GEOFF COOKE WASHED HIS FACE in the firm’s bathroom sink, then dried it with one of the paper towels. He stared into the mirror, shocked at the gimlet tint his eyes had taken on.
He’d been sick on and off all through the day, ever since he’d read about it in the paper in the morning. Breakfast had come right on up at him, and he didn’t even try to get down any lunch, instead locking his office door and trying to grab a nap on the couch in his office. That effort had been futile as well.
He hung on with busywork for another couple of hours. A bit after 4:00, he gave up entirely, told his secretary the truth, which was that he felt like he was getting the flu—she probably shouldn’t expect him to come in to work tomorrow either—and left the office. Wearing a heavy tan cashmere coat against the chill, he considered getting his car from the garage and driving up to the Marina—an hour or two out on the bay with his sailboat generally worked for his peace of mind no matter what it was that ailed him.
But today, somehow, that didn’t appeal.
Instead of going down to the garage for his car, he started walking around the downtown streets, strolling really, his mind empty except for the swish of vertigo from the sick-making emotion that seemed to wash over him every couple of breaths.
But otherwise, without a plan.
Fifteen or so minutes later, he found that he’d crossed Market and was on Fifth, heading south, a destination vaguely forming in his mind.
Straight out of law school, long before he’d even dreamed of going into private practice, Geoff had worked for two years as an assistant district attorney in the city. He still maintained relatively current friendships with a couple of the guys he had known back then.
There, a block over to his right, he made out the massive bluish-gray monolithic structure that was his former workplace—the Hall of Justice—home to Superior Court, the Southern Police Station, the district attorney’s offices, and assorted other smaller local bureaucracies. When he got to it, the front of the building was as inviting as it had always been, which is to say not. Several homeless people lay in their sleeping bags by the struggling foliage on either side of the glass-and-plywood front doors; a line of fifteen or so desultory and mostly poorly dressed citizens blew on their hands as they waited to slowly move forward into the building proper, where they would eventually encounter the security checkpoint and metal detector before finally gaining admission.
Checking his watch, 4:45, Geoff thought his timing would be pretty good for his unannounced visit. It was near the end of the workday, and though the assistant DAs often put in long hours, the courts were generally closed up by now and the office work took on a more relaxed character.
Which was, apparently, not shared by the guardians at the front gate.
When he finally got inside and made it to the security checkpoint, Geoff dutifully emptied his pockets, putting the contents into the plastic saucer provided to hold them, but the heavyset white cop at the desk stopped him before he was cleared to walk through the metal detector. “Hold up!” he said, extending his hand. “What’s this?”
Geoff looked around behind him to see who the guy was talking to, then realized with some surprise that it was him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Me?”
The cop pointed. “Yeah. You. Is this what it looks like?”
Geoff looked. “My keys and my Swiss Army knife.”
“Not allowed.”
“What’s not allowed?”
“But it’s just a—”
“It’s a knife and it’s not allowed, sir. You can either leave the line and bring it back to your car or wherever you want to keep it, and return without it, or I confiscate it here and now. No knives allowed in the building.”
Geoff drew in a breath, let it out slowly. “Look, Officer,” he said. “I promise I’m not going to stab anybody with the knife. It’s not that kind of knife. Can’t you just keep it in a drawer in your desk or something until I’m finished my business here and then I pick it up on my way out? How would that work?”
“Wouldn’t work at all,” the guard said. “You can take it out of here or I can take it and it goes in the confiscated pile. Those are your options.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Jesus!”
Behind him in the line, somebody raised her voice. “Hey! Let’s keep the show on the road up there. We’re waiting all day and freezing back here!”
The guard eyed Geoff with a terrible flat affect. “Your choice, but let’s make it right now, sir.”
Geoff shook his head, then nodded in frustration. “Keep the damn knife.”
“Thank you.” The guard picked the offending weapon out of the saucer and with no ceremony dropped it into a trash container to the side of him. “Next,” he said.
On the other side of the metal detector, Geoff stood a moment, considering the odds if he reached into the trash container and just grabbed his knife. Maybe stab the guard. But already the people behind him in line were moving him forward, so he simply reached for his keys and kept moving, into the lobby and over to the elevators.
“And they haven’t gotten any quicker—the elevators, I mean—in the last twenty years, either,” Geoff said.
“Nothing’s gotten quicker,” Don Cordes said. Bald and muscular, Cordes had his jacket off, his tie loose. “There’s no getting around it. Entropy is on the rise. Things are slowing down and we’re all doomed. I am sorry, though, about your Swiss Army knife. But if it’s any consolation, I don’t think there’s anybody who has to come to this building often who hasn’t lost at least something to the Gestapo down there.”
“Do they really just confiscate that stuff and then throw it away?”
“That’s the word.”
“They could auction them or something, couldn’t they?”
“Probably not. Somebody would stab somebody with one of the knives and then the victim would sue the city for providing the weapon. But if you want, you’re a big-time fancy lawyer now. You could write a letter with that suggestion, put ’em in the police auction, I mean. Although it wouldn’t work, because nothing does.”
Cordes was doing homicides now and so had to share his office with only one other person, who wasn’t there at the moment. Surrounded by dozens of file boxes lining the walls, he sat at one of the two facing desks, leaning back in his chair, his feet up. “Why don’t you take off your coat and stay awhile?” he asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t drop by your old stomping grounds to talk about how we keep the building safe, fascinating though the topic is. So what’s up?”
Geoff gave him a sad look, let out a breath, then shrugged out of his overcoat. “I’m all fucked up,” he said. Crossing to the facing desk, he hung the coat over the chair behind it, then sat and brought his hands together on the desktop. “Are you following the story of the lawyer they pulled out of the ocean yesterday?”
Cordes nodded. “Peter Ash.” Not a question. “What about him?”
“Well, it’s him and me, actually.”
Cordes cocked an eyebrow. “Are you coming out to me here, Geoff?”
Geoff snorted in derision. “Fuck you, Don. Give me a break.”
“Hey, you say it’s you and him. What am I supposed to think? This is San Francisco. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.”
“Well, this isn’t that.”
“Fine. What is it, then?”
Geoff started in again. “I met him six, eight months ago, somewhere in there. We got seated together at this wine tasting up in Napa and it was just like click city between the two of us. We’ve read the same books, we like the same music. The guy knows every fact in the world. Plus, I’m laughing so hard my cheeks hurt. Anyway, long story short, by a week or two later, it was like we’d been in each other’s lives for twenty years.”
Cordes nodded. “Bromance.”
“Maybe. Call it what you want. But it was pretty cool.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, so now somebody shot him and dumped him in the ocean.”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s what the paper had this morning.”
“It had somebody dumping him? I don’t remember that.”
“Well, they pulled him out of the water at the beach. So I assumed that if he’s shot, he didn’t walk there, not from any distance, anyway. Somebody must have put him in.”
“Not necessarily, but all right. Let’s say that was it. Where do you fit in?”
“I’m pissed off, Don. Maybe it’s as simple as that. I’m just royally fried that somebody took out my best friend. And I know for a fact that I was the closest guy to him in the past six months. In that same period of time, among other things, his marriage started to break up. In any event, he was going through a ton of shit, and I was the one he was confiding in. We were hanging out with each other a couple of times a week. And then somebody shoots him? Why? I mean, what the fuck? How does that make any sense?”
“You don’t have any ideas?”
“None. The guy was a pure sweetheart. But then again, I realized it’s possible I might know something important and not realize it.”
“So you want to talk to Homicide?”
“I imagine I do. I think that’s probably why I came down here. I don’t just want to insinuate myself into a homicide investigation if they’ve already got a suspect and it turns out I’m wasting their time. I don’t really have anything concrete to offer. I’m just, as I said, pissed off. I feel like I ought to do something, but I don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to be.”
Don Cordes tugged at his lower lip. “I haven’t heard word one about a suspect, so I’m thinking they’d love to talk to you.”
“Do you want to help me set that up?”
“I could do that. Or, since you’re here at this very moment, how’d you like to take a walk upstairs, see who’s hanging around?”
Ike’s daughter’s fever was spiking again and he’d gone home, so Beth was alone at her desk in the Homicide detail when she looked up and saw Don Cordes coming her way with another man in tow. Cordes was Homicide and she was Homicide, and they saw quite a bit of each other in the normal course of their business, so it wasn’t unusual to have him come to the Homicide detail. What was unusual was that he was bringing someone along with him.
And unusual was a good thing, since it might mean that something had broken outside of her routine.
From halfway across the large room, Don pointed at her and gave her a nod—yes, he was coming to see her—so she pushed back her chair, forced herself not to wince as she got to her feet and not to limp as she came around the desk. She said hello to her colleague and shook hands with Mr. Cooke, an old friend of Don’s and a former ADA himself. As part of his introduction, Cordes dropped the short version of Beth’s ordeal on the day of the terrorist attack, and when he’d finished, Geoff took her hand again. “So I’m meeting a true hero,” he said.
Embarrassed, as she always was by this sort of thing, she shook her head. “Hardly,” she said. “It was my day off and I was having lunch with a friend. I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. If some real cops hadn’t been around and stepped up just in time—the real heroes—I would have been killed for sure.”
“What a terrible day that was,” Geoff said. “I have another friend who got caught in it. She almost died, too.”
“ ‘Almost’ being the key word. I hope she’s all right now.”
“Getting there. She’s back home, anyway. Thank God.”
But enough of this, Beth thought. This goes nowhere except back around to herself. And she wanted no part of that. “So,” she said, “you were ADA back in the day. Whatever made you leave all this glamour here?”
“I’m afraid it was the pursuit of filthy lucre.”
“Well,” she said, “if you’ve got to have a reason, I suppose that’s a good one.”
“Mr. Cooke also has a pretty good reason for wanting to talk to you,” Cordes said.
“Geoff, please,” he said. “Mr. Cooke was my father, may he rest in peace.”
As subtly as she could, taking the weight from her weary legs, she boosted herself onto the desk behind her. “All right. Geoff it is. What can I do for you?”
With a look that came across as mostly apologetic, he nodded. “I may have some information on Peter Ash.”
“And that is my cue to disappear.” Pointing at each of them in turn, a characteristic gesture, Cordes said, “Geoff, lunch. Beth, later.” Then he turned and headed for the exit.
Beth didn’t hesitate for a second. “What kind of information?” she asked Geoff.
“That’s just it, as I was telling Don. And I’m assuming the killer knew him, by the way, because if this was random street violence, all bets are off. I don’t even know if what I know rises to the level of relevance. Peter and I were good friends, really good friends. I know we confided a bit in each other. I thought maybe if you had some gaps in your knowledge about him, I might be able to fill in some of them. Whoever did this to him, I want to help you find him. Or her.”
“Thank you. But basically, I’ve got nothing but gaps. I know next to nothing about him except that he seemed to have had some sort of existential breakdown over the past few months and started acting erratically. We’re going on the theory that in his altered state, if you want to call it that, he did something that finally got him killed. If you know anything about that, one way or the other, it might be a good place to start.”
“Well,” Geoff said, “I’ll start by saying that he didn’t seem to be in any kind of altered state to me. I mean, in the sense of truly crazy, or high on drugs, or anything like that. He didn’t act like a dangerous person that you’d recognize from a distance and steer clear of.”
“But still, somebody decided they had to kill him.”
Geoff picked at the fabric of his overcoat.
Beth broke the silence. “A minute ago,” she said, “you indicated that you wanted to help us find whoever killed Mr. Ash. You said you wanted to help get him, or her. Do you have any reason to think it might have been a woman?”
He broke a slight, crooked smile. “Only about a hundred of them.”
“He was seeing a hundred women?”
“I don’t have any idea of the real number, and I wouldn’t call it ‘seeing’ them, as in more than once. But it was a lot of different women—he’d meet me for a drink after work a couple of times a week, and half the time he had somebody new on his arm. Either that, or he was heading out to hook up. I’m talking a few times a week with different women.”
“And you think one of them may have killed him?”
“That makes more sense to me than one of his guy friends.”
“Well, that’s worth looking into. Did the two of you talk about his dating habits?”
“Sure. It just seemed so out of character, especially when he told me he was getting divorced, breaking up his family.”
“You were critical of him?”
“Well, I didn’t completely understand it, I can say that. I think I made that clear.”
“And how did he take that? The criticism?”
“Frankly, it rolled off his back. It didn’t bother him at all.”
“So this sexual behavior, it was a change from when you originally met him?”
“It was dramatic. Hard to imagine, really.”
“So what happened?”
“Actually, from what Don just told me, I think you might understand better than I do.”
“What’s that?”
Geoff took a beat. “Well, like you,” he said, “Peter was at the Ferry Building that day.”
Beth narrowed her eyes at him, not sure of what to make of this. But, in Geoff’s defense, he seemed to share whatever obscure thing it was that she was feeling.
“He left before the attack started,” he said, “but evidently he missed it only by a few minutes. He should have been killed, he thought. There was no reason he’d been spared when so many others had died. So then suddenly, after that, and I mean right away after that, he decided he’d had enough of the way he’d been living—working hard, the good husband, the devoted father. What was the point, right? If it could all end so randomly, so meaninglessly?”
“I felt the opposite,” Beth said. “I wanted to live, to see my daughter grow up and have children of her own, to be a better cop, to make what was left of my life mean something more.”
“That sounds like a healthier reaction than Peter’s,” Geoff said. “He felt that somehow the straight and narrow he’d been on had cheated him of his best years and he was going to make up for them now, all at once. He was going to indulge his sexual appetites, which he’d been sublimating for years. His kids were all grown up and didn’t need him. His wife would, frankly, be better off without him, since he felt no more passion for her. She’d be happier with some new guy who wanted to share her boring life. His characterization, not mine.”
Beth waited, content to let another silence grow between them.
Finally, Geoff went on. “Anyway,” he said. “That’s where Peter was coming from these last few months. I wouldn’t be surprised if he broke a few hearts along the way.”
“Or angered a few husbands or boyfriends?”
A nod. “Probably, just given the odds.”
Beth glanced up at the wall clock behind Geoff and realized that she needed to get home for Ginny, especially if they were going to Laurie’s later on. She made an apologetic face. “This has been very helpful, Mr. Cooke, except now instead of none, I’ve got a hundred suspects to find and interview. Do you know if there was anywhere that Peter tended to meet these women?”
“Not for sure. He joked about some of the online sites, where he said it was so easy it almost took the fun out of it. He preferred bars. I know he liked North Beach in general, and a semiprivate club called The Battery, up by Broadway. But otherwise, he was pretty eclectic.”
“Good to know. And at least it gives us some direction. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” He reached for his wallet and extracted a business card, handing it to her. “If you want to get in touch with me,” he said. “Anytime. In case I know something I don’t know that I know.” He sighed. “I really loved that guy. I can’t believe somebody killed him.”
“Yes, well . . .” She glanced at his business card and her face clouded for a moment.
“Is something wrong?” Geoff asked.
“No.” A small hesitation. “No. Everything’s fine. Thanks again for coming by. If anything relevant comes up, I’ll give you a call.”
“Anything I can do,” he said.
“Got it,” she replied. “Thank you so much.”