CONKLIN AND I took the curving staircase down to the main floor. I found the library by following the familiar, resonant, English-accented voice of Marcus Dowling.
I’d seen all of his older films, the ones where he’d played a spy or was a romantic lead, and even some of his more recent films, where he’d played a heavy. I’d always liked him.
I stepped through the open door to the library, and Dowling was standing there barefoot, wearing blue trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt. I admit to feeling a little starstruck. Marcus Dowling, the next best thing to Sean Connery. He was telling Jacobi about the senseless murder of his wife when Conklin and I came through the door.
Jacobi introduced us, telling Dowling that the three of us would be working the case together.
I shook hands with the film legend, then sat at the edge of a leather sofa. Dowling was clearly distraught. And I noticed something else. His hair was wet.
Dowling didn’t sit down. He repeated his story as he paced around the book-lined room.
“Casey and I had the Devereaus over for dinner. Francois and his wife, Sheila-he’s directing my new film.”
“We’ll need their contact numbers,” I said.
“I’ll give you all the numbers you want,” he said, “but they had already left when this happened. Casey had gone upstairs to dress for bed. I was tidying up down here. I heard a loud bang coming from upstairs.” His forehead rumpled. “It didn’t even occur to me that it was a gunshot. I called out to Casey. She didn’t answer.”
“What happened next, Mr. Dowling?”
“I called her again, and then as I was heading upstairs, I heard another bang. This time I thought it was a gunshot, and right after that, I heard glass breaking.
“I was all emotional by this time, Inspectors. I don’t know what happened after… after I saw my girl lying on the floor. I grabbed her in my arms,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Her head fell back, and she wasn’t breathing. I must have called the police. I saw my bloody handprint on the phone. Afterward, I realized that the safe was nearly empty.
“Whoever did this must have known Casey,” Dowling continued, weeping now. “He must have known that she didn’t always lock the safe, because dialing the combination was just… too bloody boring.
“Killing Casey was so insane,” Dowling went on. He was rubbing his chest when he said to Jacobi, “Just tell me what I can do to help you catch the animal who did this.”
I was about to ask Marcus Dowling why he’d showered while waiting for the police to arrive when Conklin got ahead of me, inquiring, “Mr. Dowling, do you own a gun?”
Dowling turned a wild-eyed stare on Conklin. His face went rigid with pain. He clutched his left arm and said, “Something’s wrong.”
Then he keeled over and dropped to the floor.
Chapter 13
Conklin found the aspirin, Jacobi cushioned Dowling’s head with a throw pillow, and I called Dispatch. I repeated the house address and shouted, “Fifty-year-old male! Heart attack!”
Dowling was still writhing when the ambulance arrived, and the big man was loaded onto a gurney and carried out through the door. Jacobi rode with Dowling to the hospital, leaving me and Conklin to canvass the neighborhood.
Lights from fantastic neighboring homes punctuated the darkness along the tree-lined street. I was worried about this new case. Because Casey Dowling had been wealthy and famous, the public pressure to find her killer would squeeze the politicos, who would, in turn, squeeze us. The SFPD was already suffering from budget deficits and too little manpower. Add to that the public expectation that homicides could be solved in an hour between commercial breaks, and I knew we were in for a humongous, spotlighted nightmare.
I hoped Clapper would come up with a good lead in the lab, because right now, along with next to nothing to go on, I was getting a bad feeling that what Marcus had told us was all wrong.
“Why would a burglar shoot Casey Dowling?” I asked Conklin as we walked up the street.
“What Clapper said. The burglar carried a gun in case he ran into an emergency.”
“Like a surprised homeowner?”
“Exactly.”
“Casey Dowling wasn’t armed.”
“True. Maybe she recognized the intruder,” Conklin said. “You know those stories Cindy’s been doing on Hello Kitty?”
Cindy is Cindy Thomas, a crime reporter at the
Recently Cindy had been writing about a cat burglar who’d been doing second-story jobs, always breaking in when the homeowners were having dinner on the first floor and the alarm system was turned off. This burglar made off with only jewelry-which had not turned up. Cindy had dubbed the cat burglar “Hello Kitty,” and it stuck.
Here’s what was known about Hello Kitty: he was fit, deft, and fast, and had a huge pair of stones.
“Think about it,” Conklin said. “Hello Kitty seems to know when these wealthy people are having dinner parties. What if he’s part of the same social circle? If Casey Dowling recognized him, maybe shooting her was his only way out.”
“Not a bad theory,” I said to Conklin as we took the walk up to the front steps of the manse next door. “But wait a sec. What did you make of Dowling’s wet hair?”
“He washed off his wife’s blood.”
“So he leaped into the shower after Casey was murdered,” I said. “It seems weird to me.”
“So what’s your theory? Homicide One Oh One?”
“Why not? Because Dowling’s a movie star? Something about him isn’t right. He told Clapper he heard two gunshots. He told us he heard a noise, and then sometime after that, he heard a second sound, and that time he was sure it was a shot.”
My partner said, “Could be he was just summing up, telling the story in shorthand.”
“Could be shorthand,” I said. “Or could be he’s making up the story as he goes along and can’t keep it straight.”
Chapter 14
THE HOME NEXT to the Dowlings’ was set back from the street and had a groundskeeper’s house in the side yard and two deluxe cars in the driveway.
I pressed the bell, and chimes rang. The front door opened, and a brown-haired boy of about ten, wearing a rugby shirt over pajama bottoms, gazed up at us and asked who we were.
“I’m Sergeant Boxer. This is Inspector Conklin. Are your parents at home?”
“Kellll-yyyy!”
The boy turned out to be Evan Richards, and Kelly was his babysitter, a woman in her midtwenties who had been watching
