Chocolate Quake (17 page)

“Who me? I’m gay.”

“Always hard for me to believe that, Sammie. I seen you crackin’ skulls for the 49ers in your day. You sure don’t look like none a them gay fellas down in the Castro all dressed up in girls’ clothes or wearin’ them chains an’ boots on parade day.”

“You gonna march with us this year, Arbus?”

“They tell me to march, I march. Always a good show down there. You want me to have Croker call you?”

“Not if you can tell me what his personal time was for.”

Arbus looked uneasy and shrugged. “Personal time is personal, man. Ask him, you wanna know, but he didn’t kill no one at that center. He teaches a class there. He gets real pissed off ’bout them domestic calls. Me, I jus’ get nervous. Croker gets mad. Mad at the guys hittin’ their women. Mad at the women not bringin’ charges. Callin’ us out an’ then sayin’, ‘Oh he didn’t mean nothin’. Don’ take him away, Officer. How we gonna eat, he be in jail?’ ”

Arbus did a good imitation of the women. I’d have laughed if it weren’t so pathetic. “Come on, man. Whatever he’s doin’, it can’t be that bad. If I ask him myself, he’s gonna get all mean, maybe call me names. An’ then I’ll have to beat the crap out of him, an’ then he’ll be twice as mad ’cause he won’t want to admit he got beat up by a gay, and our whole relationship will just go all to hell.”

Arbus sighed. “OK, but you ever tell him I told you ’bout this, you an’ me will git into it, an’ don’t be sure you can take
me.
” I agreed that it might be a close call between the two of us.

Then Arbus told me the tale Croker had been telling him every Thursday night for a year or more, which was that he liked to sneak off duty and get it on with his wife for an hour because it added spice to their love life. “Don’t that beat all?” said Arbus. “He wanna risk him an’ me gittin’ in trouble, so he can go home an’ ball his own wife. Every Thursday night I gotta let him off at the corner at eight an’ pick him up an hour later. I go call in a dinner break an’ git me some ribs, an’ Croker, he has sex with his ole lady.”

Like I believed that. I had to wonder whether Arbus did. We promised to get together for a beer when there was a good game on TV, and I headed back to Union to pick up Carolyn at the shop. She wasn’t there. I went on to the center and asked the Russian whether he’d seen her. He hadn’t, and she wasn’t on the sign-in list.

Deciding to give her a few more minutes, I sat down by the Russian guy and made conversation. Did he like his job? Did he know this guy and that guy in the Russian mob? He looked pretty nervous and insisted he didn’t. Well, I’d have to wait for my contact to call back.

What had he seen the night of the murder? Same old people coming and going, then a lot of shrieking down the hall and people running around and cops and paramedics coming in and carrying out the dead, bloody woman and taking the live, bloody woman away in handcuffs. Obviously, they’d got the right person. Ya-ta-ya-ta-ya-ta.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked Carolyn, who was coming down the stairs as if she wasn’t fifteen minutes late and unaccounted for.

“Please don’t swear at me,” she retorted in that prissy voice.

“Please tell me where you’ve been, chickie. I was worried about you.”

“And don’t call me chickie. I talked to Bebe, as you well know, and then we went to California Carpet, and I bought a gorgeous area rug. Bebe has excellent taste. I’d never have picked that one, but once she recommended it, I could see that she was right.”

“You went shopping when you were supposed to meet me?”

“You said an hour and a half.”

“You’d have been here on time if you hadn’t gone shopping.”

“And then I came here, as we agreed, and delivered a message from my mother-in-law to a woman upstairs.”

“You went to see your mother-in-law, too?”

“Visitors are only allowed on weekends. She
called
me yesterday.”

“Jesus Christ!” I grabbed her arm and hustled her toward the front door.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To a pool hall to talk to a man about Freddie Piñon.”

“I’ve never been to a pool hall.” Carolyn looked intrigued.

“Well, you’ll love this one. The ambiance is memorable.” I had been so irritated that I decided on the spur of the moment to take her to Tres Hermanos to meet Araña Morales, A-number-one pool hustler and fence, occasional hijacker of trucks carrying worthwhile merchandise. He’d love Carolyn. She was blonde. Araña would probably go for a bearded lady if the beard was blonde.

26

Pool Halls and Dragon Rolls

 

I
was hard
to feel remorse for keeping Sam waiting when I had found such a perfect rug and after he had sworn at me. Back on the motorcycle, I wanted to ask why we were going to a pool hall but didn’t push my luck. I had been invited along, and it did sound exciting. Once there, however, I wasn’t so sure. Tres Hermanos was in a very rundown neighborhood with dangerous-looking tattooed youths lounging on street corners and boarded storefronts covered with graffiti.

The pool hall itself was an even greater shock. It reeked of beer and smoke and wasn’t at all the dark wood and stained glass milieu I had pictured. Happily, there weren’t many people in it, but those who were did not look particularly respectable. One fellow at a pool table looked absolutely sinister, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a ragged undershirt that exposed a mass of tattooed spiders on his arms and shoulders. Sam headed in his direction.

I panicked and murmured that I needed to use a telephone, dismissing my first idea, escape to a bathroom, for fear of what I’d find there. Sam handed me his cell phone and said, “Order two Coronas and bring them over, will you?”

I sat down rather timidly at the bar and gave the order to a dark-skinned man with a belly that overlapped his trousers. He drew two beers into glasses of dubious cleanliness. And he didn’t provide napkins. Sighing, I made a call to Vera’s sublet. It was the only number I could think of, and she might have left a message on the answering machine.

Much to my dismay, the message was from my husband. Apologizing for ruining any plans I might have had for the evening, he said that he and his father had managed to set up a meeting for a collaborative research project that promised to open a fascinating new avenue for him and be profitable to Calvin’s company. Did I mind eating at home? He’d be back by 10:00 or so, and there was surely something in the refrigerator. Or failing that, I could order pizza. In fact, wouldn’t a column on San Francisco takeout pizza be a good idea? He actually chuckled. I clicked off without checking for further messages. Here I’d been busy all day trying to save his mother, and he couldn’t even be bothered to take me out to dinner.

I stuck the phone into my purse and picked up the beer. When I arrived at the pool table, Sam was in conversation with the dreadful spider man, who took one of the glasses from me and said, “Thanks,
Chica.
Nice hair.
Muy bonita.
” Then he leered.

Sam said, “You take the second beer, Carolyn, while I go back to the bar. This is Araña Morales. Spider, meet Mrs. Carolyn Blue. Treat her nice. She’s a lady.” Then he left me with that man.

“You wanna a game, Señora?” he asked.

“Knock it off, Spider. You try to hustle the lady, I’ll knock you on your skinny ass,” Sam called over his shoulder.

Mr. Morales called back, “That ain’t no way to talk in front of a lady.” Then he clicked his beer glass against mine and took a long swallow, after which he smacked his lips. “That Sam, he knows his beer. Lotsa guys doin’ the buyin’, they order some cheap shit. Corona now, it’s good beer.”

Then he stared at me. For lack of anything better to say, I asked if he’d read about Lola Montez, who arrived from Panama in 1853 and was famous for her “Spider Dance.”

He said he didn’t do much reading and added, “I hear you wanna know about Freddie Piñon? When Sam say that, I think why should I tell him anythin’ about
mi amigo
Freddie, but for a pretty lady with blonde hair, maybe I got some information.”

I backed up. Sam returned, beer in hand. “So Spider, my man, you know where Freddie is?”

Araña grinned at me with what I took to be lustful intent. He had a very strange drooping mustache, thin and straggling. It was hard not to shudder, and I did edge closer to Sam, who draped his arm over my shoulder companionably. “Quit looking at my lady like a goat in rut, Freddie. I don’t like it.”

“Hey, you don’t dig women. You think Araña not know you’re a—”

Some Spanish word followed that I certainly didn’t recognize but took, because of Sam’s expression, to be a rude term. “Watch your mouth, Morales,” Sam said in a threatening rumble. Mr. Morales looked alarmed and launched into apologies, which were met with Sam’s harsh “Shut up.”

What would I do if they came to blows? Run for my life? Or was I obligated to hit Mr. Morales with a beer bottle or some such thing? Actually, all I had was my purse, Sam’s cell phone, and my glass.

“When did you last see Freddie?”

Morales rolled his shoulders, which made the spiders on his upper arms appear to creep around. Keeping a wary eye on Sam, he said, “I ain’t seen him myself since, like, Wednesday, but I hear he want his sister to take him in Friday night an’ she tell him to fuck off ’cause if he was out of the halfway house, he was breakin’ parole, an’ she wasn’ gonna have the cops comin’ to her place to arrest him in fronta her
niños.
”

“So, you think you could find him?”

“You don’t need to know why I want to talk to Freddie. You just need to look. You find him, I make it worth your while.
Comprende
?”

“Yeah. OK. I find Freddie, I call you.”

“Right. Come on, Carolyn.” And before I knew it, I was out of the pool hall, which was good news, and out on the street, which was not.

“Did you know that
hoodlum
is a San Francisco word?” I asked, feeling shaky and in need of ordinary conversation. “It meant young ruffian or criminal and evolved, perhaps, from youths who shouted “huddle ’em” when they were about to stone Chinese, which was evidently a favorite pastime.”

“I doubt that Spider stones Chinese. No money in it, and it’s frowned on these days.”

“
Shanghaid
is another. Men were knocked unconscious with clubs or doped on the city’s docks and carried aboard to serve as sailors on ships to Shanghai—”

“Yeah. It was a rough town in the old days. So I’ll take my phone back,” said Sam. “That must have been some call you made inside. You came over looking like you were gonna bite someone.”

I shrugged, returned the cell phone, and donned a helmet. “I’m just a bit peeved. Jason left a message saying he wouldn’t be taking me out to dinner. I don’t know how he expects me to make my expenses tax deductible if I don’t go to any restaurants I can write about.”

“You want to try Japanese? I’m meeting Paul for sushi at Ebisu tonight.”

“You’re inviting me along?” What a bizarre idea. Was Paul his lover? Would he resent my inclusion? “Is it good sushi?”

“Best Dragon Rolls in town.”

“I’ve never had a Dragon Roll.”

“So hop on.”

“Why not?” I agreed, climbing on behind him and feeling much more cheerful. Wouldn’t Jason be surprised to find that I’d had sushi, which he loves, with two gay men? Maybe I wouldn’t mention that they’re gay. Then, as we roared off, I began to wonder what Paul looked like. Hopefully nothing like Mr. Morales. “What does Araña mean?” I shouted at Sam.

“Spider,” Sam yelled back. Zipping in and out of rush-hour traffic, we came to a very lovely park with twisted trees. It was amazing to remember that San Francisco had been built on high sand hills. All these trees must have been planted, and if they were planted in sand, wouldn’t they all fall down with the next earthquake? Not to mention the buildings. I remembered the plates and food dancing on the table at Citizen Cake and shivered. That had definitely been a tremor, even if Margaret Hanrahan had paid no attention. And surely a tremor foretold an earthquake.

27

Delicious Dragon

 

T
he weather was
turning cool when we reached Ebisu on Sunset, and I was glad to get inside, where we squeezed into a booth—well, Sam sat beside me, so I was squeezed. His friend Paul Labadie arrived fifteen minutes later, after we’d been served a Dragon Roll and Asahi beer in giant bottles.

Now, a Dragon Roll is a work of art, a sight to see, and even better to taste. Besides the usual rice and wasabi, the body of the dragon contained crunchy shrimp (tempura?) and, I think, cream cheese. The skin was green with overlapping slices of avocado, and the crowning glory of the roll was a line of orange salmon roe peaks running along the spine. The chef had sliced the whole into pieces and reassembled them into a sinuous, delicious dragon.

Sam and I had finished one and ordered another by the time Paul arrived. Then dinner was one long series of surprises. Paul proved to be a tall, slender man with white-touched black hair and a slightly Asian look. His father had been a career military officer who met and married a Korean lady while he was stationed there. And Paul, who never used rough language as Sam did, was, of all things, a venture capitalist. He played the stock market, and had since his college days at Berkeley, making money even in the bear market that preceded and followed the destruction of the World Trade towers. With this money and more that he raised, he funded dot.coms that often succeeded and biogenetic companies that discovered amazing drugs. He had even made an early investment in Yasmin Atta’s Nightshades.

At one point, during the demolition of several salmon skin rolls, we discussed the latest book by Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I loved for his hilarious novel
Aunt Julia and the Script Writer,
Paul admired for his style, and Sam detested because he claimed that Vargas Llosa was a fascist. During this discussion I realized that the Sam talking trash at Tres Hermanos and the Sam talking literature at Ebisu seemed to be two entirely different men. I commented on the change.