Fogtown (7 page)

“You sure? It doesn’t look it.” Jeeter toyed with the pistol, turning it over in his hand. He said to Chiclet, “What do you think, babe?”

An artificial smile flickered on his wife’s mouth and died in her eyes. The rictus enslaved her face in a harlequin’s grin. Chiclet didn’t know anything about weapons, and she was getting too high to care. “Buy it if you want it, sugar. Just make sure it’s a deal.”

A scowl crossed Jeeter’s irregular features. “It ain’t right.”

Stiv would’ve been retarded if he hadn’t noticed Jeeter’s hesitation. He said, “What ain’t?”

Jeeter baited him. “The gun, damn it. It don’t look new to me, man. I’ll give you fifty bucks for it. That’s a fair price.”

“Fifty dollars?” Stiv snorted. “You’re fucking unreal. Shit, it’s worth at least a hundred.”

“No way. You’re fantasizing. I’ll give you fifty. No more than that.”

Stiv whinnied, “Unh uh, cowboy. You have to give me at least sixty-five bones.”

“I can’t do that,” Jeeter complained. “I’m already being too generous. You have to lighten up on the price tag. You know me … I can get anything, anytime, anywhere. If you don’t give me what I want, someone else will. Now you want to do this thing or not?”

“You’re taking advantage of my largesse.” Stiv got sulky. “I’m only asking for sixty-five shitty bucks. That’s chicken feed to a player like you.”

Jeeter rasped, “Fifty dollars. That’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”

Stiv pleaded. “How about sixty-four?”

“Nope. You’re way off.”

“Sixty-three?”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Sixty-two?”

Jeeter smiled. “You’re out of my league.”

“Sixty-one.”

“You’re getting closer.”

“Sixty?”

“Keep coming down.”

“Fifty-nine?”

Jeeter hunched his shoulders and said earnestly, “Can’t do it.”

“Fifty-eight?”

“No.”

“Fifty-seven?”

“No.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re killing me. Fifty-six?”

“Nope.”

Chiclet begged Stiv’s case with Jeeter. The Valium was finally hitting, charging her with a blast of unfocused energy. She bent forward on the couch, elbows on her knees, hair in her eyes. “Sweetie, let’s give him five extra dollars. I have it in my purse. Stiv’s got a baby and shit to deal with. He needs whatever he can get his hands on.”

Jeeter didn’t tolerate kibitzing from the sidelines. Buying guns wasn’t a spectator sport. It was for seasoned men only. He whirled on Chiclet; his cheeks were eggplant purple from hypertension. “You hush up, chick. This is commerce. It ain’t welfare.”

“Fifty-five bucks, Jeeter, c’mon,” Stiv cajoled.

“No, fifty.”

Stiv was galled. He was doubtful and said, “I don’t know about this.”

Jeeter pointed the Saturday night special at Stiv. He put his other arm around Chiclet’s shoulders and snuggled her to his chest. He quipped, “What’s there not to know? Think of it this way. You have something and I want it. It’s a war of wills. Now what’s it going be. Fifty dollars or nothing?”

Smelling Jeeter’s feet from where he sat, Stiv said, “Fifty bucks?”

“You heard me right, bucko. Take it or leave it.”

Stiv was disappointed. His whole life it had been like this, big fish eating the little fish. There were only two kinds of people in the world,
winners and losers. He had the dreadful feeling he was in the second category. “I’ll take it.”

Payment was five shabby ten-dollar bills—even Jeeter’s money was insulting. Stiv had half a mind to ask him if the cash had been dug up from a grave. The bills stank of death and decay. But he kept his opinion to himself. There was no point in egging on the bastard. You were only asking for more damage. He waltzed to his feet, smiled icily at his hosts, and said, “Nice doing business with you. I’ll let myself out.”

Heading home to the Allen Hotel, Stiv swung over to Market Street. He sauntered by the fashionable Zuni Café. Smart little tables with crisp white tablecloths had been set up on the sidewalk to take advantage of the Indian summer weather. Patrons resplendent in chic black business suits were eating and drinking while waiters bustled to and from the bar.

A hundred yards away from the café was a homeless encampment. In the center of the camp a man was asleep. Surrounded by cardboard and goose down sleeping bags, he was enjoying the sunshine. His young-old face was serene. His pencil-thin legs were crossed, and his feet were emblazoned with bloodstains. His wrists bore the marks of recent contusions. A circus of green flies whirled around his head. Buried in rags, he was no more substantial than a pile of leaves fallen from a tree. A tiny sparrow with brown wings and a fluted beak pecked at the blood on his feet.

The civil defense siren went off, as it did every Tuesday at noon.

The Brinks money had been gone for six hours.

R
ICHARD ROOD GAVE
the farmer’s market in the Civic Center a hard look. The brick-paved plaza was swamped with sea gulls. Winos were sitting by the fountain. Senior citizens from Chinatown swarmed around merchants selling Fuji apples from Sonoma, mushrooms from Mendocino, fish from the bay, and almonds harvested near Firebaugh.

The place gave Richard the creeps. It reminded him of his days as a drag queen. Back when he was a man-child in an ash blonde wig, a satin gown, and a cashmere stole, hustling businessmen from suburban Marin in the bars on Geary Street.

He was in a dive one night in 1979, a balmy May evening with no fog or wind. Spring was only a week long in the city and Richard had been enjoying the rare warm weather. A guy came in, ordered a whiskey with water, and said the faggots were rioting on Market Street because of Dan White.

A former policeman turned politician, Dan White was from a working-class neighborhood known as Visitacion Valley. He had shot and killed the mayor and a gay public official at city hall the previous November. He had been put on trial for two counts of first-degree murder, but the jury had let him off easy, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Hearing the news, Richard ran down the hill from Geary in his stocking feet, holding his high heels in one hand. At the corner of Turk,
drag queens were trashing a liquor store. The ground floor windows of the State Building on McAllister had been wrecked. Eleven police cars in a row were burning in the Civic Center. Sirens were going off. Windshields were exploding. Richard skipped over to the first cop car in the line, broiling inside a casket of flames. He tore the wig from his scalp and threw it in the fire.

That had been a long time ago. He was different now. Wasn’t a womanish boy, didn’t get up in drag. Didn’t waste his time stealing from drunken old white men in bars. The town had changed along with him. You just can’t kill the mayor without a backlash. There was less housing, no jobs, and a permanent army of homeless.

Wending past a fruit stall laden with twenty-pound bags of oranges, Rood drifted through the Civic Center to Market Street. An assortment of police vehicles, several battered vans, three bullet-pocked Humvees, and a dozen patrol cars, barricaded the boulevard’s four lanes. A repairman in an asbestos jumpsuit was climbing a ladder to rewire the telephone lines that had fallen down during the Brinks crashing. A platoon of cops in powder blue combat overalls and white riot helmets were stationed behind a sandbagged control point at a Muni bus stop.

Standing at the curb, Richard was infuriated. The scar on his forehead was tender. His radar was up. There were just too many police in the street. Made him feel like a rat in a cage. He thumped his chest with a fist. No way in hell was he going to let them get him. He hoofed it down the block toward Sixth Street. An aged wino in a mackinaw called out to him from a porno shop doorway, singing, “Young blood, you got any spare change for a brother?”

Richard wagged his grizzled head at the wino. “I ain’t got shit, homes. The cops done took my last cent.”

The sidewalks were lathered with tourists, guys in wheelchairs selling candles, homeless kids and their dogs, businesspeople going to lunch in the smorgasbords on Kearney Street. Richard pondered the money that Stiv Wilkins owed him. The punk was making it hard to get.

Vigilance had kept the cops and his enemies off Richard’s back. But vigilance was a loan shark that demanded too much of his spirit. Made him so persnickety, he wanted to scream in terror. And terror had caused him to kill three men. One fellow he’d snuffed with a handgun, dusting him from a distance, maybe ten yards, with a Charter Arms .44 six-shooter. The guy had been talking in a phone booth, calling the police. Richard hadn’t felt a thing when the bullet lopped off the stool pigeon’s head and left his brains on the ground.

Killing a man with your bare hands—now that was slow-dancing with the lights turned low. Richard and another dope dealer had been in the restroom of the Stud on Ninth and Harrison. It was disco night. The disc jockey was playing vintage Thelma Houston. The floor had been crowded with dancers. The music drummed through the walls; the bass line had been wicked enough to loosen the fillings in Richard’s teeth.

He’d sold the dealer a bag of fine-quality Colombian weed, a quarter ounce for a hundred dollars; the guy turned around to walk off without paying. Richard said, “What the fuck are you doing?” and the thief produced a stiletto. He menaced Richard, waving the knife as though it were a magic wand. Richard knocked the cutter from the man’s hand and pushed him through a pair of toilet stall doors. He forced him onto his knees, rammed his face into a toilet bowl, and drowned him in two inches of water. His victim’s final breath had been tart, like an unhappy lover’s.

Richard glanced at his watch and winced. It was now one o’clock. Leaves jitterbugged on the ground. A chain-link fence rattled mournfully in the wind. A foghorn tooted in the bay. The hour promised two things: fog from the ocean, and more cops. The flu complicated matters. He’d never been so wasted in his life. Maybe he should get himself tested to see if he had a bug. Go down to the Public Health Service center on Lech Walesa Street and have a blood test.

He meandered into the crosswalk by the Warfield Theater and looked to his left. A cop car muddied from the rain was coming straight
at him. He froze, not knowing which way to go. He looked east on Market Street and saw the police had blocked off traffic.

Some people when they see a policeman, they turn to stone. Others remember their lawyer’s telephone number. Richard Rood high-jumped the mural-painted fence where the Embassy Theater used to be and dove head first into a vacant lot. Landing in a cesspool of rainwater, truck tires, and plastic garbage bags, he struggled to his feet and legged it through the lot into the mouth of Stevenson Alley.

The black-and-white turned the corner onto Seventh Street and was a hundred yards behind him. The cop car swerved into an overturned trashcan and lost a hubcap. The driver floored the brakes to avoid a pothole, put the gears in reverse, then shifted into drive and gunned the gas pedal. The cruiser’s oil pan scraped the roadbed; the trunk sprang open as the car bellied forward and raced through the alley at sixty miles per hour.

A garbage truck backed out of a warehouse loading dock, and the black-and-white cooked a brodie in the road, leaving a set of skid marks a hundred feet long, stopping inches short of a collision with the truck. A cloud of radiator steam rose from under the police car’s blistered hood. Officer Mandelstam flung open the driver’s door, unstrapped his riot helmet, and threw it on the gravel. He stared at Richard Rood as the black dealer skedaddled toward the alley’s end.

Climbing a wooden fence, Richard pulled himself over the top and leapfrogged into an abandoned parking lot. Going full speed, he ran through a rent in the lot’s fence onto Mission Street and then scrammed over to the Highway 101 overpass. Midway up the adjacent block, in between the Schwarz Sausage Co. factory and the Chevron gas station on Fourteenth Street, he found a man spread-eagled on the ground.

The dude was a middle-aged Mexican male in a Carhartt work vest. His pants were bunched around his hips. A pooling of blood had colored his crotch rust-red. He was shirtless; a row of deep knife cuts scored his skin. His stomach was lacerated and glistened with pinkish gore. Both of his shoes were missing, showing two bloody
feet, one without socks. His biggest problem was the bullet hole in the side of his skull.

His head was turned to one side and his unseeing eyes gazed at the street with a look of hope and uncertainty. Newspapers surrounded the deceased, bullied by the wind. A sea gull winged away, squalling at what it had witnessed.

The sight of the dead man sent an electrical charge through Richard Rood. He recognized the sensation for what it was. Death was a summons. No more complex than getting a traffic ticket with a date to appear in court. Some people showed up when they were supposed to. Others didn’t. If you were late, a warrant was issued for your arrest. Then you went to the underworld.

The doors of a motorcycle shop were open on the corner of Fourteenth Street. The blues song “You’ve Got to Love Her with a Feeling” by Freddie King swam onto the sidewalk. A car alarm sounded, followed by three more, melding into a choir. A heavyset crow in the street cawed at Richard. He craned his head and looked at the crow. The black bird was a scary sign: the day was going to get tougher before it got better.

S
ASHAYING UP MARKET STREET
, Mama Celeste navigated the sidewalk. The summer chill had settled in her feet no different than a winter in Siberia. The wind had reddened her cheeks. She looked at her face in the window of a parked car: her eyes were two balls filled with merciless self-consciousness. Her mouth was the entry wound on a murder victim. Her nose belonged to a survivor of self-hatred. It was the face of a stranger who knew everything about her. Mama couldn’t bear to look any longer—enough was enough.

Mama wasn’t sure how to distribute the money. Shading her eyes, she approached the intersection of Market and Valencia and reconnoitered it. A Department of Social Services parking lot was to one side. Up the street were the Baha’i Faith Center, the Zeitgeist bar, a liquor store, and a transmission repair shop.