"You know his car on sight?"
Her lip curled downward, the question apparently striking her as insulting. "Sure. I've gone skiing in it with Kym maybe ten times. So yes, I know the car."
"I didn't mean any offense," Juhle said. "I guess I'm just asking how sure you are."
"What? That it was Stuart? I don't know. I told you I didn't see him. But if he was driving his car, it was him. Because that was his car."
"And how did you know that?"
"I don't know. I just knew."
Mrs. Robley decided to put in her two cents. "She knows what she knows, Inspector. She's not lying to you."
"Of course not. There's no question of that." Juhle spoke matter-of-factly to Bethany. "I'm sorry if I sound critical. That's not my intention. I'm just trying to make sure of what you're saying. So now, getting back to Stuart, you watched him pull his car into his garage across the street and then close the garage door behind him?"
"No." Again, the question seemed to frustrate her. "Look, I'm sure. No. I just saw him pull up and I'm like, 'Oh, Stuart's getting home,' and then went over and got in bed. I didn't think anything about it, except that I noticed it. The end. And I didn't sit at the window and watch until he closed the garage door behind him. Why would I do that? It wasn't all that interesting, dull though the rest of my life might be."
Juhle hesitated, a fragment of a barely remembered something nagging at him. "But I believe you said… can you give me just a second?"
"Sure. More, if you need."
He thanked her, then walked a few steps down to the sidewalk and rewound the tape recorder. In a minute, he was back up at the door with Bethany. "Here," he said, "listen to this."
When he pushed the recorder's play button, they heard her voice saying, "No. He opened the garage automatically and went inside. Then closed it behind him. So I never saw him. But it was his car."
"See?" he said. "You hear it?"
"What?"
"You say, 'Then closed it behind him.' Which you just said you didn't see him do."
"I didn't. See him close it, I mean." "Well, which is it?" "It was closed."
"Okay." Juhle rubbed away the crease in his forehead. He killed another few seconds fast-forwarding his tape recorder to the end again, and turned it back to record. Then he said, "Excuse me, Bethany, for being so dumb. But then how did you know it was closed behind him if you didn't see him close it?"
For a brief moment, the question seemed to stump her. Her normally grave expression turned to a look of near-despair before she suddenly broke into a surprisingly quite lovely smile. "Because I saw him open it later," she said. "So it had to be closed."
"You saw him open it? When was this?"
"Twelve forty-five. Pretty much exactly again." She brought her shoulders up in a shrug. "I had insomnia. I always have insomnia. I hate it. But then I had to get up and go to the bathroom and
I noticed it had been an hour and fifteen minutes already that I'd been awake, which made me start freaking out about how tired I'd be for school today." She let out a heavy sigh. "And which I am. Was. God."
"So what happened? You looked out the window and…"
"And Stuart was backing out again…"
"Backing out? At quarter to one in the morning?"
"I know. I thought that was a little weird too. But really, I wasn't thinking too much about him or anything else except getting some sleep." Stifling a sudden yawn, she smiled again. "Sorry. Just talking about it, sometimes, you know…"
"I hear you. But I noticed you called Mr. Gorman Stuart. Do you know him well?"
"Not well, no. But he's Kym's dad. I know him okay. He doesn't like to be called Mr. Gorman."
"And you and Kym are friends?"
"Well, kind of. She's a little up and down, you know. Hyper up and then kind of a drag down. And lately not so much. Actual friends, I mean, except we ski together sometimes. Anyway, we've known each other since fourth grade." She brought a finger to her mouth and chewed the end of it. "This is going to kill her."
"Were she and her mom close?"
"No. I mean her dad."
"What about her dad?"
"Well, you just said. What you were investigating. I mean, if he killed her."
"I didn't say that, Bethany. We don't have any one suspect right now. But you're saying Kymberly and her mom didn't get along?"
The girl shrugged. "Her mom was pretty busy most of the time." Reaching back, she touched her own mother's hand briefly, then came back to Juhle. "Caryn wasn't really that bad."
"Did people say she was?"
Bethany shrugged. "Sometimes the two of them-Stuart and Kym-they'd be a little sarcastic. But they both loved her, I think.
You don't think Stuart killed her, do you? I can't believe he'd do anything like that."
Juhle kept it matter-of-fact. "I'm just talking to people, Bethany. Trying to get to what happened. I might have to talk to you again.
Would that be all right?"
"Sure. I guess."
Juhle peeked around behind her. "Mrs. Robley?" "If it's okay with her."
"All right, then. Thank you both for your time."
Eight
Stuart was standing by the couch, stretching. He and Gina had been going over issues for the past couple of hours when suddenly he'd become aware of the time and jumped up. "Well," he was saying, "whether or not we hit most of it, I've got to get going if I want to be on time for Kym, and I do. If Juhle calls you, maybe you can just set up a time we can all talk. But not tonight, okay, please. My girl's going to need me. That's the most important thing right now."
"Sure. Of course." Gina had pulled her heavy satchel over in front of her and dropped her well-used legal pad into one of its sections. "We'll just stay in wait-and-see mode until we hear from Juhle. If he calls me tonight, I'll tell him you need time with your daughter and ask if we can set up a time tomorrow or the next day."
"You think he will? Call you tonight?"
"Maybe not, unless there's been some break in the case we don't know about. Either way, I'll try to check in with him again, get some sense of things." She looked up at him. "Are you sure you're all right?"
He shook his head, weariness now all over him. "Just thinking about Kym." Staring into empty space across the room, he blinked rapidly a few times. "And Caryn. She's really gone, isn't she?"
"I'm afraid so."
Squeezing at his temples, he sighed deeply, then looked across at her. "Jesus, what a waste. What an unbelievable, colossal fucking waste."
The Travelodge was barely a mile from Gina's condominium. Most of it was uphill, true, but to Gina's mind, that just made it a better exercise opportunity. So after she told Stuart that he should go on ahead, that she'd let herself out and get the door, she waited until he'd gone, then took off her black pumps, dropped them into the satchel and replaced them with the pair of tennis shoes that she always carried in her bag.
Outside, the evening was still warm, although the ocean breeze had increased enough to stir up the occasional wisp of dust or debris in the gutters. Gina walked with an athletic ease, her satchel converted to a backpack. Ahead of her, across Van Ness Avenue, the street began its steep climb that summitted at the oft-photographed view of Lombard as the "crookedest street in the world."
When she got to the top, Gina was breathing hard. Good. That's what exercise was-breathing hard. She stopped a minute to take in the view. In front of her, down in the valley, North Beach, the towers of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, and a slice of Fisherman's Wharf, with Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower beyond them. Behind her, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, and from this height the glint of the sun off the Pacific Ocean on the horizon as well.
She was aware of course that on a lot of days and nights-maybe even most of them-the fog could be so thick here that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, but when the place conspired with the weather at a moment like this, Gina thought a person could live here for a hundred years and still not grow tired of it.