The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

“I read your last story. About Bagman being a guy named Rodney Booker. That he went to Stanford.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I went to Stanford, too.”

“You dropped out, I’m guessing.”

“School can’t compete,” Sammy said.

“With what?”

“With life.”

Cindy blinked into the young woman’s face. She was remembering the cautions, not to speak too fast, move too quickly, appear in any way a threat. That as long as the meth addict was talking, it was safe enough. Silence meant she might be getting paranoid — and dangerous.

Cindy tried not to look down at the fork and knife on the table. She said softly, “Do you know who killed Bagman, Sammy? Do you know we’re offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward?”

“What’s your life worth, Cindy?” Sammy said, her eyes darting all around the diner, then back to Cindy. “Would you sell your life for money you’ll never get to spend? That’s what I want to tell you. You’re wasting your time. No one’s going to say who the people are who killed Bagman Jesus. No one would dare.”

Chapter 63

I WAS IN THE squad car with Conklin, heading toward a dive of a bar in the Mission, where our new and only suspect was said to work from three p.m. until midnight.

Henry Wallis’s name had come to us by way of an anonymous tip, but what made this tip different than the hundreds of others that had fried our phone lines was that Henry Wallis was on our short list.

He was a bartender, had worked the Baileys’ parties, and had dated Sara Needleman — until she dumped him. And the tipster said he’d seen Wallis driving down Needleman’s street, passing in front of her house several times in his one-of-a-kind junker the night before Needleman died.

Wallis’s sheet listed his arrests for violent crimes.

He’d been convicted of domestic violence and assault and battery, and he’d been charged with attempted murder when he and a couple of other drunken bullies had worked over a customer in an alley behind the bar and nearly killed him.

The witnesses to the beating had differing stories. The evidence was thin. Wallis was found not guilty. Case dismissed.

Stats said that Wallis was white, five ten, 165 pounds, and, most important, forty-six years of age. That meant he was old enough to have read about the high-society murders in the ’80s.

Hell, he was old enough to have committed them.

Conklin and I wondered if Wallis had keys to both the Bailey and Needleman houses. It seemed probable, even likely.

The photo we had of Wallis was four years old, but he was good-looking, even in the scathing high-contrast flash of the Polaroid camera.

He had muscular arms, jailhouse tats on his knuckles.

But what had sent me and Conklin out to the car was the tattoo on Wallis’s left shoulder: that of a snake twining through the vacant eyes of a skull.

Conklin was quiet as he drove, and I understood why.

We were both imagining the variety of ways the scene could play out in the Torchlight Bar: what we’d do if Wallis drew a weapon, if he ran, how we’d manage whatever came down without causing collateral damage.

Conklin parked on Fifteenth between Valencia and Guerrero in front of the Torchlight Bar and Grill, a white clapboard building surrounded by bookstores and cafés.

I unbuttoned my jacket, touched the butt of my gun. Conklin did the same. And we entered the dark atmosphere of the bar. There was a TV overhead, tuned to a recap of yesterday’s ball game — the A’s were getting pounded.

The bartender was six-foot-two, weighed one eighty, and was bald. It was gloomy in that bar — dim light cast by neon signs — but even so, I could see from thirty feet away that the bartender wiping beer mugs with a dirty towel wasn’t Henry Wallis.

I stood just inside the doorway as Conklin went to the bartender, flashed his badge, talked quietly under the television’s blare. The bartender’s eyes went to me, then back to Conklin.

Then he pointed to a man at the head of the bar who was sipping a beer and looking up at the TV screen, unaware that we’d come through the door.