She was a looker, all right, this Lila.
That was her name, or the name she used working conventions, anyway. Neal learned this from the file Graham had given him, which he had ample time to peruse on the endless trip to San Francisco. It included a Polaroid taken at dinner by one of Pendleton’s AgriTech buddies, which showed Pendleton sitting at a banquet table with a striking Oriental woman. The buddy had scrawled “Robert and Lila” along the bottom.
Looking at the photo, Neal couldn’t blame Pendleton for preferring Lila to his Bunsen burners. Her face was heart-shaped, her hair was long, straight, and satin black, swept up on the left by a blue cloisonne comb. She had beautiful, slanted eyes that gazed on Pendleton with what looked like affection as he struggled with his chopsticks. She was smiling at him. If she was a pro, Neal thought, she was a classy pro, and he liked her just from looking at her picture.
He had no feel for Pendleton yet. The book on him was pretty simple. Forty-three years old, single, married to his work. Born in Chicago, B.S. from Colorado, M.S. from Illinois, Ph. D. from MIT. Taught for a couple of years at Kansas State and then went for the corporate bucks. First for Ciba-Geigy, then for Archer, Daniels Midland, and then AgriTech. Had been there for ten years before he ran into Lila. Lived in a condo, played a little tennis, drove a Volvo. No financial problems, credit hassles, debts. In fact, when you compared his salary and bonuses with his expenses, the guy should have a bunch of money in the bank. Drinks a beer on weekends. Friendly enough, but no close buddies. No women. No boys, either. Fertilizer was his life.
Jesus, Neal thought, no wonder the guy went off the deep end when he discovered sex with a gorgeous, exotic woman in a city as beautiful as San Francisco.
Neal had first gone to San Francisco back in 1970, seven years earlier, when the city was the counterculture capital. Sporting longish hair, denim, one tasteful strand of beads, and the hungry look of the fugitive, Neal was working point for Graham on your basic Haight-Ashbury runaway job. He located their particular flower child in an urban commune on Turk Street. She was the daughter of a Boston banker, and was trying hard to live down her capitalist heritage. Neal had shared a bowl of brown rice and a floor with her, gained her trust, and then ratted her out to Graham. Graham did the rest and Neal heard later that she ended up at Harvard. All betrayals should end so happily.
His next trip to the city was even easier. He was a mature twenty then, and one of the Bank’s clients wanted to film a television commercial in front of a sculpture in Battery Park. Turned out the sculpture was the work of a San Francisco artist who didn’t like to open his mail or answer his phone. Neal found A. Brian Crowe at a coffee house on Columbus. The artist dressed all in black, of course, and hid behind his cape when Neal approached him. The two thousand dollars in cash persuaded him to come out, though, and they sealed the deal over two iced espressos. A. Brian Crowe left happy. Neal hung around the city for a week, and he left happy, which made this an unusual assignment all around.
Neal figured you’d have to be a fool not to love San Francisco, and whatever else Dr. Robert Pendleton was or wasn’t, he was no fool. He was probably a man getting a little romance for the first time in his life and not wanting to let go of it, one of the lucky few who found a hooker who was also a courtesan, a true lady of the evening. She probably took presents instead of cash, or maybe a discreet check had been deposited in her account.
So Neal would write her another check, and that would be that.
Neal closed the file and cracked Fathom open. He fell asleep after a couple of chapters. The flight attendant woke him up to put his seat upright for the approach to San Francisco.
Neal had never liked the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The bill was always as large as the room was small, and the Snob Hill address didn’t impress him. But it always helps a bribery deal to look like money, and he wanted to ask Lila to a quiet drink at the Top of the Mark and have quick access to a room where he could hand her some money in privacy, so he swallowed his distaste and checked in.
He handed the Bank’s gold card to the precious clerk, confessed to having only one small bag, and found his own way to the sixth-floor room, which occupied a corner, so you could actually turn around in it without folding your arms across your chest. The windows allowed a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge and some nicely restored Victorian houses on Pine Street. Neal didn’t care much about the view, as he didn’t plan to spend a lot of time there. He wanted a slow shower and a quick meal before getting down to work.
He called down to room service and ordered a Swiss cheese omelet with a plain, toasted bagel, a pot of coffee, and a Chronicle. Then he stripped off his airline-grody clothes and stepped into the shower. After months of heating his own water for barely tepid outdoor baths, the steaming spray felt great. He stayed in a little too long and was still shaving when the doorbell rang.
He signed for the bill and the tip, poured a cup of black coffee, and sipped at it while he finished shaving. Then he sat down at the small table by the window to devour the food and the newspaper.
Neal was a print junkie, which he figured came with being a native New Yorker. He bypassed the front page of the Chronicle in favor of Herb Caen’s column, enjoyed that, and then turned to the sports section. The baseball season was about to start, and the Yankees looked pretty good for ’77. That’s one of the great things about spring, he thought. All the home teams look like they have a shot. It’s only in the sere days of summer that hopes begin to wilt, then wither and die in fall. Unless, of course, you have relief pitching.
After a thorough perusal of the sports pages, he turned to the front section to catch up on the news. Jimmy Carter really was President, wearing Ward Cleaver sweaters and treating the country like a collective Beaver. Mao was still dead, and his successors were squabbling over the remains. Brezhnev was ill. The same old same old.
Which reminded him that he had the same old job to do: find some miscreant and bring him home. He used his third cup of coffee to come up with a plan.
It wasn’t much of a plan. All he had to do was amble down to the Holiday Inn, trail them until he could find a way to contact her alone, and make his pitch. Then pick up the pieces of Pendleton’s shattered heart and check them through to Raleigh. Almost as easy as giving money to a starving artist.
That’s when he got the bright idea to let his fingers do the walking. Why drag his ass all the way down the hill and waste time following them around? Call their room instead. If he answers, hang up. If she answers, say something like, “You don’t know me, but I have a thousand bucks in cash sitting under your water glass at a table at the Top of the Mark. The name is Neal Carey. One o’clock. Come alone.” There wasn’t a hooker in the world, no matter how classy, who wouldn’t make that appointment.
Safe, simple and civilized, he thought. No point making this any harder than it has to be.
He found the hotel number in the file and dialed the phone.
“Room ten-sixteen, please,” he said.
“I’ll transfer you to the operator.”
He took a sip of coffee.
“Operator. May I help you?”
“Room ten-sixteen, please.”
“Thank you. One moment.”
It was more than a moment. More like ten moments.
“What party are you trying to reach, sir?”
Uh-oh.
“Dr. Robert Pendleton.”
“Thank you. One moment.”
Ten more moments. Long ones.
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Pendleton has checked out.”
Swell.
“Uuuhh… when?”
“This morning, sir.”
While I was showering, filling my face, and lounging over the spring training reports, Neal thought.
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“One moment.”
Did he leave a forwarding address? Your basic desperation effort.
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Pendleton left no forwarding address. Would you like to leave a message in case he calls in?”
“No, thank you, and thanks for your help.”
“Have a nice day.”
“Right.”
Neal poured another cup of coffee in the time it took to call himself an asshole. All right, think, he told himself. Pendleton’s checked out. Why? Maybe money. Hotels are expensive and he’s found himself a pad somewhere. Or maybe AgriTech kept bugging him, so he changed hotels. Or maybe the party is over and he’s on his way back to Raleigh. That’s the best maybe, but you can’t afford to count on it. So back to work.
Pendleton isn’t a pro, so chances are he won’t think about covering his traces. He probably doesn’t know that anyone is on his trail. And there’s only one place to pick up his trail.
Neal hustled to get dressed. He put on a powder blue button-down shirt, khaki slacks, and black loafers, slipped on a red-and-blue rep tie but left the knot open, and dumped half the stuff out of his canvas shoulder bag, leaving enough in to give it some weight. Sticking his airline ticket jacket into the pocket of his all-purpose, guaranteed-not-to-wrinkle blue blazer and shoving a ten-dollar bill in his pants pocket, he hoofed it to the elevator, which seemed to take forever to get there. He figured he was ten minutes away from his only shot at tracking Pendleton and he didn’t know if he had the ten minutes.
The Holiday Inn was on Kearny Street, a straight shot down California Street from the Hopkins. Normally he would have walked there, but the cable car was pulling up just as he hit the sidewalk, so he bought a ticket and hopped on, hanging on the side like he’d seen in the movies. It was sunny and cool out, but he was already sweating. He was in a race with the maids at the Chinatown Holiday Inn.
He got off on the corner of Kearny and California, three blocks south of the Holiday Inn. He didn’t run but he didn’t exactly walk, either, and he did the three blocks in about two minutes. Avoiding the doorman’s eyes, he headed straight for the bank of elevators, and there was one waiting for him. He caught his breath on the way up. Or almost caught it. He wanted to look a little breathless for the show.
The doors slid open and he looked at the sign-1001-1030-with an arrow pointing to the left. He trotted down the hallway and, sure enough, there were two maids’ carts sitting between rooms 1001 and 1012. So, Neal thought, it all depends on where they started.
He tried to look worried, hassled, and in a hurry. None of this required any serious level of method acting.
“I’m going to miss my flight,” he said to the maid who was just stepping out of 1012. “Did you find a ticket?”
She gave him a blank look. She was young and unsure. He stepped around her to 1016 and jiggled the handle. It was locked.
“Did you find a ticket in this room? Airline ticket?”
The other maid came out of 1011. “What you lose?”
She was an older woman. The boss.
“My plane ticket.”
“What room?” she asked, checking him out.
He knew he couldn’t give her time to connect Pendleton to the room. He hoped the good doctor hadn’t been a big tipper.
“Could you let me in, please? I have to catch a flight to Atlanta in forty-five minutes.”
“I call manager.”
“I don’t have the time,” Neal said as he pulled the ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it on the edge of her cart. “Please?”
She took her key ring and slipped the key in the lock. The younger one started to speak rapidly in Chinese, but the older one shut her up with a hard glance.
“Quick,” she said to Neal. She stood in the doorway as she ushered him in. The younger one joined her, in case Neal swiped an ashtray or a TV or something.
Neal had tossed a lot of rooms in his life, but never in front of an audience with the clock running, unless he counted the endless practice sessions with Graham. This was like some sort of private cop game show, where if he passed round one he got to go on for cash and prizes. It would have helped if he knew what he was looking for, but he was just looking, and that took time.
The bed was unmade, but otherwise the room was neat. They hadn’t left in a hurry. They had even left their wet towels in the bathtub and thrown their trash in the cans.
Neal started with the bureau drawers. Nothing.
“Shit,” he said, just to give the scene realism.
He checked the nightstand beside the bed. There was one of those little hotel notepads beside the phone book and the Bible. He turned his back to the audience and stuck it in his pocket.
“I’ll never make it,” he said.
“Under bed?” the older maid suggested.
He humored her and got down on all fours and looked under the bed. There wasn’t even any dust, not to mention a bachelor sock, or a note telling him where they had gone.
“Maybe I threw it away,” he said as he got up. “Stupid.”
The maids nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
The trashcan was full, as if they’d straightened up before leaving. Polite, thoughtful people. Three empty cans of Diet Pepsi sat on some pieces of cardboard, the kind you get with your laundered shirts. A pocket map of San Francisco and a bunch of ticket stubs at the bottom.
“Jesus, how could I be so stupid?” Neal said as he bent over and reached into the trashcan. He showed his audience his butt as he slipped his airline ticket out of his pocket and into the can. Then he put the map and the ticket stubs under the ticket envelope, straightened up and showed them the ticket, then stuffed the whole mess into his lapel pocket.
“Thank you so much,” he said.
“Hurry, hurry,” said the older one.
Hurry, hurry, indeed, thought Neal.
Security picked him up in the lobby.
Security in this case was represented by a young Chinese guy who was both larger and more muscular than Neal would have preferred. His chest looked uncomfortably stuffed into his gray uniform blazer, and he had big, thick arms. He had clearly spent some quality time on the old bench-presses. Neal, who didn’t have to worry about leaving space in his jacket for his muscles, knew the guy would have no trouble pinning him up against a wall and keeping him there. The guy’s white shirt was rumpled around a waist that was beginning to go to fat, and he had a two-way radio hooked to his belt. There was probably a nightstick stuck into the belt somewhere, Neal thought, probably at the small of his back. Except nothing about this guy was small. And he seemed to want to talk.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. There was no trace of a Chinese accent. “May I ask what you were doing in Room ten-sixteen?”
The younger maid hadn’t wasted any time calling down. So much for her five bucks, Neal thought.
“I left my-”
“Save it. That wasn’t your room.”
Neal nodded at the other guests in the lobby. “Can we do this outside?”
“Sure.”
He opened the door for Neal and let him get a good feel for his bulk. Neal knew that his next move would be to get in front of him and maneuver him to the wall. Which would be the end of the game, so it just wouldn’t do to let Benchpress here make that next move.
Neal looked off to his left as soon as he cleared the doorway, held up his hand, and yelled, “Taxi!”
The front cab in line started to edge forward on the curb as a bellhop hustled over to open the cab door.
“No, no, no,” Benchpress said, waving his arms as he quick-shuffled between Neal and the cab.
This was okay with Neal, who didn’t want to take a cab anyway. He wanted to take a nice long walk up a long, steep hill to see just how badly Benchpress wanted to carry all those big muscles and that belly up a pitch to talk. With Benchpress off to his left, Neal had his whole right side open to move, and he knew where a right turn would take him: through North Beach and then up Telegraph Hill, which was plenty long and steep enough for what he had in mind. He took a hard right and headed out.
Benchpress wasted two seconds standing by the cab wondering how embarrassed he should be, and then another second trying to decide if the chase was going to be worth it.
He decided it was.
Neal wasn’t happy to look over his shoulder and see Benchpress coming after him, but he wasn’t too worried either. The guy wasn’t going to cause a scene-not near his hotel, anyway-and he wasn’t going to call the city police over this kind of crap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure this thing became real personal, so Neal wasted a second of his own to turn on his heels and grin at Benchpress. Then he inserted his middle finger in his mouth, twisted it around, popped it out, and displayed it to Benchpress.
Benchpress took it personally. He nodded, put his head down, and started forward.
Okay, Neal thought, come on. I’ve spent six months hiking up and down a steep Yorkshire moor carrying packs of supplies. No overweight, pumped-up rent-a-cop can catch me on a hill.
Neal led him up Kearny and took another right on Broadway, which was a little flatter then he remembered. He picked up the pace past the strip joints and sex shops that were just opening to catch the early trade. Benchpress wasn’t distracted by the tired barkers who were sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee, or by the sleepy dancers who were just arriving with their dancing togs in gym bags slung over their shoulders. He didn’t trip over any of the empty beer or wine bottles, or slip on any of the wax-paper sandwich wrappers or any of the trash that littered the North Beach strip. A sharp, cool wind was blowing off the Bay and into their faces, but that didn’t slow Benchpress down much either.
Reduced to cheap tricks, Neal crossed Broadway in mid-traffic, inspiring some aggravated honking but no apparent concern in Benchpress, who swatted a Renault out of his way and kept coming.
Jesus, Neal thought, what a day. First I screw up and let Pendleton take off, next I find the only house detective in America with an overdeveloped sense of duty.
He swung a left onto Sansome Street, which gave him the incline he was looking for. Like a sparkling brook that flows into a polluted river, Sansome Street seemed a world apart from Broadway. Its street-level garages led up to white and pastel apartments and houses that featured large sun rooms overlooking the Bay. A lot of their windows had those security-service decals plastered on them, the kind that let prospective burglars know that they shouldn’t mess around here unless they wanted police academy dropouts with nightsticks, rottweilers, and inferiority complexes coming down on their sorry asses.
Sansome Street was pretty, trendy, and expensive looking, and Neal wondered where the money came from. Maybe it came from streets like Broadway, money that slipped through the fingers of the strippers and the whores, money that got away from the junkies and the porn addicts, from the sad drunks who paid six bucks a shot to peek over their grimy glasses of cheap bourbon at the bitter shake-and-jiggle of somebody’s baby girl. Maybe it was the angry neon glare of the strip that paid for the warm, bright sun rooms with the view of the Bay.
His class-war reverie took his mind off the pain that was starting to shoot through his legs, pain that reminded him to take Sansome Street for what it was, a steep route up Telegraph Hill. He sucked it up and shifted into high gear. There’s a trick to climbing a hill: you keep your knees slightly bent as you walk, like Groucho Marx going up a staircase. Every three or four steps you rock back on your heels. The technique saves wear and tear on the knees and ankles, and it moves you up a hill faster. Fast enough to leave a musclebound, beer-bellied badge from Woolworth’s stretched out on the pavement sucking air.
After punishing his pursuer for a couple of minutes, Neal looked back over his shoulder and saw that Benchpress was huffing, puffing, muttering, sweating… and gaining on him.
Neal didn’t know where Benchpress had learned Carey’s Own Special Hill-Climbing Technique, but figured his patent was in jeopardy. Also his ass, because his legs started to do one of those reverse Pinocchio numbers and turn to wood. The pot of coffee and the cheese omelet he had consumed started to make some serious complaints in the form of an excruciating cramp, and his lungs began to ask if all this was such a good idea.
He looked around for some boulders or something to roll down on Benchpress like they do in the movies, but didn’t see any. So he took a nice, deep gasp and plunged a little faster up the hill. Plan A, the Leave-the-Fat-Boy-on-the-Slope Maneuver, hadn’t worked, so he tried to come up with a better Plan B. The wit and wisdom of Joe Graham came to him.
“If you can’t beat ’em,” Graham had once intoned, “bribe ’em.”
He had about a ten-second lead on Benchpress and figured he’d need at least fifteen. His current tactic wasn’t getting it done-in fact, he’d be really lucky to reach the park at Coit Tower with a five-second cushion, and five seconds weren’t going to be enough for what he had in mind, so he broke into a run.
“Run” was a grandiose word for the shuffling jog he managed. His heart went into its Buddy-Rich-on-Speed imitation, the pleasant cramp in his stomach reached down into his groin, and his lungs issued a strong protest in the form of a wheezing gasp. But his legs kept moving. They ran up to the corner of Filbert Street and turned right, then hopped over to the north side of the street. While his legs were busy running, his right hand reached into his jacket, lifted out his wallet, and put it in his left hand. The two hands cooperated to take out one of the Bank’s crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and put the wallet back. Then they tore the bill in half, the left hand putting its half in the left pants pocket, and the right hand gripping its prize in its sweaty palm.
He looked back quickly and saw that Benchpress hadn’t hit the corner of Filbert yet, so it looked like he’d get his fifteen ticks. He hit the bottom of Coit Tower park, found a bowling-ball-sized rock at the base of a tree, and put the half-hundred under it. Then he sprinted as fast as he could up the walkway to the observation tower and marked the location of the tree. He leaned against the railing next to one of the coin-operated binoculars to catch what was left of his breath. As he sucked for air, he took off his left loafer and put the hotel notepad and the ticket stubs inside it before he put the shoe back on. People who search you, even after they’ve beaten you unconscious, often forget to look in your shoes.
He took in a fresh gulp of air as he checked out the view from the observation terrace, which was as stunning as he remembered. The whole bay stretched out in front of him. Off to his left he could make out a small section of the Golden Gate Bridge as it touched Marin County, and above that he could see the southern slope of Mount Tamalpais. Down and to the right of Mount Tarn he could see Sausalito, and scanning farther to the right he saw small sailboats dancing on the sapphire blue water around the plump, notorious little island of Alcatraz. To his right he could see the whole span of the Bay Bridge as it led to Oakland. A huge freighter was plying its way up the bay toward San Mateo.
He had about five seconds to enjoy all this splendor before he turned to see Benchpress shuffling to the base of the walkway. Neal saw a homicidal look in the security guard’s eye and wondered if he was about to get beaten to the proverbial pulp.
This is no big deal on television, where the private eye hero gets trashed by three guys twice his size, because when you see him after the commercial he has some beautiful woman tending his wounds and he’s up and about, so to speak, one roll-cut later. But real-life beatings hurt. Worse, they injure, and the injuries take a long time to heal, if they ever do. Neal just wanted to avoid the whole experience.
He put his back up against the railing and one of the binoculars on his left side as Benchpress reached the observation terrace and began to move toward him.
“Are you going to make me chase you down the hill now?” Bench-press asked as he edged along the railing toward Neal. He was breathing hard, stalling to catch his breath.
“I don’t know, would it work?”
“You’re an asshole. You know where I live? Chinatown. Sacramento Street? Clay Street? California Street? You know what they are?”
I’m an asshole all right, Neal thought.
“Hills,” Neal said. “They’re big hills.”
“I’ve been walking up and down those streets since I was a kid. You think you’re going to shake me on a hill? Get real.”
“You’re right. I apologize.”
“That’s okay. Now what’s your story? What did you steal?”
“Nothing.”
Benchpress was taking his air through his nose now, timing his breathing and slowing it down. He shifted his eyes around to see if they were alone. They were.
He pulled his security guard’s badge out and held it up for Neal to see.
“Let’s make this easy now,” he said.
“I was looking for something.”
“PI?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“ID?”
Neal couldn’t handle any more initials, so he held out the torn hundred-dollar bill.
“You can relax,” he said. “You did your job. I didn’t steal anything. You ran me down. Take the prize.”
He stuck the bill behind the coin slot of the binoculars and started to back away.
“You’re offering me a bribe?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have anything against the concept, I’m just checking it out.”
“Basically, I’m paying you not to beat me up to defend your honor.”
He smiled, accepting Neal’s craven surrender graciously.
“Where’s the other half?” he asked.
“It’s under a tree down there somewhere.”
He was one quick fat man. His right foot shot out and kicked the air twice, face-high, before Neal could even break into tears.
“I’m not playing hide-and-seek for half a bill that probably doesn’t exist.”
Neal edged farther along the railing away from Benchpress as he said, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You take the half-bill here and start walking down the path. I stay right here where you can see me. The tree is within sight. When you’re, oh, let’s say twenty steps away, I’ll start giving you directions-you know, ‘you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder’-until you find the other half.”
Benchpress thought about it for a few seconds.
“There are only two paths down from here,” he warned Neal.
“I know.”
“If you try to screw me, I can catch you.”
“I know that, too.”
“If I have to do that, I’ll break your ribs.”
Enough is enough, thought Neal, even for a devoted coward like me. This gig might bring me back onto this guy’s turf again, and I’d need some status to make a deal. We have to get on a more equal footing here.
“Maybe,” Neal said. “I’m carrying, Bruce Lee.”
That stopped Benchpress for a second. He hadn’t considered the possibility of this goofball having a gun.
“Are you?” he asked, studying the contours of Neal’s jacket.
“Naaah.”
But you’re not sure, Benchpress, are you? Neal thought. That’s okay. That’s just fine.
“Do we have a deal?” Neal asked.
“I think we can work something out,” Benchpress said. He reached out slowly and took the bill from the coin slot. Then he fixed Neal with a hard-guy stare and started to back away.
Neal counted to twenty, slowly and loudly, and then started to give Benchpress directions. The game went on about a minute before Neal saw him reach under the rock and come up with the other half of the bill.
“Okay?” Neal shouted.
“Wait a minute! I’m checking the serial numbers!”
Smart guy, thought Neal. Next time I come back, he’ll have an office job.
“Okay!” hollered Benchpress. “Now what?”
“I don’t know! I’ve never done this before! You have any ideas?”
“Why don’t I just walk away?”
“How do I know you won’t be waiting for me at the bottom?”
“You have an ugly and suspicious mind!”
“Tell me about it!”
Neal was debating with himself whether to trust him, when Benchpress yelled, “Do you have a dime?”
What the hell?
“Yeah!”
“Okay! I’ll go to Pier Thirty-nine! You wait fifteen minutes and then put the dime in the binoculars. Look down to Pier Thirty-nine and I’ll be standing there waving at you.”
Interesting concept, Neal thought. He shouted, “Right! That gives you a good ten minutes to sneak up the other side and then kick my head into the Bay!”
“You don’t trust me?”
No, Neal thought, but I don’t have a choice, do I? Unless I want to stand on this hill for a few days.
“You can’t walk to Pier Thirty-nine in fifteen minutes!” Neal shouted.
“I’m going to take a cab, asshole!”
There was always that.
“Okay, okay. Just get going!”
“It’s been nice chasing you!”
“Nice being chased!”
Neal watched as Benchpress disappeared beneath the trees. He checked his watch. It was ten-forty-five, but felt to him like it should be a lot later. He spent the time catching his breath, slowing his heartbeat, and enjoying the view. He waited twelve minutes and then put his dime in the binoculars and focused in on the pier. Benchpress must have found himself a hell of a cabbie, because it was not quite eleven when Neal saw him standing on the pier, looking up toward Telegraph Hill, smiling and waving.
I love a man who takes an honest bribe, Neal thought.
Neal took his time getting down Telegraph Hill. He strolled down Greenwich Street onto Columbus Avenue, stopped to admire the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul’s terra-cotta towers, and took a seat on a bench in Columbus Square. He shared the bench with two old men who were chatting amiably in Italian. The seat gave him a nice view of the park, where he saw young mothers pushing baby carriages, older Chinese people doing t‘ai chi, and still older Italian women, dressed in black, tossing bread crumbs to pigeons. He liked what he saw, but he liked what he didn’t see even better: no Benchpress, no small groups of Benchpress’s friends and associates searching for a young white guy in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. Trust is one thing, he thought, stupidity is another.
He gave it five minutes on the bench before moving on down Columbus toward the corner of Broadway. Bypassing a half-dozen Italian cafes, bakeries, and espresso bars-there would be time for those later-he headed straight for the City Lights Bookstore.
Neal had known about the City Lights Bookstore long before he had ever visited it. What Shakespeare and Company was to the Lost Generation, City Lights was to the Beat Generation. It was a literary candle in the window that showed the way back from Kesey to Kerouac, and in a sense back to Smollett and Johnson and old Lazarillo des Tormes.
Mostly it was just a goddamn good bookstore that had tables and chairs downstairs where people were encouraged to sit down and actually read books. There were no smarmy signs about its being a business and not a library. Consequently, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to buy a book from City Lights, and that was part of what Neal had in mind.
He stepped through the narrow doorway, nodded a greeting to the clerk at the counter, and headed down the rickety wooden stairs to the basement. Several other pilgrims were browsing the shelves, rapt in their perusal of sections labeled “Counterculture,” which held treasures not easily found in Cleveland, Montgomery, or New York.
He did a little browsing himself, settled on a paperback copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and sat down at a table. He spent a few minutes enjoying Abbey and then discovered an itch that required scratching on the sole of his left foot. He took off his loafer, removed the notepad and ticket stubs, and put them on the table. One of the great things about City Lights was that nobody cared what you spent your time looking at.
He started with the notepad, which didn’t take much time because there was nothing written on it, nor were there any impressions on the top or second pages. So far, no good.
The ticket stubs were more interesting, each being proof of purchase of a $3.50 round-trip fare from Blue Line Transportation on the Number four bus. Six of them, each from last week. Neal didn’t know where the Number four bus went, but it couldn’t be that far at $3.50. Where the hell could Pendleton have been commuting to? Or was it Lila? A commuting hooker?
Neal stuck the tickets and pad back in his pocket, bought the Bank the copy of Desert Solitaire, and headed back up Columbus. He knew exactly what he needed to follow up the lead, and found it at a sidewalk cafe called La Figaro, where he ordered a double iced espresso and a slice of chocolate cake. Sugar, caffeine, and carbohydrates were exactly the brain food he needed to inspire him, and he was sitting outside reveling in self-indulgence and Edward Abbey when he felt a shadow looming over his shoulder and heard a voice ask, “So, you have any more money for me?”
Neal looked up at him and smiled.
A. Brian Crowe hadn’t changed much. He still hung out in the same cafes. He was still tall and skinny, still sported shoulder-length blond hair, and still dressed all in black. Even carried the same black satin cape draped over his shoulder.
“Are there more corporate giants wanting to film their obscenities in front of my art?” Crowe asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then you could at least offer me an espresso.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
Crowe signaled the waitress, who headed straight for the espresso machine. Crowe was obviously no stranger to cadging drinks at La Figaro.
“How’s the life of a starving artist?” Neal asked when the coffee had been served.
“Fat,” Crowe answered. He swirled half the espresso around in his mouth, then jerked his head back suddenly and swallowed. He savored the aftertaste, then jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at a skyscraper down in the Financial District. “They wanted a sculpture for their lobby. They commissioned Crowe, who charged them an unconscionable fee, which they foolishly paid. Crowe bought his apartment.”
“You bought an apartment?”
“It was a very large sculpture,” he explained. He tilted the cup into his mouth again and knocked the coffee back. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked like a turkey swallowing raindrops. “It occupies a prominent place in a traffic pattern trod by the sensually enslaved but socially ambitious, some of whom have decided to attempt their climb up the social ladder clutching their very own Crowe. The monetary expression of their undying gratitude allows Crowe to live in the manner to which he has become accustomed.”
“Sun room? View of the bay?”
“In short, I am in, and therefore in the money. Buy me another espresso.” His long fingers whipped a card from his pocket.
“C’mon, Crowe! Business cards?”
“You know a lot of corporate types, don’t you?”
“I guess the Sixties are really over.”
Crowe raised an eyebrow at the waitress, who quickly came over with two espressos. Crowe leaned over his cup and looked sadly at Neal. He dropped the artsy pose and said, “My three-piece-suit clients are always asking me to get them acid. Acid! I haven’t done acid since the first Monterey Festival.”
“So you’re off the bus?”
“And on the gravy train. The Sixties are over, the Seventies are on the downslide, and the Eighties are almost upon us. You want to be carrying some money into the Eighties. Remember that, young Neal. It’s about making money now.”
Neal took the card. “My clients don’t usually come to me looking for art, but…”
“Networking, you know? Networking gets the right people together with the right people.”
“The ‘right people,’ Crowe? You joining the country club next? You were a communist, for crying out loud!”
“I turned in my card. I’m thirty-eight years old, young Neal. I can’t work for rice and beans and dope anymore. One day I looked in the mirror and saw my happy hippie face differently. It looked pathetic. I was a tourist attraction, local color for the tourists who hadn’t figured out the hippie thing was already dead.
“So I quit doing art for art’s sake and started doing it for A. Brian Crowe’s sake. I learned some interesting things, like the fact that a corporation won’t even look at a piece that costs a thousand bucks, but will fight over the same piece when it costs ten thousand bucks. I just started adding zeros to my price tags. I got myself an agent and started going to parties and sipping white wine with the right people. You can call it selling out… I call it selling.”
Neal avoided his gaze. Crowe looked older. The fire in his eyes had become embers.
“It’s okay with me, Crowe.”
The artist snapped back into his role. He stood up, whirled his cape around his shoulders, and said, “Crowe’s address and phone number are on the card. Give Crowe a call. We’ll do dinner.”
Neal watched him stride out the door. A. Brian Crowe, flamboyant artist, counterculture hero, Gold Card member.
That’s all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.