busy with Saturday night shoppers. Oh well, she was nearly home,- she would only be a little late.
There were four shops that Erasmus might have slipped into that afternoon, plus two blank and locked doors and a stairway up to the main level of shops. Two of the shopkeepers had at the time seemed merely harassed and innocent on a busy afternoon, one of them had been with a woman who was contemplating an expensive purchase and had not seemed the sort to shelter an escaped fool, but the fourth— Kate thought that she would have another word with the fourth shopkeeper, smiling behind his display of magic tricks and stuffed animals.
She parked beneath the NO PARKING sign in front of the shop and strolled in, her hands in her pockets. The man recognized her instantly,- this time his amusement seemed a bit forced, and he was flustered as he made change for the woman who was buying a stuffed pig complete with six snap-on piglets. Kate stood perusing the display of magic tricks until the customer left and he was finally forced to come over to her.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“I’m interested in disappearing tricks,” she said. She picked up a trick plastic ice cube that had a fly embedded in it, studying it carefully. “I had something large disappear, right in front of me. I’d like to know how it was done. I know that magicians don’t like to tell their secrets, but”—she put down the joke ice cube, and leaned forward—“I would really like to know.”
As she’d thought, he folded immediately. “I—I’m really sorry about that,- I didn’t know—I mean, I could tell you were a cop, but I thought you were just hassling him. They do it, to the street artists and stuff, and he’s such a harmless old guy, I just thought it was a joke when he came shooting in here and held his finger in front of his mouth and then ducked behind the curtain.”
So he’d been standing there less than ten feet away. Hell. She went and looked at the small, crowded storage space. He sure wasn’t there now.
“How did he know this was here?”
“He comes here every week. Oh yeah, I sell him things sometimes, magic stuff—you know, scarves and folding bouquets, that sort of thing. He changes clothes here and leaves his stuff in the back while he’s working. I don’t mind. I mean, he’s not that great a customer, never spends much money, but he’s such a sweet old guy, I never minded. What did you want him for?”
“Did he go out through the back?”
“Yes, that door connects with a service entrance. I let him out after you’d gone.”
“Did he leave anything here?”
“He usually does,- he changes out of his costume and leaves it here, but this time he was in a hurry. He just wiped the makeup off his face, took his coat out of the bag and changed his shoes, and took the bag with him.”
“Well, all I can say is, don’t complain about crime in the streets if a cop asks for your help and you just laugh in her face.”
“What did he do?” the man wailed, but Kate walked out of the shop and drove off.
When she got home to Russian Hill, Lee had gone to bed, Jon was sulking over a movie, and her dinner was crisp where it should have been soft, and limp where it had started crisp. However, she consoled herself with the idea that at least she knew how Brother Erasmus avoided carrying his gear all over the city with him.
¦
SEVENTEEN
¦
For the first time since he had come to San Francisco, Brother Erasmus did not appear on Sunday morning to preach to his flock of society’s offscourings, to lead them in prayer and song and listen to their problems and bring them a degree of cheer and faith in themselves. The men and women waited for some time for him in the meeting place near the Nineteenth Avenue park entrance, but he did not show up, and they drifted off, singly and in pairs, giving wide berth to two newcomers, healthy-looking young men wearing suitably bedraggled clothes but smelling of soap and shaving cream.
At two in the afternoon, Kate called Al Hawkin. “I think he’s gone, Al,” she told him. “Raul just called,- he and Rodriguez hung around until noon and there was no sign of him. All the park people expected him to show,- nobody knows where he might be. Do you want to put out an APB on him?”
“And if they bring him in, what do we do with him? We couldn’t even charge him with littering at this point. Unless you want to put him on a fifty-one-fifty.”
“No,” she said without hesitation. Putting Sawyer on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold would keep him in hand, but it would also open the door wide for an insanity plea, if they did decide to charge him. Beyond that, though, was a personal revulsion: Kate did not wish to see Brother Erasmus slapped into a psychiatric ward without a very good reason. Damn it, why did he have to disappear?
“It may come to that, but let’s give it another twenty-four hours.”
“Okay. And, Al? I talked to the guy in Chicago, he’s going to fax us some records when he can dig them out. And before that, on my way in, I stopped by and talked with that antique-store owner Beatrice told me about.” She reviewed that conversation for him, the trim woman in her fifties who had seemed mildly disturbed by her occasional lover’s death, but mostly embarrassed, both by the affair’s becoming public knowledge and by how little she actually knew about the man: He was not one for pillow talk, it seemed. She did say that he had a fondness for boastful stories about an unlikely and affluent past, which she dismissed, and a habit of denigrating the persons and personalities of others, often to their faces.
“Which is pretty much what we’ve heard already.”
“I know. Well, I’ll let you know if the Chicago information comes in. Talk to you later.”
“Look, Martinelli? Don’t get too hooked on this. You don’t have anything to prove.” There was silence on the line for a long time. “It’s Sunday,” he said. “Go home. Work in the garden. Take Lee for a drive. Don’t let it get to you, or you’ll never make it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ bullshit,” he snapped. “I don’t want to work with someone who obsesses about their cases.”
“All” Kate started laughing,- she couldn’t help it. “You’re a fine one to talk about being obsessive. What are you doing right now? What did I interrupt?”
His silence was not as long as hers had been, but it was eloquent.
“Look, Martinelli,” he said firmly, “that Brancusi case doesn’t look good, and there’s a lot hanging on my testimony tomorrow. I don’t think you can call that obsessive. I’m just doing my job. I only meant—”
“Go work in your garden, Al. Go for a walk on the beach, why don’t you? Go to a movie, Al, there’s a—”
He hung up on her. She put the receiver down, still grinning, and went home to pry some weeds out of the patio bricks.
¦
Monday morning, Al was in court and Kate was in Golden Gate Park. While Al was being dragged back and forth over the rougher parts of his testimony, Kate walked up and down and talked with people. She ignored the women with shiny strollers and designer toddlers, the couples soaking up winter sun on spread blankets, the skaters and bikers, and anyone with a picnic. The homeless are identified by the mistrust in their eyes, and Kate rarely chose wrong.
She talked with Molly, a seventy-one-year-old ex-secretary who lived off a minute pension and spent her nights behind an apartment house in the shelter that covered the residents’ garbage cans. Some of them left her packets of food, she’d received a blue wool coat and a nice blanket for Christmas, and yes, she knew Brother Erasmus quite well, such a nice man, and what a disappointment he wasn’t at the service yesterday. A couple of the others had tried to lead hymns, but it just wasn’t the same, so in the end she’d just marched down the road and gone to a Catholic church, although she hadn’t been to a church in twenty years, and it was quite a pleasant experience. Everyone had been so nice to her, welcomed her to have coffee and cookies afterward, and what do you know, as she got to talking to one of the girls who was serving the coffee, it turned out that they needed some help in the office, just three or four hours a week, but wasn’t that a happy coincidence. It’d mean she could buy a real dinner sometimes, such a blessing, dear.
