Cindy held Yuki and let her cry until Claire reached across the table and took Yuki’s hand.
“Sugar, take it easy on yourself. It seems complicated, but maybe it’s not. And nothing has to be decided right now.”
Yuki nodded, and then she started to cry again.
Chapter 92
I GOT TO the squad room before eight on Monday morning and found a thick padded envelope on my desk. The routing slip showed that St. Jude had messengered it over from the Cold Case Division and had stamped the envelope URGENT, URGENT, URGENT.
I remembered now — McCorkle had called me, and I hadn’t called him back. I ripped open the envelope, dumped out a tattered detective’s notebook, found a note from McCorkle clipped to the front cover.
“ Boxer — check this out. This subject knew the last of the nineteen eighty-two snake victims and a few of the new ones. She’s expecting your call.”
I hoped “she” was a hot lead that hadn’t gone cold over the weekend, because right now, all we had on the “snake killer” was ugly press coverage and five dead bodies twiddling their thumbs in their graves.
Conklin wasn’t in, so I killed a few minutes in the coffee room, putting milk and sugar in the last inch of coffee sludge left over from the night shift.
When I returned to my desk, my partner was still absent, and I couldn’t wait for him any longer.
I opened the notebook to where a neon-green Post-it Note stuck between the pages pointed to a twenty-three-year-old interview with a socialite, Ginny Howsam Friedman.
I knew a few things about Ginny Friedman.
She was once married to a deputy mayor in the ’80s, now deceased, and was currently married to a top cardiologist. She was a patron of the arts and a gifted painter in her own right.
I scanned the cop’s scribbled notes and saw where McCorkle had underscored her phone number, which I dialed.
Friedman answered on the third ring and surprised me by saying, “I’m free if you come over now.”
I left a note on Conklin’s chair, then took my Explorer for a spin out to Friedman’s address in Pacific Heights.
Ginny Friedman’s pretty blue-and-white gingerbread- decked house was on Franklin Street, one of the blocks of fully restored Victorian houses that make San Francisco a visual wonder.
I walked up the steps and pressed the bell, and a lovely-looking gray-haired woman in her early seventies opened the door.
“Come in, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you. What can I get you? Coffee or tea?”
Chapter 93
MRS. FRIEDMAN AND I settled into a pair of wicker chairs on her back porch, and she began to tell me about the snake killings that had terrorized San Francisco’s high society in 1982.
Friedman stirred her coffee, said, “There’s got to be a connection between those old killings and the recent ones.”
“We think so, too.”
“I hope I can help you,” Friedman said. “I told Lieutenant McCorkle that it was stinking horrible when those prominent people kept dying in eighty-two. Scary as hell. Keep in mind, we didn’t know why they died until Christopher Ross was found with that snake coiled up in his armpit.”
“And you knew Christopher Ross?”
“Very well. My first husband and I went out with him and his wife often. He was a very handsome guy. A thrill-seeker with an outgoing personality, and he was wealthy, of course. His gobs of money had gobs of money. Chris Ross had it all. And then he died.
“Some said it was poetic justice,” Friedman told me. “That he was a snake who was killed with one — but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“Take your time,” I said. “I want to hear it all.”
Friedman nodded, said, “In nineteen eighty-two, I was teaching fifth-grade girls at the Katherine Delmar Burke School in Sea Cliff. You know it, I’m sure.”
I did. Sea Cliff was an A+ oceanside community, uncommonly beautiful, populated by the uncommonly wealthy.