by Kyra Davis
Before I had time to plot my next move Anatoly pulled up in front of me in his beige automobile. “Get in!” he demanded.
I jumped in the passenger seat.
“Sophie, I can’t believe you—”
“You can yell at me later, right now we have to find Anne.”
“What do you mean find her? You were just with her!”
“Yeah, I was but she ran out. Go down Sacramento Street. Maybe we can still catch her.”
Anatoly’s face contorted into a glower but he quickly complied.
“He called again, Anatoly.”
“Who?”
“Darth Vader!”
Anatoly’s head snapped in my direction. “You got another threat?”
I pointed at the street. “Keep looking for Anne,” I instructed before telling him more about the call. “He said what happened to my friend was a shame. That it made his fur stand on end. And you should have heard the way he said it. It was like this asshole was admitting to killing Melanie!”
“Where was Anne when this call took place?” Anatoly asked.
“Right by my side.” I pressed the base of my palms into my forehead. “It’s not her. I was so sure it was, but I was wrong. Now I’m totally clueless, again!”
“You were always clueless, Sophie. You simply fooled yourself into believing otherwise.”
“I’m going to assume that your comment is only referring to my knowledge of this case!” I snapped, then added in a softer tone, “Thing is, I told Anne about the call.”
“Told her what exactly?”
“That some guy who sounded like Vader and liked animals had been prank-calling me.”
“How’d she react?”
“She literally ran out of the restaurant. That’s why we’re looking for her. She knows something, but I have no idea what.”
“I see.” Anatoly was clenching his jaw. “You realize that if you had waited for me I could have started following Anne the minute she left the café. We wouldn’t have lost her.”
“You realize,” I mimicked, “that if you had gotten a small car instead of a sedan the size of a small state, you might have been able to find parking sooner and I wouldn’t have had to make the choice between waiting for you and risking missing Anne.”
“Marcus would have kept her at the salon until you showed up,” Anatoly countered.
“How? By duct-taping her to the chair? She was done, Anatoly. Curled, highlighted and dried. If I had waited longer I would have lost her. Wait, where are you going?”
“Anne obviously got in her car and left. God knows which way she went. I’m driving down to Ocean Beach to look for that homeless woman one more time and then I’m going to take you home and explain to you the meaning of the word partnership!”
“Yes, yes, I know. There’s no ‘I’ in team…Oh my God!”
Anatoly slammed on the breaks, nearly causing the Honda hybrid behind us to slam into our bumper. “What!”
“No, no, keep driving…but I have a number this time! It didn’t come up as Unknown Number!”
Anatoly pressed back down on the gas pedal. “Are you talking about the threatening call?”
“Yes. What else would I be talking about?” I accessed the numbers of my recent received calls. There it was, a 415 number. I dialed and put my phone on loudspeaker.
Anatoly and I listened with bated breath as it rung three times and then…an awful screeching, never-ending beep shot through the speakers. “What is that?” My hands reflexively flew to my ears in an attempt to block out the sound. “A fax machine?”
Anatoly reached over and pressed End Call. “No, but it is a modem. Whoever called did it from a pay phone. Most of them are set up to go to that kind of modem after they’ve rung once or twice. It keeps people from calling them all the time.”
“There aren’t a lot of pay phones left,” I noted.
“There’s one on California Street, right around the corner from the Bittersweet.”
“In front of the Starbucks! Darth Vader was right there! We have to go back and look for him!”
“And how will we know it’s him, Sophie? Will he be carrying a light saber?”
“I don’t know, Anatoly. Maybe he’ll be dressed up like a goddamned sheep. Stop!”
But Anatoly had already seen what I had seen. He yanked the steering wheel to the right, causing the car to pull up onto the sidewalk twenty or so feet in front of the woman with the tinfoil hat.
Without another word we both jumped out of the car and faced her.
The woman hadn’t changed her appearance, except this time she was wearing dishwashing gloves. She scowled at me as if I was a middle-school kid who had thrown a rock through her window.
“What are you doin’ here?”
“We just wanted to talk to you.” Anatoly extended his hand. “My name is Anatoly.”
She studied him for what must have been a full minute before she put her yellow gloved hand in his. She didn’t shake it, but instead held on to it as if it was one more thing that she wanted to add to her shopping cart.
“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name,” Anatoly said.
“I don’t want to be givin’ up my name to no god-damned stranger.”
“Fair enough.” Anatoly smiled kindly, still holding her hand. “I was hoping we could talk to you about that pink bear you saw.”
That was enough to get her to yank her hand away. “Don’t know you well enough.”
“I see. Perhaps you could get to know us,” Anatoly suggested. “Ask us anything.”
“Are you cops?”
“No,” Anatoly and I said in unison.
“Because you gotta tell me if I ask. That there’s the law.”
“We’re not cops,” Anatoly assured her again.
“Are you in league with the bears? You gotta fess up to that, too, if you’re asked, otherwise you’ll be blackballed like dem Pandas.”
“Pandas were blackballed?” I asked.
“Yep, for a while there the other bears wouldn’t even accept them as one of their own. Said they were raccoons or some shit.”
“You’re thinking of red pandas,” I explained.
“Red pandas? Now, why would I be thinkin’ about some red bear? If I’m thinking about anything it’s those pink gay bears. Those are the dangerous ones.”
Anatoly nodded encouragingly. “Sophie told me about that. Can you tell me a little about the pink bear that killed the woman found here? Did you actually see him kill her?”
“Nope, just saw him carry her out of his rented Ford. Had her wrapped up like a burrito in a big blue tarp. Must of killed her someplace else.”
“Blue tarp?” Anatoly asked. “The papers didn’t mention that part. Did the police take that with them when they found the body?”
“Nah, I took the tarp.”
“You did?” Anatoly grinned. “Do you still have it?”
“Don’t be stupid, dem tarps sell for good money in the park. I got three bucks for that tarp.”
Anatoly’s grin disappeared and I squeezed my eyes closed against the disappointment. That tarp could have been a treasure trove of evidence and it was gone.
“What was this bear like?” Anatoly asked, quickly regrouping. “Was he trying to be discreet?”
“Now, who ever heard of a discreet pink bear? Those suckers want to be seen.”
“Ah.” Anatoly put his thumbs through his belt loop. “So he made a spectacle of himself?”
“I’d say, what with his waving at me and that grandma with her gran-kiddie.”
“Wait a minute.” I held up a hand to stop her. “What grandma and what gran-kiddie?”
“He came out of that damn Ford truck and started waving. The only people around was me and some old Chinese lady with some snot-nosed toddler. The toddler was pretty excited about it, too—you know how kids are. But the granny was a sensible woman, like me. She just pulled that little tot along with her and didn’t give that bear a second glance. That�
��s the best way to handle ’em—ignore ’em and walk away. If you run they’re more likely to eat you.”
Anatoly and I exchanged quick looks. Not only had the bear not waited for the coast to be clear, but he had actually waved at a homeless woman and some random pedestrians seconds before dumping the body? What kind of murderer went out of his way to call attention to himself?
“Did he wave again before he drove off?” I asked.
“To me he did, not that I paid him any mind. The grandma and toddler were long gone by then.”
“What did the grandmother look like?” I asked.
“Chinese.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And that’s it. I didn’t get a real good look at her. Maybe she wasn’t Chinese, maybe she was Japanese, or Korean. I don’t know, I was kind of distracted seeing that there was a bear with a rainbow tattooed on his tummy dumping a body wrapped up in a tarp.”
“That would be distracting,” Anatoly agreed. “What about the truck?”
“It was a green Ford.”
“Can you tell me anything more about it?” he pushed.
“Nope.”
“Wait a minute…” I put my fingers to my temples as if I could touch the memory that was coming back. “Right before Eugene was shot I saw a green truck…or an SUV. It was far away and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, but it was parked in a commercial district, which was weird because all the businesses had closed up, even the bars.”
Anatoly took a step closer to me. “Was it a Ford?”
“Anatoly, I can’t even tell you if it was an SUV or a truck and you want me to tell you if it was a Ford? Considering my lack of interest in cars, it’s amazing I took notice of it at all!”
Just then we heard a ringing. Anatoly looked pointedly at my handbag and I looked pointedly at his jacket pocket. But it wasn’t either of our phones. The noise was coming from the shopping cart.
“Damn thing won’t shut up,” the woman grumbled. “I don’t keep it on very much, but every once and a while I do just in case I need to make a quick call. I can’t be expected to wait for the damn thing to warm up if there’s an emergency, now, can I?”
“You have a cell phone?” I asked skeptically.
“Of course I have a cell phone. Can’t you hear it ringing?”
“Where did you get it?” Anatoly asked.
The woman took a protective step toward her cart. “It’s mine. I got it as a gift.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t yours,” Anatoly assured her. “It’s a nice gift. Whoever gave it to you obviously cares about you very much.”
“He does.”
“May I ask who that person is?” Anatoly asked.
“Jesus.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Jesus gave you a cell phone?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“No, not at all,” I said quickly. According to my Christian friends, the poor were already going to inherit the earth, so why not throw in a cell phone?
“What exactly does Jesus look like?” Anatoly asked.
“He looks like Jesus,” the woman snapped.
“I see,” Anatoly nodded solemnly. “Is there any chance that I could see the cell phone?” The woman studied him for a moment before shuffling through her shopping cart and eventually pulled out a top-of-the-line camera phone.
Anatoly put his hand out and waited for her to give it to him, rather than trying to take it from her, but the woman hesitated. “You’re gonna give this right back to me, right? I don’t know what I’d do without my cell phone.”
“I would never steal from you,” Anatoly said.
Reluctantly she placed it in his palm. Anatoly immediately f lipped it open and started going through the pictures. There were a few of a woman who looked vaguely familiar.
“I’ve seen pictures of this woman,” Anatoly said slowly, clearly addressing me rather than our new friend. “This is Marian Fitzgerald. Flynn Fitzgerald’s wife.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Why would there be pictures of Flynn Fitzgerald’s wife on the phone?”
“Because,” Anatoly said as he perused the numbers and names in the address book, “this is Flynn Fitzgerald’s phone.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. Then all the questions started tumbling out of me, too hurried and frantic to be comprehensible. “How did you get Fitzgerald’s phone? Do you know him? Is he the one who gave it to you? Is he the Jesus you’re talking about? Does he know Jesus?” The woman was looking at me as if I had just lost my mind, and maybe I had. I couldn’t make sense of any of this and the pure effort of trying was making me dizzy.
“I told you,” the woman said, finally cutting me off, “I got this here phone from Jesus.” She snatched the phone from Anatoly and held it tightly in her gloved hand.
“But how did Jesus deliver it to you?” I demanded. “Did it fall out of the sky? Did you find it in a burning bush? What?”
“He wrapped it up in the tarp.”
I reached out and clutched Anatoly’s arm. “In the tarp? You found the phone in the tarp Melanie was wrapped up in?”
“Is Melanie the woman the bear killed? Yeah, that’s where Jesus wrapped it up. Probably should have found different gift wrap, though. It got tangled up in the fabric of that dead woman’s skirt. There was blood all over this thing.” She waved the pristine phone in front of me. “Took me two days to get it all off.”
“To get it off? There was blood on it and you cleaned the blood off?” I let go of Anatoly’s arm and spun around so my back was to both of them. I might be able to resist strangling her if I didn’t have to look at her. There had been DNA evidence that would have linked Flynn Fitzgerald to a murder. A tarp and a bloody phone. And now it was all gone. Anyone who would pay three dollars to buy a bloody tarp wouldn’t think twice about wiping off that blood before using it as a makeshift tent, and even if they hadn’t, a few days of exposure to the San Francisco drizzle would have done most of the job for them. Of course this woman was an eyewitness, but as witnesses went she couldn’t have been less reliable. And in a city where over a third of the population was Asian, the grandmother with the toddler description wasn’t going to help me at all. For once I wanted to confide in the police, but thanks to this woman I had nothing helpful to bring them.
“Any chance you’d consider selling the phone to us?” Anatoly asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said slowly. “It’s special to me, it being from our savior and all.”
“Here.” I dug into my purse and waved a twenty and a ten over my shoulder, still not trusting myself enough to look at her. “Here’s thirty dollars for the phone.”
“You really want to pay me thirty dollars for this thing?” the woman gasped.
Finally I turned around. “That’s right. Thirty bucks cash right now.”
The woman’s mouth was hanging open and she stared at the bills in my hand. “Thirty dollars for this here phone.”
I nodded impatiently.
“Child, did you not hear me when I said this here phone was a gift from the one and only son of God? Wasn’t too long ago that some man sold a pancake with Jesus’ face on it on eBay for a cool sixty. Sixty dollars for Jesus’ leftover breakfast! This here’s a Motorola i880 phone! It’s got polyphonic ring tones and everything! The pope ain’t got a phone this nice! And you think you can buy it off me for thirty dollars? I may be crazy but I ain’t that crazy.”
“But thirty dollars is all I have on me!”
Anatoly already had his wallet in his hand. “I have another ten, that brings it to forty.”
“I want a hundred, and that there’s a deal. You be robbin’ me at a hundred, but I’ll do it for you folks since you’re anti-bear and all.”
“But we don’t have any more money on us right now!”
“That ain’t my problem. You come back with a better offer, and if I still has the phone, I might still be willing to sell it for a hundred.”
“No, no, no
, no, no, no.” I waved my hand in the air as if I was wiping her words off an invisible chalkboard. “It took us days to find you. I’m not going to walk away and hope that I’m able to find you again.”
“Well, you ain’t takin’ it for no forty dollars and I ain’t offerin’ no installment plan.” The woman glanced toward our car. “What’s that there on your dashboard?” She walked forward to get a clearer view. “Is that a box of chocolates?”
“From the Chocolate Café on Fillmore,” I confirmed.
“Dark chocolates?”
Anatoly went to the car and took out the box. “It says they’re extra dark.”
“Tell you what I’ll do, you give me the forty dollars, the chocolates and those diamond earrings of yours and I’ll give you this here phone.”
“Deal!” I shouted. I gave her my money and earrings (praying that she wouldn’t realize that the diamonds were about as real as Pamela Anderson’s breasts) and Anatoly gave her his money and Marcus’s chocolates.
The woman smiled and handed me the phone. Then all of a sudden her hands flew to both sides of her head. “It’s him, it’s him!”
I spun around expecting to see a pink bear, but there was nothing there. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The devil! Don’t you hear him? He’s coming! He’s f lying in on that f lying pig!”
I searched the sky, but the only thing f lying was a beleaguered-looking moth. I was suddenly filled with a deadly sense of hopelessness. I honestly did feel for this woman. She needed help. Furthermore, there was no way to tell what part of this woman’s story was true and what was a delusion. Maybe she only thought she saw a pink bear, or maybe Jesus really did give her Fitzgerald’s Motorola. In a world where people could be sexually attracted to stuffed animals, anything was possible.
The tinfoil-hat woman grabbed the handle of her shopping cart and rushed off, periodically looking over her shoulder. Anatoly and I watched her disappear and then got back in the car. For a moment we just sat there staring at Fitzgerald’s cell phone, which I still clutched in my hand. “We could call the police,” I suggested.
“We could,” Anatoly agreed, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic.