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

by Susan Dunlap

  What Leo had meant, of course, was that he didn’t want me to have to chance mentioning it in front of John and take the consequences, or be constantly alert not to. ‘Thanks.’

  John turned to me. I tensed for his reaction. But what he said had nothing to do with Leo and courtyard security. ‘What about that reporter you were with?’

  ‘Westcoff?’ Of course John would have heard about it. I filled in the rest. ‘Westcoff’s doing a story on human trafficking and drug smuggling. We were hoping to spot the guy who attacked me and Westcoff saw one of this guy’s victims escaping.’

  ‘Jeez, Darce. Guy attacks you on your grounds. Leo’s grounds. He’s involved in trafficking. Leo’s giving his victim a safe haven. He comes after you. You and Wonder Zen Woman rout him. Don’t you think he might be pissed at Leo?’

  ‘The police are looking for him.’

  ‘They need to be breathing down Westcoff’s neck to find him.’

  I had thought the wolves would devour Hudson Poulsson, but he was settling in like a second family dog. A sweet man who grieved for the suffering of his daughter and drove people all over. The man was almost too good to be true. So good, in fact, the wolves not only didn’t devour him, they offered him the guest bed.

  In part that was because their focus had changed. It was Westcoff their teeth were itching for.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I woke up, finger-in-the-electric-socket panicked. Out by the ocean the fog’s a near-constant neighbor. I blinked and blinked again, and still I could barely make out the smudges where I’d peeled off the remains of the planets and stars I’d slept under my freshman year in high school, before Saturn fell on my nose one Thanksgiving morning. That day I’d slept through the collapse, so I have only Mike’s word that he didn’t stage the photo that led to me being called Saturn-snout all day.

  Sleeping in the room where you grew up coats you with childhood, no matter how adult you think you’ve become. This morning the door had inched open and Duffy hustled in and leapt, grunting, onto the bed. (Mom’s bought him a two-step foam ladder to climb on her bed!)

  ‘You are the most spoiled dog in all of San Francisco,’ I said, scratching his head.

  Slowly, the night before shimmied into focus. The panic about Leo solidified. I reached for my phone, checked messages. Just one, from Dainen Beretski. He’d be in the production room all day. Unsaid was: so should I. I agreed. There’s no holiday when deadline threatens.

  But fat chance.

  Not unless I connected with Leo pronto. I hit Leo’s number, got his voicemail message.

  ‘Damn!’ I snapped up to sitting.

  Duffy grunted.

  Leo was not answering his phone. Could be a dozen reasons. The same dozen that hadn’t held water last night. Now I remembered my wanting to go back to the zendo then, to be there in case—

  ‘In case what?’ John had said. ‘If he walks in fine, he’s not going to want to see you. If he doesn’t walk in there’s no use you being there.’

  ‘But if he’s injured or—’

  ‘I’ll have the guys keep an eye on the place.’

  ‘A drive by every hour? I don’t think—’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Yeah, Darce,’ Gary’d said, ‘hovering, that’s one thing you can count on him for. You’ll be lucky if he isn’t up a ladder and peeking in Leo’s window every hour.’

  ‘What about—’

  ‘Westcoff? I’ve got the guys on that. If they can’t find him, you can’t. Go to bed.’

  And if Leo was on the trail of his assailant? If he was trying to find him without being spotted? I hadn’t even bothered to ask.

  I’d wanted … But when I’d shoved myself up from the table, a wave of exhaustion hit so strong that I felt wobbly. Even I had had to admit that a night’s sleep was the only option.

  Now, this morning, I left Duffy burrowing into the warm spot I’d abandoned, pulled on my jeans, checked the closet – Mom keeps a rotating array of clothes for emergencies or poor planning of her offspring – and extricated a silver-blue T-shirt that was Gracie’s. Bathroom, breakfast and then Poulsson and I were on our way. Mom was gone, which I’d already assumed when Duffy didn’t bother to leave the bed.

  Fog covered Hudson Poulsson’s old BMW-like gray pudding. Sections of the windshield opaque’d as soon as the wiper moved off. Poulsson bent toward it, fingers white on the steering wheel. The car was January cold but he didn’t try the heater and I didn’t ask why. It could have been six in the morning or ten. ‘I’ll go through his room,’ I said, speaking of Leo, ‘but if I don’t find anything you’re going to have to call your daughter.’

  ‘It’s not that easy.’

  ‘Then you should start the process as soon as we get to the zendo.’

  ‘She doesn’t like to talk about other prisoners. It’s dangerous. She—’

  ‘Hudson!’

  He nodded and kept driving east, less intent on driving than avoiding my demands.

  But he promised to answer if I called – I believed him – and I got out in front of the zendo and watched him drive away.

  The street was empty. Peaceful or ominous. Renzo’s Caffe was closed. I stood looking down toward its empty gray windows and then turned and strode into the courtyard, stopping to scan the low stone wall, the inner side where the homeless slept, where Renzo had lain.

  For an instant the key stuck, then the madrone door swung free and I stepped into the entryway. ‘Leo?’

  The syllables seemed to ring in a bell of emptiness. I glanced in the dokusan room, the kitchen, the zendo, before running upstairs and checking Leo’s room, hoping he might be asleep. He wasn’t. Not there.

  Other rooms were empty.

  I turned back to Leo’s room, stood in the doorway. Where to begin to search?

  Without thinking, I turned and walked down to the zendo, lit the candle, bowed to my cushion and sat. Not facing the wall – facing into the room that had been the center of my life here.

  Thoughts raced at me. I could feel my shoulders quivering, my chest cold with foreboding. With effort, I let those thoughts go and focused on the flow of my breath, wondered how long Leo had been gone, forced my attention back to my breath, wondered why he would leave, came back to my breath, wondered why someone would force him to leave. Back to breath. What he could have abandoned or placed strategically that would give me some hint? And breath. And breath.

  There’s a moment when you sit that your body shifts down a notch, that the flow of breath and the awareness of sound grows stronger, that you are not yanked around by each fear-laden thought. A certain calm, focus. When that time came I sat for a few more minutes then got up, bowed to my cushion, walked out of the zendo up to the phone.

  Poulsson answered on the first ring.

  ‘It’s Aurelia, isn’t it?’ Aurelia, who’d lifted weights every day, who’d run when she could, did chin ups in her room. Who had made it her business to come out in good shape. Who’d gone to Japan to meet a guy. Who Leo would not shelter in the monastery up north.

  I could hear him swallowing over the phone. ‘Hudson, she told me about working out, even in her room. Yes or no?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Finding a person you hardly know and now realize you know less well than you assumed you did is no cakewalk, particularly in San Francisco, where there are pockets of homogeneity in pretty much any neighborhood. Even the Barbary Coast, a tiny boutique commercial district, had been de-gentrified by us, and we by the homeless guy in the courtyard. Aurelia Abernathy had been released from prison very recently. So recently that she had not yet been able to see the person she most wanted to be with. She’d been here at the zendo every day this week trying to get to Leo. If anyone had her address, it would be him.

  I stepped into Leo’s room. Garson-roshi’s room. Of course, I needed to finger through every drawer like a hotel thief on the make for jewels. Leo was missing! This room was my only lead to Aurelia and, I hoped, to Leo himself. I had to ex
amine every notebook, pad, scrap of paper, take apart his bedding, root through his dirty laundry. Long as he’d been missing, there was no chance he’d just walked off.

  And yet I stood, unable to invade the privacy of my teacher. Part of the unspoken covenant of our relationship was that I focused on his needs and he focused on my Zen practice. I brought him tea; he listened to me as I circled around my fears, grumbled about work or the lack of it. He found my koans therein.

  That was exactly what had happened in the dokusan room a minute before he was attacked. What had he said to me?

  If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill the Buddha.

  If I had mentioned that interchange to the police, they’d have veered so far into leftfield they’d have been paddling in the bay.

  The dokusan room door had been shut while Garson-roshi and I talked; there was no chance of the assailant overhearing us.

  But more to the point, Kill the Buddha did not mean to actually kill the Buddha. It was a koan well-known among Zen students. Rely on nothing. Give up the thing you so thoroughly believe will make you happy. Don’t hang onto anything. Give up even your desire to give up.

  Garson-roshi had offered me that koan when I was grumbling about work.

  Give up work?

  Give up the illusion of a steady, reliable employment doing what I most wanted?

  Give up picturing Hollywood as I wanted it to be?

  No, not as easy as that.

  Give up the righteous pleasure of annoyance?

  There are times you know you’ve hit the truth just by the awful feeling you get.

  Give up the righteous pleasure of annoyance not just in work, but in the rest of my life. My brother John stepped front and center.

  Rats!

  Give up being furious that he’d made a habit of circling the block in the middle of the night on his way home from work? Give up ‘What if I’d been coming home with a guy? Would I be bare light bulb’d about him at dinner?’

  Give up my indignation at the alarm guy John had sent who’d charged into the zendo in the middle of zazen and announced he’d come to protect us from coming home to find emptiness?

  Give up the constant, visceral irritation of suspecting I was constantly being watched?

  And if you give up doing that, what are you? I could almost hear Garson-roshi asking. What are you then?

  Nothing.

  For an instant, with the whole brouhaha scooped away, I felt just nothing. I stood there, outside Garson-roshi’s door in the empty hallway, feeling empty.

  ‘I guess John’s got reasons—’

  Not important. Don’t go to leftfield. The cops are already there. I could picture Leo laughing.

  What he meant was don’t fill the empty space with a different set of assumptions.

  ‘I don’t see how—’

  Be alert!

  By which he meant spot those thoughts coming in.

  I stood for another moment, still outside Garson-roshi’s door. It would take a while to give up the feeling of being watched.

  I swallowed, reached for the knob and walked into his room. The place was just as it had been before – covers jumbled off the futon, a little buckwheat pillow at an angle, books piled by the head of the bed, closet door shut, dresser drawers shut. Car keys in a green bowl on the dresser.

  I went to his address book first. He’d handed that to me before. No scraps of paper with addresses, no odd phone numbers with no names. Nothing even crossed out.

  There she was: AA. The prefix of the phone number served the East Bay – where the federal prison was.

  A month ago this might have been a find. Now it was nothing. She’d been there. She wasn’t now. I had no more idea of her San Francisco address than before. And if Leo had known it, he would have written it in this book.

  Which meant she hadn’t told him. Yet. So, she probably hadn’t been released long.

  There had to be halfway houses in the city. Some more likely than others. John might know. I could call him and test out my intent to give up being annoyed.

  Or, knowing John, I could just walk outside.

  I glanced in Leo’s closet again, and at the surfaces in the room, but did not open a single drawer. I hoped I was making the right decision. If I was wrong …

  Then I trotted downstairs and into the courtyard.

  ‘No need to pretend to be asleep,’ I said, tapping the ‘homeless’ guy on the arm. ‘You and I are going to make a deal.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The ‘homeless’ guy shrugged and rolled over like a bear in winter.

  I grabbed his jacket and shook him. ‘How the hell did Leo walk out of here and you not notice?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Skip the act. I could be on the phone to John right now. He’s wasting his money on a loser who cannot even lie in the courtyard and keep his eyes open.’

  ‘I dunno wha—’

  ‘Forget it!’ I whipped my phone out of my pocket.

  Of course, he was protesting before I got my finger to the screen. He was saying, ‘Deal?’

  ‘Right. The deal is you answer my questions, do what I tell you and I let you walk away. I do not tell my brother what a useless piece of litter you are.’

  ‘Hey, I—’

  ‘Take it or don’t. I’m on a tight schedule.’

  Of course, he took it. Pushing himself up was like a volcano readying itself to erupt. Rumbling and sending specks of debris flying. He discarded the sleeping bag he’d had bunched under his chest and the blanket. And a long, heavy wool coat meant for the good life in the Northeast. And a scarf. He stood in jeans and a maroon sweater. The process transformed the old winter bear to a skinny guy with matted brown hair, the better to sleep on the pavement on. A month of decent meals, off substance, an hour in the shower and he might be good to go. More accurately, knowing John’s minions, he once was good to go. Now the smell of sweat-dried wool and dust cocooned us.

  I shot a glance at the cold, rough, filthy pavement. ‘How long have you been on this job?’

  ‘Let’s see. Almost a month.’

  ‘Every night?’

  ‘Nah. I got a Wednesday sub.’

  ‘Other than Wednesdays you’re here full time?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Eleven to seven.’

  ‘But you’ve been here later.’

  He shrugged. ‘I overslept.’

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. ‘How is it that John knows you?’

  ‘Professionally.’

  ‘He arrested you for …?’

  ‘Petty.’

  Petty covered an array of small crimes – shoplifting, marijuana, boosting off the back of a truck. The day laborer tasks of the small crime world, generally done by men, and women, who’d as soon labor on the right side of the law if work presented itself. My brother had been on the force for thirty-some years. He had a stable of informants and off-the-book guys. Keeping an eye on me this last year, I realized, had provided a few of them employment. Outraged as I had been at my brother’s presumption and the intrusion, these minions of John’s had occasionally been a convenience for me.

  ‘What’s he paying you, Mr …?’

  ‘Vessie. Martin Vessie. Twenty an hour.’

  To lie awake on the pavement eight hours a night! ‘That’s all?’

  Vessie shrugged. ‘He ran interference with a proprietor I, uh, ran afoul of.’

  Good for John. Criminal rehab … ‘So, Mr Vessie, how is it you overlooked Leo Garson leaving here yesterday?’

  ‘Not my shift.’ The words flew out of his mouth almost before I’d finished asking. And he was proud!

  ‘So, you’re saying Leo Garson left here between seven in the morning and eleven at night?’

  ‘I guess. You don’t expect strong-armed kidnapping in the middle of the day.’

  And yet … ‘What about when Sendar attacked me right here in the courtyard? Not your shift?’ Soupçon of sarcasm there.

  ‘He must’ve been a light foot, right? D’
you hear him running up behind you? By the time I woke – looked up – Aurelia was kicking ass for you.’

  ‘So you did nothing?’

  ‘Hey, who do you think called the cops?’

  While I’d been faking the 911 call, Vessie was off somewhere making a real one. Still … ‘He trotted off. You couldn’t have grabbed him?’

  ‘Hey, I’m paid to watch. I got a herniated disc.’

  Hard to get good help! I leaned back against the low wall. If Vessie was being straight, then Leo had gone missing after morning zazen. The later in the morning, the more street traffic there would have been. Offices and boutiques would have been open. Though with Renzo gone the main eye on our place would have been missing. Still, it was not a time you’d drag a man across the sidewalk and stuff him into a getaway vehicle.

  Gun to his side? That was possible. Metal gun. Emotional gun. Two people walk to a car in the middle of the day. Hardly a noteworthy event.

  But Vessie had slipped in one noteworthy item. Aurelia. ‘So you know Aurelia. From prison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you recognized prison in her, right?’

  ‘Nah. She spotted me. Last week,’ he added, as if used to providing dates of occurrences.

  ‘What was she doing here last week?’

  ‘Knocking. Must’ve been none of you home.’

  ‘Between eleven and seven in the morning?’

  ‘Nah. Later. After breakfast. I forgot my bag.’ He shot a look of disdain at the filthy sleeping bag. ‘Took me a couple days to get this one authentic. I didn’t want to spend bucks on a new one to destroy. So I came back. Nine-sixteen … a.m. I checked my watch because I was figuring I’d been gone too long and it’d’ve been snatched. Nine-sixteen. No one home. She turns around, spots me and recognizes me.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Here.’ He could have added, Idiot!

  ‘She’d seen you here before, during the night?’

  ‘Guess so.’ Again, he could have added …

  ‘Did you see her?’