Switchback: A San Francisco Mystery (A Darcy Lott Mystery)

by Susan Dunlap

  ‘He’ll be in jail tomorrow.’

  ‘How? I can’t ID him. Leo? Maybe. If he looked up before he was struck.’ I could see his bloody face again, his eyes swelling shut.

  ‘Try.’ John motioned me to an empty bank of chairs against the wall. We took the middle two. ‘Eyes shut. Picture him. Or – Jesus! – her.’

  In a few minutes Snell would be back with his details and we’d both know. But anything I could remember before would strengthen the case against him. Or her.

  John always contended that if you ask five witnesses in a bank robbery to describe the robber, you’ll be lucky if they all agree on his sex. One Christmas when I was eight or nine he gave me a flash card set with Hollywood-ish perp pictures. The box said the point was to match the face to a name, but John’s rules were to describe the face on the card so your teammate could pick it out of the pack. We all played it that night, three of us per team, and a couple of times after. We might have liked it but really no one can get into a game when the game-giver’s snide about how poorly you’re doing.

  Body on the gurney? I wasn’t going to win points for that.

  John’s game had a one-minute timer, loudly ticking off your seconds to failure. A bad description within the time limit was better than an inability to come up with anything. That, John suspected rightly, was a sign of the cardinal sin of slacking.

  Eyes still shut, I tried to stop-frame the assailant in the dokusan room, to separate him from the fear and anger and worry that turned my memory into a blur of sick yellows. I tried it all again referring to him as ‘her,’ hoping either for a bingo or a dead stop that would tell me a female was a no-go.

  But that was it. I didn’t dare go over the images again lest I start adjusting my memories. In a few minutes, an hour, maybe when I saw him in a line-up at the station, I’d see how well I’d done.

  But why had the assailant run out of the zendo so frantically? I tried to flash still frames of his run on my memory. He wasn’t a runner, that was for sure. He moved fast; he was thin, narrow, but his feet … That’s what I remembered – his feet in those green Crocs.

  ‘Green Crocs!’

  My brother glared at me.

  ‘You know, those wide rubber shoes with the holes in them? People use them for gardening. Not around here, but in places where people have lawns and shrubs and flowers not in pots. You can slip them on.’

  ‘The guy sloshed out in rubber slippers and you couldn’t catch him? You go to all those exercise classes and—’

  ‘Hey, Leo was bleeding. He probably had a concussion. I—’

  The swinging doors opened out. Snell stalked back into the waiting room, looked from me to John and sighed. ‘Gone,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s gone?’ John demanded.

  ‘Accident victims.’

  ‘Victims, plural?’

  ‘Yeah, plural. Medic stashed them in the hall. They took the opportunity to depart.’

  ‘They?’ I asked with a sinking feeling.

  ‘Victim number one, the runner. Vic number three, the pedestrian.’

  ‘One male, one female?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Paramedics roll in three accident victims and two of them walk out?’

  Behind me a man said, ‘No insurance.’

  ‘Yeah, what they come after you for that fancy ride, you could pay rent for a month, honey.’

  A general murmur rose around the speakers like the bread of complaint rising.

  I remembered hearing the metal hitting metal, the sirens, noting the lights on Columbus. The whole scene I could never see. So, the guy went from bludgeoning Leo to causing a crash. He was getting to be a city-wide disaster in one body. ‘Well, what’s his name?’

  ‘Not the one he gave, that much they do know.’

  John inhaled theatrically, preparatory, I knew, to an icy mistral of sarcasm. ‘Did they at least discern which patient was which gender?’

  Snell just shook his head.

  I thought John would have a good long chew on that, and me. But Snell was making him a tastier meal. ‘The man who stabbed the abbot, you don’t know who he is, and now he’s disappeared.’

  Snell let a beat pass. ‘We don’t know his identity, sir, or his whereabouts, or if he attacked Mr Garson. For that, we have only Ms Lott’s word.’

  ‘The remaining victim, Snell, do you have an ID?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Find out. Now!’

  Snell whipped through the doors so fast he nearly decapitated a nurse.

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. John pretended not to hear. ‘You think Snell’ll find out?’

  ‘Probably. But get a statement? Not a chance. Tomorrow at the earliest.’

  ‘Then why’d you just about fling him in there?’

  Facing me now, he put a hand on my shoulder – the ‘I’m telling you for your own good’ move. ‘I know how these things go. Snell starts the search. He questions people, they brush him off, it gets his dander up. He’s not about to wander back out here with his tail between his legs, right? So he keeps at it. He gets a nibble, a name. So now he’s got something. His find. The person who can lead him to the person who attacked Garson. To the person who is not you! Now he’s on the case, he’s committed. Now you’ve got a bit of an ally. Not all the way, nowhere near, but more than he was when he was cooling his heels out here.’

  Maybe. Or maybe Snell took his chance to be clear of both of us, walked back inside, climbed into an empty bed and pulled the sheet over his head. Probably not, though, from the I-hate-hospitals look on his face.

  ‘Snell’s got to be the weirdest cop I’ve ever met. And I’m including you in the “met” group.’

  John chuckled. ‘Snell? I heard something about him. Can’t pull it up.’

  ‘He’s like a shelter dog.’

  ‘Feel free to pass that on to him.’

  I smiled. John’s not entirely without humor, though in our family so much of it was at his expense that he rarely got to enjoy the payoff. I was about to ask where he’d learned that his find maneuver when he re-launched the ‘Zen Center isn’t Safe’ spiel, which he interspersed with trips to the desk to hector the clerks about Leo’s evaluation.

  When the doctor finally – finally! – emerged from the double doors we were both relieved. Snell followed him.

  He was a tall, narrow man with a high nose and startlingly pale eyes. Next to him John looked stubby and exceedingly white. ‘I apologize for the delay. I was called to an emergency. A second emergency, you see.’ His accent was lush and so thick that I felt like I was disassembling and rebuilding each noun and verb. His dark face was shadowed by darker circles under his eyes. He looked like he was dangling at the end of his way-too-long shift. Like they’d sucked out his innards to infuse the patient.

  ‘Leo Garson?’ I prompted.

  ‘Mr Garson is in recovery.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mr Garson was fortunate. Half an inch medial—’

  ‘Nearer?’

  He nodded, but his focus was on John. Because he was the man, or even in plain clothes he exuded police? ‘To his eye and there could have been problems, very serious problems.’

  ‘But there weren’t?’ I said.

  ‘No. He was fortunate.’

  ‘His eyesight’s OK?’

  ‘The prognosis is positive. For the eye.’

  My heart dropped into my gut. ‘But?’

  ‘The zygomatic process shows bruising.’

  ‘The cheekbone?’

  ‘As I stated, the patient was fortunate.’

  ‘And?’ I prodded.

  ‘Broken left first metacarpal.’

  ‘Broken thumb?’ That’s all? Broken hands and sprained wrists were rites of passage in the stunt world. John was staring at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was amazed by how many medical terms I’d learned in my years of stunt mishaps or appalled.

  ‘Concussion.’

  I nodded, relieved. Another rite.

  ‘W
hat about his recall of the incident?’

  The doctor nodded. ‘Often in the case of assault there is no memory of the incident itself. But sometimes yes.’

  ‘You don’t know.’ John’s sarcasm was so muted only I caught it.

  ‘Just so. We will be keeping him under observation for two days – three, perhaps.’

  ‘That serious?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘Yes.’ The doctor nodded.

  ‘No!’ said Snell.

  FOUR

  ‘What do you mean “No?”’ I glared at Officer Snell.

  ‘Until and unless you are cleared, you are not to be within a hundred feet of Mr Garson.’

  ‘So, clear me.’

  ‘It’s not my—’

  ‘Get someone who can!’

  ‘Those were my orders.’ Snell was looking directly at me, his face quavering. He had, I recalled, stuck his neck out to let me come here.

  I lowered my voice. ‘The person who attacked Leo was in this hospital—’

  ‘You assume.’

  Don’t assume. Classic Garson-roshi teaching. ‘I’m on pretty firm ground here. The point is he was wheeled in here and now he’s disappeared.’

  ‘It’s a big hospital. He could have left through dozens of exits.’

  ‘Or he could still be here. Looking for a second, easier shot at Leo.’

  ‘Mr Garson,’ the doctor put in, ‘is in the recovery room with a team of doctors, nurses, aides, technicians. He will never be alone.’

  I’d forgotten the doctor was still here. ‘All the easier for the assailant to slip in amidst the flurry and batter him. It’d take seconds. Your staff’s watching his vital signs, not for attackers.’

  ‘We do have security here. The sheriff’s department—’

  John, Snell and I groaned as one. SFPD and the Sheriff of the City and County of San Francisco do not hold each other in high esteem. Some reasons are valid, and some are 49ers–Rams kind of things. John had joined the police force before I started school. There was never a question where our loyalties lay.

  The pleasures of speaking one’s mind flash strong and fleeting. There are worse things than to hold than your tongue. I took a breath and said, ‘Leo was attacked. He’s helpless. No one wants to leave him unprotected.’

  It ended up that they called security. The sheriff’s department agreed to assign a guard. The doctor agreed to make sure he was there. I told the sheriff that Leo was a revered Buddhist teacher – the whole spiel about being part of a large and not-without-influence community in this city – and that my brother was a senior police detective – mumbling over the past tense of the verb – and my sister worked for the San Francisco Chronicle. The sheriff’s department had been front and center in scandals in the past years. The deputy understood. But none of us appeared happy.

  Least of all me. I convinced John to toss Snell a bone and let him deliver me solo to Central Station, the substation which, oddly, covers the northeast corner of the city as opposed to Northern Station in the northwest. If there were an Eastern it’d be in the bay. I figured my chances of waiting for hours at the station to sign my statement were preferable to John delivering me home and devoting hours to sussing out every possible threat of entry in the place.

  Half an hour later, Snell deposited me in the waiting room under the eye of the desk sergeant and amidst four college guys who had come to town to patronize the strip clubs on Broadway under the assumption that all strippers are hookers. Two of them wore black hoodies. One looked familiar. The zendo is a block below Broadway. More than once boys have landed in our courtyard after a wide-eyed evening in which they were parted from their pay in just the way the Barbary Coast barkeeps managed it with sailors a hundred and fifty years ago. When their shouts woke him at two or three a.m. Leo would push himself up, cross his legs, then sit zazen and hoped the boys sobered up a bit before driving home. I tried to do likewise. It was one of the reasons the pimp fight had shocked us less than it had John and the reporters.

  Now I eyed the one boy in the black hoodie and tried to see his hands. Were they scraped, stained with dried blood? The way he kept his hands in his pockets, we could have been sitting outdoors in Nome. Did he bludgeon Leo, run into traffic, cause an accident, get transported to the hospital, call a car to drive him across town, go to a strip show and almost immediately assault the dancer, patron, bouncer or do something else that landed him in the cop shop? Odds? Not good.

  My wait was an hour; statement signing ten minutes. I stepped out onto Vallejo Street at just after two a.m. The detective had offered to find a patrol officer to drive me home, but I’d told him I lived only four blocks away. Even if I’d lived out by the ocean I wouldn’t have chosen more open-ended time in the waiting room.

  Neither Snell nor this detective had asked why Leo hadn’t bounced up to fight off his attacker. Maybe they figured all Buddhists are pacifists. Maybe, in fact, Leo was. Or the answer could have been simpler. It’s not easy bouncing to your feet when you’re sitting in full lotus, left foot on right thigh, right on left thigh, and wearing a long black robe – all while someone’s attacking you.

  Columbus Avenue, at close to two on Tuesday morning, was empty. Pacific Avenue was dead still. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear John’s car slowly grinding down the street, like a latecomer trying to walk silently across the zendo’s creaky floor after everyone was on their cushions facing the wall. Maybe he’d already been by, just not imagining that the cops would leave me waiting an hour and then I’d choose to walk home on the night streets he’d already warned me about … repeatedly. Before his retirement he’d been a cloak of warnings; these days, unimpeded by employment, he was heading toward straitjacket-hood.

  There was a coziness now to the fog, a sense that perhaps it would shift to rain. The streetlights were blurs on black lines. The courtyard beside the zendo was dark. I peered behind the stone wall just in case – it was easy to miss a man snugged against the wall like a worm in a crevice. I’d done it once or twice. But there was no living thing except the ginkgos in the planters. Reassured, I unlocked the doors and stepped into the hallway Leo had been carried through earlier, and flicked on the light.

  At first the place looked utterly normal, as if I was just coming home from a night shoot and I’d be walking softly up the stairs, pausing at the top to listen for the sound of Leo’s breathing and slipping into my sleeping bag for a few hours before morning zazen.

  Morning zazen! In a little over four hours students, unaware of the attack, would be walking through here to the meditation hall.

  Now I saw the entry hall through their eyes. The police had left black powder sprayed on the walls and doorways. The wood plank floor which we swept after every morning zazen, washed on Saturdays and waxed on the full moon weekend was splattered with dirt, leaves, footprints and black scuff marks. Shards of glass sparkled where bare feet would be. And the dokusan room looked like it had been tossed. The two rectangular black zabutans that had lain with the ends almost touching, on which Leo and I sat as he said to me, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha,’ now lay tossed one atop the other in a corner. Leo’s round black zafu was gone – had the crime scene unit scooped the cushion up as evidence? The matching cushion I’d sat on was ripped and the white kapok spewed out of the tears. There wasn’t as much blood as I’d expected, and I took that as a good sign for Leo. But the ceramic Buddha he had brought back with him from Japan after his years in a monastery there was shattered. I hadn’t realized it was hollow.

  Hollow! I stared at a pale green shard with gold leaf flecked off at the broken edge. It felt like a sign, an omen.

  I shook my head hard, like a dog. We in Zen do not deal in signs and omens and mystical means of manipulating the future. We strive to accept things as they are. ‘That’s the whole point! Things as they are!’ I said aloud in the empty room in the middle of the night.

  Then I swept up the p
ieces and put them in a box. We also don’t deal in the kind of miracles it would take to glue it back together. Kill the Buddha doesn’t mean this, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if some ancient roshi had smashed his statue to make his point.

  And still ‘we clean to clean.’ We work in this moment, not for the result. If I’d ever doubted that, I didn’t now. I scrubbed every plank from one wall to the other, then started on the next. I didn’t think about what had happened or ponder why anyone would attack a decent, sweet man whose first concern was always the dharma. I didn’t rebuke myself for not protecting him better (though there were moments I almost slipped into that), nor did I ponder the array of bad outcomes that could await him. I scrubbed.

  The dokusan room has no windows. Night is as day. Hours become minutes.

  And so, the knock on the courtyard door just about shot me through my skin.

  FIVE

  I thought – hoped – that knock on the door would be Renzo from Renzo’s Caffe, carrying a cup of his superb espresso. A double, because Renzo believed the only reason to drink a single was to remind yourself you should have had a double.

  The knock – tap, really – was so slight I wondered if I was half-asleep, half-dreaming it. For the first time since I’d started cleaning the dokusan room I looked at my watch. Over four hours had passed! I pushed myself up. My knees actually creaked. My back felt like something made with an erector set. And, suddenly, I was very, very tired, in the way of one who’s been up all night.

  And Zen students would be arriving any time now for zazen. I could really use that espresso.

  A second tap jolted me into action. I unlocked the door and looked down at the spot where Renzo’s been known to leave the little cup.

  ‘Hello.’ Lila Suranaman stood so close to the door opening, if there’d been a draft it would have blown her in. She was small – only up to my shoulder and I’m five-six – and South Asian, her English sketchy. Had her English been more extensive she might have said, ‘Let me in, now! It’s cold out here. Dark. Hurry, I’m scared.’