“So Vince and Scooter bought paintings from her?”
“Yes, a big order. Six expensive ones. But she said they wouldn’t pay her what they were worth. They just took them and never paid.”
“Hmmm,” I murmured, mulling that over. “Is there anything else you can tell me about your sister? Or Vince and Scooter?”
She let out a long sigh. “My sister took her gun with her. She said they weren’t going to get away with it.”
Famous last words. My heart sank. “What kind of gun?”
“I don’t know. A small gun, a pistol. She put it inside her jacket.”
“And Vince and Scooter. You know much about them? What they do?”
She shook her head, then her eyes widened as she remembered something. “Johnnie said they were Blue Notes.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know what it means. She just said they were Blue Notes.”
“Okay. One more question. How do you know Poe?”
“I met him a few times. He seemed like a nice man. He had M&M’s, red, blue and yellow. Johnnie said he was a friend and that he helped us a lot. I didn’t know where else to go or what to do, so I went to him, and he said to come and see you.”
I took a breath of salty air, reflecting on what I’d just heard, catching the unmistakable stink coming off this whole situation. I looked at Frankie again. Something about her I trusted. Not necessarily what she was telling me, because that most likely had little relation to the whole truth, but my sense was that here sat a good kid. Period. She’d seen too much at a young age but hadn’t been broken by it yet. She was probably on the verge, though, if things turned out like it appeared they might.
“Can you help us? I can pay. You can trust me.” Her look was open, guileless.
Up until that moment, I had no intention of getting involved. But something in those last four words, and, goddamn me, the look on her face when she said that I could trust her, sealed it for me.
“How much money do you have?”
She stood up, shoved her fingers in her front pocket and extracted a bundle of bills in a rubber band. She extended it out to me. “Three hundred eight dollars.”
I nodded. Gave her a little whistle to show how impressed I was.
“Why don’t you hang onto that for the moment. Let me check around and see what I can find out for you. We can talk about money later after we find out a little bit more. Okay?”
“Okay,” she murmured, biting her lower lip. She shoved the money back in her pants.
“Where can I find Scooter and Vince?”
“They have a car garage. That’s where I found them last time. It’s not too far from where I live. There’s a sign that says, ‘Good & Plenty Repairs.’”
“Alright,” I said. I’d do what I could, which, I thought at the time, wouldn’t be much. I’d talk to Poe, check out her story, find out what I could about Vince and Scooter and why they were Blue Notes.
All things being equal, I’d come up with less than nothing and tell the girl the cold, hard truth. Her sister had disappeared for good and she was all alone in the rotting metropolis.
That’s what I thought then.
If I had known what was in store for me, I would have given the kid a lollipop, patted her on the head, and ushered her out of my office faster than she could flip her Rubik’s cube.
Two
Out on the dock leading to my houseboat, Frankie spun on her skateboard, singing a rap ditty.
Booty booty
Plump and moody
Booty booty
Mamma do me
Jeez. “Frankie?”
She danced. Pivoting, jumping. Behind me, around me, whirling like the proverbial dervish.
“Did Poe tell you where to find me?”
“Uh huh,” she said, continuing to rap.
Booty booty
Plump and moody
I’d moved to the boat since the last time I’d dealt with Poe. I wasn’t surprised that he kept tabs on me or everyone else in his universe. He was a careful man.
Booty booty—
“Poe knows lots a things,” Frankie added. Truly the understatement of the day.
I asked how I could get in touch with her.
She seesawed on her skateboard, rocking back and forth, her arms out surfer style. She jumped high, flipped the board end over end, landed back squarely on top of it.
Showoff.
“I’ll come by and see you on Thursday.”
“How can I reach you?”
She shrugged.
“Do you have a phone number?”
“Nope. Johnnie has a cell phone, but she took it with her.”
“Have you called it?”
“Hundred times. It rings, but she doesn’t answer. Just recorded Johnnie telling me she’ll call back if I ask nicely. I’ve left ten messages. Sometimes I call just to hear her voice and...”
My hope for the physical well-being of her big sister dimmed as Frankie continued talking.
“...the people in the house upstairs are getting a little cranky about me using their phone every day. I sneak in anyways.”
“Where do you live?”
Balancing on the board, still rocking, she again took my measure and didn’t respond.
“Look, Frankie. You have to trust me. I can’t help you if you don’t.”
She narrowed her eyes for a moment, giving me the once over twice before her face softened.
“Okay. In the basement of a house.”
“Where.”
“Mission.”
“That’s a pretty big area. What’s the address?”
“Near the park. It’s this big old white house on Church Street, right across the street from Mission Dolores Park. Me and Johnnie live in the basement.”
“What’s the number?”
She rolled her eyes up, thinking. Then she shrugged. “Don’t know. But there’s a weather vane on the roof with a chicken on it. A scarecrow too, like in the Wizard of Oz, in the middle of a tomato garden in the front yard. When I was a kid, I used to play Dorothy. My cat Leeshiepoo was Toto.” She frowned. “Leeshie got run over.” She paused, shook her head. “She was a good kitty. Wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t a dog.” Frankie rolled back and forth on her skateboard and mumbled, “Are you going to come and visit me?”
“Maybe. I just want to know where I can find you if I need to tell you something or ask for more information about Johnnie.”
“I’ll come by again in two days.”
“Can I call the number at the house above your apartment if I have to? Can someone fetch you and have you take the call?”
“I guess so...” She wrinkled her brow, scrunching her lips to the right. “Maggie or Leonard will answer. They’re a little wacky. Johnnie calls them hippie-dippie. But they’re okay. I’ll tell them you might call.”
She gave me the number, and I scribbled it down on one of my cards.
“How did you get all the way out here to see me?” I looked dubiously at her skateboard.
“The bus and this.” She pointed at the skateboard.
“You’re pretty slick on that thing.”
“My Ollies and Kickflips are pretty good.” She hammered the board with her right foot and jumped in the air. The board flipped over, and she landed squarely on it, spun a 360, and said, “Ta-da!”
“Wow,” I said.
“Workin’ on a nollie. I’ll show you when I have it down.”
“Can’t wait,” I said.
Her eyes darkened, a worry flashing over her face.
“What’s the matter?”
She locked eyes with me. “You’re really going to look hard for her, Mr. Plank?”
“Yes, I really am.”
“Pinkie promise?” Her tiny finger extended toward me. I bent my own around it, and we wiggled together. I started to smile but saw she was serious as a stroke and wiped my face clean.
“Or hope to die,” she whispered.
�
�Or hope to die,” I repeated.
If there’s one thing I take seriously, it’s a pinkie promise.
Later that morning as I was nearly napping out on the back deck with my fishing line dipped in the placid waters of the Bay, there came another rapping at my door.
Tis some visitor, I mused, tapping at my chamber door. Only this and nothing more...
The conversation I’d had with Frankie about Poe was definitely weighing on my mind.
Meiying popped her head out through the back door of my cabin and said, “Plank.”
“What brings you on board my vessel at this ungodly hour?”
She and her partner, Dao, rarely woke or ventured from their yacht earlier than noon. Their 97-foot boat, Sweet and Sour, was docked in the waters a few hundred yards away from me. Meiying was a thin reed of a woman in her early sixties, with a mane of still mostly black hair fixed tightly to her head. Everything about her was a little too rigid, including her unusual steel gray eyes. I’d seen pictures of her when she was in her twenties and ravishingly beautiful. She still retained a porcelain-like beauty. More importantly, Dao adored her and vice-versa. I couldn’t imagine them without each other.
“Dao want you come for dinner. Big party. He make his famous Gunpowder Chicken and Hoisin wraps.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“New investment opportunity.”
“Meiying...”
“I know. I know. You not invest. You not believe. You put all you money in sock and hide it on boat here. I worry for you, Plank. No children. Old age. No nest egg.”
“When I’m old and without money, I’ll come live on your boat with Dao and you.”
Meiying frowned. “We love Plank. Dao loves Plank. We give you money to stay off our boat.”
“See? I don’t need investments with good friends like you.”
Meiying shook her head disapprovingly but held her tongue. We’d had variations on this conversation for the past five years since I’d become friends with Dao.
“You come tonight. Be some nice Asian ladies there.”
“I’m not looking for—”
“You should marry Alexandra. But you don’t. Stupid. So Meiying find you Asian lady and maybe—”
“You’re wasting your—”
“No matter. You come for Gunpowder chicken or ladies or both. Fine?”
“I come for the chicken...and the wraps.”
“Good,” she said, turned, stopped, angled her face back. “Little girl come see you?”
“How’d you know about her?”
“We dock this morning. Get gas. Little girl ask where she can find you.”
“She found me.”
“She have trouble,” Meiying stated.
I nodded.
“You help?”
“Going to try.”
“Good man.”
That was the second time this morning that I’d been called a good man. It was starting to make me nervous.
“See you tonight. 8 p.m. Dress sharp. Remember nice Asian ladies.”
With that, she turned and left me trying not to think about how nice these Asian ladies might be.
Three
I stopped in at the Rusty Root early in the afternoon hoping to have a chat with Bo Fiddler, who had more experience with Poe than I did. I wanted to see if he had any updated information about Poe’s recent activities, if anything had changed, or if he still had his sticky fingers in a variety of meaty pies.
I walked through the dining room and into the kitchen where I found the chef, a young kid by the name of Rope Rivers, I kid you not, lecturing a sous chef twice his age about remoulade sauce.
“Rope,” I interrupted.
The both of them looked up, startled for a moment. Rope smiled. “Max,” he said. He wore a bandana looped around his slicked-back red hair. He had freckles and rosy cheeks and looked like he was nearing the end of a thirty-day fast. He was twenty-six, but his emaciated appearance suggested ten years older.
“Where’s the boss?”
“In hiding.”
“With the band?”
“I think so. He’s always a little cryptic about his musical interludes.”
When he practiced with his on-and-off again band, The Harder You Fall, he shut himself off completely from the real world for hours, if not days.
“When do you expect him?”
“Dinner time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t show till later. He’ll be in, but when he’s got the band going, his sense of timing goes off-kilter.”
Bo was usually a constant presence in his restaurant, one of the reasons it was so successful. But music was his first love and passion, just like it had been mine. We’d been in the same succession of bands in our late teens and through our mid-twenties, always on the verge of making it.
I left the two chefs to resolve their saucy dispute and left through the back door that led into a large shed-like structure made of corrugated metal that Bo used for storing supplies and other odds and ends. Tucked in a corner of the building beneath a blue tarp was my Ducati Veltro racing bike, a gift from Dao and Meiying on my thirty-ninth birthday last year.
I hadn’t wanted to accept it, but I knew if I refused, I’d be insulting them.
It was a piece of work. Looked almost as cool as Batman’s ride. All black carbon and magnesium, smooth and supple as a woman’s behind. There were less than a hundred ever produced, and it must have cost them a small fortune. I’d been riding an old Honda, and Dao felt like he owed me a big favor because I’d helped him out of a jam with a fellow yacht owner who was docked nearby and making an asshole of himself. Actually, Marsh Chapin had resolved that situation for me in his inimitable and decisive way.
The Ducati was as sleek and sharp as a switchblade, as fast as the blink of an eye.
I rolled the bike out the shed door, locked things up, then settled onto the leather seat and cranked the engine. It rumbled on with a smooth growl that morphed quickly into a powerful smooth hum. I glanced up at the sky, a forever sprawl of sunlit blue, and breathed in the sea-filled air.
In seconds, I was threading through traffic, the sea breeze from the Bay to my right ruffling my hair. I wound around Jefferson Street, then over to Beach and Bay, around Aquatic Park and Fort Mason, and onto Marina Boulevard.
I pulled into the small driveway of Bo’s massive, glass-fronted, two-story home, kitty corner to the lovely Marina Green and directly across from the stately boats anchored in Yacht Harbor.
The Marina district is home to some of San Francisco’s most expensive real estate, and Bo’s house is worth millions. But he isn’t really that rich—or he is, but only if he sells the house. The property was left to him by his parents, who bought it for a relative song back in the forties.
As I stepped out onto his driveway, I felt the ground rumbling. For a moment, I thought it might be the beginning of a quake, and I knew that if that were the case, this was one of the worst places in the city to be. The land beneath my feet used to be shallows, tidal pools, sand dunes. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the whole area got hammered—the fill liquefied, water mains broke, fires raged.
The moment passed, and I realized the vibrations were caused by the pounding rhythms of the drums and bass guitars coming through the powerful speakers lining Bo’s garage.
The dwellings here are attached to each other like townhouses. Amazing, considering what they cost. You can’t beat the location though, and that’s everything. You don’t get much land for your millions, but who needs it with such glorious surroundings?
I knew that he probably wouldn’t hear my knocks or rings on his doorbell beneath the rock racket they were making. I tried his cell phone, as I had earlier in the morning, but it went straight to voicemail again.
As I pondered my assault on the house, the din of the music suddenly stopped, and the garage door swung open.
Drumsticks in hand, Bo Fiddler stepped out onto the driveway and flashed me a surprised look. Be
hind him, the band—Marty on bass, Martha on electric violin, Pete on sax, and Vig on keyboards—fierce middle-aged rockers, all stood in various poses and somehow, as a group, conveyed a feeling of both energy and enervation at the same time.
“Plank,” Bo said.
“Sticks,” I responded.
We both nodded, grinned.
Bo was wearing polka dot suspenders over a short-sleeved blue t-shirt above a pair of ripped jeans. He was a big man, with big arms and stumpy legs. He had curly black hair that sprawled over his head in a tangled mop. His midsection had slowly, pleasantly, progressed over the years since he’d purchased the restaurant and now was a substantial asset spilling over his belt buckle.
“Got a gig?” I asked.
“My daughter’s wedding.”
“What?”
He shrugged.
“I didn’t even know she was dating.”
“Love is like an arrow,” Bo said flatly.
“She’s what...nineteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Jeez.”
“Love has no truck with age.”
I hadn’t seen Jen for a few months. I remembered her junior prom when I happened to be over for dinner and the sweaty, big-handed boy with the cowlick who shook my hand and giggled like a school girl. I hoped to hell he wasn’t the groom.
“One more cliche about love and I’m going to need a paper bag.”
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
I must have looked sick because Bo came over and patted me on the back. “He’s a good kid. They’re both good kids. I talked to her. I talked to him. It’s hopeless. I try to remember what I was like when I was eighteen.”
“Does it help?”
“No,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“When’s the big day?”
“End of September.”
There wasn’t much else to say about that. I’m not a big believer in marriage at any age, but I have a strict recommendation for any youth foolish enough to ask my opinion—under no circumstance marry before the age of thirty. Even that is merely a lower limit.
Stray Cat Blues Page 2