by Mark Coggins
I watched with disbelief as his finger tightened on the trigger. The gun went off with a terrific roar in the enclosed space and a slug kissed into the wall about three feet to my left. The turban lady screamed. My heart missed more beats than a grade school band.
“There,” he said. “I feel better. Now why don’t you kind of get the hell out of here. And quick.”
“Are you telling me I won’t be enjoying the benefits of club membership?”
“Go!” he shouted.
He moved out of the doorway and I edged past him. I turned my back to the revolver and went out of there, the nerves between my shoulder blades-where I imagined the bullets would hit-twanging the whole way.
WHARF TOUR
I NEEDED A DRINK-BADLY. I MET UP WITH one in the bar of the Hotel San Remo on Mason Street. It was a quaint Victorian building with no more than 30 rooms. Outside they were setting up for a shot from the new TV cop show that was being filmed in San Francisco with lights, reflectors, heavy cables, and prop and makeup people crowding the sidewalk in front. Inside, I had the place to myself.
I ordered a bourbon and soda. The bartender was a tall Indian with a high forehead, receding silver and iron colored hair, a thick black mustache, and wire-rim glasses. He wanted to talk, and women were what he wanted to talk about.
“They take your energy,” he said in a singsong voice. “They take your life energy by tempting you with sex. A man derives his strength from the seed in his loins. And a woman steals it when she copulates with him.”
I wanted to hear this bit of eastern mumbo-jumbo about as much as I wanted to hear Ode to a Nightingale read by the Elk’s Lodge Women’s Auxiliary. “Interesting theory,” I said. “I feel the same way about mucus. Never blow my nose.”
The bartender gave me a queer look and walked down to the other end of the bar: a sudden crisis involving dirty beer glasses apparently.
I nursed my bourbon and fired up a cigarette and looked forward to the time my pulse would come down to the low 90s. I never get used to being shot at, no matter how many times it happens. Minutes crept by like ice floes on the Volga, and presently a rangy-looking guy in jeans and an Oakland Raiders sweatshirt came in. He was wearing the ubiquitous baseball cap turned backwards with a pair of mirrored sunglasses. He gave me a brief glance and then took a seat at the other end of the bar. I figured him for a member of the TV crew.
After my cigarette was long gone and I had chewed all the ice in the bottom of my glass, I flagged the bartender and settled my tab. I had decided to go back to The Power Station and pull a little stakeout duty. When you stir up an anthill with a stick, the ants eventually come back to put things right. I was hoping Terri McCulloch would be in their number. I threaded my way through the TV paraphernalia in front of the hotel and went up Mason Street. As I turned on Chestnut, I looked back and caught sight of the guy in the Raiders sweatshirt from the bar. Appearing to take notice of my glance, he bent down in front of a newspaper machine and went through the motions of buying a paper. That didn’t mean he had to be following me, but if he was, he surely did stink.
I continued east on Chestnut, past The Power Station, without looking behind me. Three blocks up at Grant I went into the neighborhood branch of the public library, strolled past the front desk and found a place to lurk in the stacks where I could see the front door. Five minutes later the guy in the sweatshirt came breezing in without his paper. He stopped at the front desk to ask something, had the librarian shake her head no in response, and then cautiously glanced around the room. Not seeing me, he sat down in a chair along the back wall near the magazine racks. He made a show of reading one, but kept looking out from behind it like a squirrel afraid of losing its nut.
I crept along behind the stacks, then stepped out and walked briskly across the room to where he was sitting. Snagging the pole that held the New York Times as I went, I slammed it across the arms of his chair when I reached him. “What the hell?” was his response.
“You should give up on Highlights and get something you can really sink your teeth into,” I said.
He was still wearing his mirrored glasses. Up close, his skin had a greasy pallor and his breath smelled like the fumes from a rendering plant. “Go ahead,” he said. “Be funny. Just do it somewheres I’m not.”
“That would be easier if you weren’t stuck to me like so much discarded chewing gum.”
He grabbed the newspaper pole and jerked it out of my hands. “No need to talk sense on my account.”
“You followed me here from the hotel bar.”
“No I didn’t. I found it on my own. I go all around the city every day without any help from you. You’d be amazed.”
I felt the slightest twinge of doubt. “You’re telling me you just happened to go into the bar for a drink at the same time I did, and then you just happened to go to the library right afterward.”
“I wasn’t telling you anything, strictly speaking. But if you have to be told, I came here to get last week’s ball scores since the paper didn’t have them.” He pointed at the football magazine he had been reading.
We were beginning to attract attention. The old guy in the chair next to us was giving us dirty looks and the librarian had come out from behind the desk. The sweatshirt guy noticed me looking around and gave me an oily grin. “Maybe you should ask the nice librarian lady to help you find a book. You could look under D-for delusional. Now, buzz off. Take the air. Go burp your Tupperware, Riordan.”
His face dropped as he said my name. We stared at one another for a long moment and suddenly he lunged forward with the newspaper pole, impaling me in the stomach. The sharp thrust knocked the wind out of me and he pressed his advantage by charging out of the chair, one arm wrapped around the pole like a jousting knight, the other bending to elbow me in the jaw. I flew ass over teakettle onto the floor.
He was already sprinting out the door by the time I rolled upright. “Good Lord! What was that about?” said the librarian, who had come up beside me.
I got to my feet and rubbed my jaw. Two solid shots in one day: if this kept up I would have to send it back to the factory. I said, “He was upset because I was reading over his shoulder,” and started after him. I pushed through the double doors of the library and then stopped short to look around. I spotted him a half block down Chestnut going back towards The Power Station. He had slowed to a brisk walk, but when he looked back and saw me he started running again. I went after him at full speed. I’m no marathoner, but when it comes to a sprint I can cover the ground pretty quickly.
By the time he reached Stockton, I was only fifty yards away. In the next block to Powell I closed the gap further and I could easily make out the Raiders slogan on his sweatshirt. He twisted around to look at me, and his glasses flew off as he snapped his head to the front, frightened by my proximity. I stomped the lenses into the sidewalk. Approaching Mason he was just out of my grasp, but I was starting to wheeze like a busted accordion.
A clump of cars and TV people from the shoot at the Hotel San Remo were crowding the intersection, a large black limo in the middle of it. The guy in the sweatshirt ran through the crowd, jostling and shoving people as he went. I did the same. Right as we came to the limo, the back door opened and out stepped a guy in an expensive suit and meticulously coifed hair. It was Dan Hanson, star of the TV cop show. I watched as the sweatshirt guy grabbed hold of Hanson and flung him directly into my path. I hit Hanson square in the shoulders, taking him down for a ten-yard loss. As we bounced off the side of the limo and rolled into the street, one part of my brain was thinking that it was ridiculous to dress a guy playing a cop in a suit like that, and the other was hoping that I didn’t slam my jaw into something new.
We rolled to a stop in the gutter, and while Hanson was too dazed to say anything, his handlers were hopping mad. With a woman in a black beret and short blonde hair screaming obscenities in my face, I stepped up from the wreckage and helped pull the actor to his feet and dust him off. His stiffly
moussed hair was standing up on end like a rooster’s comb, and his cheek was abraded from the asphalt. I mumbled something about being sorry, gave Hanson a little shot in the arm, and said, “Now you’re looking like a real cop.”
The guy in the sweatshirt was nowhere to be found along Mason. However, two blocks up on Chestnut I saw someone who looked like him turn right at the intersection and walk out of view. I double-timed it up Chestnut, past rows of colorfully painted condominiums, past a construction site with a tall crane where more were being built, until I came to the three-way intersection. Here Chestnut and Taylor lay perpendicular to one another and Columbus cuts through on a slant. Across the street on Columbus, I could see Bimbo’s 365 Club. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that The Power Station was in walking distance from the place where threatening phone calls to Bishop and me were made.
There was nothing doing on Columbus so I looked down Taylor in the direction the sweatshirt guy had turned. The Powell and Mason cable car line terminated a short ways up at Bay, and there was a crowd of people in a semi-circle behind a rail at the turnaround. I caught sight of the back of my man’s head, the bill of his baseball cap bobbing up and down as he walked briskly through the waiting tourists. Holding tight to the near side of the street, I went after him as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself. My chest was still heaving and I was soaked with sweat, and I didn’t want to spook him into another foot race.
As I approached the turnaround I went past a series of graffitied, bunker-like buildings that comprised the Bay Street public housing complex. It is one of the ironies of city planning in San Francisco that tourists fresh off the cable car get dumped right into the middle of the projects. I threaded my way around the back of the crowd and popped out by the stoplight at the intersection of Bay and Taylor. I could see the guy in the sweatshirt across the street, going down Taylor into the heart of Fisherman’s Wharf. I was just concluding he thought I was out of the picture when he looked back and spotted me standing at the intersection. He broke into a run.
I dove across the intersection against the light, dodging cars and pedicabs carrying tourists. I pounded down Taylor across North Point, then Beach, then Jefferson, and finally came panting to a stop underneath a gigantic ship’s wheel with a picture of a crab in the middle. It had been donated by the big restaurant owners in the area, was tacky as hell, and had become the unofficial symbol of the Wharf thanks to prominent display on the opening credits of yet another TV cop show from the 1970s.
I leaned against the crab wheel, completely out of breath with no sign of the sweatshirt guy anywhere.
I had lost sight of him about a block back, and was now surrounded by large schools of tourists moving up and down the wharf like so many migrating tuna. Some were heading west towards the twin temptations of The Cannery and Ghiradelli Square, some were going east towards Pier 39-the citadel of crass commercialism in the area-and still others were feeding among the row of restaurants ahead of me. Included among these were the famous Fishermen’s Grotto and Alioto’s, where you could get crab cocktail and sourdough bread for $9.95 from the take-away stands out front. This entitled you to brag to your friends back home you’d eaten the quintessential San Francisco meal, but you probably didn’t mention that the bread was baked in Oakland, and the crab flown in from Alaska.
A musical group from Chile dressed in native costume and packing pipes and drums was making noise in a paved area in front of the restaurants. I drifted over to join the crush of people watching them, burrowing between a fat lady in a pink running suit and a tall kid holding a skateboard. I stood two songs’ worth of their repertoire, hunkering low, looking up and down the wharf, before I spotted the guy in the sweatshirt. He was directly across from me in the audience, trying his damnedest to blend in too.
I broke off from the crowd and looped around behind him, screening myself from view with the aid of several strategically placed hot dog and pretzel stands. When I was directly in back of him, I reached across a pair of nuns in habit and grabbed him by the neck of his sweatshirt. He jumped like a hooked marlin. I gave a sharp yank, causing him to topple backward and land in a sprawl on the asphalt. The nuns gasped. While he thrashed and twitched and clutched at his throat where the sweatshirt was cutting into him, I dragged him along the ground to a concrete bench near the food stands. I leaned down to take two handfuls of his sweatshirt and jerked him onto the bench beside me. His baseball cap was twisted sideways, his face was flushed, and he was breathing like an asthmatic at the cherry blossom festival. I said:
“First off, unless you’re playing catcher for the Giants this year- and I haven’t seen your ugly pan on my bubble gum cards-wear your freaking cap the right way round.” I pulled the bill of his cap roughly around to the front. “Second, I’ll have an answer now to the question of why you were following me and exactly how you know my name.”
The sweatshirt guy licked his lips and swallowed. “You haven’t got a thing on me. You aren’t the cops and you can’t do anything here to make me talk.”
He was right. I wasn’t the sort to break fingers and I didn’t have a gun I could wave in his face. He watched me thinking these things and that oily grin from the library crept onto his face. “Give it up Riordan, you’re whipped. As much as I’ve enjoyed rubbing your nose in it, it’s time we went our separate ways.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I wasn’t going to chase him all over North Beach with nothing to show. I reached across his torso and took hold of a belt loop on the far side of his body. In one movement I stood up and yanked him like I was starting a lawn mower. It was the last thing he expected. He spun over on the bench, landed on his stomach, and tried to bite the near armrest. He seemed to lose consciousness. I reached down to extract his wallet and moved a few steps away to examine my prize.
His name was Todd Nagel and he was a member of a construction union. He was 32 years old and he lived in Daly City, a suburb just south of San Francisco. He had a Sears charge card, a BART ticket, not much cash, and a whole bunch of nudie pictures. I started flipping through them looking for familiar faces-or other body parts-but I let myself get too absorbed in my task. When I glanced up to see how Mr. Nagel was doing on the bench, I found he wasn’t there: he was standing right next to me with a squeeze bottle of mustard from the hot dog cart.
He fired a stream of it directly into my eyes. I suddenly had a very good idea where the Germans got the name for mustard gas in World War I. My eyes teared over immediately, and I felt the wallet slapped from my hands. I pulled out my shirttail and hunched over it, trying to wipe the mustard out of my eyes. My left eye was out of commission, but I could just squint out of my right. Through it I saw Nagel ahead of me, running in the direction of the bay. I stumbled after him, but kept bumping into people or pulling up short to wipe my tears. At the edge of the wharf I paused to scan the area through a mustardy haze. There was a pier for the submarine Pampanito-guided tours for five dollars-a set of coin-operated telescopes for looking at Alcatraz and Angel Islands, and a pier for the Red and White Fleet, which ran ferries to Tiburon and Sausalito. Nagel was charging up the walkway to one of the ferries.
“Final boarding at gate number two for the Sausalito Ferry,” came an announcement.
I lurched toward the walkway, but without a ticket was stopped at the gate by the attendant. I was in no condition to crash through. I turned and fought my way up the line at the ticket window, but by the time I purchased one, the boat had left the pier.
I stood at the edge of the wharf next to the telescopes-elbowed by little boys climbing the railing and swiveling the scopes without any quarters to spend, mustard all up and down my shirt, tears still streaming from my eyes-and watched as the boat powered out into the bay. Nagel stood at the stern of the ferry and waved good-bye.
Although I didn’t know exactly what it meant, the only thing that made me feel the slightest bit better was the naked picture of Jodie I had seen in his wallet.
IN THE KEY OF G
I MANAGED THE TRIP HOME WITHOUT RE-ENACTING ANY more highlights from Three Stooges films. It was 6:20. I dumped a can of spaghetti into a pot, mixed in a can of pinto beans, threw in a dash of hot sauce, heated the mixture until it burped like molten lava, and then ladled the whole mess onto three slices of sourdough toast. I accompanied the meal with two cans of beer and a classic 1937 Roy Eldridge Vocalion reissue. I showered, changed, and killed the rest of the time before leaving for my 9:30 gig by pressing ice packs to the side of my face. It had swollen up like I was packing a three-plug chaw.
I was subbing that night for the bass player of a jazz quintet called Distant Opposition. Their regular bassist, Leo Rand, was down in LA doing some studio work on a breakfast cereal jingle. Most of the gigs I got were like that: one-night stands where I subbed for a bassist in a regular group or played in a pick-up ensemble put together to support a big name who was in town for one show.
Distant Opposition played classic jazz without a lot of electric amplification. That meant I was taking my “wife” to the show-wife being the slang term among jazz musicians for a string bass. I lugged the bass down to the street and loaded it into the Galaxie 500 in a specially designed rack I had installed in place of the back seat. I had to crank the starter four or five times before the car turned over. When it did, I pointed it down Hyde in the direction of a South of Market dive called In the Key of G.
You can count on two hands the number of clubs in San Francisco that regularly feature jazz. In the Key of G was among the hardiest. What it lacked in atmosphere, acoustics, seating capacity, and interior illumination, it made up in a dedicated cadre of patrons, a commitment to quality acts, and a peerless bartender named Slim. I parked my car on Eighth, next to the converted brick warehouse that was home to the club, and navigated my bass down the dingy concrete steps of the entrance on Minna. A stifling amalgamation of cigarette smoke, rowdy bar talk, clinking glasses, and the smell of beer assailed me as I stepped through the doors of the basement room.