Impersonal Attractions (3 page)

Annie shared Sam’s fascination for murder, but she preferred hers in bed—on the pages of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard. She loved to be terrified, but at home, where she could tuck herself under the covers with her book and a flashlight as she’d loved to do since childhood.

“What do you think a person has to do to get another cup of coffee in this place? Scream ‘fire’?”

“Try ‘murder,’” said Sam.

“Hey, that’s not funny.”

“I know. Sorry. I’m just preoccupied with this Diablo case. It’s beginning to get to me.”

“Anything you want to tell me about?” Annie hunkered forward in anticipation.

“I’m not supposed to, you know.”

“I know. So tell me.”

“Cross your heart.”

“Cross my heart. Spill.”

“Off the re—”

“I won’t tell a soul, I promise. Anyway, you’re a reporter. Aren’t you supposed to be filling us all in? Or have
I
missed something here?”

“What you’ve missed is that sometimes we learn things that we’re asked to sit on. Now, do you want to hear this or not?”

Annie nodded yes, her lips tightly sealed.

“The police found a pair of glasses on the trail where the last woman was shot. What’s great is that they’re an unusual prescription—should be traceable. Bulletins have gone out to all the optometrists and ophthalmologists in the area. It should be just a matter of time now. If they’re not the killer’s, at least maybe there’s a witness.”

Annie was pensive. She stirred her coffee quietly for a few minutes.

“Sam, what’s with these guys? These psychopaths?”

“You mean why do they do it?” Sam pushed her black curls off her forehead. “I guess I’m supposed to be the expert.” She sighed. “God knows I’ve met enough of them.”

“Is it sex? Do they get off on it?”

“That’s part of it. There’s something pent up that seems to be released in the act of murder. But I don’t think it’s ever quite that simple. They’re always complicated, lonely, screwed up. We could just say they’re crazy, sociopaths, but what does that mean? Most of us are crazy, but we don’t go around killing people.

“Revenge, a distorted revenge plays a role too. He blames everything that’s wrong with his life on girls with long, dark hair because a girl like that turned him down when he was twelve. Or on women who look like his mother. Or blacks, people who whisper, whatever.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter what the motive is,” said Annie, “except that the pattern helps to catch him.”

“Sure. And meanwhile there are an awful lot of nervous
people out there who are afraid to go for a walk in their own neighborhoods, not to mention on Mt. Diablo.”

“I wouldn’t.” Annie shivered. “Not even if Prince Charming were waiting for me at the top.”

“Where
do
you think he’s going to be waiting for you, in the ads?”

Sam’s smirk made Annie want to reach over and pop her one, best friend or no.

“I think you’re very cute, Sam, and if you don’t stop giving me such a hard time, I’m never going to write those two ads.”

“No, really, I think they’re a great idea. You place a research query ad asking to talk with others who have already placed ads and then another ad as a personal of your own—and who knows what you’ll get.”

“Samantha, I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m just doing .this for the book. Otherwise, I would never place an ad.”

Sam stared at her guilelessly.

“Okay, okay,” Annie said, “so I’ve answered a few thousand. But I’ve never placed one.”

“And you never will, either, if you don’t get it written. Or did you say you’ve done that?”

A quick look at Annie’s face answered her question. “Well, we’ll do it later on the phone.” She waved her credit card at the waitress. “I’ve got to get back to the office. You never can tell when a new loony may hit the streets with a story just for me.”

“God, are you a ghoul. Don’t worry, there’ll always be someone waiting for you.”

“Not so, my dear, not so. Sometimes you have to go out looking for a good murder, just like a good man.”

Annie waved her away, dismissing Sam’s last words as their very own brand of smart mouth.

But, on down the road, she would remember them.

FOUR

T
he bar where the blond man smiled at his reflection in the fly-specked mirror was on Folsom Street, in the gritty South-of-Market area. The streets were lined with big semis, tractor-trailer trucks bearing license plates from all over the country. Vagrants slept in bottle-littered empty lots, pulling blankets of old cardboard over them. Some of the bars attracted that segment of the gay world drawn to a little rough and tumble, the clink of chains, the smell of oiled black leather. But most of them were 6 A
.
M
.
to
2
A
.
M
.
joints, peopled with lonely men and women for whom the distinctions of desire had long been blurred by the bottle.

The blond man knocked back a shot of bar bourbon. He took a long pull on his beer chaser, set it down on the slightly sticky bar, and held his hands straight out in front of him. No shake, no tremble. He was relaxed.

Earlier he’d been nervous. It had been such a long time.

Looking in the mirror again, he flexed his biceps. He liked to watch his muscles move beneath his black T-shirt.

It was a fresh shirt. He’d been home to shower and change. He’d had to.

How surprised she’d looked when she realized that his present wasn’t what she’d thought. He’d had something to give her, all right.

She’d smiled at first, right after she’d opened the door. So excited. They always were. Talked about how pretty the flowers were. How sweet they smelled.

The roses did smell good, but not good enough to cover up her smell.

He took a deep breath. Old whiskey, cigarette smoke, stale beer. Smells he was comfortable with.

She was so stupid to have let him in.

“Dumb bitch,” he muttered to himself.

“I know what you mean, pal,” said the man drinking next to him. “They’re all alike.”

The blond man wasn’t looking for company or conversation. He liked to savor the time afterward, to roll it around in his mouth like the taste of a good steak.

“Women!” The man next to him spat on the already filthy floor. “They’ve ruined a lot more men than this.” He gestured toward his half-empty glass of beer. “One of them break your heart, mister?”

“No,” the blond man answered curtly as he stood up. He drained his beer and laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound.

“That’s good,” he said. “Nope, not my heart. Her heart, that’s more like it.” He flipped onto the bar the dollar tip he’d picked off a red and blue carpet an hour earlier and walked out. On the street, he squinted into the bright afternoon.

FIVE

L
eaving The Deli, Annie strolled west on Union Street, enjoying the shops and the warm afternoon. September was the time to enjoy San Francisco, during the Indian summer the poor August tourists had just missed.

She always felt so sorry for them, enshrouded in the bone-chilling, blowing fog that mischievously hid the Golden Gate Bridge from them day after gray day. Annie thought travel agents had a moral obligation to mother summer tourists into bringing plenty of warm clothing. Or to warn them to hold off their visits until September or October, when the fog went back out to sea and the crystalline blue days rivaled the postcards they all sent back home. Then the view from a thousand different spots could stop the heart of even a native.

But maybe this was better. The tourists were gone and San Franciscans could enjoy their city at its best, at the beginning of fall.

The beginning of the year would always be in September for Annie. She had been conditioned by so many sharpenings of pencils for school’s opening both as a schoolgirl and, later, a schoolmarm. Nature seemed to be of the same mind here in California. The fall brought warmth and sunshine, and then the rains that would turn the hills from sere brown to luscious green.

Annie strolled and stretched, catlike, in the afternoon sun. It was so nice to be dressed in only a T-shirt and jeans—one of the rare days when she didn’t need a sweater.

When she’d first arrived from Atlanta, her hometown, she hadn’t believed the advice of her friends: always, and especially in summer, take a jacket. Now the wrap was a given, as was the phenomenon of San Francisco air conditioning—a confluence of ocean, bay, and inland heat that produced the city’s clean, cool breath.

She reached the corner of Fillmore and turned to begin the steep climb up Fillmore Hill to her apartment over the crest of Pacific Heights. A young couple, out of control with downward momentum, almost crashed into her.

“Sorry, sorry,” they apologized breathlessly. She watched their backs as they crossed the street. Clad in twin yellow sweat shirts and jeans, they were a couple out of a soft-drink commercial. Laughing, secure in their world. Annie felt a twinge of envy.

She knew that feeling. Us against the world. She’d had it before. And she’d have it again.

In the meantime, she had David.

David, her once-a-week lover. Like refined sugar, he was good for a quick surge, but always left her hungry for something substantial, something more. But as Samantha said, at least men like David kept women from gobbling up handsome young boys on the street.

Like the one who was smiling down the hill toward her. Blond, blue-eyed. The quintessential California kid. She was old enough to be his mother, if, of course, she’d been a child bride. She tried to control her puffing. She hoped she wasn’t as noisy as her Volkswagen, Agatha, as she ground up the hill. San Francisco was not a city kind to old cars and old ladies with crunchy noises in their knees.

Shut up, she said to herself. You’re beginning to sound like your mother, old before her time. At thirty-seven, you’re not ready for the home yet, or worse, the endlessly boring flatlands of the South.

She picked up the pace and lengthened her stride, taking the steps up the hill two at a time. It was indeed a lovely day, a great day to be alive.

A
lucky
day to be alive. She could never walk up this hill without remembering what had once happened here to Sam, who almost hadn’t been lucky or alive.

*

Sam, like Annie, tromped through cities whenever and however she pleased. With a sane person’s healthy respect for dark, lonely streets, alleyways, and neighborhoods that everyone knew meant trouble, she was independent but not foolhardy.

One night, a year ago, having finally found a parking place in the neighborhood, a feat akin to winning the Bay to Breakers Race, Sam decided to pop in on Annie. She’d been with some friends six blocks away, a small party that had broken up at about nine.

Trudging up the Fillmore steps, thinking about a shopping trip she was planning to New York, mortality was hardly on her mind. Until a man jumped out of a dark driveway and grabbed her.

Time stopped. She’d seen plenty of self-defense maneuvers while hanging around with cops and had idly asked herself,
what if?
This was
if.

In torturous slow motion, Sam learned what stuff she was made of.

With one long, reflexive move, she had stomped on his instep, smashed his nose with the side of a hand, and screamed at the top of her lungs. He let her go and she ran like hell. She didn’t know if he was behind her or not. She just ran until she found a liquor store, where she’d caught her breath and stopped shaking long enough to call the police. Their response was quick, but they found nothing. Her attacker was long gone.

He’d been tall. He’d been black. He’d smelled of stale booze. And he ought to have a sore nose and a limp. That was all Sam could tell them.

Later, when she finally did arrive at Annie’s, too rattled to go home though it was late, she was furious.

“Joe Kelly was one of the guys who answered the call. ‘Sam,’ he said, ‘you know better than to be out on the streets of this city alone.’ How the hell does he think I get around? With an armed guard, a Doberman?”

“He probably means you should be on the arm of a man.”

“And he’s right,” Sam snorted, “for more reasons than one, but until that guy shows up, what do we all do? Double bolt our doors and stay inside?”

It was infuriating to live defensively. To concentrate on carefully locked doors, to be wary of where one walked, when, and with whom. They agreed that it meant that they’d given up, given up the night to the robbers and the rapists. They’d allowed the bad guys to circumscribe their world with fear.

“Not me,” said Sam, “no way. Let them catch me if they can.”

But bravado aside, for both of them the memory of that night was a bad taste that never quite went away.

*

At home, the red light on Annie’s answering machine flashed four times.

David: “Hi, let’s get together for a little R & R.” His voice was low and insinuating.