Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (20 page)

As I wait for my change, I remember a couple of weeks ago I heard a report on National Public Radio about how in New York Chinese immigrants pack themselves like rats into an apartment to save enormous amounts of money. Then, in “Doonesbury,” there were a week’s cartoons on how disciplined Asian kids are and how white kids just can’t fathom working that hard. If this is the future, it gives me the willies. The United States probably had its mortgage foreclosed on yesterday and I missed it. The best thing about the heartland is that we don’t know how bad things are.

A little tired, I go back to the Fairfield Hotel and try to check in with Chet, but his secretary tells me he is at a late lunch. As little as he apparently eats these days, he can’t have gone far, but when I call him back later he is still out. He probably is asleep on the couch in his office. I think of calling Sarah, but she will be at school.

Relax, I tell myself. Everything is fine. If I don’t calm down, before long I’ll be acting like a drunk who insists on making a nuisance of himself by calling his friends long distance in the middle of the night.

Since I have time to kill, I call Julia to see if I have any messages. She tells me Rich Blessing called. I try to reach him at Bando’s but am told he is running some errands and won’t be back until tomorrow.

At five o’clock I am waiting for a chair at Jim Chu’s, when a young kid who looks like John-Boy from the old “Waltons” series comes up and sticks out his hand at me.

“Gideon Page?” he asks in a clear, unaccented soprano voice. He is wearing a dark pinstriped suit without a tie. I stand up, towering over this kid, and for once crush somebody else’s hand. Usually it’s the other way around. Probably a messenger from the investigator’s office telling me she will be late. That’s okay. I’m enjoying the crowd, a mix of tourists and Asians, as Sarah has warned me to say. Rugs are oriental, people are Asian.

“That’s me,” I admit, wondering what it is about me that sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m wearing a gray, fifty percent cotton, fifty percent wool suit I got on sale at Dillard’s. Granted I’m not much of a clotheshorse, but I look better than most of the tourists who are coming in wearing anything from Bermuda shorts to college sweatshirts.

“I’m Jessie St. vrain,” she says, “and I’m starving.”

I try not to look surprised. Is everybody here androgynous?

“Good,” I say.

“We’re eating on my boss’s money.”

We sit at a table against a mirror, and I can’t get away from wondering whether Jessie is really a woman.

Harold, I remember, used the word “gal,” but I’m beginning to wonder if that holds much significance around here. Shit, maybe this is Richard Thomas’s son or daughter. Jessie’s lips are full but unpainted. John Boy wore more makeup than this woman. Jessie is mercifully oblivious to my confusion and treats me like a visiting cousin.

“Have you gotten to see anything? Ride the cable cars? We could have gone to Fisherman’s Wharf, but the prices are such a rip-off.”

I look at the menu. More expensive than home but not bad. I close it and get what I always order at home:

sweet-and-sour pork. My tastes would put a lot of people out of work, Rainey has observed. Jessie, obviously a veteran, makes several suggestions and sighs in frustration at my choice. She orders squid.

“How do you know Harold?” she asks, pouring us each a cup of tea as if we were a long-married couple who know each other’s routines.

“Isn’t he wild? I just love his show, especially that little one they call the Louisville Slugger.

If you do only one thing, you should catch it.”

Afraid to admit I already have, I say, “I’ve known Harold a while. He said you have an interesting story.”

Jessie gives me a frown, as if I have committed some horrible breach of etiquette.

“Have you got to be some place at five-thirty?” she asks, disapproval in her green eyes.

“Not at all,” I concede. Lighten up, I think. My plane doesn’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. Jessie is like a Mexican businessman. We’re supposed to entertain each other before we do a deal. I order a beer for me and sake for her. What the hell? I tell her I found the Louisville Slugger attractive, too.

“It made me feel a little weird though,” I confide.

“I have enough trouble with the opposite sex without having to worry if it’s truly opposite

Jessie laughs, revealing lovely teeth. I decide she is pretty in an unusual way. I haven’t been out with a woman who is as petite and graceful as she is in years.

Perish the thought. The last thing I need to do is go to bed with her. Even the idea of masturbation in this city makes me break into a cold sweat. Dan told me, not entirely joking, that I was running a risk by changing my underwear. I suspect that is a risk I’ll take. As she spoons her soup, Jessie begins to tell me her life story.

She is divorced but no kids. A frustrated artist, she draws in her spare time, and proving it, she whips out a pad and pen and sketches my face while we are waiting for the rest of our dinner. While she draws, she tells me she has lived everywhere except the South.

“No offense, but I’ve avoided it like the plague. We drove through Alabama and Mississippi once, and you just seem so backward and poor. Granted the prices here make you think you’re living in Russia, but the diversity is just fantastic!”

I smile, trying to avoid feeling defensive. I’m here to persuade Jessie to testify, not start a new Civil War.

Still, I can feel my hackles rising. Condescension toward Southerners is a lifelong obsession of mine.

“Yeah, the Rodney King thing,” I say, getting into my Arkansas Delta accent, “made me want to load up my old pickup and five kids and move on out. It’s hard not to get nostalgic for the old days when you see a beating like that.”

Our waiter, a frazzled Asian kid who seems accustomed to moving at the speed of light, throws on the table two egg rolls that resemble dried dog turds. Jessie downs her sake before attacking her portion. She smiles to make sure I’m joking. To keep her going, I show a few teeth. She says, “I’m afraid I’d just vegetate even in a place like Atlanta. Mainly, you just have two races, still living separate and unequal, African-Americans oppressed as ever.”

Since we are eating in a ghetto made up of a race that as far as I know has never had a governor and seems to wield little political power, I observe, “Tell me about it.

That black mayor in Atlanta rants and raves, but you know how crackers are down South. It’s a living hell all right.”

Smiling shyly, she tears off her drawing, signs it at the bottom, and pushes it at me. I’m astonished at the likeness: I’ve been told I look a little like Nick Nolte but never took it seriously until this moment.

“Not bad,” I tell her, trying not to squint. I don’t want to ruin the effect by putting on reading glasses.

The drawing somehow serves to bring about a truce, and we eat our meal in relative harmony. I tell her about Sarah and her current flirtation with fundamentalism.

As expected, Jessie expresses horror, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her own beliefs weren’t just as extreme, if Doonesbury’s Boopsie is any guide to California. At least Sarah hasn’t told me she is into “channeling” yet.

I don’t want to start a fight, so I don’t ask Jessie about her religion and am relieved when she doesn’t relate any out-of-body experiences. After dinner she reads me her fortune: ” “You find beauty in simple things. Do not neglect this gift.” ” She smiles, and I wonder if I am one of the simple things. I read her mine. ” “A wise man and his tongue are never parted.” ” Draining her third sake, she says, with a snicker, “Only with great difficulty.”

Jessie suggests that we talk at my hotel and takes my arm in a proprietary way as we walk back toward Powell Street. I confess I am nervous. From a distance she looks so much like a boy I know we are taken for a homosexual couple. Because of my acceptance of Skip, I thought I didn’t have any prejudice, but I feel myself blushing when I get a glance from tourists.

“There’s a couple of ‘em,” I can imagine them saying.

But maybe they are thinking, “Nick Nolte I didn’t know he was gay.”

Inside the Fairfield Hotel, I feel sweat soaking my undershirt.

“You want to talk in the bar?” I ask, my voice sounding plaintive even to me.

Looking up at me with her clear emerald eyes, she murmurs, “I’d feel better if we talked in your room.”

A bellman, an Asian guy in his early twenties, catches my eye and grins. He must want a tip to keep his mouth shut. I’m not doing anything wrong, I want to scream at the top of my voice. I take my hands out of my pockets as if this somehow will indicate my good faith.

“Okay,” I sigh.

“Let’s go.”

Feeling as though the entire staff of the hotel is watching us, I follow her onto the elevator and keep my eyes on the floor until the door shuts. On the sixth floor there are no guests roaming the halls, and I unlock the door to my room, relieved not to have encountered one.

Like a couple returning from a night on the town, we both head for the bathroom. Though my bladder feels like an overheated inner tube, I defer, and she says companionably, “I’m about to bust.”

Hoping things won’t get any stranger, I look around the room, wondering how to get as far away from the bed as possible. There are two chairs, and I drag them over to the window and place them a yard apart and sit down. Though I have brought a pint of bourbon, alcohol is the last thing this little party needs right now. Once she leaves, I may not even go out for ice.

When Jessie comes out of the bathroom (fully clothed, thank goodness), I point to the empty chair across from me. She yawns, and I steal a look at my bed, glad it looks as hard to get into as an aspirin bottle.

Finally, she sits down and looks out the window onto the city.

“There are some bad people living in this town,” she says, and begins to tell me about her investigation of the arson of a business in Oakland called Bay Videos.

“The company I work for won’t pay off on the excuse the place was torched. The owner of Bay Videos was screaming he was making money hand over fist and had no reason to burn down his own place. He said from the beginning that Jack Ott had done it and tried to kill him, too, but the cops yawned and went back to sleep. They don’t put the demise of a porno store at the top of their list to investigate thoroughly.

Though a couple of people could have been killed, no one was, so basically the cops’ position is that this is a private matter for our lawyers if they want to get into it.”

I write the name “Jack Ott” down on the hotel stationery.

It was Jack Ott whom Art Wallace had ripped off. I ask, “So did Jack Ott do it?”

Jessie leans forward with a conspirator’s smile and says, “I’m coming to that. I begin to check out Bay Videos’ story and sure enough, I start hearing the name Jack Ott. To make a long story short. Jack Ott is one of the biggest porn distributors on the Coast, and Jack likes to make his money the oldfashioned way—by eliminating the competition. Now, the kind of stuff these guys deal in would undoubtedly be considered obscene and therefore illegal in Arkansas, but here, by our enlightened community standards, it’s just considered a little strong. Nobody who’s actually in the business likes to make any noise, because the feds get involved once it starts moving interstate. That kind of bust is great PR for the FBI.”

I begin to doodle. I am already losing the thread.

“So if nobody’s talking for the record, what’s the point?”

Jessie reaches into her pants pocket and pulls out a small tape recorder.

“I got the guy who actually torched the place for Jack on tape. You want to hear it?” she says, her voice rising like Sarah’s when she’s excited.

“Give me a little background first,” I say, dumb founded by her claim. John-Boy never got into these contretemps.

“Why would a guy like that say anything in an investigator’s presence that would implicate him self?”

“Well” Jessie grins, standing to take off her suit coat “that’s a long story, too, but suffice it to say Robert Evan didn’t know what I was or who I was, or that I always wear a wire. Want to see?” She begins to un button her blouse.

“No, no, I believe you,” I say hastily, horrified that perhaps she has been taping our conversation.

“So you’ve been recording us, too?”

She nods, not embarrassed in the slightest.

“I like to have a record.” She presses the play button, and I hear a boozy male voice that is impossible to understand against a background noise of rock guitars and other conversations. I get a few words and actually hear the name of Jack Ott, but that’s all. When she turns it off, I shake my head.

“I didn’t get it.”

Undaunted, she rewinds it.

“You’ve got to listen to it more than once. The guy that burned Bay Videos was scared shitless of Jack Ott. You can hear it in his voice.” She plays it again, twice more, and I begin to pick it up though I can’t quite get every word. ” “Hell, yeah … I … burned Bay Videos … for Ott…. You don’t quit… him…. He wanted me … to off the guy but he got out.” ” I stare at the tape, wondering if this is admissible to show that Art Wallace truly had something to fear from Jack Ott. Coupled with Leigh’s testimony that Art had told her that he was in trouble for not coming up with the two hundred thousand he skimmed from Ott, a jury might be persuaded to believe someone else had killed him. I doubt if Robert Evan will volunteer to repeat what I’ve just heard.

“So where is Sir Robert now?”

Jessie reaches again into her bag and hands me a piece of paper.

“He’s dead. Drug overdose.” I put on my reading glasses and hold the article up to the light.

It is a brief story from a January San Francisco Chronicle and says just enough to confirm her statement.

“If my partner and I think it will do any good, would you be willing to come to Arkansas for the trial and bring your tape with you?”

Jessie rewinds the machine and grins at me.

“Is it true that people go barefoot in public?”

“Just in the summertime,” I say. This woman is a piece of work.