TELEGRAPH HILL
APRIL 16, 1906. 1:50 P.M.
By mid-afternoon that Monday, I had finished setting up Hunter's rudimentary laboratory amidst the wine casks and cobwebs of the Fallon cellar.
I moved to a rough wooden table and slid a blank sheet of paper into his outdated typewriter—the letters on the old Remington #7 struck the page at the bottom of the carriage roll so you could not see them until they emerged several paragraphs later—and began my column.
Despite my lingering grief and worry, the words came easily.
THE HOUR OF CELEBRATION
One would be hard-pressed to find two more timely operas for the San Francisco audience than Carmen and La Bohème, which represent the secular and romantic school revolutionizing every contemporary art form.
When Carmen premiered at Paris' Opéra Comique, French aristocracy was scandalized as their teenage daughters, attending the spring débutante, were treated to the shocking sight of an amoral gypsy girl seducing the virtuous young army corporal, Don José, into abandoning both his fiancée and military duty. French society, it is rumored, has yet to recover.
La Bohème, a Giacomo Puccini masterpiece of verismo, affords an impassioned look at the bohemian revolution currently sweeping the Western world, a broad embracement of art and the human spirit in an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society.
Does not Carmen's saucy dance recall our own Libertine spirits, Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, and befit the suffragist movement sweeping through San Francisco and the rest of the country? Does not the noble but impoverished life of the Latin Quarter's young artists in La Bohème reverberate among our Latin Quarter, the lofts and studios of North Beach and Telegraph Hill? Is the unwavering voice of Bohème's ardent young poet Rodolfo not heard distinctly in the uncompromising words of our Frank Norris and Jack London?
That God has sent his own voice, Enrico Caruso, to deliver His message of impassioned humanity is not to be lost among the glitter and hyperbole. By curtain call the night of April 18, we will have witnessed events that herald a new America, a new world, and a new San Francisco. The voice of God will have spoken to us.
How well will we listen?
As I reviewed my handiwork, I tensed at the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floor above, easing when I recognized Hunter's jaunty stride.
The smell of the morgue still clung to him, as did his anguish. "You saw your father?"
"I had to do the coroner's job for him."
Hunter moved past me to his rough-hewn bench. He put a slide into his microscope and leaned forward to the eyepiece.
"You performed an autopsy on your own father?"
"No cutting. Just blood and tissue samples, fingerprints, photographs." Hunter pulled the bare Edison bulb near the slide microscope. "This is the black substance I found on the steel cage by the boiler," he said, replacing it quickly with a slide he removed from his leather bag.
"And this sample came from beneath my father's fingernails." He examined it for a moment. "They look identical."
"What is it?"
"Too soft and spongy for rubber. Some kind of animal skin."
"There was an animal below?"
"Someone wearing an animal skin of some kind."
I sat at the Remington, inserted a fresh piece of paper, and typed as we talked. "Do you think someone hid below deck in the engine room?"
"Yes. Whoever was down there fell against the boiler cage when they hit rough seas. He left this black substance on the sharp edges, and then staggered around, leaving a zigzag trail of blood drops. Then he grabbed the door handle and stumbled when the boat heaved. That's how that bloody handprint got on the bottom of the door."
"Then he went up on deck to kill your father."
"My father grabbed him, that's how the same black stuff got under his fingernails. He hit my father with something, a blackjack probably, there's a purple bruise at the base of his neck, oblong shaped, about six inches long. Then he cut the rope and shoved him overboard. From up in the pilot's roost, in that bad weather, Anthony saw none of it."
"But what happened to the killer?" I asked, typing frantically.
"There are a few possibilities. He drowned, or he rode the tide to one of the islands, or a boat picked him up before the cold did him in. Maybe he even jumped off near the dock and slipped away before I got there."
"You learned all this studying Sherlock Holmes?"
"Arthur Conan Doyle studied Scotland Yard's techniques. Most progressive police department in the world. I read every story I could find about them. It came in handy when I was helping the San Mateo Coroner. We had a minister once, claimed his wife committed suicide. She was on the bed, a revolver in her right hand an inch from her head. The cops were patting the good reverend on the back, offering him brandy and condolences. Only problem is, when someone shoots themself, especially with a .44 Colt, the recoil tears the gun from their hand. Not to mention his wife was left-handed. I compared the handwriting on the suicide note to the guest book from Sunday services. It matched the signature of the church bookkeeper. I went to her apartment and asked for her fingerprints, told her I was going to compare them to the suicide note and that I had already matched her handwriting. She started crying and confessed. She and the reverend were going to move to Scotland and live happily ever after on money the dead wife inherited. They were also pilfering from the collection plate. The cops weren't even going to investigate. That was when I decided once and for all to become a detective. That's all Sherlock Holmes did. Logic and simple observation."
I pointed to a box on the table filled with eerie photographs, all of people's faces. The faces were contorted, eyes cast in all directions, their lips pursed or protruding. "I'm not sure what you wanted me to do with those."
"That was an experiment for anthropology class. I'll explain later. Right now, do you think you can stomach another ride with me?"