No Sign of Murder

by Alan Russell

  Norman raised his glass. “To Andrew Hallidie.”

  We finished our drinks, and said good-night to Mal, who was still working at the last of his spots.

  I found Norman a cab. As he got inside, he asked me a final question. “Are you sure all the horses had to be killed, Stuart?”

  I lied to him, and his question, a question that also asked me whether Anita had to be dead. “No, Norman. I just thought the story sounded better that way.”

  My office was five blocks away. I don’t know what demons prompted me to walk there, but I did. I staggered inside, and even with all the Scotch in my stomach I felt cold. I grabbed an overcoat, and then walked over to my filing cabinet, and took out the Anita Walters file. I only wanted her photo, her pretty face. I talked to her picture for a while, and asked it a lot of questions. And when she didn’t answer, I fell dead asleep on my couch.

  12

  I AWOKE AT ABOUT five a.m. Something disturbed me, some noise I couldn’t place—a fact that didn’t surprise me in light of all the pounding going on in my head. I tried to look around, but it was hard focusing on a spinning room. It sounded like mail had been dropped through my slot; that I even considered that possibility made me think I was hallucinating. A band marched in my head to the theme “Rest In Peace, Brain Cells.” Cottonmouth and throbbing temples drove me to the water cooler and ibuprofen.

  When you still walk unsteadily a few hours after retiring, you know what a serious mistake the night before was. The day wasn’t starting too great either. Just making one decision at a time was a monumental task. I was tempted to try to sleep again, but my back started to creak at the sight of my lumpy sofa, and I realized my head wasn’t the only part of my body registering complaints, just the loudest. I called for an Uber and went downstairs to wait for it.

  It was too early to talk and too early to think. I scuffed my feet on the sidewalk, looked around at the grey and felt the cold, and was sure the outside and my inside were one. A garbage truck went by, a private one, out to clean somewhere in the City.

  All garbage collectors are members of the Scavengers’ Protective Association, a very strong, and very unusual, union. It’s almost an Italian fraternal organization—no, not even Italian, but more regionalized, Genoese, or Genovese as they call themselves. Long ago the Genovese gave up their fishing nets to ply a new trade, and now more than ever they take their trash seriously. The word is they’ve found more money in prospecting garbage than any forty-niner ever found in gold.

  My Uber driver arrived. He was into yawning, and I joined him in that conversation. He drove me to my apartment, which is located on Potrero Hill. San Franciscans are very possessive about their hills. There is an ongoing argument as to how many there are in the City. The figures range from forty-seven to fifty-one. You pay to be a billy goat, even on Potrero Hill, a mixed neighborhood, a working-class neighborhood that’s trying to remain that way. My domicile is a subdivided house, older, but not quite antique, not pretty Victorian like some of my neighbors’ dwellings. The driver dropped me off, and we each gave the other a final yawn. But my mouth deceived my brain. Sleep wouldn’t come, and a cognac helper was out of the question, so I read for a bit, leafing through a few of the books and articles Leland had selected. One article about the deaf population on Martha’s Vineyard particularly interested me. In the seventeenth century several of the Vineyard’s original settlers had been deaf, and had passed on that gene to their children. Large families were the rule, and with a limited gene pool on the island the deafness was perpetuated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  The Vineyarders had little commerce with the outside world. They developed their own traditions, and made unique solutions to their problems. Being a closed community, they weren’t aware that pervasive deafness was uncommon. They didn’t know it was usually the deaf who had to fit in, and accommodate to a hearing world. So, they came upon the natural solution that one old timer voiced: “Everyone here spoke sign language.”

  The deaf were such an integral part of the community that at town meetings a hearing person signed to keep the deaf informed. Sign language was also used by fishermen. Over howling seas, over blowing winds where shouts wouldn’t carry, men signed to one another. But as the hereditary deafness gradually disappeared, as islanders began to marry off-islanders, so too did people lose their finger tongue, even if not completely. The author discovered that some of the older families still used sign language, even though they didn’t know it. They unconsciously signed, and in many cases were unconsciously understood.

  One older man lamented that sometimes he knew he was signing, or making movements that meant something, but that the person he was talking to had no idea what he was saying with his hands. In my own limited experience with the deaf I had seen that. When they spoke, their hands often moved. It probably wasn’t too different from my feeble Spanish. When in doubt, I always interjected English.

  I finished with the article, and then started reading the gorilla logs, but something bothered me. I couldn’t place my discomfort. Pain relievers and warm milk couldn’t get the thought out, and the gorilla papers didn’t add any illumination to my mental thrashings. I finally fell asleep. When I awoke, I was sweating and tossing, and remembering a dream that opened eyes and daylight couldn’t put to rest.

  I was in front of the Opera House, walking again toward the Museum of Modern Art. I heard a clacking, and I was afraid to turn, but finally did. And there was Anita. She was opening and closing her mouth, clacking her teeth in her struggle to speak, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She grew impatient with me, upset by my inability to make sense of her talk, and started shaking me. I apologized to her, repeatedly, but it didn’t help me understand.

  Then she walked away. I tried catching up with her, but she always managed to stay ahead, so I called for her to stop, but of course she couldn’t hear me. And now it was my turn to grow frustrated, to curse, and rant, and waste my breath. Anita crossed the street, and I couldn’t follow. The traffic kept me from her. So there on the corner I began screaming for an answer from her.

  “Who murdered you?”

  A hearing person probably couldn’t have heard over the noise on the street, but something connected us. Anita turned to me, and we really looked at each other for the first time. She was as pretty as everyone said, and the tragedies in her life only added to her beauty. Speech would have been impossible over the traffic, but she didn’t try speech. She signed to me, signed to me her murderer’s name. But still I couldn’t understand.

  I mimicked her signs, tried to understand the pattern of her moving fingers. To someone else they might have meant something—to me they were just moving symbols of my frustration. I had an answer at my fingertips but didn’t know what it was.

  “Tell me,” I said, and I think I was crying, and that’s when I heard Anita talk. It was as if she were next to me, by my side, on the street, and in my bed.

  “I have,” she said.

  It was the Sabbath, and I was a practicing pantheist. I called my bird number, then headed south in my rental and got off at the Dumbarton Bridge. Coyote Hills is known for its Indian shell mounds. Four thousand years of shucking oysters left an abundance of remains, visible clues of ancient lives, though at the moment, I was more interested in a modern life. Or death. I thought about my dream, of not being able to communicate with Anita. Norman probably would have read a lot of significance into it, finding symbolism and archetypes and a deeper meaning than mere frustration. I was reminded of the Biblical story of Nimrod the great hunter, and his Tower of Babel. Nimrod had thought he could build a castle to the heavens. His prideful act angered Jehovah, who cast down Nimrod’s tower, and caused a multitude of languages to come upon the people of earth.

  Me, Nimrod, Nimrod with a lot of pride. This great hunter looking for his various prey. I wondered how he would have gone about tracking Anita. Sometimes when I go looking for birds, I’m searching out more than feath
ers. Coyote Hills is a good place for birding, and thinking. There’s an abundance of sloughs there, and fresh-water marshes, and inlets from the bay. On the right days, it’s a birder’s paradise. I wasn’t exactly the early birder, but didn’t much care.

  My binoculars identified me as a possible birder or possible pervert. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Birders are a strange sort. The little-old-lady stereotype hardly applies. The average birder is a bit of a masochist. Early hours and less than ideal conditions both wet their feathers and whet their birding appetites. Difficulties make their finds that much more rewarding, war wounds to be brought out whenever there’s a show of scars. And there are a lot of rituals involved with birding, rituals akin to those of other outdoor sports, especially fishing. The stories sound alike also.

  When you approach someone else with binoculars, you always ask the same question: “See anything interesting today?”

  And in response they usually say, “There’s not that much out there, but you should have been here last week. There was everything here but a California condor.”

  Then you stand and make polite conversation. Sometimes they want to know just how much you know, so they mention an obscure species, or, Lord help you, spout off a Latin or Greek name. And these are the people you know can identify every bird call at a single pip, people who should have made their fortune on Name That Tweet. These are the sort who can casually turn their head and calmly tag a name on a flashing silhouette at three hundred yards, and act offended if you don’t bring your binoculars to the fore with the same quickness that a gunslinger draws a gun.

  I wasn’t in that league. My field checklist was pretty full, my field guide pretty scuffed, but I still had to look twice at dowitchers and sandpipers, let alone to distinguish a semipalmated sandpiper from a white-rumped sandpiper. I enjoyed being outdoors, enjoyed sighting, and identifying, and watching and learning. And so I found a comfortable promontory, looked around with my binoculars, and hoped for the unusual, scouted for the exotic, but didn’t see much of either. I scanned what was there, and that was more than good enough.

  Coyote Hills draws an abundance of birds. There are a number of trails and locations, all with their different feathered attractions. Today I was interested in shorebirds, and didn’t bother to tramp through the willows in search of flycatchers and other small birds. The winter migration was over, so I wasn’t expecting much, but one of the fascinating things about birding is that sometimes you come across the unexpected vagrant, or birds out of season. I crossed the Bay View Trail and started following the shoreline. Many of the birds that had been there in abundance a few months earlier were gone. I saw a few willets and curlews and whimbrels; most of their kind were off making little birds. There were gulls and terns, not as many ducks as I hoped for, and too many coots, which wasn’t surprising.

  What was surprising was the red phalarope. I stopped breathing for a moment, confirmed the sighting, then took a seat and watched the show. All birders have a few favorite species, and phalaropes happened to be one of mine. Favorite species don’t have to be uncommon, and they aren’t necessarily colorful. They’re usually chosen for their behavior, or their personality. You’re not objective about your birds, and you’re ready to talk them up without much encouragement. Seeing my old friend, the red phalarope, gave me a little adrenaline rush.

  There had been several unusual June storms, and one of them might have blown the bird in. He should have been nesting in the far north, but he was here, and I took that as an omen. Phalaropes aren’t known for their striking plumage, except for females in their breeding colors. But it’s not the plumage of phalaropes that attracts me; it’s their work ethic. They carry a whirlpool on their small frames.

  When a phalarope feeds on water it spins around like a top, stirring up whatever it can. With a wiggle of its rump, and a wag of its coverts, the phalarope is the swizzle stick of birds. They are not large, only eight to nine inches long and weighing about two ounces, but insects, larvae, crustaceans, and even little fish get swept up in their current.

  My phalarope didn’t disappoint me. He did his tango act. I watched as he swept forward on the water, dipped, did an enticing swirl, then swept forward again. He floated high on the water, but it wasn’t pride that kept him in that position, only trapped air. Some birders describe the floating as “corking”; if that is the case, then phalaropes are of a fine vintage. My binoculars took everything in, and were only lowered reluctantly a few times to answer questions directed at me by passersby. I explained what I was looking at, but no one could understand my fascination. They could misunderstand it though, and they did.

  “He’s watching fallopians,” one man told his wife, and she hastened him along.

  The afternoon passed. There’s something Zen-like about bird watching. Through observation you meditate. And sometimes you reach a different plane. Female phalaropes do the courting, and as I watched my bird whirlpooling around I wondered why I hadn’t heard from Ellen. I started thinking about my case and while I don’t believe there’s a Zen to murder investigation, I decided to act like a phalarope.

  It was time to swirl things about.

  13

  I WAS AT MY office early Monday making calls, and Miss Tuntland was my first dial. She told me that a Vanessa Darling had called, and had left a number for me to call back. Miss Tuntland, ever the professional, had asked Darling the reason for her call.

  “And she told me you had pressed your card on her, which got my sympathy right away,” said Miss Tuntland. “I was ready to tell her that half the women in this city already have your card, but then she said something about having received it under unusual conditions. That’s when I surmised our Darling was probably Vincent’s model, a fact she confirmed.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “although the idea that I would bandy my business card around . . . ”

  “I have another call,” Miss Tuntland said, and clicked off.

  It was about time I learned that she always got the last word in, and that I might as well accept that fact.

  The ping of my cell phone announced a text. In the last two days I had probably texted more than I had in my entire life. The message was from Ellen Reardon.

  Sorry, she wrote. How can I make it up to you?

  I’ll think of something, I wrote back. Will contact you later.

  Vanessa Darling was getting her beauty sleep when I woke her. To make amends I asked her out to lunch. She picked Hamburger Mary’s, and we agreed to meet at one. I liked her choice. The restaurant had made it through flower children, psychedelics and gay pride. It was a place where red meat and funk came together, where the food was almost as interesting as its clients.

  My next call was to Terrence Walters, and my next, and my next. My name didn’t carry the cachet to get right through to him, and a cadre of buffers blocked my entree to the great man. Mr. Walters was in conference, or court, or talking with a client. The first two messages I left were within the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. The third was more on his level.

  “Would you like to leave another message?” I was asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “tell him I’d like to discuss child molestation with him. At his convenience, of course. No need to mention prison and disbarment, just note the child molestation. Thank you very much.”

  There was something satisfying about doing the phalarope swirl. Stirring things up is fun as long as you don’t get caught up in your own whirlpool. I was ready to do some more swirling, but stopped to do a little roost cleaning first. An office shouldn’t resemble a flophouse, and mine did. In one corner was an overcoat, and in the other was a newspaper. I vaguely remembered kicking the newspaper aside in the wee and staggering hours of the morning before, and stooped to pick it up. I’d had strange things dropped through my mail slot before, items I assumed were left by the stairwell squatters who frequent the neighborhood, but this offering was different from most. It wasn’t all the news that’s fit to print. It was a gyn
ecological tabloid.

  I flipped through some pages, which reconfirmed all my prejudices. They don’t feature women in these papers, just bits and pieces of them. Breasts, vaginas, and butts, and a few more vaginas. Gynecology and misogyny, a winning combination. Not erotic, not stimulating, just locker room peep shots, and grainy ones at that. They talked about Becky’s horoscope sign, and how “Becky just loves to get it on.” The copy should have been written on toilet paper. I was trashing it when “Juliet” caught my eye. Under various naked pictures an oversized caption read, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou hard-on, Romeo?” But it wasn’t the disservice to the bard that made me cold.

  Juliet was Anita.

  You’re not supposed to notice faces in these papers. You usually don’t even see a female face clearly unless a male appendage is nearby. But I saw Anita’s face. The caption said Juliet was eighteen, “and ready to take on, and in, any Montague or Capulet.” It said Juliet liked partying and fast cars, “didn’t know how to say ‘no.’ And didn’t want to know how.”

  I noticed a few things quickly. The photographs were better than most featured in such tabloids; the newspaper was current; and if the eyes are the window to the soul, Anita didn’t have one.

  Her look was beyond hate, beyond any feeling. There was nothing that could be touched. She wasn’t playing to the camera, wasn’t sucking her stomach in and sticking her chest out, wasn’t on all fours doing peek-a-boo glances. She was naked, but not exposed, baring all, but giving nothing. Anyone who looked at her face could see that, but I wondered how many people would notice her face. In her lifetime, I wondered how many people had.