Muller, Marcia - [09] There's Something In A Sunday [v 1.0] (htm)

For Sara Ann Freed

Sunday morning dawned gray and misty outside the steam-clouded windows of the coffee shop on Lombard Street. Beyond the plate glass lay San Francisco's travelers' row: a fourteen-block stretch of motels and gas stations and restaurants that daily plays host to hundreds of visitors to the city and motorists who are just passing through. Its establishments do not boast the luxurious accommodations found further downtown; Lombard Street is for families, young people on budgets, retirees taking brief respites from their cramped RVs. And for the individual who, for whatever reason, seeks anonymity.

As shadows lifted, the ugly functional buildings took on hazy definition. The asphalt of the wide boulevard was a black and white-striped no-man's-land, devoid of the weekday stream of commuter traffic. At six A.M. the sidewalks were almost empty of pedestrians.

I'd been sitting in the twenty-four-hour restaurant since five, nursing several cups of coffee and fielding occasional curious glances from the red-uniformed waitress. A couple of delivery drivers for the Sunday
Chronicle-Examiner
had come in and departed with styrofoam cups. A cabbie had bought a bag of donuts. But now only I remained, seated in a front-window booth watching the Kingsway Motel across the street.

It was one of the older motels on the strip, which boasted some two dozen between Van Ness Avenue and Lyon Street. L-shaped and two-tiered, with space for cars underneath, it was painted an odd blue with faded yellow trim. Its still-lit neon sign sported a crown and scepter. The plate-glass windows of the office looked streaky through the fog; the railed balconies were shadowed, but not so much that I wouldn't be able to detect motion should the door to room 209 open. So far it hadn't, and the subject's aged green Ford Ranchero was still snuggled into a space below.

I sipped my coffee, burned my tongue, and sighed in irritation. My alarm had gone off at four in the morning, not my favorite hour to rise on a Sunday. Normally I like to stay in bed until noon, drinking coffee, reading the paper, doing both the
Chronicle
and
Examiner
crossword puzzles, clipping the cents-off coupons (which I save but never remember to take with me when I grocery shop). But my job as staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative often requires that I work odd hours, so there I sat yawning and drinking too much bad coffee.

As I continued to stare at the motel, Lombard Street slowly came awake. A trickle of cars passed by, most of them going toward the Golden Gate Bridge and sunny retreats in Marin County or the wine country. A woman in a raincoat and scarf-covered curlers emerged from the office of the motel next to the Kingsway, with a small curly-haired dog on a lead. The door of an Italian bakery in the next block opened, and a man in a white apron stepped out, stood yawning for a moment, then went back inside. A few people left their rooms at the Kingsway, but the door to room 209 remained closed.

My client hadn't been sure what time the man he wanted tailed usually left the motel. I might be in for a long wait.

Three more red-uniformed waitresses arrived, and the other departed without a backward glance at me, even though we'd been constant and almost solitary companions for the better part of two hours. A young couple entered and ordered a hearty breakfast. When their plates were carried past me, my stomach growled, so I ordered an English muffin and ate it slowly, my eyes on the window. Somehow I managed to drop jelly onto my jeans; I cleaned it off with a napkin dipped in the water glass.

It was after eight o'clock when the door to room 209 finally opened. I tensed, reaching for the check and leaning toward the window to study the man who came out. He was tall and lanky, dressed in faded Levi's and a rumpled tan suede jacket. His dusty brown hair hung limply over his forehead, and as he loped down the stairs, he brushed at it with his left hand. It riffled up, then most of it fell back down again. He didn't go to the Ranchero, but headed for the sidewalk and turned right.

I didn't need to consult the photo tucked in my purse to know this was the man I'd been hired to follow. His name was Frank Wilkonson, and other than that, I knew very little about him. A description, which had been backed up by a photograph, and was now confirmed by his actual appearance. The type of vehicle he drove and its license plate number. The fact that he worked on a ranch. The fact that he checked into the same Lombard Street motel late every Saturday night and left there before noon on Sunday morning.

I knew only those things, and my client's stated reason for wanting him followed—which I had doubted from the start.

My eyes still on him, I grabbed a handful of bills and coins from my jacket pocket and shoved them on top of the check. Then I hurried along the row of booths and out into the chill morning. The fog had lifted somewhat, and although the day promised to be overcast, visibility was now good. Frank Wilkonson was half a block away, walking north on the other side of the street.

The area was fairly well populated now: joggers pounded along; tourists dressed in their best sightseeing togs consulted maps; neighborhood residents fetched papers and fresh sourdough bread and hurried back up the hill to affluent Pacific Heights or toward the Marina district on the shore of the bay. The shabbiness of the subject's clothing and his listless, shambling gait set him apart from the people around him. I was reminded of an old Kristofferson song that told of down-and-out loneliness on a Sunday morning. Well, I could relate to that; I'd felt that way a time or two recently—and not just on Sunday, either.

Wilkonson kept walking for another block, then stopped at a group of newspaper vending machines and bought a
Chronicle-Examiner
. I watched from the opposite corner as he balanced the paper on top of the rack and extracted the pink entertainment section. He leafed through it, paused, and tore out one of the pages. Then he bundled up the rest of the paper, went to a nearby trash can, and dropped the whole thing inside.

As he turned and walked back toward his motel, I debated going across the street and retrieving the paper, to see which page he'd torn out. But his stride was more purposeful now, and I thought he might be heading for his car. I retraced my steps to where my MG was parked in front of the coffee shop, and waited there to see what he'd do next.

There was a hissing noise, and then a haze of fine mist covered the lens of my Nikkormat. The tiny droplets quickly spread and ran together, fracturing the image before my eyes. The knotty bole of the giant fern I was kneeling behind melted to a shapeless blob of brown; its spreading fronds became smears of green; I couldn't make out Frank Wilkonson's figure.

I lowered the Nikkormat. My subject was still there, on the other side of the room by the lily pond. I let the camera dangle from the strap around my neck and swiped moisture off my face, then pulled off my wool hat and stuffed it in the pocket of my new camel-colored pea jacket. It was hot here in the tropical pond room of Golden Gate Park's Conservatory of Flowers, and now that the fog machine had cycled on, it was also muggy. I unbuttoned the coat but resigned myself to keeping it on; carrying it would be too cumbersome, what with my purse and the camera.

Wilkonson stood gazing into the lily pond, one foot propped on its raised concrete wall. He didn't appear either surprised or disconcerted by the swirl of mist, which led me to believe he'd visited the tropical gardens before. While I located a lens-cleaning cloth, the fog machine cycled off again; I dried the camera as best I could. Then I stood up and circled the giant fern, looking for a better vantage point and feeling absurdly like an actor in a Tarzan movie. The fern stood on a small island in the center of the room's other pond; a waterfall gushed down one side of the island, muting the sound of my movements with its splashing. Nearly everything in the room was green, from apple to emerald to almost black. Vines twisted and twined on overhead piping, and the air was rich with the smell of damp earth.

I found a good place and squatted down, propping my elbows on the wall of the pond and aiming the 135mm telephoto lens between the fern and the spindly trunk of a palm tree. My Nikkormat—ancient and beloved—was a recent addition to my bag of professional tricks. For years I'd used the camera only for pleasure: a hobby I'd take up, leave off, then take up again. But during a recent picture-taking binge—which had begun the previous March, some six months ago—I'd finally been forced to admit that I'd never be very good at photography. What I wanted to capture just didn't translate to the film; what I had considered good shots when I'd taken them merely looked trite when revealed by the solution in the darkroom's developing tray. And with that realization, the use of the camera for my work no longer seemed a violation of my personal privacy.

Besides, a camera is a perfect tool for an investigator—and it has nothing to do with actually taking pictures.

A former client of mine—one who had achieved worldwide renown as a photographer—had once told me a camera was great "protective coloration." When you were holding one, he'd said, people very seldom looked at you. Instead, they focused on the black box itself, or began to fuss with their hair or makeup, in case you snapped them. In a place like the Conservatory of Flowers, this aid to anonymity worked particularly well, making me seem merely another harmless tourist.

Now I focused the telephoto on Frank Wilkonson's face. He looked tense, his mouth a thin seam in his tanned, leathery skin. His eyes were narrowed and fixed, not on the water as I'd originally thought, but on a sign sticking up from it. I adjusted the lens again and read: "Do not throw coins in pond—they poison fish." Then I scanned the pond itself: its bottom was littered with nickels and dimes, and there wasn't a fish in sight.

The humorous aspect of this wasn't lost on me, but apparently Wilkonson didn't appreciate the irony. Or perhaps, I thought, he wasn't seeing the sign or pond at all. His pose—forearms resting on his raised knee, hands dangling loosely—was casual enough, but underneath it I sensed a leashed nervousness. As I studied him, the sound of women's voices came from the doorway; Wilkonson's head swiveled toward them expectantly. But then his eagerness died and his mouth twitched, almost angrily. I swung the camera toward the door and saw two women of about my age—mid- to late thirties—dressed in the insubstantial sportswear that tourists mistakenly think appropriate for September in San Francisco.

Is Wilkonson meeting someone here? I wondered. In all the time I'd been observing him—nearly forty minutes now—he hadn't once checked his watch. But every time someone had entered the room he'd looked eagerly at the person and then glanced away. If he was meeting someone, I was willing to bet it would not be a pleasurable encounter: his obvious tension suggested to me that he might be gearing up for some sort of confrontation.

He must have projected a similar impression to the tourists who had just entered, because they hesitated and then came my way, rather than moving toward the larger pond. As they squeezed around me murmuring appreciation of the lush tropical foliage, I refocused on Wilkonson and tripped the shutter—not because I wanted a picture of him, but because I wanted to look like an amateur photographer. After the women had circled the island, they went over to the lily pond and stopped as far from Wilkonson as possible; one began rummaging in her bag, presumably for coins to murder whatever aquatic life was still hanging in there. Wilkonson glanced their way and his thin mouth twitched again. He straightened, looked at his watch, and reached into the pocket of his shabby suede jacket.

I lowered the camera and watched him bring out a piece of pink paper—the page he'd torn from the entertainment section. He looked it over briefly, then put his hand back into the pocket and withdrew a yellow sheet. I raised the camera again and focused on it; the lens wasn't powerful enough for me to make out the printing, but the sheet looked as if it had been torn from the Yellow Pages. Wilkonson scanned it, folded both sheets together, and stuffed them back in his pocket. Then he moved briskly toward the door.

I jammed the lens cap back on the camera and followed. By the time I had reached the conservatory's central room and gone down a packed dirt path through the philodendrons and palms and brilliant birdlike flowers that grew under the towering whitewashed glass dome, Wilkonson was already outside. From the top of the wide steps I watched him cut across the formal gardens toward Kennedy Drive. He was heading, I guessed, to where he'd parked his car earlier, near the bocce ball courts. Banking on that, I went a different way—through a pedestrian tunnel under the main arterial—and by the time he reached the Ranchero, I was waiting a few spaces away in my MG.

The rest of the day was both eventful and puzzling. We—Wilkonson and I—attended a plant sale at the Hall of Flowers, adjacent to the park's extensive Strybing Arboretum. The sale was a fund-raiser for the Arboretum Society, and the plants were testimony to the diversity of talents at the park's nurseries. Delicate roses vied for attention with flashy birds of paradise; clumps of bamboo and Japanese maple stood leaf-to-leaf with lime and fig trees. There were dahlia and rhododendron plants, avocado trees and fuchsias, even a fascinating hairy-leaved thing called a baboon flower. Wilkonson wandered for over an hour but bought nothing. I came away— predictably—with the baboon flower. Protective coloration, I told myself as I followed Wilkonson from the hall.

We then began a jaunt around the city that made me glad I'd thought to pack a couple of sandwiches and some fruit the night before. It began at the Sloat Garden Center, near the beach and the zoo. Sloat was a nice nursery; I'd once bought a live Christmas tree there (which I'd managed to kill before the next holiday season rolled around—my neglect, no fault with their merchandise). Wilkonson, however, ignored the rows of fir and fruit trees and fall flowers and vegetables, going directly to the sales counter. While I fingered the leaves of a chrysanthemum plant, he questioned the two clerks, moving his lean, corded hands as if framing descriptive phrases. As near as I could tell, both replied in the negative to whatever he had asked them.