The Golden Gate E-Book

Amy Chua

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 557

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA BEST FIRST NOVEL EDGAR LONGLISTED FOR THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ILP JOHN CREASEY (NEW BLOOD) DAGGER 'An epic, devastating, majestic mystery. Clever, richly imagined and outright thrilling' Chris Whitaker Berkeley, California 1944: A former presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms at the opulent Claremont Hotel. A rich industrialist, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of adversaries. But Detective Al Sullivan's investigation brings up the spectre of another tragedy at the Claremont ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the wealthy and influential Bainbridge family. Some say she haunts the Claremont still. The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris's sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth - not the powerful influence of Bainbridges' grandmother, or the political aspirations of Berkeley's district attorney, or the interest of Chinese first lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek - Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion. Chua's page-turning debut brings to life a historical era rife with turbulent social forces and ground-breaking forensic advances, when access to power, and therefore justice, hinged on gender, race and class. 'Riveting' Daily Mail 'Intriguing' Sunday Times 'Vividly intoxicating' Janice Hallett

Leseprobe

Also by Amy Chua

Political Tribes:

Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

The Triple Package:

How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall

of Cultural Groups in America

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Day of Empire:

How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance –and Why They Fall

World on Fire:

How Exporting Free Market Democracy

Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

First published in the United States by Minotaur Books,an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Corvus,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Amy Chua 2023

The moral right of Amy Chua to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from “A Peck of Gold” by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1956 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt from “The Death Baby“ from The Death Notebooks by Anne Sexton © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 948 7

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 949 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 950 0

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Mom and Dadand my sisters Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia

All the dust the wind blew high

Appeared like gold in the sunset sky,

But I was one of the children told

Some of the dust was really gold.

Such was life in the Golden Gate:

Gold dusted all we drank and ate,

And I was one of the children told,

“We all must eat our peck of gold.”

—ROBERT FROST

PROLOGUE

DEPOSITION OF MRS. GENEVIEVE BAINBRIDGE,HAVING BEEN DULY SWORN AS A WITNESS,TAKEN ON THE FIFTEENTH OF MARCH, 1944,COMMENCING AT 10:00 A.M.BY DISTRICT ATTORNEY DOOGAN:

Q: Good morning, Mrs. Bainbridge. Would you please state your full name and address for the record?

A: Genevieve Hopkins Bainbridge, 2907 Avalon Avenue, Berkeley, California.

Q: And your age?

A: Sixty-two.

Q: Thank you. Do you understand why we’ve asked you to speak with us today, Mrs. Bainbridge?

A: I wasn’t asked, Mr. Doogan. I was subpoenaed.

Q: You were indeed. Because you refused to speak with us when we asked. Mrs. Bainbridge, do you understand why you’re here?

A: I do. You want me to help you hang one of my own flesh and blood.

Q: If you could please stick to the facts, Mrs. Bainbridge.

A: I’m doing just that, Mr. Doogan.

Q: Mrs. Bainbridge, I’m giving you a chance to help your family. We know one of your three granddaughters is a murderer. I can convict all three as coconspirators, or you can tell me which one did it, and I’ll spare the other two.

[NO RESPONSE FROM THE WITNESS.]

Q: Did you hear me, Mrs. Bainbridge?

A: I heard you, Mr. Doogan.

PARTONE

Chapter One

1930

Inside an alabaster palace one January afternoon in 1930, a six-yearold girl hiding inside a closed armoire felt truly alone for the first time in her life.

Just seconds earlier, Issy, short for Isabella, had been in that tingly state of anticipation, half-excited, half-fearful, awaiting the moment when the door would be thrown open and she would be found by her sister, Iris.

Issy loved these special Sundays, when she and Iris and Mommy would put on their nicest dresses and go to the White Palace, where Mommy would change into her all-white skirt and stockings and bandeau and play tennis with her best friend, Mrs. von Urban. On those days, Mommy was always beautiful and nervous in a giggly way, and smelled a little different. She would give the girls the whole afternoon off, and while she and Mrs. von Urban had their tennis game, Issy and Iris would have the run of the hotel, which Iris, the older of the two by eighteen months, seemed to know like the back of her hand, yet there was always more to discover—secret stairways, the seven-story spiral slide, hidden turrets, ballrooms that appeared out of nowhere.

Iris with her jet-black curls and Issy with her blond ones did everything together. Issy couldn’t remember a day of her life when she hadn’t been with her older sister, which is why until this moment she’d never felt alone.

But now, suddenly, she did. She was curled up in a ball, arms around her knees, in the bottom quarter of a decorative armoire in a long hallway. It was a clever hiding place, but not her best. Iris should have found her by now. Issy should have been able to hear her sister’s light limping steps, one foot just a little heavier than the other, or her sing-song whisper, “I’m going to find you! I know where you are!” Instead everything was silent. Issy’s legs were starting to stiffen. She didn’t know it, but she’d been in the armoire for almost thirty minutes.

She pushed open one of the doors and, seeing that the hallway was empty, stepped out. The palace no longer felt right. Even the silence sounded different from other silences she’d known.

She made her way back to the hotel lobby and went to their palm tree—the spot they’d designated in case they lost each other. The lobby was bustling as always with men looking smart in their fedoras, bellboys overloaded with suitcases, women in pearls and fur collars—but Iris wasn’t there.

Issy went next to the tennis courts even though she knew her mother wouldn’t be there either. She checked all the courts, with their soft red clay and balls flying through the air and grown-ups running back and forth. There was no Mommy to be found, and Issy felt even more alone.

The little girl returned to the lobby, checked the palm tree again, then decided to go down to the enormous kitchens in the basement. She knew Iris loved the kitchen, its chaotic order, the steaming vats of soup on the stove, the loaves of bread on metal trays sliding in and out of the ovens, and the frenetic brigade that made it all work—chef, sous-chef, and pastry chef; bread bakers and potato peelers; waiters, porters, and dishwashers. Issy saw all of them that day, as well as the egg man delivering his crates, the milkman delivering his jugs, and the hooded man who delivered honey. She didn’t know why, but suddenly she felt a scream welling up inside her.

That’s when she heard the actual scream—a woman’s scream of terror.

For a moment the kitchen froze. Lips and hands stopped moving; no one took a breath. Then the entire staff ran in the direction of the awful sound, overturning carts and knocking plates to the floor, oblivious to their shattering. Issy followed them, dread rising within her.

A crowd had gathered in a low-ceilinged concrete passage near the laundry bins. The air was heavy here, steamy, oppressive. Issy wove her way numbly, without will or thought, past knees and hands; she was so small no one even noticed her. She finally broke through to the front line, where a circle had formed around a pile of soiled sheets and towels on the floor, the effluvium ejected from eight floors of laundry chutes. It smelled carnal, of sweat and other human fluids.

The grown-ups, paralyzed, were staring in horror at that pile of laundry, too frightened to step forward. On top of it lay Iris, like a broken doll, face up, dark curls strewn, one eye open, her bare neck twisted at a terribly wrong angle. My Dy-Dee doll died twice. Once when I snapped her head off . . . and once under the sun lamp trying to get warm, she melted.

Encircling Iris’s grotesquely bent neck was a laceration, fresh and thin and red and angry.

Chapter Two

1944

FRIDAY, MARCH 10

1

When I was a kid—before they took my dad away, in 1931—we used to play ball on a patchy field next to the municipal dump. Home plate was across the road from the three-mile-long Berkeley Pier, where trucks and autos would line up for the ferry to San Francisco. I always looked out for the cars with New York plates, weather-beaten and mud-crusted because they’d been on the road for weeks. These were people who had crossed the country on the Lincoln Highway.

The Lincoln Highway was the first coast-to-coast road in America. It started at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street in Times Square, New York, and from there intrepid motorists in their Fords and Studebakers would set out on the three-thousand-mile journey to San Francisco, guided by rough maps and by red, white, and blue signposts along the way. The highway—really a series of interconnected country byways—traversed the nation in the shortest possible route, avoiding big cities like Chicago or Denver in favor of smaller towns like Fort Wayne and Cedar Rapids, Omaha and Cheyenne. People had to get out of their cars when they came to streams or river crossings, so they could wade in first to make sure the water wasn’t too deep. They also had to bring camping gear: in the deserts of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada, they’d likely pass more than a night or two without a roof over their heads. My dad used to say that someday he’d take us all on the Lincoln Highway, in the opposite direction, to see New York City and the Statue of Liberty. Never happened.

Before there were any bridges crossing the San Francisco Bay, the Lincoln Highway ended in the reclaimed marshland of the lower East Bay, passing by what must have been some of the unsightliest spots of the entire journey, like industrial Richmond or the swampy lowlands of El Cerrito, where I grew up in a tenement house across the street from a tannery and a slaughterhouse. Soaring San Francisco lay just across the water, but it might as well have been a universe away.

I used to watch the overdressed Easterners get out of their cars to stretch their legs, grimacing at the heavy odor of the cracking plant and the stink of fish. Sometimes they’d point at the shoeless, shirtless brown-skinned little boys casting their poor fishing lines into the water. I could tell they felt like they were in a foreign country. English wasn’t prominent down by the pier. In fact, few white people lived in the East Bay lowlands. Instead there were Italians and Greeks and Portuguese (on their way to being white), Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans and Blacks, all poor, all living in their own separate enclaves, all dreaming dreams of a better life.

Often the Easterners, on discovering that the next ferry wasn’t leaving for a few hours, would get back in their cars, pull out from the ferry line, and tool around a bit. If they headed off toward Oakland, they would probably have seen Miseryville, where, in the wake of the Crash, hundreds of homeless men were living in surplus concrete sewer pipes, one man each to a six-foot section of pipe, subsisting on produce discarded by local vegetable wholesalers boiled into a communal stew, larded with lint or sawdust to make it more filling.

Sometimes I felt like a foreigner too. But not at the pier; it was when I took the Key train that ascended the Berkeley Hills, which I did whenever I could, that I felt like a stranger. The train took people to the white neighborhoods dotted with middle-class homes and small shopping streets, past the university with its famous campanile, climbing up and up until the air smelled of sage and eucalyptus with hints of honey and mint and sweet oleander. High up in the hills, the train came to its terminus at the foot of the splendid, many-winged Claremont Hotel. The Claremont was the largest hotel on the West Coast, and its entire exterior—not only walls and shutters, but tower and gables and even the roof—was painted dazzling white, so that the structure seemed to float cloud-like in the fresh and fragrant air, an alabaster palace in the sky.

The Crash of 1929 hadn’t been an equal opportunity wrecking ball. Like the Spanish flu epidemic only ten years earlier, it hit those on the lower rungs incalculably harder than those at the top. At the bottom, millions went hungry; children scavenged garbage cans for potato peelings, fresh meat trimmings, or other lucky finds to contribute to a family dinner that might otherwise consist of ketchup sandwiches or a single loaf of bread and a can of beans; during rough spells siblings took daily turns eating; countless families were put out on the street, unable to make rent or pay their mortgage; within a few years after the Crash, half of all Black Americans were unemployed. But at the top, it was a different story. While a few gaudy fortunes were lost, for the most part those with a million in the bank before the Crash still had it after.

For them the Depression was a time of lavish spending. Maybe even more lavish than before, if only to distract themselves from the general unpleasantness out on the street—the panhandlers, the homeless, the mass labor protests. In the wake of the worst financial collapse in the nation’s history, the California rich spent like there was no tomorrow. They threw ever more extravagant parties. They dined on Russian caviar and Hungarian goose liver. And they packed into luxurious hotels like the shimmering white Claremont, hobnobbing with Barrymore and Garbo, dancing to Count Basie’s orchestra and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

When I was a boy, I wouldn’t have dared set foot in the Claremont Hotel. The first time I went inside I was already a cop—not a detective yet, just a patrolman—called in because some rich kid had walked out on a massive bill. After I found the kid and made him pay up, I became something of a regular. I learned a ton at the Claremont Hotel. I learned how the rich drink their cocktails, how they sit—a rich man on a sofa or armchair always crosses his legs—what they say by way of small talk, how they smoke. I guess for me it was like finishing school.

And now, by complete accident, I happened to be at the Claremont again on the night Walter Wilkinson was murdered twice.

2

The maître d’, Julie, with his affected French condescension—the condescension was real enough, it was the French part that was fake—glided over to my table and asked me quietly if I could “assist” with a “matter” in one of the guest rooms. I knew Julie wouldn’t interrupt a customer in the middle of a drink if it wasn’t important, so I told the young woman I was with I’d be right back and followed him.

Julie handed me off to the Claremont’s night manager—a young sallow-faced guy I didn’t know—who lacked the maître d’s aplomb and instead looked like he was so nervous he was going to throw up.

“It’s Walter Wilkinson,” he whispered to me while we were waiting for an elevator. “Do you know who that is?”

“How could I not know who Wilkinson is?” I asked him back. “What about him?”

The elevator door opened, and the manager put his finger to his lips, meaning he didn’t want to talk in front of Pounds, the elevator operator. Pounds and I said hello.

Everybody knew Wilkinson was in town. An industrialist who’d made a fortune in Midwestern power and light, Wilkinson had come in second to FDR for president in 1940. Some people said he was going to beat him for sure this time. They were dreaming.

“Shots were fired in his room a half hour ago,” whispered the manager as we hurried down a long corridor on the sixth floor. He was so nervous his mouth kept moving even when he wasn’t talking. “He hasn’t answered his door since.”

“Who says shots were fired?” I asked.

“Guests. Three different guests. They heard the shots and called down to the front desk.”

We stopped at room 602, and the manager gave a tentative knock at the door. “Mr. Wilkinson? Are you there, Mr. Wilkinson?”

No one answered. The manager turned to me in despair.

“Open the door,” I said to him.

“I can’t. Mr. Wilkinson left specific instructions not to disturb him under any circumstances. If something’s happened to him, it will be a calamity.”

I took it he wasn’t expressing a political opinion. He meant a calamity for the hotel—or maybe for him personally. “I’ll tell you what’ll be a calamity,” I said. “The man bleeds to death in his room because you’re so solicitous of his privacy. Open the goddamn door.”

The manager nodded, swallowed hard, and used a skeleton key to open the door.

Walter Wilkinson was sitting on the edge of his bed, motionless but unhurt. He was dressed for a formal dinner: black three-piece suit, bowtie, shoes polished to a high shine, hair impeccable, but his face was as white as his cuffs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so ashen. He didn’t speak; he didn’t even look at us. I could smell his expensive cologne—Penhaligon’s. The bed he was sitting on was nicely made, and the room showed no signs of disturbance—except for a bullet hole in a wall near a standing lamp.

“Please pardon the intrusion, Mr. Wilkinson,” said the manager abjectly. “The detective ordered me to. Thank heavens you’re all right. We thought you’d been murdered.”

“I have been,” said Wilkinson, his voice deep and low, still without moving.

I introduced myself and asked him what happened.

His reply was to stand up, walk into the bathroom, and start running water in the sink. It sounded like he was splashing it on his face. The manager glanced at me, nervous as ever.

After keeping us waiting a couple of minutes, Wilkinson returned, ready for business and toweling off his cheeks as if we’d simply caught him shaving. He wasn’t ashen anymore; now he looked more like his pictures. A lot of people said he was the handsomest man ever to run for president. He was fifty-nine, over six feet in height, solidly built, with a broad chest, Brylcreemed salt-and-pepper hair, dark eyebrows, and a commanding demeanor.

“It was a Communist,” he said. “A young man. Shabbily dressed. Foreign accent.” Wilkinson shot a furious look at the manager: “How does a ruffian like that get into one of your guest rooms?”

The manager was in agony: “It’s a terrible breach, Mr. Wilkinson. We’re so sorry.”

“He was waiting for me. I came in, shut the door, and started toward the lamp. Before I got there, I felt a gun between my shoulder blades. He told me to stand against the wall. Called me a blood-sucking capitalist—an enemy of the working man—the usual rot.”

“What’d he look like?” I asked.

“I didn’t get a good look at him. It was dark, and he had a flashlight pointed into my eyes. He was shaking. He could barely keep the light trained on me. He may have been drunk.”

“Height—weight—hair color—age—facial features—anything you can remember would help, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“I told you, I couldn’t see him. Because of the flashlight.”

“All right. What happened next?”

“I went to the wall, as he’d told me to. He took a few steps backward until he was at the door. He said I deserved to die and fired right at me. Then he fled. That’s the whole of it.”

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Wilkinson,” I said.

“There’s no such thing,” he replied. “Men make their own luck.”

I nodded to avoid having to disagree with him. “You mentioned a foreign accent. What kind?”

“If I had to say,” said Wilkinson, “I’d say Russian.”

I turned to the manager: “Put Mr. Wilkinson in a different room. Don’t tell anyone where he is. Not anyone, you hear me?”

“Understood,” said the manager.

I told them I’d station a uniform outside Wilkinson’s new room for the night and have some boys come by first thing in the morning to pull the bullet out of the wall and dust for prints. In the meantime, I would interview staff and the other guests on the floor to see if anyone saw anything.

Which I did, but only after first returning to the bar to tell the woman I’d been having a drink with not to wait for me. I didn’t have to; she was already gone. Next I called Chief Greening to give him a heads-up. He told me to come to his house and brief him when I finished, no matter how late.

3

Three hours later, having learned exactly nothing more, I drove to Chief Greening’s house. The only thing still playing on the radio was the news, and the news was bad. The Japanese had invaded India and were supposedly about to make their move on Australia. The Germans were pounding Anzio. Another battered hospital ship had heaved into the Port of San Francisco, carrying home three hundred boys with blown-off limbs. Meanwhile down in the Tenderloin, shore patrol had tried to arrest a couple of drunk and disorderly marines, which ended up sparking a riot between cops and servicemen that left a dozen injured and twice that many in military jail.

It was almost midnight when I got to Greening’s house on Shasta Road, but the Chief had on his usual double-breasted suit. He was a short, portly, friendly man with a shiny bald head, glasses, and two ballpoints always sticking out of his jacket pocket. He’d had the misfortune of taking over from the legendary August Vollmer, who’d been chief of the Berkeley PD since before I was born. Vollmer practically invented forensic science; he practically invented the lie detector; his methods were copied all over the country, and folks were already calling him “the father of modern policing.” You had to sympathize with Greening; nobody could have filled Vollmer’s shoes. He poured me a cup of coffee and offered me a piece of his wife’s Lazy Daisy cake, which I accepted even though I didn’t feel like eating because I didn’t like the way his house smelled—like cat litter and stale candy. We sat down at his kitchen table, and I gave him a full report.

“A Communist with a Russian accent—obviously a Jew,” said Greening with distaste. “Tell me how a single race can both control the banks and be behind all the Reds? I despise Hitler and everything he stands for, of course, but sometimes one understands the outrage.”

Like a lot of senior officers, both military and police, Greening had been an admirer of German efficiency and had opposed going to war with them. He thought banker Jews were pushing FDR into a war that was none of our business; it was only when Hitler started bombing London that he turned. He didn’t know I was a quarter Jewish myself, which was just as well, given the other strikes against me. My dad was from Mexico, and mom was an Okie from the Dust Bowl, the very bottom of it. I ended up taking my mom’s last name, but that’s a long story.

“I’m not sure I buy the Russian Communist, sir,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Wilkinson said the man who shot him was shabbily dressed,” I answered. “But then he said he couldn’t see the guy—couldn’t tell me the first thing about him, not even how tall he was. So how does he know he was shabbily dressed?”

“Why invent a detail about the man’s clothing?” asked Greening.

“Maybe the whole story’s wrong.”

“You think he made it up? Why would he do that?”

“Who knows? Maybe he had a girl in his room and something happened and she took a shot at him. Or he took a shot at her. Wilkinson’s married. He’s running for president. Better to say a Red tried to kill him than a hooker.”

Chief Greening shook his head sadly. For all his years on the force, he still genuinely expected the better sort of people to be, well, better sorts of people.

“He said he’d been murdered?” asked the chief. “He used that word?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

The phone rang; Greening went to his living room to take it.

“Yes, yes,” I heard Greening say, “I know all about it already. No, Mr. Wilkinson is not dead, and if you spread that rumor to anyone else, I’ll have your badge tomorrow. What’s that? Are you sure?”

He listened a minute longer before coming back to the kitchen.

“Someone tried to kill Wilkinson again,” he told me. “And this time they succeeded.”

“What?”

“Wilkinson’s dead.”

“It’s a mistake,” I said. “Somebody heard wrong.”

“Exactly what I thought. But it’s no mistake. He’s dead—shot in the head.”

“When?” I asked. “Where?”

“Just a few minutes ago, at the Claremont.”

“That can’t be. I had his room under guard.”

“You had his new room under guard. Apparently he was killed in the room where the first attempt took place.”

“Son of a bitch.” I grabbed my coat and hat and was almost out the door when Greening stopped me.

“By the way, Sullivan,” he said, “what were you doing there—at the Claremont?”

“Me? Having a drink.”

“I see. Isn’t that a little beyond your—you know?”

“Beyond my station?” I asked.

“Beyond your means.”

I left for the hotel.

4

I walked into room 602 again and stopped short. Wilkinson was dead all right—but not just dead.

He was spread out on the king-size bed, face up. Statesmanlike just a few hours earlier, now he was exposed from the waist down, genitalia limp and hairy nakedness splayed out. His black trousers were crumpled down to his ankles, and his legs were half on, half off the bed, bent at the knee, his polished black shoes a few inches off the floor. He still had on his white dress shirt, bowtie, and vest, which made the whole thing more disturbing, like accidentally catching someone in black tie on the toilet. I could still smell his lavender and musk cologne. But now it was mixed with the scent of sulfur and metal from the gunshot.

That wasn’t all. His mouth was stretched open in a silent scream, preserved in that position of terror by a profusion of objects crammed into and overflowing from it.

A camera flash exploded behind me, blinding me and fixing on my retina the image of the dead man’s stuffed mouth. The flash came from Johnny, the police department photographer. Next to him was Dicky O’Gar, the officer who was supposed to have been keeping watch over Wilkinson.

“Do me a favor, Johnny,” I said. “Hold off until I have a look around. Go stand in the hall, and make sure nobody else comes in. Dicky, you stay here with me.”

I went up to the body. Wilkinson’s lips were bloody and torn at the edges because they were so overstretched. Without removing any of the objects, or touching them with my fingers, I used the blade end of my jackknife to get a better look at what was inside his mouth. It was hotel room detritus: a pen, unsmoked cigarettes, a bar of soap, a paper doily, crumpled stationery, flowers, and apparently a piece of chocolate.

He had been shot only once, in the forehead. Blood and brain matter were splattered all over the pillows and the headboard and the wall above the headboard too. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling.

“What the hell was he doing here?” I asked Dicky, who had been on the force as long as me, but had never made it past patrolman. “I told them to put him in a different room.”

“They did,” said Dicky, “but then he forgot something in his old room and he had to go back to get it.”

“Didn’t you go with him?”

“No, sir,” said Dicky, proud of himself. “You told me not to budge, not for nothing, not even if I had to go to the john.”

I hate to say it of a fellow Berkeley officer, but Dicky O’Gar was so thick he couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if you gave him two guesses. He had fallen out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

Light slowly dawned. “Oh jeez, I should of gone with him, shouldn’t I of?”

“Who found the body, Dicky?”

“I did. The manager and me, we were the first ones in.”

“Anybody move anything?”

“No, sir. But when I opened the door, that sheet of newspaper blew off him. It was covering his privates.”

Next to the bed, on the floor, there was an open double sheet of newspaper—the front and back pages of today’s Chronicle. The rest of the newspaper was lying on top of a dresser.

“Any sign of forced entry?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

“What’s that over there?”

At the foot of the dresser, on the floor, was a small black box lying on its side, its hinged lid open. I went over and had a closer look: it was two by two, black velvet on the outside with a white satin interior. Whatever had been inside it was gone.

“I didn’t touch that, Boss,” said Dicky. “I didn’t take nothing.”

“I know you didn’t, Dicky.”

I stood up and looked at the dead man again. Based on where he lay, he figured to have been shot while standing at the foot of the bed, facing his killer. The bullet blew through the back of his skull, causing the spatter on the pillows and headboard. He would have died instantly, and his body would have fallen backward onto the bed. Maybe his pants were already down when he was shot, or maybe that was done to him afterward.

“So what do you think—you figure it was a robbery?” asked Dicky. “Somebody killed him for whatever was in that box, like a diamond ring or something?”

“Could be. Except robbers don’t normally cram their victim’s mouth so full of crap their lips rip open. You check the bathroom?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Closet?”

“Uh—not yet, Boss.”

I opened the closet door, using my foot in case there were any prints on the knob, and shined my penlight at the rack and hangers. The closet was empty. All of Wilkinson’s belongings had been moved to his new room. My damn light was flickering on and off—I had to shake the thing to get it to work at all—so I almost missed the two glinting pinpricks near the floor. I kneeled down, gave the penlight a good shake, and almost jumped out of my skin.

A dead baby was staring right at me.

I shouted a curse all the way to heaven.

“What is it, boss?” said Dicky, lumbering up behind me.

“Nothing,” I said, exhaling.

It wasn’t a dead baby. It was just a doll, a glass-eyed doll, with tight curly dark hair, a cracked porcelain face, and a tiny red mouth in the shape of an O. One eyelid was half closed. Her hands were reaching out to me.

“It moved!” cried Dicky.

“It didn’t goddamn move. It’s my light that’s moving.”

“It moved!” Dicky said again.

I banged my penlight into my palm and finally got a steady light and held the beam on the doll for ten seconds. “Well, it’s not moving now,” I said.

The doll stared at me with her one open blue eye. She was wearing a faded old-fashioned dress, and had discolored age spots on her painted face and rubbery arms. What was an old doll doing in Wilkinson’s closet? But then she might not have had anything to do with Wilkinson. Tucked away in a corner, she could have been there for years.

I told Dicky to make sure he tagged and bagged the doll when the room was cleared, and I told Johnny he could start his photography now, reminding both of them not to touch anything until prints were taken. As I was leaving, something caught my eye in the doorjamb, a couple of feet up from the floor. It was a yellow thread, stuck on a splinter, no more than a quarter inch long. I tweezed it out and put it in an envelope.

Down at reception, the front desk clerks told me they hadn’t seen anyone unusual or agitated or even in a hurry leaving the hotel after midnight. Which meant that the killer was either a pretty cool customer—or hadn’t left the hotel.

In an office behind the front desk, I found the night manager, just getting off the phone with the hotel’s owner. If he was nervous before, now he looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there in his office. I reminded him that Wilkinson’s other room—the one I’d shifted him to—was part of the crime scene. Nothing was to be moved, and nobody was to go in except police.

“Can we keep this out of the papers?” he asked me, pleading.

“Not a chance. I’m going to need a list of every guest in the hotel, with their home addresses.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because the killer might be one of them.”

“One of our guests? You heard Mr. Wilkinson—his assailant was a ruffian, a Communist.”

“I want the names of everyone who ate at the restaurant tonight too. Ask Julie—he’ll know. And if there were any meetings or gatherings yesterday evening, I want a list of the people who attended them.”

“We have two hundred and seventy-six guest rooms, the best restaurant in the East Bay, and several conference rooms. You’re talking about over five hundred people. Possibly a thousand.”

“Just get me the list.” I said good night and looked at my watch. It was three thirty in the morning, and I planned to be back at the hotel by six. “Listen, I don’t want to be trouble, but I could use a room to get a couple of hours of sleep and work out of tomorrow. I’ll need a place to meet with my officers anyway; you don’t want us standing around your lobby.”

“No, I don’t,” he agreed. “But I’m afraid we’re fully booked.”

“All right. I’ll figure something out.”

“There is room 422, I suppose. If you don’t mind.”

“Why would I mind?”

“Well, it—ah—it hasn’t been stayed in for some years.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. “If it has a bed, I’ll take it.”

Chapter Three

1944

SATURDAY, MARCH 11

1

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” I said the next morning to a hotel room so thick with police officers it was standing-room only, most of them from the Berkeley PD but some borrowed from Oakland and Richmond—the Bay Area forces knew how to help each other out when we needed it. Dawn was just breaking. “You’re going to interview every single guest in this hotel. Nobody checks out without being talked to.”

The men grumbled. “There must be hundreds of them,” said McRae, who was smart but lazy.

“And there’s a dozen of you boys to interview them,” I said. “Take a maximum of fifteen minutes per interview. Do your jobs and you won’t even miss lunch.”

“But what if they got business, Detective?” McRae persisted. “The people here ain’t bums. They’re big shots. What if they won’t talk to us?”

“I don’t care if they’re Eleanor Roosevelt and they have to attend tea in the White House. This is the biggest crime the Bay Area’s ever seen—maybe ever will see. Which means our jobs are on the line, every one of us. Anybody refuses to talk with you, you take down their name and report that to me pronto.”

I wondered if the Feds were going to swoop in and try to take the case away from us. I didn’t think so. First of all, the FBI didn’t have the manpower out here—back East, sure, but not here. Second, they didn’t really have any jurisdiction. Homicide was a state crime, not federal. It didn’t matter if the victim was a presidential candidate. Hell, you could try to kill the president-elect of the United States, and you weren’t committing a federal crime, which we all learned in 1933 when that son-of-a-bitch Zangara fired five shots at FDR but missed him and killed the mayor of Chicago instead. Even killing the actual president wasn’t a federal crime, although people said Congress was planning to do something about that. But the point was that Wilkinson’s murder was our business, not the FBI’s. They’d be breathing down our necks, no doubt about it, but either we solved this murder or no one would.

“Okay, but say they do talk to us,” said Dicky O’Gar.

No more words came out of Dicky’s mouth. It was as if he thought he’d asked a question.

“Okay, say they do,” I said.

“What do we ask them?”

I was about to curse but checked myself. It was a good question. “Good question, Dicky,” I said. “You ask them five things: name—where they’re from—purpose of their visit—what they were doing at midnight—and did they see anything unusual last night? And you don’t answer any questions; you do the asking, got me? Now listen. This story’s going to break any minute. When it does, reporters will be on us like flies on an open sewer. Don’t talk to them. Don’t confirm anything to anybody—that’s the Chief’s job. Now get going. Not you two, Tankersley and Polk—you’re interviewing hotel staff. Make sure you talk to the old elevator man, Pounds—he sees and hears everything. You’re looking for anything out of the ordinary. Any new hires in the last week? Anything unusual happen last night?”

2

There’s three components to a criminal investigation: interviewing, working the physical evidence—the fancy word for which is forensics—and thinking. That’s it. I had the boys doing the interviewing, so the next thing to see to was forensics, beginning with the autopsy.

I drove to the Alameda Coroner’s Bureau in Oakland and was told that Coroner Emerson was down in the examination room. In California we have county coroners, and they’re elected, which is not exactly a recipe for competence. But Dr. Emerson was a good one. He was an old fellow—a talker who knew what he was talking about.

Wilkinson was lying on an autopsy table. The coloring is the thing that changes most dramatically in the recently dead. Wilkinson wasn’t human-colored anymore. Now he was gray with bluish streaks where blood used to flow. He didn’t look peaceful or asleep either—none of those myths. He looked more like frozen, turned meat.

“Your shooter was standing directly in front of the deceased, no more than two feet away, when the fatal shot was fired,” said Emerson. “The nitrite residue on the hair and face tells me that. I can’t determine caliber from the entry or exit wounds of course, but I’ll bet you a wooden nickel it was a thirty-eight or better.”

“Why’s that, Doc?”

“Because his brain was so lovely and largely intact that the bullet couldn’t have been smaller. Smaller things do more damage than bigger things. Keep that in mind, son—it’s an axiom of all medicine, all life if you ask me—it’s the microorganisms that kill us, and we didn’t even know they existed when I was a boy. When a smaller projectile, a twenty-two caliber say, enters the forehead and hits the back of man’s skull, it ricochets or curves around the cranial interior, turning his brain to soup. In this case, the bullet exited cleanly. Ergo, it was medium to large caliber.”

I liked Emerson—I always learned something from him.

“There’s something else you should see,” he said. “Look at this.”

Using a forceps, he picked up a small dark green object cubical in shape. I could see minute carving on it.

“This I extracted from the back of the deceased’s mouth, along with the numerous other items you undoubtedly saw. It appears to be stone. Jade by the look of it, but I’m no geologist. Oriental writing is etched into it. Whatever it is, it was found deep in the victim’s throat. It may have been the first object the murderer put in.”

“You need to keep that, or can I take it?”

“It’s all yours,” said Emerson.

3

My next stop was our forensics lab at Berkeley Police headquarters. This was another Vollmer creation—back in 1923, he’d set up the first crime lab in the country, along with the first fingerprint filing system. We detectives rotated through the lab in our first year on the force, to be sure we understood the basics.

“A gift from the coroner,” I said to Jim Archimbault, who ran the lab, as I placed on a counter an evidence box containing everything found in the dead man’s mouth. I fished out the sealed bag containing the green cube. “Found in Wilkinson’s throat—some kind of Oriental writing on it. Can you handle it?”

“Of course,” said Archimbault, who was peering into a microscope. He was the best forensics man west of the Appalachians.

“Tell me you’ve got something for me already, Archie.”

“I do indeed. To begin with, your doll has a club foot.”

The doll was lying on its back on a stainless steel counter, both its eyes now wide open. Archimbault had stripped it naked. I saw what he meant. While the doll’s right foot had ordinary toes, its left was a bulbous ugly mass. “What happened to it?”

“The foot was subjected to intense heat,” said Archimbault. “It melted.”

I was looking right at the doll when its left eye closed lazily, then reopened. “Are you kidding me?” I asked.

“About what?”

“Could there be an internal mechanism in that doll—something that makes it move?”

“That doll is hollow inside apart from a tube connecting mouth to buttocks. An innovation apparently patented by its manufacturer. It’s called a Dy-Dee Baby. Turn it over—you’ll see.”

I did. On the doll’s back it said “EFFAN BEE DY DEE BABY,” along with patent numbers from the US, England, and France. “Any prints on it?”

“Excellent prints. Unidentified as yet, but excellent. There is something odd, though. There’s an incision or abrasion on the doll, where the skin—if you can call it that—has been scraped away. On the left arm—see for yourself.”

Just below the doll’s left shoulder, a shallow groove had been carved into the hard rubber skin, about a quarter-inch long. “Any idea how it was made?”

“With something sharp—like a scalpel or the edge of a scissors—but it would have taken effort, repeated strokes, a lot of them.”

“Could it be . . . a voodoo doll?”

“No idea. Motives are your department. Come look at my microscope.”

He ceded his spot to me. I had to twist the focal lens before I made them out: three infinitesimal braided filaments, lemon yellow in color.

“This the thread I found?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Silk?”

“Very good. Silk of the highest quality—which happens to be in very short supply these days. If I had to guess, I’d say it came from a skirt or dress belonging to a wealthy woman.”

“How about the bullets?” I asked. “Same gun?”

“Looks like it. Both are Colt thirty-eight Specials. I’ll know for sure when I’ve run ballistics. If I can, that is. The one that went through the wall hit a steel stud. It’s a mess.”

On a white marble counter I saw the small black velvet box we’d found on the floor of Wilkinson’s hotel room.

“You find any prints on that box?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, no. Fabric’s a poor surface for fingerprinting, and velvet’s worst of all. Feel free to pick it up—I’m done with it. You can tell the purveyor with the naked eye.”

I held the velvet box up to the light. Inside, on the white satin, barely visible lettering said “Shreve & Co.”—San Francisco’s ritziest jewelry store. I’d have to pay them a visit.

DEPOSITION OF MRS. GENEVIEVE BAINBRIDGE,HAVING BEEN DULY SWORN AS A WITNESS,TAKEN ON THE FIFTEENTH OF MARCH, 1944,COMMENCING AT 10:00 A.M., CONTINUEDBY DISTRICT ATTORNEY DOOGAN:

Q: Mrs. Bainbridge, I asked you a simple question. Instead of answering, you’ve treated us to a history of your family. But we’re here today to talk about the present, not the past. So I ask you again—where were your granddaughters on the night of March 10th?

[PAUSE.]

A: Are you aware, Mr. Doogan, that my granddaughters were all born within a week of each other?

Q: No, Mrs. Bainbridge, I was not aware of that.

A: Yes. Cassie and Nicole are twins, and they were born in January of 1924, and by coincidence, their cousin, Isabella, was born six days later.

Q: I’m sorry, Mrs. Bainbridge, but of what possible relevance is that?

A: That depends on your view of relevance. Yours, Mr. Doogan, appears to be quite cramped.

Q: Mrs. Bainbridge, I know you think you’re helping your granddaughters by evading my questions. But I assure you you’re mistaken. Gravely mistaken. I don’t need your evidence to convict your granddaughters. I need your evidence to save them.

A: Save two of them, you mean.

Q: Yes. Save two of them.

A: Mr. Doogan, you’ve asked me—strong-armed me—to help you understand my granddaughters. But nothing about my granddaughters can be understood unless you start with their childhood.

Q: [INAUDIBLE.] Very well, Mrs. Bainbridge, you may proceed. But please try to keep it succinct.

Chapter Four

1930

1

For three months after the tragedy, Issy didn’t speak a word to anyone. Other changes, too, came over her, anomalous and troubling.

Her schoolteacher reported that the little girl had begun falling asleep during class—while sitting up, with her eyes open. When approached, Issy would snap out of it, unaware she’d been unconscious. Then came the inexplicable alphabet practice sheet. Issy had been having trouble learning to write, losing her way completely when she came to letters for which the capital differed from the minuscule. But then one day, on Issy’s desk, the teacher discovered a perfect alphabet, twenty-six flawless letters in both upper and lower case, all of them gracefully rendered. The handwriting was utterly new. Moreover, Issy denied having written it. The teacher was baffled, as was everyone else. It was the little girl’s grandmother, for whom graphology was something of a hobby, who pointed out that the alphabet had clearly been written by someone’s left hand. And that while Issy was right-handed, Iris, by contrast, had favored the manus sinistra.

All this should have engendered care and concern from the little girl’s parents, Roger Stafford and his wife, the famously beautiful Sadie Bainbridge Stafford. But it did no such thing.

Iris’s death had plunged Sadie into an impenetrable darkness. Part of this was grief. And part the tormenting wrack of guilt for leaving her little girls unattended in the hotel so long that awful day. But there was something more besides.

Above all else Sadie craved being coveted—she needed desirability as others need air and water—and having children hadn’t advanced that goal. Before the tragedy she would often remark on having lost her figure to childbearing, which wasn’t true, and just as often betray annoyance when her captivating little girls, like dolls comes to life, one with dark tresses, the other blond, drew all eyes to themselves, eliciting oohs and aahs, including from men. The truth was that Sadie envied them—Isabella with her fawnlike limbs, Iris with her crooked smile, neither having any need of lipstick, rouge, or girdles, both sparkling naturally as Sadie herself felt she once did. And now Sadie resented Iris for dying, for commanding even more attention and for casting a pall over the family.

Sadie began drinking excessively. And having fits of hysteria. This is what led to her suicide attempt five weeks after Iris’s death. Coming home late from work, Roger found Sadie passed out on the bedroom floor, an empty bottle of sleeping pills near her outstretched hand. He rushed her to a hospital, where they pumped her stomach and the doctor grimly reported that the evacuation revealed no pills, suggesting that the drug had already been digested and hence that it was too late. But she lived.

When she came home, her hysteria only intensified. It became violent, especially when she was drinking. A slew of physicians were consulted, and a slew of prescriptions followed. Cold baths were tried, then fever treatments, then sleeping salves. Nothing helped.

Roger began spending more and more nights away from home. He was a junior partner in the firm of the renowned female architect Julia Morgan, who was building Mr. Hearst’s spectacular castle in San Sim- eon. In a desperate frenzy to forget, Roger threw himself into the engineering of that 115-room cathedral of capitalism, dubbed by George Bernard Shaw “the place God would’ve built if he had the money.” Roger took to spending entire weeks at a hotel nearby the construction site. A change was coming over him as well. As with Sadie, his grief was compounded by something more. In his case, it was growing rage at his wife. He had begun suspecting her. Of deception, manipulation, and the worst of all vices.

Sadie’s first trip to the sanatorium—right after Iris died—had been voluntary, but the second was not. Roger called the hospital, saying his wife was threatening self-destruction again, and soon men in white coats appeared. They put Sadie in a straitjacket and took her away, screaming. Roger did not accompany the ambulance. From the living room window, he watched, cold-eyed, as it drove away.

Isabella had heard Sadie’s screams as well and taken frightened refuge in her bedroom. But Roger gave no thought to her or to what effect her mother’s violent extraction might have on her. Once the apple of her father’s eye, she was now, for practical purposes, an orphan.

Turning from the window after Sadie had been taken away, Roger withdrew to his study and did not emerge. One flight above him was a high-ceilinged bedroom wallpapered with miniature red roses that looked like blood clots. In that room, two child’s beds with matching canopies and floral quilts stood side by side. In one lay Issy. The other had belonged to her sister Iris, with whom Issy was speaking.

2

Issy?

Stop talking to me, Iris! You’re dead.

Don’t be scared, Issy. I’m here.

The dead lie there like ice babies.

Frozen. Like popsicles.

Issy?

What?

Remember what I was wearing that day?

Your blue dress with the white flowers.

Yes but what else?

I don’t remember.

Try harder. Do you remember what game we were playing?

Hide-and-seek.

Yes that’s it.

That was so fun.

You’re forgetting something, Issy.

No, I’m not.

Red Riding Hood.

What?

Red Riding Hood. Except the cloak wasn’t red.

I don’t want to talk to you anymore, Iris. It was so much fun that day. We were playing hide-and-seek. I was hiding and you were supposed to find me. But you never did.

That’s not right, Issy.

It is right. I was hiding.

Yes, Issy, you were hiding. But not from me.

Chapter Five

1944

SATURDAY, MARCH 11

1

After leaving Archimbault in the crime lab, I went up a few flights back to my own office. It was small, but at least it had a window, and I kept a row of potted paperwhites on the sill, because they made the air fresh. There were piles of paper all over my desk and even on the floor, but I knew what each pile contained and exactly where every single thing was. In the center of my desk was a stack of newspaper and magazine stories I’d made Holly—the secretary I shared with six other officers—collect for me on Wilkinson. I had opinions about the man, but when you think about your political opinions, you realize that ninety percent of the time you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The truth is I didn’t know a thing about Wilkinson. And if you want to solve a homicide, you better know your victim.

Especially a homicide like this one. It looked to me like whoever killed Wilkinson hated him. So the question was, who hated Walter Wilkinson? You can’t trust newspapers, but there’s one subject they’re good at—hate. First they whip it up, then they report on it.

I put my feet on the desk and began reading. Wilkinson was Indiana-born, and it turned out his dad was a serious Progressive. Wilkinson had been a Democrat himself until the presidential race of 1940, when, depending on who you believed, he either had a change of heart or saw a window of opportunity and jumped through it. He became a pro-war, pro-business Republican, going around the country decrying the New Deal as big-government socialism, and he ripped FDR for his neutrality on Hitler. “I didn’t leave my party,” he said about quitting the Democrats; “my party left me.” Wilkinson fever swept the country. He made the cover of Time magazine and Fortune.

Seventy thousand people went to one of his speeches in Los Angeles—seventy thousand. Nobody minded that he was a married man carrying on pretty brazenly with a divorcée from New York City’s literary circles. When he made his play for the Republican nomination in 1940, the GOP muckety-mucks he was shouldering out of the way tried to tank him. One senator said it was all right with him if the town whore joined the church, but she shouldn’t be leading the choir the first week. That would have sunk most candidates, but Wilkinson’s fans didn’t seem to care what the muckety-mucks said. When he won the nomination, a hundred fifty thousand people came out in a hundred-degree heat to hear his acceptance speech in Indiana. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

But in the campaign, Wilkinson’s advisers told him he needed to tone it down, and he began trying to present himself as a candidate for everybody, on both sides of the aisle. Later he said he was furious he’d listened. In any event, FDR was either too beloved or too crafty and spanked him in the general.

After Wilkinson lost in 1940, he stayed in the public eye, publishing a book that called for America to be a champion of freedom all over the globe—it sold a million copies in its first month. He was especially tough on Japan, arguing way before Pearl Harbor that we should starve the Japanese of oil. But he wasn’t a hatemonger—if anything, the opposite. He blasted Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic rants as un-American. He led a fight to oust the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio, and he called for the armed forces and Washington, DC, to be desegregated. As chairman of Twentieth Century-Fox, Wilkinson had pushed all of Hollywood to give better roles to Black actors. The NAACP loved him. And the KKK didn’t.

Bottom line: Wilkinson was a strange combination, a ladies’ man and a flamethrower, a man of passion and an opportunist, with points of principle thrown in for good measure, all of which meant that a lot of different types might have hated his guts.

Just then came a familiar knock on my office door: tappety-tap, tap tap. And Miriam walked in.

“Hi, there,” I said. “Oh shit! I forgot to pick you up, didn’t I?”

“No sweat, Al. I hitched a ride here. On the back of a scooter.”

Miriam looked like a girl growing up on the frontier, which made no sense since she’d lived practically her whole life in Albany, a gritty town in the East Bay lowlands where Berkeley’s rich used to dump their garbage. She was scrawny with freckles and an unruly mop of curly dark ringlets. She wore the same pair of overalls every day. She smoked and could cuss up a storm.

She was also eleven.

Miriam was my half-sister Rosemary’s daughter. I was supposed to have lunch with her before dropping her off at the five-and-dime on Shattuck Avenue, where she worked in the back. I didn’t love it that she was paid under the table, literally in nickels and dimes, since I was supposed to be law enforcement. But I’d learned a long time ago that when there’s no leeway, survival comes first, and with Rosemary, there was no leeway. Rosemary always had a man in her house, but they never lasted. A few of them had been decent guys, but lately they’d been getting worse and worse. When the last one bailed a few months ago, she went into a real tailspin. She was drinking again and got herself fired again, this time from the Hotsy Totsy Club down on San Pablo. If she could just pull herself together, there were plenty of other dives looking for barmaids, but for now Miriam was picking up the slack, taking odd jobs when she wasn’t in school. Miriam never complained about it, even though she was probably the breadwinner at this point. She was a good kid, levelheaded, and quick as a whip.

My intercom buzzed. It was Holly, telling me there was a man wanting to see me with information he claimed I needed to hear.

“Give me five minutes,” I said to Miriam. “Go talk to Holly for a while, okay?”

“Sounds great, Al. Don’t mind me.” And she disappeared.

The man who walked through my door introduced himself as Clark Collinson. He was maybe thirty-two or thirty-three—blond, athletic, open-faced, but already losing his hair. He looked like a lot of the fraternity boys I knew at college.

“I know who killed Walter Wilkinson,” he said.

“Who says he’s dead?”

“It’s in all the papers.”

He handed me a copy of an extra the Berkeley Gazette had just put out. Wilkinson’s murder was the headline in sixty-four-point type. They had my name in the story too, as the detective in charge. I handed it back to him.

“Go on,” I said.

“Did you know Wilkinson was in a satanic cult? They call themselves the Temple of the Holy Grail. There was a disappearance there a few years ago—still unsolved. Wilkinson was a member.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him there.”

“Where is this place? Who’s in charge?”

Collinson leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I’m happy to help, Detective, but I would expect to receive something for my services.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Fifty dollars. No one else is going to come forward with this information. They’re very secretive. And they punish anyone who turns against them.”

“When did you see Wilkinson there?”

“Three nights ago.”

“Wednesday? What time?”

“Between eight and ten.”

“You sure about that?”

“One hundred percent.”

Three nights ago, Wilkinson was still en route to California from Wisconsin.