Authors: Matt Richtel
I
got back to my loft sometime after midnight. I toted the laptop to the couch and tried to check e-mail, but somehow I’d left the computer on all day and was without power. I plugged it back in at the desk, and that’s where exhaustion overtook me. Head bobbing at chin, I fell into a deep sleep, and dreamed of Annie, evaporating into millions of tiny computer pixels.
I awoke with a start to two sounds: a meow and ringing. The meow was a cat. The ringing was a magazine editor calling. Both were hungry.
Samantha Leary had given me Hippocrates, the black cat sitting on my chest bleating for breakfast. The critter, Samantha said, was designed to teach me to be less of a “dog” and to develop my inner feline. I looked at the cat and barked, causing it to flee toward the kitchen. The phone call was from Kevin. He said, “Got a sec to chat?”
Somebody should study how editors and writers communicate. A remarkably high number of conversations begin with an editor saying, “Got a sec to chat?” But this doesn’t refer to a short exchange of ideas. It means: Do you have half an hour? I need to tell you precisely how to write your story.
Writers respond, “Absolutely.” By which they mean: You talk. I’ll ignore you. I’ll write the story the way I want to.
My dynamic with Kevin—and with other editors—demanded subtler strategies. As a freelance journalist, I needed to be particularly sensitive to editorial demands. If I ticked them off, they wouldn’t hire me and I, by extension, wouldn’t eat, or pay rent.
Kevin worked for
American Health Journal
, for which I wrote three or four times a year. The stories weren’t of particular interest to me, but the magazine paid well—on time. “We’ve got an idea about the cell phone story,” he said. “We want to do an informational graphic mapping the path of the radio wave as it passes through the brain.”
Editors say “we” when they mean “I.”
Kevin went on to explain an idea for an elaborate but simplistic illustration. It would show the radio wave taking a path from a phone tower through the major regions of the brain and to its ultimate destination—the phone being held at someone’s ear.
He stopped talking abruptly and changed directions.
“We need the story by Friday. You still on track?”
I looked at the half-foot-high stack of research I’d amassed on the kitchen table. I hadn’t begun to look through it, but I’d told Kevin I’d done the interviews and read the literature. I spent a few minutes trying to manage his expectations. The generally accepted theory is that the effect of radio waves on the brain is small, if not nonexistent, and I told Kevin not to expect any revelations. Still, the paranoia about cell phones is understandable, and not just because the idea of having radio waves crashing against the frontal lobe is disquieting. We harbor a general distrust of machines. Just look at the number of movies that make technology the enemy; wayward computers have replaced Commies, aliens, and Nazis.
Maybe our fear was a reflection of our growing dependence on gadgets. In every ear, an earpiece. On every belt, a pager—millions of devices connecting us to millions of other devices with streams of data. We’ve come to rely wholly on a bunch of things that most of us couldn’t build or fix.
“Emphasize the fact that we just don’t know how bad the medical impact could be,” Kevin said. “I’m thinking about two thousand words.”
Maybe I should have played the sympathy card—and tried to buy some more time to finish the story. The café that had exploded was all over the news. I could have told Kevin I’d come within a double cappuccino of being blown up with it. But he would have just said, “Oh my God. Are you okay?” He would have meant: Get me the story by Friday.
I tried to focus on the pile of research, but the papers were highly scientific, boring by most standards, and not particularly informative. On any day it would have been tough; on this day, doubly so.
And, besides, the laptop was beckoning again.
Home office workers know it is taboo to spend a couple of hours watching TV, but they have no reservations about surfing the Web. TV is deemed sheer entertainment and a waste of time, while monitoring Yahoo! News, catching up on stocks, and checking e-mail every two minutes is barely a misdemeanor. Procrastination under the guise of productivity.
I called up the
San Francisco Chronicle
home page, which had three stories related to the café explosion. The main headline read, “San Francisco Eatery Torn by Blast.” The story said that police were frantically hunting down leads, but had no suspects or motives. There was no credible evidence of terrorism. There were five fatalities.
According to the
Chronicle
, the blast would have killed more people if the weather hadn’t been so good. A half dozen patrons who might have been inside were sitting at the thick oak tables outside of the café. Those who were inside weren’t so lucky. I read their obituaries.
Simon Anderson was a thirty-five-year-old aspiring novelist. He left behind a wife and two kids, one adopted and with autism. Andrea Knudson, twenty-five, had just finished law school and was preparing to take the bar exam. Darby Station was a single, thirty-something regional marketing manager for a company based in Texas. And Eileen and Terry Dujobe were retirees, evidently spending an afternoon sipping their unexpectedly last latte. They were all residents of San Francisco.
The stories said several people inside the café survived the blast unscathed. At least one was mentioned by name. Police said that a waitress named Erin Coultran had walked into a small employee bathroom milliseconds before the blast. Concrete reinforcements had kept the restroom, and the waitress, virtually intact.
There was a picture of Erin. She appeared, not surprisingly, frazzled. She was thirty-three and pretty, maybe beautiful. Even in two dimensions, she had eyes that conveyed kindness and depth.
I felt a surge of adrenaline return. My legs twitched and I bit the inside of my cheek so hard that I winced. With an unsteady index finger, I drew an imaginary circle around Erin.
I looked at her eyes. Had she seen the woman who handed me the note in the café?
H
ighly skilled journalists learn techniques for finding people. Like using the phone book and the Internet. That’s why we’re so handsomely paid.
It turned out that Erin Coultran belonged to a performance art troupe in the Mission District, the Heavenly Booties. The troupe’s Web site described the group as committed to socially conscious women’s free-form improv dance style. It left a lot up to the imagination, though I could at least surmise that if I ever had a chance to dance with Erin, I wouldn’t be the one leading.
I doubted anyone would be staffing the headquarters of a performance art troupe. If they were, some other entrepreneurial journalist had probably gotten there first, but the key to unraveling a story was to muster the energy to start somewhere.
When I got there, a handful of journalists were indeed out front on the sidewalk, lingering or, rather, fidgeting. That’s what reporters do. It’s a product of the attention deficit disorder that is a prerequisite in the profession. A journalist not involved in a moment of intensity is seeking one out.
I walked to the dance troupe’s modest storefront. A crème-colored blind hung halfway down the window. I knelt and peeked through the bottom, but could see only two wooden tables on a linoleum floor.
I turned around and found myself looking into the sun. And felt a dull ache where the adrenaline had worn off.
Two months earlier, I’d written a story about how the vending machines in San Francisco’s schools were stocked with high-calorie crap sold by the same companies sponsoring extracurricular sports programs. To call it investigative journalism would have been an impossible stretch. It, like most of what I did, just involved noticing connections. Nothing cloak-and-dagger about my trade. I was a guy with a pen, curiosity, and deep thanks for the First Amendment. This quest was already demanding a different kind of grit.
I stopped at a Mexican grocery store two doors down from the dance center. Varieties of jalapeños, plantains, and tomatillos on the outside produce stand catered to the neighborhood’s concentration of Spanish-speakers, but inside the place smelled thinly of the barbecued duck I could see behind the deli glass. Many of the local stores had been purchased of late by Chinese, a demographic shared by the young man who sat behind a counter watching
Wheel of Fortune
.
“I’ve got a strange question.”
“Condoms are over there, bro,” he responded, pointing to aisle three.
“Good. Now where are your inflatable dolls?” I said.
I pulled out a newspaper clipping of Erin’s picture. “I’m trying to find someone.”
“Are you a pig?”
“Reporter. She survived an explosion the other day. I want to ask her how she’s feeling.”
Suddenly, that seemed like enough information. He picked up the photo and whistled. “Legs”—he held his hand three feet in the air—“up to here, bro.”
“So you’ve seen her. Today?”
No, but he’d seen her. She came in all the time, shepherding hungry kids from a tutoring center that was a block away. He pointed me in its direction.
A block away, I stood outside a storefront with its window covered with colorful and haphazard crayon drawings. A sign read, “Guerrero child-care and tutoring.”
I made my way through the sea of rug rats. I found her sitting in the back, huddled over a cup of coffee. I got ten feet away and stopped, just as she looked up.
Erin’s eyes widened. I saw her look to the left. I followed her gaze—to the back door. Over its top was a banner drawn in thick purple, green, and yellow markers with the words “Adios Amigos.” By the time I turned back toward her, Erin was already standing and heading full stride toward the exit, dangling a pair of keys from her left hand.
“Erin!”
She wasn’t stopping to look back.
M
y view of Erin was a ponytail poking through a baseball cap, heading purposefully in the other direction. I flashed for a moment on whether I might tear my hamstring again, then gave chase into the alley where she was putting a key into the lock of an aging green Honda with a ski rack.
Even without having time to think, I knew on some level I didn’t like what I was about to do. I stepped forward, put out my hand, and pushed her driver’s side door shut so she couldn’t open it.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” she said, with a mix of terror and anger, and a touch of resignation. I played on it.
“I was at the café. Please, I need your help.”
She wore a sweatshirt with a Tsingtao logo. She was tall and thin, with smooth, pale skin. Her face was mildly round, suggesting cheeriness in some circumstances, but at that moment just as if it had been slightly overinflated with air.
When she spoke again, it was less with venom and fear and with more than a little confidence. “Are you going to let me go? Or am I going to start screaming and kicking?”
I pulled my hand away from the door.
“I don’t know who you think I am,” I said. “But I just need your help. I mean you no harm.”
Even as I said it, I had to wonder whether I meant it entirely. After all, she was aggressively fleeing the scene.
“You’ve got the wrong person.”
I shook my head. Wrong person? She wasn’t Erin, the café waitress? Then I realized that wasn’t what she meant. What exactly she did mean wasn’t clear. I didn’t figure I’d get a chance to ask, not without a subpoena. But instead of closing the door, she put her hand over its top, curling her fingers down over the window. For the first time, she seemed to study me.
“There are reporters everywhere,” she said. “I came here to think, and to . . . clear my head.”
It struck me she could be suffering from a muted version of post-traumatic stress disorder. She was highly alert and sensitive, her responses exaggerated.
“Give me five minutes of your time.” I tried to affect my least threatening tone. “I saw your picture in the paper. I needed to talk to a fellow café survivor. I . . . I lost someone . . . ”
I launched into a concise version of what had happened to me at the café.
“This woman saved my life. I thought maybe you’d seen her too.” I didn’t bother to mention Annie. I did say, “I know it sounds insane.”
She listened. She closed her eyes, seemingly concentrating, but part of me wondered if her pause was affect. “I didn’t see a woman leave the café. I didn’t see anyone hand you a note, but I do remember you,” she finally said. “You ordered at the counter then sat by the rack where we keep the magazines. I was trying to figure out if and when you’d need a refill or something to eat. Maybe the person you’re talking about never sat down. I tend not to notice people unless they’re sitting at a table.”
I clenched my teeth and spoke with an edge. “She had long hair. You’re sure you didn’t see her?”
“I was on my break in the back, checking e-mail. I went to the bathroom just before the explosion. Maybe that’s when she showed up.”
I couldn’t repress the confrontational question bubbling from my gut. “Why did you pick just that moment to go to the bathroom—right before the explosion?”
“This conversation is over.”
“Erin . . . ”
She opened her car door. She looked at me intently.
“What’s
your
sin?”
“What does that mean?”
“Please, I need to go. Let’s continue this later,” she said.
She scribbled her cell phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. As she pulled off, I realized she’d written down only six digits. Just then, my own phone rang. I answered, and heard an unfamiliar voice.
“Nathaniel, it’s Danny Weller.” The policeman from the café.
“Sergeant,” I said.
I could hear traffic in the background. “Listen, I’m wondering if you have a few minutes to get together,” he said. “I thought you should know about some interesting developments.”
W
hen I got to the Bus Stop Bar, Sergeant Danny Weller was already there. He was seated in a booth near the back, wearing a button-down shirt, and looking more like a dentist than a cop. He was nose deep in a newspaper. Beside him sat a dark-skinned cop in uniform who was at least a head taller and thick, scrawling on some paperwork.
I neared the pair. “I need a three-letter word for ‘organism,’” Danny said without looking up from a folded-in-half
Chronicle
. “Zoa,” he added, mostly to himself.
Danny introduced the other cop as the Big Samoan, Officer Edward Velarde. He had a vise-grip handshake and he looked vaguely familiar. Near his left ear, by his hairline, was a red rash, the flaky scales indicative of psoriasis. As a medical student, you learn to identify people by their pathologies. I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before—maybe after the explosion. He asked for Sergeant Weller’s signatures on the paperwork he’d been working on, stuffed them in a briefcase. “See you back at the fruit farm, sweetie,” he said to Weller with a pronounced mock lisp, and excused himself.
“What’s going on, Sergeant?” I said pointedly.
“When I was a kid, my dad and I drove up Highway 80 almost every weekend. We’d fish in Sacto, or hike in Tahoe. The traffic was always terrible. So Dad would have me read him the crossword while he drove. He loved puzzles,” he said. “The art of the crossword is memorization, really, not analysis. I’ve been stocking away clues since I was twelve. Back then, if I used a word incorrectly in conversation, Dad would make me carry a dictionary around all day.”
He was going to do this on his terms. I fought the impulse to demand answers.
“Do you and your dad still fish?”
“He’s living in Fremont, in a group home. Sick as a dog, the kind of dog that needs a new liver,” Danny said. “Hell, I shouldn’t be talking about tragedy to you, considering what happened yesterday. How’re you feeling?”
Actually, I still wasn’t sure. I’d been experiencing such an adrenaline rush that I hadn’t paused to put it in any perspective. “Tired.”
And mystified and frustrated. I wanted to know about the new developments the sergeant had alluded to on the phone, but I had learned over the years as a reporter that one of the most effective ways of eliciting information is to not let on about your desperation. Sources usually want to divulge something, tell the story, take the spotlight.
One strategy to get people talking is to do the talking first, so I decided to tell Danny what I knew. It was a gamble, of course. Just because he had allowed me to call him by his first name didn’t change the fact that he was a cop, with his own allegiances and priorities.
I told him the little bit I knew. About the note, and a bit about Annie—and her handwriting—about going to see Erin, her hostility, the brief story she told me.
“She ducked into the bathroom—nice time for nature to call,” he said.
“In a suspicious way?”
He shrugged.
“Nathaniel, do you believe that the woman who handed you the note was your ex-girlfriend?”
It was the one question I hadn’t permitted myself to fully consider.
“I don’t think so, Sergeant—how could it possibly have been?”
I didn’t say aloud the rest of my thought: No way Annie was alive, or she would have contacted me long before.
He studied me. The more he did so, the more resolute I felt. Annie was gone, end of story. But someone had singled me out, was messing with me on a grand scale, and it was time to try to get what I came for.
“I need to know what’s going on, Sergeant.”
He lifted his glass, dropped his neck, and finished off the last of his Coke. “The district attorney has reopened the investigation into the charges against Lieutenant Aravelo’s brother.”
“What?” I said, quickly, sharply. “Why?”
Timothy Aravelo was a first-class thug. He’d nearly killed a twenty-year-old woman, then conspired with a couple of other cops to cover it up. I’d come to suspect the corruption went high into the police department. That I could never prove. But I was damn sure the younger Aravelo was one badge away from being a gang member.
“High-priced attorneys. They convinced an appellate judge to reexamine some of the sworn testimony.”
I clenched my teeth.
“It’s probably not a big deal,” Danny continued. “But I wanted to let you know things could get a little dicey. You’ll probably have to talk to investigators again.”
We were interrupted by a buzzing sound coming from the sergeant’s pants. He pulled out a pager. “Damn,” he said.
He rose from the seat.
“I’m not in charge of the café investigation. It’s Lieutenant Aravelo’s baby. But I’m tracking it.”
He explained that San Francisco’s homicide rate had spiked in the past couple of years. Lots of the murders were unsolved, especially in the poor black corners of the city where gangs roamed. He reminded me that the mayor had made a big deal out of addressing unsolved murders, earning himself enemies on the police force by publicly questioning their capabilities, and then issuing a directive that high-profile murder cases would have two teams of investigators—one official team, and then one or two shadow investigators who investigated independently, found their own leads, and were supposed to feed information to the main group. Sometimes they preferred to take credit for a collar.
It created competition, but also distrust.
“What you told me—about the note—needs to be in the right hands. I am tight with a couple of the lead investigators on the café case. I’ll have them get in touch, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Or you can contact Aravelo directly—if you feel comfortable going that direction.”
I couldn’t let him go. There was so much I wanted to know.
“Sergeant Weller. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me more about what happened at the café. Who did this? Why would I be warned? Is this a random act of violence or some insane attack that I’ve wound up in the middle of?”
He studied me, then shrugged. “I think you put it correctly yesterday. Something very strange went down.”
He turned, then looked back over his shoulder. “Call me anytime you want to talk.”
I needed another beer—or several—so I drove across town to my local joint. Samantha and Bullseye were parked at their usual spot, watching the Giants game. I barely said hello before launching in with my story.
“Your chi is way out of balance,” Samantha said, grabbing my hand and vigorously rubbing my palm. “I can do some healing with massage. But you really need to come down to the studio for acupuncture—and energy work.”
“What my chi needs is a pizza and some sleep,” I said.
She was right. In the preceding couple of years, despite sometimes protesting otherwise, I’d come increasingly to appreciate Samantha’s witchcraft. I made an appointment for the next day.
I walked outside of the bar and studied the piece of paper on which Erin had written her six-digit number. Maybe she’d left one out by accident. I tried a couple of combinations, adding a different last digit each time. Three weren’t real phone numbers, and a fourth was answered by an old lady with a slur in her voice who seemed like she wanted to talk anyway.
When I got home, I was beyond exhausted, but I saw my laptop sitting there and I couldn’t help myself. I sent an e-mail to my attorney, telling him about Sergeant Weller’s revelation that the Aravelo case had been reopened, and seeking his advice.
Then I started looking for news of the day’s events. There wasn’t much I hadn’t learned earlier from the
Chronicle
, and from Danny. I saw a picture of the eviscerated café and felt a wave of nausea.
I read about the café’s owner, Idelwild Corporation, a holding company with some powerful corporate owners. They wanted a piece of the Starbucks café phenomenon and what it represented: the confluence of technological and interpersonal communications. Cafés were like campfires but with wireless access and better pastries.
I followed link after random link for four hours. Even as my body yearned for bed and sleep, I couldn’t pull myself away, the mystery and memory stoking my quest. Finally, I drifted off, and woke up in the morning to a decision. It was time to visit the dead.