Berkeley Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  Sharpie scurried back and forth crying and whimpering at the far end. Harry seemed to take a teasing pleasure in the hunt. As he drew closer, he swept row after row of books to the floor, as though that would give him better aim; books that Mason had spent a good part of yesterday reshelving, straightening, until they were lined up like the proudest soldiers in the best army on parade. All that work . . . all the care Mason took . . . now this!

  Mason followed, staying back a couple rows. The pattern was clear now. Harry was losing the point of his anger, which was congealing into a ball of rage firing in all directions. This was Harry all over: he'd never be happy until everyone else was drowning in the same lake of misery.

  Mason had no plan either, only a dismal fear and a deeper despair. He'd lost his job now. What else was left to lose? At that moment another emotion appeared—spontaneously, it seemed.

  "Harry!" Mason suddenly shouted. "Harry, stop it!"

  His own voice scared him. It startled Harry too, because he spun around and stared back at Mason through a gap in the shelves. He put a finger to his lips and took aim right at Mason.

  "I told you to shush!"

  Crack! went the pistol. Zip! went the bullet as it split the pinna of Mason's ear. Warm liquid ran between his fingers and down his arm.

  "Awwww! I shot Mason's poor widdle ear! Keep it up and you're gonna say goodbye to the other one!"

  But as Harry spun back to his quarry, he fumbled his gun again and accidentally kicked it out from the shelves into the middle of the room. As he stepped out and kneeled to retrieve it, Sharpie made a break. But he'd lost a lot of blood and as he crossed the reading room back the way he came, he slipped on it, fell hard on his wounded side, with a sad cry.

  Now Harry rose to his full height. He marched down on Sharpie with high stalking steps, as though stepping over trip wires. Sharpie was going nowhere. And weak little Mason, what would he do? What he always did. Shake like a leaf.

  But, as he had been about so much else, Harry was wrong. Mason was staring at his bloody hand, watching it turn into a bloody fist as he fully remembered their mother's last words.

  And they weren't "Take care of Harry."

  They were "Have Harry put away."

  That was the promise Mason had failed to keep. His fear and confusion turned inside out like a sock, into purpose and rage. Even though he was already as good as fired, he'd defend Sharpie and this library, this island in the world for both of them, to the last. He was nowhere near Harry's size, but he had an idea to make himself look bigger.

  As Harry reached the far end of the first row of reading tables, Mason jumped from floor to chair to tabletop. He dashed and leaped over the tabletops, avoiding the fixed study lamps, heading right for Harry, who stood a few steps from where Sharpie lay helpless and bleeding.

  Swaying about, Harry took aim with both hands: "Fuck my girl, will ya—"

  "Harry!" Mason shouted.

  Harry spun around as Mason sprang off the table through the air. The pistol cracked again as Mason slammed down onto his brother and they crashed together into a bare wall. Mason took a hard punch in the shoulder. His ears exploded, a jolt shook his whole body. The air sputtering out in a rosy mist from his right lung choked off his scream as he hit the floor.

  Mason opened his eyes as Harry slammed down flat and hard inches away. A tooth flew out when his face bounced on the floor. He'd been tackled, knocked flat, by a someone Mason had never seen before, a stoutly built woman with bushy hair. She'd hit Harry like a falling bookshelf.

  "What's going on here? Are you all right?"

  Harry tried to get up, but she cracked him a good one with a hammy forearm. "Oof!" His head bounced on the floor again.

  "Stay put!"

  But he wouldn't listen, so she thumped him once more. Harry surrendered in blubbering tears.

  Good hit, Mason wanted to say. Anxious cries swirled in with galloping footsteps. He also wanted to ask if Sharpie was all right, but by then he was shutting down as Harry sputtered in fury, his face reflected in the sheet of blood spreading between them.

  "Fuck!" Harry spat out another bloody tooth. "How come this shit always happens to me?"

  * * *

  Mason awoke thinking he was lying at the bottom of an aquarium. He was tightly wrapped and braced, a rubber mask glued to his face, his ears still ringing. As he rattled in place in his cocoon, the ceiling, seen through watery light, slid overhead. Blurred faces swam by, then swam away. But for a ball of pain in his shoulder, he felt serene, detached.

  Voices whispered behind the ringing and clamor. One was Sharpie's: "Can I check out a book . . . so I got something to read in the hospital?"

  Harry's voice was there too, barking and spitting, but it mattered nothing to Mason. The last time it had taken four cops to subdue him. Probably take a thousand this time, Mason drowsily thought.

  Among those two voices, there came a third. It was the woman who'd finally brought Harry down: "It's been a hell of a first day on the job . . ."

  Mason floated down the stairs to the first floor and out through the security gates. He heard smatterings of applause. So, they'd opened at last. "Go, Mason!" someone cried.

  Then the daily greeting rumbled out through the PA system: "Good afternoon! Welcome to the Berkeley Public Library! We apologize for the late opening after our little kerfuffle. The second-floor reading room will remain closed for the time being! Our Tai-chi-for-Lunch class at one p.m. is canceled for today. Again, we apologize! However, our three o'clock Super Cinema program in the Community Meeting Room will continue with O Brother, Where Art Thou? The temperature outside is forty-five degrees, but it looks like we're getting a break from all the bad weather! Again, welcome . . . and have a great day!"

  Indeed it was looking to be a fine day, as bits of blue sky showed through the gray ceiling.

  "Make way for the hero!" someone cried.

  "What's so funny?" the EMT asked as they loaded Mason into the ambulance. But with that mask fastened over his mouth and nose, Mason couldn't tell him.

  BARROOM BUTTERFLY

  by Barry Gifford

  Central Berkeley

  Roy's grandfather subscribed to several magazines, among them Time, Field & Stream, Sport, and Reader's Digest, but the one that interested Roy most was San Francisco Bay Crime Monthly. One afternoon Roy came home from school and found his grandfather reading a new issue.

  "Hi, Pops. Anything good in there?"

  "Hello, boy. Yes, I've just started an intriguing story."

  Roy sat down on the floor next to his grandfather's chair. "Can you read it to me?"

  "How old are you now, Roy?"

  "Ten."

  "I don't know everything that's in this one yet. I wouldn't want your mother to get mad at me if there's something she doesn't want you to hear."

  "She's not home. Anyway, I've heard everything."

  "You have, huh? All right, but I might have to leave out some gruesome details, if there are any."

  "Those are the best parts, Pops. I won't tell Mom. Start at the beginning."

  Barroom Butterfly

  by Willy V. Reese

  Elmer Mooney, a plumber walking to work at seven a.m. last Wednesday morning, noticed a body wedged into a crevice between two apartment buildings on the 800 block of Gilman Street in West Berkeley's Little Chicago neighborhood. He telephoned police as soon as he arrived at Kosztolanski Plumbing and Pipeworks, his place of employment, and told them of his discovery.

  The dead body was identified as that of Roland Diamond, thirty-four years old, a well-known Bay Area art dealer and lecturer at the University of California who resided on Indian Rock Road in Berkeley. He was unmarried and according to acquaintances had a reputation as a playboy who had once been engaged to the Nob Hill society heiress Olivia Demaris Swan.

  Detectives learned that Diamond had been seen on the evening prior to the discovery of his corpse in the company of Miss Jewel Cortez, twenty-one, at the bar of the Hotel M
adagascar on San Pablo Avenue, where Miss Cortez was staying. When questioned, Miss Cortez, who gave her profession as "chanteuse," a French word for singer, told authorities she had "a couple of cocktails" with Diamond, with whom she said she had only a passing acquaintance, after which, at approximately nine p.m., he accompanied her to her room, where he attempted by force to have sex with her.

  "He was drunk," Cortez told police. "I didn't invite him in, he insisted on walking me to my door. I pushed him out of my room into the hallway but he wouldn't let go of me. We struggled and he fell down the stairs leading to the landing below. He hit his head on the wall and lay still. I returned to my room, packed my suitcase, and left the hotel without speaking to anyone."

  Jewel Cortez confessed that before leaving the hotel she removed Roland Diamond's car keys from his coat pocket and drove in his car, a 1954 Packard Caribbean, to Los Angeles, where, two days later, she was apprehended while driving the vehicle in that city's Echo Park area. Miss Cortez was taken into custody on suspicion of car theft. Upon interrogation by the Los Angeles police, she claimed not to know that Diamond was dead, that he had loaned her his car so that she could visit friends in LA, where she had resided before moving to Berkeley. Miss Cortez also said she had no idea how his body had wound up in the Little Chicago neighborhood. When informed that examination of Diamond's corpse revealed a bullet wound in his heart, Cortez professed ignorance of the shooting and declared that she had never even handled a gun, let alone fired one, in her whole life.

  Betty Corley, a resident of the Hotel Madagascar, described Jewel Cortez as "a barroom butterfly." When asked by Detective Sergeant Gus Argo what she meant by that, Miss Corley said, "You know, she got around." Then added, "Men never know what a spooked woman will do, do they?"

  Berkeley, California, May 4, 1955

  * * *

  "What does she mean by spooked?" Roy asked. "Frightened?"

  "Yes, but her point is that women can be unpredictable."

  "Is my mother unpredictable?"

  Pops laughed. "Your mother is only thirty-two years old and she's already been married three times. What do you think?"

  PART II

  Directly Across from the Golden Gate

  EAT YOUR PHEASANT, DRINK YOUR WINE

  by Shanthi Sekaran

  Kensington

  Henry Wheeler walks into the Inn Kensington looking for all the world like a man who's just gotten laid. He wears a humid sort of smile and his arms dangle from his shoulders like sausage ropes. With him is a woman: younger, her long dark hair parted in the middle, her mouth set straight and firm. She leads him by the hand like a mother. He bumps into a square table, holds his hand up, and mumbles something, still smiling, still wrapped in the good love or slow sex or whatever has tugged him into this Friday morning. Shaila has spotted him, I can tell. Her chest tenses. Dread and longing course by on opposite tracks as our man Henry scoots into a booth, flips his hair back, squints, grins, and examines the hot sauce before him.

  He takes a few seconds to spot us. His smile drops. The woman is talking and he tries to look at her, but his eyes dart back, again and again, to Shaila. At last, he gets up.

  "Fuck," Shaila whispers. "Fuck fuck." He walks to the bathroom and Shaila gets up and follows.

  They speak all at once. They stop. I can feel the pump of Shaila's heart, the heat rising up her neck. They stand and look at each other, waiting.

  "What are you doing here?" she finally asks.

  "I need to come clean, Shaila."

  "Henry."

  "I need to."

  "No."

  "I won't tell anyone you were involved—"

  "No. You promised."

  "Cynthia says it's breaking me. She said I need to get this off my conscience."

  "Cynthia."

  He points weakly to the booth.

  Shaila shakes her head, faster and faster.

  "Cynthia said if I just go to the police and tell them about the—"

  "Cynthia," she hisses. "Cynthia."

  "You'll be fine, Shaila—"

  "They'll know, Henry! They'll know I was there!"

  Diners begin to turn to the noise. A manager stomps toward us. That's when I leap from her pocket and run. They see me. They all see me. A lady screams. Feet everywhere, scraping chairs, mayhem. I escape through the door and scoot behind a telephone poll, my chest pounding.

  Shaila finds me. The street is quiet again, but for a man standing in the café doorway, growling and cursing. "What were you doing?" she asks me.

  "Creating a diversion."

  "You could have been killed!"

  A rat's heart, on average, beats four hundred times a minute. This sort of excitement is no good for me. My heart isn't used to such things.

  * * *

  Henry Wheeler came into our lives the night Shaila found some chickens in a supermarket dumpster. On Telegraph Avenue, the surge of feet had calmed for the night. Only the odd clutch of sneakers passed by, all of them talking at once, none bothering to look down, none willing to part with a dollar bill or food still warm in restaurant doggie bags. I was fine. There's always food for a rat on Telegraph. But from inside her jacket pocket, I could hear Shaila's belly rumble.

  I poked my head out. "Let's find you something to eat," I said. She looked down at me, her brown eyes glazed with hunger. The neon lights of the smoke shop lit her skin a pale blue. I tugged at her pocket. She rose on unsteady knees. If I could have carried her myself, I would have. If I could have brought her a feast, I would have. The best I could do was keep her moving.

  The supermarket on Shattuck threw out its fresh food at ten p.m., and she'd learned to dive in, sift through the salad-bar detritus, and find the packaged foods. I had only to skim the surface of the trash heap to find a good plump tomato, a heel of stale bread, a few cheese cubes. She sifted and sighed and I nibbled. She gagged and cursed and I swallowed. Finally, she struck gold. "Look at this!" she called.

  She held aloft a black plastic container. "Roasted chicken!" She pried open the lid, stood right in the dumpster, and tore at the meat with her nails. She held out a morsel for me, salty and fatty with some kind of red peppery paste rubbed into the skin.

  "Look!" Shaila pointed. In the dumpster behind her sat four more packaged chickens.

  She returned to Telegraph triumphant, a tower of chickens tucked into her elbow: "Motherfuckers! I bring you chickens!" A few men sat in a tight clutch and passed something around. You'd think they'd have jumped up for the food, but no one budged. It wasn't food they were looking for.

  One man did get up. I hadn't seen him before. The shop lights gleamed off his hair as he lit a cigarette. He nodded at Shaila, plucked a chicken from her stack, and sank to the curb.

  Never have I seen a human eat so fast. One minute the chicken was there, whole and plump and orange brown. The next, she was nothing but rib cage and ankles.

  He looked at Shaila and she stared back. "Are you not hungry?" he asked.

  "Who are you?" she replied.

  He tore off the wishbone and held it out to her. "Henry Wheeler."

  She snatched it. "Why're you out here?" she asked.

  He blinked. "I don't understand the question."

  The man was well dressed in a thick turtleneck and denim jacket. He had the sort of strong jaw and square chin that humans are known for. I don't trust a strong jaw. I don't trust a square chin.

  From his belt he unhooked a metallic mug. "You want to know why I'm on the street?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why are you out here?"

  "Stepdad."

  He nodded. "I hear that a lot. Out here."

  "Oh yeah? You talk to a lot of people? Out here?"

  He picked at his front teeth.

  "Who are you really?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean I've never seen you before, but you roll up today in your nice jeans and your jacket looking all clean, and you talk like you know what it's like to be out here, b
ut you don't look like you know what it's like. You look like you took a shower this morning."

  "Fucking stepdads," was all he said. He reached up. She held out the wishbone. They both pulled. Shaila won.

  He lit a fresh cigarette and we watched the ash grow until it dropped and scattered in a gray shower. "You sleeping out tonight?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "It's gonna be a cold one."

  "Do you have a better idea?"

  He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. "Yeah."

  Shaila jumped to her feet and nearly sent me flying. She backed away and I could smell her alarm. "It's making sense now," she whispered. And yes, all at once, it was. The clothes, the shave, the jaw line. Henry Wheeler stood up.

  She took her knife from her back pocket and held it out. "You're a pimp." He walked toward her. "Get the fuck away." She jabbed her knife at the air. He stopped, raised both hands.

  "I'm not a pimp," he said. His hands dropped to his sides. "Do I look like a pimp?"

  She kept her knife raised. "I'm not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the fuck you're doing here."

  He raised his arms to the sky again. "I'm a grad student. Okay? I'm a grad student."

  "Fuck you," she said, and we meant it.

  * * *

  Henry the grad student took us back to his apartment that night. We walked from Telegraph up through campus, its buildings lit from the ground like old monuments. We walked past the big clocktower as it chimed midnight. We got on a bus that took us high up into the hills, to a neighborhood of steeply sloped driveways and houses with fairy-tale turrets. I watched Shaila strip off her clothes and get in the shower. "Oh my god," she said, letting the hot water flatten her hair to her shoulders in great black sheets. I scooted into an open cabinet and relieved myself. Henry lived in what he called an in-law. A house in which humans keep their elders.