Wilkonson was an angry man. Leashed anger, but not so tightly leashed that it couldn’t be triggered, as it had been at the Wharf. A potentially violent man. Someone a person might naturally want to hide from.
Violent behavior wasn’t part of the picture of Wilkonson that Rudy Goldring had painted for me. He’d described him as “peculiar,” had said he could “get into trouble wandering around this city alone.” I’d assumed “peculiar” meant inept, perhaps retarded. But Wilkonson had proved himself neither of those.
Did Rudy Goldring know of Wilkonson’s potential for violence? If he did, he’d omitted a key factor from his description-one I’d had every right to know before undertaking to tail the man. The omission-or perhaps downright deception-made me angry. I’d been duped by other clients and in a few cases hadn’t learned what was really going on until irreparable harm had been done. In one of those cases two people had died unnecessarily-and then I’d almost lost my own life.
It wouldn’t do any good to fume over it now, though. There would be time to confront Goldring about it when I delivered my report that afternoon. To calm myself, I tuned the radio to a station that played oldies, but after a while they broke for a Sunday-night talk show about the problem of San Francisco’s homeless. The participants were a welfare worker, a priest, and a sociologist; their dispassionate discussion reduced those who slept in doorways or on park benches to mere statistics. They spoke of over seven thousand homeless people in the city alone, and more than forty-five thousand in the greater Bay Area. They said that for the city’s homeless there were only a little over a thousand beds available in shelters; in the entire area only one bed was available for every fifteen people. They talked about how the homeless problem destroyed the quality of life for all of us; about how the tax money allocated to homeless relief wasn’t beginning to pay the bills; about establishing regional support centers and funding more studies.
Studies? I thought incredulously. Spend money that could go to feed people, on more useless research?
I thought of my own college sociology major and how-had anything more come of it than a vinyl-encased diploma, whose whereabouts I couldn’t even guess at now-it could have been me on the radio, analyzing and dissecting. Then I thought of Rudy Goldring and Bob, his derelict “doorman,” and of Goldring’s comment-naïve and practical at the same time-that if every business south of Market showed an interest in a homeless person, it might make a difference. In light of that, the sociobabble on the radio began to depress me, so I switched to KSUN, “Light of the Bay.”
My former lover, disc jockey Don Del Boccio, was giving a spiel about a rock concert KSUN would be hosting at the Oakland Coliseum the next week. He and the station’s Wonder Bus would be there, Don said, along with Tina, the terrific traffic reporter. There would be a giveaway of KSUN T-shirts and posters to the first hundred couples. There would be a drawing for a door prize-a date with your favorite KSUN deejay. There would be-
I punched the button for a classical station. Listening to Don was almost as depressing as listening to the dehumanizing discussion of the city’s indigents. Not because our parting had been a bitter one; there hadn’t been enough of a connection between us by then for its severing to foster rancor. Not because I missed him; I didn’t. His departure from my life had been more of a liberation. But hearing his bubbly voice and slick, superficial delivery reminded me again of all that had gone wrong between us-of how easily people can mistake sexual attraction and admiration of qualities that they themselves don’t possess, for love.
Don is a cheerful, outgoing man who sees more good than bad in the world, a minor celebrity whose fame rests easily on his shoulders. I’d envied his carefree approach to life and thought he would help me loosen up; he’d envied my sense of purpose and thought I would help him chart a more serious career.
But finally, after a couple of years, Don and I had proved to be too different. His upbeat attitude began to seem shallow to me; it grated, just as my cynicism and jealous guarding of my privacy irritated him. He found my cases too grim and didn’t want to talk about them. I found even the in-depth talk show he’d persuaded the station to let him do to be superficial; I was reluctant to accompany him to glitzy KSUN promotional functions. Eventually we took refuge in our long, irregular working hours and just let things taper off.
We’d been apart for six months now. I hadn’t found anyone new, wasn’t really looking. Now I wondered if Don had. Who was this Tina, the terrific traffic reporter, anyway? Hadn’t he said her name with more than his usual enthusiasm?
For a moment I considered tuning in to KSUN again, listening to Don to see if I could detect his feelings and circumstances over the airwaves. Then I laughed aloud. Could it be I was a tiny bit jealous? No, I decided, not really. Don was out of my life for good. But I was interested, as I would be in any former lover.
I didn’t touch the radio’s buttons, though. The station I had on was playing Brahms, a favorite of mine ever since Don-who had once trained to be a concert pianist at the Eastman School of Music-had educated me to the joys of the classics. Hours passed as the selection switched to Mendelssohn, and then Tchaikovsky. The fog blew dense and snowy. Around midnight I almost dozed off, so I got out of the car and walked up and down the block twice, breathing the misty air. It was warmer, the fog like a thermal blanket wrapped around the city. I walked briskly, swinging my arms, and after a while felt more alert.
Now, an hour and forty minutes later, the lights went on in room 209. I watched a tall shadow move across the drawn drapes. Shortly afterward, Wilkonson emerged carrying a small travel bag. As he went to the Ranchero I started my car. He executed a U-turn and went past me, toward downtown. I hung back so he wouldn’t notice my headlights; the sparseness of traffic at that hour made him easy to spot.
Eventually he led me into the light industrial district south of Market where I’d met with Rudy Goldring on Friday. The streets were deserted and so dirty that even the fog seemed begrimed. Warehouses and semitrailers hulked darkly. My headlights washed over the latticework of chain-link fences and gleamed off railroad tracks that crisscrossed the pavement. There were no other cars in sight, and I was beginning to fear that Wilkonson would realize he was being tailed when a lighted area blazed up ahead of us. Suddenly the street was congested with cars and trucks and people. I slowed, momentarily puzzled, imagining that we had arrived at the scene of some horrible disaster. Then I saw a green and white neon sign reading CALIFORNIA FLOWER MART.
The Flower Terminal at Fifth and Brannan Streets-not far from the Hall of Justice-is as much of a San Francisco institution as Cost Plus, but not nearly as well known. Five days a week, while the rest of the city sleeps, wholesalers from all over the northern part of the state gather there to offer their wares to the area’s florists and retail nurseries and sidewalk vendors. I’d never been there before-no one unassociated with the flower industry would have occasion to-but I’d once read a magazine article that had described the terminal as “an incredible hive of activity.” The description could not have been more apt.
Trucks clogged the street ahead of me, double and triple parked. Men and women unloaded crates, boxes, and flats of flowers, as well as trees and shrubs, onto handcarts and forklifts at the back doors to dozens of stalls. People crossed within inches of my front bumper, heedless of the car’s motion. Ahead of me Wilkinson was experiencing similar impediments to progress: he weaved around a van, slammed on his brakes to avoid a hand truck loaded with saplings, crept around a group of men who were drinking coffee in the middle of the street. It was the congestion of the Wharf area all over again, only much worse, and I began to fear another outburst of violence. Wilkonson kept his speed down, however, weaving through the obstacle course. I lost sight of the Ranchero briefly when it slid around the corner onto Brannan Street, then caught up with it as it passed a busy, brightly lighted establishment called the Flower Mart Restaurant. On the other side of Sixth Street he found a quasi-legal parking space. I ke
pt going, spotted a space further down, but was beaten out by an old Chevy. Finally I left the MG by the loading dock of a ball-bearing company and hurried down the crowded street to the entrance to the mart.
A sign by the door declared it off limits to anyone without a badge. Ahead of me I saw Wilkonson; he was showing some ID to the security guard, who waved him inside. I pushed forward to the guard’s post, waited for a break in the steadily moving line, and showed him my own identification. The guard was young, and my license impressed him-much as it would have impressed me in the days when I guarded doorways and office building lobbies for a living-and in a few seconds he was on the house phone to his supervisor. After a brief exchange he handed the receiver to me. I identified myself again and said I was working a tail job on one of their badge holders-for a civil suit, nothing that would cause danger to any of their customers. The supervisor agreed to allow me inside and asked to speak to the guard again; after he hung up, the guard handed me a temporary badge.
The crowded, elongated space in front of me glared with neon light. It was lined on all sides with stalls that overflowed with plants and flowers; piles of crates and flats and boxes extended out into its center. The mart stretched for a full city block, much of it outdoors under the dark, fog-streaked sky. My gaze skipped over roses and gladioli and carnations and chrysanthemums as I searched for Wilkonson. People in work clothes, most of them bundled against the chill early morning air, moved back and forth, examining the color of blossoms and testing the freshness of leaves with their fingertips. After a moment I caught sight of Wilkonson, walking slowly down the right-hand side, stopping at each stall. His gait was no longer stiff with reined-in anger; he moved almost somnambulistically, stopping at each stall and scrutinizing every face-both buyers and vendors-before going on.
I followed him around the mart twice, but he didn’t give any indication that he was planning to leave. After a while he seemed to wake up, but there was still no suggestion of the previous day’s tension. He seemed almost resigned, as if he were going through the motions of looking for someone with very little hope of finding him or her. When he began his third go-round, I stationed myself beside a small forest of yew trees and kept my eyes on him from there.
Around me the mart hummed with activity. Vendors brought in more and more wares. Buyers moved briskly from stall to stall, inspecting the plants and flowers, criticizing their freshness, exchanging both pleasantries and good-natured barbs, haggling enthusiastically. A tall man came up and peered intently at the yew trees, blocking my view of Wilkonson. A woman joined the man, shook her head, and dragged him away. When they passed, I spotted Wilkonson standing in front of a sea of baby’s breath. Seconds later he moved on to a stall where dozens of Boston ferns hung from overhead wires. He canvassed the room in a methodical manner, not bothering to look at the vendors now, but concentrating on the buyers.
His behavior confirmed my suspicion that he was looking for someone connected with the flower industry; only professionals were allowed in here. But what was Wilkonson’s connection? He’d shown a badge to the guard. Rudy Goldring had said he worked on a ranch, though. What kind of ranch-?
“Sharon McCone!”
I jumped. A fat woman in a garish green muu-muu stood next to me. There was a pink carnation in her wildly curling gray hair, and she grinned at me, showing gapped teeth. “Sallie Hyde,” I said.
Sallie moved in front of me, holding out a pudgy hand. “What are you doing here?”
She was blocking my view of Wilkonson. I took the hand and tugged her to one side. Wilkonson was standing by a pile of cases topped by some exotic red blooms that I didn’t recognize. “Working,” I said.
Sallie’s face took on a sly, knowing look. I’d met her while on a case in the Tenderloin hotel where she lived, a couple of years ago. “Then I better skedaddle.”
“No, stand here and talk with me. You-” I stopped, realizing I’d been about to say something untactful about her bulk hiding me.
Sallie, however, is comfortable with her fat. “I make a better door than window, right?”
“Right.”
“Glad to help. How’d you get in here?”
“Security supervisor okayed it.” Then I realized this was an odd place to find Sallie, too. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a clerk at one of the flower stands on Union Square. “You must have changed jobs.”
“Still work for the same people, but I’m a sort of supervisor myself now. Oversee the stands and do the buying for the Menottis.”
“Sallie, that’s terrific!” there are only twelve sidewalk flower stands in the city, and the permits for them are held by a few families who have been in the business for generations. If one of them had entrusted its operation to Sallie, she was moving up in the world.
She flushed with pleasure. “Yeah, it is. I love the work, and I’m learning the business top to bottom. One of these days I might just have a shop of my own.”
Wilkonson was coming our way, moving past a stall that was crammed with dried and artificial flowers. I squeezed between Sallie and a yew tree, feeling its needles prickle on my cheek. “You still living at the Globe Hotel?”
“Yeah. I could afford to move to a better neighborhood, but I been there so long it’s home.”
“What about the Vangs?” They were a Vietnamese refugee family who had been my primary liaison when I’d been hired to investigate strange goings-on at the hotel.
“Bought a house in the Richmond.”
It had been their dream, as it was for many of the city’s refugees. “Nice for them. Do they still have the restaurant?”
“Sure. It’s what pays for the house.”
Wilkonson had passed behind Sallie without giving her a glance. Possibly that meant that whomever he sought was not a woman-or at least not a large woman. When he was several yards away, I motioned toward him and asked her, “Do you know that man?”
“The guy in the suede jacket?”
“Yes.”
She studied him, squinting so her eyes almost disappeared in the fleshy folds of her face. “Don’t know him, but I’ve seen him here before.”
“When?”
“Last week? The week before? I can’t really say.”
“How long have you been doing the buying here?”
“Almost a year now.”
“But he’s only been coming for a couple of weeks?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I know I’ve seen him once or twice this month. Before that, I don’t recall. I do know he’s not a regular, though.”
I was about to ask if there was any way of finding out more about the badgeholders when a man with a hand truck loaded with bamboo plants jostled against her and she lurched into me. I collapsed against the yew trees.
Sallie extended her hand to pull me up and glared at the shrubs. “Damned funeral trees,” she said.
The words gave me a prickly little chill, disproportionate to their meaning. “What trees?” I asked.
“I call them funeral trees. In Europe they plant them in the cemeteries, or so the Menottis tell me. I’ve seen them around graves here too, so I guess it’s true. I hate them.”
Her tone was so malevolent and she gave the inoffensive trees such an evil look that suddenly I remembered Sallie Hyde was a murderer-tried, convicted, imprisoned, and paroled. When her eyes returned to meet mine, she must have seen the recollection there, because she changed the subject abruptly, chatting about her new job and prospects, then saying she had better get busy with her buying. Before she left me, she gave me her card and said I should keep in touch. I promised to, but somehow I doubted I would. The flower seller was like dozens of other people all over the city whom I knew from cases: an acquaintance with whom I had nothing in common save the violence that had initially brought us together.
It was close to five in the morning and my energy had completely flagged when Wilkonson finally made for the exit. I followed him on leaden legs to Brannan Street and his Ranchero, then fetched th
e MG. There was an entrance to the I-80 freeway a few blocks away; I caught up with the Ranchero as it took the ramp, and I drove behind it for a ways until I saw it merge onto Route 101 going south out of the city.
At Army Street I took the off ramp. My long, long workday was over.
FOUR
At ten that morning I arrived at All Souls. The fog now hung still and heavy, making the playground equipment in the triangular park across the street seem alien and somewhat menacing. It was kinder to the big brown Bernal Heights Victorian that had housed the co-op for more than a dozen years: the blistered and peeling paint was obscured, seeming once more an unblemished skin; the badly patched shingles and sagging roofline wore a stately wig of gray mist. I often thought of the building as an old lady living out her last days in a constant struggle against the indignities of poverty. Today it was as if she had decked herself out in tattered finery and temporarily won the battle.
When I came through the front door our secretary, Ted Smalley, looked up from his nearly completed New York Times crossword puzzle. “Kind of late, aren’t you?”
“Kind of.” I looked down at the puzzle and frowned. It drives me crazy that he has enough confidence to do it in ink.
Ted covered the paper with his hand. He hates to share and won’t even ask for help unless he’s hopelessly stumped.
I pushed his hand aside. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That. Number seventy-two across. Seven-letter word beginning and ending with s. Fourth letter’s an l.” It was one of the few he had yet to fill in.
He glared at me, then sighed. “Feeble.”
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