“I sensed from your report that you might have considered that odd?”
She picked her words carefully. “It seemed . . . unusual to me.”
“I asked the mother—”
“Yeah? How’d that go?”
“I suspect about as well as it went for you.”
“She denied anything happened. I asked her point-blank if she suspected her ex-husband had struck her daughter. She gave me a song and dance about ‘how dare I,’ and ‘the police issued a report,’ ‘what gave me the right,’ and ‘what kind of mother did I think she was.’”
“I got a candy slapped in my palm.”
“Huh?”
“I got the same song. So I assume you didn’t report it to CPS?”
“Report what? She denies it, and the police report says it was a bike accident. I got nothing to say it wasn’t. Do you have something more?”
“No, nothing,” I said, except a history with the husband.
“Do you think you can help the girl?” LeBaron asked.
“I’m going to need to run a series of tests,” I said, “if they come back to see me. I think Daniela has a detached retina.”
“I hope you can,” she said, ending our conversation.
I stared out the window. In the near distance, rising above the eucalyptus trees along the El Camino Real, stood the steeple to the OLM church. Not wanting to go straight home to an empty house, I made another call. Ernie Cantwell answered his direct line, a number that only I, his wife, and his parents possessed.
“I’ll be home in half an hour,” he said.
“I hope you don’t expect a big sloppy kiss,” I said.
“Hell.”
Throughout high school my classmates had bastardized my last name and called me Hell. Every so often Ernie fell back into that habit.
“What up, Hell?”
“Wondering if you wanted to catch a beer at Moon’s and watch the Forty-Niners game, but it doesn’t sound like you can get a hall pass, you pussy-whipped candy ass.”
“Insult me all you want, you red-eyed son of the devil,” Ernie roared in a very good imitation of Muhammad Ali. “We both know who wears the pants in my house, if I choose to wear pants at all. I have committed to nothing, and I am the king of my castle!”
“You want to call me back after you call and get permission?”
“You know it, brother.”
3
Moon McShane’s drew a lot of Burlingame regulars and Forty-Niners faithful, making parking on Broadway scarce.
Most of the tables inside had already filled by the time I arrived. I took a seat on a stool at the bar, ordered a beer, and immediately drank half the glass. The thought of David Bateman, even after so many years, had unnerved me. The belief that he could be abusing his child made me sick.
Ernie entered ten minutes after I’d taken a seat. It felt like another ten minutes before he reached the bar stool I’d saved for him. People were drawn to the great Ernie Cantwell like magnets to metal. It had always been that way—at OLM, at Saint Joe’s High School, and at Stanford, where I followed a year behind him. Ernie had played wide receiver and studied computer science. The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in the third round, and he played in the NFL just long enough to bankroll his hefty salary and retire in the prime of his career. It had been Ernie’s intention since childhood to join the computer company his father had started in the garage of their Burlingame home. Cantwell Computers had grown significantly, and Ernie said the company had only scratched the surface of its potential, that someday every desk in every office and home in the world would have a personal computer. I had my doubts. It seemed more Star Trek than reality, but I hoped he was right, because I had a vested interest—Ernie had strong-armed me into investing some of my early inheritance in Cantwell Computers.