The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  Some photographers I know hire a printer, but I like printing too much to farm it out. Choosing the paper, selecting contrast, exposure time, burning, and dodging—I never find the process dull. And the fact that it's slow and must be done by hand adds to the pleasure. Available-light street photography is quick; one shoots fast, guided by instinct. Making prints is more like working with traditional art materials, paint or clay or wood.

  The treasure trove discovered behind Debbie Hayes's garage yields nothing in the way of fingerprints. Perhaps Skeleton-man wore gloves or time or moisture eroded whatever prints were there. It doesn't matter; in the end it's the hood that takes hold of Hilly's mind.

  Well on her way to earning Hale's old title "San Francisco's smartest cop," she and Joel try to run it down, trekking leather store to leather store, smoothly working their way into the Bay Area leather-sex community.

  Hilly's lesbianism and Joel's Pulitzer prize don't hurt, opening up doors which an ordinary team would probably not discover were there. Within days they are able to set up a meeting with several senior leather community people, aging experts on the arcane history of their scene. I'm invited, in my role as project photographer, to document the gathering.

  Our host is Chet Bellows, a vivacious, charming, grizzled survivor of gay life. White-haired, in his late sixties, decked out in leather vest and worn black leather chaps, he greets us from the window of his Folsom Street loft, when we call up to him from the street.

  "Catch!" he yells, throwing down the building key in what turns out to be a knotted sock. Hilly gracefully scoops it from the air, unlocks the building door. We enter a dark lobby, ascend in a freight elevator, then, upstairs, emerge into another world. The loft is spacious, beautifully furnished with antiques, there are good paintings by Bay Area artists on the walls, and case after case exhibiting a vast eclectic collection of books.

  Chet introduces us around: David, Fred, Bill, Adam and Cindy, all dressed casually in gear. No giggling here, these are serious scene leaders, "wise-persons" Chet calls them, working on an oral-history project that will document gay and lesbian leather culture as it grew and changed in San Francisco over the past thirty years.

  We help ourselves to beer, then Chet introduces Hilly, who explains what she's looking for and shows the gathering what she's got. The wise-persons are fascinated by the hood, which they pass among themselves, commenting on its fine craftsmanship and design.

  "Stitching reminds me of Al Jameson's work," Cindy says. "Also the fittings look like his."

  The hood makes another round. The men agree: "Does look like a Jameson piece."

  "What happened to Al?"

  "Died of AIDS in '83."

  "His old lover, Dan Fowler—he's still around. I saw him on line at the Castro Theatre a few weeks back."

  "Dan'd know for sure."

  "Shouldn't be hard to find him."

  Chet Bellows goes to the phone, makes a couple of calls, reaches Fowler, who says he'll be happy to come over and give us his opinion on the hood.

  While we wait for him, the group reminisces about the T case and what it meant to them at the time, how they feared a backlash from a normally tolerant city on account of the awful brutality of the crimes.

  "We were scared," Cindy says. She's a friendly stout woman in her forties, short gray hair, pale eyes, beatific smile. "Back then most folks didn't understand what we do is the opposite of sadistic murder."

  "Safe, sane, and consensual," Adam adds. "A lot of folks still don't get it."

  As they talk I'm impressed by their gentleness, intelligence, commitment to social justice. These are bright, friendly people who hold down sophisticated jobs: Chet's a retired professor of psychology, Cindy's a midwife, Fred's a computer programmer, Adam's an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, Bill's a flight instructor, and David's an attorney. I can feel the strong bonds of affection between them, forged by years together on the barricades.

  "We're queer and we love it," Chet tells us. "We're also a despised minority. We've found the best way to confront our detractors is with solidarity, openness and shared humanity. 'We're your children and you're ours'—that's the essence of our message."

  Dan Fowler arrives. A tall, thin, bespectacled, weathered-face guy in his fifties, he wears faded jeans, boots, a wrangler's' jacket, and carries a beaten-up attaché case.

  "Oh, certainly—this is one of Al's," he says, taking hold of the hood. "His stitching, his fittings." Although the police lab removed the mold, they couldn't resuscitate the leather. Still Dan fondles it. "He always used best quality hide."

  Dan opens his case, pulls out an oversize ledger, leafs through it. "I kept his old design-and-order book."

  I catch Joel's eye, then we both turn to Hilly. She cranes forward as Dan stops several times to examine drawings of full-head hoods. Finally, he nods.

  "Sure, here it is, order number S-H17." He drums his forefinger on the design, hands the ledger to Hilly. "'S' is for special, 'H' is for hood. This was the seventeenth special-order hood Al made. It's all there—date, customer name, and address."

  I read the data over Hilly's shoulder: Burton Boyt Quint, 110 Moraga Street, San Francisco.

  Hilly, Joel, and I pile into Melvin, then drive off into the cold night to view Quint's old address. I'm thrilled, Hilly is frothing, Joel is trying to stay cool but I can sense he's excited too.

  It's a miracle, we all agree, that Chet Bellows's group identified the deceased leatherworker, and that his surviving companion kept his order book as a memento of the man he loved.

  Moraga is in the Sunset, the vast grid of residential streets south of Golden Gate Park that extends to the Pacific Ocean. It's often foggy here, perhaps the foggiest district in the city. Most of the homes are modest two-story flat-roofed cubes erected side by side, painted in what I'm told are pastel hues. The population now is largely Asian-American, but fifteen years ago there was more of a mix. Since Burton Boyt Quint has long since been sent to swim with the fishes, our purpose is simply to find his building, gaze at it, take in the vibes.

  It's a dollhouse sort of place, simple one-story bungalow with garage on one side and narrow strip of lawn on the other. It's small, innocuous, and lonely on account of that extra bit of land on an avenue where nearly every other structure abuts its neighbors.

  "Perfect place to do bad stuff," Joel says.

  Hilly squints as she peers at the house. "Like cut guys up," she says.

  Silence. In fact, it turns out, we're all thinking the same thing: What if some of the missing heads and limbs are buried beneath that grass or walled up in the cellar?

  "You got your work cut out," Joel tells Hilly, "that is, if Quint's the one."

  "He's the one." There's something prideful in her now. An enormous success is within her grasp. She can feel it, can already taste the spoils.

  "What'll you do now?"

  "Backtrack the name," Hilly says, "come up with a Social Security number. Check military, school, voting and car-registration records. Look through old phone books and trace the ownership of the house. We know the T killer had access to a car if only to carry and dump his torsos. What happened to it? What sort of job did Quint have? When did he disappear? Who was this guy?"

  Joel looks at me. "There's one more thing we can tell you," he says to Hilly, "to help you stay on track. It's the only other thing we know and you must promise you'll never ask us how we know or reveal it to anyone."

  Hilly agrees; how could she not, since we're offering her the keys to the law enforcement treasury? Joel describes the full-body red skeleton tattoo on the T killer's arms, legs and ribs. If Hilly can turn up someone who knew Burton Boyt Quint and recalls a tattoo like that, then, Joel tells her, she's found her man.

  Long days in the darkroom trying to produce expressive prints. In a book of photographs, no matter how fine the gravure process, some quality is always lost. As I work I think of my tonal fields—glove-soft grays, glistening whites, velvety blacks—as my palette
. In that limited but expressive range, I feel I can convey any color that exists.

  Sometimes I stop work to think about the differences between the cases: Quint and the old T case; Crane's murder of Tim. Skeleton-man's crimes, brutal and sinister as they were, contained at least some mystery and passion. But what Crane did to Tim strikes me as utterly, irredeemably evil.

  Sasha warms me. After difficult days, I revel in his arrivals at night. Then the feel of his hard dark body, silken skin, the look of his gorgeous deep liquid eyes. In bed he whispers sweet intimacies into my ear. I adore that he whispers, no matter that no one's around to overhear. It's as if we inhabit a country of our own, a dark secret country of love.

  Why, I wonder, did it take me so long to come to love him? Surely not on account of any deficiency of his, Sasha being not only beautiful but wonderful as well. And, I tell myself, I must be careful not to blame the Judge. No, the fault was purely mine, my inability, my lack, something that froze up inside when Tim was killed, which only Sasha could warm and melt.

  Hilly's making good progress, Joel tells me. If her investigation pans out, it'll be the crime story of the decade. Charbeau and Shanley no longer mess with her, are much too awed and scared. She's been on the fast track since she broke the Lovsey case. It's only a matter of time, they know, before she's given a command position. Joel says she's aiming for chief of Homicide, and if she solves the T case, she may just get it . . . and more.

  I drop by Cherry Street to see Dad. There's a new openness between us, has been since he made what we both now smilingly refer to as his "confession." He tells me he's thinking of expanding his social life, which will mean cooling things down with Phyllis. He'd like to get out more, he says, meet new people. The notion of him dating makes me smile.

  Drake has disappeared. I haven't seen him in days. Twice I leave him food packages; both times they remain untouched. Has something happened to him? Is he ill? Or has he simply moved away?

  I wish he'd contact me, even as I know maintaining relationships is not his forte. Just as he used to glide in and out of the shadows, so now he seems to have drifted from Sterling Park. But to what sort of life? Though he was difficult to talk to, I miss him more than I'd have thought. And a good part of my sorrow comes from the knowledge that if he has left for good, I know no way to find him again.

  Hilly has turned up a lot on Burton Boyt Quint, including the fact that he disappeared around the time Sipple was attacked.

  His car, a 1979 Ford Mustang, probably stolen from the Haight, was discovered abandoned a few weeks later on Bluxome Street near the CalTrain depot. A Streets Environment tow truck dutifully pulled it to the pound, where, after the requisite thirty days, it was auctioned off.

  Quint never renewed his California driver's license or car registration. A month and a half after his disappearance, his landlord, one Kam Yong Choi, had his furniture, clothing, and possessions removed from the Moraga Street house, stored them 120 days and then, in accordance with California law, put them up for auction, the receipts to cover Quint's unpaid rent.

  Quint worked in a print shop on upper Geary. The company disposed of its old employment records long ago. But one senior worker vaguely recalls him as ''the quiet guy who one day stopped showing up."

  No one on Moraga Street remembers him, but few of the neighbors were living there fifteen years ago. Landlord Choi passed away, the house was sold by his estate, is now the property of a wealthy Vietnamese who leases it out to an immigrant Chinese family, and has neither the interest nor the obligation to allow S.F.P.D. to take it apart.

  Tattoos: Hilly wishes she could work that angle, round up old-timers in the tattoo community the way she and Joel gathered the wise-persons of leather-sex. But since she has no justification for asking about a set of red skeleton tattoos, she's at a loss how to proceed.

  Joel and I take her to dinner in North Beach, persuade her that her goal of nailing the T killer's identity down one hundred percent will probably not be met. What she should do now, Joel suggests, is write a report to the chief of police on everything she's discovered, making a strong circumstantial case that Quint and the T killer were one and the same. And if the Department chooses not to release it, Joel will write a front-page story depicting Hilly's quest to solve the city's most perplexing series of unsolved crimes.

  "It'll almost be better than nailing Quint," Joel tells her. "You'll be seen as a dedicated detective who left no stone unturned. You followed the trail as far as it went. Most people will believe Quint's the guy, and that little shadow of doubt will make the saga even better."

  Hilly mulls over that, decides she likes it. "It really is better," she says. "Like having a new lover, when there's still a little mystery left."

  Judd' s lawyer, Jeremiah Waldroon, makes a deal with Pat Chu: Judd will plead guilty to one count of solicitation of corruption in return for testimony against Vasquez. The agreement calls for Judd to serve two-to-six in the country club prison in Chino. In addition he'll permanently give up his right to practice law.

  Peter "Roy" Royal, on the other hand, has not yet come to terms. Pat Chu is pressuring him to implicate Sarah Lashaw, but Roy is holding out, at least for now. Pat believes Lashaw is paying Roy to take the fall.

  "God knows, she can afford it," Pat says.

  The end of February brings heavy showers. The city is washed clean by days of driving rain. I find myself depressed. Exposures, which was going so well, has bogged down. The stream of images which, a month ago, seemed to flow so well, now strikes me as awkward, at times even forced. Tim's story is so complex there are times when even I get lost. I think of Mom, the last months of her life, trying over and over to play through Schubert's B-flat sonata, forever stumbling over the repeats, unable to find and play the climax.

  Sasha tries to help. He suggests I get out of the house, start a new project or take time off, anything to stop staring out at the rain. I'm too isolated, he says, too wrapped up in work. I need stimulation, fun, something to make me laugh. I disagree. What I need, I think, is illumination, a flash of brilliant light.

  The last day of the month, six p.m. Magic time is over. I'm gazing out at the dark sodden city. It's been a windy umbrella-shredding sort of day, about as miserable here as it can get.

  The phone rings. Dazed, I pick up.

  "Hi, Kay! It's Courtney Hill."

  The voice is familiar, but for a moment I can't place the name.

  "'You said if I ever heard anything about Amoretto to let you know."

  Suddenly I'm alert.

  "This isn't definite. . . but then nothing about her is." Courtney laughs. "An ex-boyfriend of mine, part of our old Hard Candy crowd, thinks he saw her down in Mexico a couple weeks ago. He was there on vacation, thought he saw her crossing the street. He called out to her, but she didn't turn. He tried to follow her, but it was night and then he lost her in the gloom. He isn't positive, mind you. She looked different, he says. Older maybe. But the way she moved—if it wasn't her, he says, it could have been her twin."

  I try to steady my voice. "Where in Mexico?"

  "Resort town up in the mountains, San Miguel de Allende. Cool place, full of expatriates. You might like it, Kay. They got some kind of art school there."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After a dawn flight from San Francisco, total chaos in the Mexico City airport, then a four-hour bus trip, I arrive finally at San Miguel. It's five p.m., the sun is low, the light soft, magic time has just begun. Within minutes of starting out on my first exploratory walk I understand I've arrived at some kind of paradise.

  The air here, scented by flowers, is cool and dry. The hills above town are ridged with ancient stone terraces; the plains below are studded with cacti. But it's San Miguel itself that seems enchanted. Striding its steep, narrow, cobblestone streets, I feel myself slipping into a trance state, spellbound by the aura of old Mexico—shadowed, timeless, serene.

  Through partially opened doors I catch glimpses of courtyards, hear the g
urgle of fountains, smell the rich aroma of blooming plants. By the time I reach the main square, the paseo has already begun. Mariachi musicians, pants embellished with silver disks, play a bullfighter's march, while hundreds of young people circulate along covered sidewalks before an approving audience of elders seated in cafés.

  I start taking pictures. Grave young men in tight jeans pace in one direction; smiling, beribboned girls move along in pairs in the other. It's a mating dance of quick glances, bold looks, flashing eyes. As the sun fails and the shadows lengthen, the intensity of this public courtship builds. A swarm of bats swoops into the air; a flock of cawing blackbirds settles on the tops of the pollarded laurel trees. The last rays of slanting light hit building facades, etching out details—baroque balconies, carved escutcheons—causing the walls to glow as if lit from within.

  A three-legged dog limps across El Jardin, the local name for the Plaza Principal, then disappears up a narrow street. Prowling the square, I suddenly find myself face-to-face with a bent old man. He's a commercial street photographer, packing up his huge view camera for the day. His portable stand, already shut, is plastered with snapshots—young couples posed stiffly before the soaring wedding-cake facade of the town cathedral.

  Darkness falls, the air turns chilly, lights come on in branching iron streetlamps built like enormous candelabra. The courtship ritual reaches a peak. Bells start tolling; nuns scurry across the El Jardin on their way to vespers. I huddle in my leather jacket, hands deep in my pockets. Are you here, Ariane? How will I find you in this maze of angled streets, courtyards, barricaded doors?

  Setting out in the morning I devise a plan. I'll explore the town block by block, resting in restaurants and cafés; after dark I'll hang out in bars and cantinas, and late at night at discos, the sort of places where, in San Francisco, Amoretto found her prey. I will give myself five days. San Miguel is small, compact. Unless Ariane is in seclusion, sooner or later our paths should cross.