The Fog and the Cane

The telephone rang at ten minutes past four in the morning, on the third Friday of October, and Martin Wells was awake before the second ring, because a man who has kept a law practice in this city for thirty years knows which calls come at which hours, and no call at that hour has ever carried good news. He crossed the dark hall without turning on lights, the house holding its breath around him, and picked up the receiver and said his name into it, and for a moment there was nothing but the sound of the line itself, a long empty strand of wire somewhere out in the fog.

"Mr. Wells. This is Inspector Merrick, Homicide. I'm sorry for the hour."

He knew her name. She had come to the firm once, two years ago, to ask questions about an estate with a missing heir, and he remembered a woman who took notes she didn't need, because she kept everything in her head and kept her head in everything.

"Inspector. Who is it."

"Can you come down to Rincon Hill, Mr. Wells? Essex Street, under the bridge abutment. And Mr. Wells — I'd come quietly, and I'd come now."

He dressed in the dark, by habit and by some animal reluctance to see himself at that hour. The fog had come in heavy off the bay overnight, the deep autumn kind, and when he let himself out of the house it took the streetlights and dissolved them into halos twenty feet across, and the hill itself went down into a white blindness where the water should have been. He drove with the window open part of the way, though there was nothing to see. The fog was not in front of the city. The fog was the city, for the duration, and everything else was a rumor inside it.

They had the street blocked at Bryant. A young officer looked at Wells as if he were a phenomenon of weather himself, and then Merrick stepped out of the arc of a work lamp and lifted the sawhorse aside with one hand. She was not tall. She had a plain raincoat with the hood down and gray in her hair that the lamps made silver, and her face, at four in the morning, was as awake as it would be at four in the afternoon, which was the first frightening thing about her.

"You know a Samuel Ashe," she said. Not a question.

"I know the name. Judge Ashe. Retired federal. He endowed half the city's charities. Why are you waking me about him?"

"Because he's dead," Merrick said. "And he's been dead since about eleven o'clock last night. And because of what was in his pocket." She turned and walked, and Wells followed her into the fog.

The abutment of the Bay Bridge rose out of the white like the wall of some drowned cathedral, and under it the sidewalk ran along a chain-link fence toward the water, and this much Wells took in slowly, in pieces, because the fog reduced everything to pieces: the lamp stands, the tarp, the two technicians on their knees, the black shape on the wet pavement that he understood, after a moment that he would remember for years, had been a man.

"You don't have to look," Merrick said.

"I'm the executor of Adrian Vale's will, Inspector. Describe him to me instead."

She looked at him for a moment, measuring something, and then she took out her notebook out of pure ceremony and put it away again and told him, standing with her back to the body, her voice pitched for him alone under the hiss of the generator.

"Samuel Ashe, seventy-two. Leaves his apartment on the Embarcadero most nights between ten and eleven, walks to the end of the block and back, rain or fog, always alone, always the same route. Tonight he got as far as the abutment. Somebody was waiting for him under here, in the fog, where the lights don't reach. He was struck with a heavy object, more than once, from behind or above — he never got turned around. The medical examiner will give you the medical version, but the short one is that the first blow probably did it and the rest were a form of punctuation."

"Robbery?"

"He had a gold watch on his wrist and three hundred dollars in his coat. So no." She paused, and Wells heard her pause the way you hear a lawyer's pause in a deposition, a pause with furniture in it. "The weapon is the problem, Mr. Wells. Or rather, the weapon is not the problem, because we found it, or most of it. It's a walking stick. Antique. Whalebone handle, silver head, the shaft of some dark tropical wood. It broke in the using — those old canes go like that, all the strength in the head and none in the shaft. We found the lower half of the shaft in the trash receptacle at the corner of Essex. The upper half — the grip, the silver head, the half a man holds — is gone."

Wells stood very still. The fog moved through the arc of the work lamps in slow coils, and somewhere out on the water a foghorn sounded, one long complaint, and answered itself.

"Describe the handle again," he said.

"I didn't. I said what it's made of." Merrick watched him. "You've seen it."

"I've seen a cane like that my whole adult life. It belongs to Adrian Vale. It was his father's. There isn't another like it in the city, probably not in the state." He heard his own voice saying it, level and precise, the courtroom voice, and some small part of him stood aside and observed how useful thirty years of practice could be at four in the morning. "He was struck from behind, under the abutment, where the lamps don't reach," Wells said. "On a route the man walks at the same hour every night — you'll have a witness from one of those windows up the hill, or you'd have called it a mugging by now."

"There's a witness." She nodded up toward the apartment blocks along the rim of the hill, where a few windows burned yellow through the fog. "A housekeeper across the street — Mrs. Chao, works for the couple on the fourth floor, leaves at eleven, was on the corner waiting for the owl bus. She was under the light. She saw a man cross to Judge Ashe from the shadow of the abutment, saw him strike the old gentleman, more than once, and then go through his pockets, very quick, and then walk away north up Essex. She never saw the face. Fog, distance, the man kept his head down, and she was frightened besides. But she saw the cane come down. She saw it in the lamp light, and she saw it was broken in the man's hand when he finished, and she watched him carry the two pieces like a man carrying kindling."

"And the identification of Crow—"

"Is not hers," Merrick said. "Not by face, not by name. She gave us a description and it's a description that could fit five hundred men in this town. Thin. Stooped. Moved close to the ground. Walked without any sound she could hear, and she was listening, she says, because the fog carries sound so well that she could hear the man's clothing as he moved and still couldn't hear his feet. White face. She said that twice. The white face she was sure of."

Wells closed his eyes and saw, without wishing to, the figure from Harriet Alley, the January night three seasons behind him now, crossing a fallen girl the way a man steps over luggage, going into the steel door without hurry. Thin. Stooped. No sound. He opened his eyes.

"I met the judge once," he heard himself say. "Last spring. He came to the office about his estate, sat in my fireproof room for an hour, and left without changing a word of his will. On his way out he asked me a strange question. He asked me whether I thought a man's benefactions could cancel his debts, or only balance them. I gave him the lawyer's answer. He thanked me and never came back." The fog pressed at the lamps. "You told me there was something in his pocket. If it was meant for me — a letter, a warning, I don't know — then he never asked for an appointment, and he never changed a word of his will, which means whatever he was carrying, he was carrying it to me. Which means the old gentleman knew something was coming, and knew it had a shape I'd recognize."

"Or the letter found him some other way," Merrick said. "Keep going. This is the first thing tonight that has interested me."

"I'd want to know where he was going," Wells said. "A man walks the same block every night at the same hour. Men like that don't change their routes, and they don't carry letters they haven't decided about. Something decided him."

"You said what was in his pocket," he said. "Say it now."

Merrick took an evidence envelope out of her raincoat pocket and held it, but did not give it to him yet.

"Judge Ashe was carrying one item besides his wallet and his watch. A letter. Sealed. The envelope is addressed in ink, by hand, and the address on it is you. Your office on California Street, your name above it. No return address."

"Has it been opened?"

"It has not. It's addressed to you, it was found on a dead man at a homicide scene, and the man who died was carrying it to you, which makes it evidence and makes you a person of interest at the same time, and I am holding both of those facts in one hand tonight, Mr. Wells, and I would like very much for you to make the weight lighter." She gave him the envelope. "The lab has photographed it. The seal is intact. Read it if you want — you're entitled — but I want you to understand that the moment you open it, you're in this. And I think, from your face, that you were in this before I telephoned."

The envelope was heavy paper, cream-colored, and Wells knew the feel of it because he had bought that paper for Adrian Vale for thirty years, from the stationer on Sutter, because Vale said good correspondence was a form of manners that never went out of season. His own name was on it in a hand he knew as well as his own. He turned it over twice. The fog beaded on it.

"Who else knows about the cane?" he said.

"Right now? Me, two technicians who are very well paid, and the medical examiner. Mrs. Chao saw a cane, but she never saw this cane. There's no photograph of Vale's cane in any file in this city that I can find, no police record, nothing. Which means whoever identifies it for us does so out of some private knowledge." She looked at him without hurry. "You have private knowledge, Mr. Wells. So does his housekeeper. So does a chemist named Reyes. So, I imagine, does half of Pacific Heights, if it came to that."

"And Vale?"

"I'm getting to Vale." She said the name carefully, as if setting it down on a high shelf. "Dr. Vale has not been seen since yesterday afternoon. His housekeeper says he's away. His laboratory says he's traveling. His attorney — that's you — has no appointment on his calendar, which I know, because my sergeant checked while you were driving down the hill. So tonight a retired federal judge who endowed the wing of a hospital with Vale's mother's name was killed with Vale's cane, by a man whom a witness describes as thin and stooped and silent, carrying a letter addressed to Vale's own lawyer. And I am standing in the fog at four in the morning being told by that lawyer, in a very level voice, that the cane belongs to a man nobody can find." She put the notebook away again, the ceremony completed. "Tell me how I'm doing, counselor."

"Like a woman who already has her theory," Wells said.

"I have several theories. It's early." A small dry movement at the corner of her mouth that was not a smile. "Here's what happens next, and I'd like your cooperation, though the day will come when I have to ask for more than cooperation. The letter stays sealed if you choose, but I'll need it back by this evening. The weapon stays in my evidence room. Dr. Vale gets a visit from two of my people today, politely, at his house on Broadway. And you, Mr. Wells, are going to go home and sleep, if you can, and when you wake up you're going to decide how much of a friend you are, and to whom."

Wells looked down at the envelope in his hands. The fog had gathered on the cream paper in fine droplets, and it ran when he tilted it, the way things run.

"One more thing," he said. "The half of the cane that's gone. The lower shaft."

"The half a man holds is the half he kept," Merrick said. "You can read that two ways, Mr. Wells. A man getting rid of a weapon keeps the part that points to him — the grip, the silver. Or a man who wants to keep a piece of something keeps it too. The bin says one thing and the missing half says another, and I don't know yet which."

Wells did not open the letter on the street. He drove home up out of the fog, and the fog let him go gradually, in layers, so that the city assembled itself around the car piece by piece — the bank, the church, the corner where the owl bus ran empty and lit — and by the time he reached his own hill the sky had gone the color of dishwater and the streetlights were off. He let himself into the house and stood in the hall with the envelope in his hand for a long time. Then he broke the seal, because he was the executor, and because he knew already, with the certainty of a man who has heard a verdict read, what name would be signed at the bottom of it.

It was two sentences long, written in the hand he had known for thirty years, the strong forward-leaning letters of A. Vale:

Martin — if you are reading this, then I have failed to be rid of Mr. Crow after all, and worse has followed. Whatever you find, believe this much: the father is not gone by choice, and what remains is not the man you dined with.

There was no signature. There was no need for one. Wells sat down in the dark hall with the letter on his knees and the morning coming gray through the glass, and outside, far below, the fog was still on the water, patient, keeping what it kept.