Escape To Magpie Ridge

By David Bartley

The police want to talk to Isidore Strong’s friend Meryl Liu Quinn, a refugee from China’s Cultural Revolution upheavals, about the murder of her adoptive father, one of San Francisco’s beloved leading citizens, owner of a luxury department store, trustee of a medical center, funder of a repertoire theatre, and respecter of workers, but she has disappeared after telling Isidore innocent people must be protected before she can cooperate. 

Her dilemma stirs up Strong’s deepest trauma, the murder of his own father, who had been a homicide detective. He is pulled away from his Cow Hollow home and the insulated academic life he has chosen, to face danger and right some wrongs.

 With a classic motif of private investigator dramas—a beautiful woman walks into the office—Isidore's involvement begins when she takes a revolver out of her purse and lays it on the desk. What follows is an amateur sleuth detective story and buddy adventure that captures Isidore’s inner quest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jun 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781732149403

Book preview

The House on Corinth Lane

When Dean Linwood turned away from the cashier with his tray, I already knew he would come for me like a polar bear on a scent of harp seal. It was Monday of exam week. I had met three classes and didn’t get to the faculty dining room until nearly midafternoon, the dead hour even in campus eateries. Sitting down with my sandwich and coffee, I noticed him giving the room a preliminary scan while he waited for his soup. Sensing danger, I checked it for myself; there was Isabelle Valencia, emeritus from Chemistry, who got her start with the alchemists and often doesn’t seem to realize someone is speaking to her. And there was Brody from PE who snorts when he laughs. And that was it. I didn’t think the Dean was an unkind man, but neither had I known him to extend himself for anyone.

More to the point, Dr. Linwood is Dean of Academic Development, along with Everything Else, BEC being a small college on survival technique, and I am the new guy in the new program half the faculty reviles because they wanted the money added to salaries.

I was aware the Dean had opposed the new curriculum—he preferred the college stick to its core mission. He always acts the gracious loser, but his thirty-eight minutes of chit-chat came loaded with stealth probing questions about how it was going. It violated the rule against talking shop, but I did my best to reassure him the program would succeed because it was the time for it and could help the college out of its malaise. The students seem to enjoy my classes, so I had some arrows to send into the fray.

It wasn’t what I wanted to think about over lunch, though. At semester break, I like getting out of town to purge the pores and breathe some fresh-minted oxygen, and I’d planned to go through a mental checklist of preparations for my trip to the Lost Coast. People are sometimes surprised I go there when the atmospheric river is coming in off the Pacific, but it's simple: I have access to a tight, dry cabin with electricity for reading, firewood for heat and propane for cooking, and I can take with me everything else I need for a week of solitude. If the storms come, great; let them. In softer weather, I’m outside for a walk.

The no-exit conversation reminded me some teachers like to unwind with coffee and gab while others, like me, are pedaling hard to be done and gone. After we bussed our trash, trays and coffee mugs, the Dean invited me to drop by someday soon for a more in-depth talk and went to his office. I headed for the parking lot.

Rain arrived while I was crossing the Bay Bridge, the leading edge a torrent that smacked the windshield like buckets of water thrown and made me hope nobody in my lane had slammed on the brakes. It tapered off soon enough, and by the time I left the freeway at Fell, I had switched off the wipers. I turned north through the Fillmore, climbed to consulate row, gave a shout to the mayor’s dog, who responded with bright, happy barking, and braking slowly down the other side, came to my street.

Corinth Lane runs East-West along the hillside about halfway up the steep incline from Cow Hollow to Pacific Heights. The house at 1216 had been home until my father, a detective, was killed. My mother closed the house and took my sister and me back east to Beacon Hill, Boston, where she had been a girl. She didn’t sell; she didn’t need the money, and it stood empty for twenty years. Now I’m at 1216 again, with friends this time. There are seven of us, one in the cabin down at the back of the lot.

The house was chilly; we keep the thermostat low when everyone is out and about, and it doesn’t reset until five. I went to the kitchen and put water on for tea, then up to my study to lay a fire in the stove, an insert attached to the fireplace. The wood is almond I buy from a grower in the Valley who hasn’t started chipping his old trees; it gives off a pleasant nutty smell and makes embers as well as oak. While the first blaze-up was burning off, I went down to the kitchen, made a pot of black tea and brought it up on a tray.

I pulled the drape back from the window bay, emptied my book bag, arranged things on the desk, compacted the fire, adjusted the damper, and got down to work, glancing through the first set of essays, restacking in the order I wanted to read them. I spent some time commenting on each student’s work. Rain returned, a gentle, silent rain that keeps coming and becomes a mood.

There was a gap in one column when I entered the grades. Not unusual, and I expected to hear from the student soon. I’d been told it’s a rookie mistake accepting papers late, but I usually do, if they’ve been written when I’m asked. Some of my students are commuters working two part-time jobs, and scheduling can be a problem for them.

I was downstairs getting something to eat when the house phone rang. The young-sounding voice on the line was new to me, an employee in the Fraud Department at my credit union. He asked if I’d written a two-thousand-dollar check to something called Rock and Record.

That’s a forgery, I said, as cheerfully as possible. Don’t pay it from the new account.

We thought so, Mr. Strong. We don’t like the signature. They weren’t even trying, really.

I asked him if he knew anything about Rock and Record.

It’s a recording studio south of Market, he said. The rates are low, and it’s popular with anonymous local bands. I’ve recorded there myself.

I’m surprised they would take such a big check without proper ID, I said.

He hesitated. They’re known to be a little casual when they have too many unscheduled hours. They have this form you sign that can become an obligation.

You mean they’re looking to get leverage with clients in case one of them becomes a prospect?

You said it, not me. I pay. Keeps things clear.

You have the right idea, I said.

My missing checkbook had fallen among thieves, musical ones, apparently.

I gave him the number of a private line recently installed with an answering machine. I get a lot of calls, and my roommates had told me taking messages was making them feel like office help, and they wanted to just be roommates again.

Thanks for being on this, I said.

Sure enough, Mr. Strong.

I went to the fridge anticipating the crusty parmesan chicken breast that was still in the baking dish after Sunday’s all-house dinner. I’d stashed it behind a head of cabbage at the back of the middle shelf, but it was gone. In its place there was a note on an index card: Thnx, Love, L&H, and winking smiley face. Lily and Hodge, known brownbaggers. Their card shop in the Duboce Triangle is small, lovely, filled with handmade paper goods, gratifyingly busy around the holidays, and they work it themselves.

Our policy on house leftovers is they are for everyone, first come first served. We think that makes it more likely they’ll be eaten. Looking for an alternative plan for dinner, I considered suggesting the cleanup chore be sweetened with dibs.

There didn’t seem to be any other quick and easy solutions, except there was some cooked rice and forlorn leftover broccoli. I heated some oil and sautéed onion, garlic and the remaining half of an orange bell pepper diced up, stirred in the rice, added stewed tomatoes, chicken broth, a little salt and black pepper, and had an emergency cold-weather soup. Several pimiento-stuffed olives halved and tossed in made it a little bit Christmasy. The two greens clashed, and I was going to leave the broccoli for someone else, but the nutrition-minded people in my family tree were jingling our DNA, so into the pot it went. I set a cast iron pan on another burner and assembled a Cuban to grill. I may have been overcompensating.

I could hear the ringing of my new phone upstairs; the answering machine responded but was interrupted by the caller hanging up. Then the house phone rang. It was Meryl Quinn, a friend from university days who had moved in recently.

Isidore, I need your help, but I can’t talk right now. Will you be up later?

Sure. How late do you think?

A couple of hours, maybe three.

Are you okay? Where are you?

I had a meeting with Father, and… She paused and went silent.

What happened?

I can’t talk now, she said, and hung up.

I was standing by the kitchen window looking out into the yard, which I like to do while on the phone. Meryl had taken the back room at the top, with the balcony and the view north over Cow Hollow, Crissy Field, the Marina, Alcatraz, Richardson Bay, Angel Island and Belvedere beyond. I had intended to keep that room open for access to the balcony and to be a sitting room away from downstairs, which can be noisy at times. But she had left her guardian’s house on short notice and convinced us she urgently needed a place to stay. All my attempts to find out what had caused the problem had been ignored or passed off with responses that were barely verbal.

The quiet, steady rain had been a lull, and blustery downpour was all around us despite being alee of the windbreak on the Presidio. The branches of our back yard tree were slapping against the utility porch’s thin walls. The tree was one of the first projects after my parents moved us to Corinth Lane. I was five and stood beside my sister, she in a baby carrier, watching our parents transplant it into the fresh brown soil of a hole I had helped dig. It’s a Tasmanian acacia and has the potential for growing to forty feet or half again larger, much too big for a yard like ours. My mother had liked its spherical clusters of tiny white flowers and said it would attract the birds and bees. With regular grooming, my father would manage the size, a sort of grand bonsai. Over the twenty years of absence, pruning had been neglected, and it was misshapen and out of balance. I was being indecisive about having it taken out.

I tasted the soup and added a little more salt and pepper, turned the sandwich, poured a glass of wine and set a place at a pine table by the kitchen window. I heard music faintly through the glass as I reached to close the blind. The dusk had darkened. A light in the cabin down at the bottom of the yard told me our least-seen housemate was in for the night.

I had converted the garden shed into a cabin and used it for temporary quarters while remodeling the house. I’d thought that once the house was filled, the cabin as a retreat space would be an asset and talked it up with prospective roommates. When Galen saw it, he campaigned to have it for his room. The work had made it suitable for his fretted strings—dulcimer, guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele—which he loved to play, and being at the end of the yard, he could play them when he wished. We found we all liked Galen, so it was a question of giving up the retreat space. Nobody had objected.

The other housemates were all out somewhere: Lily and Hodge at their shop, Danielle at SF General doing a residency; most of her free time is spent trying to catch up on sleep. Barry often stays late at the library on campus.

I was ready to den up for the night. I rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. There was a scrap of wine left which I added to my glass and took upstairs with me. A third set of papers was waiting; they would tell me how I’d done that semester with an experimental course for the program I am helping launch at BEC: They are calling it Contemporary Ethnography; ’83-’84 is my second year.

And the ‘Niners and the Cowboys were out at Candlestick Park reenacting medieval warfare without the spiked bludgeons and boiling tar, regretful omissions, possibly, for some of the players.

The office phone rang. Another forged check.

I showered, got into some fresh sweats, and settled at my desk with that day’s crop of take-home finals from the new course, Margins of Identity. As I opened the unnecessary report cover on the first paper, the Dallas free safety intercepted a pass—roughly the equivalent of unhorsing a knight with a blunt lance. I was watching the replay when a news crawl started along the bottom of the screen—something about a death at Quinn’s Department Store. I switched on the radio and dialed KTAK. A janitorial worker had reported finding Merchant Quinn in his office, shot dead.

Merchant Quinn was Meryl’s guardian. In a room where I was alone, I said, There is no way.

I set the essay on the desk and shut off the radio and TV. My car would be a nuisance downtown, so I called a cab before changing into street clothes. I thought about Meryl’s call, the feeling and tone more than the words. Over the months since she moved out of the Quinn mansion, the estrangement had eased. They had been communicating, and she was still managing the repertoire theater he had funded several years before, but she had not gone back to his massive residence on the hill.

Meryl and I had met when she was going with a friend of mine, a campus character named Ethan Broadwick. Ethan was working in a lab at the Alemany Care and Research Center where Quinn was a trustee. Ethan and Meryl and I, sometimes with a fourth and sometimes not, often went places together, and I met Quinn during social functions at his home and at the medical center, or related community events. I went along to those low-key affairs because I knew I should counter my reclusive tendencies when I had a chance; being introduced to new people made it impossible to be anonymous. I had been rewarded with meeting an interesting civic leader and watching him work.

The cab was quick getting there and I went down the front steps putting on my coat.

Union Square, please, I said.

The cabbie talked to me over his shoulder, You know there’s a police activity down there? You in a hurry?

Not really. You can take it easy.

Hey, buddy. Of course, of course. He turned and glanced at me. Hey, I know you. I seen you on the news, ain’t I? Your name is, uh... is, uh... He snapped his fingers twice; whether he meant to prod his memory or me I could not say.

I was disinclined to chat with him, so I said, It probably wasn’t me.

The cabbie withdrew into himself as he went through the gears, not taking it easy.

It’s okay with you, I’ll drop down to Lombard until Van Ness, he said. It usually moves quicker.

I liked the suggestion. Except for Union Street, which has a busy nightlife with retail, restaurants and bars, the grid all the way to Gough had stop signs at every corner, even on Broadway at the top of the hill, and cabbies tended to accelerate hard and brake hard in every block, an unpleasant ride. His asking me about going via Lombard, a slightly longer route, was a gesture meant to rectify our relationship, and I was glad for it. I had been uneasy that I’d made him feel snubbed, though I felt correct in deflecting his forward question. An apology from me would have been misunderstood; the disjointing error had not been mine.

I said, Good idea. Thanks for asking.

Yeah, no problem, he said and was silent again. A talk radio program and the cab’s communications band two-way were both on, turned down low, the sound almost buried in heater fan noise. On Lombard, a four-lane thoroughfare, the lights are somewhat timed, and we sailed through several blocks. In the airflow around the car, the lights of the city bled along the windows with the rain.

My name and face do show up in the news now and again. I feed the hungry beast; I admit it, but there’s a reason. Before forming his own agency, my father had become a well-known detective at SFPD Homicide. When he was killed, I was pulled out of school; to distract myself and fill the time, I read and reread the newspaper reports daily and sought radio and TV news all day long; I wanted to know what had happened; the information never came. The news people kept the story alive as long as they could but eventually dropped it. They described the crime, his history, his service to the city, his famous cases, his heart-broken family, his funeral, and updates on the investigation, determined at first, then hinting at progress, then trying to sound hopeful. Finally, nothing. The lack of an arrest was loud in the silence.

When I was hired to launch the new program at BEC, publicity notices went out; a reporter connected the names, and the story was rehashed. That put me in touch with Lt. Gary Garcia, the last cop to ride with my dad on the force; he called to congratulate me and ask about my mother and sister. Since then, like I said, I feed the news beast when I can. I want my father to be remembered; I want the murder to be solved. Whoever killed him is still out there; I’m angry about that, and I want him brought in.

Unsolved homicide has become a preoccupation. I sometimes discuss new cases with Lt. Garcia or my father’s partners, who still run the agency. Gary says I need to let it go and tells me to stay out of the way, but he doesn’t shut me out.

I had the cabbie drop me at Union Square and walked the half-block to Quinn’s Department Store.

Merchant Quinn’s Sad Demise

To my surprise, people were crowding into the reception area of Merchant Quinn’s office. The police officer at the door stepped in front of me and showed me the palm of her hand, like a traffic cop.

Who are you? she asked.

I’m here to help with a member of the family. Lieutenant Garcia knows I’m here.

He hasn’t told me anything about that, she said.

Maybe he has other things on his mind. Can you tell me where Meryl, the decedent’s adopted daughter, might be? She’s here somewhere. She called me earlier.

The ‘decedent’? she said, smiling, more around the eyes than the mouth. You mean that person who is dead?

I do, I said.

I thought that must be it. I bet you know a lot of words. You Isidore Strong?

I nodded and said, Yes.

She affected a scowl. I don’t know any Meryl, but there’s some family in the conference room there. She waved a hand toward a door on the left.

I was pretty sure this was misdirection, but I didn’t object. Some of the police had seemed okay with my presence at crime scenes, but some had not; if she was one of the latter, facing off with her was not going to help.

A conference room is an awkward space for a gathering unless the people are sitting at the table talking to each other. The table was large, the chairs numerous and mostly not being used, and the number of people made the room feel crowded. Many were new to me, but I recognized a few Quinn clan members and people associated with the ACRC whom I had met while running with Ethan and Meryl. She was not in there, but I saw a door at the back of the room and continued moving toward it. I made my way around, repeating Excuse me, please like a mantra and nodding a greeting when appropriate; there didn’t seem to be any openings for conversation. The door opened into a workroom where the lights were on. A team of clue hunters was leaving through another exit carrying their kits. Nobody in the conference room was paying any attention. I went through and closed the door behind me.

I looked to see what the technicians were doing. The room they’d gone into was Quinn’s inner office. I could see him in his chair slumped onto the desk. I held back rather than crowd the techs and used the time to study the workroom. Along one wall, there were deep shelves holding art supplies and a cabinet with wide, shallow drawers that could hold camera-ready copy for newspaper advertisements. Next to them stood a high bench with two light tables angled up steeply for doing page layouts; below each light table a tall stool had been tucked under the bench. A landscape photo mural with the horizon at the lower third was mounted on the wall above the pasteup bench; the expanse of sky in the photo eased the closed feeling in the windowless room.

The center of the space was filled with two sizable worktables, one for standing and beyond it a lower one with chairs. Near the sitting worktable, an alcove in the wall to the right was fitted with cabinets, sink, refrigerator—the usual break room stuff. Beyond the alcove was an elevator door and in the far wall another exit.

To the right of the kitchen was the short passage to Quinn’s office. On the left side of it there were shelves of office supplies and things you’d want on hand for a bar. Opposite these, an open door revealed a carpeted private dressing room.

At the top of a walnut valet, an open-slatted shelf held a folded blanket; beneath it at the right there were perhaps a dozen neckties on individual wire pegs; a tuxedo in plastic wrapping hung on a short closet rod; at the bottom, a low wire rack for shoes held a pair of Milano velvet loafers, size eleven and a half, still in the box. Merchant Quinn would have worn these instead of the more correct patent leather: a little nose thumbing at black-tie formality. On the right side of the lower area, a cubby contained folded shirts and beneath that were two drawers, one rather shallow and the lower one more than twice the depth.

Next to the valet, there was an upholstered chair and underneath it a pair of slippers, or house shoes, depending how fancy you want to be about it. At a doorway beyond the chair, the richly colored carpet gave way to terrazzo flooring around a basin, shower and toilet. On the wall opposite the valet there was a mirror; just below it, a narrow shelf held a hairbrush and comb, and an open case displaying tie clasps and cufflinks, some in matching sets. A lint roller on a hook bore proof it worked. On the floor below the shelf, a motorized, double-ended shoe shiner switched on democratically every time the scuffed toe of my buffalo-hide desert boot came near either of its fluffy buffers.

The technicians finished packing their gear onto a cart and wheeled it through a side door of Quinn’s office, disappearing into a hallway. I stepped out into the place where a man I had known lay dead. Next to his body, the upper right-side drawer stood open to the first divider. He was slumped forward over his writing pad, his cheek on a pillow. An expensive hairpiece cantilevered away from his defoliated scalp announcing suspension of vanity.

His forearms framed the pillow, manicured hands poised on fingertips and wrists. The double cuffs of his powder-blue shirt were pulled beyond the ends of his coat sleeves, and the cufflinks had been removed. The radio report had said he was shot to death. Though I did not see any wounds or blood, he did not appear to be resting from overwork to rise again refreshed. His face was more abandoned than faces are during even the most sublime of naps; its link to the person I had known was lost, and all that remained were the material facts. I turned away to remember him alive which I could do by recalling a time I had enjoyed his company and hearing again the sound of his voice. Then I looked at the room.

Quinn’s daytime digs had scale. There were comfortable seats in a conversation grouping away from the desk, a disguised bar, convenient tables, and shelves holding decorative items and a few books. A round table with four chairs could be used for a salesman’s presentation so it wouldn’t have to be done on Quinn’s desk. There was a door to the private elevator that also opened to the workroom. There were framed prints but no oils or watercolors. Along the wall opposite the desk was a couch long enough to stretch out on; the upholstery matched the pillow under his cheek; at one end, its twin remained.

Next to Quinn’s desk, touching nothing, I studied a pile of papers splashed on the carpet. A copy of the book-like trend forecaster and advertising annual, Interior Design Report, was partly visible. The banner stacked the three title words, the initial letters blocked in a column and inverted to white on black; someone had filled them in with a felt-tip pen. The cover photo and the spider web drawn on it by the same pen were both obscured by other papers; a caption identified an object in the photo as the Artemis Brauronia-devoted alabaster hedgehog on display in the museum at Attica.

News to me, I mumbled to nobody.

Quinn’s Department Store did a good business in art objects, both original and reproduction. Notes on xeroxed catalog pages indicated high interest in pricey copies of the hedgehog carving—a symbolic womb—and of a figurine, a variation on the androgynous goddess from the five thousand B.C.E. lower Danube Hamangia culture. I wondered what that figure had meant to those people. To my modern intellectualized sensibility, it looked like an earth-bound conception of cosmic unity shrouded in gender, and I had no problem seeing a kinship to Genesis One and the Taoist taijitu, but I couldn’t imagine an Hamangian native needing to discuss it with me. The other papers included sketches, lists of items with quantities and prices, idea briefs, purchase order blanks, and more catalogs. Some of them had been walked on.

Quinn’s interesting business was so absorbing that a voice saying sir seemed distant and meant for someone else until a uniformed officer gently plucked at my coat sleeve. He spoke to me as if to a second grader and asked me to step out into the reception area with the others.

In my unofficial status, it would have been better to follow his suggestion, but my first impulse was to push back; nodding and raising my eyebrows, I pointed at the side exit where the clue techs had gone and moved in that direction.

Well, all right, sir, he said, but his tone put me on notice I would be watched for further signs of exceptionalism. He was clearly another of the cops who disagreed with Garcia’s admitting me to crime scenes, but he was not unfriendly. He hurried ahead of me and opened the door, a latex-gloved hand grasping the knob.

The door swung open with the help of another latex-covered hand on the outside; it belonged to a substantial man in a two-button gray suit he wore like work clothes; an ID tag clipped to the outbreast pocket read Medical Examiner under his name. He was probably in his late sixties and had abundant, wavey, autonomous hair that seemed to rise from all areas of his head like a wild white flame. He eyed me suspiciously.

Are you Daniel Strong’s boy? Sometimes a question is more like a demand for an answer.

Yes, sir, I am.

I thought he was extending his right hand to shake, but my right hand, offered in response, hung unmet in the air like the limb of an awkwardly posed mannikin. The M.E. gripped my left elbow and gave it an avuncular squeeze.

Sorry, he said. I don’t usually shake hands with these things on. Nice to meet you, and congratulations on the work you are doing.

Thank you, sir.

You know, you really shouldn’t be in here. I thought we had put a stop to this. Cases could be compromised. There’s always a risk, but this is unnecessary.

Yes, sir. I understand.

How did you get in here?

I told him. He was not happy.

He said, Well, it’s done. We’re going to move the body now and prepare it for removal. You can stay if you want, but no more. You understand?

Yes, sir, I said.

I nodded and moved aside. Two men followed with a gurney. While one maneuvered it into place, the other spread a body bag on the floor near Quinn’s chair. Working together, the three of them gently lifted Merchant Quinn’s body just enough to pull the chair out of the way. Controlling his head and minimizing limbs flopping around, they laid him on the bag. They rolled him one way, then the other, as nurses do when changing sheets for the bedridden, lifting the sides of the bag around him and tucking in his arms and legs. They zipped it closed and lifted him onto the gurney. The M.E. partially unzipped the bag; he was heavy and might not have been comfortable working on the floor. I could see entrance wounds in the clothing, one near Quinn’s right shoulder and another below the rib cage on the left. As the M.E. began to study Quinn’s injuries, I left by the side door.

In one direction, the hallway led past some restrooms to a door under an Exit sign and in the other, past the posted uniform, to the open mezzanine and the entrance to Quinn’s offices, understated but impressive. The doors were rosewood and brushed stainless steel, the partitions large glass panels framed in rosewood timbers, a design meant to suggest openness, but the glass was covered everywhere with drapes. There were still many people standing around; those leaving were being stopped to be identified.

Brushed stainless steel railings along the rim of the mezzanine kept everyone from falling off, and the staircase from the lobby had the same railings on both sides. They had been retrofitted with wire mesh screen infill to make them safer for tykes and tots, marring their aesthetic effect, but it would have been difficult to imagine anyone objecting. Merchant Quinn’s son-in-law, Roger Sytton, stood below shaking the rain off his trench coat. Near the staircase a window wall looked out onto Stockton Street. Space around the stairs, differences in levels, and reflections and distortion in the glass could induce vertigo, especially while descending because you are on that side.

On the street, reporters holding notepads or recorders were getting the news, and technicians were setting up cameras and doing sound checks. There was a light drizzle, and they were trying to protect some of their equipment with unfitted plastic sheet, but the air was not still, and it moved the plastic out of place.

One traffic lane was open. Cars passed up the street in a slow line, curious faces appearing at the windows. A policeman was doing his best to keep them moving; some drivers who had stopped because the cars ahead had paused for the traffic light were reluctant to move on. They wanted to see the drama that was making a familiar place more interesting. The policeman wore a black slicker with reflective stripes; a clear plastic cover protected his service cap, its neck curtain shedding the water below the slicker’s collar. A heavy flashlight he was using to direct drivers was powerful enough to flood someone’s eyes and could also be a truncheon.

Pedestrians gathered on the sidewalk and off the curb outside the police barricade hoping to see something. They asked each other questions and shared whatever answers they had. New arrivals turned and looked at the building without seeing the dead man they had been told was in there. Most would stay only briefly, moving on because of boredom and the rain.

One of the reporters, a friend, had been at the police line earlier when Lt. Garcia told a cop on the barricade to let me through. She had wanted me to take her along. Garcia would not have liked it, so I didn’t try. She was doing her job, though, and pressed, and I worried about refusing. Now she held a large golf umbrella with one hand and a mic in the other; when the breeze picked up, it moved the umbrella, but she managed to control it. She was studying the people arriving at the store or leaving. When she noticed me watching from the top of the stairway, warm and dry, she shook her fist at me and pretended to shout, you fink, and smiled and waved. She did that sometimes;