“Once. I saw him several times.”
“Could you describe him, please?”
“Your sort of build, Inspector Hawkin, only shorter. He wore heeled boots, glasses. Brown hair going gray, tan skin, stubby little hands.”
“Did he wear a hat?”
“The first time I saw him, no. He was dressed as a normal businessman. The time he drove out, he looked like a cowboy, with snakeskin boots and a hat with a turned-up brim—a cowboy hat.”
“Do you remember the make of car?”
“I didn’t see it.”
“How did you know he had one, then?”
“John described it. He said it was big and ostentatious because his brother had a small… sexual organ.”
“Did he smoke?”
“Thomas or John?”
“Either.”
Sawyer thought for a moment. He looked now like an tired old ex-professor on the skids, and it would have taken a considerable leap of the imagination to place him in a black cassock.
“John smoked cigars, expensive ones, from time to time. I never saw him with a cigarette, although he carried one of those disposable lighters. I don’t remember about Thomas, but I was only with him about ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Think about it and let me know if you come up with anything.”
“He may have been a smoker, come to think of it,” Sawyer said, sounding surprised. “His hands—they were tidy. Small, fussy hands. But the nails were discolored, yellow. Like a smoker’s.” The pauses between his words were becoming brief, more sporadic. His speech was almost normal, but he looked so tired.
“Is there anything else you know about Thomas Darcy?”
“He was here in San Francisco on the day his brother died.”
“Was he, now?” Hawkin almost purred with satisfaction.
“Yes. I normally saw John before I would go to Berkeley. I would meet him somewhere in the park, often in Marx Meadow before I walked up to Park Presidio, where Joel picked me up. That is where we met that day.”
“What time did you meet him?”
“In the morning. Perhaps nine. We walked through the meadow and up into the trees, and he told me that his brother was coming to see him again. And he told me that he had decided what to do about the piece of land his brother was so desperate to sell. He told me… he said he had made up his mind to disappear again, but before he went, he was going to sign over his half interest in it. Sign it over not to his brother, but to me.”
“What?”
“Yes. Can you imagine? It wasn’t enough to confound and rob his brother, he had to do it in a way that would take over my life, as well. The property was worth four or five million dollars, he told me. It is not possible to own that much money,-he wanted it to own me.”
“What was your response?”
“I was angry… very angry. I thought… I had hoped that after more than a year of working with him, he would begin to grow, to let go of his wickedness. Instead, it had grown within him. I was so incensed, I shouted some words at him and then walked away from him. In fact, it took me so long to calm myself that I forgot about Joel. He had waited and then left. I had to walk and thumb rides across the Bay.”
“But you didn’t actually see Thomas Darcy?”
“Oh yes, I did. He was sitting in a car parked along Kennedy Drive, reading a map. He didn’t see me, I don’t think, but I saw him. I might not have recognized him, because he’d grown a beard, but I saw his distinctive hands on the map, and after all, he was on my mind, since John had just told me that he was going to meet him.”
“What kind of car was he in?”
“It was not the one John had described. This one was small, white, ordinary. New-looking.”
A typical rental car, Kate thought, writing the description on her pad.
“I suggest, Dr. Sawyer,” said Hawkin evenly, “that it is fortunate for you that Thomas Darcy did not notice you.”
Sawyer held up his left hand, rubbed his thumb on the indentation carved there by his ring, which now lay in an envelope in the property clerk’s basement room, and shook his head slowly. “Poor, poor Beatrice. A queen among women. She saw him. She must have.”
“Not that day. Earlier, when he drove his own car out from Texas, then she saw him. The rest was Thomas Darcy’s guilty imagination, reading too much into her words.”
“Did she suffer?”
“I don’t think so. The same as John, a hard, fast blow to the skull, immediate unconsciousness, and then death.”
“Poor child. So pointless. Will she have a funeral?”
Hawkin was taken aback at this unexpected question. “I really don’t know. It depends on whether or not someone claims the body. The city doesn’t pay for elaborate funerals.”
“She had no family left. I will perform the ceremony.”
“We’ll have to see about that.”
“I can raise whatever money is required, Inspector Hawkin. And although I suppose my license has expired, back in another lifetime I was once an ordained priest.”
♦
Late that night, Kate went up to the sixth-floor jail and stood outside David Sawyer’s cell. He was on his knees on the hard floor, his hands loosely clasped, and he looked up when she appeared. A smile came into his eyes and his face, and he got to his feet.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said.
“Dear Kate. What a pleasure to say your name, Inspector Martinelli. Names are one of the few pleasures I have longed for. I was not praying. I don’t seem to be able to pray, but going through the motions is calming. What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to say thank you, for today. I know what it cost you. Or at least I can begin to guess.”
“Had the payment been made a month ago, a life would have been saved. No cost would be too great, were it to change that.”
“I’ve often thought how nice it would be if we could know the future,” Kate said, and realized with surprise that she was now comforting him. The thought reached him at the same time, and he gave her a crooked smile. Then he did a strange thing: He put his right hand out through the bars and, with his fingers resting in the hair above her temple, he traced a cross with his thumb onto the skin of her forehead.
“Absolvo te, Kate Martinelli,” he said. “What you and your partner did was both necessary and right. No apology is due.” For a moment, he rested his entire hand, warm and heavy, on the top of her head, then retrieved it and stepped back from the bars. “Good night, Kate Martinelli. I hope you sleep well.”
♦
TWENTY-SEVEN
♦
By nature he was the sort of man who has that
vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity
which is very near to humility.
Kate was involved in the final stages of the case and even testified during the trial of Thomas Darcy, but her heart was not in it, and the case seemed remarkably distant and flat in the wake of the revelations of David Sawyer’s statement.
Once they had the name, the case quickly became watertight: plane tickets, a gasoline station receipt, and a hotel clerk with a good memory placed him in San Francisco the week his brother was killed. The identity of the John Doe in the park was confirmed as that of Alexander John Darcy through the partial fingerprint raised by forensics and the dental X ray sent by his Fort Worth dentist. By the time Thomas Darcy was faced with Beatrice, he had become slightly more wily, but he had still used a credit card to hire a car,- the newsagent in Fort Worth testified that Darcy had received the Wednesday San Francisco paper with the interview of Beatrice on the day after it had appeared, and Darcy was remembered by the sales clerk in a Pacifica hardware store where he had bought a pair of narrow, strong wire cutters. He even took the wire cutters home with him to Texas, where they were found in an odds-and-ends drawer in his kitchen. Forensic analysis proved that the clippers had been used on the cut ring found near Beatrice’s body, a ring remembered well by many, including the owners of Sentient Beans, who testified at Darcy’s trial, as well. The partial fingerprint lifted from the side of the ring had enough points of similarity to clinch the case.