go. Sorry. Be sure to tell Mina she was the best monkey I’ve ever seen.”
“I will tell her. And don’t worry, your avoidance of our potluck desserts is in good company.” Maj glanced over Kate’s shoulder toward the door. Kate turned and saw a distinctively tailored and hatted figure sweeping out of the school cafeteria. The moment the door swung shut behind him, someone’s voice rose above the Babel with a remark about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, the group of feminist vigilantes who had in recent weeks set the city on its ear with a series of creative and, Kate had to admit privately, funny acts of revenge. Just that morning the mayor had issued a statement to the press saying, in effect, “We are not amused.”
Kate smiled absently at the overheard remark and turned back to Maj. “That was the mayor, wasn’t it?”
Maj shrugged and gave her a crooked smile as if to apologize for a flashy display.
“I wondered whose car that was. Very impressive,” Kate told her. “Look, Maj, could you find someone who might be able to take Lee and Jon home? We only brought the one car.”
“We, on the other hand, always bring two, because Roz invariably finds someone she just has to talk to. I’d be happy to give them a ride, if they don’t mind waiting for Mina to stuff herself with cookies first.”
“I’m sure they won’t mind. Jon secretly adores Oreo cookies and— what are those Jell-O things called?”
“Jigglers,” Maj pronounced with fastidious disapproval, giving the word three syllables. Kate laughed and reached out again to pat Maj’s shoulder in thanks, waved to Lee, and hurried out of the school hall in the footsteps of Hizzoner to her own, lesser vehicle.
The western sky was still faintly light ahead of her as Kate drove down Lombard Street in the recently acquired and thoroughly broken-in Honda, which on the first warm day she owned it had declared itself to be the former property of a pizza delivery boy. She rolled down the window to let in the air of this April evening, clear and sweet after the drizzle earlier in the day, and wished she hadn’t let Lee bully her into giving up the motorcycle.
Kate loved San Francisco best at night. During the day it was an interesting city, decorative and lively and every bit as anonymous as a villain, or a cop, could ask for. But at night the city closed in and became intimate, a cluster of hills and valleys with the sea curled up against three sides of it. Sometimes, beneath the stars and the hum of traffic and the collective breathing of three-quarters of a million people, Kate imagined she could hear the city’s song.
The imagined song was a flight of fancy unlike Kate—or rather, unlike the image Kate had of herself—and a thing she had never mentioned to anyone, even to Lee. (Perhaps especially not Lee, an analytical therapist who tended to read far too much into small imaginings.) Like an old tune that had been recorded in a hundred ways, the song of the City could be smooth and sexy from the throat of a torch singer or ornate in
Lombard Street’s garish blast of motel and cocktail lounge lights cut off abruptly at the wide gate that marked the entrance to the Presidio, and the clutter of buildings and phone lines gave way to trees and dignified officers’ housing. The Army was in the process of withdrawing from the base it had built here, the most gorgeous piece of open land left in San Francisco, but so far the untidy life of civilian San Francisco had been kept at bay, and Kate’s headlights picked out neatly trimmed lawn and ranks of dark barracks. Following the directions she had been given, she kept to the right. The road passed along the edge of a parking lot so huge it might have been a parade grounds, with three cars in it, before narrowing further to become a single lane between a wooden building and the madly busy but oddly removed freeway that led to the Golden Gate Bridge, and then Kate saw the gates to the military cemetery and a police car across the adjoining road, turning cars back. She showed the uniform her identification and drove on, headlights playing now across rows of gleaming white gravestones that stretched up the hill to her left, and then the City’s song took on a discordant note, like the warning of a minor chord in a suspense movie, with the appearance of a brilliant blue-white light thrown against the undersides of the trees around the next turn.
The stark glare rising before her in the night made Kate slow to a crawl before rounding the corner. What looked like two hundred people were scattered up the road before her, although she knew it could not be more than thirty at the most, and that included the reporters, who had come here on foot, dragging their equipment with them, from where they had been forced to leave their vans on the other side of the cemetery. She pulled to one side and parked among a wild assortment of official vehicles—park police and SFPD cruisers, ambulance and coroner’s van, half a dozen unmarked police cars—and a few small cars from personnel who had been called from home. Further along the curve of the road, kept at a distance by uniforms but making full use of their long-range lenses, television vans were already in attendance, hoping for a lead story for the eleven o’clock news. A uniformed patrolman was still in the process of wrapping yellow tape around the perimeter of the crime scene, using trees, a fence post, and a convenient street sign. Kate nodded at familiar faces among the cops, ignored the questions of the reporters on this side of the scene, and ducked under the restraining tape.
Al Hawkin was standing with his hands in his pockets watching the medical examiner at work, homicide bag on the ground at his feet. He turned when he felt his partner at his side.
“So much for an evening off,” he said by way of greeting.
“If you’d called an hour earlier you’d have saved me from the whole play.”
“Which one was that?”
“A school play, if you can believe it. You know Roz Hall?” He nodded; half the people in the City knew Roz Hall, to their pleasure or their fury, and occasionally both at once. “Well, she and her partner, Maj, adopted Maj’s niece last year, and asked Lee to be the godmother. The kid—her name’s Mina—goes to a private school that’s big on ethnic celebrations, and this was some complicated Indian story about gods and wars. Mina played a monkey. The mayor himself was there.” Hawkin’s eyebrows went up. “So, what do we have here?”
“The ME beat me here, so I haven’t had a chance to look. Called in by a jogger just after six-thirty—there’s a uniformed at the guy’s house. Seems to be a white male, no obvious signs of violence that the jogger could see, but then he only looked close enough to pass on the CPR before heading home for a phone. I’d say the vie looks to be about twenty-four hours old.”
“Funny place to have a heart attack,” Kate remarked. “And he wasn’t exactly dressed for jogging.” What they could see of the body, half hidden by the bushes at the side of the paving, was clothed in heavy, stained work boots and some sort of khaki pants. “And why on earth didn’t anyone spot it during the day? This is a pretty heavily used road.”
“Not as many people on foot as usual, because of the rain. It was getting dark, so the guy who found him figured it was safe to stop and have a pee, happened to stop here.”
There was a certain humor in the picture, which Kate turned over in her mind as they waited to be allowed access to the body. Al broke into her thoughts with a question.
“Why do you suppose he was dropped here? Other than it’s dark and you can see cars coming?”
Kate looked around, and she had to admit that it was not the first place she would have chosen for easy disposal of an inconvenient corpse. “If it’d been me, I’d have gone on down there,” she told her partner, nodding toward a cluster of dark buildings in the hollow of the hill. “There’s no gate across the access road, is there?”
“Nope. And the park guys say there wasn’t anything going on there last night, shouldn’t have been any traffic down there at all.”
Kate turned and looked in the other direction, up the hill. On the other side of the road, some brambles and trees rose up, then the fence that surrounded the cemetery. “You suppose they were aiming for the cemetery but missed? Maybe there were people in there, scared the perps off.” She herself had run through the Presidio when she was feeling ambitious, and knew the cemetery for a closed-in area with limited access and regular visitors; too likely to get trapped in there, and hard to explain a dead body missing its casket and mortuary van.
Eventually, the ME stood away and she and Hawkin moved into the glare of the portable floodlights to get a closer look at their dead white male.
Dead he clearly was, and Kate agreed that trying CPR on that darkened face with that swollen, froth-covered tongue protruding was not a cheering prospect.
“Strangled,” she said, pointing out the obvious.
