The Color of Light (17 page)

“Around eight, I guess.”

“Mrs. B died some time between then and just before noon, right?”

“Yep.”

“When she saw Beto off that morning, she was wearing a powder blue shirtwaist dress and low-heeled black pumps.” I held the coroner's evidence log for him to see. “According to this, when she was found she was wearing a white blouse and nothing else.”

“Okay.”

“It isn't a blouse.” I pointed at the button placket visible in the Polar­oid close-up of her chest area, a bloody mass speckled with black gunpowder burns. “It's a man's shirt.”

As he looked at the photo, he fingered the placket at the neck of his polo shirt, checking which side the buttons were on. He said, “I'll be damned.”

“According to the medical examiner, Mrs. B was naked on the bottom when she fell or was pushed. At some point, and in some order, she had intercourse, put on a man's shirt, and was shot in the chest.”

“That's what it says.”

“Where is the shirt now?” I asked.

“In a sealed evidence bag locked up in my office.”

“Is there a laundry mark? Maybe remnants of fluids from more than one person?”

He glanced askance at me. “How much do the TV people pay you to snoop, Sherlock?”

“I'm doing okay.”

“I'll send the shirt to the crime analyst and ask him to check it out.” With the back of his hand, he wiped away sweat running down the side of his face. “See anything else?”

“Lots of blood on the shirt, but there wasn't very much blood found here in the park,” I said. “She was murdered elsewhere and dumped. It wouldn't take a very strong person to carry her because she barely weighed a hundred pounds.”

“That we know, but no crime scene was ever determined,” he said. “You think you know what happened?”

“I have some ideas,” I said. “How long can I keep the book?”

“You can't keep something you never saw,” he said. “It's an open murder case and that's a confidential police document. Besides, I don't ever, ever want Beto to get a look at what's in there.
I
keep the book.”

I looked around for a boulder in the shade to sit on. “Then give me a minute with it, okay?”

“Take your time.” He started up the steps that were cut into the face of a granite tower. “Whistle when you're finished.”

I opened the book and began reading the investigation reports. Mrs. Bartolini's body was identified by Patrol Officer Ray Gutierrez, who knew her because he frequented the Bartolini Deli and because he and the victim attended the same church. The police captain who responded to the scene dispatched Officer Gutierrez to collect Father John and to go with him to inform Bart of his wife's death. Bart took the news as expected, hard, and was driven home from his place of work by Officer Gutierrez. Father John stayed with Bart while Officer Gutierrez went to the school to pick up Beto. Father John was worried enough about Bart's state of mind that he summoned the family physician, Dr. Benjamin Nussbaum, who administered a sedative. Any questioning of Mr. Bartolini was postponed until, in police-report-speak, “such a time that he was not under the influence of sedation.”

The first conversation between Bart and the police happened three days after the murder. Bart went by the police station to retrieve his wife's wedding ring so that she could be buried with it, and stayed to answer some questions posed by Detective Charles Riley. According to the interview summary, he was at the deli all that morning. His lovely wife had no enemies. Period. I could hear what my late husband, Mike, would have to say about the softball questions Chuck Riley lobbed at Bart, who should have been his first suspect. But Mike worked detectives in great big, occasionally murderous Los Angeles, and not in relatively peaceful little Berkeley. Kevin had already told me that his department didn't get much experience working homicides. Everyone in town knew Mr. B, and knew that he doted on his beautiful young wife. But still...

What happened to Beto? I flipped through the pages but found nothing except that when the police left the Bartolini house that evening, Beto, Father John, Doc Nussbaum, and Dr. Brian Halloran, the head counselor at the high school—Kevin's father—were “inside the residence.”

“Hey.” Kevin's shadow fell across the book. I looked up and spotted him leaning over a ledge about fifteen feet above me. “Did you know there's a cross chiseled on the rocks up here?”

“I saw it the other day,” I said. “But I don't remember seeing it before.”

“Me either.” He started down the steps. “Last time I was up here I think I was with you. We wouldn't have seen it though, because it was dark when we came up to watch submarine races.”

“
Uncle
Kevin,” I said, ignoring the remark. “When did you and Beto become such great friends?”

“It started then.” He indicated the book on my lap as he walked toward me. “Old Bart was a basket case after Mrs. B died.”

“I remember. The report says your dad was at their house that after­noon.”

“Father John asked Dad to go over and talk to Beto, to make sure he had what he needed. They decided that because Dad was a school counselor and Mom was a nurse, they'd be able to look after Beto until Bart could pull himself together, so Dad brought him home. He stayed with us off and on for maybe a year, until Aunt Quynh got out of Vietnam and contacted Bart. There were a lot of crazy rumors going around. Dad wanted me to make sure the kids at school weren't...”

He searched for a word. I said, “Kids?”

“I was going to say little shits.” His color was better than it had been when he picked me up.

“That's when you started walking to school with us.” My shade had disappeared so I got up and moved into the shadows cast by the rocks.

He followed me. “Yeah. I'd walk him over to your street and meet you guys, make sure you didn't stop to rumble with any more bullies on the way to school.”

“I keep seeing Father John's hand in our lives,” I said, leaning my back against the rough, warm stone. “He's the keeper of everyone's deepest, darkest secrets. I wonder how he can sleep at night.”

“Maybe he doesn't.” Kevin fell quiet, his focus on something far, far away. “Maybe that's why he's sick.”

“You're not going to say Father John is dying for our sins, are you?”

“No.” The corner of his mouth came up in a semblance of a wry smile. “Dying from the weight of them, maybe.”

“Kev?” I put my hand on his arm and waited until he looked down at me. “You ready to tell me why you decided to show me the murder book?”

There was a fresh breeze coming in off the Bay, and we were in the shade, but he broke out into a sweat again and seemed to have difficulty breathing. I was afraid he would pass out. I put my hand against his cheek and made him meet my eyes.

I said, “Beto told me you signed Lacy into rehab last night.”

He shook his head. Choked with emotion, he managed to say, “I committed her on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. Danger to herself and to others.”

“Namely, a danger to me?”

“You had it figured out, didn't you?” he said.

“After overhearing what you said to her last night when you manhandled her out of the Bartolinis' backyard, I started to wonder,” I said. “But it wasn't until I saw your name on the work order for repairs to a certain shot-up silver car that I actually knew.”

“That crazy bitch,” he said, dropping his head into his hands for a moment before he straightened up and faced me. “Yesterday afternoon, I went over to the dealership to make sure your truck was locked in a secure area until the ballistics techs could go over it. And there was Lacy's car, already parked at the body shop. She shot off her own side mirror, for chrissake.”

“The good news is, Lacy is a lousy shot and no one got hurt.”

He let out a long, labored breath. “My career is over.”

“Oh, sweetie, lots of cops have crazy wives.” I patted his shoulder. “If they all got fired when their wives spun out of control, there would be no one left to write tickets. You'll get through this, Kevin. Just tell me you haven't done anything really stupid yet, like filing a false report or making anything disappear?”

“I've thought about it.”

“Does Lacy have a psych history?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Then get her a good lawyer and let it all play out, Kev,” I said. “It's up to the Oakland PD to file charges, and so far they don't seem inclined to get overly involved. Your insurance company will probably pay mine off and then cancel your coverage, but that's the worst they'll do.”

“I'll have to file a report with my department,” he said.

“Do what you need to do,” I said. “I won't press charges, Kevin. You didn't need to try to bribe me with the murder book, but I'm glad you did.”

He let out a long breath, one he may have been holding for the last day. “Know a good lawyer?”

“Uncle Max will,” I said. “He's at the house now. Take me back to my car and then you go right over and talk to him.”

“Are the Lopers on patrol?”

“Of course they are, but surely you haven't forgotten the secret way into my backyard?”

He laughed, a big, full-chested
ha-ha-ha
that verged on sobs. Without warning, he pulled me against him and held me in a tight bear hug.

“God, Mag, I've missed you.”

“Just don't flip me, Kev,” I said, my face pressed against the front of his sweaty polo. “And don't tickle me. Okay?”

“Okay.” He set me on my feet and released me. “Not this time.”

As he drove us back down the hill, I turned toward him. “Yesterday, no one knew where Jean-Paul and I were going, not even us. So, how the hell did Lacy track us down?”

“She followed you,” he said.

“All day? Impossible. I would have seen her.”

“How many silver cars do you think were out there on the freeway yesterday? Would you notice one little piece-of-shit Focus?”

“Maybe not. So, has Lacy been lying in wait for me?”

“She didn't have to,” he said. “You know where her folks live, right?”

I nodded. “Across from Beto.”

“The other night, when I picked her up from your house, I took her to her parents' house because I didn't want my daughter to see her like that. She had it in her head that I was hanging out with you. When she saw your truck go by on Saturday with a man driving, she assumed it was me. So she grabbed her dad's gun from a drawer in the front hall table and lit out after you.”

“And stuck with us all afternoon?”

He nodded. “All afternoon, probably dogging you, waiting to get a good shot. This isn't exactly pickup country so your truck wasn't hard to follow.”

“It wasn't me she was shooting at, though, was it? It was you.”

“What can I say?”

“Hell hath no fury?” I said.

“Crazy jealous bitch?”

“Hey, Kev?”

“Mmm?”

“The other night, when Lacy was pounding on my front door because she thought you were inside with me, what if the door had been unlocked and she had been able to come in, and if she'd had her dad's gun with her then, what would she have done?”

“Probably woulda shot you through the heart.”

“Oh my God, Maggie.”
With delicate hands, my cousin Susan took the dragonfly brooch out of its red leather box and held it up to the light. The gems sent streamers of bright color across the room. “I had no idea this still existed. There's a portrait of our great-grandmother on the wall at home. In it she's wearing this brooch. Dad told me it was a very special anniversary gift. I can't believe I'm holding it.”

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” I said, feeling just a pang of regret seeing the brooch for probably the last time. “Mom always wore it on special occasions. I hope you enjoy it as much as she did.”

“Me?” Susan seemed taken aback. “Thank you for showing it to me, but it's your mother's.”

“Mom says it's time for the next generation to wear it.”

“But it should pass to you and Casey, not me.”

I shook my head. The brooch had passed from mother to daughter in Mom's family for three generations. But I was not part of Mom's bloodline. As much as I cherished my memories of evenings when Mom dressed up, and last thing and with some ceremony, pinned the brooch to her dress, I felt that the jewel could not rightfully come to me. I was, however, keeping the black dress I wore on Friday night, and that was memory enough.

I said, “The brooch should go to you and your daughter, Maddie.”

“What does your mom say about that?”

“I told her what I think, and she left the decision to me.”

“Oh my.” Susan held the brooch against her shoulder and looked at it in the mirror over Mom's dressing table before she put it back in its box. “I'll have to think about that.”

Standing beside her, I looked at Susan's reflection in the mirror. She was still as pretty as I remembered her, blue-eyed, with dark blond hair, and tall like the women in Mom's family. Indeed, she closely resembled Mom and my deceased older sister, Emily. Growing up, people often said I was Daddy's girl, though I had no clue until last fall how literally true that was. My sister and brother and I all had Dad's long nose, and looked enough like each other that if it ever occurred to me that I hadn't inherited Mom's height or her hair, it also never occurred to me that I might not be biologically connected to her. That revelation struck me the very first time I met Isabelle's mother, Élodie Martin, and saw how closely I resemble her.

“Susan,” I said, “the brooch is a Robnett family heirloom. It needs to remain within your family.”

She met my eyes in the mirror. “Maggie, I would be lying if I said that I wasn't absolutely shocked when I found out that Aunt Betsy isn't your birth mother.”

“You and me both,” I said, laughing a bit, surprised by her frankness. The topic was awkward for me, but I had brought it up.

“No one in the family ever said one word to me about it,” she said. “You know why?”

“Too scandalous for words?” I asked.

“No, not that at all,” she said, turning to face me. “Truthfully, I think everyone just put it out of their minds, a non-issue, if you will. You were a fully enfranchised member of the family, and how that came about, well, so what?

“Last fall, when Aunt Betsy called Dad and warned him that you had found out about your relationship to the Martin woman—”

“Isabelle.”

“Isabelle,” she repeated. “And because you are who you are, the whole story would be on TV. Dad summoned us for a family meeting so that he could tell us about you and her before it went public. He said that there are some secrets that are just too big to be kept forever. They always knew that the truth would come out someday. He said they had only hoped it wouldn't happen before you were old enough to understand.”

I laughed. “I'm not sure I'll ever understand, and I'm even less sure that I want to. Maybe some secrets should just stay secrets.”

“Maybe so.” She put an arm around me and bent her head close to mine. “Maggie, to my parents—to me—you are family. Period.”

We went downstairs to drag Uncle Max out to dinner. He and ­Kevin had been holed up together in Dad's den for a couple of hours, supposedly talking through Kevin's legal issues, though I thought they had wandered far afield by now and it was time to extricate Max.

On the stairs, Susan leaned toward me and spoke in a very soft voice. “The man with Max looks so familiar. I know I've seen him before. Who is he?”

“I'm sorry I didn't take care of introductions earlier, but the poor guy's in a bit of a legal pickle at the moment and I didn't want to interrupt them,” I said. “You have seen him before, though. That's Kevin, my high school boyfriend.”

“Kevin? Oh my God,” she said, a little giggly. “Remember that Christmas my family flew out? I think we were maybe juniors in high school.”

“I remember,” I said. “You were having a blizzard. When Mom told your dad that it was eighty degrees out here, your family was on the first available flight out of Cleveland.”

“Your parents made you drag me along everywhere you went.”

“They didn't make me, Susan. I wanted to. We had fun, didn't we?”

“Poor Kevin, though. He was so cute.”

“He still has his moments.”

Max looked up when we appeared at the den door. “Ladies?”

“Ladies are hungry,” I said.

Kevin lumbered to his feet. “Sorry to hold you up.”

We went through proper introductions. Kevin did his best to be gracious, but I could see the effort it took.

“Anyone else need a drink?” Max asked. Sometime during the afternoon, he had decanted a bottle of red wine that he wanted Susan, a newly certificated sommelier, to try. He poured wine into wide-bowled goblets and I handed them around.

As I gave a glass to Kevin, in the interest of moving us all closer to the front door, I asked, “Join us for dinner?”

“Thanks, but I can't.” He held up the wineglass. “This hits the spot, but I need to get home. I'd rather tell the kids myself about what's going on than have them hear it on the street. Or worse, on Facebook.”

“Chin up, my boy.” Max clinked his glass against Kevin's. “I'll make those calls and get back to you tomorrow.”

Susan was looking closely at the marquetry table next to Dad's reading chair. The table had a blue sticky, meaning it was staying.

“This is pretty,” she said.

“It's something Dad dragged home.” And it was.

Berkeley has a transient population of students. Many of them furnish their residences with cast-offs they find in family attics, garages, and barns. Who knows what treasures might lie buried under their piles of textbooks, laundry, bongs, hookahs, and dirty dishes for the length of their tenure at the university? When they break up housekeeping and move on to the next thing, students frequently dump their furniture on the curb, making it available for anyone to pick up before the trashmen haul it away.

My dad and Dr. Nussbaum now and then would carry home pieces of furniture that caught their eye. That's how Dad acquired his big early-twentieth-century desk and the round marquetry table that he put beside his reading chair. Not a skimpy end table, it was big enough and sturdy enough to accommodate a lamp, a decanter of scotch and a tray of glasses, a telephone, and maybe three stacks of books at a time. It was tall enough that everything on top was within Dad's reach.

Now the table held only a lamp, a telephone, the wine decanter, and a yellow legal pad covered with Max's precisely made notes from his conversation with Kevin.

Susan nodded with appreciation when I told her how Dad had acquired it.

“He had a good eye; it looks like an exceptional piece,” she said. “Two of my friends who are coming tomorrow, Ann and Angie, are antiques dealers. They're more interested in jewelry, but they'll be able to give you a rough idea what its history is. You might change your mind about leaving it.”

While we were talking about furniture, Max saw Kevin out. When he came back into the den he poured himself more of the wine. Holding it up to the light, he said, “What do you think about that wine, Susan?”

“It's lovely,” she said. She twirled her glass and put her nose into the bowl. “Full-bodied, earthy, a hint of anise, I think.” She took a sip and seemed to chew it before she swallowed. “There's a nice mineral cleanness. I get hints of pepper and black cherry with a bit of chocolate in the finish. What is it?”

“It's a Central Coast blend. The label calls it ‘Red Table Wine' and I like it,” he said. “Heavy on zinfandel, I think.”

“The instructor in our course had good things to say about the Central Coast red wines,” she said. “He told us he thinks that Napa Valley has become a sort of Disneyland for wine drinkers, overcrowded and overpriced. The real innovation is happening at small wineries down south.”

Max and I agreed that Napa Valley is overcrowded with tourists, especially during the summer. We both preferred the Central Coast wine region, in no small part because it is easier for us to get there from LA. I told her about a favorite oceanfront boutique hotel in San Simeon, a short and beautiful drive over the Santa Lucias to some of the wineries her instructor recommended. Before we left for dinner, she had placed a conference call to the friends who were joining her in the morning, and received permission to cancel their hotel reservations in Calistoga and find new accommodations in San Simeon. That mission was accomplished with two more phone calls, and they were set to explore the wine country further south.

“I have never heard of five women reaching consensus that easily,” Max said as he ushered us out the front door.

“We're from Minneapolis, remember,” she said, patting his shoulder as she passed him. “They were sold at ‘oceanfront.'”

We walked down to a small Indian restaurant across the street from the drugstore where Dad had captured Isabelle on film. All through the meal, I kept looking out the window at the door she had stepped out of, almost expecting her to be there, waiting for us when we left the restaurant.

Jean-Paul said that ghosts live only in the imaginations of the living. That doesn't mean they aren't real.

“Worn out, Maggie?” Max asked when he noticed that I had dropped out of the conversation.

“A bit, yes.” I folded my napkin under the edge of my plate. “It hit me today that once we hand the house keys over to the university, I won't have a connection to this place anymore.”

“You still have friends here,” he said.

I thought about that for a moment before I said, “What I have here is a history. All in the past.”

He caught the waiter's eye and signaled for the check. “Susan, it's time to take our girl home and tuck her in.”

As we turned up our front walkway, George Loper came out onto his porch.

“How long is that damn Dumpster going to sit there?” he wanted to know.

“It's scheduled for pick-up tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay then. If it's out there any longer, it's going to start smelling.”

“Good night, Mr. Loper,” I said, pulling out the house keys. There should have been nothing in the Dumpster that smelled worse than old rubber balls or well-worn tennis shoes, but I had to admit that, as I passed it, I caught a whiff of something that had acquired a certain gamey tang. Maybe a neighbor had contributed some household garbage to the mix inside.

Later, with Max snoring in the room next door to mine and Susan safely tucked in bed in the room at the end of the hall, I slept the sleep of the dead.

— —

Monday morning
, five trucks were scheduled to come and haul things to various destinations. The first of them arrived early, before we had finished our first cups of coffee. Uncle Max declared that he would be most helpful if he stayed out of the way. He took his telephone and his yellow legal pad to the backyard to make phone calls on Kevin's behalf and I went out front to make sure that whoever was backing into the driveway did not go off the side into Dad's beautiful flower borders.

A staffer and a student assistant from the university library came to pick up the books the science librarian had selected from Dad's collection. They loaded the boxes quickly and were hardly out of the driveway before the truck from the thrift store arrived. The pile of donations in the garage seemed huge, but the crew worked efficiently and had it loaded in a surprisingly short time; I could again see most of the garage floor. As the driver handed me a receipt for Mom's tax records, I asked him to please come again on Tuesday for what I hoped would be one last load.

With space in the garage now cleared away, after I swept the floor I would be able to bring out the things I was taking home so that the house cleaning crew scheduled for Tuesday could do their work unimpeded by extraneous clutter. We were still waiting for the piano movers to pick up Mom's baby grand and the haulers who would ship Susan's pieces to her home in Minneapolis. The refuse company promised to pick up the Dumpster and replace it with an empty as soon as a truck was available; as the day grew warmer, the gaminess coming from the Dumpster grew more pungent.

Susan had looked closely at everything marked with a yellow sticky note, deciding what to keep and what to leave. She knew right away that an armoire in an upstairs bedroom and the long mahogany sideboard in the dining room that had come from the family farm in Ohio, furniture that was oversized for most contemporary houses, belonged in the nearly century-old house in South Minneapolis she and her husband Bob had restored. There were other pieces that she found interesting or were very old, but thought might not be worth the cost and hassle of shipping. With a felt marker, she put question marks on their sticky notes.

I am not much of a decorator. My cousin is. She helped me shove aside the furniture I was taking home with me so that we could see what would be left for the tenants. There were a few pieces with blue sticky notes, designating that they were staying, that she thought I might want to think about keeping, Dad's chair-side table among them. She put question marks on those notes as well.