Page 16 of Safe Enough

Wolfe turned away. Picked up the phone.

Dialed 911.

The locals called the state troopers. Mary was kept under some kind of unofficial house arrest in the kitchen until the excavation was completed. A state lieutenant showed up with a search warrant. One of his men pulled an old credenza away from the garage wall and found a hammer behind it. A carpentry tool. Dried blood and old hair were still clearly visible on it. It was bagged up and carried out to the yard. The profile of its head exactly matched the hole punched through the skull they had found in the ground.

At that point Mary Lovell was arrested for the murder of her husband.

Then science took over. Dental, blood, and DNA tests proved the remains to be those of the husband. No question about that. It was the husband’s blood and hair on the hammer, too. No question about that, either. Mary’s fingerprints were on the hammer’s handle. Twenty-three points of similarity, more than enough for the locals, the state police, and the FBI all put together.

Then lawyers took over. The county DA loved the case to bits. To put a middle-class white woman away would prove his impartial evenhandedness. Mary got a lawyer, the friend of a friend. He was good, but overmatched. Not by the DA. By the weight of evidence. Mary wanted to plead not guilty, but he persuaded her to say yes to manslaughter. Emotional turmoil, temporary loss of reason, everlasting regret and remorse. So one day in late spring Wolfe sat in the courtroom and watched her go down for a minimum ten years. She looked at him only once during the whole proceeding.

Then Wolfe went back to her house.

He lived there alone for many years. He kept on working and did his own invoices. He grew to really love the solitude and the silence. Sometimes he drove down to the Stadium but when parking hit twenty bucks he figured his Bronx days were over. He bought a big-screen TV. Did his own cable work, of course. Watched the games at home. Sometimes after the last out he would sit in the dark and review the case in his head. Cops, lawyers, dozens of them. They had done a pretty thorough job between them.

But they had missed two vital questions.

One: With her pale delicate hands, how was Mary Lovell accustomed to handling hammers and shovels? Why did the local cops right at the beginning not see angry red blisters all over her palms?

And two: How did Wolfe know exactly where to start digging the hole for that damn Christmas tree? Right after the fight? Aren’t cops supposed to hate coincidences?

But all in all Wolfe figured he was safe enough.

NORMAL IN EVERY WAY

In 1954, the San Francisco Police Department was as good or as bad as any other large urban force in the nation. Which is to say it was mixed. It was part noble, part diligent, part grudgingly dutiful, part lazy and defensive, part absurdly corrupt, and abusive, and violent. In other words normal in every way. Including in the extent of its resources. Now they seem pitifully few. Then they were all there was. Manual typewriters and carbon paper, files in cardboard boxes, and old rotary dial telephones, sitting up straight and proud on metal war surplus desks.

It goes without saying there were no computers. There were no databases. No search engines. No keywords or metadata. No automatic matching. All there was were men in a room. With fallible memories. Some of them drank. Most of them, in fact. Some put more effort into forgetting than remembering. Such were the times. The result was each new crime was in danger of standing alone, entire unto itself. Links and chimes and resonances with previous crimes were in danger of going unheard.

All police departments were in the same boat. Not just San Francisco. Every one of them evolved the same de facto solution. Separately and independently, fumbling blind, but they all ended up in the same place. The file clerk became the font of all wisdom. Usually a grizzled old veteran, sometimes confined to a desk due to getting shot or beaten, presiding over a basement emporium packed with furred old file folders and bulging old boxes on shelves. Usually he had been there many years. Usually he chatted and gossiped and remembered things. Sometimes he knew a guy who knew a guy, in another part of town. He became a database, as imperfect as it was, and the guys who knew guys became a network, even though partial and patchy. Carbon-based information technology. Not silicon. All there was. The same everywhere.

Except in one station in San Francisco the file clerk was not a grizzled old veteran. He was a misfit rookie by the name of Walter Kleb. He wasn’t much more than a kid at the time. He was shy and awkward and strange in his mannerisms. He didn’t stutter or stammer but sometimes he would need to try out a whole sentence in his head, maybe even to rehearse it on his lips, before he could speak it out loud. He was considered odd. Retarded for sure. A screw loose. Nuts, psycho, spastic, crazy, loony, schizo, freak. In 1954 there was no better vocabulary for such things. He struggled through the academy. He was hopeless in most ways, but his paper grades were sky-high. Never been seen before. No one could figure out how to get rid of him. Eventually he was assigned to duty.

He showed up wearing an overstarched uniform too big in the neck. He was an embarrassment. He made it to the file room in record time. No long previous career. No shooting or beating. But he was happy in the basement. He was alone most of the time. With nothing to do except read and learn and alphabetize and arrange in date order. Occasionally people came to see him, and they were politer than most, and kinder, because they wanted something. Either to return a file, or take one out, maybe without anyone knowing, or to find something that had been accidently lost, or to lose something that had been inadvertently found.

What none of them did was ask database questions. Why would they? How could a retard rookie who had only been there five minutes know anything? Which was a shame, Kleb thought, because he did know things. The reading and the learning were producing results. True, he had no network of guys who knew guys. That strength was certainly deficient. He wasn’t a boy who could call up a grizzled old veteran a precinct away and gossip for twenty minutes on the phone. Or ask a favor. Or do one. He wasn’t that boy at all. But he was a boy who made lists and liked connections and enjoyed anomalies. He felt they should have asked him questions. Of course he never spoke up first. Well, except for once. Late in January. And look what happened after that.

A detective named Cleary came down and asked for a file nearly a year old. Kleb knew it. He had read it. It was an unsolved homicide. Thought likely to be political. Conceivably at the secret agent level. There were certain interesting factors.

Kleb asked, “Has there been a break in the case?”

Cleary looked like he had been slapped. At first Kleb thought not slapped as in insulted, but just astonished, that the retard spoke, and showed awareness, and asked a question. Then he realized no, slapped as in rudely jerked from one train of thought to another. Cleary’s mind had been somewhere else. Not thinking about breaks in the old case. The only other reason for getting the file was therefore a new case. With similarities, possibly.

In the end Cleary took the file and walked away without a word. Kleb was forced to reconstruct its contents in his head. Homicide by gunshot, apparently at very long range. The victim was an immigrant from the Soviet Union. He was thought to be either a reformed communist gunned down as a punishment by an actual communist, or the reform was fake and he was really a sleeper agent, taken care of by a shadowy outfit with a deniable office close to the inner ring of the Pentagon. In 1954 either theory was entirely plausible.

As always at lunch Kleb sat alone, but that day one table closer to the crowd, to better hear what they were saying. The new case was a baffler. A Soviet immigrant, shot with a rifle from far away. No one knew why. Probably a spy. Then someone said no, State Department back channels were reporting no sensitivity. Therefore no spies involved. Just regular folk, doing whatever regular folk do, with deer rifles in Golden Gate Park.

Kleb went back to the basement, and back inside his head. He read the first file all over again. He checked every detail. He weighed every aspect. The date of the crime, January 31, 1953, exactly 361 days earlier, the location, also Golden Gate Park, a lonely time of day, few potential witnesses, zero actual witnesses. Bullet fragments suggested a medium caliber high-velocity rifle round. A disturbed patch of dirt behind a tree five hundred yards away was thought to be where it was fired from.

Cleary came back again early in the afternoon.

“You asked me a question,” he said.

Kleb nodded, but didn’t speak.

Cleary said, “You knew it was an unsolved case.”

Again Kleb nodded, but didn’t speak.

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