Death in North Beach

by Ronald Tierney

  Gratelli napped. He had already put in a day’s work and he was planning to canvas the North Beach bars this evening. There was a lot of pressure these days. On one hand citizens were complaining about too much police overtime. On the other, they were complaining not only about the rise in the murder rate but about how few murders were solved. Lab reports on DNA were taking months in some cases and there was bickering between the medical examiner and the police and the District Attorney.

  He had just met with the chief and the DA. Because this was a high-profile case, Gratelli would have whatever resources he needed. His lab requests would be priority. He was paired again with Rose and Stern, two homicide inspectors who helped on an earlier case involving people who were just a little more important than the average citizen. The two cops could get on his nerves, but they were more than competent. Now he snored, feet up on the sofa, trying to store a little energy for a reluctant night on the town.

  Lang tried to keep his work at work. Through the afternoon – and with Thanh’s expert search skills – Lang worked his own list:

  Marshall Hawkes, artist. Warfield despised his effeteness.

  Agnes DeWitt, memoirist, wrote her own tell-all.

  Marlene Berensen, Warfield’s mistress. In the will?

  Richard Sumaoang, poet/painter, publicly challenged Warfield’s honesty.

  Elena Warfield, Warfield’s wife and wronged woman.

  Ralph Chiu, developer, political activist, conservative, vilified by Warfield.

  While Thanh pounded the Internet, Lang found a phone number in the White Pages for Richard Sumaoang, among the last, it appeared, to give up a landline. The guy proved amenable to a discussion of Whitney Warfield and a meeting was set up for the evening.

  Thanh provided Lang with files of information gleaned from newspapers, websites, and other sources. One page was a photograph of Agnes DeWitt. She had to be eighty. There was a sense of spirit in her eyes, but she was quite likely incapable of chasing down Whitney Warfield, hopping a fence, and stabbing him in the neck. Even so, she was added to the list of people to talk to. The murderer, after all, might not be on the list.

  The other thing that struck Lang was that not only was Agnes DeWitt too old to be chasing Warfield around North Beach in the middle of the night, Marshall Hawkes and Elena Warfield weren’t exactly young gazelles.

  A number of articles were written about Hawkes. He had endless mentions on Google, was listed in Wikipedia, and the stories about him were published in very reputable publications – The New York Times, The Financial Times, Art World, Art Forum to name a very few. His work had been auctioned at some of the prestigious auction houses – Sotheby’s, Christie’s and, locally, Bonhams & Butterfields.

  Lang skimmed the articles and found a Q & A on how Hawkes fit in with the history of art. He was smug, condescending and funny. His comment about there being no great women artists in history set up a long discussion that fell victim to Lang’s short attention span.

  Thanh also included a sheath of documents on Warfield himself. Fascinating reading. No one, it seemed, really liked the guy personally, though he had admirers of his work and his ‘take-no-prisoners’ philosophy. He was among the early practitioners of fictionalizing fact or factualizing fiction. It was difficult to tell which was which sometimes. Warfield’s language was colorful, strong, passionate and his characterizations often mean-spirited.

  ‘Life is mean,’ Warfield was fond of saying. ‘It’s a battle.’ He was a fan of the rebelliousness of the Beats, of the truth-telling of the movement’s artists and writers. They wrote about things that weren’t necessarily pretty. They challenged the status quo. They didn’t mind insulting what they considered the uptight middle-class masses with their words and actions. But for Warfield, there were those who simply abdicated responsibility, a kind of ‘the-world-is-screwed-up, let’s-dance’ mentality. He didn’t like them. He didn’t like those who opted for some sort of humbling spirituality either.

  He didn’t like ‘sissies’. He didn’t mind ‘queers’, though. He said so. That’s not what he meant when he used the word ‘sissy’. He meant anyone who wouldn’t fight – verbally or physically – for his or her beliefs. He disliked dissemblers. Stand up for what you believe. Call things as you see them.

  ‘Let the chips fall where they may,’ Lang said.

  ‘Kill or be killed,’ Thanh said, standing over Lang as he scanned the information about the victim. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Killed in the line of duty, maybe.’

  Lang left at four, earlier than any ambitious businessman would. His approach to work was creative but not necessarily entrepreneurial. He locked the office. Carly was gone. Brinkman hadn’t come in. And Thanh had run off to who knows where. Outside, Lang got into his banged up old Mercedes and drove to the Western Addition. Home, a former Chinese laundry, still looked like one from the outside. A Chinese name and characters, though scratched a bit, were painted on the windows. Inside, there was no trace of the former business. It was a big room. A skylight – two stories up – let in a bit of soft afternoon sun. Buddha, a brown, golden-eyed Burmese cat, waited at the door to welcome his human room-mate to his domain.

  ‘You’re on your own this evening,’ Lang said to Buddha. He changed Buddha’s water, filled in some dry food. ‘You can meditate, contemplate your navel. Do cats have navels? Do bees have knees?’

  Buddha walked away.

  ‘I see. No sense of humor today.’

  Buddha was his sister’s cat and a reluctant adoptee. Shortly before she died she made Lang promise to watch over him. It was a situation neither he nor the cat wanted. But after a period of distrust, they bonded, and Lang was happy to have another living being nearby, especially one that, in the end, was far less demanding than one of his own species.

  Lang watched part of an early Oakland Athletics game, then fixed dinner. It wasn’t a demanding exercise. He opened a package of pot stickers he bought from King of Dumplings out on Noriega. They made them fresh. Three Chinese women sat around a table in the back rolling and pinching the product – and freezing them immediately. No MSG. No preservatives. He boiled a dozen of them for 10 minutes, then tossed them into a skillet with some peanut oil. He opened a beer and retrieved a bottle of Pearl River soy sauce from the cupboard.

  Buddha sniffed the pot stickers on Lang’s plate, but left, curiosity quickly quenched.

  ‘You see, that’s how you keep your slender figure.’

  Lang felt a little disloyal preferring the Athletics to the Giants since he was living in San Francisco. But the Oakland team – and after all Oakland was just across the Bay – always seemed to have a little more spirit, had a little more fun playing the game, and they took some risks.

  He had a few more hours to kill before meeting Richard Sumaoang at Alighieri’s. It was to be a purposeful evening. He’d meet the poet and painter, have a little chat about Warfield and, when that was done, he’d quiz the bartender.

  It had been a long time since Lang was in North Beach at night. His days hanging around bars were largely behind him. But when he first arrived in San Francisco, a couple of decades ago, he made the rounds of hotspots in the city. Many of them were in North Beach. In those days he frequented places that could be counted on to provide the kind of opportunities a young man appreciates – cheap beer, warm women and eight-ball. He was no longer that young or that interested – in eight-ball.

  The North Beach he and Carly saw at noon wasn’t the same as North Beach at night. Bars and restaurants, closed during the day, were open and busy. Neon glowing in the darkness gave the whole area a sense of mystery and adventure.

  While the old, respected and authentic bars on Columbus – Tosca, Specs and Vesuvio – offered both locals and tourists pleasant spaces for friends to meet and talk, much of the action was on the oldest street in the city, Grant Avenue. Grant, which began near the upscale shopping district of Union Square, turned into the main tourist street of Chinatown, and eventu
ally, as it crossed Broadway and Columbus, into the real heartbeat of the Italian village.

  And it was in an alley off Grant that Alighieri’s was inconspicuously located. The sign was small and blue. People who didn’t know it was there would likely not find it. The result was that this was a special crowd, generally people who knew each other, and their guests. Being there meant, in a way, you had been vetted as a genuine San Franciscan, if not a genuine San Francisco character.

  Inside, Alighieri’s was a long, narrow room, with a long bar. There was enough space for a row of booths to line the wall opposite the bar. Conspicuously missing was a pool table and jukebox. Tony Vale’s mellow voice rose slightly above the chatter.

  The bar was half full. Customers there had come solo. The evidence was that a stool or two separated the half dozen men at the bar. Maybe half the booths were occupied as well, with couples or threesomes. The low-backed stools were upholstered in black leather, the same leather that covered the seats in the booths. The tabletops were shiny black. The one he could see clearly was cracked. Halfway down the bar room, there was a break in the pattern of booths and a large poster hung on the wall. It was a large, old, framed illustration of a red devil and a bottle of booze. Lang could make out the words ‘Anis Infernal’.

  The room was dark, the conversation low. From what Lang could see, the customers, mostly men, were middle-aged or older. They wore dark clothes, sported either beards or long hair or both. It was pretty clear none of them had day jobs in the financial district.

  Lang looked around for someone who would fit the description of a Filipino artist and poet. No one. He looked at his watch. Nine. Lang found a stool that wouldn’t disturb the protocol of keeping at least a stool away from the next guy and sat.

  ‘Peroni,’ Lang said, when the bartender came up. Seemed fitting to order an Italian beer. The bartender took no note. His look was neither welcoming nor discouraging.

  ‘How’s Mr Alighieri?’ Lang asked when the beer arrived.

  ‘Dead,’ the bartender said.

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ Lang said.

  ‘About seven hundred years.’

  ‘Has it been that long?’ Lang asked. ‘Time goes by so quickly.’ He’d hoped he could get beyond the bartender’s complete indifference, tap into a sense of humor. Not even a smile. That would make questions later a little more difficult.

  Behind the bar was a wall of liquor bottles, the shelves interrupted in the middle by another large poster, this one showing a lithe and sly-looking green devil holding a bottle of spirits.

  We’ve got a theme here, Lang thought. Drink and go to hell. Or, as he thought more about it, maybe they serve drinks in hell. He liked the idea.

  Sumaoang appeared in that sudden way that Lang’s cat Buddha appeared – one second nowhere to be seen, the next right beside him.

  He was a slender man, short, fit, looking to be fifty maybe, though probably older. Jeans, a worn silk sport jacket over a dark shirt. Big eyes, soul patch just below his lower lip. A smile on his face.

  ‘Noah?’

  ‘Yeah. You picked me right out.’

  ‘I know everybody else,’ he said, slipping on to the stool beside Lang, and putting his iPhone on the bar. Tight clothes, Lang thought. Nowhere else to put it.

  ‘Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,’ Lang said.

  ‘I come down here most nights,’ Sumaoang said. It wasn’t a warm smile he had on his face, but a cold smirk. ‘Nothing special.’

  Lang took the slap without showing he understood it. ‘Buy you a drink?’

  The bartender was there with a bottle of water.

  ‘You must be a regular,’ Lang said to the artist.

  ‘Real regular. You want to know about Warfield?’ Sumaoang asked.

  Five

  After cleaning up the dishes, Carly brewed a cup of coffee and settled on the sofa with her laptop to follow up on the people on the list. Frank Wiley had several links on Google. She discovered his photographs were used in magazine and newspaper articles. They were included or featured in several exhibitions over the years. There was an out-of-print book on Amazon. His specialty was North Beach – the neighborhood, its characters, and its celebrities.

  Some of the photographs she found were of the Beats, some of them about to make a name for themselves, the core group in their youngest San Francisco days. That meant Wiley was no spring chicken. Some of these photographs were taken in the fifties, late fifties probably, but still a long time ago. If he was twenty then, he’d be in his seventies at least. A murderer? Possibly, seventy is the new forty.

  His work was currently being represented by Reed Fine Arts on Geary, according to a fairly recent posting on an art-oriented website. That meant the gallery would likely know where to find him. Tomorrow she could visit the gallery. It was in what could loosely be called the ‘gallery district’ – a small area near Union Square with a mixture of fine arts targeted to serious collectors and lesser ones targeting less knowledgeable tourists. Reed was one of the former. Perhaps she could also locate Lili D. Young through the galleries. There were casual mentions on the Internet. And eBay had one of her watercolors listed for $1,200. There was an old newspaper article that indicated that, at least at the time of that writing, she lived on Potrero Hill.

  After the gallery visit, she’d check her email. If she hadn’t heard from the newspaper editor Bart Brozynski or city Supervisor Samuel McFarland, she knew where to find them and she would hunt them down.

  She felt as if she had put in enough time, even if half of it was in the comfort of her own home. She was beginning to like this new Carly Paladino, a little more laid-back, a little more spontaneous. Yes, it still made her a little nervous and she had twinges of guilt. But, she was getting the job done, wasn’t she?

  She poured herself a half glass of wine and stepped back out on to the deck. The cold had come in – good for sleep, but not so good for hanging out. She downed her wine, checked the locks on the doors, switched off the lights, undressed, and slipped naked into her luxurious bed.

  As Lang talked with Sumaoang, he noticed something odd. As the night wore on, people came into the bar, walked past the two of them toward the back and didn’t return. He thought, at first, they were going to the john. But it’d be quite a gathering in there by now.

  Richard Sumaoang was talking about ‘the scene’ and it didn’t take too much prompting to get him to talk. He said that when he came along, the old guard had either died or moved on. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and many of the other core members of the ‘Beats’ were traveling the world, no longer just North Beach talent. But by the mid sixties, the energy these legends had supplied mutated. The center of the new culture moved from North Beach and the ‘Beats’ to Haight Ashbury and the ‘Hippies’. With the media as an active accomplice there was dramatic, though philosophically slight, cultural shift. The Beats catered to a small, highly literate audience. The Hippies were mass-marketed. Jazz, the musical backdrop for the Beats, gave way to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

  As Richard Sumaoang told the story, he preferred the Beats and remained camped out in North Beach, a neighborhood that was becoming rich in history, but drained of the spark that created such literary shake-ups as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, a book so threatening to the ‘standards’ of ‘decent’ Americans that some thought it was an exception to ‘freedom of speech’. The case went to the Supreme Court.

  Each of the names that Lang mentioned brought about a wistful smile and a little story. Marshall Hawkes hung around North Beach in the early days, but was never a part of it, according to Sumaoang.

  ‘He was too materialistic, too practical,’ Richard Sumaoang said. ‘There was this great fight between Hawkes and a painter named Anselmo about art, but some say it was about love. Hawkes denied being queer, but most people thought he was and Anselmo was just a lustful creature. They’re still fighting, I think.’

  ‘What about Warfield?�
�

  ‘He was a transplanted New Yorker,’ Sumaoang said. ‘That alone made him superior in his mind. He was never part of anything. He couldn’t be. That would mean he would subsume his personality to something larger. A movement, for example.’ Sumaoang smiled.

  ‘What about Warfield’s mistress?’ Lang asked.

  ‘Marlene? She’d have no reason to kill him. The theory was that whatever Warfield’s estate was – and it was probably only the potential future income on the copyrights because he spent every penny he got – it would go to his wife, unless of course, the wife dies first.’

  ‘You’re saying if Marlene wanted someone dead it would be Mrs Warfield?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess – if.’

  ‘The wife then,’ Lang said.

  ‘What changed with his death?’ Sumaoang asked. ‘That’d be the question I would ask. Elena was his wife through several mistresses, all known to her. She delighted in it. She was Mrs Warfield. That made her a celebrity of sorts. And she enjoyed that. And she didn’t have to put up with him, let alone sleep with him.’

  Sumaoang laughed.

  ‘Didn’t she feel shame? Everyone knew.’

  ‘Not a lot of shame being felt by anyone in that group.’

  ‘There was a guy named Ralph Chiu. Also on Warfield’s enemies list.’

  ‘Pretty straightforward,’ Sumaoang said. ‘Chiu was a political conservative. Some used to say he was very powerful among the Republicans in the city. All twelve of them.’

  ‘Just politics?’

  ‘There is a rumor that despite all the Italian businesses in North Beach, the Chinese actually own all the buildings. I don’t know the specifics but there was some sort of real estate issue between Warfield and Chiu.’

  ‘What did Warfield have on Chiu?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that. But between politics and real estate, progressives and developers, there are some suspicious deals and lots of animosity. Could be that.’