Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

percent social, Carmen. There are a couple of things I need to talk to you about.”

“About the case?”

“Indirectly.”

“Where did I go wrong?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. You didn’t go wrong, there just turns out to be more to it than was immediately apparent.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Sam Bernstein wasn’t killed that night in the Bronx.”

“Holy shit!”

“…is right.”

She stood and walked out onto the lawn. The first stars were piercing the deep blue of the evening sky. After a moment, she turned to face me. “When did you find out? Did you know this back in Shamrock? This changes everything.”

“I found out today. No I didn’t, and I am not so sure it does.”

She spread her hands and shook her head. It was like a gesture of helplessness. “How? How did you find out?”

“I took my pictures of Mick’s skull to the ME. I wanted to make sure it was him. While we were talking, it struck me that dental record ID really depended a lot—” I gave a small laugh. “—on your having dental records to begin with.”

“Obviously.”

“A lot of the less privileged people in our society haven’t got dental insurance,” I went on, “and so their dental records are sketchy at best or nonexistent. Sam would have known that.”

“What’s your point?”

I was thoughtful for a bit, watching the flames in the barbeque, feeling their heat reaching my face in the evening air.

“I have never been really comfortable with Sam’s murder. The timing was just too much of a coincidence. A gunshot wound to the head. Probably a .45. A .45 was what Sam took from his father’s trunk. When I looked closer at the details of the wound, the entry was at the back of the skull, the exit through the front.” I shook my head, “Not just an execution, but an execution designed to disfigure.” We stared at each other a moment as she assimilated the implications. “And let’s face it, what mother is going to examine her son’s face in that condition? She’s going to close her eyes and look away. She is going to see his clothes, his personal effects, and she is going to say it’s him. And who is going to question that? We have his ID papers. The cops are going to think, this middle-class schmuck was at Hunts Point at two a.m., probably looking for a whore, and he got mugged. What did he expect?”

“So you’re saying Sam killed some kid?”

I shrugged. “Looks that way to me.”

“So who did Jennifer and Mick talk to?”

I smiled. “Sam.”

“Shit. Why? What was he trying to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you told the Feds?”

“I haven’t told anybody yet except the ME and you. And I asked Lynda to keep quiet about it till I am ready. I’m asking you the same thing.”

“I got to tell you, I am lost.”

I sighed and nodded. “I think that was the idea.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take a few days off. Go away.”

“Where?”

I smiled. “I think I’ll put some flowers in my hair and go to San Francisco. I hear summertime will be a love-in there.”

“You want me to come with you?”

I smiled, my gaze lost in the flames.

“Where I’m going, you can't follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of, Dehan. But we’ll always have Shamrock.”

“Asshole.”

The coals had burned down, and I stood to put the steaks on the grill. I threw on a handful of fresh thyme first and then laid on the oiled steaks as the flames leapt and licked at the meat. The haunting strains of a mandolin trailed out onto the evening air.

Dehan asked me, “Is Maria Garcia dead?”

I poured the rich wine, red like dense blood, into the two glasses. The intense orange of the fire glowed within it like a living thing. “Oh yes.” I handed her a glass. “There can be no doubt about that at all. Maria Garcia is dead.”

“Who killed her?”

I stared into her black eyes. She knew what I was going to say, but she needed to hear me say it.

“Sam Bernstein.”

Twenty-FIVE

I touched down in San Francisco at ten in the morning and picked up my hire car at the Hertz desk. I treated myself to a Mustang Cabrio convertible and took it easy to my hotel on Taylor Street, via the Sierra Point Parkway.

I checked in, had a shower, and changed my clothes, then settled down to do some research. There are a lot of universities in and around San Francisco. It took a lot of old-fashioned, dinosaur-style, tedious looking up lists and making phone calls, and progress was slow. At midday I went for a walk, found some food, and took it back to my room, where I continued making lists, making phone calls, and crossing entries off my lists. It was like a pulse, like the rhythm of life: accumulate, eliminate, accumulate more, eliminate more.

I get deep like that sometimes. Dehan would approve.

By the time I fell into bed that night, I felt I had done about all I could do over the phone. So the next morning, after coffee and croissants, I took my Mustang and drove across the bay, via the Dwight Eisenhower Highway, to Berkeley. I got lost for a bit, enjoying the feeling of being at large in a cool, hip city, and finally wound up at Tolman Hall and the psychology department. I found my way to the student office and finally tracked down Tania Goodman, whom I had spoken to on the phone the day before.

She was sweet, and that always helps.

I took her aside, told her who I was and that I was there in an unofficial capacity on behalf of a friend.