The Hall of Justice on Bryant Street had a blocky, ominous look, or maybe that was just my guilty conscience. The immediate surroundings weren’t seedy, exactly, but a lot of uniformed police officers were coming and going, police patrol cars were parked on the street in significant numbers, and an assortment of rather shattered-looking people were wandering around outside. All of the nearby storefronts housed bail bond agents. The most prominent was Honest Eddie’s Bail Bonds. Good grief.
The other people waiting in line to go through the metal detectors seemed to be mostly family or lawyers visiting inmates at the jail on one of the upper floors. I had to empty my pockets to go through the metal detectors, but I was allowed to take my three-inch Swiss Army knife through the barricades and into the elevator. I kept my fingers around the knife in the pocket of my jeans, in case someone escaped from the jail and tried to take it from me. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone getting taken hostage. I was still defending myself against imaginary accusers when the elevator doors opened again, and Inspector Lichlyter was standing there waiting for me. It took me a second to recognize her without her red jacket.
She led me past what American crime dramas called the squad room. I looked around curiously, hoping for something less mundane than tidy desks, battered office chairs, and out-of-date computer monitors. Most of the desks were empty—I guessed their owners were all out solving crimes. She stopped briefly to pick up a tray holding a manila envelope and a file folder from one of her colleagues, scribbled something on the file folder, and ushered me down a hallway into a room just big enough for two chairs, facing each other across a narrow table.
The floor was carpeted, and the walls sprouted large, asymmetrical bulges and ridges covered in dark fabric. It had a weird dampening effect on sounds, which I suppose was the point. Our conversation was easy enough to hear, since we were only two feet apart, but everything else was muffled. Small noises, like closing the door, fell instantly into the abyss. It was also too warm in there and, unlike the larger room, felt oddly threatening.
“I won’t be recording our conversation, Ms.… Bogart,” she said, indicating a video camera on the wall in one corner of the room. “For now, the equipment is turned off, and you are just assisting me as a helpful member of the public.”
“Right. Okay,” I said. Perhaps she meant it to be calming.
She picked the file folder out of the tray and opened it in front of her, leaving the lumpy manila envelope in the tray.
“I understand Ms. Dermody was suing you on behalf of Mr. Gavin Melnik,” she said. I was surprised our conversation was apparently to be about Katrina and not Sergei, and tried not to look it.
“Right. Yes,” I said. I abandoned my knife to clasp both hands on the table in front of me. “It was a trip and fall lawsuit. The details were being handled by my insurance company.”
“I understand also that Mr. Melnik has dropped the lawsuit since Ms. Dermody’s death.”
“He told me. He said she had pressured him into suing me.”
“That seems strange. Why would she do that?”
“Katrina didn’t like me.”
“Is there any particular reason for that?”
I told her about Matthew and my adversarial role on the neighborhood association board, and my conviction that she’d sent Gavin Melnik to Aromas to make trouble for me.
“So there was some animosity between you and Ms. Dermody?”
“Not really.” I hesitated. “Perhaps on her side.”
She shifted some papers in the file folder. “Your grandfather moved to San Francisco with you?”
“A couple of months afterward.”
“He must be very protective of you,” she said pleasantly. She reached for the manila envelope and shook it gently.
To my absolute horror, the plastic bag containing Grandfather’s hoof pick landed on the table.
“We’ve identified this item, Ms.… Bogart.”
I felt the color drop from my face.
“Apparently, it’s a hoof pick,” she said. “People who ride horses often carry them, and as you can see, this one is also being used as a key ring. Do you ride, Ms.… Bogart?”
“I have in the past; I don’t anymore.”
“I imagine your childhood in England being full of ponies and horses, is that right?”
I nodded.
“And other members of your family probably ride horses, too.”
“My parents didn’t ride. My mother didn’t have the time, and my father never learned. They—”
She held up a hand. “But other family members. Your grandfather?”
I swallowed. “Yes; he’s a life-long rider. But he had, you know, grooms and people to take care of his horses. He wouldn’t need a hoof pick.” Another lie. All riders carry one.
“Odd that you didn’t recognize what it was when I asked you before.”
“It doesn’t look like a hoof pick,” I lied. “They’re usually more like small screwdrivers or large pocket knives, not that circle thing.”
“It’s neat, isn’t it?” She picked up the plastic bag and pressed it around the contours of the hoof pick. “Easy to slip into a pocket I would have thought, and, as you see, there are keys attached.” She raised an enquiring eyebrow.
“Is there—did you find fingerprints? I mean,” I added more firmly, “that would help you identify whoever handled it. Maybe it belongs to someone who isn’t the killer.” I wiped my hands on my jeans. “I mean, fingerprints would tell you who handled it, but not necessarily who the killer was.” Oh God, shut up.
“Yes, we’ve gotten that far, thank you,” she said dryly. To my surprise, she went on, “There are some partial prints of interest. We’re waiting on the identification now. It doesn’t take long if the prints are in our system.”
She put the hoof pick back into its envelope. “Thank you for coming in today, Ms.… Bogart.”
“That’s it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Unless there’s something you’d like to add?”
I started to shake my head. “No. Yes—before I go—the fingers in Nat’s microwave. Did they belong to the body I found?”
“It looks that way,” she said. “At least, Father Wolf’s body is missing those parts of his hands. We’ll know for sure when the medical examiner has finished with him. The ends of the bones will be compared, the DNA matched, but for now I’m satisfied that they belong together.”
I wasn’t sure if that was good news or not.
“Some South American gangs mutilate priests in that way,” I said, as if I knew anything about South American gangs.
“So we’ve heard. We’re taking that into consideration, of course.” She returned the hoof pick into the envelope and showed me politely to the elevator.
What did she mean to accomplish by showing me the hoof pick again? If she meant to rattle me, mission accomplished. Was I a suspect? Was Grandfather?
I got on the wrong bus by mistake because I wasn’t paying attention to anything outside of my own head. By the time I got home, everything had changed, and not for the better.
When I walked into Aromas, Haruto stuffed his phone into his jeans. “Theo! Thank God! I was just calling you.”
“What’s happened?”
He gulped. “Davo’s been picked up by the police for questioning. Something about his fingerprints on a murder weapon. What the hell? He’d never do anything like that.”
“God, no, of course not.” I pulled out my own phone.
Haruto dragged a hand through his hair. “It was his stupid friends who got him into trouble for tagging.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“You know—spray painting graffiti on billboards and bridges, harmless shit, but his prints were in the system.”
My phone rang, and I picked up the call on autopilot. Nothing had ever sounded so good as Davie’s foghorn voice, and the relief threatened to knock my legs from under me. I grabbed hold of the counter.
“Davie! Where are you?” I looked at Haruto, who mouthed something I couldn’t decipher. “What’s happening? We have a very good lawyer, and I’ll call him right away.”
“Don’t worry, okay?” he said anxiously in my ear. “I dunno what this is all about, but Juvie isn’t so bad.” I could almost see him shrug. “One of my friends is there,” he added, as if I’d find that comforting. “They won’t let me leave with just anyone; if they can’t reach my dad, I’m stuck here ’til Monday.”
I bowed to his superior knowledge of the criminal justice system. It was already four o’clock. After making what I hoped were comforting promises, I hurriedly told Haruto what was happening and then telephoned my grandfather’s attorney, Adolphus Pratt, who promised to see Davie immediately. “He’s a minor and I can’t reach his father,” I told him. “Do we need a—a barrister? I mean I know they don’t call them that here, but a lawyer who specializes in criminal cases?”
He made soothing sounds, explaining that he was capable of navigating the preliminaries and would bring a criminal attorney aboard if and when it became necessary.
“Hurry,” I said. “God knows what’s happening to him. And he’s just a kid.”
I left Lichlyter a vaguely threatening message about the proper treatment of juveniles in custody. I wasn’t all that surprised when she didn’t call me back.
I got to the apartment Davie shared with his father in the Tenderloin as fast as I could—in an Uber this time. Maybe I needed to rethink my decision not to have a car in the city. I’d been there once before, in an unsuccessful attempt to have Mr. Rillera arrested for neglect and child abuse. At the time, fifteen-year-old Davie outweighed his father by about fifty pounds, which, added to the denials of both, weighted the scales of justice on his father’s behalf.
The elevator still didn’t work, and I climbed three flights of rubbish-strewn, sharply aromatic stairs with flickering light fixtures behind metal cages giving a sinister liveliness to the graffiti on the walls. I rang the Rilleras’ doorbell, which I decided wasn’t working, since I couldn’t hear it even with my ear pressed to the cracked wood of the door. I knocked, but with no better result, even when I abandoned polite taps for a side-of-the-fist hammering. I began knocking on doors up and down the hallway. The woman in the apartment at the end of the hall reluctantly appeared after I’d answered her litany of questions to uncover if I was from the police or “the immigration.”
“Please, it’s really important. It’s about his son.”
The door opened a few more inches, pressing hard against three security chains, and I saw an eye and part of her nose. “Davie in an accident?” she said sharply. “His father’s a waste of skin, but Davie’s one of the best.”
“I agree. No, not an accident, but he really needs his father right now.”
Her eye flicked to the card I’d slipped through the gap and then brightened. “You’re the soap store girl. Yeah, Davie talks about you. I’ll tell his father if I see him. Knowing him, it’ll be late,” she added with a sniff.
The only other person I roused came to the door in his boxers and an undershirt and didn’t know—or refused to say—when Mr. Rillera would return. “I got a shift tonight,” he grumbled. “Stop all th’ damn banging and hollering.”
I gulped. “I’m really sorry but it’s an emergency. His son needs him.”
“If his long shot came in at Golden Gate Fields, he’ll be on his first beer at the Venus in North Beach. He’s got a thing for one of the dancers. Just keep it down,” he said sourly, and shut his door
I checked the time. It was ten minutes to five. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Unless Adolphus Pratt was able to work a miracle, Davie would spend the weekend with his friend at Juvenile Hall.
While I was still on the bus heading home, my grandfather telephoned in answer to my frantic messages, and I told him about Davie being taken in for questioning.
“They won’t question him without a parent or guardian ad litem present,” he said. “The boy needs an attorney—”
“I’ve asked Adolphus to go down to see what he can do.”
“Ah. Good, well done, Theophania. I’m sure he will telephone you after he’s spoken to the boy.”
“He’d probably rather speak to you. He thinks I’m an airhead.”
“I’m sure that isn’t true, Theophania,” he said, although he didn’t actually sound very certain. “Now I must speak to your Inspector Lichlyter. I will keep you informed. And Theophania?”
“Yes?”
“Instead of worrying, try thinking of something pleasant, like the white cliffs of Dover.”
He hung up abruptly.
Knowing my grandfather as I did, he was heading downtown to confess to owning the hoof pick and explaining how Davie’s fingerprint came to be on it. I was puzzled about that for a minute, until I remembered Davie saying something about the china bowl where my grandfather kept his keys. He’d obviously picked them up at some point.
I took another Uber to Grandfather’s house and, multi-tasking like nobody’s business, I spoke to Adolphus while I took down The White Cliffs of Dover and found a telephone number written on the back in pencil.
Adolphus said Davie would have to stay in custody until his father could be found. He’d already received a telephone call from my grandfather, who had walked into Inspector Lichlyter’s office to admit to ownership of the hoof pick and was, he said, assisting the police with their inquiries. It didn’t help his cause when he was asked his blood type, and it was the same as the blood found on Sergei’s ring.
“I told him not to answer any further questions,” Adolphus said. He sounded irritable. “Anyone who watches television knows not to answer questions without a lawyer present.”
“It was because of Davie,” I blurted. “He would want to make himself the object of the investigation; not Davie.”
“It apparently didn’t occur to him that the police might think he had an accomplice,” he said, crossly.
I drew in a breath. “Oh God—”
“Please don’t worry. I’ve done everything I can. Until young Mr. Rillera’s father is found, and Clement is arraigned, and bail is set, our hands are tied. And visitors,” he added repressively, “are not permitted.”
So I paced in my living room, with Lucy pacing beside me, and tried to tame my anxieties by listing them. This was a trick I’d tried before, and it never worked, but I didn’t know what else to do. Grandfather had been detained, on the strength of his ownership of the hoof pick and his blood type on Sergei’s ring. Davie might or might not be detained due to his fingerprint on the hoof pick but, as a minor, he could only be released into the custody of a parent or guardian. Davie’s father was MIA, and Grandfather’s bail hearing wasn’t until Monday. In the meantime, I wasn’t permitted to visit them. Nope. Still didn’t help.
Lichlyter’s hints about Grandfather being protective of me aside, I was sure he hadn’t killed Katrina. He was much more likely to use Adolphus Pratt against an adversary than a handgun. He had given me my small revolver for Christmas a year ago since, as a woman living alone, I was apparently in need of one, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now to wonder if he owned one, too. He hadn’t killed Sergei. He told me so, and I tried to have faith that Lichlyter wouldn’t be able to prove that he had. I told myself he was a grown-up, capable of taking care of himself; he probably had handcuff keys and a metal file hidden in the heel of his shoe. Did they let you keep your shoes in jail? Oh God, would they make Grandfather wear an orange jumpsuit? Was he really arrested, or just being held for questioning, and what was the difference? And I was frantic about Davie. He’d sounded okay when we spoke, but I recognized bravado when I heard it.
After telephoning Adolphus Pratt so often with questions that even he ran out of patience, I telephoned Honest Eddie’s Bail Bonds. I was expecting whoever answered the phone to sound like a character from Guys and Dolls, but he sounded more like an insurance agent.
“If bail is granted—” he said smoothly.
“If!”
“It sounds as if your grandfather is being arraigned on a capital offense. The judge may decide he’s a flight risk—didn’t you say he was a foreigner?”
“No. He’s English.”
“Right. Foreign. So if he’s feeling generous, the judge will take his passport and set a high bail.”
“How high?”
“Could be a million; could be several.”
“Dollars? Yes, of course dollars. So I would have to raise the money and turn it over to the court before he can be released?” Grandfather was wealthy, but I’m not sure he, or I, could raise multiple millions overnight.
“That’s where I come in. You raise ten percent of the bail, and I lend you the rest. It means I’m on the hook to guarantee your grandfather’s appearances in court. When he shows up, if the charges are dropped or he’s tried and found innocent, you pay me back what I loaned you, and I keep the ten percent as my fee. If he’s found guilty”—I made a noise I wasn’t proud of—“the same applies. I hope that’s clear?”
I swallowed. “Yes. How quickly can this be arranged?”
“As soon as bail is set, come to my office. If I think it’s a reasonable risk, I’ll pay the bond. It might take a day or two, but we’ll get your granddad out of jail, okay?”