Out of Nowhere

by Susan Dunlap

  ‘It gets like that,’ Gary muttered to his plate.

  ‘That was a Tuesday,’ I said. ‘Friday morning he went out for a run—’

  ‘That’s his deal now,’ Gary said. ‘Says I suck the hours out his days. If he doesn’t get to exercise in the morning, doesn’t happen. Says, if he starts to leave the office, I figure he’s got time to do some more filing.’

  ‘He’s right.’ I’d temped for Gary. ‘Anyway, he was sideswiped again. Cutting across the Embarcadero.’

  ‘Jaywalking while people are trying to get to work. No one stopped, right?’

  John was stating a fact more than answering a question, and I just nodded. ‘Of course he said he wasn’t hurt, not much anyway. But he took it seriously enough to find himself a temporary apartment.’

  ‘The place beneath us?’ Boots said between bites of scrambled eggs.

  ‘Right. Just till Adrienne came back.’

  ‘So, he sublet from this Adrienne?’

  ‘She says not.’

  Boots held up a bandaged hand, stopping Heather mid-fork. ‘From Wally? Like us?’

  Gracie had lost the coffee lottery contest and gotten up to make more. Mom had water boiling, so Gracie’s penance was only pouring water into the pot and carting it back to the table. I reached for it.

  ‘Wait, Darce. Give it time to clear the filter!’

  ‘OK, OK! Here’s my guess. I never got to ask Mike about it, but here’s what I think. Janice said everyone knew Wally. She did. So chances were Mike did. So, he probably called him, assuming he’d know who could put him up for a few days. Long enough to figure out who was after him.’

  ‘So, who was after him?’ Boots said. ‘I mean, there was the gas leak. That was aimed at him, right? And now this! What does he think?’ He looked down at his bandaged hand, spotted with egg. ‘Same guy as shot Wally?’

  ‘Investigation’s ongoing,’ John said.

  ‘Can’t they run a make on the gun?’

  ‘If it was registered in the city, yeah. In the state, maybe. It … No.’

  ‘Adrienne said it wasn’t hers. Mike told me it wasn’t his.’

  John just looked disgusted. But it was Gracie who said, ‘Sure. Pack eight hundred fifty thousand people into a forty-seven-mile-square city. Toss in guns. What could go wrong? It’s an epidemic.’

  John, Gary and I started to speak at once. We’d all heard Gracie’s rant before. It was Gary who prevailed. ‘What we’ve got is an unknown perpetrator with an unclear object. Is he after Mike? All of us? Or whoever was in—’ he glanced at Boots and Heather – ‘or above Mike’s temporary apartment. Whoever drove his car?’

  ‘Oh, Darcy, that means you, doesn’t it?’ Mom was squeezing my shoulder.

  I put my hand over hers. ‘Probably. But I’m here shoveling down eggs. So, tough for the villain.’ I plunked a forkful into my mouth. ‘Mike followed me for two days trying to spot the guy, and to protect me. But nada. And then Wally was shot upstairs.’ I eyed Boots and Heather. ‘What do you guys know about that?’

  What they knew boiled down to how inconvenient it is to have a murder in your temporary dwelling. ‘I couldn’t get my presentation notes! Or clothes,’ Boots added. ‘My suitcases were suddenly all “crime scene.”’

  ‘Mine?’ Heather said. ‘For all I know they’re in San Francisco or in Spain or South America. I don’t think I’m ever going to see them again. But that’s minor compared to what you all are going through. Mike being gone all that time and now he could be killed.’

  We definitely did not want to deal with that. ‘Wally,’ I said, ‘info I got is he once knew everything going on, politically, socially. Wrote columns for counterculture papers occasionally. But word is his ship had sailed.’

  ‘Maybe his sources drowned.’ That from Gary. ‘Or died of old age.’

  ‘I’ll tell you, I’d never have put money on him making it this long. All those years … If he didn’t know, he didn’t let on. If he did, he’d’ve choked before he’d do anything—’

  ‘Doing nothing is doing something.’

  We all stared at Heather for a moment.

  ‘True,’ John said, ‘he could have cleared a lot of cases just by opening his mouth, prevented some aftermath. When the mayor was caught up with the trafficking, the circuit of teenaged girls from Vegas, etc., Wally knew all about it before we did. If he’d even hinted to us, we could have set up a sting and got to some of those girls before the circuit moved them on. If we could’ve pulled him in on some charge and held him we would have. He was a sly one.’

  ‘Wow.’

  We all stared at Boots.

  ‘So he really did know people, way back? I figured he’d just had too much substance, you know?’

  ‘So, you’re saying Wally told you secrets from past city scandals and people who—’

  ‘He would have, I think. But you know, we’re paying a bundle to sleep in his place in order to talk about our ideas, our apps, our plans. If we want to listen to some old guy natter, we can do that at home.’

  ‘Besides,’ Heather said, ‘Wally just knew local stuff. Names from twenty years ago in San Francisco don’t mean anything to us.’

  Gracie hefted the coffee pot, gauged the level of fullness and poured herself half a cup. ‘Keeps coming back to: if someone was out to shoot him, they’d have done it ten or twenty years ago, not now.’

  ‘Darcy?’ Mom was standing behind me. Had she been there all along? ‘Just what was it you were doing all night up there north of Santa Rosa?’

  ‘Looking for Maria Perez. I had a lead to her from Jansen’s Burritos, the place Mike and I … Maybe this is just too personal, you know. You don’t mind, Boots? Heather?’

  In the flurry of their dismissal I finished my eggs, reached for the coffee pot and reconsidered. Then I told my brothers and sister and mother that Mike had been transporting criminals from the coast to the city, beginning with Santino right before Mike disappeared.

  ‘And after?’ Gracie said.

  ‘Santino killed four people. We had half the force looking for him!’ John.

  ‘Mike did that while he was “missing”?’ Gary.

  ‘He brought Santino into the city and let him go undercover? And kill people? Do you know the havoc?’

  It seemed like there was a silence before Mom spoke. She said, ‘All the time we thought he might be dead. He was driving into the city.’

  She didn’t say: He never called? He didn’t care enough to let us know he was alive. Mom, who never left the house overnight all those years lest Mike came back and found it empty.

  My gaze went blank. No one spoke. The silence seemed too thick to allow movement. I suspect the rest of them were having their own variations of my realization: the brother I thought was so special had faded away. Maybe he’d existed only in my imagination. Maybe he’d changed. But the man I had argued with on the pier a few days ago, later in Golden Gate Park resembled ‘my’ Mike, but he was a different being wearing that body.

  I couldn’t bring myself to believe that before. I did now.

  I sat there, feeling like a cold cave had been carved into my gut.

  Then I proved I was a Lott. I poured the rest of the coffee into my cup, swallowed some of it, and my feelings, and then told them about the safe house in Berkeley, Adrienne using it, Maria owning it. ‘Thank Janice. When it comes to finding something or someone on the computer, she is the best. She discovered the Berkeley safe house’s owner was near Point Arena. Grouch Marcus knew how to contact Maria. I—’ I swallowed – ‘drove him up there to meet Maria. Maria called Santino and I took her to rendezvous with him. She had a truck parked out of the way there; when she drove off I went after her. I lost her. I followed the sheriff back to near the original place Marcus and I met her. That’s where I watched them bring up the body. It was Marcus.’

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘You’re wrong about that.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I got an update from the sheriff. The man they
pulled out of the water wasn’t Marcus at all.’

  ‘Listen, I saw—’

  He held up his palm.

  ‘Grouch Marcus, as you called him, never existed at all. The man they pulled from the water was Santino.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Grouch Marcus, as you called him, never existed at all. The man they pulled from the water was Santino.

  I wanted to protest: No, John, the body wasn’t Santino. I saw him on the stretcher. It was Marcus. I drove the man up there, three hours in a car together.

  But John was saying, ‘“Marcus” looked like Santino because he was Santino. Santino, in the guise of Marcus.’

  ‘What? That’s not … How could …?’

  Voices battered at me from all directions. ‘How could that be?’ is red meat to a Lott. They all had opinions, even Mom.

  ‘How could it be?’ I all but shouted. ‘Marcus recognized me from when I was a kid at the taco stand.’

  ‘He said he recognized you. Easy for him to say; no reason for you not to believe.’

  Point for Gracie, there.

  ‘What do you remember of his house?’

  ‘Ramshackle. Sometimes Mike and I and the Perez girls sat on the steps. But we had to be careful for splinters. Splinters in the butt was a big joke then.’

  ‘No one chased you?’

  ‘No.’ I thought about it a moment. ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, Darce, as far as you can say with confidence, you did not see any evidence of a man living in that house until today?’

  ‘I was a kid. I got to scoop on the burrito line. Mike and I were on our way to the ball game.’

  ‘You were headed to the ball game. Mike was setting up business.’ Gary’s voice was cold, steely, like a knife out of the fridge.

  ‘You were cover.’ John.

  I pulled Duffy up onto my lap and stroked his chest. ‘Be that as it may … OK, let’s say Mike did pick up Santino at the coast and drive him to Jansen’s. That’s right before the earthquake. Then Mike disappeared.’

  ‘Wise move. For him,’ Gary muttered.

  ‘Wise for all of us. No, listen, I’m not just going to bat for him. Suppose he’d stayed. Santino would have used us as leverage on him. He could have come after us one at a time. Like now.’

  ‘Are you saying Mom was better off worrying every day that Mike was dead or—’

  ‘I’m saying either way, same difference. She worried about him wherever he was. If he’d stayed here she would have worried about the danger to him here, or to you, Gracie, or any of us. And she’d have been right; he would have been in danger. I’m saying Mike chose the lesser of evils,’ I said surprising myself. Outraged as I was, I hadn’t intended to defend him. I could feel myself shaking.

  ‘Probably one of a flock of safe houses, that shack,’ John’s elbows were braced on the table, as if the food had disappeared and he was back in the station house. ‘That basement in Berkeley, bet we’ll find Santino’s fingerprints there. Place up near Point Arena. Who knows where else? Here’s the beauty of it, no one’s looking at those shacks; no one wants them in their line of sight. So there’s no one wondering why they hadn’t seen the old guy for a while. Santino can just pop in when he needs to.’

  I was remembering what Maria said to me. ‘The date of the shoot-out, when Santino shot those four people in the Mission, what was it?’

  Phones leapt into hands.

  I didn’t wait for their confirmations. ‘The first Thursday in April, right? The day Wally Ellis was shot.’

  ‘Coincidence?’ Gracie asked after a moment.

  John snorted. ‘I’ll tell Higgins you spotted that.’ A few moments passed in silence. He said, ‘PD’ll check it out.’

  ‘But what’s the connection?’

  ‘PD’ll find out; that’s what we do. Let it go, Gracie.’

  Mom reached for the empty egg platter. Spoons clattered. ‘So,’ she said, ‘are you saying we’re home free? Or just that we’ve done all we can?’

  John just shrugged.

  Gracie drew in a breath preparatory to combat, then suddenly gave it up, sighed and said, ‘I’ve got a meeting in an hour. There’s been an outbreak of Hanta Virus east of San Diego and … We done here?’

  Gary finished his coffee in one swallow and stood. Duffy jumped off my lap.

  ‘Hey, what about Wally? The man was murdered.’

  ‘Wally,’ John said, shaking his head. ‘That’s going to be one long case. Half the city had it in for him one time or another.’

  ‘But not now,’ I insisted.

  ‘Darce, leave it to DD.’

  Not our problem. But I didn’t say that. We were a family that was full up on tension. No one wanted to sip from a stranger’s glass.

  Heather stuck her head in through the doorway; the idea of enduring more discomfort with her sad-sacking about it underlined the communal feeling.

  And the scrum of pre-departure necessities began. Gary slid a ring of keys into my hand. He had to run, he insisted, but he was leaving me one of his other cars. Implicit in that was that I could cart the techies back downtown to wherever they’d be staying from here on in.

  Suddenly Mom and I were alone in the kitchen. I grabbed the cups by the handles, slipped an arm in front of Mom at the sink and eased one batch in and then the other. ‘You ought to get a dishwasher.’

  She gave a thin laugh. ‘I am the dishwasher.’

  ‘What I mean—’

  ‘I know. What you mean, Darcy, is that when Mike was gone, he was safe. When we brought him back, we robbed him of that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘We traded worry for danger. But here’s the thing, honey: we traded fantasy for reality. That’s what Leo would tell you, right?’

  It was.

  ‘Do you have a phone number for Mike?’

  ‘A cell. If he checks it.’

  ‘Give it to me.’

  Mom herded the two techies back into the kitchen while I went upstairs to see if Janice had woken up. She was in her old room, one with dormer window that she liked. The room, though, always looked as if heat would skid to a stop at its door. The dormer faced the Pacific – ‘my ocean view’, she said with an irony that Gary, Gracie and John never bothered to get. Her view, of course, was fog. It varied from heavy morning fog to the kind of dusting in the afternoon that allowed her to squint into the horizon and try to discriminate the gray blue above from the muddy blue below, and do it quick before serious fog rolled back in.

  I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Glad you’re not dead.’

  ‘I’m not?’ She glanced at the gray window.

  ‘This is the last time I ever give you car keys, you know that, right?’

  ‘That supposed to assure me I’m not dead?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t have much time. So, tell me what you found out about Wally Ellis. Was he in it with Santino? Two old guys about the same age.’

  ‘Help me sit up.’

  ‘Are you sure you—’

  ‘Darcy, I have something you want.’

  I smiled and helped, relieved at how much better than expected my sister seemed.

  ‘There’s a lot of data on Santino. It took me two hours to wade. You know one report says the same as another, as the one before that and before that, and then suddenly one has a line that’s nowhere else. So you have to read every paragraph of every one.’ She scrunched her shoulder and bent a knee preparatory to pushing herself up, and gasped.

  I grabbed the sheet and held it away from her knee.

  Janice, the nice one, never complained.

  I said, ‘And you discovered?’

  ‘No connection between Wally and Santino. No hint, no speculation. And here’s the take-away. There wasn’t any connection, because Santino was shrewd and very, very careful. If he had had any need of Wally, he would have back-grounded him first and Santino would have concluded that a guy like Wally could never be trusted.’

  ‘But Wally was known to never reveal—’

&nb
sp; ‘Everyone’s got their breaking point.’

  ‘You sound like the Mafia.’

  ‘Oh, little sister, you don’t know the paths my fingers have taken.’

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or shiver. I said, ‘But Wally must have heard that Santino was in the city. I mean, if Wally knew everything then—’

  ‘Oh yeah, he knew.’

  I raised an eyebrow and waited.

  ‘Read Wally’s column the day after Santino got to the city. The day before the shootings. If you read it contemporaneously it wouldn’t mean anything to you. Wally covered himself that way. But read it a week later and Bingo!’

  Janice’s shoulders tightened. She was trying hard to keep herself upright, to keep me from seeing how hard she was trying.

  ‘So, why was Wally shot?’ Before she had to speak, I said, ‘Mike aided Santino big time. He’s been targeted big time. And yet, Mike’s not dead. He was as easy a target as Wally, but he’s not dead.’

  She sagged down. I knew I should leave. She would answer my questions till the fog turned dark. She’d never complain, just go at it, query after positing, the way she had checking out Santino and Wally. The way she’d taken public transit into the city rather than inconveniencing me—

  ‘Janice, how long did it take you to get to Mike’s?’

  ‘It wasn’t bad.’

  I didn’t have time to break through her wall of non-suffering. ‘No, listen, what time did you get to Mike’s car?’

  ‘Oh. I had to wait for BART – there was a hang-up on the Fremont line. So, it took me awhile to get in here on the train, get the streetcar. That was an hour and forty-five minutes. Then I walked a few blocks and—’

  ‘What time …?’

  ‘… Did the car blow up? 5.27.’ She smiled weakly. ‘So, yeah, that was after you drove Santino out of the city.’

  I nodded.

  She inhaled so hard the cords on her neck stood out. ‘The explosive was triggered. Not on a timer. Set off when I got in.’

  ‘Omigod.’ I reached down to hug her, but she put up a hand. And I realized I didn’t know where all her burns were. Instead I repeated, ‘I’m glad you’re not dead.’

  It was a moment before I said, ‘If someone set it off when you got in, they saw you get in. Me they might have mistaken for Mike, but not you.’