I took a right onto Thirtieth and pulled up in front of a two-story stucco 1940s duplex. Cheerful marigolds bordered a sun-parched lawn, and ancient rosebushes flanked the front steps. A cracked concrete path led to the front door. I knocked. No response. I rang the doorbell. Still nothing.
A little girl skidded up on a pink, long-handled bicycle. An old-fashioned wooden clothespin attached a playing card to the bike's frame so that it rubbed against the spokes as the wheel turned, making a pleasant clicking sound. She wore red cotton shorts and a white T-shirt, and her hair was plaited into dozens of beaded braids that fell to her slim shoulders.
“Hi,” the little girl said, her face serious.
“Hi there.”
“I'm Shawna. What are you doing?”
“I'm looking for a friend of mine. Do you know the women who live here?”
She nodded. “They go to school up to Berkeley.”
“Have you seen them around today?”
She shook her head. “Everybody just walk in. They leave the door open.”
I gave the doorknob a tentative twist. It turned, so I stuck my head inside and called out, “Hellooooo?”
The drab but clean foyer was crowded with a ten-speed bicycle and a shoe rack holding six pairs of sneakers and espadrilles. Straight ahead was a door with K. SMYERS printed on an index card. To the right a flight of carpeted stairs led to the second floor.
“Jus' go on up,” Shawna said. “I tol' you, they don' mind.”
She rode off, her hair beads and the playing card clacking.
I didn't usually take etiquette advice from children, but since I was here I figured what the heck. “Cindy? Anybody home? Hello?”
At the top of the stairs another door sported another card labeled B. NGUYEN/C. TANAKA. I knocked again, again no reply. I tried the knob.
The door opened onto a bright living room furnished with a large television set, a CD player and speakers, a tall rack filled with CDs, a maroon futon sofa, a bamboo papasan chair, and a bookshelf crammed with texts. Beyond the living room was a combination kitchen/dining room with a light green Formica-topped table and four chairs. The living room walls were hung with inexpensive framed prints from local museum exhibitions. A neat stack of sky-blue bath towels were piled on the futon sofa next to a white plastic basket of clean clothes. The apartment was neat as a pin. It was also empty.
I jumped as a black cat with green headlamp eyes rubbed against my legs and mewed.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I crooned, picking up the friendly feline and scratching her behind the ears. A red metal heart attached to her pink collar said her name was Lurleen.
Lurleen purred, leapt from my arms, and strolled into the kitchen, looking over her shoulder at me. A plastic dish was half-full of dry cat food, but I didn't see any water, so I filled a large bowl from the dish rack next to the sink and set it on the floor. As I watched the cat delicately lap the water, I felt an unexpected warmth. Maybe I
should
get a cat.
A door off the living room stood ajar. Lurleen dashed into the room, then returned and rubbed against my legs some more. I scooped her up.
“What's up, sweetie? Is that your room?” I pushed the door open.
The rank smell of stale vomit hit me in the gut like a sucker punch. The bedroom was lined with shelves full of textbooks, precisely labeled binders, and boxes of minicassette tapes, and was spare and tidy except for an empty bottle of Jägermeister and some vials of pills lying on the bedside table.
Cindy lay on her stomach, one arm dangling off the side of the bed so that her fingers lightly touched the floor.
Lurleen leapt from my arms and bolted from the room.
“Cindy?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”
As though in slow motion, I reached out my hand and brushed the hair from her face. Her eyes were closed, but a trickle of vomit trailed from her open mouth and pooled on the sheets. I touched her arm. It was cold and rigid.
I yanked my hand away and jumped backward, tripped, and fell on my butt. Black spots danced before my eyes. I heard someone choking and making unintelligible guttural sounds, and it took a few seconds to realize it was me. Staggering to my feet, I made it out of the room and stumbled down the stairs to the front stoop, where I sank onto the top step. Lurleen climbed into my lap with a feline air of entitlement. I stroked her sleek black fur, took great gulps of fresh air, and tried to clear my mind and get my emotions in check.
I
hated
finding dead bodies. I
really
hated the fact that finding dead bodies had become an all-too-common occurrence in my life.
There was a clicking sound. Shawna sat on her bike on the sidewalk.
“Hey, Lurleen,” she said. “You okay, lady?”
“Yeah.” I managed a shaky smile. “But the lady upstairs isn't so good. Have you seen anybody go in there lately?”
She shook her head. “She sick?”
“She, uhâwell, she needs a doctor. Would you do me a favor, Shawna?”
“ 'Kay.”
“Run home and call 911? Tell the operator you need an ambulance.” I'd read in a library brochure called
Safety Is No Accident!
to call from a landline so the address would show up on the 911 operator's computer.
“Mama said to do that only in a 'mergency.”
“This is an emergency, Shawna.”
“ 'Kay.” The girl's eyes widened, and with a push of a sandal-clad foot she headed off on her bike.
I called 911 on my cell phone just in case, wondered at the beauty and grace of cats, and tried to pull myself together.
It took only a few minutes for the emergency vehicles to arrive. A squad car was the first to pull up, followed by paramedics and a fire truck. I moved out of the way as uniformed personnel swarmed up the stairs. A potbellied, mustached cop listened to my story with a weary but compassionate air. We both fell silent as the EMTs came downstairs, shaking their heads. The cop thumbed his shoulder mike and requested that detectives be dispatched. I saw black spots again and sat down suddenly, leaning against the metal rail.
Disembodied voices spoke of a bottle of booze and vials of pills. Lurleen had abandoned me when the newcomers arrived, and I already missed her. I tried humming to block out the voices, but the only song I could think of was “Oops, I Did It Again.”
A middle-aged paramedic with a kind, no-nonsense manner squatted in front of me and said she needed to check me over. I smiled at her. I liked paramedics. They helped people and never threatened to take them to jail. The woman wore her hair in a short, practical bob that Mary called a “man-cut.” She gave me something sweet to drink, and I started to feel less spacey.
Twenty minutes later an unmarked car pulled up and two suit-clad detectives got out. They chatted with the uniformed cops, who pointed at me. I braced myself.
“I'm Detective Hucles,” a tall, soft-spoken detective said. I noticed his partner interviewing Shawna and a woman I assumed was her mother. “You found the body?”
“Yes.”
“Name and address?”
I told him.
“You a friend?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I drove up about, I don't knowâmaybe forty minutes ago? I went upstairs and found Cindy. Came back downstairs and asked Shawna, the little girl, to go home and call 911.”
“You have a key to the apartment?”
“No, the door was open.”
“Wide open?”
“Um, no. I meant it was unlocked.”
“So you just walked on in?”
“Shawna said I could.”
The detective smiled. “See anyone when you got here?”
“Just the little girl. And Lurleen.”
“Who's Lurleen?”
“The cat.”
As if on cue, Lurleen strolled over, and I scooped her up. Her rusty purr put me at ease.
“Ah. You feeling okay?”
“I'm all right.”
“Okay, then. You touch the body?”
“I moved her hair aside. And touched her arm.” My skin crawled at the memory of Cindy's cold flesh.
“That's all?”
“Yes.”
“Name of the deceased?”
“Cindy Tanaka. She isâwasâa graduate student at Berkeley. Anthropology. A Dr. Gossen is her professor.”
“Looks like she had a roommate.”
“She's out of town.”
“Name?”
“I don't knowâI think it's on the card next to the door.”
“Contact number?”
I shook my head.
“Know when she's getting back?”
“No. I've never met her. I didn't know Cindy all that well, either.”
“Any reason Ms. Tanaka would want to kill herself?”
“You think she killed herself?”
“The medical examiner will make the final determination, but so far there are no signs of foul play.”
“I can't imagine her doing such a thing.”
“You said you didn't know her that well,” he said with a shrug. “It's often hard to figure these things out.”
The other detective walked up, and the two huddled. Detective Hucles turned back to me. “I'd like the EMTs to check you out again. Then you can go.”
“I'm fine.”
“Humor me. The first time you see a dead body can be quite a shock.” He gave me an encouraging smile, and I thought,
If only the nice detective knew
. . . . He signaled the paramedic with the man-cut, who checked my vital signs again and confirmed I was safe to drive.
Shawna and her mother approached.
“Nice to meet you, lady,” said Shawna.
“Are you all right?” Shawna's mother asked, her voice gentle. “What a terrible thing.”
“Thanks, I'm okay. It was nice to meet you, too, Shawna.”
“We'd be glad to care for Lurleen until Brianna, Cindy's roommate, gets back,” Shawna's mother said. “That is, unless you'd planned to take her.”
“I'd better not. I don't know anything about cats,” I said and regretfully passed Lurleen to Shawna.
Detective Hucles glanced up from his notebook and handed me a business card. “You think of anything else, give me a call. We have any questions, we'll call you. Take care, now.”
I drove straight to the cemetery. Someone there must know Cindy. She had a key to the gates, after all. A grave-robbing ghoul, wild speculation about a mistaken masterpiece, and now the death of a vibrant young woman . . . how did all this fit together?
Did
it fit together?
The minute I walked into the stone cottage that housed the cemetery offices I felt assaulted by the huge Tim O'Neill painting. The downside of my sensitivity to art was that it was almost physically painful to be around something I found distasteful. At the moment my nerves were so jangled that the painting brought tears to my eyes, and the walls seemed to close in on me.
The only employee in the room was the curly-haired man, who sat at a desk talking to two young men.
“Excuse me, do you know someone named Cindy Tanaka?” I interrupted.
He shook his head, his pale eyes expressionless.
“Is Helena around?” I persisted.
He shook his head again and turned back to his clients.
I spun on my heel to leave. Big mistake. I swayed, and my knees started to buckle.
A strong hand grasped my elbow. “Why don't you have a seat for a moment?” a man's sympathetic voice suggested.
The kind-eyed stranger led me to the Naugahyde sofa and sat beside me. The gray pinstripes in his subdued, well-cut suit complemented the spray of silver at his temples. He gave me a sad smile, and white teeth flashed in a distinguished, tanned face whose wrinkles suggested he'd seen his share of sorrows. I imagined working in the funeral business took its toll.
“You're pale,” he said. “May I get you some juice?”
“No, thanks.”
He took my hand in his fine-boned one. “Has someone passed?”
I nodded, and realized I'd come to the right place to mourn. “I'm sorry,” I mumbled. “I hardly even knew her. I don't know why I'm reacting like this.”
“Death is always a shock,” he said. “No matter how much you're around it. Every once in a while a case really gets to me, and I wish I could have done more.”
I stared at him. “More how?”
“Often I think that had I been called in earlier things might have turned out differently.”
Turned out differently?
What was this guy talking about? Dead was dead, and no funeral director in the world could change that.
The eyes that had seemed so warm and reassuring a few minutes before now took on a sinister cast. What kind of a pervert was this guy? Did he have some kind of Dr. Frankenstein complex?
“Just what do you do to them?” I demanded.
“To whom? My patients?”
“You call them your
patients
?”
The man looked bewildered. “My dear, I'm a physician.”
“You don't work here?”
“You thoughtâoh my.” He gave a hearty laugh. “No, though I do hang around often enough. My wife, Helena, is the head docent. I'm a gastroenterologist.”
“A gastroenterologist?”
“A guts n' butts man, as we say in the biz.”
I decided gastroenterology was even scarier than proctology.
“I was here looking for my wife. Did you know that Russell over there”âhe nodded toward the curly-haired man at the deskâ“is something of a cemetery savant? He wrote this.” He handed me a picture book from the coffee table. Its cover read
Bay Area Cemeteries.