“I’m already in; I got my stuff out of storage this afternoon. After living on my sister’s hide-a-bed for five months after I broke up with my boyfriend, this place is like heaven, dirt and all. Besides, I can take care of myself.”
Tallman thrust her chin out defiantly, daring me to contradict her, and I realized how young she was—no more than twenty-one or -two. Young and full of bravado, as I’d been two decades before, and likely to get herself into fully as much trouble as I sometimes had.
“At least change the locks,” I suggested.
“Can’t afford to.”
She didn’t know who or what she might be up against but, then, neither did I. Maybe the threat wasn’t serious; maybe Jody Houston was simply paranoid. Still, I couldn’t leave Paige Tallman alone and at risk.
I handed her my card. “I’ll make you a deal. When you hear from Jody, try to find out where she is and let me know. In exchange, I’ll send a friend over who specializes in residential security. She’ll install an alarm, free of charge.”
Tallman looked at the card. “Thanks, Ms. McCone! What a day. This is the second time the right person’s come along at the right time.”
“And my friend will make sure the wrong person won’t be able to come along tomorrow.”
After I left Paige Tallman I climbed the interior stairway to the floor above and let myself into Roger’s flat. It was very cold there, as if each chilly night since his death had added its weight until the warmth of day could no longer penetrate it. The flat smelled of fresh paint and furniture polish, but beneath those clean odors was filth and decay. Fanciful thinking on my part, I supposed, because I knew what the closet and cupboard doors concealed.
The other morning I’d noticed the phone up here was still connected; my cell had discharged by now, and I wanted to call Sue Hollister, my friend in residential security, right away. Sue was home and agreeable to coming over first thing tomorrow; I asked her to bill my office and gave her the Nagasawa case-file number for reference.
Then I turned on a small lamp in the living room and sat down on the sofa to listen to the silence.
When I was looking for my birth parents the previous autumn, Hy had taught me a useful technique: listening to the spaces between people’s words, the pauses between statements. Listening, in effect, to what they censored. I hadn’t tried it with a physical environment before, but I’d long contended that a place can tell you a great deal about the events that have transpired within it if you’re patient and allow it to do so. Now I waited for the flat to give me some hint of the past.
From outside came the normal city sounds: more sirens, more barking dogs, someone yelling in the street, a car burning rubber, an alarm gone haywire. But the flat must be well insulated, because all of those seemed very far away.
In the kitchen the refrigerator made ticking noises. Then there was a swirling and gurgling. Something wrong with the coil, meaning costly repairs or even a whole new unit. Mine did that periodically, and every time I heard it I got depressed.
The wind was stronger now. It made small, shrill whistles as it seeped through the ill-fitting frame of the rear window. A skylight groaned ominously, and a piece of plaster beside it broke loose and crumbled as it hit the floor.
I thought of Roger coming back to the city, landing a dream job, expecting stock options, buying a flat full of light. But then the dream job turned into a nightmare, the options didn’t materialize, the flat turned into a maintenance problem—
No. You can quit a job and find another. You can defer maintenance or take out a home-improvement loan. Those problems are not personal “failures.” Those problems are not the “circumstances” that drive you over a bridge railing.
I listened some more. Tick. Gurgle. Whistle. Groan. Crack. There was something in between, a subtlety that I couldn’t quite grasp—
The phone shrilled.
My heartbeat accelerated and I jumped off the sofa, scooped up the receiver, and answered in a voice made hoarse by surprise.
“Communing with the dead again?” The caller could have been either male or female, sounded like he or she had covered the mouthpiece with something. “It’s not going to do any good. Better you should reschedule our appointment.”
“Who is this?”
A silence. Caution? Surprise?
The receiver was replaced violently.
Roger, thank God, had favored state-of-the-art phone equipment. I pressed the key to view the number of the last caller, saw that the prefix was the same. Close by, then.
“McCone,” Adah Joslyn’s sleep-clogged voice said, “I can’t do it till morning. Shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
“I don’t ask for a lot of favors.” I pictured the SFPD homicide inspector snuggled up in bed with my operative Craig Morland and her enormously fat cat, Charley. Warmth and comfort were the reasons she didn’t want to run the check.
“Don’t go all humble pie on me, girl! It ain’t you.”
I waited her out while she fulminated about late-night calls when I wanted something. Adah, who often denigrated her talents by claiming her straight-to-the-top career path was due to her being the department’s “three-way poster child”—meaning half black, half Jewish, and a woman— was a terrific cop and a better friend, if inclined to be testy.
“Okay,” she finally said, “fifteen minutes. But this is the last time, McCone. You hear? The last!”
“Phone booth,” Adah said some ten minutes later. “Lobby of the Redwood Health Club on—”
“Brannan.”
“You knew that, why’d you wake me up?”
“I know where the club is, not their phone booth number.” The club was next door. Whoever called had seen there was a light here in the flat.
Adah snorted. “
You
know where a health club is? When was the last time we swam together?”
“We’ll go to the pool next week, I promise.”
“Yeah, sure. You know, McCone, you and that crew of yours at the pier are really something.”
I tapped my fingers on the receiver, impatient to hang up. “What does that mean?”
“Well, you wake me up on a night when I had trouble getting to sleep because my man’s out boozing with your office manager—”
“Craig’s with Ted?”
“Right. Seems Neal up and quit his job this afternoon. Harsh words were exchanged. So Ted’s afraid to go home, and he and Craig’re on a pub crawl.”
Great. Now I had to worry about Neal, alone and miserable, while Ted, who couldn’t hold his liquor, was out drinking with Craig, who could, and would probably tempt him to spectacular excess. Well, that was their problem—for now, anyway.
The health club was a twenty-four-hour operation, and the large windows that fronted on the sidewalk were awash with light. Inside, a dozen or so spandex-suited individuals used various instruments of torture, bearing grim expressions born of a determination to achieve bodily perfection. I’ve never understood why you would want your sweaty efforts displayed to every passerby—isn’t it something better done in private?—but most fitness centers seem to favor this form of free advertising.
The lobby was empty, with no one at the horseshoe-shaped reception desk. The pay phone was in an alcove tucked between the entrances to the men’s and women’s locker rooms. I went back there and looked around, but there was no trace of the person who’d recently used it. Then I went to the entrance to the exercise room and studied the people. They were all concentrating on their machines and didn’t notice me.
Well, what did I expect? The caller wasn’t likely to have remained on the premises to work on his or her abs.
A black woman with curly auburn hair came through a door behind the desk marked Office. “Help you?” she asked.
“Maybe. A friend called me about half an hour ago from the pay phone. I was supposed to meet her here, but I don’t see her. Is there someplace she might be besides the exercise room?”
“She a member?”
“I guess.”
“What’s her name?”
“Uh, Jody Houston.” Since she’d lived next door, she might have been a member; if she was, maybe the woman would let me look around.
She went to her computer and tapped in the name. “Sorry, we’re not showing her.”
“Maybe you saw her make the call?”
“I haven’t seen anybody on the phone tonight, but I’ve been in and out of the office, so I could’ve missed her.”
I glanced toward the signs for the pool, racquetball courts, and juice bar. “Could I—?”
“Sorry. Members only.”
“I understand. Thanks anyway.”
“Hope you find your friend.”
As I went out I reflected on the phone call. Implied threat there, and I suspected it was directed at Jody Houston, who had told me she had a key to Roger’s flat. Someone was watching the building, had seen the light. But why use a booth that was so close by, whose number Houston could have traced as easily as I had?
Of course—that was part of the threat:
I’m right here. I can find you any time I want.
There were three messages on my home machine, two of them predictable and one intriguing.
My brother John: “Just calling to see how you are. After you left last week, I realized you were talking like you did because you’re pissed at Joey. Well, guess what? So am I. We need to discuss this.”
Not tonight, John.
Neal: “I guess you’ve heard that I quit. I’m not cut out for the job, and I should’ve known I couldn’t work with Ted. Sorry for all my screwups. If you know where he is, will you call me?”
In a minute, Neal.
J.D. Smith: “Okay, Shar, I’ve got a sweet deal for you. So pick up … Are you screening your calls? No, you wouldn’t screen this one. Why aren’t you home, goddamn it? All right, I guess it can wait till morning. I’ll see you at Miranda’s at nine for breakfast. You’re gonna love my plan.”
Thursday
To the casual passerby Miranda’s would seem to be an ordinary waterfront dive. Gray weathered clapboard with salt-caked windows, it teetered on pilings over the bay’s brackish shallows, clinging tenuously to mainstream San Francisco. It, as well as the nearby Boondocks and Red’s Java House, were already on the city’s endangered-species list.
Proposals for redevelopment up and down the waterfront had already threatened many venerable establishments. The plans ranged from desirable to the preposterous: among the latter were a Disneyesque faux-city theme park replete with earthquake simulations, and a full-scale floating replica of the
Titanic
. Such madness could strike at any location at any time, hence my concern for several of my favorite eateries.
Fortunately, Miranda’s had assets that increased its chances of survival: its much-loved owner, Carmen Lazzarini; excellent food, courtesy of Carmen’s new wife; aficionados in city government and on the Port Commission. As I waited for J.D. in a window booth I looked around and noticed a powerful member of the board of supervisors, a well-known actor, and an appellate court judge downing eggs and hash browns. Standees clustered by the lunch counter, drinking coffee while waiting for tables. Just as I was beginning to feel guilty for hogging an entire booth, J.D. pushed through the door and strode toward me, clapping the supe on the shoulder as he passed.
“Traffic!” he exclaimed, collapsing on the bench opposite me and shrugging out of his raincoat. “Fender-benders all over the place. Why is it that Californians forget how to drive when it rains?”
“Don’t know. We ought to be experts, given the monsoons we’ve had recently.”
“Parking’s impossible too.” He studied the menu and set it aside. “Makes me long for the days of my youth, when parking was plentiful and drivers in the Old South were courteous.”
“You left Savannah because you found it dull and stifling.”
“True. I came west looking for excitement and got it— congestion, rolling blackouts, high PG and E bills, higher rents, and now rain when the rainy season’s supposed to be over. What’s that the Chinese say? ‘May you live in interesting times.’ ”
Carmen himself, wrapped in a stained apron, appeared to take our orders. The big man—whose real first name, I had found out after considerable investigation, was Orlando— had undergone a renaissance of sorts since meeting his second wife, Cissy. Beneath the apron he wore a teal blue silk shirt and stylish cords; hair implants dotted his head like seedlings in a vegetable garden. I couldn’t help eyeing them and wondering if they’d ever grow. Carmen noticed, and I looked away, embarrassed.
J.D., a reporter to the bone, had no similar qualms. He asked, “How’re those things doing, Carmen?”
“A few more little hairs every day.”
“You know, your experience would make an interesting story, give other bald men hope.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. I could write it up, chart your progress. We could sell it as a series to one of the online ’zines, and you’d be all over the Internet. Great publicity for the diner.”
“I don’t know, J.D.” Carmen glanced at the crowd still waiting for tables. “We’ve got more customers than we can handle already, and while the Port Commission isn’t selling us out to the developers yet, they’re not about to give us the go-ahead to expand.”
“Well, think about it, anyway.”
“Yeah, I will. Now, for breakfast I can definitely recommend the Denver omelet.”
J.D. made a face. “Orange juice, English muffin, hold the jelly.”
Carmen snorted. “Why you bother with breakfast I don’t know.”
As he turned to go, J.D. said, “Hey, what about Shar’s order?”
Carmen looked over his shoulder and winked at me. “Two eggs over easy, double side of bacon, hash browns.”
J.D. blinked, astonished. “You have that all the time?” he asked me.
“Except when they’ve got chicken fried steak and eggs on special.”
“Don’t you know stuff like that can kill you?”
“Well, I don’t come here every day. Unless I have a breakfast appointment, I usually just have coffee and some tomato juice.”
“It’s a wonder you’ve survived this long.”
“I’ve survived worse things at the hands of people who wanted me permanently gone. Breakfast doesn’t scare me. Now, what’s this plan you have for getting me inside—”