The shower went on and, after two minutes, off again. Kate emerged, her hair wet but her clothes on, kissed Lee absently, and left. Lee listened to her lover’s feet on the stairs, the familiar pause in front of the closet while the wicked gun was strapped on, then the front door opened and closed. A car started up on the street outside, where Kate had left it instead of rattling the garage door late last night, and she was gone. Lee sighed and set about the laborious business of the day.
♦
Not that night, nor the next morning, but the following day over dinner the conversation was resumed.
“You know what you were saying the other day about trying to put together a bunch of quotations to throw back at David Sawyer?” Lee began.
“Fat chance of that now. There’re two more members of that woman’s family in jail now,- they were going at each other with chains in the dead woman’s front yard. There used to be a rose bed. Do they give prizes for the most dysfunctional families? This crew would take the gold.”
“I was wondering if there would be any reason you couldn’t have Philip Gardner and Eve do it for you? Come up with zinging quotes, that is.”
“He’s still in jail.”
“I know he’s still in jail,- is there any reason why you can’t have a conference of half a dozen people? Using the two of them as translators, like you thought of before, only in two-way translation, into and out of Erasmusese?”
“There are problems in allowing civilians—friends—in on an interview,” Kate said slowly.
“Insurmountable problems?”
“I’d have to talk to Al,” Kate finally said.
“Do. Because if you have to argue with him using his own language, you’d better have someone who speaks it as well as Philip and Eve do.”
“You’re right. In fact—no, maybe not.”
“What?”
“I was just thinking that he and Beatrice seem very close. If she’d be willing to help us, it might make it less adversarial. I don’t know if that would help or not.”
“I think it would be a good idea.”
“I’ll have to talk to Al about it. I could probably find Beatrice before Friday night, although I suppose we’d have to do the interview on Saturday anyway to work around Dean Gardner’s schedule. I’ll talk to Al,” she said again finally.
Al agreed, with strong reservations but a willingness to try anything that might loosen David Sawyer’s guard. Philip Gardner agreed,- Eve Whitlaw agreed. The conference was set for ten o’clock on Saturday morning, regardless of whether Beatrice had prior commitments.
But when Kate went to Sentient Beans on Friday evening to talk to the homeless woman, Beatrice was not there. Beatrice had not been there the week before, either.
Kate stood listening to the angry young owner, feeling the cold begin to gather along her spine.
♦
TWENTY-FOUR
♦
Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body.
“You scared her off.” The young man behind the wooden bar was gripping the latte glass as if he were about to throw it at her. His name was Krishna, but he had obviously been named after one of the god’s more violent manifestations.
“Could you explain that please, sir?” Kate asked politely, keeping an eye on the glass.
“You probably did it on purpose. That’s harassment. You could tell her nerves were bad.”
“Are you telling me you haven’t seen Beatrice Jankowski since the night I was here? That was nearly a month ago. I’ve seen her since then.”
“She was in once,” the man said grudgingly.
“Twice,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. The woman herself appeared, carrying a tray of clean cups, which she slid into place beneath the bar. She was very small, with hard, slicked-back unnaturally black hair, at least a dozen loops and studs in her ears and one through her nose, and kind, intelligent brown eyes. Kate recognized the guitarist from the night she had come here. “We didn’t see her last week, and we haven’t seen her since then, but she was in a couple of times after you were here.”
“How do you remember when I was in? One face on a busy night.”
“I noticed you. Beatrice talked about you. But we were a little concerned last week when she didn’t show, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for her in the neighborhood. She’s not around.”
“You haven’t filed a missing-persons report?”
“For a homeless woman? Who’d listen to us?” snorted the man.
The woman answered Kate as if he—her husband?— hadn’t spoken. “I decided that if she didn’t come in tonight, I would report her missing. I called the hospitals, but she’s not there. My name is Leila, by the way.”
The man turned to her, his grip on the glass so tight now that white spots showed on his knuckles. “You called the—I thought we agreed—”
“Oh, Krish, of course I called. What if she was sick or something?”
“But she was here two weeks ago?” Kate asked loudly, to interrupt the burgeoning argument.
“Just like always,” Leila said.
“And she said nothing to indicate that she would not be here?”
“No. In fact, she said, ”See you next week, dear,“ just like she always does. Did.” Leila was worried now, taking police interest as evidence that something was very wrong.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned, not yet. I just wanted to pass on a message from a friend of hers who’s in custody.”
“Brother Erasmus?”
“Yes. You know him?”
“Not personally. Though I feel like I do, since she talked about him all the time. She went to see him in the jail.”
“I know. But not for a while, apparently, because he was asking about her,” she embroidered.
“How long? Since he’s seen her?”
It was in the small beat before Kate answered that she acknowledged her own apprehension.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’ll have to check.”
The stark possibilities lay there, and nothing Krishna or Leila could add changed them any. Finally, she asked for the use of their telephone and began to cast out her lines of inquiry.
The logs at the jail revealed that Beatrice Jankowski had last visited David Sawyer on Wednesday the ninth of March, two days before she had not appeared at Sentient Beans to wash her clothes and sketch the customers.
A call to the morgue confirmed that there were no unclaimed bodies in San Francisco that remotely matched Beatrice’s description.
Al Hawkin was not at home and had not yet arrived at Jani’s apartment in Palo Alto. Rather than beep him, she left brief messages at both numbers, on his machine and with Jani’s daughter Jules, and then went back out into the coffeehouse, where she found Leila cleaning the tables.
“Did Beatrice leave anything here?” she asked.
“Probably. There’s a little cabinet in the back we let her use.
“Does it lock?”
“There’s a padlock. We kept one key, gave her the other.”
“Just the two keys?”
That’s all.“
“May I have the key, please?”
Leila let a cup and saucer crash down onto the tray. “Oh God. What did you find out?”
“Not a thing. I’m not going to open the cabinet, and I’ll give the key back to you if Beatrice turns up. I’d just be more comfortable keeping it in the meantime.”
Leila dug into the deep pocket of her baggy black silk pants and drew out a fist-sized bundle of keys. She flipped through it, unhooked a cheap-looking key, and handed it to Kate. “There’s nothing much in there. Her sketch pad and box, a few clothes, odds and ends.”