To Play the Fool

To Play the Fool

Laurie R. King

♦

ONE

♦

Brother Fire

The fog lay close over San Francisco the morning the homeless gathered in the park to cremate Theophilus.

Brother Erasmus had chosen the site, the small baseball diamond in the western half of Golden Gate Park. Only one or two of the men and women who came together recognized the macabre irony in the site’s location, which adjoined the barbecue pits, and wondered if Brother Erasmus had done it deliberately. It was his style, to be sure.

The first of the park’s residents to wake that gray and dripping January morning was Harry. His awakening was abrupt as always, more a matter of being launched from sleep by the ghosts in his head than it was a true waking up. One moment he was snoring peacefully,- the next he snorted, and then there was a brief struggle with the terrifying confines of the bedroll before he flung it off and scrambled heavily upright to crash in blind panic through the shrubs. After half a dozen steps his brain began to make its connections, and after three more he stopped, bent over double to cough for a while, and then turned back to his bed beneath the rhododendrons. He methodically loaded his duffel bag with the possessions too valuable to risk leaving behind—the photograph of his wife and their long-dead son taken in 1959, one small worn book, a rosary, the warm woolen blanket some kind person had left (he was certain) for him, folded on their front steps—and began to close the duffel bag, then stopped, pulled it open again, and worked a hand far, far down into it. Eventually his fingers closed on the texture they sought, and he pulled out a necktie, a wadded length of grubby silk with an eye-bruising pattern that had been popular in the sixties. He draped it around the back of his neck, adjusted the ends in front, and began the tricky loop-and-through knot with hands composed of ten thumbs. The third time the slippery fabric escaped his grasp, he cursed, then looked around guiltily. Putting an expression of improbable piety onto his face, he returned to the long-unused motions. The fifth try did it. He pulled the tie snug against the outside collars of the two shirts he wore, then after a moment of thought bent again to the duffel bag. This time he did not have to dig any farther than his forearm before encountering the comb, as orange as the tie and almost as old. He ran the uneven teeth through his thin hair, smoothed the result down with spit-wet palms, straightened his wrinkled tie with the panache of an investment banker, and pulled the top of the duffel bag shut.

Harry took a final look around his cavelike shelter beneath the shrubbery, swung the bag over his right shoulder, and pushed his way back out into the clearing. He paused only to pick up the three dead branches he had leaned against the tree the night before,- then, branches upraised in his left hand, he turned west, deeper into the park.

Scotty was awake now, too, thanks to Harry’s convulsive coughing fit 150 feet away. Scotty was not an early riser. He lay for some time, listening through a stupor of sleep and booze to the preparations of his neighbor. Finally Harry left, and the silence of dripping fog and cars on Fulton Street lulled him back toward sleep.

But Theophilus was your friend, he told himself in disgust; the least you can do is say good-bye to him. His hand in its fingerless glove crept out from the layers of cardboard and cloth he was swaddled in, closed on the neck of the bottle that lay beside his head, and drew it back in. The mound that was Scotty writhed about for a moment; gurgles were followed by silence,- finally came a great weary sigh. Scotty evolved from the mound, scratched his scalp and beard thoroughly, drank the last of the cheap wine against the chill of the morning, and then with a great heaving and crashing hauled his grocery cart out of the undergrowth.

Scotty did not bother with self-beautification, just set his weight against what had once been a Safeway trolley and headed west. However, he walked with his eyes on the ground, occasionally stopping and bending down stiffly to pick up pieces of wood, which he then arranged on top of his other possessions. He seemed to prefer small pieces, but he had a sizable armful by the time he reached the baseball diamond.

As he went under the Nineteenth Avenue overpass, which was already humming with the early bridge traffic, Scotty was joined by Hat. Hat did not greet him—not aloud, at any rate— but nodded in his amiable way and fell in at Scotty’s side. Hat almost never spoke,- in fact, he had received his name only because of the headgear he always wore. Brother Erasmus might know his real name—Harry had once said that he’d seen the two men in deep conversation—but no one else did. Hat migrated about the city. For the last few weeks, he had taken to sleeping near the Stow Lake boathouse. Today’s hat was a jaunty tweed number complete with feather, rescued from a bin outside a health-food store,- it was marred only by three small moth holes and a scorch mark along the back brim. He also wore a Vietnam-era army backpack slung over his shoulder. In his right hand he held a red nylon gym bag that he’d found one night in an alley. (He had discarded most of the burglary tools it contained as being too heavy, though the cash it held had been useful.) In his left hand he clutched the pale splintery slats of a broken-up fruit crate. His waist-length white beard had been neatly brushed and he wore a cheery yellow primrose, liberated from a park flowerbed the previous afternoon, in his lapel.

From across the park the homeless came, moved by a force most of them could neither have understood nor articulated. Had you asked, as the police later did, they could have said only that they came together because Brother Erasmus had asked them to. That good gentleman, though, despite appearing both lucid and palpably willing to help, proved as impossible to communicate with as if he had spoken a New Guinean dialect.

And so, despite their lack of understanding, they came: Sondra from the Haight, wearing her best velvet,- Ellis from Potrero Street, muttering and shaking his head (an indication more of synapse damage than of disapproval),- Wilhemena from her habitual residence near the Queen Wilhemena Tulip Garden, her neighbor Doc from the southern windmill, the newly-weds Tomas and Esmerelda from their home beneath the bridge near the tennis court. Through the cultivated wilderness of John McLaren’s park they came, to the baseball diamond where Brother Erasmus, John, and the late, lamented Theophilus awaited them. Each one carried some twigs or branches or scraps of wood,- all of them tried to assemble before the sky grudgingly lightened into morning,- the entire congregation came, each adding his or her wood to the pile Brother Erasmus had made beneath the stiff corpse, and then standing back to await the match.

Of course, there were other people in the park that morning. Cars passed through on Nineteenth Avenue, on Transverse Drive, on JFK Drive, but if they even noticed the park residents drifting through the fog, they thought nothing about it.

Other early users, however, did notice. The spandex-and-Nike-clad runners from the neighboring Richmond and Sunset districts had begun to trickle into the park at first light. Committed runners these, men and women who knew the value of sweat, unlike the mere joggers who would appear later in the day. They thudded along roads and paths, keeping a wary, if automatic, eye out for unsavory types who might beg, or mug, or certainly embarrass. It was actually relatively rare to see one of the homeless up and around at this hour, though they were often to be glimpsed, huddled among their possessions in the undergrowth or, occasionally, upright but apparently comatose.

This morning, though, the natives were restless. Several runners glanced at their chronographs to check that it was indeed their usual time, two or three of them wondered irritably if they were going to have to change where they ran, and some saw the sticks the tatterdemalion figures carried and abruptly shied away to the other side of the road.

The morning’s injury (aside from the blow that had downed poor Theophilus—but then, that was from the previous day) happened to a bright young Stanford MBA, a vice president’s assistant from the Bank of America. He was halfway through his daily five-mile stint, running easily down Kennedy Drive past the lake, the morning financial news droning through the headphones into his ears and the thought of an ominous meeting in four hour’s time looming large in his consciousness, completely unprepared for the apparition of a six-foot-four bearded lunatic crashing out of the bushes with a huge club raised above his head. The MBA stumbled in sheer terror, fell, rolled, struggled to rise, his arms folded to protect his skull—and watched his would-be attacker give him a puzzled glance and finish hauling the eucalyptus bough out from the bushes, then walk away with the butt end of it on his shoulder and the dead leaves swishing noisily and fragrantly behind him.

By the time the trembling jogger had hobbled painfully onto Park Presidio, hitched two rides home, iced his swollen ankle, and telephoned the police, the assembly in the glen was complete: some two dozen homeless men and women, arrayed in a circle around a waist-high heap of twigs and branches, into which was nestled a small stiff body. They were singing the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” painfully out of tune but with enthusiasm, when Brother Erasmus set the match to the pyre.

The headline on the bottom of page one of that afternoon’s Examiner read: HOMELESS GATHER TO CREMATE BELOVED DOG IN GOLDEN GATE PARK.

♦

Three weeks later, his breath huffing in clouds and the news announcer still jabbering against his unhearing ears, the physically recovered but currently unemployed former Bank of America vice presidential assistant was slogging his disconsolate way alongside Kennedy Drive in the park when, to his instant and unreasoning fury, he was attacked for a second time by a branch-wielding bearded man from the shrubbery. Three weeks of ego deflation blew up like a rage-powered air bag: He instantly took four rapid steps forward and clobbered the unkempt head with the only thing he carried, which happened to be a Walkman stereo. Fortunately for both men, the case collapsed the moment it made contact with the wool cap, but the maddened former bank assistant stood over the terrified and hungover former real estate broker and pummeled away with his crumbling handful of plastic shards and electronic components.

A passing commuter saw them, snatched up her car telephone, and called 911.

Three minutes later, the eyes of the two responding police officers were greeted by the sight of a pair of men seated side by side on the frost-rimed grass: One was shocked, bleeding into his shaggy beard, and even at twenty feet stank of cheap wine and old sweat,- the other was clean-shaven, clean-clothed, and wore a pair of two-hundred-dollar running shoes on his feet. Both men were weeping. The runner sat with his knees drawn up and his head buried in his arms,- the wino had his arm across the other man’s heaving shoulders and was patting awkwardly at the runner’s arm in an obvious attempt at reassurance and comfort.

The two police officers never were absolutely certain about what had happened, but they filled out their forms and saw the two partners in adversity safely tucked into the ambulance. Just before the door closed, the female officer thought to ask why the homeless man had been dragging branches out of the woods in the first place.

By the time the two officers pounded up the pathway into the baseball clearing, the oily eucalyptus and redwood in this second funeral pyre had caught and flames were roaring up to the gray sky in great billows of sparks and burning leaves. It was a much larger pile of wood than had been under the small dog Theophilus three weeks earlier, but then, it had to be. On the top of this pyre lay the body of a man.

♦

TWO

♦

The Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula,

without comforts, without possessions, eating

anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on

the ground.

“God Almighty,” muttered Kate Martinelli, “what’ll you bet Jon does a barbecue tonight.”

She and Al Hawkin stood watching the medical examiner’s men package the body for transport. The typical pugilist’s pose of a burned body was giving the men problems, but they finally got the fists tucked in and loaded the body onto the van. The cold air became almost breathable.

“You know,” remarked Al, squinting up at a tree, “that’s the first joke I’ve heard you make in—what, six months?”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

“It’ll pass for one.”

“Life has not been funny, Al.”

“No,” he agreed. “No. How is Lee?”

“She’s doing really well. She finally found a wheelchair that’s comfortable, and the new physical therapist seems good. She wants to try Lee in a walker in a week or so. Don’t mention it, though, if you talk to Lee. She’ll want to do it then and there.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Did I tell you she’s started seeing clients again?”

“No! Now, that is good news.”

“Only two of them, and on different days, but it gives her a feeling of real life. It’s made a hell of a difference.”

“I can imagine. Do you think she’d like a visitor?”

“She always loves to see you, Al.”

“I got the impression it tired her out.”

“Tires her for that day, cheers her up for the next two. A good trade. Just call before you go,- she doesn’t deal too well with surprises.”

“I’ll call. Tomorrow, if I can swing it. I’ll take her some flowers.”

“Don’t do that. Lee hates cut flowers.”

“I know. It’ll give us something to argue about.”

“So thoughtful, Al.”

“That’s me.”

“Well,” said Kate, pulling her notebook and pen from a jacket pocket, “back to work.”

“Martinelli?” She stopped and turned to look at her partner. “It’s good to have you back.”

Kate ducked her head in acknowledgment and walked quickly away.

Al Hawkin watched her walk toward the motley congregation of homeless, her spine straight and her attitude as quietly self-contained as ever, and found himself wondering why the hell she had come back.

The last months must have seared themselves straight down into the bones of her mind, he reflected, but aside from the increased wariness in her already-wary eyes, she did not show it. Oh, yes—and the white-eyed terror with which she regarded the three newspaper reporters who slouched behind the police tapes.

Last spring the media had seized her with sheer delight, a genuine San Francisco lesbian, a policewoman, whose lover had been shot and left dramatically near death by a sociopath who was out to destroy the world-famous artist Eva Vaughn— the combination of high culture, pathos, and titillation were irresistible, even for serious news media. For a couple of weeks, Kate’s squarish face and haunted dark eyes looked out from the pages of supermarket scandal sheets and glossy weekly news journals, and ABC did a half-hour program on homosexuality in the police force.

And while this jamboree was going on, while the hate mail was pouring in and the Hall of Justice switchboard was completely jammed, Kate lived at the hospital, where her lover teetered on the edge of death. It was six weeks before Kate knew Lee would live,- another six weeks passed before the doctors voiced a faint hope that she might regain partial sensation and a degree of control below the waist.

At this juncture Hawkin had done something that still gave him cold sweats of guilt when he thought about it: Guided by an honest belief that work would be the best therapy for Kate, he had taken ruthless advantage of her newfound optimism and yanked her back onto the force, into their partnership, and straight into the unparalleled disaster of the Raven Morningstar murder case. And of course, when the case blew up in blood and scandal back in August, the media had been ecstatic to find Kate right in the middle. That she was one of the few out of the cast of dramatic personae not culpable for any fault greater than a lack of precognition mattered not. She was their prize, their Inspector Casey, and she bled publicly for the nation’s entertainment.

Why she had not resigned after the Morningstar case, Hawkin could not understand. She hadn’t put her gun inside her mouth because Lee needed her,- she hadn’t had a serious mental breakdown for the same reason. Instead, she had clawed herself into place behind a desk and endured five months of paper shuffling and that special hatred and harassment that a quasimilitary organization reserves for one of their own who has exposed the weakness of the whole. Two weeks ago, pale but calm, she had appeared at Hawkin’s desk and informed him that if he still wanted her as his partner, she was available.

He held an enormous respect for this young woman, a feeling he firmly kept from her, and just as firmly demonstrated before others in the department.

However, he still didn’t know why the hell she had come back.

♦

At four o’clock that afternoon, across town at the Hall of Justice, the question had not been answered so much as submerged beneath the complexities of the case.

“So,” Hawkin stretched out in his chair and tried to rub the tiredness from the back of his neck. The coffee hadn’t helped much. “Have you managed to make any sense of this mess?” He might have been referring to the case in general, or to the unruly drift of papers covering the desk’s surface, which now included roughly transcribed interviews, printouts of arrest records for the people involved, as well as the records from the earlier dog incident. This last report had been couched in phrases that made clear what the two investigating officers had thought of their odd case, wandering as it did between a recognition of its absurdity and downright sarcasm at the waste of their time. The recorded interview with the dog’s owner had been perfunctory and less than helpful, and Hawkin’s interview with the officer involved had stopped short of scathing only because he knew that his own reaction would have been much the same as the younger man’s.

“A bit, but we have to find this man Erasmus. He organized the cremation of the dog last month, though everyone was quite clear—those who were clear, that is, if you know what I mean—that he wasn’t here this time. They seem to have decided that what was good enough for the dog was good enough for the dog’s owner. Crime Scene’s going back tonight to check the whole area with Luminol, but it looks like one patch of blood that bled slowly and stopped with death rather than blood pouring out from, say, a knife wound. Could have been shot, but Luis, one of the men who found him, said his head looked bashed. And of course we know what happened to every loose stick in the whole damned park. Sorry? Oh, yes, I’ll have another cup, thanks.

“Where was I?” Kate thumbed through her notes a moment. “Okay, who found the body. Harry Radovich and Luis Ortiz both claim they saw him first, but they were together, and their stories mesh—though Harry’s is a little clearer in the details. They saw his kit abandoned behind a bench at about six p.m., went looking for him, and found him. You saw the place, about three hundred yards from where they tried to burn him this morning. At first they thought he was asleep, lying facedown, slightly tilted onto his right side, under that tree with the branches that touch the ground. They were worried, seeing him lying on the ground just in his clothes, and thought he might be sick, this flu that’s going around. So they shook his legs, got no response, pushed their way in and turned him on his back. There was dried blood covering the right side of his head and face, his eyeballs were slightly sunken and dry-looking, the corneas cloudy, his facial skin dark with no blanching under pressure, and he was getting pretty stiff in his upper body.”

“A couple of drunks told you all that?” asked Hawkin, turning from the coffee machine to look at her in astonishment.

“Luis was a medic in Vietnam for three years,- he knows what a dead body looks like.”

“So you think his judgment’s good on this?”

“Large grain of salt, but he swears he didn’t get truly smashed until after finding the body, and he seems shaky now but sober. His testimony is worth keeping in mind, that’s all, until we hear the postmortem results.”

“Which probably won’t tell us much about time of death unless the stomach contents are good.”

“Any idea when they’ll do the postmortem?”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Good,” she said evenly, as if talking about the arrival of a tidy packet of information instead of the participation in an ordeal of burned flesh and the smell of power saws cutting through bone.

“Meanwhile, though,” he said, “what are we talking here? Middle-aged alcoholic on a night just above freezing, how many hours to rigor?”

“John didn’t drink. They all agree on that. Or use drugs.”

“Okay. So assuming they recognize liver mortis when they see it, which I doubt, that’d put it, oh, say some time before noon on Tuesday morning. Just as a guideline to get us started.”

“I agree, though I’d lean to the later end of that. His body looked on the thin side.”

As Hawkin had studiously avoided any close examination of the remains, he couldn’t argue.

“Any of them have a last name for him, any ID?” he asked.

“Nope. They just knew him as John.”

“Theophilus’s owner.”

“Who?”

“The dog. Means ‘one who loves God,” I think.“

“What is this, a mission to the homeless? Lover of God and Brother Erasmus. Batty names.” Kate snorted.

“Erasmus was a philosopher, wasn’t he? Wrote The Praise of Folly. Seventeenth century? Sixteenth?”

“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, this Erasmus is across the Bay somewhere, Berkeley or Oakland, not due back until Sunday, and they were afraid the body would smell, so they didn’t wait for him to get back. Just hauled in every scrap of wood they could find, shoved his body on, added a few bottles of various flammable liquids, and lighted it. With prayers, read by Wilhemena and one of the men. Rigor mortis may have been beginning to wear off, by the way, at six this morning. His head was floppy when they moved him onto the woodpile.”

“Right. Let’s hang on to Harry, Luis, and Wilhemena, at least until we get the postmortem report to give us a cause of death. Charge them with improper disposal of a body, interfering with an investigation, whatever you like. The rest of them can go. And we might as well go, too. There’s not much more we can do until the results come in, except find the good Brother Erasmus. You want to do that?”

“Tonight?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll take the postmortem.”

How interesting, Hawkin thought. I’ve only worked with Martinelli for a total of a few weeks, and most of that was months ago, but I can still read her face. She’s trying to decide if she should insist on taking the shit job, to prove herself capable. No, can’t quite do it. Can’t quite admit she’s relieved that I took it, either.

Kate was still wrestling with gratitude when Hawkin’s phone rang.

“Hawkin,” he said, and listened for a minute. “I am.” Another longish pause, then: “Sure, bring her up.” He hung up and looked at Kate. “There’s a homeless woman downstairs, came in with information on the cremation.”

♦

THREE

♦

Water his sister, pure and clean and inviolate.

The woman who entered a few minutes later wasn’t quite what Kate had expected. She was quite tidy, for one thing, her graying hair gathered into a snug bun at the nape of her neck,- her eyes darted nervously about, but they were clear, and her spine was straight. She wore the inevitable eclectic jumble, long skirt with trouser cuffs underneath, blouse, vest, knitted shawl, and rings on five fingers, but she wrapped her clothes around her with dignity and sat without hesitation in the chair Hawkin indicated. Kate turned another chair around to the desk and took out her pen. Hawkin looked down at the paper he’d just been given and then up at her, a smile of singular sweetness on his rugged face.

“Your name is Beatrice?” he asked, giving the name two syllables.

“Beatrice,” she corrected, giving it the Italian four.

“Any last name?”

“Not for many years.”

“What was it then?”

“The men downstairs asked me that, too.”

“And you didn’t give it to them.”

“I was not impressed by the manners of your police department.”

“I apologize for them. Their youth does not excuse them.”

She studied him thoughtfully.

“Forgive them,- for they know not what they do. That’s what Brother Erasmus would say, I suppose.”

“Who is this Brother Erasmus?” he asked her.

“Jankowski.”

“Erasmus Jankowski?” Hawkin said, polite but amazed.

“No! I hardly know the man,” Beatrice protested. Kate rested her elbow on the desk and pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment. “Well, no, I admit I do know him, as well as anyone you brought in this morning, which isn’t saying much.”

“It’s your last name, then? Beatrice Jankowski?”

“You can see why I gave up the last part.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hawkin, rising to gallantry. “It has a certain ring to it.”

“Like a funeral toll,” she said expressively. Hawkin abandoned his flirtation.

“What do you know about what happened in Golden Gate Park this morning, Miss—is it Miss Jankowski?”

“Call me Beatrice. I told them they were imbeciles, but even men who fry their brains on cheap wine don’t listen to women.”

“You tried to dissuade them… from the cremation.”

“There is a difference between a man and a dog, after all.”

“You were there when the dog was cremated—what was it, three or four weeks ago?” Hawkin asked.

“That had a certain beauty,” Beatrice said wistfully. “It was appropriate. It was also—well, perhaps not strictly legal, but hardly criminal. Wouldn’t you agree?” she asked, and blinked her eyes gently at Al Hawkin. He avoided the question.

“Did you know the dead man?”

“I knew the dog, quite well.”

“And the man?”

“Oh dear. He was…” For the first time Beatrice Jankowski looked uncomfortable. “You don’t really want to know about him.”

“I do, you know.”

She met his eyes briefly, looked down at her strong fingers with their swollen knuckles, twisting and turning one ring after another, and sighed.

“Yes, I suppose you do. I’d rather talk about the dog.”

“Tell us about the dog first, then,” Hawkin relented. Relief blossomed on the woman’s weathered face and her hands lay still.

“He was a real sweetheart, white, with a black patch over his left eye. His coat looked wiry, but he was actually quite soft, picked up foxtails terribly. John—that’s his owner—had to brush him every day. Very intelligent, particularly when you consider the size of his skull. I saw him cross the road once, looking both ways first.”

“So how did he die?”

“We… They… No one saw. He must have made a mistake crossing the road. John found him, in the morning. He’d hit his head on something.”

“Or something had hit him.” She nodded. “Or kicked him.” Her face contracted slowly and her fingers began to wring each other over and over.

“How did John die?”

“I don’t have any idea. I didn’t even see him.”

“How did you hear about his death?”

“Mouse told me late last night. He was sorting through the bins behind a restaurant on Stanyon Street.”

“Which one is Mouse?”

“They call him Mouse because he used to be in computers, before his breakdown. Lovely man. His other name is Richard, I believe.”

“Richard Delgadio. Tall black man, hair going gray, short beard?”

“Is that his last name? Delgadio. What a lovely sound.”

“What time did he tell you about John’s death?”

In answer, the woman pushed her left sleeve up her arm and looked eloquently at the bare wrist.

“Roughly what time, then?” Hawkin asked patiently.

“Time,” she mused. “Time takes on rather a different aspect on the streets. However, I do remember that the dress shop was closed, but the bookstore was still open, so that would make it between nine and eleven. Is it of any importance to your investigation?”

“Probably not.” Beatrice giggled, and Hawkin gave her a smile. “But you didn’t go to the—what did they call it? The cremation?”

“I did not. I told Mouse then and there he was a cretin and a dunderhead, and that he should tell Officer Michaels about John.”

“Michaels is one of the local patrolmen?”

“He’s a hunk.”

“Sorry?” Hawkins asked, startled at the unlikely word.

“He is. Gorgeous legs, just the right amount of hair on them. Don’t tell him I said anything, though. He might be embarrassed.”

Kate thought she recognized the description.

“Is this one of the bicycle patrol officers?” she asked.

“Gorgeous,” Beatrice repeated in agreement. Al Hawkin’s mouth twitched.

“But you didn’t report John’s death?” he asked.

“It was not my place.”

“You knew they were planning on burning the body first thing in the morning.”

“Mouse found a half-empty bottle of paint thinner and asked me if it would burn. And I saw Mr. Lazari at the grocer’s giving Doc and Salvatore a couple of old wooden crates. I told him, too.”

“Mr. Lazari?”

“Of course not. He’s quite sensible.”

“You told Doc. That John was dead?”

“Inspector, are you listening to me?”

“I am trying, Ms. Jankowski. Beatrice.”

“Ah, you are tired, of course. I apologize for keeping you. No, I told Doc that he and Harry and the rest were a parcel of half-wits and were going to find themselves in trouble. I told them Brother Erasmus would be unhappy. Doc listened, Salvatore didn’t. He even had a Bible, although I didn’t think much of his choice of readings. Song of Songs is hardly funereal.”

“Salvatore had the Bible? So Salvatore led the… funeral service.”

“I was surprised, too, considering.”

“Considering what, Beatrice?”

“Well, you know.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“Oh, of course, how silly of me. You never met the man.”

“Salvatore Benito? I spoke with him earlier.”

She sat in her chair and gave him a look of sad disappointment.

“Or do you mean John? No, I never met him.”

“Lucky old you,” she muttered.

“You didn’t like John?”

“He did not deserve a dog like Theophilus.”

“That surprises me. The others seemed to think he was a nice guy.”

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Did Erasmus say that, or did I read it somewhere? Oh dear, I am getting old.”

“John was friendly on the surface but not when you got to know him? Is that what you mean?”

“I did not know him,” she said firmly. “Unfortunately, he knew me. But he couldn’t make me go to his funeral, and now he can’t—” She caught herself, looked down at her hands, and twisted her rings before shooting a chagrined glance at the two detectives. “He was not a nice man.”

Hawkin leaned back in his chair and studied her.

“He was blackmailing you?” he suggested.

“That’s a very ugly word.”

“It’s an ugly thing.”

“I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t anything nasty. Maybe a wee bit nasty,” she amended. “Just a sort of encouragement, to make me do things I otherwise might not have.”

“Such as?”

“They were such big shops, they could afford to lose a bit to pilfering.”

“He had you shoplifting for him?”

Her head came up and she flushed in anger.

“Inspector! How could you think that of me? I would never! There’s a world of difference between actually doing something like that and just not… tattling.”

“I see. You witnessed John shoplifting and he made you keep silent,” Hawkin translated.

“After that he would show me things he’d taken. He knew I didn’t like it, that it made me… uncomfortable.”

“Did he blackmail others?”

“It wasn’t really blackmail,” she protested. “He never wanted anything. It was just a sort of… control thing. He liked to see people squirm.”

“Who were these others?”

“I’ve only known him for two years.”

“Their names?” he asked gently.

“I… don’t know for sure. I wondered, because there were a couple of men he seemed friendly with who suddenly seemed to be uncomfortable around him and then moved away. One of them was named Maguire—I think that was his last name—and then last summer a pleasant little Chinese man named Chin.”

“Any who didn’t move away?”

“Well, I…”

“Salvatore, perhaps?”

“It did seem very odd, him conducting the funeral like that, when he’s never been all that close to Brother Erasmus.”

“Was John? Close to Brother Erasmus, I mean?”

“He thought he was.”

“But you felt Brother Erasmus was keeping some distance?” Kate was very glad that Al seemed to be following this woman’s erratic line of thought, more like a random series of stepping-stones than a clear path.

“Brother Erasmus has no friends.”

“But John thought he was Erasmus’s friend?” Hawkin persisted.

“Undoubtedly. He always steps in when Brother Erasmus is away. Stepped.”

“Do you think John was blackmailing Erasmus?”

“I don’t think that is actually his name.”

“John? Or Erasmus?”

“Why, both, come to think of it.”

“Was John blackmailing Brother Erasmus?”

“Brother Erasmus isn’t the sort to be blackmailed.”

“Do you think John was trying?”

“Oh, Inspector, you are so pushy!”

“That’s my job, Beatrice.”

“You’re as bad as John was, in a way, though much nicer with it, not so sort of slimy.”

“Do you think—”

“I don’t know!” she burst out unhappily. “Yes, all right, it seemed an unlikely friendship, partnership, liaison, what have you. But Brother Erasmus is not the sort to submit to overt blackmail.”

“But covert blackmail?” Hawkin seized on her word.

“I… I wondered. There was a sort of—oh, how to describe it?—a manipulative intimacy about John’s attitude toward Erasmus, and in turn Erasmus—Brother Erasmus—seemed to be… I don’t know. Watching him, maybe. Yes, I suppose that’s it. John would kind of sidle up to Erasmus as if they shared a great secret, and Erasmus would draw himself up and, without actually stepping back, seem to be stopping himself from moving away.”

Considering the source, it was a strikingly lucid picture of a complex relationship, and Kate felt she knew quite a bit about both of the men involved. She continued with the motions of note-taking until Hawkin finally broke the silence.

“Tell me about the man Erasmus.”

“You haven’t met him yet?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Oh, you’d know it if you had. He’s a fool!” she said proudly, varying her terms of derision to include a monosyllable.

“He’s a sort of informal leader of the homeless people around Golden Gate Park?”

“Only for things like the funeral.”

“John’s funeral?”

“I told you, Inspector, he wasn’t there. He brought us together, said words over Theophilus, and lighted the pyre. Today’s lunacy would never have happened on a Sunday or Monday, but instead those morons Harry and Salvatore and Doc—and Wilhemena! God, she’s the worst of them—decided they could say words as well as he could. I should have insisted, I know,” she admitted sadly. “There’s not a one of them playing with a full deck.”

“And Brother Erasmus is a bad as the others, you said.”

“I never!” she said indignantly.

“But you did. You called him a fool.”

“A fool, certainly.”

“But the others are fools, too?” asked Hawkin. He spoke with the caution of a man feeling for a way in the dark, but his words were ill-chosen, and Beatrice went rigid, her eyes narrowing in a rapid reassessment of Inspector Al Hawkin.

“They most certainly are not. They haven’t any sense at all.”

Kate gave up. The woman’s occasional appearance of rationality was obviously misleading. Even Hawkin looked lost.

“I think we should talk with your Brother Erasmus,” he said finally.

“I’m sure he’ll straighten things out for you,” Beatrice agreed. “Although you might find it difficult to talk with him.”

“Why is that?”

“I told you, he’s a fool.”

“But he sounds fairly sensible to me.”

“Of course. Some of them are.”

“Some of whom?”

“Fools, of course.”

Kate was perversely gratified to see that finally Al was beginning to grit his teeth. She’d begun to think she was out of practice.

“And where is this foolish Brother now?” he growled.

“I told you, it’s Wednesday. He’ll be on Holy Hill.”

“Holy Hill? Do you mean Mt. Davidson?” There was a cross on top of that knob, where pilgrims gathered every year for Easter sunrise services.

“I don’t think so,” Beatrice said doubtfully. “Isn’t that in San Francisco? This one is across the bay.”

“Do you mean ‘Holy Hill’ in Berkeley, Ms. Jankowski?” Kate asked suddenly.

“That sounds right. There’s a school there, in Berkeley, isn’t there?” The flagship of the University of California fleet, demoted to a mere “school” status, thought Kate with a smile.

“Yes, there’s a school in Berkeley.”

“Brother Erasmus is in Berkeley every Wednesday, Ms.— Beatrice?” continued Hawkin. “Just Wednesday?”

“Of course not. He leaves here on Tuesday and is back on Saturday. Although usually he doesn’t come to the Park until Sunday morning, when he conducts services, which is the excuse those idiots used to cremate John right away. They said he’d stink,- personally, I think the weather’s been too cold.”

“Good. Well, thank you for your help, Ms. Jankowski. We’ll need to talk with you again in a day or so. Where can we find you?”

“Ah. Now that’s a good question. On Friday night I am usually at a coffeehouse on Haight Street, a place called Sentient Beans. Some very nice young people run it. They allow me to use their washing machine in exchange for drawings.”

“Drawings?”

“I’m an artist. Or I was an artist—I never know which to say. My nerves went, but my hand is still steady enough. I do portraits of the customers sometimes while my clothes are being cleaned—I do so enjoy the luxury of clean clothes, I will admit. And a bath—I use the one upstairs at the coffeehouse on Fridays, and occasionally during the first part of the week the man who runs the jewelers on the next street lets me use his shower—if he doesn’t have any customers. But I’m never far from that area if you want to find me. It’s my home, and the people know me. It’s safer that way, you know.”

“Yes,” agreed Hawkin thoughtfully. “Unlike some of the gentlemen in this case, you are certainly no fool.”

“I told you,” she said with a degree of impatience, “they are not fools. But then,” she reflected sadly, “neither am I. I’m afraid I haven’t enough strength of character.”

♦

FOUR

♦

And as he stared at the word “fool” written in

luminous letters before him, the word itself began to

shine and change.

When Beatrice Jankowski had gone, Kate and Al sat for a long minute, staring at each other across his desk.

“Al,” said Kate, “did that woman have a short in the system or was she just speaking another language?”

“I feel half-drunk,” he said in wonder, and rubbed his stub-bled face vigorously. “I need some air. Come on.”

Kate scrabbled her notes together into her shoulder bag, snatched up her coat, and caught up with Al at the elevators, where he stood with his foot in the door, irritating the other passengers, who included three high-priced lawyers and an assistant DA. The door closed and they began to descend. The four suits resumed their discussion, which seemed to involve a plea bargain, and suddenly Hawkin held his hand up.

“Fool!” he exclaimed. The lawyer in front of him, who in a bad year earned five times Hawkin’s salary, started to bristle, but Al wasn’t seeing him,- he turned to Kate intently. “The way she used the word fool,” he said. “It meant something to her, other than just an insulting term.”

Kate thought back over the woman’s words. “You’re right. It’s as if she thought of the word as being capitalized.”

“Damn. Oh well, we can find her Friday night at the coffee place, if we want.” The doors opened onto the ground floor and Kate followed him outside, where he stood breathing in great lungfuls of the pollution from the freeway overhead. Kate tried to breathe shallowly, if at all, and was suddenly very aware of the trials of the long day.

“You’ll go to Berkeley tomorrow morning, then,” said Al. “I’ve been in touch with the department there, letting them know you’ll be waltzing across their turf. If you need to make an arrest, call them for backup. I doubt that you will, though,” he added. “Erasmus sounds a peaceable sort. Better take a departmental car, though. You do know where this Holy Hill is?”

“If it’s the same place, it’s what they call the area above the Cal campus, where there’s a bunch of seminaries and church schools.”

“Sounds like a reasonable shot. I’ll take the postmortem, and we’ll talk when you get back.”

Right.“ It was a good time to leave, but she lingered, enjoying the sensation of being back in her own world. The nightmare of the last year was not about to fade under two weeks’ worth of cold reality, but she did feel she had achieved some small distance. It was a good feeling. ”Al,“ she said on impulse, ”come home for a drink. Or coffee, or dinner. Or even just a breath of real air.“

“No, I can’t. You haven’t warned Lee.”

“Oh hell, a little surprise will do her good. Unless—do you have something planned for tonight?”

“Not tonight.”

“Still seeing Jani?”

“Still seeing Jani.”

“She’s a fine person, Al.”

“She is. She was happy to hear you’re back in harness, sent her greeting. Invited you for dinner, as soon as Lee’s up to the drive.”

“She might enjoy that. Ask her yourself, tonight.”

“You’re sure?” I’m sure.

“Okay. One drink and a brief conversation with Lee, and if that damned houseboy of yours is cooking a barbecue, I’ll break his neck.”

♦

Hawkin did not stay to dinner, and as Jon was experimenting with lentils, he escaped with his neck intact. After Hawkin left, Kate settled Lee at the table, which was set for two, and went into the kitchen. She peered past Jon’s shoulder at the pot on the stove, plucked a piece of sausage out, receiving a slap from the wooden spoon, and put the meat in her mouth.

“Are you not eating, or am I?” she asked Jon.

“Since you’re here, I’m going out.”

“You’re leaving me phone numbers?”

He turned to look at her. “Why on earth do you need phone numbers? You’re not a teenaged baby-sitter.”

“Jon,” she said with exaggerated patience, “I am back on active duty. I explained to you last month what this would mean. I am no longer shuffling papers from eight to five. I may be called out at any time, and I do not want Lee left alone forq hours and hours. I need all of your phone numbers.”

“But I don’t know them,” he cried. “I mean, what if I decide to go somewhere?”

“Report in. Damn it Jon, you know it isn’t good for her to be alone for any length of time.”

“All right, all right, all right. I’ll give you phone numbers. But don’t you think it’s time we entered the twentieth century and got me a beeper?”

“Good idea. Get one tomorrow.”

“How chic. Everyone will think I’m a doctor. I think I’ll be an obstetrician. Terribly exotic, and it’ll save me from having to look at strange growths and aches on strangers that I’d rather not know about. Now for heaven’s sake, quit jabbering and take those plates in. I have to go do my hair.”

Kate obediently took the plates, served herself and Lee, and then bent her head and wolfed the lentil-and-sausage cassoulet. Whatever Jon’s shortcomings (and she’d had her doubts from the very beginning, even before the day they had passed in the hallway and he had paused to say, “Look, dearie, it isn’t every man gets to change his shrink’s diapers. I mean, what would Papa Sigmund say? Too Freudian”), the man could cook.

Kate helped herself to a second serving and started in more slowly.

“Did you eat today?” Lee asked.

“I think so. There were sandwiches at some point, but it was a while ago. Jon, this is gorgeous,” she said as he came in from the recently converted basement apartment. “Will you marry me?”

“You just want me to work for nothing, I know you macho types,” he said with an exaggerated simper and held out a piece of paper. “Here is my every possible phone number, plus a few unlikelies. And I’ve also put down the numbers of Karin and Wade, in case you’ve lost them. Karin can come anytime, Wade, up until six in the morning.”

“What about Phyllis?”

“She’s in N’Orleans this week, y’all,” he drawled. “Playin‘ with the bubbas and all them good ol’ boys, hot damn.”

“Have a good time, Jon,” said Lee.

“You too, darlin‘.”

The house seemed to expand when he left, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Kate was aware of a touch, just a faint brush of unease at being alone with Lee. She wondered at it, wondered if Lee felt it, and decided that she couldn’t have or she would say something.

“I feel like my mother has just left me alone in the house with a girlfriend,” Lee said.

“I was just thinking how quiet it was.”

Without taking her eyes from Kate’s, Lee reached down and freed the brakes on her chair, backed and maneuvered to where Kate sat, laid her hand on the back of Kate’s neck, and kissed her, long and slow. She then backed away again and returned to her place, leaving Kate flushed, short of breath, and laughing.

“Necking while Mom’s away,” Kate commented.

“Different from having her in the next room.”

“I’m sure Jon would love it if you started calling him Mom.”

“You still don’t like him, do you?”

“I like him well enough.” That Kate detested having any person other than Lee in the house, no matter how easy to live with, was a fact both unavoidable and best not talked about.

“You don’t trust him.”

“With you, with the house, I believe he is a thoroughly responsible and trustworthy person,” Kate said carefully. “He is absolutely ideal as a caregiver for you, and I think we’re very, very lucky to have him. If there’s anything about him I don’t trust, it’s his motives. He’s a blessing from heaven, he works cheap, he even knows when to disappear, but I can’t help having a niggling suspicion that we’re going to have to pay for it somehow in the end.”

“Transference with a vengeance,” Lee agreed. “Every therapist’s nightmare, a client who gets his foot in the door. However, I think Jon Sampson’s a much more balanced individual than he appears. He plays up the ‘patient turned powerful doctor’ role in order to defuse it, and he is aware that one of his motives in taking the job was his lingering guilt at having a part, however minor, in my being shot. He’s clearly focused both on his sense of responsibility for what happened to me and on how invalid the guilt is, and he’s working on it. It’s a complex relationship, but I still don’t think I was wrong to allow it.”

“You’re probably right. I just get suspicious when someone wants to ingratiate himself.” Kate paused, remembering Beatrice Jankowski’s similar description of the dead man John. Odd, the coincidence in names, although come to think of it Jon’s name had been chosen to replace the hated Marvin his parents had blessed him with. Though what was to say John was not an alias, as well? Beatrice thought so. Another thing to ask Brother Erasmus tomorrow, if she found him. She put the forkful in her mouth and looked up, to see Lee gazing at her with an odd, crooked smile on her face.

“What?”

“You really are back into it, aren’t you?” Lee said.

“Back into what?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You were suddenly miles away, thinking about the case.”

“Was I? Sorry. Funny, Al said pretty much the same thing today. I guess you’re right. This case is different. It’s… interesting. Could you push the salad over here?”

Silence, and the sounds of fork and plate, and then Lee spoke, deliberately.

“For a while there, I thought you might quit.”

“What, resign? From the department?”

“You’ve been hanging by a thread for months, and I got the distinct impression that going back into partnership with Al was a final trial to prove to yourself how much you hated the job.”

“I don’t hate the job.”

“Kate, you’ve been a basket case. You’d hate any job that did that to you.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“It’s true. You’ve been a classic example of posttraumatic stress syndrome. I’m not saying without reason, sweetheart. I mean, I know you’re Superwoman, but even a Woman of Steel can develop metal fatigue.”

“I’ve just been tired. I’ve been working too hard.”

“Bullshit,” Lee said politely. “You’ve spent months doing nothing but type reports and worry about me. You’ve been through hell, Kate. First the man Lewis and then, when you got your feet under you again, the Morningstar case steamrolled over you.”

“So what do you want me to say?” Kate demanded. “That I’m not quitting? Okay, I’m not quitting. We can’t afford it, for one thing. We’d starve if I went private.” Which, she realized belatedly, revealed that she’d at least considered it, a point that Lee did not miss.

“You know full well that with your reputation in the city, if you went into private investigations, within a year you’d be making twice what you do now.”

“Not twice,” Kate protested feebly.

“Damn near. So don’t use salary as an excuse.”

Anger did not sit well on a face so carved by pain’s lines as Lee’s face was, and the sight made Kate rise up in wretchedness and despair.

“You want me to quit? I’ll quit. I’ve told you that before, but you have to say it. All right, I thought if I hated the job enough, I’d want to resign on my own, and that would make you happy. But I didn’t. All I hated was being away from my job. I will quit if you ask me, Lee, but if you don’t, all I can say is, I’m a cop. I am a cop.”

Lee’s features slowly relaxed and the lines lessened, until she was smiling at Kate.

“Your resignation would not make me happy, sweetheart. I’ve never much liked your job, and now it just plain frightens me, but I don’t want you to quit. You are a cop, Kate, and I love you.

♦

FIVE

♦

Le Jongleur de Dieu

The sun came out while Kate was driving across the Bay Bridge the next morning, and the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland were green with the winter rains. The departmental unmarked car had something funny about its front end, so rather than wrestle it through the side streets, Kate stayed on the crowded freeway, got off at University Avenue, and drove straight up toward the University of California’s oldest campus, squatting on the hill at the head of the broad, straight avenue like an ill-tempered concrete toad. At the last possible instant, Kate avoided being swallowed by her alma mater and veered left, then right on the road that followed the north perimeter. Between university buildings on the right and converted Victorians and apartments on the left, she drove until she came to a cluster of shops on a side street and one of the main pedestrian entrances to the campus, a continuation of Telegraph Avenue on the opposite side. She turned up this street away from the University of California, moving cautiously among the crowds of casually earnest students and suicidal bicyclists, and in two hundred yards found herself in a different world. As she had remembered, the university crowds seemed miraculously to vanish, leaving only the serious-minded graduate schools of divinity and theology and eternal truths.

There were also more parking spaces. She fought the car into one, fed the meter, and then walked back down the hill to indulge in a few minutes of nostalgia. The Chinese restaurant was still there, and the pizza-and-beer joint in whose courtyard, in another lifetime, Lee the graduate student had oh so casually brushed against the arm of Kate the junior-year student, Kate the unhappy, Kate the unquestioningly hetero, leaving a tantalizing and only half-conscious question that would crop up at inconvenient moments until it was finally resolved almost two years later: Yes, Lee had meant it.

The espresso bars and the doughnut shop, the scruffy bookstore and the art-film theater, shops selling clothes and pens and backpacks, all crowded into one short block. Browsing the windows in bittersweet pleasure, Kate’s attention was caught by a display of unusual jewelry made of some small scraps of odd iridescent plastic. She went to the shop and bought the hair combs, a pair of extravagant multicolored swirling shapes, the blue of which matched the color of Lee’s eyes. The woman wrapped the box in a glossy midnight paper and Kate dropped it into her coat pocket.

She turned briskly uphill, crossed the street that brought an end to commerce, and walked up another block to the sign for a Catholic school she had noticed while cruising for a parking space: Surely the Catholics would know.

As she reached for the door, it opened and a brown-robed monk came out.

“Excuse me,” she said, stepping back, “I wonder if you can tell me where I might find the Graduate Theological Union?” Sketchy research the night before had brought her as far as the name, and indeed, the monk nodded, gestured that she should follow him back to the street, and once there pointed to a brick building a couple of doors up, smiling all the while. She thanked him, he nodded and crossed the street, still smiling. A vow of silence, perhaps? Kate speculated.

The ground floor of the building proved to be an airy oak-floored bookstore. The customer ahead of her was just finishing her purchase of three heavy black tomes with squiggly gilt writing on the back covers. When she turned away with her bag, Kate saw that she was wearing a clerical collar on her blue shirt, an odd sight to someone raised a Roman Catholic.

At the register, Kate showed her police identification and explained her presence.

“I’m looking for a man in connection with an investigation. He’s a homeless man in San Francisco who apparently comes over to this part of Berkeley regularly. How do I find the head of your security personnel?”

The man and woman looked at each other doubtfully.

“Is he a student here?” the woman asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Or a professor—no, he wouldn’t be, would he? Gee, I don’t know how you’d find him.”

“Don’t you have some kind of campus police?”

“We don’t actually have a campus, per se,” the young man explained. “In fact, you could say that there’s actually no such thing as the GTU. It’s an administrative entity more than anything else. Each of the schools is self-contained, you see. We’re just this building. Or actually, they’re upstairs. We’re just the bookstore. If you want to talk with someone in administration, you could take the elevator upstairs.”

“And how many schools are there?”

“Nine. And of course the affiliated groups, Buddhist Studies, the Orthodox Institute,- most of them have separate buildings.”

“What about a student center?”

“All the seminaries have their own.”

Kate thought for a minute. “If someone came over here regularly, where would he go?”

“That depends on what he’s coming for,” the young man said helpfully. Another customer arrived with a stack of books, mostly paperbacks. These titles were in English, but as foreign as the gilt squiggles had been. What was—or were—hermeneutics? Or semeiology?

“I don’t know what he’s coming for. All I know is that he comes over on Tuesday and returns to San Francisco before Sunday. Look, this is not a part of Berkeley that gets a lot of homeless men. Surely he’d be conspicuous.”

“What does he look like?”

“Six foot two, approximately seventy years old, short salt-and-pepper hair, clipped beard, Caucasian but tan, a deep voice.”

“Brother Erasmus!” said a voice from the back of the store. Kate turned and saw another woman wearing a clerical collar, this shirt a natural oatmeal color.

“You know him?” Kate asked.

“Everyone knows him.”

“I don’t,” said the young man.

“Sure you do,” said the woman (priest?). “She means the monk who preaches and sings in the courtyard over at CDSP. I’ve seen you there.”

“Oh, him. But he’s not homeless.”

“Do you know where he lives?” Kate asked.

“Of course not, but he can’t be homeless. I mean, he’s clean, and he doesn’t carry things or have a shopping cart or anything.”

“Right,” said Kate. “Where is CDSP?”

“Just across the street,” the man said.

“I’ll take you if you want to wait a minute,” said the woman. (Priestess? Reverend Mother? What the hell did you call her, anyway? wondered Kate.) She waited while the woman rang up her purchases, and Kate glanced at these titles, then looked again with interest: Living in the Lap of the Goddess, Texts of Terror, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. Well, well.

“Thanks, Tina,” she said to the cashier.

“Have a good one, Rosalyn.”

Kate followed her out the door and down the wide steps. On the sidewalk the woman stopped and turned to study Kate.

“I know you, don’t I?” she asked, uncertain. Kate became suddenly wary.

“Oh, I don’t live around here.”

“I know that. What is your name?”

There was no avoiding it. “Kate Martinelli.”

“I do know you. Oh, of course, you’re Lee Cooper’s partner. Casey, isn’t it? We met briefly at a forum at Glide Memorial a couple of years ago. Rosalyn Hall.” She held out her hand and Kate shook it. “You won’t remember me, especially in this”—she stuck a finger into her collar and wiggled it—“and with my hair longer. I was into spikes then.”

“Sorry,” Kate said, though she did remember the forum on community violence and vaguely recalled a woman minister. She relaxed slightly. “I go by Kate now,” she added. “I grew out of Casey.”

“Amazing how nicknames haunt you, isn’t it? My mother still calls me Rosie. Tell me, how is Lee? I heard about it, of course. It’s one of those situations where you feel you should do something, but to intrude seems ghoulish.”

“She’s doing okay. And I don’t think it would be intrusive. Actually, she’s lost a lot of friends in the last months. People feel uncomfortable around wheelchairs and catheters and the threat of paralysis.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try to find some excuse to go see her. Something professional, maybe. Her profession, I mean. Is she working?”

“She just started up again, and that would be ideal, if you need an excuse.”

“Fine. I’m glad I stumbled into you, Kate. I’ve got to get myself together for a lecture, but we’ll meet again. Oh—stupid of me. Brother Erasmus. I’ll show you where he holds forth.”

They crossed the tree-lined curve of street with its sodden drifts of rotting leaves and winter-bare branches and went through an opening in the brick wall into a broad courtyard, at the far side of which were doors into two buildings and, between them, steps climbing up to more buildings. Rosalyn went to the doors on the right, and Kate found herself in a long, dimly lighted and sunken room with a bunch of tables, some of them occupied by men and women with paper cups of coffee.

“This is the refectory,” said Rosalyn. “The coffee isn’t too bad, if you want a cup. And that’s where Brother Erasmus usually is.” She nodded toward the opposite windows, which looked out on another, smaller courtyard, this one grassy and with bare trees, green shrubs, and a forlorn-looking fountain playing by itself in a rectangular pond. Rosalyn glanced at her watch. “He may be in the chapel. I’ll take you there, and then I have to run.”

Across the refectory, out the doors at the corner of the grassy space, and up another flight of stairs, more brick and glass buildings in front of them—the place was a warren, Kate thought, built on a hillside. Up more stairs, more buildings rising up, and then suddenly confronted with what could indeed only be a chapel. Rosalyn opened the door silently and they slipped in.

“That’s Erasmus,” she murmured, nodding her head toward the front. “In the second pew from the front on the right-hand side. He’s sitting next to Dean Gardner,” she added with a smile, then left.

It was a small building, simple and calm. The pews were well filled, Kate thought, for a weekday morning. There were two priests near the altar, and a woman at the lecturn reading aloud earnestly from the Bible. Kate chose a back pew, sat one space from the aisle, and listened to the service.

She hadn’t even thought to ask what kind of church this was. She knew that each school in the Graduate Theological Union was run by a different church, or an order within a church—the first building with the silent but friendly monk, for example, had been the Franciscan school. However, Church Divinity School of the Pacific could be anything. The service going on in the front was vaguely like the familiar Catholic Mass, but she imagined that most churches would at least be similar. Rosalyn, she thought she remembered, had belonged to a small, largely gay and lesbian denomination, but it surely could not be the possessor of a grand setup like this.

She looked at the books of various sizes and colors in the holder in front of her. The first one she pulled out was a Bible, which didn’t help much. The next one she tried was a small limp volume, its onionskin pages covered with Greek writing and a sprinkling of English headings such as “The ministry of John the Baptist” and “The five thousand fed.” That went back into the holder, too. At this point, the man next to her took pity on the poor heathen. He handed her a book, put his finger to the page to guide her reading, and smiled in encouragement.

She studied the page for a minute, which seemed to offer alternate choices for prayers, and then flipped to the front of the book: The Book of Common Prayer didn’t tell her much, but farther down the title page she came across the key words Episcopal Church. So Brother Erasmus, homeless advocate and adviser, traveled across the Bay every week to say his prayers with the church that, if she remembered the joke right, served a vintage port as its sacramental wine. And furthermore, he seemed quite chummy here. Look at him seated next to the dean, two gray heads, one in need of a haircut and above a set of shoulders in a ratty tweed jacket, the other hair cropped short above some black garment that looked both elegant and clerical, both of them—

Everyone stood up. Kate nearly dropped the prayer book, then rose belatedly to her feet. There was a reading and a brief hymn, for which she had to flip back thirty pages in the prayer book, after which came a familiar prayer called the Apostles’ Creed, forty pages ahead of the hymn. Then everyone kneeled down to recite an unfamiliar version of the Lord’s Prayer.

After the “Amen” some people sat, although others stayed on their knees,- Kate compromised by perching on the edge of her pew. Her view of Erasmus, partial before, was now limited to the top of his head, and it would not be improved short of sitting on her neighbor’s lap. The important thing was not to let him leave, and she could see him well enough to prevent that. She glanced through her prayer book, looking up regularly at the shaggy graying head in the second pew. She learned that The Book of Common Prayer had been ratified on October 16, 1789,- that the saint’s day for Mary Magdalene was July 22 and that of the martyrs of New Guinea, 1942, was September 2.

There was a shuffle and everyone stood up again with books in their hands, but not the book Kate held. Fortunately, the hymnal was clearly marked on its cover, so she traded the two books, found the page by looking over her neighbor’s arm, and joined the hymn in time for the final verse. When they sat, it was time again for the prayer book, but at that point Kate decided the hell with it and just sat in an attitude of what she hoped looked like pious attentiveness.

More words from the altar, response from the congregation, another hymn, a final blessing, and then everyone was rising and chattering in release. Kate stayed in her pew, allowing the people on the inside to push past her until the two men she had been watching hove into view, and she realized that she had made a profound mistake: The unkempt graying head belonging to the ratty tweed turned out to be that of a much younger, shorter, and beardless man. Brother Erasmus, on the other hand, was wearing an immaculate black cassock that swept from shoulders to feet in an elegant arc, broken only by the white rectangle of a clerical collar at his throat. Brother Erasmus was dressed as a priest.

She tore her eyes from him and studied the altar as he went past, his head down, listening to something the dean was saying. She turned to follow them out, noticing Brother Erasmus do two interesting things. First, an older woman wearing rather too much makeup hesitated as if to speak to him. Without breaking stride, he reached out his left hand, fixed it gently to the woman’s cheek in a gesture of intimacy and comfort, and took it away again. The woman turned away, beaming,- the dean kept talking,-a gold ring had gleamed dully from the fourth finger of the Brother’s hand. Then, as they reached the doors to go out, Erasmus took a step to one side and reached out for a tall stick that stood against the wall. Outside in the sun, Kate could see that it was a gleaming wooden staff. Its finial had been carved to resemble a man’s head, with a bit of ribbon, colorless and frayed with age, around its throat. The stick was almost precisely the same height as the man, who did not so much lean on it as caress it, stroke it, and welcome it as a part of his body—a part temporarily removed.

Kate looked at the fist-sized knob on top of the heavy stick and found herself wondering if the postmortem now going on across the bay would find that the man John had been killed by a blow to the head.

A part of the congregation now dispersed, most of them touching Erasmus somehow—a handshake, a pat on the back, a brief squeeze of his elbow—before leaving. The dean was one of them, and he added a brief wave as he walked off, fingers raised at waist level before his arm dropped to his side.

Erasmus himself, surrounded by fifteen or twenty of his fellow worshipers, moved off and down the steps Kate and Rosalyn had come up, which led to the grassy courtyard and the adjoining refectory. Kate trailed behind. She had to see the dean, who she assumed was the man in authority here, but first she needed to be certain that Erasmus would not leave the area.

However, he planted his staff into the damp turf with an attitude of permanence and then stood, his hands thrust deep into pockets let into the side of his cassock, eyes focused at his feet, while people drifted onto the grass, standing about or leaning against the walls, all of them expectant. It occurred to Kate that she had not yet seen him utter a word, but these people were obviously waiting for him to do so, with half smiles on their lips and sparkles of anticipation in their eyes.

Silence fell. Brother Erasmus raised his head, took his hands from his pockets and held them out, palms up, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth to sing. In a shining baritone the words of the Psalm sung by the congregation a short time before rang out and reverberated against the brick and the glass: “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God. The Lord builds up Jerusalem, he gathers the outcasts of Israel,” he sang joyously. “The Lord lifts up the downtrodden, he casts the wicked to the ground.” And then he stopped, as abruptly as if a hand had seized his throat.

For a very long time, Brother Erasmus did not speak. The smiles began to fade,- people began to glance at one another and fidget. Then, unexpectedly, the man in the priest’s robe sank slowly to his knees, and when he lifted his face, there were tears leaking from his closed eyelids, running down his weathered cheeks, and dripping from his beard. A shudder of shock ran through the assembly. Two or three people took a step forward; several more took a step back. Erasmus began to speak in a deep and melodious voice that had the faintest trace of an English accent, more a rhythm than an accent. At the moment, it was also hoarse with emotion.

“O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger, nor chasten me in thy wrath! For thy arrows have sunk into me, and thy hand has come down on me. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thy indignation,- there is no health in my bones because of my sin.” His beautiful voice paused to draw a breath that was more like a groan, and the noise seemed to find an echo in the electrified audience. Whatever they had been expecting, it was not this. “My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness, I am utterly bowed down and prostrate,- all the day I go about in mourning.”

It was something biblical, Kate could tell, but with little relation to the readings she had heard in the chapel half an hour earlier,- those cool tones had been nothing like this.

“My loins are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult in my heart.” The young man standing next to Kate did moan, deep in his throat. Nearby, a thin young woman began openly to weep. “I am like a deaf man, I do not hear, like a dumb man who does not open his mouth. Yea, I am like a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no rebukes.” He paused again, eyes still shut, swallowed, and finished in an almost inaudible voice. “Do not forsake me, O Lord. O my God, be not far from me.”

He bent forward until his forehead touched the grass, held the position for a moment, then knelt back onto his heels again. His eyes opened and he smiled a smile of such utter sweetness that Kate was instantly aware that Brother Erasmus was not altogether normal. Disappointment and relief hit her at the same moment and dispelled the spookiness of the scene she’d just watched: Probably a third of San Francisco’s homeless population had some form of mental illness. Erasmus was obviously one of them, and very likely he had cracked John across the head because a voice had told him to, or John had angered him, or just because John had happened to be there. No mystery.

This cold splash of sobriety had not hit the others,- they still stood around him enthralled. Kate heard feet on the cement steps and turned, to see the dean coming down. He nodded at her politely, and then he saw the tableau beyond.

“What’s happened?” he asked. Before Kate could attempt an explanation, another man, one of the group from the chapel, turned and answered in a low voice.

“He recited Psalm Thirty-eight, making it very… personal. I’ve never seen him like this, Philip. It’s very—”

“Wait,” commanded the dean. Erasmus was speaking again.

“I am a fool,” he said conversationally, and scrambled to his feet, bending to brush off the knees of his cassock. For some reason, this phrase, an echo of Beatrice Jankowski’s cryptic judgment, seemed abruptly to defuse the tension in the crowd. The weeping young woman pulled a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose, and raised her head in shaky anticipation. There were two people with pen and notebook in hand, Kate noticed. Was this to be an open-air lecture? Erasmus had both hands in the pockets of the garment again, and when he pulled them out, there were objects clutched in them—a small book, a little silver plate—which his left hand began to toss high into the air, one after another, rhythmically—juggling! He was juggling, four, five objects now in a circle, and he began to talk.

“It is actually reported that there is immorality among you,” he declared fiercely, glaring at a figure Kate had noticed earlier, a tiny wrinkled woman in the modern nun’s dress, plain brown, with a modified wimple. She blushed and giggled nervously as his gaze traveled on to the man behind her. “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men. Not to associate with an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Not even to eat with such a one. Drive out the wicked person from among you! Do not be deceived, neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

Oh Christ, thought Kate in disgust, he’s just another end-of-the-world, repent-and-be-saved loony. Why the hell are these people listening to this crock of shit?

Erasmus had turned his attention to the things he was juggling, looking at them with a clown’s amazement at the cleverness of inanimate objects. He allowed each of them, one after another, to come to a rest in his right hand, paused, holding them for a moment, and then began to toss them back into the air with that right hand, reversing the circle. When he spoke again, his voice was neither hoarse with suffering nor fierce with condemnation, but gentle, thoughtful.

“After this he went out, and saw a tax collector, named Levi, sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, ”Follow me.“ And he left everything, and rose and followed him. And Levi made him a great feast, in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ”Why does your teacher eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?“ And Jesus answered them, ”Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.“”

There were seven objects in the air now, different sizes and weights but perfectly, effortlessly maintaining their places in the rising and falling arcs of the circle. Again, Erasmus studied them with the openmouthed admiration of a child, and then suddenly the objects leaving his right hand did not land in the left but flew wildly through the air to be caught by onlookers. The small red book with a wide green rubber band holding it closed was caught by the young woman who had cried, the silver plate by the older man who had spoken to the dean, a palm-sized plastic zip bag by a scruffy young man with lank blond hair. A gray plastic film container hit a tall black woman on the shoulder, and then the last thing left his hand, something shiny that flashed at Kate and she automatically put out a hand to catch it: a child’s toy police badge, the silver paint chipped. She jerked her head up and looked into Erasmus’s dark and smiling eyes.

“I think that God had exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools, for Christ’s sake, but you—you are wise in Christ,” he said slyly. “We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands.” Leaving the staff upright in the grass, he held out his rough hands before him and moved slowly forward, toward the dean and Kate at his side. “When reviled we bless, when persecuted we endure. We are the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. I urge you, be imitators of me. The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.” He was very close now, and he was facing not the dean, but Kate. “What do you wish?” he said, and stretched out his hands to her, cupped together, his elbows in and his wrists touching: the position for receiving handcuffs.

♦

SIX

♦

The whole point of St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy.

Kate stared for several seconds at the thin pale wrists with their fringe of black and gray hairs before the automatic cop reflex of never react kicked in. She calmly took the toy star, reached up to pin it onto the chest of the black cassock, and patted it. The beard split in a grin of white teeth.

“Our feelings we with difficulty smother, when constabulary duty’s to be done,” he commented, then turned to the dean. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” he said, cocking his head expectantly. The dean frowned for a moment, then his face cleared and he laughed.

“I agree, I’m feeling particularly blessed myself. Omelette or Chinese?”

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you,” Erasmus said inexplicably. He then looked pointedly first at Kate, then back at the dean, who in response turned to extend his hand to her.

“I’m sorry. Philip Gardner. I’m the dean of this school. Are you a friend of the Brother here?” he asked.

“Not yet,” replied Kate somewhat grimly. “I would like to speak with both you and Brother Erasmus. Privately,” she added, although the people around her had obviously picked up some signal to indicate the end of the—performance? lecture?—and were beginning to move away, up the stairs and across the lawn, most of them clapping the oblivious Erasmus on the arm or back as they went.

“Right. Sure. Have you had breakfast yet? Or lunch? We were just going for something.”

“I had a late breakfast,” she lied.

“Coffee, then. I hope you don’t mind if we eat, you heard the good Brother say he was hungry.”

Kate had heard no such thing, but now was not the time to quibble. The courtyard was emptying, the wet moss-choked lawn surrounded by brick walls looking cold and bleak. Kate took out her identification folder and held it open in front of Erasmus.

“Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. We’re investigating a death that occurred Tuesday in Golden Gate Park. The man seems to have been one of the homeless who live around the park, and we were told that you might know more about him than the others did. You are the man they call Brother Erasmus, are you not?”

The man turned his back on Kate and went to the tree, pulled his staff out of the turf, came back, and, curling his right hand around the wood at jaw level, leaned into it. She took this as an affirmative answer.

“Were you aware that there was a death in the park?” she asked. Silently he moved the staff to his left side and dug around with his right hand in the cassock’s pocket, coming out with a much-folded square of newspaper. He handed it to Kate. It was the front page of that morning’s Chronicle, whose lower right corner (continued on the back page) told all the details that had been released, including the man’s first name, the cremation attempt, and even a paragraph on the cremation of Theophilus last month.

“You knew the man?”

“He was not the Light, but came to bear witness to the Light.”

“Sir, just answer the question, please.”

“Er, Inspector?” interrupted the dean. “Could I have a word?” He led her aside, under a bare tree. She kept one eye on Erasmus, but the man merely pulled a small book with a light green cover out of his pocket, propped himself against his staff, and began to read. “Perhaps I ought to explain something before you go any further. Brother Erasmus does not speak in what you might call a normal conversational mode. He may not be able to answer your questions.”

“He was doing well enough talking to all those people. There’s only one of me.”

“But he wasn’t talking. He recites. Everything he says is a quotation.”

Kate took her eyes from the monk and looked at the dean.

“Well then, he can just quote the information I want.”

“It’s not that simple. If the answers to your questions were contained in the Bible or the Church Fathers or Shakespeare or a couple dozen other places, he could give you answers. But a direct question is very difficult. Look, you heard me ask him if he wanted omelette or Chinese food for breakfast, or lunch, whatever you call it this time of day.”

“He didn’t answer you.”

“But he did. He gave me the first part of a quote from Matthew’s Gospel, which ends, ”even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.“ Hen: egg. He wants an omelette.”

“But all that… speech he gave.”

“All quotations. First Corinthians, Luke, Matthew. And a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan to you—that’s a first.”

“Why does he talk like that?”

“I don’t know. I just know he never speaks freely. I suspect he carries a fair amount of suffering around with him. Perhaps it’s his way of dealing with it.”

“Would you say that he is mentally disturbed?”

“No more than I am. Probably less, since he doesn’t have any administrative jobs hung around his neck. No, but seriously, he’s not delusional, doesn’t think he’s Jesus. He never mutters and mumbles to invisible beings. He’s always cooperative and helpful. He reacts and understands even if he doesn’t always answer in a way people can understand. The board here discussed his presence—this is not public property, you know, so in effect he has been invited. He stimulates discussion and thought, the students enjoy his stream-of-consciousness talks, and frankly I find him great fun. I love asking him direct questions, just to see how he answers. It’s a game, for both of us.”

Oh, right lots of fun, thought Kate: prospecting the off-the-wall remarks of a religious fanatic in hopes of finding nuggets of sense. Well, since he enjoyed it: “I wonder if I could ask you to stay with me, then, while I talk with him. You can be my translator.”

“I’d be happy to, but I’m leading a seminar in an hour, so could we do it while we eat?”

“No problem.”

In the cafe down the road, the air was thick with the smells of cooking eggs and hot cheese and coffee, the clatter of crockery and voices, the essence of a morning cafe in a university town. Erasmus stepped inside behind the dean, then circled behind the door and propped his staff up in the corner before following the dean to a table next to the window. Kate, behind both of them, noticed the easy familiarity of both men with the place and its patrons, the way they collected and distributed nods.

The waitress knew them, too, and automatically brought two mugs of coffee along with the menus. Erasmus paused in the act of sitting down and rose up again to his full height. After she had put down the coffee and distributed menus, he reached out, took hold of her heavily ringed hand, and, looking into her eyes, black with makeup, declaimed in full rotundity of voice, “The sweet small clumsy feet of April came into the ragged meadow of my soul.”

The waitress blushed scarlet up into the roots of her emerald colored hair and began to giggle uncontrollably. She managed to find out from Kate that yes, coffee would be fine, then took her giggles off to the kitchen.

The dean looked sideways at Kate. “Her name is April,” he said, more as an apology than an explanation.

Kate let them study their menus. The dean did so perfunctorily, then dropped it onto the table. Brother Erasmus read through it thoroughly, as if to memorize it and recite it at a later time, although when April returned with a third mug, he did not recite. When the dean had given his order, Erasmus placed his finger on the menu and April looked over his shoulder, wrote it down on her pad, and looked to Kate for her order. Kate shook her head, and the woman left. No question: The man could communicate when he wanted to. Let’s see how much he wants to, she said to herself.

“They call you Erasmus, I understand,” she said to him. He looked at her with his gentle dark, eyes but said nothing. “Is that your real name?”

“Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name,” he said, after a brief pause.

“That’s a quote?” she said.

“From Genesis,” contributed the dean. “Er, the Bible.”

“Fine, I’ll call you Erasmus if you like, but I do need to know your real name.”

“That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“Shakespeare,” murmured the dean.

“Right. Okay. We’ll come back to names later. You saw the article this morning that one of the homeless men who lives around Golden Gate Park died and that some of his friends there attempted to cremate him. I think the article said his name, as well?”

“He was not the Light,” said Erasmus with a nod.

“You told me that before.”

“Er, Inspector? That phrase is used in the New Testament about John the Baptist,” said the dean. “Was this man’s name John?”

“It was. Did you know John?” she asked Erasmus. Again, there was a short delay before he answered, as if he needed to consult some inner oracle.

“A fellow of infinite jest,” he said dryly.

“Would you take it that means yes?” she asked the dean.

“Probably.”

“This is going to be such a fun report to write up,” she grumbled, and took the mug of coffee from the waitress, poured cream in it, and took a sip. “Sir, can you tell me where you were on Tuesday morning?”

Erasmus smiled at her patiently, tore open a packet of sugar, and stirred it into his own cup.

“Does that mean you don’t remember, or you won’t tell me?”

He put the cup to his lips.

“It may simply mean that he can’t think of a quote that fits the answer,” suggested the dean. Erasmus smiled at him with an air of approval.

“Did you know the man they called John?” she persisted.

“I knew him, Horatio,” he said clearly and without hesitation.

Thank God, one answer anyway, thought Kate. I’ll just have to choose my questions to fit a classical tag line.

“Do you know his last name?”

Erasmus thought for a moment, then resumed his drinking. With a regretful air?

“Do you know where he came from?”

Erasmus began to hum some vaguely familiar tune.

“Do you know where he stayed?” There was no answer. “What he did? Who his close friends were?”

Erasmus looked at his cup.

“Why do you do this?” Kate threw her spoon down in irritation. “You’re perfectly capable of answering my questions.”

Erasmus raised his eyes and studied her. His eyes were remarkably eloquent, compassionate now, but Kate could make no use of that kind of answer. Suddenly he leaned forward, held his hand out in an attitude of pleading, and began to speak.

“I am a fool,” he pronounced. “And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity. A man’s pride shall bring him low,” he said forcefully, and his eyes searched her face—for what? Understanding? Judgment? Whatever it was, he did not find it, and he turned to the dean. “A man’s pride,” he said pleading, “shall bring him low,” but the dean gave him no more satisfaction than Kate had. He turned back to her, the muscles of his face rigid with some powerful but unidentifiable emotion. He swallowed and his voice went husky. “Then David made a covenant with Jonathan, because he loved him as his own soul. Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son. Behold, I am vile. What shall I answer thee? A fool’s mouth is his destruction.” Seeing nothing but confusion in his audience, he sat back with a thump and forced a weak smile of apology. “I am a very foolish fond old man, forescore and upward, not an hour more or less, and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

While we’re talking quotations, thought Kate, how about “crazy like a fox”? They were interrupted by the waitress bringing two plates, and Kate instantly regretted not ordering something to eat. She half-expected Erasmus to say a prayer, or at least bow his head over his food, but instead he calmly spread his napkin onto his lap and began to eat.

“So,” she said, “you cannot tell me anything about the man John?” She did not hold out much hope for an answer, but he surprised her.

“A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper,” he said promptly, his face going hard. “The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart. His words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords.” He took a forkful of food and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment, then added, “Choked with ambition of the meaner sort. His heart is as firm as a stone, yea—as hard as a piece of nether millstone.” He returned to his omelette.

“You don’t say. Your friend Beatrice would certainly agree with that.”

Erasmus’s stern features relaxed. “Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low—an excellent thing in a woman.”

“Do you know how John died?”

He paused briefly.

“Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” He began to butter a piece of toast. “Mors ultima ratio.”

“ ‘Death is the final accounting,”“ translated the dean sotto voce, around a mouthful of eggs and cheese and chili peppers.

“And John had much to account for?” Kate suggested. She did not know whether or not to take the first part of his statement as an assertion that John had actually died by fire—something to be explored later.

“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close, and let us all to meditation.”

“That’s fine for some,” answered Kate. “However, it’s my job to find how he died and if someone hurried him on his way. Even an obnoxious sinner has a right to die in his own time.”

Erasmus surprised her again, by smiling hugely.

“O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” he boomed into the startled restaurant. The dean stifled a laugh, but Kate refused to be distracted. She looked him in the eye and bit off her words.

“Do you know anything about John’s death?”

The seriousness of her questions, what they meant for the man on the pyre and all involved with him, seemed suddenly to reach the figure in the cassock. Erasmus studied the food on his plate as if searching for an answer there, and when he did not find it, he brought his left hand up and laid it flat on the table, studying the worn gold ring that encircled one finger. Gradually his mobile features took on the same appearance they had shown when he had knelt on the ground to declare his abject inadequacies. He was not far from tears. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” he whispered finally. The dean choked on a piece of food, shot a brief glance at Kate, and then, despite the half-full plate in front of him, he looked at his watch and began to make a business of catching April’s attention. Kate ignored him, staring at Erasmus, who seemed mesmerized by the gold on his hand.

“Erasmus, do you know how he died?” she said quietly.

The man took a long breath, exhaled, and then looked up at her. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The dean stood up so rapidly, his chair nearly went over. He looked from Kate to Erasmus helplessly, and when the bill was placed in his hand by the passing waitress, he could only throw up his arms and go pay it.

“Erasmus,” Kate began evenly, “you have the right to remain silent.”

♦

SEVEN

♦

He was, among other things, emphatically what we call a character.

Kate closed the back door of the departmental car and turned to the unhappy man standing beside her on the sidewalk.

“Is this really necessary?” he said, more as a plea than a protest.

“You heard what he said back there. Even I know the Bible well enough to remember that ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?” is how Cain answers the accusation that he killed Abel. Which, if I remember rightly, he did. That comes very near to being a confession, the way Brother Erasmus talks. You can’t argue with that,“ she pointed out, though in fact he was not.

“The man’s mixed up, but he’s not violent, never harmful.

You can’t arrest him on the basis of biblical passages.“

Kate was not about to go into the technicalities of precisely what constitutes an arrest, particularly in a fuzzy situation like this one. Still, she had to tell him something. “I haven’t actually arrested him. I read him his rights because at that point he changed status, from being a witness to being a potential suspect. He is not in handcuffs,- he is with me voluntarily.”

“What will you do with him?”

“As you heard me tell him, I’ll take him back to the City, interview him, and then we’ll either let him go or, if information received during the interview demands, we’ll arrest him. Personally, I doubt that will happen, at least not today.”

“I’d like to be informed,” he said with authority.

“Certainly.” Kate retrieved a card from her shoulder bag and handed it to him. “I have a few questions I need to ask, if you don’t mind.”

“I did promise to take this seminar.”

“Ten minutes,” said Kate, knowing that if he’d eaten the abandoned breakfast, he would have taken at least that. “How long have you known Brother Erasmus?”

“He’s been coming here for a little over a year now.”

“And you didn’t know him before?”

“No.”

“Have you any idea what his real name might be?”

“No, I don’t. It might actually be Erasmus, have you considered that?”

Kate ignored the dean’s sarcasm. She was used to that reaction to police questions. “What about where he might have come from?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but no. I don’t know anything about him.”

“Can you narrow it down, when he first appeared?”

“Let’s see,” said the dean. He stood thinking for a while, oblivious of the curious looks they were receiving from young passersby with backpacks and books. “I was on sabbatical two years ago, and I came back in August, eighteen months ago. Erasmus appeared in the middle of that term—say October. He’s come regularly as clockwork ever since—during term time, I mean. Last summer and during breaks and intercession, he shows up from time to time.”

“How does he get here?”

“The last few months, one of our students who lives in San Francisco has brought him.”

“I’d like the student’s name, address, and phone number.”

“I suppose I could give that information to you. I’ll have to check and see if there’s a problem.”

“This is an official murder investigation,” said Kate sternly, hoping the postmortem hadn’t found a heart attack or liver failure.

“I know that. I’ll call you with the information.”

“I’d appreciate that, sir. What can you tell me about his movements here? When does he come,- when does he go, where does he sleep,- does he have any particular friends here?”

“Well, he sleeps in one of the guest rooms.”

“That’s very… generous of you,” commented Kate, wondering how the other guests felt about it.

“It’s only been for the last few weeks.” The dean seemed suddenly to become aware that the subject of their conversation was sitting practically at their feet, albeit behind the car window, and he moved away across the sidewalk and lowered his voice. “Back in the first part of November, he showed up one Tuesday in bad shape. He looked to me like he’d been beaten up—his lip was swollen and split,- one eye was puffy,- he had a bandage on his ear—a real mess, and, well, shocking, seeing that kind of damage, especially to an old man. It wasn’t fresh, probably three or four days old, though he was obviously in some pain, but he was still just carrying on. However, he was in no condition to sleep out, so we got together and put him into a hotel for the next three nights.”

“We?”

“Some of the other professors and I passed the hat. The next week, he was better, but it was raining, so we did it again, and then the third week he seemed to have made other arrangements. It wasn’t until the fourth week that we discovered the dorm had formed a conspiracy and had him sleeping in their rooms the nights he was here.”

“Which nights are those?”

“Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, usually.”

“So you just gave him a room?”

“Not exactly. I mean, we did, but only after a tremendous number of meetings and discussions, and student petitions. The students themselves did it, pointing out gently but firmly that to collect funds for Thanksgiving meals and preach Christmas sermons on the theme ‘no room at the inn’ and then to lock the gates against an individual who by that time was a part of the community was perhaps not operating on Christian principles. They did it very well, too. Not once did they even use the word hypocrisy, which I thought was very mature of them—have you ever noticed how students love that word? Anyway, to make a long story short, we presented the case to the board and they agreed to a trial period of two months. That’s nearly at an end now, and I expect it’ll be renewed.”

He saw the polite disbelief on her face, so he strung the explanation out a bit further. “Yes, it was more complicated than that, insurance and security and all that. But what won them over was Erasmus himself. He has… it’s difficult to explain, but I suppose there’s such an air of sweetness around him, even administrators feel it.”

Kate decided to let it go for the time being. “You said he comes on Tuesdays.”

“Yes. The young man he rides with is an M.Div. student.” (Whatever that is, thought Kate.) “He has an afternoon class at three, I think, or three-thirty—a seminar on pastoral theology, but he may come over earlier and work in the library, I see him there quite a bit. He has a couple of kids, so it’s hard for him to work at home.”

“Did you see him this Tuesday? Or Erasmus?”

“I had meetings pretty much all day. I didn’t see anyone but university bureaucrats.”

“And when does he usually leave Berkeley?”

“Berkeley as a whole, I can’t vouch for, but we rarely see him after Friday morning.”

“You don’t know how he leaves?”

“No.”

“What about friends here? Does he have any particularly close relationships with students or professors, or with any of the street people?”

“Joel, the young man who brings him over on Tuesdays, is probably the student closest to Erasmus. I suppose I’m his best friend among the faculty. I wouldn’t know about the homeless, or anyone out of the GTU area, for that matter. Look, Inspector Martinelli, I have to go.”

“Just one thing. I’d appreciate it if you could write down for me where those quotes he used today come from.”

“All of them?”

“Whatever you can remember.”

“Why? Surely you can’t consider them evidence?”

“I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know that I will want them. But I do know that if it turns out I need them in two or three weeks, you won’t remember more than a handful. Right?”

“Probably not. Okay, I’ll do my best. And I’ll be talking to you. Um… can I say good-bye to him?”

Kate opened the back door of the cruiser and Dean Gardner bent down, holding his hand out to Erasmus.

“So long, old friend,” he said. “Sorry you’ll miss dinner tonight, I hope we’ll see you next week. You remember my phone number?” Erasmus just smiled and let go of the hand. “Well, call me if you need anything.” He stepped back and allowed Kate to slam the door, her mind busy with the image of Erasmus in a telephone booth. Why was that so completely incongruous?

She told the dean she would talk with him soon, got in behind the wheel, and drove away from Berkeley’s holy hill.

Kate kept her eyes firmly on the road, for Berkeley had long been a haven for the mad cyclist and the blithe wheelchair-bound, although on this occasion it was a turbaned Sikh climbing out of a BMW convertible who nearly came to grief under her wheels. She did not glance at the passenger behind the wire grid until they were on the freeway, passing the mud-flat sculptures, but when she did, she found him sitting peacefully, displaying none of the signs of the guilty killer apprehended: He was not asleep, he was not aggressive, he was not talking nonstop. He met her eye calmly.

“The driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously,” he commented.

“Yeah, well, if you don’t dodge around a bit, you get mowed down.” Glancing over her left shoulder, she slipped over two lanes and then slid back between two trucks and into the turnoff for the Bay Bridge. Once through the toll booths, she looked again at Erasmus, who again met her eyes in the mirror. She had been dreading the drive, fearing the mindless recitations and the inevitable stink of the wine-sozzled unwashed, but he smelled only of warm earth, and his silence was somehow restful. He shifted slightly to ease his cramped position beside the long staff that had barely fit in, and the toy star she had pinned to his chest caught the light.

“How did you know I was a cop?” she asked.

“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.”

“That doesn’t explain how you recognized me.”

He answered only with a small and apologetic shrug. Perhaps, she realized some time later, it was one of those places where exact quotes were unavailable.

“Do you mean you saw my picture somewhere?” she tried.

“The morning stars sang together,” he said gently. Right: the Morningstar case. Really great when even the homeless had your face memorized from papers salvaged out of the trash cans, she reflected bitterly, and wrenched the car’s wheel across to the exit for the Hall of Justice. She drove around to the prisoners’ entrance and let him out, wrestled with his long staff and the small gym bag the dean had fetched from the room Erasmus stayed in, and began to lead him to the doors. Erasmus stopped, a large and immovable object, and looked down at her from his great height. His eyes were worried, but not, Kate thought, because of what might happen in this building. Rather, he searched her face as if for an answer.

“Weeping may endure for a night,” he said finally, “but joy comes in the morning.”

“Thanks for sharing that,- now, in you go.” He pulled his elbow away from her hand and turned as if to seize her shoulders. She took a quick step back, and he did not pursue, but bent his entire upper body toward her.

“It is a good thing to escape death, but it is no great pleasure to bring death to a friend.”

“What are you—”

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend. What is a friend? One soul in two bodies.” The intensity with which he was trying to get his message across was almost painful.

“Are you talking about John?” she asked.

To her dismay, he straightened and with both fists pounded on his head, once, twice in frustration. Two uniformed patrolmen walking toward the building stopped.

“Need some help, Inspector Martinelli?” the older one said, warily eyeing the tall, graying priest in the distinguished black robe with the child’s badge pinned to one shoulder. Erasmus paid him no attention but flung out a hand to her in appeal.

“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,” he repeated, nearly shouting. Then immediately, as if the one arose from the other, exclaimed, “These vile guns. The wounds of a friend.”

Kate felt her face stiffen as the sense of his peculiar method of communication hit home: He was not talking about the man John, he meant Lee. He saw her comprehension, and his face relaxed into the loving concern of a kindly uncle, but there was no way Kate was going to accept his sympathy. She cursed bitterly under her breath and seized his elbow again, propelling him past the patrol officers and through the doors. There was no escape, no relaxing, she was not even allowed to perform the simplest tasks of her job without the constant reminder that everyone and his dog knew who and what and where she was. She would have preferred to have her nude photograph on the front pages—at least that would have required a degree of imagination on the part of the voyeurs. Instead of that, even the looniest of the park-bench homeless knew everything about her, had followed her exploits like some goddamned soap opera.

She stabbed her finger on the elevator button and stood staring straight ahead, not looking at the man beside her whose whole being radiated a patient understanding that was in itself infuriating. They stepped inside the elevator along with four or five others and the door closed. They went up, the others got off at the second floor, and when the elevator had resumed, Erasmus spoke to her.

“A fool’s mouth is his destruction,” he said, sounding apologetic. “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee.”

Kate tried hard to hang on to her anger, but she could feel it begin to dissipate, shredding itself against the monumental calm of the old man in the priest’s robe. She sighed.

“No, Erasmus, I’m not angry. Hell, I’m a public servant,- I have no right to a private life, anyway.” The elevator stopped and the door opened. Kate gestured with the carved end of the staff. “Down there. I’ll see if my partner is here.”

She parked Erasmus at a desk and went in search of Al Hawkin. There were no signs of recent habitation in his office, and the secretary said no, she hadn’t seen him yet, so Kate phoned down to the morgue to find out when he would be through. She waited while the woman went to find out, but instead of a female voice, Al himself came on the line.

“What’s up, Martinelli?”

“I didn’t mean you should come to the phone, I just wanted to know how much longer you’d be.”

“Just finished.”

“What did he find?”

“Fractured skull—compression, not from the heat. Somebody whacked him. It’s ours.” Not just an illegal body disposal case, then, but murder. Kate eyed the hefty staff that she had left leaning on the wall behind Hawkin’s desk, wondering if she was going to have to bag it as evidence.

“There’s a fair amount of stuff for the lab, of course,” he said, “but there were no other overt signs.”

“Any chance of lifting fingerprints?”

“Two of the fingers have a bit of skin left, might give partials if we’re lucky. And there were no teeth to x-ray, and no dentures, though the doc said he’s been wearing them until recently. Is that what you’re phoning about?”

“No. I have Brother Erasmus here,- you said you’d like to be in on the interview.”

“I would, yes. Have you had lunch?”

How the man could think of food with the stench of the autopsy still in his nose…

“No. You’re going for a sandwich? Bring one for the good brother, too. He didn’t eat much of his breakfast.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I’ve changed.” He hung up. In the months since she’d been on active homicide duty, Kate had forgotten Al’s almost ritual cleansing after witnessing an autopsy. The smell was pervasive and tenacious, clinging to hair and clothes, and after the first couple of times she, too, had made a point of taking along a change of clothes and some lemon-scented shampoo.

Kate went back to Erasmus. He was sitting where she’d left him, the small green book open in his left hand, his right arm tucked up against his chest, with the fist curled into the line of his jaw. It was a peculiar position, and Kate stood studying him for a moment until it came to her: That was how he had stood on the seminary lawn, with the right side of his body wrapped around the tall staff. Except now there was no staff inside the fist.

“What’s that you’re reading?” she asked. He closed it and held it out to her.

APOSTOLIC FATHERS

I

Translated by Kirsopp Lake

She opened it curiously. The first thing she noticed was that it was a library book, property of the Graduate Theological Union Library. It was divided up into chapters titled “Clement,” “Ignatius to Polycarp,” “The Didache.” In the text of the book, the left-hand page was in Greek, which Kate recognized but could not read, with the right-hand page its English translation. Erasmus, she thought, had been reading the left side of the book. Kate read a few lines, which had to do with repenting, salvation, seeking God, and fleeing evil, then closed the book and let it fall open again, something she’d once seen Hawkin do, although she supposed it wouldn’t mean much in a library book. She read aloud: “ ‘Wherefore, brethren, let us forsake our sojourning in this world, and do the will of him who called us.”“ She let the pages flip and sort themselves out, finding: ” ’Let us also be imitators of those who went about “in the skins of goats and sheep.”‘ Yes, I’ve seen a few of those downtown lately.“ She let the book fall shut and handed it back to him. ”It’s going to be about half an hour before we can get started. Sorry about that. Do you want something to drink? Coffee? A toilet?“ At her last word, he stood up with an air of expectation. She escorted him down the hall, brought him back, and left him at the desk with his Apostolic Fathers while she retreated to Hawkin’s office, keeping one eye on Erasmus.

It was closer to forty-five minutes before Hawkin arrived—his hair stilldamp—smelling faintly of lemons and strongly of onions from the pair of white bags he dropped on her desk.

“I didn’t know if your religious fanatic was a vegetarian, so I got him cheese.” Kate waited while Al dug the sandwiches out and handed her one, then she picked up a packet of french fries and a can of Coke and took them to Erasmus.

“Just another ten minutes,” she told him. “There’s cheese and avocado in that,- hope that’s all right.”

“My mouth shall show forth thy praise,” he replied gravely.

“Er… you’re welcome.”

She went back and found Hawkin halfway through his sandwich.

“What are you grinning at?” he said somewhat indistinctly.

“I’ve dealt with nuts before,” she told him, “but nobody quite like Erasmus. Is this that chicken salad with the almonds and orange things? Great.” The french fries were thick and crisp, and for several minutes the only noises to come from Hawkin’s desk were the sounds of food being inhaled.

“So,” said Hawkin eventually, “tell me about our friend down the hall.”

“Well, he’s going to be an interesting interview. He speaks only in quotations—the Bible, Shakespeare, that kind of thing—so of course there’re a lot a direct questions he can’t answer.”

“Is he coherent?”

“Yes, in a roundabout sort of way. There’s usually a kind of key idea in his quote that answers whatever question you’ve asked, but sometimes you have to dig for it. He usually hesitates before he speaks, to think about what he’s going to say, I guess. Some questions he just doesn’t answer at all; others, he answers with body language or facial expressions. When he really wants you to understand, though, he just keeps at it until he’s sure you’ve got whatever it is he’s driving at.”

“Interview by inference,” Hawkin grumbled. “How the hell can we transcribe a whole session filled with shrugs and eloquent silences?”

“It might not be so bad. The problem is interpreting the meaning of his words. For example, it looks like he’s confessed to John’s murder, but I may have misunderstood him.”

“Explain.”

Kate told him what had happened in the restaurant. “And Dean Gardner agreed that to have Erasmus using the words of a biblical murderer could be taken as an admission of guilt. So I read him his rights and brought him here.” Kate decided it wasn’t necessary to mention the little scene outside.

Hawkin shook his head and then began to laugh. “As you say, it’s nice to have a variety of nuts to choose from.” He drained his Coke and swept the rubbish into the wastepaper basket. “Let’s go see what sense we can shake loose from the holy man.”

♦

EIGHT

♦

A camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.

At home, sitting at the dinner table, Kate asked a question.

“Do you know anything about fools?”

Lee finished chewing her mouthful of lasagna and swallowed.

“It’s not a clinically recognized category of mental illness, if that’s what you’re asking. Far too widespread.”

“Not this kind of fool. This one thinks of himself as some kind of prophet, spouting the Bible.”

“You mean a Fool?” Lee said in surprise, her emphasis placing a capital letter on it. “As in Holy Fool?”

“As in,” Kate agreed.

“How on earth did you find one of those?”

“He’s connected with that cremation in the park. Seems to be a sort of friend or maybe spiritual leader, if that isn’t too farfetched, to the street people in the area.”

“That would make sense, I suppose.”

“So what do you know about fools?”

Kate watched Lee take another forkful while she thought.

“Not an awful lot, off the top of my head. It’s a Jungian archetype, of course, a way of counteracting the tendency of social and religious groups to become concretized. The Trickster is a combination of subtle wisdom and profound stupidity, a person both divine and animalistic.” She pinched off another square of lasagna with the edge of her fork, ate it. “Many of the most influential reforms, certainly in religious history, have been made by people who fit the description of fools. St. Francis, for example, was a classic fool: He was the son of a wealthy family, who suddenly decided it wasn’t enough, so he gave it all away and went to live on the streets, preaching simplicity. Let’s see. In the Middle Ages, the court fool was the only one who could speak the truth to the king. Clowns are a degenerated form of fool. Charlie Chaplin used traces of Trickster behavior. I don’t know, Kate, I’d have to do some research on it.” She chewed for a while longer, on the food and on the idea. “You know, I vaguely remember this guy at a conference, years and years ago, in the Berkeley days maybe, who presented himself as a fool. A very deliberate and self-conscious evocation of the archetypal figure—it must have been a Jungian conference, come to think of it, one of those weekend things sponsored by UC Extension or the Jung Institute.”

“Do you remember anything about him?”

“Not really. Tall fellow, had a beard, I think. White. Him, I mean, not the beard—he was young, not more than about thirty.”

“You’re sure about the age?”

“Kate, love, this was—what, fifteen years ago? All I remember is that he was taller than I was, hairy but neat, wearing motley and carrying this skinny little cane with an ugly carving on it, and trying hard to project an aura of wisdom and self-confidence, although I think at the time I was not impressed. I picture him as uncomfortable, and I think I wondered if he felt silly. Memory is too unreliable to be sure, but I’m fairly sure if he’d been much older I would have been even more struck by his lack of self-assurance. I take it your fool is too old.”

“He is. I’d say he’s a very healthy seventy, seventy-five.”

“No, I don’t think the man I remember could have been anywhere near fifty. Is there no way of finding out who he is?”

“We’re making inquiries, but so far everything’s negative. Nobody knows where he came from,- he was not carrying any ID. He won’t tell us anything.”

“He doesn’t talk?”

“Oh, he talks. Just doesn’t always make sense. He speaks in phrases taken from someplace—the Bible, Shakespeare, things like that.”

“Everything he says?”

“So far as I can see. I don’t know, of course,- I’m just a Catholic, and everyone knows Catholics don’t read their Bible. But I’ve been told that.” She explained about Dean Philip Gardner and the Graduate Theological Union. “He says they’re quotes, and I’ll take his word for it. They’re definitely not straight speech.”

“How strange.”

“You’d say that isn’t standard behavior for a fool?”

“I don’t know that there is such a thing as standard behavior among fools,” replied Lee, “rules of behavior being almost a contradiction in terms. Still, I wouldn’t have thought that speaking only in quotations was completely consistent with being a fool. In fact, I’d have said fools would be the last people to constrict themselves in that way. Spontaneity would be their hallmark, clever wordplay, and a definite, urn, suppleness in mind and body. Two things that I possess not, at the moment. I’d have to make a deliberate effort and research the topic before I could give you more than a superficial idea, I’m afraid.”

“It’s not superficial, and you’re doing fine. It’s very helpful, especially knowing there was a fool in the woodwork ten or fifteen years ago, even if it’s a different man. Would you like to look into it for me, see if you can find out who he was, or maybe find someone like him?”

“For you, or for the department?”

“I suppose it would be for me. I doubt they’d pay you a consultancy fee, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It isn’t that. I’m just… I don’t know.”

“What is it, sweetheart?” Kate could see that Lee was troubled but couldn’t understand why.

“Oh nothing. No, I guess it is something,” said the therapist. “I just don’t know how I feel about getting involved in another case.”

“Oh God, then don’t, hon.” She took Lee’s hand from the table, kissed it, held it tightly. “I don’t want you to touch any of my cases,-I don’t want them to touch you. The question of who fools are or were is of no earthly importance,- I can’t imagine it has the slightest relevance to the case. This man who calls himself Brother Erasmus, he interests me, that’s all. I don’t know what to make of him and I was curious about what you might know.” She did not add, And I thought it might interest you, give you a project that was challenging but not strenuous. Think again, Kate. The last and only time Lee had been involved with one of her lover’s cases, she’d ended up with a bullet tearing through two of her vertebrae and a multiple murderer dead on her living room floor, ten feet from where they were now sitting. A lack of enthusiasm for future involvement was not only understandable, it was to be encouraged.

“It was a bad idea, hon. Forget it.” She gave Lees hand a squeeze and let it go, but Lee did not immediately resume her meal, and Kate kicked herself for her stupidity.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Lee said slowly. “When I said I don’t know how I feel about it, I meant just that: I don’t know. I think I’m expecting to feel apprehension, but I honestly don’t know if I am. If anything, there’s an absence of emotional overtones, just a vague interest, intellectual almost. Perhaps the apprehension is so strong that I’m blocking it. There’s a degree—What are you laughing at?”

Kate wasn’t laughing, but she was grinning widely. “God, you sound like a therapist, Lee.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “I am a therapist.”

“I know,” Kate said, loving her, loving the surge of affection and exasperation and normality that had hit her, and then she really was laughing, and Lee with her. When it had washed on, Lee picked up her fork again and continued where they had left off.

“If it’s just for you, I’d be happy to see what I can do. Jon has the modem up and running, this would be a good exercise in learning how to use it in research.”

“If you want to, if you have the time, I’d appreciate it. But I want it kept on a purely theoretical level. If you find someone, I don’t want you talking to them, even through the computer. I don’t want your identity out there at all. The last thing we want is the press standing in our petunias and looking in our windows, and the case is colorful enough already without you getting involved.”

“Actually, I think Jon dug out the petunias and put in some sweet peas, but I agree. Newspaper reporters know how to use computer nets better than I do. Now, tell me more about this fool of yours.”

Dinner progressed with the story of Erasmus, told as entertainment, with the dark moment of the cremation and the possible confession downplayed and the conversation in the parking lot behind the Hall of Justice omitted altogether.

Jon came into the kitchen just as Kate was putting on the coffee. He raised his eyebrows at the plates in the sink.

“Aren’t you a clever girl, then?” he murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“She hasn’t eaten that much in a month,” he said, and then in a normal volume added, “Well, toodles, ducks, I’ll be seein‘ ya. Dr. Samson has his beeper on, so buzz me if you have to go out. Arrivederci, Leo,” he called.

“Have a good time, Jon,” she called from the living room, and the door opened and shut behind him.

Kate loaded the dishwasher, put the leftovers in the refrigerator, and took the coffee back into the living room. The television was on and Lee was on the sofa, slightly flushed from the effort of clambering from the wheelchair. Kate stood and looked down at her, smiling.

“You look gorgeous,” she said.

“Tamara came today and gave me a cut and a shampoo. You should let her do yours,- she’s pretty good.”

“It’s not your hair. It’s you.”

“Poor Kate, going blind from all the paperwork. Come and sit down for a while. There’s an old Maggie Smith movie on Channel Nine.” Lee had a thing for Maggie Smith.

“The chair’s a better place if you’re going to_ watch TV. You’ll get a stiff neck sitting here.”

“I thought maybe if I sat here I could tempt you away from your paperwork. Then I can lean on you and I won’t get a stiff neck.”

Kate put both cups on the table and obediently inserted herself behind Lee, who leaned into the circle of her left arm. The movie had just started. They drank their coffee. Kate began to find the warm smell of Lee’s curly yellow hair distracting.

“Did your mother pronounce it dabl-ya or day-li-ya?” asked Lee suddenly.

“What?”

“Those hideous flowers,” said Lee, gesturing at the screen with her cup. “English people tend to use three syllables, but I always thought there were two. I should check in the dictionary,” said the scholar.

“Do you want me to go get it for you?” asked Kate, her face buried in Lee’s hair. Her left hand, having migrated from the back of the sofa, was pressed flat against Lee’s stomach, her forefinger bent and gently circling the rim of one of Lee’s buttons.

“Not just now.” Lee slowly finished her coffee. Kate’s was going cold. “Don’t you love it, a woman with bright red hair wearing that color of red? Only Maggie Smith could pull it off.”

“I’m jealous of Maggie Smith,” muttered Kate happily.

They never did see the end of the movie.

Murder cases not solved within two or three days tend to drag on into weeks, and this was no exception. The fourth and fifth days passed without any startling revelations. Kate and Al Hawkin had agreed that Brother Erasmus was not likely to run, so after Thursday’s fruitless question-and-statement session he was handed back his staff and allowed to walk back out into the city of Saint Francis. Kate, rather to her surprise, found herself making a detour from a Sunday morning shopping trip to drive slowly through Golden Gate Park, where eventually she came across Erasmus, dressed like a tramp and walking along the road in the midst of a group of street people. The raggle-taggle congregation might have been from another world compared to the group of his admirers in Berkeley, except for one thing: on these faces was an identical look, a blend of pleasure, awe, and love.

Hawkin saw him once, too, although his sighting was accidental, when he passed Erasmus on his way home from work one afternoon. Erasmus was not wearing his cassock then, either, but a pair of jeans and a multicolored wool jacket. He was sitting in the winter sun on a low brick wall, reading a small green book and eating an ice cream cone.

The millstones of justice continued to grind. Their John Doe’s lab work showed no signs of alcohol, drugs, or even nicotine and indicated that his last meal had been a large piece of beefsteak, green beans, and baked potatoes at least six hours before his death. Death had been due to a blow with a blunt object to the right side of the skull, which, judging from the angle, had been delivered by a right-handed person standing behind the victim as he sat on the stump a few feet from where Harry and Luis had found his body. Death had been by no means instantaneous, although unconsciousness would have been.

John had bled slowly, both internally and onto the ground, for as much as an hour before his heart stopped.

There was one other piece of possible evidence, which Hawkin interpreted as sinister, though Kate privately reserved judgment,- twenty feet from the body, at the foot of a tree, had been found a lone cigarette stub that had been pinched off, not ground out. Oddly, though, the-drift of ashes on the ground around the tree was considerably more than could be made from one cigarette. The crime scene investigator estimated that five to eight cigarettes could have produced that quantity of ash. There was another, smaller pile of ash just in front of the stump. In three places at the site were found boot prints, none of them complete, but together an indication that a pair of size nine men’s heeled boots, not cowboy boots but similar, had been there within a day of the time John had died.

When the lab results were in, Al had Kate drive him across town to the park. He stood within the fluttering yellow tapes marking the crime scene and stared at the ground.

He said deliberately, “I think a man wearing a pair of those expensive men’s boots that make you two inches taller stood here and talked with John, smoked a cigarette, walked around, picked up something—baseball bat, tree branch, nightstick— and hit John with it as hard as he could. John collapsed but didn’t die, and the man dragged him away from the stump and under the bush so he was invisible. He then stood behind that tree over there, smoking cigarettes—which he pinched off and put in his pocket, except the one he dropped—and watching John die. Cold-blooded, deliberate, smoking and watching.”

“I can’t see this as a pleasure killing,” objected Kate.

“No. Too casual, no ritual. And he didn’t come in close to watch,- it was more just waiting. He wanted John dead, didn’t mind if he suffered, but didn’t want to be too close. Could have been simply caution—he could get away more easily from over there if someone came down the road, couldn’t he?”

“You think he had a car along one of the streets outside the park?”

“Let’s get some posters up, see if anyone noticed something. Funny, though, about the cigarettes.”

“What about them?”

“Why did he pinch them all and take them?”

“To leave nothing behind. He watches too much television, thinks we can find him from a fingerprint on paper. Or just didn’t want us to know he was here.”

“Why not knock the ashes out into the cellophane wrapper, then? I’ve done that myself, smoking on a tidy front porch. And why didn’t he worry about his footprints? They’re at least as distinctive as his smoking habit.”

“Maybe the TV programs he watches only deal with fingerprints. That could also be why he waited for the man to die instead of bashing him again—he wasn’t necessarily coldblooded, just afraid of getting blood on his clothing. With the single hit, he was probably clean, but multiple blows would increase the risk of contamination.”

“You have an answer for everything, Martinelli. How about this one: What kind of man habitually pinches his cigarettes out rather than smashing them?”

“You’re the smoker, AI. You were, anyway. J don’t know. Someone showing macho? Like striking a match with your thumbnail to show how tough you are. Someone about to put the butt in his pocket and wanting to make sure it didn’t light his pocket on fire?”

“You’re probably right,” he said absently.

“Okay, AI. What kind of man would you say habitually pinches off his smokes? And why do you think it’s habitual?”

“Because he went through at least six or eight of them without once forgetting and putting it out against the tree or under his foot. Pretty calculating for a guy standing there smoking nervously, waiting for a friend to die.”

“Friend?”

“Acquaintance at least. And you may be right about the reason for the habit. Or it could be he’s a man who doesn’t mind a bit of ash but doesn’t want to toss a burning butt onto the ground. Someone who works around flammable things, maybe. Or someone concerned with the litter. Groundskeepers rarely toss away their cigarettes, knowing they’ll have to clean them up.”

“So, we have a short, vain groundskeeper in expensive boots who is friends with a homeless man who doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs, bashes him on the head, and stands around being tidy until the homeless man dies.”

“Yep, that’s about it,” said Hawkin.

“I like it.” Kate nodded and followed Hawkin to the car. “Sure, that is a doable theory. Let’s give it to the DA and just arrest every gardener in the city, starting with the park workers. Get a bus and shovel them in.”

“You’ll take care of it, won’t you?” asked Hawkin. “I have a date with Jani tonight.”

“No problem. Drag ‘em in, beat ’em up, get a confession, be home for dinner.”

“I knew I could count on you, Martinelli.”

♦

NINE

♦

The way to build a church is to build it.

Six days, seven days. Lee came up with some references and sent Jon in several directions to pick them up and request more from the university’s interlibrary loan service. She began to read and digest, in between physical therapy, a trip to the doctor’s, the lengthy preparation for and exhaustion following an appointment with one of her two clients, and sleep. Dean Gardner phoned Kate every day, even though Erasmus had been released, until finally, to get rid of him, Kate gave him the same research assignment she’d given Lee: Find me someone who knows what a Fool is.

Kate didn’t quite know why she was interested, though she did know that it had more to do with the enigma that was Erasmus than with the investigation into John’s murder. She mentioned her by-proxy academic investigations to Hawkin only in a passing way, he, in turn, nodded and told her to let him know if anything came up.

♦

Nine days after the murder, eight days after the cremation, the first faint hairline crack appeared in the case, although Kate did not at first recognize it as such. She was mostly annoyed.

“Dean Gardner, I do not have any news for you. I haven’t even seen Erasmus since—oh, he is? Of course, it’s Thursday.” Erasmus had been told not to leave San Francisco, but somehow she wasn’t surprised that he was following his usual rounds. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, he seems in good spirits. The reason I called is that I have some suggestions for that question you put to me. Do you have a pencil?”

“Go ahead.”

“The first name is Danny Yamaguchi. Danny is a woman, a professor of Religious Studies at Stanford. Her specialty is cults, she should know if there is a Fool’s movement. Second is Rabbi Shlomo Bauer. He’s a GTU visiting professor this semester, his field is Jewish/Christian relations in Russia from the seventeenth century to the present. And third is a Dr. Whitlaw, who teaches at one of the redbrick universities in England and is over here on a sabbatical. I don’t know her, but I was told that she’s something of an expert on modern religious movements.” He then gave Kate telephone numbers for Yamaguchi and Bauer, explaining, “Dr. Whitlaw is staying with friends in San Francisco, but I couldn’t come up with her number. The only one I have at the moment seems to be an answering machine.

I’m sure I’ll have a number for you in a few days, and I know she’s coming to lecture here the end of next week, but do you want the machine’s number?“

“Might as well.” She wrote it down, thanked him, and prepared to hang up, when he interrupted her.

“I also have that list of passages Erasmus was quoting. Shall I send it to you?”

Actually, Kate had forgotten about it. “That would be helpful. Just send it to the address I left with you.”

“There was just one odd thing—it struck me when I was thinking about that conversation. One of his passages was wrong. That’s never happened before, not that I’ve ever caught. Remember when he was getting so worked up about something and cited David’s lament over his son Absalom? Before that he said, ”David made a covenant with Jonathan, because he loved him as his own soul.“ I’m sure he said it in that order. In fact, I was aware of it at the time because it’s wrong. It’s Jonathan who makes the covenant with David.”

“Does that matter?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it would in the biblical context, but I don’t know if it was only a slip. I just wanted to mention it, because it was unusual.”

Kate thanked him, reassured him yet again that she would phone if there was news, and firmly said good-bye. She dutifully wrote the information down, then went out to pick up Al Hawkin so they could tie up the interviews of the people who lived in houses facing Golden Gate Park, on the slim chance they might have noticed, and remembered, the booted man nine days before. The inquiries had to be made, but she was not too surprised when the slim chance had faded into nothingness by the end of the day.

That night she took out her notebook and phoned the three numbers. At the first, a tremulous voice with limited English informed Kate that her granddaughter was away until Tuesday and then hung up. There was no answer at Rabbi Bauer’s number. The number for Dr. Whitlaw was indeed an answering machine, which rattled at her in a woman’s rushed voice: “You’ve reached the Drs. Franklin answering service, please leave your name, number, and a brief description of what you need and we’ll try to get back to you.” That last qualified offer was none too encouraging, but Kate left her name, without any identifying rank, her home number, and the message that she needed to reach Dr. Whitlaw and would the recipients of the message please phone back, whether or not they were able to pass the message on to Dr. Whitlaw, thank you.

When she hung up, she found Lee looking at her, forehead wrinkled in thought. “Was that something to do with your fool case?”

“A rather thin lead to finding an expert, yes. Nobody home.”

“I just wondered, because a couple of the names sounded familiar—Yamaguchi and Whitlow.”

“Whitlaw.”

“Was it? It might not be the same person. Those were a couple of the names I’ve come up with. Jon’s requested a book for me that was edited by a Whitlow or Whitlaw… on the Fools movement of the twentieth century.”

“You don’t have anything yet?”

“Do you want to go up and get the folders and I’ll look? It’s on my desk next to the computer, a manila folder labeled ‘Fools.”“

It was there. Kate came back downstairs with it and handed it to Lee, who opened it on her lap and started sorting through the pages.

“Oh, I meant to mention,” she said without looking up from the file, “Jon has a friend whose brother installs those stairway lifts in peoples’ houses,- he said he’d do it for cost plus labor. The only problem would be that when we want to tear it out, it’ll leave marks on the woodwork. What do you think?”

It was fortunate that Lee was busy with her papers and did not look up—fortunate, or deliberate. Kate felt her face stiffen in an impossible mixture of shock and relief and despair: This was the first time Lee had admitted that her time in the wheelchair might not be brief. The first time, that is, since the early months of complete paraplegia, when suicide had seemed to Lee a real option. Kate turned and walked out of the room, looked about for an excuse, saw the coffee machine, poured herself a second cup, although she hadn’t drunk her first yet, and took it back into the living room.

“Any idea what it would cost?” she said evenly.

“It would still be a lot, several thousand dollars, but there’s an extended-payment program, and they buy it back when you’re finished with it. I don’t really mind going up and down on my butt. Actually, it’s good exercise, but it is slow. I just thought it would save you and Jon a few hundred trips a week up and down, fetching things for me.”

Anything that could increase Lee’s sense of independence was to be snatched at, and Kate’s face was firmly in line when Lee looked up, a paper in her hand.

“Anyway, it’s something to think about. Here’s that printout. D. Yamaguchi, Stanford, and E. Whitlaw—you’re right, it is Whitlaw—Nottingham, England. You said she’s here?”

“Dean Gardner thought she was visiting friends in the city.

“The titles of her articles and the one book look like what you need. I should have some of them Monday or Tuesday, if you want to look through them before you see her.”

“Good idea. If she calls and I’m not here, see if you can get a real phone number or an address from her. Want another coffee?”

“No, this is fine. Could you stick that tape into the machine for me?”

Kate obediently fed the indicated videotape into the mouth of the player, turned on the television, and, while she was waiting for the sound to come up, looked at the box: The Pirates of Penzance.

“Another heavy intellectual evening, I see,” she said, grinned at Lee’s embarrassment, and went off to do the dishes. Lee thought Gilbert and Sullivan hilarious,- Kate would have preferred the Saturday-morning cartoons.

After a while, she heard Jon’s voice above those of the cavorting sailors. A minute later, he came into the kitchen, dressed in his mauve velour dressing gown, and took two glasses and a squat bottle out of the drinks cupboard.

“We really must have a crystal decanter,” he complained, pouring out a thick red-brown liquid. “Would you like a glass?”

“What is it?”

“Port, my dear. I thought it might be fun to reintroduce gout as a fashionable disease.”

“No thanks. Say, Jon? Just now Lee said something about installing a lift on the stairs. Do you know anything about that?”

“Yes, well, I thought it might not be a bad idea.”

“I agree. I suggested it three or four months ago and she nearly bit my head off.”

“Did she? Well, times change. I admit I did bitch—a small bitch, a gentle bitch—about the state of my knees on those stairs. And, er, I also pointed out that she could probably deduct the depreciated cost of it as a business expense, now she’s working again.” Jon studied his fingernails for a moment and then looked up through his eyelashes at her—difficult to do, as he was four inches taller than she. Kate began reluctantly to grin, shaking her head.

“By God, you’re a sly one. And she fell for it. I’d never have believed it.” He laughed and whisked the glasses off the counter. “Jon?” He turned in the doorway. “Good work. Thanks.” He nodded, then went to join Lee in front of the television.

An hour later, Linda Ronstadt was bouncing around a moonlit garden in her nightie, flirting with her pirate, when the phone rang. Kate picked it up in the kitchen, where she had retreated with a stack of unread newspapers.

“Martinelli.”

“This is Professor Eve Whitlaw, returning your call.” The voice was low, calm, and English.

“Yes, Dr. Whitlaw, thank you for phoning. I am the—”

“Is that pirates?”

“Sorry?”

“The music you’re listening to. It is, yes. Not perhaps their best, but it has a few delicious moments. You were saying.”

“Er, yes. I am Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department. We are investigating a murder that occurred recently in Golden Gate Park. The reason I am calling you is that one of the persons involved refers to himself as a ‘fool,” and I was told by the dean of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific over in Berkeley that you might be able to tell me exactly what this man means when he uses that description.“ By the time Kate reached the end of this convoluted request, she was feeling something of a fool herself, and the sensation was reinforced by the long and ringing silence on the other end of the line.

“Dr. Whit—”

“You’ve arrested a Fool for murder?” the English voice said incredulously.

“He is not under arrest. At most, he’s a weak suspect. However, he’s a problem to us because it’s very difficult to understand what he’s doing here. The interviews we’ve held have been… unsatisfactory.”

The deep voice chuckled. “I can imagine. He answers your questions, but his answers are, shall we say, ambiguous. Even enigmatic.”

“Thank God,” Kate burst out. “You do understand.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but I may be able to throw a bit of light into your darkness. When may I meet this fool of yours?”

“You want to meet him?”

“My dear young woman, would you ask a paleontologist if she would care to meet a dinosaur? Of course I must meet him. Is he in jail?”

“No, at the moment he’s in Berkeley. He will be back in San Francisco by Saturday, I think, and I could put my hands on him by Sunday. Perhaps we could arrange a meeting on Monday?”

“Not until then? Ah well, it can’t be helped, I suppose. However, my dear, if you lose him, I shall find it very hard.” There was a thread of steel beneath the jovial words, and Kate had a vivid picture of an elderly teacher she’d once had, a nun who used to punish tardiness and forgotten homework with an astonishingly painful rap on the skull with a thimble.

“I’ll try not to lose him,” she said. “But I wonder if before then you and I could meet.”

“A brief tutorial might well be in order. Tomorrow will be difficult, the entire afternoon is rather solidly booked. Let me look at my diary. Hmm. I do have a space in the early afternoon. What about one—no, shall we say twelve-thirty?”

Dr. Whitlaw gave Kate an address in Noe Valley and the house telephone number, wished her enjoyment of the remainder of Pirates, and hung up. Kate obediently poured herself a tiny glass of the syrupy port and went out to sit between Lee and Jon on the sofa, watching the equally syrupy ending of the operetta.

♦

TEN

♦

When Francis came forth from his cave of vision,

he was wearing the same word “fool” as a feather

in his cap, as a crest or even a crown.

At under five and a half feet with shoes on, Kate was not often given the chance to feel tall, except in a room full of kids. In fact, when the door opened, she thought for a moment that she was faced with a child. It was the impression of an instant’s glance, though, because no sooner had the door begun to open than it caught forcibly on the chain and slammed shut in her face. The chain rattled, the door opened again, more fully this time, and the person standing there, colorful and gray-haired and of a height surely not far from dwarfism, was not a child, but a woman of about sixty.

“Doctor Whitlaw?” Kate asked uncertainly.

“Professor, actually. You’re Inspector Martinelli. Come in.”

Kate stepped inside while the woman reached up to fasten the chain.

“I was told that I must always bolt and chain the doors in this city. I live in a village, where a crime wave is the neighbor’s son stealing a handbag from the backseat of a car. I’m forever forgetting that I’ve put the chain on,- I nearly took my nose off the other day. Come in here and sit down, and tell me what I can do for you. Will you take a cup of tea?”

She had a lovely voice. On the phone it had sounded gruff, but in person it was only surprisingly deep, and the accent that had sounded English became something other than the posh tones of most actors and the occasional foreign correspondent on the news. Her accent had depth rather than smoothness, flavor rather than sophistication, and made her sound as if she could tell a sly joke, if the opportunity arose. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk tea, but she accepted.

They sat at a round, claw-foot, polished oak table, between a cheerful pine kitchen and a living room bursting with gloriously happy plants, tropical-print fabrics, and African sculpture. Professor Whitlaw brought another cup from the kitchen (using a step stool to reach the cupboard) and poured from a dark brown teapot so new that it still had the price sticker on the handle. She added milk without asking, put a sugar bowl, spoon, and plate of boring-looking cookies in front of Kate, and sat back in her chair, her feet dangling.

“This is a very pleasant place,” Kate offered.

“Do you think so? It belongs to friends of my niece, two pediatricians who are away for the month, so I’m house-sitting. Actually, I am beginning to find its unremitting cheerfulness oppressive, particularly in the mornings. I come out in my dressing gown and expect to hear parrots and monkeys. Fortunately, I don’t have to care for the jungle. They have a sort of indoor gardener who comes twice a week to water and prune—a good thing, because if I was responsible, they would come back to a desert. You wish to talk about the Fools movement.”

“Er, yes. Or about one particular fool, really.” Kate explained at length what she knew about Erasmus, his relationships with the homeless and the seminary, and his apparent unwillingness or inability to speak other than by way of quotations. She then gave a very general picture of the murder and investigation, ending up with: “So you see, the man must be treated as a suspect,- he has no alibi, no identification, no past, no nothing. The only thing he has said about himself that sounds in the least bit personal is that he thinks of himself as a fool. Now, he could just be saying that, or he may be referring to this organization or movement or whatever it is. Dean Gardner thought there was a chance he might be, so he referred me to you.”

“You are catching at straws.”

“I suppose so.”

“And even if he is a remnant of the Fools movement, it may have nothing to do with the man’s death.”

“That’s very possible.”

“But you are hoping nonetheless to understand the differences between the cultivated lunacy of Foolishness and the inadvertent insanity of a murderer.”

“Well, I guess. Actually, I was hoping that if he had been a member of this… movement, there might be records, or someone who might know who Erasmus is.”

“The Fools movement was short-lived, and fairly comprehensively dispersed. It was also never the sort of thing to have any formalized membership—that would have been seen as oxymoronic. If you will pardon the pun.” She chuckled, and Kate smiled politely, not having the faintest idea what the woman was talking about. “What you require,” she continued, sounding every bit the academic, “is background information. However, as I told you over the telephone, my day is fairly full. I’m afraid that I’ve loaned out my only copies of the book I edited on the subject, but may I suggest that I give you a couple of papers and you come back and talk with me when you’ve had a chance to digest them? This evening or tomorrow, or whenever.”

Without waiting for Kate to agree, she slid down from her chair and went out of the room and through a doorway on the other side of the hall. When Kate reached the door, she found Professor Whitlaw with her head in a filing cabinet. She laid three manila folders on the desk, opened the first two, and took out some papers, leaving a stapled sheaf of papers in each one. The third one, she hesitated over, then opened it and began to sift through the contents thoughtfully.

The doorbell rang. Professor Whitlaw glanced at her wrist in surprise, thumbed through two or three more sheets of paper in the file, and then snapped it shut and handed it to Kate along with the other two folders.

“I don’t have photocopies of the loose material,” she said, “and it would be very inconvenient if you lost it. But if one cannot trust a policewoman, whom can one trust? Give me a ring when you’ve had a chance to formulate some questions. The next two nights are good for me.”

The professor remembered the chain this time. Kate changed places on the doorstep with an anemic young man wearing a skullcap and went to do her assignment.

♦

“What are you doing home?” demanded Jon. “Did you get fired?”

“The teacher gave me homework. Ooh, love your outfit, Jonnie.” It was quite fetching—a lacy apron over his Balinese sarong and nothing else—as he leaned on the table, making a pie crust on the marble pastry board, the rolling pin in his hand and a smudge of flour on one cheekbone. It always surprised Kate to see how muscular Jon was, for all his languid act. She wiggled her fingers at him and went looking for Lee.

Her voice answered Kate from upstairs, and Kate followed it to the room they used as a study. Lee was in her upstairs wheelchair at the computer terminal. A scattering of notepads and a long-dry coffee cup bore witness to a lengthy session.

“Hi there,” Lee said. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

“I’m obviously getting too predictable in my old age,” complained Kate. “You and Jon can plan your orgies around my absences. I had some reading to do and it’s too noisy at work,” she explained, waving the folders. “Look, I don’t know if you want to go on with your search. Dr. Whitlaw—Professor Whit-law—is a real find, and if you’re getting tired…”

“Oh, I’m not working on your stuff. This is something else.” Feeling both piqued and amused at her sensation of being abandoned, Kate went to look over Lee’s shoulder at the screen, which was displaying a graph.

“What is it?”

“I had an interesting visit this morning from a woman I worked with on a project two or three years ago,- she said she’d seen you in Berkeley recently.”

“Rosalyn something?” Kate tossed the folders onto a table and sat down.

“Hall. She’s putting together a grant proposal for a mental-health program targeting homeless women, wondered if I might help with it. Remember that paper I gave at the Glide conference? She wants me to update it so she can use it as an appendix. I was just reviewing it, seeing how much I’d have to rewrite the thing. I don’t know, though,- my brain seems to have forgotten how to think.”

“You and me both, babe. It looks like you’ve been at it for quite a while.”

Lee picked up on the question behind the statement. “I did most of this earlier. I had a long session with Petra,- she thinks the tone in my right leg is improving. And then I had a rest, so I thought I’d work for a while longer.”

They talked for a while about gluteus and abdominal and trapezius muscles, about spasms and recovery and tone, the things that until a month ago had formed their entire lives, until Lee had seemed to make a deliberate choice to push back all the necessary fixations and passions of her recovery in order to allow a small space for the life that had been hers a year ago. Kate respected Lee’s decision and tried hard not to push for every detail of a muscle gradually regained, a weight lifted, in the same way that she had respected Lee’s choice of a caregiver, Lee’s decision to come directly home from the hospital with full-time attendants rather than enter a rehabilitation clinic, and Lee’s determination to keep some of the details of her care from her lover. Privacy is a precious commodity to anyone, but to a woman emerging from paraplegia, it was a gift of life.

So all Kate said was, mildly, “Well, don’t overdo it.”

“Of course not. What have you got?”

“Couple of articles by the expert on Fools. I was looking at one of them on the way here, and I swear it isn’t written in English.”

“Would you rather do my appendix to the grant application?”

“Tempting, but I think there’s going to be a quiz on this.”

Kate picked up the folder and Lee turned back to the terminal, and for the next hour the rusty gears of two minds independently ground and meshed. Kate looked over her two articles, decided to skip for the moment the one that used exegetical and synthesis in the first sentence, and began to read the other, a transcript of a talk given to some religious organization with an impressive name but an apparently generic audience.

HOLY FOOLISHNESS REBORN

The modern Fools movement began, as far as can be determined, in 1969 in southern England. Its earliest manifestation was on a clear, warm morning in early June, when three Fools appeared (with an appreciation for paradox that was at the movement’s core from the very beginning) at the entrance to the Tower of London, that massive and anachronistic fortress which forms the symbolic heart of the British Empire. And, lest anyone miss the point, they arrived there from the morning service at St. Bartholemew-the-Great, a church founded by Rahere, Henry I’s jester.

Had any of London’s natives been watching, the behaviour of the taxi driver would have alerted him to the extraordinary nature of what was arriving, for the cabby, unflappable son of a phlegmatic people, stared at his departing passengers with open-mouthed befuddlement. Interviews with that driver and with the American tour which witnessed the appearance of Foolishness were more or less in agreement: One of the trio, the tallest, turned to pay the driver, adding as a tip a five-pound note and a red rosebud plucked from thin air. The three passengers walked a short distance away, dropped the small canvas bags they each carried, joined hands in a long moment of (apparently) prayer, and set about their performance. The cab driver shook himself like a setter emerging from a pond, put the taxi into gear, and drove off. The red rose he tucked into the side of his taximeter, where it gradually dried and blackened, remaining tightly furled but fragrant, until he plucked it off and threw it out the window over the Westminster Bridge nearly three weeks later.

He did not see his three passengers again, although as the summer passed he saw others like them. The original three, having bowed their heads and muttered in unison some chant barely audible even to the women who emerged from the toilets ten feet away, turned to face the Tower (and its tourists) full-face.

And an arresting trio of faces it was, too, glossy black on the right side, stark white on the left, hair sleeked back, and a row of earrings down the length of each left ear. Black trousers and shoes, white blouses and gloves, harlequin diamonds black and white on the waistcoats. The tall one alone had a spot of color: One of the diamonds on his waistcoat was purple.

What followed was a busking act such as even London rarely saw, street performance as one of the high arts. Part magic show, part political satire, part sermon, it seemed more of a dance done for their own pleasure, or a meditation, than a performance aimed at the audience—though audience there was, and quickly. The act of the three Fools was peculiarly compelling, faintly disturbing, wistful and wild in turns, austere and scatological, the exhortations of gentle fanatics, anarchists with a sense of humour, three raucous saints who were immensely professional in their direct simplicity. The bobby who eventually moved them on had never seen anything quite like it. He had also never seen buskers who didn’t pass the hat.

By the end of the summer, there were at least a dozen harlequin buskers in London, and others had appeared in Bath and Edinburgh. By Christmas, New York had its first pair, and the following summer they were to be found as far afield as Venice, Tokyo, and Sydney.

Then, around the second Christmas, the first tattooed harlequins appeared: the black half of their faces no longer greasepaint, but one solid and spectacularly painful tattoo from a sharp line down the center of the face, from the hairline to the chest. These half-and-halfs were the extremists, the most radical of a radical group, and although they never numbered more than a dozen, they were visible, confrontational, frenetically active, and disturbing: frightening, even. The other Foolish brothers and sisters contented themselves with the small tattoo of a diamond beneath the left eye, like a tear, but the handful of tattooed harlequins inevitably garnered the attention of the press, and the police. There had been arrests before, for such things as unlawful assembly and public nudity, but now the Fools (as they were known to the public through the various newspaper articles) began to collect more severe misdemeanors, and eventually felonies. One half-and-half in New York was so caught up in his performance that he picked up a small child and ran off with her, the little girl was greatly amused, the mother was not, and he was arrested for attempted kidnapping (a charge that was later dropped). Another assaulted a police officer who was trying to move him out of a crowded downtown intersection in Dallas. Four months later, the same man, out on bail but now in Los Angeles, reached the climax of his performance by pulling a revolver from his motley and shooting a young woman dead.

It was the death, too, of the Fools movement. The young man had a history of violence and severe mental disturbance, and the Fools were not to blame for providing him with an outlet, but they were all comprehensively tarred with the same brush of dangerous madness, and within a few months they had dispersed. Fools went back to the everyday life they had so often mocked: Fools bought clothes, bore children, voted in school board elections. And six teachers, two lawyers, a magistrate, two actors, four clergy of various denominations, and a junior congressional aide all wear the faint scar of a removed tattoo high on their left cheekbone.

The modern Fools movement of the early seventies sprang from a soil similar to that which nourished earlier Fools movements: The Russian Yurodivi, the classical Medieval Fool, the buffoonery of the Zen master—all came into being as a warning personified, a concrete and living statement that the status quo was in grave danger of smothering the life out of the spirit of the individual and the community. A church which no longer hears its parishioners, a government which is operating with its head in the clouds, a people which have moved too far from its source: The Fool’s laughter serves to point out the shakiness of these foundations,- the Fool seeks to save his community by appearing to threaten it. The essential ministry of a Fool is to undermine beliefs, to seed doubts, to shock people into seeing truth.

However, I shall not trespass on the lectures of my colleagues by going any further into the larger themes of the Fool movement, and in addition, I see that we have run short of time. Perhaps we might take just two or three questions from the audience.

The question-and-answer session that apparently followed was not recorded, and Kate turned to the next article with a sigh. This one was composed as a written, rather than oral, presentation, a reprint from a quarterly journal, and had so many footnotes that on some pages they took up more space than the text. Kate didn’t think she really needed to know all about “Fedotov’s analysis of this Russian manifestation of kenoticism,” “Via’s exploration of the kerygmatic nucleus of Gospel and the generative linguistic matrix of Greek comedy,” or even “Harvey Cox’s dated but valuable Feast of Fools.” The article was cluttered with names—Willeford and Welsford, Hyers and Eliade and Brown—and turgid with the concentrated essence of scholarship.

She contented herself with skimming, picking up interesting tidbits, mostly from the footnotes. “Holy Foolishness” was an accepted form of ascetic life in Russia, with thirty-six canonized saints who were Fools. Extreme Foolishness was used as a means of triggering Zen enlightenment. The Cistercian, the Ignatian, and the Franciscan orders of the Roman Catholic Church all had their roots firmly in Foolishness. (St. Ignatius Loyola regarded Holy Foolishness as the most perfect means of achieving humility, and St. Francis of Assisi was, as Lee had suggested, Foolishness personified.) There was an illiterate Irish laborer in the nineteenth century who lived the life of a Fool, and a tiny monastic order in the same country, founded about the time the tattooed harlequin in Los Angeles had murdered international Foolishness. The members of this Irish order, monks and nuns alike, wandered the roads like harmless lunatics, carrying on conversations with farm animals and then going home to pray.

So why not Erasmus, in twentieth-century San Francisco? Kate mused, turning to the third folder.

The loose papers it contained were a disparate lot, most of them handwritten, occasionally a mere scrap of paper, but mostly full sheets, though of a different size from standard American paper. The writing was in several hands, all ineffably foreign but for the most part legible. Some of the sheets were merely references, often with two or three shades of ink or pencil on the same page: titles and authors of books or, more often, articles. Kate glanced at these pages and left them in the file. Others had quotes and excerpts, with references, and yet others seemed to be Professor Whitlaw’s own writing, perhaps thoughts for the book outlined on one page, much scratched out and emended.

A number of the pages were as unintelligible as the second article had been, one academic talking to others in a shared language. Others, however, were obviously meant for popular consumption, as the transcribed lecture had been. Kate picked up a few of these and read them:

There is no place [professor Whitlaw wrote] for the Fool in the modern world of science and industry. The Fool speaks a language of symbols and of Divinity. We forget, however, those of us who live our lives conversant with computer terminals and clay-footed politicians, with scientists who gaze into invisible stars or manipulate the genetic building blocks of living matter, that there is an entire population living, as it were, on the edge, who feel as powerless as children and cling, therefore, to any sign of alternate possibilities. They believe in the possibility of magic, the reality of Saints, and would not be surprised at the existence of miracles. The Fool is their representative, their mediator, their friend.

Judaism doesn’t have fools,- it has prophets. Mad— look at Ezekiel. Poor and uneducated—Jeremiah. Laughingstocks all—poor old Hosea couldn’t even keep his wife from making a spectacle of them both. Jesus ben Joseph fit right in, preaching to the poor, the prostitutes, the scum, scratching his lice and calling himself the son of God—and the ultimate absurdity, God’s only son strung up and executed with the other criminals: A royal diadem made from a branch of thorns, a king’s cloak that went to the high throw, his only public mourners a few outcast women with nothing left to lose. Then, to cap it off, Christ the original Fool is decently clothed in purple, his crown traded for one of gold, he is restored to the head of his Church, and the transformation is complete.

But what consequences, when the jester assumes the throne? Someone must take his place in the hall, lest the people forget that the essence of Christianity is humility, not magnificence, that in weakness lies our strength.

(This page was marked: “Taken from personal communication, 12 October 1983, David Sawyer.”)

The three thinkers of Deventes—Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa, and Desiderius Erasmus—all based their thought on Foolishness.

The craving for security leads modern people to images of God that are powerful, demanding, and, above all, serious. We have lost the absolute certainty in God (God existing and God benevolent) which allows us to express religious ideas in freedom and good humour. In the twentieth century, God does not laugh.

Foolishness can be a hazardous business, and not only to one’s mind and spirit. After all, one of the Fool’s main activities is to make a fool out of others, to throw doubt on cherished wisdoms and accepted behaviours: in a word, to shock. If this is done too aggressively, without caution, the result is more likely to be rage than enlightenment. Foolishness does not usually coincide with caution. Even the less flamboyant Fools courted danger: The half-and-half extremists seemed almost to glory in it. I know of twenty-two cases of violence against Fools, all but one of them a direct result of some inflammatory word or action on the part of the Fool. One Fool spent three days unconscious in hospital, put there by a motorcycle gang member who became enraged when the Fool made fun of the motorcycle’s role in the man’s sexual identity. Another Fool had one foot amputated following a particularly aggressive mocking episode which began when a young man came out of a Liverpool pub with his girlfriend literally in tow, bullying and abusing her. The Fool stepped in and soon had a crowd gathered, all ridiculing the young man. A more experienced Fool would have then turned the barrage of criticism into a more long-term solution—some pointed suggestion perhaps, that real men do not slap women around—but this Fool was new to street work and lost control of his mob. The man stormed off, got into his car, came back to the pub, and ran the Fool down.

St. Francis wished his followers to become joculatores, clowns of God,- his band of fools and beggars quickly became an order studded with intellectual giants.

How can a movement embodying the antithesis of organisation possibly deal with the modern world? When I wished to interview a certain Brother Stultus about the early days in England, he was not to be found. One of the brothers told me he had gone to Mexico (we were then in San Diego), but that was some weeks before. Stultus was not a young man, and I was concerned, but there was not much I could do. Some weeks passed, and a rumour reached me of a “crazy Anglo” who had taken up residence near the border patrol offices in Tijuana. I immediately drove down, and there found Stultus, living behind a garage, fed by the generous Mexican women, and waiting for rescue with sweet patience (in between periodic arrests for vagrancy by the frustrated police). Stultus, of course, carried no identification papers, and without them the U.S. Immigration Service would not allow him back in.

♦

ELEVEN

♦

He listens to those to whom God himself will not listen.

Kate closed the folder, unable to read any more. She felt as if she’d just finished Thanksgiving dinner: packed with more than she could possibly digest and experiencing the onset of severe mental dyspepsia. This wasn’t cop business,- this was tea-and-sherry-with-the-tutor business, Oxbridge-in-Berkeley business, Greek-verbs-and-the-nuances-of-meaning business, worse than memorizing the latest departmental regulations concerning the security of evidence and treatment of suspects. That at least was of personal interest, but this—she couldn’t even convince herself it had anything to do with one charred corpse in Golden Gate Park. She thought it did, feared it might not, and all in all she had the urge to strap on her club and go rousting a few drunks, just to taste the grittier side of reality again. She scratched her scalp vigorously with the nails of both hands, knowing that there was no way she would be going back to continue her interview with Professor Whitlaw, certainly not tonight, and possibly not tomorrow.

She reached for the telephone.

“Al? Kate here. I had an interesting time with Professor Whitlaw.” Hawkin listened without interrupting while she told him about the interview with the English professor and gave him a brief synopsis of the papers she had waded through, ending with, “Anyway, I thought I’d check and see if you still thought we needed to interview Beatrice Jankowski. I could do it tonight.”

“We definitely have to see her again. She knows more about the victim than she was willing to tell us last week. However, if you want to go tonight you’ll have to take someone else—Tom called in sick, I have to stand in for him on a stakeout.”

“Hell. If this flu goes on we’ll have to put out a white flag, ask the bad guys for a cease fire.”

“We could make it another time, or I can ask around here for somebody to go with you. What’s your preference?”

Kate thought for a moment. “Would you mind if I went by myself?”

“Martinelli, you’re not asking my permission, are you?”

“No. I just wondered if you had any objections. It might be better anyway if I went alone,- she might talk more easily.”

“That’s fine, whatever you like.”

“Where’s your stake-out?”

“The far end of China Basin.”

“The scenic part of town. Dress warmly. We don’t want you coming down with this flu, too.”

“Yes, mother. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Kate sat for a while staring at Lee’s books until gradually she became aware that the voices she had been hearing for some time now were not electronic, but indicated a visitor. She wandered downstairs in hopes of distraction and found Rosalyn Hall, wearing not her dog collar but an ordinary T-shirt with jeans and looking to Kate’s eyes eerily like a defrocked priest. She was standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, putting her jacket on, and Kate greeted her.

“Kate, good to see you again. As you can see, I took you at your word that Lee might be interested in the project, and wasted no time.”

“I’m happy to do it, Rosalyn,” said Lee.

“It’s been tremendously helpful. I didn’t know how I was going to pull that section together. I’m so grateful I ran into Kate the other day,- I’d never have had the nerve to ask otherwise. So what did you think of Brother Erasmus?” she asked Kate, her eyes crinkling in humor.

“He’s an experience,” Kate agreed.

“I’ve never really talked with him, but I’ve heard a couple of conversations, if you can call them that. It’s sort of like listening to a foreign language; you get a general sense of what people are talking about, but none of the details.”

“It’s a challenge for an interviewer all right.”

“I can imagine. I saw him again the other day,- he sure manages to get around.”

“In Berkeley, you mean. Yes, I knew he was back there.”

“Well, actually it was over here, down on Fishermen’s Wharf last weekend. At least, I assumed it was him, though honestly I hardly recognized him, he looked so different.”

“Why, what was he doing? Why did he look different?”

“He was performing, like that juggling act he does sometimes, but a lot more of it, and other things. Sort of clowning, and some mime, but weird, a little bit creepy, and his face was painted—not heavily, like a clown’s, just a really light layer of white on one side and a slight darkening of the other half—he looked like he was standing with a shadow across half of his face. And he wasn’t wearing his cassock—he had on this strange outfit. Well, it wasn’t strange, just sort of not right. He was wearing those sort of dressy khaki Levi’s, but they were too short for him, and a striped T-shirt that had shrunk up and showed a little wedge of his stomach, and a pair of white athletic shoes so big, he kept tripping over them. Oh, and a watch. I’ve never seen him with a watch before.”

“What day was this?”

“Saturday. I had a friend visiting, and you know how you only do the touristy things when friends and family come. I thought she’d like Ghirardelli Square.”

“And that’s where you saw him?”

“Across the street—you know that park where the vendors set up? Necklaces and sweatshirts? Lots of times street performers wander up and down there. Isn’t that where Shields and Yarnell got their start?”

Kate had never heard of Shields or Yarnell, but she nodded her head in encouragement. However, it seemed that was about the sum of the report. After a bit more fussing and arrangements for the next phase of the grant application, Rosalyn hugged Lee and then left.

“Nice woman,” Lee commented, her wheels purring after Kate on the wood of the hall. Kate turned and went into the kitchen to stand in front of the refrigerator.

“Did I have lunch?” she called to Lee. Nothing in the gleaming white box looked familiar.

“Once, but who’s counting?” Lee answered. Kate fingered the increasingly snug waistband of her trousers and settled for an apple,- Jon’s cooking had its drawbacks.

“I’m going to have to be out tonight,” she told Lee.

“I’ve been surprised you haven’t had more calls at night,” Lee said in resignation. “I expected it, with you back on duty.”

“Yes, I’ve been lucky. It’s been quiet—nobody feels like shooting anyone in the rain. But I need to talk to one of Brother Erasmus’s flock, and Friday’s one of the few times I can find her without a search.”

♦

Sentient Beans was your typical Haight coffeehouse, self-conscious about its location and the sacred history of the district in the Beat movement and the Summer of Love. In this case, however, it was without the superiority of age, for its even paint and the cheerfulness of the furniture within gave it away as an imitation, set up by people who in 1967 would have considered an ice cream cone a mood-altering substance.

Still, it was a harmless enough place, and discreetly notified customers that the venerable Graffeo Company had deigned to supply it with French-roast coffee, the smell of which grabbed at Kate when she opened the door, a heady aroma, sharp and dark and rich as red wine. She ordered a latte and watched with approval as the man assembling it tipped the coffee over the steamed milk with a flip of the wrist rather than using the effete method of dribbling it cautiously over the back of the spoon to create multiple multicolored layers in the glass, a drink filled with aesthetic nuances but, to Kate’s mind, lacking the pleasurable jolt of contrast between milk and coffee. Reverse snobbery, Lee had called it once, admiring on that distant occasion her own tall glass with at least nine distinct strata.

“Have you seen Beatrice tonight?” she asked as she paid.

“She’ll be down in a bit,” said the man, and slapped Kate’s change down on the wooden bar. She picked up the dollars, tipped the rest of the change into the tips mug, and found a seat at a table with the surface area of a dinner plate. There was a guitarist at the far end of the L-shaped room, a woman all in black, with perhaps a dozen gold loops running up her ear and one through her nose. She was attempting classical music, with limited success: The notes kept burring and her fingers squeaked as they moved along the strings. However, the flavor was there, and Kate did not mind waiting.

Twenty minutes or so later, the guitarist took a break, and shortly after that, Beatrice came through the bar area and into the room, a ten-by-twelve artist’s pad in one hand and a small tin box in the other. She sat down in the point of the L and without fuss opened the box, took out a black felt-tip pen, and began to sketch the person sitting in front of her, her pen flashing across the page in sure, quick gestures. In a couple of minutes, she put the cap on the pen, tore the page off the pad, and put it on the table, then stood up and moved to another vacant chair and another face. A mug marked for the artist had joined TIPS and FOR THE MUSICIAN on the wooden bar, and as people left, they tended to put some change and the occasional small bill in Beatrice’s cup, even those who had not been sketched.

Eventually, when Kate had finished her second latte (this one decaffeinated) and was beginning to think she would have to approach the woman, Beatrice finished her dual portrait of a pair of nearly identical bristly-headed, metal-and-leather-clad punks, reached across her drawing on the table to pat the girl’s black leather sleeve affectionately, and then took her pad and tin box over to Kate’s table. She opened both and began to sketch.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “I thought I might see you one of these nights.”

“Hello, Ms. Jankowski.”

“Beatrice, dear,- call me Beatrice. I always feel that when someone calls you by your last name, it’s because they want something from you. Either that or they want you to know they are better than you. Funny, isn’t it, something looks like respect but underneath it’s a power trip. Do they still use that phrase, I wonder? My vocabulary is so dated, it’s coming back into style. You need a haircut, dear. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Martinelli. Kate,” she corrected herself with a smile.

“Just Kate? Not Katherine?”

“Katarina,” she admitted. Beatrice looked up from her drawing, both hands going still.

“Oh that’s very nice. Katarina. It sounds like those beautiful little islands down south, near Santa Barbara, is it? Or San Diego? Kate is too abrupt. Do you have a middle name?”

“Cecilia,” said Kate patiently.

“Katarina Cecilia Martinelli. Your mother was a poet. There’s power in names, you know,” she said, going back to her drawing. “Last names are safe, generic, but when you give someone your first name, you give them a part of yourself. What about your partner?”

“Al? You mean his name? It’s Alonzo. Hawkin, and I don’t know if he has a middle name.”

Beatrice stopped again, to gaze in an unfocused way at the shelves over the bar. “Alonzo,” she repeated softly. “Oh my. I am such a sucker for a pretty name. Other girls used to fall for eyes or a lock of hair, but I would just melt at a melodious name. My three husbands were named Manuel, Oberon, and Lucius. Of course, they were all bastards,- you’d think I would learn. I don’t think Alonzo would be a bastard though, do you?”

“No, but he’s already spoken for.” Kate exaggerated his marital status slightly for Al’s own benefit.

“I figured he would be.” She flipped the page of her sketchbook over to a fresh one. “But this chitchat is not why you’re here, is it?”

“No.”

“It’s about that odious man.”

“John? I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, why can’t you let him just… be dead?” she said crossly.

“Because if we let the ‘odious’ people be killed, where would it stop?”

“Oh, dear. You are right, I suppose. Very well,” she said, turning to her pad again, “ask away.”

“Do you know anything about John’s history? Where he was from, what he used to do?”

“He never talked to me, not that way. I don’t think he much liked women, certainly not to talk to. Not that he was gay, but a lot of men who sleep with women don’t much like them.”

“Did he sleep with many women?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. Just because people don’t have beds doesn’t mean they lack sexual organs,” Beatrice said, primly amused.

“Beatrice, I’m a cop, not a nun in a cloister,” Kate reminded her. “I was surprised because the way you’ve described him made him sound unattractive. Were other women attracted to him?”

“He was presentable enough, and certainly kept himself cleaner than a lot of the men do. I found him repulsive, true, but he could have a very glib tongue when he wanted to bother, and many women fall for a clever line even more than they do a pair of shoulders or a handsome face. I’m sure he got his share of female companionship.”

“Who in particular?” Kate asked, but Beatrice’s lips went straight and she bent over the pad. “The homeless women in the park? Wilhemena?” Beatrice snorted. “Adelaide? Sue Ann?”

Kate tried to remember the names that had cropped up, but Beatrice shook her head. “Did he have lady friends in the area, then?” Kate asked, and thinking she saw a slight hesitation in the moving hand, she pressed further. “One of the women who has a house near the park? Or someone who works here?”

“Shopkeepers. He liked shopkeepers,” Beatrice admitted.

“What kind? Bookstore, grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop—Beatrice, please tell me, I need to know.”

Beatrice pursed up her mouth and rubbed her lips with the side of her thumbnail, a portrait of anxious thought. It wouldn’t do for a woman living on the margins, dependent on the goodwill of her settled, more fortunate neighbors for what degree of comfort she managed to achieve, to offend them. Kate realized this and waited.

“Antiques,” she finally muttered. “Junk really, but pretentious. I saw him inside the antique store on the corner of Masonic one morning before it opened. He kissed the owner,- she let him out. He didn’t see me.”

“Is she the only one?” Beatrice shot her a look full of anger and closed her pad.

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “Thank you for that. I’ll talk with her, and of course I won’t tell her where the information came from. Is there anything else you know about him?”

Beatrice did not open her sketch pad again, but neither did she stand up and leave.

“Horses,” she said suddenly. “He once said something about quarter horses, I think it was, one day when the mounted police went by. I suppose he was from a farming community of some kind, between the horses and the drawl.”

“Drawl?” asked Kate sharply.

“Yes, he spoke with a drawl. Didn’t you know that?”

“Nobody’s mentioned it that I’ve heard.”

“Oh yes. I mean, it wasn’t strong, like Deep South, but it was there. Texas, maybe, or Arizona, though it sounded like he’d lived in cities for a while.”

Kate thought for a minute. “You said you’d once seen him in a car with someone.” Beatrice did not respond, but flipped open the sketch pad and thumbed the cap off her pen. “When you made your statement downtown,” she elaborated. When the woman merely turned to a clean page and began to run her pen up and down, Kate’s interest sharpened. So far this evening, Beatrice had shown little of the blithe, slightly disconnected stepping-stone quality of the earlier interview: Was it back, and if so, what had brought it? “Do you remember saying that?”

“It was a remarkably ugly car, considering how much money must have been spent on it.”

“An expensive car. Foreign? A sports car? A big car? Cadillac? Rolls-Royce?”

“Just like a ten-gallon hat, all show and terribly impractical.”

“Imagine the problems with parking it,” Kate suggested, with success.

“Exactly.”

“But at least he bought American,” Kate offered tentatively, and held her breath. This system of interviewing a witness was inexcusable, leading questions compounded by guesses and utterly inadmissible as evidence, but there seemed no other way, and indeed, the responses kept coming.

“I never thought that a particularly good argument. The last car I owned was a Simca.”

“The man driving the car looked the sort who would use that argument, though, would you say?”

“I suppose. The cost of gasoline certainly wouldn’t trouble him,” she added in a non sequitur.

“Was he actually wearing his ten-gallon hat when you saw him?”

“No.” Ah well, it was a try, thought Kate. “He didn’t have it on. A ridiculous notion, isn’t it? A hat that literally held ten gallons would be big enough to sit in. It was on the backseat.” By God. Bingo. Kate sat back in the flimsy chair.

“You remember what color the license plates were?” Might as well try for the big prize, if one’s luck is in.

“Color? I don’t remember any color. They weren’t black and gold, though, I’m pretty sure.” The old California plates had gone out of use about the time Kate had her first pair of nylon stockings, so that wasn’t much help.

“I don’t suppose you remember when this was that you saw the two men?”

“My dear Katarina, life on the street does not necessarily mean a person is brain-dead.”

“I didn’t—”

“Of course I remember. It was election day. The church served lunch outside that day because the hall was being used as a polling place and there was a mix-up over who was supposed to hold the soup kitchen instead, so they just worked inside and brought it out the back. Very apologetic, they were, but it was actually quite festive, I thought. Gave one a sense of participation in the democratic process. The last presidential candidate I voted for was George McGovern. He didn’t win,” she explained kindly, hr, no.

“I know that the man was in the city for a few days at least, because I remember seeing the two of them again on the Friday. They came in here. Didn’t stay, just bought something to go, coffees probably, talked for a minute and looked around, then left. I was busy and didn’t talk to them, but I think John saw me. I was a little nervous that he would come over, but he didn’t, so that was all right, and he hasn’t come in since, either. I did not like the idea of his taking over my Friday nights.”

Beatrice took another thoughtful bite, then said suddenly in a muffled voice, “Texas!” Kate waited while she chewed and swallowed rapidly. “Pardon me. Texas, I’m sure, because of the star.”

“Which star was that?”

“The license plate. The Lone Star State. That is Texas, isn’t it? Or is it the yellow rose? No, I’m certain there was a star on it.

“The yellow—” Kate stopped, struck dumb, and slowly shook her head. The old bastard.

“What is it, Katarina? You look amused.”

“Something Erasmus said—or rather, something he told me.” He had told her by humming, over the breakfast table in Berkeley, a tune she had only half-recognized and ignored: “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

So, both Erasmus and Beatrice agreed that the mysterious womanizing John had probably been from Texas, and according to Beatrice, as recently as the first week of November he had retained a (wealthy?) possibly Texan connection.

“Did John smoke, do you know?”

“He did not.”

“Did he wear false teeth?”

“My dear, I never looked in the man’s mouth. Although, come to think of it, he occasionally hissed his’s‘s, and once when he was eating a banana it sounded like strawberries, that click-crunch noise. Ask Salvatore,” she said dismissively, starting to close up her pen, preparatory to moving on.

“Let me buy you a coffee,” Kate suggested. “Something to eat?”

Beatrice stopped, suddenly wary, then resigned. “Very well, dear. Krish there knows what I’ll have.”

Kate ordered herself yet another coffee, a decaffeinated cappuccino this time, and asked for whatever Beatrice liked, which turned out to be mulled apple cider with a toasted scone, a large dollop of cream cheese, and some plum jam. She arranged plates, cup, and cutlery onto the inadequate table, retaining her own cup for fear it would end up on her lap, and waited while Beatrice delicately cut her scone and scooped up cream cheese and jam in a practiced heap, then popped it into her mouth.

“I need to ask you a few questions about Brother Erasmus, now that I’ve had the chance to meet him.” Kate’s attempt to make the meeting sound like a social occasion fell flat beneath Beatrice’s rather crumby words.

“You arrested him last week, I heard, and then let him go.”

“No. There was no arrest,- he was not even detained,” she protested, stretching the truth slightly. “I gave him a ride back from Berkeley so we could take his statement, then we turned him loose. I admit it took us a while to get a statement, but that wasn’t exactly our fault, if you know what I mean,” she added pointedly. Beatrice got the point and laughed.