A uniformed guard wearing the insignia of the Pinkerton agency stepped from a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. I saw a small washroom behind him.

“Hi there,” I said. “Sorry if I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be. I’m looking for the girl who plays the bells at the top of the tower.” I pointed up, as if this would help him understand. “Gail Prentice?”

“That’s her name?” he asked, looking at his watch. He was older than me and slightly built, barely filling out his uniform. “I don’t work here in the tower, I’m posted next door in the Hollywood Building. I just use this washroom whenever . . . well, whenever. But I think I know the girl you mean. There’s a bell concert each night to close down the park, and she and I usually talk a bit before she plays. Saw her just last night. Maybe she heard about what happened and thought they’d closed the—” He looked about. “We had a jumper here today, you know.”

I said I knew, and asked him if there might be a regular guard for the tower who could have seen Gail. This amused him. “There’s no guard here. What’s someone gonna steal, the chimes, the tower?” He looked at his watch again. “The music should have started by now. I mean, it’s not like we wouldn’t hear it.” I thanked him, left the Tower of the Sun, and hurried over to the area called the Enchanted Garden, to which Gail and the rest of the crowd had earlier been exiled by Culpepper. Beyond a gateway with a mural depicting GOOD WILL BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, an octagonal fountain was splotting great long drops into the air, giving the illusion of water going both up and down at the same time. A pinwheel vendor told me that the sequestered crowd had been dismissed to the East Bay ferry landing over an hour earlier.

I didn’t think I had a chance in hell, but I headed to the Key System’s boat slip just in case she might still be there. I got to the terminal in time to see a big purple ferry already departing, but odds were Gail had left long before this.

There was a coin telephone booth around the corner from the terminal’s ticket counter, and I dialed the number Gail had given me in her letter. The girl who answered sounded like she thought she had better things to do with her time than say, “Berkeley Club.”

“Gail Prentice, please?”

“This is the front desk, there are no phones in the rooms, I can page her if it’s urgent.”