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Page 16

by Stephen Greenleaf


  Since it seemed a reasonable prognostication, I gave him a friendly wave, then trotted down the steps and headed for my car as I plotted an end run around Paul to get at his reclusive wife.

  As I approached the corner of Fell and Masonic, I heard footsteps approaching from my rear. When I looked back I saw a young boy jogging toward me—Nikes flying high, backpack flopping at his shoulder, sweatshirt shiny with the Batman logo. He had dark hair and eyes and a slim, undeveloped physique; I guessed his age at six or seven.

  He didn’t say anything when he went by and a moment later had disappeared around the corner. But when I reached the garage he was waiting for me, eyes wide, panting less from his jog than from whatever significance he thought I had to him.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” He got right to it. “I heard you talking back there at the house.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “About my dad.”

  “You’re Wade’s boy.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alfred.”

  I smiled. “From Tennyson?”

  “‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,’” he recited carefully. “Mom read it to me once. I didn’t get it,” he added, as though it was cause for concern.

  “I didn’t either,” I admitted truthfully, to indicate it wasn’t. I decided Mom wasn’t entirely an ogre, and maybe not an ogre at all. “Do you use Lucerne as your surname, too, Alfred? Like your mom?”

  He shook his head and puffed his chest. “I’m a Linton. Like my dad. Alfred Lucerne Linton.”

  And there it was, from the mouth of a babe—the Dennis Worthy of Hammurabi become the Wade Linton of Sebastian, and late of Folsom Prison.

  “Do you know where your father is, Alfred?”

  “Al.” He shook his head again. “I did. I mean, I used to know where he lived, but he moved.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Right there.”

  Alfred pointed to my back, at the thick strip of the Panhandle.

  “What was the address?”

  Alfred scowled at my obtuseness. “He didn’t have an address—he was living in his car. It was parked right there, by that sign.” He bit his lip. “Then it wasn’t there anymore. I guess the cops took it with the others,” he concluded simply.

  Alfred was referring to the Panhandle’s most recent contretemps. A year or so ago, the parking spaces along its borders were laid claim to by the homeless, specifically a subgroup of transients living in their vehicles. For several months a string of tattered rigs, sagging with rot and bulging with possessions, rimmed the Panhandle like a border of gritty and misshapen seashells.

  The division of impoverished panzers made the Panhandle’s lawn their home—kitchen for cooking food, yard for playing games, deck for worshipping the sun, for some even a garden to plant crops. But because the hippies who overran the neighborhood in the sixties had been for the most part displaced by more affluent and less tolerant residents, a petition was quickly mounted for the mayor to do something about the situation, without quite coming to grips with what the situation was. Naturally, the gentry had sufficient clout to get the job done, and the transients were quickly routed.

  “Did your mom know your dad was living here?” I asked young Al.

  He shook his head. “It was a secret. He said she’d send me away if she found out. She would, too.” His nose wrinkled. “Mom hates him, pretty much.”

  “Did you talk to your dad very often?”

  “All the time,” he said proudly. “We met by the lawn bowling courts. We had a place where we’d leave messages for each other, and presents, like food and stuff. It was neat.” His countenance darkened. “But I haven’t seen him for a long time. Do you think something happened? There’s some nice people out there—Dad introduced me to a whole bunch of them—but there’s some crazy people, too. Dad always told me to be careful.”

  Alfred’s expression indicated he was afraid his father hadn’t taken his own advice. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “A long time ago. A month, maybe.”

  “Do you know why he left?”

  He shrugged. “The cops were bothering them more and more. He probably just took off.” Alfred marshaled a youthful anger. “There was no reason for it. I mean, they weren’t criminals; they were just people who had bad luck.”

  “Like your dad.”

  “Yeah. People like my dad.” Alfred fell silent, as though he had delivered a eulogy and was giving me time to absorb it. “He’s not like Paul said; he’s a nice guy,” he added as a coda.

  “I’m sure he is.”

  Alfred looked toward the place where he’d seen his father last. A tear trickled down his cheek. “I don’t care what they say, he’s really just a dad.”

  I patted Al on the shoulder. When he could, he looked up at me. “What do you want to see him for?”

  I had known the question was coming, but I still didn’t have a good answer for him. “It’s something about a book,” I said finally.

  “What kind of book?”

  “A book your dad might have written. Did he say anything to you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever give you anything to keep for him? Some pages he’d written out, or typed? Anything like that?”

  Alfred shook his head, then fished in his pack. “Only this,” he said, and handed me a sheet of paper that had been folded four times, and unfolded and refolded a dozen times that often.

  “Dear Al,” it said. “There is a person in the world who loves you more than any other thing on earth. Your Dad.”

  I handed it back. “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  He sniffed and nodded. “Just an old one.”

  He reached in his pack again, and this time pulled out a small square, not much bigger than a postage stamp, wrapped in foil to preserve it. He unwrapped it carefully and handed it to me.

  On glossy stock, its size suggesting it had been excised from a group portrait, the picture looked to have been clipped from a larger snapshot. The face in it was young, untroubled, open to the future. I could see Al in the face, and I could see a basis for Emma Drayer’s years of longing in it, too.

  I handed it back and Al rewrapped it. “So you’re going to keep checking till he comes back again.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I fished in my own pocket and handed Alfred my card. “If your dad gets in touch with you I’d appreciate it if you’d call me.”

  He looked up but didn’t say anything.

  “I think your dad would want you to. It might help him get back on his feet.”

  “Okay.” He stuck my card in his pocket, then looked down the block. “I got to get to Jimmy’s. We’re going to Muir Woods.”

  “Okay. Good luck, Al.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And thanks for talking with me.”

  “Sure.” He started down the street, then stopped. “Mr. Tanner?”

  “What?”

  “If you find my dad, tell him I’d like to see him again. Tell him we could meet by the bowling club, like we used to.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “See ya.”

  “See ya.”

  Alfred trotted off toward Jimmy’s while I debated how much of our conversation had been a fraud and a sham, not on his part but my own.

  In many ways it isn’t surprising that so many people believed I had abused Amanda: She was more in need of love than any student I had ever seen.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 144

  19

  When I called Charley and told him I’d finally come up with a name and asked him to feed it to the computer, he didn’t bother to grouse. Which probably meant he was preoccupied with something foul enough to preoccupy a man who’d been a street cop for thirty years. When I told him I’d be in my
office in twenty minutes, he told me he’d call if anything turned up. If something else was on his mind, I was glad he didn’t bother to tell me what it was.

  The phone was ringing when I walked in the door. “Wade Linton,” Charley said when I picked it up. “Pleaded nolo to PC two-two-zero, assault with intent to commit rape, six years ago. Then—”

  “Six?”

  “Right. Released from Quentin—

  “Not Folsom?”

  Charley ignored me. “Released from Quentin four months back. Outright release, no parole.”

  “Any current address?”

  “I can tell you where he spent the last thirty days.”

  “Where?”

  “San Bruno.”

  “For what?”

  “Trespass. Seems he hung around the Astral Apple over on Haight, nursing a cup of coffee for about three hours. When he asked for his seventh refill they asked him to leave. He got belligerent, so they called in the beat cop.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The patrolman? Jerry Augustine. I talked to him—said he tried to calm everyone down and convince them to forget it, but the owner wanted to make your guy an example to the rest of the ‘street slime,’ as he called them, so he signed the complaint.” Charley hesitated. “I guess that’s the kind of example that made debtor’s prison so popular a while back,” he concluded in an acerbic sally.

  “Is Linton still in Bruno?”

  “Released three days ago.”

  “Any address at all?”

  I heard Charley flip some papers. “When he was booked in ’eighty-four, he was living on Twenty-sixth, out in Noe Valley. When he was busted last month, he gave this one.” Charley read off the address of Linton’s wife and son.

  “That one’s bogus,” I said. “He shows up there, Linton will be back in Bruno. What’s the address in Noe?”

  Charley read the number. “That’s all I got. Help any?”

  “Some, but not enough. I think he’s living on the streets or maybe in his car. He was one of the guys who parked along the Panhandle till they rousted him.”

  “A lot of the guys from the Panhandle park in China Basin now. Of course if he’s just out there on the street there’s all kinds of places he could be. I’d start with the Civic Center, but there’s ten thousand of them around town, so …” Charley refrained from fleshing out the difficulty of my task.

  “Where else but the Civic Center?” I asked. “Somehow I don’t see him hanging around that rowdy a group.”

  “They’re all over, Marsh; you know that—we got homeless living in the public library, for Christ’s sake. What a fucking world.”

  Homelessness. The scourge of the city, the shame of the nation. Charley and I had debated its causes and effects for years. Charley placed most of the blame on the assault on the poor during the Reagan years: housing subsidies cut 75 percent; eligibility for unemployment insurance, food stamps, and similar aid restricted or made so cumbersome to obtain that even the eligible couldn’t take advantage; the dramatic escalation of rental costs in poor neighborhoods while welfare payments and the minimum wage remained at the same low levels, all while the rich saw their obligation to do anything about it in the way of taxes reduced by more than half.

  Charley brands this new America loathsome—the America where the gap in both assets and attitudes between the rich and poor has become cavernous, the America that allows businessmen to coin money in the name of junk bonds and stock options yet requires a poor, illiterate woman to fill out a six-page form to qualify for food to feed her children, the America whose poor contribute a higher portion of their incomes to charity than its rich, the America whose best and brightest are no longer rewarded for creating things of value but for selling off our resources to foreign companies, the America whose politicians want to force everyone to pledge allegiance to the flag while hundreds of thousands of men whose allegiance to that flag included bravery and bloodshed must find shelter in doorways and subway tunnels and abandoned sewer pipes. Loathsome. I don’t go quite as far as Charley does, but then I’m not the one who has to clean up the mess.

  “If I was you I’d try the big food distribution outlets,” Charley was saying. “Glide Memorial, Salvation Army, St. Anthony’s, some of them. Hang around and see if he shows up. If he’s really on the streets, sooner or later he will. The Tenderloin Self Help Center has heavy traffic, too. Or you could try the hotels on Turk and Sixth, or the Sanctuary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, that place that used to be a bathhouse. It’s a shelter now. He got a wife?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Then he’s probably on his own—the men’s shelters are too dangerous unless you’re so strung out you can’t survive anywhere else. You’ll just have to try and spot him, or wait till he gets busted again.”

  “Can you flag his name for me? So you’ll be notified if they bring him in?”

  “Sure.”

  I was still despairing of the job of searching through a forest of homeless men to find one I’d never seen except in a tiny snapshot that was probably a decade old, when I suddenly thought of something. “If he was just busted, there’d be a mug shot, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “No, but I can get it.”

  “That’ll help a lot.”

  “I’m going to be in and out. If the machinery’s not fucked up, you should be able to pick it up at the desk at Central by noon.”

  I thanked him. “You know, Linton has a kid living out on the Panhandle, so he has a reason to want to hang out in that area. Got any ideas where he might crash now that they don’t let them sleep in their cars?”

  “Over a hundred people sleep in Golden Gate Park every frigging night.”

  “Hard to get a line on, though.”

  “Damned right they are—a crafty bunch. It drives the park people crazy that they can’t find their nests in all that greenery.” Charley paused. “If I were you I’d show the mug to Augustine and see if he’s seen the guy around, and maybe show it in some of the other joints along Haight Street, too. Hamilton Methodist and All Saints Episcopal hand out free food out there, so try them, too—I think the Episcopals do the weekends and the Methodists during the week. And Food Not Bombs passes out food at the Haight and Stanyan entrance to the park, once in a while, at least.”

  “I thought the city shut them down.”

  Charley swore. “They did but they’re ‘reviewing the policy.’ Apparently someone suggested giving free food to starving people wasn’t up there with coke cartels and child abuse in your list of crime priorities. But here’s a tip.”

  “What?”

  “You go nosing around the park and you want those guys to talk to you, you better look a lot more like them than you usually do, or they’ll figure you for fuzz and stiff you. Better smell like them, too.”

  “Smell?”

  “Yeah. Like you haven’t had a bath for a while. Like for about a year.”

  “That’ll be pleasant.”

  “About as pleasant as it is for them. Enjoy.”

  I never saw Amanda Keefer after she assaulted me with her cinema verité accusation. But I encountered her friend Jeffrey outside school the morning I came to remove my effects. When I asked why she had done this to me, he donned an infuriating smirk and said, “Because you’re expendable, you cretin.”

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 149

  20

  I had some time to kill before the mug shot would be ready at the Central Station, so I decided to drive out to Noe Valley and see what Linton’s former neighbors had to say about him. Enough differences were developing between the world according to Hammurabi and the real events that had transpired at the Sebastian School that I needed all the information I could get to help me separate fact from fiction. Plus, if there was a way to find Linton without going undercover in Golden Gate Park disguised as a homeless transient, I wanted to be sure I found it.

&
nbsp; Noe Valley is at once one of the more interesting and anonymous of the city’s neighborhoods. Long a tranquil mix of artists and writers and intellectuals folded in among a wide spectrum of working folk, it was one of the last areas in the city to be gentrified. But its time has come as well, as it has with every other desirable neighborhood in town, with the result that Noe housing has become priced out of the reach of anyone of normal means—the last time I looked, the average price of a single-family dwelling in Noe Valley was $360,000. Still, from my observation of the steady stream of foot traffic that passed by as I sat in my car on the corner of Noe and Twenty-sixth, at least some of the old-timers had resisted the urge to sell their homes for more money than they’d earned in their lifetimes. All I had to do was find one who had known the Lintons before they were transformed by the events at Sebastian.

  The address Charley had given me turned out to be a typical San Francisco duplex, a boxy structure in the middle of the block, gray stucco stuck onto the front of a wood frame, three levels, blue trim, garage on the ground floor, spindly tree fighting for its life in the middle of a concrete box out front. The numbers on the mailbox indicated the Lintons had lived on top, so I pushed the bell for the second level.

  The man who answered was on the far side of middle age, his physique a waistless gourd, his expression frank and anticipatory. He was still in his robe and not ashamed of it, and in contrast to the usual reaction to my arrival on any given scene, he seemed pleased to have someone to talk to.

  I told him my name and asked if he remembered some people named Linton who used to live in the flat on top. He scratched at his hair, hitched his pajama bottoms above his bulge, and tugged at the ends of his sash. “I’ve lived here for thirty years, and I’m not one of them that goes in for ignoring your neighbors. I remember the Lintons as well as I remember my Lotto numbers. Name’s Gunderson by the way. Tiny’s what they call me when they’ve known me for a while.”

  He stuck out his meaty hand and I took it. Then he chewed on a fingernail, remembering. “Don’t know where they are now, though; up and gone, like that.” He snapped the finger he’d just pruned. “I remember the boy the best—Allen, I think his name was. Cute little rascal. Could hear him cry all the way down here. I often wonder what happened to him.”

 

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