man John and
finally hit him in the head in anger. No, much as I would like to hear
what you could come up with by way of a response, I'd really
prefer if you would just listen."

Hawkin slouched down in the chair, playing with the clasp on the envelope that lay on the table between them.

"However, I don't think you killed him. I know you could
have. I know you have a short temper, for all your years of saintly
behavior, and you could easily have lost it and swung at him with that
stick of yours. But I don't think you would have been capable of
standing by and waiting for him to die. And I don't believe you
could have broken the skull of his dog three weeks before that. And I
know damn well that you were in custody eight days ago and that
therefore you could not have committed the murder of your friend
Beatrice Jankowski."

It took a moment for the information to lodge in his mind, but when
it did, the effect was all Hawkin had aimed for: Shock, profound and
complete, froze David Sawyer's hands on the edge of the table,
kept him from moving, stopped the breath in his body.

"Yes. I'm very sorry," said Hawkin, sounding it.
"Beatrice died last week. Inspector Martinelli and I just
identified her body a few hours ago." He pushed back the flap on
the envelope and slid the photograph out onto the table, pushed it
across in front of Sawyer, and withdrew his hand. The old man stared
uncomprehending at the black-and-white photograph of Beatrice
Jankowski's face that had been taken on the autopsy table just
before she was cut open. She lay there calmly, her eyes closed, but was
very obviously dead.

Sawyer closed his own eyes and his hands came up to his face,
pressing hard against his mouth and cheeks as if to hold in his
reaction--vomit, perhaps, or words--but he could not hold
back the tears that squeezed from beneath his closed eyelids, tears
utterly unlike the simple, generous, childlike stream he had cried so
freely on the first occasion Kate had seen him. These were a
man's tears, begrudged and painful, and he clawed at them with
his long fingers as if they scalded his skin.

They all waited a long time for him to take possession of himself
again. Even Professor Whitlaw waited, as she had been instructed,
though she palpably yearned to go and comfort him. They waited, and
eventually he raised a bleary red-eyed face from his hands and accepted
the tissue that Al Hawkin held out to him.

Hawkin then sat forward until his arms were on the table and his
face was only inches from the stricken features of the prisoner.

"Dr. Sawyer, you had nothing to do with the deaths of your son
and the wife and children of that madman Kyle Roberts. You believe you
did, because grief has to go somewhere, but the truth of the matter is,
you were in no way responsible.

"Beatrice Jankowski's death is a different matter. You
know who the dead man was, and you know who killed him. You may even
know why. You wouldn't tell us because of this vow of yours. You
figured the man was such a miserable shit-filled excuse for a human
being, his death was hardly a reason to break your vow. You played God,
David, and because you wouldn't answer our questions a month ago,
because you distracted us and slowed down the investigation, he came
back. He heard a rumor that Beatrice had seen him, he probably read the
interview in the newspaper where she hinted that she could identify
him, so he came back for her. He killed her, David. He broke her skull
and he cut those distinctive rings from her fingers and then he
stripped her naked and dumped her body down in the mountains, because
you had made up your mind to be noble in prison rather than answer our
questions."

Although she had been briefed on what to expect, Professor Whitlaw
started to protest. Kate stopped her with a hand on her arm, but it was
doubtful that either Sawyer or Hawkin noticed.

"Tell me, David," Hawkin pleaded, nearly whispering.
"You know who did it, you know why,- you even know where he
is--you were headed for Texas when they picked you up in Barstow,
weren't you? You know everything and I don't even know what
the dead man's name is. David, you have to suspend this vow of
yours. Just long enough to give me the information I need. Please,
David, for God's sake. For Beatrice's sake, if nothing
else."

Kate saw David Sawyer's surrender. With a jolt made of triumph
and sorrow and revulsion at Al Hawkins superb skills, she could see the
old man succumb, saw the moment when he buckled off the only thing that
had held him together through ten hard years. His mouth opened as he
searched for words, his own words, a foreign language spoken long ago.

"I..." he said, then stopped. "My name... is David Sawyer.

Eve Whitlaw stood up and went to him, taking up a position behind
his chair, her hands resting on his shoulders. He raised his right hand
across his chest to take her left hand and, fingers intertwined, he
appeared to gather a degree of strength, then continued.

"You know... who... I am. You know... about
Kyle Roberts. I... do not need to say anything about... that.
You need to know about the man who died. The man... you know as
John... was sick. Mentally. His mind and his... spirit had
become twisted. He... enjoyed... power over others. He was
rich." Sawyer stopped and with a visible effort pulled himself
together. His tongue, so easy and fluent with the complex thoughts of
others, seemed unable to produce a sentence more complicated than a
four-year-old's. When he resumed, his words were more
sophisticated, but each phrase, occasionally each word, was set apart
by a brief pause.

"John was actually a very wealthy man, and he... left his
home and his business to... wander. There are others like him on
the streets. Not many, but always a few who choose the nomadic way of
life for... various reasons, rather than falling into it. He did
not change, though. He was--he had been a cutthroat businessman,
in land speculation and development. He was proud of his... shady
dealings. When he came onto the streets, he remained... sly and
manipulative. In many ways, I believe he derived more pleasure from
controlling the... destitute and the downtrodden than he had from
breaking his business rivals.