Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  “What’s going on, Sergeant?” I said pointedly.

  “When I was a kid, my dad and I drove up Highway 80 almost every weekend. We’d fish in Sacto, or hike in Tahoe. The traffic was always terrible. So Dad would have me read him the crossword while he drove. He loved puzzles,” he said. “The art of the crossword is memorization, really, not analysis. I’ve been stocking away clues since I was twelve. Back then, if I used a word incorrectly in conversation, Dad would make me carry a dictionary around all day.”

  He was going to do this on his terms. I fought the impulse to demand answers.

  “Do you and your dad still fish?”

  “He’s living in Fremont, in a group home. Sick as a dog, the kind of dog that needs a new liver,” Danny said. “Hell, I shouldn’t be talking about tragedy to you, considering what happened yesterday. How’re you feeling?”

  Actually, I still wasn’t sure. I’d been experiencing such an adrenaline rush that I hadn’t paused to put it in any perspective. “Tired.”

  And mystified and frustrated. I wanted to know about the new developments the sergeant had alluded to on the phone, but I had learned over the years as a reporter that one of the most effective ways of eliciting information is to not let on about your desperation. Sources usually want to divulge something, tell the story, take the spotlight.

  One strategy to get people talking is to do the talking first, so I decided to tell Danny what I knew. It was a gamble, of course. Just because he had allowed me to call him by his first name didn’t change the fact that he was a cop, with his own allegiances and priorities.

  I told him the little bit I knew. About the note, and a bit about Annie—and her handwriting—about going to see Erin, her hostility, the brief story she told me.

  “She ducked into the bathroom—nice time for nature to call,” he said.

  “In a suspicious way?”

  He shrugged.

  “Nathaniel, do you believe that the woman who handed you the note was your ex-girlfriend?”

  It was the one question I hadn’t permitted myself to fully consider.

  “I don’t think so, Sergeant—how could it possibly have been?”

  I didn’t say aloud the rest of my thought: No way Annie was alive, or she would have contacted me long before.

  He studied me. The more he did so, the more resolute I felt. Annie was gone, end of story. But someone had singled me out, was messing with me on a grand scale, and it was time to try to get what I came for.

  “I need to know what’s going on, Sergeant.”

  He lifted his glass, dropped his neck, and finished off the last of his Coke. “The district attorney has reopened the investigation into the charges against Lieutenant Aravelo’s brother.”

  “What?” I said, quickly, sharply. “Why?”

  Timothy Aravelo was a first-class thug. He’d nearly killed a twenty-year-old woman, then conspired with a couple of other cops to cover it up. I’d come to suspect the corruption went high into the police department. That I could never prove. But I was damn sure the younger Aravelo was one badge away from being a gang member.

  “High-priced attorneys. They convinced an appellate judge to reexamine some of the sworn testimony.”

  I clenched my teeth.

  “It’s probably not a big deal,” Danny continued. “But I wanted to let you know things could get a little dicey. You’ll probably have to talk to investigators again.”

  We were interrupted by a buzzing sound coming from the sergeant’s pants. He pulled out a pager. “Damn,” he said.

  He rose from the seat.

  “I’m not in charge of the café investigation. It’s Lieutenant Aravelo’s baby. But I’m tracking it.”

  He explained that San Francisco’s homicide rate had spiked in the past couple of years. Lots of the murders were unsolved, especially in the poor black corners of the city where gangs roamed. He reminded me that the mayor had made a big deal out of addressing unsolved murders, earning himself enemies on the police force by publicly questioning their capabilities, and then issuing a directive that high-profile murder cases would have two teams of investigators—one official team, and then one or two shadow investigators who investigated independently, found their own leads, and were supposed to feed information to the main group. Sometimes they preferred to take credit for a collar.

  It created competition, but also distrust.

  “What you told me—about the note—needs to be in the right hands. I am tight with a couple of the lead investigators on the café case. I’ll have them get in touch, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Or you can contact Aravelo directly—if you feel comfortable going that direction.”

  I couldn’t let him go. There was so much I wanted to know.

  “Sergeant Weller. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me more about what happened at the café. Who did this? Why would I be warned? Is this a random act of violence or some insane attack that I’ve wound up in the middle of?”

  He studied me, then shrugged. “I think you put it correctly yesterday. Something very strange went down.”

  He turned, then looked back over his shoulder. “Call me anytime you want to talk.”

  I needed another beer—or several—so I drove across town to my local joint. Samantha and Bullseye were parked at their usual spot, watching the Giants game. I barely said hello before launching in with my story.

  “Your chi is way out of balance,” Samantha said, grabbing my hand and vigorously rubbing my palm. “I can do some healing with massage. But you really need to come down to the studio for acupuncture—and energy work.”

  “What my chi needs is a pizza and some sleep,” I said.

  She was right. In the preceding couple of years, despite sometimes protesting otherwise, I’d come increasingly to appreciate Samantha’s witchcraft. I made an appointment for the next day.

  I walked outside of the bar and studied the piece of paper on which Erin had written her six-digit number. Maybe she’d left one out by accident. I tried a couple of combinations, adding a different last digit each time. Three weren’t real phone numbers, and a fourth was answered by an old lady with a slur in her voice who seemed like she wanted to talk anyway.

  When I got home, I was beyond exhausted, but I saw my laptop sitting there and I couldn’t help myself. I sent an e-mail to my attorney, telling him about Sergeant Weller’s revelation that the Aravelo case had been reopened, and seeking his advice.

  Then I started looking for news of the day’s events. There wasn’t much I hadn’t learned earlier from the Chronicle, and from Danny. I saw a picture of the eviscerated café and felt a wave of nausea.

  I read about the café’s owner, Idelwild Corporation, a holding company with some powerful corporate owners. They wanted a piece of the Starbucks café phenomenon and what it represented: the confluence of technological and interpersonal communications. Cafés were like campfires but with wireless access and better pastries.

  I followed link after random link for four hours. Even as my body yearned for bed and sleep, I couldn’t pull myself away, the mystery and memory stoking my quest. Finally, I drifted off, and woke up in the morning to a decision. It was time to visit the dead.

  10

  The paper said Simon Anderson’s funeral and memorial service would be held graveside in Colma. The City of Souls. More than one million people are buried in cemeteries on a lush hillside setting just south of San Francisco. The only thing more crowded than life in the Bay Area is the afterlife.

  The obituary said the deceased was a former investment banker focusing on technology who had done well enough to take on his dream of becoming a writer. He’d published a children’s book through a vanity press.

  A crowd was gathering. A woman next to me pulled out a bottled water and a pouch of raw mixed nuts. She told her friend she’d brought her own snacks in case the funeral food wasn’t organic.

  A tent had been set up over the gravesite and a woman I took to be Anderson’s wife
sat underneath, with her daughter and autistic son, who bounced excitedly, seemingly oblivious to the solemnity. Surrounding us were tombstones big and small, death’s haves and have-nots. The Silver family mausoleum was big enough to fetch $3,000 a month without renovations if rented as a one-bedroom apartment in Noe Valley.

  I had come to the funeral looking for a place to start, maybe someone who had been at the café to whom I could show the picture in my breast pocket. I pulled it out and looked at Annie.

  Our second date took place two weeks after our first. We’d had little contact because she’d been on a work trip to New York and relatively unresponsive to e-mail. But when I got to her apartment to pick her up, we immediately launched into a kiss, which threatened to get heavy, until a little girl from across the hallway opened the door.

  She told Annie that her cat had again crawled behind the stove and had been there for hours. Annie promised to help, went inside her own apartment for a second, slyly showed me a bag of catnip, and then we went over to retrieve Edmund. Annie knelt beside the stove and made a show for the girl of coaxing out the cat with a fantastical plea about how everyone involved would be better off by its appearance.

  When Edmund emerged it set off genuine joy from the girl, and also Annie, who wiped cobwebs from the cat’s face and scratched the base of its ear. Annie, the cat whisperer. I’d always been a sucker for a woman who could nurture a pet, figuring if she could love something that habitually puked on the carpet she could cope with whatever hair balls I brought up. Annie startled me by reading my thoughts.

  “If you run behind the stove, you’re on your own.” She smiled.

  “I’m not easy. I’ve had sex with only three people,” Annie said.

  “You mean at once?”

  “Pig.” She paused. “This is going to be something special.”

  She pulled me into her apartment. At a glance, not much registered. I could tell one thing, though: The place was neat. Hospital corners all around.

  “Nat, this whole thing is freaking me out,” Annie said. She lowered her voice, like she was too embarrassed to finish her thought. “Is this real?”

  I laughed. “I was wondering the same thing.”

  She led me to the bedroom. I noticed that tacked neatly around the edges of the ceiling were Christmas lights—blue, red, yellow, and green—but unlit.

  “I should have removed them six months ago,” Annie said. “I’m better at putting things up than taking them down.”

  “Sure, putting things up is exciting—it means holidays and vacation and presents are coming. Taking things down means it’s over. Hibernation.”

  “Very deep,” she said. “I don’t know where their box is.”

  She giggled and her eyes shone joy, and desire. I dove into them.

  Afterward, I looked at her bedside table. It was bare, except for a tick-tock clock with metallic black hands, and two hardbacks: Heart of Darkness and Horton Hears a Who.

  “Nat, have you ever saved a life?” Annie asked. “You know, in the line of duty.”

  I told her the story from two years before when I’d seen an SUV back over a pregnant woman outside a mall. I administered CPR, as anybody with basic training would have done. The woman died, the baby survived. The woman’s husband sued me for failing to stabilize his wife’s cervical spine. His case was tossed out, but not before it made the experience even more painful.

  “I would have wanted that man’s head on a platter,” Annie said, then added after a pause, “Why are you smiling?”

  It was true. She was right. In a millisecond, my mood had shifted.

  “I haven’t felt angry about that for a long time,” I said. “The thing is, I haven’t felt much of anything for a long time.”

  From the bedside table, I picked up Horton Hears a Who. It was autographed, inscribed to “Annie, A Wondriferous Girl, Who Someday Could Rule The World.”

  “Why did you ask me if I’d ever saved a life?”

  “Why, Doctor,” Annie responded playfully, “you never know when a girl will need saving.”

  We spent the next two days prone. Not necessarily in the throes of passion—we talked constantly—but there were a lot of throes. It was a bit surprising, given the relative lack of contact between our dates. She dismissed my questions about her inattentiveness on her work trip by noting that she had been overwhelmed. Her father had sent her to size up a small technology company in upstate New York. The work was all- consuming. She told me that she’d thought about me all the time.

  All in all, it was two days of great conversation, take-out food, and Strawberry Too, her Labrador retriever, named after her first childhood dog. We took a crash course in each other. Annie got nervous when people touched her neck; she preferred watching television with the light on because it reminded her that what was happening on the screen wasn’t real; she once had a “little brother” from East Palo Alto from whom she learned Spanish to better communicate with; she had a high tolerance for liquor but not beer; she monthly wrote handwritten letters to her mother, who had divorced her father several years ago and moved to Washington State. She liked writing letters, and theorized that her handwriting changed slightly depending on who they were written to; with her mom the script was a little rounder, bespeaking sympathy.

  It wasn’t one single thing that inspired me about Annie, one accomplishment or trait I could point to that summed up her allure. It was how she made me feel—that she was clearheaded and passionate but waiting, like me, and I could be the thing she was waiting for. When I woke up Monday morning, I was truly hooked—until we had our first fight.

  I was sitting in an antique chair in her living room a few weeks later. I leaned my head back over the back of the chair, reveling in the greatness of the moment. I over-reveled. The chair fell over backward and a leg snapped. Annie rushed over. To the chair.

  “Can I get you a sledgehammer?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said, holding up my bleeding hand.

  I walked into the kitchen, turned on the faucet, and ran warm water over the cut that ran inside the webbing of my thumb. I’d need a butterfly bandage. Behind me, I could hear Annie trying to put the wood pieces back into place. Finally, she walked over and inspected the wound, but she remained cold.

  “That’s the first thing I ever bought myself,” she said.

  I held my tongue. I left in a dark silence and spent the night replaying the event. Maybe it was just a function of upbringing; Annie was Prada, I was Levi’s. Then with the light of day came a delivery on my doorstep. It was a baby snapping turtle in a terrarium. There was a note. It read, “I am so horribly sorry for snapping. Please forgive me. A.”

  In the coming months, when one of us lost track of our priorities or blew things out of proportion, that person was deemed “turtle.” Our first pet name. As time passed, it became our singular term of endearment.

  But I didn’t give in immediately. Following our fight, I slowed the engine. I started peeking around corners. One night, we were about to climb into my car after going to a movie. Annie asked for the keys and told me she was driving. I sat in the passenger seat, she put a finger to my lips, encouraging silence. Then she pulled out a black scarf, wrapped it across my eyes, and tied it behind my head. I laughed as we drove in circles around town for half an hour. She was trying to confuse me as to our destination. I was imagining we would wind up in a hotel bed, with me wearing only the blindfold.

  We finally parked. She led me into a building and up a set of stairs. It felt familiar. I remember the smell of cinnamon cookies coming from somewhere nearby. She leaned in close and whispered, “Please trust me . . . again.”

  I heard her put a key in a lock and open the door. She undid the blindfold and held my gaze.

  “I’m getting there,” I said.

  I realized we were standing in the doorway of my apartment.

  “Surprise,” Annie said, pointing me to a pile of gifts: a quill pen, a stack of crepe stationery with my initi
als, and a new Mac with a big, dazzling screen, all of it sitting on an antique mahogany desk. Annie said she wanted to share the wealth of a deal that had yielded her father’s firm tens of millions of dollars. I ran my hands over the carved side of the desk.

  “I can definitely be bought,” I added, mostly joking.

  “No you can’t,” she said, taking my face.

  “They’re a writer’s rocks and sticks—his tools. Your tools,” she whispered into my ear. “Keep creating. Keep building.”

  From then on, I wrote Annie poems, and left goofy messages on her answering machine, and put notes on her car, and I never doubted her again.

  Back at Cypress Lawn, I was shaken from my memory by the voice of a minister delivering a by-the-book eulogy. Simon Anderson, loving father and husband, charitable man, passionate in his pursuits, taken from us too soon. Anderson’s brother spoke next. He was strikingly attractive, as were many of those in attendance. The kind of gene pool drawn to San Francisco, but even more so. Many men wore ties, a fashion relegated to weddings and funerals. Anderson’s brother described his sibling as a wicked-quick study, who would have struck it rich even without help from the dot-com boom; a pilot and adventurer with an effortless charisma, and a husband and father who cherished his family.

  “I know things got a little rough at the end,” he said, looking at the widow. “He wouldn’t have wanted pity from anybody. You know Simon. He would’ve wanted a proper wake. So let’s drain one more keg.”

  The crowd began to disperse, and I noticed a hundred hands reach into pockets to extract cell phones. It was like the airplane had just landed. I looked for an in-person conversation. I saw one mourner in a dark suit hobbled by a leg cast. His face was scabbed. I started walking toward him just as he was approached by two serious-looking gents, one bearing a notepad. Cops. I turned in the other direction and took a stroll on the giant lawn, which reminded me of the setting of Annie’s memorial service, with hundreds mourning a tragic death at sea. By then, there was little hope her father’s no-holds-barred search effort would yield a miracle, or even a body.