City of Whispers

by Marcia Muller

There was a time when he was happy and safe, with Mom and Dad and Robbie in the big house in Boise. They’d been a regular family, not like the perfect ones you’d see on TV, but they’d gotten along. Mom and Dad were busy with their work, but they’d still had pizza nights and gone on camping trips. He’d graduated high school after flunking a few courses and having to go to summer school. Had gotten good with video cams, even had a job for a while editing for a TV station. But then Dad died and he started drifting and drugging and now all the memories were scrambled.

  Mom and Robbie would say it was the drugs, but he wasn’t so sure of that. It might be like a disease in him, or maybe not. He wasn’t sure of a damn thing.

  He took one of the red-white-and-blue straws that he’d found in his pocket and started twisting it. It made him feel better, like his feet were solid on the ground. He’d grabbed a handful of the straws… when? Where? Didn’t matter, they helped him get through.

  Somebody went up the steps of the house across the street. Not the little brown girl. Taller woman, no cape. She put a key into the lock and disappeared inside. A little later lights went on in the top-floor windows.

  A roommate? Last night he’d heard voices, music….

  A couple came along the street, a little dog on a lead. Darcy pulled farther back into the shadows between the two houses. Couldn’t stay there long. Couldn’t go back to Shar’s—he’d forgotten how to get there. The park again? Under that bush? His cozy shack on the river?

  The river. So long ago, like a dream. Had he really ever been there?

  Yes. He’d had friends there, a life. Sort of. But then the cops had rousted them and they’d run west till they hit the coast. South to… where was he now?

  San Francisco. Remember: San Francisco.

  What had happened then?

  What happened to you?

  Sharon McCone

  When I got back to M&M’s I knew that Jimmy Crow’s watch was working: he showed up exactly at eight. Shaggy dark blond hair, stubbly chin, dressed in faded jeans and a leather jacket so old that the elbows were cracked and peeling. He slouched onto a stool near the middle of the bar, and the bartender automatically placed a shot of whiskey and a beer in front of him. After he’d downed the shot Mario said, “Lady wants to buy you a drink,” and nodded in my direction.

  Crow turned and squinted at me with one eye. The other appeared to be swollen shut. “Lady, huh? In this place?”

  I slid over toward him. “My old neighborhood hangout.”

  “Must’ve been years ago. Don’t remember seeing you before.”

  I signaled to Mario to bring him another shot. “A few years, yes. I used to live up on Guerrero. The building’s gone now, everything’s changed.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “There was a guy used to play here. Blues guitarist, name of Chuck Bosworth.”

  “Chuckie? Yeah, I know him. Still comes around sometimes, but he ain’t the same no more neither. Had a stroke, can’t play or sing worth shit. Calls himself the Nobody. What kind of a name is that?”

  “A pretty sad one. You know where I can find him?”

  Crow’s one open eye took on a wily glint. “Why?”

  I gave him my card. “The musicians’ union hired me. Bosworth may be in line for some insurance money.”

  He peered at the card. “Didn’t know he belonged to no union. Course, I don’t know much about him. Just another barfly. You say there’s money involved?”

  “Some.”

  “How much for me if I take you to him?”

  I studied him, gauging his price. Decided it wasn’t very high. “Twenty dollars.”

  “Done.” He held out his hand.

  “When we get there.”

  He’d expected that response and didn’t look disappointed, just said for form’s sake, “You drive a hard bargain, lady.”

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  The neighborhood where Jimmy Crow directed me—Visitacion Valley—is one of the worst in the city, and the alley he led me down was unlighted and smelled of garbage and urine. Nearby on a rise near McLaren Park loomed the infamous Sunnydale Housing Projects, World War Two barracks converted to apartments that once were extolled as an excellent example of public housing, but have now degenerated into squalor, violence, and all too often death.

  Gangs patrol the bleak landscape, dealing drugs or extorting money from the hard-pressed residents. Stores have bulletproof windows, barred doors, and turnstiles, surveillance cameras, and armed clerks. Drive-by shootings happen weekly, and burglaries are a near-normal occurrence. The surrounding small dwellings mirror the projects: boarded windows, trash and broken glass in the yards, dead automobiles and trucks in the cracked driveways.

  Who’s to blame? The housing authority? The mayor? The residents themselves?

  Nobody, maybe. It exists, that’s all, as similar pockets of poverty do in every city in the country.

  Jimmy Crow stopped and touched my forearm. “That’s the place.”

  All I could see was a structure that looked like a falling-down chicken house.

  “Where’s my money?” he asked.

  “Stays with me, until I talk with Bosworth.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said. Don’t push me.” I was looking into the darkness, identifying shapes and alert for sounds that might mean danger.

  “But you said…” He was whining now.

  My hand went to my .357 Magnum, where it rested in the outside pocket of my bag. I’d removed it from the office safe tonight and brought it along—and a good thing. Armed was the only way I would’ve come into this area with a stranger, day or night.

  I showed the gun to Jimmy Crow. He didn’t look surprised, just shrugged and moved forward up a flight of rickety steps. I followed.

  “Chuckie?” he called softly. “Chuckie?”

  Over on Sunnydale a siren began wailing. Somewhere closer a woman screamed just once and then was quiet. A heavy, cold wind had come up, rustling trash around my ankles. There was a distant report from the projects that might have been a gunshot.

  “Chuckie?”

  Silence within the ramshackle structure.

  Crow opened the door, and it nearly came off its hinges. The air that rushed out was fetid: old food smells, unwashed clothing, more garbage, urine and feces.

  Crow said, “Chuckie don’t have no lights or plumbing. When he’s not here kids come in and crap and piss the place up.” He moved inside and flicked a cigarette lighter, put its flame to a candle that stood on an oilcloth-covered table.

  I’d seen squalor over the course of my career, but this was the worst. Two rooms, the door to the second hung with a bead curtain minus most of the beads. Heaps of trash in the corners of the front room, decaying food and armies of ants on paper plates, a single armchair, the fabric torn and bleeding its stuffing. The other room contained a filthy mattress topped by a twisted, equally filthy quilt. The floor was covered with dirty laundry.

  “Jesus,” I murmured.

  “Pretty bad, huh?” Crow said. “The damned fool’s so far gone he ain’t got the sense to get himself on public assistance. Me, I got a nice gig days taking care of this sick old man in the lower Mission. One of these days he’ll kick, leave me all his money.”

  Crow was starting to annoy me. “Wait outside,” I told him.

  “My money—”

  “When I come out.”

  He retreated.

  Trespassing, illegal search. Yes, but who was going to press charges? Not the Nobody.

  I moved slowly through the shack, inspecting everything. On the table: grocery bag containing a couple of tins of sardines; empty malt liquor bottle; crumpled cigarette pack and a tuna fish can full of ashes and butts. Under the chair’s cushions: a racing form from 2007, three pennies, a ballpoint pen from someplace called Leo’s Club, and a broken guitar pick. In the bedroom: nothing in any of the pockets of the strewn clothing, but when I lifted the thin mattress I fo
und a five-by-seven clasp envelope. I opened it; the only thing inside was a photograph.

  A tall, thin man with a gaunt, wasted face; a brown-haired woman, her head thrown back in laughter so you couldn’t really make out her features; a black man with a guitar clutched against his chest, as if he didn’t know what to do with it; and another white woman, smiling directly into the camera’s lens.

  Gaby DeLucci.

  I turned the photograph over. On the back someone—Bosworth, probably—had written on it in faded blue felt-tip: “The Four Musketeers.”

  I paid off Crow and waited alone for Bosworth’s return, opting to sit on the bare, littered ground behind the shack’s steps rather than breathe the fetid air inside. As the hours passed one part of me remained alert, registering sound, motion, and the swiftly dropping temperature. The other part slid into the almost trancelike state that makes a long surveillance possible.

  What thoughts I had were of the photograph I’d found and the notation on its back: “The Four Musketeers.” Gaby DeLucci, Chuck Bosworth, another man, and another woman. I supposed that the other man was Jack Tullock, aka Tick Tack Jack; the brown-haired woman must be Laura Mercer, aka Lady Laura. Gaby had supposedly been mentoring them, yet the photo and the inscription indicated a more egalitarian relationship. I wondered if—

  A noise came from below: someone moving on the hard-packed earth.

  I tensed. More sounds, low grunting voices, indicating that more than one person was coming uphill. I stood quickly, gripping my .357 in both hands, straining to hear.

  A hurt, fearful cry, the words unintelligible. Then—no doubt this time—the sudden crack of a handgun firing not far away.

  I drew farther back into the shadows beside the shack. The hillside was silent, except for a distant siren and the far-off grumbling of traffic. As if every living thing in the vicinity were holding its breath. The stillness seemed to last a long time. Then small creatures began to stir again, a man hooted somewhere below, voices rose up above. But no one came to investigate the shot. Rule of the urban jungle: stick to your own lair.

  After a while I took out my small flashlight, moved carefully away from the shack. Everything seemed to be as before—rocks, thickets of dead weeds, refuse. I started down the slope, moving the light ahead of me. After a few steps it picked out a heap of rags on the littered ground—

  No, not rags, a person.

  Noises again, the rustling of some kind of shrubbery off to my left. I turned in that direction—almost too late. If I hadn’t gone into a crouch and switched off the flashlight when I turned, it would’ve been.

  The bullet whined damn close to my ear as it was. I saw the muzzle flash, heard the crack of the shot, as I flung myself to the ground. The second bullet whanged off rock to my left, not as close.

  There was no time to set myself and return the fire. All I could do was scramble away downhill as fast as I could. A piece of broken glass sliced into the heel of my right hand, bringing a sharp stab of pain, but I managed to hang on to the Magnum.

  A third shot. This one didn’t seem to come anywhere close.

  The ground dipped sharply and I rolled over and down into a weed-choked hollow. My momentum checked, I twisted around and scrubbed my eyes clear with my left hand, bringing the .357 up into firing position.

  Nothing to see but darkness.

  Silence for several seconds, then the faint sounds of movement. But not toward where I lay—away from it along the hillside. The sounds faded and silence resettled again, still thick and charged even though I sensed the shooter was gone. Either he thought one of his last two shots had hit me, or he was afraid he’d missed, seen that I was armed, and didn’t want anything to do with a firefight.

  I stayed put anyway, letting my pulse rate slow and getting my breathing under control. My palm hurt where the glass had cut it and it was still bleeding. I wiped off as much of the blood as I could, then tore a piece off the bottom of my blouse and wrapped it around the hand.

  It didn’t take long after that for the reaction to set in—a couple of minutes of dry-mouthed shakiness, and a shudder when I thought of how close those first two bullets had come to ending my life. This would have been a hell of a place to die.

  After maybe fifteen minutes I crawled out of the hollow and climbed the slope to where I’d seen the raggedly dressed body. It still lay in the same spot, motionless. I’d lost my flashlight at some point, so I had to kneel down close to see that it was a man lying prone with his arms along his sides. Long gray dreadlocks spread out over his shoulders.

  With some difficulty I turned him over. There was a black stain of blood across the front of his filthy shirt. I was pretty sure I knew who he was, but I put my face close to his to make sure. Right, dammit—the black man in the photograph, Chuck Bosworth, the Nobody. His face was a mass of cuts and bruises, as if he’d recently been beaten.

  But he was still alive. Barely, his breathing labored, his pulse thready.

  My cell phone still worked—small miracle, after that tumbling scramble downhill. I switched it on and called 911.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

  Mick Savage

  The road across southwestern Oregon was mostly flat and straight, with pine-topped hills in the distance. Once he’d left behind the clutter of strip malls and fast-food joints, more pines and trees heavy with some kind of nut closed in to either side of the asphalt. Fruit stands edged the highway. He slowed as he passed through small towns where people moved lazily along the sidewalks, calling out greetings to one another; some even waved at him. Nobody was in a hurry—it was too fine a morning for that.

  Mick had caught a flight to Portland at the obscene hour of six that morning and now, at a little after eight, he was sucking down coffee from a Styrofoam cup in order to stay awake. Before he’d exited the airport in his rental car he’d phoned the number Jack Tullock had given him; the woman who’d answered said Tullock wasn’t there yet, Mick should come on over anyway.

  Tick Tack Jack. Jesus, it sounded like a breath mint.

  McMinnville turned out to be an attractive small city in the Willamette Valley wine country. Mick recalled that his late Uncle Joey had once worked in a restaurant there. A few blocks off Third Street, the main drag, in a section of small, well-kept homes, he located the address Tullock had given him, a small frame cottage painted pale blue and surrounded by rosebushes.

  The woman who came to the door was a few years older than Mick, with upswept dark hair and gold-rimmed glasses that perched on the tip of a kind of skimpy nose. She wore a pink-and-white waitress uniform with her name—Rosa—stenciled over the blouse pocket.

  “Jack’s still not here,” she said. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping him, but I have to get to work.”

  “I can wait in my car for him, if it won’t make your neighbors uneasy.”

  “Not at all. This town’s pretty laid back.”

  Back in the rental car he called Shar and reported his whereabouts.

  “Okay,” she said. “You get a line on Laura Mercer?”

  “Her former employers are vacationing in the Greek Isles, the maid told me. I sent them a message, but haven’t heard back yet.”

  “Well, I located Chuck Bosworth. Somebody shot him last night in front of his shack in Visitacion Valley. He also looked like he’d recently been beaten. He’s in critical condition at SF General.”

  “He going to pull through?”

  “The doctors aren’t sure yet. Let me know what you find out from Tullock.”

  Mick put in another call to the offices of Merrill Lynch in San Francisco’s financial district, where his current love, Alison Lawton, worked as a broker. “Guess where I am.”

  “Not at home; I just tried to call you.”

  “McMinnville, Oregon.”

  “What for?”

  “Case. I’m probably coming back later. You want to have dinner tonight?”

  A pause. “Mick, you’ve broken three of our dinner dates in the past few wee
ks. I know your job’s demanding, but I can’t keep setting myself up for disappointment.”

  Ominous old story. His last serious love interest, Charlotte Keim, had acquired a fiancé while he was caught up in an investigation.

  Alison added, “I’ve got a meeting. Call me when you get in.”

  He closed his phone and brooded, picturing Alison. Tall, willowy blonde, and to his eyes beautiful. Funny, smart, and genuine. He’d met her when they were both buying men’s socks at Macy’s; her big feet didn’t bother him, though she considered them a major detraction. They’d been together since last winter, and he’d thought everything was going fine—until now.

  Maybe he should quit the agency. He and Derek Ford were making great money from SavageFor.com. Derek had been making noises about leaving recently; even though his was largely a desk job, he felt it was getting in the way of his real life, which consisted of making the rounds of the clubs and meeting women. Derek wasn’t lazy; he worked hard when motivated, but it took something major to do the motivating. He’d busted his butt developing SavageFor.com, but now it was managed by one of the Internet giants, and he and Mick had little to do with it except cash their checks.

  Mick supposed the two of them could go off on their own and create other sites, but he knew deep down that wasn’t going to happen. Derek was at a stage in his life when he wanted to play and, besides, Mick liked investigative work. The tech stuff was fun, but at the end of the day he needed to feel that he’d done something to make a difference for somebody. Too much like his father, he supposed. Ricky could’ve sat down and never worked a day for the rest of his life, but instead he was arranging exhausting nationwide tours for charity.

  Stuck with a work ethic, dammit.

  More time limped along.

  Getting late. He scanned the street in his side-view mirror, saw a woman walking with a familiar bouncy gait. Rosa, returning from work. He met her on the sidewalk.

  She blinked. “You still here?”

  “Yeah. Jack never showed.”

  “What?” Her eyes filled with alarm.