Telegraph Hill (3 page)

Chapter
3

At Hunan House Restaurant in San Francisco’s
Chinatown, Tamo sat back in his chair. The forty year old Shanghai native had a
crude bulk that made other men step back despite his lack of height. An
assortment of scars and cuts on his hands and neck were living mementos of a
highly evolved violent streak. Tamo finished the last call and jammed the cell
phone in his pocket. Damn thing was overheating. He picked at his dinner of
spicy shrimp.

The message came two hours before, and it was very
clear: The bosses wanted the whore. And they wanted her now. She was a witness
who saw something downtown and got out of the building before the job was done.
Cops had picked her up, interviewed her. They couldn't take any chances.

He filtered a slightly different version into the
flinty night. The long reach of the Black Fist Triad came into play: photos
passed, descriptions detailed, names and addresses reviewed. Kids selling
newspapers on Kearny, the night clerk at the liquor store, bartenders, club
kids, truck drivers, anyone of them could make an easy grand for a positive ID
on the girl. She had taken something—speculation was money, but no one was
certain—taken something that was not hers to take. That was the story. No one
asked whose money, and no one asked how much. People seemed sensitive to the
vibration. The triad was calling for justice for one of their own. When a tiger
gets angry, the grass gets trampled. No one wanted to be the grass.

Tamo now had over seventy men sitting on her
apartment. The young bloods loved stakeouts. This was the private eye shit they
saw in the movies. How good some of the kids were at surveillance, though, was
open for evaluation. But what some of them lacked in experience, they made up in
sheer numbers—that was why he had fourteen cars out there. The men parked at
staggered points around the block. Four or five guys to a car, meandering
around the neighborhood.

He had three cars on Larkin Street, which had sunk
into its customary vileness by 11:00 PM. Solitary men in hoodies dealt meth in
the shadows of withered trees dying on the sidewalk. Suburban addicts drove
around the block, nervous but desperate, risking it all for a one hour high.
Transsexual hookers perched on street corners. A steady trail of cars rolled by
with young guys ogling the tits and ass. A few triad soldiers razzed a Latina
in red heels with enormous fake breasts bursting through her blouse.
“Ass-smellin’ bitches!” she hissed. Billy didn’t take that shit from no man in a
dress. He tried to get out of the back seat to bash her skull. The crew held
him back, laughing crazily, high fives all around. The Latina stalked up Post
Street. The men returned to watching the apartment.

Tamo left the restaurant and had a beer at an underground
card game near Stockton. So many tunnels had been dug in the basement that no
one was sure anymore which building they were sitting beneath. By 1:00 AM, he
was thoroughly pissed at the lack of news. He worked the cell again. He ordered
dozens more soldiers into the Tenderloin, North Beach and Telegraph Hill, the
bars near the Marina, downtown, SOMA, the Mission. The soldiers walked all
night long, a scanned photo from some years back jammed in a pocket; others sat
in cars watching the clubs empty out and compared faces to a photo set on the
dashboard. Not perfect, but better than nothing. They scoured Chinatown and Nob
Hill, driving slowly and ripping the streets with eyeballs. They drove up and
down Broadway staring at any girl who fit the profile: Chinese, early 20s,
pretty eyes, face as seen in the picture.

No sign of Tania by the next morning. Another
hour. No word by noon. Tamo smacked the table—how the hell do six hundred men
not find this girl walking the streets? He made more phone calls, burning
through the anger with sheer activity.

“Get everyone out there. Roll out every dickweed
by the carload!” All they wanted was one little whore.

Chapter
4

The sun was shining and joggers crowded the
crumbling paths on the banks of the Charles River. Ray headed to his office in
Cambridge, located on the top floor of an 18th century brick building near
Harvard Square. Harvard College had been founded in 1756, the nation’s first
men’s college. As the college’s elite reputation spread, the neighborhood
outside its red brick walls grew with it. Some people thought the neighborhood
had grown too much and lost its distinct flavor; it now resembled any other
urban center. Ray strode past the few funky cafes and bookstores that refused
to be shouldered aside as national retailers moved in, undaunted by rising
rents. A crew of young punks at the subway station kept a wary eye on the
upward mobility of the Square.

Ray walked into his office. Bookcases lined the
crimson walls. A Fiji mask hung near the door, grinning a razor smile, a crazed
god watching over some forgotten crevice of the universe. His receptionist and
editor, Sheri Haynes, sat at her desk in a sunny corner.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Hello Ray.” She stopped editing a report and
looked up. “Nice shirt. Love that color.”

“A question for you. The guy at Brooks said this
color is mauve.” He pulled at his shirt. “I say lavender.”

“It’s lavender, Ray. He’s color blind.”

“We agree on something.” Ray poured a cup of black
coffee, and sat down.

“That attorney overnighted the retainer,” said
Sheri. “For the case in California.”

Glancing out the window at the street, Ray saw a
man wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers with black dress socks cross
Massachusetts Avenue. The man, probably a professor, soon disappeared behind
the brick wall of Harvard Yard. Ray shook his head in disgust—denizens of
Harvard had a polluted sense of style.

He turned to a tidy pile of mail on his desk and
opened a letter from Lucas Michaels. It contained a check written out for ten
thousand dollars and two photos of Tania. A brief note listed Tania’s date of
birth and Social Security Number.

He looked closely at the photos. One was a
close-up of an Asian woman with long black hair combed back and parted in the
middle. Her skin was tan, darker than most Chinese, leavened as it was with
Thai blood. Her eyes were set just a bit too close, so that she was bumped from
the ranks of the beautiful into the merely intriguing— a far better category,
in Ray’s opinion. Her face radiated an inquisitive intelligence. The second
photo showed her thoughtful, unsmiling, holding her awkward teenage body
slightly toward the camera. She was dressed in jeans with a white shirt that
just showed a sliver of stomach. A note stated that the first photo was taken
when Tania was twenty years old, while the second was taken when Tania was
seventeen years old.

Ray turned to his computer and ran Tania’s name
and birth date through several locator databases. The databases were built on
information from credit applications, phone records, real estate transactions,
licensing records—the citizenry of the United States reduced to its essential
numbers and sequences. Tania did not come up in any database. Ray guessed that
she was using cash, flying low to avoid the radar.

He looked down at his calendar, checking the
schedule. No pressing meetings for the next few days. He worked mostly for
lawyers, narrowly intelligent men who still wore suits on Fridays and tried to
look older than they were. Serious faces for serious business. On their behalf
he undertook the messy work of facts, of witnesses with criminal convictions
and flawed memories. The thousand nicks and scars that make a human.

They asked him to interview witnesses. They asked
him to put people under surveillance. He had a modest army of surveillance
operatives. Rich clients especially loved that aspect of investigations: a
transitory omnipresence, watching your opponent’s daily rituals. They called on
weekends, demanding constant updates. They wanted descriptions, auto makes,
shoe sizes, and facial details. They wanted the name of the awesome blond. He
once had a client in California who had requested that Ray keep an enemy under
surveillance around the clock for two years. There was a beauty to such demented
pursuits.

He decided he would waste no more time in Boston.
His personality was geared to projects, numbered lists. Check them off and the
day is done. He devoted time to it, the detailed tasks in a notebook, the
required follow-up. And now he had two projects in California.

“Sheri, will you take this to the bank now?” He
handed her the check. “I’m heading west.”

“You’re off where?” she asked, coming to him and
taking the check.

“San Francisco.”

Sheri stared at him. “Are you working on Cherry yourself?”

“Partly,” said Ray. “The check covers other work
actually.”

She paused, an odd look on her face. “You ready to
jump back into that?”

“San Francisco is where I have to go. The path to
a molten ending is made of a thousand cold steps.”

Sheri adjusted her glasses. “What’s that from?
Faulkner?”

“That’s from me,” said Ray. Then he flicked on the
computer and booked a flight to San Francisco.

Chapter 5

Head low, Tania skittered through the narrow,
sun-blasted alley. It looked too open, a concrete shooting gallery. This place
always made her nervous. But she had to get off Market Street. The wind ripped
down from Twin Peaks, blowing newspapers against her leg.

She pulled her hoodie close to her face. She
looked like a homeless wreck, a huge ratty sweatshirt, old sneakers. She should
cut off her long hair—too noticeable.

Her friend lived in a gray house with a heavy
steel door. She looked toward Mission and back to Market. No one was following.
She took the key, opened the door and slipped inside. The door clanged shut
behind her and she breathed out audibly.

In the hours after the murder, she had been out of
her mind with fear. She had left the hotel running but a cop stopped her after
he saw her leaving the front gate. She sat in the car, and he took her
downtown. As the cruiser pulled away, they were watching, three of them,
staring at her through the glass. She told the cops nothing and got out few
hours later, but the damage was done. She had survived the shooting and now
they thought she was a snitch. A death sentence two times over.

They would shoot her ten, twenty times, right in
the neck and face. The girls called these kids the walking dead, because
despite their youth, they harbored no hope, no feelings. The whole thing
involved a different breed now, these kids, they planned nothing and just
reacted, cyclone spasms of mayhem. Pulled from typhoid slums in China, they
only wanted to live large for a few crazed years and then die like men. The triad
promised them a life where both desires would be fulfilled.

She had eaten almost nothing for days. She would
shape shift and let hunger carve her appearance into something new,
unrecognizable. She couldn’t eat anyway. Every goddamn guy that came near her.

She remembered one story of a triad member who
shot a guy from a motorcycle. He wasn’t sure if his mission was complete. That
was the word the kids used—they went on missions. The guy stopped a motor bike
in front of a crowd of people. Revved the engine and sent smoke into the crowd.
Then he walked over to the kid lying on the street, bent down, and emptied the
gun into his face. This was who they were sending after her.

The night the men had stormed the hotel, two of
them charging up the fire escape, they put a dozen bullets in her friend’s back.
Jesus, the way one guy came in, calmly, methodically, like he was coming to fix
the sink. Then he just unloaded everything at Cindy, the booming shots in the
hallway, total chaos.

She panicked and ran for her life. The sight of a
girl running down the street half-naked did not arouse undue suspicion in San
Francisco. She made it into some night club, just to get off the street. She
had no money—Johnny got shot before he paid her. The club turned out to be some
sort of S&M club. There were different floors with chains drilled into the
walls and wood contraptions that looked like torture devices from a distant
Spanish century. The lighting was dim, red, surreal. Smells of cigarette smoke,
sweaty bodies, a desperate kind of lust in the air. Tomorrow, no one would
remember she had been here; this was a place that erased memories.

She walked through the cavernous club for the
entire night, just killing time. At 4:30 AM, the place was dying down a bit.
She found a huge hole in a wall, some abandoned expansion project, downstairs
in the basement. She slipped inside and cried herself to sleep. The club closed
and no one bothered her.

She woke up the next day, and slipped out the rear
door while a beer truck unloaded. She was starving. Her teeth felt nasty. She needed
a shower.

She stopped by a store on the corner of Mission.
Inside the grocery, an Asian kid alternated between reading a magazine and
staring at her. Too long, she thought. Heart hammering her ribs. She paid for a
candy bar and an iced tea, then walked outside, half-expecting the last view of
her life would be the battered yellow doorjamb of this little store.

Her foot hit the pavement. The second she was
clear of the door, she started running.

Chapter
6

Ray chatted with an Ohio housewife sitting next to
him on the plane. “That must be interesting,” she remarked upon learning he was
an investigator. Everyone said that. Sometimes, sometimes not. Ray didn’t want
to repeat any war stories, and grew quiet after the pretzels arrived. He
watched the tiny houses below as the plane began its slow descent into San
Francisco International Airport. Red salt ponds lined the coast to the south,
while the city of San Francisco lay to the north.

San Francisco, California. Where you went when no
one on the East Coast was talking to you anymore. You traversed the country on
a personal gold rush to show parents, childhood tormentors—everyone you ever
knew— that something rare boiled inside you. An accident of geography lifted
San Francisco into the ranks of sublimely beautiful cities. Sharply etched
hills—Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, Nob Hill—offered sudden vistas of the blue
Pacific, which drew the day to a close with a foggy gray curtain. San Francisco
was rich, seductive, insatiable, demanding, and even after you saw her grimy
face and wasted ways, you loved her like a woman—the endless promise of
California.

Ray expected to interview numerous people over the
next few days. He had rented Detroit spawn. A Cadillac: big, American, faintly
ridiculous. He liked pulling up to witnesses in a Caddy. Americans had been
raised on mob movies, and instinctively associated the Caddy with power, ruin,
conspiratorial afternoons in villa gardens. Something like that.

After clearing the airport, Ray headed up Highway
280, taking signs for the Port of San Francisco. The traffic flowed and weaved
as he arrived at 6th Street. He headed east toward the waterfront. He arrived
at the Embarcadero, where palm trees graced the median and a pale strip of
glass brick lined the sidewalk. The Bay Bridge soared over the bay, straddling
the twin cities of Oakland and San Francisco.

He turned right on Broadway, racing past the strip
joints and restaurants, zigzagged his way on the small side street just before
the tunnel, then left on Mason over Nob Hill. It felt good remembering all the
old shortcuts. Ray parked and walked a few blocks to pick up a cheese steak
sandwich. Then he headed toward the criminal courts. He had decided he would
check the dockets first to see if Tania had caught a case.

In every county seat in the United States, a vast
public record exists in the form of court cases, all indexed by last name. On
the civil side, the records contain a history of the grievances, complaints and
assorted ailments that plagued a society. And on the criminal side, courts
maintain historical dockets of deviance and sick behavior, a blueprint of the
lives of society’s incorrigibles.

Ray was dressed for court in dress pants, a dark
blue shirt with a tan jacket. He drove South of Market to the Hall of Justice.
Nine stories tall, and built like a bomb shelter, it was nerve center of law
enforcement in the city of San Francisco. He walked through the metal detector,
strolling past predators prowling the tiled hallways: rapists, murderers,
district attorneys. The tiles made it easy to scrub off the accumulated filth.
The rough banter of probation officers, lead-eyed felons, and thick-handed
cops. The veteran cops and criminals had an easy familiarity with the place,
comfortable in each other’s presence. They understood that they needed each
other. They had spent time together in the past, and would likely do so again.

For others, fear and rage clung palpably to the
walls here, lives determined in small courtrooms with swinging doors. Signs in
English and Spanish on the wall:

Do Not Chew Gum In Court. Weapons Are Not Allowed
In The Courtroom.

Conversations boomed and echoed in the hallway so
that privacy was something you left at home, for other buildings, other times,
a luxury the rich enjoyed in carpeted homes with solid wood doors. An odd sense
of racial peace reigned, for this was a place for the democratic poor—black,
white, brown, it didn’t matter. One look around confirmed that the jaws of
justice chewed meat in all flavors.

Ray walked over to a clerk at the service desk, an
attractive Latina in her forties. She was entombed in a bulletproof glass
cubicle. He had to shout through a narrow slit to make himself understood. The
clerk had dark eyes, and a bosom barely constrained in a light green suit. She
got away with it; her curvy nerve got her through.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’d like to check a name for any cases going back
to the 1980’s.” He jotted down Tania’s name and birth date on a sheet of paper.

The clerk checked the alphabetized index on her
computer for Kong and printed out the results: one case from 1997. Ray filled
out an order form and requested the case file. The clerk disappeared behind
some rolling file cabinets. After a few minutes, she returned with the file.

“I like your jacket,” said Ray.

“Thanks,” the clerk handed him the file, smiling.
“No fear of a full color palette.”

She laughed. “I like to spice it up in here.” She
rapped the Plexiglas with her knuckles. “Place is decorated like a
penitentiary.” She handed him the file. “Here you go. Let me know if you need
copies,” she said.

He was feeling better already. Funny how a bit of
human interaction could mean so much to a traveler. He opened the case file,
but saw only a single sheet of paper, the criminal complaint. It contained the
barest amount of information, announcing with the quaintly Communist language
used by California courts: People of California v. Tania Kong. The charge was
California Penal Code Section 315: Tania had been arrested for working at a
house of prostitution.

There was nothing else in the case — no photos or
affidavits or legal papers. The briefly worded complaint stated that on May 24,
1997, Tania Kong had been arrested for prostitution after police raided a
brothel at 781 Jackson Street in Chinatown. No other defendants were named.

Ray jotted down the address, and copied the
complaint. He returned the file to the light green lovely in her glass cube.

“What did this one do?” she asked.

“A rapscallion. Hardcore.”

The clerk glanced at the complaint. “Poor girl had
some bad love.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

Ray thanked the clerk and left the courthouse.