I couldn’t have picked a more tranquil town to play cops and robbers. Palo Alto is an upscale university town about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco. Peter likes to tease me by reading out loud at the breakfast table the “Weekly Crime Watch” section of the Daily News. East Palo Alto and Redwood City get their share of drug busts and even shootings, but here we mostly issue tickets for barking dogs—a Palo Alto canine has fallen afoul of the law if it barks for more than ten minutes—and pick up intoxicated homeless people, to whom we give a meal and a place to dry out before releasing them back onto the streets.
I pull my new Toyota—recently financed by my promotion money—into the Westin’s circular drive off El Camino, and park it in a no parking zone. When a doorman gestures to hurry me along I show him my badge and he, suddenly gracious, opens the door for me. I’m still not quite used to this—the deference shown to me as an officer of the law. Although sometimes, of course, I get the opposite reaction: impudence or scorn, especially given my small stature and the fact that I’m a very young-looking twenty-eight years old. At least, when wearing the uniform, people believed I was an officer. In street clothes, even when I show my badge, some people openly express their doubts about my authority. I’ve had both men and women reach out and pat my head when I’m in the middle of questioning or even issuing a warning. Mortifying.
The Westin has been open less than a year, and although situated right off campus, I’ve never had cause to visit it before. They’d hardly find many reasons to call in the police. Mostly the hotel is frequented by well-heeled Silicon Valley types. The lobby is full of them when I arrive, milling around with cups of Starbucks and carrying binders that say EQUIS RESEARCH in bright red block letters. A placard proclaims High Tech Investments: A New Paradigm for Risk Assessments. Just another chance for the haves to help themselves to more.
I look for stairs, but none are obvious so I do something I hate, which is to take an elevator to the second floor. Once I exit the elevator car, signs indicate that room 224 is to my right. Deep plush piled carpet. Elegant gold-leafed tables holding elaborate bouquets of flowers, implausibly fresh and blooming—so implausibly that I surreptitiously pinch off a bright red blossom. I bring the flower to my nose. Real. Incredibly sweet, almost nauseating. Then I turn the corner and bump into a crowd gathered in front of room 224. I drop the flower and kick it to the side, hoping no one notices. The two cops guarding the door, Mollie and Henry, wave me through. I recognize Jake, a slight, balding man in his forties, kneeling on the floor over the body of a heavyset man dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt, newish-looking sneakers on his feet. The body is on its side. A violent red contusion mars the forehead, and blood is spattered across the man’s cotton top. Behind Jake, a woman armed with a large camera and with an official badge hanging around her neck is photographing the area around the body. Two men, also with badges, are carefully filing away plastic evidence bags. I assume that they, like Jake, are from Santa Clara County. They’ve got a CSI Crime Lab there. We don’t even have a photographer on our staff. At crime or accident scenes we use our phones to take photos.
One of the cops guarding the room is Mollie, a new hire—the officer who called me. The other is her more seasoned partner Henry. Mollie seems a bit ill, but is doing a valiant job keeping what appears to be the hotel manager—he’s wearing a suit and a name tag—and a couple of women, also wearing name tags, from getting inside the room. They are pressed up as close as they can get, though, trying to get a clear view of Jake and the body. A Latina woman in a housekeeper’s uniform is standing off by herself. I push past them.
“It looks like he hit his head on the corner of the dresser when he went down,” says Jake, throwing me a pair of rubber gloves. We’ve worked together just once before. Last month, in fact. A homeless man had stepped in front of a car on University Avenue, the only other death I’ve had to deal with since I’d made detective. Open-and-shut case.
“What caused him to fall?”
“That’s the question,” Jake says. “I’m thinking heart attack. This fella doesn’t seem like he hit the gym very often. Although he may have died from striking the dresser here. There’s a lot of blood, but head wounds tend to be bloody.”
“Any ID?”
Henry hands me a wallet. Even I can recognize that it’s damn fine leather, there’s a buttery sheen to it that my fake leather purse could never aspire to. I begin pulling out cards. “John Taylor,” I read off a Visa then find a driver’s license in the same name. The always-unflattering DMV photo made this John Taylor look tired and somewhat older than his sixty-two years. A reddish, corpulent face. Nice head of hair, though, for his age. I find a Stanford University Medical Center ID.
“He’s a quack,” I say. “John Taylor, of Stanford Hospitals and Clinics. A fat doctor. Go figure.”
“What makes you think he was a doctor? Lots of people work over at the hospital, he could be a nurse, a technician, an orderly . . .”
“Yeah, but how many of them can afford a room at the Westin? Besides, it states it right here on his ID: Dr. John Taylor.”
Jake is frowning.