No Footprints (22 page)

By the time I was lifted to the dock, an emergency vehicle—the one from the set, no doubt—had arrived and Macomber Dale'd been deposited in it. It was making an oh-so-careful three-point turn. In a few minutes the entire crew would be out here.

The sun hadn't even broken through the fog yet. It wasn't quite eleven o'clock!

‟Is he alive?” I asked the cop standing over me.

‟Yeah. Friend of yours?”

It took me a moment to see things from her point of view. I was still shivering despite the blanket the EMTs had wrapped around me. My head felt like it had ballooned inside my skull, making it hard to process any thought at all. Of course, she didn't know what had happened before the car went in. No one did but me. ‟Acquaintance. Do you have any coffee?”

She walked over to a pack and extricated a thermos. ‟Peet's,” she said. ‟My own emergency supply.”

Make this woman chief!
‟Thanks.” I opened it and let the steam warm my chin. I wanted to jump inside. Sipping slowly, I pondered how much to tell her. What I needed was to get Jed out there so he could get the car hauled out, and not screw up our chance of using the location here, when and if we did do the shoot. Assuming there was still adequate backing
without Mac, assuming we could get the car out of the bay. What about Dale's connection to Varine Adamé?

‟Did he say anything?” she asked.

‟Suicidal, you mean? It'd be a stupid way to go. And, frankly, yet another expense for our budget, not that that'd be something he'd consider.”

‟You don't sound very sympathetic.”

I looked down at my wet cold body. ‟Maybe I'll learn something that will make me. But right now, I was supposed to be setting up a stunt here. We're on a tight schedule. The city's only given us this spot for a couple hours. He's wrecked the set-up, wrecked the car, and my spare clothes are in the fucking bay!”

She started to reply, then turned toward the crowd now thundering at us.

I hadn't considered Mac's moronic behavior as a suicide attempt. He might as well've used the bathtub. But now I wondered. Maybe not planned; maybe spur of the moment. Nothing I'd seen suggested an ability or even a desire to control his impulses. But, then, that was the guy's MO
.
Maybe—
Oh shit!
—his driving off the pier had been spurred by my mention of Varine Adamé!

I drank the coffee, and, all the while continuing to shiver, watched Jed, the camera crew, the gaffers jog out along the planks. I assured them all that I was fine. That disposed of, the issue became the car.

‟We could get a crane,” Jed proposed.

‟It'd sink the pier
if
it could even maneuver onto it.”

‟Barge?” the cop suggested.

Jed stared at her like she'd lost her mind. ‟That'd be our whole budget.”

She stared back. ‟Don't even think of leaving that vehicle in our waters. This is the city of Berkeley you're dealing with. We take illegal parking very seriously.”

I smiled and took another swallow of her coffee, and let them work it out. Finally, they settled on a marina tow truck.

I wasn't smiling, though, when the truck arrived and it became apparent someone had to dive down to help hook the car to the pontoon arrangement, then wait around—wet!—till the truck dragged it ever so slowly to the shore and up over the rocks onto dry ground.

‟Paint's okay,” Jed mused when the car was at last settled on dry land. ‟How many more scenes do we have with it?”

‟Interiors?”

‟We can do those in studio in a mock-up.” He paced as he considered. I'd seen him go at it for half an hour, driving other guys as high-strung as he was crazy.

‟Exteriors? Distant shots, not a problem”—I was thinking, too. ‟So we're talking close exteriors. How many? How many essentials?”

‟If we—”

‟Where d'you want me to take this piece of crap?” The tow driver motioned to our junker.

Jed strode toward it, turned back toward us. ‟I need to look at the storyboard again. Got to check with—”

‟Hey! I have to get this thing out of here. So where you want me to take it?”

‟I don't know if we absolutely have to have it at all. Maybe—”

‟You're not leaving it here.” The cop had a one-track mind.

It was going to take longer to arrange, and—dammit—going to involve me longer, but there was no other alternative. ‟Let's haul it back to the garage where it was in the city and let it dry out while we decide.”

‟San Fran? Shit, I can't drag this over the bridge. I'm going to have to get a trailer for that.”

‟Yeah, sure. Do it.” To me Jed said, ‟You can handle this?” He looked toward the cameras, lights, all the equipment brought over here, unused, needing to be schlepped back to the city. Naturally, he was calculating how much this wasted day cut into our budget.

‟Yeah, I'll deal with the car. You going to go to the hospital and check on Mac?”

‟Hospital! Yeah, I suppose. One more pain-in-the-ass problem the . . . pain-in-the-ass's adding to this pain-in-the-ass of a day. If he'd planned it he couldn't have screwed things up more.”

‟Do you think he did?”

‟Planned it? Anything's possible, with him.”

Not the tack you took when you were hot for me to give him driving lessons.
But it wasn't the time to go into that. Particularly when I had much worse to put on the table. ‟On the drive here he said he had money problems. He sounded like his deal with the Adamés is falling through.”

‟Shit!
Shit!
Oh shit!” Jed glared at me. ‟Why didn't you let the bastard drown? We've got insurance. He's dead, he's golden.”

Did Mac know that? Was that what he was doing? His own ‟one decent thing”? Or, like he said, was it all about feeling used?

‟Did he clue in Harmon?”

The real producer? ‟Doubt it. Sounded like he was blurting it out for the first time.”

‟Shit!” he repeated. ‟Yeah, okay, I gotta call Harmon. He can go over to the hospital with me. He can sort out this mess.”

I nabbed some dry clothes from costumes—a halter top and cargo pants—caught Jed before he headed off, and guilted him out of his black jacket. ‟I have to get some soup before I deal with the car. You want to come?” But he only scowled, not even bothering to answer.

I stopped to buy the thickest T-shirt in the tackle shop—Berzerkely Marina it said under a drawing of a boat with hippies on the deck and protest signs for sails. I wondered how many decades they'd been praying for some tourist to take it off their hands. I inside-outed it and hoped the colors would run in the wash.

After that, I downed a bowl of clam chowder. Shane, the tow driver, was waiting for me.

‟You know that tow lot on Folsom—the wrecking yard?”

‟Granger's? Yeah, we got an arrangement with them. You want to—”

‟Our garage is a couple blocks from there.”

He shrugged. As I climbed into the cab he said what I'd already learned: ‟Most people have no idea how shallow the bay is.”

It was a lousy, stupid ending for Mac. Maybe if I'd known him before I would have suspected he was flipping out these last couple days when he plopped into the car on the set and refused to leave, when he offered me a fortune that he knew he didn't have—sheesh!

But now, as I leaned back against the padded seat in the warm tow truck cab, with the faded tobacco smell and Elvis strumming through the speakers and the San Francisco skyline growing larger as we crossed the bridge, there was nothing separating me from a long hot bath and a very big meal other than getting home. Well, except for opening the garage and guiding Shane as he lowered the sodden old Civic into it. So I could toy with compassion. Now, instead of Macomber Dale, the annoying threat to my employment, and Jed's and my relationship with the city film commission, the threat to my whole future, I dipped my toe in the picture of a man losing not only his money but his self-image. A guy facing humiliation, helplessness, ridicule. A man sufficiently unhinged to lock onto the only escape he could find—to drown himself in the bay.

The problem was, I wasn't through with being pissed off. I looked out the windshield at the streets of the outer Mission and felt myself at one with universal grumpiness. You couldn't get more cranky than I felt. But this strange contract with Varine, I needed to get to the bottom of that. Despite his many infuriating qualities, Dale did not seem threatening, dangerous, hardly worth killing yourself for.

Then again, a couple hours ago I wouldn't have been able to imagine him undermining the movie or driving into the bay.

‟
This
is it?” Shane stopped across the street from the ramshackle garage. ‟I thought there was money in filmmaking.”

There's nothing like seeing something through the eyes of a stranger to make you realize how well you'd been deluding yourself.

‟Yeah, well, my dad got a deal on it years ago and every so often it comes in handy. Like now.”

He was staring. ‟Even this, you could sell it. I mean, property in San Francisco . . .”

‟Shane, I've got six brothers and sisters, and a mother. Making a decision about anything at all, ever, is a miracle. Trust me, it's not worth the effort.”

I opened the door, jumped down to the sidewalk, and walked across the street, pausing only momentarily to let a truck by. Next to our garage on one side was an auto repair shop—closed and dark. The stucco block on the other side—a mate in decrepitude to ours—hadn't been occupied in ages. If my brother Gary didn't need to park one of his extra cars here, I could leave the junker to rot through eternity.

I jiggled the lock, the doors fell open, and I motioned to Shane. I had the feeling he wanted me to turn on the light, but we hadn't paid for electricity here for, well, ever. As I watched him backing up the truck, I realized
that the garage's main function in our family was as a talisman to my father's memory.

The taillights outlined the piles of dried-up paint cans and cardboard boxes.

‟Wait a minute!” I didn't remember the stuff being so far into the room. If I shoved—

‟Omigod!
Omigod! No!
”

I bent down over the body, squinting against the dim light and deep shadows in the back of the garage. Time slowed like cells in a reel of film. I saw a person lying face down in the pile of rags. A woman in a latte-brown suit. Just a woman—it didn't have to be her. Her knees were bent, her shins covered in black boots with brown trim. The clothes Marc, the bellman, had described—anyone could have walked through the hotel lobby, spotted them, bought them. It didn't have to be her.

Her hair was chin-length, dark, and matted to the back of her head. Matted with blood!

The
back
of her head. She'd been struck. Killed. She hadn't killed herself—someone had beat her to it!

She was cold. Like she'd been on the bridge. No, not like that at all. She was cold now because she'd been dead for hours. I looked at her face. Blood had pooled on the side nearest me.

Someone had killed her! Picked her up, laid her in a vehicle, and driven her . . . here! I couldn't be sure—that was the cop's job—but that's what it looked like.

But why? Who knew about our garage? Only Mike had any inkling about this woman.

The grind of the tow truck reverberated off the walls, bringing me out of my reverie.

I made it only to the side of the building before I threw up.

Shane gave me water. I washed out my mouth. The air was still but I could feel it on the wetness around my mouth. I stood there numbly. Just stood. It was a couple minutes before I could make myself go back into the garage and double-check what I couldn't believe I had seen.

I scanned the area around her for a purse—none. No purse, no pouch. I wanted to leave it at that, but made myself feel her pockets—no cash, not even a tissue. But in her breast pocket was a credit card: Varine Adamé.

I wanted to stay with her, for no sensible reason, just to do it. But I had to get outside in the air.

Shane, the tow truck driver, was pulling out his cell to call 911. Once he'd done that he started grumbling about his truck and the junker still on the carrier, all the while standing with his back to the garage, as if rejecting the reality of what lay beyond. Finally, I told him to slide the car down next to the curb. I was as relieved as he was to have something do.

But there wasn't any space at the curb and he ended up leaving it on the sidewalk just clear of the garage doors. It sat right next to the space between the garage and the next building, right next to where I'd thrown up.

When the police squealed into view, lights flashing, sirens keening, figures racing around, it all seemed overblown and irrelevant.

‟Do you know the deceased?” the detective asked.

‟I don't know.”

She heaved a big heavy, theatrical sigh. She'd told me her name but it had floated by me. She was young, African American, brusque.

From the doorway, I could see into the garage, to the body lying on her side in that vintage brown suit. I thought I could make out a wrinkle around the hips from the skirt riding up as she pedaled, but I might have
been imagining. She looked so ‟tossed away.” Like the rags Gary, Mike, or Gracie'd used to clean windshields when they'd had cars here, the rags John ranted about, not because he cared about them but because they might be a fire hazard and endanger some other discarded belongings.

I didn't save you
from jumping
for this!
I felt like screaming at the stupidity of it all. The waste.
What is life?
I had hunted down, considered, imagined so much of a life for her. Ironically, without ever knowing her, I already missed her. And I would go on missing her, because . . . I didn't know her.