“Good morning Ms.… Bogart.”
I managed not to groan aloud as I turned, but it was a close run thing. “Hello, Inspector.”
In San Francisco, police detectives are known as Inspectors, which makes them sound like characters in a British crime drama. In the same mystifying way, a full-floor apartment here is called a flat, as if we were in Oxford or Liverpool. Inspector Lichlyter was the only person here besides my grandfather who knew who I was, and she knew because she was a good detective. She’d been the lead investigator the last time (but unfortunately not the first time) I’d been involved in a murder.
I think she was in her early forties although her face was deeply lined, making her look older. She was wearing the same red jacket I remembered and carrying the same heavy Coach shoulder bag. I had never thought about it before, but TV detectives don’t carry handbags, and I wondered why she bothered. Her shaded glasses, which she wore even at night and even on foggy mornings, were a disguise for her mismatched eyes; one was brown, the other was blue, and without her glasses her expression projected a sort of all-purpose skepticism. I didn’t dislike her; I even liked her a little. I just didn’t expect to see her again so soon after all the turmoil of a few months ago.
She always called me “Ms.… Bogart,” with that little hesitation. It was a hint of humor, or maybe just sarcasm, in a woman who otherwise appeared to have no sense of humor.
It had been more than an hour since I’d found Katrina’s body, and I was shivering in the blanket someone had wrapped around my shoulders. Inspector Lichlyter headed in my direction, leaving behind a small group of uniformed officers who dispersed in several directions, looking motivated.
“Tell me what happened here, Ms.… Bogart,” she said. She rooted about in her bag and came up with a shabby notebook. Maybe that’s why she carried the bag. Like the others I’d seen her use, its wire binding was bent and coiling into nowhere at one end. Various cameras and tablets were being used by others to record the scene, but she liked and used the notebook as a prop. Sometimes, as I knew from personal experience, she abandoned it casually and strategically, to see if the contents prompted any ill-advised reaction. She rummaged again and came up with a cheap ballpoint pen, clicking it against the notebook’s cover and scribbling impatiently until ink emerged. She looked up at me.
“I’ve already told him.” I nodded at one of the uniformed officers. She just waited and I took a deep breath. “Right. I was walking along the street here—”
“Why?”
“Sorry?”
“It’s cold, it’s still dark, and none of the stores are open. Why were you out here on the street?”
“Not that it’s any of—”
She frowned
“Right. In a murder investigation, everything is your business.” I bit the inside of my cheek, irritated at the need to lay myself bare for her, and finally said, “I couldn’t sleep. I walked down to the Embarcadero, then up to Russian Hill, back down California, and turned onto Polk.”
“That’s a lot of walking. You were out for how long?”
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t in a hurry. Two hours, a little more.”
“And you did or didn’t see Ms. Dermody’s car when you started out?”
“I went the other way, down Polk to the Embarcadero, so no, I didn’t notice it then.”
“Go on.”
I swallowed. “I got close to Katrina’s car and saw the blood on the window.”
“You recognized the car?”
“It’s a new Tesla. We all heard about it when she finally got off the waiting list.” Oops. A little too caustic. I smiled to make it a joke and then mentally slapped my forehead; a joke was probably worse than sarcasm. She didn’t smile back.
“What did you do then?”
“I got into the car and tried to see if she was still alive, but … well, she wasn’t. I called 911 and waited here for your minions to arrive.” I’d been sitting on the curb with my head on my knees when Nat arrived, ready to open up The Coffee. He found me, and he sat with me until the first police patrol car and emergency vehicles arrived.
Her lips twitched. “Minions. Yes. Did you see anyone on the street; hear any footsteps, anything like that?”
I remembered faintly hearing the buses up on Van Ness, which in daylight would be drowned out by Polk Street’s own traffic noises. The near silence had been peaceful, I’d thought.
“I did hear something,” I said after a minute, during which she merely looked at me. “I thought it might be Matthew. He sleeps here in the doorway on some nights,” I added in response to her raised eyebrow. “There’s a dumpster in the alley and he picks through it sometimes. I think that’s where he got the duvet.” I pointed at the shopping trolley, abandoned in the doorway.
“Did you see him?”
I shook my head.
“But he left his comforter and his shopping cart here?”
Right, the duvet was a “comforter,” and the trolley was a “shopping cart.” “He often does.”
“And you stayed after you found Ms. Dermody and called a friend.” She gave Nat, across the street behind the yellow tape perimeter, a flickering glance.
She didn’t sound concerned on my behalf, just analytical. I abandoned the duvet and flapped a hand at Nat. He gave me a sympathetic pout.
“I was supposed to meet Nat. He arrived just before your first-responders and he stayed because we didn’t like to leave her here alone,” I said. Nat had agreed it felt wrong to leave her with strangers.
They’d separated us, questioned him, and then made him keep his distance, which was just as well since I’d seen him faint more than once at the sight of blood. He’d spent the few minutes he was with me rubbing my back and carefully not looking toward Katrina’s car.
At street level the lights from all the official vehicles were bouncing off the patchy fog, which revealed and then closed around the storefronts farther down the block. It was strange and disorienting. I was also getting flashes of Katrina’s ravaged face superimposed over the scene of uniformed men and women exhibiting detached competence all around us. I had a new image to add to my nightmares. Lucky me.
Lichlyter cleared her throat. I tried to remember what we’d been talking about.
“So not just out walking, then, but meeting your friend.”
“He’s started a new business, reopening the coffee shop, and I’ve been helping him get things ready for an hour or two every morning.”
“Starting when?”
“For the past couple of weeks.”
She frowned.
“What time, do you mean? I’ve been coming at around five thirty.”
She consulted the battered notebook. “So you were early today. You told the uniformed officer you tried to open the driver’s side door.”
You’d think it would be impossible to forget, but I found details were already hazy.
“Right. It was locked, so I went around the car and opened the passenger door.”
“Which wasn’t locked.”
I shrugged and didn’t say anything.
“The car was running when you arrived?”
“I didn’t know how to turn it off.”
She consulted her notebook. “The Tesla—does she usually park it on the street?”
“The renovations to her garage weren’t finished in time.” She’d blistered the workmen’s ears with her displeasure. At volume. “She had a charging station installed in her garage, but there was some sort of problem, with a hole or a broken pipe, I’m not sure. They had to lay a new surface on the floor, and it needs a few days to cure before it can take the heat of the tires or something.” Lichlyter frowned at her notebook, and I realized I was babbling. “Anyway, the point is, she couldn’t drive on it. She was charging the car at her office building.” San Francisco being San Francisco, parking garages were required to have charging stations for electric cars.
“Is there anything else you feel I should know?” The mild sarcasm, with which I was all too familiar, seemed to be bringing our conversation to an end. I couldn’t think of anything to add and probably looked as clueless as I felt. She glanced over at someone approaching with a cell phone in his extended hand. She took the phone with a nod of thanks and turned back to me.
“You can leave, Ms.… Bogart. I may need to speak with you again later, and if you think of anything … well, you know the drill.” She didn’t wait for me to respond, just flipped her notebook closed and walked away with the phone to her ear. I felt oddly snubbed. I’d remembered her being—not warm exactly, but less brisk. We’d even had a friendly moment or two in the past. Perhaps she didn’t remember.
I went over to stand with Nat. He put an arm around my shoulders, which was sweet, but I almost ached to have Ben’s arm around me instead. But Ben wasn’t with me, and wasn’t likely to be anytime soon. He’d been recalled to duty for the first time when we’d been together just a month. He wasn’t allowed to tell me anything and he was gone for six weeks. He’d come home with a broken wrist and offered no explanation beyond a dry, “Bumpy flight.” He was still spending two weeks a month at his civilian job in Washington, DC, and two weeks with me so, what with one thing and another, we’d only been in the same town at the same time for a handful of weeks.
Nat and I couldn’t make ourselves leave. We stood together outside the crime-scene tape and watched procedures roll on like an industrial grinding machine. Men and women in uniform, as alert as border collies in spite of the early morning hour, made note of license plates up and down the block, placing small cards under windshield wipers. Two officers crisscrossed Polk Street, checking doorways, trying handles, shielding their eyes to peer into street-level shop windows, and ringing the doorbells of the apartments above. This brought out an assortment of sleepy or pissed-off locals with bed head who wandered over to the barrier or climbed back to their upstairs windows to stare down at the unfolding drama, hugging their coffee mugs.
Photographs. Video. Laser measurements. Medical examiner. Ambulance. Flickering red and blue lights. Yellow crime-scene tape. Pale, intent faces. And Inspector Lichlyter’s familiar suspicion that everything I told her was, at least, filtered through my own lack of candor.
I didn’t really blame her. Most people would feel that a proven liar will always lie. The reasons wouldn’t matter, and I might have felt that way myself not too long ago.