Fogtown (4 page)

The minute he walked in the door, it went wrong. The Asian shopkeeper decided he didn’t care for Stiv’s looks, the black leather jacket and the chains, the sunglasses, or the rust-eaten revolver in his hand, and shot him with a chrome-plated.40 Smith and Wesson semiautomatic. The only reason Stiv was still alive was that the bullet struck the pocket watch he wore on his belt, stopping the hands at quarter of two.

Stiv shut the radio and went over to the sink, turned on the cold-water tap, and washed his face. He had to come up with five hundred and seventy bucks by the end of the day. Four hundred dollars was for Richard Rood. One hundred and seventy was for Jeeter Roche. Drying his neck with a threadbare towel, Stiv laughed. If he didn’t get the money, he was as good as killed. Richard Rood would make sure of it.

T
HE RAIN STOPPED
, as sudden as a heart attack. The sun, playing peek-a-boo with the fog, came out from behind a bank of offshore clouds. A rainbow curved over the Tenderloin’s rooftops and sunshine dappled the marquees of Market Street’s porno palaces. Looking in the window of the Donut Star coffee shop at Seventh and Market, Mama Celeste thinned her lips in consternation—nobody was in there.

Every morning Mama went to the Donut Star for a cup of coffee with her associates. She called them that because they weren’t exactly her friends; they were acquaintances of long-standing repute. It was nothing special, just retired folks drinking coffee and talking. Mama was saddened. She’d come to depend on these meetings.

Now that the rain had ceased, steam was rising from the pavement. Sea gulls wheeled over the buildings. A train in the Southern Pacific rail yards on Fourth and Townsend blew its whistle. Two transvestite hookers carrying umbrellas and dressed in matching silver lamé pants suits and stiletto heels teetered past the Donut Star. The Muni bus shelter across the street was jam-packed with winos; a murder of crows perched on the shelter’s roof. Waterlogged pigeons dive-bombed the stoplights and the stores on Jones Street, including Saint Anthony Dining Room, a venerable soup kitchen owned by the Catholic Church.

Mama didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to go inside and drink coffee by herself. It was too lonely. But standing in the street wasn’t healthy. Somebody might come up from behind and bonk her on the head. Knock her out, maybe shank her and take what she had. She didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. If someone wanted to mug her, she couldn’t stop it.

Hugging the shoebox, Mama Celeste nudged the door and limped in. The first things that greeted her were the smells of fresh instant coffee and sausages burning on the grill, and a canned Tony Bennett ballad playing on the cheap-ass sound system. The short-order cook hailed her from behind the counter. He was pint-sized and barrel-chested in a T-shirt that was four sizes too small; a cold cigarette was wedged in his mouth and a squared-off Afro flossed his ears. “Good morning, Mama Celeste,” he said. “How’s it hanging with you?”

The dining area was empty. The brightly laminated yellow and blue plastic tables and booths were damp; the floor had been recently mopped. The fish bowl windows facing Market Street were streaked with cleaning powder. Mama Celeste answered the smiling black man in the bloody white apron with a wave of her hand. “I’m cool. Where’s everybody?”

The short-order cook picked up a spatula and dug the sausages off the griddle. Flipping them onto a plastic plate, he reached in a pail of uncooked French fries, pulled out a handful, and threw them on the grill. He said, “The damn police got everyone all scared. No one’s been in yet.”

“How come?”

He swung around and stared at Mama Celeste. His blueberry black face was creased with sweat. His purpled eyes were fixed with concern. He put one gnarled hand on the counter, stuck out his beer belly, and squawked around the cigarette in his mouth. “Shit, woman, what’s wrong with you? You blind? Look over there.”

He pointed the spatula at the window. Where Market Street intersected at McAllister and Jones, there was a delta of police vehicles.
Cops in riot gear with assault rifles and bandoliers of stun grenades were laying down yellow crowd-control ticker tape. “That Brinks robbery has the police in a fucking tizzy,” he said. “You hear about it?”

Mama Celeste forced her face to remain inscrutable. “I ain’t heard a damn thing.”

“That’s good,” the cook chuckled, “because here comes one of them cops right now.”

Pushing open the door to the Donut Star, patrolman Mandelstam made out his face in the glass. Cigarette ash was caked on the bib of his midnight blue combat tunic. His eyes were molten from sleeplessness. His fleshy cheeks were festooned with salt-and-pepper stubble. His nose was larger than a continent. Pausing in the doorway, he unstrapped his scuffed white riot helmet. The fluorescent lights in the coffee shop were too bright, too disorienting. He noted the dining area, and then the short-order cook. The black man looked back at the cop with no visible expression on his battered face. He simply nodded at Mandelstam and moved the cigarette in his mouth from left to right.

The silence in the place didn’t feel right. Mandelstam couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was off. The music was overly loud, like it was covering up something. Even the food cooking in the back smelled weird. Mandelstam sized up Mama Celeste at the counter. Maybe it was the crazy looking old lady. She couldn’t have been more than four feet tall, not even with the mountain of dreadlocks on her head.

Retirees all looked alike to Mandelstam. He saw a million of them every day in the Tenderloin. Sitting in wheelchairs under liquor store awnings. Digging in trash bins for bottles to recycle. Feeding pigeons. Getting helped into ambulances. Standing in line at the welfare office. The old coot had her army coat zipped up to the collar, a stinky woolen muffler around her neck. The bill on her baseball hat was bent, covering her eyes. She had a decade-old Reebok shoebox in her hands.

If Mandelstam had been more on top of things he might have noticed the runs in Mama Celeste’s stockings, how spotty her coat
was. He would’ve discerned the wrinkles in her weathered face and memorized the macabre shape of her orthopedic shoes and the hem of her dress as it unraveled in an exodus of loose threads. He might have wondered what was in the shoebox. But no matter how savvy the cop might have been, he’d never have deduced, not in a thousand years, that she was a millionaire living in a tenement hotel. He queried her, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Mama Celeste.”

“Where do you live?”

Mama squeezed the shoebox to her bosom. “The Allen Hotel.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“Getting me some coffee, maybe a jelly doughnut.”

“You seen anything out of the ordinary around here? We had a robbery earlier this morning.”

“I ain’t seen nothing,” Mama said stoutly.

There had been a time, like yesterday, when she hadn’t been able to afford an aspirin for her sciatica. Money was like poor arithmetic. So many people had none. Others had too much. There was no balance in between. Now she had more money than city hall, more money than a rock star. Now she could afford a proper burial when the occasion arose.

Each step Mama Celeste executed might be her last one. When you were seventy-nine years old, you had to think like that. Forget the past. Forget the future. It was too confusing. It was better to stay focused on the present to make it last a smidgen longer.

Mortified that the shoebox was broadcasting the money in it, Mama ducked her head. The cook sensed her fear and moved back as Mandelstam raked him with tombstone eyes. The policeman’s unblinking narcoleptic stare was hypnotic. He wasn’t physically intimidating like other officers. He didn’t swagger. He didn’t bully. He just looked into you as if he knew everything that you were thinking.

Mandelstam guessed the old lady was lying, but as quickly as he felt the hunch, it vanished and he couldn’t summon it again. The cook, watching him closely, relaxed and went back to his chores. He turned
over the French fries on the stove and hurled a batch of hamburgers in the sink to thaw.

Maybe it was the music, that Tony Bennett, but Mandelstam was unable to focus. He was too damn tired. Rubbing his eyes, he had a flashback about a party he went to as a kid. He’d been dressed up in his best clothes, a pearl-buttoned cowboy outfit with rhinestones. After getting him to join a ring of other children underneath a papier mâché piñata in the living room, his father sauntered off to flirt with the host’s wife. She was in the kitchen mixing up martinis for the adults.

The piñata was a crudely fashioned donkey that had been painted green. It was attached to a fixture on the ceiling by a garden rope. The birthday girl, a tow-headed rug rat in a pink dress, announced to everyone that they were going to play a game in her honor. The girl’s daddy handed out plastic baseball bats to the kids assembled under the donkey. The object of the contest was to break the piñata and get at the toys inside it.

Armed with a bat, Mandelstam bashed the piñata into smithereens. A plethora of individually wrapped toys plummeted to the floor. He set his eyes on a black plastic gun and beat everyone to it. The gun was a replica of a Russian AK-47 assault rifle, just what he’d wanted.

This pissed off the birthday girl to no end. She freaked out and hollered that the plastic rifle was hers. She stamped her foot and chanted, give me the gun, give me the gun. The rest of the kids joined the chorus. Give her the gun. Give her the gun. The hue and cry grew louder. Mandelstam’s semidrunken father and the girl’s mother intervened; the toy was torn from his grubby mitts.

His father was in an Eddie Bauer chamois hunting shirt unbuttoned to his navel, and he upbraided Mandelstam in front of the other children. “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? Don’t you know how to share?”

Sequestered by his beery-smelling old man and the lady of the house, Mandelstam was escorted out of the living room and marched downstairs into a half-finished basement. The woman opened the door to a vacant laundry room. A little tipsy, she had lipstick all over
her teeth. A barrette in her hair was about to drop off. She said, “In here, shrimp.”

Mandelstam blubbered in his own defense. “But I didn’t do nothing to no one.”

Without further ado, he was deposited in the laundry room. His pops said, “I hope you’ll learn something from this, kiddo.” The door was shut with a resounding click of the lock. When the party was over, Mandelstam was released from confinement and his father drove him home.

A Neil Diamond tune came on the coffee shop’s sound system; the opening bars of “Solitary Man” jarred the cop from his stupor. Mandelstam loved the song and remembered it well but had heard it too many times and didn’t want to hear it again. He stiffened, nodded at Mama Celeste, turned around, and booked out the door and into the streets.

The cook waited until they were alone before saying to Mama, “I thought that whitey-ass old chump would never leave.”

Mama took a deep breath. “The man was pesky, all right.”

“He was looking at your shoebox. What you got in it?”

“Money.”

It was the funniest thing the cook had heard all week. “Girl, you strictly from hunger,” he said. “You ain’t even got a penny.” Laughing as if he was in on the joke, he shucked, “And what you doing with that money?”

“Whatever God tells me to do with it.”

It was ten o’clock. Four hours had passed since the Brinks robbery. The rain had moved north over the Golden Gate Bridge into the coastal hills of Marin County. The soup kitchens in the Tenderloin were in full swing. Market Street’s sidewalks were thick with burglars, dope fiends, prostitutes, and panhandlers. Mama Celeste had to get going.

A
DOVE SAT ON A TELEPHONE POLE
at the corner of Van Ness and Market. It heard a mighty flapping of wings, looked to see what kind of bird was making the noise, and was attacked by a red-tailed hawk. The predator sank its talons in the dove’s neck and yanked it from the pole. Flying off with the stunned creature, the hawk zoomed over the New College law school campus on Fell Street.

Richard Rood looked up at the red-tailed hawk and then at his fake Rolex watch. It was ten-thirty. On a scale of one to twenty, his day was starting out at zero. He had no food in his belly. No real money in his pockets. No weed to smoke. Leaning against a chain-link fence, he collected his thoughts. Stiv Wilkins had failed to come up with the money he owed. The white boy was a poltroon.

On the upside of things, Stiv was going to have to pay a harsh penalty for his transgression. Sadistic by nature, Richard looked forward to the thrill of punishing him. Maybe he’d beat Stiv into a pulp. Or put out a lit cigarette in his face. Cutting off the punk’s ears with a knife sounded divine.

If it hadn’t been for the black-and-white police cruiser that pulled up beside him, Richard Rood would’ve stood there all day thinking on how to torture Stiv Wilkins. The car announced itself by backfiring, emitting a report identical to the discharge of a large caliber handgun. Officer Mandelstam turned off the engine and decamped from the vehicle in slow motion, as if he were losing a battle with gravity.
A stainless steel Ruger Security Six revolver in a lightweight canvas mesh holster was glued to his hip. A four-foot-long plastic nightstick with a whiplash handle was in his gloved fist.

Richard Rood assessed the cop and was mellow. He wasn’t sweating it. He had no warrants out on him. No outstanding tickets to pay. No probation violations hanging over his head. He wasn’t going to get busted, not for no penny-ante shit. He wasn’t holding any drugs. No dime bags of indica. No bags of crank. No stolen credit cards. No guns or knives. He was clean, pure as driven snow. Which was wise because his rap sheet was sizable—a grand total of thirty-seven arrests that had resulted in two felony convictions and ten years of court-appointed probation. But staying clean also meant he wasn’t doing any trade. Which meant Richard had no cash.

“All right,” Mandelstam burped, “what are you doing?”