by Susan Dunlap
‘Working? He never worked.’
‘He’s not a trust fund baby. Where’d he get money?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Think. You lived there ten years; no one’s going to believe you never wondered. The police were all over his apartment last night. If they haven’t gotten to yours already, they will. And to you. Even here. Even if I don’t alert them. So, Adrienne, what did you notice about him?’
She ran her fingers through her hair, raking clumps downward with no set destination, as if she was trying to pull her mind into focus by her hair. ‘Coffee shops. It was like he lived in coffee shops and visited the apartment.’
‘Which coffee shop? If you’re a serious coffee drinker, you find your best place and become a regular. You claim your table. Your order becomes “the usual”. You don’t lower yourself to drink lesser coffee in lesser establishments.’
‘Not him. I saw him in the old place near Ashbury, the one that was next to the head shop that was there forever, and then all of a sudden it was a Gap. He was in Starbucks, in McDonald’s. In the Bottomless Cup. You know, everywhere.’
‘Was he meeting someone?’
‘Yeah, but no one special. And special people. I saw him with our district supervisor; with the mayor once, but just because the mayor had been our district sup before. When I first moved in, Wally was still in the mix. Things have thinned out by now.’
‘And? Women?’
‘Women?’ From the baffled look on her face I could have been asking about individual Shiba Inus or emissaries from Saturn. ‘Women? Not much. Wow, dead,’ she said, as if that word was just now hardening into reality. ‘I never expected that of Wally. Shot?’
I hadn’t mentioned shooting. ‘Through his head. From the front. Not random. Shot more than once.’
Sirens squealed on San Pablo Avenue. The avenue was a major connector, a straight route for police, fire, EMTs. She must have been jolted up ten times during the night. This made the eleventh.
‘So, Adrienne, he mostly met men in coffeehouses. Was he gay?’
‘Wally? I doubt it. He was like … sex wasn’t his deal.’
‘So what was?’
She shrugged.
‘Oh come on. You lived there ten years and you’ve never once wondered? I don’t believe that. The police’ll ask you and they won’t believe you either.’
‘Whatever it was, he kept it to himself. I mean, he never had guests, unless you call his weekend renters guests. You know their ads say, those places that set up the rentals. “Be a guest in the house of …” That kind of schmaltz.’
‘Otherwise, no one? Ever?’
‘Not that I saw. I wasn’t watching or anything. But I’d’ve heard something if there’d been people up there. I made the mistake one weekend of staying when he was renting out his sofa and it was like the sofa guy was tap-dancing. Never’ll do that again.’
‘Mail? Packages? Deliveries?’
‘Boxes? Never. But mail, yeah.’ She leaned forward, suddenly near awake. ‘Wally never said anything, but the man was obsessive about his mail. He was always home when it came. Always watching the box.’
‘For?’
‘I don’t know. He never bounded down the stairs.’
I couldn’t imagine Wally bounding anywhere, and from her expression neither could she. ‘Did he rip open letters at the box?’
‘Are you kidding? Never. It was like there were eyes in the walls.’
‘But he checked who they were from?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Did they come around the first of the month? Or the end?’
She was sitting up now, alert, or almost, and she seemed to be kneading the questions, her fingers moving in and out. ‘No, no special time. It was more like they were gifts, you know? Random gifts.’
‘Did he seem happy to get them?’
‘Wally? Happy? I never saw him without a scowl. He would have grumbled through sex. Except, like I said, he couldn’t be bothered with sex.’
‘How about calls? Texts?’
‘Nothing I heard. He wasn’t a nose to phone in the crosswalks type. He was, you know, an old guy. The guys he’d be sitting with in cafes were old guys, mostly.’
‘Mostly?’
‘Maybe three out of four.’
‘The others?’
‘You’re asking if there was a commonality? Uh-uh. None. Not race – some Hispanic; a couple blacks but not together. Never together. He was always one on one.’
‘Like an interview?’
‘Maybe. But it wasn’t like he was all private about it. He’s lived here forever. Everyone knew him. He’d be cordial – well, cordial for him – if you passed his table. Not “sit down a while” cordial. And really, no one was desperate for that.’
‘Everybody knew him?’ I repeated questioningly. ‘And you?’
‘I made a point of not knowing.’
‘Because?’
‘I’ve got a good deal with the flat.’
‘What do you pay?’
‘Depends on his short-termers. Months they’re there, I sail free.’
‘Nothing? That is a good deal.’ No wonder she was willing to endure this place. ‘Wally … What’s his last name?’
‘Last name? I don’t know.’
‘What do you write on your rent checks?’
‘I pay in cash. OK, here’s what I figured on that. These short-term renters, they pay a bundle for a week or weekend. They sleep on everything that’s horizontal. Some of them would sleep standing up if that’s all there was. Whatever. Wally rakes it in on them. He can’t make them all pay cash. So there’s a record of their rent, his income. The IRS could get that if they went after him. But me, he can do in cash. With all he gets from them, the feds aren’t going to imagine there’s even more rent money they’ve missed.’
‘Still, a small deception.’
‘Wally’s a small deception guy.’
‘Which means?’
‘Just that. He likes to be in control, not take chances, not get taken. An old guy who’s always checking his wallet.’
I nodded. Standing on the sidewalk, checking to be sure he wouldn’t be sideswiped by not having enough cash. Never looking up in time to see the mugger.
‘He was so careful, and yet he’s dead.’
‘You get old, you get used to being safe. You check your wallet, but you forget to check your back.’ She could have been talking about a minor character in a movie. I eyed her more carefully trying to suss out if that was true, mostly true, or partly. Ten years living beneath a man, knowing him well enough to list off his hangouts, is a long time to have no emotion when you hear he’s dead.
She braced her hands on the edge of the sofa but didn’t exert the effort to push herself up yet. ‘So, you done? I could be sleeping.’
Fat chance. I didn’t track you down only to leave without finding out about Mike. ‘Tell me again how you came to offer the apartment to my brother.’
‘He called.’
‘He had your number?’
‘Obviously. He called me.’
‘You and Mike were, uh, friends?’
‘What?’
‘How is it you know my brother? Are you friends? More than friends? Are—’
‘A. We’re not friends. B. If we had been before he offered me this dump, we wouldn’t be now.’
‘So, how’d he get your number?’
‘Wally gave it to him.’
‘Wally?’
‘That’s what he said, your fine brother.’
‘How would he know Wally?’ I was thinking aloud more than asking her. But she said, ‘Maybe he met him in a coffee shop. Any time in the last fifty years – that’s what somebody or other said. When Wally left college he just moved his butt from the lecture hall to the coffee shops.’
‘So, you’re saying Mike ran into him there this year?’
‘Are you listening? I don’t know. I don’t know your brother outside of one phone call and the
key under the mat. He said he’d stayed here from time to time. That it was safer than it looked.’ She laughed. ‘That should have been the clue.’
‘And the gun in your lingerie drawer?’
‘You were poking through my underwear!’ She shot up off the sofa; stood, hands actually on hips, and glared down at me. For an instant I was amazed she had that much energy. She stomped to the door, yanked it open. ‘Get out!’
I didn’t move. ‘Your gun?’
‘I don’t own a gun. Not now. Not last week.’
‘But, there is a gun, in your bedroom. You can stonewall me, but like I keep telling you, the police will get to your apartment. They’ll open every drawer. They’ll find that handgun and they’ll end up sitting right here where I am, asking you exactly what I’m asking. And, Adrienne, they won’t leave.’ I let that bit of reality sink in, then said, ‘Whose gun is it?’
I thought she’d opt for the mysterious housesitter, Mike, but she leaned back against the doorjamb and began tapping her finger on a knuckle of her other hand. In the garage out front metal clanked, an engine roared, brakes squealed, engine roared again. The odor of gas wafted through this basement, though maybe I was imagining that.
‘I’m still furious about you rooting through my drawers …’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Really.’
‘Huh? Yeah, OK.’
‘You were about to say …?’
‘Wally. It’s probably Wally’s gun. He’s got these strangers, these tech guys, and who knows how weird they are? They sign up online – I know that because he bitched about it, having no idea who he’d get. I don’t know if their conferences or anyone screens these guys, but to hear Wally – and you’ve got to consider the source there; Wally’d bitch asking for a glass of water. Anyway, to hear him he could be housing a bunch of crazies. So, it’d make sense for him to buy a gun. And since he’s renting out his flat, it’d make sense to stash the gun in mine.’
We were still a moment, both realizing, whatever Wally had thought, he’d been wrong and he was dead.
I stood. ‘Thanks for you help. Here’s my card. In case …’
She slipped it in the pocket of her robe, where it would probably disintegrate in the wash.
‘The people in the house upstairs? Are they the owners?’
She laughed, an edgy sound, and pulled the door open wider.
‘Hardly. This property doesn’t look like much. It isn’t much. But it’s in Berkeley. If you own property like this, here, you don’t have to live in it. You sit on the beach in Mexico and cash the checks.’
‘Thanks,’ I repeated just in case. If she’d connected me with the owner, that would have been a boon. But property ownership was public record.
My phone rang just as I pulled into traffic. I let it go to message.
TWENTY-ONE
‘Mike had a crash pad in Berkeley. You knew that, right?’
‘Nooo.’
I’d heard that single syllable – meaning not-no, maybe not-yes – from my sister, Janice, as long as I could remember. Janice is the number three child in our bunch of seven. The one who never fit. Katie, now Katharine on the newspaper masthead, was already writing in kindergarten, investigating chocolate pudding thefts, joining clubs, running clubs, getting awards. John was destroying robbers in the backyard before nursery school. Word is that Gary shot out of the birth canal objecting and never stopped. Gary and Gracie (the epidemiologist who’d been known as the bug kid) were a pair; different foci but they always had each other’s backs.
Like Mike and me.
Which left Janice.
Janice, ‘the nice one.’ The one left holding the bag and sneered at for doing it. The one afraid to turn her back because she knew no one had it. Katie, John and Janice are so much older than me that they were out of the house before I was in middle school. Most of what I know about Janice is family lore and not flattering. Her final indictment in the eyes of my fourth-generation San Francisco family was her move to Berkeley.
Citizens of other states may link the two cities together, but locals know the difference. Berkeleyans appreciate the value of their time, their long-term civic concern for the rights of the individual, their environmental probity. (The first integrated schools in the country were in Berkeley.) They talk about San Franciscans having a ‘hard energy.’ San Franciscans cannot believe any sane person could live in the best city in the world and opt to move to the suburbs. The City and County of San Francisco is 49 square miles at the tip of a peninsula. In their eyes the water keeps the bourgeoisie out.
I could go on, I thought, as I waited for Janice to modify her no, but I’d heard John and Gary and Gracie riff on it all too often. When I moved away to New York none of them complained. San Francisco … Paris … Rome … London … New York, OK. A volitional move to San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Berkeley? It was akin to six-to-life in Atascadero.
She pushed a clump of fading brown hair behind her ear, as if shoving it out of sight for a visitor. ‘Can I make you some tea?’
I would have killed for coffee. Not likely here. ‘When Mike was missing all those years, you were the one who knew where he was.’
‘Where he’d been.’
Big difference, but I wasn’t going to give her that.
‘I tried to make him—’
‘You were the one who never let on, Janice. The one who let us all look over the railing and think the worst every time we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge.’
‘Nobody told me.’
‘“Nobody tells me anything.” That could be your name.’
I stared not at her but past her into the paper-cluttered living room of this flat in the hills. She could have countered with: you would have done the same thing for Mike. And she’d have been right. I’d destroyed a marriage searching for him.
I was desperate to avoid looking at her, to not see her shrink back against my betrayal. When I’d been stranded she was the one I’d called. And yet, little as I really knew my sister, I did know this. She was concealing something. Throwing out answers that were not whole, running diversions, protecting the nugget of I-couldn’t-guess-what, as if it would blow up in her face. She’d been a rabbit raised with foxes; she knew how to hide in plain sight. ‘Mike had a crash pad in Berkeley. You knew that, right?’
‘No!’ She grabbed my shoulder and slammed me into the wall.
My head ricocheted off the plaster. For a moment my vision went blurry. I couldn’t feel my fingers at all. I stared at her pale blue eyes. I was too shocked to speak. The teenage lore of Janice is that she took it and took it and took it until one day Gary found her cringing behind the water heater and she came at him with a knife.
‘No.’ Her energy drained as fast as it had built.
I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing.
‘No.’ Her voice quavered. ‘Why would he? He could stay here any time.’ She was staring at my shoulder, rubbing it now as if to erase her outburst. ‘Why would he need somewhere else?’
‘Women?’
‘Not that place. If he took a woman there she wouldn’t be thinking about him, she’d be looking out for rats.’
She knew she’d blown it the instant the words left her mouth. I just shook my head. Then I smiled and patted her arm. She had husbanded secrets about Mike for years, never letting on to the family, not even to Mom. It was, she told me later, the reason she’d had to move out of the city. ‘I should be pleased you let your guard down with me.’ I repeated the question. ‘Why did he need a place to stay here when he could have dropped in on you?’
She sighed.
‘To do something he didn’t want you to know?’
‘I put my life on hold for him. How can he …?’
‘It’s the question we all have. Here, sit.’ I steered her to the sofa and waited while she moved a pile of orange flyers to the floor. Monday, on the pier, I’d promised Mike my silence. Screw it. ‘Janice, I need you to keep this to yourself.’
‘My
superpower.’ She almost smiled.
I gave her the rundown. ‘So he left his own place to stay in the Haight with Wally—’
‘Wally Ellis?’
‘You know him?’
‘Everybody knew him.’
Knew? ‘You already know he’s dead?’
‘What? No way! Wally?’
I told her about that, too. ‘So, Janice, Mike tells Adrienne about this dive in Berkeley.’
‘He leaves his place because it’s too dangerous and goes to Wally’s and Wally is shot. Did someone mistake Wally for Mike?’
I almost laughed. ‘Not if they’re of our species. Other than sex and race there’s no similarity at all.’
Janice picked up the flyers and started batting at the edges, thinking. In the years of her exile here she had kept herself in the counterculture ‘know’ in case she heard something about Mike. She’d been to meetings. Many meetings. She’d probably straightened more packs of flyers than the rest of the family combined. Now as I looked at her, I could see her puzzling out what these last days meant, the way she would have assessed news of an anti-coal-tar demonstration in Canada that might possibly have attracted Mike. Tapping, mulling, finding the sheet of the story that didn’t fit.
I waited, noting how focused my sister was, how in her element. How relaxed.
‘You know what surprises me most?’ she said, still tapping but so softly that none of the papers moved. ‘Not that Wally Ellis was killed, but that he was killed now. Years ago he was the source. He knew everyone. All hush-hush went through him. The mayor wanted the lowdown on a gang lord, Wally was the one with the real scoop. Reporter wanted the rumors on a parish priest, he could save himself weeks of work by one coffee with Wally. Everybody knew Wally; Wally knew everything. “Gave the least amount”, that’s the phrase I kept hearing. He gave to get. It was the getting he cared about. So, he was sitting on a lot, always. Or so it seemed. If he’d been shot back then there would have been a hundred suspects.’
‘So no one could take the chance?’
‘Exactly. He was a master of self-protection. Ironic, huh? He never revealed anything about someone who could hurt him, but to stay in the game he had to give something.’