When he managed to cut a few guys loose, even if he wasn’t exactly sure how he had done it, he began to develop a reputation among a particular clientele as a good man to know. Almost before he realized it, he was on a roll, and it wasn’t long before his client list was reasonably impressive, that is if he stuck strictly to contemplating the quantity and didn’t worry too much about the quality.
Sometimes it occurred to Eddie that he didn’t know much about actually practicing criminal law since he had done nothing after school except banking and finance work; but then most if not all of the people who hired him were guilty as hell anyway so he figured maybe it really didn’t matter that he knew so little. Sometimes he wondered if doctors knew any more about medicine when they started out on their own than he knew about law. That thought always scared the crap out of him and caused him to swear that he would never go to a doctor who wasn’t really old.
Eddie jumped off the cable car when it slowed at California Street for the brakeman to lock-up for the steep crawl down Nob Hill. He let the car’s momentum carry him into a gentle jog onto Powell and angled off just enough to make the turn toward Grant without slowing down. It was a slick-looking move if he did say so himself and he felt a momentary stab of disappointment that some woman he wanted to impress hadn’t been around to see it. Good moves were good moves regardless, he supposed, even if no one was around to admire them.
He climbed the stairs and heard the clicking from Joshua’s keyboard even before he opened his office door. Eddie had known Joshua since he had been his first paralegal at Wren & Simon, although why Joshua had given up the security and prestige of a big, commercial firm to go with him to Chinatown, Eddie had never really understood. Joshua lived with a retired fireman on a houseboat in Sausalito and he was Eddie’s most loyal employee. Actually, he was Eddie’s only employee. Joshua was very thin and, with his full head of long, silver hair and his rimless glasses, he looked like he had come straight to the office from a Grateful Dead concert in 1968 and hadn’t left since. Eddie didn’t know for sure how old Joshua was, and frankly he didn’t think Joshua knew either.
“If you’re thinking of giving me anything else to do, you can forget it.”
As usual, Joshua didn’t look up or even stop typing before he spoke. Eddie always wondered how he even knew who had come in.
“I’m still doing the discovery motions in the Wong robbery,” he added.
“How about starting on the Wright robbery instead?”
“I don’t remember any…” Joshua’s fingers stopped moving, but he kept his eyes fixed on the computer screen. “Was that a joke, Eddie? It was, wasn’t it?”
Before Eddie could say anything, Joshua began to shake his head. Then he started typing again, very fast.
“That was pathetic, Eddie. Really pathetic. You’re no Al Gore, are you, man?”
“Any messages?” Eddie asked, not even bothering to try for a witty recovery.
“Michael called from Seattle.”
That was odd. Eddie’s son had just turned fourteen and didn’t call him all that often.
“Really? What about?”
“Didn’t tell me. Said he’d call back later.”
Joshua had recently begun to resent Michael a little and he didn’t try very hard to keep it hidden. He and Eddie had never talked about it, but Eddie knew that Joshua thought Michael treated Eddie disdainfully, almost like he was ashamed Eddie was his father.
Joshua had Mike’s attitude diagnosed about right, Eddie thought, and he didn’t like it much either. But he also knew that being a father and an ex-husband was a complicated thing and you had to make allowances. Joshua hadn’t had any experience trying to be either, at least not that Eddie knew of, so he just let the whole thing slide and they didn’t get into it.
Eddie had still been at Wren & Simon when he came home late on a wet Tuesday in November and discovered that his wife had taken Michael, as well as most of what they owned, and moved out. Before he could get a grip on what was happening to him, Jennifer surfaced in Seattle and filed for divorce and custody of Michael. She told Eddie that it wasn’t his fault really. It was just that she didn’t want to be married anymore, that she wanted to have her own life, not live as an extension of his. Eddie didn’t really know what to say to that—actually it sounded pretty reasonable to him—so when the divorce papers came, he signed them and sent them back.
It was while Eddie was still trying to decide how he felt about being single again that what he later took to calling ‘the disagreement’ occurred and he abruptly parted company with Wren & Simon. That made two divorces in the same month. It had been almost ten years ago now, but he could still recall every minute of the day when the firm’s management committee called him into the conference room and fired him. He could remember every word they had said. His memory of the other divorce was less vivid.
“No other messages?” Eddie asked.
“Nothing you care about.”
Bless Joshua, Eddie thought; he always had everything under control. Eddie, on the other hand, wasn’t really certain he’d had anything under control since about 1960. That had been the time at his fifth birthday party when he socked Becky Schulman in the nose. She had been seven and had stuck out her tongue at Eddie and called him a ninny, so he had drawn back his little fist and popped her right in the snot. Becky had bled all over the carpet and Eddie’s mother had spanked him hard, although whether for hitting Becky or for getting blood on the carpet he was never absolutely certain, but he hadn’t yelled because it had been worth it. He’d cold cocked the little bitch and even now he thought she had deserved it. But he also figured that was probably the very last time in his life that he had been fully in control of anything.
“Could you bring me some coffee, Joshua?” Eddie asked as he headed into his office.
“Right away, oh master of mine.”
Come to think of it, Joshua was starting to remind him a whole hell of a lot of Becky Schulman.
Eddie flopped into his low back desk chair upholstered in nondescript brown cloth—he hated those high back leather thrones that lawyers usually sat in—and dumped his briefcase on the floor. He rummaged halfheartedly through the mail and was mildly pleased to find a couple of real letters among the usual junk. The first bore the engraved return address of Martin, Fletcher & O’Brien, a famously stuffy commercial firm that occupied about half of the Bank of America Tower. Eddie threw that one back onto his desk unopened.
The other envelope had no return address at all, and Eddie held it up and looked it over curiously.
It was an airmail envelope, one of those old-fashioned ones with a bright red and blue border and the words ‘Par Avion’ printed in big letters underneath two exotic-looking stamps. It crossed Eddie’s mind briefly that he hadn’t seen an envelope like that in a long time, and it even surprised him a little to see that they still existed.
This one had been addressed by hand. Very neatly and carefully, someone had printed on it in black ink: MR. EDWARD DARE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, 469 GRANT STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 94108, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
The envelope wasn’t very heavy and when Eddie ripped into it he thought at first that it was empty. But then he turned it up and shook it and a single snapshot slid out, face up, onto his desk. Eddie bent forward and peered at it.
The photographer had caught a bunch of young marines in a moment of horsing around with some Asian girls. From the uniforms and the look of the kids wearing them, Eddie knew the picture had to date back to the Vietnam War era, but otherwise nothing about the photo hinted at where or exactly when it had been taken.
Still, there was one thing about it that got Eddie’s complete and undivided attention, and that caused him to pick up the photograph very slowly and then to sit and stare at it for a long time.
Someone had drawn a bright red circle on the snapshot using a sharp-pointed pen wielded with considerable force. The line was angry-looking and etched so deeply into the surface of the
photograph that it had even ripped through the paper completely in one place, nearly decapitating one of the young marines. Eddie carefully studied the fresh, open face in the center of the red circle. The face studied him silently in return, oblivious to the deep slash yawning just below its chin.
There was no doubt in Eddie’s mind. None at all. The loopy, slightly lopsided stare he was meeting was his own.
The violent slashes framing his face added a deeply unsettling element to Eddie’s surprise at seeing the photograph. It bothered him, too, he had to honestly admit, that the young Eddie gazed so guilelessly out of the picture at the middle-aged Eddie slumped in a cheap chair in a crummy office over a noodle shop. That was a swipe far subtler than the harsh red circle but, for all its slyness, it dug into him almost as deeply.
Eddie fumbled for some sensible explanation for the photograph, some obvious interpretation that would match the innocence of his cockeyed young face, but nothing came to him. But as he sat and thought about it, he began to feel the unmistakable sensation of a cool breeze on the back of his neck. It was gentle but persistent, and as Eddie raised his head from the photograph to take its measure, all in a rush he knew.
Something was coming at him, something straight out of a cloudy, forgotten corner of his past. He couldn’t imagine what it was, but of one thing he was absolutely certain.
Whatever it might be, it was just about to dump all over him.
Two
EDDIE wanted to forget about the snapshot entirely, to tell himself it meant nothing at all. He wanted to write it off as a prank by someone he hadn’t seen in years and throw it away. He wanted to do all of that, but he couldn’t.
In Eddie’s experience, weird things that happened to him seldom meant nothing. Weird things, he had found, almost always turned out to mean something, frequently something not too good. Every time he tried to ignore weirdness until it went away, he eventually found it tattooed onto his butt. No, Eddie had decided a long time ago, it was always good policy to take on weirdness before it took him on, to meet it out in the street before it got inside his house, popped open a Coors, and made itself at home on his couch.
The problem was, he wasn’t certain how to apply his policy in this particular case. For the life of him, he couldn’t work out what the point of the photograph was supposed to be.
Maybe it was a threat, but he really couldn’t think of anybody who would want to threaten him at all, much less in such an obscure way. Certainly none of his clients were the sort to go in for that kind of subtlety. If any of them had a problem with him, they were the kind of guys who would come around to his apartment one night with a hockey stick. But if the photograph wasn’t a threat, then what the hell was it? A joke?
Eddie stared at the other men in the photograph and at the women, too, threading them back and forth through his memory. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t recall any of their faces. He might even have sworn he didn’t know anybody in the picture at all, but there he was right in the middle so he guessed he must have seen them at least that once. Surely no one would have gone to the trouble of faking such an innocuous picture. All of which brought him back full circle again to wondering why anyone would send the picture to him at all, even if it were real.
The best idea Eddie could come up with offhand was to show the picture to someone else he had been in the marines with and see what they made of it. Only one guy came readily to mind, but he was close by, so Eddie tucked the photograph into a jacket pocket and headed for the door.
Joshua was on the telephone as Eddie came out of his office. He put the call on hold and turned his head until his eyes caught Eddie’s.
“Must be family day for you,” he said.
Eddie was about to say something impatient; he was already up to his ass in subtlety and couldn’t face any more. Then Joshua laid it out.
“It’s Kathleen.”
Eddie had given marriage another shot three or four years after Jennifer left him. Her name had been Kathleen Strong—not Kathleen Dare, Kathleen Strong—and she had been an assistant district attorney in Marin County. He always had to stop and think to work out exactly when they had been married and when they got divorced, so he seldom bothered. It hadn’t lasted very long, and thank God they hadn’t had any children. Eddie flinched a bit every time he realized he was thinking that but, if they had, Kathleen would probably have hung the unfortunate kid with some idiotic surname like Strong-Dare, and that was a future too horrible to wish on any child.
Actually Kathleen had been okay, if a little strident and overly prone to sneak attacks. At least Eddie had thought of her that way until the day she announced she had decided to leave him and move to Alaska. Kathleen failed to mention then that her motivation was neither a new found love of elk crap nor a sudden obsession with the NRA, but rather that she was screwing a federal judge in Fairbanks.
Eddie hadn’t really minded all that much finding himself single again, actually he hardly noticed any change in his life at all, and he figured that anybody who ran off to Fairbanks to sleep with a federal judge probably had enough trouble already so he didn’t make a fuss when she filed the papers. That meant the divorce was—what else?—okay.
“She’s calling from Alaska?”
“No, from Tiburon. I gather the judge is history and she’s back.”
“Oh, Christ.” Eddie thought for a minute. “You didn’t—”
“No, I said I thought you’d just left.”
Eddie wiggled his eyebrows a couple of times and then cut Joshua the biggest wink he could and ducked out the door. That damned picture was already giving him heartburn. Kathleen would just have to take a number if she wanted to make him miserable today.
He covered the few blocks down Grant to the Transamerica Pyramid in a brisk walk, cut through the plaza underneath it, and turned north on Columbus toward the bay. Maybe he would get lucky and figure this thing out quickly. This guy he knew had a way of doing that kind of thing.
Heluska Jones had been the endlessly good-natured guy in his platoon, the volunteer for whatever might be going. There was one in every outfit. Lusk always claimed to be a full-blooded Apache Indian whose name meant ‘great warrior’ until deeply stoned one night he admitted he actually came from a tribe called the Winnebagos and that Heluska really translated as something more like ‘little fairy sent by the gods.’
From then on, of course, Lusk was Winnebago Jones for life. They would have tried out Little Fairy Jones for a while, but then they saw the look in his eyes and decided that fucking with an angry Indian was probably riskier than fucking with the VC. Anyway, Winnebago Jones had something. You could almost dance to it.
Winnebago and Eddie rotated back to Camp Pendleton together in 1975 and were discharged within a few days of each other. Eddie was hitching up the coast to San Francisco to get himself into college and, since Winnebago had nowhere to go but back to the hard scrabble of Northern Arizona, he just tagged along. As it turned out, Winnebago quickly found the beatnik ghetto around Columbus Avenue, or it found him, and he was home.
A hippie Indian named Winnebago was just the thing for San Francisco in the mid-seventies and for a few years he worked in a bookstore and wrote what he insisted was poetry; but as a decade slid past and Columbus Avenue turned from a hangout for aging beats into a tourist attraction, Winnebago just went with the flow and became a tourist attraction, too. Even now, after more than twenty years, he could still be found in the same little bookstore on Columbus, wearing what he thought was an appropriate costume for a hippie Indian in San Francisco, selling a few books and a lot of other garbage to tourists.
When Eddie pushed open the door, a bell on the back tinkled and Winnebago glanced up from a paperback propped against the cash register. He was wearing a shirt with a beaded front that he had bought at a garage sale in San Jose because it reminded him of the one Tonto wore in the Lone Ranger movies, and his shoulder-length, black hair was tied back off his face with a red and white beaded he
adband that said FULL-BLOODED AMERICAN INDIAN.
Eddie had once tried to tell Winnebago that he wasn’t supposed to be an Indian anymore; that somebody had gone and made him a Native American when he wasn’t looking. It had something to do with preserving the dignity of his race, Eddie explained, but Winnebago said he didn’t really care too much about that since he already had all the dignity he could use in San Francisco anyway. He was an Indian; he had always been an Indian; and he intended to stay an Indian. That seemed to settle it, and Eddie never brought the matter up again.
“Hey, Eddie, my man!” Winnebago closed the book and scraped his stool back. “How long’s it been?”
“Two weeks. I was here two weeks ago Thursday.”
Winnebago thought about that as he reached for the pack of unfiltered Camels he always kept at hand.
“Yeah?”
“We walked over to North Beach Pizza.”
Winnebago seemed to strain a moment, trying to remember as he shook a cigarette from the pack. He gave up quickly, struck a match and lit the cigarette, exhaling in a long, steady stream.
“Well, if you say so, Eddie. Can’t remember a damned thing about it though.”
“You must be getting old, Winnebago.”
Winnebago tapped one finger slowly against the side of the cash register and considered the proposition. Eddie waited for him to decide what he thought, but when it became obvious that it might take a while, Eddie went ahead and fished the photograph out of his pocket and put it on the counter. Winnebago took another toke on his cigarette and shifted his weight slightly on the stool so that he could see it more clearly.
“Hey, that’s you, Eddie! Damn, you look so young!” Winnebago lifted the picture off the counter and peered at it. “Why’d you draw that circle around your head?”
“I didn’t. It came that way.”
“Your head? Came that way?”
Winnebago apparently was not having one of his better days, Eddie reflected.
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