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  “I don’t see that much pathology here, Marsh. Not unless you take this hit-man thing seriously, and even then, well, it’s not an unnatural reaction, is it? The poor guy’s got a problem—he’s in love with a woman who is paying him back in spades for the dirt she feels he’s done her. An all too common situation, sad to say, but one for which my particular branch of witchcraft has little to offer of immediate efficacy except to advise him to uncouple from her and take some steps to feel better about himself.”

  “This is the kind of situation that drove Othello mad, doctor. And he was only imagining things.”

  Max laughed. “True enough. So you should keep track of your friend to make sure he isn’t slipping over the edge.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?”

  “Of course there is. I can do what you’ve been doing, which is to listen to his tale of woe, give him the chance to publicize his pain and his betrayal, then offer sympathy and concern and suggest some steps he can take to improve his self-regard. The difference is, I’d have to charge him two hundred dollars an hour and I’m not at all sure I could achieve much more than you already have or could if you tune back into him. Maybe you should put him in touch with a family therapist, set up an appointment that would preferably include his wife. It’ll be cheaper, and probably more effective than the kind of prolonged analysis I deal in. But don’t quote me on that or I’ll be drummed out of the profession.”

  I thanked Max for his time and asked if there were any therapists he could recommend. He gave me three names. I called two of them, compared their fees and procedures, and prepared my pitch to Tom. I even made some notes, clichés mostly, phrases like “getting the lines of communication reopened” and “coming to grips with the underlying trauma,” and pap like that. Then, when I envisioned the look on Tom’s face when I began to read from them, I threw the notes away.

  In any event, my preparations were all for naught. The message from Tom that was on my answering machine when I returned from Dr. Rosenfall’s was shrill and histrionic:

  “I was right—there’s more to this than I thought. It’s labyrinthine, Marsh; the ramifications are fiendishly complex. What it amounts to it is that Richard Sands is evil incarnate; I’m following a trail of blood that includes my own brother’s. Prepare to be amazed.”

  I called Tom several times during the rest of the day and the day after that but never managed to reach him. After a couple of fretful nights, I stumbled out of bed and turned to the morning paper for diversion. In a two-inch filler at the bottom of page 9 and a more lengthy obituary set out in the second section, the Chronicle informed me and the rest of its readership that my friend Tom Crandall was dead.

  FIVE

  One of the more telling signs of age is that you scan the obituaries more closely than you scan the box scores. All too frequently I find a name that saddens me, in the case of a public figure, or pains me, in the increasingly common instance when the deceased is someone I know. Eight days after our night at Guido’s and fourteen hours after the last time I heard his voice, I found my friend Tom—Thomas Clarence Crandall in the heading above the obit—a man the Chronicle labeled simply: Hero.

  And hero he had been, not once but twice. The first instance occurred in the war, during a brief but terrible engagement that had earned Tom two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for giving medical aid to a fire team that had been ambushed. Phrased in the argot of the citation, Specialist Crandall, despite many adversities and without regard for his personal safety, had crossed a minefield under hostile fire from a determined and aggressive enemy, located and administered to the wounded, become twice wounded himself, and continued to deliver medical aid and assistance until reinforcements had interdicted the ambushers and the dead and wounded had been transported to the rear. Specialist Crandall’s actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the service and contributed materially to the success of his unit’s mission as well as to the mission of the forces of freedom in the Republic of Vietnam.

  And that was the least of it, because Tom Crandall’s heroism in war had paled before his valor in peacetime. This time the peril had been not man but nature—in the night and day following the earthquake of October 1989, for a period of more than forty hours, Tom and his partner had been hip-deep in the rubble of the Marina District, struggling to free people from structures that had collapsed as the ground contorted and convulsed beneath them.

  Tom hadn’t been able to hide his heroism—TV had caught his act. Again and again, as captured in the hand-held tremble of a Channel 4 camera, Tom had disappeared into a mound of mortar and brick and timber, passing debris back to his partner as he dug his way toward a plea for help that originated within the wreckage, risking further collapse of the building and the explosion of a ruptured gas main and any number of other calamities foremost in everyone’s mind but Tom’s.

  He’d found one dead and freed four others over that period, accomplishing rescues few others would have considered. It was magnificent, to put it mildly—a physician who lived in one of the houses and had been on the scene the entire time was quoted as calling Tom Crandall the bravest man he’d ever seen. In contrast, the only comment I’d ever heard Tom utter about the entire affair was an expression of sorrow that he’d been too slow to save the one who died.

  It wasn’t surprising that Tom had told me almost nothing about any of this, not even his Silver Star. Nor that, although invariably reserved and unprepossessing, Tom was a certified hero. In my experience, such beings are often people who are not inherently brave—far from it—but are simply inherently dutiful. Whether the inclination is grounded in genetic encoding or merely a proper upbringing—in Sunday school or Batman comics or merely the family tree—I doubt anyone knows. Luckily for the rest of us, the filter we know as civilization has somehow allowed a few such people to survive.

  As I read through the obituary, I was pleased that Tom was being duly honored for his exploits, but the feeling dimmed when I turned to the news article and read the circumstances of his death. Tom’s body had been found in the Tenderloin, in an abandoned airline bus terminal at the corner of Taylor and Ellis. Death had occurred some time Thursday night, but the body hadn’t been discovered until the next day. Since his job was to aid victims of disease and violence, and since there were more such victims per square inch in that area of the city than any other, Tom’s presence in the Tenderloin was not surprising. Except Tom had apparently been alone when he died, not on call with the ambulance service, and the estimated time of death—1:00 A.M.—was not his normal duty hour.

  Stranger yet, the article initially implied that Tom had died from a mugging—his body was found in a place where such assaults had become de rigueur since the day hard drugs hit town—but in the final paragraph the police were quoted as saying that although a weapon had been found at the scene, foul play was not indicated. The Chron had trotted out, in other words, its usual euphemism for suicide.

  Perhaps most surprising of all was that someone at the Chronicle had taken the trouble to dig up so many details about Tom’s life and seen to it that they appeared on the obit page with a prominence more common to society mavens and movie stars. Among other things, as I began to wonder what had really happened to my friend, I resolved to find out who it was.

  The obit said the funeral service would be held the next day, at a chapel across the bay in Danville where Tom’s mother still resided. I detest funerals as much as anyone, but I decided to go nonetheless. In his thirst for a more thorough knowledge of his world and his insistence on a moral center to his life, Tom Crandall had been a hero to me as well as to the world at large, and fallen heroes deserve tribute. Plus, I had to admit, I wanted to see if his wife would show up for the services, and whether if she did she would arrive on the arm of the legendary Richard Sands. In the meantime, I put in a call to Charley Sleet, to get a line on Tom’s death from the police perspective, but Charley was where he always is—temporarily out of touch.

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sp; SIX

  The day was far too real for a funeral, the drought-driven heat of the San Ramon Valley too evocative of purgatory to give comfort to saints or sinners. After pulling into the parking lot next to the chapel in the north end of Danville, I sweltered in the irregular heartbeats of the Buick’s idling engine as I watched the temperature gauge rise inexorably toward the red, an arc similar to the one I see every time I step on a scale.

  Three minutes and a well-soaked collar later, I gave in to my compunctions and decided to forego the chapel service in favor of paying my respects at the gravesite, if the radiator didn’t blow its top before I got there. In the meantime, I enjoyed the prelude that wafted my way through the heavy oaken doors of the small brick building, courtesy of the chapel organ. As a somber throng made its way from the parking area to the chapel entrance, I took an unobtrusive inventory.

  There were more mourners than I expected. Although he had come across as a virtual recluse, Tom Crandall had obviously made a bigger dent in the world than he let on or perhaps was aware of. I couldn’t know for sure, of course, but as I watched the crowd file dolefully into the chapel, I guessed it included several friends of his mother’s, a couple of former teachers now retired, perhaps a former coach or commanding officer, probably an old girlfriend, and a couple of fellow grunts who, like Tom, had found peacetime more perilous than its opposite. I also spotted a few poor souls who knew only that there was a funeral that day and had decided to drop by and see if either the deceased or the mourners would generate some gossip. Although I was alert for the rumpled getup and boozy blear of an obit writer at the Chronicle, I didn’t spot a candidate.

  At ten minutes past two, an ambulance roared up, muffler bleating, siren off. As the disc brakes squeezed it to a noisy halt, the guy riding shotgun hopped out, smoothed the wrinkles out of his blue uniform with one hand and unkinked his tight black curls with the other, then pulled a stethoscope from his pocket and tossed it onto the seat he’d vacated. After a quick word with the driver, he dashed inside the chapel without bothering to close the door. His partner stayed behind, slumped behind the wheel, his only concession to the occasion the effort to close his eyes.

  The ambulance service was Atlas, based in San Francisco, which meant the medic who’d hurried inside the chapel must have been Tom’s partner. I remembered his name was Tony. I knew that he and Tom had been through a lot together, and that Tom envied Tony both his flagrant way with women and his seamless nonchalance in the face of danger and emergency.

  I was about to ape the ambulance driver and catch some rest myself when a pickup truck rumbled to a stop in front of the chapel door. Battered and bruised, its paint worn to the color of mud, well past its useful life, it was precisely the kind of vehicle Tom would have driven to show his contempt for society’s submission to the tyranny of internal combustion. But the man who emerged from the wayward Dodge wasn’t anything like Tom, in aspect or in attitude.

  Beefy in mass and autocratic in movement, with the set to his jaw and the glow in his eyes that complement the wrongheaded and the narrow-minded, the man marched into the chapel with less reverence than ferocity, intent on doing damage. When I tried to imagine a reason for his ferment or an object for his ire, I couldn’t come up with an answer.

  It was only after he had gone inside the chapel that I noticed a second person in the truck, so small her tight gray bun was barely visible above the seat back, so static she could have been a candidate for the last rites herself: Over the minutes the man was gone, her head never shifted a fraction. Only when the chapel door reopened and the man marched back to the truck and yanked open the passenger door did the gray head turn to watch. When it did, it confronted the tearful countenance of the woman the man had extracted from the chapel.

  She was thirtysomething, plain going on frumpish, wearing a black frock that buttoned from hem to neck and flat black pumps worn at the heel. A gray ribbon around her neck supported a large gold cross and matched the one that drew back her straight black hair. Her eyes were wide and wounded by what had gone on between her and the man intent on shielding her from the fallout from the funeral.

  As she approached the truck, the young woman looked back to the chapel for a final instant with what could pass for yearning, then hesitated as though she had decided to retrace her steps. But the man didn’t give her a chance. He said something I couldn’t hear, grabbed her arm and squeezed it, then tugged her toward the open door of the truck. The woman seemed to flinch, then resist, then yield to the greater force.

  With just the briefest glance in the direction that included me, the young woman climbed grudgingly into the pickup. The gray-haired lady scooted to the center to give her room, the man slammed the door behind them hard enough to rattle the fenders, then climbed in the driver’s side and sped away. The cloud he left behind was sufficiently toxic to make the ambulance driver open his eyes and wrinkle his nose and mutter an audible oath.

  I was still trying to decipher the psychodrama I had just been privy to when the star of the show arrived. Her chariot was a long black limo I assumed had been dispatched by the mortician until I noticed the license plate—RS 2—and concluded her presence was courtesy of Richard Sands. That didn’t make me like her very much, and neither did the cut of her dress, which exposed enough cleavage to be more suitable for opening for Tony Bennett at the Venetian Room than watching them bury her husband.

  Clarissa Crandall—tall, dark, large but far from hefty—got out of the limo, fluffed her cumulus cloud of hair, hitched her bodice to a more modest level across her breasts, smoothed the arc of a brow with the tip of an index finger, licked some shine onto her scarlet lips, and entered the chapel with the eagerness of a politician on his way to a press conference. Which left the limo driver, the ambulance guy, and me each trying to figure out who was who. In less than a minute, we decided we didn’t care.

  Twenty minutes later, the organ sounds returned, a peppy postlude this time, and ushered the mourners back to their vehicles. More than a few eyes were dabbed along the way, though none belonging to the widow, and several hands were clasped beneath words of condolence whispered to a stocky blue-haired lady who lingered in the chapel doorway, at once stoic and somber and sociable, each as the occasion demanded. I took her to be Tom’s mother. When I looked for common features, I found them in the chin and mouth.

  As unobtrusively as I could, I waylaid one of the objects of my interest—the medic, Tom’s partner. He was movie-handsome and knew it, Neapolitan to the core. He was about to climb back in the ambulance when I caught up to him. “Can I talk to you a second?”

  He frowned and looked at his watch. “What about?”

  “Tom Crandall.”

  His black eyes measured me, to no clear conclusion. “What about him?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what he was doing on Taylor Street the night he died.”

  He shrugged without interest. “Tom got off on, like, your basic slime. You got an itch like that, you scratch it in the ’Loin.” Tony wiped a drop of sweat from his temple and regarded me with an untroubled gaze. “Who are you? A cop?”

  “A friend of Tom’s.”

  “Name?”

  “Tanner.”

  His eyes narrowed to the width of a scalpel. “The P.I.?”

  “Right.”

  “Guido’s.”

  “Right.”

  “Nice place, I guess. Me, I prefer Vesuvio or the Bohemian.”

  He started to say something else, but his partner pressed the horn. “Come on, Tony. We’re AWOL, man.”

  “Put a patch on it, Harris.” Tony looked back at me and rolled his eyes. “Fucking New Guy, gets diarrhea whenever we freewheel. Dispatch thinks we’re chewing Chinese at Chan’s.” He climbed into the cab of the ambulance and slung the stethoscope over his shoulder. “I say what difference does it make? We don’t tag and bag ’em, the city or Healthways will handle it. I mean, it’s not like we’re on commission, right? Not to mention it’s Sunday.
”

  “I’d like to talk to you some more about Tom when you have time. How can I get in touch with you?”

  “Tony Milano, but in the book it’s Anthony. Greenwich by the playground. Don’t call me at work, ’cause if I’m at work, I’m in the rig, and they won’t patch you through.”

  “Will you be home tonight?”

  “Not if I’m lucky,” he said, and smoothed his hair and rubbed his crotch. “And Tony Milano is as lucky as he needs to be.”

  The driver cracked his whip, and the rescue wagon roared away. I watched it go with the twinge I always get whenever I see someone doing a job I didn’t have the nerve to do myself.

  When I looked back toward the chapel, the cortege was already forming, Tom’s casket in the hearse in front, his mother in the Chrysler that went second, the widow and her private limo next, the rest of us bringing up the rear. I hooked my Buick onto the end, hoping it wouldn’t vapor-lock before we got there.

  Ten minutes later, we snaked into a small cemetery nestled on a knoll beneath a glade of live oak and walnut trees just off the Danville Highway, not too far from Tor House, where Eugene O’Neill had lived for twenty years and written his best plays. By the time I crossed the creek and parked my car and hiked to the gravesite, the casket was in place atop the vault, and a flag had been draped over it. An honor guard stood at order arms, ready to fire a brief salute. I stood on the fringe of mourners and went into my customary trance while the minister did his thing.