Chapter 11

 

I was jolted awake by the sound of my door buzzer. I'd nodded out in my reading chair, an evidence file over my eyes as though I might learn something by osmosis. It was six thirty, I assumedp.m., and that I'd been asleep for an hour and not unconscious for thirteen.

When Colleen entered, she looked strained, anxious, but still kept up a strong front. Once again, a tailored suit over a lacy white blouse did nothing to knock the edge off her beauty. In the evening light her eyes were still the most mesmerizing green I'd ever seen.

She took her coat off, sat in the chair I offered her, kicked off her high heels and accepted a glass of wine. A solid pull at the wine and she seemed ready to talk.

"How did it go today?" I almost hated having to ask.

"Not much different. More lab reports, fingerprint expert saying they were my prints on the gun, a crime lab guy reconstructing the scene, saying the shooter was to the inside of William, you know, William was closer to the French doors, like the shooter came from inside the house instead of outside."

Once again I wondered how she did it, how anyone guilty or not stood up to a murder trial. Being innocent and on trial for murder had to be the ultimate nightmare. "What plans do you have for tonight, Frank?"

I hesitated for a minute, wondering why she asked.

"Evidence files. I still have a lot to cover." I left out the part about being down to the last three weeks and getting more nervous by the minute.

"Can we have dinner somewhere, somewhere I might not be recognized?"

Outside of Tonga, I wasn't sure where she had in mind.

"I have a friend in Santa Cruz," she said. "A retired schoolteacher, Virginia Riley. She has this great old Victorian house on Depot Hill in Capitola, a bed-and-breakfast place she runs in the summer. She lets me come down anytime I want."

She stood up, and my heart raced a little as I started sorting out all the reasons to say no; time, professionalism, my own fear that she'd be gone in three weeks if I couldn't find a way to save her.

"Look, Frank, I don't know how to put this," she said, sounding a little sad, and serious. "I'm not a fool; I know what I'm facing if you don't find the burglar. This may be my last three weeks of freedom. I've been thinking about this for more than a week." She hesitated, then said, "I haven't been with a man in almost two years."

The potential, I surmised, was enormous.

"I'm crazy about you, Frank. For years I've seen your newspaper photos, read the stories about you, heard William and his friends talk about you. I don't want you to think I'm a desperate woman reaching out for just any man. I could have done that anytime. And I'm not doing this to coerce you to try harder or do anything dangerous. I know you're doing everything possible. If I only have three weeks left, I don't have time to be coy or clever."

"I know it's a lot to ask of a man, to get involved with a woman he might never see again. But I don't want to go to prison without something to remember, wishing I had known you better."

She lowered her head and a few tears ran down her cheeks. Once again, she fought it off, wiping the tears away with her hands, looking at me, fresh tears magnifying the jade eyes.

My heart was pounding. It was tough to talk. "I had all these reasons worked out in case this came up," I said.

"Just say yes, Frank. Do what you want and not what you should."

"Yes."

Thirty minutes later, I parked the Corvette along the side of the road in the Presidio and made a mad dash through the woods, grateful that none of the photographers had staked out the stone wall behind the house.

When I reached the stone wall, I chucked a rock over.

Moments later a suitcase came over the wall, followed by Colleen, dressed in tight faded blue denim, tan cowboy boots, and sunglasses. She slithered down the wall, dropping to the ground.

We ran to the car, laughing, a little giddy.

I took the scenic route through the Sunset District, past the Cliff House and along the ocean on the Great Highway.

We were in Pacifica in a matter of minutes, despite the Friday night traffic. Once we had rounded Devil's Slide to the south, the traffic disappeared and the Pacific stretched endlessly ahead.

There are some great roads in the world, but Highway 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz and beyond to Carmel and Big Sur can match sights and stories with any of them.

This is God's back porch. An occasional farmhouse nestled among the hills, and redwood forests, pumpkin farms, blackberry fields, spectacular beaches, green hills, jagged cliffs rolled by. We rode for a long time in silence, enjoying the moonlit sights, the smell of the ocean, the pine forests, the eucalyptus and redwood. It eased a lot of wounded spirit.

We passed the old whaling town of Davenport, now a haven for time-warped hippies, artists, and potters, past the beaches where I'd spent a lot of my summers as a child surfing and sunning: Hole-in-the-Wall, Red White and Blue, Four Mile. Many were hidden from the road, accessible only by winding, narrow paths filled with the fragrance of wildflowers.

To the left were the roads that snaked through the Santa Cruz Mountains to Boulder Creek and Bonny Doon, thick with towering redwoods, pine and eucalyptus, roads with names like Pine Flat and Ice Cream Grade.

I told Colleen a story for each spot, each road, from my youth spent in paradise. I felt like a tour director for a dying woman, as though this was the only time she might see them, as if the gravity of her final visit had become an unseen weight, affecting the way I'd look at this road, these places for the rest of my life.

Capitola is another of the country's great towns, four miles south of Santa Cruz, a tiny village of four streets filled with shops, restaurants, a two-dollar movie theater, and enough charm to make you forget a lot of things you want to forget.

Virginia Riley's Victorian stood on Depot Hill overlooking the town, the oldest in a row of Victorians that had been built near the start of the century, all painstakingly restored and preserved.

Virginia had left Colleen a key and a note, telling her she'd had to go "over the hill" to visit her daughter in Los Gatos and would be spending the night. We had the run of the place, a creaking, antique-filled old house with a spectacular view of the ocean, the cliffs, the town. A burnt-orange sunset draped the western sky.

I called an old friend, a sculptor who worked nights waiting tables, got a reservation for a table at the Shadowbrook, which overlooked the river and village. I asked for the private dining room downstairs, near the riverbank, offering a healthy bribe for the maitre'd.

Colleen and I dressed in separate rooms, emerging tense, excited. She wore a skintight black dress of antique lace through which was visible a silky black camisole. The dress had a scooped, slightly revealing neckline and a row of buttons down the front. The hem was six inches above her graceful knees. She wore sheer black stockings and black patent leather pumps that made her only an inch shorter than I. She looked classy enough for a fashion layout, sexy enough to get a rise out of a dead man. I forget what I was wearing.

She slipped into a thin coat, presumably to prevent domestic upheavals as we passed through town. We took the back streets to avoid being seen, crossed the bridge over the Capitola River, hiked up a short hill, and got into the tiny tram car that is the Shadowbrook's trademark for the ride down from the parking lot.

As soon as I closed the tram door the car started its snail-like crawl down the hill. Colleen got a wild look in her eye, and asked how long it took the car to reach the bottom.

"At least a minute," I said.

She leaned into me, and I felt my hands on her hips, her leg between mine. We kissed, more intensely than the first time. The effect was dizzying. The world spun a little, the tram cable groaned beneath us, a tall pine creaked against another in the wind. I was hers, I was had. She kissed better than most women make love.

Opening one eye, I noticed we were approaching the restaurant and gently pushed Colleen away. She sighed and stared into my eyes, more alive and animated than I'd seen her yet.

The tram thudded softly to a stop, the door opened, and a family of seven, complete with bespectacled grandma wearing a blue corsage, nodded hello and told us to "have a nice dinner." We told them we would.

I tipped the hostess to lead us outside the restaurant, across a brick patio overlooking the slow-moving river, where several young couples paddled boats among the ducks and geese.

We entered through a door off the patio, Colleen causing a bit of neck strain, male and female, as we made our way to a large round table in a corner of the restaurant's lowest tier. We sat in our private corner, ate, held hands, smiled ourselves stupid. In the middle of dinner Colleen leaned over and kissed me, slid her left hand into my lap and started stroking, ever so gently.

The look on her face was subtle, restrained, her eyes searching to see how long the effect would take to reach my face, my voice. "How is it," she asked, not specifying the dinner or the warm feeling that had flooded the Fagen organ.

I croaked, "Great," and tried to eat, which is difficult with a hard-on.

She stopped for a second, unbuttoned a few of the lower buttons of her dress, folded it away from her leg, and put my right hand on the inside of her left thigh. I could feel the silk top of her black stocking, her garter belt, the smooth, hard expanse of thigh.

"I like to play a little," she said. "Do you mind?"

I called a cab to take us back to the house after dinner.

She led me into the living room, eased me down into a large, black leather armchair. "I saw you staring at my body the first time we met," she said, "when I was walking out of the box at the opera."

"Gee, and I thought I was so subtle."

She walked toward the fireplace, turned, faced me, smiled, looked down at the top button of her dress. She fingered it for a second, then popped it open. She looked at me, popped another one.

She worked it, enjoying it almost as much as I did. There was no hurry, no world outside. A few more buttons revealed the lace camisole, then a drum-tight stomach, an antique black satin garter belt, and the dream that springs eternal.

She walked over, slowly, the sound of spike heels on hardwood, sat in my lap and kissed me. Then she looked straight into my eyes. "I've been thinking about this for a long time. Anything you want, Frank, all you have to do is tell me."

I was working on the list when my beeper went off. It startled Colleen a little, as it was in my jacket pocket and she was practically sitting on it. We were both excited, anxious, but I knew it couldn't be ignored, as only the City Lights crew had the number.

I looked at the beeper. The code number indicated it was Martha Walley calling me from the office. She always knew when I was having too much fun.

I told Colleen to hold the thought, went to the phone, and called the office.

"Martha, Frankie calling. What's up?"

"I think you better get up here right away, Frank. Arnie just called. He was listening to the police scanner in his car. An hour ago a bridge worker found a woman's purse in the middle of the Golden Gate."

I had a hunch what was coming. "Lynne McBain?"

"Yes. I just turned on your marine radio; the Coast Guard is going out any minute. They received a report of a body in the water, white female, blond hair. A cargo vessel saw her floating out by the entrance to the Bay. It's pretty foggy right now; it may take them some time to find her."

I went back into the living room and looked at Colleen standing there in basic black, looking a little self-conscious but no less seductive. I told her what had happened.

She put her dress back on, grabbed her coat and bag, and in less than a minute we were in the car and headed back up Highway 1 to San Francisco.

We'd just left the north end of Santa Cruz, where the road turns to a double lane each way, when Colleen looked at me and the night's excitement returned. Slowly, she unbuttoned her dress, stripping down to her camisole, G-string, garter belt, and stockings.

Then she leaned over, unzipped my pants, and proved that her late husband had not lied to his dear mom when he talked of her oral expertise.

We floated back to San Francisco in an hour flat.