City of Whispers

by Marcia Muller

  “Who? Darcy? No.”

  “He’s in the city, just e-mailed Shar wanting help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Shit.” Her voice was flat.

  “Did you change the locks after that time he trashed your place?”

  “Yes. Dammit, what’s he gotten himself into this time?”

  “Whatever it is, it wouldn’t surprise me. If you hear from him, give me a call. And don’t tell Shar I got in touch with you.”

  “Right. Got to go.”

  Mick considered calling his girlfriend, Alison Lawton, then remembered she, a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, had told him she had client meetings scheduled back-to-back for most of the day. Two careers, not much time, but when they were together…

  He gathered up his jacket and keys, went down the stairs to the floor of the pier, and got on his Harley. Now that he thought about it, he regretted giving Shar the information about where Darcy had e-mailed from. He knew his aunt; even though he’d said he’d look for Darcy, she’d head to The Wiring Hall as soon as she was free and launch an all-out search for her half brother. If she found him—and she would, Mick was sure of that—she’d bring him home and try to rehabilitate him. It wouldn’t work, of course, and she’d be heartbroken. Maybe then Darcy would take up residence under the Golden Gate Bridge—hopefully in the shipping lanes.

  Harsh, Savage. Harsh.

  He started the bike and headed for Chestnut Street.

  Parking in the Marina district was impossible, as always, even with a motorcycle like his Harley. Finally he found a space three blocks from the café that he could wedge the bike into without fear of its being damaged by the vehicles to either side.

  The Wiring Hall had neon tubes designed to look like lightning bolts in its large front windows. Inside it was all high-tech aluminum. Several people hunched over their laptops and lattes or used the terminals provided by the café, and none looked up when Mick strode to the counter. A woman of about his age with a tattoo of red rosebuds covering half her face was standing by the register, counting out dollar bills. She’d probably had the tat since her late teens, and Mick wondered if she now regretted it. She would someday, like as not, when the wrinkles set in and all those pretty flowers wilted….

  He ordered black coffee, and when the woman brought it, said, “Guy was in here maybe an hour and a half ago. Used one of your terminals. You’d have noticed him: Indian features, funny dyed hair, lots of piercings. Scruffy. Didn’t fit the neighborhood.”

  “I’d’ve noticed him if I was on shift then, but mine just started.”

  “Who was on then?”

  She eyed him suspiciously. He took out his ID case and handed it to her.

  “Okay,” she said, returning the case to him. “What are you after the guy for?”

  “Nothing bad. He’s just a missing person.”

  “Oh. Well, then, the person to talk to is Mira. Mira Rasmussen.”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “Usually she has lunch at Zero’s.”

  Mick knew Zero’s. Small and narrow and noisy and way too expensive. Very popular and God knew why; the food was atrocious. An odd place for a coffee barista to frequently lunch, but then maybe she had odd taste. He walked the two blocks down Chestnut to Zero’s and went inside. The long bar down the right-hand side was crowded. He shouldered between two suits and asked the barman for Mira Rasmussen.

  “She’s out back, having lunch.”

  “Out back?”

  “Yeah—like in the kitchen.”

  “Why there?”

  “She’s the owner’s old lady, works down the block.” Someone at the other end of the bar was gesturing for service. “Go straight back through those swinging doors, and you’ll find her.”

  Mick went past closely packed tables where people were eating sandwiches dripping with oddly colored veggie mixes, weird-looking salads, and pizzettas loaded with things like arugula and pineapple.

  Thank God for steak and fried chicken and meat lasagna!

  Behind the swinging doors the kitchen was hot and fragrant with the foods being prepared by a busy staff of five. At the far end of a central prep island, where a short Latino man was chopping tomatoes and onions, a woman with long, dusky hair and large tortoiseshell glasses sat reading the Chronicle and spooning up soup. The soup, Mick noted, was an odd yellow-green and had… things floating in it.

  He went to her, introduced himself, and showed his ID.

  She looked a little surprised—she’d probably never met a private investigator, and he was relatively young for the job—then held out her hand and said, “What can I do for you?”

  He described Darcy, asked, “Did you see him?”

  “How could I not? He came in during the early rush, went straight to use one of the terminals, and sent a quick message. A woman who came in after him tried to stop him from sending it, but too late. Then they left.”

  “Did you notice anything odd about him, other than his appearance?”

  She considered. “He acted… well, furtive. And he kept glancing at the woman as if he were afraid of her. Also, he was whispering to himself.”

  “You hear what he whispered?”

  “Only a phrase. ‘The palace, the coral tree.’ Weird, huh?”

  “Yeah. This woman—can you describe her?”

  “Long blond hair. Short. Shabby clothes. I didn’t get a good look at her face.”

  “Anything else?” Mick asked.

  “The guy grabbed a handful of straws from the condiment station on his way out.”

  “Straws?”

  “Plastic straws for smoothies. Red-white-and-blue-striped.”

  “You see which way he went when he left?”

  “West, toward Divisidero. The woman was hanging on to his arm.”

  “Thanks. If you remember anything else, you have my card.” Mick started across the kitchen, then turned. “By the way, what color is his hair these days?”

  “Greenish, an odd yellow-green.”

  Like the awful-looking soup she was eating with apparent relish.

  Darcy Blackhawk

  This city, it makes me afraid.

  Shouldn’t, he knew. Wasn’t like the movies he’d seen of New York, with its crowds and subways and taxicabs that nearly clipped you every time you crossed the street. Or LA—all those messed-up freeways. Or Seattle—that city he knew for real—where if your Indian blood showed on your face, they treated you like some drunken bum. He’d been worse places than San Francisco.

  When, though?

  And why was he here?

  He was still drugged up from the cocaine he’d shared with Laura before. Now he shook his head, felt the first symptoms of vertigo, and heard a shushing sound in his ears. Leaned against a lamppost and peered up at the street sign: Lyon and California. How the hell had he gotten here? He was supposed to be someplace else. Some palace. Or maybe he’d already been there…

  A woman said, “Darcy? You okay?”

  He knew her, but he couldn’t remember her name. In her twenties, maybe. Long, dirty, blond hair and gray eyes. Brown cape with fringe that hung almost to her ankles. Sandals and a silver toe ring. She’d come up to him like this before, when he’d found Laura. Laura, who had gone to meet her connection. Laura’d needed a fix bad after two months in jail.

  “Darcy?”

  He swayed, and the girl put an arm around his shoulders to steady him. She was very strong.

  “Palace,” he said. “Have to go to the palace.”

  “You’re sick,” she said.

  “Have to go Gaby’s grave.”

  “Gaby! Why?”

  “Grave. Under a coral tree. Some… reason…”

  “Something there?”

  “… Maybe.”

  “Let me help you.”

  He shivered and clung to her while she hailed a cab.

  He didn’t want to go with her, but Shar hadn’t answered his e-mail.
No wonder—he didn’t have his laptop any more—he’d sold that a long time ago. But didn’t Shar know he had e-mail in his head?

  Or did he? Nobody had sent him a message in… what? Months?

  A cab pulled to the curb. Yellow. Were they all yellow in San Francisco? Or was that someplace else? The girl helped him in, leaned forward, and whispered an address to the driver.

  He took out one of the drinking straws he’d gotten at the café. Twisted it, released it, twisted it again. An old habit, twisting things; it helped him focus.

  Not now, though: the vertigo got worse and bile was rising in his throat. He forced it down, dropped the straw, pressed his face into the scratchy wool of the girl’s cape.

  This city, it makes me afraid….

  Sharon McCone

  The last of my new clients left my office, bound for an interview with Julia Rafael, the operative to whom I’d assigned his case. The others had said they would let me know if they required our services, meaning the fee had put them off. But this latest, a businessman asking for a fairly routine skip trace on a former employee, had wanted to get started immediately.

  When I swiveled around I was looking through the big arched window behind my desk. Beyond it the Bay sparkled, the bridge spanning it and disappearing into the tunnel on Treasure Island. Sailboats glided over the blue water. I loved these offices in the pier, but there had been those rumblings from City Hall about demolishing it. If that happened I’d have to move the agency. But where? Not one of the bland office towers that were springing up like mushrooms all over the area. Maybe one of the outlying neighborhoods? Someplace with cheaper rents and more plentiful parking?

  No, I didn’t like that idea. The kind of clients we were now attracting expected upscale offices. Ours here certainly weren’t luxurious, but our being in a pier had a certain cachet that made them take little notice of the décor. We’d been doing so well recently that I’d hoped to put the surplus profits into employee raises and health-care options. This impending move would put those plans on hold.

  I should have been dealing with the rental-space problem, but I had a more immediate one: Darcy. I’d promised Saskia I’d find him, then had let Mick take over for me, and now I’d heard nothing from Mick.

  I checked my phone to see if there was a message from him on voice mail. Nothing. I called his cell, but apparently he’d turned it off. Damn! Of course, Mick didn’t do much fieldwork—he was mainly confined to his computer and the office—and he didn’t know I required my operatives to check in frequently. It wasn’t that I wanted to hamper their movements; it was a simple safety precaution to know where and with whom they were.

  The Wiring Hall, I thought. Internet café on Chestnut Street. Maybe I’d catch up with him there.

  I soon found I was playing follow the leader with Mick. The woman at The Wiring Hall told me she’d sent him to see a Mira Rasmussen at Zero’s. Mira wasn’t at Zero’s, but after viewing my credentials the bartender gave me her address on nearby Francisco Street, a short distance from Fort Mason.

  The building was three stories with an ornate arched entryway and cracked marble floors, probably built in the thirties. Genteel shabbiness: the stucco façade needed painting, and the eaves and downspouts were rusted. The intercom was choked by static. Mira Rasmussen buzzed me in without using it.

  Trusting lady.

  Mira’s apartment was on a second-floor corner. I had my ID out and ready when the slender, dark-haired woman opened the door. She wore an ankle-length floral-patterned skirt that flowed around her legs, and a pale pink tee; her eyes grew wide behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses as she examined my license.

  “Another one,” she said.

  “I take it you’ve spoken with my associate, Mick Savage.”

  She nodded. “I’m glad you came by; I was just about to try to contact Mick because my friend Nola, who runs the bookstore down the block from Zero’s, stopped in right after he left to give me the key to her flat so I can feed her cat while she’s gone on vacation. I told her about meeting a real-life detective because she’s a mystery novel junkie. Now I can tell her I’ve met two.”

  Does this have a point? I wondered. But you never want to crowd a witness.

  “Anyway, Nola told me she saw the green-haired guy and a woman getting into a cab on the corner of Lyon and California, near Fort Mason.”

  “Did Nola describe the woman?”

  “Yeah—sort of a retro hippie type. Dirty, dishwater-blond hair, long cape, sandals. I guess it was the same woman who was with him at The Wiring Hall. My friend said he didn’t act as if he wanted to go with her; he looked kinda sick and she was holding him up and whispering in his ear.”

  “Could Nola hear anything?”

  “Not much. Just something about a palace.”

  The Palace of Fine Arts, maybe. It was several blocks away from where the cab had picked Darcy and the woman up, on the edge of the Presidio.

  I called the office, asked Derek to check with the cab companies about a pickup at Lyon and California. He called back within minutes: the fares—a man and a woman—had gone to the Palace of Fine Arts.

  The neoclassical-style Palace, its dome rising against the clear blue sky, was mirrored in the lagoon that stretched beside it. The structure, which now housed the Exploratorium museum, had been built in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—a World’s Fair that honored the opening of the Panama Canal and the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean. Where finely dressed ladies and gentlemen had once strolled under its huge rotunda, tourists now took pictures and children ran about, screeching and laughing at the echoes of their voices. Pigeons and gulls swooped through, wary eyes on the interlopers. Strangely for a city with such a homeless problem, there were only two shabbily dressed men curled on the marble floor with their bedrolls; a woman, face turned up to the sun, sat outside with her back against one of the Corinthian columns.

  I began walking around, hoping to spot Darcy and the woman. Ducks floated on the placid water, diving under and wiggling their butts as they foraged for food. A man with a small boy diverted them with pieces of bread. The bell on an ice cream cart tinkled, and I bought a waffle cone with a scoop of vanilla chocolate chip from the red-haired vendor. I strolled along some more, watching the tour buses come and go, their occupants exclaim and click their cameras, and the sunbathers bask on the grass.

  No Darcy. No woman.

  When I returned to my starting point, the ragged homeless woman leaning against the column was still there. I approached her, thinking to ask if she’d seen anyone who resembled Darcy. Her skin was deeply wrinkled and browned, her beige parka stained and torn; she wore glasses with a cracked left lens; her eyes were open behind them.

  “Ma’am?”

  No answer.

  I knelt down and gently touched a thin arm. The woman shifted the other way and fell over, her head thumping on the concrete.

  Jesus!

  Shaken, I momentarily drew back, then quickly felt for the woman’s pulse.

  Dead. Flesh still warm to the touch, but definitely dead.

  Vomit had dribbled from the corners of her cracked lips, and her skin was bluish. Cardiac arrest. Or maybe a drug overdose. There were no outward signs of violence. She’d probably become disoriented, sat down here, and died.

  Died alone and unnoticed in a public place, surrounded by the faded architectural beauty of another age.

  I waited forty-five minutes at the Palace of Fine Arts for the uniforms and coroner’s people to arrive. The city emergency services’ response time was normally bad, and I supposed this call had been low-priority—after all, the woman was dead.

  Briefly I’d considered telling the police that I thought my half brother might have been at the scene, then rejected the notion. There was no proof Darcy had come here and, as for my presence at the Palace, who could say that I wasn’t there to enjoy a beautiful San Francisco afternoon?

  I stood on the perip
hery of the official activities while the technicians did their work and plainclothes cops arrived. After a while a tall, sharp-faced man in a gray suit approached me, his light-brown hair ruffling in a sudden breeze: Inspector Chase Fielding of the SFPD Homicide detail. Homicide always came out in a case where death might not be natural. I’d never met the man, but I’d seen his picture in the Chron and Adah Joslyn, my operative who used to be on the elite squad, told me he was by-the-book but fair.

  “Adah Joslyn speaks highly of you,” Fielding said after he’d introduced himself.

  “And of you.”

  “Tell her hello for me.” He paused, surveying the scene at the Palace. “You found the body?”

  “Yes. At first I thought she was just sleeping.”

  “Anyone else around?”

  “A couple of homeless men with bedrolls inside the dome. They took off before I could ask them if they’d seen anything.”

  They’d been aroused by the commotion and vanished into the faceless population of those who wandered the city’s streets and slept in its parks and other public places. The police knew how homeless people sometimes established territories; they’d find them if it was at all possible.

  Right now, my primary concern was Darcy.

  Okay, they’d left, maybe gone to another palace.

  They were grand residences, usually housing royalty or heads of state. Think Versailles, the Imperial Palace, Buckingham Palace, the Kremlin. Louis XIV, the emperors of Japan, the Tudors, the Romanovs. Nothing like that in this city.

  What other palace was there? Of course—there was an art museum, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park across the Presidio and beyond the Sea Cliff district. Too far to walk, but Darcy and the woman could’ve caught the outbound 38 Geary bus that ran all the way to Point Lobos and the Veterans’ Hospital. Or hailed another cab.

  Who was this woman? As far as I was aware, Darcy knew no one in San Francisco; the closest he’d ever gotten was Berkeley.

  But what did I really know of my half brother’s life? He could’ve been to the city many times and not contacted me. Could’ve been living here since he left the Salmon River.