“Yes, indeed, I understand,” Glen said. “And if I might suggest something to you. You felt terrible because you’d done something you shouldn’t. You’re not Catholic, so there’s no confessional for you, my friend. I’d simply recommend that you leave off doing things you oughtn’t.”
“The voice of experience?” I asked.
He laughed again, shortly. “Yes, the voice of experience. We pay, one way or another, for all our sins, I assure you.”
“Quentin certainly did,” I said. “Whatever those sins were. Knowing Quentin, I assume they were legion.”
“Safe assumption,” said Glen. “I always worried Quentin would turn up HIV-positive. He was so free with his favors.”
We both let that statement sit there for a bit.
“And you’re certain he wasn’t?” I ventured.
Glen looked at me for a moment. “No, he wasn’t. He was quite careful, even with all his adventures. And he got himself tested regularly. He was a lucky man.”
“Until the end,” I said.
Glen looked up at the kitchen clock.
“Well, now, where does the time fly? Let’s have a look at those invoices and I’ll send you on your way.” I pushed the envelope in his direction and let Glen riffle through. He scanned the pages, one by one, muttering under his breath, circling a few items, initialing other pages.
“Sorry,” he said, “just be a moment.”
“Take your time,” I said as I stood and wandered over to the Fox family bulletin board. School pictures of the Fox brood, a soccer phone tree, Mass schedule from St. Peter and Paul’s, a chore chart, adorned with many check marks and the occasional stick-on gold star, and a patchwork of other family photos.
“St. Peter and Paul’s?” I called. “Isn’t that far to troop everyone for Mass?”
Glen looked up. “Oh, yes, a little. Corinne and the kids go here in the neighborhood, but I like the North Beach scene, so I ramble over there from time to time. You know, have an espresso afterward with friends.”
“Mm-hmm.” I leaned against the refrigerator and surveyed the kitchen.
How settled Glen and Corinne seemed here, how American. I wondered if they felt that way. It was hard to know what was okay to ask. I’d just pried into Glen’s past, and had been made to feel even nosier than I already considered myself, but, oh well, might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat.
“Glen,” I ventured, “do you feel like you’re raising an American family?”
He looked up. “American, Maggie? As opposed to what? Bosnian?”
“No, Irish.”
He snorted. “Hardly. Do you have the slightest idea how pervasive you Yanks are? You wander through Trinity College in Dublin and you’d swear you were at UC Berkeley. The kids wear the same Tshirts, pierce the same body parts, listen to the same music, tell the same jokes. Even Irish culture gets co-opted. You know who’s on the cover of Rolling Stone this month?”
I shook my head. Only Puck could tell me. “The Cranberries. There’s that sweet-faced Dolores O’Riordan, looking like an American girl and singin’ her heart out. I mean, you know she’s Irish, but I’ll tell you, we’re all of us, everywhere in the world these days, just a little bit American.” He gestured around the kitchen.
“I’m raisin’ American kids, and I say that’s just fine. There’s not many other places in the world a man can start over.”
“Like the song in West Side Story?”
Glen looked up, puzzled.
“I want to be in America. Okay by me in America,” I sang.
“Don’t quit your day job, Maggie,” he said and went back to the invoices.
“Wait,” I protested. “You started over. In the seminary in Ireland, after Oxford.”
“Oh, well,” said Glen, “that’s another matter now. The Catholic Church is a world unto itself—just like America, but without the rock and roll.”
Silence hung in the kitchen again, and I was reminded of what private lives we all lead, more of Inspector Moon’s puzzle boxes. Opened occasionally, in some flash, some moment, and then shuttered again, away from even those we think we trust. And I began to think that my stupid, stubborn reluctance to let go of Quentin’s murder must have something to do with proving my own trustworthiness to Michael again. Bring him the solution, the way the cats bring something they’ve conquered and leave it on the mat. See what I’ve done for you! The memory of those poor ravaged creatures—half-eaten mice and chipmunks—brought me perilously close to remembering Quentin’s body the morning I found him.
“Okay, that’s about it,” I said hastily. “I’ll leave you in peace, and Gertie will be pleased to get your approvals on these.”
Glen stood and we walked together through the dark hallway to the front door. Impulsively, I moved to give Glen a hug. He hesitated and then wrapped his arms around me and hugged back. “Ah, Maggie,” he said, “so California. Fix anything with a hug.”
I released him. “Just being friendly,” I said. “Besides, maybe I’ll catch your flu. I wouldn’t mind a day or two in bed with a stack of trashy novels.”
“Yes, well, what do they say about being careful what you wish for?”
I waved from the station wagon, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror to see what suicidal driver had decided to make Liberty Street personal territory. Glen stood in the doorway, slight, rumpled, the light catching his gingery hair.
His face was still tired and drawn.
“It’s nothing,” I said to myself, maneuvering the Volvo out onto the street. “You wouldn’t look so perky yourself if you were coping with city life, five kids, and the flu.”
And with that almost comforting thought, I headed toward Mission to angle across the great divide, Market Street.
19
If Music Be the Food of Love
There are those who treasure the pleasures of rural life: muddy tramps on country roads, speaking to your neighbors and home to your own wood stove.
There are those who treasure the suburbs, with their organized sports, PTAs and community task forces, and oversized sport utility vehicles lined up after school.
And then there are those who like the drama of urban life, the theaters and cafes and after-hours places, and dark, dimly lit bars that serve real martinis. San Francisco, bless her diverse, beloved heart, is the country-cum-suburb-cum-city that cheerfully, even elegantly, integrates them all. And nowhere demonstrates that more clearly than the south of Market, or SoMa, scene, an updated Greenwich Village moved way out west. Just minutes away from parent-obsessed neighborhoods like Potrero Hill, a few short miles away from the great country-scene-within-a-city that is Golden Gate Park, there is SoMa. Bright lights, neon, shops that offer piercing in anatomical locations never before imagined, clubs with mosh pits where Gen Xers and slackers fling themselves onto dance floors seemingly designed by the architect of Dante’s Inferno, hip multimedia ghettos where gearheads create cyberworlds of reality beyond the virtual, gay bars that offer everything from down-home Texas two-step dancing lessons to biker hangouts, converted live-work lofts where childless couples live in art-directed gray and white, clean-lined, Bauhaus-approved splendor.
Hot Licks, despite its sexy name, is actually something of a tame player in the neighborhood. It’s a traditional jazz club, though after hours the club’s open-mike policy welcomes the more avant-garde—musicians, comedians, and the kind of people who cover themselves in glue and birdseed and apply for NEA grants as performance artists. The drinks are generous, the bar food is good but not chichi, and famous visitors love to drop by and sit in for a set with the house band. It’s owned by a Chicago-transplanted couple and it shows, with an honest Midwest-joint feel in a neighborhood that has more attitude than anything else.
As I pulled up to the door on Eighth Street, I noticed that yet another auto body shop had given way to SoMa-ization and been replaced by a billiards parlor and champagne bar. Another place for the overpaid and overanxious younger set to wile away time and mo
ney, I groused to myself, sounding ever more like a bourgeois housewife. I resolved then and there to persuade Puck to take me along on one of his famous late-night SoMa crawls, so that I could feel marginally less stuffy.
In the meantime, Hot Licks’s notorious hostess, she of the flame-colored hair and lingerie modeling career, awaited. She would be disappointed when she heard I was hopeless with a saxophone.
I pulled open the door and stepped inside, transported from dim fall sunshine into that eerie nobody-home darkness nightclubs have in the middle of the afternoon.
“Hello?” I called. “Anybody here?”
“We’re not open! Go away,” I heard someone shout back. I peered into the darkness and made out a tshirted young man, putting bottles away in back of the bar.
I marched over and hoisted myself onto the bar. I grinned at the young man and admired the line of turquoise studs marching up his right ear. I counted five.
“Hi.” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Maggie Fiori.”
He shook. “And I’m Casper. But we’re still not open, lady—uh, Maggie.”
I turned on what I remembered as a beguiling smile. “Oh, I know. I’m a friend of Quentin’s. He used to play sax in your Sunday jam sessions?”
He shook his head. “I remember. Cool guy. Shame he got… done in.”
“I know. Anyway, someone called from here and wanted to know if I’d sit in for him.” Casper regarded me suspiciously. I don’t think the suburban matron getup led him to believe I was capable of delivering licks, hot or otherwise. I disabused him of that notion quickly. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to play. I’m just talking to people who knew Quentin. Since I’m temporarily filling in for him at Small Town, I’m gathering material for a memorial piece.”
He looked interested. “Oh, yeah? Well, you shouldn’t talk to me. I hardly knew the guy. You ought to talk to our hostess, Stare.”
“Stare?”
“Yeah. I think it’s like Esther or something. But she’s kinda cool for one of those Biblical names. So we call her Stare, ’cause, well—when you see her, you’ll understand.”
I got the drift. “You mean she’s great looking and men stare at her, huh?”
He laughed. “Men. Women. Children. Small animals.”
“So is she here?”
“Yeah, she’s in the office. Want me to get her?”
“Please.”
Casper disappeared through a swinging door behind the bar, leaving me to contemplate myself dispiritedly in the mirror behind the bottles. Stare, huh? Wonder what you have to look like to get called that? After Puck had mentioned her to me, I’d heard more about her from other people—little nuggets here and there. Heard about the modeling jobs for the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Featured heavily in the teddy, brassiere, and bustier sections. Hmmph, I snorted inwardly, all that upper body emphasis must mean she’s got less than gorgeous thighs. And was she conversant with the pluperfect tense? And did she know all the verses to John Jacob Jingelheimer-Schmidt? Get a hold of yourself, Maggie. This is envy so low, so degraded, so—and then, I stopped, because Stare was walking through the door and any envy I could have imagined was inadequate to the challenge.
Right off, the goddamn thighs were fine. I could see that because she had on a miniskirt—or not. It was so short, it was sort of a Zen skirt; you just had to imagine it was there. And there was that obnoxious cleavage. “Wonderbra,” I thought to myself. “I could look like that.”
And then there was that red hair, lots of it, redder than mine, in one of those dated, curly, cascading to the shoulders looks that men claim to love. It’s what they mean when they sigh and say, “Why can’t you wear your hair like.…” Creamy skin, green eyes (contact-enhanced, I felt sure), and twenty-minute lips.
The pieces were terrific, but it was the sum of the parts that knocked a person out. Most of all, I realized, it was the way she moved all that gorgeousness across the floor. Something like warm caramel dripping off a spoon liquid, languorous, and melting everything in its path.
“Maggie? Gee, it’s really great to meet you. Quentin talked about you a lot.”
Yeah, I thought to myself bitterly, pillow talk, when he was contrasting your glamorous self to his frumpy, hausfrau stationwagon-driving suburban squeeze.
She hoisted her perfect little butt onto the barstool adjoining mine and reached awkwardly over to give me a hug. “I feel as if we know each other.” I didn’t. But it seemed rude to say so.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “Did Casper tell you I was doing a piece on Quentin?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off all that perfection. Those billiard-table felt green eyes welled with tears. She nodded. “He told me. I’d love to help. What can I do?”
I felt the knot of envy dissolve. I’d like to think it was some grand feminist principle that made me feel petty to envy someone so beautiful. But probably not.
Maybe it was being past thirty and knowing that even in my prime, I’d been the farm team to Stare’s major league. Or maybe it was just that she was so perfect, so pleasurable to contemplate. I felt a little like an art student, struck happily dumb before a canvas of some pre-Raphaelite beauty. Stare was well-named.
So I simply launched into what I have to consider as a very fine piece of amateur detection. How she met Quentin? At the club. What their relationship was? More tears, but, well, just magical, Quent was so brainy and stuff. Who else Quent hung out with at the club? You know, just everyone. Any enemies? No, everyone liked him. Kinda quiet for this crowd, but very funny, good musician, very generous.
“Generous?” I asked, thinking about Quentin’s real-life assets, separate from Claire.
Stare dabbed her eyes with a Hot Licks napkin. “Uh huh. You know, treating people to… well, treats.”
“Standing drinks?” I asked.
“Oh, well, no. I mean, if you play here, the bartenders really take care of you.”
“Okay, then, what do you mean? Making loans to people?” I couldn’t quite conjure up an image of Quentin as a loan shark, but then, you never know.
“No, no,” said Stare, and shifted uneasily on the barstool. “I just meant.…”
Tiny bells went off in the back of my head. “Dope? He treated the guys to drugs.”
A look of both relief and discomfort flitted over those art-directed features.
“Oh, you know. Nothing hard. But he’d bring hash in now or then, or good grass, and he was generous with it.”
I guiltily remembered our small, suburban stash of Belize Breeze, also courtesy of Quentin, and began to wonder.
“He didn’t sell, did he?”
Stare looked horrified. “Sell? Oh, no. He wasn’t a dealer. He just seemed, every now and then, to have access to quite a bit of very high-quality stuff. And we’d all share the goodies.”
I could see the headlines now. “Preppy Magazine Editor Doles Dope Largesse, in Places High and Low.” Michael and I would probably be busted along with the musicians at Hot Licks. Oh well, at least there’d be more than Muzak in jail.
“So, Stare,” I pressed on. “Any idea where this stuff came from? A friend of Quentin’s? Somebody he worked with?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? We didn’t ask. Quentin’s—was—a kinda private guy. I mean, he had that bitchy Pacific Heights wife of his, and then.…” she gestured toward herself.
“You?” I filled in politely.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me. And hey I wasn’t kidding myself. A whole lot of others. Boys and girls. That Quentin, he got around. You know.…”
I knew. How nice to be part of a large extended family. “So as long as we’re discussing Quentin’s love life,” I continued, “any past sweeties who were really pissed at him?”
Stare blew her nose, furrowed her brow, and appeared to give the matter some thought. “I don’t think so. You know, with Quentin, no one ever took things very seriously. And he was so polite. I mean, he didn’t really dump anybody. He just moved on. And it was okay; you ju
st felt like you were part of a club or something.”
“An alumni association,” I commented, wondering if we should plan a reunion.
“Yes, that’s it,” she said brightly. “It was never love. It was fun with Quent. You felt as if you were his project for a while, and then the next project came up. But he didn’t forget you or anything.”
I nodded and made a mental note to call Inspector Moon.
“So, is what I said going to be part of the article?” asked Stare. “Seems kinda weird.”
For a moment I was bewildered, and then I remembered my ruse for speaking with Stare. What a lousy detective. Got to keep those stories straight. “It’s all background,” I said. “But everything you said has been helpful.” I had a sudden, queasy thought.
“Stare, did you tell the cops any of the stuff about drugs you told me?”
She shook her head. “No, they just asked us about enemies he might have had at the bar. I think they thought it was a different kind of place, that people get in fights here. You know.”
Back at my office, Gertie was happy to get the signed invoices and relieved to hear that Glen was on the mend and would probably be in the next day. I dealt with the usual collection of pink message slips and then wandered down the hall to Puck’s office.
He was in full writing mode. Gone was the laid-back, leather-jacketed, cooler-than-cool look. Jacket discarded on the floor, he was hunched over the word processor, three half-empty coffee mugs scattered over his desk, index cards taped to his walls. He looked undistractable, so I began to creep away. Without looking up, he barked at me. “Stop. Don’t sneak out. Don’t leave. Save me, save me!”
I wavered in the doorway. “You look like you’re in the middle of it.”
“I am, I am, and that bitch Fiori has me on deadline.”
“Ooh, I love it when you call me names,” I cooed to him.
Puck swiveled his chair around, away from the screen, and pointed at his disreputable armchair. “Sit, sit. I need a break. The bitch will have to wait.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “Speaking schizophrenically, I’m sure she will.”
Edited to Death Page 16
