by D. F. Bailey
When he entered the lobby to the Vincent Hotel Finch took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the shadows that extended from the reception desk down the narrow corridors. Behind the wire grill that separated the front desk from the residents, a twelve-inch black-and-white TV silently displayed Anderson Cooper at the helm of a CNN panel discussing Donald Trump’s wild race for the Republican presidential nomination. It was, as the Romans used to say, a circus maximus.
“Anybody home?” Finch rapped his knuckles on the lip of the counter that protruded under the grill.
“Wha’da ya need?” a voice called from the underside of the counter. The head of a man in his mid-forties emerged from below. His hair lay in a damp fold-over across the top of his head. A bead of sweat stood above his brow.
“You the manager?”
“I dunno. You the audio repair guy for the TV?” He stood and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. In his fingers he held a multitool.
“Not my specialty,” Will conceded and wondered how to approach the problem at hand. Straight on. “Listen, I’m a reporter from the eXpress. Yesterday, one of your residents died in the lane down the block.” He pointed to Dodge Place. “The SFPD told me he lived here. Room 203. They said I could check his room.”
The manager slid a pair of wire-framed glasses over his nose and ears and studied Finch a moment.
“Just to finish off the personal angle to the story,” Finch added.
“You mean Lenny Earl?”
“Lenny?”
“Yeah. The Brit guy with the lame leg.”
Finch nodded. “That’s him.”
“You want into his room?”
“Yeah. He’s not coming back.”
He waited as the manager studied him again. He paused as if he were trying to snap a puzzle piece into place, shifting his weight from one leg to the other as he considered the options.
“You’re the reporter, aren’t you.” He tipped his head to the silent TV screen.
“Who’s that?”
“On CNN.” He nodded to the TV. “The reporter who covered that poor guy eaten by a bear in Oregon last year. And then the one who shot the sheriff.”
“That’s me.” He smiled. Rarely did anyone link him to his reporting. “Will Finch.”
“You were over in Baghdad, huh? In Abu Ghraib.”
“Yeah.” His sense of surprise now bordered on disbelief. “You seem to have pretty reliable sources.”
The manager smiled as if the depth of his resources would amaze anyone who cared to probe his inner world. He set the multitool on the counter, opened the security gate behind the desk and approached Finch with an open hand.
“Frank McGill,” he said and quickly added, “but everyone calls me Gilly. Yeah, I was with the 377th Military Police Company back in oh-five. That’s when I caught this. Only ten days in. Who’d’ve guessed?”
As they shook hands Will realized that his new fan had an amputated left arm. The sleeve, knotted below the elbow, drooped like a torn flag where it fell to a spot above his belt. A wounded vet from the three-seven-seven. The numbers resonated like the whispers of a ghost. Finch decided to ignore the possibility that Gilly might have crossed his path back in Abu Ghraib. Better to disavow anything that he’d done in Iraq.
Will glanced at the staircase that rose to the second floor. From somewhere above he could hear a heavy coughing followed by a low moan.
“So is 203 upstairs?”
“Yeah.”
“You have a key?”
Gilly needed to consider this. “I’m not supposed to—”
“I just want to look. Not touch.”
Gilly narrowed his eyes as he pondered the proposition. Then he stepped back through the gate, leaned over the counter and drew a key from a hidden drawer. He locked the gate to his cage, and when he saw Will hesitate, he wagged his good arm in the air, mumbled “all right, come on,” and led the way up the dilapidated staircase.
When they entered 203 Finch pulled on his latex gloves. At first he was struck by the spare, tidy space that Squire had built around his broken life. A three-drawer dresser stood beside a small closet. Two straight-back metal chairs were tucked beside an arborite table stationed next to the window overlooking Turk Street. Along the wall a narrow cot had been made up with a sheet and blanket tucked under a flat, stained pillow. A low coffee table abutted the end of the bed, a makeshift extension to accommodate Squire’s seven-foot frame.
“He was a tall one,” Gilly said and let out a sigh.
“Yeah.” Finch walked to the window and pulled aside the sheer curtain. The double-sash frame was locked. He could see his car parked up the road. A homeless couple stirred under their blankets in the doorway across the street.
He walked to the dresser and studied the few knick-knacks adorning the top shelf. A glass jar full of polished pebbles. A collection of teacups, a sugar bowl and creamer. A lace doily in a glass frame. A flashlight standing upright on the lens. And leaning against the flashlight, a three-inch square polaroid photograph of Squire and a friend sitting together on a park bench. The background looked familiar, but Will couldn’t quite place the area.
“Looks like he lived a simple life,” he said.
“Yeah. Not a lot of friends, you know?”
“I bet.” Once again Will felt the remorse he associated with the city’s homeless men and women. While he was insulated from their destitution, he suspected he was never more than two or three steps from the street himself. An irrational dread he could never quite shake. He turned his attention back to the room.
“No bathroom?”
“End of the hall.” Gilly pointed his stump toward the corridor. “Ten rooms share one shower, sink and toilet.”
“Ten?” Finch suddenly became aware of the murmurs in the surrounding rooms. The coughs, the whispers. A door opened and closed, followed by the sound of bare feet plodding along the hallway. Then, above the low undertone of despair sounded a loud shriek that collapsed into a drawn-out whimper.
Finch tried to ignore it and stepped over to the closet. Next to the door a row of five coat pegs had been screwed to the wall. A pair of pants hung from one hook, shirts and a jacket from two others. Two of the pegs held identical, but well-worn chauffeur caps.
“Hmmph.” Gilly let out a gust of air. “He always wore one of those caps. Never thought he kept an actual collection of the things.”
Finch opened the closet door. A pungent odor of urine wafted into the room.
“Jeez, what is that?” Gilly leaned over Finch’s arm to peer into the darkness.
Finch clicked the switch beside the door and the closet was flooded with light from an overhead bulb. On the floor stood a two-foot high wire cage filled with shredded newspaper and garbage. The pen shook with a brief, near-invisible shudder.
“What the hell was that?” Gilly took a step backwards.
After he recovered his bearings, Finch leaned in and kicked the cage with his toe. A massive rat surfaced from the shredded paper and then burrowed back to the bottom.
“Sorry, Gilly, but you’re going to have to call Animal Control to get rid of this.” Finch turned his head away. As he did he heard more people plodding up the stairs and along the hallway toward them. Two, three people? He couldn’t be sure.
“Animal Control? What for?”
But before Finch could explain Toby Squire’s obsession with rats, Detectives DeRosa and Hausmann appeared at the door. A look of surprise crossed her face and then broke into a broad frown.
“All right Finch, time to leave.” She bunched her fists on the tops of her generous hips. “I thought I told you to give us a day.”
“You did,” he said and stepped next to the dresser. “That was yesterday. This is today. That’s a day, right?”
He smiled but a look of distaste swept over her face.
“Good God, what is that smell?” she said.
“Be my guest.” Finch swept his hand toward the door. DeRose and Hausmann stepped pas
t him toward the closet with Gilly at their heels. During the diversion Finch plucked the polaroid picture from the top of the dresser and slipped it into his pocket.
“What are they?” Hausmann asked.
“Rats.” Finch smiled again. The victory of beating DeRosa to the scene provided a boost, especially now that he had the picture of Squire’s friend in his pocket.
“All right.” DeRosa let out a bleak gasp of exasperation. “You, clear out.” She waved a hand at Finch. “You the building supe?” She eyed Gilly as if she were about to clamp her cuffs on his wrists.
He nodded.
“Okay, you I talk to. Finch, like I said, outta here.”
“All right.” Finch couldn’t suppress his cheery glow. “I look forward to hearing the SFPD report on this.”
He pulled the latex gloves from his hands, walked to the door and down the staircase to the street. The look on DeRosa’s and Hausmann’s faces told him that he’d scored a point. Maybe two. He could feel the rush in his blood. The game was on.
※ — FIVE — ※
KALI ROOD STOOD at the railing of the penthouse balcony on top of the Fairmont Hotel and gazed in the direction of Stanford University at the south end of San Francisco Bay. As she studied the gray band of fog that stood above the water and cloaked the distant hills, she considered what had happened here—the birthplace of all that she had become.
It began when Reverend Jim Jones moved the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel from Indiana to California’s Redwood Valley in 1964. By the the late 1960s the Peoples Temple had expanded to the Bay Area where it flourished. His social programs caught the eye of local politicians and for a few years everyone wanted to be seen with the charismatic visionary. San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone, California’s Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, even The Chronicle’s city editor served as a cheerleader. Then things slowly began to drift. The cheering became a chorus of boos, the accolades became threats. In the mid-1970s Jones moved the Temple to the jungle wilderness in Guyana where he tried to relaunch his revolutionary church. Then came the drugs. The mass slaughter. And the Reverend’s suicide by a gunshot to his head.
In some ways it was not an unusual story. The Bay Area specialized in failed cults. The most recent being Dr. Martin Fast and his clan of true believers. While she’d never had a personal relationship with Fast, Kali knew that he’d lived in Palo Alto and made a life for himself at Stanford. His career flourished and over the past ten years he’d taken on the mantle of a modern-day hero. A dragon-slayer of some kind—who knew how he imagined himself?—a modern Saint George who could kill the curse of capitalism and restore the world to an atheist Eden. Well, he was gone now, and with him all his illusions of righteousness had vanished.
“The media say that he died quite absurdly,” she said in a near whisper.
“Yes, ma’am.” Jacob Bell stood behind her, his hands clasped behind his back. “The police claim he was shot by someone who escaped custody over a year ago.”
Kali considered this. “Perhaps it was unwise for Dr. Fast to be wandering along Market Street. Even in broad daylight.”
“Unwise?” he scoffed. “To say the least.”
Moreover Fast was a fool, Kali thought. A Nobel-prize winning fool, which is probably the worst kind of all. A man cut from the same cloth as Edward Teller, one of the scientific Merlins behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And for the next twenty-four thousand years, the children of God will endure the ticking half-life of plutonium decay until the mutation into iron atoms is complete. Was this wisdom or folly? She knew the answer, of course. Knew it by chapter and verse. Revelation 8:11. The third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.
The pain came back into her stomach and then rolled through her chest. She shuddered and drew a deep breath. Sometimes that worked, just breathing through it. She blinked when she felt the leaden discomfort lighten and fade away. If it came back, she’d take another pill. Thank God for the small relief they gave.
When a breeze drifted past her head she held the corner of her hat in one hand. Funny how it is out here, she thought. San Francisco was physically beautiful but she could never embrace the local obsession with lifestyle and street culture. It was a form of collective narcissism she decided, and so much self-love could only lead to a state of moral decay. Indeed, it already had. That was the message she needed to deliver to Will Finch if she was going to make him understand the predicament they all faced.
“Jacob, is everything set for my meeting with the reporter?”
“Yes, ma’am.
“And you’re sure it’s Will Finch?”
“It is.”
“Good.” She made a final assessment of the view. “Call and tell him I’m running ten minutes late. Then arrange to have a taxi meet me outside the lobby.”
※
The B Restaurant—a decent enough eatery despite its second-class name—had an outdoor patio nestled above the Yerba Buena Gardens just a few blocks away from the eXpress office. Dixie had texted Will that Kali Rood would meet him on the patio at two-thirty. A second message said that she’d be ten minutes late. By three o’clock he’d finished his first espresso and began to doubt that she’d appear at all.
Then he saw her emerge from the far side of the deck and heard her heels clicking on the paving stones as she marched toward him. She wore a dark, wide-brimmed hat and an ivory chiffon dress that cascaded from her shoulders to her knees. A decorative belt matched her shoes and hat. An inch-long gold cross hung from a chain that dipped below her neck. The cross had a loop at the top and Finch recognized it as an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. At close range he realized that she was quite beautiful, almost stunning. Her look conveyed a sort of 1950s New York City chic. As she strode toward him she raised her right hand. An image of Audrey Hepburn flashed before his eyes.
“Will Finch? Sorry I’m late.” She extended her fingertips for him to touch and studied the surrounding tables. “This is my assistant, Jacob Bell.”
The long, lean subordinate tipped his head to Finch and discretely stood aside without a word. Something about his fawning manner caught Finch’s attention. He presented an obsequious sneer that suggested a sort of superiority. Odd.
“Let’s sit over there. Do you mind? The further away, the more privacy we’ll have. Besides, I like to stay out of the sun.”
She let out a laugh and led the way to the furthest table and sat in the far chair where she could observe everyone coming and going.
“This okay?” she asked brightly. She sat without waiting for his reply.
“Fine.” Will took the chair beside her and opened his bag and took out a notepad and pen. He always wrote down key phrases and usable quotes during interviews, but like everyone else in the business he recorded all interviews on his phone. Whenever threats of libel came his way, it helped to have a verbatim transcript on record.
A waiter came to the table and they ordered Americanos.
“You mind if I record our talk?” he asked and launched the recording app before she could answer.
“Of course.”
“Then we’re underway.” He planted a smile on his lips and studied her a moment. Some people, especially those with oversized egos, would jump into an interview without prompting. He waited.
“Your secretary said you wanted my perspective on Martin Fast’s murder.”
He nodded.
“It goes without saying that we’re all shocked, of course.”
“We?”
“The foundation. I talked to my executive committee last night in New York.” She adjusted her hat to block the sunlight from her neck. “As you know, Dr. Fast and I hold—held—contrary views on a lot of issues. To be honest, I suspect you support his perspective, too.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I’ve read some of your articles. Green science, climate change. Whatever you like to call it. And that profile you
wrote on Martin Fast last week. Basically endorsing his politics. He’s a geo-engineer who encouraged dumping over one hundred tons of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean in Canada. Supposedly to fertilize the dying sea-bed. Do you support that sort of meddling with nature?”
“I wouldn’t say I support him,” he offered. “I’m here to provide readers with a balanced view. I featured Dr. Fast last week. Now it’s your turn.”
The waiter returned with their coffees. When he stepped away, Kali added cream and sugar and stirred them into her cup. The procedure bore all the signs of a meticulous ritual. He wondered if she took such elaborate care with every beverage that she drank.
“Well, these days balance is hard to find,” she continued as if there’d been no interruption. “But tell me something. You used to be a crime reporter. Why the new focus on climate change?”
Occasionally an interview turned inside-out and the subject would start to interrogate him. He usually allowed a few questions, and in this case he sensed they were necessary to ensure Kali Rood would open up. He wanted her to reveal more than she’d ever disclosed before. To let readers know exactly where she was leading her thousands of followers.
He took a second sip from his cup. “You want the truth?”
“Mr. Finch,” she said with a smile, “one thing you can report about me is that I always want the truth.”
“Burn out.” He shrugged. “I’d spent months reporting the Whitelaw story. Then I took a six-month leave from the eXpress to write a book about it.”
“Who Shot The Sheriff?”
“Yes.” He glanced away a moment. She’d done her homework. Or one of her handlers had. “After that I knew I needed a change. Despite the urgency, reporting climate change has faded from the media agenda. I decided to pitch it to my editor. And here we are.” He waved a hand between them to suggest a bond of sorts.
“What if it’s all a crock?”
“What is?”