The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  “I’ll pay you when we get there,” Aloa said.

  Twenty minutes later, the woman pointed toward a section of the encampment under the sweep of highway. “He’s in there. Over by that big pillar,” the woman said. “Ask for Elvis. He knows where to find Pablo.”

  The place looked like it had been dreamed up for an apocalyptic movie. Packed-dirt paths led through a maze of tents, tarps, and graying sheets of plywood. Shopping carts—overflowing with mildewed sleeping bags, broken chairs, and discarded rugs—were parked in front of makeshift huts. Trash piled along the edges of the place and shattered glass lay scattered on the ground.

  After Aloa had left the newspaper and when she thought she might lose her grandmother’s house, she sometimes considered what it would be like to not have a home. She imagined herself as a vagabond, traveling the country with only a sleeping bag and a car, working a series of mindless jobs and having her freedom. Part of her thought it wouldn’t be a bad way to live. But what was in front of her wasn’t freedom. This was being so tied up in the chains of poverty and illness that you couldn’t move.

  Aloa took a breath and walked in.

  Eyes followed her from beneath piles of dirty blankets. A man in saggy jeans and a faded Raiders jersey waved his arms and shouted at one of the freeway support pillars in the center of the space. “God will judge you and find you wanting,” he cried. “He will send you into the fires of hell.” His gaze caught Aloa’s and he pivoted, pointing a finger at her. “Only God can pull you from eternal punishment. Only God’s grace can lift you up. Ask for forgiveness, sinner, and you will be saved.”

  Aloa hurried on.

  If only forgiveness were that easy, she thought, remembering the looks in the newsroom as she boxed up her desk and the faces of her so-called friends who turned away as she walked past. She’d broken not only the trust of the newspaper’s readers, but also of her fellow journalists. Reporters did not forget when one of their own betrayed them. And they didn’t forgive easily either. Even with the series she’d done for Novo, redemption was a long way off. If it was there at all.

  She passed a tattooed man working on a bicycle and a man so covered in sores he looked as if he were a leper. “Spare change, sister?” he asked.

  The place smelled of rot and overflowing sewer. The noise of cars above created a never-ending roar. Ahead of her, a toddler dug in the dirt with a teaspoon as a tired-looking young woman with a headful of dark braids watched. Aloa’s heart cracked and she wished she’d thought to bring sandwiches and coffee. She smiled at the young mother but the woman wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  What was her story?

  A little farther in, Aloa approached two guys in stained clothes seated next to a wood-and-canvas hut. They were warming their hands over a hibachi.

  “Welcome to Shackteau Saint Shithole,” said one of the men. “What can we do you for?”

  “Do you know where I can find a guy named Elvis?” Aloa asked.

  “I told you, Ronnie, fine ladies never come looking for us,” said the second man, shaking his head in fake regret.

  “That’s because you scare ’em off with the way you’re smellin’,” said the man who apparently was named Ronnie. “Lucky for me, I got sinus problems.” He thumbed toward a plywood-and-tarp lean-to a short distance away. “That’s Elvis’s place over there.”

  The other man leaned forward. “But be careful,” he said, “he might bite.”

  The two men rocked back with laughter and Aloa moved on, hoping it was a joke.

  She stopped in front of the makeshift shelter. “Elvis? Are you in there, Elvis?” she called.

  She heard a rustle of tarp and a phlegmy cough. “Who’s askin’?” said a voice.

  She took a step back just in case. “My name’s Aloa. I’m looking for Pablo. Pablo Ruiz.”

  The face of a grizzled and toothless man poked out from the hut—the biting threat was a joke after all. “I got first dibs,” he said.

  “Sorry. I don’t understand,” she said.

  Elvis cocked his head toward a blue tent next door. “Pablo lives there, and if he ain’t back by tomorrow the place is mine. Them’s the rules. You can’t be jumpin’ ahead.”

  “I just want to speak with Mr. Ruiz,” Aloa said.

  “Well, he’s gone,” Elvis said.

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “I guess a Jackson could jog my memory,” the toothless man said.

  Aloa pulled a twenty from her jacket pocket. She was starting to feel like an ATM machine.

  “Last I saw him was about two weeks back. He was going to a recovery meeting over there at that old yellow storefront on Cesar Chavez. Then nothing until about six days ago. He come back, middle of the night; didn’t see him, but heard him rustling around and saw a light in his place.”

  “Can I look through his tent?”

  “Sure, but don’t take nothin’,” Elvis warned.

  Aloa crouched in front of the nylon shelter and unzipped the door. Inside was the facsimile of a tiny and tidy home: a neatly made cot, a faded rug, a camping stove, and a framed photo of a smiling family. A cardboard box held a stack of papers. Aloa reached out a hand and pulled it toward her. “People vs. Pablo Ruiz” read a superior court document. Clipped to that was a printout of the story Aloa had seen, along with a photocopied picture of Corrine Davenport.

  Davenport’s face was circled in red ink.

  Aloa took photos of the interior of the tent and a shot of Corrine Davenport’s altered photograph with her phone.

  Maybe she’d found something.

  She stood as a man pushing a big-screen TV in a shopping cart shoved past. “’Scuse me,” he said.

  Elvis was now sitting on an overturned milk crate, a grimy sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders. He looked to be in his late sixties, but Aloa guessed he was younger. Life on the streets would do that to you.

  “Do you know when Mr. Ruiz is coming back?” she asked him.

  “Say, you got a cigarette on you?”

  Aloa shook her head.

  Elvis made a sucking sound with his lips. “He’s gone a week, I get his place. I woulda had it a lot earlier but ol’ Pablo jumped me to it. Billy used ta live there, but he disappeared and the next thing I knows, Pablo took over and I sure as heck weren’t going to mess with him. He a crazy dude. Just outta the joint. He throwed down a knife in front of this girl, Star, who offered to blow him for a speedball.”

  Elvis leaned in and Aloa could smell his stale breath. “Then her, that Star, well, she up and disappeared too,” Elvis said. “Just like Billy. Lotta people been disappearing around here lately.” Elvis rocked back on his crate.

  “Disappeared?”

  “Poof,” Elvis said.

  Aloa’s brain clicked. “Are you saying maybe Mr. Ruiz killed them?”

  “Ain’t nothing impossible in this place.”

  Her mind raced. Not only did the documents in Ruiz’s tent point to his apparent interest in Corrine Davenport, but now there was also a possible connection to two missing people.

  She asked for the address of the recovery meeting and got the full name of the missing Billy (Elvis didn’t know Star’s real name) along with a request to return with a pack of Camel Lights.

  Aloa was sitting in a coffee shop nursing a black coffee with a crowd of other chilled San Franciscans when Rick Quinn returned the call she’d made after she’d left the Jungle.

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re asking about a guy we found dead in a duffel bag, one William Lisowski?” he asked.

  “Oh crap,” she said. “How’d he die?”

  “First, you tell me how you know the guy.”

  Aloa paused. “His name came up.”

  “Are we going to play this game?”

  Aloa knew she’d get nowhere with Quinn if she didn’t lay at least some of her cards on the table. “I was at the Jungle, looking for this drug dealer Corrine Davenport put away, and somebody mentioned him.”

&nbs
p; Quinn swore. “What the hell were you doing in the Jungle? That place isn’t safe.”

  “Nothing happened,” Aloa said defensively.

  “This time,” Quinn warned.

  “Can you spare me the lecture and just answer my question about how Billy, Mr. Lisowski, died?”

  “The coroner says it looks like somebody shot him in the forehead with a bolt gun. Then they slit his throat. His skull had a dent a half-inch deep. That’s not something you see every day.”

  Aloa shuddered. Poor Billy.

  “Where’d they find him?”

  “On Howard Street.” He gave her the address.

  Aloa waited. “Are you going to tell me more?”

  “Not if you’re going to be wandering around homeless camps.”

  “I wasn’t wandering. I was looking for a suspect who might have wanted Corrine Davenport dead.”

  Quinn sighed. “Listen. We already checked that out. There were no threats made against the victim. The only person who had it out for her was the professor.”

  “But what if he’s the wrong guy?” she pressed.

  “You got something I should know about?”

  Aloa thought of her promise to Hamlin. “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Well, work on it somewhere besides the Jungle.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Quinn paused. “And if you find something different, you’ll let me know. Right?”

  “Say pretty please.”

  Quinn hung up.

  It took Aloa a half hour of searching on her phone before she found information about Billy’s death from a street blogger who went by the name MistaNews. Apparently, the death was the second murder of a homeless person in the new year, a fact that hadn’t made it into the regular news. Billy, who’d had two convictions for opioid sales, had been seen peddling his wares on a street corner controlled by MS-13, a violent international ring of criminals that engaged in drug smuggling, human trafficking, and money laundering. His body had been discovered by another homeless guy who’d opened the duffel bag thinking he might find something good to sell, only to discover Billy dead and curled in a fetal position—bound hand and foot with barbed wire.

  Aloa stood near the address on Howard Street, getting a feel for where Billy’s body had been found. It was a trick she’d learned from an ex-lover, an LA homicide detective she’d dated until his darkness had threatened to overrun her.

  A crime scene will tell you stories, her ex had said, but only if you have patience.

  Often, he would order everyone from the room, then sit and silently contemplate everything in front of him. On one murder case, he’d spotted a bloody thumbprint on a picture frame. The print was later connected to the killer. Another time, he’d noticed part of a navy-blue button that had slipped between the wall-to-wall carpet and the baseboard. It turned out to belong on a shirt the victim’s ex-husband owned.

  Aloa’s father had taught her something similar. If you walk into a meadow or a forest without stopping, you’ll never see what the environment is really like, he’d said. Birds will scatter, insects will fall silent, and animals will freeze in their tracks. But stop and sit and the world will gradually reveal itself again. You’ll see the butterfly alight on a flower, you’ll notice animal tracks and hear the call of birds.

  Aloa leaned against a pale masonry wall, observing what was around her. A clump of people huddled under a bus stop shelter, their arms laden with grocery bags, shuffling from one foot to the other in an attempt to stay warm. A bored attendant sat on a folding chair at the entrance to a parking lot. A nearby bar advertised happy hour from four to six every day but Saturday. It was a busy place.

  She guessed Billy’s corpse had been dumped in the early morning hours when the bar had emptied and traffic was lighter, and that it had taken two people to bring the body here. Either that or someone who was very strong. Prison strong? She wondered.

  She caught sight of an advertisement for the California lottery on a distant billboard. GOOD FORTUNE FOR ALL read the ad, which certainly hadn’t been true for Billy. His life had been hard, his death gruesome. Nobody deserved that.

  She was just crossing the street to take in the view from another angle when her cell phone rang.

  She saw the caller ID and answered.

  “I was wondering if you might stop by the house,” Davenport said in a voice that sounded tired and used up. “Kyle found something I’d like you to see.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  Now she was in Davenport’s study once again, sipping a tea that Davenport had called Gyokuro Tamahomare, which, he said, was one of the most sought-after teas in Japan. Its name meant something like prestigious pearl of dew and its taste was intense and velvety. The kind of tea that could almost change her mind about being a coffee drinker. Aloa took a sip, then another.

  Davenport had been quiet as Kyle prepared the tea and now asked his assistant to fetch the information they’d discovered.

  Aloa heard Kyle’s footsteps going up the stairs. “Does Kyle live here?”

  “He moved in after Corrine died.” Davenport sighed. His eyes were glassy and feverish.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Aloa asked.

  “Just having a bad day,” Davenport said.

  He looked toward the living room where flames crackled in the marble fireplace. “Last night I thought I saw her,” he said softly. “She was right there. Just standing. Her hair was down and she was wearing that dress, the one she wore when she died. She turned and smiled, and I called for her to come, but then I saw she didn’t have feet. She floated away.”

  The hairs on the back of Aloa’s neck tingled.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Aloa?” he asked quietly.

  “I guess I’ve seen enough things I can’t explain to not rule out the possibility of ghosts.”

  “I think ghosts are our regrets. What we didn’t say or do before someone died,” Davenport said. “I think we all have them. Even you.”

  Aloa thought of her secret and also of her unthinking words to her father before he’d gone on his last run. He’d asked her to take out the trash and she’d rolled her eyes. Yeah, whatever, she’d said.

  Her fingers shook slightly and she wondered how much caffeine was in the tea she was drinking. She set the cup aside.

  “My regret,” said Davenport, “is that I didn’t die, that Corrine suffered so much because of me. Remember gaman, the virtue of endurance?”

  “I do.”

  “She was the definition of it.” His gaze went to Corrine’s picture on the shelf and came back. “There was this prisoner in Afghanistan, a guy about my age, who claimed he was a farmer. He wouldn’t break no matter what I did. I tried talking about his family. I tried telling him how his comrades had abandoned him and that he should look out for himself now so he could go back to his village. I offered him cigarettes. I offered him a nicer cell. And you know what happened?”

  Aloa shook her head.

  “After a couple of months, one of the guards found him dead. He didn’t hang himself with his clothes or his bedsheets like some of the others. The guy just willed himself to die.” Davenport inhaled a long breath and looked toward the photo of his wife at the Eiffel Tower.

  “After my accident, I tried to do what that guy did. Every night I would lie in bed and try to make my heart stop beating. I did it for hours, but I didn’t have whatever he had, and so I kept on living. Do you know what it’s like to want death but not be able to have it?”

  Aloa shook her head.

  “It’s worse than any torture you can think of. I begged Corrine to help kill me but she wouldn’t and neither would Kyle. I even asked my old lieutenant, Tim Everson, when he stopped by. But he told me it was more courageous for a warrior to continue to fight than to kill himself. I told him being a coward was fine with me, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  The room suddenly felt close and t
oo warm. Aloa slipped out of her jacket. She could hear Kyle coming down the hallway.

  “The only reason I have now for living is to make sure Burns Hamlin suffers for what he did,” Davenport said. “I want him to hurt. I want him to hurt every single minute of every damned day. I want that sonofabitch to pay.” His nostrils flared. “I want him to rot in prison, the same way I’m rotting in this chair. To see how it feels to be caged up.”

  Luckily Kyle came into the room and Aloa was spared from answering.

  “Here you go, Ms. Snow,” he said, handing her another manila envelope.

  She looked at Davenport. “What’s in here?” she asked, but he turned his head away.

  “It’s a complaint filed against Hamlin when he was an undergrad at a private college in New York,” Kyle said quietly. “A classmate claimed he’d stalked her and that she was afraid for her life. The info is all there. Plus, there’s an interview with Mrs. Davenport’s old boss, who said she’d never been threatened by anyone she’d prosecuted, and two years’ worth of medical records for Hamlin. He was seeing a psychiatrist and had a prescription for Xanax.”

  “How’d you get this stuff?” Aloa asked. She knew the records, especially medical reports, weren’t public.

  Kyle looked down at his shoes and cleared his throat. “It’s not hard to find things, plus Christian still has friends.”

  “The FBI?”

  Kyle cleared his throat again. “You should go.”

  Aloa glanced again at Davenport and knew she would get no answers from him.