The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  Choking back tears, I quickly descend the spiral stairs. He follows, but before he can reach me I let myself out, then rush down to the street.

  Now there are things I must do. I order a taxi from a pay phone, tell the driver to take me to the Castro.

  In the Safeway on Market, I buy a box of chalk, walk over to the mailbox on Collingwood and Eighteenth, leave the mark that will tell Hilly I seek a meeting at eight the following night. Exhilarated at having set things in motion, I drop into a burrito joint for dinner. Then I taxi home, change clothes, grab my camera and go out again on foot to stalk the Gulch.

  The fog has suddenly rushed in from the ocean, causing particles of water to accumulate in window screens. But despite the mist, the Gulch tonight seems especially alive, hustlers posing awaiting clients—who appear to be in scant supply.

  I spot Sho beside the Korean barbecue in a classic stance, one leg bent so his foot is pressed against the building wall. I sidle up to him, ask what's going on.

  "Police sweep," he says. "Scared off the johns. Usually takes a couple days for things to settle down."

  I take up a position beside him, position my foot the same way, breathe in the cooking smells, enjoy the feel of the concrete wall against my back. Checking out the parade emerging and disappearing into inky mist, I sense an abundance of energy, hunger, testosterone.

  I turn to him. I'm fascinated by the triangular shape of his face and the way it's framed by his long center-parted hair.

  "Tell me, Sho—did you ever go out with the bald guy, the one drives the Mercedes coupe?"

  He squints, asks why I'm asking.

  "Just curious," I tell him. "What's his scene about?"

  Sho smiles; "Can't tell you that, Bug."

  "Hustler's secret?"

  "You'd probably—" He screws up his face.

  "—throw up? You think I'm that naive?"

  He shuffles awkwardly. "It's just—it's hard to explain to a woman."

  "Believe me, there's nothing I haven't heard about and little I haven't seen."

  He shuffles again. "Rain probably told you."

  I don't reveal how pleased I am to receive this confirmation that Tim knew Crane.

  "I hear he can be mean," Sho finally says. "Depends on his mood. Different strokes for different folks. Never messed with me. Probably knew if he did I'd bust his nose."

  So much for a "benign interest."

  I'm content to leave it at that, but there's more Sho has to say.

  "Rumor is he bashed a couple kids. Pissed everybody off. Some of the guys got together, agreed they wouldn't go out with him anymore. But, you know, there's no way to enforce something like that out here. Anyway, I'm sure he still finds what he's looking for, young and sweet. What he likes to do with them—I couldn't say."

  "Knob rents him his boys, doesn't he? Tommy and Boat?"

  Sho is surprised I possess such sensitive information. "You're wired pretty good, Bug."

  "Knob put you with him?"

  Sho shuffles, shakes his head. "There're things I just can't say."

  "Tim used to tell me stuff."

  "Yeah . . . look what happened to him."

  "You think he got offed because he talked too much?"

  Now it's Sho's turn to shrug. "You don't mess with Knob and make a living on the Gulch," he says.

  I thank him, saunter off into the gloom, chewing on this new bit of information. So Knob is king here, rules with a merciless hand. Tim never told me that, but then he was a freelance, and, in Sho's words—look what happened to him.

  I join the parade, searching for Knob, but don't spot him on the street. Perhaps he's in one of the bars, doing a deal in the back of someone's car, or, unpleasant thought, tracking me even as I seek him out. I stop a couple of times, turn abruptly in the hope of catching sight of him behind. But the gloom's so thick I doubt I'd see him even if he were trailing me at fifty feet.

  I ask myself: What makes me so important to Knob? For all I know, he administers beatings twice a week. But then I'm the only one here who carries a camera, a device that can document meetings between people who would deny they ever met.

  Back home, setting down my camera, I realize I didn't take a single shot. An odd event, but then it's been a strange evening all around.

  Approaching my telescope, I swing the tube from its usual position, trained on the penthouse of the Judge. I don't even bother to check the viewfinder to see if he's standing outside brooding over our final words. Rather I pick the whole apparatus up and move it to the bay window of the dining room. The view from here is only a smidgen different, but the new position will remind me I'll be taking a new perspective from now on.

  The phone rings. I pick up.

  "I'm in a pay phone." It's Hilly. She doesn't identify herself. "Got your message. I'll be there." She clicks off.

  I smile; I do enjoy this cloak and dagger stuff, so perhaps the Judge was right. In a sense I am playing Private Eye . . . but then it no longer matters what he thinks.

  Ariane: I dream of her, this woman I have never seen. I may have lost Tim, but it gives me hope that his twin, whom I'm convinced I will one day find, still walks the earth.

  In the morning I wait around until eleven, then set out for Clement Street. I want to arrive just after the baking and Dad's prime business hours, yet catch him before he goes out on errands.

  He's standing outside City Stone Ground when I arrive, talking to one of his suppliers. I study him as I wait: a huge friendly bear of a man in a white apron with smears of flour on his forearms and cheeks.

  The staff is friendly. Everyone greets me. "Hi ya, Kay!'' "Hi!''

  Tamara brings me coffee and a slice of panettone. Peter stops to show me the new narrow crusty baguette. Kids, he tells me, love these long thin loaves; they pretend they're swords, fight duels with them.

  Dad gives me a great hug. "Wanna have lunch?" he asks. "Chinese?"

  I shake my head, suggest since it's a beautiful day, we pack a picnic and take it into the park.

  He thinks that's a great idea, strips off his apron, goes to the refrigerator, extracts a half-bottle of rosé, packs two narrow baguettes into a canvas bag, then leads me down Clement two blocks to a Russian deli, where he purchases napkins, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, a little container of blackberry-and-green-coriander sauce, and a cold flattened Tabaka-style chicken which he orders cut up.

  With these gastronomic treasures, we walk into the Presidio, find an empty picnic table overlooking the golf course and sit down to feast.

  We make small talk for a while. He knows I've come for a reason, but for now we pretend we're on a pleasant father-daughter outing in the woods.

  I ask after Phyllis. He tells me she's made a huge sale in Pacific Heights.

  "Sold a floor of that fancy ocher building on Washington."

  "Don't know it, Dad. Remember, I don't see colors." He winces. The moment the words escape my lips I'm angry at myself for sounding bitchy.

  "Sorry," I tell him. "That wasn't necessary. I had no right. You, who helped me more than anyone . . ."

  He places his hand on mine. "I'm a fool to have forgotten, darlin'." He smiles. "It's the building next to the big Spreckels house."

  "Sure, I know it."

  "Sold it for two million eight. She'll split six percent—net eighty-four thou. Not bad."

  I can tell he's not really excited by this; he repeats it by rote, as if straight from Phyllis Sorenson's lips.

  "Phyl says she wants to blow some of it on a Christmas trip. She's got Hawaii in mind. When I told her I always spend my holidays with you, she said she'll invite you and her daughters along."

  I can imagine how much fun that's going to be—Christmas in some big beachfront hotel, beholden to a woman I can barely stand, along with her two college-age daughters whom, having met only once, I hoped never to see again.

  "Actually, Dad, I'm not sure that's such a good idea."

  He laughs. "That's what I told her. So it's off."
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  "How're the two of you getting along these days?"

  "So-so," he says. "Actually, I think we're getting kind of tired of each other, wanna know the truth."

  I nod respectfully, not sure I'm happy about that. Though I don't care for Phyllis, I hate to think of Dad companionless.

  "We went to see them," I say.

  He looks up; he's nibbling on a Russian pickle. "If you don't mind my asking, darlin'—just who is 'we' and who is 'them'?"

  "We is me and Joel. Them is Ricky, Wainy, and Vasquez. Billy Hayes is dead."

  He nods.

  "You didn't mention that the other day."

  "I didn't much feel like describing how it happened."

  I nod to show him I understand. "Anyway, Vasquez refused to talk."

  "Figures."

  "Ricky and Wainy, on the other hand, they talked a lot."

  Dad dips a piece of chicken into the blackberry sauce, places it in his mouth. He's so calm, so thoroughly at ease, I wonder if I'm onto something after all.

  "They went off on riffs, the two of them. Lots of words but the underlying meaning wasn't clear." Again Dad smiles. "Still, thinking it over, I decoded some of it. You know, what they call the subtext."

  "I believe I've heard that word, on public television I think."

  "You're hilarious, Dad!"

  He grins. "Humor, they say, can sometimes leaven the load."

  I'm grateful he wants to lighten up. At least this time he isn't twisting his neck against his collar.

  "What I got out of it is more like a theory. Because, you see, though they were drinking and talking crazy, they were also careful about what they said. Maybe they thought we were recording them." I pause. "In fact, I was."

  "So, you got a theory, darlin', share it, why don't you?"

  I lay it out for him, first Ricky's numerous references to each cop's propensity for violence.

  "Billy Hayes's boxing skills, a hint that Vasquez might be cowardly. Wainy, he said, busted a few heads in his time. What he said about you is you could swing a nightstick good as anyone in Central Command."

  "And himself?"

  "He didn't say."

  "Ricky knew how to be a brute."

  "So that leaves us with a gang of five cops, four with tempers, capable of beating people up."

  "That's good." Dad smiles. "I'm impressed. Go on."

  "Ricky also made a point about how none of you were clumsy or dumb, none of you the type to bungle evidence. Yet somehow, by some mysterious process, you all seemed to become afflicted at the same time with this lose-the-evidence 'disease.'"

  Dad laughs. "Disease—I like that. Kind of sums it up."

  "What're you telling me?"

  "Just listenin', darlin'. You're the one doing the tellin'."

  I boil down Wainy's ravings. "First he boasted about how he and a fellow guard in Santa Cruz beat an amusement park intruder to a pulp a few nights before. Then he claimed to be harboring a secret about Sipple, which, if he told it, could hurt people including you." Dad doesn't blink. "Finally he admitted this secret concerned the location of what he referred to as 'that bag of ever-lovin' shit-eatin' fuck-all ev-eye-dense.'"

  "So, darlin', what'd you make of all that?"

  "That Wainy's still got a violent temper and that the Sipple evidence wasn't neglectfully lost, but stashed."

  "Putting that together with what Ricky told you, you come up with a pretty grim picture, right?"

  "Jesus, Dad! Do I have to spell it out?"

  "Only if you want to, darlin'."

  "You could put it together for me, couldn't you?"

  "I could," he says. "Let me think about it a little first."

  Suddenly I realize that what he's just said is about as far as I've been prepared to hear him go. Anything more and I'm not sure I can take it, anything less and I'll leave with the feeling he's a liar.

  "That was a load of crap you handed me the other day," I tell him. "About the guy who tied up Sipple maybe not even being the T killer. Or—what was your other theory? That maybe the whole Sipple incident was a plant—whatever that was supposed to mean."

  Dad stares at me, not blinking.

  "Why?"

  "Why what, darlin'?"

  "Why'd you try and mislead me?"

  "'If I did, you can be sure I had my reasons." He pauses. "Know something?" He smiles. "That I didn't succeed only makes me more prouder of you than ever!"

  I study him. He's showing me the face of a parent whose kid has just won a trophy. I realize he actually is proud his deception failed,

  I want to scream! What's going on? I turn to him. He's staring into my eyes.

  "What," I ask him, "what the ever-loving hell did the five of you guys do?"

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Even from the first moment Jack knew. That wasn't what he told Hale of course. He admitted nothing, played stupid, figuring that was his only way out of the jam. Still, he maintained, he knew from the first moment he walked in, and so did the others when they arrived . . . but damned if any of them would admit it.

  Soon as his eyes took in the scene—the nude kid bound, the tattoo equipment—he knew. He recognized the tattoo stuff because he and Rusty Quinn had worked bunko in Chinatown, and he'd been in a lot of tattoo parlors over those years. But it really wasn't that or anything else he consciously added up that told him this was a failed T killing. Rather it was the smell, the way the whole place stank of craziness and homicide.

  First task, he knew, was save the kid . . . if he wasn't already dead. But even as he moved in to wrestle the black leather hood off his head, his eyes probed the edges of the room to make sure the T killer wasn't still there.

  He wasn't. The room had an empty feel to it, yet there was this feeling of menace, too, something strong, powerful, that stank of hatred, cruelty, blood splashed and spilled, bones broken, tissue rent. There was a real smell too, the smell of an exotic brand of soap, sweet and spicy all at once, with something added to it, something unexpected, dark and black, and he knew what it was—the dark stifling smell of licorice.

  He got the hood off, saved the kid, worrying even as he did that he'd pick up something awful from his mouth. Not HIV, for no one knew about AIDS back then, but something vile like gonorrhea or syphilis the kid was nurturing in the warm wet swamp pit of his throat, acquired from giving blow jobs at the baths or whatever they did in there—Jack didn't like to think too much about stuff like that.

  Yet, despite his fear, he breathed for the kid, became his lungs until he felt him respond. Then he felt as good as he had in the twenty years he'd been on the force—because the best times for him had never been stopping a suspect or making a collar or sitting in a courtroom when a jury came in with a verdict. The good, the heady times were helping people, doing such small fine deeds as assisting a mother to find her lost child in the crowds on Stockton, or persuading some girl with dirty hair and scabs on her arms to get herself into detox before she caught pneumonia and died there on the Haight. This time it was saving this kid's life, because he hadn't the slightest doubt that if he'd walked up the hill instead of run, or taken his time about searching the flat before wrestling off the hood, the boy, who now lay before him spitting and puking, would be dead.

  Maggie, the middle-aged landlady from upstairs, was watching from the basement doorway horrified. Maybe it was the kid's nudity or the choking and vomiting or just that something so sordid was taking place in her house. Whatever, he ordered her back upstairs to call for an ambulance and extra cops, and then, when she was gone, took the kid's head in his lap, mopped his face, told him he was going to be okay and asked who had tied him up. The kid couldn't speak too well. He was in the twilight limbo state of a person who'd just crossed the line back from death. But he did manage to croak out a word that sounded like it was maybe a person's name, something like "Skelton," Jack thought, though he wasn't sure, and the kid was looking so distant and terrified he decided to let it rest awhile.

  Then it occ
urred to him there'd be no chance to pursue it, for the whole thing would soon be out of his hands. The T case was the biggest game in town, was, as everyone in the Department knew, the exclusive no-intruders-allowed province of the elite investigative unit headed by the city's top cop and press favorite, Inspector Jonathan Topper Hale.

  Billy Hayes was the first to show. The two of them always got along, so when Billy entered in that fighter's crouch he invariably used when he set foot in a room, as if entering a ring for a bout, Jack didn't say a word, just waited, curious how Billy would react. He wasn't surprised when Billy shot his bright blue little fighter's eyes around, took everything in, sniffed the air, blinked and said: "Bad, Jack. Bad!"

  What was bad about it? Jack wanted to know. But before he could ask, Billy came out with it himself:

  "It's the smell, ain't it—like you sniff sometimes around a gym when one fighter's beat up on another too hard, the murderous smell the trainers call 'the stink.'"

  Billy checked the kid's pulse, then Jack pointed out what the perp had left behind—the hood with its elaborate trussings, so sinister and black, fraught with hazard, pungent with his victim's vomit and sweat; the tattoo gear, old stuff, crude, acquired most likely third or fourth hand, and the sooty smell that came out of the jar of black tattooing ink; the hypodermic syringe lying on the wooden stool, full of some colorless viscous fluid with a cotton swab tucked carefully beneath its tip; finally, that thing you couldn't see, the aroma lingering over everything, strong enough to cut through the smell of the vomit and the ink, the sweet-acrid licorice scent of the soap.

  They sniffed it together without speaking, trying to track it to its source. It took them straight back to the kid, the skin of his torso though not his head or arms or legs. That's when Jack went into the bathroom to sniff at the soap in the depression of the sink. Nothing there, so he stuck his head through the greasy plastic shower curtain into the rusted sheet-metal stall, and this time he got a heavy hit. But the bar in the soap dish was ordinary, without a trace of the cloying odor, so he came back out, knelt beside the kid, said: "He washed you up first, didn't he—with his own soap too?"