TEN
He slept. The phone had detonated a couple of times, but he’d slept through it. He sat up. There was a knife-edge of light under the drapes. He’d drawn them when he came back from Tiburon. He’d slept. He’d even dreamed. It wasn’t that Sailors never slept, but it was rare. They’d sleep an hour or two once a month. But they almost never dreamed. What had he dreamed? Like the rest of us, he couldn’t exactly remember. Angel was in it. There was a gathering of some kind, characters moving in from all quarters, in some kind of empty room. It felt ordinary, obvious, pedestrian. The surprise was that Mary wasn’t in it.
He ordered breakfast, a big breakfast. He was acting like a Norm all of a sudden. It came, and he ate it. He took a shower and put on a clean shirt. Like it was the first day of the rest of his life.
When he stepped out into the hallway in the hotel, he had to step over the Chronicle. If it had been facedown, he wouldn’t have stopped, and his day might have gone a different way, but it was faceup, looking right at him, with a headline across half the page:
THREE GOLDEN GATE SUICIDES
WITHIN SPAN OF ONE HOUR
“Span.” At least someone on the headline desk had a sense of humor about it. Jimmy picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. He took the elevator straight down to the garage. While he waited for the car, he read the details. The three suicides off the bridge were unrelated. One was a German tourist, a woman. One was a woman in her nineties. (You had to wonder how she got up and over the rail.) The third was an anomaly, a man in his twenties who’d gone off the west side of the bridge, the side facing out to sea, something that almost never happened. Maybe he was a sailor. Small s.
It made Jimmy go back to the bridge. Maybe he was looking for something to bring him back to the present.
He drove along the Marina, the broad sweep of created land, a former marsh filled in a hundred years ago with ’06 earthquake rubble. Now it was as if it had been there all along, another pricey district with its rows of two- and three-story houses, shoulder to shoulder on the left, red-tile roofs and pale ice cream colors, and the expanse of Marina Green and St. Francis Yacht Club to the right. And the Presidio ahead.
And Fort Point, under the southern anchorage of the bridge. Jimmy parked in the lot next to the rocks, the water so close that the cars’ windshields would all be grayed out, misted, when the drivers returned. The massive red/orange ironwork of the bridge, this end of it, was overhead. Sometimes you could hear the traffic noise above all the sounds of the Bay. To stand underneath it felt a little like being inside a hollow sky-scraper. It also made you see how high it was off the water.
Jimmy walked along the shore on the paved path toward the angular brick fort. It had been built at the beginning of the Civil War, to guard the mouth of the Bay, set there long before the bridge. It was a Monday and still early, and tourist traffic was light. As vacationers’ destinations go, Fort Point seemed not to mean much to non-Americans. The crowd, what there was of it, seemed like Kansas people, men in short cargo pants with skinny white legs who looked like they’d been up since four thirty, their portly wives, and kids in Disneyland tees and knit Target shorts the colors of the houses back in the Marina District.
Jimmy knew Fort Point was a gathering place for Sailors. By night anyway. They weren’t out now, or at least they wouldn’t be expected to be, only the ones looking for trouble.
But George Leonidas was there.
“Hello, sir,” Jimmy said, surprising himself with the deference, the formality.
The grieving father, if that’s what he was here for, grieving, was sitting on a bench next to the freshly painted guest services restroom. He was wearing the same clothes, but a fresh version of the brown cuffed trousers and the white short-sleeved shirt. And the brown wing tips. He sat with his legs open, his forearms on his knees, one hand wrapped around the fist of the other, as if holding it back from doing what it wanted to do. His eyes were on the water but unfocused. He hadn’t seen Jimmy until he spoke. But he didn’t seemed surprised to come upon him here. Maybe nothing surprised him anymore. He nodded a greeting, tipped his head up.
When Jimmy got a good look at his eyes, it was hard to think of what to say to him.
“How’s your wife doing?”
Leonidas nodded.
“Better than you, I bet,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it harshly, but Leonidas bowed up a little, seemed about ready to come at him, to say something, but didn’t. He knew it was true.
Jimmy looked down at him. I shouldn’t have told you, he thought. He almost said it out loud. This is what you get, when you tell them. It doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder. The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it wraps you in a whole new set of chains.
“Why’d you come down here?” Jimmy asked him.
“A kid on the waterfront told me to. Works at one of the crab joints.”
“Told you what?”
“That he thought he saw my Selene here.”
“Selene.”
“Christina,” George Leonidas said. “I called her Selene.”
He suddenly looked at Jimmy, very directly. “I never saw Melina,” he said. “My other girl. Is she the same as . . . as what you said? Like Christina?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Stop thinking about what I told you. Forget me.”
Jimmy watched as the Greek’s eyes left him, went to the underside of the bridge, out across the bowed line of it toward the center.
“There were three more. Went off the Gate,” he said.
“I know,” Jimmy said.
“It’s not anything I ever thought of. Before,” Leonidas said, still looking where he was looking. “I was in the army. In Vietnam. You see people die, and it changes the way you think. You think different. You just want to come home, work hard, have your house.”
Jimmy thought of the pink rooms Duncan Groner had described, the girls’ rooms.
“One of them was an old lady,” Leonidas said. “Ninety.”
“Go home,” Jimmy said. “Go back over to El Cerrito. Stay away from the City, from places like this.”
Leonidas nodded. He got up, still nodding. Jimmy got the sense that something had scared him, something he’d felt in himself, an idea, an impulse. He was grateful to be yanked back to himself. He offered his hand, and Jimmy shook it.
Jimmy watched him walk away, watched him until the Greek was behind the wheel of the Cadillac, in the first slot in the lot. He’d been up all night, the first one there. Jimmy watched until he saw the Caddy’s wide hood dip at one corner, when the engine started.
He stayed on the bench for a minute, then made a pass through the fort, walked across the open courtyard, but it was all just sea breezes and sunbeams.
He didn’t know what he was looking for anyway.
064
Coroners’ offices have less security than you’d think. Jimmy walked in a back door, off the loading dock. He came down one corridor and then another, threaded his way into the interior, following his nose.
He was alone in a roomful of the dead for a good two minutes before anyone came in.
And she didn’t work there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was in her late fifties. She was dressed like a businesswoman but in particularly muted colors. Rich, but muted. Dignified.
Jimmy just smiled, the it’s-all-right smile.
The coroner came in, a deputy coroner. He’d probably heard voices in the room. He was in his thirties and fleshy with heavy glasses that could have been military-issue. He looked like he should be working in a comic-book store somewhere.
He looked at Jimmy first. He seemed to know the woman.
“Can I . . . ?” he asked.
“She was first,” Jimmy said. Maybe it would give him time to figure out what he’d come here for.
The man let his eyes linger on Jimmy for another beat, then crossed the room to a steel desk, curved corners, a gray “marble” linoleum top, like an old schoolteacher’s desk, or a cop’s desk. There were clear plastic bags on top. He found the one he was looking for. It had a number on a tag. He lifted his glasses to read it—so he was nearsighted!—and then went to the wall of body drawers. He pulled one out, pulled away the polythene over the face, put it back, and checked the number on the end of the drawer.
He left it open and looked at the woman. She came over. He nodded at her. The woman pulled down the plastic and looked at the body.
Jimmy slipped out, left them alone. There was something that convinced him she wasn’t a family member, but Jimmy couldn’t decide who she was. Clergy? She looked too uncertain, too off balance for that. But she also didn’t look like she was any stranger to morgues. He was at the water fountain, taking a good long drink, when she came out of the body room. She didn’t stop to lean against the wall or anything, didn’t twist a hankie in her hand. She wasn’t distraught, but she had a tear in her eye. And, with this one, you got the idea those eyes hadn’t cried in a while, that her eyes were just a bit too old to tear up easily. Or had seen too much.
Jimmy came out into the parking lot in time to see what she drove, a pearlescent white Infiniti FX45 SUV that was probably almost pink in the right light. She pointed the remote at the door. There was a double click, and she went first to the hatchback and opened it and put the plastic bag there, on the carpet.
He didn’t know why exactly, but Jimmy tailed her across town to Russian Hill.
The Infiniti was parked in the stubby driveway of a six-story apartment building, a vintage place, some vintage. It had character. He found a place down in the next block and hiked back up the incline. No wonder San Francisco women had such good-looking legs. He was about to go into the first floor—the door was propped open—when he saw something on the door of the Infiniti, letters impossible to read from any real distance. He came closer. They were silver on white. Dignified. Rich. Muted.
What they said was:
GRACEFUL EXITS
SENIOR MOVING—ESTATE CLOSURE
In the lobby was an old-fashioned elevator, with a brass arrow to point to the number of the floor. It was pointing at six. The top. As good a bet as any for where the woman had gone. Jimmy pushed the button to bring it down and stepped back. It was slow. It took twenty seconds just to creak down to five.
He leaned against the opposite wall. He’d been smoking all day, since he’d gotten in the Porsche in the basement garage of the Mark, since he’d dropped the metal door of the glove box, looking for his sunglasses, and had seen the pack of cigarettes he’d bought at the little store back down in Paso Robles.
Luckies.
He was snubbing out the cigarette in the sand in the canister ashtray across from the elevator when the Infiniti woman stepped out of a door at the end of the lobby, a door that had been left standing open but that he hadn’t noticed.
“Hello,” she said. “Again.”
“Hi.”
“Do you need a minute?”
Jimmy took one, to think what to say. He had been intending to work on his opening lines on the ride up in the elevator, have something worked out before he got to the top floor.
“I know it’s difficult,” the woman said.
“Unprecedented,” Jimmy said.
She smiled and nodded. She’d been misting up again, just like she had in the coroner’s office. He could see the teary sparkle in her eye. She turned around and left him there, went back through the door at the end of the lobby, left it open.
When he looked in, it was a small apartment. The door opened into a four-foot-square foyer and then a twelve-foot living room. It was tiny, but it was a deluxe apartment. The building was on the top of the hill, so even on the first flo or there was a view, a blue and white pane of color, clear and bright, like a stained glass rendering of a slice of the skyline and the Bay beyond. The woman saw him looking out the window and for some reason got a bit flustered, apologetic.
“I opened the drapes,” she said. “She kept it so dark in here.”
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
She crossed to him, a card already in her hand. “Someone said you weren’t coming in until this afternoon,” she said. “Patricia Hatch.”
Jimmy took the card. He convinced himself that he was working, working for some greater good, and just let the lie tell itself.
“Were you her only child?” she said. “No,” she immediately corrected, “I’m sorry. A neighbor said she had a daughter here in the City who came to see her often. Who had just moved here?”
Jimmy kept quiet, took in the place. Every inch of wall, every flat surface, was covered with photographs, framed. On the coffee table was an ashtray from The Coconut Grove.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she corrected again. “You would be grandchildren. I forgot how old she—she was ninety.”
There was picture after picture of a beautiful, sassy girl, maybe twenty-two. In gowns. In a bathing suit, what they used to call a bather.
“Why were you crying?” Jimmy said, still scanning the pictures. “At the coroner’s. And here, before I came in. I mean, in your business you must see the same thing, over and over. Was something different with her?”
The woman stepped closer, with a kind of familiarity, the same familiarity she’d been apologizing for ever since he came in.
“Can I show you my favorite picture?” she said.
“Please,” Jimmy said.
“It’s this one.” It was a publicity shot, the young woman as a chorus girl. She handed it to him. “You see, I was a dancer, too,” she said. “A million years ago.”
“But not seventy,” Jimmy said.
“No.”
Jimmy put the picture back on the table.
“The world has changed so much,” the woman said.
Jimmy couldn’t argue with her there. “I don’t have a sister,” he said. “You said a woman had been coming by?” He tried to amend his tone, to keep from sounding like he was pushing. “Someone young?”
“That’s what they said. A new friend. Maybe she’s just someone in the neighborhood,” the other said. “Someone like me. Who cared very much for your grandmother. It was good that she had a friend.”
She went to her purse and started unpacking. A pad. A gold pen. A phone with a keyboard. A handheld tape recorder. A digital camera. “Timothy from our office will be here in a few minutes. Of course, you can have your own Trusted Witness for the inventory.” He heard her capitalize the T and the W. He thought, That’s what I’d like to be: a Trusted Witness. Angel was a Trusted Witness. Jimmy knew a few others. “Of course, you can take anything today, before the walk-through,” she said.
“I think I’ll walk around the block,” Jimmy said.
“Of course.”
He made another scan of the room. There weren’t any pictures anywhere of anyone who looked like a son or a daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter. Or a man friend. Or even the “new friend” she’d made. No friends, neighbors. Nobody. But don’t you get used to being alone, being lonely, in ninety years? Don’t you get used to outliving everyone, even get used to outliving yourself, at least what you used to be? Your perk? Your spark? The tone of young skin? The beauty, the sex that drew people to you? If she had been sixty, it would have made sense. Or seventy.
At least now he knew how she got her leg up and over the rail on the bridge. She had been a dancer.
“I wonder why I thought I should do this today,” Jimmy looked at Patricia Hatch and said.
“Everyone is different,” she said.
And he made his exit, graceful or otherwise.
065
The world wasn’t neat. The world didn’t make sense, at least not moment by moment. Nobody knew that like Jimmy knew it, but still, he tried to neaten it up where he could, even if only in his own head. He made lists. He checked things off.
So, after Russian Hill, he looked into the other two suicides off the Golden Gate, the latest ones.
The German woman apparently was traveling alone, had checked in, alone, to a fairly expensive room at a blue-and-white nautical-themed hotel down on Fisherman’s Wharf, a new hotel in an old, old brick building, a former cannery. You could look out every window and see the Buena Vista bar and the cable car turnaround and the water beyond. It didn’t look like the kind of place a last-stage depressive would pick for herself. She’d been there three days, had made the rounds of all the sights, had asked the concierge for maps and restaurant picks. She was signed up for a wine country bus tour tomorrow, prepaid. (A pair of tickets. Why?) From here, it was on to L.A. for the woman. Alone.
Jimmy talked to a half-dozen guests and hotel staff. It didn’t make sense to anybody, but everybody admitted they didn’t know much about her, about how she was spending her days and nights. The concierge seemed particularly to feel the loss. The woman was German. Europeans understand that you tip the help at the end of your stay.
So that was two out of the three.
What about Mr. Wrong Side?
He had AIDS. That was the first thing Jimmy learned about him: he was dying of AIDS. It was right there in the paper, a sidebar bylined by Duncan Groner, who apparently owned the suicide beat. Jimmy had stopped for an Irish coffee at a place in North Beach. By night North Beach would be packed with tourists and locals, one of the neighborhoods that satisfied both of them, with good-as-Rome Italian restaurants and bars and hipster bookstores and strip joints. It was three in the afternoon, and the coffee and Irish whisky was good. Up and down in the same cup.
The young man was living in a hospice. Too weak to move out of his bed, they had thought. So he’d had some help. Jimmy didn’t really want to follow up on it. He had the address for the hospice. It wasn’t far away, four or five streets over. He didn’t want to follow it up because the answer to the question of why the young man was dead was too clear. In spite of what he told himself all the time, he didn’t like simple, obvious answers. A young man killed himself because he was dying in a slow, bad way. Jimmy wanted it to be something else. He wanted a little mystery. Not a lot, a small mystery, easily blown out, like a candle, by a professional with a modicum of sense, even if he was from out of town and wrapped in the cloak of his own mysteries, dragging around his own chains.
Then again, there was that detail . . .
The man dying of AIDS had to have had some help.
And something else . . .
Most of the day, Red Boots and another had been tailing Jimmy, neither one of them looking all that happy to be up in daylight.