The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  “You think I’m going to fall for that again?” he said.

  The door began to close but Aloa quickly shoved her Timberland into the space, thanking her father again for the sturdy footwear.

  “No. This is good,” she said. “Something the cops didn’t see. Give me five minutes.” She waited. “I’ll call Esther after we talk.”

  The pressure on her boot eased but Hamlin’s frown didn’t.

  “Show me your closet,” Aloa said.

  “What the hell?”

  “Please?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Hamlin said but he led Aloa upstairs, down the hall, and into a good-sized room with an unmade king-size bed, a nightstand brimming with books, an antique bureau cluttered with socks and papers, and a window with a view of the house’s small backyard.

  The tired man at Justus had been dressed head to toe in black, which had sparked Aloa’s memory, and she opened Hamlin’s closet to see exactly what she’d hoped to find. Everything in it was black: shirts, pants, sports coats, and jackets.

  “Do you own any blue jeans?” Aloa asked.

  “God no. I’m not some soccer dad,” Hamlin said.

  “The guy at the door that night wore blue jeans,” Aloa said.

  “See, I told you,” Hamlin said. “I’m innocent.”

  “It’s a start,” Aloa said. “Unfortunately, you’ve still got problems. There’s a text from Corrine that appears to ask you to meet her on the night she died.” She recited the line of poetry to him.

  “Browning,” he said and frowned, “but I never saw a text like that.”

  “Then why were you in Corrine Davenport’s neighborhood around the time she was stabbed?” She wouldn’t put it past Tick to get in touch with Hamlin and tell him about the cell phone trace, and she wanted to get the professor’s reaction before he had time to prepare.

  “Jee-zus, what?” Hamlin said.

  “Your cell phone,” Aloa said. “It puts you near her house.”

  His gaze darted to the antique bureau and back. “Maybe I just like to walk. It’s not a crime to exercise at night.”

  Aloa followed his glance to a framed photo of a gawky teenaged boy with horn-rimmed glasses, dark hair, and an oversize nose that was almost an exact replica of Hamlin’s.

  Did Tick know he had a grandson?

  “What’s your son’s name?” she asked.

  “None of your business.”

  “That’s Coit Tower in the background. Does he live here?”

  “Christ, you’re nosy.”

  “Side effect of the business. Do you see him often? He’s a good-looking kid.”

  Something shifted in Hamlin’s eyes. “I see him on Tuesdays,” he said quietly.

  Corrine Davenport died on a Tuesday.

  “Were you with him the night of Corrine’s death?”

  Hamlin rubbed a hand over his face. “You can’t tell anybody.”

  “Tell me how I can get ahold of your son,” Aloa pressed.

  Hamlin sank onto the edge of the bed. “This has to be off the record. You can’t write about this or tell the cops.”

  “This isn’t a game,” Aloa said.

  “Off the record or not?”

  Perhaps she could change his mind later. “All right,” she said.

  According to Hamlin, when he was twenty-two and living in New York, he’d met a woman and they’d moved in together. Things had been good. She’d worked in the kitchen of an important chef while he worked toward his MFA at Columbia. They spent their free time reading and eating and going to plays. She was intense and mercurial, which offset his tendency to fall into routine. A year later, she’d broken up with him after an argument, but they’d gotten back together after a month. She told him she was pregnant, and when she delivered a healthy baby boy, he’d cried. A year later, she’d discovered he’d slept with one of her friends during the period they’d been apart and accused him of cheating on her.

  Couldn’t you have kept it in your pants for four weeks? Aloa thought.

  The lover had taken a $20,000 painting he’d bought for her, spray-painted “B. Hamlin is a cheater” on the wall of his apartment building, and moved out.

  Hamlin, torn apart by the loss of his son but not the boy’s mother, had sued and won partial custody of his then two-year-old boy. His ex-lover, however, had later found a bulldog of a lawyer who persuaded a judge that Hamlin had failed to properly care for the boy. The attorney recounted how Hamlin had taken the boy with him on a visit to his new girlfriend on Cape Cod, forgetting both his son’s medication and the fact the child was allergic to cats, of which his girlfriend had three.

  “I took him to the ER. Everything turned out OK,” Hamlin had explained.

  But the judge had disagreed and his ex-lover had moved without leaving a forwarding address. Hamlin, however, had hired a private investigator who found the boy and his ex three years later, living with a fisherman near Dillingham, Alaska—hence, the stay that inspired Eternal Light.

  Hamlin had arrived in Dillingham and knocked on her door, demanding to see his son. The fisherman’s answer had been to give Hamlin two black eyes and a broken nose.

  Hamlin had retreated inland, rented a cabin, and tried to get a judge there to allow him shared custody of his son. The attempt failed: the former lover claimed Hamlin was drunk when he came to their house, and since the judge wasn’t a fan of outsiders coming to his state to escape court judgments in the lower forty-eight, the ruling went against him.

  Six months later, the boy’s mother broke up with the fisherman, left Alaska, and was gone for seven years. Finally, the investigator discovered the boy and his ex living in San Francisco under another name, and Hamlin, who was then back in New York, moved west.

  This time, however, he tried a different tack. He found the boy’s school and waited outside, eventually handing the boy the only photo he had of his short-lived family—one taken at the hospital after the boy was born.

  “Unlike my own father, I wanted a relationship with my son,” he said.

  Aloa decided it wasn’t her place to tell him what Tick had said about why he hadn’t seen his son.

  Hamlin, meanwhile, said he’d given the boy a cell phone he’d bought in his own name and told the boy if he wanted to talk, to call him and they could go get pizza or tacos or something. He asked the boy not to tell his mother.

  The boy had called, they’d had Mexican food, and the meeting had turned into a standing date for Taco Tuesdays while the boy’s mother worked as a cook at some tourist restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. The boy was smart, Hamlin told her, but, like a lot of smart kids, was the target of bullies. Hamlin had taught him how to fight and the boy had proudly been suspended for landing a punch to the throat of his biggest tormentor—although his mother was not quite as overjoyed.

  “He’s an amazing kid, my whole world,” Hamlin said.

  Aloa’s mind raced ahead. “So on the night Corrine Davenport died, a Tuesday, you’d had dinner with your son.”

  “Yes. We ate and he went home to study, and I went to a bar down the street to have a beer. Corrine had threatened to report me, and if I lost my job I’d lose my trust fund, thanks to a lovely stipulation my stepfather included. Before I can get the seven million dollars he promised, I need to have a ‘real job’ for at least five years,” he said, making air quotes. “His lawyer makes me send W-2 forms. I’ve got three more years to go.”

  Again, Aloa wondered why Hamlin couldn’t keep it in his pants.

  He told Aloa he drank two Stellas at a table by himself. Around 9:30 p.m., he’d gotten a call from his son. A girl he liked had just texted to tell him she didn’t want to eat lunch with him anymore. The boy was heartbroken.

  “His mother was still at work so I walked over to meet him and we talked. I left around ten forty-five, I think.”

  “So you never went to Corrine’s house?”

  “No.”

  “And does your son live nearby?”

  “Not to
o far away. I walked home.”

  “So your son is your alibi,” Aloa said.

  Hamlin stood. “He’s not part of this.”

  “You’d rather go to jail?”

  “I’m not going to jail. I’m innocent.”

  Aloa had met people who’d stubbornly insisted on their innocence, only to be caught later in a lie. But, for some reason, she believed Hamlin. Maybe it was the look in his eyes when he talked about his hunt for the boy and about his son’s pain that night.

  “Do you have a credit card receipt from the restaurant or the bar?”

  “I always pay cash.”

  “How about if you tell me names of these places? Maybe somebody will recognize you.”

  “I don’t want you snooping around, period. If my ex somehow finds out I’ve been anywhere near her neighborhood—for any reason—she might leave again. The last time she disappeared with the boy, they ended up in Thailand. It’s a screwed-up situation, I know. But it’s all I’ve got. My lawyer says there isn’t much hope of getting custody. Not after all this time.”

  “If you’re in prison, you won’t see him either.”

  “At least I’ll know where he is.” Hamlin looked at his hands, then up at Aloa. “I know I was wrong for sleeping with a student, but I didn’t kill her. Please. Find out who did it. Figure out who was there that night. It wasn’t me, I swear.”

  She thought of her own father and how he’d been torn from her, and how she still felt the ache of that loss.

  Hamlin’s voice cracked. “I can’t lose my son.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  Aloa thought Hamlin was being a bit too paranoid about his ex and, besides, she knew she could be discreet. Thanks to Hamlin’s slip of the tongue, she found two Mexican restaurants within a three-mile radius of Corrine Davenport’s home and visited both, asking the managers if they’d seen a tall man wearing a plaid scarf who came in regularly for Taco Tuesdays.

  At the second restaurant, the manager said he’d seen a guy like that and that he usually came with a teenage boy. He couldn’t be sure, however, whether or not they’d been there on that particular Tuesday. And, no, he didn’t know the boy’s name—or the man’s name for that matter.

  Aloa found the bar a few doors away. The bartender, who had an Irish accent as thick as a peat bog, said he always worked Tuesday nights but didn’t remember Hamlin. “I’m not just sitting around staring at my customers, now am I?” he said.

  Aloa supposed she could wait outside the Mexican restaurant the following Tuesday, which was six days away, or she could hang around every public school in the area looking for a boy who matched the photo, but the kid could have been enrolled in a private school, which would add a dozen more locations to the mix. She would leave surveillance as a last resort.

  On the way home, she stopped at her favorite grocery and bought a chicken to roast and the makings for a green salad. Then, she settled in at her desk, the space heater baking the lower half of her body but leaving her torso to freeze.

  What sadist designed these things?

  She spent an hour searching online for a custody lawsuit involving Hamlin, but if it existed, it had been sealed. After, she took a wild stab and looked for stories about female chefs in the city but none of them worked at Fisherman’s Wharf. Frustrated, she closed the lid on her laptop and went into the kitchen and drank a large glass of water. While she was there, she scrubbed the sink and swept the floor until her irritation eased.

  She was into her third hour at her computer when she found something interesting. A search of Corrine Davenport’s name and title as assistant district attorney had brought Aloa to a prison-rights website and the story of a twenty-nine-year-old defendant named Pablo Ruiz. Ruiz had been sentenced to four years in state prison for selling a half pound of heroin to an undercover agent near his son’s elementary school. Corrine Davenport had been the prosecutor.

  According to the article, Ruiz, who had no prior criminal record, had claimed that he only sold the drugs because he needed the money to pay for his wife’s stomach-cancer treatments.

  Aloa sat straighter in her chair. Could the fact Corrine Davenport had been stabbed in the abdomen be a symbolic payback?

  The writer chronicled how Ruiz had fallen apart in prison when he learned his wife had died and their two children had been put into foster care. Advocates said the only reason Ruiz had been given a maximum sentence was because the district attorney was being pressured to get tough on heroin dealers in the city and the judge’s son had died of a drug overdose eight months before.

  It was the perfect confluence of overzealous prosecution and lack of sympathy for the terrible choices faced by the poor when they got sick, activists said.

  Aloa did a quick search on a prison inmate site and found three Pablo Ruizes, but none of them were the right age. She glanced at the clock and dialed her friend Steve Porter, a computer whiz who worked for the State Department and owed her a lifetime of favors for clearing his name in a murder investigation.

  “How’s it hanging, girl?” Steve bellowed.

  A forty-year-old white guy who graduated from Harvard, he talked like a street tough from the wrong side of the tracks.

  “In case you didn’t notice, I’ve got nothing to hang, Steve,” she said.

  “True that,” he said. “So what’s the refresh?”

  Sometimes she thought she needed a Steve Porter translation app.

  “I’m working on another article.”

  “Fives to you.”

  She frowned. “And I need to find out where a guy who was in prison for selling heroin might be.”

  “No prob. Give me the deets.”

  It took Porter only four minutes to come up with the answer. Pablo Ruiz had been paroled from Folsom Prison back to San Francisco four months before Corrine’s death.

  “Looks like he had some trouble inside,” Porter said. “Six months in the SHU, the Special Housing Unit, for trying to light another inmate on fire. Got caught with a shiv too.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue. “If you’re looking for him you’d best be careful. You know what solitary does to a dude.”

  Aloa knew. While doing a story on a man who’d been released from prison after DNA tests had overturned his rape conviction, she’d read the testimony of a professor of psychology named Craig Haney. Haney compared solitary confinement to a long form of social death. Most of those who went into those silent, windowless cells came out so psychologically damaged they could never fit into the world again.

  Aloa asked for the name and phone number of Ruiz’s parole officer and thanked Porter.

  “Ain’t nothin’, girl,” he said. “And I’m going to email you a photo of the dude. Got to be wary, you know.”

  Ruiz’s parole officer was brusque when Aloa called. Ruiz, he said, had been paroled to a halfway house in the city and hadn’t lasted a month before he rabbited, and if she knew where in the hell Ruiz was she’d better tell him.

  She told him she was on the hunt, too, and broke the connection.

  She got up, preheated the oven, and pulled the chicken from the refrigerator. She fired up a little early Madonna as background music and stuffed a few pats of butter under the chicken skin. She rubbed the skin with olive oil, salt, and garlic, and put it in the oven to roast while she tossed a salad. She thought about what she’d accomplished so far and poured herself a glass of wine. She was still a long way from finding the answers she needed, but at least she had a new path to follow.

  DAY 6

  Cold and fog still pressed down on the city. San Franciscans who accepted the gentle summer fog as a fact of life were growing unnerved by the frigid miasma that seemed to weigh them down. The dark clouds were suffocating and mean, as if they were determined to bring the too-pretty city to its knees.

  The mayor had announced the opening of warming shelters, and a suicide hotline reported calls had increased by 50 percent. The same columnist who had written about the shipwreck
in the fog now told a story about the time the US military used San Francisco’s fog as part of a germ warfare test.

  Aloa made herself a slice of avocado toast, poured some coffee, and sat down in front of her computer to read. According to the columnist, in 1950 a navy ship had spent six days spraying what was believed to be harmless bacteria into the fog over San Francisco as a way to test the susceptibility of a big city to a germ warfare attack. The experiment was a success. Monitors showed hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting residents had been exposed to the germs. But the microorganisms may not have been as harmless as was thought. Right after the spraying, eleven people landed in the hospital with urinary tract infections caused by a rare bacterium—the same one that had been sprayed.

  Aloa couldn’t help looking out her front window into the grayness and wondering what lurked out there.

  She told herself to stop imagining what wasn’t there and shook away thoughts of germs in the mist. She got up, washed her few dishes, and slipped into jeans and a thick sweater before heading out the door.

  Twenty minutes later, she parked the bike and climbed cracked steps to the halfway house where Ruiz had been paroled. The manager of the house, a man with a bulldog face and a long scar that bisected his top lip, told Aloa it wasn’t his job to track down parole violators, and besides, Ruiz had been nothing but trouble.

  He had harassed other residents, refused the chores he’d been assigned, and had missed two mandatory meetings.

  “Good riddance to bad seed,” the manager said.

  Aloa let herself outside and was considering her next move when a skinny woman slipped out the door behind her.

  “I know where he is,” the woman hissed, plucking at Aloa’s sleeve. “For twenty dollars I can show you.”

  The whites of the woman’s eyes had yellowed, and beneath the open coat she wore was a bloated belly on a too-thin frame.

  “Where is he?” Aloa asked.

  “In the Jungle,” the woman whispered.

  The Jungle was a homeless encampment under the 101 freeway where more than a hundred of the city’s most vulnerable citizens had created a small village for themselves. They were the sick, the unemployed, the just plain unlucky. More than half had substance abuse problems or mental illness. Many had both. Overdoses, fights, and stabbings occurred with regular frequency, and for a moment Aloa considered calling Rick Quinn and asking if she could buy him a cup of coffee in exchange for a little backup. But she knew the arrival of a police officer at the encampment would send everybody running for cover. This woman in front of her, now picking at her lips with nervous fingers, would be a much better guide. She’d just have to try to outrun whatever trouble came her way.