“It’s a worthy cause. I can see you’re upset about the murder.”
More upset than I dare tell you. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll do it.”
“Maybe, nothing. You’ll do it. Now get out of here and let me suffer in peace.”
As I came downstairs, Ted signalled that I had a call. I followed one of the red cords down the hall until I located a phone on a bookcase. I’d often suspected that the folks at All Souls favored twenty-five-foot cords so they could abandon the instruments in peculiar places.
Linnea’s hysterical voice assaulted my ear. “Sharon! Sharon, you won’t believe what Tim just told me!”
“I already know, Linnea. I was planning to call you.”
“Call me? You couldn’t tell me in person? I assume you came home last night.”
“You’re right, I did come home. But I had to go out early, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Didn’t want to disturb me? You think I’m not disturbed now? Being told about a murder by that grinning, leering tub of guts?”
“Linnea, that’s no way to talk about Tim.”
“I’ll talk any way I please! Oh, my God, Sharon! Molly said the cards were to blame. The fortune teller...” She began to sob.
Molly had evidently taken the prophecy seriously. “Look, Linnea, I know how you feel. I feel terrible myself. I’m going to talk to the police...”
“The police!”
Her shriek made me hold the receiver away from my ear. “Well, to Greg Marcus. You know — the cop who sends me all the chocolate, the one you’ve never met.”
“What good is that going to do?”
“I’ll find out what they know so far.”
“And, in the meantime, what do I do?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Here I sit, in your crummy apartment, all cooped up and scared to death!”
The reference to my apartment stung, but I controlled my voice. “Look, Linnea, why don’t you get out of there? Go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day.”
“Go for a walk, with a maniac on the loose? Are you crazy?”
I sighed. “Okay, do what you like. I’ll be home as soon as I can get there. Maybe I’ll have some news by then.”
“Oh, great!”
“And Linnea, try not to...” I paused.
“Try not to what?”
I had been about to tell her not to hit the bottle again, but I knew it would only provoke another outburst. “Try not to worry,” I finished lamely.
“Oh, sure.” There was a click, and the line went dead.
I set the phone down and leaned against the bookcase, thinking. Linnea’s hysteria seemed genuine, not the reaction of someone with something to hide. The problem was, how much did she remember of what she did when drunk? She had confessed to alcoholic blackouts in recent weeks.
“Something has to be done about this situation,” I said aloud. “Something has got to be done.”
4
At one o’clock I pulled up in front of the massive stone block that was the Hall of Justice. I watched as Greg ambled down the steps, admiring his trim body which, at forty-two, was still fit as an athlete’s. Greg was good company, good looking, and, in Hank’s words, managed to piss me off totally on the average of once a week.
“Good afternoon.” Greg opened the car door and got in. Quickly he reached into his coat pocket and tossed a bag of Hershey Kisses in my lap.
“Dammit! You promised!”
“I did nothing of the kind.”
“I’ll get fat.”
“Good. Then you’ll have to start seeing me again because no one else will have you.”
I sighed and pulled away from the curb.
“Where are you taking me, by the way?” Greg asked.
“I thought we’d try Dolores Park.” I named the grassy slope across from Mission High School.
“That’s fine with me. If I really cared, I could probably nab a few dope pushers during lunch. But that would mean more paperwork.”
“And I know how you hate paperwork.” I shot through a space between a MUNI bus and a police car and headed back toward my own neighborhood.
The park was dotted with loungers, many of them shirtless, spread-eagled to receive the warm rays. Teenaged couples from the school strolled about in ambulatory embraces whose maintenance required ballet-like precision. As we spread my car blanket at the top of the hill, Greg said:
“Ah, if only you would walk in lockstep and talk of love with me!”
I laughed. Greg’s bantering had begun to ease the tension I’d felt over this, our first real time together since our quarrel. I sensed he wouldn’t press the issue seriously today.
We finished arranging the blanket, and Greg burrowed through the bag from the deli, giving enthusiastic thanks for his salami and cheese sandwich. I opened the two bottles of San Miguel beer and unwrapped my own hot pastrami.
“The lunch is in exchange for information on Molly Antonio’s postmortem,” I said. “How close were you able to pinpoint the time of death?”
“Very. We know, from the husband, exactly when and what she had for dinner. From the stomach contents, she had to have been killed less than two hours after they ate at six o’clock.”
I thought of Gus Antonio, an arthritic little man who seemed continually bewildered by the world around him. “Can you be sure his information is reliable?”
“Reasonably. He and his wife always ate at six on the dot. And the meal stood out in his mind because it was, for her, a particularly sketchy dinner.”
“What was it?”
“Hamburgers and fried potatoes. No vegetable, which was strange because she usually insisted on two, even though the husband hates the sight of them. She told him she’d forgotten to shop, but would lay in fresh supplies later.”
It fit with what Mr. Moe had told me. “She must have been preoccupied with something, if she’d forgotten to buy vegetables. So, after this sketchy meal — which, incidentally, sounds a lot better than most of mine — Gus went to Ellen T’s to play dominoes?”
“Right. He claims he was in the back room all evening, until just before he found the body at eleven. We checked with the bartender, but unfortunately there’s a rear exit, by the restrooms. It’s possible Gus could have slipped out and come back, on the pretext of going to the john. We’re talking to the domino players today, but it’s difficult rounding them up.”
“It’s hard for me to picture Gus doing anything so devious,” I said. “He has so much trouble coping with life as is.”
“I know what you mean. I had difficulty getting a coherent statement from him this morning, even though he’d calmed down. Apparently he followed the same routine every night, though: first to his wife’s for dinner, then to the bar, then back to the wife’s, and finally home.”
“As near as I know, he never deviated from it. But I’m not home enough to be an authority on his comings and goings.”
“Sharon, what about this peculiar living arrangement they had? Do you know anything about it?”
I held my beer bottle up and squinted at the sun through its bubbles. “Only what I told you last night.”
“But what was the reason she threw him out? You don’t discard a husband after all those years — he says they were married for forty — without some event to trigger it.”
“All she would say was that she’s been driven crazy long enough.”
“How, though?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s damned strange.” He was silent a moment. “What about his job? He works for the Sunrise Blind Center.”
“Yes. He leads one of the patients, a man named Sebastian, who restocks the grocery store racks with the brushes they make there.”
“How’d he get into that?”
“Let’s see.” I considered. “The Center’s been in that location — on Twenty-fourth Street, in the buildings that used to be Saint Luke’s Catholic Church and Convent — for two or three years. Gus retired two years ago from his job as janitor at Edison School. Molly thought he needed something to keep him busy, and I think she asked if the Blind Center needed volunteers. They didn’t, but they had this paying position, and they offered it to Gus.”