Post to the emergency room with tachycardia and blood pressure that was going through the roof.
At about eleven, by which time the street had been taped off, Inspector Bob Martín arrived with Ingrid Dunn, the medical examiner, and a photographer from forensic services. Bob pulled on latex gloves and followed the medical examiner upstairs to the Constantes’ bedroom. On seeing the couple lying in the bed, he initially assumed he was dealing with a double suicide, though he would have to wait for a verdict from Dunn, who was meticulously studying those parts of the bodies that were visible, careful not to move anything. Bob let the photographer get on with his job while the rest of the forensics team showed up; then the ME had the gurneys brought up, and the couple was taken to the morgue. The crime scene might belong to the San Francisco Police Department, but the bodies were hers.
The autopsy later revealed that Doris, forty-seven, and Michael, forty-eight, had both died of an overdose of heroin injected directly into the jugular vein, and that both had had their buttocks branded postmortem.
Ten minutes later the phone woke Blake Jackson again.
“Hey, Hench, I’ve got a question.”
“Amanda, that’s it—I’ve had enough!” roared her grandfather. “I resign as your henchman!”
His words were followed by a deathly silence.
“Amanda?” ventured her grandfather after a second or two.
“Yeah?” she said, her voice quavering.
“I’m just kidding. What did you want to ask?”
“Tell me about the burn marks on their butts.”
“They were discovered at the morgue when the bodies were stripped,” her grandfather said. “I forgot to mention in my notes that they found a couple of used syringes with traces of heroin on them in the bathroom, along with a butane blowtorch that was almost certainly used to make the burns. All of it wiped clean of prints.”
“And you’re saying this just slipped your mind?! That’s vital evidence!”
“I meant to put it in, but I got sidetracked. I figure that stuff was left there on purpose, as a taunt—all neatly set out on a tray and covered with a white napkin.”
“Thanks, Kabel.”
“ ’Night, boss.”
“ ’Night, Grandpa. I won’t call again, promise. Sleep tight.”
It was one of those nights with Alan that Indiana looked forward to like a blushing bride, although they had long since established a routine in which there were few surprises, and the rhythms of their sex life were those of an old married couple. They had been together for four years: they were an old married couple. They knew each other intimately, loved each other in a leisurely fashion, and took the time to laugh, to eat, to talk. Alan would have said they made love sedately, like a couple of geriatrics; Indiana felt that for geriatrics they were pretty debauched. They were happy with the arrangement—early on they had tried out some porn-movie acrobatics that had left Indiana peeved and Alan half paralyzed; they had explored more or less everything a healthy imagination could dream up without involving third parties or animals, and had finally settled on a repertoire of four conventional positions with some variations, which they acted out at the Fairmont Hotel once or twice a week as their bodies demanded.
While they waited for the oysters and smoked salmon they had ordered from room service, Indiana recounted the tragic tale of Carol Underwater, and told Alan about Danny D’Angelo’s tactless comments. Alan knew Danny, and not only because he often met Indiana at the Café Rossini. A year ago Danny had flamboyantly thrown up in Alan’s new Lexus while Alan—at Indi’s request—was driving him to the emergency room. He’d had to have the car washed several times to get rid of the stains and the stench.
It had happened that June, after the city’s annual Gay Pride March, during which Danny had disappeared. He didn’t come in to work the next day, and no one heard from him until six days later, when some guy with a Hispanic accent phoned to tell Indiana that her friend was in a bad way, ill and alone in his apartment, and to suggest she go round and look after him, or he could wind up dead. Danny lived in a crumbling building in the Tenderloin, where even the police were afraid to venture after dark, a neighborhood characterized by booze, drugs, brothels, and shady nightclubs that had always attracted drifters and delinquents. “The throbbing heart of Sin City,” Danny called it with a certain pride, as though those living there deserved a medal for bravery. His apartment block had been built in the 1940s for sailors, but over time it had degenerated into a refuge for the destitute, the drugged-up, and the diseased. More than once Indiana had come by to bring food and medication to her friend, who often ended up a wreck after some sleazy binge.
When she got the anonymous call, Indiana once again rushed to Danny’s side. She climbed the five flights of stairs scrawled with graffiti, four-letter words, and obscene drawings, past the seedy apartments of drunkards, doddering lunatics, and rent boys who turned tricks for drugs. Danny’s room was dark and stank of vomit and patchouli oil. There was a bed in one corner, a closet, an ironing board, and a quaint little dressing table with a satin valance, a cracked mirror, and a vast collection of makeup jars. There were a dozen pairs of stilettos and two clothes racks from which the feathery sequined dresses Danny wore as a cabaret singer hung like ugly, lifeless birds. There was little natural light; the only window was caked with twenty years’ worth of grime.
Indiana found Danny sprawled on the bed, filthy and still half dressed in the French maid’s outfit he had worn to Gay Pride. He was burning up and severely dehydrated, a combination of pneumonia and the lethal cocktail of alcohol and drugs he had ingested. Each floor of the building had only one bathroom shared by twenty tenants, and Danny was too weak for Indiana to drag him there. He didn’t respond when Indiana tried to get him to sit up, drink some water, and clean himself up. Realizing she could not deal with him on her own, she called Alan.
Alan was bitterly disappointed to realize Indiana had called him only as a last resort. Her father’s car was in the shop, probably, and that son of a bitch Ryan Miller was off traveling somewhere. The tacit agreement whereby their relationship was limited to a series of romantic encounters suited him, but it somehow offended him to realize that Indiana could happily exist without him. Indiana was constantly broke—a fact she never mentioned—but whenever he offered help, she dismissed the idea with a laugh. Instead she turned to her father for help, and—though he had no proof—Alan was convinced she was prepared to accept help from Miller. “I’m your lover, not some kept woman,” Indiana would say whenever he offered to pay the rent on her consulting rooms or Amanda’s dentist’s bill. He’d wanted to buy her a Volkswagen Beetle for her birthday—a lemon-yellow one, or maybe that deep nail-polish red she loved—but Indiana dismissed the idea: public transport and her bicycle were more environmentally friendly. She refused to allow him to open a bank account in her name or give her a credit card, and she didn’t like it when he gave her clothes, thinking—rightly—that he was trying to make her over. Indiana found the expensive silk and lace lingerie he bought for her faintly ridiculous, but to make him happy she wore it as part of their erotic games. Alan knew that the moment his back was turned, she would give it to Danny, who probably appreciated it more.
Although Alan admired Indiana’s integrity, he was upset that she did not seem to need him. Being with this woman who was happier to give than to receive made him feel small, made him feel cheap. In all their years together, she had rarely asked for his help, so when she called from Danny’s apartment, he rushed to her side.
The Tenderloin district was notorious for Filipino, Chinese, and
