How do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole?
You step forward.
But something triggers that decision. According to John, chance is a bigger cause of crime than the law-abiding would like to believe. But he sure wasn’t going to make that argument in this case. Not and have the fault be all his own.
I rounded the top of the stairs onto the observation circle. No patrol cars. Good.
“John!”
His eyes were jammed to a telescope pointing far right and down into the bushes. “See anything?”
“What do you think? No! She . . . took . . . my . . . car!” He was almost yelling. Behind him people moved away fast. “What the hell got into her?”
“I don’t know, John!”
“You brought her here!”
“It was a fluke.”
“Fluke? Yeah, right!” He turned and strode back from the parapet, got a car-length away, charged back, planted himself inches from my face. “You brought her. How come?”
“I didn’t
bring
her. I’d just met her. She wanted to go for a run; I only had an hour. We were in Washington Square. This was just the logical place—”
“Washington Square, a minute from Gary’s office. Gary! He’s behind this,” he shouted at me, light dawning, “isn’t he?”
“Stealing a police car? Are you nuts? I’ve kept away from our family all of my adult life. I hardly know either one of you. But that’s just crazy.”
He was pulling in breath through clenched teeth, eyeing me like I was a suspect. “It’s Gary, isn’t it? What did he tell you?”
He told me to rabbits.
Why had Gary insisted I not tell him? Gary was my buddy, but he was what I loved in guys—a brat. Could John possibly be right?
His face was growing purple. I’d never seen him this out of control. He dug his fingers into my arm. “Don’t you clam up to protect him.”
“Let go of me!”
His grip loosened. I jumped back.
“Not Gary, huh? You saying
she
set us all up? What do you know about her? You tell me! Why did Gary say to bring her here?”
Ah. “Gary didn’t. He only told her I’d take her running. He didn’t say where.”
“So
you
chose Coit Tower?”
“No, she wanted a high spot with a view and trees . . . oh.”
“Exactly. What did she say to you?”
“She’s getting a divorce. But she didn’t go into that. She just about got killed shoving a girl out of the way of a car. Driver was furious.”
“Really?” For an instant he seemed taken aback.
“Yeah, just as suddenly as she decided to take your car. People
do
lose it in divorces, you know.”
“What else?”
“A Zen koan; she talked about that, and about Mike.”
John barked out a laugh. “Your two favorite subjects!”
“Hey, I don’t—”
“What else did she say?”
“Nothing! No, wait. There was one last thing, but it’s not going to help you. She was trying to be kind. She said, don’t beat yourself up—meaning me—about Mike.”
He nodded, his lips tensed into a slight sneer I knew all too well. “So you liked her, right?”
“What’s wrong with that!”
He took a step back and shook his head. His expression said I was an idiot. “If someone’s your friend, they’re okey-dokey and the rest of the world just doesn’t understand. You’re sure you see something the rest of us’re too thick to get. Your friends, you’ll move heaven and earth to justify them. You’ve always been that way. Used to be Mike, now it’s Gary. So Gary couldn’t have set this up ...” His voice trailed off and I had the feeling he found it hard to believe Gary had purposely sabotaged him either. “If it’s Mike, he must’ve walked out of the house one Thursday in a bubble
of innocence and been spirited off to another life. Because you adored him, there has to be some very fine, all-redeeming reason a forty-three-year-old man can’t walk back in the door now and just say, “I screwed up.”
I just stared. Then I said the only possible thing. “Fuck you!”
A patrol car, lights flashing, raced up the down lane of the exit road. When John spotted it, he jumped back and the expression on his face was not that of a police detective relieved to have a ride back to the station. Nor did he take the all too familiar gritted teeth inhalation of one prepared to take a ribbing. His expression was momentary; the next instant he was walking toward the car, leaning down toward the driver. But during that moment, I could have sworn his face showed a flash of fear.
4
I RAN TOWARD the patrol car.
John glanced back at me, got in and slammed the door. The car sped away down Telegraph Hill Boulevard.
“Damn you!” I was so furious—so hurt—and stunned by his attack, my temptation was just to let him deal or sink. What I needed to do was get to the location and get ready for my gag. It was already 5:30. In an hour I’d be turning the ignition key. But there was no way I could just let John go, not as out of control as he’d been.
I leapt the observation ledge, skidded between pines and cypress, pushed off and leapt for the plaza.
They were almost at the Lombard curve. I slid down the double railings, swung forward and hit the sidewalk.
John glared out the window. He still had that panicky look. The vehicle picked up speed, nearly hitting a cab. Both paused momentarily. John made some kind of signal, and the patrol car shot away.
I yanked the cab door open and flung myself in. “Hang a U.”
“I can’t do a U here!”
“Of course you can. John will cover for you. He’s not paying you to lose him.”
“He’s not paying me at all.”
“He will when we get there.
If
you don’t lose him, Webb.”
Webb Framington Morratt hung a U, shooting me across the leather seat, then hit the gas. He was on what he called an unofficial retainer from John. Very unofficial. I wasn’t sure the range of things he did for my brother
or
their legality. But he definitely wouldn’t want to offend him. “Keep him in sight.”
“He didn’t tell me to trail him.”
“Of course he didn’t. When he called you, he figured he’d be sitting back here with me. He didn’t figure you’d screw around so long a patrol car would get to him first.”
“I didn’t—”
“No matter. Just keep up because I don’t have the address.”
When we got there, John would be livid, Webb Morratt would be outraged, and the next time I needed to make use of Morratt I’d pay for it. But that would be then; this was now. “John uses you because you can tail a car in traffic. Because you
say
you can. Don’t give him reason to doubt it. Your record for honesty isn’t the best.”
He grunted, but did step on the gas.
I braced my feet as we shot through the narrow North Beach streets, the cab swaying as Webb whipped around corners.
What was with John? If he’d stayed up nights planning the cut, he couldn’t have pierced deeper. Mike was four years older than me; I’d adored him. In a family where siblings paired off, he was my other half. I told him everything; he told me . . . less than I’d realized. When he disappeared, I was fifteen. As a family we held together; individually and in private we fell apart. John, for his part, just plowed on. Why this outburst now of all times?
Morratt was watching me in the rearview mirror. I took a breath. “Tourist season, and you’ve still got time to hang around for John.”
Morratt scowled, his round pink head scrunched like a ball a retriever had just had a go at. The ball unwrinkled a bit. He hesitated, fighting his urge to sound off. It was a losing battle. “What’d you think, John’s my patron? I do some work for him. He’s front of the queue, but he’s not keeping me in gas. There’ve been times I’ve missed airport runs for him. Fast fares. It’s a big loss I incur for John.”
If I’d been biting my lip I’d have bled to death. “But you could pick up fares at Coit Tower the times you dropped him off, right?” I was trying to make sense of it all.
“I never dropped him off there.”
Was he lying? Damn! What was my brother doing up there that he was so hot to hide? Wait a minute. “So you’ve just
picked him up
there.”
He nodded, with a grunt.
Of course. “Cheapskate. You mean he’d have called another cab to get him up there? So he didn’t have to pay you to wait?” Pay him to sit around enjoying the view while the meter ticked? To note whatever it was he was doing up there. So Morratt could tell me.
He studied my face in the mirror. Now he had his eyes on the rearview the whole time. The road was incidental. “Yeah.”
“There were times he called you, right, and you dropped everything, right, and then he wasn’t ready and you had to sit around and wait, on your own sweet time, right?”
His eyes narrowed. Even Webb Morratt had a limit. Just as I was deciding on a different approach, he said grudgingly, “Nah. If he made me wait, he made it up.”
“And when you had to go out of your way to take his friend down with him, was that on the meter, too?”
“Nah, that wasn’t the problem. It was him driving around dead silent after, going crazy if I said two words. You know what a bummer that is
when you’re alone hauling hack all day and finally you get someone you can shoot the breeze with and he clams up, plus makes you clam, and even—get this—turn off the radio. Like a tomb. And when he—”
A horn honked.
Morratt shot a glance out the window. Traffic was almost stopped. Ahead on the left was the Ferry Building and for a moment I wondered whether there was a reception or rally there. Then I spotted the cause of the hold-up. It was the set.
My
set, where I’d be doing my stunt in—yikes!—fifty-five minutes. As I’d told Karen Johnson, Market Street was closed for two blocks, from here up past California Street, which was where the action would be. I could see two fire engines and an ambulance, and a huge crowd—workers stopping on their way to the Embarcadero BART station, streetcars out to the Castro, Glen Park, the avenues, or buses to the East Bay.
The black-and-white stayed on the Embarcadero under the Bay Bridge and cut right on Brannan. From there it was an easy shot to the bridge entry at Second Street. If John got on the bridge, I was sunk. No pedestrian walk. But he didn’t. He shot across Second Street on Brannan. He was headed toward the Mission. Damn! Toward the Hall of Justice. He’d flagged the patrol car to take him back to the police station! Ahead, the light was turning red. John shot through it. I thought the police were being more careful about jumping lights now that the city was making a big deal about it. Morratt followed.
Was this really a prank? Karen Johnson an actress set up by Gary to ensnare me? I’d even asked her to dinner. But I couldn’t believe—
Like John said, I couldn’t believe it of Karen, nor could I of Gary. Definitely not.
He passed Sixth Street without slowing, without veering from the left-hand lane. The Hall was at Seventh and Bryant, one block north.
I watched for his taillight, but cops don’t always announce their intentions. Still, when he neared the corner without signaling I wondered if I’d been made and he was just running out the game. In the distance a siren pierced the air.
He crossed Seventh, kept going. Between Eighth and Ninth John turned around and the driver hit the gas. I had been made. But he was almost into the mix of streets under the freeway, not a place to lose someone. What was he doing here in the Mission? He
was
a detective; maybe in the middle of all this, he’d been called to a dead body. Maybe by now Karen Johnson and her appropriation of his unmarked car had been shoved out of his mind.
The siren was louder. John’s car picked up speed on the Fifteenth Street hill. A truck pulled out and across at Caledonia, blocking the entire street.
Metal crunched. The siren went dead.
I got out and ran through the stopped traffic, across the blocked street, pushing hard, up to the corner at Valencia, then started down the hill.
The patrol car John had been in was double-parked, the driver standing behind his open door. The focus of his attention—everyone’s focus of attention—was ten yards further on.
There, in front of a trio of well-kept Victorians was a black-and-white, engine steaming, grill crunched into a fire hydrant. Two officers stood next to it shaking themselves, first arms and then legs, as if to prove they were in better shape than their car. A woman in a royal purple velvet sweat suit—the type you’d never dream of sweating in—and sling-back heels was striding angrily into the house. On the sidewalk, San Francisco Police Department Detective John Lott—my brother, John—looked devastated.
5
THE SWEAT-SUITED woman turned back toward the house and motioned John over with an imperious flick of the wrist. She looked furious.
He was pretty near boiling over himself. As he strode toward her, no one but a sibling would have known how close to the edge he was, but I could tell that from the brick-stiff fingers on the hand he was fighting not to make into a fist. I didn’t envy the velvet woman this encounter. John had never touched any of us younger kids, but he could degrade, humiliate and disgrace all with one phrase. It had made us wary and his friendships brief.
The woman stood on the stoop in her spike heels, he on the walk. Still, he had a couple inches on her and it looked like he could tuck her under his arm. Her expression said: Try it! She was probably in her fifties, but well cared for, with dark hair slant cut to her chin line. She raised a hand. A bracelet sparkled, diamonds all around. Definitely not a woman planning to sweat. Without raising her voice enough for me to hear five yards away, she lit into John.
I had to stop myself charging over to protect him.
She spat out a few more words, turned her back and tapped up the steps. It appeared she’d out-Johned John.
He looked close to snapping. It wasn’t just anger, there was something else—something I couldn’t quite put a name to.