To Play the Fool Page 3

“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 Wilhemenal 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 stubbled 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 the
re’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 for 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 s
tress 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.