San Francisco Noir 2

by Peter Maravelis

  Happy Bastille Day, Jimmy.

  The guts and brains Jimmy never displayed in his life lay submerged in seven different gut-buckets of paint thinner, rubbing alcohol, or vodka and sealed with duct tape.

  Skinner was dead, Ralph and George weren’t going to show up. The six hundred cans of gourmet meat were mine, the two hundred fifty pounds of cat litter were Jimmy’s. I folded his arms funeral-style, rolled him into a sheet, and returned him to the bathtub, buried in Tidy Cats.

  A week passed. I monitored the police and fire frequencies, that godless ocean of misery and chaos beyond the glittery tidepool of evening news. I heard dispatches to investigate suspicious odors but never for this neighborhood. Somebody was always decomposing somewhere else. Thing was, I knew those other addresses, each one. I knew the dead guys and they knew me, but they hadn’t known where I’d end up. My word kept me alive while the Numbers kept looking.

  I ate canned salmon and drank warm beer. Outside, civilians drank at the Blackthorn, ate pizza by the slice and rode the N Judah through the fog. I breathed bad air and played solitaire and single-deck blackjack, betting painkillers, germ killers, matchsticks, money or cigarettes. I wagered on the closing of the Nasdaq, the next day’s weather and sports scores. I lost twenty-five tins of smoked oysters and six candy bars to the house when Foreign Object came in dead last, so I quit the ponies altogether. The civilians on Irving fell in and out of love, in and out of bars, hailed cabs and racked up parking tickets, while I mastered the dart board. I dug damp litter from the bathtub with a gardening trowel and dumped fresh litter in its place. After four fifty-pound bags, it stayed dry.

  Jimmy’s face could have been cut from a rotting saddle. His lips were pulled back from his teeth for a hardened, loveless smile and his eyes were windows to nothing but the hollow of his head. I don’t have a single good reason for having exhumed him from his catbox coffin, though I have many bad ones. A steady diet of boredom and paranoia, spiked with bourbon and painkillers consumed in isolation, has impaired my judgment to such a degree that propping Jimmy in a chair seemed funny during the moment. I’d been wagering against an imaginary and anonymous house and now the house had a name.

  I shuffled and cut. Watch and learn, Jimmy Rehab, or at least watch. You can do that much. I burned the top card and dealt the next two and turned them over for the high card. I came up with the two of hearts while Jimmy showed a queen.

  “Your deal, Jimmy.”

  I want to believe I’m still here because of my word. The truth is, between the law and the Numbers, I’d survive an hour above ground on a good day. I’m safe, and staying here is the only way I’ll ever be certain that Skinner Jones didn’t hand over a map to Plan Q before they snuffed him, which means Skinner Jones never said Johnny Pharaoh so he could walk away from the jewelry store.

  Jimmy’s expression never changes. He pulls his hands close with his fingers curled inward, clinging to a phantom noose. His fingernails keep growing and I play his hands for him.

  I chase my bad run with a big bet, ten thousand milligrams to break even. Jimmy deals me a hard twenty, two kings against his six up. My luck’s turning but Jimmy doesn’t flinch. I split the kings for a hard twenty and a hard seventeen before I stand.

  Jimmy draws a five. Jimmy draws an ace. House rules call it a soft twelve so he hits. The king breaks his winning streak and I drag twenty thousand milligrams into my bottle. My luck is changing but Jimmy Rehab doesn’t say a word, doesn’t blink. It’s unnerving, I tell you. He stares right through me like he’s been doing for weeks.

  THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED

  BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  Tenderloin

  (Originally published in 1989)

  The Zombie had a room in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, next to a “health club,” and on Sundays he sat in Boedekker Park and listened to the whores say, “Wherever you be going, I be going,” and he watched the dark gray pigeons fixed like statues on the roof-ledge of the building adjoining Big Red’s Bar-B-Que, while old women sat across from him, combing their hair for hours. Here he whiled away the day, tasting blood as he licked his decaying gums. (The Other did the same.)—“If you ain’t got nothin’ else, then ’bye,” he heard a whore say. Pigeons gurgled and chuckled and waddled fatly. A man in a black hat leaned against the lamppost smoking, and the smoke was thick like milk. A woman in a tan coat sat bent over her knees, scuffing her tennis shoes to keep the flies away, and then suddenly raising her graying head, more or less as a jack-in-the-box will pop abruptly out of its gay metal coffin. The Zombie saw that she was weeping. Beside her sat The Woman Who Laughed.

  He had found the rooming house when he cane-tapped down Turk Street past The Woman Who Laughed, and a lady on crutches was purring, “I smell fire,” at which The Zombie swiveled his head up on his long stem of neck to see smoke coming out of one of the barred windows of a black brick building that looked old and dirty and hopeless, and there was a sign saying ROOMS AVAILABLE—LOW MONTHLY RATES, and The Woman Who Laughed came rushing up and sniffed the smoke like an animal, snorting and laughing. The hallway smelled like dead fish and never stopped humming with slow fat flies. There was a security camera in the elevator, under which some knowing soul had scrawled RAPE ITCHES ANYHOW. The Zombie lived on the eighth floor, a special place for special people, where the hall lights were burned out and the carpet was charred. The door to his room bore hatchet marks. Inside was a dirty sink which he used as a urinal, a three-legged bed with a greasy mattress, and a window that looked out upon a brick wall. It was very dark and still in that room. The Zombie hid in his bed and looked at the brick wall through the window. Perhaps it was this lack of a view which had impelled him to go wandering in the Blue Yonder. (Oh! Had he lived in a mansion on Russian Hill, then he never would have become The Zombie; is that what I am saying?—Not at all; I do not want to investigate causes and hypothetical has-beens; The Zombie was a thing without a cause.)—He did not go out much when he was The Other, either;—for more or less the same reasons that blood in a dead body soon becomes permanently incoagulable, The Other had never been a good mixer. Sometimes The Zombie woke up with a fever headache, the chills racing up and down his fingers like the arpeggios of a concert pianist, and there was a meaningless throbbing in the soft tissues of his buttocks. He lay rubbing his neck and staring up at a brown stain on the ceiling. An ammoniac smell sometimes came to his nostrils then, caustic and clean, as if he had gotten chlorinated water in his nose or sustained a sharp blow to the face. This meant that The Woman Who Laughed was sitting outside on the front steps with her dress hiked up, tapping her toes on the concrete and laughing.

  She had a very round pimpled face. She might have been Indian, for her nose was flattish and she had black bangs and high cheekbones. She stank. He did not know where the clean smell came from. Her black eyes were tolerantly knowing, mocking you without malice, as if she had seen every sort of death and found it funny, but if you tried to look into her eyes she would cover herself with her arm and shake with laughter. If you tried to talk to her, she ran away. (She dreaded the warning-pangs of encounters which might poison her laughter, as Carolina had dreaded the defilement of her drinking cup, for we all want to keep something clean, no matter if it is a lump of ice dwindling in our hotly protective hands.) Once a tweed-suited radical woman came marching and smiling down Turk Street, distributing leaflets, and The Woman Who Laughed accepted one politely and read it and started to laugh so hard that her fat legs quivered, and The Zombie heard her laughter up on the eighth floor, so he went downstairs and stared at her through the bars of his golden eyelashes and held a quarter in front of her to draw her inside, and she kept laughing and reaching for the quarter as she followed him step by step, dragging her two black garbage bags behind her through the hallway, and he pulled her and her bags into the elevator in a familiar way, with his hand on her shoulder, and she laughingly suffered his touch because she knew him, so he suffered himself to breathe her stench all the way to th
e eighth floor, while the security camera emitted its death-rattle and a drop of dirty water slunk down the elevator wall, until finally the doors opened and he showed her the quarter again to impel her down the hall, so that then he could unlock his door, sweeping moldy underwear off his one chair and sitting her down on it as he lay back on his bed like a crocodile floating on the surface of some dirty brown river. There he watched her nod her head and spread her hands and wave at the air, and then as her shoulders would sag she’d shake her head and begin to laugh helplessly. She knew him! Her feculence aroused his disgust and anger to a degree bordering on sexual pleasure. (How could she smell so bad?) Sitting in his chair, stroking her trash bags tenderly, she unwrapped a lifesaver and ate it. She looked at the wrapping and laughed and laughed. When she laughed on Turk Street or in the brickwork park, passersby smiled slyly behind their hands, thus proving that humor is indeed contagious, especially when joy-wrapped in idiocy and stench; so she contributed some cheer to the world, although of course it was not the reward of the world’s scornful merriment which elicited her good deeds; it could not be, because she kept laughing in The Zombie’s room even though The Zombie did not laugh or smile or do much of anything. (All he wanted was to know why she smelled so bad, and where the other clean smell came from.) What made her so happy? (She smelled like rotten wharves, like tuna-canning factories, like a mass grave on a hot afternoon.) Sometimes the sweet smell of lifesavers on her breath would overpower her odor temporarily, like a soothing cherry coughdrop to put a dead woman to bed. Her hair was washed and done up in a neat mare’stail; who could have helped her?—She laughed and pointed at the window. For the first time, The Zombie saw something there other than the brick wall next door:—Pigeons were tapping at the window with their wings; they wanted to get in. The Zombie got up and ran his fingers through his hair and opened the squeaking groaning window (he had never done that before), and The Woman Who Laughed peeked over her shoulder to make sure that no one would rob her or hurt her and then took a slice of blue-moldy bread from one of her trash bags and threw it on the floor, and the pigeons rushed down into the room jostling each other in a cloud of feathery dust, dirty-black pigeons and dirty-gray pigeons, and they crowded on the floor around the bread waddling fatly with downcast heads and pecked until all the bread was gone; then they pecked at each other, and the Woman sat there with her black trash bags clutched to her, working her mouth as the pigeons ate, and the smell from her got worse and worse. It was a sweetish rotten smell. Laughing, she opened the other bag to show him. Inside were dead pigeons, so decomposed now as to be squashed fans of feathers stuck together by slime, and flies buzzed out of the bag and landed on The Zombie’s underwear and some of them whined and went greedily back inside that dark stinking bag and settled between the feathers and on the sharp black pigeon-heads and walked into the black pits where the pigeons’ eyes used to be. Looking at this made the Woman very happy. Oh, how she laughed! (Was she a murderess or just a collector?) The tears rolled down her cheeks. She laughed and laughed and shook her head in smiling humorous disbelief at the ways of the world. Then she sat still for a while, resting her pimpled cheek in her hands. Heat and dust streamed in through The Zombie’s window.

  ASH

  BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  The Mission

  (Originally published in 1991)

  Ash watched the police car pull up to the entrance of the Casa Valencia. The door to the apartment building, on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission district, was almost camouflaged by the businesses around it, wedged between the standout orange and blue colors of the Any Kind Check Cashing Center and the San Salvador restaurant. Ash made a note on his pad, and sipped his cappuccino as a bus hulked around the corner, blocking his view through the window of the espresso shop. The cops had shown up a good thirteen minutes after he’d called in the anonymous tip on a robbery at the Casa Valencia. Which worked out good. But when it was time to pop the armored car at the Check Cashing Center next door, they might show up more briskly. Especially if a cashier hit a silent alarm.

  The bus pulled away. Only a few cars passed, impatiently clogging the corner of 16th and Valencia, then dispersing; pedestrians, with clothes flapping, hurried along in tight groups, as if they were being tumbled by the moist February wind. Blown instead by eagerness to get off the streets before this twilight became dark.

  A second cop cruiser arrived, pulling up just around the corner from the first one, which was double-parking with its lights flashing. By now, though, the bruise-eyed hotel manager from New Delhi or Calcutta or wherever was telling the first cop that he hadn’t called anyone; it was a false alarm, probably called in by some junkie he’d evicted, just to harass him. The chunky white cop nodded in watery sympathy. The second cop, a black guy, called to the first through the window of his SFPD cruiser. Then they both split, off to Dunkin’ Donuts. Ash relaxed, checking his watch. Any minute now the armored car would be showing up for the evening money drop-off. There was a run of check cashing after five o’clock.

  Ash sipped the dregs of his cappuccino. He thought about the .45 in the shoebox under his bed. He needed target practice. On the slim chance he had to use the gun. The thought made his heart thud, his mouth go dry, his groin tighten. He wasn’t sure if the reaction was fear or anticipation.

  This, now, this was being alive. Planning a robbery, executing a robbery. Pushing back at the world. Making a dent in it, this time. For thirty-nine years his responses to the world’s bullying and indifference had been measured and careful and more or less passive. He’d played the game, pretending that he didn’t know the dealer was stacking the cards. He’d worked faithfully, first for Grenoble Insurance, then for Serenity Insurance, a total of seventeen years. And it had made no difference at all. When the recession came, Ash’s middle management job was jettisoned like so much trash.

  It shouldn’t have surprised him. First at Grenoble, then at Serenity, Ash had watched helplessly as policy-holders had been summarily cut off by the insurance companies at the time of their greatest need. Every year, thousands of people with cancer, with AIDS, with accident paraplegia, cut off from the benefits they’d spent years paying for; shoved through the numerous loopholes that insurance industry lobbyists worked into the laws. That should have told him: if they’d do it to some ten-year-old kid with leukemia—and, God, they did it every damn day—they’d do it to Ash. Come the recession, bang, Ash was out on his ear with the minimum in benefits.

  And the minimum flat-out wasn’t enough.

  Fumbling through the “casing process,” Ash made a few more perfunctory notes as he waited for the armored car. His hobbyhorse reading was books about crime and the books had told him that professional criminals cased the place by taking copious notes about the surroundings. Next to Any Kind Check Cashing was Lee Zong, Hairstyling for Men and Women. Next to that, Starshine Video, owned by a Pakistani. On the Valencia side was the Casa Valencia entrance—the hotel rooms were layered above the Salvadoran restaurant, a dry cleaners, a leftist bookstore. Across the street, opposite the espresso place, was Casa Lucas Productos, a Hispanic supermarket, selling fruit and cactus pears and red bananas and plantains and beans by the fifty-pound bag. It was a hardy leftover from the days when this was an entirely Hispanic neighborhood. Now it was as much Korean and Arab and Hindu.

  Two doors down from the check-cashing scam, in front of a liquor store, a black guy in a dirty, hooded sweatshirt stationed himself in front of passing pedestrians, blocking them like a linebacker to make it harder to avoid his outstretched hand.

  That could be me, soon, Ash thought. I’m doing the right thing. One good hit to pay for a business franchise of some kind, something that’d do well in a recession. Maybe a movie theater. People needed to escape. Or maybe his own checkcashing business—with better security.

  Ash glanced to the left, down the street, toward the entrance to the BART station: San Francisco’s subway, this entrance only one short block from the check-cashing center. At fiv
e-eighteen, give or take a minute, a north-bound subway would hit the platform, pause for a moment, then zip off down the tunnel. Ash would be on it, with the money; escaping more efficiently than he could ever hope to, driving a car in city traffic. And more anonymously.

  The only problem would be getting to the subway station handily. He was five-six, and pudgy, his legs a bit short, his wind even shorter. He was going to have to sprint that block and hope no one played hero. If he knew San Francisco, though, no one would.

  He looked back at the check-cashing center just in time to see the Armored Transport of California truck pull up. He checked his watch: as with last week, just about five-twelve. There was a picture insignia of a knight’s helmet on the side of the truck. The rest of the truck painted half black and half white, which was supposed to suggest police colors, scare thieves. Ash wouldn’t be intimidated by a paint job.

  He’d heard that on Monday afternoons they brought about fifteen grand into that check-cashing center. Enough for a down payment on a franchise, somewhere, once he’d laundered the money in Reno.

  Now, he watched as the old, white-haired black guard, in his black and white uniform, wheezed out the back of the armored car, carrying the canvas sacks of cash. Not looking to the right or left, no one covering him. His gun strapped into its holster.

  The old nitwit was as ridiculously overconfident as he was overweight, Ash thought. Probably never had any trouble. First time for everything, Uncle Remus.

  He watched intently as the guard waddled into the checkcashing center. Ash checked his watch, timing the pick-up process, though he wasn’t sure why he should, since he was planning to rob him on the way in, not on the way out. But he had the impression from the books that you were supposed to time everything. The reasons would come clear later.