To Play the Fool (4 page)

Kate thought back over the woman's words. "You're
right. It's as if she thought of the word as being
capitalized."

"Damn. Oh well, we can find her Friday night at the coffee
place, if we want." The doors opened onto the ground floor and
Kate followed him outside, where he stood breathing in great lungfuls
of the pollution from the freeway overhead. Kate tried to breathe
shallowly, if at all, and was suddenly very aware of the trials of the
long day.

"You'll go to Berkeley tomorrow morning, then,"
said Al. "I've been in touch with the department there,
letting them know you'll be waltzing across their turf. If you
need to make an arrest, call them for backup. I doubt that you will,
though," he added. "Erasmus sounds a peaceable sort. Better
take a departmental car, though. You do know where this Holy Hill
is?"

"If it's the same place, it's what they call the
area above the Cal campus, where there's a bunch of seminaries
and church schools."

"Sounds like a reasonable shot. I'll take the postmortem, and we'll talk when you get back."

Right." It was a good time to leave, but she lingered,
enjoying the sensation of being back in her own world. The nightmare of
the last year was not about to fade under two weeks' worth of
cold reality, but she did feel she had achieved some small distance. It
was a good feeling. "Al," she said on impulse, "come
home for a drink. Or coffee, or dinner. Or even just a breath of real
air."

"No, I can't. You haven't warned Lee."

"Oh hell, a little surprise will do her good. Unless--do you have something planned for tonight?"

"Not tonight."

"Still seeing Jani?"

"Still seeing Jani."

"She's a fine person, Al."

"She is. She was happy to hear you're back in harness,
sent her greeting. Invited you for dinner, as soon as Lee's up to
the drive."

"She might enjoy that. Ask her yourself, tonight."

"You're sure?" I'm sure.

"Okay. One drink and a brief conversation with Lee, and if
that damned houseboy of yours is cooking a barbecue, I'll break
his neck."

Hawkin did not stay to dinner, and as Jon was experimenting with
lentils, he escaped with his neck intact. After Hawkin left, Kate
settled Lee at the table, which was set for two, and went into the
kitchen. She peered past Jon's shoulder at the pot on the stove,
plucked a piece of sausage out, receiving a slap from the wooden spoon,
and put the meat in her mouth.

"Are you not eating, or am I?" she asked Jon.

"Since you're here, I'm going out."

"You're leaving me phone numbers?"

He turned to look at her. "Why on earth do you need phone numbers? You're not a teenaged baby-sitter."

"Jon," she said with exaggerated patience, "I am
back on active duty. I explained to you last month what this would
mean. I am no longer shuffling papers from eight to five. I may be
called out at any time, and I do not want Lee left alone forq hours and
hours. I need all of your phone numbers."

"But I don't know them," he cried. "I mean, what if I decide to go somewhere?"

"Report in. Damn it Jon, you know it isn't good for her to be alone for any length of time."

"All right, all right, all right. I'll give you phone
numbers. But don't you think it's time we entered the
twentieth century and got me a beeper?"

"Good idea. Get one tomorrow."

"How chic. Everyone will think I'm a doctor. I think
I'll be an obstetrician. Terribly exotic, and it'll save me
from having to look at strange growths and aches on strangers that
I'd rather not know about. Now for heaven's sake, quit
jabbering and take those plates in. I have to go do my hair."

Kate obediently took the plates, served herself and Lee, and then
bent her head and wolfed the lentil-and-sausage cassoulet. Whatever
Jon's shortcomings (and she'd had her doubts from the very
beginning, even before the day they had passed in the hallway and he
had paused to say, "Look, dearie, it isn't every man gets
to change his shrink's diapers. I mean, what would Papa Sigmund
say? Too Freudian"), the man could cook.

Kate helped herself to a second serving and started in more slowly.

"Did you eat today?" Lee asked.

"I think so. There were sandwiches at some point, but it was a
while ago. Jon, this is gorgeous," she said as he came in from
the recently converted basement apartment. "Will you marry
me?"

"You just want me to work for nothing, I know you macho
types," he said with an exaggerated simper and held out a piece
of paper. "Here is my every possible phone number, plus a few
unlikelies. And I've also put down the numbers of Karin and Wade,
in case you've lost them. Karin can come anytime, Wade, up until
six in the morning."

"What about Phyllis?"

"She's in N'Orleans this week, y'all,"
he drawled. "Playin' with the bubbas and all them good
ol' boys, hot damn."

"Have a good time, Jon," said Lee.

"You too, darlin'."

The house seemed to expand when he left, and suddenly, unexpectedly,
Kate was aware of a touch, just a faint brush of unease at being alone
with Lee. She wondered at it, wondered if Lee felt it, and decided that
she couldn't have or she would say something.

"I feel like my mother has just left me alone in the house with a girlfriend," Lee said.

"I was just thinking how quiet it was."

Without taking her eyes from Kate's, Lee reached down and
freed the brakes on her chair, backed and maneuvered to where Kate sat,
laid her hand on the back of Kate's neck, and kissed her, long
and slow. She then backed away again and returned to her place, leaving
Kate flushed, short of breath, and laughing.

"Necking while Mom's away," Kate commented.

"Different from having her in the next room."

"I'm sure Jon would love it if you started calling him Mom."

"You still don't like him, do you?"

"I like him well enough." That Kate detested having any
person other than Lee in the house, no matter how easy to live with,
was a fact both unavoidable and best not talked about.

"You don't trust him."

"With you, with the house, I believe he is a thoroughly
responsible and trustworthy person," Kate said carefully.
"He is absolutely ideal as a caregiver for you, and I think
we're very, very lucky to have him. If there's anything
about him I don't trust, it's his motives. He's a
blessing from heaven, he works cheap, he even knows when to disappear,
but I can't help having a niggling suspicion that we're
going to have to pay for it somehow in the end."

"Transference with a vengeance," Lee agreed.
"Every therapist's nightmare, a client who gets his foot in
the door. However, I think Jon Sampson's a much more balanced
individual than he appears. He plays up the 'patient turned
powerful doctor' role in order to defuse it, and he is aware that
one of his motives in taking the job was his lingering guilt at having
a part, however minor, in my being shot. He's clearly focused
both on his sense of responsibility for what happened to me and on how
invalid the guilt is, and he's working on it. It's a
complex relationship, but I still don't think I was wrong to
allow it."

"You're probably right. I just get suspicious when
someone wants to ingratiate himself." Kate paused, remembering
Beatrice Jankowski's similar description of the dead man John.
Odd, the coincidence in names, although come to think of it Jon's
name had been chosen to replace the hated Marvin his parents had
blessed him with. Though what was to say John was not an alias, as
well? Beatrice thought so. Another thing to ask Brother Erasmus
tomorrow, if she found him. She put the forkful in her mouth and looked
up, to see Lee gazing at her with an odd, crooked smile on her face.

"What?"

"You really are back into it, aren't you?" Lee said.

"Back into what?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You were suddenly miles away, thinking about the case."

"Was I? Sorry. Funny, Al said pretty much the same thing
today. I guess you're right. This case is different.
It's... interesting. Could you push the salad over
here?"

Silence, and the sounds of fork and plate, and then Lee spoke, deliberately.

"For a while there, I thought you might quit."

"What, resign? From the department?"

"You've been hanging by a thread for months, and I got
the distinct impression that going back into partnership with Al was a
final trial to prove to yourself how much you hated the job."

"I don't hate the job."

"Kate, you've been a basket case. You'd hate any job that did that to you."

"Don't exaggerate."

"It's true. You've been a classic example of
posttraumatic stress syndrome. I'm not saying without reason,
sweetheart. I mean, I know you're Superwoman, but even a Woman of
Steel can develop metal fatigue."

"I've just been tired. I've been working too hard."

"Bullshit," Lee said politely. "You've spent
months doing nothing but type reports and worry about me. You've
been through hell, Kate. First the man Lewis and then, when you got
your feet under you again, the Morningstar case steamrolled over
you."

"So what do you want me to say?" Kate demanded.
"That I'm not quitting? Okay, I'm not quitting. We
can't afford it, for one thing. We'd starve if I went
private." Which, she realized belatedly, revealed that
she'd at least considered it, a point that Lee did not miss.

"You know full well that with your reputation in the city, if
you went into private investigations, within a year you'd be
making twice what you do now."

"Not twice," Kate protested feebly.

"Damn near. So don't use salary as an excuse."

Anger did not sit well on a face so carved by pain's lines as
Lee's face was, and the sight made Kate rise up in wretchedness
and despair.

"You want me to quit? I'll quit. I've told you
that before, but you have to say it. All right, I thought if I hated
the job enough, I'd want to resign on my own, and that would make
you happy. But I didn't. All I hated was being away from my job.
I will quit if you ask me, Lee, but if you don't, all I can say
is, I'm a cop. I am a cop."

Lee's features slowly relaxed and the lines lessened, until she was smiling at Kate.

"Your resignation would not make me happy, sweetheart.
I've never much liked your job, and now it just plain frightens
me, but I don't want you to quit. You are a cop, Kate, and I love
you.

FIVE

Le Jongleur de Dieu

The sun came out while Kate was driving across the Bay Bridge the
next morning, and the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland were green with
the winter rains. The departmental unmarked car had something funny
about its front end, so rather than wrestle it through the side
streets, Kate stayed on the crowded freeway, got off at University
Avenue, and drove straight up toward the University of
California's oldest campus, squatting on the hill at the head of
the broad, straight avenue like an ill-tempered concrete toad. At the
last possible instant, Kate avoided being swallowed by her alma mater
and veered left, then right on the road that followed the north
perimeter. Between university buildings on the right and converted
Victorians and apartments on the left, she drove until she came to a
cluster of shops on a side street and one of the main pedestrian
entrances to the campus, a continuation of Telegraph Avenue on the
opposite side. She turned up this street away from the University of
California, moving cautiously among the crowds of casually earnest
students and suicidal bicyclists, and in two hundred yards found
herself in a different world. As she had remembered, the university
crowds seemed miraculously to vanish, leaving only the serious-minded
graduate schools of divinity and theology and eternal truths.

There were also more parking spaces. She fought the car into one,
fed the meter, and then walked back down the hill to indulge in a few
minutes of nostalgia. The Chinese restaurant was still there, and the
pizza-and-beer joint in whose courtyard, in another lifetime, Lee the
graduate student had oh so casually brushed against the arm of Kate the
junior-year student, Kate the unhappy, Kate the unquestioningly hetero,
leaving a tantalizing and only half-conscious question that would crop
up at inconvenient moments until it was finally resolved almost two
years later: Yes, Lee had meant it.

The espresso bars and the doughnut shop, the scruffy bookstore and
the art-film theater, shops selling clothes and pens and backpacks, all
crowded into one short block. Browsing the windows in bittersweet
pleasure, Kate's attention was caught by a display of unusual
jewelry made of some small scraps of odd iridescent plastic. She went
to the shop and bought the hair combs, a pair of extravagant
multicolored swirling shapes, the blue of which matched the color of
Lee's eyes. The woman wrapped the box in a glossy midnight paper
and Kate dropped it into her coat pocket.

She turned briskly uphill, crossed the street that brought an end to
commerce, and walked up another block to the sign for a Catholic school
she had noticed while cruising for a parking space: Surely the
Catholics would know.

As she reached for the door, it opened and a brown-robed monk came out.

"Excuse me," she said, stepping back, "I wonder if
you can tell me where I might find the Graduate Theological
Union?" Sketchy research the night before had brought her as far
as the name, and indeed, the monk nodded, gestured that she should
follow him back to the street, and once there pointed to a brick
building a couple of doors up, smiling all the while. She thanked him,
he nodded and crossed the street, still smiling. A vow of silence,
perhaps? Kate speculated.

The ground floor of the building proved to be an airy oak-floored
bookstore. The customer ahead of her was just finishing her purchase of
three heavy black tomes with squiggly gilt writing on the back covers.
When she turned away with her bag, Kate saw that she was wearing a
clerical collar on her blue shirt, an odd sight to someone raised a
Roman Catholic.