“It’s OK. Really. It’s tough to talk about. Even now.”
They sat awkwardly, waiting for the food. The host was making a big show of seating a well-dressed older couple, who ate up the attention.
“How is the investigation going?” Dominique asked. “They indict anyone?”
“They never did. We think the bombing was retaliation for my work with the Law Center a few years back. We developed evidence that an Aryan Knights group planned the murders of several Mexican migrant workers found bludgeoned to death in camps near the border.”
“And they tied all this to you?”
“The group knew my face. But privacy is not what it once was. All those goddamn internet sites selling personal data,” he said, trailing off. “Somehow, they tracked me here.” Ray sipped his wine and took a deep breath to calm himself.
“Who is the main suspect?”
“Dude named Bobby Cherry. An investigator saw him on the Embarcadero the week before the bombing, spreading discomfort among the tourists.” Ray fingered a knife. “Skinny white boy calling for a race war. The coming of the great white god.”
“Did the police ever question him?” Dominique asked.
“He was interviewed. He admitted being present at the wharf, but denied heading into North Beach. Nothing could tie him in.”
Ray looked around for the waiter and signaled for another drink. Dominique sat back, and frowned. She started to say something when the food arrived.
The restaurant grew noisy. Once Ray and Dominique had a few bites of dinner the gloom disappeared. The red wine loosened nuggets of conversation. They laughed about old times, lovingly chopping down friends who weren’t at the table to defend themselves. They were in the early stages of an old dance resumed. Best taken slow.
“This swordfish is great—would have a food critic fingering the thesaurus,” Ray said.
Dominique laughed. “I hate food critics. They’re either hack authors or failed chefs. Not good enough for either.”
They finished the meal. “Anything you need this week, just call,” Dominique said.
“I will. I have something else going here. Some surveillance on another case. Recommend anyone?”
“There’s a PI firm downtown I’ve used a couple of times. I’ll call over and have them get in touch with you.”
Wrapped in conversation, they finally noticed that the restaurant was emptying.
“This waitress looks like she wants to dive-bomb the table,” Ray said. “She’s ready to close out.”
Ray paid the bill, the waitress muttering a thank-you in his direction as they moved to the door.
Lightly stewed in red wine, they ambled to the door, brushing arms as they walked into the night.
“It was great to see you.”
“Yeah, great to see you too, Ray. I'm so glad you called.”
“The past is the past,” he said, not knowing what that meant.
“I have to go now.”
“Another drink?”
“I really do have to go Ray,” she said smiling. “Call me tomorrow. I don't trust you yet after midnight.”
Ray stopped walking. “How about after two?”
“How about after sunrise,” she replied. “We can talk then.”
“Sunrise? You worried I’m a vampire?” He showed his teeth.
She ignored him, smiling at some private thought.
A cab slowed in front of the restaurant. Dominique got into the rear seat, a vision of lavender and exposed toes. Ray smiled, humming an old song about the virtue of patience. For the better, he thought. She was a beautiful person in every way. He realized just how much he missed her, the joy of life that radiated from her.
The cab pulled away. Ray walked on Hyde Street toward downtown as it descended to the outer reaches of the Tenderloin. Fog drifted across the hilltop and through the dark alleyways. He passed laundromats and bistros, a corner pizzeria with a jade plant overgrowing its windows. On Sutter Street, a pair of women perched on a street corner, garish birds trolling for crumbs. One in a red leather contraption that screamed hooker, the other dressed in a cocktail dress several sizes too small. Ray walked by, nodded. One of the women replied in a deep voice, a basso profundo. The juxtaposition of female curves and male audio jarred his senses. Still, he had to admit that the transsexual looked better than the waitress at the restaurant.
Ray reached the hotel. The Red Room was pulsing with twenty year old men practicing elaborate approach rituals on anything resembling a female. A clueless frat boy wearing bowling shoes and a green sweatshirt tested a line — “Hey, nice cookies.” A blond woman frowned, and looked for something to swing. Several men roared with laughter.
The spectral neon blue from the hotel sign leaked into his room. He didn’t mind; he had kept Christmas lights up year round in his old apartment in law school. Sometimes he just liked to keep them lit, even in summer. He remembered Dominique busting his ass about it once, like he was some old dago with lights lining the restaurant ceiling. He fell asleep instantly, nostalgic and exhausted.
Chapter 9
7:12 AM. Jet-lagged and sandy-eyed, Ray reached for the water glass on the night stand. He needed a drink; the antiseptic air of the hotel was irritating his lungs. He showered, scrubbing hard with the face cloth. The soap was wrapped in crisp paper and tied with a string. Smelled good, like lavender. He wondered if it worked any better than regular soap.
He dressed in a pair of olive slacks, a black jacket and black leather shoes. He took the stairs to a diner in the lobby and ordered the house special: thick French toast with home fries dusted with paprika. The place was a classic, with hard-ass waitresses busting chops as they brought carbo-overload to each table. Breakfast was the most unpretentious meal of the day.
The local paper was a horror, all ads and no news. Ray finished quickly. Then he paid the bill and went back to his room.
The message light on the phone was blinking. Dominique had called: the old cop, Waymon Pierce, was happy to help in any way he could. As he had recently retired from the force and apparently was not leaving home much, Ray could drop by anytime. That was always the case when Dominique brought those dark eyes to bear. Men rearranged things, cleared their schedules, purged themselves of crappy attitudes. Beauty may fade, but it packs a short-life wallop.
Ray jotted down Waymon’s address, which was located in San Lorenzo, a suburb in the East Bay. He headed over to the garage and the valet had his car driven to the front. Ray turned right on to Sutter Street and made a series of right turns to Jones Street, heading into the Tenderloin.
In the 1930’s, the Tenderloin had housed San Francisco’s budding film industry. Many of the grand edifices remained intact, Victorian residences with quoins and cornices and carved wood statuary, silent testimony to the era of San Francisco’s celluloid dreams.
The neighborhood had changed. Middle class families, black and white, had fled the city core for big green lawns and a TV in every room. Now, corner sidewalks were slick with piss and blood, and other human slime. Derelicts walked on Jones with their heads down, baseball-capped and anonymous. Homeless AIDS patients, the evidence of the thing all over their faces; red blotches, black ditches for eyes. A druggy violence pervaded whole blocks. Hawk-eyed young guns strutted past buildings jabbed with massage parlors and windowless lounges. The bars—when they had a name at all—sloughed off prosaic names: “Black Bottle,” “Tipsy’s,” “The Driftwood,” and “Thirsty Club”. Bartenders revived broken men who muttered into their beer, bleary-eyed in the middle of the afternoon: bankrupts, felons, unemployed hit men, crack heads. This was the city’s underbelly, crammed into a six-block dead zone. Only the children redeemed the place, laughing as they frolicked in fortified playgrounds under watchful eyes.
Waymon Pierce had patrolled the Tenderloin for over twenty years.
Ray arrived at the address he had been given for Waymon. A man wearing jeans and a neat white T-shirt stood in the doorway of a California bunga
low fronted by neatly trimmed grass. Short of stature but with a hard lean body that belied his age, Waymon Pierce stepped outside as Ray approached. Waymon’s face, however, reflected his age—it was a crisscross masterpiece of wrinkles and bony clefts.
“Hope I’m not intruding,” said Ray.
“For a friend of Dominique's?” he shrugged.
“She’s a good friend. We went to school together.” He left out the law part.
“You have case work all the way here in California? You must be doing well for yourself.”
“Things are good,” Ray said. Waymon invited him inside. They stepped into a dark living room. It was a museum of 1970’s decor: shag rugs, and a lumpy sofa, all dark brown, nature’s safest color. A furry gray layer of dust had accumulated on the furniture. Apparently Waymon’s attention to yard work did not extend to the interior. Waymon returned from the kitchen and shoved a beer at Ray, who settled into the chocolate sofa. He left the beer on the table: a bit early to start drinking.
“Did you like working in San Francisco?” Ray asked.
“I reckon I did,” said Waymon, rubbing his palms together. “Been here long enough. I like Southern California more. I like the heat. I was thinking of moving to San Diego, but it’s turning into another LA.”
“Too noisy,” offered Ray.
“Too noisy. And too many people. SeaWorld is taking over Mission Bay. They sell everything at SeaWorld now! When Shamu dies, they’ll sell his pecker as a yard ornament.”
“Anyway, I’ve been here since the 70s. It’s home. San Francisco was different then. The drug culture swamped the city. Lots of wide-eyed innocents. Haight-Ashbury drew ‘em west, people coming here because they saw hippies dancing beneath a fucking street sign on the six o’clock news!”
“People change their lives because of the things they see on TV,” Ray said. Waymon looked unhappy at the interruption. He continued.
“By 1969, the dealers took over the neighborhoods. The emphasis in Haight-Ashbury was on the H-A-T-E. Not a pleasant place. Not really peace and love. When these wad stains saw a hippie, they jacked him up. They got these kids hooked on narcotics, and then took ‘em for all they were worth.”
Waymon spoke with a slight Southern accent, a relic of his youth in North Carolina. He showed a certain sunken charm, suspiciously friendly as only cops can be. A talented detective, he had been considered a great partner, albeit eccentric. He worked some of the toughest beats, and had more than his share of good press. But his offbeat demeanor was seen as a less desirable trait in a supervisor, and so he had been relegated to working his entire career as a vice detective. And Waymon knew it; knew he had been tagged with some invisible stamp of noncompliance. But he never cared about a promotion. He scorned his fellow officer’s willingness to accept mediocrity in exchange for a pompous title when hair turned white and bellies grew soft.
“Waymon, I don’t know what Dominique told you about this case. I’m looking for a girl who disappeared about ten years ago. Her family’s lawyer asked me to try to track her down. She was last known to be living here in the 1990's. She may have been a prostitute.”
“You happen to have a photo?”
Ray pulled out the photo of Tania. “Her name is Tania Kong. She would be twenty-eight now.”
Waymon took the picture, and turned it in his thick hands. “Hmm. Pretty girl. Never seen her. I can run her name by someone at the station, see if she was ever arrested.”
Ray watched Waymon, who seemed to be perpetually squinting. As if his eyes were rimmed with the grime of criminals spewing lies at him for a quarter century. He wondered how many suspects the man had interrogated and bashed down over the years.
“I know that she was arrested at least once,” said Ray. “I checked court records. There was a 1997 arrest for prostitution in Chinatown.”
“How long was she working?”
“I don’t know. The fact she worked at all was news to me. And I don’t think my client had any idea.”
Waymon scratched his nose absentmindedly. “You suspect she’s still working?”
“I don’t know. Where do the girls work usually?”
“Well, most of ‘em are on the internet.” Waymon opened his fingers to show cyberspace. “They have web sites now. But the city has several areas where street girls can still be found. Some guys just like drive-by pussy.”
“Where is the drive-by pussy in this city?”
“You’ve got your downtown girls, mostly on Geary and O’Farrell near Jones. They get to be thick as flies on a weekend night. Some of them are known to wander up to Post, but the folks there are more active—shoo ‘em off right quick. Shemales work the corner of Larkin and Post. Is she a real girl?”
“I have no reason to suspect any unusual surgeries,” Ray said.
“Good. They give me the creeps, those trannies — ‘You wanna go with me baby?’” Waymon imitated a falsetto voice. “Disgusting.”
“Anywhere else?”
“The Mission has a tittering of hookers on 16th. Roughest corner in the city. Young girl out there at 2 AM, she looks forty-five by morning. Classic crack whores. Drier than a nun’s twat.”
“You have a lovely way with words.”
Waymon shrugged. “Regional aptitude, Ray. All southerners know how to work their way around a word. ”
Waymon sipped his beer. All the windows in the house were closed. The room was cooking, but Waymon looked perfectly comfortable. Ray looked around at a number of photographs on the walls. Some appeared to be crime scene photos.
“And don’t forget the house girls,” Waymon added. “Like I said, they all have web sites now. Trolling for clients on the web. Real discreet. Hell, some of those sites are better than IBM.”
Ray glanced around the room and settled briefly on a framed picture of Richard Nixon. Waymon noticed his gaze.
“Here, let me show you something.” Waymon got up suddenly. He wiped dust from a bureau and retrieved something from a drawer. He returned with a signed photo showing Richard Nixon shaking hands with a newly minted police officer. The caption read: President Nixon presents award to Detective Waymon Pierce, May 2, 1971. Nixon’s face, frozen in a smile deeper than sainthood.
“Nixon’s about the greatest president this nation has ever had. He did wonderful things with the Chinese. He walked on the Great Wall. He looked them in the face and said: ‘Be our friends or we’ll bomb the whole billion of you back to the Stone Age. Knock down the Great Wall too.’ He was a great man.”
Ray listened as Waymon launched into a survey of Nixon’s foreign policy objectives circa 1971.
Let him ramble, thought Ray. He moved the conversation back to where he wanted to go: “Waymon, do you know if there were any detailed records of the arrest? Did you normally fingerprint or photograph the girls?”
Waymon nodded. “Yes, we photographed every girl we arrested. More of a public service than anything. These girls were lost, runaways. End up on the bottom of the Bay if they’re not careful. We wanted to help the families track ‘em down.” He paused. “Let me show you something.”
Waymon picked up a jagged piece of gray rock from a table. “This is asbestos in its natural form. I found it once while panning for gold. It’s completely harmless in nature. But heat it, process it, put it on the side of your house — one speck in your lungs, you’re one plot down from the Marlboro Man.”
Waymon got up. Ray followed him into a tan kitchen. An eerie mix of old and new haunted the place: a 1950s avocado refrigerator, a juicer on the counter next to a pile of orange pulp. A woman hadn’t been in this place in decades.
They took the stairs down into the cellar. Lights blinked on automatically, revealing a minor disaster area of cardboard boxes, a canvas heavy bag, boxing gear, an old table, and numerous filing cabinets of different sizes and shapes: wood cabinets, old steel behemoths, newer ones in anodized black. There was a dime store Indian made of wood, various paintings in ornate gold frames, stacks of old porno maga
zines, and a Halloween decoration of a witch on a broom. Waymon waded into the piles, blowing dust, moving boxes. ”I know it’s here. I knooooow it's here,” he said. After about five minutes, he dragged out two boxes, looking pleased.
“When I retired from the force, they were just tossing old cases, including misdemeanor mugs. Even some of the older felonies, back to the 60’s, all ready to be tossed away. I took it all! It’s not in any kind of order, just box loads of criminals and degenerates. You’re welcome to sort through it.”
Waymon pointed to a work bench running along one wall. “You can work there. Just don’t take anything without checking with me first!” he said. Then he turned and headed back up stairs.
Ray pulled one box closer to him and carried it to the work bench. Various nude photos of women decorated the walls, some of them looking like they had been pinned for decades on the nails of Waymon’s lust.
Ray opened the box and peered inside. There were rows of old photos, curled at the sides with graying edges. Snapshots of grifters, murderers, arsonists, rapists. The faces of men in various snaky, blunt, angry poses. The overwhelming maleness of crime seeped from the pictures. It was all neatly cataloged: the local San Francisco purveyors of vice, labeled with notes and accompanied by a photograph.
He looked quickly through the box. The pictures from the 1960s were all black and white, the faces poignant in monochrome stillness. Some faces peered out with a look of sanctified surprise, as if asking: “Do my crimes still matter?” Others showed men with a self-conscious bent of the head as they held up a sign with inmate numbering, forced to assist in their own degradation. The hardcore felons just glared, bleak and shark-eyed. Arsonists wore the most disturbing look: a vacant gaze, faintly sexual.
The pictures were sorted roughly by year, filed by a court docket number. After rummaging for a few hours, Ray found mug shots of prostitutes from the 1960s.
Ray looked at the photos. One girl, a bruised face set with eyes that were elfin and sprightly. She wore a stiff collared dress that reminded him of dancers he had seen on old TV shows like Laugh-In. An older black woman, looking off to her left, the picture faded, blurry, like a jazzy snapshot of a Harlem after-hours club. A Midwestern farm girl with heavy-rimmed glasses that made her look like a high school math teacher.
Telegraph Hill Page 4
