Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery by M. Louisa Locke Page A

of the matter. He tried seeing Mrs. Sullivan again this morning. No luck. He just prayed she wouldn’t contradict him tomorrow in court when he stood up and asked the judge for a postponement.
    Neither the day nor his headache improved much after he’d dropped the petition off at the superior court house on Montgomery and took one of the North Beach Line’s yellow horse cars up to Mrs. Sullivan’s home. Located on Stockton, a half a block south of Washington Square, her residence was a narrow, two-story house crammed between a dry goods store and millinery shop. When a young, harried maid answered the door, he asked to speak to either Mr. Sullivan or Mrs. Tonner, Mrs. Sullivan’s mother. The young girl just stared at him as if he’d been speaking a foreign language.
    He then asked if he could come in while she consulted with her master or mistress. That had some effect since she turned and fled, leaving the door open. He stepped in and shut the door behind him. The resulting darkness, in contrast to the sunny day outside, left him momentarily blind. He stood, his hat in his hand, listening, trying to get his bearings. The house felt hot and closed in and silent, except for a strange sound that Nate eventually recognized as snoring. Someone upstairs––surely Alan Sullivan––was evidently still abed. Not that strange, if he worked nights at the Call.
    The girl stuck her head out of a room to his left, whispered something about him coming on in, and disappeared back into the room. When he followed her, he found her hovering over a tiny white-haired old woman wrapped in numerous shawls. He bowed and introduced himself, and Mrs. Tonner (at least he assumed it was she) nodded and indicated that he should sit down in the chair next to her. He then proceeded to try and hold a conversation with a woman who turned out to be profoundly deaf.
    As far as he could determine, Mrs. Tonner believed her daughter was helping the police with their inquiries into her employer’s death, although she seemed confused over why Florence would need to stay at the police station to do so. He did get confirmation that the snoring man upstairs was her son-in-law, and he thought she promised to give him Nate’s card.
    The only useful piece of information he got out of this visit came from the maid. As he was leaving, he asked her when Mrs. Sullivan returned to work on Friday evening. She replied that her mistress got home a little early and ate dinner with her mother before leaving to return to work, a little after seven. When he asked about whether her master had dined with his wife and mother-in-law, the maid became agitated and shook her head, glancing upwards. Apparently reassured by the continued sound of snoring, she said her master wasn’t happy to learn his wife was returning to work and stormed out of the house without his dinner. What seemed most upsetting to her was that she’d made a special pudding for him that night that he’d never gotten to eat.
    Brooding over the significance of this quarrel, Nate had then decided to go down Stockton to the city morgue, which was on O’Farrell Street just off Market. Only a twenty-minute walk, mostly down hill, the light chill in the air was a pleasant contrast to the over-heated atmosphere at the Sullivans’ home. He’d planned on asking some questions of the doctor who’d performed the autopsy on Joshua Rashers Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the man he wanted to see didn’t have an office at the morgue. Turned out, Dr. Blach, the City Physician, had been called in to do Rashers’ autopsy because the regular coroner and his assistants were all off for the Fourth of July weekend. Nate was going to have to track him down at Blach’s regular surgery and hope the doctor would have more to add in person to the very uninformative official autopsy report.
    Trying to salvage something good from the trip to this part of town, Nate then decided to take the short four-block walk up