“Clear the set! Get off!” someone yelled. I shot a glance across the street. Was there someone in eggshell blue over on the sidewalk? Could Karen really be here? “Action!”
I punched the gas. Continuity would pick up ten feet before the corner, where I left off yesterday. I needed to hit 30 there. Fog smeared the windshield. The car burst through it, like stepping off the hundred-foot pole.
Focus!
25, 30. I eased the wheel left, as if falling for the illusory road next to the wedge of 101 California.
The first cable car loomed, and I jimmied the wheel in “panic.” The camera cart cut in close. I hit the slip pad, yanked the wheel hard right. Then the skid, and I was slamming the rear fender into the front corner of the cable car. Fog blurred the street. I cut left, down California, shimmied onto the cable car tracks, overcorrected full out, smacked the first junker, bounced left, hard-righted into the second. The dummy pedestrian popped out. I skimmed it, slammed the brake.
The car lurched—hard-right, hard-left—as I hit the ramp and clung to the wheel. It bounced, spun, going wide toward a lamppost on the far sidewalk. The front bumper missed but the rear smacked it. Metal crunched. Drifting out of the circle, I yanked the wheel back into the spin. The second cable car was two yards to my left. I went up over the sidewalk, slammed into the fish wagon from the back. Big, sloppy, silvery fish flew against the windshield. Slime turned the glass gray. I couldn’t see anything.
The cable car was dead ahead, the passengers’ bare legs dangling from the outside benches. I stood on the brakes. The shrill squeal cut the air.
A fish flew over the windshield into my face.
“Sheesh!” I said as I pulled to a stop and someone opened the door. “Did you have to get day-old fish?”
He didn’t react.
I snapped the belt free and was out of the car. “The cameraman okay?”
Another fish hit me. “Jes’ fine, thank you.”
Shoes hitting pavement, disembodied cheers came through the fog. “Good work!” Jed was calling. “You get it all?” he was asking. In reply, the cameraman was flinging another fish. Duffy was barking, then he leapt into my arms, making everyone laugh.
I’d lucked out. This time. What a day it had been since that call from Gary. It scared me how closed I’d come to losing focus. I had a fire gag coming up in a couple days. Fire’s fire. If I couldn’t focus then, I’d die.
It was night now. The streetlights blurred the road surface under the fog and I was glad I wasn’t the one making sure every dead fish was swept away. Duffy jumped down. I headed west toward the corner where I’d started. It was just the second unit—the stunt crew—here tonight. They’d be a few minutes packing up before we met at Harrington’s, the site of the per diem. It was the few minutes I needed. Common sense told me this was
the last place Karen Johnson would come. Common sense said I’d imagined that flutter of blue cloth.
But, still, I wasn’t ready to rule it out.
7
THERE WERE A LOT of places Karen Johnson could have been in the vicinity of California and Davis. None panned out. I called John’s cell. No answer. Ditto Gary. By the time I walked back down the hill toward Harrington’s the euphoria from the gag had evaporated and I was tired, worried, and frustrated. Duffy, on the other hand, was annoyed and hungry.
“Come on!” Jed was just leading the crew inside. “We’ve got a section at the far end of the bar.”
“Reserved?”
“Commandeered.”
“Yeah, we weren’t very restrained last night,” a tech chuckled. “Hey Darcy, your drive was great. You got a lot of distance with those fish. Brad’s still out with the broom and searchlight. Poor guy.”
“Thanks. But, listen, I’d better eat out here with Duffy.”
“Bring ’im!”
“Yeah, he’s one of us!” The crowd, about a dozen strong, surrounded us and we moved inside as one. If the bartender noticed the small black shape, he didn’t let on. We pushed tables together and ate in a single very loud group, with shrimp on the table, beef strips under it. Duffy, who was not the sort to lower himself to beg, or bark in a no-bark area, never had his mouth empty long enough to reconsider. I had grilled calamari
and a beer, and enjoyed being part of a crew again, not to mention hearing their praise.
“Hey, guys,” I called out when there was a trough in the noise level, “did you notice a blonde woman in a pale blue linen pantsuit standing by the curb? I thought I spotted her there just as I was starting the gag.”
“And you didn’t pull over and check her out?”
“You’d done another three-sixty maybe you coulda caught ’er.”
Everyone was into it.
“Listen, if you remember you did see her, call me.”
“She a friend?”
I hesitated. “Truth? I don’t know. But I do want to see her again.” “I’ll be going over the dailies,” Jed said, waving the waitress over to get the tab. “I’ll call you if I spot anything.”
“Thanks.” I gave him my card, not that I expected him to have her on film. But it doesn’t hurt for the second unit director to have your card in his pocket.
An early morning call loomed for everyone but me, and by half past nine people were cutting out.
I left Duffy outside while I used the ladies’ room and when I came out the street was empty, or nearly so. Only Brad, the guy in charge of fish removal, was still at work, him and the last of the police detail double-checking to make sure no civilian tried to follow my route down the road. The cops were laughing at the idea of a fish wagon down here in the financial district. Movie location duty was a plum and I wasn’t surprised to see a guy John’s age sitting in his warm car. I tapped on this window.
“Yes?” he said questioningly. “Oh, hey, you’re Lott’s sister. I heard you were working this set. It you that did that drive?”
I nodded, pulling my totally inadequate fleece vest tighter around me.
“You made it look real.
Real
real! When you hit the pole—great driving.”
“Don’t let on to anyone on the set, but that wasn’t exactly planned.”
He laughed. “What about the fish wagon, you supposed to hit that?”
“Yeah, but not so I ended up wearing it.” I shivered and turned up my collar.
“You need a ride? If you don’t mind riding in the cage.”
“What I need’s a favor. A big one. I need to get my dog home to Mom.”
“John’s mom’s still there? When him and me were tight—years ago—I had some great times out there. She still make that stew?”
“Always has some ready. She’ll be very pleased to see you again. A guy who makes a special trip to bring her her favorite furry child, you’re going to just about be enshrined.”
Duffy hopped in the heated car. I gave my mother a quick call and loped the few blocks to the zendo. The building was dark, as were the steps upstairs to the living quarters, which was fine, since I had no intention of staying. I changed into a heavy sweatshirt and jeans, clipped on my pouch and headed out into the fog.
From the zendo Gary’s office was a ten-minute walk north on Columbus. It’s the second-floor front unit in a small Victorian, on a wedge of corner where two streets meet at Columbus. He could have rented a more impressive office, in a more expensive location, but the charm of this little building suited him. His office was a cupola of windows at the fruit end of the pie slice, like a cherry that’s slipped off the crust. If you stand on his desk you can see the Golden Gate.
I rang the downstairs bell. I’d given him a lot of leeway today. I’d dropped everything to distract his troubled client, even without him
explaining why I’d been called upon. And despite his hanging up on me when I asked! I’d left a message telling him Karen had swiped a police car, and another after she crashed it. Now, Gary could damn well tell me what was going on.
He didn’t buzz me in.
I rang again.
No response.
I jumped back and looked up to catch a flicker of guilty movement. But there was no sign of life.
I pulled out my phone and called. He had to be there. I was sure of it. No answer.
“Damn you! Call me!”
There was only one exit. I could have waited. He’d slept in his office before. He’d be likely to spend a more comfortable night in there than I would freezing on his doorstep. But, thanks to Duffy’s previous owner, I was the proud possessor of what looked to be the illegitimate offspring of a door key and a lock pick. I let myself in. If Gary wasn’t going to explain things himself, then I’d let Karen Johnson’s case file do the talking. It was merely a question of finding it.
The last time I’d been here Gary was about to meet with a new client whom for some reason he wanted to impress. So he’d paid his paralegals double time to file away mail, hole-punch documents and put cases back into the file cabinets. Now it was business as usual: the place looked like it’d been burgled. The conference table in the crust end of the wedge held a frightening mountain of cases. Folders were propped against the walls, piled on the floor and in front of the file cabinet, blocking any possibility of putting them away. It was like Gary had forgotten he lived in earthquake country. His apparent belief—not unfounded—was: out of sight out of mind. He had a system, but it was beyond words. What I did
know of it was that the most recent case would be on his desk or nearby. Balancing against a padded chair that itself held a stack of files, I stepped over two piles of folders, edged around the desk and almost fell over the body behind it.
8
I LEAPT BACK, swept the pile of cases off the desk onto the rising figure behind it. That bought me just enough time to reach for Gary’s phone and punch in the 9—
“Wait!”
“Huh?” I glared down at the form of my brother John. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Waiting to get a hold of Gary.”
“Back there? You aiming to grab him by the ankles?”
“I wanted to see what kind of amateur it was pulling a b-and-e,” he corrected me, as he stood up. “I could have taken a train to the East Bay in the time you spent attacking the lock.”
“I’ll be quicker next time.” I switched on the light and caught the remnant of something on his face. Once I might have called it a “can’t control her” look. But I’d seen this same expression when the patrol car had picked him up at Coit Tower. After he’d blindsided me about Mike. Before he yelled at me in front of the crash scene.
“John, what the hell is going on?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
He was all cop—
we ask, you tell
—now. I could have smacked him. But I wanted answers more. With huge effort, I swallowed my rage and
steeled myself to play his game. “Your plan went awry when Karen took your car.”
“Your friend stole my car.”
“Not
my
friend. The woman you’d been meeting at Coit Tower for how long? I barely knew her, but you, John, you knew her very well. Not as well as you wanted to, you, in your hot guy-on-the-make suit. So, just what were those get-togethers about?”
Was this how cops did it, sucker-punched and watched? If I hadn’t been so furious, I would have felt bad, very bad. “You have these clandestine meetings,” I went on, “and she steals—oh, no, wait, she doesn’t
need
to steal your car. You’re her—what?—boy toy? She can just borrow your car. The city won’t mind you lending it to a girlfriend. That kind of thing happens all the time. It only creates problems when there’s a crash in front of a spiffy Victorian and the buck gets traced to you.”
“Are you here to find out something about Gary? Or do you just want to make a scene?” His control was masterful. He wasn’t red-faced. His hands weren’t in fists. He didn’t look like he was about to slug me. Not quite.
“Let me condense my question so you can grasp it: can you explain you and Karen Johnson?”
“It’s none of your—”
“Not my business? It’s my business, the SFPD’s business, the whole city’s business.”
“It wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t—”
I shook my head. Just stared at him.
His stared back, his face taut, walling off the machinations going on behind it. “Okay. You’re right.”
“Right about what?”
“I’m meeting her for a torrid affair. You’re just wrong about the Victorian. We’re using the Laundromat across the street. It’s more practical. We can get a clean load—”
“This is serious.”
“You don’t think I can have a serious affair?” He settled back on the desk. He knew he’d won.
In his mind I was still his baby sister, in front of whom he’d dangled toys out of reach and spelled out secret words to the other big kids. I could have screamed.
I had to regroup, but not now. Definitely not here. “So what’d you find among Gary’s mire?”
“Nothing.”
“All your own speedy lock-picking for nothing?” The office looked more daunting a muddle in the light. Even if John or I knew exactly what to grab there’d be less than a ten percent chance of finding it in here. “I’m assuming by your presence here in the dark, without a warrant?”—
He nodded.
—“that your issue is personal rather than police business.”
He offered the most grudging of grunts. “But you brought her to Coit Tower. How come?”
“Gary called. Told me zip. I’m as much in the dark as you. I don’t know whether he planned the carjacking or she did or she did it on the spur. What do you think?”
I expected him to attack or evade, but he surprised me. He cleared Gary’s chair and settled into it. “Dunno, Darcy. There’ve always been gags and gotchas in the family, me trying to keep control—okay, I know, with a way heavier hand than you kids wanted. Particularly Gary. Three years younger with too much time spent trying to show me up.”
I resisted the urge to come to the defense of Gary—and, in fact, all the rest of us.
“But lately . . .”
“Lately?” I prompted.
“Lately . . . The last couple weeks, maybe month, he’s been weird. I mean, for Gary. Whatever you may think, he and I are close. There’s probably not a single thing outside of Mom and the 49ers we agree on—and even with Mom we’ve got opinions that don’t match—but still we’re brothers and I know what Gary’s like. I’ve seen him through three divorces, a couple of huge settlements on cases he was almost sure to lose in trial, one loss that threw him for a loop for months. What I’m saying is I know him. And lately he’s been strange.”