“Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “I’m not with the traffic division.”
“Yes, well. It was stupid. I wouldn’t have hit the car, but I did scare him, and he went past, shaking his fist out the window at me. And then I saw that man.” She pointed toward the newspaper. “I noticed him because he seemed to be shaking his fist at me, too, but as I went by, I could tell he wasn’t even looking at me. He’d have had to turn his head to see my car, and he hadn’t; he was looking straight ahead.”
“What was he looking at?”
“Nothing, as far as I could tell. He was coming out of the park on one of the paths, not quite to the pavement, and he was holding that big stick of his, shaking it, sort of punching it into the air as he walked along.”
“You’d seen him before?”
“Oh yes, he’s a regular in the park. We call him ‘the Preacher.”“
“ ‘We’ being…”
“There’s a group of us who run three times a week and then go for coffee. We tend to see the same people.”
“Did you ever talk with him?”
“The Preacher? Not really. He’d nod and wave and one of us would call hi, but nothing more. He struck me as kind of shy. Always neat and clean, and polite. Which is why it was so odd to see him behaving that way. I mean, some of the street people are really out of it,- they really should be on medication, if not hospitalized. Of course, thanks to Reagan, we don’t have any hospitals for the marginally insane, only for the totally berserk. But I don’t need to tell you that.”
“Would you mind showing me just where you saw him?”
“Sure, I need to take Dobie for a walk, anyway. Just let me get some clothes on. Help yourself to more coffee. I’ll just be a few minutes.”
It was with some irritation that Kate heard a shower start, but Sam Rutlidge was as good as her word, and in barely seven minutes she came back into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a UCSF sweatshirt, her wet hair slicked back and a pair of worn running shoes in her hand.
“Sorry to be so long,” she said, dropping onto a chair to put on her shoes. “I hate getting dressed without having a shower first. Makes me feel too grungy for words.”
“No problem. Dobie’s a good conversationalist.”
Dobie had, in fact, only eyed her closely. Now, however, she emerged from her basket and went to stand at her owner’s feet, tail whipping with enthusiasm. When the woman rose, the dog turned and galloped like a clumsy weasel down the hallway to the front door. Rutlidge put on a jacket and took down a thin lead to clip to Dobie’s collar, and down the steps they went.
They walked down to Fulton, where Rutlidge paused and pointed.
“I turned onto the road here,” she said. “Moved over into the right lane, the other driver accelerated to pass me, and then I saw the Preacher. Just about where that crooked ‘No Parking’ sign is. See it? He was walking toward the road at an angle, as if he was headed to Park Presidio.”
“Was he carrying anything other than his staff?”
“Not that I saw, but then I couldn’t see his right hand, just his left, and that was holding his stick.”
“What was he wearing?”
Sam Rutlidge wrinkled up her forehead in thought while Dobie whined restlessly. “A coat, brownish, I think. It came almost to his knees. Some dark pants, not jeans, I don’t think. Dark brown or black, maybe. And he had a knit hat, one of those ones that fit close against the skull. That was dark, too. I only saw him for about two or three seconds. I don’t think I’d have given him a second glance if it hadn’t been that his anger was so obvious—and uncharacteristic.”
“Okay. Thank you, Ms. Rutlidge, you’ve been very helpful,” said Kate, polite but careful not to appear overly enthusiastic or grateful. “I’ll need you to sign your statement when I get it drawn up. Could you come by and sign it?”
“Tomorrow’s not very good. I’ll have a long day at work.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a technical writer. Boring, but the pay is good. Do you want my number there? You can call me and arrange a time to meet?” They exchanged telephone numbers and then Rutlidge and her small sleek dog turned right toward the signal where Thirtieth crossed into the park, while Kate walked to the left until she was across the street from the point where the dirt path met the paved sidewalk, marked by a post with a crooked NO PARKING sign. There was no need to cross the road and follow the path through the trees, no need to look for scraps of yellow on the trees. She knew where she was. She stood looking at the park, at the path along which an angry Brother Erasmus had stormed on a Tuesday morning two weeks ago, leaving behind him the area that, twenty hours later, would be surrounded by great lengths of police tapes. Behind those bushes, sometime that morning, John the nameless had lain, bleeding into the soil until the life was gone from him.
She walked back to her car and set into motion the process of obtaining a warrant for the arrest of one David Matthew Sawyer, aka Brother Erasmus, for the murder of John Doe.
♦
NINETEEN
♦
… The valley of humiliation, which seemed to him
very rocky and desolate, hut in which he was
afterwards to find many flowers.
They picked him up near Barstow.
Two sheriff’s deputies spotted him less than a hundred miles from the Arizona border, walking due east along the snow-sprinkled side of Highway 58, barely twenty-four hours after the APB went out on him. They recognized him by the walking stick he used, as tall as himself and with a head carved on the top. He did not seem surprised when they got out of their car and demanded that he spread-eagle on the ground. He did not resist arrest. Besides his staff, he was carrying only a threadbare knapsack that held some warm clothes, a blanket, bread and cheese and a plastic bottle of water, and two books.
He seemed to the sheriff deputies, and to everyone who came in contact with him, a polite, untroubled, intelligent, and silent old man. In fact, so smiling and silent was he that the sheriff himself, on the phone to arrange transportation for the prisoner, asked Kate if the description had neglected to say that Erasmus was a mute.
The Sheriff’s Department already had a scheduled pickup to make in San Francisco, and in light of the state budget and in the spirit of fiscal responsibility, they agreed to take Erasmus north with them. Kate was there to receive him when he was brought in Thursday night, even through it was nearly midnight. He spotted her across the room, nodded and smiled as at an old friend one hasn’t seen in a day or two, and then turned back to the actions of his attendants, watching curiously as they processed his paperwork and transferred the custody of his person and his possessions to the hands of the San Francisco Police Department. Brother Erasmus was now in the maw of Justice, and there was not much any of them could do about it.
When the preliminaries were over and he was parked on a bench awaiting the next stage, Kate went over and pulled a chair up in front of him. He was wearing the clothes he had been picked up in, minus the walking stick, and she studied him for a minute.
She had seen this man in various guises. When she first met him, he had appeared as a priest, wearing an impressive black cassock and a light English accent. Among the tourists, he had dressed almost like one of them, a troubling jester who did not quite fit into his middle-class clothing or his mid-western voice. When ministering (there was no other word for it) to the homeless, he had looked destitute, his knee-length duffel coat lumpy with the possessions stashed in its pockets, watch cap pulled down over his grizzled head, sentences short, voice gruff.