Early on a foggy, wind-swept morning in June, 1963, the twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser
Toot Sweet
and her crew of five left San Francisco bound for points east. The bay was choppy and all the boys except Dean, the skipper, suffered seasickness until the wind died and the fog burned off. Around ten o'clock as the boat entered the Carquinez Strait, the thermometer started to climb and the party began in earnest with a card game and a few beersâa sure cure for a queasy stomach. The
Toot Sweet
carried two twenty-gallon gas tanks and twelve cases of beer, and one of each was empty by the time the boat arrived in Sacramento around two in the afternoon.
An accomplished boat handler, Dean motored slowly into a marina to take on fuel. A little drunk, a flimsy tri-cornered hat perched on his crewcut, he shouted from the flying bridge, “Ahoy, me bawdies, bringin' her about. Look smart now.”
Ready with a line, a red bandana tied around his head, Nelson manned the stern; Charlie, who in those days sported a wispy goatee, stood on the foredeck prepared to secure the boat to the dock. After navigating ninety miles from San Francisco, they felt like hardy mariners, ready for adventure. They were, to use an old phrase, higher than kites.
“Aye aye, cap'n,” Nelson hollered as loud as he could.
Charlie sang out, “Easy now. Steady as she goes.”
“Ha!” Dean laughed and demanded, “Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Not a clue! Hahaha!”
Bobby and Alex remained below playing five stud in the compact cabin. Hearing Dean bellowing like Captain Bligh, Bobby peered out a port hole and saw pilings sliding by and muddy water slick
with kaleidoscopic oil film that dazzled in the bright sunlight. A few small boats were tied to floating docks. Weeds and Cyclone fence and dilapidated metal sheds in varying shades of rust lined the near riverbank.
The boat shuddered as Dean reversed the prop.
“Hmm,” Alex pondered. “Maybe we should go up and see what's going on. What's the bet?”
“Half a buck on the four,” Bobby said lazily. “You think Dean is sober enough to drive this boat?”
“So far, so good. Let's finish the hand, and I'll go up and smell his breath.”
“Like hell! How're you gonna smell his breath when yours already smells like a brewery?”
“Hear, hear,” Alex toasted, raising his can of Schlitz. “To the hops.”
“To the grain,” Bobby replied in kind.
“It's the water!” they both cried out and shared a laugh. They were enjoying heads-up poker while the others ran around the boat like little kids playing pirate. The engine stopped and suddenly the boat was quiet. They could hear little river wavelets slapping against the hull and the pilings of the floating dock. They finished the hand and Alex won for the eighth time in a row.
“Damn, you're a lucky son of a gun,” Bobby swore.
Alex winked and said, “It's luck if you think so. I'm going up on deck.”
On the bridge Dean tossed the hat aside and clamored to the dock to roust the attendant. He was walking back toward the boat with the gas man in tow when he saw her sitting on a bench near the gas pumps, blond and pretty, forlorn, chin on palms, elbows on knees, tiny suitcase by her side and transistor radio in her lap. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink blouse, and Dean asked the gas jockey who she was. He didn't know. Never saw her before. Fill 'er up?
She was watching him and watching the boat. A young girl on a dock had only a handful of possible reasons for being there, and Dean guessed she was waiting to join someone on a cruise.
“Hey,” Dean said, face ruddy and sweating, trying to sound cool.
“Hey, yourself.”
“You waiting for someone?”
“Maybe. What's it to you?”
She smiled and he read her as streetwise with her wits on a hair trigger.
“You from around here?” he asked.
“Uh-uh. No.”
“Too bad,” he said
“Why? Why is that too bad?”
“We could use a little help, you know, a pilot, a navigator.”
“I don't know what that is. I don't know anything about boats.”
Dean took a long look over the docks and water and the craft afloat around the marina, pointedly drawing her attention to the aquatic nature of their surroundings, and then said, “I suppose it's not as hot by the river as it was wherever you came from. What's your name?”
A string of different names she liked to use flashed though her mind, but because he was near her own age she told him her real name. “Sally,” she answered. “Is this your boat?”
Dean turned to look over his shoulder at the white cabin cruiser to make sure she was talking about the
Toot Sweet
.
“I'm the captain,” he declared with pride. “My name is Dean.”
“What's that mean, âToot Sweet San Francisco'?”
“That's the name of the boat. It's sort of ⦠French. It means âHurry Up' only it's spelled funny.”
“So what it says is Hurry Up San Francisco? That's cute. Are you from there?”
“From San Francisco? We're from the city, yeah.”
She walked toward him, swaying sexily and asking, “Are you going there?”
“We're headed the other way. We won't be going back for two or three days.”
“How manyâ?” She looked past him and started counting the young men assembling in the stern. She counted three young high
school or college guys with crewcuts, one of whom was Chinese or Japanese, and a fourth little guy with a scrawny beard. Savage adolescent horniness dripped out of them like sap.
“Five,” Dean said.
“Ooo. All guys? From San Francisco?” If there were five, one was still invisible.
“Yeah, that's right.”
“What are you guys? You look like, I dunno, pirates, only I bet you're not.”
“We're gamblers,” Dean said. “Riverboat gamblers.”
She laughed. “My foot. You guys aren't gamblers. I bet you've never even been to Las Vegas.”
“So what? We don't need Las Vegas. We have everything we need which is exactly one deck of cards.”
She smiled up at the boys who were staring down at her from the after deck. “Do you really have everything you need?”
Watching the girl tease the boys, the gas man hollered, “Hey, kid, you got any money?”
Dean walked down the dock to pay for the gas, leaving Sally looking up at Nelson, Charlie, and Alex. She shifted her pose, placed her hands on her hips, and said, “Hi.”
“Hello,” Alex answered, trying to sound like an adult. “Who are you?”
“I'm Sally.”
“What are you doing down here on the docks, Sally?”
“This is where I got dropped off,” she said. “I was hitchhiking.”
Alex furrowed his brow and asked, “Hitchhiking from where to where?”
“L.A. to San Francisco.”
“Why? Don't you have any money? You can fly from L.A. for twenty dollars.”
She considered several answers and considered her interrogator who looked Jewish and smart like a lot of kids from Hollywood. She happened to like wise guys, and so she said, “If I wanted to spend twenty bucks then I wouldn't be here on this dock talking to you, would I? Besides, hitchhiking is fun.”
“And dangerous.”
“I guess that depends on what you're afraid of, doesn't it?”
“You're running away,” Alex stated flatly. “Tell me the truth.”
“Yes.”
“You're fifteen but you tell people you're eighteen.”
“Sixteen.”
“Why do you want to go to San Francisco?”
“Why not?”
“Tell the truth.”
“I was born there, but I haven't been there since I was three.”
“What are you running away from?”
She hesitated. In her view, her story was complex, tragic, and sad, and she wasn't inclined to tell the whole truth to strangers, no matter how attractive or useful.
“A foster home,” she said.
“Bad scene?”
“Very bad scene.”
“You're a lost soul,” Alex pronounced. “And you want the
Toot Sweet
to transport you to paradise.”
“Are you a poet?” she asked. “Some kind of beatnik?”
“No,” he answered, surprised by the question. “I'm a mathematician.”
“Don't mind Alex,” Dean said, coming back. “The skinny one is Charlie and the Chinaman is Nelson and Bobby is around here somewhere. Down below. Bobby! Come up on deck, we have company.”
In 1963 the epitome of teenage cool was Marlon Brando's eyes, Elvis Presley's hair, a smoldering Hells Angels swagger, and a pack of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve of a white T-shirt. The ace of diamonds suited Bobby like a birthmark. He rose up through the hatch like an angel from below, a can of Schlitz in one hand and a Lucky in the other and Sally caught her breath. Bobby instantly injected a charge into the tableau the way carbonation adds zest to beer. Before Bobby could say a word, Sally fell in love.
“Hey! What happened to the game?” Bobby complained, coming up the ladder and for some reason looking behind him, unconsciously
showing off his tight jeans and a rakish, provocative mass of dark hair slicked back in a duck tail. “Are you guys gonna come back down and play, or what?”
He looked down onto the dock, saw Sally and blurted, “Oh, shit.”
Her eyes wouldn't let go. They were light blue, the color of a high sky in the afternoon, tinged with cloudy gray around the edges, and he knew she wouldn't be fooled by his carefully constructed façade.
“Bobby,” Alex said. “Meet Sally, our little runaway from the city of angels.”
And Dean added, “She wants to come with us.”
Girls fell in love with Bobby all the time, white girls, Chinese girls, black girls, all kinds of San Francisco girls, and he recognized a world of trouble when he saw it. Whether it was true or merely a fabricated Hollywood tradition, he remembered that women were supposed to be bad luck on boats. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and said, “Hey guys, let's leave her on the dock and get on up the river.”
She didn't blink. She smiled and looked away from Bobby and enveloped each of the other boys one at a time in her gaze. Except for Charlie, their pulses raced and their dicks swelled inside their pants. “If you take me with you”âshe paused to slide her tongue over her lipsâ“you won't regret it.”
Every few hands the queen of hearts appeared and transported each player to his private vision of the past. The first time it came up, the red queen spoiled a nine high flush in diamonds for Charlie, and he threw in his hand with a groan.
“Four diamonds and then this. I swear, the card is cursed,” he said, exasperated. “The hearts are drops of blood and the queen a taunting ghost.”
“Superstitious twaddle,” Nelson said to grunts of approval, but for a while no one could win with the queen of hearts in his hand. A little spooked, they continued to play until all the cards seemed freighted with obscure meanings as though the red and blue Bicycles had become tarot decks.
Finally, after the fickle queen ruined a ten high straight, Alex said to Bobby, “You wanted to leave her in Sacramento. Do you remember that?”
“Sure.” Bobby closed his eyes and thought, here we go; the opening scenes of this movie play in slow motion with great clarity. “I remember you calling her a lost soul. I was still down below when I heard you and that's why I came up on deck.”
“I was just trying to be cute. I had no idea what I was talking about.”
“But you were right, and your words were ringing in my ears when I saw her. I thought, holy shit, if she wasn't lost before she met us, her fate would be sealed if she got on the boat. It doesn't matter now if I had a premonition, and I'm not sure it mattered then. You guys decided it was okay. She wanted to go and you outvoted me.”
“There was no vote,” Dean declared. “I was the captain. I decided.”
“That's not true,” Nelson contradicted immediately. “There
was
a vote. There was no show of hands but we voted with our dicks.”
“Horseshit,” Dean insisted.
“Do you really believe you decided by yourself that she could go, Dean?” Charlie's face contorted into a smirk. “My ass.”
“That is the way I see it, damned straight. Everyone could see she fell for Bobby right away. Her eyes popped, but when you said”âhe jerked a stubby finger toward Bobbyâ“âLeave her on the dock,' I guess she figured, what the hell, and made a play for all of us. If I'd said no, she never would have come on board, but that chick batted her eyes at me and licked her lips like Marilyn Monroe and turned me into a jellyfish.”
“That sounds like voting with your gonads to me,” Nelson said.
“Chicks know how to do that,” Dean said. “Especially that one.”
“No kidding,” Bobby said sarcastically. “What's the point?”
Before Dean could answer with another angry expletive, Alex interjected. “The point is Dean has blamed himself all these years for allowing her on the boat, and that's not fair. Any of us could've said no, and that would have been that. As it was, only you said no, Bobby. We were eighteen and horny as hell and she was absolutely out of our league. You were the only one who could've said no to a sexy girl like that, and you did, but we didn't have enough sense to listen. You had girls hanging around you all the time, but not the rest of us. We were geeky, gawky teenagers lucky to get a taste of your leftovers. You were way ahead of us on that score and besides, you had that old black magic. That's what I remember.”
Nelson grinned and chuckled and said, “Hey, Kimosabe, do you still have it?”
Gimme a break, Bobby thought, and added to himself, whatever it is you're talking about died that night.
The room was so still they could hear the city rumble. Four stories below, the hotel doorman blew a taxi whistle, and a moment later an engine raced in the street, followed by a squeal of brakes. A car door slammed shut and a journey began. Life went on. The cityâ
the worldâwas indifferent to their plight. What happened to them meant no more than the turn of a card.
He was fucking her and so drunk he passed out in
situ.
A real high school romeo. And when he woke up she was dead. That's all there was to it. Her skull was cracked, her skin was blue and she was dead.
Charlie drew back the drapes and admired the view up Montgomery Street to Telegraph Hill. He could see his house.
“Ah shit,” Bobby said, sensing that if he played along they'd start to tell him whatever they brought him here to tell him. “I never thought about what Shanghai Bend did to you guys. I only know what it did to her.”
“Fair enough,” Alex said.
Another silence. Alex walked over to the cart and began cracking crab legs, loudly crunching the pink and white crustaceans. “Let's have a little music, what do you say? How about a little Miles Davis?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Sketches of Spain
. Mellow tones, ancient rhythms, Miles the pure. They listened for a few minutes, and then Nelson asked Bobby, “Do you want to know who she was?”
“I thought she hasn't been identified.”
“I said Yuba County hasn't identified her.”
“But you have?”
Nelson opened his briefcase and took out the first document. “We knew three things: Her name was Sally, she came from L.A., and she was born in San Francisco. That's why I joined the LAPD, to get access to the right archives. Anyone can get a birth certificate for anybody, so this first document is a formality, and it gives us some important information. Her name was Sally Richfield, and she was born in San Francisco, which is what she told us. This is her birth certificate.”
He handed Bobby the stiff, formal paper that registered a live birth at San Francisco General Hospital on May 28th, 1947.
“The rest is straightforward, really,” he said. “The only means of identification in this case is dental work. The county medical examiner
has X rays of her teeth that he's circulated statewide. A state forensics lab was able to approximate the date of death as between 1961 and 1965. The medical examiner's circular arrived in Los Angeles two weeks ago, and a trainee clerk was sent to look through a warehouse full of old microfiche records of missing persons from that era. The clerk will find nothing because all the records are right here. I took them out of the files twenty years ago, about the same time Dean moved to Verona.”
Nelson handed Bobby a sheaf of documents, bulky, old dental X-ray film in manila envelopes, official police reports, and brittle, gelatinous sheets of microfiche. The last document was the Yuba County medical examiner's circular.
“You sure you got them all?”
“I think so. I can't think of anything I overlooked. I got all the duplicates, too.”
“So what this means is when they go looking for records, they won't find anything.”
“That's the idea.”
“So you're home free.”
“As far as Yuba County is concerned, they'll never identify her.”
“Unless she has family,” Bobby said. “Unless there's someone who's always been looking for her.”
Charlie coughed, closed his eyes and thought of all the fishes in the sea.
“Is that the ghost that haunts you?” Alex asked.
“One of many,” Bobby said, studying the documents. “Her birth certificate lists a mother and father.”
“Correct.”
Nelson handed Bobby two death certificates.
“Sally's mother died in San Francisco in 1950 when Sally was three. Her father died in Los Angeles in 1962 when she was fourteen.”
“An orphan.”
“Yes. When her mother died, her father took her to Los Angeles to be raised by his mother in Manhattan Beach. Her grandma became ill with cancer in 1961 and couldn't take care of her granddaughter.
She died that year. The dad was out of the picture, a drunken bumâhe died of cirrhosis of the liverâand Sally ended up in the care of the welfare department who placed her into a succession of foster homes. None of the foster fathers could keep his hands off her, and she ran away from three foster homes. The last foster family reported her missing
two months
after she left because they wanted the checks to keep coming. They never would have reported her if a social worker hadn't shown up for a routine check. They told her she disappeared the previous day when in fact she'd been gone for two months. I can't account for the first month before we met her. I can only guess.”
“So who's left? Friends?”
“Nobody, Bobby. Only us. She had just about the worst luck a human being could have. He mother was a hooker and a junkie and her father was an alcoholic car thief in and out of prison. Her grandmother was an illiterate Okie who came to California in 1935 and worked in an aircraft factory for twenty-five years as a bolt inspector. When she retired, she was almost blind. She couldn't control her granddaughter. Sally was a wannabe surfer girl. She took care of the boys on the beach, and they took care of her.”
Taking that statement with a grain of salt, Bobby said, “So she had friends. Beach people. Surfers.”
“Maybe you could say that, and maybe not. If she'd had real friends, I don't think she would've tried to hitchhike to San Francisco. She hung out on the beach and stayed for a few days with whoever would take her in. The first two foster homes she ran away from reported her right away. The school authorities declared her a truant, yada yada, and this one social worker knew how to find her on the beach. The last time she was shocked to learn that no one had seen Sally for two months. The surfers were pretty loose, but they remembered Sally. The missing person report was filed on July 22, 1963, a month after we encountered her.”
“The social worker. What about her?”
“I know her,” Nelson said. “She's a lovely old lady who's long retired. As a matter of fact, she's a card player, a blue-haired demon who plays in Gardena. It's a small world.”
“That's it? Nobody else?”
“Just us, Bobby.”
“Jesus,” Charlie said. “What time is it?”
“Almost two,” Nelson said.
“So what do you want to do?” Bobby asked. “Lay it out.”
“First we have to find out what really happened,” Nelson said. “I'm pretty sure we have five different versions sitting at this table. We need to sort it out.”
“And then?”
Alex broke his rule and performed his signature card trick, fanning a deck in which every card becomes the jack of diamonds. He winked and did it again and the entire deck was the queen of hearts.
Alex laughed. “Then we play cards. Even better, we play cards first and sort it all out later.”