The Boys from Santa Cruz

CHAPTER FOUR
1

Whoever wrote that song wasn’t kidding about the morning fog filling the air, thought Pender, when he reached San Francisco early the next morning. Even with the headlights and windshield wipers on, he couldn’t see much farther than the end of the Toyota’s hood. Somehow he found his way to Francisco Street, though, and pulled into a convenient parking spot directly across the street from Epstein’s building.

A mist of silver droplets hung suspended in the air like a stop-motion rainstorm, muffling the thud of the car door. The city smelled of the ocean, sharp tang and faint rot; the pavement gleamed wet and gray. A rolled-up newspaper in a thin plastic bag lay on Epstein’s doormat. Pender picked it up and pressed the doorbell, heard chimes bing-bonging inside. Excuse me, I’m looking for Tony Bennett’s heart, he was planning to say when Epstein answered the door, only Epstein never answered the door. Pender rang the bell again and pressed his ear against the door. No footsteps, no sounds of life inside.

Puzzled, he took out his notebook to make sure he had the street number right, then tried the doorknob. To his surprise, it wasn’t locked. He shoved the door open and stuck his head inside. “Anybody home?” he called down the dimly lighted hallway. “It’s me, Pender.”

He closed the door behind him, put the paper down on the whatnot table next to the umbrella stand, then stooped to check out the mail that had fallen through the slot. It all had Epstein’s name on it-either that or “Occupant.”

But everything else was wrong, wrong, wrong, from the door that had not been locked to the dangling chain that had not been latched to the dual dead bolts that had not been thrown. Why would anybody so lax about security have installed redundant dead bolts in the first place?

Then there were those reddish brown flecks on the baseboard and the faint, roughly circular stain where the gloss had been rubbed off the hardwood floor of the hallway. Mark well, said Pender’s gut-after chasing serial killers for almost twenty years, he didn’t need phenolphthalein or luminol to tell him he was looking at blood spatter and a clumsy cleanup job.

Pender took a giant step over the stain and walked on down the hall, checking out the rooms on either side. In the living room, an upright vacuum cleaner stood abandoned, its power cord still plugged into the socket. In the kitchen, a full bottle of Heineken lay on the floor next to the refrigerator.

By now, Pender was in full don’t-fuck-up-the-crime-scene mode. Touching nothing, planting his feet wide so as not to step where footprints were most likely to be found, he used his handkerchief to turn the doorknob by the base when he opened the door of the bedroom at the end of the hall. The bed was unmade, with a duvet and a pair of pajamas on the floor, and the door of the adjoining bathroom was open. Backing out, Pender grabbed the edge of the door rather than the knob, and yanked the door closed behind him.

The door to the left of that one was slightly ajar. Pender edged it open, glanced around. Originally a guest bedroom, judging by the single bed and narrow dresser, the room was currently being used for storage. An old TV console minus the TV, an upended rowing machine leaning against the wall, boxes of old clothes, books, cassettes, LPs, board games, rolled-up posters, and small appliances, including a radio with a cracked Bakelite case and a toaster oven with a frayed cord.

It all looked random enough at first glance, but a closer inspection revealed to Pender’s trained eye a story written in the dust. A pattern of scrapes, drag marks, and rectangular depressions in the nap-worn carpet told him that someone had recently cleared a path diagonally across the room, shoving cartons aside to drag something heavy from the doorway to the closet.

In order to avoid disturbing the marks on the floor, Pender delicately picked his way around the edge of the room. When he reached the closet door, he took a deep, deliberate breath-slow the breath, slow the painful pounding of the heart-then used his handkerchief to turn the knob.

Sometimes you know what you’re going to see before you see it; sometimes you’re wrong. Pender had himself so convinced he was going to find Epstein’s body in the closet that after the door swung open, releasing the sickly sweet odor of day-old death, it took him a few seconds to realize that it was not Skip Epstein in drag he saw lying crumpled in the back of the cluttered, junk-filled closet, but a brown-skinned woman with her head wrapped in a bloody turban of paper towels.