Leave It to Me (11 page)

I pushed poor Wyatt out of guilt range, and ordered an ole and a bagel at the counter.

“Cool, “the kid behind the counter said above the whoosh of steamed milk.”I like the way you say it. Makes for a fiesta in the head.”

I carried my coffee and bagel to the row of tables by the wall-to-wall glass sliding door and took possession of the only table for two left overlooking Waller Street. Then I shifted my chair around and scanned faces for one that had “gumshoe” glowing in invisible ink on its forehead. None of the coffee-drinking males looked the right age. They still wore their baseball caps backwards, had too many rings in their lips and lobes. An HIV test came back positive on my right, and on my left a techie argument about too many Asians making the Internet boring. Two men in hard hats strode in for take-out lattes. Another seedy row house being gentrified, more Haight natives being expelled. An old man in winter coat, fur cap and galoshes loped in. He carried his own mug. It had a Yale logo. “How’s it going, Lionel?” the kid behind the counter chatted as he filled the mug. “The Martians treating you any better today?”

A car honked on Waller, kept honking. A woman in a shapeless dress of expensive linen looked up, frowning, from her paperback. She was frowning at a yellow VW bug honking at a double-parked panel truck. The truck was Loco Larry’s. The woman went back to reading
The Portable Chekhov
. She caught me staring, got up and grabbed a postcard advertising Tanqueray gin from a rack of freebie postcards and scribbled something on it. Then she popped the book into a canvas tote, gathered up her dirty glass, plate and fork and stacked them in a plastic
bin that had a
PLEASE
! Magic-Markered on its side, stalked past my table, dropping the postcard on the floor near my feet, pushed the sliding glass aside and left the café. I didn’t have to crane my neck to read her message:
Read “The Kiss” and Die
.

On Waller the driver of the VW bug had given up honking. I watched him sit on the sidewalk and do what looked like yoga breathing exercises.

A tall, bald man came in, wheeling a bike. He had the shaved legs of a competitive bicyclist. He didn’t go to the counter and order an herbal tea as I’d expected. He came straight to my table. “No fun when you make it easy.” He grinned at the rose on my face. “Fred,” he said, “Fred Pointer. Let’s get started.” The grin didn’t lighten up the harrowed blue of his eyes.

“Get you a tea?”

“How about we walk around some and you fill me in. I’m not saying yes yet. As Ham told you, I don’t take missing-persons cases.”

“It’s a mission, not a case,” I shot back.

He gave me a strange look. “Maybe you need a shrink more than you need me.”

“Ready?” I left my dirty dishes on the table, and led the man from Vulture out of the café.

We walked; I talked. Of Mama and Pappy, of Celia, of Wyatt, of Mr. Bullock and his silly assignments. I kept talking. I couldn’t stop talking. It became as easy as breathing. I described the smell of lye in an outhouse, the furry touch of spiders crawling over my legs, the pooling
of sap-white blood of roaches I swatted dead, I tasted stony grit in orphanage gruel, I felt panic as fingers closed around my throat. I hadn’t remembered any of it, not until that moment. We kept walking. Away from the Haight.

Fred Pointer dug fast and dug deep. He called me back in less than a week. “What I have isn’t necessarily pretty.”

I arranged for him to meet me at Steep Steps as I came off my Friday-night-Saturday-morning shift. “Want to call off the dogs?” And when I didn’t say yes or no, he added, “No guarantees except that it’ll be expensive.”

I said I wanted to know what he knew before I decided whether to stay in or quit.

We went in our separate cars to an all-night diner in the Tenderloin. There was only one other patron, a slick fifty-something Eurasian man in leather pants and Elvis hair on a stool at the counter. The man was sipping water out of a highball glass. It may have been gin or vodka in the glass. A khaki duffel bag and cheap vinyl carry-on were on the floor by his booted feet. He was chatting up the waiter, probably Vietnamese, in some Asian language and making the stool seat spin half turns. The waiter kept his head down and wet-mopped around the bags.

Fred picked his way to the table farthest from the counter. “Can we get some service?”

The waiter looked up but didn’t stop mopping. “Yeah?” he said.

Fred Pointer ordered hot water and a slice of lemon. “What’ll you have?” he asked me. “You’re paying.”

I ordered a Coke. “So lay the good news/bad news on me,” I begged.

“Pepsi,” the waiter said.

“Okay, Pepsi.”

Fred said, “You’re pretty special, Devi.”

“I knew that,” I snapped.

The waiter propped the handle of the wet mop against the table next to ours, and went off for the Pepsi.

“No, I mean different special.”

“How different?”

“Two continents went into your making. That means you’re one up on Kurtz, Devi.”

Kurtz was probably a mixed-race local rock star. I’d ask Ham to get me a freebie to a Kurtz concert. “Well, not that special,” I countered. “There’s the late Klaus Nomi, and—”

Fred said, “Shut up, okay. Let me do the talking.”

“Go ahead,” I pouted.

“I’ve exchanged a couple of faxes with a fellow in Bombay. I worked on a case with this fellow must have been five years ago. He didn’t recognize the name you gave, but he said he remembered there’d been juicy stuff in all the papers about a sex-guru serial killer and his harem of white hippies, he thought way back in the seventies. He’s checking it out.”

“How do you know this man’s reliable? Have you met him?”

“Who? Rajeev Raj? He’d kill if he had to. When we had him work on the case I mentioned, it was the usual post-custody-hearing
kidnapping thing, he tracked the kid and his dad down to a beachfront hotel in Goa, broke into the room, beat up the dad and kidnapped back the kid. He’s efficient.”

“So what’re you saying? There’s a possibility that my mother was in that harem?”

“The years fit. The region fits. Who knows, maybe you have half brothers and sisters roaming the world. He’s supposed to have fucked all the members of his happy hippie family. A lot of those gals didn’t make it back. White slave traffic, Saudi sheikhs, jaundice, cholera, want me to go on?”

“My mother came back to California.” Pappy’d paid her airfare back, but I didn’t get into the money angle.

“You don’t know it was your mother, do you? That’s why I say, it could get expensive.”

“Males too?”

“He’d fuck a cockroach if it were big enough, that’s his rep. What we used to call polymorphous perverse.”

Fred made that phrase sound a fun type to be. Even if I owed my existence to two of those sex-cult bozos, I didn’t have to out-polymorphous-perverse them; in fact I didn’t have to believe Fred and his Mr. Raj. “How do I know you aren’t kidding?”

“What do you want from me, jokes?” He parted his lips slightly, and moved his lower jaw laterally a couple of times. “Hear it pop?” he asked. “It’s tensing up. I could use some jokes myself. You know, loosen up.”

“What else did your man in Bombay fax?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He pummeled lemon pulp with the back of his teaspoon. “That you want me to give the green light to Rajeev? He won’t come cheap.”

What choice does an orphan have? Ignorance is no choice.

“You want to sleep on it, and call me tomorrow?”

“Get me what you can find, Fred.”

“I’ll get you what there is to be found, period.” He stood, a tall man with a tortured face. The top of his bald head glowed in the diner’s silver-blue light. That’s the way a fed’s head must look to Loco Larry. “I’m the goddamn best there is.” He checked his watch. “What you do with the stuff, I don’t need to know. Goodnight.”

“What time’s it in Bombay?” I asked Fred’s long-waisted back.

“Thirteen and a half hours into tomorrow. Goodnight.”

Leatherpants on the bar stool said something that sounded dirty. He was looking at me, but speaking in loud Vietnamese to the waiter, who’d vanished into a storeroom for my cola. Putting together the two and two of my drama with Fred and getting it wrong, I assumed.

I took two dollar bills out of my wallet for Fred’s hot water with lemon wedge, but didn’t leave the diner with him.

The waiter came back with my Pepsi in a glass.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.

“You can’t change your mind now,” the waiter said. “Too late. You ordered a Pepsi. I brought you a Pepsi. Drink or no drink it, that’s your problem.”

I started to walk out of the waiter’s arm range. The waiter made a halfhearted show of blocking my path with his mop. Leatherpants slid off the stool and gave his duffel bag a quick, vicious kick. The duffel caught me in the left ankle before I could get to the door. My ankle felt as if it’d been clubbed, but I wasn’t about to give Leatherpants the satisfaction of a howl or yelp. I stepped over the duffel bag, and hissed, “The INS is on its way, mister.”

The man on the stool hooted. “And fuck you too, doll!”

“Hey!” I heard the waiter’s voice behind me. “Hey, you owe for Pepsi!” But he chose not to chase me. The wet mop was still going swish-swish and the man on the stool was still laughing when I left the diner.

The other day a man driving home from work on I-80 was shot by a sniper near Davis. The man usually stopped for a beer, but that day his son was pitching Little League, and nothing, he’d promised, would keep him away. He was the third red Honda Civic with bumper stickers to pass under the bridge between five and five twenty-five, fulfilling all five preconditions set by his anonymous executioner for moral target practice.

The other night in Oakland, the proud owner of an Asian-run market closed early for his daughter’s wedding. While celebratory firecrackers were being set off in Orinda, an elderly neighborhood woman was knocking on the store’s shuttered door looking for her usual small bag of scented kitty litter. The woman could have waited—the cat didn’t care—but she loved her cat Melba, named after an aunt, and so she embarked on a trek to the supermarket three long blocks away. She stepped off the curb without looking and was run over by a thirteen-year-old who’d stolen the car from in front of a 7-Eleven where the car’s owner was counting out enough change to pay for a Snickers bar and a quart of skim milk.

The other week a refugee, just arrived in San Jose from Banja Luka by way of camps and detention centers, was stepping out of the third-floor offices of a relief organization with his care package of groceries, old clothes and used blankets when a shoot-out erupted between two just-formed girl gangs, the Pretenders and the Prissies, in the hallway, and a shot from a. 30-gauge Chinese-made pistol ricocheted off the elevator into his skull.

The other month two high school dropouts from Stockton, hired for three grand by a cheated-upon wife to do a beat-to-a-pulp job on her pharmacist husband, were driving north on I-5 towards the drugstore when a highway patrolman stopped them for seat-belt and open-container violations. The pharmacist’s still dispensing pills and trying to work things out with his wife.

We don’t paint the lines on our palms, says Madame Kezarina aka Linda Szymborska-Wakamatsu. My take is different. Convergence is coincidence.

A daughter bumps into her runaway mother, what coincidence could be more natural?

All the same, I call Fred Pointer at his office. He’s out of town, his tape tells the caller, but the caller may leave a brief message. “Give it to me fast, Fred,” I whisper into the tape, “and fuck the cost!”