Till the Butchers Cut Him Down

by Marcia Muller

  “Is that why you’ve been too busy to buy furniture?”

  He grinned. “You got it.”

  I was still troubled by the tone of what he was telling me. The Suitcase Gordon I’d once known had been short on the social niceties and often crassly insensitive, yes. But he’d never been cruel.

  As if he’d heard my thoughts, he touched my hand gently with his forefinger. “Sometimes, Sherry-O, you’ve got to cause pain to accomplish something worthwhile. The people who get hurt in the bloodbath generally’re the ones who contributed to how bad things are. Or they’re people who’ll be better off out of there anyway. And the bloodbath and stabilizing stages lead to what I call the visionary stage. That’s when you can really make things happen.”

  I moved my hand away, reserving judgment and wishing he’d stop calling me Sherry-O. “What kind of things?”

  Suits’s gray eyes began to take on a glow; his pale skin became suffused with color. My unease deepened. I’d seen that expression before on the faces of zealots—and madmen.

  He said, “Revolutionary things. Sweeping changes that reach far beyond the corporation. You can change the course of every life you hold in your hands. You can change the course of a nation. You can completely alter history.”

  Zealot, I decided.

  Suits sat up straighter, fixed his burning eyes on mine. “What I’m offering you,” he announced, “is the chance to help me alter the course of the history of San Francisco. But first you’ll have to find the bastard who’s trying to kill me.”

  No, I thought. Madman.

  Three

  Suits waited expectantly for my reaction. He seemed disappointed when I asked, “What makes you think somebody’s trying to kill you?”

  “There have been incidents.” He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Such as?”

  “Incidents,” he repeated darkly. “Here—I’ll have Carmen tell you about the latest.”

  “Carmen?” I looked around, saw no one except the big bald man behind the counter.

  Suits beckoned to him. He came around and crossed to our booth, rubbing his palms on his apron and grinning at my puzzled expression. “They got to calling me that back in the sixties when I was offloading Costa Rican banana boats,” he said. “Carmen Miranda, you know? Some guy’s idea of a joke. It stuck.” He shrugged philosophically. “What d’you need, T.J.?”

  “Tell the lady about last Thursday night, will you?”

  Carmen hesitated, frowning.

  “It’s okay. She’s working for me.”

  Suits’s words didn’t seem to reassure him. He hesitated some more, chewing on his lower lip. “Well, what happened, I’m locking up. Maybe eleven-thirty. And there’s this big splash pierside. I turn on my floods, go out, take a look. And there’s T.J. in the water, flopping around like a half-dead sea lion. I toss him a line, but he can’t grab it, and I realize he’s practically unconscious. So I’ve got to go in after him, and when I haul him up on the pier, I see he’s got the start of a big knot on the back of his head.” Carmen patted the back of his own skull. “And before I’m done with him he’s puked up about a gallon of water.”

  I looked at Suits. “How’d you end up in the Bay?”

  “Somebody hit me and dumped me in. I’d stopped for a beer with Carmen, left around eleven twenty-five, and started back toward my place. I remember footsteps coming up fast behind me, and nothing much after that until my friend here was pumping the water out of me.”

  I glanced back at Carmen; his expression was remote. More to this than he’s letting on, I thought.

  “You see anybody?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “Hear anything between the time Suits … T.J. left and when he hit the water?”

  “Nope.”

  “Was there anybody here in the diner who might have followed him?”

  “Hadn’t had a customer for nearly an hour.”

  I turned to Suits. “Was anything taken? Your wallet, for instance?”

  “No, and I had a few hundred dollars on me, plus my Rolex.”

  “So you think this has to do with the other—” I didn’t finish, because he moved his eyes from side to side, signaling that he didn’t want to discuss the other incidents in front of Carmen.

  “Thanks, Carmen,” I said. “If you remember anything else, let T.J. know, would you?”

  He nodded brusquely and went back to the counter, but not before I glimpsed a trace of indecision clouding his eyes. Carmen wanted to mention something else, but he wasn’t sure how it would go over with Suits.

  “All right,” I said to Suits, “give me the whole story, starting with this current turnaround.”

  “You know Golden Gate Lines?”

  “The shipping company? Sure. They’re based in Oakland, aren’t they?”

  “For now, yes. They called me in a little less than a year ago, after they filed for Chapter Eleven. I’ve already got them stabilized, and I’m moving into the visionary stage. It’s a sweeping vision; like I said before, it’ll change the course of this city’s history. And somebody doesn’t want me to live to make it happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “… Wait a minute.” He got up, went to the pay phone on the wall by the door, and made a quick call. When he finished, he motioned to me. “Come on, I can show you better than I can tell you.” Before I could object, he waved to Carmen and hurried outside.

  There are times in every investigator’s career when it’s wise to walk away from a prospective client. I knew instinctively that this was one of those. But did I do it? No. Instead I went after Suits and followed him back toward his building, like a child trailing after a demented Pied Piper.

  When we got to Bay Vista, Suits led me to the extreme rear of the complex and into an elevator that had to be operated with a key. As we stepped on, I said, “Where’re we—”

  “Roof.”

  “Why?”

  He folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the cage, flashing me an irritated look. “You ask too many questions. Can’t you just let things unfold?”

  “Asking questions is my job.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

  “When?”

  He rolled his eyes. We rode the rest of the way and stepped out onto the roof in silence. It was windy up there, and cold; I zipped my jacket. Suits put his hand to his eyes like a visor and scanned the sky.

  “There’s the bird,” he said. “Record time.”

  I looked to the east. A helicopter—a big one, probably a JetRanger—was flapping toward us.

  “Is that—”

  “Mine.” He tapped his chest proudly. “JetRanger Three, and I’ve got a Learjet Thirty-five-A as well. But the bird’s my favorite. Pilot’s on call twenty-four hours—Josh Haddon. Good man, he—”

  The copter was overhead now, its roar drowning out the rest of his words. As it bobbed into position over an X painted on the concrete, Suits grabbed my shoulder and spoke directly into my ear. “Did you catch the identification number?”

  I glanced at the copter’s fuselage, saw the number was E622T. In aviation radio parlance, it would be pronounced Echo-six-two-two-Tango. Cute.

  The copter hovered briefly before beginning its clumsy descent. Wind from its rotors swept my hair from my shoulders, kicked up grit that stung my face and eyes.

  I hate helicopters. You’re always reading about them getting tangled up in high-tension wires, and when they crash they drop like a stone. After piloting an aerodynamically perfect plane like Hy’s Citabria—I’d started taking flying lessons and expected to solo by the end of the year—a helicopter’s movements felt unnatural and clumsy to me. But now it seemed I was to be treated to a ride in one, courtesy of Suitcase Gordon.

  The copter touched down, its rotors slowing; the pilot leaned over and pushed open its door. Suits motioned for me to precede him. I ducked my head and hurried over. The pilot, a big redhead with a generous sprinkling of fre
ckles across his weathered face, extended a hand and helped me on board. Suits shouted introductions and instructions as I belted myself into one of the backseats and put on the headset that would enable us to talk. Then he climbed in next to me, and the copter lifted off.

  “All right,” I said when he had his headset on, “where’re we going?”

  “I told you—too many questions.”

  “Suits!”

  “Let me tell you something about Golden Gate Lines.”

  I shook my head in resignation and settled in for the ride. Josh Haddon turned the copter out over the Bay and angled south along the shoreline, toward China Basin. To our left was Oakland, its downtown spires shrouded by yellowish haze; to our right I glimpsed the white telecommunications tower that crowns the russet hump of Bernal Heights where All Souls is located.

  “You ever heard of the Pacific Coast Steamers?” Suits asked through the headset.

  “Of course I have.” The Pacific Coast Steamers plied the country’s western shoreline from Portland to San Diego, beginning in the 1870s. Every good student of California history knows that—and I am a very good one. I hoped to God Suits wasn’t about to deliver a lecture on the subject.

  “Well, Golden Gate Lines was formed in nineteen sixteen,” he said, “when the Pacific Coast Steamship Company was bought out by Admiral Line. Seems one of the principals at Pacific Coast detested the old reprobate who’d built Admiral Line, so he took the money and started a rival shipping company. Within ten years Golden Gate was a premier ocean-freight carrier, homeported in San Francisco.”

  “Suits, what does all this have to do with—”

  “Context is everything.”

  Whatever that meant.

  “Okay, we move ahead to the mid-seventies.”

  So much for context. Trust Suits to dismiss six decades with a flick of his hand.

  “The line’s riding high,” he continued. “They’ve got sixteen container ships, and they’re cashing in on the Persian Gulf trade. Money’s flowing in—up to three mil a voyage. Those ships’re loaded to the max—three hundred and fifty, four hundred containers. But money’s also flowing out: cost over-runs on crane rentals, astronomical phone bills, high salaries, lost equipment. But nobody notices, because they’re not nickel-and-diming.”

  He paused, shaking his head. “You know, they’d offload those shipping containers to Iranian haulers, and the damned things’d just disappear into the desert. To this day you can see them outside of Teheran, housing entire Bedouin families. But nobody noticed, nobody gave a rat’s ass, the line was flying. And when the Mideast trade fell off in seventy-seven and the roof caved in, they all acted shocked.”

  We were nearing Hunters Point now, where dilapidated housing built for shipyard workers during World War II still sprawls over the hillsides, providing dubious shelter for many of our less privileged citizens. Maybe, I thought, those Bedouins don’t have it half bad. A twenty-year-old ocean-freight container must keep out the elements better than those places.

  “So what does Golden Gate’s board do?” Suits asked rhetorically. “Fire management? Bring in a troubleshooter? No, they do not. Instead they sell off the five best ships they’ve got, recruit more management at higher salaries, fire the one guy there who’s got any sense, and move the line to Oakland, where somebody’s cooked up a deal with a moneyman that immediately falls through. And then it’s Chapter Eleven time, and a lot of good people—employees, stockholders, creditors—are left holding the bag.”

  “But that was in the late seventies,” I said. “The line survived.”

  “Yeah, they found an angel. Guy by the name of Harvey Cameron. Big industrialist from Ohio, in love with the sea like a lot of landlocked people are. Old Harve got it into his head to move west, run a shipping line. Bought GGL in seventy-eight, turned it into a modest success. Not the dramatic turnaround I’d have liked, but you’ve got to give him credit.”

  “So what happened to bring the line down again?”

  “Old Harve died. And then his heirs also got it into their heads to move west and run a shipping line. Trouble is, they’re a bunch of dickheads. It took them a year to totally screw up, one more to head the line back into Chapter Eleven.”

  “And then they sent for you.”

  Suits started to laugh. I flinched. His laugh was another thing I’d forgotten: a high-pitched explosion, somewhere between a whoop and a cackle.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “They sent for me because the chief dickhead, Kirk Cameron, used to buy dope, term papers, and acid off me when he was at Ohio State. So you see, those old connections’re still paying off for me, Sherry-O, and—”

  Now something besides his laugh was grating on me. “Hold it right there!”

  Suits frowned.

  “I want you to stop calling me by that ridiculous nickname. I’m Sharon. Say it—Sharon.”

  “… I didn’t think you minded. I like it when you call me Suits. Reminds me of the old days.”

  “Then I’ll continue to call you that. But no more Sherry-O.”

  He shrugged, clearly as puzzled as Mick had been when I’d earlier insisted he stop calling me Aunt Sharon. After a moment he said, “Okay. Now where was I? Oh, yeah—those old connections’re still paying off for me, and they can for you, too. Name your fee, I won’t even question it.”

  An investigator’s dream, and coming at just the right time. Still, I said, “I need to know everything before—”

  “Look down! There it is!”

  I looked. We were hovering over the abandoned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Over five hundred acres of decaying buildings, pitted pavement, rusted cranes, and weedy rubble-strewn terrain spread below us. The base had been closed since 1974. The federal government had been trying to offload it to the city for years, but had succeeded in transferring only eighty acres that were suitable for conversion to a business district to serve the adjacent Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood. The rest stood empty and desolate, its sewer system rotted, its facilities outmoded, much of it so contaminated by toxic waste that cleanup seemed an impossibility.

  “So what do you see?” Suits asked me.

  “A ghost town.”

  “That’s what you see. What I see is a state-of-the-art inter-modal containerized-freight station. I see piers and truck and railway terminals and a ship-repair facility. I see jobs and prosperity and the renaissance of the Port of San Francisco. And that is vision.”

  “You mean you want to—”

  “I’m going to. I’m going to relieve the navy of that albatross and turn the entire port around. I’m going to bring Golden Gate Lines back home where it belongs—to its own mega-terminal, right down there.”

  “… But the base is contaminated.”

  “I’m tapping the EPA’s superfund for cleanup financing.”

  “It’s out of date.”

  “I’ll bring it up to date. I’ve already cut my deals with my moneymen.”

  “San Francisco’s got limited rail access. You can’t—”

  “I can.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I finalized the purchase agreement yesterday. Josh, set the bird down.”

  “Right, boss.”

  “Suits, why are we landing? We can see all that we need—”

  “No, we can’t. I want you to really experience this. Then you’ll understand about the tunnel.”

  “Tunnel,” I said weakly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What—”

  “Too many questions. Let it unfold.”

  Josh set the copter down. As we thumped onto the ground, I thought of the perfect three-point landing I’d once—quite accidentally—made in the Citabria. And tried not to sneer.

  Four

  I’d visited ghost towns before. They struck me as sad, even tragic, places, but the strength of their pathos was diluted by many decades. Not so with the modern-day ghost town at Hunters Point. No edges were yet blunted, no ugliness
softened. It didn’t help, of course, that the wind blew harshly there; didn’t help, either, that the afternoon was so unrelentingly gray. But borne on the cold air was a sense of waste and ruin. A sense of forgotten lives spent in largely forgotten toil. A confirmation of the futility of most forms of human endeavor.

  Suits and I stood on a knoll near the helicopter, looking down a badly potholed street toward a cluster of crumbling piers and corroded equipment. Seemingly oblivious to both the cold and the emotions that swirled in the void around us, he spoke animatedly, with much pointing and gesturing.

  “Over there by the South Basin”—he motioned in the direction of distant Candlestick Park—“that area’s so contaminated it’ll just have to be sealed—paved over. But the piers there”— he directed my attention to the northeast—“they’re fully rehabilitable. The dry dock”—he shrugged—“it’ll be costly to bring up to snuff, so I’m saving it for last.”

  “And this?” I swept my hand over the buildings and parking areas around us.

  “Truck and rail freight station.” He pivoted slightly. “That land over there where Dago Mary’s restaurant and those arts-and-crafts buildings are belongs to the city now. The businesses that’ll move in can’t help but benefit from my mega-terminal. And I’m planning a hiring and job-training program that’ll directly impact the residents of Bayview–Hunters Point.”

  “You haven’t mentioned the tunnel yet.”

  “Best for last.” Taking hold of my shoulders, he turned me until I faced the hilly area to the west. “See those rails?”

  They were rusted and weed-choked. “Uh-huh.”

  “They join the old Southern Pacific line at a tunnel in the Bayshore district. Through that tunnel, south down the Peninsula, then a quick jog east, and it’s clear tracks all the way to Chicago and other transfer points.”