Civil Twilight

by Susan Dunlap

  I didn’t know what to say. I wondered what Gary had told her, and why.

  “None of my business. It’s just I’ve had friends . . . and . . . don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  The horn beeped again. I headed toward it and when I turned back, Karen was walking toward the parapet.

  John was pulling into a legal parking spot, something he rarely troubled to do. That meant he hadn’t swung around the waiting traffic, Code 3’d it up the down lane, and parked in the crosswalk, which would have saved him twenty minutes. He was dressed in a suit that fit better than any I’d seen on him. He looked good; he looked not like a cop. “You here on a case?” I asked, leaning into his car window.

  He ignored my question—his family trademark—and opened the door, forcing me to jump back. I took that to mean Yes. He put an arm around my shoulder and walked us toward the west side of the circle. I have affectionate siblings, but John is not one of them. His arm around my shoulder historically meant I was about to hear something unlikely to improve my day.

  “Amazing view, huh?”

  “Yeah, John. Same as it’s been for a century.” I shifted my shoulders, but he held on tight. “You passing yourself off as a tourist? Keeping an eye on someone who can’t spot an unmarked?”

  “Just here to think.”

  “About annexing my shoulder?”

  “About Mike.”

  “You drove an unmarked car, sat in a line of exhaust-spewing cars for twenty minutes, so you could park your official vehicle in a civilian spot in a crowded tourist attraction and not look at the view, all so you could have some thought about Mike that you haven’t considered in the twenty years since he disappeared?”

  “This new lead you think you’ve got. You’re not going to find anything there.”

  He squeezed my shoulder in a way he never had the entire time he was barking orders and complaining that we younger kids were out of control. Something was going on with my oldest, stiffest, most wary-making brother. I waited.

  “I’ve been all over. I’ve checked every possible lead from San Diego to Seattle and beyond. I’ve had PIs on retainer.”

  “And you kept them all to yourself? Did you think—”

  “You want to hear about each dead end?”

  I turned toward John, trying to read him. “This conversation could be about Mike, but it’s not, is it? What’s the matter, John? Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” He bent near and hugged me. I was so stunned I didn’t move. Then I hugged him back, feeling like I was in the middle of a stunt and hadn’t read the script.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  I followed his gaze and saw Karen through John’s eyes: a slim, attractive blonde checking her phone messages as she waited for one of the telescopes to free up. She caught his eye and smiled, a sweet, longing expression. He wasn’t a bad looking guy. None of the star quality of Gary, but he was in decent shape, graying at the temples, and today sporting a lime green shirt that set off the green in his eyes, evincing a sartorial concern I’d never seen him show before. He’d sure dressed for someone. But not Karen. As for her, I felt sure she ached not for John, but for the sweet closeness she assumed we shared. John, though, was seeing something entirely different. He was smiling back with a hesitant, vulnerable expression. His whole being screamed: vulnerable.

  Be careful, big brother! You’re out of your league with her. What you need—What he needed was to snap him back to himself. “You’ve had a PI on retainer? And he’s never found a lead to Mike? Maybe what he’s found is a patsy.”

  “Patsy! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ah, that was the John I knew.

  He put his arm back around my shoulder, but this time to herd me to the walkway where he could hold forth more privately. “I don’t walk onto your movie sets and decide I can do stunts, do I? But you assume you can do missing persons better than the police. I’m the professional, I—”

  “John!”

  “What!”

  “Your car. That’s your car! Someone’s stealing your car!”

  A woman screamed and grabbed a toddler, as the car shot past. Karen Johnson was at the wheel.

  3

  “SHE STOLE MY CAR!” John yelled at me as the unmarked shot across the parking circle onto the exit road.

  I ran after. Skidded to a stop. No way I’d catch her. The exit road had no traffic, and only one stop sign. You don’t boost a police car, then brake for stop signs.

  I raced for the sidewalk, jumped the parapet into the trees and underbrush. It wasn’t a dead drop but close. I skidded tree to tree. Below was the Lombard curve where the road ended. I had to catch her there. If she beat me, she’d be out into the warren of North Beach streets, in an unmarked black car made to draw no attention.

  I slammed into exposed roots, grabbed for a tree trunk, swung around it. The hill was steeper, rockier, the drop to the curve almost straight down. I shot a glance at the road. Car barreling down. A family started across, jaywalking. Car kept coming.

  “Karen!” I yelled. “Karen! Stop!”

  She wasn’t braking. Wasn’t slowing. She was going to hit them.

  “Get back! Get your kids on the sidewalk!”

  A siren shrieked. I stumbled, leapt, landed hard ten feet down on the cement.

  The car shot by, siren suddenly keening. The family huddled at the edge of the macadam; the woman flat out on the cement.

  I ran into the road, after the car. Karen turned left onto a side street—out of the park, into North Beach—and when I reached the street she was gone. There was only one way she could have turned, but at the next corner there were more options and more at the next after that. She was out of sight, but in the distance, the siren screamed. The siren was still on!

  No problem. I stopped, gasping for breath. John would have called in the theft. By now every patrol car in North Beach would be closing in. The woman had been an idiot to steal the car, and a lucky idiot not to have killed anyone, but now, pinpointing herself with the siren, she was just a run-of-the-mill dolt.

  I stood, catching my breath, listening for new sirens, for sirens converging. Instead, silence. I tried to gauge where the sound last came from. No luck. I dug out my phone and called Gary. Gary’s machine. “Gar, get ready for a call from Karen. Whatever trouble she had an hour ago, it’s nothing to what she’s in now. She stole John’s car, his unmarked police car! Hey, what the hell’s going on? Call me!”

  I hurried up the path. I needed to get to my brother before backup arrived. Before a uniform scooped him up and spit him out at the scene of Karen’s arrest, wherever that would be. How was I going to explain this to John? I slowed my pace. I couldn’t explain it to myself! I liked Karen. Liked that despite whatever was going on with her, she was interested in Mike. And me. Don’t beat yourself up! She’d paused to say that on her way to steal the car!

  I was impressed by her immediate, certain response to the hundred-foot pole koan. You are atop a hundred-foot pole. How do you proceed? Letting go, I knew from reading rather than experience, meant not releasing your grasp and falling in terror, but rather stepping out of the past, out of who you are, into the next moment, whatever that moment brings. It was about walking though a door to the unknown. But was it stepping out of your life as a soon-to-be-divorced woman to drive away in a stolen police car?

  What could possibly have spurred her to do such a crazy thing? Chance? The keys, obviously, had been in the ignition. That was going to make John look great. “Just-so John,” as he was called behind his back in the department, was now going to be just a laughingstock. Cops don’t leave the keys in the car. Civilians in San Francisco don’t leave their keys, not unless they’re hot to be pedestrians. The one small saving grace for him would be the muzzling of his biggest fun-poker—Gary would be silent, indeed.

  Gary with his hush-hush client, John suddenly gone irresponsible, and . . . Karen . . . What the hell was going on here? I needed time to think. But time was
the one thing I didn’t have.

  A couple speaking German ambled down the steps. I veered around them and headed up. I wanted to beat the reinforcements John would have called, but not by too much.

  What could have made Karen pull a crazy stunt like stealing a police car? I asked again, as if it was the koan. I was walking slowly now.

  How do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole?

  You step forward.

  But something triggers that decision. According to John, chance is a bigger cause of crime than the law-abiding would like to believe. But he sure wasn’t going to make that argument in this case. Not and have the fault be all his own.

  I rounded the top of the stairs onto the observation circle. No patrol cars. Good.

  “John!”

  His eyes were jammed to a telescope pointing far right and down into the bushes. “See anything?”

  “What do you think? No! She . . . took . . . my . . . car!” He was almost yelling. Behind him people moved away fast. “What the hell got into her?”

  “I don’t know, John!”

  “You brought her here!”

  “It was a fluke.”

  “Fluke? Yeah, right!” He turned and strode back from the parapet, got a car-length away, charged back, planted himself inches from my face. “You brought her. How come?”

  “I didn’t bring her. I’d just met her. She wanted to go for a run; I only had an hour. We were in Washington Square. This was just the logical place—”

  “Washington Square, a minute from Gary’s office. Gary! He’s behind this,” he shouted at me, light dawning, “isn’t he?”

  “Stealing a police car? Are you nuts? I’ve kept away from our family all of my adult life. I hardly know either one of you. But that’s just crazy.”

  He was pulling in breath through clenched teeth, eyeing me like I was a suspect. “It’s Gary, isn’t it? What did he tell you?”

  He told me to rabbits. Why had Gary insisted I not tell him? Gary was my buddy, but he was what I loved in guys—a brat. Could John possibly be right?

  His face was growing purple. I’d never seen him this out of control. He dug his fingers into my arm. “Don’t you clam up to protect him.”

  “Let go of me!”

  His grip loosened. I jumped back.

  “Not Gary, huh? You saying she set us all up? What do you know about her? You tell me! Why did Gary say to bring her here?”

  Ah. “Gary didn’t. He only told her I’d take her running. He didn’t say where.”

  “So you chose Coit Tower?”

  “No, she wanted a high spot with a view and trees . . . oh.”

  “Exactly. What did she say to you?”

  “She’s getting a divorce. But she didn’t go into that. She just about got killed shoving a girl out of the way of a car. Driver was furious.”

  “Really?” For an instant he seemed taken aback.

  “Yeah, just as suddenly as she decided to take your car. People do lose it in divorces, you know.”

  “What else?”

  “A Zen koan; she talked about that, and about Mike.”

  John barked out a laugh. “Your two favorite subjects!”

  “Hey, I don’t—”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Nothing! No, wait. There was one last thing, but it’s not going to help you. She was trying to be kind. She said, don’t beat yourself up—meaning me—about Mike.”

  He nodded, his lips tensed into a slight sneer I knew all too well. “So you liked her, right?”

  “What’s wrong with that!”

  He took a step back and shook his head. His expression said I was an idiot. “If someone’s your friend, they’re okey-dokey and the rest of the world just doesn’t understand. You’re sure you see something the rest of us’re too thick to get. Your friends, you’ll move heaven and earth to justify them. You’ve always been that way. Used to be Mike, now it’s Gary. So Gary couldn’t have set this up ...” His voice trailed off and I had the feeling he found it hard to believe Gary had purposely sabotaged him either. “If it’s Mike, he must’ve walked out of the house one Thursday in a bubble of innocence and been spirited off to another life. Because you adored him, there has to be some very fine, all-redeeming reason a forty-three-year-old man can’t walk back in the door now and just say, “I screwed up.”

  I just stared. Then I said the only possible thing. “Fuck you!”

  A patrol car, lights flashing, raced up the down lane of the exit road. When John spotted it, he jumped back and the expression on his face was not that of a police detective relieved to have a ride back to the station. Nor did he take the all too familiar gritted teeth inhalation of one prepared to take a ribbing. His expression was momentary; the next instant he was walking toward the car, leaning down toward the driver. But during that moment, I could have sworn his face showed a flash of fear.

  4

  I RAN TOWARD the patrol car.

  John glanced back at me, got in and slammed the door. The car sped away down Telegraph Hill Boulevard.

  “Damn you!” I was so furious—so hurt—and stunned by his attack, my temptation was just to let him deal or sink. What I needed to do was get to the location and get ready for my gag. It was already 5:30. In an hour I’d be turning the ignition key. But there was no way I could just let John go, not as out of control as he’d been.

  I leapt the observation ledge, skidded between pines and cypress, pushed off and leapt for the plaza.

  They were almost at the Lombard curve. I slid down the double railings, swung forward and hit the sidewalk.

  John glared out the window. He still had that panicky look. The vehicle picked up speed, nearly hitting a cab. Both paused momentarily. John made some kind of signal, and the patrol car shot away.

  I yanked the cab door open and flung myself in. “Hang a U.”

  “I can’t do a U here!”

  “Of course you can. John will cover for you. He’s not paying you to lose him.”

  “He’s not paying me at all.”

  “He will when we get there. If you don’t lose him, Webb.”

  Webb Framington Morratt hung a U, shooting me across the leather seat, then hit the gas. He was on what he called an unofficial retainer from John. Very unofficial. I wasn’t sure the range of things he did for my brother or their legality. But he definitely wouldn’t want to offend him. “Keep him in sight.”

  “He didn’t tell me to trail him.”

  “Of course he didn’t. When he called you, he figured he’d be sitting back here with me. He didn’t figure you’d screw around so long a patrol car would get to him first.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “No matter. Just keep up because I don’t have the address.”

  When we got there, John would be livid, Webb Morratt would be outraged, and the next time I needed to make use of Morratt I’d pay for it. But that would be then; this was now. “John uses you because you can tail a car in traffic. Because you say you can. Don’t give him reason to doubt it. Your record for honesty isn’t the best.”

  He grunted, but did step on the gas.

  I braced my feet as we shot through the narrow North Beach streets, the cab swaying as Webb whipped around corners.

  What was with John? If he’d stayed up nights planning the cut, he couldn’t have pierced deeper. Mike was four years older than me; I’d adored him. In a family where siblings paired off, he was my other half. I told him everything; he told me . . . less than I’d realized. When he disappeared, I was fifteen. As a family we held together; individually and in private we fell apart. John, for his part, just plowed on. Why this outburst now of all times?

  Morratt was watching me in the rearview mirror. I took a breath. “Tourist season, and you’ve still got time to hang around for John.”

  Morratt scowled, his round pink head scrunched like a ball a retriever had just had a go at. The ball unwrinkled a bit. He hesitated, fighting his urge to sound off. It was a losing battle.
“What’d you think, John’s my patron? I do some work for him. He’s front of the queue, but he’s not keeping me in gas. There’ve been times I’ve missed airport runs for him. Fast fares. It’s a big loss I incur for John.”

  If I’d been biting my lip I’d have bled to death. “But you could pick up fares at Coit Tower the times you dropped him off, right?” I was trying to make sense of it all.

  “I never dropped him off there.”

  Was he lying? Damn! What was my brother doing up there that he was so hot to hide? Wait a minute. “So you’ve just picked him up there.”

  He nodded, with a grunt.

  Of course. “Cheapskate. You mean he’d have called another cab to get him up there? So he didn’t have to pay you to wait?” Pay him to sit around enjoying the view while the meter ticked? To note whatever it was he was doing up there. So Morratt could tell me.

  He studied my face in the mirror. Now he had his eyes on the rearview the whole time. The road was incidental. “Yeah.”

  “There were times he called you, right, and you dropped everything, right, and then he wasn’t ready and you had to sit around and wait, on your own sweet time, right?”

  His eyes narrowed. Even Webb Morratt had a limit. Just as I was deciding on a different approach, he said grudgingly, “Nah. If he made me wait, he made it up.”

  “And when you had to go out of your way to take his friend down with him, was that on the meter, too?”

  “Nah, that wasn’t the problem. It was him driving around dead silent after, going crazy if I said two words. You know what a bummer that is when you’re alone hauling hack all day and finally you get someone you can shoot the breeze with and he clams up, plus makes you clam, and even—get this—turn off the radio. Like a tomb. And when he—”

  A horn honked.

  Morratt shot a glance out the window. Traffic was almost stopped. Ahead on the left was the Ferry Building and for a moment I wondered whether there was a reception or rally there. Then I spotted the cause of the hold-up. It was the set. My set, where I’d be doing my stunt in—yikes!—fifty-five minutes. As I’d told Karen Johnson, Market Street was closed for two blocks, from here up past California Street, which was where the action would be. I could see two fire engines and an ambulance, and a huge crowd—workers stopping on their way to the Embarcadero BART station, streetcars out to the Castro, Glen Park, the avenues, or buses to the East Bay.