Fogtown (2 page)

A yell in the hall interrupted her. Holding her breath, Mama was afraid. She listened carefully to every sound in the room. The faucet in the sink was dripping. The floorboards were creaking. The light bulb on the ceiling sizzled. Monstrous green flies buzzed at the window.

She couldn’t recall a day when she hadn’t been scared. Fear was in her blood. But it was odd how rapidly things changed. Two hours ago she’d been at the Social Security office on Market Street without a dime in her pocket. Then a miracle had occurred—God had communicated with her. He had done it for a reason.

Mama closed her eyes and replayed the Brinks crash. Money had poured out of the vehicle, more cash than she’d ever seen before. The guard inside the truck had been deathly pale; his khaki uniform was drenched with blood. Mama Celeste had felt bad for him, but when she saw the Franklins stacked ankle-deep on the pavement, she felt even worse for herself. Being hungry all the time could do that to a person. So could being penny-poor. It made you selfish.

Crossing the street, she went to the truck’s door. Taking a Kleenex, she’d dabbed at the gash in the guard’s forehead to staunch his wound. But seeing that it didn’t do him any good, she clawed a sack of cash out from under his boots. That put her in a trance. The money had her head swimming. The other pensioners flitted over to the truck from the Social Security office. Moving fast, Mama stashed the bag under her coat. While everybody else was busy fighting over what cash there was on the ground, she beat a path homeward to the Allen Hotel.

Back in her room, Mama hid the legal tender in the chest and then fell on her knees to pray. She screwed her eyes shut, pressed her palms together, and asked God what she should do with the loot. Mama had
been a non-unionized nurse’s aide for most of her adult life. She’d toiled in hospices and rest homes. Having a ton of money was unfathomable. The question she posed to Him was on basic economics.

“Well, Lord,” she incanted, “what do you want from me?”

God didn’t waste any time getting back to her. He answered her prayers in a jiffy and instructed her what to do with the dough.

Mama gathered the money on the bed and then loaded it into an empty Reebok shoebox. Placing Ben Franklins in the box, she lost count of how much was in it after two hundred thousand dollars. Big numbers made her dizzy.

After filling up the shoebox to the brim, she threw the remaining cash back in the muslin Brinks sack. Dropping the sack in the Safeway shopping bag, Mama heaved herself off the bed. Her feet hurt like the dickens. So did her knees. She had worked hard for forty years, and this was what had happened. Her body was an assortment of pains and sometimes she hated it. The bag in hand, she slogged over to the oak chest and returned the booty to its hideout.

She made a cup of chamomile tea on the hot plate and then sat in a chair by the window and drank it, watching the butterflies cavort outside. The fog had lifted; the sun was getting higher, reaching over the rooftops. She rinsed the cup, put it on the counter next to the sink, set the shoebox by the door, and donned her army coat. As she did that, she had a glimpse in the mirror. What she saw disappointed her.

Her
punim
was a road map of seven-plus decades. Her nose was too large for the rest of her face. Her eyes were close-set and made her seem angry even when she was happy. The grooves in her mouth never expressed joy. Her chin was sharp as an axe. The furrows on her forehead were deep enough to plant corn in. No wonder she had no one to keep her company nowadays. With a
punim
like hers, who would want to?

She buttoned the coat to the collar, tied a yellow cotton handkerchief around her dreads, and crowned the ensemble with her Giants baseball hat. Safety-pinning her house keys to the coat’s inner sleeve,
Mama Celeste picked up the shoebox, shuffled to the door, and opened it.

The melody of Oliver Nelson’s jazz standard “Stolen Moments” greeted her in the dusty hallway. A neighbor had the tune on upstairs. A baby’s high-pitched weeping wafted in from the airshaft. A man was singing while taking a shower in the communal bathroom. Mama Celeste shut her rickety door and keyed the deadbolt.

Certain the shoebox was snug in her arms, she went down four dark flights of stairs. She stopped at the landing on the third floor to catch her breath. A calico cat nipped past her and went out the window and onto the fire escape. The feline’s orange-flecked fur glinted in the sun that was getting through the fog.

The Allen Hotel’s lobby was a postage stamp–sized rectangle of marble floor. The walls were spray-painted with graffiti. Uncollected bags of trash garrisoned the corners. Cobwebs choked the ceiling. Judging by the number of them on the floor, letters to hotel occupants from the probation department at the Hall of Justice were the most popular kind of mail.

Enthroned on a milk crate in the foyer was the building’s manager, a stocky, middle-aged ex-con named Jeeter Roche. Attired in a chartreuse polyester leisure suit and tan buck loafers, and smoking a hand-rolled Bugler cigarette, Jeeter was reading a paperback novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, the dissident Polish writer from the 1970s.

He pored over a sentence, taking pleasure in the author’s writing style. The lobby’s dim light burnished Jeeter’s shaved pate. Tobacco smoke bedeviled his pointed ears. The paperback’s pages were annotated with ballpoint pen markings, scoring his favorite passages. Books were Jeeter’s obsession. His jacket pockets always bulged with a tatty paperback or two. The hotel lobby, along with everything else at the Allen, was his private kingdom. Every week Jeeter collected one hundred and seventy dollars in rent from each of the hotel’s eighty tenants. A hundred and sixty was for the owner; the other ten was for Jeeter.

In addition to the fee he charged the tenants, Jeeter had another enterprise at the Allen. The owners, the city’s premier slumlords, in exchange for his managerial services, had given him and his wife Chiclet a rent-free room on the second floor. Jeeter was using it and the rest of the hotel to sell a variety of drugs. He had some joints in his shirt pocket, one-papered reefers sprinkled with Peruvian coke flakes. Nobody in the building wanted them, so he’d smoked one for breakfast. The buzz had his head in a vise grip. Made his teeth ache from grinding them.

Selling dope was tolerable. The cash flow was consistent and it gave him extra hours to indulge in books that he ordinarily wouldn’t have chanced. Lately he’d been reading William Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It was slow going; the print required a magnifying glass.

Reading was a survival skill that Jeeter had acquired in prison. He’d been languishing in county jail, waiting for a transfer to the penitentiary upstate, and came upon a dog-eared copy of a John Dos Passos trilogy in his cell. The book took weeks to read and had kept him from going insane with boredom.

Jeeter closed his paperback when he heard steps on the staircase. The movement meant only one thing: a tenant was approaching. He looked up to find Mama Celeste holding onto the railing as she made her way downstairs. Jeeter noted she was dressed for winter on a summer morning. He put the novel in his jacket, rubbed his eyes, and smiled. Jeeter had several types of smiles. There was the smile he’d learned while doing his first jolt for larceny. That was his everyday servile smile. Then there was the smile that he’d earned during a three-year bit for burglary. That was his serene smile. And there was his vocational smile. He employed the latter on Mama Celeste, snarking, “Hey, girl. Top of the morning to you.”

Mama Celeste said an epithet under her breath. The landlord was speaking to her. He was a putrid man, worse than a Cossack. She was instantaneously defensive. “What do you want?”

Jeeter had a pull off his fag and said, “The rent. It’s due today. That’s why I’m sitting down here in the lobby, to let you and everybody else in the building know it.” He winked at Mama Celeste. “You look ready for a snowstorm. Don’t you get hot wearing that army jacket all the time?”

Mama turned beet-red. She was indignant. Jeeter Roche was a bully. Sitting on the milk crate with his flabby legs, the goniff reminded her of the demon in her dreams. “I get cold,” she said flatly.

“You do? Well, turn up the heat in your room.”

“There ain’t any.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t work.”

Jeeter had turned off the heat in the building to save money. The owners had asked him to do it, saying they’d split the profit with him. For Mama Celeste’s benefit, Jeeter made out like he didn’t know anything. “Oh, yeah?”

Mama wasn’t buying his innocence. Her nostrils quivered in accusation. “You knew there was no damn heat.”

The cigarette’s smoke hid the dismay on Jeeter’s rubbery face. She’d slipped that one in real nice. Essentially calling him a liar. Jeeter had stolen cars in his ill-starred career as a villain. He’d also robbed banks, not very successfully, and had thieved from department stores. But when all was said and done, that was in the distant past and he now considered himself an honest man. Miffed, he said, “Well, hell.”

“I see what goes on around here. I ain’t blind.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jeeter retorted. “And what is it that you see?”

Mama showed her claws. “You and them drugs.”

Jeeter switched off his vocational smile and resorted to his penal smile. It was a submissive smile, how a feral dog is submissive. You turn your back on the cur, and it goes for your throat. Jeeter’s lips were veal-colored. His teeth were sharp and yellow. His tongue flicked sideways when he said, “Whatever I’m doing, that ain’t your business, you hear?”

Unconsciously, Jeeter fingered his face. His livid skin was a minefield of razor bumps and ingrown hairs. Shaving was daily purgatory, a personal holocaust. Choreographing his mouth, he coaxed a final drag from the roll-up. He exhaled, spat out flecks of tobacco, then flung the butt on the ground and crushed it under his loafers. His bulky muscles twitched under the leisure suit’s antiquated polyester. He said without emotion, “You keep talking like you’ve been doing, Mama, and you and me, we’re gonna have a disagreement. One that will be thorny.” He added, “Have you got your money for me?”

Mama was hard of hearing when the subject wasn’t to her liking. “What, the rent?”

Jeeter whipped out an embossed leather bound receipt book from another pocket in his jacket. The receipt book was his pride and joy; it spoke the language of his soul. He opened the book, licked his thumb, turned several pages, and smiled again, this time with warmth. “It says here in my ledger, you haven’t given me no money yet for this week. You either pay up or I’m going to have to evict you. You know I don’t want to do that. But it’s the law.”

Mama was aghast. “You’d evict me?”

“I’d have to.” Jeeter was impassive. “The owners would make me.”

An eviction in a city with a 1 percent vacancy rate in rental housing was a nightmare. It was a death warrant for a geriatric on a fixed income. Too agitated to respond to Jeeter Roche’s threat, Mama Celeste moved stiffly past him and went out the yawning security gate.

It took Mama a few seconds to get used to the street. A trolley car rumbled past a row of stunted palm trees. Three homeless men saddled with sleeping bags sat on the pavement by the Allen Hotel. A pigeon winged overhead, arcing into the haze. The wind mischievously lifted the hem of her coat. She felt chilliness under her collar, but the money in the shoebox, about two hundred thousand dollars, lifted her spirits as she ambled to the corner of Gough Street.

A
T NINE O’CLOCK THAT MORNING
it began to rain. Lightning buzzed over the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. The city’s piebald hills were shrouded in eggshell-colored clouds. The shower lambasted Market Street with deafening intensity, rebounding off the pavement like buckshot. Tourists held newspapers over their heads and ducked into doorways for cover.

The shift in the weather didn’t stop the police response to the Brinks robbery. Teams of plainclothes agents from the department’s intelligence unit fanned out in the Tenderloin to hunt for eyewitnesses. A squad of uniformed police officers, acting on an anonymous tip, searched the housing project for the aged on Polk Street. Radio and television news said a gang of well-organized thieves had pilfered over four million dollars.

The symphony of police car sirens on Market Street startled Stiv Wilkins, making him think he was back in jail. Rolling over in bed, he looked at his bride of ten months. She was snoring mouth open, dead to the world. Her shoulder-length bleached platinum blonde hair was splayed on the pillow. Matte black lipstick was daubed on her mouth. Her belly button was pierced with an eighteen-karat-gold ring. Her taut coppery breasts were swollen with milk. Their three-month-old baby boy was sleeping on her stomach.

Crawling out of the sack, Stiv padded over to the window to see
what the brouhaha was about. Naked, he braced his hands on the sill. Pressing his aquiline nose to the cold glass, he gazed at the street. The rain was coming down in buckets. A string of black-and-white cop cars flashing red and blue lights were at the Bank of America building on Van Ness Avenue.

The Allen Hotel had been Stiv’s residence for two years. Twenty-four months. Seven hundred and thirty days. Seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty hours. Ever since his band came to town on tour from Portland and fell apart. The drummer decided he was gay and left the group to join a drag queen revue, and the bass player went back to Oregon because the heroin was cheaper up north.

The room was ten feet wide and twelve feet long. The bed took up most of the floor. A sink was wedged in a corner and a Sony television was bolted to the wall. With three people in it, him, Sharona and the brat, the place was no better than a sardine can. Watching the cavalcade of police cars glide past the Allen Hotel toward Octavia Street and the cross-town freeway overpass, Stiv was anxious and tugged at the hair on his narrow chest.

The day before he’d had a beef with a dope dealer. It began when Richard Rood came up to him in the Orbit Café on Market Street. Stiv had been sitting alone at a table drinking a cup of black coffee and minding his own business. Richard was decked out in a gaudy red patent leather suit with a large American flag sewn on the back. His jacket was skintight, advertising his muscular chest. The pants rode high up the cleft in his ass, causing intense discomfort. Three zircon earrings gleamed in each ear. His ebony countenance profiled an oft-broken nose, chiseled cheeks, and deep-set brooding eyes.