“What about Gabriella’s movements before her death? Where had she been, who had she seen, what had she been doing?”
“Gaby attended her ten o’clock seminar at Stanford and later had lunch with an old classmate from Miss Abbott’s here in the city, but after that no one could place her.”
“Did she have a car?”
“Of course—one of those small Mercedes convertibles. It was in its space at the apartment building until I finally had it towed away and sold. I took care of all the arrangements, and I’m still administering her trust according to her wishes.”
Drew sighed heavily. “After that… we went on. The updates from the police became less frequent and now have stopped. We were left with a big hole in our lives. My wife never got over it; sometimes I’d come home and find her sitting in the dark in Gaby’s old room.”
Drew’s mouth twitched and he swallowed as if to remove a bad taste. “Gaby ruined our lives. I know that sounds harsh, but in some way she brought her murder upon herself. I loved her, but I hate her for what she did to us.”
Yes, blame the victim.
Darcy Blackhawk
Nobody can find out what I did.
He lay shivering under a big bush. Its leaves dripped water on him. There was a steady thrum of traffic close by. It hardly ever stopped, hurt his head. He pressed his hands to his ears but the noise came through anyway.
How’d he gotten here? When?
That little brown girl… taking her keys while she slept, turning the lock and sneaking out of the bedroom. It was a downstairs room behind a garage; stairs led up from there. He tiptoed up them and pushed the door at the top open a few inches. Dark, quiet house. The hallway led to a front door.
He crept to it, turned the knob. Locked, but one of the other keys on the ring might open it. He tried them—one, two, three—
And then he was out on the porch in the cold night air. Running down the steps and away from there, squinting in the bright lights, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk, darting across the streets. Cars honking at him… and then the dark ahead…
Now light was coming through the branches over his head. Not bright, but enough to make his eyes sting. He’d cover them, but if he did he’d have to take his hands off his ears, and then that damned traffic roar…
Sick now. Retching. Vomit spilling out of his mouth and across his cheek onto the ground.
Sit up! You’ll choke!
Sitting. Better.
He’d done something, couldn’t remember what, but he had a feeling it was bad.
Think!
He flashed on the cold, dead face.
No, don’t wanna go there.
But it was bad, very bad. Or was it? Had he done something?
Where had he been since then?
Shar’s house.
Was going to knock on the back door, but he’d tripped and fallen down. Something crashing, those balls rolling everyplace. Lights on in the house next door. He’d had to run before somebody saw him and called the cops.
But where’d he run to?
He pushed to his feet, water from the leaves running down his cheeks. Felt sick again, bent over till it passed. Then he stumbled through the bushes, a branch scratching a corner of his eye, and came out on a street. Something about the light told him it was afternoon.
Bicycle shop, small café, instant printers, real estate office. He didn’t remember seeing any of them before. He started across the street, and a car rushed past, almost grazing him.
Got to get hold of Shar. Need her.
But now he couldn’t remember where she lived. Couldn’t remember her phone number either.
Her e-mail address? He remembered that… didn’t he?
[email protected].
Yeah, right, that was it. Okay, find a place with free computer terminals, like before.
He moved along the sidewalk, gazing into windows, until he found one. Went and typed, “Real trouble now. Help me.”
She’d get back to him now. He was sure she would.
When he went outside—the waitress glaring at him for not buying anything—a picture in the real estate agency’s window caught his eye. Old house, tall, with marble steps.
The little brown girl.
What I did.
Nobody can find out what I did.
Sharon McCone
Real trouble now. Help me.”
The message jarred me. For a moment I sat very still, absorbing it. Then I fired it off to Derek, with a request he find its source. A few minutes later he got back to me: Beans, a Haight Street café.
The Haight had changed since hippie days, yet not changed. It was a neighborhood trying to immortalize its brief glory, when it had been featured in national magazines as home to the counterculture. Head shops still remained, wannabe hippies still loitered on its sidewalks, but the scene was shopworn, much like the souvenir stands at Fisherman’s Wharf. And in between were interesting boutiques and good restaurants; on the hill above were multimillion-dollar homes. Another neighborhood that would reinvent itself again and again—as most of those in this city did.
The woman on the counter at Beans remembered Darcy—he was a “cheapskate,” she said. “And weird.”
I had to agree.
“Did you see where he went after he left here?”
“No.”
“D’you remember anything else about him?”
“He looked scared. A druggie needing a fix or afraid his connection was gonna hit him for money he owed.”
Was that it? Or was it something more complex?
Either way, Darcy seemed farther away than ever.
I walked slowly along Haight Street, hoping to spot Darcy. A man in a dashiki with paint on his face was playing a drum. He ignored me when I tried to talk with him. A circle of teenagers sat on the sidewalk near Magnolia’s—great burgers—sharing a joint. They looked at me as if I were the freak when I approached them. No, they hadn’t seen anybody like my half brother.
Would they even notice? I wondered.
A clown was selling balloons on the corner of Haight and Stanyan, across from Golden Gate Park. Momentarily I shied away from him: I have an unreasonable dislike of both clowns and mimes—unfortunate because they abound in San Francisco. Then I steeled myself and asked about Darcy. The clown said he hadn’t seen him.
My fear for Darcy was coming upon me in waves now—ebbing when I approached a new prospect, flowing when each answered in the negative. Repeatedly I checked my phone and e-mail. Nothing of any consequence.
Real trouble now.
A person with Darcy’s history would know real trouble when he encountered it. He’d been to Beans, sent me a message, and…?
Disappeared again. Or been forced to disappear. Either way, he was gone.
Mick Savage
Earlier this afternoon Shar had turned over to him the information from her interview with Clarence Drew, then left to pursue a lead on Darcy. He was reluctant to start work on the cold case that might or might not be connected to Darcy’s disappearance. Maybe, wherever she’d gone, she’d find her half brother and that would be that.
In the meantime she’d saddled him with the dubious task of trying to find three homeless people with the equally dubious names of Tick Tack Jack, Lady Laura, and the Nobody. St. Francis Relief, on Folsom near Seventh Street, would be his starting place.
It was an old hotel, three stories of ugly stucco, its windows barred and in some instances boarded up. Mick went inside, to a foyer with walls papered in posters advertising free clinics, odd jobs, medical marijuana clubs, shelters, church counseling groups, and any number of other services. Many were fringed at the bottom with tags with phone numbers written on them, but there had been few takers. To his right was the old registration desk, strewn with more flyers, and to his left a common room filled with shabby mismatched furnishings. A woman—dark-haired, anorexically thin—sat at a card table, pecking at the keys of an old Selectric typewriter.
/> “Hello,” Mick said from the doorway.
She didn’t look up, although a slight change in her posture indicated she’d heard him.
He went into the room. “Excuse me.”
“I know you’re there.” She remained focused on the keyboard.
“That’s right, I’m here.”
“Damn!” A sigh. Big brown eyes looked up at him. “This is a referral form for one of our clients to a state agency. It needs to be perfect, but I’ve screwed up three copies now.”
“I’m sorry for interrupting you.”
“Not your fault. I’m a lousy typist.” She released the sheet from the typewriter, balled it up, and flung it at a wastebasket. It missed.
“I happen to be a very good typist,” Mick said. “I do better on a computer, but I used to have one of those machines. I’m sure I could familiarize myself fast enough.”
“But this is confidential—”
“I know all about confidentiality.” He crossed the room, handed her his card. Her collarbone was prominent, and through her thin red sweater he could see the outlines of her ribs.
She was looking closely at the card. Then she looked closely at him. “You want something?”
“Just information on three former clients.”
“I can’t give you that.”
“It’s old information. The clients may benefit if I can locate them. A mentor has asked us to locate them.”
The big eyes grew wider. “This mentor wants to help them?”
“Right.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! Give me the names and I’ll look for their files.”
“And in the meantime, I’ll type your form.”
As he sat down at the card table and tried to remember how the damned Selectric worked, he felt bad about lying to her.
Sharon McCone
Paper reports,” Mick said, dropping an armload of folders on my desk. “St. Francis Relief is so underfunded they don’t have a computer. They do have a copy machine, an old one, and I’ve been sweating over it for hours.”
Mick had told me about the homeless organization and warned me he’d be bringing the documents. It was well after three o’clock, and my eyes burned from staring at my monitor as I’d read other operatives’ reports and intermittently tried to get a lead on Darcy’s whereabouts. I eyed the files with distaste.
“Have you read these?” I asked.
“No, but the lady who provided them gave me an overview.”
He had that expectant look—the one that said I should commend him for his diligence and his ability to get the best out of ladies who were attracted to him. But I wasn’t in the mood to banter with him. It had been a frustrating day, and my sense of humor had taken a battering.
“Sit down and tell me what you’ve got.”
He flopped into one of the chairs. “Leads on all three of the people Gaby DeLucci was mentoring. Tick Tack Jack—real name Jack Tullock—kicked his meth habit and moved to Oregon. Runs a ranch he calls The Jokin’ Jack near a little town, Amity, in Yamhill County. Raises wine grapes.”
“How could a meth addict on relief afford that?”
“An uncle left the ranch to him after he moved to Oregon and got clean and sober. Details are in the file.”
“Lady Laura?”
“You were right—her full name was Laura Mercer. Her background’s more sketchy than Tullock’s. Was born in Chicago, parents deceased. No evidence of a high school diploma or higher education. There’s a record of her being employed as a domestic in the Boise area until four years ago. As you know, her most recent residence was the city jail.”
Boise. Maybe she had known Darcy there?
“And the Nobody?”
“He’s the most interesting of the three.”
The Nobody, Mick explained, was a former blues guitar player named Chuck Bosworth. He’d been moderately popular throughout the Bay Area until two years ago, when he’d suffered a minor stroke that affected the motor functions in his hands. Now he occasionally turned up on open mike nights at seedy clubs, billing himself as the Nobody and banging on his old guitar while singing off-key.
“Nobody sightings” had become popular with a cult of old blues fans, and they’d established a website to chronicle them. Bosworth moved around among SRO hotels in San Francisco and Oakland, and Mick had found no current address for him.
“Okay,” I said. “Jack Tullock may remember something about Gaby and the others. You contact him. I’ll tackle Chuck Bosworth. And you ask Derek to keep on trying to find out who the woman Darcy was at the cemetery with was.”
“She’s proving impossible to trace.”
“Then we’ll work these other angles, tangential as they might seem.”
I pulled the Chuck Bosworth file from the bottom of the stack, but before I opened it I went to NobodySightings.com.
Bosworth was a heavyset black man who, at the time the photo that was featured on the site had been taken, was in his fifties. Over the course of his career he’d made three CDs that were offered through the site for two dollars apiece plus postage from a recording company called BluesSynch. There were various comments from fans: “Awesome, man.” “One of the greats.” “Should’ve had a terrific career.”
I clicked on the list of recent sightings. The Aces Club on Mission Street; Our Hideaway near Oakland’s Jack London Square; CopOut in Daly City; the corner of Seventh and Market; Hair o’ the Dog on Silver Avenue; Van Ness near Turk Street; Lydia’s Lounge in southern Sonoma County; M&M’s Lounge in the Mission.
The Nobody got around.
I needed an expert, so I called The Library Hotel in New York City, where Ricky was staying that week, and caught him just before he was to leave for the airport.
“Chuck Bosworth?” he said. “Good blues musician. Not one of the best, but he had his day. I heard someplace that he’s gone off the rails and is singing for nickels and dimes.”
“Right. You have any idea who he hangs out with, where he might be living?”
“No, but I can make some calls.”
The music world, like that of any other profession, has its own intricate connections: any given person, no matter his status or whereabouts, is only a few calls away. I was reminded of the Moccasin Telegraph, a sort of World Wide Web of Indians who communicate information via any means available to them.
I thanked Ricky and hung up, then swiveled back to the computer screen and clicked through my address book to the listing for my friend Will Camphouse, the creative director of an ad agency in Tucson. Will and I might or might not be related, bloodlines among the tribes being tangled as they are, but we’d formed a bond similar to that of brother and sister when I was searching for my birth parents.
“Hey, you,” he said in his easy Southwestern manner. “How’s it goin’?”
“Not too well. You remember my half brother, Darcy?”
“Couldn’t forget him.”
I explained what had been going on, ending with, “It occurred to me that this might be something to put out on the Telegraph.”
“I’ll be glad to do it. When’re you gonna learn how?”
“I already have. I call you, and you call Aunt Bessie, who lives in Salmon, and she calls her friend Dorothy, who works for the Department of Forestry, and she calls—”
“Smartass.”
“I love you too.”
I sat in my ratty old armchair by the arched window and stared out at the Bay, mentally running through the bits and pieces of information that we’d gathered so far. They were puzzling, inconsistent, yet I sensed connections beneath their surface.
Number one: Lady Laura’s death. Was it connected to Gaby DeLucci’s murder, or was it merely coincidental? Was it somehow connected to Darcy?
Number two: this blaming of the victim. Yes, when people died those left behind were frequently angry with them. Natural response, one of the stages of grief. But Clarence Drew had been so vehement, so insistent that Gaby had brought her murder upon hers
elf.
Number three: Drew’s recall of Tick Tack Jack, Lady Laura, and the Nobody had been too quick, considering they were just people Gaby had mentioned in postcards. Had they featured prominently in the police investigation? I’d have to check when the file I’d requested from the SFPD arrived.
Number four: Lucy Bellassis. She was a living link to Gaby.
After a while I turned to the computer and accessed the Bellassises’ address and phone number. Turned out they were in Sea Cliff, a couple of blocks from Rae and Ricky. Easy enough to pay a call later on.
Darcy Blackhawk
Out here nobody looks at me.
He stumbled on the broken sidewalk, and still nobody noticed him.
There was a pizza place, burger and sandwich shops. He smelled Indian food. His stomach rumbled, but he had no money.
Head shop, patchouli oil overpowering the cooking smells. Books, ice cream. Crafts and beads. Someplace called Magnolia’s. A lot of regular people, a lot of freaks like him. None of them paid attention to anybody else.
In front of a newsstand a bunch of kids sat on the sidewalk. One of them had brighter green hair than his. They wore ripped jeans and ratty T-shirts and none of them could’ve been over eighteen. Suburban kids, he could tell. They had warm dinners and cozy beds to go home to when they wanted. He’d had that once too. No more.
His own fault. But he couldn’t go back to Mom’s, not after what he’d done.
Darcy went over and sat down on the sidewalk. One of the kids said, “Hey.”
“Hey.” He leaned back against the building’s wall. It was still warm from the sun, although dark was setting in above the hills.
The kid scooted closer. “Somebody’s been lookin’ for you.”
“Who?”
“Pretty lady. Dark hair. Old, though. Got to be in her thirties.”
Shar. She was in her early forties, but looked younger. So she’d gotten his message. But why hadn’t she—oh, yeah, he didn’t have his laptop any more and the e-mail in his head wasn’t working.
City of Whispers Page 5