The Man on the Washing Machine

 

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To Frank, who never lost the faith and who saved the bubbly until the Fates were no longer tempted

 

CHAPTER ONE

Nothing was different about the Wednesday morning Tim Callahan died. Tim was a petty thief and a bully. I can't think of anyone who'll miss him, but being thrown out of a three-story window seems like more punishment than he deserved.

When I woke up, fog was obscuring my slice of Golden Gate Bridge view but sun was expected later, which is fairly typical. I pulled on jeans after a quick shower, and gathered my emotional resources to face another day of lying to every single person I knew. The effort took a toll I hadn't considered when I moved here eighteen months ago. All the same, for no particular reason I was feeling more hopeful that morning than I'd been for a long time. The dim sum aroma from Hang Chow's down the block was more appealing; the air a little crisper; colors a little brighter. If I'd been less absorbed with how my friends would react if they found out the truth, I might have wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

I walked down to Helga's coffee shop and strolled back with my morning tea. The climbing rose was doing its best to obscure the front window of my fancy little bath and body shop, and I made a mental note to have Davie trim it back. He'd turned a corner since he tried to rob me the first week we were in business and, somehow, he never left. We gave him a fifteenth birthday party last month. The rose needed attention, but the planter had been repaired and the whole building painted just after I bought it so it looked good on the outside, even if my top-floor flat was still in the throes of an endless renovation. My tenant in the middle apartment was good at handyman stuff, so his place was nicer than mine at the moment. A friend of a friend was about to move into the ground-floor studio apartment and then I'd have a full house.

Like the British Royals I live over the shop, and I climbed the two flights of stairs to my flat, still thinking about the rose because it was easier than facing other things. Lucy, a burdensome representative of her short, bad-tempered canine gene pool, lumbered out from the bedroom to welcome me back. She realized I was carrying a muffin instead of Milk-Bones, gave me a disillusioned look, and went back to the bed we shared. Until a couple of days ago we'd slept on the Murphy bed in the studio behind the garage rather than risk brain damage upstairs from the fumes of paint and glue. Finding the new tenant meant I'd have to risk it, and besides, I was fed up with sleeping downstairs and commuting up here to my small selection of identical jeans and T-shirts. A couple of days before I'd had a mattress delivered and dropped on the floor of my bedroom. Lucy and I were both more comfortable and I could stop worrying that the Murphy bed mechanism in the studio would fail somehow and stuff us, still sleeping, into the wall cavity. I know—never going to happen. But irrational fears are irrational by nature, right? In any event, I hoped my new tenant had no Murphy bed issues. I liked the view much better from up here, and if I kept the windows open the fumes weren't too bad.

I wandered back through the mostly unfurnished flat, picking my way through the jungle of timber propped against the walls and the coils of electrical cable littering the floor. The building trembled as it does every now and again. Minor earthquakes can be shrugged off after you've lived here for a while. The first few raise your heartbeat a little. The ever-present threat of a big killer shake had added to the renovation costs because shear walls and foundation bolts don't come cheap. Even so, the result was a priceless refuge from my former life. So far, no one from my Maserati and Bollinger days had come looking for me behind the counter of a small neighborhood store five thousand miles from home.

I could hear Davie shuffling around in the tiny yard behind the shop and the vigorous swishing of a broom. I leaned out of the window and saw the top of his closely cropped head balanced on his thick body like a basketball. By some instinct he looked up and caught sight of me. “Hey, Theo,” he called in his foghorn voice, “you need me up there?”

I shook my head and he went back to his sweeping. I'm not particularly maternal (that's English understatement right there), but I make sure he does his homework and try to feed him a healthy meal occasionally. Some of his pals have done time in juvie; I'm reasonably sure Davie hasn't.

I finished my muffin and sipped my tea looking down from my bedroom window at the leafy pocket park that occupies the combined property behind all the buildings on our block and reminds me of my home in England. San Francisco is great in a lot of ways, but I still get homesick sometimes. The way the residents tell it, the landscape has survived nearly a century of volunteer caretaker-gardeners with different and often opposing views of how the space should be used. Pine-needle pathways meander in random directions. Benches and strategic clusters of Adirondack chairs provide places to relax, read, or doze. There are several areas of lawn, a koi pond, some lush perennial borders, and a ruthlessly disciplined knot garden the kids use as a maze and the adults use as a meditation labyrinth. A large compost pile and a toolshed share the blue-collar end of the garden with the ragged abundance of a raised-bed vegetable garden. One of the swings in the cedarwood jungle gym was still rocking gently from the effect of the earthquake.

I was turning away when a flash of movement caught my eye in one of the third-floor windows opposite and very quickly something landed with an abrupt and repulsive thud on the lawn near the children's swings. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, certain I must have imagined it. But when I opened them he was still there—a man dressed entirely in white, crumpled on the neatly shaved green lawn with his arms and legs arranged around him like a swastika.

 

CHAPTER TWO

I called 911 while I was tripping and stumbling down the back stairs and across the garden. Others were running toward the same awful rendezvous. A few of us arrived more or less together, breathless and stunned into silence.

It was hard to look at. With his painter's overalls gradually soaking up epaulets of deep red, Tim Callahan's crumpled corpse glowed like graffiti on the green velvet lawn. As usual his chin bristled with a three-day stubble, his truculent expression replaced by a slack-jawed, wide-eyed stare. Given his crushed skull—I looked away quickly—I didn't expect him to be breathing, but the absence of the life signal that gently raises and lowers the chest in a living being was deeply unnerving. The only things moving in the lifeless tableau that had been Tim Callahan were the tufts of wood shavings stuck to his hands and the front of his overalls. They quivered in the breeze.

Davie stood next to Tim's body like a postmodernist Colossus, still holding the broom in one huge hand, looking as if his face might crumple into tears at any moment.

“Davie, you should go inside,” I said.

“You might need me.” Then he reached out a big hand and patted my arm. He's built like a UPS truck and wears an earring in his nose, but he's still only a kid and he was asking for reassurance, not giving it. I rubbed his hand gently.

I didn't know what to do. Should I be feeling Tim's neck for a pulse? There didn't seem much point given the unnatural angle of his neck. I was saved from having to touch Tim's broken body when Kurt Talbot—
Doctor
Kurt Talbot—pushed Davie aside with an irritable shove. He eased the knees of his Armani slacks before crouching to touch those sensitive fingers of his under Tim's jawbone. After half a minute or so he leaned back on his heels and shook his head. He glanced over at me with an expression I refused to recognize as concern, but neither of us said anything. I don't remember noticing during our brief affair that Kurt's winter-cloud eyes are a bit too close together. Maybe I'd forgotten. He's good-looking if you like the Nordic Snow Prince look, and unattached surgeons are thin on the ground so he doesn't usually lack for company. Unfortunately he has a lump of ice instead of a heart and no woman has been brave enough yet to risk frostbite on a permanent basis. I think shrinks call that transference: remembering how little Kurt and I meant to each other stopped me thinking too much about the awful sight in front of my eyes. Or maybe it's called something else. Either way, that's what I was doing.

Helga, who owned the bakery coffee shop a few doors down from me, came up to us and covered Tim's body with an afghan of brightly colored squares before anyone could stop her. It immediately started soaking up blood, which made things worse somehow.

“What happened?” she whispered.

Helga was a big woman—a voluptuous, curvy goddess in bakery whites—with golden hair and a fondness for bright pink and leopard-print Crocs. She was looking a little shaky, so I took her hand and squeezed her fingers gently as I shrugged the universal I-have-no-clue shrug. We weren't close friends, but we'd spent some early morning hours together in the past couple of weeks. Her father had recently died and I was one of a handful of neighbors who'd taken turns playing baker's helper to give her a bit of a break. She and her dad had been close and his death had hit hard. It had taken me a while to get used to it, but people looked after one another here, and a few hours of shifting bakery trays and kneading dough before sunrise was the way we did it for Helga.

“Looks like he fell out of number twenty-three. That quake—he must have lost his balance,” Kurt said. After another silent moment had passed, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and began to check his e-mails.

“Seriously?” I said. He slid it back into his pocket without a word. Doctor or no, the man was a tool.

“The earthquake had finished before he fell,” I said. Kurt looked annoyed and, since Helga has a crush on him and tends to follow his lead—more English understatement—she withdrew her hand and looked annoyed at me, too.

Someone opened the padlocked gate to the street and gradually the garden filled with police cruisers, an ambulance, and a huge fire truck, complete with firefighters, police officers, and EMTs. The firefighters and EMTs were okay—sort of cute in fact—but I had a bad experience once with police and I don't like them. Well, it's more that they scare the hell out of me. An English policeman broke my nose—they're not all as polite as everyone thinks—and American police are armed. With guns. My muscles tensed and my weight shifted as my subconscious clicked into flight mode and prepared me to back away. I ignored my very sensible subconscious, took a deep breath instead, stayed still, and faced them all down, feeling valiant. They didn't appear to notice.