The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (4 page)

Neal looked off to his left as soon as he cleared the doorway, held up his hand, and yelled, “Taxi!”

The front cab in line started to edge forward on the curb as a bellhop hustled over to open the cab door.

“No, no, no,” Benchpress said, waving his arms as he quick-shuffled between Neal and the cab.

This was okay with Neal, who didn’t want to take a cab anyway. He wanted to take a nice long walk up a long, steep hill to see just how badly Benchpress wanted to carry all those big muscles and that belly up a pitch to talk. With Benchpress off to his left, Neal had his whole right side open to move, and he knew where a right turn would take him: through North Beach and then up Telegraph Hill, which was plenty long and steep enough for what he had in mind. He took a hard right and headed out.

Benchpress wasted two seconds standing by the cab wondering how embarrassed he should be, and then another second trying to decide if the chase was going to be worth it.

He decided it was.

Neal wasn’t happy to look over his shoulder and see Benchpress coming after him, but he wasn’t too worried either. The guy wasn’t going to cause a scene—not near his hotel, anyway—and he wasn’t going to call the city police over this kind of crap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure this thing became real personal, so Neal wasted a second of his own to turn on his heels and grin at Benchpress. Then he inserted his middle finger in his mouth, twisted it around, popped it out, and displayed it to Benchpress.

Benchpress took it personally. He nodded, put his head down, and started forward.

Okay, Neal thought, come on. I’ve spent six months hiking up and down a steep Yorkshire moor carrying packs of supplies. No overweight, pumped-up rent-a-cop can catch me on a hill.

Neal led him up Kearny and took another right on Broadway, which was a little flatter then he remembered. He picked up the pace past the strip joints and sex shops that were just opening to catch the early trade. Benchpress wasn’t distracted by the tired barkers who were sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee, or by the sleepy dancers who were just arriving with their dancing togs in gym bags slung over their shoulders. He didn’t trip over any of the empty beer or wine bottles, or slip on any of the wax-paper sandwich wrappers or any of the trash that littered the North Beach strip. A sharp, cool wind was blowing off the Bay and into their faces, but that didn’t slow Benchpress down much either.

Reduced to cheap tricks, Neal crossed Broadway in mid-traffic, inspiring some aggravated honking but no apparent concern in Benchpress, who swatted a Renault out of his way and kept coming.

Jesus, Neal thought, what a day. First I screw up and let Pendleton take off, next I find the only house detective in America with an overdeveloped sense of duty.

He swung a left onto Sansome Street, which gave him the incline he was looking for. Like a sparkling brook that flows into a polluted river, Sansome Street seemed a world apart from Broadway. Its street-level garages led up to white and pastel apartments and houses that featured large sun rooms overlooking the Bay. A lot of their windows had those security-service decals plastered on them, the kind that let prospective burglars know that they shouldn’t mess around here unless they wanted police academy dropouts with nightsticks, rottweilers, and inferiority complexes coming down on their sorry asses.

Sansome Street was pretty, trendy, and expensive looking, and Neal wondered where the money came from. Maybe it came from streets like Broadway, money that slipped through the fingers of the strippers and the whores, money that got away from the junkies and the porn addicts, from the sad drunks who paid six bucks a shot to peek over their grimy glasses of cheap bourbon at the bitter shake-and-jiggle of somebody’s baby girl. Maybe it was the angry neon glare of the strip that paid for the warm, bright sun rooms with the view of the Bay.

His class-war reverie took his mind off the pain that was starting to shoot through his legs, pain that reminded him to take Sansome Street for what it was, a steep route up Telegraph Hill. He sucked it up and shifted into high gear. There’s a trick to climbing a hill: you keep your knees slightly bent as you walk, like Groucho Marx going up a staircase. Every three or four steps you rock back on your heels. The technique saves wear and tear on the knees and ankles, and it moves you up a hill faster. Fast enough to leave a musclebound, beer-bellied badge from Woolworth’s stretched out on the pavement sucking air.

After punishing his pursuer for a couple of minutes, Neal looked back over his shoulder and saw that Benchpress was huffing, puffing, muttering, sweating … and gaining on him.

Neal didn’t know where Benchpress had learned Carey’s Own Special Hill-Climbing Technique, but figured his patent was in jeopardy. Also his ass, because his legs started to do one of those reverse Pinocchio numbers and turn to wood. The pot of coffee and the cheese omelet he had consumed started to make some serious complaints in the form of an excruciating cramp, and his lungs began to ask if all this was such a good idea.

He looked around for some boulders or something to roll down on Benchpress like they do in the movies, but didn’t see any. So he took a nice, deep gasp and plunged a little faster up the hill. Plan A, the Leave-the-Fat-Boy-on-the-Slope Maneuver, hadn’t worked, so he tried to come up with a better Plan B. The wit and wisdom of Joe Graham came to him.

“If you can’t beat ’em,” Graham had once intoned, “bribe ’em.”

He had about a ten-second lead on Benchpress and figured he’d need at least fifteen. His current tactic wasn’t getting it done—in fact, he’d be really lucky to reach the park at Coit Tower with a five-second cushion, and five seconds weren’t going to be enough for what he had in mind, so he broke into a run.

“Run” was a grandiose word for the shuffling jog he managed. His heart went into its Buddy-Rich-on-Speed imitation, the pleasant cramp in his stomach reached down into his groin, and his lungs issued a strong protest in the form of a wheezing gasp. But his legs kept moving. They ran up to the corner of Filbert Street and turned right, then hopped over to the north side of the street. While his legs were busy running, his right hand reached into his jacket, lifted out his wallet, and put it in his left hand. The two hands cooperated to take out one of the Bank’s crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and put the wallet back. Then they tore the bill in half, the left hand putting its half in the left pants pocket, and the right hand gripping its prize in its sweaty palm.

He looked back quickly and saw that Benchpress hadn’t hit the corner of Filbert yet, so it looked like he’d get his fifteen ticks. He hit the bottom of Coit Tower park, found a bowling-ball-sized rock at the base of a tree, and put the half-hundred under it. Then he sprinted as fast as he could up the walkway to the observation tower and marked the location of the tree. He leaned against the railing next to one of the coin-operated binoculars to catch what was left of his breath. As he sucked for air, he took off his left loafer and put the hotel notepad and the ticket stubs inside it before he put the shoe back on. People who search you, even after they’ve beaten you unconscious, often forget to look in your shoes.

He took in a fresh gulp of air as he checked out the view from the observation terrace, which was as stunning as he remembered. The whole bay stretched out in front of him. Off to his left he could make out a small section of the Golden Gate Bridge as it touched Marin County, and above that he could see the southern slope of Mount Tamalpais. Down and to the right of Mount Tarn he could see Sausalito, and scanning farther to the right he saw small sailboats dancing on the sapphire blue water around the plump, notorious little island of Alcatraz. To his right he could see the whole span of the Bay Bridge as it led to Oakland. A huge freighter was plying its way up the bay toward San Mateo.

He had about five seconds to enjoy all this splendor before he turned to see Benchpress shuffling to the base of the walkway. Neal saw a homicidal look in the security guard’s eye and wondered if he was about to get beaten to the proverbial pulp.

This is no big deal on television, where the private eye hero gets trashed by three guys twice his size, because when you see him after the commercial he has some beautiful woman tending his wounds and he’s up and about, so to speak, one roll-cut later. But real-life beatings hurt. Worse, they injure, and the injuries take a long time to heal, if they ever do. Neal just wanted to avoid the whole experience.

He put his back up against the railing and one of the binoculars on his left side as Benchpress reached the observation terrace and began to move toward him.

“Are you going to make me chase you
down
the hill now?” Bench-press asked as he edged along the railing toward Neal. He was breathing hard, stalling to catch his breath.

“I don’t know, would it work?”

“You’re an asshole. You know where I live? Chinatown. Sacramento Street? Clay Street? California Street? You know what they are?”

I’m an asshole all right, Neal thought.

“Hills,” Neal said. “They’re big hills.”

“I’ve been walking up and down those streets since I was a kid. You think you’re going to shake me on a hill? Get real.”

“You’re right. I apologize.”

“That’s okay. Now what’s your story? What did you steal?”

“Nothing.”

Benchpress was taking his air through his nose now, timing his breathing and slowing it down. He shifted his eyes around to see if they were alone. They were.

He pulled his security guard’s badge out and held it up for Neal to see.

“Let’s make this easy now,” he said.

“I was looking for something.”

“PI?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“ID?”

Neal couldn’t handle any more initials, so he held out the torn hundred-dollar bill.

“You can relax,” he said. “You did your job. I didn’t steal anything. You ran me down. Take the prize.”

He stuck the bill behind the coin slot of the binoculars and started to back away.

“You’re offering me a bribe?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t have anything against the concept, I’m just checking it out.”

“Basically, I’m paying you not to beat me up to defend your honor.”

He smiled, accepting Neal’s craven surrender graciously.

“Where’s the other half?” he asked.

“It’s under a tree down there somewhere.”

He was one quick fat man. His right foot shot out and kicked the air twice, face-high, before Neal could even break into tears.

“I’m not playing hide-and-seek for half a bill that probably doesn’t exist.”

Neal edged farther along the railing away from Benchpress as he said, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You take the half-bill here and start walking down the path. I stay right here where you can see me. The tree is within sight. When you’re, oh, let’s say twenty steps away, I’ll start giving you directions—you know, ‘you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder’—until you find the other half.”

Benchpress thought about it for a few seconds.

“There are only two paths down from here,” he warned Neal.

“I know.”

“If you try to screw me, I can catch you.”

“I know that, too.”

“If I have to do that, I’ll break your ribs.”

Enough is enough, thought Neal, even for a devoted coward like me. This gig might bring me back onto this guy’s turf again, and I’d need
some
status to make a deal. We have to get on a more equal footing here.

“Maybe,” Neal said. “I’m carrying, Bruce Lee.”

That stopped Benchpress for a second. He hadn’t considered the possibility of this goofball having a gun.

“Are you?” he asked, studying the contours of Neal’s jacket.

“Naaah.”

But you’re not sure, Benchpress, are you? Neal thought. That’s okay. That’s just fine.

“Do we have a deal?” Neal asked.

“I think we can work something out,” Benchpress said. He reached out slowly and took the bill from the coin slot. Then he fixed Neal with a hard-guy stare and started to back away.

Neal counted to twenty, slowly and loudly, and then started to give Benchpress directions. The game went on about a minute before Neal saw him reach under the rock and come up with the other half of the bill.

“Okay?” Neal shouted.

“Wait a minute! I’m checking the serial numbers!”

Smart guy, thought Neal. Next time I come back, he’ll have an office job.

“Okay!” hollered Benchpress. “Now what?”

“I don’t know! I’ve never done this before! You have any ideas?”

“Why don’t I just walk away?”

“How do I know you won’t be waiting for me at the bottom?”

“You have an ugly and suspicious mind!”

“Tell me about it!”

Neal was debating with himself whether to trust him, when Benchpress yelled, “Do you have a dime?”

What the hell?

“Yeah!”

“Okay! I’ll go to Pier Thirty-nine! You wait fifteen minutes and then put the dime in the binoculars. Look down to Pier Thirty-nine and I’ll be standing there waving at you.”

Interesting concept, Neal thought. He shouted, “Right! That gives you a good ten minutes to sneak up the other side and then kick my head into the Bay!”

“You don’t trust me?”

No, Neal thought, but I don’t have a choice, do I? Unless I want to stand on this hill for a few days.

“You can’t walk to Pier Thirty-nine in fifteen minutes!” Neal shouted.

“I’m going to take a cab, asshole!”

There was always that.

“Okay, okay. Just get going!”

“It’s been nice chasing you!”

“Nice being chased!”

Neal watched as Benchpress disappeared beneath the trees. He checked his watch. It was ten-forty-five, but felt to him like it should be a lot later. He spent the time catching his breath, slowing his heartbeat, and enjoying the view. He waited twelve minutes and then put his dime in the binoculars and focused in on the pier. Benchpress must have found himself a hell of a cabbie, because it was not quite eleven when Neal saw him standing on the pier, looking up toward Telegraph Hill, smiling and waving.