by Julie Smith
“He said where he was from, then?”
“Yeah. Said he was a rancher. They have ranches in Gallup?”
Rob shrugged. “I’m not sure. Did he—”
“Said he owned half the state of New Mexico. Tell me about it, man! He got that satin shirt at the local J. C. Penney’s; in the basement, probably. Synthetic City, know what I mean?”
Rob laughed. “Rhinestone cowboy?”
“Didn’t even have boots. He was wearing Adidas.”
Rob got serious. “Well, he’s naked now. Lying on a slab.”
That sobered Jake up. He shivered. “Dead. You don’t think… ?”
“I think he met someone here who killed him.”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Jake.
“Did he leave with anyone?”
“Omigod. Yeah. He did. There was this other cowboy type…”
“Someone you knew?”
“No. He was weird, though. I should have known he was weird. Terry liked him.”
“Terry?”
“Yeah. Terry Yannarelli. Lives around the corner—you can talk to him if you want.”
“Terry liked him,” said Rob, “but he didn’t leave with him?”
“No. That’s the weird part. There’s guys in this neighborhood who’d kill to go home with Terry. I don’t go in for that clean-cut type myself, but he’s Mr. Star Boarder—I give him free drinks every night just to keep him here.”
“A drawing card, is he?”
“Regular little belle of the ball.”
“But Rhinestone’s friend didn’t like him.”
Jake said, “It’s coming back to me now. Terry sent him a drink and he came over and talked. But only for about five minutes. Never seen it happen before.”
“Maybe the guy didn’t go in for the clean-cut type. What’d he look like?”
Jake got a faraway look, as if trying very hard to remember. Rob prompted: “Good-looking?”
“Damned if I know. He had on shades and a cowboy hat, pulled down.”
“Anything else?”
“Beard. Couldn’t tell much, really. Mystery man. Jesus, he must be the murderer.”
Rob nodded.
“Come to think of it, he wasn’t dressed right either. For the hat. Jeans; that was okay. But he had on this kind of ordinary shirt.”
“Synthetic City?”
“I don’t know. Just ordinary. Jeez. A murderer. You know what?” said Jake. “Nobody else was interested in that poor dude.”
“The murderer?”
“No. Rhinestone. He couldn’t attract flies, you know? I should have given him a free beer. You know what about that guy?”
“Rhinestone?” Rob sounded confused.
“No. The murderer.”
“What?”
“His beard looked kind of fake.”
I almost said, “Synthetic City?” but stopped myself in the nick of time.
We’d drawn quite a little crowd by now, and a buzzing had started. The regulars had caught on that a man had come into the bar last night and picked up someone and killed him. It was now occurring to them that it could have happened to anyone; that this sort of thing had happened before—and when it happened once, it usually happened twice, and three times. The gay version of Jack the Ripper.
Rob got Terry’s address from Jake and nodded, as we left, to the little group of bar buzzers. “Fear stalks,” he said.
“Huh?”
“That’s my follow story. ‘Fear Stalks the Streets; Lunatic on the Loose.’”
“We don’t know that. It sounds as if the killer went straight for Rhinestone—I mean Sanchez; he must have known him.”
“Yeah, but it’ll still make a pretty decent follow.”
I bit my tongue to avoid a fight.
If Terry Yannarelli was really Italian, he must have had a nose job—either that or his mother’s name was McGillicuddy. He was a regular-featured redhead, but not the freckled kind; he had kind of gold skin that looked as if it had more than a passing acquaintance with a sun lamp. I could see what the guys saw in him. He was wearing only a towel when he opened the door, so I could see pretty well. He had excellent muscle definition, the kind guys get from working out three times a week. He was definitely eager to talk.
“I knew there was something funny about that guy. I told Jake—did he tell you? I knew it. He said it was sour grapes.”
“You talked to him for a while?”
“Hell, no—I tried, but he didn’t want to talk. Plain wasn’t interested. Asked me where I was from and that was about it. I said, ‘I live around the corner,’ and gave him a wink, you know. That usually gets ’em. Jake thinks they like me because I’m cute, but, really, it’s because I’m geographically desirable. The straight ones especially like that.”
“The straight ones?”
“You know. The ones with a wife and kids at home—that come to Castro Street once a month or so. They like to go around the corner for a quickie. I’ll tell you something—that’s my weakness.”
“Quickies?”
“Straight ones. I can always spot ’em.”
“And this guy was straight?”
“Bet on it. He killed that old guy, didn’t he? That’s the kind that gets weird. They hate themselves because they’re gay, so they want to beat up on gay guys.”
“They beat up on you?”
“Sometimes. That’s not the part I like. I like the danger.”
I spoke for the first time, unable to keep quiet: “But you could have been killed—doesn’t that frighten you?”
He shrugged. “I can take care of myself. That’s probably what it was, come to think of it—he didn’t think he could take me. I knew there was something funny about him.”
“One more question,” said Rob. “Did he tell you his name?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, he did. Now, what the hell was it?”
We kept quiet, trying not to interrupt his train of thought. “Lee, maybe,” he said at last.
“You sure?”
“No, but something like that.”
“Last name?”
“He didn’t say. Listen, you want to take my picture or anything?”
4
And that was how Terry Yannarelli got the fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol assures us we will all achieve. Rob sent a photographer over and Terry made page one. Needless to say, so did I, though not my picture—only an account of my having accompanied intrepid reporter Rob Burns on his latest body-discovering expedition.
There were no plane crashes that day, no presidential surgery, and no uncovered civic corruption—indeed no other news of interest except an announcement of an early mussel quarantine. So the body on the cross was the lead story. Neither the Reverend Ovid Robinson nor Miranda Warning was mentioned—omissions I found oddly disappointing, but rereading the story, I didn’t see how Rob could have worked them in without digressing. It was a tight, well-told tale, and I wished I weren’t in it.
I was greeted at the office by my mother’s voice—or at least a first-rate facsimile: “Rebecca. Your father is lying down. The doctor says he may possibly be all right, though no thanks to you.”
“Alan, I am now going to count to five—”
“I just don’t see why you can’t find some nice boy like Mickey and stop tripping over bodies.”
“Very good, Alan—you get an Academy Award. Just shut up!”
“You’re almost thirty, you know, and your thighs are already getting kind of mushy.”
“There is nothing wrong with my goddamn thighs!”
“Nothing three miles a day wouldn’t fix.” He dropped the falsetto and went back to his normal voice. “You can run with Mickey on her prenatal exercise program. You gotta look good at the wedding.”
“I’ll accept you as a brother-in-law the day Charlie Manson gets out of jail—that is, if Charlie isn’t available.”
“Some aunt. Don’t you want your nephew to have a name?”
“Sure. Sc
hwartz would be great. Or Yannarelli, maybe. Just so long as it isn’t Kruzick.”
I stomped past him into my office. I was definitely going to have to work on my attitude. Whether I liked it or not, I figured there was about a fifty-fifty chance I was really going to have Mr. Wonderful for a brother-in-law. Mickey’d shown poor judgment so for; it was too much to hope she was really smartening up.
“Why do I always have to read everything in the paper? You find a body nailed to a cross and you don’t even tell your nearest and dearest?” It was Mom’s voice again, but now it was coming out of Chris’s mouth. She was standing in my office doorway.
“I get the strangest feeling there’s an echo in here.”
“An echo?”
“We’ve got to fire Kruzick; you’re already sounding like him. What if you start to look alike?”
“My nose is getting longer already.” I laughed. Kruzick had a healthy schnoz, but Chris was six feet tall and her nose was in proportion; on her it looked elegant. “Who killed that poor man?”
“In the Castro, they seem to think it was a freak who hates gays.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
I shook my head. “I’m not even sure either one of them was gay. The killer—Lee or whoever he is—dumped the beauteous Terry Yannarelli for poor old Sanchez. I think maybe he already knew him. If Lee wasn’t gay and had simply arranged to meet Sanchez at the Yellow Parrot—maybe not even knowing it was a gay bar—that would explain it, wouldn’t it?”
“You mean they had a date and Terry horned in? But couldn’t that have happened if they were both gay?”
“Yes, but Terry thinks Lee was straight. It could just be ego, but there was a woman on the hill who said Sanchez was her man.”
I explained about Miranda, and then Chris left me to a pile of messages from various reporters in competition with the Chronicle. Out of loyalty to my true love, I declined to return their calls. Instead, I phoned Rob to brag about my faithfulness—and just happened to ask what was new.
“He was definitely gay. No question about it. Item one—he was staying at the Oscar Wilde Hotel. What does that tell you? Item two—I talked to his family in Gallup this morning. He had never once, not even in junior high, been known to have the slightest interest in females. Even a female horse. Item three—I had his sister poll the whole family and not one of them ever heard the name Miranda.”
“So who is she?”
“That would seem to be the key question—but for one. Dinner tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
And then I applied myself to my thriving practice. I’d been involved in a couple of murders before and noticed that they played hell with getting my work done. I thanked my stars I wasn’t really in the middle of this one. But the next night over Hunan food so hot I had to drink three beers, Miranda was still on my mind.
We were walking back to my place when I had my great idea: “Suppose she wasn’t Sanchez’s lover.”
“I have been. Haven’t you?”
“I mean, she has to fit in someplace. Maybe Lee was her man.”
Rob quit walking and stared at me. “Miss Schwartz. You may have something there.”
“So maybe she caught Lee with Sanchez and killed him out of jealousy.”
“Unlikely. She was too drunk, don’t you think? And not strong enough to get him on the cross.”
“That’s not the half of it. She’d have killed Lee, not Sanchez. At least I would. Kill you, I mean.”
He kissed my ear. “Um. Would you? With the knife or the candlestick?”
“The knife. Naturally. But suppose she lied about the way it happened.”
“You’re brilliant tonight. Like I said, I’ve been so supposing, haven’t you?”
“What if she were Lee’s woman and for some reason Lee thought Sanchez was having an affair with her, which he wasn’t, being gay. But anyhow, that’s why Lee killed him.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Chris says that, according to southern tradition, if you’re drunk and get laid, it doesn’t count. She says lots of southern women who’ve been to bed with half the men in the county still haven’t lost their virginity.”
“So if we make love it won’t count?”
“Nope. We’ll wake up as pure as Mormon missionaries.”
“I just remembered a previous engagement.” Sometimes Rob didn’t like it when I acted silly.
On the other hand, he did like it when I’d had a few beers and felt like staying up making love far too late on a weeknight. Which was what we ended up doing and why we decided to spend the next couple of nights recuperating instead of seeing each other. So naturally when Rob phoned Friday morning, I assumed he was merely missing me and eager to confirm our mud-bath date. But then I realized he sounded far too excited. “I want to read you something.”
“Okay.”
“It just came in the mail. I think it’s from the killer.”
“Read.”
“‘Dear Mr. Burns: I’m glad you were the one who discovered the body. You have always been my favorite Chronicle reporter; so here is a tip. Look for action at Pier 39.’ It’s signed, ‘Tourist Trapper.’”
“Tourist Trapper! Sanchez was a tourist.”
“And Pier 39 is tourist heaven. I don’t like to think about the implications.”
“You really think it’s real?”
“I’m afraid I do. You’re always hearing about the police getting crank letters, but reporters don’t. The last time I remember anything like this was back in the sixties.”
“The Zodiac?”
“Yeah. Paul Avery was the reporter who covered the killings—the Zodiac decided Avery’d make a good pen pal.”
“The letters ran in the paper. I remember them.”
“Yes, but only after extensive conferences with the cops. It was decided that—”
“Don’t tell me. The public had a right to know.”
“Well? Don’t you think that’s right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is some crank this time.”
“Let’s hope. Meanwhile, I’ve got to spend the day conferring with cops and editors. The last thing I want to do. You busy tonight?”
“Why, no, Rob—I’d just love to go to Pier 39. That’s my idea of a dream date.”
“Pick you up at seven. We’ll make it an early evening since we’re driving to Calistoga tomorrow.”
* * *
Know-nothing easterners with an unreasonable prejudice against what they call “kooks and gays,” as if the two groups are really one, should only know about Pier 39, a melanoma on the cheek of San Francisco. As late as 1976, it was indeed a pier; a scant thirteen months later, it was a municipal scandal of a shopping complex that looks vaguely like a misplaced New England fishing village, though some say it’s meant to evoke the Victorian era as translated by the Old West. It’s “weathered,” at any rate, or perhaps it better deserves that term applied to ersatz antique furniture—“distressed.” Distressed is certainly the way it makes the natives feel, those of us, at least, who do not operate shops or restaurants within its ticky-tacky confines.
One of us smart enough to know a lucrative thing when he saw it was our erstwhile city supervisor, Dan White, a kook who hated gays enough to gun down his fellow lawmaker, Harvey Milk, known as “the Mayor of Castro Street,” along with George Moscone, who was then mayor of the whole city. White was one of the first entrepreneurs of Pier 39, the proprietor of a stand that dispensed baked potatoes to the hungry hordes from the Midwest.
I don’t mean to sound bitter, but if you had a blight like Pier 39 in your city, no one would accuse you of sounding like that other Rebecca, either—the one from Sunnybrook Farm. We have other shopping complexes favored by our brothers and sisters from Paris, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois. We have, for instance, the Cannery, where canning was once performed, and Ghirardelli Square, where chocolate was once contrived, and I am wholly in support of both of these rehabilitated buck factories. To com
pare them with Pier 39 is to compare the Tivoli Gardens with Coney Island. The place makes my skin itch, as if it’s turned to polyester.
When Rob and I got there, there were almost more cops than tourists—about 3 million of each, conservatively speaking.
“Chief Sullivan seems to have heard about your note.”
Rob nodded. “I think he’s taking it seriously.”
“Are you going to run it?”
“Not now. Why scare people?”
That would normally have been my position, but I found myself arguing. “Why indeed? Wouldn’t want to stem the flow of tourist bucks. Even if spending them is hazardous to health.”
“But we don’t know that. You think we should have gone ahead and run it?”
I thought about it. “No. But I’m beginning to see what kind of back-and-forth goes into these decisions.”
“Aha. So you admit it’s something more than cheap sensationalism.”
“I’m reserving judgment. If something does happen, you can run it then and still have an exclusive.”
“And you think it’d be wrong to run it then?”
“Oh, not really. I’m just being ornery.”
“Which probably means you’re hungry. Let’s prowl around a little and then we’ll find something to eat.”
“Okay. Funtasia or Only in San Francisco Memorabilia?”
“I hate to say this, but—”
“Oh, no!”
“Right. Both.”
He steered me into Only in San Francisco. Never, outside of a cattle car, have so many been packed so tightly. It was wall-to-wall with buck-bearers, plunking down for T-shirts adorned with the Golden Gate Bridge and misshapen mugs that said, “I Got Smashed in San Francisco.” I took an elbow in the midsection and hollered, “Ouch!”
“What is it?”
I pointed to one of the mugs.
“Right,” said Rob. “Let’s go.”
We did, retracing our ten or so steps in roughly three and a half hours, thereby satisfying ourselves the Trapper, if he existed, would strike there only at the risk of becoming the Trapped. Off to Funtasia.
Here you had your bumper cars, your video games, your skeeball, your video games, your boomball, and your video games. Mirrors everywhere to make the place look twice as big as it was; that funny land of lighting like they have in casinos that resembles neither day nor night nor dusk nor dawn. And 93,000 kids. A rough estimate, but not entirely off, I think. A true nightmare, to think of the Trapper in here, but as far as we could tell, all was normal.
