EVELYN GATES YOU KNOW A LITTLE. She was forty-one on the night she died; no deaths are painless, but hers, at least, had been swift. A sword, in the hand of a capable assailant, accomplishes its work with almost surgical precision: the killer had lanced her first in the neck, and then, gripping the hilt of his sword with both hands at about the level of his midline, thrust awkwardly but decisively upward. The point of the blade had entered about an inch below her sternum. Her spine temporarily stayed its force; feeling it stick, her killer had tugged forcefully at the hilt, doubling the blade’s damage on the way back out of its victim’s body. Most notably, it nicked the lung a second time. Her injuries were several, causing massive blood loss; but it was that twice-punctured lung that made the blows fatal. Struck, she’d fallen face-first onto the floor; her assailant had pressed the heel of his shoe down against the back of her head to muffle the sound of her screams before seeing his quest through to its end. You can’t breathe when your lungs can’t inflate. She suffocated to death.
Her life, up to this point, had been one of petty privilege. Prior to her father’s death, she’d owned a couple of Shakey’s franchises bought with family money; franchise owners usually hire people with management experience to man the house, but Evelyn had insisted on personally overseeing everything. She’d never worked in a restaurant a day in her life; she was incompetent at best, and a genuine menace when things were busy. She’d stand on the line advising the cooks on how to increase their work rate, or head out into the restaurant to patrol the tables, slowing down the needed flow of traffic and generally getting in the way. She seldom fired anybody; she preferred to dock pay on questionable grounds, and to keep doing it just enough to keep morale low—for showing up late, for long lunch breaks, for using the toilet during the work shift. Her employees were unlikely to file any complaints. Most of them were high school students, or needy retirees, or single moms returning to the workplace.
She was pretty, but had never married. Managing her father’s properties had kept her busy. Had anyone known her intimately, they’d been discreet. It was hard for me to get a read on her beyond these immediately available details, which felt like a caricature: but I did manage to unearth a profile piece from about a year after her father’s death.
In the picture that accompanies it, she stands beside an antique bookcase. Her smile seeks approval almost to the point of insisting upon it; her teeth gleam. The books on their shelves are protected by glass doors that swivel upward onto a track above them; I saw something like them in my grandmother’s house when I was a child. The caption reads: Evelyn Gates stands with her collection of rare books, which includes some of the oldest volumes to be found in California, which may well be true. But the authors whose names I was able to make out from the spines of the books had all been popular at the turn of the century: H. Rider Haggard, Annie Fellows Johnston, Wilkie Collins. Johnston didn’t even publish at all until 1893.
Among Californians whose ancestors came west early, a nostalgic mood sometimes takes hold: a feeling of having been born too late to enjoy the spoils that are rightly theirs, of finding themselves on the wrong end of always having to always ask for things. I wonder if Evelyn Gates was one of these, though her clothes, in the picture, don’t suggest anything of the sort: a smart skirt and a crisp blouse, a modest pair of earrings in modern geometric shapes. She’s in partial profile, with her hair cut just above the shoulder; I can see, if I set my imagination to it, how she might have looked with a braid hanging down to the middle of her back, her attire in the more severe and decorous fashions of an earlier age—a crinoline skirt rippling past her ankles, the sleeves of her blouse billowing until they cinched at the wrists. In this vision, her eyes don’t change: they still demand respect, because the person who opens them in the morning and closes them at night has been raised to believe she deserves it.
Evelyn Gates’s corpse had been found splayed atop the remains of Marc Buckler, thirty-one years old on the night he came to inspect the property, which he intended to purchase from Gates at a discount. She’d agreed to the markdown on the condition that Buckler buy two other of her properties, it didn’t much matter which. At the time of the proposed sale, she had her eye on new ground then being broken in the same neighborhoods Whitney Burnett would try to steer me toward years later. In Gates’s day, these lots still lay undeveloped; new arrivals, their wallets fat with new money, were the target buyers for the properties to be built atop them, in which Evelyn Gates saw an opportunity to improve her station.
She died before she was able to get in on the action. An investigator from the forensics crew, when her body had been turned face-up, cried out in shock: he’d grown up in a Gates house, and his parents still made out their rent checks to Gates Homes, Ltd., every month. As a child, he’d been present during some of Evelyn’s surprise visits to her properties—humiliating, embarrassing exercises of power that left deep impressions on children made to see their parents showing deference to an overdressed, unexpected visitor. “Miss Gates,” he said, standing over the pit, trying to think of something else to say, wondering who the body beneath hers had belonged to in life.
Marc Buckler was from Charter Oak, but he told most of his business associates he came from Hollywood: he hoped to cultivate an air of success. On the day he died, his plane out of Ontario was delayed several times; it finally took to the air bound for San Francisco almost three hours late. He was angry, and sweating through his business clothes. He’d wanted to fly up again, quickly view a property he already knew he intended to buy, and catch a red-eye home; the whole prospect made him feel metropolitan.
He rented a car from Budget. It was a white Ford Taurus, the economy option. At home, he drove a red 1968 Pontiac GTO with cream leather interior, which he pampered by hand every weekend; by the time he got to the offices of Gates Homes, Ltd., he was out of sorts. Evelyn’s receptionist, a high school student working off the books, remembered him later: “He was mad,” she told the detectives. “The way he came in, I thought he was going to hit somebody. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, because now he’s dead, all right? But he was all red and sweaty. Like, hot. He pushed open that door like, I’m going to cause trouble. I kept one hand on the phone just in case.”