Late morning, Colleen parked down Paris Street, noting a blue Chevy C10 pickup blocking the driveway of 355. It looked like Mary Davis had company. Maybe not a good time to stop by. Or maybe Jim Davis had finally come home. That would be a huge relief.
A few minutes later, a man in a Giants cap left the Davis house, bouncing down the stairs even though he was middle-aged and a good forty pounds overweight. Colleen knew him, in a sense. He’d tried to chat her up a couple days ago, sitting on a barstool at Dizzy’s, when she went in to speak to Jim Davis. Jim had called him Frank. She watched him get into the pickup, fire it up, back out onto Paris Street, and head off.
Colleen got out of the Torino, headed to the Davis residence. She took a deep breath, rang the bell.
She thought she saw someone darken the peephole viewer.
The front door flew open. There stood Mary Davis, wearing a red bathrobe over a nightdress and white slippers with blue snowflakes on them. The drone of metal music floated from upstairs, quieter than the other day. Mary Davis’s eyes were red and had been recently wiped. But the rest of her face radiated pure rage.
“You again!” she hissed.
“I am really sorry to bother you, Ms. Davis.”
“Where is my husband?” Mary Davis practically spat the words.
So Jim Davis wasn’t around. Colleen’s spirits sagged. “I don’t know. I was hoping to speak to him myself.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Not since yesterday—when I stopped by. It was down at Dizzy’s. I told you: we were going to meet at The Manor coffee shop, but he never showed up.”
“And you haven’t seen him since then?”
“No. And I take it you haven’t either.”
The rock-n-roll grew louder upstairs, as someone opened the door.
“Ma?” Steve Davis shouted down the stairs. “Who is it?”
“Just that woman who was here yesterday. And turn that garbage down.”
The upstairs door shut. The music dropped in volume.
Mary Davis turned her attention back to Colleen, holding onto the door with a hand that vibrated with anger. “I’m going to say this just one more time,” she said. “Leave us alone.” She turned her head, eyed Colleen sideways. “Jim’s got friends on the force. Got that?”
Colleen swallowed. “Maybe I can help you find him.”
Mary Davis laughed out loud. “Yeah, you’ve been such a help already. You don’t even have an investigator’s license. Now get lost. Final warning.”
“I’m—”
The door slammed in Colleen’s face with such force that she reared back.
Back in the car, Colleen rolled down the window, lit up a Slim. She’d hit a wall with Mary Davis. Who had told her Colleen didn’t have her PI license? That guy Frank? The one who’d just left? He looked like a cop. He hung out in a cop bar, with cop friends. He knew Jim Davis.
And then there was the resistance she got trying to obtain a copy of the homicide report. She thought she’d seen the clerk at 850 Bryant make a phone call when she asked for the report. She remembered talking to the desk officer in Homicide, too, room 561, asking about the case. She’d told him she didn’t have a license. Could he have contacted someone? Frank?
She got out her file folder on the Copeland murder. In 1967, one of Margaret’s friends from the crash pad she was staying at said Margaret had gone out for a walk late the night before she was found dead in Golden Gate Park. Colleen reread another article, which included a map showing where Margaret Copeland’s body had been found near Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park.
She tossed her cigarette, started up the car. Fifteen minutes later, she parked at Stow Lake, a man-made affair with paddleboats for rent and an island in the center. It looked like something Pamela would’ve liked when she was a kid, before her dad had taken her innocence, and Colleen had taken his life. Colleen pushed the thought away. Thinking about her daughter only ended up bringing sorrow anymore. If Colleen could just reconnect with Pamela, perhaps they’d be able to move past that painful time. But Pamela didn’t want to know.
At the boathouse she bought a box of Crackerjacks and asked the kid behind the counter if anybody ever heard anything new about the old Margaret Copeland murder that had happened nearby. The kid had a severe case of acne. He didn’t know anything. He’d probably been in kindergarten at the time of the murder.
Colleen opened the Crackerjack box. “Is your boss around?”
“He comes in later.”
She set a business card on the counter. “There might be some reward money for any new info on that murder.”
Eating caramel corn and peanuts, Colleen hiked down to a grouping of shrubs and trees. Margaret’s body had been found by a man walking his dog early in the morning when the dog had run into a secluded spot in the trees. The shape of a twisted tea tree, its thick branches sprawling low to the ground like giant limbs, matched the photograph in the article, although the tree had grown. This was the place. Colleen felt an involuntary shiver. The details of the murder in the newspapers were grisly, and this place had been hell on earth for Margaret Copeland.
Colleen stepped over and past branches, brushing foliage aside, and found herself in a damp green cavern. She stood there for a moment, a smell like eucalyptus filling her nostrils, and gazed around, looking around at the spiral of branches. She felt foolish when she eyed the ground, as if some evidence might still exist after all this time.
Eleven years ago, someone had dragged Margaret Copeland in here.
Beat her. Sexually assaulted her. Suffocated her with a plastic bag.
Ended her life.
Colleen realized the half-finished box of Crackerjacks was dormant in her hand. She was no longer hungry.
She marched back up to the boathouse where there was a pay phone. She’d call the Chronicle again, see if Howard Broadmoor might have checked in. He’d written several articles on the Copeland murder over a decade ago. She tossed the Crackerjacks in a waste can, wiped her sticky fingers off on a napkin she had pocketed, and dialed the number.
“Your messages are still in Mr. Broadmoor’s In box, ma’am,” a nasal voice informed her.
Colleen thanked the woman, headed over to her Torino parked in the loop around the lake. She got in, rolled down the window. A couple with a young boy were out in a paddleboat. The man and boy were going at it furiously, grinning up a storm. Water thrashed and ducks quacked. Colleen was just about to light a cigarette when she saw an old gray-hair in a blue jumpsuit pushing a wire cart full of tools up to the door behind the snack shop.
She slid the cigarette back into the pack, got out of the car, and went back to the snack shop, where she caught him by surprise.
He started. He had fine slender features and crooked wire-frame glasses.
“Sorry,” Colleen said. “You the manager?”
“Does it look like it?” He pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.
“Maintenance?”
“You must be clairvoyant.” He began to unload the cart, pulling a loop of green garden hose out and flinging it up against the building.
She gave him one of her business cards.
“Hayes Confidential?” he asked.
She introduced herself. “I’m working for the family of the girl who was murdered nearby in ’67.”
“You have a tight schedule,” he said, getting out a pair of vise grips, fiddling with some kind of metal trap he’d picked up out of a cardboard box in the cart. It had a long metal contraption apparently made for snapping some small beast’s back. “Only been what—eleven years?”
“I know,” she said. “But here I am.”
“And here you are.” He gave her an appraising look before he wrestled with a spring that appeared to be seized up.
“I didn’t get your name.”
“That’s because you haven’t asked.”
“Fine,” she said with a smirk. “What’s your name—if that’s not too personal a question.”
“Larry,” he said.
“Great. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Larry, were you working here back then by any chance?”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
A flutter of enthusiasm lifted her spirits. “Remember anything?”
“Margaret Copeland was the girl’s name. They never caught the guy. Later on, they said it might have been the Zodiac.”
“You remember her name,” Colleen said. “Margaret Copeland.”
“You think I’m simple because I’m the maintenance man?”
“Now did I say that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“I didn’t even imply it, as a matter of fact.”
“I guess not,” he said, wrestling with the animal trap. It snapped shut and popped out of his fingers as he let it go. “God dammit!” The trap landed on the grass.
“So,” she said. “What else do you remember about the murder?”
“No one wanted to listen to me then. Why now?”
“Who didn’t want to listen?”
“SFPD.”
Interesting. “Well, I certainly want to hear all about it.”
He gave her the once-over. “You married?”
She attracted only the finest. “Dear man, I’m afraid so.”
“Figures.”
“You know, there is some reward money involved—not just for any old piece of gossip—but for information related to solving the case.”
“How much?”
“That’s a good question. The family hasn’t told me yet.”
“I see.” He reached down to pick up the trap, started fussing with it again with his vise grips.
“You could lose a finger doing that.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Back to Margaret Copeland. You were working here.”
“Right here.” Larry pointed with his vise grips down at the ground. “Twenty-first of November, 1967.”
He had a good memory. “What time?”
“Five in the morning.”
“See anything?”
“I already told the cops. Nobody thought it was important.”
She put her hands on her hips. Learn to wait, she told herself. “I’m listening,” she said. “It’s important to me.”
“How important?”
“Well, we know I’m married,” she said, going for the wad of cash in her pocket. She peeled off a twenty, held it up between index and forefinger. “But maybe this will ease your pain.”
“That’s it? Your reward?”
“This is just an incentive. To finish this conversation before the day’s over.” She reached over, tucked the bill into the top pocket of his jumpsuit.
He went back to fiddling with the trap.
“Green Ford Falcon,” he said. “Parked right up there.” He turned, nodded where her Torino was parked under a pine tree. “Only car up here at the time. Except for my truck.”
Green Ford Falcon. “And how did that come about? You being here at five a.m.?”
“Came in early,” he said. “Had to fix the generator before we opened up. Broke down the night before. Thought it was odd, that car, brand spanking new, parked up there like that. No one else seemed to think so though.”
This was sounding like a decent lead. “Get a license plate?”
“No.” He looked up.
She gave a sigh. “That’s too bad.”
“Because there wasn’t one.”
That sparked her interest. “You think someone might have taken the plates off?”
He squinted and pointed the vise grips at her. “I can see how your mind works. Suspicious. But maybe the car was new?”
“Do you recall seeing any paperwork taped to the inside of the windshield?”
“Didn’t get that close. When I saw no one was in it, I went to work on the generator.”
“When did the Falcon leave?”
“It was gone when I left. I didn’t hear it leave. But I was futzing with the generator in the boathouse.”
“And you told the police all this, right?”
“I did. And they couldn’t have cared less. The guy I talked to didn’t even write down a thing I said.”
“You don’t remember his name, do you?”
“Sure, I do.”
She wondered if he was going to tell her. “Was it Jim Davis, by any chance?”
“No, Jim Davis was the one in charge of the case.”
She nodded with approval. “You’ve got a mind like a trap, Larry. A lot better’n that thing that’s about to snap your finger off.”
He looked up again, smiling. “I do.” He looked back down, focused on his task again. “Madrid was the cop’s name,” he said. “Like the city.”
“It was on his name plaque?”
“You got it. ‘F. Madrid.’”
“Was his first name Frank?”
He shrugged.
“You’ve been a big help, Larry.” She got out her penny notebook and a ballpoint pen. “Let’s stay in touch.”
“How come you don’t wear a wedding ring?”
* * *
For whatever reason, most likely because she was feeling encouraged, Colleen drove over to Mission Street to The Manor coffee shop. Maybe she’d get lucky. Maybe Jim Davis had forgotten what day it was, and was going to show up now, and bring the report, and tell her everything she needed to know, including the killer’s name and address.
She ordered a cup of coffee and changed a dollar in dimes for the pay phone. She dialed the Department of Motor Vehicles and, after being transferred several times, learned what she needed in order to do a vehicle search. She jotted it down in her notebook.
Then she dialed SFPD Human Resources and said she was calling from Wells Fargo Bank, checking a job reference in regard to a home loan application for an Officer F. Madrid.
“Sergeant Frank Madrid retired from the force four years ago,” the woman informed her.
Colleen would bet that Frank Madrid was the Frank in Dizzy’s the day she went to meet Jim Davis. The same Frank that had left the Davis house earlier.
“I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “Now that you say that, I do see that information right here on this application. You don’t have a forwarding address, do you?”
“He didn’t put his address on the application?”
“No.”
“I’m going to need you to talk to my supervisor,” the woman said with an air of suspicion.
“I’ll call back. Thanks so much.” She hung up, went back to her seat at the busy counter, loaded up her weak coffee with sugar and half-and-half. It was easy to nurse because it still wasn’t very good. She fought having a cigarette to go with it. She was just getting up the courage to go back to Jim Davis’s house when the Chinese waitress in the pink dress and white socks reached up and turned up the volume on the television that had switched away from Hollywood Squares to a local news update.
“We interrupt this broadcast for late-breaking news: a former SFPD detective’s body has been found down at Fort Funston.”
Colleen looked up at the TV. A pretty young woman with a dark feather-cut spoke into a microphone in front of the entrance of some kind of concrete bunker, presumably down at the beach. There were quite a few people in and around a wide tunnel that led to a sandy bluff beyond.
“The World War II gun emplacement at Fort Funston is a known hangout for San Francisco’s growing transient population. It was here this morning that the body was found. The name is not being released at this time, pending notification of kin. Police are asking anyone who has any information to contact them. More news as it comes in.”
Excited chatter erupted around the coffee shop. Speculation began. Transients. Suicide. Drugs. Double-cross. Gangs.
Colleen found that her coffee cup had been half raised to her lips, frozen in midair for a good thirty seconds. Although the detective wasn’t named, she knew who it had to be.
She set the cup down on its saucer, paid, left a fifty-cent tip, and went out to her car, bracing herself for another face-to-face with Mary Davis.
She drove down Mission, up Persia, took a left on Paris. Numerous vehicles were parked in and around Jim Davis’s house, including two SFPD black-and-whites, one in the middle of the street. Not the time to drop by.
But it confirmed her suspicion about who’d been found down at Fort Funston.
Not that there’d been much doubt to begin with.
A tidal wave of guilt flowed through her, knowing she might well have had a hand in Jim Davis’s demise. She had planned to meet him regarding a case that SFPD apparently didn’t want brought to light. And now he was dead.
Dead.
She drove by the house slowly, then headed back down Mission, where she managed to find a parking spot not far from Dizzy’s. A black-and-white was double parked outside the bar. Colleen got out of the car and headed for the bar. She knew she wouldn’t be welcome but she had to know what the hell had happened to Jim Davis.