To Play the Fool (28 page)

"When I came to San Francisco in August, a year and a...
half ago, I..." He seemed suddenly to run dry of words. It
took a moment with his eyes closed, while he searched for the source,
before they began to flow again. "I met John. He had only been
here a few months himself. I knew immediately that there was
something... wrong with him, and as I watched him move among his
friends--and they were friends, real friends--I... felt
he was like a jackal, watching for weakness in the herd. I...
avoided him as best I could, and we went our separate ways. Until
November, All Saint's Day, when one of his victims tried to
commit suicide.

"The man recovered, but something had to be done. So, I
offered myself to John. I allowed him to think I possessed a great and
awful secret that would... devastate me were it to become known.
There was such a secret, of course, but I greatly exaggerated the
effects of public knowledge to make it more... appealing to John.
I... dropped hints to encourage him to concentrate on me. I did
not stop his... activities entirely, but I... became his main
focus."

"How much did he find out?" Hawkin asked quietly.

"I do not think he knew the entire story. He would make
guesses, and I would react, you see? He knew there had been deaths, in
an academic setting. He knew I felt responsible for those deaths. I
believe he hired an investigator, a man was asking questions about me,
about eight months ago. But no, I think he would have let me know
in... clear ways had he known the full truth.

"It succeeded, in distracting him from others. The
most... unpleasant part of the affair was his increasing sense of
intimacy with me. Not physically, of course, but emotionally. He took
to confiding in me, as I said, recounting the details of his past
business coups. He thought it amusing to take something from another,
even if he did not actually desire it. He told me a long story once,
how he had stolen away the wife of a rival, saw them divorced, and then
refused to marry her. He preferred to destroy a thing rather than see
it in the hands of another. A very twisted man."

He stopped again, allowing his head to fall back against Eve Whitlaw's shoulder.

"Can I get you anything?" Kate asked. "Coffee? A
glass of water?" He smiled at her with his eyes and shook his
head minutely before looking back at Hawkin.

"I hope you are recording this," he said. "I'm not going to tell it twice."

"We're recording it."

"Good. So. That was John. You needed to know."

"What was his real name?"

"John was his middle name. Alexander John Darcy, of Fort
Worth, Texas. I thought of him as John Chrysostom, who was called
'Golden-Mouthed." Now I will tell you what I know about his
death.

"John had a brother who lived near Fort Worth. The two men had
been business partners until John left. His leaving created many
difficulties for the brother, whose name is Thomas Darcy. John was
greatly amused at the problems. Deals were suspended and money was lost
because his signature was unavailable."

As the fluency returned to David Sawyer's tongue, Kate was
aware of other changes, as well. His posture in the chair had become an
awkward slump. His right hand remained intertwined with the
professor's, but his left hand wandered up and down, feeling his
shirt front, plucking at his trouser legs. And his face--she was
briefly reminded of the Dorian Grey story, for as Sawyer's
features relaxed from the attentive and thoughtful pose she had always
known there, they aged, becoming almost grim with the sense of burden
borne. With a shock, Kate realized that the man in the chair across
from her was no longer Brother Erasmus.

"A few months ago, John found out two things. First, a piece
of land that had been left him and his brother jointly-- worthless
scrub," he called it--was now surrounded by town and a
freeway and had become very valuable. Then he discovered that sometime
before, Thomas had begun the legal process of declaring his missing
brother dead. John was almost dancing with pleasure at the thought of
confounding his brother's plan."

"He told you these things?"

"Everything. I was safe, you see. I had to listen, and he knew
I would not tell the others that, for example, he had money and an
apartment he used sometimes. He knew I disapproved of everything he
did. Perhaps you could even say I detested it. He felt my reaction, and
it gave him wicked pleasure. Yes,
wicked
is, I think, the word for the man. Not evil, simply wicked."

"What did he do about his brother?"

"He played games with the telephone at first. He called
Thomas, hinting at who he was. Finally he came out in the open. They
hadn't been in touch for five years or more. Thomas was at first
shocked, and then he became angry and said he thought it was a hoax.
John told him where he was. Thomas flew out here in--I don't
know. September? October? He also drove out once, a month or so later.
John kept him dangling for weeks, offering to sign the deed papers,
then withdrawing."

"Did you meet him?"

"Once. I saw him several times."

"Could you describe him, please?"

"Your sort of build, Inspector Hawkin, only shorter. He wore
heeled boots, glasses. Brown hair going gray, tan skin, stubby little
hands."

"Did he wear a hat?"

"The first time I saw him, no. He was dressed as a normal
businessman. The time he drove out, he looked like a cowboy, with
snakeskin boots and a hat with a turned-up brim--a cowboy
hat."

"Do you remember the make of car?"

"I didn't see it."

"How did you know he had one, then?"

"John described it. He said it was big and ostentatious because his brother had a small... sexual organ."

"Did he smoke?"

"Thomas or John?"

"Either."

Sawyer thought for a moment. He looked now like an tired old
ex-professor on the skids, and it would have taken a considerable leap
of the imagination to place him in a black cassock.

"John smoked cigars, expensive ones, from time to time. I
never saw him with a cigarette, although he carried one of those
disposable lighters. I don't remember about Thomas, but I was
only with him about ten or fifteen minutes."

"Think about it and let me know if you come up with anything."

"He may have been a smoker, come to think of it," Sawyer
said, sounding surprised. "His hands--they were tidy. Small,
fussy hands. But the nails were discolored, yellow. Like a
smoker's." The pauses between his words were becoming
brief, more sporadic. His speech was almost normal, but he looked so
tired.

"Is there anything else you know about Thomas Darcy?"

"He was here in San Francisco on the day his brother died."

"Was he, now?" Hawkin almost purred with satisfaction.

"Yes. I normally saw John before I would go to Berkeley. I
would meet him somewhere in the park, often in Marx Meadow before I
walked up to Park Presidio, where Joel picked me up. That is where we
met that day."

"What time did you meet him?"

"In the morning. Perhaps nine. We walked through the meadow
and up into the trees, and he told me that his brother was coming to
see him again. And he told me that he had decided what to do about the
piece of land his brother was so desperate to sell. He told me...
he said he had made up his mind to disappear again, but before he went,
he was going to sign over his half interest in it. Sign it over not to
his brother, but to me."

"What?"

"Yes. Can you imagine? It wasn't enough to confound and
rob his brother, he had to do it in a way that would take over my life,
as well. The property was worth four or five million dollars, he told
me. It is not possible to own that much money,-he wanted it to own
me."

"What was your response?"

"I was angry... very angry. I thought... I had hoped
that after more than a year of working with him, he would begin to
grow, to let go of his wickedness. Instead, it had grown within him. I
was so incensed, I shouted some words at him and then walked away from
him. In fact, it took me so long to calm myself that I forgot about
Joel. He had waited and then left. I had to walk and thumb rides across
the Bay."

"But you didn't actually see Thomas Darcy?"

"Oh yes, I did. He was sitting in a car parked along Kennedy
Drive, reading a map. He didn't see me, I don't think, but
I saw him. I might not have recognized him, because he'd grown a
beard, but I saw his distinctive hands on the map, and after all, he
was on my mind, since John had just told me that he was going to meet
him."

"What kind of car was he in?"

"It was not the one John had described. This one was small, white, ordinary. New-looking."

A typical rental car, Kate thought, writing the description on her pad.

"I suggest, Dr. Sawyer," said Hawkin evenly, "that
it is fortunate for you that Thomas Darcy did not notice you."

Sawyer held up his left hand, rubbed his thumb on the indentation
carved there by his ring, which now lay in an envelope in the property
clerk's basement room, and shook his head slowly. "Poor,
poor Beatrice. A queen among women. She saw him. She must have."

"Not that day. Earlier, when he drove his own car out from
Texas, then she saw him. The rest was Thomas Darcy's guilty
imagination, reading too much into her words."

"Did she suffer?"

"I don't think so. The same as John, a hard, fast blow
to the skull, immediate unconsciousness, and then death."

"Poor child. So pointless. Will she have a funeral?"

Hawkin was taken aback at this unexpected question. "I really
don't know. It depends on whether or not someone claims the body.
The city doesn't pay for elaborate funerals."

"She had no family left. I will perform the ceremony."

"We'll have to see about that."

"I can raise whatever money is required, Inspector Hawkin. And
although I suppose my license has expired, back in another lifetime I
was once an ordained priest."

Late that night, Kate went up to the sixth-floor jail and stood
outside David Sawyer's cell. He was on his knees on the hard
floor, his hands loosely clasped, and he looked up when she appeared. A
smile came into his eyes and his face, and he got to his feet.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," she said.

"Dear Kate. What a pleasure to say your name, Inspector
Martinelli. Names are one of the few pleasures I have longed for. I was
not praying. I don't seem to be able to pray, but going through
the motions is calming. What can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to say thank you, for today. I know what it cost you. Or at least I can begin to guess."

"Had the payment been made a month ago, a life would have been
saved. No cost would be too great, were it to change that."

"I've often thought how nice it would be if we could
know the future," Kate said, and realized with surprise that she
was now comforting him. The thought reached him at the same time, and
he gave her a crooked smile. Then he did a strange thing: He put his
right hand out through the bars and, with his fingers resting in the
hair above her temple, he traced a cross with his thumb onto the skin
of her forehead.

"Absolvo te,
Kate Martinelli," he said.
"What you and your partner did was both necessary and right. No
apology is due." For a moment, he rested his entire hand, warm
and heavy, on the top of her head, then retrieved it and stepped back
from the bars. "Good night, Kate Martinelli. I hope you sleep
well."

By nature he was the sort of man who has that

vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity

which is very near to humility.

Kate was involved in the final stages of the case and even testified
during the trial of Thomas Darcy, but her heart was not in it, and the
case seemed remarkably distant and flat in the wake of the revelations
of David Sawyer's statement.

Once they had the name, the case quickly became watertight: plane
tickets, a gasoline station receipt, and a hotel clerk with a good
memory placed him in San Francisco the week his brother was killed. The
identity of the John Doe in the park was confirmed as that of Alexander
John Darcy through the partial fingerprint raised by forensics and the
dental X ray sent by his Fort Worth dentist. By the time Thomas Darcy
was faced with Beatrice, he had become slightly more wily, but he had
still used a credit card to hire a car,- the newsagent in Fort Worth
testified that Darcy had received the Wednesday San Francisco paper
with the interview of Beatrice on the day after it had appeared, and
Darcy was remembered by the sales clerk in a Pacifica hardware store
where he had bought a pair of narrow, strong wire cutters. He even took
the wire cutters home with him to Texas, where they were found in an
odds-and-ends drawer in his kitchen. Forensic analysis proved that the
clippers had been used on the cut ring found near Beatrice's
body, a ring remembered well by many, including the owners of Sentient
Beans, who testified at Darcy's trial, as well. The partial
fingerprint lifted from the side of the ring had enough points of
similarity to clinch the case.

For his brother's death, he was found guilty of the lesser
charge of manslaughter, but for the killing of Beatrice Jankowski, the
charge of first-degree murder persisted to the final verdict.

He was never tried for the death of his brother's dog
Theophilus, although traces of canine blood were identified in the
crevice between the sole and upper on the right boot of a pair in his
closet.

Before all that, though, on the day Thomas Darcy was arrested in
Fort Worth, Kate went to the jail and personally supervised the release
of David Sawyer. She waited outside while his orange jail clothes were
taken from him and his jeans and shirt, duffel coat and knit cap, the
worn boots with the dust of Barstow still on them, the knapsack with
two books and a jug of stale water, and the worn gold wedding ring were
all returned to him. When he came out into the hallway, he was met by
the sight of Inspector Kate Martinelli, propping herself up against a
carved hiking stick nearly a foot taller than she.