I took out my notebook and pencil, glancing at Gary. He had stopped pacing and was watching the DiCesares. His craggy face was still mottled with anger, and I sensed he shared Ernest’s uncertainty.
Opening the notebook, I said, “I need more details about Vanessa, what her life was like the past month or so. Perhaps something will occur to one of you that didn’t this morning.”
“Ms. McCone,” Ernest said, “I don’t think Sylvia’s up to this right now. Why don’t you and Gary talk, and then if there’s anything else, I’ll be glad to help you.”
“Fine.” Gary was the one I was primarily interested in questioning, anyway. I waited until Ernest and Sylvia had left the room, then turned to him.
When the door shut behind them, he hurled his cigarette into the empty fireplace. “Goddamn little bitch!” he said.
I said, “Why don’t you sit down.”
He looked at me for a few seconds, obviously wanting to keep on pacing, but then he flopped into the chair Sylvia had vacated. When I’d first met with Gary this morning, he’d been controlled and immaculately groomed, and he had seemed more solicitous of the DiCesares than concerned with his own feelings. Now his clothing was disheveled, his graying hair tousled, and he looked to be on the brink of a rage that would flatten anyone in its path.
Unfortunately, what I had to ask him would probably fan that rage. I braced myself and said, “Now tell me about Vanessa. And not all the stuff about her being a lovely young woman and a brilliant student. I heard all that this morning — but now we both know it isn’t the whole truth, don’t we?”
Surprisingly he reached for a cigarette and lit it slowly, using the time to calm himself. When he spoke, his voice was as level as my own. “All right, it’s not the whole truth.” Vanessa is lovely and brilliant. She’ll make a top-notch lawyer. There’s a hardness in her; she gets it from Ernest. It took guts to fake this suicide...”
“What do you think she hopes to gain from it?”
“Freedom. From me. From Ernest’s domination. She’s probably taken off somewhere for a good time. When she’s ready she’ll come back and make her demands.”
“And what will they be?”
“Enough money to move into a place of her own and finish law school. And she’ll get it, too. She’s all her parents have.”
“You don’t think she’s set out to make a new life for herself?”
“Hell, no. That would mean giving up all this.” The sweep of his arm encompassed the house and all of the DiCesares’ privileged world.
But there was one factor that made me doubt his assessment. I said, “What about the other men in her life?”
He tried to look surprised, but an angry muscle twitched in his jaw.
“Come on, Gary,” I said, “you know there were other men. Even Ernest and Sylvia were aware of that.”
“Ah, Christ!” He popped out of the chair and began pacing again. “All right, there were other men. It started a few months ago. I didn’t understand it; things had been good with us; they still were good physically. But I thought, okay, she’s young; this is only natural. So I decided to give her some rope, let her get it out of her system. She didn’t throw it in my face, didn’t embarrass me in front of my friends. Why shouldn’t she have a last fling?”
“And then?”
“She began making noises about breaking off the engagement. And Ernest started that shit about not footing the bill for law school. Like a fool I went along with it, and she seemed to cave in from the pressure. But a few weeks later, it all started up again — only this time it was purposeful, cruel.”
“In what way?”
“She’d know I was meeting political associates for lunch or dinner, and she’d show up at the restaurant with a date. Later she’d claim he was just a friend, but you couldn’t prove it from the way they acted. We’d go to a party and she’d flirt with every man there. She got sly and secretive about where she’d been, what she’d been doing.”
I had pictured Vanessa as a very angry young woman; now I realized she was not a particularly nice one, either.
Gary was saying, “... the last straw was on Halloween. We went to a costume party given by one of her friends from Hastings. I didn’t want to go — costumes, a young crowd, not my kind of thing — and so she was angry with me to begin with. Anyway, she walked out with another man, some jerk in a soldier outfit. They were dancing...”
I sat up straighter. “Describe the costume.”
“An old-fashioned soldier outfit. Wide-brimmed hat with a plume, frock coat, sword.”
“What did the man look like?”
“Youngish. He had a full beard and wore granny glasses.”
Lee Gottschalk.
The address I got from the phone directory for Lee Gottschalk was on California Street not far from Twenty-fifth Avenue and only a couple of miles from where I’d first met the ranger at Fort Point. When I arrived there and parked at the opposite curb, I didn’t need to check the mailboxes to see which apartment was his; the corner windows on the second floor were ablaze with light, and inside I could see Gottschalk, sitting in an armchair in what appeared to be his living room. He seemed to be alone but expecting company, because frequently he looked up from the book he was reading and checked his watch.
In case the company was Vanessa DiCesare, I didn’t want to go barging in there. Gottschalk might find a way to warn her off, or simply not answer the door when she arrived. Besides, I didn’t yet have a definite connection between the two of them; the “jerk in a soldier outfit” could have been someone else, someone in a rented costume that just happened to resemble the working uniform at the fort. But my suspicions were strong enough to keep me watching Gottschalk for well over an hour. The ranger had lied to me that afternoon.
The lies had been casual and convincing, except for two mistakes — such small mistakes that I hadn’t caught them even when I’d read the newspaper account of Vanessa’s purported suicide later. But now I recognized them for what they were: The paper had called Gary Stornetta a “political associate” of Vanessa’s father, rather than his former campaign manager, as Lee had termed him. And while the paper mentioned the suicide note, it had not said it was taped inside the car. While Gottschalk conceivably could know about Gary managing Ernest’s campaign for the Board of Supes from other newspaper accounts, there was no way he could have known how the note was secured — except from Vanessa herself.
Because of those mistakes, I continued watching Gottschalk, straining my eyes as the mist grew heavier, hoping Vanessa would show up or that he’d eventually lead me to her. The ranger appeared to be nervous: He got up a couple of times and turned on a TV, flipped through the channels, and turned it off again. For about ten minutes he paced back and forth. Finally, around twelve-thirty, he checked his watch again, then got up and drew the draperies shut. The lights went out behind them.
I tensed, staring through the blowing mist at the door of the apartment building. Somehow Gottschalk hadn’t looked like a man who was going to bed. And my impression was correct: In a few minutes he came through the door onto the sidewalk carrying a suitcase — pale leather like the one of Vanessa’s Sylvia had described to me — and got into a dark-colored Mustang parked on his side of the street. The car started up and he made a U-turn, then went right on Twenty-fifth Avenue. I followed. After a few minutes, it became apparent that he was heading for Fort Point.
When Gottschalk turned into the road to the fort, I kept going until I could pull over on the shoulder. The brake lights of the Mustang flared, and then Gottschalk got out and unlocked the low iron bar that blocked the road from sunset to sunrise; after he’d driven through he closed it again, and the car’s lights disappeared down the road.