Snitch World (13 page)

“Put your clothes on,” Klinger abruptly said. His voice carried an unexpected ring of authority, and it was sufficient to take Marci aback. Her complexion colored.

She let fall her hands, then extended her arms away from her hips, palms outward. “Do you not find me desirable?”

“I’m sure you’re very beautiful,” Klinger said quietly, his voice uninflected by so much as a particle of interest. “And no doubt your future husband will express himself accordingly.”

She appeared to consider this. But watched him as she did so. “I’ve never had an orgasm,” she suddenly announced.

While, to some people, this may seem a fine topic for discussion, Klinger found himself at the end of forbearance. Can of worms, he told himself. You’re almost out of it. Don’t go there. He pointed at the briefcase. “There’s probably an app for that.”

Poised for disappointment, Marci smiled. “Phones are getting good,” she said. “But not that good.”

A silence fell between them.

“I can’t help you,” Klinger finally said.

Marci looked at him, then looked around the room. Fourteen by twelve feet. Curtains, once beige, now brown, with finger smudges shoulder high. Tinfoil on the panes,
as perhaps a poor man’s Faraday grid, intended to keep out evil radio signals along with the least soupçon of daylight; a sempiternally cold radiator below, and it, too, painted gray many times. A dirt-flocked light bulb on a cord dangled from the ceiling, and a beaded pull-chain dangled from that, with an odorless and faded pine-tree air freshener as finial. Gray carpet heading to black, its pile mostly shredded, even its formaldehyde leeched into the ambient fetor long since, let alone any comfort it might afford to stockinged feet. A brown haze deposited by cigarette smoke on the ceiling directly above the damp impression of a human on the bed’s gray blanket. A bedside stand that held no clock, no book, no phone, no radio. The walls had been papered, painted, papered, then painted again, gray, gray, gray, into the layers of which many thumbtack holes revealed a long and fading trail of disappeared images, icons, photos, clippings, pinups, prayers, calendars. She turned back to Klinger. “Of all the places to find a man I can respect,” she said at last. She retrieved her blouse from the floor, turned her back on him, set about getting dressed. “You’ve never had a decent woman in your life?” she said to the door.

“The more decent they were,” Klinger answered without hesitation, “the sooner I ruined them. After that, they were nothing but trouble. In the end I realized that if I cut women out of my equation, I saved myself any number of difficulties. Them, too.”

“And how long ago was that?” she asked the door.

Klinger snorted. “I have no idea.”

She turned around. “How’s this?”

“You’re pretty with your clothes off, you’re pretty with them on,” Klinger offered.

She made a little grimace. “It’s kind of you to say so. Now what?”

Klinger shrugged. Despite having been up all night, he no longer felt like sleeping. “Now I guess I’ll get some coffee. After that, I’ll visit the Goodwill, buy myself some dry clothes.”

Marci put on her jacket. “How about some breakfast?”

This took Klinger aback.

“Know a place?”

Klinger nodded dumbly.

She glanced at the face of a little watch on the outside of the wrist that bore no bracelets. “We’ll be able to buy a battery in about an hour.”

Klinger blinked. “We?”

Marci nodded. “If Phillip’s phone coughs up the information I need, there will be a reward for you.”

“Reward …” Klinger repeated, almost to himself. “What sort of reward?”

“Well,” Marci smiled wryly, obviously gaining on her former confidence, “since you turned down the good stuff, how about a little cash money?”

“Money …” Klinger said softly. “Oh, money …”

“Jesus Christ.” Marci made a little frown. “Is money another sign of life you abjure?” She shook her head with authority. “That just can’t possibly be true. If you were to go about eschewing sex as well as money, you’d be as good as dead.” She wagged a finger at him, so that the bracelets rattled. “If not dead in fact.”

Klinger shook his head. “It isn’t.” Then he nodded. “It isn’t a sign of life which I …”

“Eschew,” Marci prompted him.

“Dodge,” he substituted. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, suddenly loquacious, “I like money. I really do. It’s just that money is the bane of my existence. All my life,” Klinger confirmed, “money has been the bane of my existence.”

“Listen to me,” Marci told him, suddenly all gravity. “You dear, dear man.” She extended her hands toward him, palms down. Klinger’s mouth fell open. She turned her palms up and waggled her fingers. “Come on,” she said. Klinger blinked. She waited. Klinger covered her palms with his own. She clasped his hands with hers. She clasped them gently, but she clasped them firmly. She locked eyes with him “Are you listening to me?”

Klinger nodded.

“I can’t hear you,” she said, “Klinger,” she added, using his name for the first time.

“I’m listening,” he told her.

“Marci,” she told him.

“Marci,” he repeated.

“Look at me,” she told him.

Klinger raised his eyes. It was the first time he’d looked another human being in the eye in a very long time. He didn’t even go eyeball to eyeball with his own reflection—especially his own reflection. There’s more than one reason they don’t put mirrors in these rooms—. “I’m listening,” he abruptly said.

“Money,” Marci told Klinger in all sincerity, “should be the bane of other people’s lives. Not yours.” She gave their clasped hands a squeeze. “Other people’s. Understand?”

Klinger watched her with amazement, and not a little alarm. What money? What other people? There was never any money. None. And there were no other people, not any to speak of, not any other people who counted, no people who counted at all.

At bottom, Klinger had no idea what she was talking about.

“Well,” she said. “Do we understand one another?”

“Sure,” Klinger nodded and lied. “Sure.” He smiled woodenly. “Can I have my hands back?”

“Only if you promise me,” she said earnestly, “that you will try to bring to bear what I have just told you upon your daily life, and especially,” she squeezed the hands, “upon those around you.”

Klinger watched her, askance, from under the ledges of his eyebrows. When she’d finished speaking, he moved his head through a figure eight. It might have been a token of hasty agreement. It might have been a recalcitrant shudder of denial. It might have been a fly in an orgone box, desperate to escape.

“Okay,” Marci said. “Good.” She released his hands, and paused to smile before she retrieved her purse/briefcase from the floor next to the bed.

“Let’s go get some breakfast.”

Outside, the rain was coming down.

“Listen,” Klinger told her when they’d descended to the street. “I need a drink.”

She glanced at her watch. “It’s ten-thirty in the morning.”

Klinger regarded her with frank amazement. “What’s that got to do with it?”

She lifted her hands.

Down at the end of the bar, the two guys in flannel shirts had laid off the mumblety-peg. Midway along the bar the old man had his usual seat, and Bruce was behind the plank, ringing up a sale.

They took a pair of stools adjacent to the old man.

“Oh, my goodness,” Marci said, as they settled in.

Klinger, who had taken up a
Chronicle
that lay on the bar, intact but for its sports section, looked at her. She slid her eyes toward the bartender, who wore, as Klinger soon observed, boots of the type with a buckled strap over the instep, a pair of chaps, a vest, and a high-visored officer’s cap, all black, all leather, and all by itself with no other apparel.

“It must be Saturday,” the old man said, turning a page in the sports section without looking up.

“Friday,” Bruce said to the cash register. “I’m starting early.”

“You think he’d take the time to visit a tanning booth.”

Bruce waggled his ass. “My regulars like their buns untoasted.” He keyed the old-fashioned register without
turning around. The drawer slid open with an indefatigable ca-ching.

“Hirsute and wan,” the old man qualified.

Bruce turned to spin a pair of cocktail napkins onto the bar in front of his newly arrived customers. “What’s your pleasure?”

Klinger looked up from the paper. “Go ahead,” Marci said. “It’s on me.”

“Grog.” Klinger returned his attention to the newspaper. “Jameson double.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

Bruce set a coffee mug on the bar in front of Klinger and explained the drink as he built it. “Hot water, juice of half a lemon, sugar because there’s never been any honey at the Hawse Hole other than yours truly, and whiskey.” He centered the coffee mug on its coaster. “It’s medicinal.”

Marci had been watching attentively. When Bruce had finished she said, “That looks good. May I try one?”

“Take that one,” Klinger said, as he opened the Metro section.

Marci shook her head. “Too much whiskey. Could you make me one with half that?”

“Absolutely.” Bruce placed a mug in front of Marci and started over.

Klinger, meanwhile, had found something to read.

SAN FRANCISCO—Passersby called police to the scene of an apparent double mugging in North Beach on Thursday night.

Authorities convened onto the 900 block of Montgomery St., between Broadway St. and Pacific Ave. at 11:16 p.m. where they found the two men unconscious. A passing pedestrian, one of a number to call 911, could provide no information about the two victims. Twenty-dollar
bills were strewn about the scene, a police spokeswoman said, apparently overlooked by the mugger or muggers in their haste.

Emergency vehicles removed the victims, both men, to St. Francis Memorial Hospital, where one of them was pronounced dead at 1:45 a.m. The survivor remains in critical condition. Police and hospital authorities are withholding identification pending notification of next of kin.

Witnesses to the incident are encouraged to call a confidential tips line …

Klinger skimmed the balance of the Metro section. There was no mention of a convenience store stickup.

He reread the double-mugging item.

Shit, Klinger said to himself, as he folded the paper. Could it be the cops didn’t find Frankie’s wire?

He watched steam spiral up off the golden surface of his toddy and shook his head. Once they ran his prints, it wouldn’t make any difference.

Which is the dead guy, which the survivor?

He passed his now lemon-fragrant palm over his grizzled face.

Marci’s phone rang. She plucked it from her purse, looked at the screen, stood off her stool, excused herself, and headed for the front door. “That’s a polite little lady you got there,” the old man said to his sports section, “who don’t mind putting some distance between her neighbors and her phone conversation.”

“Yeah,” Klinger said, not half paying attention. “She’s like that.”

For sure the cops will make Frankie whether he survived or not. Klinger took a tentative sip. The toddy was good and it was hot and he took some consolation in it,
but he took further solace in a pair of twinned facts. To wit, if Frankie hadn’t survived, Klinger’s contribution to Thursday’s debacle would remain unknown; if Frankie had survived, however, he wouldn’t tell the cops a thing. Frankie was a professional. Klinger’s anonymity was assured.

Dead or alive, on the other hand, Frankie Geeze was done.

Bummer.

Klinger wrinkled his lips and recalled a case in point.

Several years before, a witness noticed a bicyclist exit the Broadway Tunnel, heading west, at two-thirty in the morning.

Ten minutes later, at Steiner and Jackson, high atop Pacific Heights, three pedestrians in a crosswalk toppled the cyclist in an attempt to rob him.

The bicyclist, however, hit the pavement rolling, came up in a crouch holding a pistol in both hands, and precisely drilled his assailants once each. Then he sprinted into the darkness of Alta Plaza Park, diagonally across the intersection, never to be seen again.

The commotion drew the attention of someone six stories up in a building overlooking the intersection, who called the cops.

One of the three assailants died on the spot. A second was grievously wounded. The third, also wounded, helped the second man half a block down Steiner, where they got into a pickup truck. The driver managed to back the truck out of its perpendicular parking place but only got a block away before he crashed it into a row of parked cars.

Meanwhile, before the cops arrived, a fifth party happened onto the scene, noticed the bicycle lying in the crosswalk, and stole it.

When the cops showed up, the observant neighbor met them in the street, mentioned the theft of the bicycle,
pointed out the body in the crosswalk, and led the authorities down the hill to the crashed pickup truck. In its cab they found a dead passenger and the guy behind the wheel wounded and unconscious.

Net result? The surviving mugger found himself slapped with two counts of murder, which, having been committed in the course of another felony, the attempted robbery, made him liable to special or aggravating circumstances—a capital offense. It made no difference whatsoever that it was somebody else who shot the surviving suspect and his two partners. It didn’t even make a difference if the survivor had no previous strikes. The surviving suspect took the fall.

The cops put out the word that they’d like very much to talk with the cyclist, as well as to the man who stole the bicycle.

Nobody came forward.

If Frankie Geeze were already dead? He was better off.

Klinger sipped his drink.

Which leads us …

Klinger contemplated the second toddy on the counter.

Which leads us to that extra cellphone.

“If I’m a lousy hour late to work,” Marci said, resuming her seat, “it’s like the whole company falls apart.”

“Is it your company?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Ow.” She leaned back and glanced under the bar. “There’s hooks under there.”

“For your purse,” Klinger pointed out.