been greatly encouraged: There had been no antagonism, and he had interpreted Sawyer’s mute periods as the first signs of stress, the lapse of confidence that would open him up. Kate was not sure of that. She had been in the room with Sawyer and she had witnessed no lack of confidence. If anything, he seemed to be reconciling himself to his surroundings. When he came into the room, he stood easily in himself, he submitted to the handcuff rituals without noticing them, and he was beginning to look with interest at his jailers and fellow prisoners. Last night, the guards had told Kate, he had sung to the other inmates and read from his book of poetry. It had been, she was informed, the calmest Saturday night in a long time.
No, Kate did not think Erasmus was building up to a revelation,- she was afraid he might be settling down to a new home.
Had the tape recorder been voice-activated, the tape they were listening to might have run under two hours. As it was, by the time it ended, Kate was laying out plates and forks and the cold salads Jon had left for them. They helped themselves and carried their plates and glasses back to the sofas and the fireplace. Kate shoveled a few bites down and then opened her notebook.
“Now,” she began, “there are two reasons I’ve asked you to help me with this. The first, as I mentioned, is that one of you might have an idea about how we can get David Sawyer to talk to me about the murdered man. The other is to help me decipher what he’s already told us. It would take me years to track down the references and meanings you probably know instantly.”
“I don’t know about Professor Whitlaw,” began the dean.
“Eve, please,” murmured the professor.
“Eve, then. But it would take me hours to figure out sources for most of the quotes Erasmus uses.”
“I don’t think we need all of them. How about if we concentrate on the ones that don’t seem to have much bearing on the question that we’re asking at the time.”
“What do you hope to gain?” the professor asked doubtfully.
“I won’t know unless I find it. You see, in an investigation like this we may ask a hundred useless questions for every one that turns out to be of importance. The hope is that a thread end may appear in the process.”
“The method is not precisely scientific,” said Professor Whitlaw, sounding disapproving.
“That side of it is not. It’s an art rather than a science,” Kate stated, hoping she sounded confident rather than apologetic. The dean and the professor seemed satisfied, though the therapist lowered her gaze to her plate and did not respond.
“For example. Dean Gardner, when—”
“Philip.”
“Philip. When I first met you, Erasmus said something about—where is it? Here… Jerusalem killing the prophets, and you interpreted that as a reference to hens, and therefore eggs, and so decided he wanted omelets for breakfast.” Lee was frowning and Eve Whitlaw smiling at the convoluted reasoning. “Now, I’m assuming there are other places in the Bible or Shakespeare or wherever where hens are mentioned. Why did he choose this one?”
Philip Gardner scowled at the first page of the thick sheaf of papers. “Yes, I see what you mean. The Beatitude he quoted before that was definitely from Luke, not Matthew, so it wasn’t a tie-in from that. And before, let’s see. It was Corinthians.”
The professor had put her plate aside and picked up her own papers. “Perhaps the link in his mind was thematic rather than—what, bibliographic? I see he was citing Paul’s criticisms of the Corinth church for not accepting the negative side of being prophets—that is, being perceived as silly or mad. It is a reasonably close parallel to ‘Jerusalem killing the prophets,” don’t you think?“
“Was Sawyer saying that he is a prophet, would you say?” Kate asked.
“I don’t think we should read too much into his choice of passages,” the professor objected. “It strikes me that he uses whatever is to hand, then cobbles the phrases together as best he can. A bit like a collage, where the overall effect is more the point than the parts that go to make it up.”
“Would you agree with that, Lee?”
“A Freudian would say that each phrase has to be analyzed in regards to its setting, but I am no Freudian. However, I think you do have to be aware of the sources—where they come from and what’s going on in the place he lifts them from—and to be sensitive to any themes and patterns that may appear. It’s like a collage I saw once, Eva, to use your analogy. It was a giant picture of an empty chair with a book on the floor next to it, but when you got up close you saw that the whole thing was made up of snippets of naked female bodies, cutouts of portions of breast and navels and throats. Knowing that changed the meaning of the final collage considerably. Which was the whole point.”
“Philip?”
“I agree, the overall picture is more important than the component parts. For one thing, I don’t think Erasmus regards himself as a prophet. A prophet is chosen, often despite his wishes, and spends his time exhorting, preaching, driving people toward right behavior. In my experience, Erasmus seems to spend a great deal of his time listening, and when he does preach, it’s often far from clear what he thinks you should do. No, he’s no prophet. Although he may well be a saint.”
Kate looked at him, startled, but he did not appear to be joking.
“Are you serious?”
“About his potential sainthood? Oh yes. You have to remember that even Francis of Assisi was a man before he was a saint. Why not Erasmus?”
She could think of no way to answer that, so Kate turned back to her notes. “Why not indeed? Tell me about his choice of passages that first day, out on the lawn at CDSP. What is Corinthians? Why would he use it so much?”
¦
It was very late when the meeting broke up, and Kate felt more battered than enlightened. It had been a slow and laborious process, and humiliating, an ongoing admission of her own profound ignorance. She had persisted, however, and in the car, driving back from delivering Professor Whitlaw to the Noe Valley house, she came to certain conclusions.
First of all, she abandoned any hope of finding a hidden meaning in Sawyer’s utterances by looking at their original context. Occasionally he used a phrase to refer to a story or episode, but those were generally characterized by the marked inappropriateness of the phrase, such as when he referred to the dead man as “He was not the Light” to give the man a name. For the most part, Sawyer used a quotation as raw material, hacked from its setting regardless.
Beyond that, Kate was not sure what she had expected. However, she did not feel it had been a wasted day. Without knowing why, she felt she had been told the layout of a dark room: She still couldn’t see where she was going, but she could begin to sense the shapes and obstacles it contained.
And as she turned up Russian Hill, she began to play with the idea of meeting Erasmus on his own ground. Could her team of translators assemble enough quotes of their own to enable her, as their mouthpiece, to put David Sawyer on the spot?
Could it be that he was waiting for someone to do just that?
¦
TWENTY-TWO
¦
When the phone rang at 2:20 on Wednesday morning, Kate’s first thought was how she’d forgotten this jolly side of working homicide. Her second thought was that David Sawyer had attempted suicide.
“Martinelli.”
“Inspector, this is Eve Whitlaw.”
“Professor Whitlaw?” Kate dashed her free hand across her eyes and squinted at the bedside clock. Yes, it was indeed the middle of the night. “What is it?”
“It’s about David. I know why he does it.”
