by Julie Smith
“I like the way you said, ‘lose him,’ not ‘lose the case.’ That’s keeping a healthy distance.”
“You also have to remember that if you lose the case, he’s a goner. And I’ve got to tell you, I think there’s a good chance you’ll lose.”
“You don’t like the Les Mathison theory.”
“I think it’s worth pursuing.” He gave me one of his famous smiles, the kind that showed off all the cute crinkles around the blue eyes.
At least he didn’t think I was completely off my nut. And he and Chris were in agreement—they both thought it was my only chance. That made three of us.
12
“You’ve got two choices,” Chris said when I brought her up to date the next morning. “Hire an investigator or get Rob to help.”
Without hesitation, I picked up the Yellow Pages and turned to Private Investigators. I knew who I wanted, a guy who’d done some good work for some people I knew. I’d even met him a couple of times—a big Italian guy—but try as I might I couldn’t get his name to come to me. I ran my finger down the lists, turning the pages, but nothing jarred my memory. I’d have to call one of my friends who’d used him. I picked up the phone, held the receiver so long I lost the dial tone, punched the button to get it back, and dialed Rob’s number. Deep down, I must have been looking for an excuse to call him.
I was sure of it later when I walked into John’s Grill and saw him waiting for me on a barstool. When he saw me, he smiled, and his face looked as if somebody’d plugged him in and flipped a switch. If I’d been worried that I was wearing nothing nicer than a lawyerly black suit, I forgot about it. “You look terrific,” he said, and I knew he’d have said it if I’d had a stocking over my face; he didn’t really care how I looked at all, he just wanted to be with me, and I loved him for it.
“So do you.” To my unmitigated horror, tears popped into my eyes.
“Awww. Where does it hurt? I’ll kiss it.” For the next couple of minutes we must have looked like a standing tangle of black linen and tan corduroy. I couldn’t imagine what had made me stay away.
“I must have been crazy,” I said.
He looked alarmed. “To see me?”
“Not to see you.”
Relief flooded his face. “Certifiable.”
“I was hurt.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
The drunk at the next table leaned over. “You two belong on daytime TV.”
“We are getting a little sudsy,” said Rob.
“I’m enjoying it.”
“Wallow in it, baby. Cry me a river.”
“Oh, can it.”
“Speaking of cans… and suds—”
“Beer’s for journalists.”
He hailed the bartender: “One beer and one insipid white wine.”
“Please, no Yuppie jokes.”
“I like Yup women. They have money.”
“Same old Rob.”
“Admit it. It’s been hell without my acerbic wit.”
“There’s always Kruzick.”
“That reminds me—how’s the little mother?”
“Still determined to go through with it; I think she’s working up the nerve to tell Mom and Dad.”
“Marin General better double their emergency room staff.”
“Let’s don’t talk about it.” Mickey’s pregnancy was an area of my life—along with Rob—that I’d managed to put out of my mind since taking Lou’s case. Thinking about it—especially Mom’s reaction to it—depressed me too much. “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s talk business first.”
“And then what?”
“How about a rousing game of gin?” He reached in his pocket and took out an envelope. “Look what I brought you.”
“Clips!”
He nodded. “Clips indeed. Guaranteed to make you the happiest lawyer on Montgomery Street.”
“You found something on Les Mathison.” I’d asked him to look, realizing it was only an outside chance.
“Not just something, babycakes. I’ve got what you want.” I’m no good at coquettish looks, but I attempted one: “I’ll bet you do.” And then I fell upon the clippings like a cop on a box of doughnuts.
There were two, the first a routine crime story about a woman killed in a random incident of violence aboard a cable car. The woman’s name was Darlene Mathison.
The second was an interview with the bereaved husband, Leslie Mathison, formerly of Turlock. The reporter, one Annie Ballard, had hit pay dirt, turning up a human interest story so good she’d written a long, moving feature about it—a story detailing the life of a simple man who grew up on a ranch, who knew only an innocent kind of life in which he’d been a churchgoer and a member of the 4-H Club; a man who after moving to San Francisco with his wife and daughter, had found the same kind of hardships any city dweller might have. And then the hardships began to multiply. He had frustrations with banks, buses, and restaurants as anyone would—the sort of problems all city dwellers take for granted. But Les didn’t take them for granted; he found himself frustrated everywhere he turned and had no armor to cope with his frustration. He took a job at a flooring company in South San Francisco.
His family suffered because banks wouldn’t take out-of-town checks without a waiting period, because a decent apartment for a family of three was for beyond his means, because everything cost too much. He found himself horrified by the crowds on the bus, in restaurants, everywhere he went on business, everywhere he took his family for fun. He was a man who’d never before had to wait in line to see a movie. Because his rent was so high, he’d had to sell his car. Aside from the inconvenience of having to leave for work an hour before he had to punch in, aside from the vandals and druggies on the MUNI, there was a very real problem with that—the buses sometimes didn’t run on time, sometimes broke down, and caused him to be late to work. He would have left earlier, he told Annie Ballard, but his wife worked a morning shift as a waitress, which meant he had to get their daughter, Kathi, ready for school. Even so, he had to leave Kathi alone for half an hour: “I’d see that kid sitting there, hardly able to hold her eyes open, looking so forlorn every morning when I left I just couldn’t stand to think of making her get up at 6:30, and stay alone an hour in the house just so I could make sure I got to work on time for some bozo who didn’t care about anything except the almighty dollar.” Ms. Ballard noted that his voice shook as he spoke.
The inevitable happened: He was late to work once too often and lost his job. Before he found another, his daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident—hit by a lad on drugs. It was hardly a month after that that Darlene was stabbed to death on a cable car, having gotten in the middle of someone else’s fight.
It was almost too much to believe. “Annie Ballard,” said Rob, “must have thought she’d died and gone to heaven when ol’ Les started letting down his hair.”
“Oh, Rob.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, and had the grace to flush a bit. “Great quotes, though.”
I couldn’t argue with him. For instance: “When I lost Kathi, I don’t mind telling you, I about lost my faith in God. But I was raised to be a Christian and I kept on prayin’, kept on going to church. Now that Darlene’s dead, I don’t feel that way. I feel like God’s made a monkey out of me. Right now I feel like burning every church in this miserable hellhole.” Ms. Ballard closed with this one: “When I think about what’s happened to me since I came here, I’d like to do to San Francisco what the God I used to believe in did to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
I got goose bumps reading—worse ones than when I’d read the Trapper’s notes to Rob, because those were just the maunderings of a sick mind; now I felt as if I knew the man behind the sickness. He was real to me, and scarier than the shadow man; there wasn’t a shred of doubt in my mind that Les Mathison was the Trapper.
Rob said, “The Trapper’s words are even in there. ‘Hellhole’; ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’”
“Rob,
do you realize the most horrifying thing about this? That wasn’t even the end of it—after all that, he got beat up by Lou Zimbardo.”
“Poor sucker. No wonder he went nuts.”
“Excuse me, but did I hear Rob ‘Hard-Case’ Burns call a multiple murderer a poor sucker?”
He shook his head unhappily. “I never heard of anything like this.”
“You’re just jealous because someone else got the story.”
“I’ve got feelings, too, you know.”
I patted his hand. “I forget sometimes.”
“So now what? Do we go to the D.A. and lay it on him?”
“I don’t think it’s good enough. He’s got physical evidence against Lou.”
“What? The gun that killed Sanchez? All part of the frame-up.”
“It reads like that if you don’t think he’s guilty, but what if you do? And he’s got reason to prosecute Lou—he can get a conviction.”
“But surely if you know about Mathison, there’s a reasonable doubt.”
“Yes, but there’s no proof against him; there’s proof against Lou.”
“So let the cops get some.”
“I don’t think this will convince them; I think we have to have more.”
“I thought you’d be thrilled.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m beside myself.”
“You know what he must have done? He must have been planning the thing all the time Lou was in prison, waiting for him to get out.”
“My goose bumps have goose bumps.” I shivered and reached for Rob, for comfort, just as the bartender shouted: “Phone for Rob Burns.”
Rob answered the page and came back flushed. “A bomb went off at the Bonanza Inn. An elevator crashed with a load of conventioneers aboard.” He was fumbling in his pocket for money to pay up so he could get out fast. “Want to come?” I did not. Not in the least. But the Bonanza Inn on Union Square was one of the top five hotels in the city—enormous, nicely appointed but not fabulously expensive, maybe fifty years old (which made it historic without being a relic), newly redecorated, conveniently located near Union Square, and currently, due to the massive refurbishing, very much in vogue—in other words, a prime Trapper target. I remembered my premonition the night of the cable car crash that the Trapper would strike a hotel. I followed Rob out the door, though I knew I wouldn’t catch him. He’d slammed down a couple of bills and charged out like a rhino; I was reminded rather sickeningly of the night the Trapper struck Full Fathom Five, when Rob left me in a cloud of dust at the Eagle Cafe. As I clacked after him this time, wishing ardently for Nikes to replace my Joan and Davids, I was discomfited that I was now using the Trapper’s shenanigans as mileposts, that I’d done it twice in the last five minutes. In a way, as I thought about what the city had been through and might be about to go through again, I wished Lou really were the Trapper.
The police hadn’t yet cordoned off the building, and the emergency vehicles hadn’t yet started to arrive; apparently, the second word came over the police radio the city desk had called Rob, who was known to hang out at John’s Grill and could be at the scene in about three minutes, only half hurrying. But on a breaking story Rob wouldn’t have dreamt of half hurrying and had no doubt kicked small children and helpless winos out of his way in his relentless protection of the people’s right to know. I’d say I got there in about three minutes ten seconds, and already he was nowhere to be seen.
A phalanx of security guards blocked the doors. “Is something happening?” I said in a concerned voice.
“We can’t let you in right now, ma’am.”
“But I’m staying here.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We can’t let you in.”
“What is it, a fire?” I let my voice rise. “My husband’s in there.”
“No, ma’am, it’s not a fire.”
“But my husband!” I wailed.
The guard didn’t answer, just stood there impassively. That made me mad. In truth, there was no real reason I had to go in, but I was getting caught up in the excitement, so caught up I’d already compromised my principles by lying and hadn’t even realized it, hadn’t even stopped to consider the ethics of the situation. I tried to push past, still doing my imitation of a terrified wife. The guard grabbed my arm. “Ma’am, you can’t go in there now.”
“I’ve got to.” I tried to jerk my arm away, but he held on. To my horror, I saw that I was beginning to draw a crowd, and I could also hear sirens getting close. If I didn’t get in now, I probably wasn’t going to. Should I retreat?
And then I heard a male voice say, “The lady’s with me.” It was Pete Brainard of the Chronicle, evidently the photographer they’d sent to meet Rob. He was flashing his press card.
“Let’s see her press card.”
“She’s not a reporter. She’s my assistant.” Pete took his heavy camera bag off his shoulder and put it on mine. “Here, Rebecca, take this will you?”
“We can’t let her in without a press card.”
“Dammit, she’s with me!” The guard had relaxed his grip on my arm, and now Pete grabbed me every bit as roughly, and whisked me past the rent-a-cop.
“Goddamn newshawks!” the guard said, giving up the fight. It made me giggle. “Newshawk” was what my mother called Rob when she wanted to be particularly insulting. There was no one quite so arrogant as a newshawk on a story, be he or she reporter or photographer. If I thought I had a right to be in that hotel, I was probably catching the disease myself. No doubt Mom would be disappointed in me, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
The lobby was nearly deserted, the elevators being around a corner and down a corridor. We ran toward them, me weighed down by Pete’s heavy camera case. In the distance, we could see a crowd. Up close it proved to be not a dense one, but a milling one, again kept at bay by the hotel’s security staff. Rob was at the front.
He was pale. Looking past the line of guards, I could see why. More than a dozen men and women were lying on the floor, some moaning, some lying still, as maids, bellmen, and hotel executives raced back and forth with blankets and first-aid supplies. I started to feel as if I shouldn’t have come.
As Pete and I reached Rob, we heard a commotion behind us, and the crowd parted, the line of guards parted, to let the first medics through. Pete went into frantic action, snapping the overall scene, the carnage on the floor, the faces of the paramedics, the faces of the victims. He couldn’t yet get close enough to get to the fallen elevator itself, but I knew he’d stay there until he could, even though as the first photographer on the scene, he was bound to have the best pictures.
Rob was simply watching, scribbling on his notepad, not bothering anyone. I supposed he’d already talked to hotel personnel and witnesses, and he’d talk to more later, but at the moment he was a witness himself. I felt profoundly depressed; the breathless excitement had passed and I was watching something that resembled one of the more frenetic war-is-hell scenes from M*A*S*H. I wondered what the hell I was doing there.
“Rebecca, give me a long lens, dammit!”
I fumbled in Pete’s bag, found the lens, and promptly dropped it. I thanked my stars the floor was carpeted, but when I bent down to pick it up, I bumped someone who was thrown off-balance and who accidentally kicked it just past one of the guards. I was going to ask him to hand it back, but Pete pushed past me, reaching for it. The guard grabbed him and pushed him back, hard. The crowd fell back in a shudder, but they were mostly well behaved. Which was more than I could say for Pete, who shouted, “Stupid asshole!”
“Who’re you calling asshole?” The guard doubled up his fist.
“I’m from the Chronicle.”
“I don’t care if you’re from the New York Times, you’re out of line.”
“Goddamn jerks got no respect for the press.” Pete was only mumbling now, having better sense than to provoke fisticuffs, but still obsessed with the one thing on his mind: “This is a news story and I am currently God.”
I w
as starting to feel my old revulsion for my boyfriend’s job, but something took my mind off it. Loud and clear, even in the midst of all that, I heard someone calling Rob’s name—a bellman who’d come to tell him he had a phone call. I didn’t think hotel employees would have gone to that much trouble for just anyone, but thanks to the Trapper, Rob was currently something of a VIP around town. He looked dismayed, torn between what was probably an instructional call from his office and the story itself.
Finally, he said, “Rebecca, could you take the call?” I wanted out of there, anyway, and jumped at the chance. As I turned around, Pete grabbed his bag, still on my shoulder, and pulled. I snapped, “Take it easy, will you?” But he didn’t even bother to answer.
“This is Rebecca Schwartz,” I said to the caller. “Rob can’t get away right now. He asked me to relay the message.”
The caller spoke in a calm, authoritative voice: “This is the Trapper. I did it with plastic. Two charges—one for the hoists, one for the governor. There’s only one way to stop this—pay me half a million dollars. I’ll call back about the details. In the meantime, tell Burns he better put this in the paper tomorrow.”
The Trapper hung up; I wasn’t so quick. I stared into space, still holding the receiver, until finally it occurred to me to jot the message down. All I had was the back of a check, but that would do. I was still writing, trying to get it exactly word for word, when I felt an arm around my waist. “Was it the city desk?”
“Oh, Rob! It was the Trapper.”
“No!”
“I’m afraid so.” I read him the message.
“You’re sure that’s exactly right?”
“Pretty sure. I might have a ‘the’ where there ought to be an ‘a,’ but believe me, that’s basically what he said. I don’t get the stuff about the plastic and the governor, but the hoists must be cables.”
Rob said, “He never asked for money before.”
“You think it wasn’t Les?”
