Tell No Lies (2 page)

“Losers walk,” she says.

The door closes neatly behind her, and the car purrs up the street.

Daniel watches until it disappears. Blowing into his cupped hands, he begins the long walk home.

*   *   *

Pausing at the top of the Lyon Street Steps, panting, Daniel turned and looked back. Far below, the younger man he’d blown past struggled up the final leg of his run. Daniel took a few seconds to catch his breath, the raised sweatshirt hood damp around his head, eucalyptus clearing his lungs, stinging his nostrils. The summit afforded a view across the vast forest of the Presidio toward Sea Cliff, where Evelyn presided over her estate, looking down on the city.

He took the stairs hard back down and ran for home, dodging curbside recycling barrels. Victorian mansions alternated with Mission Revivals and the occasional Chateau, the gleaming façades making clearer than ever how Pacific Heights earned its nicknames—either the “Gold Coast” or “Specific Whites,” depending on which demographic was weighing in.

Daniel and Cristina’s place, though several blocks downsized from Billionaires’ Row, was still stunning. Average-sized by the standards of any reasonable town, the midcentury house was a narrow three-story rise of concrete and dark wood with a square patch of front lawn, shoulder-width alleys on either side, and a matchbook courtyard framing a black-pebble fire pit in the back.

Daniel entered, tossing his keys onto the accent table beside the miniature Zen garden with its white sand groomed into hypnotic patterns. Up the stairs to the wide-open second story, the view making its grand entrance through the floor-to-ceiling steel-framed windows in a fashion that—still—made his breath hitch. Backdropping the kitchen, a cascading vista down the hill to the Bay, the Golden Gate forging magnificently into the craggy headlands of Marin, Angel Island floating in an ice-cream haze of fog. And on the other side, beyond the little sitting area they called a living room, a panorama captured the dip of Fillmore and the Haight and the houses beyond popping up like pastel dominoes, forming a textured rise to the one visible Twin Peak. Sutro Tower loomed over it all, sticking out of the earth like a giant tuning fork.

He climbed to their bedroom on the third floor. Red pen clenched between her teeth, Cris was proofreading a printout and wriggling into a pair of jeans at the same time. Her eyeglasses were shoved atop her head, forgotten.

“Your op-ed?” he asked.

She nodded, distracted, not looking up.

“It was great two drafts ago.”

“It has to be
better
than great. It has to be a brimstone avalanche of influence that convinces the planning commission that it is not worth their political while to displace sixty low-income families so their cronies can build faux-Italian town houses.”

Cristina’s job as a community organizer for nonprofit tenants’ societies had grown harder each year since the aggressive gentrification of the dot-com era. The hot-dotters had taken over vacant lots and homeless squats, pressing out each fold and wrinkle of the city like an expanding waistline. Now the trendy restaurants and bars of the Divisadero were creeping into Western Addition, and developers were picking off buildings not officially designated as projects and protected with federal subsidies. Including the sixty-unit apartment complex Cris was currently fighting to preserve.

She scribbled at the sheet. “They bought off the asshole landlord, who’s helping drive the tenants out. No repairs, nothing. There’s a family of six in there that’s had a broken toilet for a month, so they have to use the neighbors’. Two black drag queens. You can imagine how
that’s
working out. There are elderly couples with nowhere to go. I had a single mom in yesterday, crying, won’t be able to afford to live in her own neighborhood. A five-generation Chinese-Filipino family on the third floor—”

“
Five
generations?”

“There’s a great-great-aunt in there somewhere.”

“Maybe the cupboard.”

Her face lightened. For an instant. “This is boring.”

“Not even a little.”

She slashed out another paragraph. “I have two volunteers and a college intern. We spend six months organizing through churches and schools to get thirty thousand signatures, and then some
associate
”—she spit the word—“bundles two hundred grand in contributions to the right city supervisor and tilts the whole goddamned seesaw the other way.”

Her accent edged into her words when she was mad. She sank onto the bed, chewing through the cap of the red pen. Having grown up in a similar apartment building in the Mission, she took her job personally.

“The power brokers,” she said. “They matter more than we do.”

“Don’t say that,” he told her.

She looked at him evenly, not a trace of self-pity in her eyes. “But it’s true.”

Chapter 2

The heat had been shut off again last week, and the walls of the box apartment held the San Francisco cold greedily—the place might as well have been refrigerated. A scorched comet marred the plasterboard above the uneven stove where a grease fire had flared and died. No door to the bathroom. Toilet missing its lid, a prison bowl. The concrete floor like ice even through their shoes, even through the thin mattress they shared each night, fully clothed.

If he hit her just below the left cheek, they’d discovered, it brought up a pleasing raised bruise without causing any real damage. She stood patiently, exposed, her face turned slightly. Waiting. He executed the first blow, taking care not to put too much weight behind it. Her head snapped back, and she smiled, her eyes dazed and distant.

His life, it seemed, had become nothing more than a series of tough runs laid end to end. Lately it had been flipping burgers and onions, the stink of the grill clinging to him, in his pores, coming off his clothes, filling the shower stall when the lukewarm water drizzled over his head. Nine bucks and change an hour, forty-nine cents taken out for Social Security, Medicare at twelve, and SDI—whatever the hell that was—chiseling off another couple pennies. They were almost through the canned meat, but he’d be paid tomorrow and then there’d be fresh cigarettes, a few packs of hot dogs, gas for the tank, a gallon or two of milk. If things got too bad, he could dip into the stash, but that money was reserved for the Purpose, and the Purpose was everything. And so they’d held their vow to abstain even through a few daylong stints with no food at all. That morning he’d found a still-smoldering butt on the sidewalk, and he’d crouched in a bus shelter and smoked it down, watching all the well-heeled folks traipse by.

She was trembling there in the semi-dark, thin arms at her sides. Spread across the floor behind her were their secret plans—maps with red circles, schedules gleaned from months of surveillance, confidential files painstakingly collected.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Mouth now,” she said. “Come on, baby.”

He palmed the back of her head and struck her, a hard tap of the knuckles, enough to split her lip. Her grin gleamed darkly, red filling the spaces, framing her lower teeth. She tasted her lips, her loose gaze radiating a deep, almost sexual ache. “More,” she said. “Give me more.”

Again.

This was the really sweet part. The sacrifice. The lengths they were willing to go to.

The grief had caught up to her now, rushing in with the pain. Tears glittering, feather of blood on her chin, her shoulders shuddering.

Sheets of fog stirred at the window, ghost raiments forming and re-forming, diffusing the streetlight’s glow. The rumble of a Muni bus down the hill reached them, another hollow stomach, another city beast out to feed.

She breathed wetly. Her eyes glinted like dimes.

Overcome, he lowered his arms, and his fingers flexed at his sides, trying to grasp the ungraspable. He looked at the scattered maps and folders, the underlined addresses, the names on printouts. So much work, so much careful planning, years in the making. He tried to draw strength from it all, tried to let it fuel him.

She hooked his neck with a hand, pressing her forehead to his, the warmth of their sobs mingling.

“I love you, baby,” she said. “I love
her.
”

He nodded, swiped at his cheeks with the worn cuff of his sweater. “Me, too,” he managed.

Her fingertips touched the blood at her lips, checking. “Then make me hurt for her. Make me
feel
it.” She pulled away a half step and raised her head regally, bracing.

Still crying, he drew back his fist.

Chapter 3

Quarter to eight and the November sky was already as dark as midnight. For Daniel, navigating the smart car across town felt a bit like driving a shopping cart, but it got great mileage and could ratchet itself into any parking space that might improbably come available. He headed south of Market, weaving through municipal buildings, rusty warehouses, and dilapidated apartments, the worsening neighborhood still a four-star upgrade from the danger zone it used to be. The 22 Fillmore bus, nicknamed the “22-to-Life,” rumbled past, heading even farther south to real high-risk territory.

Daniel’s workplace loomed ahead. A colossal mausoleum of a building implanted in the mid-seventies, Metro South was as cold and bare-bones functional as an insane asylum or a Soviet ministry office. A subterranean gate rattled open, and then Daniel pulled in to the dungeon of the parking level, complete with sweating concrete walls and flickering fluorescent overheads. He pulled in to his usual spot, then got on the elevator, redolent of industrial cleaner. As the car rose, he drummed his hands against his worn jeans, praying it wouldn’t get stuck again.

The five-story building housed Probation, Parole, and various related social services. Last year the city had moved about half the occupants north into newer quarters, so now Metro South gave off a condemned-building vibe—empty halls, groaning pipes, loose floor tiles. The only departments remaining were those purposefully left behind. Like the one Daniel belonged to.

He had a job very few would want. A job that tested his patience, courage, and sometimes his sanity. And yet here he was. No one ever said he didn’t love a challenge.

The elevator shuddered on its cables. What a far cry from his past life in a penthouse office managing the family portfolios. He vividly remembered Evelyn’s response when he’d told her that he was switching career tracks—to this one in particular.

*   *   *

“Isn’t that just like you. The world at your feet, and you trip over it.” She turns, buries her nose in her gimlet. “A shrink.” She snorts. “Oh, that’s rich. Well, I suppose I gave you plenty of material.”

He observes the derision in her face; at thirty-five he has learned to regulate his reactions to her. Outwardly at least. Not that it slows her down any.

“What did I do to you that you have to do the opposite of everything that makes sense?” she asked. “Just once can’t you take the easy way?”

“Easy’s overrated.”

She smiles humorlessly, then orients herself toward a more pleasing view. Her sitting-room window looks across the curved cliffs rimming Baker Beach. In the distance a hang glider leaps free of the earth and soars, dangling from rainbow wings, a dot against the choppy expanse of the Pacific. “We’ve all had
hobbies.
When I danced for Balanchine as a young woman, I never lost sight of my
real
responsibilities. And now with your father gone and you the last one.” She takes a silent sip, as if her nerves need settling. But Evelyn’s nerves never need settling. “This is because of
her,
isn’t it? The illness.”

“Yes, but in a good way. It’s what I want. I’ve been lucky. I’ve made plenty of money—”

“With the job
I
handed you.” The jeer seems not up to Evelyn’s standards, and sure enough her face registers a flicker of regret. Her insults are generally less trifling, better constructed. She turns to the window, her steel-gray hair fastened in a chignon. “You are
built
for your job. This is what we
do.
This family has weathered the Great Quake, two world wars, Black Monday, Black Friday—hell, a Black Each Day of the Week—and now you want what? To leave? Forge your own way in the world?” The last, tinged with mockery.

“Yes.”

She turns, that silhouette, framed against the double-paned glass, still striking. “You’ll never make it.”

“Why?” he asks.

She touches her lips to the rim of her cocktail glass as if to nibble it. “Because I couldn’t.”

He shows himself out. He is at his car when he hears dress shoes crunching the quartz stone of the circular driveway behind him; James is too well mannered to call out. Before James has to say anything, Daniel nods, sighs heavily, and heads back inside.

There has been a set change. Evelyn is sitting on the velvet couch in the sunroom, flipping through a magazine. “You know, Daniel, I’ve been thinking. Maybe this
is
a good thing. All this talk about helping others. You and Constanza—”

“Cristina.”

“—have been so vocal about good works and charity that it’s made me consider my own blessed lot in life. Long look in the mirror, et cetera.” A smile creases her face, stopping well short of her eyes. “In fact, you’ve inspired me to bequeath my estate, my
entire
estate, to the arts. A museum. Perhaps the opera house. Isn’t that something you’d approve of?”

Now,
that,
he thinks, is an Evelyn-grade assault.

At last her smile is genuine. His mouth has gone to sand, and he feels the familiar fury burning through his veins, but then he blinks and sees her with a moment of pristine clarity, as if a filter had been changed on his camera lens. He sees her as if she were just another seventy-six-year-old lady, sitting next to him at a play or getting off a bus from the Midwest, a petulant woman-child full of flaws and scars who wants to take her toys and go home. He breathes out and feels the tightness in his chest release, if only slightly.