by Steven Gore
Donnally squinted at the faded handwriting on the original intake sheet from the late 1980s and made out the name of Brown’s next of kin: Katrisha Brown, but the relationship field was blank. And whoever she was—sister, mother, wife, aunt, or grandmother—over a decade working the San Francisco projects had taught Donnally that she wouldn’t be pleased to find him knocking on her door.
Chapter 8
“Retarded, my ass.”
Katrisha Brown sneered as she gripped the paper coffee cup in one hand and an unfiltered Camel cigarette in the other.
“He’s no more retarded than I am.”
Katrisha and Donnally stood side-by-side in front of the blue metal railing facing Fisherman’s Terminal marina along Salmon Bay, just east of Seattle’s Puget Sound. Donnally had found something engaging in the athletic stride that had brought her toward him from the parking lot and in her alert eyes and the braids tied back from her mahogany skin.
Donnally turned away from watching the commercial fishing boats rocking in their slips and flashed Katrisha a playful grin.
She shrugged her shoulders. “So SF State ain’t Harvard, but it’s not Podunk Community College either.”
“Is that where you met Charles?”
“Freshman year, 1981. We got married in ’82.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “It was the lisp, wasn’t it? That’s what made them think he was retarded.”
“What lisp?”
“He does this lisp thing. It’s brilliant. He started using the gimmick after he got busted for groping a girl on a trolley car.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette; it fragmented, then swirled in the wind. “You know San Francisco?”
Donnally nodded. “Used to live there.”
“It was on the J-Church Metro Line, right along Market Street. That’s where he did it. A couple of months after he dropped out of school. The cops arrested him, but cited him out and gave him a court date. By the time he showed up for his arraignment he almost had the lisp perfected.”
“Are you telling me the whole thing is an act?”
“No, he’s bonkers all right. He had a psychotic break when he was twenty-one, but that never kept him from working the system.”
“What about violence?”
Katrisha glanced around, unzipped her windbreaker, then unbuttoned her blouse. She pulled down the top edge of her bra. Donnally could see a three-inch keloid scar across the top of her left breast.
“Why’d he do that?”
“Fuck if I know.” She rebuttoned her blouse and zipped up her jacket. “I’m not sure he even realized he had a steak knife in his hand when he lost control. He was way out there that night. Way out. Usually he just punched the walls until his hands bled.” She shuddered. “That night he started flailing.”
“He get jail time?”
“He lisped his way through a two-day competency hearing and they sent him to Napa. A couple of years later he showed up on my doorstep. I hardly recognized him. He looked like some homeless veteran begging for spare change. A complete fruitcake and scary as hell. I wasn’t going to risk my neck trying to help him again. I put him in my car, drove him to that old Dead Head tent city on the Berkeley waterfront, then went home and packed up everything I owned and moved up here.”
“But you kept his name.”
“That’s not it. I kept my name. I was born with the name Brown. Coincidence. I think there’s a lesson there. It’s like marrying your first cousin. Nothing good can come of it.”
“Does he have family left?”
She shrugged. “No idea. His mother took off when he was six. I think she had some kind of breakdown, too. I never found out what happened to her. He was raised by his grandmother in San Jose, but she’s long dead. I heard his father died of AIDS about ten years ago.”
Donnally stared out at the afternoon rush hour traffic creeping along the bridge crossing Salmon Bay, each driver heading toward a known destination. Finding Charles Brown would be just the opposite. He’d only know he’d arrived after he’d gotten there.
He looked back at Katrisha. “How did you hear about the murder in Berkeley?”
“The DA. He left a message at my mother’s asking me to come testify that Charles was competent to stand trial.” She took a sip of coffee. “How was I supposed to know? I hadn’t seen him for years. And there was no way I was gonna let Charles find out where I moved. I knew the DA would have to give my address to Charles’s public defender if I even let him interview me.”
“Has Charles contacted you since then?”
“I didn’t think they let the patients make long-distance calls.”
“He’s not a patient.”
Katrisha’s body spun toward Donnally. Coffee exploded from the top of her cup, splashing her Levi’s and Nikes.
“What?” She tossed her cigarette into the bay, then shook the hot liquid from her hand. “How the fuck did he get out?”
“Some judge in Fresno decided he wasn’t dangerous anymore.”
“He beat the system. That nut beat the system.” Katrisha shook her head in disgust, her mouth tight. “He did better than that. Putting him in with mentally ill and retarded women. Talk about the briar patch. Then, when everybody forgot why he was locked up in the first place, they showed him the door.”
“I want to find him and bring him back.”
Katrisha turned away and scanned the horizon, as if hoping an image of where he was hiding would appear. “He could be anywhere.”
“But he isn’t. He’s somewhere.”
Donnally glanced down at Katrisha’s coffee-splattered jeans, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward the terminal.
“Let’s go inside and wash that off.”
She shrugged. “Wet is wet.”
She pulled another cigarette from the pack in her jacket pocket, then lit it with a worn stainless steel Zippo.
Donnally pointed at the lighter. “Your father in the service?”
“No. Me. I joined the navy after college. I wanted the Pacific Ocean between me and Charles. I did twenty-plus years and got out last May.”
“What are you doing now?”
“You mean besides looking over my shoulder?”
Donnally nodded.
“I teach industrial diving, training technicians to do underwater repairs on ships and oil rigs. Mostly welding.”
“You get married again?”
“No point. I spent a lot of time at sea. After a while I realized I didn’t need the baggage.” She winked at Donnally. “I could get laid anytime I wanted.”
“And now that you’re on land?”
Katrisha’s eyebrows went up, exposing twinkling eyes. “You interested?”
“I’ve kinda got a girlfriend.”
“Kinda? How kinda?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
She leaned over the railing and stared down toward the water lapping against the pilings.
“I’ve been a kinda girlfriend a few times myself. Spent a lot of time sitting by a phone that rarely rang.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
She looked over. “That’s what they all said, meanwhile they were screwing everything that moved.” She caught herself. “Sorry. That’s was out of line. I don’t know you.”
“It’s okay. I’ve been prying into your life. It’s only fair.”
She smiled. “Keep my number, just in case kinda turns into used to be.”
Donnally patted his jacket pocket where he stored his cell phone. “Got it.”
Katrisha took a drag on her cigarette. “And make sure I’m the first one you call if he turns up.”
“Any idea where he’d go?”
“You sure he’s not in jail?”
“Not that we know of.”
“Maybe he’s six feet under.”
“No evidence of that either.”
She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the railing and stared down at the water.
“I’m thinki
ng he’d be in some kind of homeless encampment. His lisp made other people want to adopt him.” She thought for a moment. “Does People’s Park still exist in Berkeley?”
“From what I hear nobody sleeps there anymore.”
“Anybody camp out in Golden Gate Park?”
Donnally nodded.
“Lots of bushes. That’s where I’d start.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him?”
She stared at him for a moment, then said, “There’s no way I’m going to help you find him.”
Donnally offered a half smile. “I had to try.”
“But I’ll tell you something that may help. He liked to be called Rover, like a dog. You might have better luck asking for him by that name instead of Charles. At first I thought it was kind of cute, but then one evening he started humping my leg at the dinner table, and the charm wore off.”
Chapter 9
Donnally sat in his truck parked along the Embarcadero and watched the last of his digital photos download onto his laptop computer. In the previous two weeks he’d photographed nearly every homeless black male in San Francisco. He’d started at Golden Gate Park, then the skid-row, hotel-lined Tenderloin, and finally now along the waterfront. He’d attached them to e-mails and sent them on to Katrisha. She always responded within a couple of hours, and always in two words: “Not him.”
He was starting to think it would’ve been simpler just to put out some dog food and start calling out, “Rover. Here, Rover.”
And it pissed him off that Blaine hadn’t put much effort into finding Brown, and had stopped returning his calls even sooner than Donnally had expected. The final one, spoken with the bureaucratic authority that Donnally had learned to despise when he was at SFPD, was abrupt:
“We’ve devoted all of the resources we can to this matter. It’s time to move on.”
Donnally had always wondered why careerists like Blaine were always ready to move on when it came to others’ suffering, but displayed the mechanical compulsiveness of psychotic hamsters when it came to their tennis forehand or their putting game. Perfecting those was worth a thousand frustrating weekends, while the Anna Keenans of the world weren’t worth even one.
Donnally watched a gray-suited man walk from the Ferry Building, stop at a sidewalk news rack, drop in a couple of quarters, and pull out a newspaper. His mouth formed into a predatory grin as he skimmed the business headlines, as though he’d discovered that he’d just profited from someone else’s loss. He then turned and headed up Market Street toward the financial district. A homeless woman stared up at him from the curb, her expression saying that she had lots of better uses for his change.
The escape of Charles Brown still hadn’t hit the papers, and Donnally was sure it wouldn’t because everyone had an interest in making sure it didn’t. The Alameda County district attorney’s halfhearted, failed effort was the perfect solution to the public relations problem that was Charles Brown. Why call attention to the crack in the criminal justice system that Brown and perhaps countless other murderers had slithered through?
And Donnally couldn’t go to the press, because he knew that even a rabid dog fears the cage, and Brown would go even further underground once his name hit the Chronicle or his face appeared on the local news.
Blaine’s “It’s time to move on” had told Donnally that he was now on his own.
But every attempt to find Brown had died in failure.
SFPD patrol officers had only shrugged their shoulders when Donnally stopped them on the street.
Detectives had leaned back in their desk chairs, offering war stories as substitutes for the information they didn’t have.
All anyone possessed were vague memories of someone who sort of looked like Brown who’d been around the park years ago.
Donnally stared out at the ferry dock, wondering whether Katrisha had been right. Maybe Brown was dead, his bones long scavenged by rats in a ravine up in Marin County or down the Peninsula, with nothing but a rusting shopping cart filled with recyclable cans and bottles marking the spot.
He heard a foghorn blow, then a red and white tugboat glided into view, guiding a container ship through the swirling mist toward the Port of Oakland and leaving a black plume of diesel exhaust in its wake. He could just make out the captain standing at the controls inside the upper bridge of the rusting craft and the yellow-slickered crewman poised at the bow.
Donnally then felt his mind sweep upward and he imagined himself looking down at a nautical chart of the bay with its contours of land, depths of water, edges of coastline, tidal currents, and sunken hazards: all the details needed for navigation, except for a marked route, much less an inland passage leading to whatever bush Charles Brown was living, or had died, under.
Turning the ignition, Donnally realized that the mental map was missing something else: his point of departure. He was already at sea and wasn’t sure where he’d started from. He didn’t even feel as if he’d pushed off from solid ground, rather he’d just found himself in motion. He couldn’t even say it had been the flesh and blood of Mauricio, for the truth of his crime had acted as a solvent, somehow dissolving him, leaving only a stain behind.
And he knew that’s exactly what Mauricio would’ve called it.
Donnally checked his side mirror and pulled into traffic, the acceleration feeling for a moment like a rush of relief, for it carried with it the realization that with the death of Anna, the stain that Mauricio left had been washed away into the nothingness of the past.
But only for a moment, for he felt the vertigo of a waxing and waning tide swaying him first forward toward an unknown shore and then backward toward the depths of his own motives.
Chapter 10
“Your father called,” Janie Nguyen said, looking over from the pillow next to Donnally’s, her head backlit by the light on the nightstand. The smell of sweat and perfume and sex infused the upstairs bedroom air like wilting gardenias, overripe and cloying.
He glanced over at the bedside clock: 10:30 P.M.
“How come you didn’t tell me before we got into bed?”
Janie grinned. “You really want me to answer that?”
He didn’t.
“What did he have to say?” Donnally asked.
Janie giggled. “He asked me if I wanted to play an Asian madam in the new movie he’s planning to shoot. No lines. I just lounge around in my underwear for a couple of days. He said he was looking for the classical Vietnamese look.” She lowered the sheet, exposing her breasts. “I’m not sure he had these in mind or my face.”
Donnally knew he meant both, because his father had insinuated a hundred times that Janie reminded him of the elegant prostitutes he’d met at the Autumn Cloud Hotel in Saigon during the war, the nouveau riche “dollar queens” who wore silk in the daytime and shopped in the officers’ PX, and who were beyond the reach of the enlisted men, forcing them to settle on bar girls.
His father’s almost incestuous sexual interest in Janie made Donnally nauseated and angry. He realized that his fury showed on his face when Janie pulled away and covered herself again, as if for protection.
“What?” she asked.
Donnally shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“If it was nothing, your jaw wouldn’t be clenched like that.”
He stared up at the ceiling, deciding how much to say and whether to risk the sort of all-night conversations that had led to their last breakup by ranging into borderlands where neither wanted to go. He felt an internal shrug of resignation, of inevitability.
“He thought it would be funny to call you a prostitute,” Donnally said. “And see how you would react.”
She reddened. “He said he wanted me to play one, not be one.”
“There’s no difference in his mind, because what thrills him is the effect his words have, not the reality behind them. He knows that if you yell fire in a theater, everybody’s going run for it, whether there really is one or not.”
Janie rolled
over on her back. “So offering me the job was him yelling fire in your theater.”
“For the thousandth time.”
She sighed, leaned back, and folded her arms over her breasts.
“Now I really do feel like a prostitute.”
“Where’s the director?” Donnally asked his mother as he walked into her third-floor bedroom in the Hollywood Hills mansion late the following morning.
She looked up from her book lying on the table in front of her and rolled her eyes.
“You mean your father?”
“He tried out for the part a couple of times,” Donnally said as he approached where she sat in a recliner by the open window, “but couldn’t carry it off.”
“Maybe you should give him a new audition.”
“I’ll check the sign-in sheet and see if he’s applied.”
Donnally watched disappointment flood his mother’s face. He kissed her forehead, smoothed a few gray hairs that had been disturbed by the breeze, then sat down in a matching chair and took her hands trembling with Parkinson’s into his.
“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean for things to start out this way. I really just came to see how you’re doing.” He glanced out the window, over the circular drive and toward Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. “Where is he, really?”
She tilted her head in the opposite direction. “He needed a hilltop sunset for his new movie, so he went out early to meet a crew at Rattlesnake Mountain to shoot the dawn.”
Donnally tensed. That was typical of his father, filming a sunrise and running it backward just for the pleasure of deceiving the audience. He couldn’t hear the phrase without thinking of his father’s most famous war movie, Shooting the Dawn, hailed as an existential masterpiece by academic critics who misunderstood the sarcasm of the title, believing that the message was that one’s fate cannot be changed any more than “shooting at the dawn” can stop the sunrise.
For reasons it took Donnally years to grasp, this had been the theme of all his father’s movies, and his method of delivery had always been the same: Take some massacre that haunted the public conscience, like My Lai or Wounded Knee or Hue, change the location, give it a new name, blame it on human nature or the nature of war or on Asian or Indian enemies who not only killed indiscriminately, but murdered the spirit and corrupted the soul and drove anonymous soldiers into berserk orgies of revenge.
