Chapter Three
I used to look the part when I worked down in L.A. I had a clean-shaven upper lip, razor cut hair, and wouldn’t be caught at work without a suit of at least two pieces along with freshly shined shoes. I also exuded confidence just short of arrogance. That was part of the L.A. law enforcement culture back then. People on the street could read it a mile away, and I was mistaken for a cop more than once. But when I got out of my car in the old section of Portland the next morning, I didn’t turn any heads. I had on a pair of jeans, scuffed deck shoes, and a faded polo shirt under a well-worn leather jacket. My hair was longer now, sprinkled with gray, and the moustache that sprouted after I moved north was full and ran to the shaggy side between trims. Somewhere along the way, I’d definitely lost that L.A. swagger.
As Nando promised, the medical center was on Davis, just down from the Chinese Garden, in a converted two-story office building. The sign above the front entrance read Old Town Urgent Care. Everyone Welcome. A young man with a cherub face and disks the size of quarters stretched into his ear lobes had his nose in a paperback at the desk. I wanted to ask how he’d done those discs, but thought better of it. “My name’s Cal Claxton. I’m looking for Danny Baxter. He goes by the name Picasso. I was told he might be working here.”
He gave me an annoyed looked. “Uh, he might be in the back. Let me check.” He disappeared through a set of swinging doors.
It was only a little past nine, but the waiting room was nearly full. A medicinal smell mingled uneasily with body odor and a hint of bleach coming from a damp swath of the floor that had been recently mopped. I sat down between a young girl with dull, uncombed hair framing a pretty face and a twenty-something man with a backpack on his lap and his right foot wrapped in a filthy, blood-stained bandage. A sign across from me on the wall said, Tats Holding You Back? See if You Qualify for Free Tattoo Removal, and gave an address on Burnside. Another said, Do You Have Hepatitis C? Get Facts. Get Treatment. Here Every Thursday, 7 to 9 p.m.
Five minutes later a tall woman in a white coat came through the doors. She raised her eyes above a pair of reading glasses straddling the bridge of her nose and spotted me immediately. “Mr. Claxton?”
I stood up and smiled. I expected her to speak to me in the waiting room, but she spun on her heels so I followed her to a small, cluttered office on the other side of the swinging doors. In the harsh fluorescent light her eyes were the palest blue, her face devoid of color and slack with fatigue. Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail. It was the color of wheat, swirled through with veins of a lighter, almost golden color. “How can I help you?” she asked without introducing herself.
“I’m looking for a young man named Danny Baxter. His street name’s Picasso. I understand he works here.”
A strand of hair had broken free and hung down across one eye. She tucked it back in place and assumed a poker face. “What’s your business with this person?”
I pulled a card from my shirt pocket and handed it to her. “I’m an attorney. Mr. Baxter came to me with a legal problem, but at the time, I didn’t think I could help him. I’ve reconsidered.”
She looked down at my card, pursed her lips slightly and then looked back at me and smiled ever so slightly. “You don’t look like an attorney.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
She kept her gaze on me, as if trying to gauge my sincerity. “What sort of problem?”
I smiled. “I can’t discuss that.”
She smiled back and some color rose in her cheeks. “We seem to be at a standoff then. I’m sure you can appreciate that we have stringent confidentiality constraints here at the clinic.” She motioned in the direction of the waiting room. “It’s hard to gain the trust of these kids, and it’s very easy to lose it.”
“I can understand that.” I glanced at the nametag pinned on her coat. “Look, Dr. Eriksen, I just want to talk to him. I think I can help him.”
“This is about his mother, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
She shook her head and focused on something over my shoulder. “God, the things these kids have to endure,” she said, more to herself than me. Then she caught herself and continued, “We’ve hired him to paint a mural on the side of our building. He’s just getting started. He’s a talented artist.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“He’ll be in sometime this morning, I think. You’ll have to wait for him to show.”
I thanked her and as I turned to go, she offered her hand. “I’m Anna Eriksen.”
“I’m Cal Claxton. Nice to meet you, Anna.” And it was.
At a little coffee shop across from the clinic, I ordered a double cappuccino with skim milk and sat out front waiting for Picasso. From where I sat, I had a clear view of the side of the building where the mural was to be painted. It was a two story, windowless brick wall that extended nearly the length of the lot. The wall was blank, but a crude, one-tiered scaffolding was in place along maybe forty feet of its length. The lot next to the building was vacant.
While I waited I was asked for spare change by three different people, which explained, I think, why most customers were having their coffee inside. I was out of one dollar bills when the third—a twenty-something girl with both arms solid with tattoos—hit me up. Since I’d given to the other two, I felt obligated, so I handed her a five. As she walked away, I found myself wondering how much those tattoos cost. I decided that if I was going to spend any time around here, I needed to think through my approach to panhandlers or I’d go broke.
I’d finished the coffee, gone back for a blueberry scone, and read most of a Willamette Week before Picasso showed. He had on a paint-spattered sweatshirt and—despite the cool morning—a pair of cut-off jeans, which looked a little odd with his combat boots and spindly legs. He arrived on the same rickety bike, and when he got off it, I had to chuckle. He looked more like Ichabod Crane than a Goth or Punk, or whatever hip tribe he identified with. He locked his bike and disappeared around the side of the clinic. I decided to wait and watch for a while.
He returned carrying a backpack, a six foot ladder, a large bucket, and a scrub brush on a pole. He took a hammer and a sack of nails from the backpack and using the ladder to mount the scaffolding, shored up several of the rafters below the eaves. He handled the work with surprising ease, and I realized he wasn’t as scrawny as I’d thought. His shoulders were bony, but they were broad and squared off. His calves bulged and knotted on his thin legs as did the muscles on his sinewy forearms. He was obviously no stranger to physical work, and I was willing to bet he’d put some miles on that bike of his.
He had begun scrubbing the wall with a soapy brush when I walked across the street to join him. “Wow,” I said, “This is going to be a huge mural.” And I meant it. Stepping up to the wall gave me a sense of the scale Picasso was tackling.
He turned around and squinted into the morning light at me, his forehead beaded in sweat. The skin above his eyebrow where his silver ring was inserted looked red and angry, like it was infected. His eyes finally registered recognition. “What do you want?”
“I was in the neighborhood. Thought maybe we could talk about your mother’s case.”
“I’m busy,” he shot back.
“I can see that. Look Dan, uh, I mean Picasso. What the hell do I call you, anyway?”
“My friends call me Picasso, but that leaves you out.”
“I don’t blame you for being pissed. I should have listened to what you had to say the other day. I drove up here to make amends. Okay, maybe I should’ve ridden a bike, but here I am.”
“I don’t need your help. I’ve decided to handle things myself.” He turned back to the wall and began scrubbing again.
I stood there for a while, but it was clear the conversation was over. Finally, I laid a card on the bottom rung of his ladder and said, “O
kay. If you change your mind, give me a call.” I took a couple of steps, then turned back and added, “You should have Doc Eriksen look at that ring in your eyebrow. It looks infected.”
“Fuck off,” I heard him mumble under his breath.
As I was leaving, the good doctor came out of the clinic with the young girl I’d seen in the waiting room. I caught her parting words as I approached—“See you on Monday, Caitlin. Remember your promise to me.” The young girl—she couldn’t have been a day older than sixteen—nodded her head solemnly and started down the sidewalk, her shoulders sagging under some unseen load. Anna turned to go back inside, but stopped when she saw me.
“Is she homeless?” I blurted out. I could scarcely contain my indignation at the thought of such a young girl on the streets.
Anna looked back at the girl and sighed deeply. “Almost all the kids we see here are runaways. Most for good reasons. The streets look better than what they’re dealing with at home—physical abuse, sex abuse, parents that are drug-addicted or involved in criminal activity, the list goes on.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Surely there’s a place for her.”
She forced a smile, as if she’d dealt with my sort of uninformed, righteous indignation many times before. “It takes time. Resources are stretched to the breaking point and the kids are wary. The streets are dangerous, but there’s a certain allure, too. They’re free from a lot of the pressures we put on kids these days, and they fall in with others they feel they can trust. They form the families they didn’t have.” Then she glanced at her watch. “I’m running late. Did you see Picasso?”
“Uh, yeah. Doesn’t look like I’ll be helping him, though.”
Her eyes were a deeper shade of blue in the sunlight, and her look said she guessed what had happened. She chased a strand of hair from her forehead before saying, “You’re lucky to get one chance with these kids. They’ve pretty much had it with adults. Believe me, I know.” Then she eyed me more intently. “Will he be okay, I mean with whatever’s going on with the investigation of his mother’s death?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. He feels like the police aren’t doing enough to find her killer. He said he’d decided to handle the situation on his own.”
She wrinkled her brow and absently nibbled on the cuticle of her thumb. “Oh, that doesn’t sound good. He’s carrying a lot of rage around. No, that doesn’t sound good at all.”
“Maybe you could talk to him. Persuade him to give me a call. I have some contacts in the Portland Police Department. I might be able to do something.”
Anna agreed to speak to him on my behalf and then hurried back into the clinic. That didn’t make me feel any better. I’d sent Picasso back to Portland empty-handed, and now I had a better sense of just what the young man was up against. I’d blown it, for sure.
Chapter Four
Nando Mendoza and I worked together on occasion, but the real basis of our friendship was a love of food. It was the following week and I was back in Portland having lunch with him at a Cuban restaurant aptly named Cuba Cuba. Nando was having the churrasco cubana, a thick skirt steak garnished with curled strips of bright yellow plantains. I ate a grilled fish that had been marinated in something remarkable. I closed my eyes and picked out lime, cilantro¸ cumin, and maybe some nutmeg. Damn, I asked myself, how do they do that?
I was on one of my infrequent business trips to Portland when he called and said he had a legal problem. I waited patiently for my friend to broach the subject, knowing from experience that this would not happen until most of the food on his plate was gone. Nando was a big man—six four, at least—with an ample girth, powerful arms, and a deep, resonant voice. His eyes were like black marbles, wide-set under thick, arching brows. More often than not, his eyes laughed at you or hinted they knew something you didn’t. But all was forgiven when he smiled, an act that could light a dark room.
A funny thing about his English—it was Spanish inflected, of course, but it also had a British ring to it. He’d lived his first year in the states with a British philosophy professor at the University of Miami and his family. I suspected Nando liked the effect, because seven years in Portland had done little to soften it.
He tossed a plantain back on his plate. “These are not so good, but this steak”—he held up a piece speared on his fork—“ah, we could only dream of such meat in Cuba. Did you know I was an electrical engineer there, but went back to school for a degree in hotel management?”
“Why did you do that?” I asked. I hadn’t heard this one.
“Simple, my friend. The best food went to the hotels for the tourists. I was a growing young man. I worked the desk at my first hotel job in Havana, but I became very good friends with the chef there. Her name was Catalina. She was ten years older than me.” He whispered, “Ay dios, es figura me tenia enloquecido,” with closed eyes, then added, “We used to meet in the cooler where the meat was hung. From then on my family and I had enough to eat.” Nando went on to describe the dishes his mother cooked from the food he smuggled from the hotel. Finally, as he was chewing the last bite of steak, he said, “Ramon got arrested last night.”
Ramon Duarte was another member of the small, tight-knit Cuban community in Portland. He was a photographer who occasionally worked for Nando. “What for?”
“Assault.”
“What happened?”
He waived his hand in disgust. “Ah. He was taking photos of a man with his mistress. I work for the man’s wife. The man approached him and tried to take the camera away. That was a big mistake. Ramon beat the man up, and someone called the cops.”
“Where is he now?”
“I bailed him out this morning. He should have just walked away. But, no. He had to break the man’s nose. This is not good for business. The police are unhappy with me. I, uh, thought perhaps you could speak to your friend, maybe smooth things out. I don’t want to lose my license.”
My “friend” was Pete Stout, District Attorney for Multnomah County. I’d worked with Pete down in L.A. in my previous life, the life I’d come to Oregon to escape. We had re-established our friendship after he’d taken the job up here. I gave Nando a pained look.
He raised his hands in surrender. “I know, I know. This is a big favor to ask.”
I let him squirm for a few moments. I only had so much capital with Stout, after all. Finally, I shrugged. “I’ll talk to him, but I won’t ask for any favors. I will tell him you’re a good man and ask if there’s anything you can do to improve your image with the department. ”
After lunch I interviewed a witness for an upcoming court case. I finished about three and as I came down 13th, realized I was only a couple of blocks from the Old Town clinic. What the hell, I said to myself. I hung a left on Davis and parked across the street from the building.
Picasso was up on the scaffolding sketching with white chalk. He was a leftie, I noticed. A large sketch book lay opened next to him. As I approached I could see he had divided the wall into a checkerboard grid of three-foot squares. It looked like the squares had been snapped in place using a carpenter’s chalk line. I thought I recognized the pyramidal shape of Mt. Hood outlined on the wall. The volcano looked down on a foreground consisting of a set of undulating, horizontal lines that might represent the Willamette River. A gently curving path or road led from the mountain to the river, where it connected to a couple of diverging lines suggesting a wide bridge. Other groupings scattered east and west of the river looked like place holders for some of the landmarks in Portland, like the Big Pink, the twin spires of the Convention Center, and the graceful arc of the Fremont Bridge.
Unsure of the best way to announce my presence, I blurted out, “Da Vinci was left-handed, too.”
Picasso swiveled around on the ladder and looked at me like someone awakened from a deep sleep. Without smiling, he answered, “So was M. C. Escher.”
I chuc
kled. “You’re in good company.” I nodded toward the wall. “What’s the theme going to be?”
“Doc Eriksen wants something on health care,” was all he answered before turning and starting to sketch again. He was wearing a paint spattered pair of jeans I’d seen before, a t-shirt from a past Portland Blues Festival, and a ball cap that had Dignity Village written in script across the front. I knew the latter was some kind of tent city for the homeless. The red, yellow, and black bands of the coral snake tattoo stood in bold relief against the pale skin of his neck, and the piercing above his eye still looked infected.
“Buy you a coffee?” I asked.
He turned back around and considered my offer with narrowed eyes. I’d like to say it was my charm that won him over, but it was more likely that he figured this was the only way to get rid of me. “I only drink tea.”
“Tea it is, then.”
After we’d sat down with our drinks, a double cappuccino for me and a green tea for him, I said, “So, you’re a muralist?”
“Yeah, that’s my main interest. Murals that tell the truth.” He’d brought his sketch book with him, but made no effort to show me the plan he was working from, and I didn’t press it.
With little coaxing, he went on to tell me about the muralists and street artists he admired—Diego Rivera, Ras Malik, Keith Haring—people I’d never heard of doing a form of art I scarcely understood. I had, however, some familiarity with the political murals painted during the sectarian troubles in Northern Ireland. I’d leafed through a book about them once in a bookstore, and the stark images had impressed me so much that I bought the book. When I mentioned this, a faint crack formed in the ice between us. His dark eyes lit up for just a moment, and in that instant I could see the enthusiastic boy that was still in there somewhere.
Matters of Doubt Page 2