“How much later?” I asked.
Caesar shrugged. “Long’s it takes to have me a short one.”
“Ten minutes?” Flint asked. “Twenty minutes?”
“More like a half hour,” Caesar said.
Caesar had filled in some of Emily’s last minutes for us, but it wasn’t nearly enough. At the time Emily walked down to the wishing well for her mysterious rendezvous, I was probably either on my way from the airport or sitting on her front stoop. I couldn’t help wondering how differently things might have gone down if Caesar had just delivered his note on time.
Caesar emerged from his silver cocoon to sit crosslegged beside us, putting his face on a level with ours. His breath was indescribable. Flint’s eyes watered and I had to turn my head to get some fresh air. It took a strong stomach, but I hung in there.
“When you saw her,” I asked, “was she alone?”
“Mos’ly. People come by say, hey Doc. But it start rainin’, so not many people were around.”
Flint held a handkerchief over his face. “Did you hear any-thing like a gunshot that afternoon, see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Might be,” Caesar smiled. I don’ hear nothin’. But someone else be lookin’ for the doc ‘bout then.”
“When?” I asked.
“Back then. That same day.”
“Who was it?”
“Some dude.”
“Some dude, huh?” Flint squeezed my hand. “When you saw this man, could it have been around four o’clock?”
” ‘Bout then. Before dinner time.”
“This was when you went to the wishing well the second time. After the doc was gone.”
“Like I say.”
I was excited. “The four o’clock date,” I said, to Flint.
“Could be.” Flint literally held me down. “Let’s hear him out.”
Flint turned from me, back to Caesar. “Did you know the man? Someone from the neighborhood, maybe?”
“Coulda’ been,” Caesar said. There was a crafty look on his grizzled face. “That was some time ago. I can’t exac’ly remember.”
“It was only yesterday,” I said.
Flint held out a five-dollar bill. “Maybe a dollar-and-a-dime will help your memory.”
“Dollar-an’-a-dime, ease my mind.” Two fingers came out of the blanket and hooked the money. “Like I say, I never seen him before.”
“Describe him,” Flint said.
Caesar thought for a moment. “Like the doc. You know, tall dude. Skinny nose.”
“Dark or fair?”
“It’s rainin’. He wear a hat. But he no brother.”
“How old do you think he was?”
He shrugged. He smiled. “Old enough to be out walkin’ by hisself.”
“Okay,” Flint sighed. “Anything else you can tell us?”
“Maybe it’s worth somethin’?” Caesar asked slyly.
Flint shook his head. I already gave you enough for a dollarand-a-dime and a forty ouncer to chase it. If you want to try for a few dummy bumps, keep at it.”
Caesar rubbed his head and grinned up at Flint. “I already got me enough dummy bumps, officer.”
“Then tell me what you know.”
I tell you this. This tall dude, he come up to me an’ he say, do I know the doe? I say she done left already. Nex’ thing, some lady come around, kinds’ hang there by the wishin’ well, lookin’ at him like maybe he want a date. The dude, he walk up to her, real cautious. He call her by some number. He jus’ say, ‘M.’ Like a question, you know, ‘M?’ Like that.”
“What did she do?”
“She say a little prayer. She say, ‘Dear Lord, it’s true.’ Then she take off runnin’.”
“Where did she run to?” Flint asked.
I don’ know. None of my business. I jus’ ke’p on walkin’.”
“What did she look like?”
“She have on a raincoat with a hat on it. Can’t see much.”
“You sure it was a woman?”
“Yeah.” Caesar ran his long, pink tongue over his lips. “She walk the walk. You know.”
I looked up at Flint. “Who do you think?”
He shook his head. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Flint stood up and brought me with him. He reached into his pocket, found some change, then dropped a quarter and his card onto the sidewalk in front of Caesar’s nest.
“You put that coin in your pocket with my number,” he said to Caesar, heavy menace in his voice. “That’s for the telephone. If you start remembering things, or if you hear something, you call me. I already gave you enough money to buy yourself some comfort for the night. If I find out—and you know I will—that you held out because you used that pissy little quarter to buy a pull on someone’s bottle, I’m going to come back and pull your chitlins out of your ears. Got it?”
Caesar cringed, but there was still a simpery smile on his face. “Yes, officer.”
Mike held tightly onto my arm. “Another thing. Better find another place to sleep tonight. If we found you, whoever shot the doc might find you, too.”
“But I didn’ see nothin’,” Caesar protested.
“The shooter doesn’t know that,” I said.
Caesar was on his feet, gathering his meager possessions about him.
“Come with us,” Flint said. “We’ll drop you off in Chinatown. Maybe I can persuade your friend at the Chevron to let you in.”
Away from the dumpster, the night was bitter cold. Trailing his blankets and his poncho, Caesar followed us back to Mike’s car on San Pedro. It took some persuading—he said the last time he was in a police car he was being booked on a fifty-one-fifty charge that got him seventy hours of detention—but he finally climbed into the back seat.
We left him at the Chevron station, amid a slobbery reunion with his dog, and drove up Hill Street to Emily’s apartment with all the car windows rolled down, in spite of the cold.
“Are you coming in?” I asked.
Flint looked up at the three-story building. “Why do you ask?”
“Let me think,” I said. I crossed my arms and slouched down into the seat. “How about, Oh, Mike, I’m so scared to go up there all alone. Will you come and turn on the lights for me?”
“Looks to me like the lights are already on.”
“If you’re going to be difficult, then how about, my friend dropped off some video news footage from the sixties. Maybe you can help me evaluate it.”
“Maybe I can.” He took the keys out of the ignition. “How long do you think it will take?”
I shrugged as I groped for the door handle. “What time is sunrise?”
Chapter Fifteen
Little arrangements of flowers had made a reappearance on the stoop. There were a few votive candles among them, and some burning incense. Mrs. Lim had scrubbed at the spray-painted message on the wall until the beige stucco had lost nearly all of its texture bumps. For all of her effort, she had only managed to fade the heavy black lines: DIE FAST, BITCH was still easily readable from the street.
“I called someone to take care of that,” Flint said. “Mrs. Lim shouldn’t have to deal with it.”
“Nice of you,” I said. I unlocked the front door and held it for him. “I was going to get some paint in the morning.”
“Good idea, if that filth is still there.” We were walking past Mrs. Lim’s door, so he whispered, “How are you getting along with Mrs. Lim?”
“Fine, I think. I never see her. When I’m out, she comes in and cleans up, leaves food for me. She’s a rare treasure. I’m sure she was indispensable to Emily. Maybe Em could solve health problems of global significance. But sometimes she had trouble crossing the street in heavy traffic all by herself.”
“I know.” He smiled. “Like the absent-minded professor. People were always watching out for her, making sure she didn’t get herself lost.”
The building was quiet. I found myself walking on tiptoes up the carpeted stairs
to the third-floor landing. Sneaking in past the landlady, trying not to wake the other tenants.
Mike held onto my arm.
I turned to him at the top of the stairs. “What’s a dummy bump?”
“A lump left on your head after a good thumping. Why?”
“So that was a threat, when you offered Caesar some dummy bumps.”
“It was not,” he said, quick, sharp denial. He could get his back up in a hurry. “He was trying to hold us up. I let him know we weren’t going for it. That’s all.”
“I see.” I liked having him on the defensive, for a change. In the downdraft, Flint still smelled of Latonya and I still felt the bile in the back of my throat. I wasn’t about to let up on him. “How many people in town have to comb their hair around dummy bumps you administered?”
“You trying to get me to cop to something?” He pulled at my jacket. “You have a wire in there?”
“No wires. Just me. It’s very interesting, this whole police culture of thumping and leaving scars. Tell me, what was the most satisfying beating you ever administered?”
He looked down at me through narrowed eyes. “I do not go around beating people.”
“Maybe not now that you’re a detective. What about when you were patrolling the mean streets?” I spoke softly to spare the sleeping tenants. “Go ahead, tell me about the best.”
“The best?” He smiled and wrapped his arm around me. “I can’t answer that. My career isn’t over yet.”
I snuggled against him, trying to ignore the cheap, secondhand cologne.
“These tapes we’re going to see,” he said, “what are you looking for?”
“Answers to some questions, like, who was the man with the skinny nose? Who was the woman who walked the walk?”
“Good questions,” he said.
I stopped under the chandelier at the head of the stairs to sort Emily’s door key from the collection on her ring. Flint was looking around, as he always does, ever observant, waiting for me.
Mrs. Lim’s building is long, with narrow frontage on the street. Emily’s apartment was at the far end of the hall, the only flat that overlooked the street. From the stairs, the area around her door seemed very dark and a long way down. Some of the ceiling lights were out.
At nearly the same moment that I realized there was too much light escaping past Emily’s doorjamb, I heard the crunch of glass underfoot. The thin, frosted glass of smashed lightbulbs.
Flint took out his automatic and pressed me against the wall with his free arm the way my mother, in the car, used to shoot out her arm whenever she had to brake real fast.
We slithered along toward Emily’s apartment with our backs brushing against the bamboo-print wallpaper. I could see that Emily’s door hung ajar. The building is old and hardly high-security. I kept thinking about the hate in the spray-painted scrawl on the wall outside, and how close below us that was. And how close we were to the alley on Gin Ling Way where Emily had been shot.
When we were a few feet from the door, Flint put his finger to his lips and motioned for me to stay put. I didn’t argue he had the gun.
Standing like statues in the hall, listening for noises inside the apartment, I imagined a wild variety of possibilities for what had happened, for what still might be happening in there. It was a full range, from Mrs. Lim wiping out the shower to the revivified Symbionese Liberation Army lying in wait with cocked grenade launchers. Quickly, I eliminated the most unlikely scenario; Mrs. Lim would never leave the door open.
I could only see the back of Flint’s gray head as he listened. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he motioned again for me to stay back. He gave the silence a full minute before he booted the door. The door flew inward, banged against a table or some-thing. Then there was silence again.
Motioning for me to wait, Flint slipped inside behind his automatic. No grenades burst through the gap, but the scene I imagined became more involved and more gruesome with each quiet second that passed. I waited, truly breathless, ready to flee down the stairs as soon as Flint cued me. Or to call for reinforcements if he didn’t come out soon. I was worried about him alone in there. I could have followed him. I didn’t want to get in his way.
All was stillness from Em’s apartment for several minutes. I had just decided to give him until the count of ten before I banged on the neighbor’s door to call for help, when I heard Mike’s footsteps on the hardwood floor, walking, not running. And only one set of steps. I began to relax.
When Flint came back out, he had his gun holstered. The expression on his face was befuddlement.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Did you say Mrs. Lim tidied up today?”
“Yes.”
“Better come in and have a look.
Staying close, I followed him inside. The hinges on the front door had been sprung, so it wouldn’t shut all the way.
Most of the mayhem had occurred in Emily’s office, though mayhem is an exaggeration. This burglar had been fairly tidy. And quite directed in his search.
Every one of Em’s file drawers hung open. The floor around the cabinets was piled with hastily made stacks of manila folders. Some of the files looked as if someone had fanned through them. A few had spilled across the rug.
Em’s desk had been similarly, systematically, rifled. Her computer, Grandmother Duchamps’s heirloom inkwell, and Em’s pretty-good wristwatch were all on the desk and undisturbed.
“Wonder if he found what he was looking for,” Flint said.
“Is it all right to go in?” I asked.
“No. Let the fingerprint people do their thing first.”
“You’re going to report this?”
“I already have.” He was looking around. “What was he after?”
“I don’t know.” I went on to the sitting room door and peered in. The room was so spare, so barren of ornamentation, that there was nothing for a burglar to take. But he had been there. The sofa cushions were just a little bit askew. The lamp in the corner cast its shadow at a slightly different angle than before.
At my feet was the box of videotapes that Garth had left. I hadn’t had a chance to go through them. They might have been rearranged. Some might have been missing. I couldn’t tell.
The bathroom was as I had left it—makeup on the sink, hairdryer on the back of the toilet, damp towels on the single rack.
The contents of the medicine cabinet were at least tidy. I had never looked inside; I had no idea what should have been there. Flint had been following me while I made this circuit. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Too weird,” I said.
“How so?”
“I don’t know whether he found what he was looking for in the files or in the desk. But I can only see one thing that’s missing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s too strange,” I said.
“So, tell me what it is.”
“A framed photograph of my brother, Marc.”
Chapter Sixteen
“‘Up against the wall, motherfucker?’”
Flint put down his beer and paused Emily’s VCR. “They let those long-hair peckerwoods say ‘motherfucker’ on the six o’clock news? Where was I? I don’t remember language like that.”
“Such a prude you are,” I tsk’ed. “This is just raw, unedited footage. All the ‘motherfuckers’ and tit shots get purged before any of this hits the air.”
“I know that,” he said. “Just checking to see if you’re awake.”
“I’m awake. Barely. These tapes are so boring.”
“Ditto,” he said. “Anything for dessert?”
“Tofu.”
“I pass.
The Corona beer we had picked up at Chico’s all-night market on Broadway was warm. I gathered up the greasy wrappers of takeout tacos that littered the couch between us and wadded them into a bag I set on the floor next to the last two beers in the sixpack. My knees were stiff when I got up to put another tape from Garth’s bo
x into the VCR.
I needed to move around a little to stay awake. We had made it to the end of the first two tapes without finding enlightenment. The raw footage was damn tedious to watch. Most of it was just people milling around or mugging for the cameras, peace demonstration organizers looking for people to organize. There was an incredible amount of T and A. Young, nubile women had a magnetic attraction either for the zoom function of the camera lens or for the cameramen. I used the fast-forward button a lot. If I skipped past any young female material that looked especially choice, Flint rewound the tape and replayed it, sometimes a couple of times. He was a tease.
“What is this we’re watching now?” Flint asked.
I picked up the tape cover and read to him from the label, “Demonstration against war-related research on campus, University of California, Berkeley, November 19, 1969.”
“How long is this one?”
“Two hours, fourteen minutes, twenty-eight seconds.”
“Hmm.” He unsnapped his belt holster, took it off, and tucked his automatic under the sofa. After some stretching, he settled down into the sofa cushions and put his feet up on Em’s coffee table. His socks smeared a few of the black graphite smudges the fingerprint man had left on every surface in the apartment. The place was a mess and I thought about poor Mrs. Lim tackling it alone. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, and so beer-mellow, I would have gone in search of a rag and some cleanser.
Instead, I reached for the VCR remote and fast-forwarded the tape until something seemed to be happening.
The demonstration was in Berkeley, on a lovely, clear fall day. The camera was set up at the end of Telegraph Avenue near the Setter Gate. This was my hometown. I enjoyed watching people walk by, seeing again the familiar street scene just off-campus. It was something like watching home movies.
On the screen, a couple of cars pulled up, followed by a flat-bed truck festooned with banners, HELL NO, WE WON’T GO, and variations on that theme. The truck parked in front of the Bear’s Lair, a popular student hangout. The truck was positioned so that its bed was a stage facing down Telegraph. Two men in bright tie-dyed shirts and bellbottom jeans hooked up a P.A. system. I recognized one of them—young, thin, red-haired Rod Peebles.
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