“Before noon. One-thirty kickoff.”
“Let me make a few calls, see how the day shapes up.”
“You’re a workaholic, you know that? Drop dead of a heart attack one of these days, you don’t start taking it easy. All right. Give me a buzz by eleven-thirty if you want to go.”
I said I would and rang off. He was probably right about my needing to take it easy; Kerry kept telling me the same thing. It was a nice day, perfect football weather; why not take the afternoon off, go to the Cal game, soak up some sun and a few beers? I had no leads that needed immediate attention. Except for Richie Dessault-but I didn’t have any idea where he was and I was not about to hang around Mission Creek all day, waiting for him to show up. I thought about calling Tom Washburn, but he hadn’t got in touch with me and that meant he either hadn’t gone back to Leonard’s house yet, or if he had, hadn’t found anything among Leonard’s papers worth telling me about. I could drive down to Moss Beach again, try to find somebody who knew Danny Martinez, maybe knew where Eva’s family lived in Mexico; but Klein already had somebody working on that. No point in duplication of effort. I still wanted a talk with Margaret Prine, and one with Eldon Summerhayes, but they could both wait until Monday. Besides, to get either of them to see me on their home turf today, I would need ammunition-and I wasn’t exactly loaded at the moment.
I fidgeted around for a time, while I drank the rest of my coffee. I wanted to go to the game with Eberhardt and yet I kept having mind’s-eye flashbacks to that bloody night in Leonard’s house-little messages of guilt. I told myself I was being obsessive. I reminded myself that I had been working plenty hard on this case, that I had already made some headway by ferreting out Danny Martinez’s name. And I just about had myself convinced to go ahead and call Eberhardt, take the rest of the day off, when the telephone rang again.
“This is Elisabeth Summerhayes,” the voice on the other end of the line said, surprising me. “I am glad I reached you. I didn’t know if you would be available today and I want to do this before I change my mind.”
“Do what, Mrs. Summerhayes?”
“Talk to you about what you told me yesterday,” she said. Her voice was flat but I thought I detected an undercurrent of anger. “About Kenneth Purcell’s collection.”
“I see.”
“But not on the telephone. Can we meet?”
“Of course. Would you like to come here?”
“No, I can’t. My husband is out and my car is being repaired.”
“I could come to your home…”
“No. He might return.” She paused and then said, “Do you know Sutro Heights Park?”
“Yes.”
“The parapet above the Great Highway?”
“Yes.”
“I can be there in one hour.”
“So can I. No problem.”
“In one hour, then.”
She hung up and I did the same, feeling relieved in spite of myself. Partly because the stirring up I had done yesterday seemed to have produced results, and partly because now I could spend the afternoon working instead of loafing at the Cal game, even though the Cal game was where I really wanted to be.
A bundle of ambivalences and inconsistencies, that was me. A living, breathing paradox, groping through a Saturday that might not turn out to be so blue after all.
Chapter Seventeen
There is an old superstition among San Franciscans that Sutro Heights is either haunted or cursed (nobody seems able to decide which). Not the park itself, which stretches for a couple of blocks south and west from Point Lobos Avenue, above Cliff House. Just the part along the rim of the promontory that contains the ruins of Adolph Sutro’s once-palatial estate.
Sutro was a German tobacco merchant and mining engineer who made his fortune in the Comstock Lode silver mines, and who became mayor of San Francisco in the 1890s. He bought the Heights ten years before that, after returning from Nevada; renovated and built additions on the cottage that already stood on the property, forested the land with cypress and pine and eucalyptus to act as windbreaks, and constructed elaborate gardens full of fountains, gazebos, and a hundred plaster statues of wood nymphs and Greek gods and goddesses cleverly painted to look like marble. But Sutro hadn’t much enjoyed his life on the Heights; things had begun to go wrong for him soon after he moved there-“as if something was exerting calamitous influences,” according to the legend. The cottage was badly damaged when a schooner carrying a cargo of gunpowder went aground on Seal Rocks and exploded. Sutro’s wife died unexpectedly. Cliff House, which he had bought for his own amusement, burned to the ground. His term as mayor was marred by infighting and corruption beyond his control. He contracted diabetes and his mind went on him. His daughter, the last member of the Sutro family to live on the Heights, also went insane before she died in the late thirties. And as if all that wasn’t enough to foment the superstition, a well-known local ballerina had plunged to her death off the crumbling parapet above the Great Highway in 1940, under circumstances that were still shrouded in mystery.
I didn’t buy the “haunted or cursed” business myself; the only ghosts I believe in are those that haunt the human mind, and the only curses I give much credence to are the profane ones people hurl at me during the course of my work. Still, there is something vaguely eerie about the Sutro ruins-a sense of loneliness and despair that seems to pervade the place. Not too many people go out there on days when the fog comes roiling in off the Pacific, when the wind blows in gusts and moans among the trees and rocks. I had been out there once on a day like that. It hadn’t bothered me at the time, except to stir my imagination and my sense of history, as places like that always do; but then, I hadn’t been back since. Not until today-and I surprised myself by thinking, as I curbed the car on Forty-eighth Avenue, that I was glad it was a nice sunny day without too much wind.
I walked into the park, thinking about the superstition and about the fact that there were not a lot of expensive homes in this neighborhood. Back a ways on Clement, across from the Lincoln Park Golf Course, there were some; maybe that was where the Summerhayeses lived. Either there, or all the way over on the other side of Lincoln Park, in Sea Cliff, and she’d taken a bus to get here. Not that it mattered. If I needed to know their address I could find it without too much trouble.
The look of Sutro Heights did little to belie its legendary status. It was weedy and generally unkempt, with a lot of gopher holes and earth mounds pocking the grassy areas and a few pieces of disreputable statuary and urns here and there that may or may not have dated back to Adolph’s time. It was neither crowded nor deserted today: a few careless dog owners and their squatting, leg-lifting pets, some kids playing frisbee, a young couple sitting cross-legged on a blanket toasting each other with red wine in plastic glasses. I followed the old carriage road past the last remaining gazebo-it was decorated with graffiti, these being creative and enlightened times-and toward the high ground at the outer end.
When I got there I turned onto a sandy path that took me up to a flight of crumbling stone stairs. At the top of the stairs was what had once been a grand terrace, roughly circular and enclosed by low stone walls; now it contained a few wind-sculpted cypress trees and a profusion of weeds, high grass, and litter. Near the westward parapet, where the ground was bare and gravelly, were some low backless benches. Elisabeth Summerhayes was sitting on the middle one, looking out to sea. There wasn’t anybody else around.
She sensed my presence as I approached, glanced my way, and then looked back toward the ocean. She was wearing a knee-length leather coat with a fur collar and her blond hair was tied down with a scarf. She looked small and huddled at a distance, and oddly, considering her stature, the impression didn’t change much even when I reached her side.
She still wouldn’t look at me, so I sat down on the other end of the bench and took in the view myself. From up here you could see a good portion of the south rim of the city, the full two-mile sweep of Ocean Beach in that direction. The other way and down below, the area in front of the new Cliff House was clogged with tour buses, sidewalk vendors, tourists. Seaward, lying just offshore beyond Cliff House, gulls and pelicans swarmed over Seal Rocks; and much farther out-thirty-two miles-the Farallone Islands were like an irregular blot of shadow on the
