“You ever hear of an organization called the Blue Notes?”
“Like the club in New York?”
“More like the gang in the Mission.”
“Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure.”
“It seems not many people, outside of Poe and the cops, have.”
“Newspapers aren’t what they used to be. Poe, you say?”
I nodded and told him about Frankie and my meeting with Poe and the little he’d told me about the Blue Notes.
“I know Angelique. Best watch your p’s and q’s around her.”
“How do you know her?”
Marsh looked away for a moment, deflecting the question. “So how is the little girl paying you?”
“In doubloons.”
Marsh was under the impression that I had a bit too much Don Quixote in me, especially when it came to women of any age. He’d been the one who commissioned my stained-glass front door with its Knights of the Roundtable theme.
“You going to visit some of these Blue Notes?”
“Looks like it.”
“There’s a great dive, Mamasita’s, off Market and 16th. Tacos al Carbon to trade your first kid for.”
“Tomorrow at 11 a.m.?”
Marsh nodded and turned away.
“Too bad about Tom and you,” I called out.
His shoulders rose and fell, as he offered a dismissive wave of his hand.
Six
I left Marsh in the driver’s seat of his Aston Martin across the street from Good & Plenty Repairs on 25th and Sanchez.
The corrugated metal door was rolled down tight, despite the fact that it was 1:30 p.m. The storefront had a decrepit Spanish tile roof with a weathered white brick facing. Two adjoining windows were covered by white poster paper and secured with iron bars.
We’d lingered at Mamasita’s, and I’d probably had one too many Negro Modelos and, for sure, one more habanero-laced taco than I needed.
I burped and glanced back across the street. Marsh nodded. The Aston Martin was neon yellow. A crowd of teenagers was already gathering around it.
Kitty corner to the body shop was a tiny grocery, Amash Produce. I wandered in, felt up a couple of green bananas and an orange, and piled them all together in a bag.
A weigh scale sat next to the cash register, and I plopped the bag on top of it. A man from somewhere in the Levant part of the world, who had to be at least eighty—white-haired, his skin a network of brown wrinkles folded over upon themselves—eyed the scale, removed the bag, and said, “$3.55.”
I paid him, turned away, paused, turned back.
“Do you know when the garage next door will be open?”
He frowned, shook his head, lifted his hands. “Who knows, mister. Kids don’t know how to run a business. How they keep it open?” He glanced out nervously toward the front door. “I do not bring my car there, mister. If I am you, I listen.”
“So you know the owners?”
“Nobody here knows them. Really, sir. Punks. One or another of these hoodlums comes in here sometimes, usually for candy or to steal. This one, Marley, gives me very hard time. He just takes. He never pays.” The old man reached under the counter and came back up with a small revolver in his hand. “I think sometimes,” he muttered, staring at the piece, then sighed. “But I’m an old man. Jalil just wants to be left alone.”
He lowered the gun back into its slot beneath the register.
“One boy is nice. Not like the others. But, like the others, he has no father. His mother, who I have met, a nice woman, but too much for her. She always works. Her son is Vince. Vince is good boy, mainly. He needs friends, and so he has these punks for friends. I have talk to him. So have police. They are often here. But he is young, and he does not listen.” Jalil shook his head, his jowls sagging, his eyes pooling with the ravages of a thousand years living at the margins.
“So they don’t keep regular hours? They might not open again today?”
He glanced again at the door as if expecting trouble and bad luck to walk in, arm in arm, at any moment. “I cannot say more. Take your business elsewhere. Thank you.”
He handed me my bag of produce with a trembling hand.
I pressed a round black ringer next to the garage’s door and waited. After a long pause, I hit it again and didn’t let go. The annoying, high-pitched buzz kicked up a racket inside.
From the corner of the building, a face appeared above a crumbling brick fence. “What the fuck you want?”
“Car needs work.” I pointed across the street to the Aston Martin.
The boy’s eyes widened. “You’re shitting me?”
“The engine light came on. It’s overheating. We need somebody to look at it right away.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the car. Marsh waved at him. “Hold on a minute.” He disappeared.
A minute later, the accordion doors creaked upward and three young men stood in front of me.
Jalil had hit the nail on the head. If you looked in a picture dictionary under the word “punk,” you couldn’t have done better than to depict these three fine, youthful specimens.
There was hardly an inch of skin on any of them that hadn’t been tattooed or pierced. Personally, I think tattoos are a scourge, an insult to a perfectly fine canvas. I don’t like ‘em, never did, never will. But that’s a personal thing. I know some really nice people who have a liking for indelible ink. And this is America after all, home of the brave and the witless.
But these boys had jumped the shark vis-a-vis body decoration, and, even worse, there didn’t seem to be an ounce of youthful lightness or optimism in their faces. It was all pose and sneer, challenge and defiance.
I doubted they had much walk-in business.
The Asian boy stepped forward. “I’m Louie,” he said finally. “These my homies, Jason and Tart.”
I extended my hand. “I’m Max.”
Louie looked at it as if it had just arrived from Venus.
“Gentlemen, a pleasure,” I said. “Are you the mechanics?”
Tart grinned, looked nervously at Louie. Jason farted. Louie kept a straight face. “Yeah. We work on cars all the time.”
“Is the owner here?”
“Nope.”
“Is that Scooter?”
“Yeah. Scooter. He’s not here. I’m his brother,” Louie said.
“I see,” I said. “Okay.” I waved my hand out towards the Aston. “My friend’s car has a problem. The engine light is on. It appears to be overheating. We’re late for an appointment. Can you help?”
Louie, with two nose rings and a dragon tattoo crawling from his pinky finger to his Adam’s apple, tossed his smoldering cigarette to the ground. “Whoah. That’s some ride, buddy. Yeah. We can take a look at it for ya.”
“You’re lifesavers.”
I motioned to Marsh. The Aston purred to life and inched forward.
Marsh strolled next door to Amash and picked up a Hershey bar and a milk. While he ate, we loitered near a lamp post a half-block from where the boys gathered around the Aston.
“So what’s the plan?” Marsh asked, offering me a square of chocolate.
I declined. “I’m in an improvisational mood today. We lit a match, now let’s wait and see.” I paused, glanced back at the garage. Tart was smoking a cigarette, standing watch, the occasional sideward glance our way, while the other two boys stayed under the hood. “You messed with the spark plugs?”
Marsh winced, took a gulp from his pint of milk. “It truly pained me to violate her. I also loosened the gas cap. Should be an easy fix for the boys.”
Marsh hardly ever took “her” out of his garage. We figured the $175,000 car would present maximum temptation to our mechanics.
“I have a subtle feeling they’re going to complicate matters.” I looked back again. Tart stubbed out his cigarette, gave me what could have been a smile or a sneer, and rejoined the boys inside.
We decided to let them have a little time to themsel
ves, time to let their true natures percolate, and walked around the block. We encountered a homeless man who beseeched us for cash. Marsh offered him the second half of his chocolate bar. The man cursed him and stumbled away. The neighborhood had a lot of yipping dogs and overturned garbage cans.
Back at the garage, we found the accordion door once again slammed shut. Marsh peered over the brick fencing. “Can’t see much. A narrow alley with cracked concrete and weeds. It angles away behind the garage.”
“Let’s go over,” I said.
We scaled the five-foot wall and dropped down onto the other side.
“I fear we misjudged the mendacity of the youngsters, but they had better not hurt a hair on her head,” he said, and I felt a chill run through me at the tenor of Marsh’s voice. I hoped the boys weren’t as dumb as they looked.
At the end of the alley, we found an open door leading back into the garage. Inside, the Aston Martin rested quietly in the center of the room. In a tight corner beneath a hanging ring of tires, the boys were playing poker on a makeshift table, four tires stacked and topped with a piece of metal siding.
“Louie,” I called out.
“Hey,” he said, not bothering to look at me, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He flipped his hand—three jacks—laughed, and raked in a bunch of change and a few bills.
“Fuckheads,” he said. “Your tell’s too easy, Tart. Like taking candy from a monkey.”
“A baby,” Tart barked.
“Baby. Monkey. Dumb is dumb.“ Louie ground out his cigarette on the metal. “Ride’s ready,” he continued. “No big deal. Spark plug. You left your gas cap loose, too. Everything should be copafuckingcetic.”
I stood there for a moment trying to improvise. And it wasn’t just Louie’s surprising familiarity with the word copacetic that threw me.
Finally, I came up with, “How much do we owe you?”
He slashed the air with his hand dismissively.
Had I fallen into an alternate universe where juvenile delinquents had a different, more Disney-esque mode of being?
“For your time,” I tried.
“Just tell your rich friends to bring their cars here. We’ll give ‘em a deal. Start getting Astons and Ferraris and Mercedes in here ‘stead of the usual shitty old rides, we’re going to be sittin’ in shit heaven. Keys in the visor. Open sesame, Tart.”
He cursed, threw his cards down on the table. “You’re a lucky a-hole, Louie.”
“Luck’s got nuthin’ ta do with it, T. Just figurin’ out the stupid.”
Tart hit a red button, and the folding entrance to the garage stuttered open.
I started toward the car, stopped. “Are you three the primary mechanics?”
Louie frowned.
“I just...I want to recommend you and wanted to make sure that—”
“Answer to your question is yeah. Lately. Scooter doesn’t have much time for the business and—”
Tart snorted. Jason laughed.
Louie ignored them. “...and so I’m kinda in charge at this point. Tell ‘em Louie will take good care of ‘em.”
Seven
“Interesting.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Youth can be a perplexing time.”
“Does anything about that make sense to you?”
Marsh turned on the radio, and Vivaldi’s violins sang rapturously through the Aston’s spectacular speakers. “Looks like the ones we met may not be directly involved in funny business. Probably Scooter and the Blue Notes used this as a front of some sort, or he started it legit and lost interest. Maybe he’s turned it over to his younger, more industrious brother.”
I mulled that over. Based upon Tart and Jason’s reaction to Louie’s comment about his brother not having time for the business, it was pretty clear the boys did know what Scooter was up to. If and why they were not involved was less clear. Maybe Scooter was trying to keep his younger brother on the straight and narrow? Seemed like a subplot of a hackneyed TV crime show, but clichés sometimes operate quite nicely in the real world.
“Where to?” Marsh asked as we pulled away from the curb.
I thought for a moment about my boat, my hammock on the back deck, a cool drink in my hand, the sound of the water gently lapping the hull, and sighed. I made a sudden decision and told Marsh where to go.
From Frankie’s vivid description, I didn’t think it’d be tough to find where she lived, and it wasn’t.
The scarecrow wasn’t exactly a dead ringer for Ray Bolger in the Wizard of Oz. It was four pieces of plywood painted black, covered by a black velvet dress and a blonde wig over a painted Mardi Gras mask. The birds pecking away at the vegetable garden beneath were unimpressed.
The chicken weather vane on the roof was a work of art—a funky melding of metal and copper piping configured to resemble a red rooster crowing at the heavens.
I left Marsh to his Vivaldi in the Aston and strolled around to the side of the house where a narrow concrete stairwell angled and disappeared into a covered porch. I scaled the stairs and found myself in the midst of a tropical jungle. Palms and orchids and snapdragons, long flowering vines in pastel colors filled up virtually every inch of the small wood-framed porch’s terra cotta floors. Insects buzzed and flitted about the deep, wet depths of the foliage. A strong vanilla scent with a hint of grape filled the air, along with something else more pungent. A weedy scent. I thought immediately of pot, but couldn’t glimpse any, although there was so much dense greenery that it could have been buried there somewhere. With marijuana legalized for medical use, there were more than a few home farmers in the city now, growing the stuff to treat every and any manner of illness, real or imagined.
I tiptoed around the assorted pots and planters and tapped three times on a door that was a tapestry of memories from the psychedelic sixties: Day-Glo colors, guitars, flower children, and peace symbols, drawn with childlike simplicity.
As I looked around me, a bit overwhelmed by the sights and sounds and smells, a stirring, a step from inside reached my ears.
A moment later, the door creaked open a few inches until it was stopped by a latched gold chain. A single blue eye, framed by a high forehead and dirty blonde hair, peeked out at me.
“Hello. Max Plank. Looking for Frankie.”
The door closed. A moment passed. The door opened.
No surprise. She was a throwback to a more innocent time of incense, free love, rock music when it mattered, and girls dressed in their summer clothes. Her natural cloth fiber neck-to-ankle dress hung on her like it was still on a wire hanger in a closet.
“Frankie lives here?” I asked.
“Wait,” she said, a perplexed smile on her lips. “Wait…”
I did that.
“...it’s only...” Her lovely green eyes were a little spacey. The pungent smell on the porch intensified momentarily, or maybe it was just my sensory imagination, adding up two plus two.
“...yes. I think. No. C’mon, Mr.?”
“Plank. Max.”
“Max.” Her weak smile broadened. “I like that. Max. Such a strong name for a man.” Her eyes took me in, running the length and breadth of me. “Very strong. My name is Maggie, Max. C’mon.”
She stepped back. I ambled in.
We sat on bean bag chairs—mine ruby red, hers a violent shade of pink—in a front room that overlooked Church Street and Mission Dolores Park.
Outside it was late afternoon and the fog had rolled in, a ghostly mist like a warning of worse things to come. The only lights inside were the candles surrounding us on all sides. Incense filled the air with a stomach-turning sweetness.
“Green tea?”
“No, thank you. I understand that Frankie lives here and that you are her landlord.”
She recoiled as if I’d slapped her. “I hate that word. It’s so...legal...so capitalist. As if because we happen to be caretakers of this property that we are the oppressive lords over it and any who live here.”
Su
ch a fresh perspective.
“So you don’t own it? You’re only taking care of the house?”
“I didn’t mean that. The home has been in Leonard’s family for several generations, so technically we do own it. It’s just that language, I mean, it’s so important, isn’t it? Language can fool us...that’s what Leonard always says.”
I nodded. The expression on her face was a mix of concern and embarrassment. I thought perhaps it wasn’t only language that fooled or confused her.
“Is Frankie here?”
“That’s what I was trying to remember...”
“Whether she’s here or not?”
“No. No. You, Max. Frankie told me about you.”
I nodded again.
She rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead in a gesture that reminded me of Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She scratched her head, wrinkled her nose, blinked repeatedly. “I’m remembering now.” She looked up at me, and her eyes widened in sudden surprise. “You’re a private investigator? You’re trying to help Frankie?”
“I’m not a private investigator, but—” I was wasting my time trying to explain to her the intricacies of what I was and how I operated. “I am trying to help her find her sister.”
Maggie was staring intently at a grouping of large candles dripping copious amounts of wax on the pockmarked fireplace mantle. Without looking at me, she said, “I can’t say that I approve of most law enforcement practices...although I imagine that they are sometimes a necessary evil.” She glanced at me for a brief moment, then her eyes searched a corner of the room. “But I am glad that someone is helping that poor little girl. It’s just awful. Her parents dying and now her sister, her protector, vanished into thin air.”
“Do you know what happened to her parents?”
Her eyes flared to life. “I gather that her father was a ne’er-do-well of some sort who left when Johnnie was a teenager, right after Frankie was born. Her mother died a few years back. Cancer. Dragged on for a while. Must have been just awful.” Maggie’s voice had suddenly become strangely animated, her face twitching, her fingers making jerky movements. My mind was stuck on ne’er-do-well—it seemed an archaic expression coming out of her mouth.
Stray Cat Blues Page 5
