The Man on the Washing Machine (11 page)

After that successful sale, the rain came down even harder. Haruto was on the schedule that morning, but he telephoned at about ten-thirty to tell me he was having a crisis with a design for a bamboo fence and did I mind if he came in later, because business was bound to be slow there at the store, and the rain released his gamma rays (or endorphins or some damn thing), which helped him to think, and if he didn't get this fence designed his client was going to have cat fits. The storm had pulled in some giant waves at Ocean Beach, so I figured he was headed there with his surfboard. I didn't mind as it happened, apart from the shower caps, business was nonexistent, but I grumbled anyway.

I eventually gave up on the schedule. I put out a bucket of folding umbrellas I was trying to get rid of at a bargain price, then moved on to dusting shelves and rearranging the displays of by-the-ounce potpourri. One of them is called Spring Rain, which was depressingly apt. Several dripping people came in during the morning and dawdled around hoping the rain would stop. Two of them bought umbrellas. At about twelve-thirty, I handed Davie two twenties and told him what to get me for lunch. “Get yourself something, too,” I said as an afterthought. His shower caps sale deserved a little celebration.

“We gonna have lunch together?” he said eagerly. He usually headed out to the McDonald's a few blocks away, in spite of my best efforts.

“Sure. Get whatever you'd like and we'll have lunch together.” I didn't feel like eating alone anyway.

A short while later he lumbered in the front door dripping wet, carefully shielding several Styrofoam containers inside his jacket. We sat in the office—me with an ear cocked for the spring bell, and one eye on the two-way mirror—and ate our quiche and drank our sodas, and listened to the rain. The quiche wasn't bad but the salad was slightly limp and the rain was flooding down the shop window. If it keeps up, I thought, I'll be able to count the day's profit on one hand. It was days like this that I missed my life as a freelance photographer. The light outside was interesting; passersby on the sidewalk, backlit by a ray of sunshine coming from somewhere, had turned into silhouettes and I felt the urge to pick up a camera again.

“You know what?” Davie said happily. “This is fun.”

I opened my mouth to snort, and then looked at him. His eye was blooming into a deep pansy purple. He was perched on a carton of shampoo jugs like an enormous elf on an undersized mushroom, stabbing at his plate with his plastic fork, stuffing great green bouquets of salad into his mouth and chewing vigorously. Huge gulps of Coke followed each mouthful. I handed him my half-eaten quiche.

“Thanks,” he said, and wolfed it down. This was only a snack; he'd eat three more times before the day was over. Basically everything I paid him went straight into his stomach.

And if no one came into the store all day I wouldn't have to be diplomatic with shoplifters, or be stern with Jehovah's Witnesses, or apologize for running out of pink orchid soaps and having only blue orchid soaps left. For the first time since I'd come in that morning, I relaxed. I smiled at him. He was right. It was kind of fun.

“So what do you think about the man who broke into my apartment?” I asked him.

He swallowed his latest mouthful. He looked thoughtful and frowned. It made him look shifty, which is unfortunate because he's anything but.

“Maybe he was taking something into your apartment, not taking something out,” he said, and he laughed at his own joke. Davie laughs like an asthmatic: “Heh, heh, heh, heh.” He stuffed another forkful of salad into his mouth.

The first customer of the afternoon came in as the rain stopped. It must be a good omen, I decided as Davie trudged out to serve him.

He was wearing a yellow rain hat, which caught my eye in the two-way mirror and made me smile. He bought more than eighty dollars' worth of stuff, too. “… and two tins of Gibney talc number seven,” I heard him say.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No. How much?” He was gruff, but I was in a mood not to mind. Eighty-seven dollars and he could be as gruff as he liked. Davie was doing well. “Is Nicole here?” the customer said as he counted out the money.

“Nicole's not here today,” Davie said.

Until then I hadn't looked at him closely, except for his dorky hat and his eyes when he first came in. I always look customers in the eye and taught Davie to do the same. It makes customers feel you're warm and sincere, but I do it because troublemakers give themselves away with their eyes. It's hard to explain, but now I can usually tell. I hadn't yet learned that skill when the guy tried to rob me last year.

But this fellow had calm, mud-colored eyes. I moved to the office doorway, ready to give Davie a well-deserved pat on the back, when my jaw dropped with an audible click as the customer left the store. He was taking off his rain hat and rolling it to put in his pocket. There was something about his back, and the way his bald head looked as he walked away from me. The last time I'd seen this man he was stomping away from me across my neighbor's roof.

I started mouthing air like a landed fish, but he'd pulled open the door and left the store before I could say anything.

“Davie! That's the man on my washing machine—watch the store! Call the police! I'll be right back!” And I vaulted the counter and ran out. I heard something crash and break as the door slammed behind me, but I didn't care. I didn't even spare a thought to what I'd do if I caught up with him.

The sidewalk was still glossy from the morning's rain, but there were a few young mothers barging around with strollers, and office workers hugging go-cups of cappuccino from Helga's coffee shop. I looked both ways and caught a glimpse of him passing the hardware store at the corner. I could see his bald head and thick neck above his black raincoat like a new mushroom popping out of a plant pot.

But, now I had him, figuratively speaking, I didn't know what to do. Accost him? Follow him? Our local beat cop wasn't in sight. He was probably flirting with the girls at the flower shop.

So okay, I could follow him.

I felt glaringly conspicuous for the first fifty yards or so. I was wearing my shop apron—a fairly eye-popping turquoise—and pink ballet slippers. Not that anyone in the neighborhood gives odd outfits a second glance—or that by local standards the outfit was even all that odd. A guy with purple hair and thigh-high white boots passed me. He made up my mind. No one was going to notice me. I took the apron off, rolled it, and tucked it in the back waistband of my jeans.

I managed to keep at least one person between us and followed him, feeling exhilarated and faintly ridiculous at the same time. It reminded me of the days when I'd spent untold hours stalking reluctant celebrities to capture photographs of them and their newest inamorata. Apparently I'd been lying to Lichlyter; there was still something seductive about the thrill of the chase.

He didn't seem to be in a hurry. Every now and again I stopped to look in a shop window, and once, when he went into a bakery, I spent several minutes choosing an orange African daisy from a flower stall. He came out of the bakery carrying a grease-proof bag, and continued on in the same direction as before without looking my way.

After fifteen minutes we had passed the worst of the SRO hotels, with their front steps occupied by skinny boys in too-tight jeans and tank tops, and were coming up on another stretch of retail stores. There was more litter in the gutters here, and some of the windows had To Lease signs up. The man ahead of me was trucking steadily along, with his turquoise-and-white-striped Aromas bag swinging daintily from one hand and his bakery bag in the other. Then he stopped dead twenty yards ahead of me.

I did a quick ninety-degree spin next to a run-down Chinese herbal pharmacy, and stared intently through the window. Shops like it are all over the city, not just in Chinatown, in these enlightened days of holistic treatments and acupuncture cures for tennis elbow and childbirth pains. I'm always intrigued by the rows of unimaginable powders in jars and the chunks of unrecognizable and mysterious substances, and can't help being fascinated by a store where I recognize none of the merchandise. There was part of a thick horn or antler—or something that looked remarkably like one—standing on a shelf next to some glass jars of dried leaves. I buy artisan bread rather than commercial stuff because it tastes better, so I have no clear idea why mass-produced pharmaceuticals from mega-factories seemed more trustworthy than whatever was being mixed up in front of my eyes.

I risked a glimpse at Mushroom Head. He was searching through his Aromas bag, as if for something in particular. I turned away, shielded my eyes with my hand, leaned against the herb store window, and looked further inside. A woman in a white pharmacist's jacket was standing behind the counter measuring a brownish-gray powder onto a scale. She already had a pile several inches high of different-colored ingredients, some looked like broken bark and leaves, and there were coarse crumbs of something that looked like chopped dried mushrooms. For all I knew, they were chopped mushrooms. The whole setup brought to mind Mr. Choy and Derek's hair tonics.

After I had been staring at her for half a minute, the woman in the shop began to look at me inquiringly and I realized I had to move on—or go in and buy a stomach powder or something—before she came out to ask what I wanted.

Mushroom Head disappeared into a doorway as I watched him from under my arm. I sidled up to the storefront he'd gone into and risked a quick look through the narrow Venetian blinds. It was an office of some kind, with a sagging sofa under the window and a waist-high fence a few feet inside like the kind in old-fashioned courtrooms. Six chest-high cubicles in two rows took up most of the space, and a small glass office at the back of the room took up the rest. There was a woman wearing a red sweater across her shoulders in the glass office. All but one of the cubicles was empty. My man was halfway down on the left, his back toward me, in the act of hanging his raincoat on a hanger and hooking it over the top of his cubicle wall. I pulled hastily back out of sight as he turned around and sat down. What was he doing? Somehow I'd never thought people like him—whatever that meant—had day jobs. Did he wander around the city all night like some sort of twisted super-villain and, come daylight, turn into a mild-mannered—well, a mild-mannered what?

It occurred to me to look up. The sign hanging out over the sidewalk above my head said:

AcmeTax.

The man on the washing machine was an accountant.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I lingered on the sidewalk holding the daisy and positioned myself so I could see into his cubicle. Fortunately neither he nor the woman in the back office looked up. He was staring at a computer screen looking exactly the way I look when I'm fooling with the Aromas computer—bored. Every now and again he tapped his teeth with the end of the pencil he was using to tap on his keyboard. He had a muffin or something in a drawer and he was chewing lumps of it and compulsively gathering little piles of crumbs and pressing them together and sucking them off his fingers. I watched him in frustration. It felt anticlimactic to leave, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I'd been known to shinny up drainpipes in my quest for the right photo, but I couldn't see that helping me much here.

I looked around for inspiration. There was a tiny shop across the road with brightly colored plastic merchandise spilling onto the sidewalk outside—cheap laundry baskets, dishpans and kiddie chairs, and toilet brushes standing upright in a plastic wastepaper basket shaped like a flower. Everything was sheltered under a clear tarpaulin puddled with raindrops. I gave Mushroom Head another quick glance and crossed the street to ask them—whatever I could think to ask them.

The place smelled strongly of plastic and was jammed with shelves almost to the ceiling.

The Asian woman behind the counter smiled and bowed as I crossed the threshold, and watched me carefully as I knocked over a pile of plastic sandals in little gold plastic mesh bags.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and stooped to straighten them. I could have used a pair; my ballet slippers were soaked, scuffed, and sorry looking. My feet were freezing, too.

“Okay, okay! Can I help you?” She was slender and bright-eyed.

“Uh, not … I was wondering about the place across the street.”

“Empty store? To lease?” she said.

“No. The tax place.”

“Ah. They very good.” She said something unintelligible, which I realized must be someone's name.

“Tell her we send.”

I looked at the bilingual card she handed me. I was evidently in the Happy Day Company, Marilyn and George Goh, proprietors.

“I prefer to deal with a man. Is there a man there?” I offered my apologies to the potentially vengeful goddess of working women and held my breath as Marilyn—only the owner ever controlled the cash register in mom-and-pop stores like this one—paused to consider.

A faint shrug. “Mr. Obwiyen.”

“Mister—?”

“Obwiyen.”

I thought rapidly, anxious not to offend. “O'Brien,” I said firmly. She nodded. “Mr. Obwiyen. He okay.” Again, the faintest of shrugs.

What had my burglar said? Something about the luck of the Irish? “Is Mr. O'Brien a short, bald gentleman?”

She nodded again. “No hair. But no short.”

I judged her to top out at five feet, so it could still be my quarry. “Well, I'll look around if that's okay.”

“Sure.”

I walked up and down the tiny aisle, worries about my own abandoned business beginning to resurface, but still thinking about what the hell an accountant could possibly …

I watched Marilyn as I peered through the wavy lenses of a pair of neon green plastic sunglasses. She was pretending to straighten her counter display but one eye, at least, was following me. This was stupid; it was time I got back. I reluctantly considered calling the police. But without a report of the original incident, would they do anything? Besides, now that I'd seen him respectably at work, I was having my doubts.