He gave me a once-over look and said to Rosten, “Alex — how badly is he hurt?”
“We don’t know yet,” Rosten said grimly. “It looks like he was hit pretty hard on the back of the head. He’s probably got a concussion, if not worse.”
“Christ. Is he conscious?”
“No.”
Leo glanced at me again. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
I did not want to go over it again before the police arrived, but he had a right to know, and the others too. So I gave them a somewhat abbreviated version, while the shriek of the siren got louder and eventually headlights — three sets of them, in tandem — appeared at the top of the far hillside.
When I was done, Leo shook his head and said, “Doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing in that office worth stealing, no money or anything else of value.”
“The police will get to the bottom of it, Mr. Cappellani.”
“I hope so.”
He turned abruptly and went inside the cellar. Rosten went with him, but Dockstetter and Brand stayed where they were and looked alternately at me, as if I were some sort of curious specimen, and at the headlights coming down the road toward us.
The siren cut off as the ambulance rolled into the yard, but the flasher light on its roof kept going, streaking the darkness with stroboscopic red patterns. The other two vehicles were Napa County sheriff’s cars, neither of which had flasher lights or sirens. They all came to stops near where we were standing, and a couple of interns jumped out of the ambulance and opened the rear doors and hauled out a wheeled stretcher. Three uniformed deputies came running up; one of them asked where the injured party was. I said inside, and Dockstetter said he would show them where and led the interns and two of the deputies into the cellar.
I identified myself to the third deputy, a guy about my own age. We went over by the county cars and I explained to him what had taken place; I had told the story enough times now so that it was like delivering a set speech. Then I admitted to being a private investigator, showed him the photostat of my license, and said that I had been doing some confidential work for Alex Cappellani. The deputy wanted to know what work, if it could have any bearing on the attack on Alex. I told him I had no ideas on that. But I gave him a rundown of Alex’s reasons for hiring me and of what I had learned about Jason Booker. When I asked him if he could refrain from saying anything to Rosa Cappellani or any of the others until he was able to talk to Alex, because it was a delicate family situation and maybe not related to the attack, he agreed to handle matters with discretion. He seemed to be a decent sort and I thought that he would keep his word.
While we’d been talking another set of headlights had appeared, this time up in the vineyards to the south, coming down the same dirt-and-gravel road that I had been running on earlier. Now the car, a dusty station wagon, pulled up on the edge of the yard and a man got out and jogged toward us. He was a slender fortyish guy wearing slacks and a turtleneck sweater, with a handsome ascetic face and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin that you could spot at ten paces even in the spinning flasher light.
Just before he reached us, looking half agitated and half perplexed, the cellar doors swung open and the interns came out wheeling Alex on the stretcher. Rosa Cappellani, and Leo, and Shelly and Rosten and the two deputies, followed in a bunch. The slender guy went straight over there, gaped at the stretcher, and then moved quickly to Mrs. Cappellani’s side and put a hand on her arm.
I heard him say, “My God, Rosa, what’s going on? What’s happened to Alex?”
“Someone attacked him, Jason,” she said in her brusque way. “One of the others will explain.”
Jason Booker, I thought. I watched him stand there scowling as Rosa stepped away from him. The interns were loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance now, and Mrs. Cappellani stood in a rigid posture with her arms folded across her breasts until they had closed the doors and started around to the front. Then she turned abruptly to Leo.
“We’ll follow them to the hospital,” she said.
Leo said something I didn’t catch, and the two of them hurried off toward the house, Rosa without looking again at Booker.
Her apparent indifference to him made Booker scowl all the harder. He spun around and went over to Shelly and got into a conversation with her, presumably to find out what was going on.
I glanced at my watch as the ambulance pulled away, and the time was a few minutes past eleven. I asked the deputy beside me if I was going to be needed much longer; he said he didn’t imagine I would be. But then one of the other deputies joined us, and he had questions, and I ended up having to tell my story still another time while he took notes and copied down my name and address and investigator’s license number. It was eleven-thirty before they finally decided it was all right for me to leave.
I thanked them and started wearily to my car. Halfway there, a voice called my name behind me. Shelly. I stopped, turned to her as she came up.
“Leaving us?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”
“That it has.” She watched me for a moment and then smiled faintly. “Maybe we’ll see each other again, one of these days.”
“Maybe we will.”
“Ciao then, big man.”
“Sure,” I said. “Ciao, Shelly.”
And I left her and got into my car and went away from there.
4
I spent the night in a hotel in St. Helena.
When I woke up a little after seven on Friday morning, after a good deep sleep, I felt better than I might have expected. I still had a headache, but it was muted and tolerable; the pain in my wrist was gone, and my lungs were clear of phlegm and my chest felt normal. I was even pretty hungry.
In the bathroom I had a look at myself in the mirror. Nickel-sized bruise on my cheekbone — but it hurt only when I touched it. The bite wound under my collarbone also hurt when I touched it. It was some bite too: torn skin, raw flesh, the teeth marks sunk so deep they were visible even now. The iodine I had swabbed on it last night before going to bed, from the first-aid kit I keep in my car, made it look even worse. I put more iodine on it and covered it with a gauze bandage, to guard against infection; the bite from a human, I had heard somewhere, can be even more dangerous than one from an animal.
After I was done with that I shaved off the gray stubble on my cheeks. Then I put on a change of clothes from my overnight bag, went out and hunted up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle — morning habit — and took it into a cafe on St. Helena’s picturesque main street.
Over eggs and toast and coffee I had a look at what was going on in the world. Most of the front page concerned Fidel Castro, who had been in Washington the past three days for talks with the President — his first visit to the United States in nearly twenty years, and naturally a controversial one. There had been another demonstration by Cuban exiles protesting his presence in the country, but like the others before it, it had been small and well controlled. The President was quoted as saying that the talks were proving successful, which the political columnists were interpreting to mean that re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba was imminent. Castro and his entourage were expected to leave Washington today for a swing through other parts of the U.S., including a brief one-day visit to San Francisco on Monday. On the local scene, the mayor was being roasted by right-wing opponents for inviting Castro. And there was more flap over water rationing; and the Gay Task Force was planning another human rights demonstration. I read Herb Caen’s column: he was grousing again about the infighting in San Francisco’s city government. I turned to the Sporting Green, and one of the columnists there was alleging that the 49ers would be a .500 team at best this year because of poor coaching and dissension between players and management.