The Angels of Catastrophe (2 page)

It had taken Durrutti the better part of an entire day to file off the serial numbers on the gun with a set of files. A task like that wasn't for amateurs and he had done an excellent job. He'd been proud of his craftsmanship. Proud of his diligence. He said to Kulak, “I'm sorry. I never gave a gun to this guy. I don't know what this is about.”

The atmosphere in the office was still polite, nothing heavy. Any vibes in the air were more or less under control.
No need for him to retain a lawyer, not yet. Kulak knew he was lying. Durrutti could hear it in the cop's voice, how he phrased his questions, the weariness in them, the weight of them dragging him down. He took childish delight in provoking the policeman.

“You haven't heard from Mister Ramirez recently?”

“How could I? Listen, you've got to understand this. He's a stranger. Even if we slept in the same bed, I wouldn't know him.”

Kulak wasn't enamored of his response. “You haven't talked to him about the gun?”

“No, I haven't. Not now, not ever. I could walk by the dude in the street and I wouldn't recognize him. I don't know anything about this stuff.”

The weapon in question was a Smith and Wesson .32 revolver Durrutti had acquired for sixty-five dollars from a Wackenhut Corporation security guard who'd used it to shoot the mallard ducks at Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. The gat had a tendency to veer an inch to the right when you shot it, so it wasn't accurate. Durrutti had never fired it. Guns were a nice idea, but having one around made him twitchy. The temptation to use it was too great.

“According to the report, there is also another problem.”

How Kulak said it, dry and matter-of-fact, made Durrutti's skin crawl, but he didn't take the bait. The fine and brittle ghetto bone structure of his face remained arctic as Kulak fed him another tidbit of hearsay. Whatever a cop told you was always second-hand, a xeroxed version of the truth. Something to be taken with a grain of salt.

“After Jimmy Ramirez got the pistol back from the gunsmith he said it was stolen from him. He told us the name of the person he thinks did it. We are very interested in talking to this individual. The man who took the gun has been identified by the police as the alleged perpetrator in a homicide.”

Durrutti's curiosity was shameful, running smack dab into his instinct for self-preservation. It made him loquacious. “You're kidding me? Who did this guy kill?”

Kulak's comeback was just as naked. “A police officer.”

“When?”

“Very recently.”

“You mean the cop that got shot on Mission Street?”

“Correct.”

“With a gun that belongs to this Jimmy Ramirez?”

“Possibly.”

“And who is the killer?”

“A bag of shit named Paul Stevens.”

Hearing the name, Durrutti almost fainted. His fingertips began to tingle. His left foot fell asleep. A spear point of paranoia jabbed him in the gut. A vicious spasm rippled through his colon. Paul Stevens was someone he knew. Someone who had passed away three years ago at the All-Star Hotel on Sixteenth Street. Complications from AIDS after going in and out of the hospital. He didn't explain this to Kulak. If the Feds were after a dead man, he wasn't going to stop them. He blithely said, “I've never heard of the dude.”

Kulak pressed him. “You don't know him? He attempted to kill another policeman some years ago. That makes him our first suspect.”

“Nope. Not in my life. I've never heard of these guys before.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure, I'm sure.”

Durrutti stopped and thought about what he was saying. For refusing to talk, Kulak might arrest him for obstructing justice. He had to watch himself, how far he stonewalled the cop. Going to jail wasn't anything he wanted to contemplate. The prospect made his testicles shrink in their sac. What Kulak did to him next was worse.

“Let's stop here,” he said. “I've got what I want. You can leave now.”

This took Durrutti aback. He was settling into the groove of the interrogation, how the fear flowed from him into Kulak, as if he was giving a blood transfusion to the cop. He was getting addicted to the logic of answering questions with lies. He wasn't prepared to depart and he protested, unwilling to go. “You done talking to me? That's great. Now what do I do?”

“You wait.”

“I wait? For what?”

Kulak pinned him with a glance that could've cut a man's throat from ear to ear. A glance that let him know his journey with the law had just begun—he was an accessory to the murder of a police officer. Durrutti's spirits fell into his socks. His entire life had just changed. He said to himself, “Fucking hell,” and exited the office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

M
ost Americans pay taxes, vote, think of death as something they can take or leave. Lowlife in the street are another story. They know something the citizens don't—every dollar bill is marked, every killing has a witness, and nobody gets away with anything.

The first thing Durrutti had to do was locate Jimmy Ramirez. Exiting the Federal Building, he conjured up a plan. He'd commence his search with a visit to Hunt's Donuts and was confident he would find the man by night-fall. All he had to do was walk the streets and talk to people. Jimmy had a public profile; someone would know where he was. It would be a cinch. A breeze.

Walking with an awkward limp, a condition that had afflicted him since birth, he toddled south on Mission Street toward the doughnut shop, humping it past Lady Seikko's Japanese Restaurant. He remembered what Kulak had said about Paul Stevens, him being the prime suspect in the cop's murder.

Durrutti had met Paul four years ago while shackled to a modular concrete bench in the city prison's holding cell at 850 Bryant Street. They were the only prisoners
in the fly-smeared, blood-spattered, whitewashed pen. Paul was wearing a nurse's medical smock, a pair of dungarees and tan desert boots. Tall and gray-haired with humorous blue-green eyes, his paste-white face was gaunt and covered with a weedy field of beard. He introduced himself by saying, “Don't listen to any of the assholes in this place. Never do that to yourself. You gotta be careful because everyone in here is just a worthless fuck, swear to God.”

It made sense to Durrutti. He took Paul's advice to heart and they started to talk. The hoosegow quickly filled up with parole violators, winos and burglars, the usual Monday night suspects. Booking was slow—the warders were the county sheriffs and they were moving only as fast as their union contract made them—he and Paul Stevens had plenty of time to get acquainted. Durrutti had been busted on a public nuisance charge and for resisting arrest after getting shortchanged by the cashier in a Mission Street taqueria. He expected to be treated with respect. When he didn't get any, he usually ended up in jail. This was the fourteenth time so far. Paul said he was taken into custody for fighting with a cop by the Midnight Sun bar on Eighteenth Street.

Paul spoke a little more about himself, declaring how one summer a few years back he'd shot at a cop on Albion Street near the Valencia Gardens housing project. He did seven years in Soledad Prison for it. The policeman was John Bigarani, notorious for repeatedly attacking and beating Bob Kaufman, a union organizer and an outspoken poet. Kaufman had passed away penniless and sick
in the streets at the age of sixty—no doubt helped to the cemetery by what Bigarani had done to him.

Paul confessed all this in a quick rush. It was a warm night and everyone in the slammer was getting loud and crazy. Prisoners were screaming and the noise traveled the long corridor from the felony tanks to the holding cell. Paul told his story like he was lounging in a cafe on Valencia Street drinking beers. Being in jail didn't bug him. He was better at it than Durrutti. Penal hardened and more experienced.

The last time he'd seen Paul alive was on a glorious July afternoon, pollen plagued and steaming hot; no fog anywhere. The sidewalks that day were swollen with French and Irish tourists fresh off the bus from the Mission Dolores Church. Durrutti had been trying to procure an ounce of sinsemilla, but a drought in the Mission had wiped out everyone's supplies—even the semilegal medical cannabis clubs couldn't come up with anything. In desperation, he'd gone over to Dolores Park, looked around and noticed the cops had driven the Salvadoreño nickel bag dealers out of the park.

Moping around the Roxie Cinema on Sixteenth Street, he bumped into Paul Stevens eating lunch at Cafe Picaro. He was having rock cod and broccoli over a bed of white jasmine rice. Paul was modeling a hound's-tooth check overcoat and smoking a cigarette in his left hand while he ate with his right hand. Durrutti told him what was up and Paul was glad to help. He said, “No problem. You need some fucking weed? C'mon, I know someone. What do you want? Mexican? Homegrown?”

His connection was Scott Smith, who used to be the lover of the murdered San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk. Nowadays Scott was selling pot to pay the rent on his Seventeenth Street flat. Nothing too extreme, just a small enterprise. Paul informed Durrutti that Scott was having complications because he still had some of Harvey's papers. Not that they were a problem for him; he liked having them in his house. But the public was clamoring for the stuff. A lot of institutions were interested in buying the dead gay liberation hero's archives. Scott didn't know what to do.

Paul made a phone call to Scott and set up everything. “We're cool,” he said. “Let's proceed.”

They paraded west on Eighteenth Street, going by Mission High School to the Castro District. Paul's hound's-tooth check coat flapped around his ankles as he walked. His legs were longer than Durrutti's and he moved much faster. He hadn't shaved in a couple of days and his beard was coming out iron-gray, rendering the green in his eyes a lighter shade of blue. He said, “Did I tell you me and my boyfriend broke up? That was a pain in the ass. I don't ever want to go through that divorce crap ever again. You invest everything you got into someone and then they throw you away like toilet paper. That ain't right.”

Durrutti was embarrassed by Paul's confession and he stammered, “I'm sorry to hear this. What went wrong?”

“You know me,” Paul said, glad to give his opinion. “I don't hide my feelings. If I care about someone, they know it. If I'm ticked off at them, I snap and so we had a fight and he said that was it. Our fucking relationship was
over.” Paul turned his head to appreciate a hummingbird in flight, zipping over the rooftops. “Looking back, I don't think I was that hard to live with. Hell, I paid the rent on the apartment and when we went out drinking at the Stud, I paid for his beer. What a gutless wimp he was. I need a real man in my life. Someone I can count on when the shit gets weird.”

Paul was selling weed too, but he wasn't saying anything about it, typical of him. No one ever knew what he was doing, he was so secretive. Mister undercover. When they hit Scott's front steps, he went rigid, the drug dealer in him coming out in full force. His body language became paramilitarized; shoulders hunched, hand out. He barked at Durrutti, “Okay, you got the money?”

“Yeah. So what can you get me?”

Paul tapped his foot, getting impatient. “Don't be smart with me. I'll get what I can get. What do you want?”

“I've only got a hundred and eighty bucks here.”

“That won't get you shit. Nothing, really. Just some low-rent ragweed. It might get you some of that Mexican sinsemilla.”

“Is it good?”

“Of course not. What a dumb question. It'sjust cheap. That's what you're paying for. You're getting a bargain price, just no quality.”

Durrutti pondered his options for a millisecond. The price of a bag wasn't worth what you got, but he was nervous and wanted to get high. This was his best bet. Defeated, he said, “Go for it.”

“Give me the cash and wait outside, okay?” Paul examined
Durrutti and grinned. “On the other hand, you're gonna attract attention just standing here. When was the last time you shaved? Maybe you should take a walk around the block and blend in with the surroundings. Act like a civilian.”

Durrutti shoved a wad of greasy one- and five-dollar bills at him. Paul stashed the cash in his coat, muttered something incomprehensible to himself and then he legged it up the long flight of stairs to Scott's flat.

Durrutti took a stroll around the block and watched an indigo blue dusk settle over the cars and the pedestrians at the intersection of Castro and Seventeenth Streets near Orphan Andy's hamburger shop and the Twin Peaks bar.

A few minutes later Paul stepped out of Scott's door and clambered down the staircase to where Durrutti was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. In his hands was a spotty brown paper bag. He punched Durrutti in the chest with the bag, saying matter-of-factly, “Here you are, kiddo. I hope you like it. If you don't, what the fuck. It was the only thing he had.”

Paul's wan face was dappled with sweaty lines, acne buried in his stubble and sleepless smudges under his eyes. Durrutti opened the bag and had a glance at the weed. It was as bad as Paul said it would be. Brown-green Sinaloa cartel pot sprayed with pesticides. Paul bundled his coat around him and swaggered a step down the sidewalk, turning to beam at Durrutti with a sudden mischievous light in his eyes. He mashed his chewing gum and blew a spastic pink bubble. “Let's go to K &H Liquors. I have to get me some cigarettes.” Paul consulted his wristwatch,
then coughed. “Shit, on the other hand, it's later than I thought. I need to get back to the All-Star. Some people are coming over to sell me a radio.” He smiled again. “Days like this are a bitch, aren't they?”