Dead Midnight (2 page)
In 1989 this area was at the bottom of a steeply descending curve. Years before most of the shipping industry had fled to Oakland or other West Coast ports; factories and warehouses stood abandoned; many piers were vacant, run-down, and rat-infested; the torching of buildings for insurance money was not uncommon. Then, on October 17, the tectonic plates along the Loma Prieta Fault shifted, the earth heaved, and one of the ugliest structures in the city, the Embarcadero Freeway, crumbled. When its ruins were razed, bay vistas that hadn’t been seen for over thirty years were revealed, and we all realized that San Francisco could have a beautiful waterfront.
Now, with the redevelopment still continuing, the heart of the city has gradually moved from such traditional places as the financial district and Union Square to the water’s edge, where it pumps lifeblood into long moribund areas. New buildings rise, and old structures are being converted to offices or live-work lofts. Technology-related firms have relocated to the South of Market, and close on their heels have followed the upscale restaurants, clubs, and boutiques that their owners and employees require. Even the crash of the hot tech market hasn’t put too much of a damper on the vibrant ambience of South Beach, SoMa, and Mission Bay, and the future looks bright there. Of course, all change comes with its price, and in San Francisco’s case, it has been costly.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Glenn said, “Too much, too fast.”
“The changes in the city? Yes.”
“I don’t mind most of them. The Mission Bay complex, for instance, that’s exciting: six thousand more badly needed apartments, the new UCSF campus, all the open space. It’s good development. No, it’s the divisiveness that bothers me. The haves versus the have-nots. The old people who can’t afford to remain in the neighborhoods where they were born. Young families and working-class people who are being forced out by the high cost of living. The black community shrinking. It changes the face of the city, makes it a playground for rich people. What’s the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood these days?”
“I’m not sure. I paid well under a hundred thousand for my house, but last year a smaller one down the street sold for five hundred to a couple from Silicon Valley—and it was advertised as a fixer-upper. Office rents’re coming down since the dot-com companies started failing; I’ve been watching them in case the Port Commission doesn’t renew my agency’s lease on the pier next year. But they were astronomical to begin with.”
Glenn waved to a man in blue spandex who was jogging by. “One of my young associates,” he said. “Top talent out of Columbia. I had to pony up a hundred and twenty-five thousand to get him. All these baby nouveaux throwing money around as if it were confetti. If the dot-com fire hadn’t fizzled, we’d be ass-deep in them by now.” He sighed. “Don’t misunderstand me, my friend. I don’t begrudge those who’ve earned it. And I like the new vitality in the city, even if we do have the worst political machine west of Chicago. But I wish …”
“You wish the bucks were spread around more evenly. Or that the haves exercised some old-fashioned concern and charity.”
“Exactly. This isn’t an abstract conversation, you know. It’s leading up to the reason I asked to meet with you today.”
At last he was getting around to the matter at hand. I glanced at him, expecting to see the crafty expression— what he called his “wolf look”—that always accompanied his efforts to enlist my aid in a near impossible case. But instead l saw only deep melancholy.
He said, “I am about to ask a very personal favor of you.”
The matter he wanted me to investigate, Glenn explained, was atypical for his practice. A civil case, which he almost never took on. A wrongful-death suit against an online magazine called
InSite.
InSite
’s market niche was chronicling the new and the hip in the Bay Area: whatever restaurant the hordes were about to flock to; hot artists, authors, and celebrities; trendy products and fashions. In short, a
W
of the local wired set. I myself had visited their site a few times: to check out good shops for unusual Christmas presents; to read an interview with Mick’s father, Ricky Savage, whom they’d described as a “country-and-western icon”; to see what subjects my reporter friend, J.D. Smith, was currently delving into. The writing was lively and informative; the content changed frequently.
InSite
and a handful of other quality online publications such as
Salon
had survived the recent economic downturn.
I asked Glenn, “What’s the personal angle?”
“The suing family are people I count among my closest friends. The
InSite
employee who died was my godson.”
“And how was the company at fault?” Working at a magazine didn’t sound like particularly hazardous duty.
“Have you heard of
karoshi
?”
I shook my head.
“The word is Japanese. Literally it means to die of overwork. A common phenomenon in that country—responsible, they estimate, for between one thousand and ten thousand deaths per year.”
“What kind of deaths? Heart attacks? Strokes? Pure exhaustion?”
“All of those, and more. Until recently the majority of such deaths seldom resulted in litigation, but last year the family of one victim successfully sued a large Tokyo advertising agency. My clients, who are of Japanese descent, knew of the case and decided to see if the same could be accomplished in the U.S. courts.”
“And you need my agency to document that the employer was liable for your godson’s death.”
“Yes. And I want you, Sharon, not one of your operatives.”
“Of course.” The concept was intriguing. Why had Glenn felt he needed to ply me with expensive food and wine in order to interest me? I pulled my mini-cassette recorder from my bag and said, “I’ll need some particulars now, so I can open a file. And I’ll need copies of your files on the case as well. What’s the family’s name?”
“Nagasawa.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“You’ve probably seen the name in the paper. They’re patrons of the arts and supporters of a number of local charities. I went to college with Daniel Nagasawa. He’s an eye surgeon and owns one of those clinics that do corrective laser treatment. His wife, Margaret, has a small press that publishes quality children’s books. They have—had—three sons. Harry, the oldest, is twenty-nine and a resident in cardiac surgery at U.C. Medical Center. Roger, my godson, was twenty-six when he died, the middle child. Eddie’s twenty and still down at Stanford, studying a combination of physics and computer science, top of his class.”
“From their given names, I judge the family has been in this country awhile.”
“Four generations. Daniel’s grandfather came over from Osaka to work on a truck farm in the Central Valley, and ended up owning his own farm near Fresno. He left his son a going concern that earned enough to put Daniel through college and medical school. The Nagasawas are worth many millions now.”
“Okay, what about Roger? What was he like?”
Glenn’s face grew more melancholy. “An underachiever in a family of overachievers. Had a degree in journalism from the University of Michigan—the only one of the boys who ever lived far from home. Personally, I think he chose Michigan in order to escape the family pressures. After graduation, he drifted from one reporting job to another, moving west with each change. A year and a half ago he returned to San Francisco, and a friend recommended him for a staff position at
InSite
. Roger saw it as an opportunity to excel, eventually exercise promised stock options, and measure up to the rest of the family.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. We were close. But apparently not as close as I thought.”
“What does that mean?”
Glenn ignored the question. “The atmosphere at
InSite
was brutal. Sixteen, twenty-hour days, seven days a week, and no comp time. Low pay, and their promises of stock options went unfulfilled. The editor and publisher, Max Engstrom, is an egomaniac who delights in abusing and humiliating his subordinates. Stupid stuff, reminiscent of hazing in college fraternities, but it cuts to the core when a person’s sleep-deprived and unsure as to whether he’ll have a job the next day. And particularly hard to take for a sensitive young man who’s desperate to win his family’s love and approval.”
“So what happened? Did Roger die because the hazing went too far?”
Glenn’s mouth twitched and his eyes grew liquid. “You could say that. Two months ago, on Valentine’s Day, Roger committed suicide. Stopped his car on the Bay Bridge, climbed over the railing, and jumped. Beforehand he mailed a letter to his parents in which he apologized for being a failure.”
I’m sorry.
Joey’s note. God, the parallels were so obvious! A man who drifted from job to job. An underachiever in a family of overachievers.
A man who killed himself.
Suddenly I felt lightheaded. I touched my fingers to my forehead. It was damp, and the too-heavy lunch I’d eaten now lay like a brick in my stomach.
“Sharon?” Glenn said.
I pressed the stop button on my recorder. “I’m okay,” I said after a moment. “But I can’t take this case. There’s no way I can take it.”
And there was no way I was going to discuss Joey’s suicide with Glenn. Too much of my private life had been the subject of conversations over the past six months. Bad enough that I was repeatedly forced to explain—as I just had at lunch—that when the man whom I’d thought to be my father died in September, I’d discovered that I had a birth father living on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. That while I had a family in California, I also had a birth mother, a half sister, and a half brother in Boise, Idaho.
No, I couldn’t take this case, but I’d find some way of explaining why that didn’t involve Joey. Or so I told myself until Glenn spoke again.
“I know about your brother,” he said. “Hank told me.” Hank Zahn, my closest male friend since college, had betrayed a confidence.
“The subject came up because of Roger,” Glenn added.
“And you, like a typical lawyer, saw a way to capitalize on it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, what’s not fair is you asking me to do this. Why would you want me to take on a case that would continually remind me—”
“Perhaps you need to be reminded, and to deal with it.”
“What’re you saying? That you’re offering me the job for its therapeutic value?”
Glenn stood, put both hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes. “Yes, for its therapeutic value—for you, me, and the Nagasawas.”
“Sorry, the answer is no.”
He studied me for a moment longer, then straightened, smiling faintly. “I’ll have copies of my files messengered over to you by close of business.”
“So that’s how it is. You understand why I’ve got to tell Glenn I can’t take the case.”
Curled up on my sofa, a cat draped across the back with its paws dangling onto my head, another purring on my feet, I was sipping a glass of wine and talking on the phone with my birth father, Elwood Farmer. Elwood was one of the few people I knew whom I could find wide awake and eager for conversation at eleven-thirty P.M.—the hour I’d finished reading Glenn’s files on Roger Nagasawa’s death.
“I understand why you
think
you can’t take it,” he said.
I could picture him seated in his padded rocker in front of the woodstove in his small log house in Montana. He’d be wearing a plaid wool shirt and jeans, his gray hair unkempt and touching his shoulders, a cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, its smoke making him squint. We’d taken to talking every couple of weeks, feeling our way toward a comfortable father-daughter relationship. Unfortunately, the conversations were not always amicable, because I harbored a resentment toward him for having suspected my existence my whole life but making no effort to find me, and he was plainly bewildered at how to be a parent to a forty-one-year-old stranger.
“What?” I said. “You think I
should
accept a job that’s going to make me dwell on Joey’s suicide?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well,
do
you?”
“What I think isn’t important.”
“Come on, Elwood. Be a father for once. Give me some advice.”
“I’m only learning to be a father. And I don’t believe in imposing my opinion upon another person.”
“I just want to know what you think.”
“… I think the answer is already within you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! If you’re going to get mystical, or whatever you call this, I’m going to hang up.”
“Good. Hang up and call me back when you’ve assembled your thoughts.”
Assemble my thoughts, my ass! He pulled that crap on me when we first met, but it isn’t going to work this time.
Who is this man to me, anyway? Somebody who donated his sperm to my birth mother, that’s all. End of his connection to both Saskia and me. Later, when she was in worse trouble than the pregnancy, he didn’t return her phone call because he was preoccupied with the woman he eventually married.
Why should I care what he thinks?
Assemble my thoughts. Hah!
“I’m sorry I hung up on you.”
“I know you are.”
“I’ve assembled my thoughts.”
“Yes.”
“And I know what you mean by the answer already being within me. I can’t refuse this case, because I’m a truth-seeker. If working on this Nagasawa investigation can help me to understand why Joey killed himself … Well, it’s something I have to do.”
“Not so difficult to figure out, was it?”
Tuesday
Roger Nagasawa’s flat was in a narrow building on Brannan Street not far from South Park: five stories of gray cinder block over an original wood facade, each with a single casement window facing the street. Its concrete front steps ended in a porch large enough for a pair of wrought-iron chairs and a small glass-topped table; all three were secured by chains to rings that had been attached to the building’s wall. To the right stood a former warehouse that now housed a health club; the building to the left was a live-work loft conversion, now stalled by the city’s six-month moratorium on such projects while a study on growth and development was conducted.