by Peter Plate
“What’s Louis saying?”
“That you’re dead. Now what are we going to do?”
“About what?”
“Jesus, I have to tell everyone he talked to that you’re alive. Do you realize what a hassle that’s going to be?”
From the way we talked, you’d have thought we were living in a shadow land between this life and the afterworld. Eichmann also said Louis wanted to meet with us in the Linda Street park. He had important news for us. The thing of it was, Louis was getting on my nerves saying I was dead, and I didn’t care if he had news or not. It was unsettling, hearing about your own death when it was the farthest thing from your mind. Loretta overheard our debate and asked, “What did he say?”
“The landlord told Louis Doojie was dead. Can you believe that? The landlord then said he wants rent money from us or he’s going to get the police.”
Loretta’s face went waxy. “He wants money because you’re living in this garage? Are you going to talk to him about it?”
“No, I’m not. We are in a nonnegotiable state of affairs here with him. Every day I’m in his garage, the more it becomes mine,” Eichmann said. Then he burped and added, turning to me, “We’ve got a meeting scheduled with Louis for this afternoon.”
I didn’t want to hear that. “What for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know … what’s the matter?”
“You’re so secretive, like a spy.”
“Hey, there ain’t no spies in this garage. Do you know what we’re dealing with here? With the cops and everything?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“I bet you don’t. Hey, fuck it, do what you want.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You want me to say it again?”
Loretta stood there with her hands on her hips, her mouth caving in from the effort of holding back her confusion; her moony face was closed off with disappointment. Eichmann turned on me so fast, she was ashamed of him. She said to him, “What’s with you?”
He gazed at her with a blank look as clear as glass. “Nothing. What are you asking me for?”
“It’s like you want to start a fight with Doojie.”
“Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to start a fight with him or whoever?”
“Because you’re mad.”
“Mad at who? Who am I mad at?”
“Maybe Louis. Or Doojie. Maybe the police.”
“What for? I got no complaints about Louis. And the cops? Well, I don’t want to talk about them. And Doojie can just fuck off, for all I care.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
Whenever Eichmann was experiencing emotional pressure, his conversational skills suicided in his throat. Loretta knew Eichmann would’ve appreciated it if she could have said something supportive to him, like “I’m sorry, baby.” But she didn’t and wouldn’t. Not that hard-headed girl. Eichmann leered at me, daring me to voice an opinion that would piss him off. I saw an unreachable vacancy sluice through his liver-colored eyes. I knew he wanted to reach out and say, “Hey, let’s be nice,” but he couldn’t bend. He was inflexible, like a piece of rubber left out in the sun. I felt sorry for him and Loretta. Eichmann was in a jungle with her. If they got lost, nobody would ever find them.
I left the two lovebirds in the carport and went over to the park. On my walk, I saw two worlds. The psychological and social differences between Mission and Valencia were like night and day. You had an onslaught of cafés and boutiques on Valencia. Most of the people spoke English and talked about restaurant menus, the cheapest meal, and the coolest waiter. Mission Street after dark was populated by itinerant mariachi musicians who slept on flattened cardboard refrigerator boxes in storefront doorways.
I got to the Linda Street park at noon, nearly tripping over two homeless men blocking the entrance with their shopping carts. Louis was sitting by himself on a bench watching the tennis players on the courts. He was drinking a Miller’s Light, and judging from the haggard look on his face, he’d been to the casinos again. Louis enjoyed skiing holidays in Tahoe and gambling in Reno. Dull but wholesome entertainment for a man his age. He hailed me, “Hey, Doojie, what’s up?”
“Not much. So what’s with you?”
“I’m kicking it, taking in the scenery. How did your week go?”
“Not too bad. I got stabbed.”
Louis peered myopically at the messy bandage on my leg. “So I see. I ain’t even going to ask how you did that.”
“What’s the news you have?”
“It’s about that shooting you saw.”
I rearranged my face by setting my jaw in a hard line that made my teeth ache. “Louis, I didn’t see anything.”
“Yeah … right. And Doojie?”
“What?”
“Get some common sense in your head and see that Eichmann is a liability to you.”
I let that sink in. A liability. This implied several meanings. One, Eichmann had nothing to offer me, which wasn’t surprising. He’d given me shelter when I needed it, and we were working together, but anything he could do, I could do better. In the long run, I’d make it without him. Two, I was in too deep with Eichmann to get out. I needed help. Just to recognize I needed help was scary enough. “Is this your opinion, Louis?”
“Off the record?”
“Okay.”
“You stay with him, you’re going to find yourself doing time. You, not Eichmann. Mark my words. I ain’t no prophet, but I can see the writing on the wall.”
“You can?”
Louis finished off the bottle and tossed it to the ground, then got another beer from his vest pocket. He examined the bottle’s label with the scrutiny of an expert, then cleared his throat of phlegm. Louis didn’t look at me, which was his way of making a point.
“Of course, I can,” he commented. “I know the man.”
“You think Eichmann’s out of control?”
“Nah, he’s muddled … that’s worse.”
Bobo’s appearance canceled any further discussion between Louis and me. We’d have to save the gory details for later. The Mexican was lugging a twelve-pack of Coors, and walking in his shadow were two girls, old friends of Louis’s from west Los Angeles, who happened to arrive at the same time. Bobo put the beer on a rough-hewn picnic table and motioned for everybody to help themselves.
A minute later, Eichmann showed up with a fake leather jacket slung over his arm and a cigarette in his mouth. He wasn’t showing any of his earlier tension; he never did. Eichmann didn’t bruise easy. Some people, when they got their feelings ruffled, they wore the pain like a brown spot on a banana, but not Eichmann.
Louis introduced us to the women without any fanfare or pomp. “Boys, this is Heather and Ruby. They’re over here from Capp Street.”
Having heard that, I took another, longer, protracted look at the pair. Ruby was a thirty-year-old woman with tracks all over her arms. She was wearing a sleeveless gingham jersey dress that stopped a good foot above her knees, showing me every blood vessel, every vein, and every mole. Heather was a teenage girl in satin capris and suede clogs with piebald hair in a pixie cut. “The reason they’re here,” Louis said, “is because they know something.”
Eichmann frowned. The nervous tic on his mouth was out of control, causing his lips to curl up at random, revealing his crooked yellow teeth. “How’s that?”
Louis eyed him with the disinterest of a man looking at a cockroach. He said, “Hold your horses. These ladies know the police are searching for witnesses to the Folsom Street shooting.”
“That’s for real.” Ruby grinned. She shook her dark hennaed hair, drawing attention to a feathered and layered 1970s Judas Priest hairdo that offset the snowy whiteness of her complexion. “The narcs are looking for a witness.”
“How do you know?” I asked her.
She squinted at me with agate-colored eyes that were washed out, duller than the pebbles at the bottom of a riverbed. “People are talking.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Dee Dee and a couple of others. Nobody you’d know.”
“C’mon, who?”
“You want me to give you names for free? Is that it? You ain’t even going to pay me?”
I laughed at that one. Gone were the days when someone would tell you a name for nothing. Gone were the nights when you could find someone to love for free. “No, I’m not going to pay you.”
Bobo read the glum expression on Ruby’s sallow face and wagged his woolly head. “Be quiet, Doojie, and let them say their piece, okay?”
Louis pinched Heather’s arm. “Chica, you got something to say?” The girl blushed under her makeup, highlighting the Revlon mascara tamped an inch deep around her eyes. “Speak up, doll,” he wheedled, “and tell us what you know.”
Heather said in a Xanax-slurred whisper, semi-inaudible, froggy-throated, “Me and Ruby know this narc. His name is Flaherty, and once in a while we party, you know. He gets wasted and he starts to talk. He says all kinds of shit. Most of it I don’t listen to. Just the other night, he was telling me he wanted the guy who saw the shooting.”
So this was what Louis wanted to share with us. Flaherty was the reason we were together. I wanted to take a photograph of our rendezvous. Louis, Eichmann, Bobo, me, and the two hookers kibitzing in the park. We could have cotton-candy tufts of fog in the background. Maybe a box-shaped kite in the sky above the treeline.
The picture would be black and white, a disposable composition, a monochromatic snapshot you could throw away, just like us.
“Okay,” Louis said. “Now you boys have something you can work with.”
“What’s that?” Bobo asked, genuinely stumped.
“These women know the narc who wants Doojie. Don’t you get the significance of that?”
What was there to understand? You didn’t need a college degree in science to add up what it meant—Flaherty would search the Mission to neutralize me. The news refertilized Eichmann’s tension and sparked it. I saw a mad red glare in his slitted eyes. His voice was sodden with indignation as he spewed, “This is what we needed. What could be better for business than having a cop on our backs? Thanks, Louis. And Doojie? Thanks a lot for making it happen.”
8
The Mission’s past is dotted with the presence of famous outlaws. Tom Mooney, the mold-maker union organizer, used to agitate in the neighborhood back when it was Irish during the years before World War I. His partner was Warren Billings, a union gunman operating from a Mission Street boardinghouse. In 1916 they went to prison for allegedly blowing up a building on Market Street during a war-preparedness parade. The anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman lived in a gray apartment building on Dolores Street the same year Billings and Mooney went to jail. Even the nineteenth-century guerrilla leader Joaquin Murrieta passed through the district on his way to the gold-mining camps in the Sierra foothills.
I went to the shoemaker on Seventeenth Street to have the heels on my shoes repaired. The owner’s son was there, drunk as usual. He was a slight, light-skinned Salvadoreno man with bad tattoos etched on his arms, a huero. While I waited in a chair for the cobbler to finish the job, junior tried to step on my foot. I pushed him away from me, and he came back at me with a monkey wrench. His dad shoved him in the chest and herded him into the back room, cursing him in Spanish, calling him a puta, a whore. He told me, “My son is sick in the head. He needs an operation.”
Last year’s burglary charges against Bobo were finally dismissed during a pretrial hearing in Municipal Court. He was overjoyed. Now he could get his clothes back from the police, who’d confiscated them as evidence.
Bobo said to me, “You mind going down to the station and taking care of that for me, Doojie?”
I thought he was being self-centered, asking me for that kind of favor. It was an invitation into a lion’s den. But I didn’t want to tell him no, so I replied, “Sure, no problem.”
It was a quarter past eight in the morning and the temperature in the Mission was seventy degrees. Heavy fog was nestling on the summit of Ashbury Heights, indicating the rest of the city was bathing in its famous summer cold. The Mission was the only neighborhood in San Francisco that stayed warm year round.
The five-year-old police station was an antiseptic, soulless sandstone bunker, so new, so pristine, it didn’t have a personality. No quirks, no faulty plumbing, no ghosts, nada. A dozen Wanted posters of murderers, bank robbers, and wife beaters were hanging from an oversized bulletin board in the empty foyer. The pictures were out of focus and poorly printed in the police photo labs—typical institutional portraiture.
I wandered down a spic-and-span corridor toward the property room where Bobo’s stuff was, getting the distinct impression I was being followed. Normally when someone was on my tail, I didn’t acknowledge it. I looked straight ahead and exercised precise tunnel vision, feigning calculated indifference. But when the footsteps behind me grew louder, I turned around to see who it was. I said to myself, Oh shit—Flaherty blocked my path. He was as short as me, but three times as wide. He spat, “Where are you going?”
Now I knew why Bobo sent me to the station, and I also knew any attempt to outwit Flaherty would fail, so I said nothing. Silence made the situation unravel faster than a ball of yarn. Flaherty growled through his clenched teeth, “Playing coy, huh? You’re coming with me, you geek.”
He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and kicked open the door to the nearest room, a windowless unpainted cell no bigger than a janitor’s closet. Another man was sitting on a stool in a corner, but I only saw the back of his head. Flaherty pushed me down onto a chair and slapped a pair of stainless steel handcuffs on my wrists, securing them so tightly the circulation was cut off and my hands went to sleep.
Flaherty pulled out a shiny brass cartridge from the Sam Browne garrison belt slung around his flabby hips and held it up for me to see. The bullet was a nine-millimeter hollow point, the kind that tore your face off on impact.
“You like it?” he asked me. “I think it likes you.” Then he crammed the shell up my nose, splitting the septum and cutting my upper lip. Instantly, the only clean T-shirt I had in the world was pinked with mucus and blood.
Having made his point, Flaherty threw the bullet on the cold tile floor and walked over to the stool where the other man sat quietly, resting his elbows on his knees. The narc bent over and whopped the fellow on the ear with a fist, sinking his fingers into the man’s familiar kinky hair. Flaherty roared, “Who’s that little white boy there, ha? Tell me!”
Louis didn’t flinch when he saw me, but I could tell by the glaze in his frightened brown eyes it was taking every ounce of his willpower to remain impassive. He was fairly well dressed in corduroy flares, a yellow shirt, and alligator-skin cowboy boots; a ten-gallon Stetson was on the floor beside him. I closed my eyes and rued the day I was born. Poor Louis. How did Flaherty ever get hold of him?
Louis hunched over the stool and said in a controlled, tinny voice, “I don’t know that fuckin’ punk white boy. Now, will you please let me go back to where you found me and let me make a report at the front desk?” he asked, blinking rapidly. “Someone stole my damn car. I got me a ’64 Chevy Malibu and I was reporting it. I still need to do that, too. But you told me I’d better come with you or I was under arrest. You didn’t even let me finish making out a report about my car. You didn’t—”
Flaherty sank his fingers into Louis’s collarbone, kneading his neck muscles with extreme vigor. “Please be polite with me. I want to ask you a few questions. Is that all right with you?”
“No, it ain’t.”
“What was that?”
Louis winced when Flaherty squeezed his neck, cutting off the oxygen going to his brain. His eyes turned bloody as he gasped, “It ain’t right. I want to see my mother-fucking lawyer.”
“I can’t let you do that. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Appropriate? What are you keeping me for?” Louis cried. “I ain’t broken the law. What’re you charging me with? I ain’t done nothing. I don’t know why I’m here. Why won’t you let me call my lawyer? I got his card in my pocket.”
“You swear you don’t know what I want from you?”
“How can I? I don’t read minds. I ain’t no magician.”
Flaherty said in a singsong tone as if he was reciting his catechism in church, “You’re not a magician? Then you must be a liar.” Without any warning, he walloped Louis on the mouth with his open hand, swinging around to light a cigarette with the other hand, doing the two things in a single fluid move. I stared at Louis as he fought to conceal his emotions. He was doing a good job of keeping his sangfroid.
“Now that we understand each other, this is what I want from you,” Flaherty said evenly. “I’ve heard through confidential sources you know some dealers I’m looking for.”
“I don’t know anybody,” Louis blurted, letting the words out in a gust of halitosis.
Flaherty sneered, “The hell you don’t.”
Louis was emanating dread in a mist that circled around his half-bald pate.
Flaherty, heavy-lidded, puffed on his cigarette. He didn’t know how to get Louis to talk; he didn’t know how to blend the ingredients together into the right chemistry.
All Louis had to do was stonewall the narc. Flaherty might get something out of him, but it wasn’t going to be the whole nine yards. If Louis kept his lips sealed, there was hope for me yet.
To test my theory, Flaherty leaned over and jammed his cigarette into Louis’s hair, grinding the fag into his scalp. Louis leaped up from his seat, but Flaherty sprang on him, flinging him back onto the stool like he was a rag doll. The awe on Louis’s face was that of a man having an encounter with his own death—he didn’t like it in the least. Flaherty’s sick eyes were two dirty holes filled with resentment, toward himself and everybody else.