As I rounded the carriage entrance at the rear a white garage door, one of eight, opened magically and admitted me to the dark interior. I'd now gone farther into the Farragut sanctuary than I had in my catastrophic two-year pursuit of William IV.
As the door closed and the darkness grabbed me, a light came on, and Consuela entered from a side door. A plain-looking woman in her early forties, short, heavyset, and seeming very shy, she kept her head down as she smiled and nodded for me to follow her.
We walked past several dusty cars that were parked in the garage: a Stutz-Bearcat, a Duesenberg, a gull-wing Mercedes, a few others of equal vintage. Several million on wheels.
We went outside and down a lengthy covered walkway. The moon had just snuck over the trees of the Presidio to the right and was illuminating the house. It was big, the size of your basic airline terminal, and Tudor-style, my least favorite form of architecture. A cow barn with racing stripes. There was one miniscule light coming from a bedroom several stories up. It would have made a nice home for Norman Bates and his mother, had they been more successful in the motel business.
Consuela pulled open a hangar door and we entered through a vestibule into a "family room" big and cold enough to hang meat in. We walked through a dining room the size of the one at West Point continuing through a kitchen and pantry to a private elevator, which Consuela operated. I had to smile at her as we slowly rose five floors to where the mistress of the castle was waiting. I wished I still had my tuxedo on.
Consuela led me down a series of hallways to the room from which the faint light had emanated. I'd been on shorter hikes in the Boy Scouts. Consuela knocked softly before admitting me.
The room was as warm and comfortable as the rest of the house was cold and intimidating. A fire was burning in the huge stone fireplace. From the giant windows at the far end of the huge bedroom, I could see over the trees to what the Pacific Ocean saw when it looked up at the bridge. Lights from Belvedere Island, Alcatraz, and the East Bay sparkled behind it.
Colleen was on the phone when I entered. After a moment she said something into the phone, hung up, and came toward me. She was wearing tight Levi's and red boots with heels, and a V-necked sweater that clung to small, perfect breasts. Her nipples poked upward through the weight of the heavy knit fabric. No mean feat, I thought. I should have run. I didn't.
"Thank you for coming, Mr. Fagen."
"Frank," I said. I saved Frankie for waitresses in doughnut shops. She told me to call her Colleen. I'm always glad when that part is over.
"I asked Consuela to make us some tea. Would you prefer something else?"
I shook my head, then followed her across the bedroom through open French doors into an enormous sitting room filled with gray leather furniture and more paintings than you are likely to see at the De Young Museum. I counted three Magrittes, two Dalis from his Soft Watches Period, a Matisse, several Modigliani's, a half dozen of Duchamp's best, and a liberal sprinkling of Man Ray's photographs, plus a handful of up-and-coming San Francisco painters. A tasteful and valuable collection, some of the best the twentieth century had to offer. We sat. Neither of us smoked. She was nervous. I was nervous. There was a lot of nervousness.
"I don't know where to start."
"Start anywhere."
"What do you think of my case?"
"I only know what I read in the papers."
"You're ducking the question."
She'd challenged, I accepted. "You're in a lot of trouble. The DA wants to hang you, the evidence is one-sided, and the newspapers think you're the Wicked Witch of Presidio Heights. The biggest thing in your favor is the sharpest mouthpiece in town, and the fact that he hasn't lost a big one since they discovered penicillin."
"And I'm terrified I'll be the first," she said.
She got a moment's reprieve as Consuela entered with a tray bearing a teapot, two cups, and an antique honey jar. Consuela poured and handed us cups. Colleen raised hers to her lips, hands trembling. She blew on the surface of the hot tea, took a sip, gathered her nerve as best she could.
I felt sorry for her, even if she had pulled the trigger. To be a murderer you have to kill something human, and there were a lot of people who felt the late Mr. Farragut didn't qualify. I was one of them.
"It wasn't just business between you and William, was it?" she asked me when Consuela had left.
"It was never just business with me, that was my problem. I despised every drunk driver, child molester, every white-collar crook I ever busted. I wasn't a cop, I was the graceless crusader. Well, here I am, living proof that no good deed goes unpunished."
I drained my teacup and wished I had accepted something stronger. She'd got me going, but I'd learned a little over the years; I reined it in. Now it was her turn.
"Come on," she said, "I want to show you something."
We walked through her bedroom and back into the Hallway Without End. We passed the elevator, two more bedrooms, another bathroom, a game room, and a library. An easy fifteen-dollar cab ride later, a marble and brass staircase brought us to the floor below.
The third floor was taken up almost completely by a bedroom the size of Pittsburgh. "I had just gone out into the hallway from my room above when I heard him get off the elevator. I came down to tell him his mother had called. He was pretty drunk.
"We had been arguing for weeks. He found out about my affair with Tommy Rivera and was saying he'd divorce me, take away everything, including what I'd earned myself."
I asked her how William had found out. She suspected he had hired a private detective. I made a mental note to find out who the detective was, and where and when he'd caught her.
"In the middle of the argument, he suddenly decided he needed another drink, so he went downstairs to the bar."
"Why did he do that?" I asked. "You have servants, and there must be a bar in here somewhere."
"The only servant who ever lived in was Consuela and she has Monday nights off She takes BART, then a bus, to San Jose to stay with her brother and his kids. And the bottle of Glenlivet in the bar over there"—she pointed to an armoire in the adjacent sitting area that looked like it had once held Napoleon's favorite suits—"was empty. Glenlivet is the only thing that William drank."
She motioned for me to follow her. We trekked back down the hallway, descended the stairs again.
Within the hour we arrived at a den filled with overstuffed red leather furniture, the walls covered with college graduation certificates and awards for citizenship and humanitarian achievements given to William and his ancestors. I had my own opinion about these last awards, but kept my tongue. A long marble-topped bar along one wall was better stocked than the ones I usually visit. Adjacent to that was a set of French doors where they let the Hindenburg in and out.
There were a few other things that made it different from the average den. The first was a yellow banner across the entrance reading DO NOT CROSS - POLICE LINES and a court order tacked to the wall. Then there was the chalk outline of a body in the middle of the thick gray carpet, and two large bloodstains that coincided with the account in the police report, which stated that Farragut had taken two slugs, one through the pumper and one through the right lung. Several drawers had been pulled open and dumped, trophies and knickknacks were scattered on the floor, and some broken glass.
I looked at Colleen, waiting for her to continue. She took a deep breath. I could see her pulse beating beneath the almost translucent flesh of her neck.
"As soon as William went downstairs, I went back to my room and took a shower, to try to calm down. I never heard the shots: the walls of this house are as thick as a vault."
"How long was it before you went downstairs and found his body? It was you that found him, right?"
"It wasn't until the next morning. After I took my shower, I just figured he'd stayed downstairs because he was drinking and he'd lost interest in fighting. I was dead tired and I went to bed."
"You weren't sleeping together?"
"No. I was sleeping upstairs in the room we were just in. We hadn't slept together in months. Not since I'd found out about the S&M adventures with his high-priced girlfriend."
"Then what happened?" I asked.
"Next morning, before Consuela returned from San Jose, I went downstairs. It was real creepy. All the lights were on, and it was deathly silent. I could see the curtains blowing in the den at the end of the hallway; the French doors were open. I saw him lying on the floor. I thought he'd passed out, or fallen and hit his head, or maybe had a heart attack. When I got up closer . . ." She covered her face with her hands. "That's when I saw the blood on his clothes, two huge stains. I'll never forget his eyes, wide open, staring at the ceiling. I had this weird, creepy feeling that if I looked in his eyes I'd see the person who shot him, you know, like his eyes were a camera or something."
She shivered. I got an Indian blanket from the adjacent parlor and wrapped it around her shoulders. It gave her time to catch her breath and compose herself.
"The gun was lying there, where the X is." She pointed to the chalk mark on the carpet. "There was an officer here in less than three minutes. He was only a few blocks away when he got the call. I showed him the body, and he said William had been dead for hours. The blood had coagulated on his shirt and on the rug. Then the paramedics and a dozen cops showed up, the coroner, everybody."
"What made you think that the murderer, or murderers, was already gone and that you weren't in danger?"
"I didn't. I never thought about it. When I saw the gun on the floor, I figured whoever did it dropped it on the way out."
"And it was your gun?" I asked.
"It was William's. He kept it in a drawer by the bar, since he spent a lot of time in his den and always had the French doors open. He used the Jacuzzi almost every night and worried that someone might come over the wall behind the house. The other side is just woods. The land belongs to the Presidio."
"The papers said the gun had your fingerprints on it, as well as his."
"I'm a farm girl; my stepfather had guns all over the place. I'm not afraid of guns. But Consuela is. William had a habit of getting drunk, taking the gun out, and forgetting to put it away. Consuela wouldn't even go in the room unless I put it in the drawer."
Classy stuff. One of the country's wealthiest men, loaded on scotch and playing country club cowboy with a loaded revolver.
"How long before the shooting had you last handled the gun?" I asked her.
"About a week."
Fingerprints could last for months, even years. "And the only prints were yours and William's?"
"Yes. Two hours after the police came, I submitted to a blood test for drugs and alcohol. Then they ran a test to see if I had fired a gun. There was no gunpowder residue on my hands or on my clothes."
"Was anything taken?"
She pointed to a display case nearest the door. "Do you know the Italian artist Ghiberti?"
"Yes. If you've ever been to Florence, it's impossible not to know him." Ghiberti sculpted the brass doors on the exterior of the Baptismal, the octagonal building constructed as a tribute to John the Baptist. It stands in front of the Church of Santa Maria Del Fiore, third largest church in the world, atop which rests Brunelleschi's Duomo. The dome is considered the greatest architectural achievement of the Renaissance.
Ghiberti's creation, dubbed "the Doors of Paradise," is divided into panels, each meticulously sculpted to depict a scene from the Bible, each in solid brass and weighing scores of tons. They are the most famous doors in all the world and took Ghiberti fifty-one years to complete. Only one of the doors has ever been reproduced. It stands at the main entrance to San Francisco's Grace Cathedral.
Colleen then explained to me that Ghiberti, ever the crafty and calculating artist, had begun his project by first working each design out in the form of a silver plate, knowing they would be immensely valuable when the project was finished. He abandoned the idea after making only four silver plates.
Two had allegedly been lost, the other two had been bought by William's father at the start of World War II. Colleen told me they were in the display case the night of the murder and must have been taken by William's assailant.
According to Colleen, the plates appeared on an insurance inventory and had been seen by dozens of witnesses in the spot from which they disappeared. Consuela had signed an affidavit that the plates were on the shelf the day of the shooting.
"Let's go outside, get some air for a moment. All right, Frank?" I nodded and followed her past the yellow police ribbon and into another room, waiting patiently as she opened enough locks to make a New Yorker proud. The locks were new, untarnished, and didn't fit in with the decor of the room. Obviously added after the murder.
In back of the house the grass was overgrown, the trees untrimmed. There was a large masonry wall surrounding an enormous gazebo that looked like an outdoor dance pavilion. To the right was a jacuzzi-cabana area and a boarded-up wet bar. It was warmer outside than it was in the house.
I could tell by the height of the trees behind the wall that there was a long drop from the top of it to the ground inside the Presidio. "Now what do you think, Frank?" she asked, turning to face me. I hesitated.
"Tell me," she said impatiently. "I don't have much time. In about eight hours it's really going to get ugly." She was suffering, ready to crack at any moment.
I told her the truth as gently as I could. "It's a hard story to believe. First, it's difficult to imagine that anyone would burglarize this house, especially at night when they'd expect people to be home. Most residential burglaries in houses like this are in the daytime."
"His gun, your fingerprints, bad sign. No gunpowder on you or your clothes will be easy for the prosecutor to dismiss. Almost nine hours passed between the shooting and your call to the police. You could have taken five showers, and washed the clothes you were wearing. And the jury might have a hard time believing someone gunned your husband down without you hearing the shots, that you slept the night away with the body downstairs. Although I'd suggest that Calvin Sherenian bring the jury out here to see the size of this place for themselves."
Again I hesitated, but she seemed to be holding up. "You were arguing, he was threatening to divorce you. If the papers are correct, your prenuptial agreement would give you nothing if he could prove you were doing horizontal aerobics with another man."
She nodded her head. I was kicking a dying horse. I didn't like it but did it anyway. I had a lot of practice.
"They got you on three of the primary pieces of evidence: motive, because of the divorce threat and prenuptial agreement; opportunity, because the two of you were home alone; and physical evidence, because of your prints on the murder weapon. But that still doesn't mean you're guilty. All that is just circumstantial. You have no criminal record, no history of violence, and your reputation for helping other people shows that you aren't one of those self-indulgent cretins that everyone hates. Calvin Sherenian has won acquittals with more evidence than that stacked against a defendant. The good thing is, no one says they saw you do it or saw you leaving the scene. Eyewitness accounts are the most damning kind of evidence. And no one has accused you of prior intent, of making a previous attempt on his life."
When I said "previous attempt" she looked up at me, then put her head down and sobbed almost imperceptibly. Her face was strained, but she didn't crack, as though by freezing her face she might freeze her emotions. But her nose was running, and a bubble of saliva slipped from between her lips. She gasped once, wiped her nose and mouth on a tissue she took from her pocket, then pulled herself back together.
I waited, and then it came.
"Yesterday, Tommy Rivera . . ." she looked at me, looked away again. "He said—he told the DA, he signed an affidavit and everything. He told them I'd tried to get him to get some of his ghetto buddies to . . . to kill William and that I promised to pay Tommy a lot of money once the estate was settled."
"I'd figured it was going to be ugly, but not that ugly."
"He's going to testify against me," she gasped, shaking, and the brave face folded. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she made no attempt to stop them. She had a right to be terrified. That's why Ian Jeffries had taken murder one to murder one with special circumstances: premeditation, prior attempt, murder for financial gain.
It also elevated the circumstantial evidence to the level of corroborating evidence.
I waited a minute. "Why would he do that?" I asked. "Why would Tommy Rivera pull a stunt like that?"
"Money—and revenge I guess. He hated me because I dumped him, and a few months after the murder he came to me and said he'd tell this story to the police unless I gave him money. A lot of money."
"Did Calvin try to trap him, to prove he was extorting money from you?"
"Yes. Calvin had a tap on the phone when I spoke to Tommy several times afterward, but I could never get him to repeat anything incriminating. He was too smart. He told me when he threatened me that he would never mention it again, but that he'd be 'most grateful' if I offered him a palimony settlement. He just called from time to time and said, 'How 'ya doin', can I help?' When I changed my number he sent me cards that said 'Been thinking about you, let me know if there is anything you need or anything I can do. Love, Tommy.' The guy is scum, I really didn't think he would go through with it."
She was dead meat, I didn't care how good Calvin Sherenian was. My partner and I had busted Tommy once when he was an eighteen-year-old gang-banger. Even then he was glib, cocky, with a lightning-fast mind. I doubted if even Sherenian could rattle him on the witness stand.
There was a bench nearby. Colleen stumbled over and slumped down on it as if her knees had gone on strike. I paced forth and back, staring up at the moon, which was now higher in the sky out over the Pacific, bathing everything in cold, pale light. I offered her no comfort.
"Frank," she said. "My attorney has had a dozen private detectives looking for the burglar ever since the murder. They've found nothing, no burglar, no silver plates, nothing. The cops have been doing 'due diligence' and haven't found anything either. Unless someone finds the person who did this . . ." She was too scared to finish the sentence.
In my mind, I finished it for her. While the death penalty seemed unlikely—an educated woman with no criminal record was unlikely to be condemned—the mere possibility would reduce anyone's heart to jelly.
And the alternative was even worse. A lifetime at Frontera Women's Prison, growing old in a five-by-ten hellhole surrounded by a mix-'n'-match collection of the biggest fuck-ups and psychopaths society had to offer. Being raped and tortured for the rest of your life could make death seem like an enviable alternative.
If acquitted, she'd inherit three hundred million, the artwork, the opera seats, the car collection, and Castle Farragut. Skiing and aperitifs at Gstaad. Regattas on the Costa Brava, sunsets at Portofino. And the only way she could guarantee herself an acquittal was for someone to find the Invisible Burglar.
"My husband hated you, Frank. You know why? Because he couldn't buy you. Because you almost ended his little reign of terror over this city. He used to brag that you were the hotshot young detective in San Francisco, the most obsessive man hunter the department had. He gloated over beating you, because he said you were the best. How good are you, Frank? Can you find someone no one else can find?"
People usually tell you you're the best when they're trying to get you to work for free. Judging by the lack of heat and maintenance at the Castle, I figured that was next. I answered the question as quietly as egomania allows.
"I'm a good detective. I've always considered myself one of the best. But I'm not Merlin. I can't find someone who doesn't leave a trail, who hasn't made any mistakes. And I'm extra bad at finding someone who doesn't exist."
She looked at me with a start, but I had to do it. I had to clue her in that I still had problems with her story.
Gritting her teeth, she went back on the offensive. "I want someone who will work for me, for me only. I don't trust anybody right now, I'm just too scared. I got through life trusting my own instincts, relying on myself when things got rough. I don't have much money left; the court froze everything, the cars, the art, all but my personal property. I've sold my car, my jewelry, what little artwork I owned. I've used it all to make bail, pay Calvin's fees and expenses, and to pay for an army of private detectives—who found nothing.
"I have ten thousand dollars to my name. I need a little so I can eat and pay Consuela. She's my only friend now. I'd go nuts in this house without her. But I'll give you most of what I have for expenses. And, if you find whoever did this—who killed William, who stole those silver plates—if you save me from this nightmare, I'll give you one million dollars when the estate is released by the court."
The best I could do was stare. I stared a long time. She stared back, barely blinking. I'd been offered a lot of things in my P.I. life, from stud-fee shares in a blue-ribbon pig to a ménage a trois with a ballet dancer and her twin sister. One of which I accepted.
But never a million dollars. And never anything by anyone as sad and beautiful as Colleen Farragut.
"The trial should only last a month, Frank. It's a month out of your life, and if you're successful you will get your million dollars. I'll put it in writing. I need to know now. I've got no place to hide and nowhere else to go."
I gave myself another minute, cleared my throat of the phantom million stuck there, and answered her.
"I'm sorry. I'd have to get my three other detectives working around the clock, and the expense money wouldn't even pay their wages. If the cops and the other private detectives couldn't find the perpetrator in nineteen months, the chances of me doing it in thirty days are next to impossible. The million means nothing unless I catch the perpetrator. I don't think I'd do you any good, and I'd just be taking the last of your money. I'm also having a hard time believing your story."
I thought that would put the last crack in her dam but it had the opposite effect. She sucked it up and came back at me, a real fighter.
"You lost your whole career because of my husband."
"Not exactly. I lost my career because I was naïve and I had an ego the size of this house. Your husband was just the object of a bad case of temporary insanity. Besides, you can't wave revenge in my face. Somebody already got it for me, better than I ever could."
"Then I only have one more thing to offer you," she said. She stood and approached me so we were eyeball to tear-filled, magnificent eyeball. My heart jumped and my breathing stopped. It seemed the erotic mysteries of the universe were about to be dumped into my lap. I wondered how I would say no if she offered. I wouldn't. She didn't. She did, however, read my mind, surprised and pleased at the effect she had. Then she set the smile aside and got back to business.
"I wasn't here when it happened, but I read the old newspaper articles and heard William talk about it constantly. You lost your job because you accused him of being involved in the murder of the mayor. You believed William wanted Mayor DiMarco dead because DiMarco was trying to stop all the high-rise building in the financial district and south of Market Street. William and his buddies had millions invested in the Marker Street corridor. If DiMarco had been able to stop them, they would have lost everything."
"That's right," I said. "DiMarco would have put an end to all that horrendous building if Warren Dillon hadn't killed him in his own office. With DiMarco out of the way, the power downtown shifted from the save-the-city group to the developers. We got skyscrapers forty-eight stories above the San Andreas Fault, and your husband made millions."
I suffered an instantaneous fuck-up flashback, a mental replay of a young inspector ranting and raving to the press about corruption and cover-up after ex-cop Dillon received a measly four-year sentence for murdering the mayor. And I saw the same young inspector alone in his house on Telegraph Hill, crying like a lost child after he'd been fired and humiliated by the city for being "unstable," "irrational," "unprofessional," and "suspected of using illicit substances." My breathing went from zero to turbo, my chest heaving up and down as she talked.
"One night, a few months after Dillon was paroled, I overheard William talking in his den to a woman with whom you must be very familiar, Helen Smidge, Supervisor Helen Smidge? They were talking about Dillon getting out, they were afraid he'd talk and tell the whole story, how'd they'd pushed him into it, promised him they'd fix his trial and take care of him when he got out. They were talking about where to hide him and how much money it would cost."
"Several times I heard my husband having angry conversations with Dillon over the phone. William told him to keep his mouth shut and said he'd give him more money and have him moved to a different location. Then, about a year later, I heard on the radio that Dillon had committed suicide, and all day William walked around with a big grin on his face."
"In my husband's safe-deposit boxes, which I can't get to unless I'm acquitted, are diaries and records that he kept every day of his life. He told me once right after we were married that if anything ever happened to him I was to take all those records and diaries and burn them. He told me to make sure I got two particular diaries, the diary from the year that Dillon murdered the mayor and the one from the year Dillon was released and supposedly committed suicide."
She was telling the truth about the existence of the Farragut diaries. The last thing I'd come up with in my attempt to nail Farragut with DiMarco's murder was a former secretary who'd told me that Farragut kept meticulous diaries. My last official act as a cop was to request a search warrant and subpoena for Farragut's personal safe and safe-deposit boxes. When the judge refused I went crazy and made my second and fatal outburst to the media.
I asked my hands and knees to behave themselves, and fought the gagging feeling in my throat.
"I know where those diaries are, Frank, and I'll give you any one you want. You can have them all. You can have a record of every bribe, kickback, and dirty deal William and his friends ever pulled. But most of all, you can clear your name.
"A million dollars and the chance to vindicate yourself in front of everyone, Frank. All you have to do is find the people I'm looking for and prove what I'm telling you and everyone else—that I am not a murderer."
My first reaction was to run, to disbelieve everything, to let the whole ugly thing stay buried. That lasted five seconds, tops, and then the old fight started welling up inside of me.
I looked at her and saw the pain, the determination, the pleading. For the first time, the one question I'd been unable to shake since we met started to make sense.
Why was she doing this, if there really wasn't a burglar on the loose? Why would she go to these lengths, giving up what was obviously her last money to find someone if that someone didn't exist? She was desperate, but she didn't seem crazy.
She had offered me the ultimate reward, the one thing that could have gotten me to take her case: the chance to prove, once and for all, that I was right and the rest of them—the department, the city, everyone had been wrong. I couldn't get revenge, but I could get something better: revenge's big brother, redemption.
I'd had some wild dreams of vengeance and vindication in my decade-long season in hell, but nothing, nothing like what was staring me in the face. All I had to do was find someone that no one else could find.
"I'll have a contract drawn up tomorrow," I said. "Where are the evidence files?"
She smiled a relieved but painful smile and led me down the hallway to a wood-paneled office. In the center of the floor were two pushcarts filled with identical boxes filled with identical files.
"Consuela and I spent days just copying them. The one on the right is yours."
I don't remember much of anything after that; loading the boxes in the Firenze Plumbing van, trading phone numbers, receiving five thousand in cash. I'm not sure what route I took home, if I passed any cars or saw any buildings or streets that may have looked familiar. I pulled into my garage, got out of the van, and loaded the boxes into the dumbwaiter I'd installed for my late grandmother, pressing the button that sent everything to the fourth-floor loft.
I climbed the stairs and exited onto the roof, taking in the San Francisco skyline, still numb, still afraid of what I was about to undertake. Along the Market Street corridor the hulking high-rises blocked what had once been an uninterrupted view of the Bay. My endless reminder, my personal hammer from Farragut and friends that after DiMarco's murder, the city had been theirs for the taking.
Behind me I heard a heavy bellow, the sound a sea lion on steroids might make: the first foghorn in over a month. I turned and saw the first of the fog creeping above the hills of Sausalito, feeling as though a vice had been removed from my heart. The world had regained some equilibrium.
Until that night, I had tried to put the whole Farragut mess behind me. I thought I had finished suffering a decade earlier. I'd spent a month, post dismissal, as an inarticulate lump. My firing had made me so miserable I eventually bottomed out on misery. One day I forced myself to crawl out of the Fagen ooze and found the sun still set behind the bridge and people still coughed in the movies. I counted my arms, my legs, my eyes, and my balls and still had two of everything. I paid my bar tabs and canceled my account at the liquor store and tore up several napkins on which I'd written the numbers of women who hadn't been able to quench the pain. I decided to go back to living.
But that night, looking at the desecrated San Francisco skyline, I realized that for ten years I hadn't been living.
I clenched my fists and shook them at the heavens, heart soaring, toes curling, and let the tears run down my face. I thanked God for my life and for the second chance to fight the fight that had almost killed me. Suddenly remembering I had neighbors all around, I looked to see if any of them had seen the lunatic flailing his fists on his rooftop, waved to the invisible gallery, smoothed my hair, and went inside. I remembered I had a job to do. The celebration would have to wait.
Downstairs, after I noticed in the mirror how horrible I looked in white coveralls, I changed to sweatpants and a sweatshirt and unloaded the dumbwaiter. Then I flopped in my leather chair and opened the first file, "Initial Incident Report," in the jacket marked PEOPLE VS. COLLEEN FARRAGUT.
I read until the sun came up.