the glue should wear off in a few weeks. Before they scrubbed the paper portion off him, the police had photographed the note in situ. It read:
BENICE.ORELSE.
—
WHEN KATE REACHED HER desk, she found a note saying that James Larsen’s car had been found, parked on a street in the Mission and stripped down to its chassis. She rounded up Hawkin and they went out to look at it. The old Chevy sedan hadn’t been much to look at to begin with, and it had sat on the street for four days; no one had seen who left it; there were no keys and a million prints, most of which no doubt belonged to the kids who had liberated the car’s radio, battery, and the rest. They arranged to have it towed off for closer examination, on the stray chance that Larsen had been transporting drugs in the trunk or had himself made his final journey inside it, and spent a few fruitless hours asking questions in the neighborhood, but it was a community of blind people when it came to seeing who had driven up and abandoned the car there with its doors unlocked.
They then set off on the entertaining task of trying to trace the cuffs that had been used to restrain Larsen. The number of shops selling that particular brand of regulation police handcuffs in San Francisco was astonishing, even to Kate, who thought she had seen it all. In each of the shops she ended up going through the same ritual, fending off the shopkeeper and customers who found the idea of an actual live, badge-wielding cop on the premises too titillating for words. She was only grateful that she wasn’t wearing a uniform, or she might never have been allowed to escape without putting half the city in cuffs, for their own entertainment.
Aside from the car and the cuffs, the investigation had become simple slog, contacting those of Larsen’s family and acquaintances whom they had not reached earlier and going back over the phone bills and financial records. The preliminary lab report came through during the afternoon, telling them that Larsen’s last meal had been two or three hours before his death and had probably been a fast-food bacon-cheeseburger and fries. There was no trace of drugs on his clothes, in his blood, or in his history. Emily Larsen showed no signs of making a run for it, no one else in sight had any particular reason to kill him, and there had been no whiff of connections to shady business deals, outright crime, sleeping with someone’s wife, or any of the other customary reasons for knocking someone off.
This one looked to sit on the shelf gathering dust for a long time, Kate thought. Al agreed.
“One thing might be worth doing, though,” he suggested.
“That phone in the laundromat?”
“Yeah, but it’ll have to be about the same time the call was placed in order to do any good.”
“You weren’t doing anything tonight, were you, Al?”
“I’m already too late for dinner. I should probably call Jani and let her know not to wait up.”
While Al made his worn apologies to his new wife and stepdaughter, Kate phoned Lee and agreed to bring home mu shu pork and kung pao shrimp. The three of them ate in the dining room of the old house on Russian Hill, looking out over the squat presence of Alcatraz and the ferries going to and from Sausalito, and with the descent of night, the long string of white lights stretching the length of the Bay Bridge. They had some coffee and talked of nothing in particular, and at eight-thirty Kate and Al returned to the car and pulled away from the curb to nose their way back into the city.
Kate parked across the street from the laundromat. On the back wall of the brightly lighted space, between a dryer the size of a compact car and a machine that dispensed tiny cartons of soap powder and fabric softener, there stood a telephone, a call from which may have brought James Larsen out to his death. The laundromat stood in the middle of a busy block. Next door was a bustling Mexican restaurant that seemed to do as much take-away business as table service. Across the street was a record store, a coffeehouse, a late-night bookstore, and a Chinese restaurant. Plenty of people around to witness a person making a call, standing beneath the harsh blue light of a couple dozen fluorescent strips, but no one to notice.
No patron of the laundry admitted to having washed her clothes there on Monday night. The woman in charge of watching the machines snapped irritably that she was too busy folding clothes in the back for the drop-off trade, and that the damn phone was a pain in the neck, she and her husband were thinking of having it pulled out or replaced with one of those new models that people couldn’t call in on, and no, her husband had not been there on Monday. The two detectives thanked her and went back onto the street.
The staff in the Mexican restaurant, most of whom had been working Monday night, had also been too busy to notice any particular individual going in or out of the laundromat. The bookstore owner had seen a bearded Rastafarian using the phone for quite a while on Monday, in a conversation of escalating anger that ended with the man bashing the receiver down, kicking a wheeled laundry cart in passing, knocking over a menu board for the restaurant next door, and shouting his way down the street, though the bookseller thought it happened closer to ten, and Kate, while dutifully noting the story, could not summon much enthusiasm for the theory that a furious dreadlocked African-American had tempted James Larsen to drive from his home to San Francisco on Monday evening.
At ten o’clock, the businesses started shutting and the patrons of the laundromat staggered off with their bulging plastic sacks of clean clothes.TheMexicanplaceseemedprepared togoondishing up menudo and enchiladas until dawn, and at eleven, a pair of weary detectives went in and ordered bowls of soup at one of the back tables.
“Well, gee,” said Kate. “That was sure fun.”
“Lots of hot leads,” Al agreed glumly.
There had been nothing of the sort, merely blank looks accompanying shakes of the head alternating with polite (or not-so-polite) incredulity that they might be expected to remember a person (male or female? white, black, brown, or striped?) making a telephone call from the back of a busy laundromat five days before.
It had been worth doing, but neither of them was surprised at the lack of results. That was how the job went.
Which meant turning back to the victim and his wife, looking for some little thing that wasn’t right. Tomorrow.
“How’s Jani?” Kate asked him. “And Jules?”
“Jules is great. Maddening, but great.” Hawkin stirred the vegetables in his soup with close attention, and then his mouth twitched in a crooked smile. “Jani’s even greater. She’s pregnant.”
“Al! How fantastic. When is she due?”
“November sometime. We just found out the other day.”
“I’m so happy for you, Al. You are happy, I take it?”
“Oh, yeah. Nervous, I guess—I’ll be retired by the time he’s playing high school football. Or she.”
“All the more free time to volunteer as a coach. You don’t know what it is yet?”
“Jani doesn’t want to.”
“How did Jules react?”
“She’s been great. Embarrassed a little, I guess—I mean, parents don’t go around making babies, how gross. But underneath that, she’s excited too.”
“I must call her, see if she wants to go bowling or something. God, Al, you’re a lucky man.”
“Don’t I know it. Has Lee said anything—”
His question was cut short by the insistent beeping of the pager in his pocket, followed seconds later by Kate’s. Al went into the empty laundromat to use the telephone that had been the cause of the outing, while Kate paid the bill and took advantage of the restaurant’s toilet. When she came out of the restaurant Hawkin was leaning against the side of the car.
“Seems to be our week for dumped bodies,” Al told her. “This one’s out near the Legion of Honor.”
Anonymously dumped bodies were the hardest of all murders to solve. They were usually drug-related, there were rarely any witnesses around, and the forensic evidence was generally scarce—most often the victim’s pockets were empty, which made identification hard and in some cases impossible. No detective liked a John Doe, but there were any number of them on the books, going back years. Some would never be solved.
Again Kate’s car took her from city lights into tree-shrouded darkness. This time the lights were along Geary Boulevard, and the dark set in more gradually, eased by the orange glow of the parking area across from the Legion of Honor and the cool lights that turned the museum’s pillars into a sort of stripped-down Versailles. The stone lions watched the playing fountain and preserved the facade of civilization; then the road turned downhill and the night closed in.
