Bones of the Barbary Coast

  So it was almost but not quite pure habit. Okay, so what was that little remainder left over? The best he could do was, it had to do with seeing her smile, like there was some remedy in it. It had to do with that thing about the healing embrace of love, the power of that heart ray. Right now he needed to see that smile, at least one more time. Like in life you could accomplish at least that.

  "You going to smile for me today?"

  Megan looked at the bird in her fingers, then crushed it awkwardly right up against her eye. She held it there and rocked minutely side to side.

  "You want to dance? We could do that. You know it makes Bert feel good, when you smile, right?"

  He stood up from the bench and the movement drew her eye. She looked up at him as if she hadn't known anyone else was there.

  "Here we go, Megan Kid. Here we go."

  He swung the chair away from the bench, then looked up at the sky and took a deep breath and found the rhythm with his own feet before he moved it to the chair. It had to be slow and sweeping. Megan's head lolled with the movements.

  Beyond the trunk of the oak and through a thin screen of laurel, Bert could see two orderlies, pushing a pair of geriatrics in wheelchairs. They were still fifty yards away, but they'd be here in another minute. A sweat broke on his temples.

  He moved the chair to the inner music, picking up the tempo, wishing Girl X would turn her head so he could see the shape of her lips. If you could just find the center of it, he was thinking, if you could find the soul or core of what was graceful, surely you could convey it to her, to anyone. But it was so rare—so hard to find, to feel all the way. It was eluding him now as it always had.

  "Megan, baby, let me see you smile," he pleaded.

  Now the orderlies had rolled their charges onto the far end of the circular walk, and the desperation turned into outright fear. He'd have to stop moving this crazy way in another ten seconds.

  "Megan, you got to give me something here," Bert begged. "This is important, Baby Kid, right? You got to give me something here."

  44

  CREE CLIMBED THE fifty-eight steps to Bert's house. The name of Lydia's church was a datum full of possibilities, and she should be feeling some renewed excitement, but all she really felt was a rising anxiety about this meeting. She'd have to confront Bert with the break-in at Ray's. If he had done it, she'd have to fight with him about it. Even if he hadn't, her knowing about it would reveal that she'd been with Ray, and he'd be angry with her. It wasn't going to be easy.

  Again she paused at the fourth landing to look around. Three o'clock Saturday afternoon, and the street below was quiet but the thoroughfare of Market Street, invisible beyond the near rooftops, hummed with traffic. Looking up, she saw Bert swing into view briefly in the big front window. Dancing again. She waited, but he didn't reappear.

  She walked up the rest of the way and rang the bell. This time the music was still playing when Bert opened the door, some big band playing lush, smooth melodies with a gently charged rhythm underneath. From the smell inside it was obvious Bert had been drinking. In the daylight, the place looked more stark and worn than it had by lamplight.

  "Get you anything? Drink? I'm having a drink."

  She hesitated, then decided a companionable gesture might help defuse what was coming. "Sure. Whatever you're having."

  That pleased him. He went behind his counter and put together a couple of whiskeys on the rocks. His shirt was wrinkled, and his puffy face had the look of somebody who hadn't slept. He pushed her drink across the counter and raised his in a quick salute before drinking off half of it. Cree tasted hers. The music brought her back to hot nights with the kitchen windows open to the back stoop, Daddy and Bert in their undershirts, radio playing.

  "Music too loud? I can—"

  "No, it's fine. I like it."

  He nodded, flicked his eyes at her, put his hands on the counter, stared out the front window. "So . . . do anything interesting last night? Friday night in San Francisco, got a great nightlife here."

  "Working, actually. How about you, Uncle Bert?"

  "Ah, the usual. A little work, a little R & R."

  "Oh? Was breaking into Ray's place the work or the R & R?"

  His red eyes came back to hers, angry and afraid. "What're you talking about?"

  "You tell me what I'm talking about."

  He didn't answer. Instead he came around the counter and past her into the middle of the living room. He stood on the rug, shifting his weight in time to the music, a new cut with a faster tempo. She followed him, threw her purse on the couch and sat into the cigarette smell. The pile of case files on the coffee table looked bigger than last time.

  "Know who this is? Basie. The Count. Him and Ellington, the succor and salvation of my later years, so help me God. Guy came along and reinvigorated the whole swing movement, put the blues roots back into it. At least at first. Later he moved up to New York and got co-opted. But still."

  Cree held her drink and waited.

  "You ever dance to this stuff? This old-time stuff?"

  "About once every other blue moon."

  "C'mon. I'll show you the steps. It's easy. Takes the edge off. Makes everything more . . . manageable, you know what I mean?" He illustrated the movements. Even drunk, he moved with elegance and precision, handling his weight with economical flourish.

  "No thanks. I'd look like an idiot."

  "C'mon, Cree. Do me a favor. We got stuff to talk about, I know. But sometimes you gotta . . . you have to . . ." He looked perplexed, trying to name it. "You gotta find a good place first. Before you get to the other stuff."

  "What other stuff?"

  He gestured for her to stand, held his arms out to her expectantly, still moving to the music.

  This was painful. She was tempted to do it for him, but there was too much tension to allow it to be real. "I think you're drunk, Bert."

  "Yeah, just a little. Fifty-eight steps up here, do it every day, but on the other thing I never got through the first twelve." He didn't smile at his joke. "Saturday afternoon, why not. C'mon."

  She made her decision. She knew it would hurt him, but she had to make him earn it, she had to have something to hold over him.

  "Bert, no. Not until we've talked about what's going on. This is all getting too crazy for me."

  He stopped moving. He looked vastly sad for a few seconds and then his face reddened and at first she thought it was rage. But it was shame, shame that he'd asked her. He had spilled a little of his drink and now scuffed at the wet spot on the carpet.

  "Okay," he said. "Okay. Another time, maybe." He looked like a broken-hearted man.

  Bert sat at the other end of the couch and for a few seconds leaned his head back against the cushions with his face to the ceiling. Cree waited. When he brought his head forward again, he was more composed.

  "There's good reasons, Cree. Just hear me out first, then tell me to get fucked, get my head examined, whatever. But listen to me first."

  "I'm listening."

  Deep breath. "Okay. You remember I told you about that murder, the one where Ray was on the list in Berkeley?"

  "The boyfriend of Ray's ex, you called it a slice-and-dice."

  "Yeah. There never was a trial because the presumed perp hung himself in jail. Cops over there think that's good enough, but technically there was never a finding. So I went and located the evidence inventory. Take a look." He passed her some stapled-together pages. "Second page. About halfway down."

  She flipped the page and looked where he told her. Items fifty-nine through sixty-four were collections of hairs identified as dog hairs.

  "The victim didn't have pets," Bert said.

  "So he had friends who came over with their dogs."

  "Maybe so. But the same or very similar dogs were at the girlfriend's house, Ray's ex's house. Evidence techs vacuumed her place, too. She didn't have dogs, either."

  Cree looked at the new pages he handed her. "So they had mutual friends wi
th dogs. Bert—on the basis of this you break into somebody's house? You hurt Ray's pets? You—"

  "You said you were going to listen first!" He was getting the baleful look in his eyes. "Look. I start getting e-mails with canine images in them, I gotta figure the taunt has to center on dogs. A reminder of something from the past, maybe evidence overlooked at the time, the grudge element. So I go back and pull up stuff that had dogs figuring in it, I showed you those. Then I go into Ray's place and find all kinds of corroboration. You been in there, you saw the art on the walls, you—" He pulled up short, realizing what he'd admitted.

  "So you were watching his place? You saw us together. That's why the calls on my cell. Checking up on me."

  "I, I was in there, and I got scared to death about what I was seeing. Yeah, I saw you, that's another whole can of worms we gotta get to. What the fuck are you doing, driving around with a psycho at night?"

  "He doesn't seem so 'psycho' when you see him up close."

  "Oh yeah? How close did you get, Cree? After I've been warning you?"

  Cree stood up. She bent to snatch her purse and then stalked to the front hall. It was all she could do to speak to him again.

  "I was going to try to talk sense to you, Uncle Bert. I was going to try to talk you out of taking this any further with Ray. But you're not hearing me, you're acting irrational and obsessive. Listen to yourself! Now you're making assumptions about what I do, too, you're judging what I do or don't do. If you want to convince me of anything, you're not going to do it with some drunken, paternalistic jealousy thing or another paranoid fantasy, you have to show me some facts that have any bearing on this! I'm trying to give you fair warning. Ray could report you. So far I've persuaded him not to, but if this goes further, so help me, I'll support him on it. Malfeasance, Uncle Bert—that could cost you your pension."

  Bert's red face had gone to a mottled white. He wasn't healthy, she realized. Suddenly she was afraid for him, and she held herself in the hallway, looking back, her heartbeat shaking her.

  "You're right," he said quietly. "You're right. Except on one thing. Listen to me and hear me out. Then you can tell me whatever."

  She didn't say yes, but she didn't move. She stood near the door to make it clear he had better say something that made sense.

  He got up to pace around the room as he explained. As before, when he laid out his forensic case he came across as focused and organized.

  He had taken the extraordinary step of breaking into Ray's because he deeply felt he was onto something. He ticked the reasons off on his thick fingers: the dog-morph e-mails. The old witness/suspect list. Ray's criminal history as a juvenile. Working where he did, Ray had access to inside information on dozens of homicides over the last twelve years. Ray knew computers and the e-mails showed he had hacking-type skills. Ray hated Bert for what had happened to his face. Bert looks into unresolved older cases, and too many involving dogs kept coming up.

  On the basis of that, he goes into Ray's house. What does he find? Suspect has three big dogs, all of them attack or security breeds. Mail is full of correspondence with path labs around the state. Files show he's owned big dogs for many years. He's got an unusual hobby: doing huge photo enlargements of X-rays and MRIs of dead people with tumors, skull injuries. That in itself constitutes a crime, the theft of confidential medical records, but more important demonstrates a morbid obsession, necrophilia or some other psychopathology. His facial disfigurement, whatever its origin, mea culpa, Cree, fine, that fits that profile, too, one of the old cases involves facial mutilation of victims. The books on Ray's table, what's he reading about? Werewolves, the psychology of serial killers, violent behavioral disorders.

  "What does it take, Cree? What? To convince you something is not right with this guy?"

  Cree felt her certainty falter. Intuitively, empathically, she now felt she knew Ray fairly well—she'd glimpsed something true about him on the rooftop, on the beach. Clearly, he was an innocent, asocial, individualistic person with an unusual philosophical or mystical bent, on a very private, very determined, quest to understand. But how far would he go on that quest? She couldn't be quite sure. Who was he, what was he? There was also that odd dissonance she'd felt from the start, the hidden part, a piece of the puzzle of Ray that she couldn't fit to the rest.

  Still, Bert's case was so circumstantial, she had to throw some of it back at him. "You know what I do? I fly all over the country to investigate and study the minds of dead people. Take a look at my library, my private files. I must be a murderer, too, right?"

  A big hand batted the suggestion aside. "He's got these maps on the wall upstairs. They're topo maps of rural areas, with paths or routes pencilled in, okay? One is San Bruno State Park, that's just south of here, Ray's drawn paths all over it. I didn't take a photo, I could kick myself now, but then a car came, I got ready for a fight." Bert looked more confident now, his lips working better, words not so slurred. "Cree, that case where the toddler was killed by dogs or coyotes, that was in San Bruno Park. Coyotes, gimme a break! I went into the files today and got the spot where it happened on the map right here. You can imagine how much I'd like to compare my map with Ray's." He looked at her thoughtfully. "You bring a camera with you from Seattle?"

  "Of course. I'm on a job here."

  "Then that's something you could help me with. The map. Next time you're 'seeing Ray up close,' go upstairs and—"

  "Bert. Stop."

  But she felt like she was standing on something that moved, a sandy slope, sliding gravel, no footing. She took a couple of steps back toward Bert, found a chair, sat.

  "There were hairs taken as evidence in the San Bruno case and those two older attacks, too. Back then, they didn't do much DNA, but now it's easy. I took some samples from Ray's place and I also got history on his other dogs, maybe the genetics guys can identify dog breed from the follicles. It's already in the works, Cree. It's already being processed."

  She thought about it as the music went into a number that would have sounded slinky in other circumstances but right now just sounded sneaky and deceptive. Bert gave her time. He stood at the window, fingering his lighter and looking out.

  "So what's next? That's what I'm concerned about. You've got Ray angry as hell. As it is, it's all I can do to persuade him not to do something back, and now—"

  "Oh? So Ray's gonna do precisely what?"

  Cree realized her mistake as the anger surfaced in Bert's red eyes. He'd heard it as a challenge. "Nothing," she said firmly. "Not if I have anything to say about it. Nothing."

  "So my visit got Ray provoked? Good. Maybe it'll provoke him into a mistake."

  "No! Nobody's doing any more provoking! You've—"

  "I'll make that decision." A clipped voice.

  Cree stood up. She started toward him, then changed her mind and went to the CD player. She slapped the stop button and the music cut off instantly. In its aftermath, the silence was merciless. She went over to where Bert stood and took him by his shoulders.

  "I'm going to make something very clear to you. You will not do any more illegal or violent things to Ray. If you've got a case, you make it by rules of procedure and law. You—"

  "Or what? You'll walk away from the wolfman research? Go ahead. We're into something else now."

  "I won't be party to anything illegal. I won't sit back and let it happen, either. You're going to figure out legitimate ways to implicate Ray, or you're going to get off his ass. Or so help me, I'll testify against you if something goes bad. You back off this whole thing, starting today. This minute."

  "Comes a time when things take on a life of their own, Cree. A momentum."

  "You heard me, right?" She glared at him and stalked to the door, then caught the overtone and had to turn back one more time. "Like what, momentum?"

  Bert's mood had veered again. He had gone distant and secret and sad. When he answered, his voice was resigned. "Cree. Voice of experience talking here. This kind of thing, it can go from c
omplex to simple real fast. At that point, and I think we're there right now, you don't have the luxury of indecision or weighing two sides or trying to reconcile them. You just have to choose which side you're on."

  45

  THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE, Ray had decided, was that you had to look straight at things—most especially, the things you feared most or found most awful, distressing, or ugly. Then you had to find the courage and strength to celebrate them. That was what reverence meant. You observed and you said, there is no part of the world I do not revere and honor; I will not turn my eye from one thing in it. It was the impulse of all real spirituality and real art: to frame anything at all within a larger scheme of truth and beauty.

  Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it seemed impossible.

  He was pleased with the X-ray compositions that sought to look inside and look at the scary things, the human mechanism people generally didn't want to acknowledge carted them around every day. The MRIs were proving to be something of an artistic challenge, still beyond him, and he didn't plan to work on them again. But he thought the visual light photos, though very difficult, were worth another try.

  Saturday night was always busy in the emergency room, but down in the basement the morgue and path sections were usually quiet. The UCSF Medical Center was familiar turf for Ray, and he had the keys for the pathology suite. Plenty of patients died on Saturday nights, but they were mostly iced upstairs until daytime, when the path staff were on the job to process them, or just waited on stretchers until the overworked staff could wheel them down.

  The Medical Center was a massive hospital complex on Parnassus Street, just below the eastern end of Golden Gate Park. From the street it looked like three blocks of uninterrupted walls and windows, but in fact it included innumerable wings and connectors and tunnels to other buildings. After all these years, Ray could find his way inside blindfolded.