I said hello to Peggy and sat down at the desk. As though I had depressed a joy buzzer, the telephone rang. It was Chet Herk. After a preliminary skirmish or two he got to what was on his mind. “You remember the other night at dinner, when I asked if you could take on something new?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Your situation changed any?”
I thought about it. “Not yet. Why?”
“Because my problem hasn’t gone away. I’ve got to do something, Marsh. If you can’t help me, give me the name of someone who can.”
I sighed. “I might be able to help you in a few days, Chet. The thing I’m on is going nowhere. Either I’m going to get taken off it or I’m going to have to hit the pavement twenty-four hours a day till I dig something up. I was just about to call the client and see what he wants me to do. If you can wait awhile I might be free.”
“I better not wait. If you get loose give me a call. I have a feeling it’s going to take more than one set of eyes to find this needle. San Francisco’s a hell of a haystack.”
“Who’s missing?”
“Who said anyone was missing?”
“You did.”
“The hell I did. Give me some names.”
“Well, when I need someone I usually try to get Jessie Tadlock, if he’s free.”
“Tadlock. Yeah. He’s the one found the kid a few years ago, right?”
“Right. Also, you remember Harry Spring?”
“Harry. Yeah. Good cop. Hell of a way to die.”
“He was a good investigator, too. His widow, Ruthie, took over his license. She’s good, too.”
“I don’t think this is anything for a woman.”
“Chauvinist.”
“That’s what one of my girl reporters tells me every day. But what the hell. Everybody’s got to be something, right? I’ll call Tadlock.”
“Tell him I sent you.”
“Why? You get a percentage?”
I laughed and we made small talk for a while. After we agreed to meet for a drink in a couple of days Chet hung up. I reached into the file drawer of my desk and hauled out the folder with the receivables in it and spread the various statements over the desk top. Someday I’ll paper the bathroom with uncollectable accounts.
As I was arranging the statements in descending order of collectability Peggy buzzed me. “A Mr. Kottle is on the line,” she said.
My nerve endings sparked briefly across the gap of my afternoon lassitude. “Which Mr. Kottle?”
“Maximilian. Your client, remember?”
I told her to put him on. I should have known I couldn’t be that lucky.
An electronic second passed; switches clicked, wires linked, then Max Kottle spoke to me, his voice arid, without ornament. “Sorry to bother you, Tanner, but I’ve had a hell of a day. Spent the morning with my lawyers, haggling over the precise language with which to inform the world, and more precisely Wall Street, that I am not long for this earth. Apparently they don’t want to make me appear too dead, since there’s a statistical chance I’ll remit, but then they don’t want to mislead people by declaring me fully alive. A troubling problem in semantics, but everyone but me seemed to be enjoying themselves. This came after the night I spent in the hospital being bombarded with cobalt rays. Right now I’m nauseous as hell. You know what I take for it?”
“What?”
“Marijuana.”
“No kidding?”
“Works, too. My nurse told me about it. But don’t tell my doctor. It’s not officially prescribed.”
“Mum’s the word.”
“So. On that cheery note I’m calling to see if you have any news for me. A man who is himself regressing inevitably seeks out signs of progress in others.”
If I could have made him better by telling a lie I would have, but he would want the gaps filled, the connections made, and I wouldn’t be able to do it. “I haven’t found him,” I said simply. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Kottle rasped. “I should have started this process a long time ago. It would have been much easier then, wouldn’t it?”
“Who knows? If we always did what we should, think of the people who would be out of work.”
“Do you have anything at all to go on?” he asked.
“A couple of things. In a few minutes I’m going to see a man who knew Karl in Berkeley and who’s been seen with him fairly recently here in the city. Also I’ve been told Karl used to hang out in a bar down by the Embarcadero. I’m going to check that out, too. Nothing hot, but warm enough.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, but it’s something. Karl’s been seen here in San Francisco within the past month. I’ll find him, Mr. Kottle. Sooner or later.”
“Who saw him?”
“I don’t think I’ll disclose that. It wouldn’t help; it could hurt.”
“Who could it hurt?” Kottle scoffed.
“Does it matter?”
Kottle didn’t respond so I pushed on. “Your son is wanted by the police,” I said. “You should have told me about it.”
“How did you find out?” Kottle said hotly. “I told you not to consult the police. Apparently you disobeyed my instructions.”
Kottle’s tone was raw and peremptory, despite his ailment. All of a sudden I got mad again. Men like Max Kottle amass a myriad of things over their lives—money, power, influence, beauty, you name it. The only thing I’ve managed to accumulate is a small pile of dignity, carefully scooped and scraped together over the years. It’s nicked and scarred in places, eroded in others, incomplete, but a pile nonetheless, small and sturdy and mine. Walter Hedgestone had stomped right on it by offering a bribe, and Belinda Kottle had taken a piece off it too, and now Max was implying I was less than competent and less than free to do things as I saw fit.
“Your check bought some hours of my time, Mr. Kottle, it didn’t buy you the right to tell me how to do my job. I got the information I needed from the people I needed to get it from. The police don’t know any more about Karl today than they did a week ago. But an investigator always needs to know whether the person he’s looking for is wanted by the cops. It makes a difference where and how he looks. You didn’t bother to tell me, presumably because you thought I’d turn bounty hunter and give Karl up for the reward, am I right?”
“Something like that.”
“Either you trust me completely or not at all. Which is it? I’ve got other things I could be doing.”
Kottle’s voice was heavy, suddenly lifeless. “I trust you. You have my apologies.”
“Great. With them and a dollar I can buy a gallon of gas. Are there any more tidbits you thought it prudent to keep from me?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Okay. I’m going to send you a bill. On it will be the words ‘For legal services and consultation.’ Pay it right away.”
“I have more lawyers than I can count already, Tanner. What’s the point?”
“The point is that as your lawyer I can keep what you’ve told me confidential. I always do this in a police case. Makes the game a little clearer. When you play with the cops it’s nice to know the rules.”
Kottle was silent for another moment. I watched a spider climb the wall across from me, a spiny nugget of terror. “I’m afraid I made a mistake in not trusting you,” Kottle said finally. “As a matter of policy I trust no one but Walter and Belinda. When Lathrop mentioned your name to me he said you were discreet and loyal. I should have believed him.”
“Lathrop Lewis?”
“Yes. You know him?”
“I know of him. I didn’t know I was on his recommended list.”
“I was stupid to doubt his word. After all, the worst thing that can happen already has.”
There was nothing I could say to that, except to tell him he was wrong. In the silence I began to wonder when they would get me, those little Storm Troopers, to wonder when the carcinoma would begin to scurry through the shadows of my lungs and the folds of my k
idneys and the creases of my brain, to wonder when I was going to die. I looked for the spider. He had disappeared.
“I’ll leave you to your business, Mr. Tanner,” Kottle said. “Pursue it in your own way. I won’t interfere. Just keep me informed.”
I told him I would and I told him I was sorry I’d gotten mad and he hung up. I looked down at the past-due accounts and decided I didn’t want to deal with them, so I called Peggy in and asked her to put them back in the file. I also asked if there was anything I needed to know before I left for the day. She told me there were just nine shopping days left till Christmas. The telephone rang again. It was Mrs. Kottle. Belinda.
“You talked to him, didn’t you?” she asked breathily. Her eagerness tickled.
“Who?”
“My husband.”
“I can’t seem to remember. What if I did?”
“Please, Mr. Tanner. I have only his best interests at heart. You have to believe me.”
“The only thing I have to do just now is assuage some of my creditors. I’m working for your husband, Mrs. Kottle. If he wants you to know what I tell him he’ll inform you himself. The last I heard there was nothing wrong with his vocal chords.”
“That’s tasteless.”
“You’re right.”
“This is ridiculous. I didn’t explain it right the other afternoon. We’re off on the wrong foot. May I see you again, and make a second effort?”
“I’d be happy to see you again, Mrs. Kottle. You can come by my apartment tonight. I’ll fix you a drink and put on some music and we can talk about anything you want except one. You’re a beautiful woman. It’ll be the best evening I’ve spent in a long time. But if you think I’ll tell you anything about your husband you’re wrong.”
She paused. “Yes,” she said at last. “I probably am. But if you think I care for anything or anyone except my husband, you’re wrong, too.”
The phone went dead in my ear, leaving an echo of frustrated purpose. I hoped I had underestimated Mrs. Kottle, but I couldn’t afford to wonder about it.
I glanced at my watch, then made a call. With surprising rapidity Sergeant Lanahan of the Berkeley police was on the line. I told him I was a graduate student in sociology at Cal and that I was doing my thesis on the war protests of the late sixties. I told him I was interested in Karl Kottle especially, and wondered if the police had any information on where he might be now.
Lanahan sounded young and happy about it. “Kottle, huh? If I knew where he was I’d get a cell ready.”
“Is he still wanted for the death of that girl?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I’ve been researching some old newspaper articles,” I explained. “The Gazette and the Tribune, mostly.”
“Well, Kottle’s still wanted, all right. My guess is he’s in Canada, but he could be about anywhere, I suppose. He’s smart as hell. A silver-tongued devil on top of it. We won’t find him unless he wants to be found or he trusts the wrong person.”
“You sound like you kind of admire the guy, Sergeant.”
“I won’t say I admire him, but he’s capable as hell, I’ll admit that. I used to monitor all those rallies and marches back then. I was a rookie. Got all the shit details. Looking for incitement evidence, was what it amounted to. Anyway, Kottle was the best of all those guys, maybe next to Savio. He didn’t insult your intelligence, you know? And he didn’t go for the trashing, either. His crowds never went off wild.”
“Then maybe he didn’t start that fire after all.”
“That’s not my job, to say whether he did or didn’t.”
“But what do you think?”
“What I think is he could have started it, since it was the ROTC. He’d go that far. But he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known that girl was inside. No way. Some of the other ones, hell, that wouldn’t have even slowed them down. But Kottle, he was a better type of individual.”
“Do you still have any pictures of him?”
“Somewhere. Hey. I’ve talked too damn much already. Do your research someplace else. And spell my name right. Lanahan. All a’s.”
He hung up and I got my car and headed for the nearest freeway.
THIRTEEN
I skirted downtown and headed into the heart of the city, then abandoned the freeway at Fell and whizzed west along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to Stanyan and then turned left. At the Haight Street intersection some old memories bestirred themselves and I slid back to another time. I pulled into the parking lot at the Cala Food Market and stopped the car, in the grip of senses seldom used.
Back in ’67 I lived in this part of the city. It was the summer of the Flower Children and the Grateful Dead and the Hog Farm Collective and Captain America, and by day Haight Street was a festival of drug-eased love and joy. Young boys with hair like Hayworth and young girls with no hips roamed the sidewalks, exchanging peace signs and daisies and soulful stares and illegal substances, all offered and received with unquestioning acceptance, without doubt or fear. During the day, when the sun was shining, it looked harmless and peaceful and somehow better than what any of the rest of us had going.
But even at the beginning there was a dark side to all of it, there always is, and as usual the dark side came out at night. I’d see one aspect of it whenever I’d come home late. Everytime I drove along Stanyan, around midnight or after, I would see them right across the street from the market where I was parked. Swaddled in the fog, huddled together against the cold and wet, a score of little rag bundles lay like dead dogs on the concrete sidewalk that led down into the park. They were the kids from Toledo and Little Rock and Duluth, the kids who’d run off to San Francisco to find on the streets of that mostly mythic city whatever it was they weren’t finding at home. The runaways.
Some of the kids, a few, actually found it for a while—the self-respect all of us crave and most of us used to develop at an early age back before the Beverly Hillbillies and the Rotary Club became more interesting to parents than their children were. But a lot of kids never hooked onto the good side of Flower Power and instead got progressively sicker and more exhausted until they were burned out and left for dead by the ones who had got there early and were so far into themselves they couldn’t see anything but their own desires. Some young lives were lost and some old hearts were broken before it ended, but still and all we, all of us, are a little better off for what those kids planted inside us a decade ago, that paramecium-sized idea that it didn’t always have to be the way it always had been.
I stayed where I was a few minutes more, remembering a past that seemed a better time for both the city and for me. Twelve years had elapsed since then, twenty percent of my life, probably, in theory my most productive period. But in practice, well, in practice there were no prizes, no awards, no books written, no paintings painted, no buildings built, no machines designed, no cures discovered. No tax shelters, no Keogh Plans, no Krugerrands. Just a five-thousand-dollar CD earning half the inflation rate and a six-year-old Buick chugging gas the way winos chug Thunderbird and a Paul Klee original that hung in my office inside a walnut frame because once, a long time ago, I’d managed a miracle for someone with imagination and good taste.
Twelve years.
At one time that seemed an expanse of time beyond the powers of contemplation. Now it seemed like a belch.
I started my engine and went on about my business, which was to talk to Karl Kottle’s old friend Howard Renn. The poet.
Edgewood Avenue runs along the base of Mt. Sutro, on its northeast edge, just below the University of California Medical Center and just above Kezar Stadium, where the Forty-Niners used to play before some visionary gave us Candlestick Park. I’d lived about a hundred yards from Renn’s house back in ’67, down on Parnassus Street in a duplex over a girl who’d owned the skinniest, ugliest dog I ever saw: an Italian greyhound. I still have nightmares about the dog and I still have dreams about the girl.
Howard Renn lived in a large,
Maybeckish brown-shingle house that perched like a grackle above the small green lawn that sloped up to meet it. A narrow flight of steps split the lawn and hooked the house to the walk. I squeezed the Buick between a Mercedes and a Volvo, after begging their pardon, and walked up the steps through a gauntlet of pink petunias. If there was another poet living on this block his name was Rod McKuen.
It was a storybook place: windows trimmed in yellow, chimney splashed with red, porch steps streaked in white. The grass was clipped shorter than my hair and the flowerbeds were weedless and geometric. The air around me smelled of rare essence—money well spent. The man who opened the door, however, looked more like a serf than a lord.
He was short and fat and bald. A ring of black and gray hair circled his head like surrey fringe. His thick beard was bristly and salted, his nose red and bulbous, his hands round and meaty, with stubby fingers the shape of kosher wieners. His eyes were black and vibrant, out of the same box as Rasputin’s. He just stood there, blocking my view of anything but avoirdupois.
“Mr. Renn?” I stuck out my hand. “My name’s Tanner,” I said cheerily. “I’d like to talk to you a minute.”
“Read the sign.” The words were brusque, like the gesture that went with them.
“What?”
“The sign.”
He gestured to his left again and I looked. A small, sparkling, black-and-white, glow-in-the-dark plate was tacked to the house just above the mailbox, at eye level. “No Solicitors.”
“I’m not a solicitor,” I said quickly. “In the profession I used to pursue, solicitation was unethical.”
“Well, now, what have we?” Renn bubbled. “A legal eagle? A master of the healing arts? Or perhaps merely a strolling minstrel, a roving ambassador, a vaudevillian manqué. Surely not the Avon Lady?”
“I’m an investigator,” I said with irritation. “I’d like to get some information from you.”
Renn inhaled, swelling his belly. “I am a veritable mountain of information,” he announced grandly. “My corpuscles are inflamed with knowledge. I have information about Emily Dickinson’s peculiar punctuation and information about the inherent fallacy in the Warren Commission’s ‘single bullet theory’ and information about the American complicity in the slaughter of the Tupemaros. Which will it be? Come now. Don’t be shy.”
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