Muller, Marcia - [09] There's Something In A Sunday [v 1.0] (htm) (4 page)

Trucks clogged the street ahead of me, double and triple parked. Men and women unloaded crates, boxes, and flats of flowers, as well as trees and shrubs, onto handcarts and forklifts at the back doors to dozens of stalls. People crossed within inches of my front bumper, heedless of the car's motion. Ahead of me Wilkonson was experiencing similar impediments to progress: he weaved around a van, slammed on his brakes to avoid a hand truck loaded with saplings, crept around a group of men who were drinking coffee in the middle of the street. It was the congestion of the Wharf area all over again, only much worse, and I began to fear another outburst of violence. Wilkonson kept his speed down, however, weaving through the obstacle course. I lost sight of the Ranchero briefly when it slid around the corner onto Brannan Street, then caught up with it as it passed a busy, brightly lighted establishment called the Flower Mart Restaurant. On the other side of Sixth Street he found a quasi-legal parking space. I kept going, spotted a space further down, but was beaten out by an old Chevy. Finally I left the MG by the loading dock of a ball-bearing company and hurried down the crowded street to the entrance to the mart.

A sign by the door declared it off limits to anyone without a badge. Ahead of me I saw Wilkonson; he was showing some ID to the security guard, who waved him inside. I pushed forward to the guard's post, waited for a break in the steadily moving line, and showed him my own identification. The guard was young, and my license impressed him—much as it would have impressed me in the days when I guarded doorways and office building lobbies for a living—and in a few seconds he was on the house phone to his supervisor. After a brief exchange he handed the receiver to me. I identified myself again and said I was working a tail job on one of their badgeholders—for a civil suit, nothing that would cause danger to any of their customers. The supervisor agreed to allow me inside and asked to speak to the guard again; after he hung up, the guard handed me a temporary badge.

The crowded, elongated space in front of me glared with neon light. It was lined on all sides with stalls that overflowed with plants and flowers; piles of crates and flats and boxes extended out into its center. The mart stretched for a full city block, much of it outdoors under the dark, fog-streaked sky. My gaze skipped over roses and gladioli and carnations and chrysanthemums as I searched for Wilkonson. People in work clothes, most of them bundled against the chill early morning air, moved back and forth, examining the color of blossoms and testing the freshness of leaves with their fingertips. After a moment I caught sight of Wilkonson, walking slowly down the right-hand side, stopping at each stall. His gait was no longer stiff with reined-in anger; he moved almost somnambulistically, stopping at each stall and scrutinizing every face—both buyers and vendors—before going on.

I followed him around the mart twice, but he didn't give any indication that he was planning to leave. After a while he seemed to wake up, but there was still no suggestion of the previous day's tension. He seemed almost resigned, as if he were going through the motions of looking for someone with very little hope of finding him or her. When he began his third go-round, I stationed myself beside a small forest of yew trees and kept my eyes on him from there.

Around me the mart hummed with activity. Vendors brought in more and more wares. Buyers moved briskly from stall to stall, inspecting the plants and flowers, criticizing their freshness, exchanging both pleasantries and good-natured barbs, haggling enthusiastically. A tall man came up and peered intently at the yew trees, blocking my view of Wilkonson. A woman joined the man, shook her head, and dragged him away. When they passed, I spotted Wilkonson standing in front of a sea of baby's breath. Seconds later he moved on to a stall where dozens of Boston ferns hung from overhead wires. He canvassed the room in a methodical manner, not bothering to look at the vendors now, but concentrating on the buyers.

His behavior confirmed my suspicion that he was looking for someone connected with the flower industry; only professionals were allowed in here. But what was Wilkonson's connection? He'd shown a badge to the guard. Rudy Goldring had said he worked on a ranch, though. What kind of ranch—?

"Sharon McCone!"

I jumped. A fat woman in a garish green muu-muu stood next to me. There was a pink carnation in her wildly curling gray hair, and she grinned at me, showing gapped teeth. "Sallie Hyde," I said.

Sallie moved in front of me, holding out a pudgy hand. "What are you doing here?"

She was blocking my view of Wilkonson. I took the hand and tugged her to one side. Wilkonson was standing by a pile of cases topped by some exotic red blooms that I didn't recognize. "Working," I said.

Sallie's face took on a sly, knowing look. I'd met her while on a case in the Tenderloin hotel where she lived, a couple of years ago. "Then I better skedaddle."

"No, stand here and talk with me. You—" I stopped, realizing I'd been about to say something untactful about her bulk hiding me.

Sallie, however, is comfortable with her fat. "I make a better door than window, right?"

"Right."

"Glad to help. How'd you get in here?"

"Security supervisor okayed it." Then I realized this was an odd place to find Sallie, too. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been a clerk at one of the flower stands on Union Square. "You must have changed jobs."

"Still work for the same people, but I'm a sort of supervisor myself now. Oversee the stands and do the buying for the Menottis."

"Sallie, that's terrific!" There are only twelve sidewalk flower stands in the city, and the permits for them are held by a few families who have been in the business for generations. If one of them had entrusted its operation to Sallie, she was moving up in the world.

She flushed with pleasure. "Yeah, it is. I love the work, and I'm learning the business top to bottom. One of these days I might just have a shop of my own."

Wilkonson was coming our way, moving past a stall that was crammed with dried and artificial flowers. I squeezed between Sallie and a yew tree, feeling its needles prickle on my cheek. "You still living at the Globe Hotel?"

"Yeah. I could afford to move to a better neighborhood, but I been there so long it's home."

"What about the Vangs?" They were a Vietnamese refugee family who had been my primary liaison when I'd been hired to investigate strange goings-on at the hotel.

"Bought a house in the Richmond."

It had been their dream, as it was for many of the city's refugees. "Nice for them. Do they still have the restaurant?"

"Sure. It's what pays for the house."

Wilkonson had passed behind Sallie without giving her a glance. Possibly that meant that whomever he sought was not a woman—or at least not a large woman. When he was several yards away, I motioned toward him and asked her, "Do you know that man?"

"The guy in the suede jacket?"

"Yes."

She studied him, squinting so her eyes almost disappeared in the fleshy folds of her face. "Don't know him, but I've seen him here before."

"When?"

"Last week? The week before? I can't really say."

"How long have you been doing the buying here?"

"Almost a year now."

"But he's only been coming for a couple of weeks?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I know I've seen him once or twice this month. Before that, I don't recall. I do know he's not a regular, though."

I was about to ask if there was any way of finding out more about the badgeholders when a man with a hand truck loaded with bamboo plants jostled against her and she lurched into me. I collapsed against the yew trees.

Sallie extended her hand to pull me up and glared at the shrubs. "Damned funeral trees," she said.

The words gave me a prickly little chill, disproportionate to their meaning. "
What
trees?" I asked.

"I call them funeral trees. In Europe they plant them in the cemeteries, or so the Menottis tell me. I've seen them around graves here too, so I guess it's true. I
hate
them."

Her tone was so malevolent and she gave the inoffensive trees such an evil look that suddenly I remembered Sallie Hyde was a murderer—tried, convicted, imprisoned, and paroled. When her eyes returned to meet mine, she must have seen the recollection there, because she changed the subject abruptly, chatting about her new job and prospects, then saying she had better get busy with her buying. Before she left me, she gave me her card and said I should keep in touch. I promised to, but somehow I doubted I would. The flower seller was like dozens of other people all over the city whom I knew from cases: an acquaintance with whom I had nothing in common save the violence that had initially brought us together.

It was close to five in the morning and my energy had completely flagged when Wilkonson finally made for the exit. I followed him on leaden legs to Brannan Street and his Ranchero, then fetched the MG. There was an entrance to the I-80 freeway a few blocks away; I caught up with the Ranchero as it took the ramp, and I drove behind it for a ways until I saw it merge onto Route 101 going south out of the city.

At Army Street I took the off ramp. My long, long workday was over.

At ten that morning I arrived at All Souls. The fog now hung still and heavy, making the playground equipment in the triangular park across the street seem alien and somewhat menacing. It was kinder to the big brown Bernal Heights Victorian that had housed the co-op for more than a dozen years: the blistered and peeling paint was obscured, seeming once more an unblemished skin; the badly patched shingles and sagging roofline wore a stately wig of gray mist. I often thought of the building as an old lady living out her last days in a constant struggle against the indignities of poverty. Today it was as if she had decked herself out in tattered finery and temporarily won the battle.

When I came through the front door our secretary, Ted Smalley, looked up from his nearly completed
New York Times
crossword puzzle. "Kind of late, aren't you?"

"Kind of." I looked down at the puzzle and frowned. It drives me crazy that he has enough confidence to do it in ink.

Ted covered the paper with his hand. He hates to share and won't even ask for help unless he's hopelessly stumped.

I pushed his hand aside. "What's that?"

"What's what?"

"That. Number seventy-two across. Seven-letter word beginning and ending with
s
. Fourth letter's an
i
." It was one of the few he had yet to fill in.

He glared at me, then sighed. "Feeble."

"Feeble. Should be easy—that's how I feel today.
S . .
.
i
…
s
… sapless."

"Sapless." He ticked off the blocks with the tip of his pen.

As I went toward the stairs to the second floor, he began filling in the word. "You're welcome," I said.

"You know I hate it when you do that."

"Why else would I?" Halfway up the stairs I stopped. "Hey, Ted, would you buzz Rae and ask her to come up to my office."

"She's not in yet."

Tardiness was one of my new assistant Rae Kelleher's few faults, but a particularly vexing one. It bothered me all the more because I suspected most of her late arrivals could be directly attributed to the demands of her perpetual-student husband, Doug.

Ted obviously held the same opinion, because he said, "Maybe she had to type a paper for Dougie, or prep him for an exam."

I grimaced and said, "When she comes in, tell her I want to see her." Then I continued upstairs to my new office.

When I stepped inside its door, I stopped—as I had nearly every day for the last four months—and admired my surroundings. The room—half of the original master bedroom—was at the front of the house, and its bay window afforded me a view. Not that it was one of the spectacular panoramas San Francisco is famous for; I couldn't see the Bay or the Golden Gate Bridge or even the downtown skyscrapers. What I could see was the Outer Mission District: the rooftops were as patched and sagging as All Souls', the buildings as shabby; the streets were flat and treeless, their gutters clogged with litter; the people who walked them were generally poorly dressed, their postures hunched and defensive. But it
was
a view, and the office was far larger than my former converted closet under the stairs. Besides, in a way, what I could see from my desk—which sat in the window bay—was perfectly fitting for the work I did there; this was my territory, and any one of those people might have been my client.

The reason I had come to possess such sumptuous digs was that my boss, Hank Zahn, who had lived in this room since he founded the co-op shortly after graduating law school, had gotten married the previous spring to another of the attorneys, Anne-Marie Altaian, and had moved to her flat over in Noe Valley. I guess I'd acted pretty mournful about him being so far away and no longer available at any hour of the day or night for counsel or companionship, because he'd bequeathed me the room for my office—disappointing several others who had been casting covetous looks at it. It didn't really make up for the loss of long late-night talking-and-drinking sessions with Hank, nor for the fact that Anne-Marie, my best female friend at All Souls, was now a married lady who hurried home to have intimate dinners with her new husband. But once I'd outfitted it with a new Parsons table desk and an old oriental rug I'd found rolled up in the attic, and had hung some of my favorite photographs on the walls… well, I'd started thinking of myself as a career woman of substance, rather than an underpaid, unappreciated lackey.

The event that had completed my metamorphosis into staff member of importance had occurred two months ago when Hank and the other partners had decided that I had too much serious investigating on my hands to continue with such important but time-consuming and essentially undemanding tasks as filing documents at City Hall and the routine interviewing of possible witnesses. Hire an assistant, they'd told me.

I'd called around to other investigators and acquaintances at security firms, and one had finally recommended Rae Kelleher. Rae was twenty-five, a psychology graduate from my old alma mater at Berkeley, and the sole support of her Ph.D. student husband. At that time she had been working as a security guard, as I had been after receiving my own highly useless degree. We'd met, and I'd liked her enthusiasm and easy good humor, had been impressed with her keen intelligence and willingness to do scutwork for low pay in exchange for learning the trade and eventually getting her investigator's license. In the two months she'd worked for me she'd been amenable and uncomplaining and quick to pick up on what she needed to know. The only problem was that husband and his demands on time she should have been devoting to her duties.