old woman. Lulu was as wrinkled as a shriveled apple; the tip of her nose almost touched her chin, and she wore a scarlet bonnet and cape like Little Red Riding Hood. She’d lived in North Beach since the long-forgotten era of the beatniks and was the self-professed official photographer of the area. The curious old crone claimed she had been photographing the people of North Beach since the early twentieth century when Italian immigrants flooded in after the 1906 earthquake, not to mention snapping pictures of every famous resident from Jack Kerouac (an able typist, according to Lulu), Allen Ginsberg, her favorite poet and activist, and Joe DiMaggio, who’d lived here in the 1950s with Marilyn Monroe, to the Condor Club Girls—the first strippers to unionize, in the 1970s. Lulu had photographed them all, the saints and the sinners, watched over by the patron saint of the city, Saint Francis of Assisi, from his shrine down on Vallejo Street. She wandered around with a walking stick almost as tall as she was, clutching the sort of Polaroid camera no one makes these days and a huge photo album tucked under one arm.
There were all sorts of rumors about Lulu, and she never took the trouble to deny them. People said that though she looked like a bag lady, she had millions salted away somewhere; that she was a survivor from a concentration camp; that she’d lost her husband at Pearl Harbor. All anyone knew for certain was that Lulu was Jewish—not that this stopped her celebrating Christmas. The previous year Lulu had mysteriously disappeared, and after three weeks the neighbors gave her up for dead and decided to hold a memorial service in her honor. They set up a large photo of Lulu in a prominent place in Washington Park where people came to lay flowers, stuffed toys, reproductions of her photos, meaningful poems, and messages. At dusk the following Sunday, when a dozen people with candles had gathered to pay a reverent last farewell, Lulu Gardner showed up in the park and promptly began to photograph the mourners and ask them who had died. Feeling that she had mocked them, many of the neighbors never forgave her for still being alive.
Now the photographer stepped into the Café Rossini, weaving between the tables like a dancer to the slow blues from the loudspeakers, singing softly and offering her services. She approached Indiana and Carol, gazing at them with her beady, rheumy eyes. Before anyone could stop him, Danny D’Angelo crouched between the women, hunkering down to their level, and Lulu Gardner clicked the shutter. Startled by the flash, Carol Underwater leaped to her feet so suddenly she knocked over her chair. “I don’t want your fucking photos, you old witch!” she yelled, trying to snatch the camera from a terrified Lulu, who backed away as Danny D’Angelo intervened. Astonished by this overreaction, Indiana tried to calm her friend, while a murmur of disapproval rippled through the café’s customers, including some who had been offended by Lulu’s resurrection. Mortified, Carol slumped back into her chair and buried her face in her hands. “My nerves are shot to shit,” she sobbed.
Amanda waited for her roommates to grow tired of gossiping about Tom Cruise’s impending divorce and go to sleep before calling her grandfather.
“It’s two a.m., Amanda, you woke me up. Don’t you ever sleep, girl?”
“Sure, in class. You got any news for me?”
“I went and talked with Henrietta Post.” Her grandfather yawned.
“The neighbor who discovered the Constantes’ bodies?”
“That’s her.”
“So why didn’t you call?” his granddaughter chided him. “What were you waiting for?”
“I was waiting for sunup!”
“But it’s been weeks since the murders. You know this all happened back in November, right?”
“Yeah, Amanda, but I couldn’t make it out there any earlier. Don’t worry, the woman remembers everything. Got a shock that scared her half to death, but every last detail of what she saw that day is burned into her brain—the most terrifying day of her life, she told me.”
“So give me the lowdown, Kabel.”
“I can’t. It’s late, and your mom will be home any minute.”
“It’s Thursday—Mom’s with Keller.”
“But she doesn’t always spend the night with him. ’Sides, I need my sleep. I can send you the notes from my conversation with Henrietta Post and what I managed to wheedle out of your father.”
“You wrote it all down?”
“One of these days, I’m going to write a novel,” said her henchman. “I jot down anything that interests me, never know what might be useful to me in the future.”
“Write your memoirs,” suggested his granddaughter. “That’s what most old codgers do.”
“Nah—it would bomb, nothing worth writing about has ever happened to me. I’m the most pitifully boring widower in the world.”
“True. Anyway, send me those notes on the Constantes. G’night, Hench. You love me?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
Minutes later, the details of Blake Jackson’s interview with the key witness to the Constantes murder were in Amanda’s in-box.
On the morning of November 11 at about ten fifteen, Henrietta Post, who lived on the same street as the Constantes, was out walking her dog when she noticed that the door to their place was wide open—something unusual in that neighborhood, where they’d had trouble with gangbangers and drug dealers. Henrietta rang the doorbell, intending to warn the Constantes, whom she knew well, and when no one answered she stepped inside, calling to see if anyone was home. She wandered through the living room, where the TV was blaring, through the dining room and the kitchen, then climbed the stairs—with some difficulty, given that she’s seventy-eight and suffers from palpitations. The resounding silence made her uneasy in a house usually so bustling with life; more than once she’d had to complain about the racket.
She found the children’s bedrooms empty and shuffled down the short passageway to the master bedroom, calling out to the Constantes with what little breath she had left. She knocked three times before opening the door and poking her head in. She says the bedroom was in semi-darkness, with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn, and that it was cold and stuffy in there, as though it hadn’t been aired in days. She took a couple steps into the room, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, then quickly retreated with a mumbled apology when she saw the outline of the couple lying in the bed.
She was about to creep out quietly, but instinct told her there was something strange about the stillness of the house, about the fact that the Constantes had not answered when she called and were sound asleep in the middle of a weekday morning. She crept back into the room, fumbling along the wall for the switch, and flicked on the light. Doris and Michael Constante were lying on their backs with the comforter pulled up to their necks, utterly rigid, their eyes wide open. Henrietta Post let out a strangled cry, felt a heavy jolt in her chest, and thought her heart was about to burst. She couldn’t bring herself to move until she heard her dog barking—then she walked back along the corridor, stumbled down the stairs, and, grasping at the furniture for support, tottered as far as the phone in the kitchen.
She dialed 911 at precisely 10:29; her neighbors were dead, she said over and over, until finally the operator interrupted to ask two or three key questions and tell her to stay right where she was and not touch anything, that help was on its way. Six minutes later two patrol
