Fogtown (11 page)

Richard’s visage hardened into basalt. The girl was Jeeter Roche’s old lady. He gave her the once-over from head to foot. She was coltish and high as a kite. Must be having a bad day. He called out to her in a desultory whine overlaid with absolute menace. “Hey, beauty queen, I need a word with you.”

Instantly recognizing his basso voice, Chiclet jumped out of her skin. Jeeter had talked often enough about the guy. He’d warned her more than once: “If this ugly black motherfucker ever comes here looking for me, it means you’ve just gone to someplace that’s worse than hell. Much worse. He’s psycho. He’s short and talks like a frog. Dresses like a freak. You watch your ass around him.”

Swaggering over to her, Richard Rood stood at arm’s length and licked his lips to see if he could get a reaction. When Chiclet didn’t take the bait, he stated his quest. He was succinct. He was polite. He didn’t mince words. He was explicit. “Listen, baby cakes, I’m looking for your husband, that Jeeter Roche dude. He knows somebody I have to get next to.”

Chiclet was exquisitely loaded, the right combination of vertigo and weightlessness. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Richard’s needs. She exhaled a perfectly executed smoke ring, saying, “Jeeter? He ain’t here.”

Richard was dubious. “Oh, yeah? Where is he? I’m on urgent business.”

“He’s out taking care of things. What do you want?”

“I have to talk with him about some information. Vital shit.”

Chiclet’s unfriendly eyes were two red holes in the white cold cream. “About what?” she said.

Richard corrected her. “It ain’t what, but who. I’m looking for Stiv Wilkins. You know that punk?”

“Nope.”

Richard nodded. “C’mon, kitty-cat, be honest with me. I understand you doing Stiv.”

Chiclet looked at him as if he were a eunuch. “That ain’t so.”

“I hear otherwise,” Richard said. “People say you fuck him on the sly.”

She dared him to refute her. “People lie, don’t they?”

He was philosophical. “For sure, but all you have to do is tell me where I can find this Stiv Wilkins.”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“Please don’t say that again, sugar cube. It upsets me.” Spicing his request with the only Italian word he knew, Richard said, “The sooner you help me find him, the happier you and me will be.
Capiche?”

A vein throbbed on Chiclet’s temple and she had an inkling of danger. Maybe it was how the dude was talking. Maybe it was how he looked at her. Maybe it was the suit he wore. Jeeter wouldn’t have approved of it. Where she came from in the East Bay, out in suburban Concord, there weren’t too many guys that dressed like Richard Rood. She snuffled, “I can’t help you, man, okay?”

Richard opened his mouth in a sick smile, displaying a battlefield of unfinished dental work. His breath was harsh and vinegary, potent enough to ream the hair off a dog. He raised a hand; ten-carat gold rings glimmered on every finger. He said, “You can’t? That’s a goddamn shame. Why don’t we just go on inside and discuss it then?”

His hollow voice broached no protest. Doing a three-sixty, Chiclet sidled into the apartment. Following her, Richard inspected the place with a professional eye. The dining area contained a vintage formica-top table with three matching chairs. A door opened to a bedroom; a king-sized futon bed and a rectangular olive-green macramé carpet occupied the floor space. The sheets on the bed were paisley flannel. A pile of unwashed clothes guarded one corner. The open closet door revealed a battalion of shoes. The kitchen was in the other direction by the bathroom. A Nautilus weight machine was in the hall. Richard saw nothing that he liked and expressed his contempt by saying, “Jeeter got any toot here? Anything good?”

Chiclet was offended by his intrusive tone. “We ain’t got any.”

“Don’t give me that baloney. He’s slanging the shit. He’s got to have some around. Something recreational. Just a little toot, you know?”

“We don’t do business at home.”

“You don’t? Pardon me. Where do you do it then?”

“The Allen Hotel.”

Richard smirked. “That a fact?” He turned his attention to Chiclet and objectified her with the same kind of heartbreaking coldness that he had used on the furniture. She had bad skin under all that cream. Dyed punk rock hair. Interesting bathrobe. Her eyes weren’t close set together. She wasn’t too ugly. He walked around the living room with his chin in his hand and dawdled by the window. “So you don’t know Stiv, huh? I thought everyone damn well did. The man is contagious.”

Chiclet reaffirmed her ignorance. “I ain’t acquainted with him.”

“Well, maybe you is and maybe you ain’t.” Richard cracked his knuckles and bruised her with a vampirish stare. It was an embittered gaze that x-rayed her inner nature and saw a vacancy sign. He said in an off-handed manner, “I got a special request.”

She wasn’t keen to hear it and affected a yawn. “You do?”

“I certainly do,” Richard said. “I want you to take off that bathrobe you got on.”

His demand sounded like it came from Mars. From an interplanetary source that was millions of miles away. Maintaining her composure, Chiclet stalled for time by killing the cigarette in an ashtray. Gongs were clashing in her head. Nausea liquefied in her stomach, and her hands were clammy. There was no doubt about it: the heel was going to have a go at her ass. She gauged the distance between him and her and glanced around the room for a weapon. A letter opener on the sink counter fit the bill, but Richard Rood saw what she was looking at and put it in the sink.

“Don’t be shy,” he beseeched her. “I ain’t got all day.”

“Are you serious?”

“Like a toothache, girl.”

There was no way out. She’d have to jump from the window to get away from him. The cops would find her on the sidewalk with her head cracked open. Nobody would blame Richard Rood. The coroner would trace all that Valium in her and call her death a fluke.
Unbelting the robe, she shrugged the garment from her shoulders and it fell to the rug.

Richard Rood nodded approvingly. This was the first time that he’d ever seen a naked woman outside of a strip joint and the chick wasn’t half terrible. She had a swan’s neck, perky breasts with large nipples, and a filigreed silver chain around her tummy. He admired the muscular tone of her legs. He also appreciated her bush. It was neatly shaven, a perfect pyramid. Highly stylized, like his red suit. Exactly how he liked things. “Okay, good,” he said. “That’s all. Thank you.”

The adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones in Chiclet’s bloodstream had killed the tranquilizing effects of the Valium. She was as sober as the day she’d been born. Crossing her arms over her breasts, she spat, “What do you mean, thank you? You ain’t gonna tie me up?”

“Nah.”

“You’re not going to beat me?”

“No, gorgeous, I ain’t.”

“You ain’t going to fuck me?”

“No. Pipe down. No need to get all excited.”

“Don’t get excited? Fuck off, you.”

Richard was swift to say, “Shit, girlfriend, I’m gay. If I want to hump someone, it sure won’t be you or any other woman. Not in this lifetime or in the next one. I definitely am not into that shit. I was just giving you a look-see, learning about this here female anatomy thing.”

The strains of “Stormy Monday Blues” by Bobby Blue Bland insinuated themselves through the walls from a neighbor’s phonograph. The scratches on the ancient vinyl were as loud as the music itself. Done with his business, Richard Rood shambled to the door and swung it open. The unoiled hinges squeaked in agony. His broad shoulders grazed both sides of the doorframe as he turned to give Chiclet a penetrating glance. A glance that said he was taking a hunk of her soul with him.

“You tell Jeeter I came by,” he said evenly. “Tell him that I want to talk.”

I
N JULY
1916 a bomb went off at a War Preparedness Day parade on Market Street. The procession had just gotten underway at the Embarcadero when the explosion ripped out a chunk of the Southern Pacific Building at the corner of Market and Steuart, injuring nearby spectators. Two local union men, Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, were arrested for the crime. Both claimed innocence during their trial.

The jury found them guilty and they were sent to prison. Then, after twenty-three years of confinement, the governor of California, a man named Culbert Olsen, pardoned Billings and Mooney. Forty thousand people attended a welcome home rally for Tom Mooney at the Civic Center. He died three years later at Saint Luke’s Hospital in the Mission district following surgery.

At Folsom State Prison, where Warren Billings served his sentence, there was a mural version of
The Last Supper
in the church chapel. A convict artist had used Billings’s face as a model for one of the twelve apostles seated at the table with Christ. When Billings got out of the joint, he became a watch repairman and opened a shop on Market Street.

Walking up Jones Street, Mama Celeste was hungry and made a straight line to Saint Anthony Dining Room. The queue into the soup
kitchen was three blocks long, winding over to Golden Gate Avenue and then down onto Leavenworth Street.

Saint Anthony was a Catholic charity, the flagship in the city’s fleet of soup kitchens. Operated by priests in a subterranean cafeteria next to an abandoned bank, it fed thousands of indigents daily.

Joining the very end of the line, Mama Celeste jiggled up and down on one foot. Her bladder was full, a result of the tea she’d been drinking. Thinking about going to the bathroom was absurd. How fast folks were getting in line behind her, she’d lose her spot if she went somewhere to relieve herself. Mama had to make a choice. Should she go find a place to take a leak or stay where she was? She hadn’t had a bite to eat since dawn. Her empty stomach settled the issue and she thought no more about it.

Mama cast a side-glance at a clock in a storefront window. It was three forty-five. She did a rough head count—two thousand people were ahead of her in the queue. The soup kitchen clientele were mostly men and a few females, all lugging suitcases and rucksacks and pillowcases stuffed with their possessions. Some had dogs. Others had cats. A few had shopping carts.

The sun, tangoing in and out of the fog, flung a shadow over the street. Pigeons were squatting on a parked police van’s roof. A hooker in torn nylons was doing her makeup in the window of a Mercury station wagon up on four cinder blocks. A gaggle of black kids in knit caps and goose down parkas was at the corner. One kid reached in his pocket and a Smith and Wesson revolver, an itty-bitty nickel-plated.32 caliber gat, fell out and hit the sidewalk with a clatter.

Mama tucked the shoebox under her coat and stripped a gummy copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
off the ground. The lead article on the newspaper’s front page was about the Brinks robbery. There was a photograph of the Brinks truck after the crash. The vehicle lay on its side, resembling a wounded buffalo.

An hour later Mama was ushered through the soup kitchen’s doors and herded down a concrete loading ramp by a burly security guard with a
flashlight. The tunnel was moldy and unlit and she had a premonition of catastrophe. What her foreboding was about, she didn’t know.

A brown-robed priest with a tonsured hairdo escorted Mama into the immense dining room. A sea of badly dressed people ate at a hundred rough-hewn pinewood picnic tables. Thanking the friar for the personal touch, Mama said, “Bless you, father. I’m glad to be here.”

“You’re welcome, my daughter,” the priest replied. “This is the oasis of the Tenderloin. You come often?”

“All the time, ever since my husband died.”

“We’re glad to have you. Consider us your home away from home.”

Glomming a tray from a stack, Mama set the shoebox on it, and then collected a spoon, fork, and knife. A sanguine ex-con in a hair net gave her a bowl of instant oatmeal, a plateful of powdered eggs, orange slices, and a cup of instant coffee. The quartered orange slices scintillated in the cafeteria’s fluorescent lighting; the eggs were steaming, and the oatmeal was gelatinous.

Mama made herself cozy at a table laden with cartons of tomato juice, loaves of day-old white bread, baskets of apples, ketchup bottles, and saltshakers, and began to chow down. Spooning oatmeal in her gob, she peeked over the cereal bowl’s rim at the rest of the room.

The soup kitchen’s decor wasn’t anything to write home about. The concrete walls were painted prison pea green. The floor was fatigued linoleum tiling. There was a full-color oil portrait of Jesus Christ in his prime on the door. Security guards in windbreakers roamed the aisles just in case a client went crazy. Pushed around by the cops, cheated out of their welfare checks by liquor store cashiers, and unable to stay dry because of the fog and rain, people fresh off the street were testy.

Eating and reading at another table was Jeeter Roche. The Allen Hotel’s manager was alone and modestly clothed in a puce-colored goose down vest and oversized Phat Farm jeans. A paperback, the novel
Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon
by the Brazilian writer Jorge
Amado, was propped against a tub of margarine. Engrossed in the story, Jeeter forked powdered eggs into his mouth with the precision of an auto mechanic. His nearsighted eyes were fixated on the book. His lips were encircled with ketchup. He held a mangled slice of white bread halfway to his mouth. His receipt book was on the chair next to him.

The music of alienation played a hymn in Mama Celeste’s mind as she watched Jeeter eat. She didn’t know what to do. The dirtbag said he’d evict her and had to be confronted. There were several ways to go at it. Mama could leave him unmolested until they got outside and then lay into him. That would be the safe thing to do. Keep things private. Keep it discreet. Make sure there were no witnesses, just him and her. Another way was to have it out with him right here in Saint Anthony. Let the shit hit the fan. Putting her arms around the shoebox, Mama Celeste shot to her feet, the chair toppling to the floor. The ruckus caused every head in the room to turn and look.

Jeeter Roche saw her and put the slice of bread on his plate. Prison had taught him quite a few things. The crucial lesson was, don’t let anyone slip up on you from behind. The second lesson was even more elementary. There was a totem pole in life. Some folks were high on it. Others were low. But either way, you had to know your place. It was obvious that Mama Celeste wasn’t hip to this.