Muller, Marcia - [09] There's Something In A Sunday [v 1.0] (htm) Page A

you know the procedure. You still with that same outfit?"
    "All Souls? Yes." I stood, too, and gave him one of my cards.
    Gallagher studied it, then looked back at my face. His eyes were a trifle wistful now, and I wondered if he was remembering the old days, too. What he said confirmed it: "You ever see the lieutenant?"
    He meant Greg Marcus, my lover back then. "We have dinner occasionally, but that's it."
    "Funny, I always thought the two of you would get it together."
    "So did we—once." I looked at my watch. Six-thirty. I'd told Rae I would meet her at the Remedy Lounge an hour ago. "Is it okay to use the phone?"
    "Sure, Goldring won't mind." Ben raised a hand in farewell and left the room.
    I stared at the empty doorframe. It wasn't a remark he would have made in earlier days, nor one that I would have accepted—not without anger and protest. But the years had tempered our reactions; now we both wore carapaces of cynicism. It was the only shield either of us had against the pain, the only armor that made it possible to go on.
    I turned away toward the fern-filled front window. Foggy dusk enveloped the city, early for September, a forewarning of a long, dark, hard winter. As the shadows lengthened, my depression deepened. For me, San Francisco had always been a brightly lit city, and that illumination mainly came from its good people. But lately it seemed the lights were going out; one had been snuffed here today. The loss of Rudy Goldring's kindness and warmth—even though I'd experienced it for less than an hour—filled me with a painful emptiness.
    I forced myself to go over to the phone and call the Remedy Lounge. Brian, the bartender, told me that Rae had left about fifteen minutes before, after asking him to tell me I should call her later. No, he said, she hadn't been upset with me. In fact, she'd spent the time drinking beer and talking with one of the regulars, Joey Corona, who owned an auto body shop further out on Mission.
    Brian's words made me smile. I pictured Rae's rusted-out old Rambler American; knowing her, she'd probably sweet-talked Joey into a cut-rate repair job.
    The thought was comforting. As long as men were available to be sweet-talked into things, and as long as women were willing and able to do that… well, things couldn't be all that bad…
    Or could they?

6

    I didn't want to go home, not yet. There was nothing much there to eat; my cat had taken to wandering and probably wouldn't be there to greet me; the place's continual and usually interrupted state of construction (I'd recently begun enclosing my back porch to turn it into my bedroom but had run out of money) made it decidedly inhospitable. Besides, I still felt depressed—not a deep funk, but a prickly discontent, underscored by an odd clear sorrow—and I wanted to be with people who would understand. Jack Stuart, Rudy Goldring's attorney, would surely be one of those, and if the police hadn't already contacted him, he deserved to be informed about the death. I drove to Bernal Heights and All Souls.
    It was after seven when I parked at the apex of the triangular playground. All along the street, windows glowed faintly through the fog. The buildings in Bernal Heights are mainly single-family homes, with a sprinkling of two- and three-flat dwellings. The people who inhabit them are a mixture of working-class families, neo-Yuppies, and oddballs like the folks at All Souls. I looked into the windows of the nearby houses and saw a family eating from trays in front of a TV, a couple setting a candlelit dinner table, and a string quartet practicing next to a grand piano whose lid was littered with wrappings from McDonald's.
    It was quiet inside All Souls. I shed my coat and, out of habit, tossed it on the desk chair in what had once been my office. Then I continued to the kitchen. No one was there but Hank and Jack Stuart—the man I'd come here to see. They sat at the round table by the windows, wineglasses in hand, deep in