The Man on the Washing Machine (2 page)

We were kept isolated as the bustle and activity level grew, and our little group grew more talkative in a disjointed sort of way, but the conversation was no more illuminating. I was the only one who'd seen any part of Tim's fall; everyone else had only heard his scream. Helga muttered, “Poor Tim, huh?” at Kurt, who put on his sympathetic doctor face and nodded. I thought he might put a comforting arm around her but he didn't.

I knew something about Tim—he had put up drywall in my garage and stolen a pair of my mother's earrings, and he'd once struck Davie in the face and drawn blood. So not feeling too sorry, no. Shocked, but not particularly sorry.

Sabina D'Allessio bit her bottom lip and put an arm around Helga's shoulder. Sabina was a messenger—she rode a poison-green Kawasaki and hid her mane of springy red curls under a matching motorcycle helmet. I could see she was choking down a giggle and I was afraid to catch her eye since the situation was so dire. She tends to react to pressure that way. She was famous for giggling through her cousin's funeral and it didn't take much to set her off. I couldn't imagine anyone would appreciate it.

Paramedics bundled the afghan out of the way and were working over Tim. The five of us moved away a few yards, keeping together like a school of minnows.

“I hope the homeowners association isn't liable,” Kurt said abruptly. He pays huge malpractice premiums and tends to worry about things that never occur to anyone else. “If it was the earthquake, it's an act of God and we're not responsible.”

“The earthquake was over by then,” I said again.

Kurt frowned and then his expression cleared. “Are you feeling okay? It must have been a shock.” He reached out a hand toward my cheek and I saw Helga's scowl out of the corner of my eye.

“I didn't see much of anything.” I jerked my head a couple of inches so his fingers brushed the side of my hair. That had nothing to do with Helga.

“Good. You don't need more nightmares,” he muttered, and dropped his hand. He was making nice and I felt a little bad for being a bitch. He used to hold me when I woke up from my nightmares. I was starting to get used to it when he ended things. He said I was emotionally unavailable, which was almost funny coming from him, but he didn't know the half of it.

“I'm fine,” I said, and tried to unclench my jaw and smile at the same time. I was successful enough that Helga scowled at me again.

“Does Tim have a paintbrush?” Davie said. He looked worried, as he often does, but it was the most intelligent remark I'd heard so far. Where
was
Tim's paintbrush? His white overalls were smeared with blue and yellow paint and so were his hands—it was fresh, because the wood shavings were sticking to it. If he'd fallen while he was painting a window frame or something, the paintbrush would be somewhere near him on the ground. Wouldn't it?

“What the hell does that matter?” That was more like the Kurt I knew. Davie looked hurt and I tucked his arm under mine. I'm only eleven or so years older than he is but I swear sometimes I feel like a hen with one enormous chick.

The knot of uniforms nearest to us parted in a lazy wave around a new arrival, a woman with deep, depressed-looking lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth. I guessed she was in her late forties, although she might have been younger and aged by what she'd seen on the job. Her round shoulders were hunched inside a red wool jacket and one was supporting a heavy Coach shoulder bag. She had nut-brown hair cut, apparently, with hedge shears and her expensive-looking glasses were faintly shaded. As she approached us, some instinct made the hairs on my arms ripple like the fur of a defensive dog.

She showed us a badge and introduced herself as Inspector Lichlyter, pronouncing it “lick-lighter,” which struck Davie as funny for some reason. He sniggered and she gave him a look sharp enough to bore a hole in plate steel. See? I was right about the giggling. Davie's fingers closed more tightly around my arm and he took a half step closer to me.

She rummaged in her shoulder bag for a few minutes and came up with a notebook crammed with folded pieces of paper and used envelopes. She glanced at a couple of the folded notes, found a pen after another rummage, and finally looked up at us. Her shaded glasses reflected the light and prevented me from seeing her eyes.

“Did anyone see him fall?” she said.

No one answered her. I hesitated and watched everyone's eyes drift to the two paramedics kneeling next to Tim, the urgency gone from their movements. Inspector Lichlyter sighed heavily and shifted her shoulder bag.

“Pay attention, people,” she said more sharply. “Did anyone see him fall?”

“I did,” I said after another moment. She prodded the bridge of her glasses and turned in my direction. She made me uneasy. More uneasy. An inspector in San Francisco is the same rank as a detective in other cities—in other words not someone you would expect to be gathering initial information at an accident scene.

“And your name?” she said.

“Theo Bogart.” Which was half true.

“Ah. The owner of the soap store.”

“Yes,” I said, and didn't ask how she knew.

“Did he seem to jump?”

I thought back to the little I had seen before Tim landed. “He fell facing backwards. On his back,” I added when she raised an eyebrow.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

She scribbled in her notebook.

“Where were you when it happened?”

I turned to point at my bedroom window. “Up there. On the third floor.”

“Did you see anyone else with him before he fell?”

“No.”

“Did anyone see you up there?”

That was an odd question. Wasn't it?

“I called down to Davie.”

She looked at Davie. “So you spoke to Ms. Bogart?” He nodded, his eyes wide, and she returned her attention to me. “Your store opens at ten, doesn't it? I'd expect you to be there.”

“I don't open up every morning. What does this have to do with the accident?”

She didn't answer. She stared up at my bedroom and then at the tall old-fashioned windows of number twenty-three opposite. She scribbled in her notebook again. A few of the envelopes and folded papers fell to the floor and a uniformed officer came over to pick them up. She took them from him absently before continuing: “Do you know the dead man, Ms. uh, Bogart?”

“His name is Tim Callahan. He lives in one of the studio apartments and does odd jobs for anyone who can't get a proper workman to do the job.” He also made up for his low bids by petty pilfering. I was surprised that anyone who knew him would employ him to do anything. I'd hired him, sight unseen, because my business partner Nicole recommended him. Lichlyter gave me a sharp look and I wondered confusedly if I'd said any of that aloud. She asked for my address.

“You know my store opens at ten, but you don't know my address?” She waited, pencil poised, eyes on me with the kind of resolution that could wear away mountains. I gave her my address.

She raised her voice slightly. “Did anyone else see anything at all?” She passed an eye over our dispirited group and apparently found us wanting.

“I heard him scream, looked out, and there he was,” Helga said. She glanced over at Kurt and then down at her pink Crocs. Kurt and Sabina said much the same thing. Lichlyter wrote it all down.

Davie shifted his grip on the broom in his hand and gave me a worried look. Lichlyter frowned slightly at the broom, closed her battered notebook, thanked us all with a touch of irony, and went to confer with her colleagues. They stood back respectfully as she joined them. They had everything necessary to record the scene, from iPads and tiny video cameras to laptops, and I wondered why she bothered with the notebook.

They let us leave eventually. Sabina suggested we all go to Helga's for coffee. I gave her big eyes and she looked away quickly, hiding a smirk with a splutter and a cough. Inviting us all to coffee as if we were some new book club she'd organized earned her some shit later on and she knew it. Kurt left without responding. He smiled absentmindedly at Helga, who watched him walk away. She pulled herself together and she and Sabina headed in the direction of her coffee shop.

Davie had to go to school and I went to Aromas, where Haruto pumped me for details of what he insisted on calling our police grilling. Haruto looked like a hippie Mikado and lived in my middle-floor apartment. He'd been working for me a couple of days a week in the store. Before I went inside I heard Lichlyter's harsh voice tell a uniformed officer to arrange a search for Tim Callahan's missing paintbrush.

Within hours—gossip traveling at twice the speed of light—we all knew Tim had been hired by a new tenant to paint the inside of number twenty-three. Tim's paintbrush wasn't found, although the yellow paint in the attic room had been wet.

Inspector Lichlyter telephoned. She asked me odd questions, as if she was hoping to surprise me into saying something new. I told my bald little story twice more, but it didn't seem to discourage her. Without knowing why I felt anxious about it, I reminded her that Davie had seen me up on the third floor a couple of minutes before Tim's accident.

She said: “Ah?” but that was all the reaction I got.

She asked me about Davie, and whether I had definitely seen him in the yard at the time Tim Callahan fell. I insisted, with more emphasis each time she asked, that I had, although in truth there were several minutes between when I saw him and when Tim fell to his death. That's the horrible thing about police investigations—and believe me, I know. Everything suddenly has grave significance and the difference between “now” and “a few moments ago” feels like an hour. By the time she hung up I was covered in sweat. I couldn't decide if I should be more worried about Davie or about myself. Before I had time to decide, he climbed heavily up my back stairs.

“Hey, Theo,” he said.

I knew he was nervous about going home, where by this time of night his father would be drinking and waiting to pick a fight.

He sat on the kitchen floor picking at his thumbnails while I heated a couple of cans of chili. Canned chili is Davie's favorite food. He says his mother used to fix it for him. I sometimes wonder how he grew so big and strong on a childhood diet of canned chili and Dr Pepper. I usually try to feed him some vegetables, but I couldn't summon the energy to steam broccoli. We ate the stuff with corn tortillas torn into pieces with our fingers. Davie sat on the floor and I perched uncomfortably on an upturned spackle bucket.

“Did she ask you anything else?” Lichlyter had called him, too.

“Sure. She asked if I'd ever argued with Tim. But don't worry,” he said. “I told her the truth.”

That gave me a jolt on several levels. I thought she would only ask him about what he'd witnessed; she hadn't asked me much more than that. “You told her you worked for Tim?”

“Yeah. And I told her Tim cheated me and wouldn't pay me, the asshole.”

My fault—I asked Tim to hire Davie before I noticed the missing earrings. “I remember. Did you—did she ask anything else?”

“I told her Tim and I had a fight and Tim hit me.”

My fault again—Davie got my mother's earrings back for me. “Did you tell her you didn't hit him back?”

“Sure. Don't worry. If I hit him, he wouldn't get up again.” He grinned.

“Don't say things like that to her, okay?”

I told him everything would be fine and hoped I wasn't lying. He hung around helping me shift lumber and drop cloths out of my bedroom until nearly eleven, by which time his father was usually unconscious and Davie could get into their apartment unnoticed. I went to bed and, as usual, didn't sleep.

*   *   *

So nothing much was different about the day Tim Callahan died. He was a petty thief and a bully, and I couldn't think of anyone who would miss him. But it was pretty clear Lichlyter thought he'd been shoved from that third-story window, which meant intense police scrutiny for all of us, which meant our secrets might no longer be our own, which meant my life was going to be even more complicated than it was already.

 

CHAPTER THREE

A friend of mine says she becomes a different person every few years. I think she means it literally—she lives in a Northern California ashram—but I've noticed the same thing about myself. University flunk-out, society bubblehead, celebrity photographer—I'd worn a series of personalities. But I'd never literally become a different person until I survived the worst time of my life.

The day after my father somehow managed to hang himself in his temporary cell at the Old Bailey during his murder trial, I fled my home in London with a swarm of paparazzi on my trail, willing to pay anything for a ticket on the first plane flying anywhere English was spoken. On a different day, I might have ended up in Australia or East Africa. Instead, nearly staggering with jet lag and emotional overload, I registered at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton under an assumed name and didn't stir from my room for three days. When I felt the trail was cold, that photographers weren't going to be jumping out of the lobby palm trees (and believe me, the irony was not lost on me), I began to walk the hilly city streets. For three more days I walked, falling into bed late at night, exhausted and aching and mentally blank. On the fourth day I raised my head sometime before dark and saw a For Sale sign on an empty storefront.

I had no idea where I was—it turned out to be the nicer end of Polk Street, away from the rent boys and SRO hotels farther south—but it didn't matter anyway. I don't know why the building interested me. It was in terrible shape; most of the wood was bare where the paint had simply cracked and fallen away. Window boxes full of dead grass hung at each of the four upstairs windows and a rambling rose with no blooms but plenty of thorns smothered most of the street level. The rose was flourishing somehow in a broken brick planter full of old coffee cups and evidence that the neighborhood was home to at least a couple of dogs. The jewelry store on one side and the gourmet chocolate store on the other looked busy and prosperous; same for the produce place and the dry cleaner opposite. This ugly, derelict building was the neighborhood blight.