The Crooked Street

by Brian Freeman

  “Oh yeah. Alan was a great guy. If you’re right about Martin Filko, it pisses me off to think of Alan getting killed because of a rich little punk like that.”

  Frost heard the bells of a trolley clanging its way north toward Fisherman’s Wharf, and he glanced over his shoulder to keep an eye on the people around them.

  “I’m surprised Alan didn’t tell you about Filko and Naomi before he was killed,” Frost said. “You were in homicide. He wasn’t.”

  Gorham shrugged. “It doesn’t surprise me. That’s the kind of cop he was. Cautious. Alan always played things close to the vest. He wouldn’t have come to me without some real evidence to prove that Filko was involved in Naomi’s death. Rumors don’t count.”

  “Do you think he confronted Filko at Net-Con?” Frost asked.

  “Knowing Alan, I’m sure he did. A sleazebag like Filko wouldn’t have intimidated him, no matter how much money the guy had. Alan probably made some veiled threats to see how he reacted. Obviously, Filko freaked out and used Lombard to eliminate him.”

  Frost studied the sailboats on the water. “And Fawn?”

  “She saw what happened to Alan. I’m sure she was scared that she’d be next. That’s a good incentive to keep your mouth shut.” Gorham’s head swiveled, and he stared at Frost from behind his sunglasses. His sandy hair was windswept. “So we know what really happened on the boat, and we can’t prove any of it. What do we do now?”

  “We find Mr. Jin,” Frost replied. “He’s the last witness. If Lombard gets to him first, he’ll disappear permanently.”

  Gorham worked his tongue around his jaw to get a piece of popcorn that was stuck in a tooth. “Okay, I’ll start canvassing Chinatown. I’ve got a lot of contacts over there from my vice days. If Mr. Jin is hiding out in the community, someone will know where he is.”

  “I’ll check at his restaurant,” Frost added. “Maybe they can point me to family and friends. Plus, I want to find his son, Fox, again. He shouldn’t be on the streets. If Lombard is desperate, he wouldn’t hesitate to snatch the boy.”

  Gorham stood up from the bench. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ll do the same,” Frost replied. “I’m going to talk to Prisha Anand, too. Fawn’s sister.”

  Gorham looked down at him with a frown on his face. “Is that such a good idea?”

  “Fawn’s dead. She should know.”

  “Yeah, but what can you tell her? The story in the media is that Diego Casal killed Denny. If you mention the mayor or Filko, you’re putting her in jeopardy.”

  “I don’t have to tell her anything about that. Not yet.”

  “You don’t think she’ll start asking questions? You already mentioned Zelyx, didn’t you? She’s going to connect the dots and wonder what’s going on. The safest thing is to say nothing at all.”

  “Maybe so, but I’d rather not leave her in the dark,” Frost said.

  Gorham ate more popcorn and watched the pedestrians on the sidewalk. His face was unhappy. “Look, it’s just a matter of time before she finds out the truth. The odds are that Fawn’s body will wash up along Ocean Beach sooner or later. It’s harsh, but why not wait?”

  Frost nodded but made no promises. “I still want to talk to her.”

  “Do what you have you do,” Gorham said. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  He wandered away with his big shoulders slightly hunched. When he passed a wastebasket, he dumped the remains of his popcorn box inside. Frost stayed on the bench, watching as the other detective disappeared in the crowd. The next time he spotted the man’s profile, Gorham was on the other side of the Embarcadero, passing between the palm trees in front of the Hyatt Regency.

  He thought about what Gorham had said about Fawn’s body washing up on Ocean Beach. Gorham was right. The ocean usually gave up its dead eventually, even if the body was nothing but bones when it rolled up on the sand. His remark was an offhanded comment, a meaningless detail that probably meant nothing.

  Even so, it nagged at Frost’s mind like a loose thread.

  Ocean Beach was an oddly specific location for Gorham to mention. Frost had never told him that the Roughing It was out on the Pacific when Fawn went over the side.

  Prisha Anand answered the door at her home in Presidio Heights. When she saw Frost, the expression on her face was eloquent in its horror. She only expected one thing from him, and that was to hear that her sister was dead.

  She led him silently into the same heavy Victorian living room in which they’d met before. A fire roared in the fireplace, making the room warm and smoky. She waved him to the sofa, but she could hardly even look at him as she sat down herself. Her fingers kept moving nervously, as if she didn’t know how to calm them.

  “So?” Prisha asked.

  He was genuinely undecided about how much to tell her. “I don’t know anything for certain,” he said finally.

  “But you know something. Yes?”

  “Well, it looks increasingly likely that Zara was on a boat on Tuesday evening and that she didn’t make it back alive. Without a body being found, of course, we can’t be absolutely certain.”

  Prisha didn’t cry. Her face didn’t move. Her only reaction was in the shallowness of her breathing. She got out of the chair and turned her back on him and stood like a statue in front of the fire. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move for a long time. Frost waited for her.

  Eventually, she turned back, and her face was flushed. She straightened her hair with delicate movements and arched her back as if she were summoning her courage.

  “I studied the news after you came here the last time. I know about this man you mentioned, Denny Clark, and how he died. Now they’re saying he was on a cruise with drug dealers and that one of those men killed him. Is that the cruise Zara was on? Did this same man kill her?”

  Frost hesitated. “That’s possible.”

  “So was this drug dealer her client?” she asked.

  “Again, that’s—”

  “Possible, yes, everything in the world is possible. Except I don’t think you believe that, and I don’t believe you’re telling me the truth, Inspector. Do you think I’ve forgotten the questions you asked me? About Fawn and her friend Naomi? About the Zelyx party where I brought my sister? Those questions don’t seem to have much to do with a dispute over drugs.”

  He wanted to tell her more, but he couldn’t. Gorham was right. It would have been better to say nothing at all. As it was, his silence enraged her. Prisha stalked across the room, and her voice rose like the violins at a symphony.

  “Did someone at Zelyx murder my sister?”

  Frost shook his head with regret. “I can’t answer that question. I’m sorry.”

  Her hand flew across the space between them and slapped his face with an audible crack. He took the blow with no reaction, but when he touched the tender spot on his cheek, his fingers came away with blood where the metal of her ring had cut him. The sight of it shocked her. She spun away and sat down and buried her face in her hands. Frost found his way to the small powder room in the front hallway.

  He ran cold water from the sink and washed away the blood, but it bled again when he stopped. His face throbbed. He found a tissue and pushed it against his cheekbone and held it there, staring at his own eyes in the mirror, until the flow of blood diminished.

  When he left the bathroom, Prisha was in the doorway of the living room. She stared at her feet to avoid meeting his gaze.

  “I apologize,” she said. “That was unforgivable of me.”

  “I understand how upset you are. I wish I had more information to share with you.” When she still didn’t look up, he added, “Do you mind if I look at Zara’s bedroom?”

  She spoke in a hushed voice. “It’s upstairs on the left.”

  He took the varnished wooden steps to the second floor. Zara’s door was closed, and he opened it and turned on a light. The windows faced the street. It wasn’t a particularly large roo
m, but it was furnished with expensive antiques and dark, heavy wallpaper. Zara had money and good taste. He saw Bulgari face and hand cream on the nightstand, along with a copy of Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. A mirror with an ornate, slightly tarnished brass frame was hung over her redwood dresser. He opened some of the drawers and found neatly folded lingerie. In her closet, which was almost as big as the bedroom itself, he saw the wardrobe of someone who could dress perfectly for any occasion. She could be intellectual, erotic, businesslike, fun, demure, anything that the situation demanded.

  This was Zara’s and Fawn’s room all in one, but he had no idea who either woman was. She was more than her possessions, but her possessions were all she’d left behind. There were no photographs, no diaries, no computer, no phone, nothing to give a clue about any of the other compartments of her life.

  “I hurt you. You’re still bleeding.”

  Frost looked up. Prisha stood inside the room, looking uncomfortable. Her hands were knit together in front of her. He touched his cheek and realized she was right.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. He waved a hand around the room. “There’s no real person here. All I see is the disguise of a woman.”

  “Well, yes, that’s Zara,” Prisha said. “She kept secrets even from me. There’s a lot I don’t know about her life.”

  “You said she had a boyfriend. You saw pictures of Denny Clark on the news, didn’t you? Had you ever seen him before? Is it possible he could have been involved with Zara?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize him, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Frost took another look at Zara’s bedroom. Where Prisha was standing, he saw the corner of a wooden picture frame on the wall behind the open door. He went over to look at it and saw a charcoal sketch of Zara’s face and bare shoulders. The painting was signed only with the artist’s initials, but it was dated with the current year, so it had been done in the past three months. It was all black and white, except for a few streaks of deep red color sketched into Zara’s lush black hair. This portrait of her was very different from the photograph he’d seen. She was unforgettably beautiful, but she wasn’t acting or putting on a role for a client in this sketch. She was being herself. Her dark eyes had a fierce intelligence. Her mouth was turned upward in a Mona Lisa smile, inscrutable but happy.

  “Do you know where she had this done?” Frost asked.

  “The Cannery, I think. One of the street artists down there did it for her.”

  “Was her hair really tinted like this? With red highlights?”

  Prisha nodded. “That was a recent thing. It was lovely.”

  The painting didn’t tell him anything, but he used his phone’s camera to take a picture of it anyway. He found it hard to look away from Zara’s face. There was a strange magnetism about it.

  “I should go,” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” Prisha replied. “Again, forgive me for striking you like that. I’ve always been very protective of my sister. I would do absolutely anything to save her.”

  “I know how that feels,” he told her.

  He didn’t mention that he’d failed to save his own sister.

  Frost took one last long look at the portrait of Zara Anand on the wall. Her beauty was in her bare skin; her courage was in her eyes. When he stared at her enigmatic smile again, he knew that Prisha was right. Zara was a woman who kept secrets, but whatever she’d been hiding was buried now under the unforgiving ocean waters.

  The only one who knew what really happened was Mr. Jin.

  34

  Darkness caught up with Frost as he headed across the city toward Chinatown. Traffic crawled from red light to red light. Up and down the hills, the neighborhoods changed. First there were painted ladies among the houses, and then there were painted ladies on the streets. Neon lit up the storefronts, glowing on leather and fishnets on the sidewalks. He passed Fillmore, which was young and hip and rocking with music. He rolled on through Nob Hill, where the rose window of Grace Cathedral glowed like a blue star and the smell of money oozed from the Mark Hopkins, the Stanford Court, and the Fairmont hotels.

  At Stockton, he turned north and crossed into Mr. Jin’s world.

  His favorite Chinatown restaurant was on Washington Street only two blocks from Mr. Jin’s apartment. He pulled his Suburban into the tow-away zone outside the brightly lit door. The owner was a tiny Chinese woman who knew him well. She could have been anywhere from fifty to four hundred years old. She saw him and waved, and five minutes later, one of her daughters brought a brown paper bag out to his truck. He paid and gave the girl a large tip, and then he divvied up the order between himself and Shack. Frost ate stir-fried beef and baby bok choy with an order of barbecued pork. Shack ate shrimp fried rice and a fortune cookie.

  The paper fortune that Frost took out of the cookie felt ominous. Someone close to you is not your friend.

  He tried calling the number that Fox had given him, but the boy’s cell phone was turned off, so the call went straight to voice mail. He left a message. When he was done with dinner, he hiked uphill. The street was lined with gift shops, dragon murals, pagoda facades, and second-floor acupuncture clinics. Paper lanterns glowed like cherries under the awnings, and car headlights swept the walls. Every other doorway was a bakery or restaurant, and he found Mr. Jin’s hole-in-the-wall dim-sum house on the ground floor of the building adjacent to the chef’s apartment.

  The restaurant itself was simply called Jin. It was nothing to look at outside, but inside, the handful of tables were covered with white tablecloths and surrounded by black lacquered chairs carved with Chinese characters. The clientele was all Asian, and there wasn’t an empty seat anywhere. Waiters in starched white uniforms pushed dim-sum carts from table to table Hong Kong style, and he saw steaming bamboo pots of har gow and shu mei. He noticed that the framed posters decorating the wall were not Chinese cityscapes from Kowloon or Shanghai but were all pictures of Niagara Falls, just like in Mr. Jin’s apartment.

  He asked to see the manager, who was younger than Frost expected. He didn’t look old enough to drink. He was dressed in a tuxedo, and his black hair was oiled and lay flat on his head. He bowed when Frost showed him his badge.

  “How may I help you?” he asked politely.

  “I need to find Mr. Jin,” Frost replied. “Has he been in here lately?”

  “Mr. Jin? Oh no, he rarely comes here. He hires me to run his restaurant. Best dim sum in Chinatown. You want a table? I always find a table for a police officer. You keep us safe.”

  “Thank you, but no. It’s very important that I find Mr. Jin quickly. He isn’t in his apartment, and he’s not in his restaurant. Where should I look for him?”

  The young man’s face wrinkled unhappily. “I’m very sorry. If Mr. Jin is not at home, then he must be cooking somewhere. I have never known him to do anything else.”

  “How does he get around? Does he have a car?”

  “No, mostly he walks,” the manager told him.

  “He walks?”

  “Oh yes. Mr. Jin does not believe in modern things. Sometimes he will take the bus, but more often than not, he walks.”

  “What about friends or family? Is there anyone local he might stay with?”

  “His only family is his son. The rest of his family is in China. As for friends, I don’t know of any. Mr. Jin is a very private person. When he is not working, I believe he is usually by himself.”

  Frost couldn’t help but think that he and Mr. Jin had been cut from the same cloth. If the chef had a cat, it would have been uncanny. The good and the bad of Mr. Jin being an elusive loner was that he was hard to find. If Frost didn’t know how to track him down, neither did Lombard.

  “Has his son been in here recently?” Frost asked. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No, I haven’t seen Fox in nearly a week.”

  Frost handed the man his card. “If you see or hear from Mr. Jin, tell him to call me immediately. It’s extremely
important. Understand? No delay.”

  “Immediately,” the man repeated.

  Frost headed out of the dining room. He stopped in the foyer to examine several framed magazine reviews that were hung on the wall. Most of the articles included photographs of Mr. Jin, and Frost realized he’d never seen a picture of the man before. The photos had all been taken at different times, but Mr. Jin’s expression was identical in each one. He wore no smile or frown, just seriousness on his face. He wasn’t old, probably no more than forty, and he was lean, which made sense for someone who spent his days hiking the San Francisco hills. His eyes were dark, and his black hair was shaved to stubble on his skull. Despite reviews calling him one of the city’s top chefs, he looked unimpressed by all the fuss.

  Outside, the sidewalk was busy, and the night air was fragrant with flowers. Cars jammed the street like a backed-up pipe, and pedestrians jaywalked between the bumpers. He headed downhill toward his Suburban but stopped when he felt the buzz of a text arriving on his phone. He checked it and saw a single-line message from a blocked number:

  Meet me in the alley.

  Frost turned around. He studied the Chinese faces coming and going on the street. No one in the crowd seemed interested in him. He turned the corner into the alley and waited for his eyes to adjust. The lone streetlight was broken, making the walkway darker than the bright neon of Washington Street. It smelled of burnt oil from the restaurant kitchens. The same homeless man who’d haunted the alley three nights earlier was still there, eyeing him from under his wool blanket. People came and went like ghosts in the wisps of fog. Overhead, clotheslines stretched between the windows and the fire escapes.

  Not far away, a silhouette in black stood with one foot propped against the redbrick wall. It was Fox, grinning at him.

  “Hey, Copper. You find Lombard yet?”

  Frost didn’t like hearing Lombard’s name shouted out loud. He checked the alley in both directions and then walked up to Fox. The boy was a foot shorter than he was, and half his weight, but Frost had learned the hard way not to treat him as harmless. “Hello, Fox.”