To Play the Fool Page 6

  “You don’t say. Your friend Beatrice would certainly agree with that.”

  Erasmus’s stern features relaxed. “Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low—an excellent thing in a woman.”

  “Do you know how John died?”

  He paused briefly.

  “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” He began to butter a piece of toast. “Mors ultima ratio.”

  “ ‘Death is the final accounting,’ ” translated the dean sotto voce, around a mouthful of eggs and cheese and chili peppers.

  “And John had much to account for?” Kate suggested. She did not know whether or not to take the first part of his statement as an assertion that John had actually died by fire—something to be explored later.

  “Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close, and let us all to meditation.”

  “That’s fine for some,” answered Kate. “However, it’s my job to find how he died and if someone hurried him on his way. Even an obnoxious sinner has a right to die in his own time.”

  Erasmus surprised her again, by smiling hugely.

  “O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” he boomed into the startled restaurant. The dean stifled a laugh, but Kate refused to be distracted. She looked him in the eye and bit off her words.

  “Do you know anything about John’s death?”

  The seriousness of her questions, what they meant for the man on the pyre and all involved with him, seemed suddenly to reach the figure in the cassock. Erasmus studied the food on his plate as if searching for an answer there, and when he did not find it, he brought his left hand up and laid it flat on the table, studying the worn gold ring that encircled one finger. Gradually his mobile features took on the same appearance they had shown when he had knelt on the ground to declare his abject inadequacies. He was not far from tears. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” he whispered finally. The dean choked on a piece of food, shot a brief glance at Kate, and then, despite the half-full plate in front of him, he looked at his watch and began to make a business of catching April’s attention. Kate ignored him, staring at Erasmus, who seemed mesmerized by the gold on his hand.

  “Erasmus, do you know how he died?” she said quietly.

  The man took a long breath, exhaled, and then looked up at her. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  The dean stood up so rapidly, his chair nearly went over. He looked from Kate to Erasmus helplessly, and when the bill was placed in his hand by the passing waitress, he could only throw up his arms and go pay it.

  “Erasmus,” Kate began evenly, “you have the right to remain silent.”

  Seven

  He was, among other things, emphatically what we call a character.

  Kate closed the back door of the departmental car and turned to the unhappy man standing beside her on the sidewalk.

  “Is this really necessary?” he said, more as a plea than a protest.

  “You heard what he said back there. Even I know the Bible well enough to remember that ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is how Cain answers the accusation that he killed Abel. Which, if I remember rightly, he did. That comes very near to being a confession, the way Brother Erasmus talks. You can’t argue with that,” she pointed out, though in fact he was not.

  “The man’s mixed up, but he’s not violent, never harmful. You can’t arrest him on the basis of biblical passages.”

  Kate was not about to go into the technicalities of precisely what constitutes an arrest, particularly in a fuzzy situation like this one. Still, she had to tell him something. “I haven’t actually arrested him. I read him his rights because at that point he changed status, from being a witness to being a potential suspect. He is not in handcuffs; he is with me voluntarily.”

  “What will you do with him?”

  “As you heard me tell him, I’ll take him back to the City, interview him, and then we’ll either let him go or, if information received during the interview demands, we’ll arrest him. Personally, I doubt that will happen, at least not today.”

  “I’d like to be informed,” he said with authority.

  “Certainly.” Kate retrieved a card from her shoulder bag and handed it to him. “I have a few questions I need to ask, if you don’t mind.”

  “I did promise to take this seminar.”

  “Ten minutes,” said Kate, knowing that if he’d eaten the abandoned breakfast, he would have taken at least that. “How long have you known Brother Erasmus?”

  “He’s been coming here for a little over a year now.”

  “And you didn’t know him before?”

  “No.”

  “Have you any idea what his real name might be?”

  “No, I don’t. It might actually be Erasmus, have you considered that?”

  Kate ignored the dean’s sarcasm. She was used to that reaction to police questions. “What about where he might have come from?”

  “I’m sorry, Inspector, but no. I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Can you narrow it down, when he first appeared?”

  “Let’s see,” said the dean. He stood thinking for a while, oblivious of the curious looks they were receiving from young passersby with backpacks and books. “I was on sabbatical two years ago, and I came back in August, eighteen months ago. Erasmus appeared in the middle of that term—say October. He’s come regularly as clockwork ever since—during term time, I mean. Last summer and during breaks and intercession, he shows up from time to time.”

  “How does he get here?”

  “The last few months, one of our students who lives in San Francisco has brought him.”

  “I’d like the student’s name, address, and phone number.”

  “I suppose I could give that information to you. I’ll have to check and see if there’s a problem.”

  “This is an official murder investigation,” said Kate sternly, hoping the postmortem hadn’t found a heart attack or liver failure.

  “I know that. I’ll call you with the information.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir. What can you tell me about his movements here? When does he come; when does he go; where does he sleep; does he have any particular friends here?”

  “Well, he sleeps in one of the guest rooms.”

  “That’s very…generous of you,” commented Kate, wondering how the other guests felt about it.

  “It’s only been for the last few weeks.” The dean seemed suddenly to become aware that the subject of their conversation was sitting practically at their feet, albeit behind the car window, and he moved away across the sidewalk and lowered his voice. “Back in the first part of November, he showed up one Tuesday in bad shape. He looked to me like he’d been beaten up—his lip was swollen and split; one eye was puffy; he had a bandage on his ear—a real mess, and, well, shocking, seeing that kind of damage, especially to an old man. It wasn’t fresh, probably three or four days old, though he was obviously in some pain, but he was still just carrying on. However, he was in no condition to sleep out, so we got together and put him into a hotel for the next three nights.”

  “We?”

  “Some of the other professors and I passed the hat. The next week, he was better, but it was raining, so we did it again, and then the third week he seemed to have made other arrangements. It wasn’t until the fourth week that we discovered the dorm had formed a conspiracy and had him sleeping in their rooms the nights he was here.”

  “Which nights are those?”

  “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, usually.”

  “So you just gave him a room?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, we did, but only after a tremendous number of meetings and discussions, and student petitions. The students themselves did it, pointing out gently but firmly that to collect funds for Thanksgiving meals and preach Christmas sermons on the theme ‘no room at the inn’ and then to lock the gates against an individual who by that time was
a part of the community was perhaps not operating on Christian principles. They did it very well, too. Not once did they even use the word hypocrisy, which I thought was very mature of them—have you ever noticed how students love that word? Anyway, to make a long story short, we presented the case to the board and they agreed to a trial period of two months. That’s nearly at an end now, and I expect it’ll be renewed.”

  He saw the polite disbelief on her face, so he strung the explanation out a bit further. “Yes, it was more complicated than that, insurance and security and all that. But what won them over was Erasmus himself. He has…it’s difficult to explain, but I suppose there’s such an air of sweetness around him, even administrators feel it.”

  Kate decided to let it go for the time being. “You said he comes on Tuesdays.”

  “Yes. The young man he rides with is an M.Div. student.” (Whatever that is, thought Kate.) “He has an afternoon class at three, I think, or three-thirty—a seminar on pastoral theology, but he may come over earlier and work in the library, I see him there quite a bit. He has a couple of kids, so it’s hard for him to work at home.”

  “Did you see him this Tuesday? Or Erasmus?”

  “I had meetings pretty much all day. I didn’t see anyone but university bureaucrats.”

  “And when does he usually leave Berkeley?”

  “Berkeley as a whole, I can’t vouch for, but we rarely see him after Friday morning.”

  “You don’t know how he leaves?”

  “No.”

  “What about friends here? Does he have any particularly close relationships with students or professors, or with any of the street people?”

  “Joel, the young man who brings him over on Tuesdays, is probably the student closest to Erasmus. I suppose I’m his best friend among the faculty. I wouldn’t know about the homeless, or anyone out of the GTU area, for that matter. Look, Inspector Martinelli, I have to go.”

  “Just one thing. I’d appreciate it if you could write down for me where those quotes he used today come from.”

  “All of them?”

  “Whatever you can remember.”

  “Why? Surely you can’t consider them evidence?”

  “I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know that I will want them. But I do know that if it turns out I need them in two or three weeks, you won’t remember more than a handful. Right?”

  “Probably not. Okay, I’ll do my best. And I’ll be talking to you. Um,…can I say good-bye to him?”

  Kate opened the back door of the cruiser and Dean Gardner bent down, holding his hand out to Erasmus.

  “So long, old friend,” he said. “Sorry you’ll miss dinner tonight, I hope we’ll see you next week. You remember my phone number?” Erasmus just smiled and let go of the hand. “Well, call me if you need anything.” He stepped back and allowed Kate to slam the door, her mind busy with the image of Erasmus in a telephone booth. Why was that so completely incongruous?

  She told the dean she would talk with him soon, got in behind the wheel, and drove away from Berkeley’s holy hill.

  Kate kept her eyes firmly on the road, for Berkeley had long been a haven for the mad cyclist and the blithe wheelchair-bound, although on this occasion it was a turbaned Sikh climbing out of a BMW convertible who nearly came to grief under her wheels. She did not glance at the passenger behind the wire grid until they were on the freeway, passing the mud-flat sculptures, but when she did, she found him sitting peacefully, displaying none of the signs of the guilty killer apprehended: He was not asleep; he was not aggressive; he was not talking nonstop. He met her eye calmly.

  “The driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously,” he commented.

  “Yeah, well, if you don’t dodge around a bit, you get mowed down.” Glancing over her left shoulder, she slipped over two lanes and then slid back between two trucks and into the turnoff for the Bay Bridge. Once through the toll booths, she looked again at Erasmus, who again met her eyes in the mirror. She had been dreading the drive, fearing the mindless recitations and the inevitable stink of the wine-sozzled unwashed, but he smelled only of warm earth, and his silence was somehow restful. He shifted slightly to ease his cramped position beside the long staff that had barely fit in, and the toy star she had pinned to his chest caught the light.

  “How did you know I was a cop?” she asked.

  “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.”

  “That doesn’t explain how you recognized me.”

  He answered only with a small and apologetic shrug. Perhaps, she realized some time later, it was one of those places where exact quotes were unavailable.

  “Do you mean you saw my picture somewhere?” she tried.

  “The morning stars sang together,” he said gently. Right: the Morningstar case. Really great when even the homeless had your face memorized from papers salvaged out of the trash cans, she reflected bitterly, and wrenched the car’s wheel across to the exit for the Hall of Justice. She drove around to the prisoners’ entrance and let him out, wrestled with his long staff and the small gym bag the dean had fetched from the room Erasmus stayed in, and began to lead him to the doors. Erasmus stopped, a large and immovable object, and looked down at her from his great height. His eyes were worried, but not, Kate thought, because of what might happen in this building. Rather, he searched her face as if for an answer.

  “Weeping may endure for a night,” he said finally, “but joy comes in the morning.”

  “Thanks for sharing that; now, in you go.” He pulled his elbow away from her hand and turned as if to seize her shoulders. She took a quick step back, and he did not pursue, but bent his entire upper body toward her.

  “It is a good thing to escape death, but it is no great pleasure to bring death to a friend.”

  “What are you—”

  “Faithful are the wounds of a friend. What is a friend? One soul in two bodies.” The intensity with which he was trying to get his message across was almost painful.

  “Are you talking about John?” she asked.

  To her dismay, he straightened and with both fists pounded on his head, once, twice in frustration. Two uniformed patrolmen walking toward the building stopped.

  “Need some help, Inspector Martinelli?” the older one said, warily eyeing the tall, graying priest in the distinguished black robe with the child’s badge pinned to one shoulder. Erasmus paid him no attention but flung out a hand to her in appeal.

  “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,” he repeated, nearly shouting. Then immediately, as if the one arose from the other, exclaimed, “These vile guns. The wounds of a friend.”

  Kate felt her face stiffen as the sense of his peculiar method of communication hit home: He was not talking about the man John; he meant Lee. He saw her comprehension, and his face relaxed into the loving concern of a kindly uncle, but there was no way Kate was going to accept his sympathy. She cursed bitterly under her breath and seized his elbow again, propelling him past the patrol officers and through the doors. There was no escape, no relaxing; she was not even allowed to perform the simplest tasks of her job without the constant reminder that everyone and his dog knew who and what and where she was. She would have preferred to have her nude photograph on the front pages—at least that would have required a degree of imagination on the part of the voyeurs. Instead of that, even the looniest of the park-bench homeless knew everything about her, had followed her exploits like some goddamned soap opera.

  She stabbed her finger on the elevator button and stood staring straight ahead, not looking at the man beside her whose whole being radiated a patient understanding that was in itself infuriating. They stepped inside the elevator along with four or five others and the door closed. They went up, the others got off at the second floor, and when the elevator had resumed, Erasmus spoke to her.

  “A fool’s mouth is his destruction,” he said, sounding apologetic. “Let there be no strife, I
pray thee, between me and thee.”

  Kate tried hard to hang on to her anger, but she could feel it begin to dissipate, shredding itself against the monumental calm of the old man in the priest’s robe. She sighed.

  “No, Erasmus, I’m not angry. Hell, I’m a public servant; I have no right to a private life, anyway.” The elevator stopped and the door opened. Kate gestured with the carved end of the staff. “Down there. I’ll see if my partner is here.”

  She parked Erasmus at a desk and went in search of Al Hawkin. There were no signs of recent habitation in his office, and the secretary said no, she hadn’t seen him yet, so Kate phoned down to the morgue to find out when he would be through. She waited while the woman went to find out, but instead of a female voice, Al himself came on the line.

  “What’s up, Martinelli?”

  “I didn’t mean you should come to the phone, I just wanted to know how much longer you’d be.”

  “Just finished.”

  “What did he find?”

  “Fractured skull—compression, not from the heat. Somebody whacked him. It’s ours.” Not just an illegal body disposal case, then, but murder. Kate eyed the hefty staff that she had left leaning on the wall behind Hawkin’s desk, wondering if she was going to have to bag it as evidence.

  “There’s a fair amount of stuff for the lab, of course,” he said, “but there were no other overt signs.”

  “Any chance of lifting fingerprints?”

  “Two of the fingers have a bit of skin left, might give partials if we’re lucky. And there were no teeth to x-ray, and no dentures, though the doc said he’s been wearing them until recently. Is that what you’re phoning about?”

  “No. I have Brother Erasmus here; you said you’d like to be in on the interview.”