Part 28 (1/2)

The original native inhabitants of the place might quibble over how well those seeds of civilization took, especially if they could see the macabre scene here tonight.

William Epperson's body twists in the dark, damp air of early morning, suspended from a rope around his neck that is looped over the horizontal beam of the ma.s.sive brick cross that forms the monument.

The bronze plaque with its words to the friar rests embedded in the white plaster covering the base beneath the giant cross that stands thirty feet high, faced with red brick.

By the time Harry and I arrive, the medical examiner's office is setting up a ladder, an extension affair lent to them by the fire department that is on the scene with two of its trucks and several big portable lights.

Even from a distance, I can see Epperson's body. Harry and I park at the top of the hill on the street near the colonnade. We slipped in this way to avoid the emergency lights all along the road down below. We drove up past Old Town and came in through the park at the top of the hill. It takes us five minutes to hike down, avoiding the roots of eucalyptus trees and the depressions in the ground obscured by the angle of the bright lights aimed up from the cross and s.h.i.+ning in our eyes from below.

Both Harry and I come out of the woods with one arm up to shade our eyes from the light.

As we get closer, I can see the rope and crude noose, rough hemp, and hear it strain under the weight and over the hush of voices, as Epperson twists slowy in the still, damp air and the evidence techs work beneath him around the base.

He is clothed in a white dress s.h.i.+rt and suit pants, one shoe on, the other lying on the ground, as if shot by gravity from his foot when the body stopped at the end of the rope. The line suspending him is tied off around the bottom of the brick cross, just above the rectangular base with its plaque.

A painter's ladder, which looks to be ten or twelve feet in length, is tipped over, lying on its side near the path that fronts the monument.

It is a picture worth a thousand words, all of them screaming one thing-suicide, all of it bathed in bright floodlights with the SID, the Scientific Investigation Division, crime-scene folks, working it and looking for a different message.

One of them is examining the soil near the foot of the base, casting light at different angles over the ground, looking for impressions, footprints, though I doubt they will find much. The compacted river-bottom sand is as hard as concrete.

Several cops are working farther up the hill. They have laid out police lines of yellow tape from tree to tree. One of the uniforms stops us as we approach the tape.

It takes a couple of minutes to explain why we are here, the dead man being a witness in a case we are trying. He takes my business card. This seems to work its way from hand to hand up the hierarchy, until it gets to somebody in a suit farther down the hill. If the man is impressed, he doesn't show it. Gives us a look, then back to the card. Words exchanged with one of the uniformed officers that I cannot hear.

We cool our heels.

Harry nudges me in the ribs with an elbow. When I look over, he nods, off in the direction of the parking lot down below toward the museum that sits on the opposite hill.

The lot is crowded with police cruisers, emergency vehicles with strobes flas.h.i.+ng, blue, red and amber, enough color to spike blood pressure even if it isn't in a rearview mirror.

Getting out of one of the cars is Evan Tannery. He stops to talk to the bra.s.s cl.u.s.tered in the parking lot, spending most of his time and attention on an older guy, gray hair, in a uniform. He seems to be in charge. Tannery is pumping him for information. They huddle for several seconds, the cop motioning with his arm up toward the hill behind us.

Until that moment I hadn't seen it. Parked in the shadows under a eucalyptus on a narrow service road leading up the hill toward the cross is the dark blue van I'd seen Epperson driving earlier that day. The cops have staked it off with yellow tape and one of the fingerprint guys is giving it a going-over with dust on the driver's-side door handle and window, spreading the graphite liberally with a brush and blowing every few seconds searching for latents.

They've got a problem, and somebody knows it. A key witness in a felony murder is dead, and the cops are telling themselves this is no suicide.

”You Madriani?”

I am interrupted by the detective holding my business card. He has come up the hill behind us and is now looking at Harry and me like something the cat dragged in, interlopers.

”I'm Madriani. This is my partner, Harry Hinds.”

”I understand you knew this man?” He squares off in front of me, legs spread, and gestures toward the dangling body with his head. The coroner's guys have finally got their ladder up, and two of the firemen are giving them a hand, lifting the load so that they can sever the rope near the base and lower the body. They will cut this to avoid s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with the knot, hoping that the fas.h.i.+on in which it is tied will tell them something about whoever tied it.

”We weren't well acquainted,” I tell him. ”I talked to him once, about a week ago. I was scheduled to cross-examine him in court.”

”Looks like that show's off,” he says. ”How did you get here so quickly?”

”We were alerted by a phone call,” says Harry. ”He's right over there. You want to talk to him?” Harry has spotted Max Sheen in the distance, reporters in a flock, Sheen trying to work his way toward us around the police tape. The last thing the cops want, a conversation with counsel close to microphones, on camera, or anywhere near the pad-and-pencil crowd.

”Why don't you come this way,” he says. Open sesame. We are through the police line.

chapter.

fifteen.

it's Sat.u.r.day morning, and we are all in the dark regarding Epperson. Coats's courtroom went dark on Friday. With Epperson dead, Tannery had no one to talk to. The offer of proof is now in suspense while he scrambles trying to figure what to do next.

With no witness to confirm Tanya Jordan's testimony, unless he can come up with another witness, her words are now hearsay. In an early-morning appearance in chambers, Tannery asked Judge Coats for time to consider his moves. He had no difficulty getting it. Harry and I didn't even oppose the motion. The judge is as mystified as the rest of us concerning Epperson's death, telling the D.A. he wants details as soon as they are available.

In the middle of a murder trial there is not much that can get your mind off events in the courtroom. But this morning is an exception. Still unhinged by Epperson and events of the last twenty-four hours, I am also confronted by the fact that the driving force that caused me to take this case is suddenly gone. Penny Boyd has died.

It happened earlier in the week. Doris called to give me the news, and for the first time since hearing it, I now have a moment to dwell on the pa.s.sing of a child. It brings back memories of the first death I can remember as a kid. I was seven. A little girl crippled from birth and confined to a wheelchair had pa.s.sed away. She lived up the block. I saw her often out on the sidewalk, wheeling along trying to keep up with the other kids. A perpetual smile on her face, she would call me by my first name. With her angelic blond hair and sunny disposition, she seemed not to comprehend the injustice dealt to her in life, legs that were dead and lungs that each year filled with pneumonia. I didn't learn until many years later, after talking to my mother, that it was a bout with pneumonia that finally took her. After all these years, I can still picture her face and remember her name, an indelible impression. I remember the day my mother told me she'd died. I said nothing, went to my room and sat there in shock. In my sheltered world of middle-cla.s.s America, children didn't die.

It seems I have not grown a lot over the years. I was caught completely off-guard when Doris called. I would have expected such a message from someone else, a friend or family member. But Doris was amazingly composed, though her voice was strained, a little raw. The news. .h.i.t me like a bullet in the brow. Penny had died in her sleep.

This morning I sit behind the wheel with Sarah in the pa.s.senger seat, headlights on as we motorcade from the church.

We are five cars behind the hea.r.s.e when we finally park on a gentle curve in the cemetery. I had debated in my mind whether to bring Sarah. The last time she had been to a funeral was her mother's.

Nikki has been dead nearly four years, and I feared that cemeteries and caskets would dredge up all forms of memories, most of them painful. But my daughter has come of age. Attending Penny's funeral was not something for me to decide. When I suggested that she might stay home, that the family would understand, Sarah would have none of it.

This morning she wears an ankle-length black dress, gathered in high under her shaping bosom, and black leather pumps with heels. She is changing from a child into a young woman before my very eyes, a transition occurring with the speed of time-lapse photography.

Sarah has thick brown hair, generous and abundant, and has Nikki's long legs, like a gazelle's. Her thick ponytail now bobs above her shoulders as we walk toward the a.s.sembling crowd at the grave site.

If it must be, at least Penny goes to G.o.d on a bucolic morning, one of those blue Pacific days with transparent wisps of white high in the jet stream. There is only a hint of dew on the gra.s.s, and the soulful tune of birds, none of them visible, their songs erupting from the ma.s.sive oaks and sycamores that shade the graves.

There are more people here than I would have expected for a child who has been largely homebound for two years. There are children here Penny's age-wide-eyed kids, I suspect, from her grade school-and cousins, all confronted, most of them for the first time, with the stark reality of death. Someone they knew, a child, one of their own, is gone.

Folding chairs are set up in two rows under the canopy that covers the casket. Up front in the center is Doris, seated in one of the chairs. Relatives, another woman on one side and her two surviving children on the other, all within touching distance of the coffin, flank her. Frank, it seems, cannot sit. He stands behind her, his large hands on the back of her chair, his head downcast, a giant in pain.

Penny's two surviving siblings, Donald, her little brother who is seven, seems in shock, eyes of wonder. Jennifer, his older sister, Sarah's friend and cla.s.smate, is more controlled.

She looks to see Sarah and actually smiles. She has inherited the social grace of her mother. Even under the circ.u.mstances irrepressible. The last place she wants to be. She loved her sister. Still, this cloud has darkened much of her life; it is probably difficult for her to contemplate life without this load.