The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  "I meant what I said, Kay." I wait for him to explain. "So proud you didn't give up. I tried to confuse you. I didn't want you to know. But deep inside I hoped you'd figure it out."

  "You taught me the importance of truth," I remind him. "So you see, I couldn't flinch."

  I walk him back to his bakery. At the door we embrace. Then I walk down to Arguello and catch the 33 bus. It follows a singular route, along the rim of Golden Gate Park, meanders through the Haight and the hills north of Twin Peaks, finally depositing me at the corner of Castro and Eighteenth, the intersection known informally as Hibernia Beach.

  It's magic time when I arrive, the sky still darkening, my favorite hour in the city. The Castro is alive, people going rapidly about their affairs while others linger against the sides of buildings or sit on benches observing the passing scene. An urgent young man with an AIDS petition gently importunes me. A smiling young woman, hair like straw, offers me condoms from a basket.

  Autumn chill has not discouraged the exposure of flesh. Here skin is always king. Tank tops abound, bare arms exhibit tattoos, hair glows, eyes glisten, men and women alike wear shorts to display attractive legs. Still too early for my meeting with Hilly, I decide to float with the crowd. As I walk pairs of eyes meet mine, lock in, then release me with a smile. This is the way here, and most of the time these street gazes are more ironic than lewd, gazes of what-might-have-been, wistful admiration exchanged. For a moment our lives cross, we esteem one another's beauty, then move on. The world turns, the clocks advance, yet for an instant we pause to acknowledge we share the earth and that each of us lives under the tyranny of his desire.

  I think of Dad's strange intersections that night fifteen years ago—breathing the breath of life into Robbie Sipple, kneeling beside Skeleton-man, feeling his life ebb away. Did Dad commit a crime? Did any of them besides Billy? Yes, of course, and I cannot condone what they did. But, with the possible exception of Vasquez, I forgive them. They've been punished enough.

  I pause at a pay phone, dial Joel. Ice Goddess Kirstin answers.

  "You are very missible here," she says in her Swedish-accented singsong. Does she mean I'm missed, admissible or merely miserable? Before I can ask she turns the phone over to Joel.

  "We need to talk. I know where the Sipple stuff is stashed."

  I can feel his excitement through the wire. "Your dad?"

  "He told me everything. We can break the T case, Joel, but we have to protect him and the others by blaming it all on Billy Hayes. He didn't tell me to do that, but it's the only way. He didn't even say dig it up or don't, just told me what happened and where it's buried." I pause, out of breath.

  "Can you come over?"

  "I'm meeting Hilly in half an hour. I'll drop by soon as we're finished."

  Hilly looks sloppy tonight, eyes tired, hair wild, not gelled. She's wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and grungy fatigues. I'm pleased she's not dressed hot.

  We attract no attention in our corner of The Duchess; it's clear we're not here to play. The loud scene swirling around us is fun. I enjoy the spectacle of funky women on the make. It's only the smoke I dislike, but then Hilly explains that here a cigarette dangling from a (preferably bee-stung) lip is considered a luscious come-on.

  "I'm beat," she informs me, applying her beer bottle to her brow. "Shanley gives me shit, Charbeau gives me shit. I'm onto something, but those oafs don't see it. It's a crappy life, Kay, being a cop."

  "Want to tell me about it?"

  "Not especially." She peers at me. "You called this meet. What's up?"

  I wonder why she's being secretive. Is she irritated with me or just feeling testy?

  "There's a pimp on the Gulch they call Knob," I tell her. "Don't ask me his real name—I've no idea. He wheels and deals, acts as middleman for underage hustlers. He hangs out with two kids, Tommy and Boat, runaways who think he's God."

  "So?"

  "They're the three beat me up in the park. Last week the kids vandalized my place while Knob stood lookout downstairs."

  "Great! Swear out a complaint. I'll pick 'em up."

  I explain why she can't, that my only witness is a park hermit terrified of the police. He won't testify and would be ineffective if he did.

  "So what's the connection to Tim Lovsey?"

  "Someone put Knob up to it, wanted me scared off. Why do that if he isn't the killer?"

  "How do you know someone put Knob up to it?"

  "Just a hunch. But I think there's a soft spot, the runaways. I hear the one called Boat is mushy. If you pick him up for soliciting, get him alone, put on pressure, there's a chance he'll break. So I was thinking—suppose you squeeze him, turn him against Tommy, then turn the two of them on Knob. With two witnesses ready to testify against him, maybe Knob'll say who ordered me hit."

  She studies me. "You got it all figured out."

  "Just a suggestion, Hilly."

  "You think like a cop."

  "Is that a compliment?"

  She smiles, sips some beer. "You're talking about entrapment. That's tricky business. There're all sorts of niceties—coercion, legal representation, 'fruit of the poisoned tree.' And it gets trickier when you're dealing with juveniles." She pauses. "This Knob—tell me more about him."

  I tell her what I heard from Doreen and Sho, that Knob's ruthless, and in effect rules the Gulch.

  She nods. "Probably got a record. Too bad you don't know his name."

  I show her the photo I took of him at The Werewolf. She examines it.

  "Looks like he's been around."

  "I could go through the mug books."

  "That's slow and a lot of times doesn't work. Prints are better. I can run them through the Automated Fingerprint ID System, A.F.I.S., do a national screening."

  "You want Knob's fingerprints? We'll get 'em!"

  She brightens up, we bring our heads close, quickly hatch a plan. After a while the butch bartender appears with another round of beers. An anonymous person has sent them over.

  "She doesn't want to be pointed out," the butch informs us, squinting down one eye, raising the corresponding nostril. "Said to say you guys look very friendly so she thought she'd act friendly too."

  Joel owns a run-down Victorian on Roosevelt Park Hill, not far from where Sipple lived in the upper Haight. The place has what realtors call "good bones," plus a fine rear-window view across the city to China Basin. A dusty granddaddy palm, centerpiece of a jungle, obscures the front of the house. Making my way beneath it, traipsing through a mesh of vines, I nearly trip over an abandoned rake. Joel, no surprise, is not big on domestic upkeep. A feral cat scoots beneath the stoop, gazes up at me, meows.

  I notice a mezuzah beside the door. Ice Goddess opens up. Her long hair is parted in the center; her large Nordic eyes sparkle with spirituality. Joel found this willowy young blonde shortly after Rachel Glickman dumped him, a week after their second daughter left home for college. Rachel, dark, homely, serious and brilliant, is a tenured professor of sociology at San Francisco State. Kirstin, fair, beautiful, bright only in the wattage of her smile, makes fabric collages and reads runes for pay.

  "Hi, Kay!" she moos.

  We embrace.

  "Am I still missible?" I ask.

  She stands back, perplexed. "Golly, I hope not!"

  So . . . whatever she was trying to tell me earlier will remain a mystery to us both.

  She leads me to Joel's office in the attic, a clone of his cubicle at the Bay Area News. No Pulitzer certificate here but a similar decor—cartoons posted on the walls, dog-eared books jammed top first into shelves, a chaos of clippings, manuscripts, articles in progress, an old manual Underwood on the desk. Joel claims to despise computers.

  He listens, fascinated, as I recount Dad's saga. When I'm finished he reminds me of one of my exchanges with Hale.

  "You pointed out he had conflicting theories," Joel says. "Remember what he said?"

  I think back. "Something like. . . once you understand what happ
ened the theories no longer conflict."

  Joel nods. "A tattoo-freak cute-boy T killer and a cop who gets rid of unwelcome evidence. Two separate crimes. Which means Hale more or less figured it out. Amazing!"

  Joel's right: it is amazing. Hale's statement, so cryptic at the time, now makes sense. So, I ask, does this mean we're going to tell him where the stuff is buried?

  Joel muses. "Obsessed old detective, forced out of his job, works the case fifteen years, finally finds missing evidence. Eureka! The old T case is solved!"

  "It's a good story, but I don't like it, Joel."

  "Neither do I." He starts to pace. "Hale's a paranoid and paranoids are dangerous. He won't buy that Billy Hayes did it all alone. He'll want to string up everyone . . . including your dad." He pauses. "Which leaves us with Hilly. All she wants is glory. She's got no axe to grind, so we can probably make a deal with her up front."

  "We could just let it go, couldn't we?" I ask.

  A knock on the door. Kirstin appears with a pot of herbal tea and three hand-painted Scandinavian cups.

  "I am thinking your thirsts would use a good quenching," she says.

  Joel smiles, the sweet my-heart-is-touched grin of an indulgent father whose daughter is showing off her goodness. Kirstin, I understand, is what he's always wanted: a shiksa innocent who reminds him of his time on the Haight—heroic days and nights of good dope, dumb talk and endless sex with doped-out girls wearing flowers in their stringy hair.

  Kirstin pours the tea, settles on a hassock, exposes milky thighs. She sips, then, apropos of nothing, announces she and Joel have decided to make a baby. I turn to Joel; he glows with pride. Sure, it figures—he could use a second crack at youth. I've seen plenty of gray-haired men like him trotting around supermarkets with papooses on their backs, filling grocery carts with baby chow and Pampers.

  He turns to me. "Could you bear to let it go?"

  There's a side of me, I recognize, that could, that would just as soon leave buried evidence in the ground, especially as I now know that the T case has nothing to do with Tim. But there's another part of me that can't stand the notion of leaving things incomplete, that, like Dad, wants to know who Skeleton-man was.

  "On what basis could Hilly get a warrant to dig?" I ask.

  Joel smiles. "Tip from a confidential informant—you and me, kiddo. Not all that far-fetched. She's investigating the T case angle on the Tim Lovsey homicide. She starts asking around about the old case. Someone calls, tells her where the evidence is buried. She goes to a judge, says her source is reliable. Judge scowls. . . but lets her dig."

  Kirstin's tea tastes of bitter herbs. I can barely stomach it, but Joel sips as if it's ambrosia. I suddenly wonder if Kirstin holds him in thrall with more than sex, with spells and secret potions.

  "What about Debbie Hayes, Billy's widow?"

  "I doubt she knows anything, and even if she does she won't make a fuss. She's getting Billy's pension. She won't want to screw that up."

  "So Billy goes down as the bad guy?"

  Joel shrugs. "In a major sense he was."

  Kirstin, following our dialogue like a spectator at a tennis match, doesn't have a clue as to what we're talking about. Still I sense she's hurt at being ignored. When I turn to thank her for the tea, she flashes me a grateful smile.

  "If it all works out," Joel says, "we'll be handing Hilly fame beyond her dreams."

  "And if that encourages her to get to the bottom of who killed Tim, she'll deserve it," I reply.

  I've no idea where Drake gets his food; the groceries I leave for him couldn't sustain a child. Where does he find the water he needs—to drink, bathe, launder his clothes? Where does he sleep when it's cold, store his covers when it rains, go to the toilet, shampoo his hair? When he ventures out of Sterling Park, where does he go? How can he survive in a wood the size of half a city block?

  The homeless, I understand, have survival strategies, holes and caches, stocks of booty. Some get by collecting aluminum cans, others barter, still others find saleable treasure scrounging trash. There are soup kitchens in church basements, shelters offering toilets and hot showers, and the urban parks where they reside can be gold mines to those who know how to live off the detritus of a wealthy town.

  I sit with Drake side by side on a bench, he, as always, perched as far from me as he can get. Filled with feelings yet unable to form attachments, he likes me at a distance, even loves me in his way, but up close I frighten him, am too solid, too real. Better a fantasy woman glimpsed at night through a window from afar than a live palpable female person seated in broad daylight three feet away.

  The trees break up the sunlight, scatter it upon his face. We talk about his future. He hopes to go back to school one day, resume studying chemistry. He's from Oregon, misses the rain. His favorite color is green. He has a sister. Photochemistry is interesting. Do I use Kodak Dektol? Do I believe someone really wants me dead?

  His non sequiturs touch me.

  "Do you think someone does?" I ask.

  He turns away, nods. "I do," he says gravely. "But he will have to kill me first."

  We're cruising slowly along Polk in Hilly's old Volvo, the kind that in California seems to last forever. Hilly is driving, I'm in the passenger seat, an actor named Rob Mathews is in back.

  Rob's in his forties, well groomed, dressed tonight like an affluent dentist. I met him a few years ago when I did some fashion photography for his wife, an ad exec. He's a member of the company at Berkeley Rep, specializing in middle-aged character roles. He's intrigued, he tells me, by the proposed gig.

  "Never played a chicken hawk before," he says, stroking his mustache. "But how tough can it be? I like girls in their twenties, so why not boys in their teens?"

  Hilly guffaws.

  Rob leans forward. He's eager, wants to internalize the role. "How should I behave? Timid or bold?"

  "Either way," I tell him. "Some guys are cocky, most are scared. They know if they get caught they'll lose everything, job, wife, kids. You gotta be obsessed to take the risk."

  Rob understands.

  "There he is." I point out Knob as we cruise by. He's standing alone in his usual spot between Bush and Sutter, back propped against a wall beside an all-male video store.

  "Looks mean," Rob says.

  "Is mean," I tell him. I slink down in my seat in case Knob looks up.

  Hilly asks Rob if he wants her to make another pass. Rob says that isn't necessary, he saw Knob clear enough. Hilly drives two blocks, turns the corner, cuts over to Larkin, stops.

  "What's my best lead-in?"

  I turn to Rob. He's cool. In his shoes I'd have the jitters.

  I advise: "Tell Knob you hear he's the man to see. He'll probably pretend he doesn't know what you're talking about. If he asks who steered you to him, just say 'a friend.' If he insists on a name tell him you can't give it up, it's a matter of personal honor. He'll laugh. . . but that'll build his confidence. Offer to buy him a drink."

  Hilly hands him an envelope. "The photos inside are sterile. Hand them to him discreetly at the bar. Tell him this is the type of kid you want—young, long hair, smooth. Since you don't want him to think he's being set up, make a big point that for legal reasons you don't want a kid under eighteen. What you want is someone who looks underage. Can he fix you up?"

  "Great! But what if he does?"

  "He won't. Not tonight. Too risky," Hilly says. "You'll have to see him two or three times before he'll agree to do business. Show him you understand this, that you came by to get acquainted, build trust. The important thing is to get his prints on the photos. Don't worry if you touch them. We'll eliminate yours, go for what's left."

  Rob nods, gets out of the car. Hilly and I wish him luck then take off. We've agreed to meet him in an hour at the Buena Vista. We drive for a time, threading through the Tenderloin. It's a weekday night; people are hanging out. The hotels down here don't rate neon signs. You can see the stains on the window shades even from the street.


  "Jesus, what a gutter!" Hilly says.

  "I don't know, it doesn't seem all that bad."

  She glances at me. "Yeah, you can say that. You live up on Russian. No whores or homeless up there. The air's sweet. You got a pretty view. Every once in a while you come down, take a few pictures, then go back up. That's fine, Kay. But reality's down here where it stinks full-time.'

  "Ah," I say, "the cynical cop!"

  "You bet!" She bites her lip.

  I'm annoyed. I don't like being patronized. I decide to smack her back.

  "Of course you don't slum around," I tell her. "With your cozy flat in the Castro, your cat, your lifestyle, your hot dyke bars. Give me a break, Hilly. I take a few pictures, you make a few arrests—after which we both go home. Frankly, I don't see the difference."

  She chews on that as we run a gauntlet of addicts clustered around the door to a Cambodian restaurant.

  "You're right. I'm feeling mean tonight. Sorry to take it out on you."

  "What's the matter?"

  "The job. Believe me, I could tell you a few things."

  "Please do,"' I urge.

  Again she bites her lip. Then it comes, the torrent. Charbeau, she tells me, has been riding her. Last week he called her in, told her she wasn't cutting it. When she asked what was wrong he said it wasn't her work, it was the way she strutted around. "I got nothing against female detectives," he told her, "fact I think they're great. What I can't stand is anyone, male or female, who fucks me up with a colleague."

  She knew immediately he was talking about Vasquez. "You don't mess with a guy like that," Charbeau told her. "Whatever you think of him, you don't talk to him the way you did."

  I ask if this goes back to the incident by the elevators. Hilly shakes her head. "Something else. He blew up when I asked him about the soap."

  She pulls into a bus stop, cuts the engine. Though I've no idea what she's going to say, I feel my pulse speed up.

  "There's stuff I didn't tell you," she says. "I first noticed it out at Wildcat Canyon after Shanley sent you home. Timothy's torso had been washed with a very strong type of medicinal soap, so strong you could still smell it on him in the rain. Sweet and peppery. Like licorice."