“I’m here,” I said.
“What the hell happened?”
“Nothing. Mechanical glitch. I’ll call you later. Take care of Casey.” I hung up.
Trinh and Nurse Barbara had slipped into the room. Barbara bustled over to help Dr. Song, while Trinh guarded the door. “She’s okay,” I said to them.
Trinh nodded, though she didn’t seem persuaded. She looked at me and said, apologetically, “Some of those policemen in the hall want to talk to you.”
“Good,” I said, helping Dr. Song to redress Emily. “I want to talk with the police. Ask them to come in.”
Trinh brought in two of them. Both wore banker-gray suits, both had police photo I.D.‘s clipped to their handkerchief pockets. There were four rain-spattered black wingtips on the floor. In spite of this plainclothes uniform, the two couldn’t have been more different. One was tall, slender, gray-haired, his face set in an expression of quiet, almost reverential watchfulness. His partner was a solid block of man, from his Brillo pad mat of red hair to his box-shaped feet. If he hadn’t had tears in his eyes, he would have been thoroughly intimidating.
The big redhead moved toward me first, offering his massive hand.
“Detective T. O. Bronkowski,” he said. “You’re McGee, Doc’s sister?”
“MacGowen,” I said. “Maggie MacGowen.”
“Right. Saw on the tube that thing you did about the ‘Frisco quake. Thought you’d be taller.”
“I’m tall enough,” I said. At five-seven, I’m no midget.
“I guess because the Doc’s such a stretch model, I thought you would be, too.”
He carried a white plastic trash bag that he carefully set on the floor. “I’m so damn sorry about the Doc. How’s she doing?”
“Holding on,” I said. “Who did this to her?”
“Don’t have much to tell you,” Bronkowski said. “But, count on it, we will. In the middle of Chinatown, in the middle of the day, someone heard the gunshot, someone saw something. People around here can be pretty tight around the police. But for the Doc’s sake, they’ll come around.”
Bronkowski leaned over and took a long look at Emily. His face flushed with blood. “Bastard must be some kind of animal to leave her out in the rain.”
“Emily was left out in the rain?” I hated the picture that flashed behind my eyes. “How long?”
“Hour, maybe two,” Bronkowski said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Alley off Gin Ling Way. Around six, a busboy from Hop Louie’s ducked out for a smoke and found her lying behind some lettuce crates.”
I turned to Dr. Song. “If someone had found her sooner.
He shook his head. “Wouldn’t have made any difference.”
When I looked away, I met the stare of the second detective. I had nearly forgotten about him. He stayed behind Bronkowski, quietly, constantly watching me. I couldn’t tell his age; his face was young but his short hair and his carefully trimmed mustache were silver-white. If I were a criminal, I think he would be the one to worry about.
We engaged in a bit of a staredown. I think I won, because he was the first to smile. He offered his hand.
“Detective Michael Flint,” he said. “Emily and I go a long way back.”
“Detective,” I said, taking his hand. His fingers were still cold and damp from outside.
“You live in the Bay Area?” he asked.
“San Francisco.”
“Down visiting for the holidays?”
“No. I flew down just for the day, to see Emily.”
“Someone called you about the shooting?”
“No.”
“You just happened to come down. Today?”
“Is this the third degree?” I asked.
“This is conversation.” He smiled again. I leave the third degrees to Bronk.”
“Okay, then,” I said. I didn’t just happen to come down. Emily called me. We were supposed to meet at her apartment at four.
“Did you meet?”
“No. She never showed.”
“Any idea what she was involved in?”
“Other than a measles epidemic and TB testing, no. I could probably sketch in her day until about noon. Then I lost her trail. She missed some appointments.”
“Noon? That gives us a big gap. We think she was most likely shot between four and five.”
“Jesus.” I felt nauseous. “At four I was sitting on her doorstep, waiting for her.”
“Alone?”
“Alone with everyone in Chinatown.”
We were interrupted by the priest I had seen in the lobby. He pushed open the door and looked around the room. “May I?” he said.
“Father Hermilio,” Dr. Song said. “Please, come in.”
The small room already held a capacity crowd, so one more soul made tight quarters intimate.
“Albert, Michael, Bronk,” Father Hermilio greeted each in his soft, accented voice. Then he reached out for me. “You’re Maggie. Emily always speaks of you with affection. She is very proud of you.”
I almost lost it then.
“I ask you for permission to administer the sacraments to Emily,” Father Hermilio said.
“The sacraments?” I had to think about it. Emily had fallen away from our parents’ Catholicism long before I had. As far as I could remember, her last religious excursion had been a summer trip through Buddhism. If there seemed to be a lot of church-related people in her life, it was only because church volunteers staffed so many of the city’s social-service programs.
“Is it all right, Maggie?” Father asked.
“Yes, please,” I said, not for Emily’s sake, but because I knew my mother would ask about it when I called our parents. When I called our parents.
Father Hermilio slipped a purple stole around his neck and took out a little bottle of anointing oil. Bronk laid his big arm around me, Albert Song took my hand, and we all watched the priest. Maybe someone in the room was waiting for a miracle to come from the prayers. I was not. I was only glad for the moment of silence to gather myself, because I did not want these people to see me cry.
The situation was doubly hard for me because it was all deja vu, a rerun of the night of December 20, 1969.
Someone, the Pentagon maybe, had leaked an unconfirmed report that my brother, Marc, had been fragged, killed by his own men, in Vietnam. Coming at the same time as Emily’s indictment, with her face on the cover of Time, this was big news. The press descended on my parents’ house in Berkeley, corralling them inside, as it were.
When a picture of me in my school uniform appeared in the early television newscasts, my father had sent Emily to fetch me from school. We made our escape from St. Catherine’s Academy, to the principal’s great relief, directly after the swim meet. I remember little about the ride up the Peninsula in the car beside Em, except that my hair was still wet and I couldn’t stop shivering.
At home, we found the usual undecorated Christmas tree in the living room, and the accumulation of lights and ornaments stacked in boxes beside it. Mother always waited to decorate until we were all home for the holidays. That year she had defied tradition and hung a snapshot Marc had sent from Vietnam. We never got around to hanging anything else on that tree.
For the rest of the afternoon, we had sat silent vigil. There was nothing safe to say. Sometime during the evening a detachment of officers arrived from the Presidio across the Bay, bearing the official message. They had filed in and stood in our living room, ramrod straight, all starched and pressed and spit-polished, as my parents crumbled. It had been brutal.
And now it was my turn to deliver the message. There was no way, in the end, to soften the truth except to tell them in person. But I could not leave Emily.
I thought that the best thing would be to call on my father’s brother, Max, impose on him as I had so often before, persuade him to prepare the ground.
Everyone in the room was watching me, half a dozen pairs of tear-filled eyes. Their sadness made me feel better for Emily, knowing there were so many people who cared about her. Em, always on a crusade, didn’t always spend enough time nurturing friendships. Or little sisters.