became briefly aware of her surroundings. After a long time, Professor Whitlaw looked up at her, and to Kate’s astonishment the woman did not seem far from tears.
“I want David back, you do understand that. He was my best friend in all the world, and I have missed him terribly, every day, for all these years. However, much as I would rejoice in having him return to himself, I have to admit that what you want could finally destroy what remains of his life. If you make David break this strange vow of personal speechlessness, you will force him to break faith with his murdered son, and I suspect that for David that would be intolerable. It would negate the whole last ten years of his life. I do not wish to be overly dramatic, but I very much fear that if you break his oath, you will break him. You could kill him.”
“What would you recommend we do?”
“You might find the real murderer.”
Kate suppressed a surge of irritation. “Yes,” she said dryly.
“Other than that, frankly, I do not know what you can do. Self-preservation is too low a priority for him to respond to that particular appeal, and you have already tried to convince him that he has the responsibility to help bring the man’s killer to justice, with no result whatsoever. Unless you can convince him that his silence positively harms others, I can’t see that you’ll budge him.”
Kate began to pile her dishes together. She did not say anything, could not say anything without it being inexcusably rude. Even a “Thank you very much” would inevitably sound like sarcasm, and this woman was only doing her best. Still, even with all the pretty words she’d dressed it in, she had told Kate no more than she knew already: Erasmus would not talk, Sawyer would not save himself. So she said nothing. Professor Whitlaw, however, had one more observation to throw in.
“Martyrdom has always been the act of fools. It’s the ultimate absurdity, giving up one’s life for an idea.”
“Martyrs stand for something,” Kate said, suddenly fed up with words. “There’s nothing to stand for here. He’s just being stupid, and a real pain in the neck.”
With that judgment, she tipped her plate into the tub marked DISHES and walked out into the rain.
¦
TWENTY-THREE
¦
…
A few days later, David Sawyer was returned to the jail, along with a lengthy psychiatric evaluation that said, in effect, that the man was eccentric but quite sane enough to stand trial. That evening, on her way home, Kate stopped by his cell to see him. She stopped in the next night as well, to take him a book of poetry that Lee had sent, and the next. It soon became a part of her day, and twice when she was out in the city and might normally have gone directly home, she found herself making excuses to drop by her office first and then go up to the sixth floor for a few brief words.
Kate was not the only one to fall beneath the spell of Brother Erasmus. One evening he held out a flowered paper plate and offered her a home-baked chocolate chip cookie. A child’s drawing mysteriously appeared, Scotch- taped to the wall of his cell. Once, late, following a long and depressing day, Kate entered the jail area and heard the sound of Sawyer’s voice ringing out clear and loud among the astonishingly silent cells. When she came nearer, she saw him stretched out on his narrow bed, reading aloud from a book called
He had visitors, too, over the next couple of weeks. Those of the homeless who could work up the courage to enter the daunting Hall of Justice came for brief visits: Salvatore once, the three Vietnam vets once each, Doc and Mouse and Wilhemena twice each. Beatrice came four times in the first six days after he had returned to the jail. From Sawyer’s other worlds came Dean Gardner, who visited regularly, and Joel, the grad student who had given Erasmus rides to Berkeley. There was a steady stream of others from the seminary, professors, staff, and students, and from Fishermen’s Wharf, the owner of the store that sold magic supplies and the crystal woman.
Brother Erasmus even had his own newspaper reporter, who had adopted him and argued with his editor about the newsworthiness of a jailed homeless man. Ten days after Sawyer had been brought back to San Francisco, the reporter’s efforts paid off with a full-page human-interest story in the Sunday edition on homeless individuals, one of whom was Erasmus. Photographs and interviews of the homeless men and women connected to him, and of their more settled neighbors, succeeded in drawing a picture of the homeless population as a community of wise eccentrics. The feature spread resulted in a great deal of cynical laughter among those responsible for enforcing the law, a flurry of letters to the editor in praise and condemnation, a brief increase in the takings of the panhandlers across town, and even more visitors for David Sawyer.
It was a popular article, and two days later the reporter submitted another, smaller story, this one looking at the murder case itself in greater detail. His editor cut out half the words and changed it from an investigative piece to one with a greater emphasis on the people involved, but still, there it was in Wednesday’s paper, with interviews of five of the homeless, a review of the facts, and photographs of Erasmus, Beatrice, and the colorful Mouse.
The guards grumbled at the number of visitors they had to handle for this one prisoner. However, they did not stop bringing him plates of food their wives had made and snapshots of their dogs.
The only person Erasmus flatly refused to see was Professor Eve Whitlaw. Everyone else he listened to, smiled at, prayed with, and presented with a pithy saying to take away with them, but the English professor from his past, he would have nothing to do with. She tried twice but not again.
During the weeks after David Sawyer’s arrest, Kate had been immensely busy, not only with the case against Sawyer but with another investigation that she and Hawkin had drawn, the lye poisoning of an alcoholic woman (who had looked to be in her sixties but was in fact thirty-two), which could have been either accident or suicide but was looking more and more like murder. It involved long hours of interviewing the woman’s large and predominantly drunken extended family, and it left Kate with little time to spare for Erasmus, safe in his cell.
It was over a month since the murder, and Kate felt the Sawyer case slipping from her. She had neither the time nor the concentration to pursue it further, and she was uncomfortably aware that she might let it go entirely but for the continued entreaties of Dean Gardner and Professor Whitlaw. She came home late on a Monday night, aching with exhaustion, cold through, and hungry, and found a series of five pink “While You Were Out” slips lined up for her on the kitchen table: Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw, Rosalyn Hall, Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw.
Fortunately, it was too late to return the calls. However, she no longer had much of an appetite. She poured herself a tumbler glass of raw red wine, drank it up as she stood in the kitchen, filled up the glass again, and took it to bed.
¦
Things looked rosier in the morning, as she lay with Lee’s arm around her shoulder while they drank their morning coffee.
“You see,” Kate was saying, “what I had hoped to do was assemble enough quotes of my own to meet him on his own ground. I even got a book of quotations and started it off—The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself and ‘I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,” that kind of thing. But I can’t do it. I just don’t have time to memorize the whole damn book.“
“You saw the notes, that Eve and Philip Gardner called?”
“I did. I’ll call them later.”
“She’s only here for another month, did you know that?”
“So she told me. About six times. I don’t know what I can do, Sawyer won’t see her.”
The phone rang.
“Oh hell, it’s not even eight o’clock.”
“Let the machine get it,” Lee said, but Kate was already stretched across to the telephone.
“Yes?” she demanded. “Oh, Al. Hi. Yeah, I was expecting someone else. What’s—Who?” Kate became quiet and listened for a long time, unconsciously disentangling herself from Lee’s embrace until she was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “What do they think about her chances?” she said finally, listening again. “Okay. Sure. Do you have someone at the hospital? Good. See you there, twenty minutes.” She hung up and went to the closet.
“That wasn’t about David Sawyer, was it?” Lee asked.
