street performers wander up and down there. Isn’t that where Shields and Yarnell got their start?”
Kate had never heard of Shields or Yarnell, but she nodded her head in encouragement. However, it seemed that was about the sum of the report. After a bit more fussing and arrangements for the next phase of the grant application, Rosalyn hugged Lee and then left.
“Nice woman,” Lee commented, her wheels purring after Kate on the wood of the hall. Kate turned and went into the kitchen to stand in front of the refrigerator.
“Did I have lunch?” she called to Lee. Nothing in the gleaming white box looked familiar.
“Once, but who’s counting?” Lee answered. Kate fingered the increasingly snug waistband of her trousers and settled for an apple,- Jon’s cooking had its drawbacks.
“I’m going to have to be out tonight,” she told Lee.
“I’ve been surprised you haven’t had more calls at night,” Lee said in resignation. “I expected it, with you back on duty.”
“Yes, I’ve been lucky. It’s been quiet—nobody feels like shooting anyone in the rain. But I need to talk to one of Brother Erasmus’s flock, and Friday’s one of the few times I can find her without a search.”
¦
Sentient Beans was your typical Haight coffeehouse, self-conscious about its location and the sacred history of the district in the Beat movement and the Summer of Love. In this case, however, it was without the superiority of age, for its even paint and the cheerfulness of the furniture within gave it away as an imitation, set up by people who in 1967 would have considered an ice cream cone a mood-altering substance.
Still, it was a harmless enough place, and discreetly notified customers that the venerable Graffeo Company had deigned to supply it with French-roast coffee, the smell of which grabbed at Kate when she opened the door, a heady aroma, sharp and dark and rich as red wine. She ordered a latte and watched with approval as the man assembling it tipped the coffee over the steamed milk with a flip of the wrist rather than using the effete method of dribbling it cautiously over the back of the spoon to create multiple multicolored layers in the glass, a drink filled with aesthetic nuances but, to Kate’s mind, lacking the pleasurable jolt of contrast between milk and coffee. Reverse snobbery, Lee had called it once, admiring on that distant occasion her own tall glass with at least nine distinct strata.
“Have you seen Beatrice tonight?” she asked as she paid.
“She’ll be down in a bit,” said the man, and slapped Kate’s change down on the wooden bar. She picked up the dollars, tipped the rest of the change into the tips mug, and found a seat at a table with the surface area of a dinner plate. There was a guitarist at the far end of the L-shaped room, a woman all in black, with perhaps a dozen gold loops running up her ear and one through her nose. She was attempting classical music, with limited success: The notes kept burring and her fingers squeaked as they moved along the strings. However, the flavor was there, and Kate did not mind waiting.
Twenty minutes or so later, the guitarist took a break, and shortly after that, Beatrice came through the bar area and into the room, a ten-by-twelve artist’s pad in one hand and a small tin box in the other. She sat down in the point of the L and without fuss opened the box, took out a black felt-tip pen, and began to sketch the person sitting in front of her, her pen flashing across the page in sure, quick gestures. In a couple of minutes, she put the cap on the pen, tore the page off the pad, and put it on the table, then stood up and moved to another vacant chair and another face. A mug marked for the artist had joined TIPS and FOR THE MUSICIAN on the wooden bar, and as people left, they tended to put some change and the occasional small bill in Beatrice’s cup, even those who had not been sketched.
Eventually, when Kate had finished her second latte (this one decaffeinated) and was beginning to think she would have to approach the woman, Beatrice finished her dual portrait of a pair of nearly identical bristly-headed, metal-and-leather-clad punks, reached across her drawing on the table to pat the girl’s black leather sleeve affectionately, and then took her pad and tin box over to Kate’s table. She opened both and began to sketch.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “I thought I might see you one of these nights.”
“Hello, Ms. Jankowski.”
“Beatrice, dear,- call me Beatrice. I always feel that when someone calls you by your last name, it’s because they want something from you. Either that or they want you to know they are better than you. Funny, isn’t it, something looks like respect but underneath it’s a power trip. Do they still use that phrase, I wonder? My vocabulary is so dated, it’s coming back into style. You need a haircut, dear. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Martinelli. Kate,” she corrected herself with a smile.
“Just Kate? Not Katherine?”
“Katarina,” she admitted. Beatrice looked up from her drawing, both hands going still.
“Oh that’s very nice. Katarina. It sounds like those beautiful little islands down south, near Santa Barbara, is it? Or San Diego? Kate is too abrupt. Do you have a middle name?”
“Cecilia,” said Kate patiently.
“Katarina Cecilia Martinelli. Your mother was a poet. There’s power in names, you know,” she said, going back to her drawing. “Last names are safe, generic, but when you give someone your first name, you give them a part of yourself. What about your partner?”
“Al? You mean his name? It’s Alonzo. Hawkin, and I don’t know if he has a middle name.”
Beatrice stopped again, to gaze in an unfocused way at the shelves over the bar. “Alonzo,” she repeated softly. “Oh my. I am such a sucker for a pretty name. Other girls used to fall for eyes or a lock of hair, but I would just melt at a melodious name. My three husbands were named Manuel, Oberon, and Lucius. Of course, they were all bastards,- you’d think I would learn. I don’t think Alonzo would be a bastard though, do you?”
“No, but he’s already spoken for.” Kate exaggerated his marital status slightly for Al’s own benefit.
“I figured he would be.” She flipped the page of her sketchbook over to a fresh one. “But this chitchat is not why you’re here, is it?”
“No.”
“It’s about that odious man.”
“John? I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, why can’t you let him just… be dead?” she said crossly.
“Because if we let the ‘odious’ people be killed, where would it stop?”
“Oh, dear. You are right, I suppose. Very well,” she said, turning to her pad again, “ask away.”
“Do you know anything about John’s history? Where he was from, what he used to do?”
“He never talked to me, not that way. I don’t think he much liked women, certainly not to talk to. Not that he was gay, but a lot of men who sleep with women don’t much like them.”
“Did he sleep with many women?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. Just because people don’t have beds doesn’t mean they lack sexual organs,” Beatrice said, primly amused.
“Beatrice, I’m a cop, not a nun in a cloister,” Kate reminded her. “I was surprised because the way you’ve described him made him sound unattractive. Were other women attracted to him?”
“He was presentable enough, and certainly kept himself cleaner than a lot of the men do. I found him repulsive, true, but he could have a very glib tongue when he wanted to bother, and many women fall for a clever line even more than they do a pair of shoulders or a handsome face. I’m sure he got his share of female companionship.”
“Who in particular?” Kate asked, but Beatrice’s lips went straight and she bent over the pad. “The homeless women in the park? Wilhemena?” Beatrice snorted. “Adelaide? Sue Ann?”
Kate tried to remember the names that had cropped up, but Beatrice shook her head. “Did he have lady friends in the area, then?” Kate asked, and thinking she saw a slight hesitation in the moving hand, she pressed further. “One of the women who has a house near the park? Or someone who works here?”
“Shopkeepers. He liked shopkeepers,” Beatrice admitted.
“What kind? Bookstore, grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop—Beatrice, please tell me, I need to know.”
Beatrice pursed up her mouth and rubbed her lips with the side of her thumbnail, a portrait of anxious thought. It wouldn’t do for a woman living on the margins, dependent on the goodwill of her settled, more fortunate neighbors for what degree of comfort she managed to achieve, to offend them. Kate realized this and waited.
“Antiques,” she finally muttered. “Junk really, but pretentious. I saw him inside the antique store on the
