Telegraph Hill (5 page)

Chapter
9

7:12 AM. Jet-lagged and sandy-eyed, Ray reached
for the water glass on the night stand. He needed a drink; the antiseptic air
of the hotel was irritating his lungs. He showered, scrubbing hard with the face
cloth. The soap was wrapped in crisp paper and tied with a string. Smelled
good, like lavender. He wondered if it worked any better than regular soap.

He dressed in a pair of olive slacks, a black
jacket and black leather shoes. He took the stairs to a diner in the lobby and
ordered the house special: thick French toast with home fries dusted with
paprika. The place was a classic, with hard-ass waitresses busting chops as
they brought carbo-overload to each table. Breakfast was the most unpretentious
meal of the day.

The local paper was a horror, all ads and no news.
Ray finished quickly. Then he paid the bill and went back to his room.

The message light on the phone was blinking.
Dominique had called: the old cop, Waymon Pierce, was happy to help in any way
he could. As he had recently retired from the force and apparently was not
leaving home much, Ray could drop by anytime. That was always the case when
Dominique brought those dark eyes to bear. Men rearranged things, cleared their
schedules, purged themselves of crappy attitudes. Beauty may fade, but it packs
a short-life wallop.

Ray jotted down Waymon’s address, which was
located in San Lorenzo, a suburb in the East Bay. He headed over to the garage
and the valet had his car driven to the front. Ray turned right on to Sutter
Street and made a series of right turns to Jones Street, heading into the
Tenderloin.

In the 1930’s, the Tenderloin had housed San
Francisco’s budding film industry. Many of the grand edifices remained intact,
Victorian residences with quoins and cornices and carved wood statuary, silent
testimony to the era of San Francisco’s celluloid dreams.

The neighborhood had changed. Middle class
families, black and white, had fled the city core for big green lawns and a TV
in every room. Now, corner sidewalks were slick with piss and blood, and other
human slime. Derelicts walked on Jones with their heads down, baseball-capped
and anonymous. Homeless AIDS patients, the evidence of the thing all over their
faces; red blotches, black ditches for eyes. A druggy violence pervaded whole
blocks. Hawk-eyed young guns strutted past buildings jabbed with massage
parlors and windowless lounges. The bars—when they had a name at all—sloughed
off prosaic names: “Black Bottle,” “Tipsy’s,” “The Driftwood,” and “Thirsty
Club”. Bartenders revived broken men who muttered into their beer, bleary-eyed
in the middle of the afternoon: bankrupts, felons, unemployed hit men, crack
heads. This was the city’s underbelly, crammed into a six-block dead zone. Only
the children redeemed the place, laughing as they frolicked in fortified
playgrounds under watchful eyes.

Waymon Pierce had patrolled the Tenderloin for
over twenty years.

Ray arrived at the address he had been given for
Waymon. A man wearing jeans and a neat white T-shirt stood in the doorway of a
California bungalow fronted by neatly trimmed grass. Short of stature but with
a hard lean body that belied his age, Waymon Pierce stepped outside as Ray
approached. Waymon’s face, however, reflected his age—it was a crisscross
masterpiece of wrinkles and bony clefts.

“Hope I’m not intruding,” said Ray.

“For a friend of Dominique's?” he shrugged.

“She’s a good friend. We went to school together.”
He left out the law part.

“You have case work all the way here in California?
You must be doing well for yourself.”

“Things are good,” Ray said. Waymon invited him
inside. They stepped into a dark living room. It was a museum of 1970’s decor:
shag rugs, and a lumpy sofa, all dark brown, nature’s safest color. A furry gray
layer of dust had accumulated on the furniture. Apparently Waymon’s attention
to yard work did not extend to the interior. Waymon returned from the kitchen
and shoved a beer at Ray, who settled into the chocolate sofa. He left the beer
on the table: a bit early to start drinking.

“Did you like working in San Francisco?” Ray
asked.

“I reckon I did,” said Waymon, rubbing his palms
together. “Been here long enough. I like Southern California more. I like the
heat. I was thinking of moving to San Diego, but it’s turning into another LA.”

“Too noisy,” offered Ray.

“Too noisy. And too many people. SeaWorld is
taking over Mission Bay. They sell everything at SeaWorld now! When Shamu dies,
they’ll sell his pecker as a yard ornament.”

“Anyway, I’ve been here since the 70s. It’s home.
San Francisco was different then. The drug culture swamped the city. Lots of
wide-eyed innocents. Haight-Ashbury drew ‘em west, people coming here because
they saw hippies dancing beneath a fucking street sign on the six o’clock news!”

“People change their lives because of the things
they see on TV,” Ray said. Waymon looked unhappy at the interruption. He
continued.

“By 1969, the dealers took over the neighborhoods.
The emphasis in Haight-Ashbury was on the H-A-T-E. Not a pleasant place. Not
really peace and love. When these wad stains saw a hippie, they jacked him up.
They got these kids hooked on narcotics, and then took ‘em for all they were
worth.”

Waymon spoke with a slight Southern accent, a
relic of his youth in North Carolina. He showed a certain sunken charm,
suspiciously friendly as only cops can be. A talented detective, he had been
considered a great partner, albeit eccentric. He worked some of the toughest
beats, and had more than his share of good press. But his offbeat demeanor was
seen as a less desirable trait in a supervisor, and so he had been relegated to
working his entire career as a vice detective. And Waymon knew it; knew he had
been tagged with some invisible stamp of noncompliance. But he never cared about
a promotion. He scorned his fellow officer’s willingness to accept mediocrity
in exchange for a pompous title when hair turned white and bellies grew soft.

“Waymon, I don’t know what Dominique told you
about this case. I’m looking for a girl who disappeared about ten years ago.
Her family’s lawyer asked me to try to track her down. She was last known to be
living here in the 1990's. She may have been a prostitute.”

“You happen to have a photo?”

Ray pulled out the photo of Tania. “Her name is
Tania Kong. She would be twenty-eight now.”

Waymon took the picture, and turned it in his
thick hands. “Hmm. Pretty girl. Never seen her. I can run her name by someone
at the station, see if she was ever arrested.”

Ray watched Waymon, who seemed to be perpetually squinting.
As if his eyes were rimmed with the grime of criminals spewing lies at him for
a quarter century. He wondered how many suspects the man had interrogated and
bashed down over the years.

“I know that she was arrested at least once,” said
Ray. “I checked court records. There was a 1997 arrest for prostitution in
Chinatown.”

“How long was she working?”

“I don’t know. The fact she worked at all was news
to me. And I don’t think my client had any idea.”

Waymon scratched his nose absentmindedly. “You
suspect she’s still working?”

“I don’t know. Where do the girls work usually?”

“Well, most of ‘em are on the internet.” Waymon
opened his fingers to show cyberspace. “They have web sites now. But the city
has several areas where street girls can still be found. Some guys just like
drive-by pussy.”

“Where is the drive-by pussy in this city?”

“You’ve got your downtown girls, mostly on Geary
and O’Farrell near Jones. They get to be thick as flies on a weekend night.
Some of them are known to wander up to Post, but the folks there are more
active—shoo ‘em off right quick. Shemales work the corner of Larkin and Post.
Is she a real girl?”

“I have no reason to suspect any unusual
surgeries,” Ray said.

“Good. They give me the creeps, those trannies —
‘You wanna go with me baby?’” Waymon imitated a falsetto voice. “Disgusting.”

“Anywhere else?”

“The Mission has a tittering of hookers on 16th.
Roughest corner in the city. Young girl out there at 2 AM, she looks forty-five
by morning. Classic crack whores. Drier than a nun’s twat.”

“You have a lovely way with words.”

Waymon shrugged. “Regional aptitude, Ray. All
southerners know how to work their way around a word. ”

Waymon sipped his beer. All the windows in the
house were closed. The room was cooking, but Waymon looked perfectly
comfortable. Ray looked around at a number of photographs on the walls. Some
appeared to be crime scene photos.

“And don’t forget the house girls,” Waymon added.
“Like I said, they all have web sites now. Trolling for clients on the web.
Real discreet. Hell, some of those sites are better than IBM.”

Ray glanced around the room and settled briefly on
a framed picture of Richard Nixon. Waymon noticed his gaze.

“Here, let me show you something.” Waymon got up
suddenly. He wiped dust from a bureau and retrieved something from a drawer. He
returned with a signed photo showing Richard Nixon shaking hands with a newly
minted police officer. The caption read: President Nixon presents award to
Detective Waymon Pierce, May 2, 1971. Nixon’s face, frozen in a smile deeper
than sainthood.

“Nixon’s about the greatest president this nation
has ever had. He did wonderful things with the Chinese. He walked on the Great
Wall. He looked them in the face and said: ‘Be our friends or we’ll bomb the
whole billion of you back to the Stone Age. Knock down the Great Wall too.’ He
was a great man.”

Ray listened as Waymon launched into a survey of
Nixon’s foreign policy objectives circa 1971.

Let him ramble, thought Ray. He moved the
conversation back to where he wanted to go: “Waymon, do you know if there were
any detailed records of the arrest? Did you normally fingerprint or photograph
the girls?”

Waymon nodded. “Yes, we photographed every girl we
arrested. More of a public service than anything. These girls were lost,
runaways. End up on the bottom of the Bay if they’re not careful. We wanted to
help the families track ‘em down.” He paused. “Let me show you something.”

Waymon picked up a jagged piece of gray rock from
a table. “This is asbestos in its natural form. I found it once while panning
for gold. It’s completely harmless in nature. But heat it, process it, put it
on the side of your house — one speck in your lungs, you’re one plot down from
the Marlboro Man.”

Waymon got up. Ray followed him into a tan
kitchen. An eerie mix of old and new haunted the place: a 1950s avocado
refrigerator, a juicer on the counter next to a pile of orange pulp. A woman
hadn’t been in this place in decades.

They took the stairs down into the cellar. Lights
blinked on automatically, revealing a minor disaster area of cardboard boxes, a
canvas heavy bag, boxing gear, an old table, and numerous filing cabinets of
different sizes and shapes: wood cabinets, old steel behemoths, newer ones in
anodized black. There was a dime store Indian made of wood, various paintings
in ornate gold frames, stacks of old porno magazines, and a Halloween
decoration of a witch on a broom. Waymon waded into the piles, blowing dust,
moving boxes. ”I know it’s here. I knooooow it's here,” he said. After about
five minutes, he dragged out two boxes, looking pleased.

“When I retired from the force, they were just
tossing old cases, including misdemeanor mugs. Even some of the older felonies,
back to the 60’s, all ready to be tossed away. I took it all! It’s not in any
kind of order, just box loads of criminals and degenerates. You’re welcome to
sort through it.”

Waymon pointed to a work bench running along one
wall. “You can work there. Just don’t take anything without checking with me
first!” he said. Then he turned and headed back up stairs.

Ray pulled one box closer to him and carried it to
the work bench. Various nude photos of women decorated the walls, some of them
looking like they had been pinned for decades on the nails of Waymon’s lust.

Ray opened the box and peered inside. There were
rows of old photos, curled at the sides with graying edges. Snapshots of
grifters, murderers, arsonists, rapists. The faces of men in various snaky,
blunt, angry poses. The overwhelming maleness of crime seeped from the
pictures. It was all neatly cataloged: the local San Francisco purveyors of
vice, labeled with notes and accompanied by a photograph.

He looked quickly through the box. The pictures
from the 1960s were all black and white, the faces poignant in monochrome
stillness. Some faces peered out with a look of sanctified surprise, as if
asking: “Do my crimes still matter?” Others showed men with a self-conscious
bent of the head as they held up a sign with inmate numbering, forced to assist
in their own degradation. The hardcore felons just glared, bleak and
shark-eyed. Arsonists wore the most disturbing look: a vacant gaze, faintly
sexual.

The pictures were sorted roughly by year, filed by
a court docket number. After rummaging for a few hours, Ray found mug shots of
prostitutes from the 1960s.

Ray looked at the photos. One girl, a bruised face
set with eyes that were elfin and sprightly. She wore a stiff collared dress
that reminded him of dancers he had seen on old TV shows like Laugh-In. An
older black woman, looking off to her left, the picture faded, blurry, like a
jazzy snapshot of a Harlem after-hours club. A Midwestern farm girl with
heavy-rimmed glasses that made her look like a high school math teacher.

He wondered what had become of the women. Dead
probably. He knew of a famous Boston call girl known as the Leopard Lady on
account of a spotted coat she usually wore while picking up johns in the
theater district. Supposedly she married a high-tech mogul in the western
suburbs. The exception. The mug shots, so different than the ones of the men,
capturing a strange feminine disregard for the cop—it had probably been a
man—taking the picture. Almost like they never saw him, looked through him. A
sliver of terrible light in those eyes. Not innocence, but something else, a
grim illumination. He felt a sadness looking at the photos, but there was
something else too, something almost holy. He could not stop poring over the
faces.