I didn’t have to touch her to know she was dead. Her skin was bluish-gray and appeared to have thickened and solidified over her bones, like a thin layer of candle wax had been dripped over her. Her facial angles, pleasantly round in life, had sharpened, and her head looked like a skull with skin on it. But her body was relaxed, her hands lying loosely at her sides. A slight smile rested on Lucy’s lips, as if she were having a pleasant dream. A window was open and it was quite cold in the room, but there was still an odor of putrefaction. I put my hand up to my face and stifled the urge to gag and scream at the same time.
Les was on his knees at the side of the bed, his head in his hands, making a noise that was half groaning, half crying. I put my hand on his shoulder. Like I’d given him an electric shock, Les jumped to his feet. He gave me one quick look and then ran over to Lucy’s closet. He pulled the door open and started rummaging around in Lucy’s clothes.
“Les, what are you doing?” I stammered.
He responded by pulling out several shirts and making a bundle of them. One was a distinctive red and orange tie-dye T-shirt I’d seen Les wearing at work.
“What are you going to do with those? You’re not supposed to take anything out of here.”
Les didn’t seem to hear me. He went over to the wastebasket by the bed and looked in. He lifted the bedskirt and checked under the bed. He took a Kleenex and used it to open Lucy’s bedside table. He pulled out a handful of condoms and put them in his back pocket. Then he used the Kleenex to rub the surface of the nightstand.
“Les, are you crazy? This is a crime scene. We should be calling 911!”
Les grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the living room. He sat me rather roughly on the couch. When I looked at his face he had tears in his eyes. Then I realized I was in tears myself.
“Angie, you’ve got to believe me, I know how this looks. But I didn’t kill Lucy, I didn’t even know she was dead. I just came over to get some of my stuff.”
“But, I didn’t even know you were friends with Lucy!” I felt like I was going to faint. I lowered my head and Les’s voice was filtered through my knees.
“We were dating, sort of. Lucy didn’t want anyone at work to know about it.”
I lifted my head. “All right, but that doesn’t explain why you’re trying to take evidence away.”
“I was over here on Friday night. We had a fight and she threw me out.”
“What were you fighting about?”
“She was into this vampire stuff. Blood drinking and a bunch of other freaky shit. She tried to get me into it but I said no. I told her it was dangerous, but she just laughed.”
Les rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “That night, she told me she’d met someone else and she wanted to break up. She said he was a ‘real vampire,’ not like the posers she’d been with before. Naturally I was upset. I might have said some things I shouldn’t have. When she didn’t come back to work I thought it was because of me. She said she never wanted to see me again.” He looked at me imploringly.
“Did you think that maybe something like this could have happened?” I waved my hand toward the bedroom.
“Yes, of course!” Les was shouting. “But what could I do? If she was into supernatural shit, what was I going to do to stop it?”
I was taking deep breaths to stay calm. I looked up at Les. He looked genuinely distraught, but everything he was telling me could have been a lie to cover for his own crime.
I made my voice very calm. “Les, we need to call the police.”
Les jumped toward me and grabbed my hand. I forced myself not to snatch it away. I didn’t want to do anything to upset him further.
“Angie, you’ve got to let me get out of here. I swear I didn’t have anything to do with this. But if the police find out I was here I’m not going to be able to explain things. I know how it works. They’ll find a way to pin it on me, even though I didn’t do it.”
“It’s not going to happen like that.”
“No one but you knows we were dating, so if I just take my stuff and go home they won’t waste their time talking to me. Please, Angie, let me go.”
“Les, I have to call the police.”
Les let go of my hand and clenched his fists. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me.
“Please, just let me put this stuff in the car and then we’ll call.” Les didn’t wait for my answer but instead grabbed the bundle of clothes he’d taken out of Lucy’s room and ran for the front door. Moments later I heard the sound of an engine. When I looked out the front window I saw a car speeding away.
I went outside and called 911. Ghosts made of mist and fog swirled around me while I waited for the cops to come.
Within minutes the paramedics and the police arrived. The paramedics left after certifying what I already knew about Lucy’s condition. The police dispersed a small crowd of neighbors who had gathered, and then asked me to sit in a squad car until the homicide inspectors arrived. I watched them wrap yellow tape around the front entrance. Eventually two men approached. They were the first I’d seen wearing civilian clothes, so I assumed they were the homicide guys. I stepped out of the car to greet them.
They were the classic odd couple. One was a handsome Hispanic man in his mid-thirties dressed in a nicely tailored suit, probably not Armani, but a mighty good knock-off. His immoveable, black Ken doll hair reminded me of Steve’s. The white man standing beside him had been handsome in his youth, but had let time slip by him with a vengeance. He appeared to be in his mid-sixties, with thinning red hair tinged gray, sunken blue eyes, and the jowls of a bulldog. The tarnished gold buttons of a ratty blue sport coat strained over his formidable belly.
Bulldog shook my hand with what felt like a baseball mitt. “I’m Inspector Sansome of the San Francisco Police Department and this is Inspector Trujillo. We’d like to ask you some questions.”
At that moment one of the uniformed officers came up to the Inspectors. Trujillo said a few words to him and left me with Sansome, who said, “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in the squad car?” I nodded.
Inspector Sansome unbuttoned his coat before sliding into the back seat. Suddenly I was wondering if I should have called a lawyer. Being questioned in the back seat of a cop car had triggered some latent guilt complex. But Sansome smiled at me encouragingly, then gazed out the window.
“Mighty foggy out here. I don’t know how people stand it. Me, I prefer the hottest weather I can get. Live in the Mission District myself, and when I retire I plan to go to the desert, Arizona. I know this must be very upsetting for you, Ma’am, but we need to get some basic information. Your full name, please.”
“Angela Margaret McCaffrey.”
Sansome smiled. “A good Irish name. Did you grow up in San Francisco?”
“Yes. I was named after Angel Island.”
People are usually amused when I tell them that I am named for Angel Island, a small, green, undeveloped rock in the Bay between San Francisco and Marin. Accessible only by ferry, it was first an immigration and quarantine station for Asian immigrants. After World War II the Parks Department took it over and people began coming for picnics and hikes. My parents grew up in the Irish working-class neighborhood of Noe Valley, where big families were packed into railroad car Victorian houses with two bedrooms and one bathroom. My mother was one of five children and my father one of seven, so when they were courting as teenagers there weren’t many places for them to go to be alone. They would take the ferry to Angel Island and be gone for hours, “walking.”
My mother found out she was pregnant a week before her graduation from Mission High School. I don’t know if theirs could be called a shotgun wedding, but being the good Catholics that they were, there probably weren’t a lot of other viable options. Mom and Dad graduated from high school and went straight into full adulthood, with my sister Thea coming eleven months after me (Irish twins, as siblings like us were called in the neighborhood). So I was named after the place that gave my parents what were probably the only moments of carefree happiness in their lives. Sansome, with his faded blue eyes and a ring of copper hair around his otherwise bald head, looked like he would probably understand this story, maybe even have lived a similar one.
“Really, that’s nice, a local girl. I’m from North Beach myself,” he said, naming an Italian neighborhood just north of downtown. “Boy, was I a fish out of water in school.” He pointed to his hair, which was probably carrot orange in his youth. I could imagine him standing out in a classroom full of dark heads.
“Well, I guess we better get to these questions.” He seemed regretful, and I realized that making small talk was probably part of the interview process, intended to make me feel comfortable with him before getting to the real questions. It had worked, though. I felt an unexpected camaraderie with the guy.
He took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen, unconsciously licking the point of the pen before poising it over the paper. He reached up and flicked on the car’s interior light.
“How did you know the deceased, Ms. Weston?”
“We worked together at Hall, Fitch and Berg. It’s an ad agency.”
“Did you work directly with Ms. Weston?”
“She was my boss. I’m an assistant account executive, AAE, as we say. She’s an account executive.” After I said it I noticed I had slipped back into the present tense.
Sansome nodded and wrote in his notebook. “When was the last time you saw Ms. Weston alive?”
“I saw her on Friday, at work. But her Sunday paper was open on her coffee table. And her neighbor, Ida, had collected the other newspapers. Doesn’t that mean she died on Sunday?”
“Would you like a job on the police force, Ms. McCaffrey?” Sansome smiled indulgently. “That’s good detective work, but I’d say Ms. Weston has only been where she is for a day or so. I’m not the coroner, of course, but I’ve been doing this job for twenty-two years.”
“What do you mean, how do you know that?”
Suddenly Sansome was looking at the thumbnail of his left hand, not at me.
“How long were you in the apartment before you found Ms. Weston?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
He looked at me without speaking for what seemed like a long time. He was succeeding in making me nervous, if that was his intent.
“Were you two friends, Ms. McCaffrey?”
“No, not really. Work friends, I guess you could say.” I paused and thought about it. “Lucy didn’t seem to have any friends. No family, either, except for a sister in St. Louis. Human Resources was having trouble finding anyone when she didn’t show up on Monday.”
Sansome wrote down my answer. “Why did you come here tonight?”
“To get some papers that she brought from the office. Some illustrations.” I neglected to mention that I had also come to assuage my guilt.
“Uh huh,” said Sansome. “Did anyone else know you were coming?”
“Yes, I told Web Northrup, from the Creative department. He told me where the key was, he’d watered her plants for her before.”
It was time to tell Sansome about Les. I felt bad for him, but I wasn’t about to lie to the police.
“While I was in the house, someone else came. Les Banks, a graphic artist from HFB. Lucy was dating him, I guess. It was news to me, he just told me now. He showed up a few minutes after I got here. He said he came over to make sure I was all right.”
“To make sure you were all right?”
“Yes. He seemed shocked when we found the, um, body. But he took some things, his shirts and other stuff, so you wouldn’t know he’d been dating her. He said you wouldn’t understand.”
Sansome didn’t give me any indication of what he thought of this news. He just nodded calmly and asked, “Did he say anything else? Had he and Ms. Weston had a fight?”
“Yes, he said they did have a fight, on Friday night. She said she never wanted to see him again, that she had a new boyfriend. He said he thought that was why she didn’t come to work, because she was trying to avoid him.”
Sansome wrote, the pen disappearing in his big hand.
“Ms. McCaffrey, as far as you know, was Ms. Weston having any conflicts with anyone else at work?”
I paused again. “I did hear some gossip today that she might have been having a conflict with another AAE, Kimberley Bennett. But it was just gossip.”
“Who told it to you?”
“Lakshmi Roy.”
“Could you spell that for me?”
When we were done Sansome handed me a business card, white with a little gold embossed shield on it.
“Well, thank you very much, Ms. McCaffrey. I imagine we’ll have some more questions for you tomorrow or the next day. You seem to have landed right in the middle of things. And by the way, it might be better if you didn’t mention anything to your work colleagues about Lucy dating Les. If it’s a secret it might be useful for us to find out who knew and who didn’t.”
He let himself out of the car, came around to my side and opened the door.
I just couldn’t leave without asking one question. “Uh, Inspector Sansome, do you have any idea what happened to Lucy? How she—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word died.
Sansome’s face was a mask of professional neutrality. “We won’t know that until the autopsy reports are in, and that might take a while.”
In the car driving home I thought about the fact that I had said nothing to the police about the “real vampire” Lucy had told Les about. I told myself that I had just forgotten, that I would call Inspector Sansome when I got home. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I was already lying to protect Eric.
It was past dinnertime when I got back from Lucy’s house. I wasn’t hungry but I felt dirty, tired, and miserable. I took a shower and put on my pajamas, consciously telling myself that I was not going to meet Eric that night. I climbed into bed and fell asleep, but at exactly 9:30 my eyes sprang open and wouldn’t shut again. I lay still and listened to the electric whir of my alarm clock in the silent room. Something huge and horrible had just happened to me. I wanted to crawl into someone’s lap, be sheltered by a protective arm and told that everything was all right and I was safe. It was not the first time that I’d lain in bed and felt the sheer depth of my loneliness, but it was the first time that the image of somebody appeared in the darkness, somebody whose arms could protect me from anything.
I got up and went to my closet. If there had been an earthquake that night I would have crawled out of the rubble of the apartment building and dragged myself to the Ocean House on two broken legs, so there was no use trying to convince myself otherwise. I just needed to figure out what to wear. Eric hadn’t said what we were going to do or where we were going. By coincidence, the place where I was meeting Eric was almost back at Lucy’s house, so I knew that the weather was cold and foggy. I decided going casual would serve two functions: I’d stay warm, plus I might look more nonchalant about our rendezvous than I felt. Enveloped in a soft down parka and my favorite jeans and leather boots I headed west again.
The Ocean House is visible for miles as you wind your way up the Great Highway from the south. For the last mile it’s hard to remember you’re in the city, with the ocean on your left and the dense greenery of Golden Gate Park on your right. The road runs flat along Ocean Beach then up the cliffs to turn right and disappear into the Richmond District. Right at the top of the hill, clinging improbably to the steep terrain like a baby monkey to its mother, is the restaurant, known more for its beautiful views than for its food. I’d lived in San Francisco all my life and could count on one hand the number of times I’d been there, but I’d always admired the restaurant’s strange tenacity. Three different buildings, ornate Victorian affairs with multiple towers and verandas, had burned down between 1865 and 1907. The present Ocean House didn’t have anywhere near the same architectural distinction, but it did have the same ocean views as its predecessor. Still, it was an odd place to meet a date. It was probably the last place a real San Franciscan would go to eat, but Eric was a tourist, wasn’t he?
And were we going to eat? Eric had asked me to meet him, not in the restaurant, but behind it. I circled past the front door and down a flight of concrete stairs to come out on a large outdoor terrace, perched directly over the water facing the seal island. It’s outfitted with a few of those binoculars on a platform where you put in a quarter, blink, and it’s over. There was no view in the dark, except for the twinkling lights of a passing freighter, so Eric was the only person on the terrace. But even if it had been crowded with people I would have recognized him. His back was to me as he gazed out toward the sleeping seals but his hair was unmistakable. He had taken it out of its fastener and it flowed like liquid copper over the back of his black leather jacket.