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.”
Gates took him out for a pick-me-up, presumably to improve his mood; he drank a Manhattan, which records show she paid for with her business Visa. Over drinks, beneath cut-out Halloween pumpkins and cartoon spiders, she showed him printouts of the several other listings he hadn’t inquired about on his previous visit, just in case: Buckler talked fast and interrupted a lot, and she thought maybe she had a live one on the line. She was right. He harbored dreams of a big windfall. His friends kept saying the Silicon Valley boom was just now entering its actual growth spurt. Houses outside the city were still cheap. He wanted in.
They didn’t arrive at the property until after dark. Most realtors will try to get you inside during daylight hours: everything looks more appealing in the sunlight. But Buckler didn’t care that much, and it showed; his only concern was how much it would cost him to make any improvements needed to resell the place at a profit. Minus that motive, he wouldn’t have even gotten out of the car to inspect this property: it was one of the unasked-for listings Evelyn Gates had brought along. She hadn’t intended to show it tonight. It was a semi-distressed property in a nothing neighborhood, the sort of place you might point out to a client when you drove past it. But with a client all wet behind the ears like this, you never knew.
Inside, when the figure emerged from the shadows, Buckler froze right where he stood: he wanted to run, but his fear of the unknown wouldn’t let him pick a direction. Evelyn Gates was standing flash-frozen in genuine horror at the sights that surrounded her, the thousand loving touches that illuminated the magnitude of her miscalculation, the innumerable things she didn’t know or care enough to learn about the people who lived or did business in the properties she’d inherited from her father. Buckler watched her die, the whole sudden scene; when, as she fell, his survival instinct finally kicked in, someone was waiting to block his escape route. It could have been anybody; I have my suspicions, but, for several reasons which I hope to eventually make clear, I’m not inclined to put them down on paper.
I try to honor the dead in my books. It’s one of the things, I hope, that sets me apart a little from my partners in true crime. When I read what others write about places where the unthinkable became real, the focus always seems off to me. Victims spend their entire time in the spotlight just waiting for the fatal blow, on a conveyor belt that leads to the guillotine: I pity their fates, but it’s hard to grieve for them, because the treadmill on which they ran feels specifically designed to kill them. I brought this up at a convention once; I wasn’t exactly shouted down, but a luminary I’ll decline to name told me, on a live mic: “There aren’t any villains in a true crime book. There’s the hero, and there’s his victims.” Everybody in the room laughed. It left a bad taste in my mouth.