Bohemian Heart

by Dalessandro, James

  "Gee, and I thought I was so subtle."

  She walked toward the fireplace, turned, faced me, smiled, looked down at the top button of her dress. She fingered it for a second, then popped it open. She looked at me, popped another one.

  She worked it, enjoying it almost as much as I did. There was no hurry, no world outside. A few more buttons revealed the lace camisole, then a drum-tight stomach, an antique black satin garter belt, and the dream that springs eternal.

  She walked over, slowly, the sound of spike heels on hardwood, sat in my lap and kissed me. Then she looked straight into my eyes. "I've been thinking about this for a long time. Anything you want, Frank, all you have to do is tell me."

  I was working on the list when my beeper went off. It startled Colleen a little, as it was in my jacket pocket and she was practically sitting on it. We were both excited, anxious, but I knew it couldn't be ignored, as only the City Lights crew had the number.

  I looked at the beeper. The code number indicated it was Martha Walley calling me from the office. She always knew when I was having too much fun.

  I told Colleen to hold the thought, went to the phone, and called the office.

  "Martha, Frankie calling. What's up?"

  "I think you better get up here right away, Frank. Arnie just called. He was listening to the police scanner in his car. An hour ago a bridge worker found a woman's purse in the middle of the Golden Gate."

  I had a hunch what was coming. "Lynne McBain?"

  "Yes. I just turned on your marine radio; the Coast Guard is going out any minute. They received a report of a body in the water, white female, blond hair. A cargo vessel saw her floating out by the entrance to the Bay. It's pretty foggy right now; it may take them some time to find her."

  I went back into the living room and looked at Colleen standing there in basic black, looking a little self-conscious but no less seductive. I told her what had happened.

  She put her dress back on, grabbed her coat and bag, and in less than a minute we were in the car and headed back up Highway 1 to San Francisco.

  We'd just left the north end of Santa Cruz, where the road turns to a double lane each way, when Colleen looked at me and the night's excitement returned. Slowly, she unbuttoned her dress, stripping down to her camisole, G-string, garter belt, and stockings.

  Then she leaned over, unzipped my pants, and proved that her late husband had not lied to his dear mom when he talked of her oral expertise.

  We floated back to San Francisco in an hour flat.

  Chapter 12

  After we passed Pacifica and hit the south end of the city, I plugged my car phone into the Vette's cigarette lighter and called Martha Walley at the office. She told me the Coast Guard had gotten lucky: despite the fog they had located the body floating near the Marin County headlands. They "dragged and bagged" her and were headed to Fort Point, where the cops and coroner were already waiting.

  I asked Martha to assemble my photo gear—spare camera and high-speed film, tripod, telephoto lenses—and to be ready when I arrived.

  Zane Neidlinger was in bed when I called to tell him the Coast Guard had found a floater relevant to the Farragut case, promising more when I saw him. He agreed to meet me at the observation point at the south end of the bridge.

  We arrived back at Telegraph Hill, parked on the sidewalk, and sprinted into the office.

  I wasn't surprised that Martha wasn't surprised to see Colleen. They both smiled as I made brief introductions. I told Colleen to wait, to go to my bedroom upstairs if she was tired. Henry Borowski entered from another room, and I told him to watch the house.

  Martha and I got in the Vette and headed to Fort Point, little more than a mile from the house. Martha drove while I loaded film.

  Zane pulled into the parking lot at the observation point seconds after we did. The three of us walked swiftly down the access road below the bridge and through the Presidio, stopping on the grassy hill overlooking the fortress at Fort Point, a hundred feet above the action. Most of the fog had dissipated at sea level, and a very bright moon illuminated six squad cards, three unmarked sedans, and a paramedic vehicle.

  We took a minute to catch our breath, waiting for the show to start. Fort Point is the spot where the city and Bay were discovered, where Spanish explorers first landed. From there you can look up at the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, feel its size and power, listen to the trucks passing, the wind whipping through its cables. I always remember it from the scene where Jimmy Stewart fishes Kim Novak out of the Bay in Vertigo.

  Out past the bridge, three hundred yards away, we could distinguish the Coast Guard launch fighting the outgoing tide, pitching and yawing in a vicious chop.

  I set the camera up on my shortest tripod as the three of us crouched in the bushes, anxious not to be seen. Through the telephoto lens, I scanned the small group gathered below us to see who the players were. I recognized only two of the half dozen uniformed officers. In the middle of the pack, however, stood the ubiquitous Inspector John Naftulin, and next to him Assistant Coroner Michael Wentworth. Let the charade begin.

  The boat arrived and was tied up after a mighty struggle. Everyone crowded in as two baby-faced Coast Guard recruits passed the green body bag over the side. Several cops helped place the body on a gurney as the others shooed away a small group of gawkers.

  Dr. Wentworth signaled everyone to stand back and zipped open the green bag. Someone held a strong, portable spotlight on the face, making it easy for me to photograph.

  Wentworth removed a patch of tangled kelp from the long, stringy blonde hair and turned the face toward the light. The eyes were wide open, bloodshot and glassy, and the skin was waxen, the scar on the right of her mouth chalky white and more pronounced. It was Lynne McBain.

  Wentworth motioned for the purse that was found on the bridge, removed the wallet, and held the driver's license photograph up to her face. He turned and nodded to Inspector Naftulin as I clicked away on speed winder.

  Wentworth made a cursory examination of the body, turning the neck slightly, with effort, rigor mortis setting into the muscles from the cold water of the Bay. He checked for broken bones in the neck and face, which was bruised on the left side. It appeared her neck had been broken.

  He then unbuttoned her gray blouse, revealing that both breast implants had burst, the skin ripped open by the 124-mile-per-hour impact with the water. One of the plastic breast sacks fell out onto Wentworth's gloved hand. He shook it off, unbuttoned her blouse further, revealing a mass of purple and blue discoloration on the right side of her ribs. Lynne just stared skyward as she was manhandled by yet another stranger.

  Wentworth stepped back, apparently deciding he'd seen enough, and let the crime lab photographer take some shots of the body. I took pictures of Wentworth and Naftulin conferring off to the side. Zane scribbled notes and talked softly into a lavaliere microphone connected to the microcassette recorder in his coat pocket.

  As they loaded Lynne's body into the meat wagon I fought off a momentary sadness, then urged Martha and Zane to crouch in the bushes until everyone left.

  I rode with Zane back to the office and had Martha use my car to take the film to an insomniac photo whiz named Richard Beccari out in the Richmond District.

  Once inside, Zane's face puckered in disbelief when Colleen descended the steps from my bedroom. I introduced them and he shook her hand politely. The pucker turned to one of those you-outdid-yourself-this-time grins.

  "You want to tell me what's going on?" he asked.

  I gave him the shorthand version, told him that Lynne McBain was the mystery gal who'd done the leather tango with William Farragut for several months before he died. I told him about Andrew Simcic's attempted blackmail, his supposed suicide, and the hatchet job that Inspector Naftulin and Assistant Coroner Wentworth had done on the Simcic evidence.

  "You don't think this was a suicide either," he said.

  "I just talked to her about eight hours ago. She was
upset, but she sure wasn't suicidal."

  Zane and I looked at each other for a long moment, then almost in sync we said "Flynn Pooley!"

  "Who?" Colleen asked.

  I thought for a minute before I answered. Once again, pieces of the past were falling into the current puzzle until past and present were virtually indistinguishable.

  "Flynn Pooley was a crackpot geologist at UC Berkeley," I said. "Years before Mayor DiMarco was murdered, Pooley built a reputation by predicting a series of small earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault. He didn't use traditional methods—to put it mildly. He studied all this information: premature births in cows, household pets running away, the history of the fault slipping in patterns from south to north. He was the darling of the anti-high-rise movement in San Francisco."

  "A lot of the land south of Market Street is just landfill; it's where the old Yerba Buena port was. Pooley said that if high-rises were built along the Market Street corridor and an earthquake of 1906 magnitude, eight point one or greater, were to hit during the morning or afternoon rush hour, fifty-thousand people could die. They'd be cut to ribbons by glass exploding from the windows of all those skyscrapers downtown. He said the glass and the bodies would be piled twelve feet deep."

  I paused to let this sink in, and Zane took over.

  "Flynn Pooley was a wild character. Smoked pot, hung around with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, got arrested in a lot of peace demonstrations in the sixties. All the high-rise advocates—your late husband, the flunkies who took office after Mayor DiMarco was killed—they all despised him. Every time Pooley predicted an earthquake somewhere in the state, it happened. So his theories about the high-rises gained credibility with each prediction. One day, about eight months before Warren Dillon snuck into City Hall and murdered DiMarco, they found Pooley floating in the Bay."

  "His bomber jacket and wallet were in the middle of the bridge, near the suicide point, where all the jumpers climb over the railing."

  "Just like Lynne McBain," said Colleen, visibly unnerved by it all.

  "Just like Lynne McBain," I said.

  "And you think Pooley was murdered?"

  "Pooley was acrophobic," Zane told her. "Deathly afraid of heights. The medical report said he was high on pot and a mega-dose of LSD. They said he was so zonked he just decided to fly like Superman."

  "I was on the police force then," I told her. "I'd been the head of white-collar crime for only six months. I knew your husband was bribing people, hiring private detectives, primarily Hayden Phillips, to get dirt on the opposition, the anti–high-risers, trying to blackmail and discredit them."

  "You think my husband had Flynn Pooley killed and made it look like suicide to discredit him and get him out of the way? And then William got Warren Dillon to kill the mayor so that his people could take over and build all those high-rises?"

  "That's exactly what I think."

  "This sounds like we're living in some banana republic," Colleen said.

  I watched as Zane disconnected his lavaliere microphone and rewound the tape he had made at Fort Point.

  "Zane, where's the tape you played for Lynne McBain over the phone?"

  "You mean the interview with Helen Smidge? I got it right here, I took it out at Fort Point to put in a fresh tape."

  "Cue it up, will you? The same section you played for McBain."

  The tape whirred as it rewound, then Zane hit the play button and we listened to Smidge droning on about her "role" in the city's future. But in the middle, Smidge's secretary buzzed and said, "Supervisor Smidge, your meeting with the mayor is postponed until four." I asked Zane if McBain would have heard that and he looked at the tape counter and said she must have.

  "This is airtight," I said. "McBain realized the voice on the tape was the 'Evelyn' who had set her up with William Farragut, then heard the secretary call Smidge by name. She called Smidge's office, probably threatened to make noise about Smidge being Farragut's procurer unless Smidge did something about Simcic's murder. McBain must have thought it was Farragut who'd had Simcic killed. Maybe she realized Smidge might have been in on it and threatened her too."

  "So Smidge arranges a meeting with McBain, ostensibly to meet her demands, maybe try to bribe her. Then whoever does Smidge's dirty work does a Flynn Pooley on Lynne McBain."

  "It was the perfect night for it," Zane said. "Just like the night Pooley died. The fog was so thick, the video cameras that monitor everything from the towers of the Golden Gate couldn't have picked up anyone. Someone could have jumped out of a van in the middle of the span, dragged McBain five feet to the railing, thrown her over, then gotten back in the van, wham, bam, so long ma'am. Less than ten seconds."

  "It also brings up another problem," Zane said. "Did McBain tell Smidge that you paid her a visit?"

  "If she did," Colleen said, "they'll all know you're working on the case, and you could be their next target."

  I had already realized that the next target could be me—or Colleen.

  Chapter 13

  "It all changed in the city after DiMarco's murder," Zane said, "just like it changed in the whole country when Kennedy was killed."

  "Kennedy was no saint, but he made the Russians back down, he stopped the steel companies from ripping everybody off, he told black people the Constitution included them. And now he's a jerk for what, because he fucked Marilyn Monroe? This is a crime? Kennedy fucks Marilyn and the guys who came after him fucked everybody else. They robbed the country blind. That's just what happened here."

  "DiMarco wasn't God, but he loved the city, he wanted to keep the high-rises out, keep a place for families, for artists, a real city, not Disneyland North for a bunch of camera-packin' turistas. You know what's the saddest holiday of the year in this city," he said, pouring a little more gin, testifying. "Halloween. There's no kids left. San Francisco has fewer kids per capita than any city in the world. The national average is two and a half times what it is here."

  Zane muttered some more, abruptly realizing he'd had enough of both the gin and dissertation. He excused himself and left.

  Martha returned with the blowups of the McBain photos. I looked them over closely and felt my hunch had been right: somebody had worked her over before they tossed her in the water. It increased my anxiety that she might have told her torturers my name. When Colleen came over I set the photos aside so she wouldn't see them. She squeezed in under my arm, and I could feel the fear and tension in her body.

  A new concern was added to my worries: Colleen's safety. They'd silenced Lynne McBain, quickly, brutally. If they even suspected Colleen were about to be acquitted, and that she might turn Farragut's diaries over to the wrong people, they'd do anything to prevent it.

  I asked Colleen to spend the night and the following night telling her I needed more information from her, and that I could watch over her more easily this way. She agreed, trying to smile.

  Pulling Martha into my office, I shut the door, and told her what had happened with Lynne and the tape recording. I asked her to stay with Colleen until I got back. She took her revolver from her purse, slipped it into a clip-on holster and attached it to her belt at the small of her back, putting two speed-loaders in her pocket.

  Henry was to do a serious recon of the neighborhood; I wanted to make sure that no one was staking out the house.

  It was just past midnight when I left.

  The body count was now four in the Flynn Pooley–Mayor DiMarco–Andrew Simcic—Lynne McBain string. Five if you counted Farragut, who I figured to be either directly or indirectly responsible for the first four.

  I cranked up the Norton and headed straight for Bajilla, the bar where Smudge first asked Lynne McBain to wait while someone approved her for Farragut's consumption.

  I arrived on Market Street barely four hours after Colleen and I had eaten dinner in Santa Cruz. Things were moving faster, taking shape, but the big picture was still not clear. I still had not found the burglar, or Ghiberti's silver plates. I prayed I w
as heading in that direction, that somewhere ahead there was a link between all this and Farragut's murder. I shuddered at what the consequences might be if I was wrong.

  The most encouraging part, I reflected as I parked on the sidewalk and chained the Norton to a parking meter, was that I was starting to believe Colleen.

  Bajilla, an upscale bar with a row of picture windows overlooking Market Street a few blocks east of the Castro District, was jumping when I walked in, Brazilian music pounding, the singer singing in Portuguese about his love for "dangerous lovers, dangerous lives." It always sounds better in song than it is in real life. I asked the bartender where to find the owner or manager. He examined me warily before directing me to the back of the club.

  Shouldering my way through a polyglot crowd of gays, yuppies, converted rastas, and unemployed socialists, I found a door in the back with a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. I knocked.

  A male voice said, "Come in."

  The owner, a tall, balding man in his early forties with a mustache and very white teeth stood as I entered. He introduced himself as Sean Kaplan, extending a hand bigger and stronger than the body it belonged to. He was bespectacled, outgoing, and gay.

  He asked how he could help me. I was too tired for subtlety. I showed him my ID, told him I was working on a murder case and that an innocent woman might spend the rest of her life in prison if I didn't find what I was looking for.

  Kaplan studied my ID, looked at me twice. I said another prayer.

  "You're the guy they called Peekaboo Fagen. I remember you. You were a hero to a lot of people, especially in the gay community, when you held that press conference and blasted the sentence Warren Dillon got for killing the mayor. I was a precinct organizer for DiMarco. I worked night and day for six months to help him get elected. It's a crime what they did to him, and to this city after his death. What can I do for you?" he asked.