by G. M. Ford
He stopped what he was doing and walked over to peer at the pictures.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “They been around for a few days, showing some picture around, asking if anybody knows where to find the guy in the photo.”
“You recognize the guy in the picture?” Gabe asked.
Mr. Bubbles shook his head and began to dump water into the bucket. “Real bad picture,” he said as he mixed the concoction. “Coulda been anybody from Tina Turner to Karl Malden as far as I was concerned.”
We thanked him and kept walking south along the sand. The beach was thick with kelp; swarms of sand flies buzzed and settled before the next high tide rolled in and the ocean reclaimed it.
A Heermann’s gull skittered across the sand in front of us before launching himself into the breeze and flapping indignantly away. By the time we’d walked back to where Abbott makes the big turn and becomes Newport, we’d been told more or less the same thing by at least five different people, none of whom had recognized the guy in the photo Greenway and Pope had shown them. The most common descriptive phrase about the two men was “biggest SOB I ever saw,” or something to that effect.
“So Eagen’s info was spot on,” Gabe said as we dodged an Odwalla truck crossing Bacon Street on our way back home.
“There haven’t been any lodging charges on their credit card,” I said.
“So they’re either sleeping rough or sacking out in the rental.”
“We’ve got the plate number on their rental.”
“I’m betting Dog Beach,” Gabe said. “That or someplace along the river.”
“Good bet.”
Wasn’t till we got up to Cable that the final piece fell into place. Otherwise, we’d gotten what we came for. We’d confirmed Eagen’s information and were strolling back home to decide what in hell to do about it when Tran, the guy who made keys out of a little kiosk in a furniture store parking lot, started waving his arms to attract our attention.
“Leon,” he shouted through the thick morning air. I waved back, and Gabe and I veered in that direction.
Tran was a beloved town character. A former marine, he was in his mideighties and had lived in O.B. since the ice had receded from North America. Seventy years back, as a teenager, fresh from Texas, he’d helped plant Newport Avenue’s famously photogenic palm trees. As usual, he was wearing a Padres hat and a portable oxygen unit. As always, the jazz channel was blaring from his boom box. Sounded like Hank Mobley workin’ the sax to me.
The three of us exchanged pleasantries. “Folks saying you looking for them guys showing a picture around town.”
We admitted it was true. “Funny thing about that,” Tran said. “Picture wasn’t worth a shit . . . coulda been just about anybody . . . ’cept . . .” He gave it a dramatic pause.
“’Cept what?” I prodded.
“’Cept the T-shirt, man.”
“What about it?” Gabe pressed.
“Whoever was in the picture was wearing that same Blue Rush Fishing Charters shirt you wear sometimes. The light-blue one. The one from Puerto Rico with the fish on the back. Got no idea who was in the picture, but it was the same damn shirt. Swear to God.” He held up two fingers, like scout’s honor.
We made a little more small talk, had the obligatory conversation about the weather, thanked Tran for the info, and started toward home.
Soon as we were out of earshot, Gabe asked, “You remember the last time you wore that shirt?”
I ran it through my circuits for half a block. “Maybe a month ago. Tijuana. It was a hot day. Remember? You went with me. The bank was an oven. I sweat it up pretty good. It’s been in my laundry basket ever since.”
“So that answers the question of how they got on to us to begin with.”
“Yeah. Somebody in the bank’s flapping his lips.”
“Dog Beach,” Gabe said. “Let’s find those fuckers.”
“What then?” I asked. “Not like we can call Saunders. Pope and Greenway haven’t committed any crime that we know of, and if we get the cops involved there’s a real good chance our identity cat is going to get let out of the bag.”
“We could off them ourselves, I suppose.”
“Maybe they can be persuaded,” I suggested.
Gabe said, “Giants aren’t in my job description.”
“Yeah, but like you said, either we find them, or they find us.”
I prefer optimists to pessimists. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen. No sense getting all worked up over it beforehand. That way you suffer twice. Or at least that’s what I regularly told myself when things went to shit.
The woman at the hospital had been a bit of an optimist. The supposed afternoon email didn’t hit my phone until nearly seven in the evening. The muted bong said I had a message. Scripps Clinic in Mission Valley. Confidential.
Took a few minutes to answer all the security questions and then find the report. I turned my eyes away and didn’t look. Gabe was sitting on the other side of the glass table. The Beacon, a local advertising rag, was spread out over that end of the table. Gabe was cleaning the automatic on it. Or had been anyway. Right then Gabe was staring at me like I’d grown an extra head.
“Well?”
“You know what I was thinking about?”
“Do tell.”
“Remember those old brainteasers where people were asked whether they’d like to know their futures—assuming, of course, that such a thing were possible—and I remembered how I’d always answer no, that I’d prefer to live it out and see what happens?”
“Whenever you get through talking . . . what does it say?”
I winced as I jabbed at the phone. You know . . . you’d think that with something like this, something in the same area code as life and death, they’d just come right out and say it. Bold print. Above the fold, so to speak. You’re going to die in three weeks. You’re fresh as a spring lamb. But no, you had to read through the damn thing and the damn readings and numbers that you had no idea what they measured, till finally way down at the bottom of the second page was the verdict.
“Your lips were moving as you read,” Gabe commented.
“And apparently they’re going to keep moving into the foreseeable future—no HIV, no hepatitis, no nothing,” I said. “The only things the kid . . .” I corrected myself. “The only things Brandon had were head lice and crotch pheasants.”
“You feelin’ itchy?”
“No.”
Gabe stuck out a hand. “Congratulations.” I took it and shook it.
Gabe went back to oiling and reassembling the gun, while I cc’d the message to two different police departments. Eagen in Seattle. Saunders in San Diego. I thought about calling the media, but that seemed a bit excessive.
Garrett knew from experience that you had to be in just the right size city to have this work. Like you could never do it in New York or L.A. Too many people, too many pizza joints. But a place like this, most of which seemed to be homegrown noncorporate businesses, maybe. Just maybe. Took him six calls. Out of habit he’d started with the big chains. Dominos, Round Table, Little Caesars, that kind of thing. Second time he got told they don’t deliver to that part of town, he figured it out and started calling the local pizza joints. Surf Rider, it was called.
“Hey . . . this is Leon Marks. How’s about shooting me over a big sausage pie.”
“You still at 4896 Del Monte number 4?” the girl asked.
“Yep,” he said.
“Thirty-five minutes,” she said and hung up.
He knew the address was close enough to walk but decided to drive down, trying to keep his street presence to a minimum. He rolled down Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and turned right onto Del Monte.
Nice palm-lined street maybe six hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean. A few private houses but mostly small to midsize apartment buildings from the forties and fifties. Nothing over three stories tall, ’cause that’s all the California Coastal Commission would allow. But you could add as many re
ntal units as you could fit onto the property’s footprint, because what used to be family beach cottages were now worth millions and required a bunch of rentals just to pay the taxes.
He drove slowly, braking once in the middle of the block as a trio of young people on electric scooters zipped across the street in front of his rental car. Forty-eight ninety-six looked to be pretty much par for the course. Ten, twelve units. Two stories. Concrete steps up to the upper floor. Wedged into the lot sideways so’s they could fit an extra unit or two. Had he been going any faster he might well have missed the SUV along the south side of the street, way down at the end. With that eerie ocean light behind the vehicle, nothing was visible but the silhouettes of the occupants, one of whom was the size of a Hereford heifer. He broke out into a grin. You needed to find a guy who was looking for some other guy, all you had to do was find the guy he was looking for.
He turned his head as if he were studying something on the other side of the street as he drove by, stopped at the stop sign, memorized the SUV’s license plate, and turned onto Cable Street.
Ten minutes later we were sliding between the hedge and the board fence, heading for the inner courtyard of our apartment complex. As Gabe and I popped out into the courtyard, we skidded to a sudden halt. People were milling around. Our neighbors. Several of them. Adam from upstairs. Cat from the other end of the building. The older couple from down below. All seemed to be huddled around Kevin, the young guy whose ground-floor unit ran along the back alley.
“What’s up, Kev,” I hollered.
“Somebody stole my truck, man,” he yelled back.
“Right out of the parking lot?” Gabe asked.
“No shit,” Kevin growled.
“You call the cops?”
He choked out a short, bitter laugh. “They told me to fill out an online form and if they found it, they’d get back to me.” He waved an angry hand. “I mean . . . man, it’s not like I expected a SWAT team or anything . . . but you’d think . . . Jesus . . .”
I didn’t hear whatever Kevin said next because that’s when it clicked for me. One of those millennial moments when the extinct crater of my mind finds a long-forgotten ember and begins to glow red. Kinda like when, all of a sudden, your car’s engine light comes on. Sorta.
Detective myth has it that Sherlock Holmes could logically work his way from one thing to another, deducting his way to the truth. Not me, though. I didn’t work that way. Sure, I can generally follow the obvious to the more obvious, but with me there was always a bit of pure intuition involved. Something that came to me out of the blue, rather than something I’d rationally stalked. All twenty years working as a PI had accomplished was to make me way better at noticing the light.
“What?” Gabe said, nudging me toward the stairs.
“I’ve got an idea,” I whispered over my shoulder.
“Remind me to update my will,” Gabe groused, closing the apartment door behind us.
I made it down to the river at about ten A.M., just as the marine layer was turning to lace in the sky. I slid down the path and called his name. “Brandon,” I hailed. “It’s Leo. You here?” I waited for the Southwest airliner to pass overhead and then called again.
His head slid out of the thicket. “Hey, man,” he said.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Come on down,” he said and disappeared.
I swung around the corner and took a seat on an orange plastic bucket.
“How you doing?” I asked.
“Good, man. Real good. Tell ya the truth, feels real good not to be itchy.” He offered me a half-gone bottle of Gatorade. I shook my head but thanked him for the offer.
“Lots of shit down in the park last night,” he said.
“What are you hearing?”
“Cops found a couple of tourists murdered. One of ’em stuffed down inside one of the shitters.” He shook his shaved head. “Bad stuff, man . . . I’m tellin’ ya. They rousted everybody. Tested everybody to see if they’d fired a gun. Checked everybody’s ID and shit. Busted a couple of people with old warrants. Bad bunch of shit like that. Lotta people real upset about it. Saying they’re gonna get the hell out of here.”
“Anybody actually see what happened?”
He pointed west. “Old Vera—lives in that beater van down the end—Vera says the only person she saw other than the local yokels was some tourist in a bucket hat and some loud-ass shorts.”
“No shortage of those types,” I said.
He nodded and took a big swig of the Gatorade.
“So what can I do for you, man?” he asked.
“The other day . . . you told me that the same guy on the cliff calls the cops on you every time he lays eyes on you.”
“Son of a bitch,” Brandon said. “Motherfucker’s such an asshole.”
“And you said the cops show up every time this guy calls. Right away.”
“Like he keeps ’em in the garage. What about it?”
“Well . . . you know, man, whenever you hear people talk about crime in O.B., the big bitch is that the cops won’t come down here for anything short of armed robbery or mass murder. People have their apartments broken into. They have their cars and surfboards and stuff stolen, but the cops never show up. They just have the victims fill out a report online and let it go at that.”
“Yep.”
“So how come they come every time this guy on the cliff calls?”
He thought about it for a bit. “Well, man . . . that little area there . . . you know, like it’s like a snooty district . . . kinda like an island of high-rent types hiding out by the ocean . . . you know . . . and I mean the joint’s got security like fucking Fort Knox . . . so he’s obviously got some kind of serious-ass clout.”
“Show me,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Show me the house you’re talking about.”
“You mean . . . like now?”
“I always mean like now,” I said.
He grinned. “Yeah, you do. Okay, let’s go.”
He was damn near as fast a walker as he was a runner. Took everything I had to keep up with him as we headed south on Bacon.
“So . . . ,” I asked him as we walked along. “You done any thinking about my offer?”
“You mean the tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“A little.”
“So?”
“I think I’d feel like I was joining something.”
“Joining what?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe the human race.”
“You got a belly button?”
“Shit yeah . . . why?”
“Then you’ve already joined.”
We hooked a right on Saratoga and walked down to Abbott and turned left, walking along about as close to the beach as you could get. I could feel he was uncomfortable with the subject of the tattoo, so I buttoned my lip.
“What’s your favorite rock-and-roll song?” he segued out of the blue.
“‘Gimme Shelter,’” I answered right away.
“Rolling Stones. Real retro, man.”
“Feels urgent to me. Always has.”
“I can dig it. The Betty can really sing.”
We followed Abbott down to where we had to walk out into the sand to get to where the town beaches ended and the cliffs began. Twenty minutes later, we climbed up the stairs to Niagara Avenue, from whence one had three choices. You could turn right and walk out on California’s longest concrete pier. Gabe and I had done it once, which, as it turned out, was sufficient. Or you could turn left and walk into the adjacent end of the Niagara neighborhood. Or finally, you could, in a severe fit of pique, throw yourself over the rail and dash yourself on the jagged black rocks below.
Brandon wisely chose the Niagara route. But not for long. We’d barely gotten across the ramp connecting the pier to terra firma when Brandon scuttled over to the small cottage on our right and pushed his back against the wall, arms spread like angel’s wings.
&nb
sp; He gestured with his head. “Around the corner, man. I step out into that alley, that big gorilla comes out and starts busting my balls, and then the cops’ll be here in under five minutes. Sure as shit.”
I shrugged, stepped around him, and walked out into the alley. Took me a minute to get my bearings. This side of Niagara looked out over the town beaches toward Mission Bay in the distance. On the other side of Niagara, the jagged cliff face jutted out farther into the ocean than the rest of the shoreline. As it wasn’t possible to put a fire lane in front of the rocky node, they’d carved a fire alley out behind the buildings, thus creating several oceanfront properties, slightly isolated from the rest of the neighborhood.
I ran a hand over my face, took a deep breath, and stepped around the corner. On my right a newer ten-unit condo development faced the Pacific. Nothing showing along the alley side except everyone’s bathroom windows. The rest of the block it was hard to tell. The green house in the middle was definitely a dwelling. The buildings on either end showed only faceless garage doors to the alley and could have been just about anything.
I got about five more strides before the guy stepped out from between buildings. Mexican, I thought. Sunglasses. Thick black hair brushed straight back from his forehead. Maybe six feet tall. Black Ralph Lauren polo shirt and jeans. Standing there with his hands clasped behind his back pretending he had a serious alley fetish and wasn’t watching me.
I pulled out my camera and began filming my approach. Out in front of me, the alley abruptly ended at a set of white metal garage doors that appeared to belong to a three-storied building that fronted Narragansett Avenue. Nothing showing on this side of the building except another collection of bathroom windows.
I swung myself and the camera around in a circle and then kept walking. When I got abreast of the guy, he stepped forward.
“This is private property, sir,” he said.
“No it’s not,” I said. “If it was a private road, it would say so on the street sign.” I pointed back in that direction. “It doesn’t, so it’s public property.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good. I kept walking all the way to the dead end, where I made a U-turn and filmed my way back.