“Aren’t you a clever girl, then?” he murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“She hasn’t eaten that much in a month,” he said, and then in a normal volume added, “Well, toodles, ducks, I’ll be seein‘ ya. Dr. Samson has his beeper on, so buzz me if you have to go out.
“Have a good time, Jon,” she called from the living room, and the door opened and shut behind him.
Kate loaded the dishwasher, put the leftovers in the refrigerator, and took the coffee back into the living room. The television was on and Lee was on the sofa, slightly flushed from the effort of clambering from the wheelchair. Kate stood and looked down at her, smiling.
“You look gorgeous,” she said.
“Tamara came today and gave me a cut and a shampoo. You should let her do yours,- she’s pretty good.”
“It’s not your hair. It’s you.”
“Poor Kate, going blind from all the paperwork. Come and sit down for a while. There’s an old Maggie Smith movie on Channel Nine.” Lee had a thing for Maggie Smith.
“The chair’s a better place if you’re going to_ watch TV. You’ll get a stiff neck sitting here.”
“I thought maybe if I sat here I could tempt you away from your paperwork. Then I can lean on you and I won’t get a stiff neck.”
Kate put both cups on the table and obediently inserted herself behind Lee, who leaned into the circle of her left arm. The movie had just started. They drank their coffee. Kate began to find the warm smell of Lee’s curly yellow hair distracting.
“Did your mother pronounce it
“What?”
“Those hideous flowers,” said Lee, gesturing at the screen with her cup. “English people tend to use three syllables, but I always thought there were two. I should check in the dictionary,” said the scholar.
“Do you want me to go get it for you?” asked Kate, her face buried in Lee’s hair. Her left hand, having migrated from the back of the sofa, was pressed flat against Lee’s stomach, her forefinger bent and gently circling the rim of one of Lee’s buttons.
“Not just now.” Lee slowly finished her coffee. Kate’s was going cold. “Don’t you love it, a woman with bright red hair wearing that color of red? Only Maggie Smith could pull it off.”
“I’m jealous of Maggie Smith,” muttered Kate happily.
They never did see the end of the movie.
Murder cases not solved within two or three days tend to drag on into weeks, and this was no exception. The fourth and fifth days passed without any startling revelations. Kate and Al Hawkin had agreed that Brother Erasmus was not likely to run, so after Thursday’s fruitless question-and-statement session he was handed back his staff and allowed to walk back out into the city of Saint Francis. Kate, rather to her surprise, found herself making a detour from a Sunday morning shopping trip to drive slowly through Golden Gate Park, where eventually she came across Erasmus, dressed like a tramp and walking along the road in the midst of a group of street people. The raggle- taggle congregation might have been from another world compared to the group of his admirers in Berkeley, except for one thing: on these faces was an identical look, a blend of pleasure, awe, and love.
Hawkin saw him once, too, although his sighting was accidental, when he passed Erasmus on his way home from work one afternoon. Erasmus was not wearing his cassock then, either, but a pair of jeans and a multicolored wool jacket. He was sitting in the winter sun on a low brick wall, reading a small green book and eating an ice cream cone.
The millstones of justice continued to grind. Their John Doe’s lab work showed no signs of alcohol, drugs, or even nicotine and indicated that his last meal had been a large piece of beefsteak, green beans, and baked potatoes at least six hours before his death. Death had been due to a blow with a blunt object to the right side of the skull, which, judging from the angle, had been delivered by a right-handed person standing behind the victim as he sat on the stump a few feet from where Harry and Luis had found his body. Death had been by no means instantaneous, although unconsciousness would have been.
John had bled slowly, both internally and onto the ground, for as much as an hour before his heart stopped.
There was one other piece of possible evidence, which Hawkin interpreted as sinister, though Kate privately reserved judgment,- twenty feet from the body, at the foot of a tree, had been found a lone cigarette stub that had been pinched off, not ground out. Oddly, though, the-drift of ashes on the ground around the tree was considerably more than could be made from one cigarette. The crime scene investigator estimated that five to eight cigarettes could have produced that quantity of ash. There was another, smaller pile of ash just in front of the stump. In three places at the site were found boot prints, none of them complete, but together an indication that a pair of size nine men’s heeled boots, not cowboy boots but similar, had been there within a day of the time John had died.
When the lab results were in, Al had Kate drive him across town to the park. He stood within the fluttering yellow tapes marking the crime scene and stared at the ground.
He said deliberately, “I think a man wearing a pair of those expensive men’s boots that make you two inches taller stood here and talked with John, smoked a cigarette, walked around, picked up something—baseball bat, tree branch, nightstick— and hit John with it as hard as he could. John collapsed but didn’t die, and the man dragged him away from the stump and under the bush so he was invisible. He then stood behind that tree over there, smoking cigarettes—which he pinched off and put in his pocket, except the one he dropped—and watching John die. Cold- blooded, deliberate, smoking and watching.”
“I can’t see this as a pleasure killing,” objected Kate.
“No. Too casual, no ritual. And he didn’t come in close to watch,- it was more just waiting. He wanted John dead, didn’t mind if he suffered, but didn’t want to be too close. Could have been simply caution—he could get away more easily from over there if someone came down the road, couldn’t he?”
“You think he had a car along one of the streets outside the park?”
“Let’s get some posters up, see if anyone noticed something. Funny, though, about the cigarettes.”
“What about them?”
“Why did he pinch them all and take them?”
“To leave nothing behind. He watches too much television, thinks we can find him from a fingerprint on paper. Or just didn’t want us to know he was here.”
“Why not knock the ashes out into the cellophane wrapper, then? I’ve done that myself, smoking on a tidy front porch. And why didn’t he worry about his footprints? They’re at least as distinctive as his smoking habit.”
“Maybe the TV programs he watches only deal with fingerprints. That could also be why he waited for the man to die instead of bashing him again—he wasn’t necessarily coldblooded, just afraid of getting blood on his clothing. With the single hit, he was probably clean, but multiple blows would increase the risk of contamination.”
“You have an answer for everything, Martinelli. How about this one: What kind of man habitually pinches his cigarettes out rather than smashing them?”
“You’re the smoker, AI. You were, anyway. J don’t know. Someone showing macho? Like striking a match with your thumbnail to show how tough you are. Someone about to put the butt in his pocket and wanting to make sure it didn’t light his pocket on fire?”
“You’re probably right,” he said absently.
“Okay, AI. What kind of man would
“Because he went through at least six or eight of them without once forgetting and putting it out against the tree or under his foot. Pretty calculating for a guy standing there smoking nervously, waiting for a friend to die.”
“Friend?”
“Acquaintance at least. And you may be right about the reason for the habit. Or it could be he’s a man who doesn’t mind a bit of ash but doesn’t want to toss a burning butt onto the ground. Someone who works around flammable things, maybe. Or someone concerned with the litter. Groundskeepers rarely toss away their cigarettes,
