Donley shifted his attention to two men huddled in another corner of the room. One appeared to be in considerable pain. Pale and gaunt, he looked fifty years older than his partner. Donley tried not to eavesdrop, but it was clear they were afraid this could be their final trip to the hospital.
“M&M?” Harris held out a pack of candy he’d bought from the vending machine.
Donley took the pack and poured several colored candies into his palm. The taste of chocolate made him remember the buffet he was missing at home, which made him remember the party he was missing at home. Maybe it was the sugar, but something sparked the thought that followed.
“Where do they take people who can’t pay?”
“What’s that?” Harris asked.
“People who don’t have medical insurance. Where do they take them?”
“Here.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve done it enough times myself. We’ll pick people up off the street and bring them here to general. The private hospitals won’t keep them.”
Donley stood.
“Where’re you going?” Harris asked.
“Be right back.”
Donley approached the nurse at the station. She edged her seat away from the counter. “I wanted to apologize for my behavior earlier. I was upset.”
She nodded but offered no forgiveness.
“I was wondering, where would I find admissions? Where would I go to see if a patient has been admitted?”
“Was he admitted to the hospital, or did he come in through the emergency room?”
Donley thought for a moment. “Emergency room. December twenty-first.”
She turned to a computer screen. “Admission will be closed or short-staffed tonight. What’s the patient’s name?”
Donley tried to remember the name Father Martin had provided. “Danny.”
She gave him an inquisitive look.
“Simon,” he said. “Danny Simon.”
The nurse typed. A moment later she ran her finger down the front of the screen.
“Simeon?”
“That’s it,” Donley said.
“Daniel Simeon.” She ran a finger across the computer in a straight line. “He was moved this morning to a room on the third floor, west wing. Three twenty-seven. But you won’t be able to see him,” the nurse said. “Visiting hours are over.”
Donley called down the hallway to Harris. “Let’s make some phone calls home.”
When they exited the elevator onto the third floor, a stocky nurse stepped out from the nurses’ station. “Do you have a patient named Danny Simeon?” Donley asked.
“Mr. Simeon is resting.” She looked frazzled. “You’ll have to come back in the morning. I just sent his uncle home.”
“His uncle?” Donley looked to Harris, thinking it unlikely Simeon, who’d grown up on the streets, had an uncle who cared enough to pay him a visit on Christmas Eve.
“What did he look like?” Harris asked.
“Excuse me?”
“His uncle. What did he look like?”
Donley started quickly down the hallway, scanning the numbers of the rooms on the wall.
“I don’t remember.” The nurse turned to Donley. “Sir—”
Harris badged the nurse. “What did the man look like?”
“He was white. Six foot two or three, I think. Husky, over two hundred pounds. He had a crew cut.” She called out to Donley. “Sir, you can’t go in there.”
Donley pushed open the door to Room 327 and slapped at the wall switch.
The thin, white sheet lay crumpled in a ball, the tube from an IV bag dripping clear fluid onto the floor.
Chapter 13
December 26, 1987
Frank Ross wedged a knee beneath the steering wheel, balanced a cup of coffee in one hand, and dunked a cinnamon-twist doughnut with the other, maneuvering the dripping pastry to his mouth. Nothing better on a cold Saturday morning. If the best things in life were free, the next best things could be bought for less than two bucks at the local 7-Eleven.
Unfortunately, the cinnamon twists would be a casualty of his New Year’s resolution, a begrudging concession to his inner conscience, bathroom scale, and wife. The day after Christmas, he’d weighed in at 270 pounds, too heavy even for his six-foot-five-inch frame, and the slide to three hundred was a slippery slope getting more slippery by the doughnut.
This morning, however, not even the thought of his last doughnut could depress him. He felt rejuvenated and excited to get to his office for the first time in a long time. After a few days in Tahoe for the Christmas holidays, he was going to work with a sense of purpose. When was the last time he could say he was working on something real and substantial, not the dime-store cases that had become a vivid reminder of how far he’d fallen?
He clenched the doughnut between his teeth, steered the black 1965 Fleetwood past the OK Barber Shop and Elk Motel, and turned onto Eddy Street. A blinding glare greeted him, the sun reflecting off the rain-soaked pavement and building windows. Ross lowered the visor and quickly corrected the steering wheel as the Cadillac drifted precariously close to a parked car.
The hard rains might have washed other areas of the city glistening clean, but it had done little to improve the brick and stucco buildings of the Tenderloin. The ten square blocks of graffiti-splattered buildings, wedged tighter together than impacted teeth, still looked in need of a massive paint job. Ross honked the horn at an orderly line of homeless waiting for a hot meal at the St. Vincent de Paul Society’s shelter. No one reacted. Even the homeless had become accustomed to Ross, another of San Francisco’s misfits. Ross could have taken a more scenic route to the office, but he’d turned on Eddy to see the homeless, a reminder that no matter how bad things got, he still had a roof over his head, and he sure as hell wasn’t starving.
Halfway up the block, he spotted a parking spot, thanked the Lord for small miracles, and nudged the curb. Coffee spilled over the rim of the cup, missing his leg and splattering on the floorboard to be soaked up by discarded napkins and old sports pages. He finished the last bite of the cinnamon twist, licked his fingers, and stepped from the car to a high sky of billowing clouds that offered some hope of relief from the persistent rain.
Ross pushed aside a shopping cart filled with other people’s discards and placed the brown bag containing a second cup of coffee and cinnamon twist near a blue sleeping bag on the tile entryway.
“Rise and shine, Annie. Breakfast.”
The mound stirred. Two arms stretched out the top of the bag followed by dark hair and dark skin. Annie squinted and raised her hand to cut the glare.
“Lordy. You must be an angel. Couldn’t be no Frank Ross because he gone and deserted old Annie.”
“Now, you know I wouldn’t do that, Annie. I told you I was going to Lake Tahoe for a couple of days. How do you like sleeping in that bag?” It had been a Christmas present. Ross couldn’t afford it, but Annie couldn’t afford to freeze, either. Her old bag and plastic tarp had been stolen.
“Like a caterpillar in a cocoon,” she said in her raspy voice. “Warm. Too warm. Can’t shake the sleep now; it’s got a grip on old Annie for sure.” She brightened at the sight of the brown bag and removed the plastic top on her cup of coffee to dip the twist the way Ross had taught her. “Mmmm. Mmmm,” she said.
Ross handed her a paper napkin. “Is it going to rain again today, Annie?”
Annie set the coffee down and balanced the cinnamon twist on the rim. Then she took a deep breath of the chilled morning air. “Smells like rain. Yep. It does smell like rain.”
Ross considered the sky. “I’m tired of the rain, Annie.”
“Not the rain that makes a man tired. It’s his soul. You have a tired soul, Frank Ross.”
Ross looked up and down the block. “Yeah, Annie, I guess I do.” He reached into his pocket and handed her spare change. “But not today. You keep an eye out for those meter maids. No sleeping on the job.”
�
��They ain’t pulled one by on Annie yet, has they? Annie knows when they’re coming.”
Ross stepped past her and pulled open the glass door, gathering the newspapers and mail delivered while he’d been away. He hadn’t wanted a vacation, not with Lou Giantelli hiring him to work the case involving the priest of Polk Street, but he also knew he couldn’t disappoint his wife. It had been their first vacation since they’d lost Frank Jr., and neither wanted to be in the house during the holiday, not with the memories still so fresh. Lou had told Ross to go. He said nothing much would happen over the holiday, anyway.
Ross thumbed through his mail as he walked up the tiled steps to the second floor. The windowless hallway smelled like damp carpet. He hoped it was damp carpet and not the lingering odor of the accountant’s rotting corpse. Paramedics had found the man sitting upright in his chair, a heroin needle stuck in his arm. He’d gone unnoticed for nearly a week, until he failed to pay his rent and the landlord brought a locksmith. Surprise. They’d carried his body out in a sitting position.
Ross had chosen the office closest to the exit, in case of a fire. He’d had to pay six months’ rent in advance before the landlord would stencil the black letters on the smoked glass window of his office door.
2C
FRANK ROSS
PRIVATE DICTECTIVE
Mr. Chang proved to be more adept at collecting rent than spelling. He’d promised to correct the mistake, but Ross wasn’t holding his breath, except when he walked down the hallway and “dictected” the lingering smell of the accountant.
Ross pushed open the door and stepped into an office bathed in a light blue from the arched, stained-glass window behind his desk. On sunny days, the room shaded a color of a particular windowpane depending on the time of day and time of year. Ross had rented the office on a cloudy day, not realizing he was destined to sit inside a kaleidoscope until the first sunny day.
He dropped the newspapers on his desk and hit the button on the answering machine, listening to his messages as he sorted through the stack of mail, depositing most pieces into the garbage can at the side of his desk. He stopped when he heard Nathaniel Collins’s nasal whine. The wealthy lawyer from Pacific Heights was convinced his young wife was cheating on him with her tennis instructor. He wanted photographs to prove the affair. Under the terms of the couple’s prenuptial agreement, Abigail Collins stood to make a tidy $1.5 million if the couple divorced, but she received nothing if Mr. Collins could prove she’d been unfaithful. What a way to start a marriage. Collins’s terse message indicated his displeasure with Ross’s efforts to catch his young wife and lover. Apparently his mistress, the next Mrs. Collins-in-waiting, was growing impatient.
The second message was from the owner of Fotomat kiosks whose cash registers weren’t adding up at night. On other days, the messages would have depressed him. Today, Ross just smiled. Before settling at his desk, he pulled the cap off a black marker and put an x thru the days he’d been away. Three additional days. Sober.
One day at a time.
He sat and unfolded the newspaper for Tuesday, December 23. His eyes stopped on the black block headline indicating the priest was to be arraigned the following day, Christmas Eve.
“What the hell?” he said, quickly opening the paper to where the article jumped to an inside page. Ross noticed a second headline and quickly sat forward, knocking over his cup of coffee.
The Sunset District, forty city blocks bordered to the north by Golden Gate Park and to the west by the Pacific Ocean, was one of those odd San Francisco neighborhoods where the weather in the winter and fall was actually better than in summer and spring. In the summer, pea-soup fog driven by heavy winds off the ocean often prevailed, but the winters could be crisp and clear. The day after Christmas was one of those days. Donley sat huddled in the Saab, the collar of his leather jacket pulled up around his neck to ward off the cold. As with most streets in the Sunset, foliage was sparse, sporadic trees planted in dirt squares in cement sidewalks. The one-story, detached houses had been cut from the same developer mold: two-bedroom-and-one-bath buildings with flat roofs. The front door, centered between two windows, faced the street. The houses varied only in the color of the stucco and amenities to the gardens. It was Anywhere, USA, and according to real-estate records, it included the house once owned by Max and Irene Connor, where their son, Dixon, currently lived.
The exterior of Connor’s home seemed to confirm everything Harris had said about the man: cold, dark, and uninviting. Swatches of moss that thrived in the damp climate spotted the beige-stucco exterior. The small patch of lawn had died and sprouted dandelions, and the planter boxes beneath the windows were empty.
Donley needed to subpoena Connor to appear at the evidentiary hearing on Thursday. He’d done it before. When you were a small practice, you became a jack of all trades. Harris said Connor was a mean son of a bitch who did not like lawyers, which meant he definitely wouldn’t appreciate being subpoenaed to answer questions in court, but Donley had a job to do. He was hoping that Connor might have an ax to grind against the department for suspending him, which might make him willing to talk.
Even if Connor refused to talk to him or to attend the hearing, Donley might be able to use his refusal to seek a continuance, or to argue against the court admitting the evidence since an inability to cross-examine the detective who found it would greatly prejudice Father Martin’s defense.
Donley might never know. He’d thought the day after Christmas would be the best time to find Connor, but no one had answered the front door, and no car was parked in the driveway down the side of the house. He was beginning to wonder if Connor had gone away for the holidays.
Donley started the ignition and pulled away from the curb. Harris had told him that Connor frequented a local bar in the Sunset called The 19th Hole, which was near Golden Gate Park Golf Course, just a few blocks from Connor’s home. The bar was next to a small grocery store, both likely built when neighborhoods were still where people lived, shopped, and socialized, before cars became individual neighborhoods.
Like Connor’s house, the stucco of The 19th Hole needed painting and repair. Gangs had tagged the building, and a fender-high hole revealed mesh where a car had jumped the curb and come to an unplanned stop. The neon sign overhead displayed a green flagpole with a white flag, and the bar’s name in pink, though part of the tubes no longer lit, so the sign actually read, THE 1 HO.
Donley stepped from the car and zipped his leather jacket against a chill wind as he crossed the street. He pushed through weathered, swinging doors. The interior was a narrow, windowless corridor, the bar set along the west wall. The only light came from the portholes in the doors and a light beneath the bar that illuminated the bartender in strange shadows that brought to mind a set in a black-and-white horror film.
Sitting on a bar stool, his thick shoulders and a broad back hunched over a cocktail glass, was a man who fit Harris’s description of Dixon Connor. His arms looked to be putting the seams of a tweed sports coat to the test. A crew cut shaped his head square. Two other men sat several stools away, keeping to themselves, watching a college football game on a television mounted in the corner of the room.
Feeling like he was plunging into shark-infested waters, Donley sat down on an empty stool one removed from Connor. When the bartender approached, Donley took out a ten-dollar bill.
“Corona.”
“They don’t serve that Mexican shit in here,” Connor said, without looking at him. “Why don’t you order an American beer?”
The detective’s gaze remained on the television. Donley looked up at the bartender. “Budweiser.”
The bartender pulled a Budweiser from under the bar and put the bottle on a paper coaster adorned with the 19th Hole neon sign and made change at an old-fashioned cash register.
Donley took a pull on his beer. “What’s the score?”
Connor gave no indication he’d heard the question. He sipped from a highball glass, probably Scotch or
whiskey over ice, and returned to cleaning his teeth with a toothpick.
“I got fifty bucks on the Forty-Niners tomorrow,” Donley said, “but I’m worried about the spread. It was eight and a half this morning. That’s a lot of points, no matter who they’re playing.”
Connor took another drink and spit an ice cube back into the glass.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Donley flagged the bartender. “Whatever he’s drinking.”
The bartender gave Donley an inquisitive look before pulling a glass from under the counter and pouring Jameson Irish Whiskey over ice. He put the glass on the bar. Connor ignored it.
Donley let a few plays pass. “You’re Dixon Connor?”
Connor continued to work the toothpick between his teeth.
“I’m Peter Donley. I represent—”
Connor raised his left hand and placed a .44 Magnum handgun on the bar. The bartender stopped washing glasses. The two men sitting nearby froze with their beer bottles at their lips.
Donley took a swig from his bottle, fighting to remain outwardly calm, though his insides were churning. He was already evaluating potential options should Connor raise the gun.
“I know who you are.” Connor spoke without looking at him. “And I know who you represent.”
“I want to talk—”
“Want?”
Connor glanced at Donley. His face was fat and fleshy, his eyes as dark as checker pieces. He smelled like the bar—a mixture of cheap cologne, perspiration, alcohol, and cigarettes. God, how Donley hated that smell.
Donley’s pulse quickened. “All right, I need to ask you a few questions about what happened at the shelter the night you arrested Father Martin.”
No response.
“I understand you’ve been suspended.”
Connor slid the second drink in front of Donley. “Don’t want your drink. Don’t want to answer your questions. Don’t like lawyers who represent murderers. Don’t give a shit what you want or need.”
A voice in Donley’s head cautioned him to get up and walk out. But there was that stubborn streak again, and Donley hated bullies. “I’m just trying to do my job, Detective.”
The 7th Canon Page 14