Spook Read online

  When I returned the clipping, Taradash said, “You see that part about how many John and Jane Does died in the city this year? How their ashes get scattered if they’re not identified?”

  “I saw it.”

  “That’s the part really gets me, can’t get it out of my head. A man dies and nobody knows his name, who he was, if he was always unbalanced or something made him that way. Scatter his ashes off the Golden Gate and that’s it, like he never existed at all. You understand what I mean?”

  “All too well,” I said.

  “Just another crazy street guy. Who cares, right? Well, I do. My people do. We knew him, liked him... ah, Christ. I’d really like to know who he was. Contact his people, if he had any. If he didn’t... maybe arrange for his burial myself.” Taradash dragged another cigarette out of the pack, stared at it the way he had at the other one. The tic was working again. “That sound off-the-wall to you?”

  “Not at all. It sounds decent, humanitarian.”

  “Yeah, well, I can afford to be humanitarian. I’ve made mine and poor bastards like Spook... well, you know how it is. The haves and the have nots.” He went to work with his penknife again. “Besides,” he said, “it’s the season, almost Christmas. I always feel sentimental, this time of year.”

  “Too bad more people don’t share your feelings.”

  “Yeah.” The knife point bit deep into his blotter, scoring it. “How long will they keep the body on ice before it’s cremated? Thirty days, isn’t it?”

  “Usually, in a homicide case.”

  “Two weeks till Christmas. You think you could find out who Spook was, something about him, in two weeks?”

  “Depends on what kind of leads we can turn up. We’ve had identity cases that were wrapped up in a few hours, others that couldn’t be cleared in two months.”

  “How much do you charge?”

  I gave him the daily rate and the weekly rate, and added the usual “plus expenses.” The numbers didn’t faze him; he kept right on dismembering the weed.

  “So would you be willing to take it on?” he said. “Two weeks, max?”

  “Just an identity search? You’re not asking for an investigation into the murder?”

  “Would that be an extra charge?”

  “No. But it might not be do-able. The SFPD doesn’t like private investigators mixing into homicide cases. Even if I could get clearance, the odds are I wouldn’t be able to find out anything more than they have.”

  “They can’t be making much of an effort. I mean, Spook was just another street crazy to them. And they have a lousy track record with violent crimes anyway. That series in the Chronicle a while back... the SFPD doesn’t exactly inspire confidence these days.”

  I’d seen those articles, courtesy of Kerry and Tamara. They were the result of a seven-month newspaper investigation into the SFPD and contained some eye-opening statistics: just 28 % of serious felonies committed here between 1996 and 2000 solved, the lowest percentage of any large city in the country; only half of all homicide cases cleared; close to 70 percent of robberies and serious assaults not actively investigated by an inspector. The department claimed it was emphasizing crime suppression over crime solution, and I was aware of extenuating circumstances not covered in the paper’s expose and that efforts had been made since to improve performance, but the statistics were disturbing nonetheless. As Taradash had said, they didn’t exactly inspire confidence, even in an ex-cop and pro-police citizen like me.

  I said, “You have a point, Mr. Taradash. But the police still have resources I can’t match.”

  “So I guess we’ll never know who did the shooting.”

  “If no clear-cut motive emerges, probably not. I take it you have no idea who might have done it, or why?”

  “Not a clue. A guy like Spook...” He shrugged and wagged his head.

  “Did he own anything of value?”

  “God, no. His clothes were filthy, little better than rags. He never had any money except for what we gave him and what little he could panhandle.”

  “No trouble or friction with anyone here?”

  “My people? Absolutely not. He got along with everybody, we practically adopted the poor bugger.”

  “Any of your employees spend more time with him than others?”

  “Meg Lawton, she’s my accountant. She was always talking to him, giving him spare change, feeding him. When he first showed up around here, she caught him taking a leak on the wall next to the loading dock, yelled at him for it. He didn’t yell back, like most of them. Told her he was sorry, he’d never do it again, and he never did as far as we know. Next day he brought her a little bunch of flowers that he got somewhere. That’s what started us looking out for him, him bringing Meg those flowers.”

  “When was that, when he first showed up?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “Never saw him in the neighborhood before that?”

  “No, never.”

  “He spend time with any or the other homeless?”

  “I don’t think so. Pretty much a loner.” Taradash finished slaughtering his second cigarette, this one more finely chopped than the first, and dumped the remains into his wastebasket. For a time, then, he looked out into the warehouse. The two workers had disappeared; there was nothing to see out there but stationary objects draped in light and shadow. “Well,” he said at length, “there was one guy I saw him with, once. Cold, rainy day and they were sharing a bottle of sweet wine when I came in to work.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Couple of weeks, maybe longer. Right around Thanksgiving.”

  “Do you know the other man’s name?”

  “Never saw him before or since.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Big, heavier than Spook, three or four inches taller. Dark. Not a black man, but dark. Wore a ratty red and green wool cap pulled down over his ears. That’s all I remember.”

  “Did Spook ever say anything about himself, where he grew up, where he lived before he showed up here — anything at all that might help?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “What did he talk about, aside from begging money and food?”

  “He didn’t beg money or food,” Taradash said, “that’s the thing. He never panhandled any of us, we always volunteered. As to what he said... most of it sounded like gibberish to me. Particularly when he was talking to those ghosts of his. Truth is, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. Only one who did was Meg.”

  “They have names, his ghosts?”

  “If they did, I don’t remember what they were. Meg might be able to tell you.”

  We’d covered enough ground for now. I’d brought a blank agency contract with me and we got it filled in and signed, and Taradash wrote out a retainer check for three days’ work. He said then, “How soon can you start on this?”

  “Monday morning, first thing.”

  “Not tomorrow? I know it’s Saturday, but we’ve got a local commercial scheduled to shoot and I’ll be here most of the day. So will Meg and some of my other people.”

  “Well...”

  “I don’t mind paying extra, if you could manage it.”

  “That wouldn’t be necessary.” I thought it over. Christmas shopping wouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours in the morning, and the family outing we had scheduled to pick out a tree wasn’t until Sunday. Another couple of hours on the job wouldn’t cut too deep into the rest of tomorrow. “I suppose I could stop by,” I said. Old Easy Touch. “Say around noon or so.”

  “I’d really appreciate it,” Taradash said. “You don’t need to call first, just show up.”

  He walked me out to the front entrance, shook my hand again with even more enthusiasm. “This takes a load off my mind, I want you to know that. Or maybe I mean eases my conscience. Just being able to do something, no matter how it turns out.”

  I said I knew how he felt. Just being able to do something is a major reason I’ve stayed in this bus
iness as long as I have. For a man like me it’s one of the job’s few nonmonetary perks.

  3

  On the walk back to the car I saw fewer homeless. Cold night, with a stabbing Pacific wind, and the temperature would drop another ten to fifteen degrees before morning. Many of the displaced were already forted up in shelters or warming themselves with hot meals in soup kitchens; the less fortunate had gone to sit around illegal fires in one of the encampments, or staked out building doorways where they could spread their blankets and sleeping bags. The ones who were still wandering the streets were the hardcore panhandlers and traffic beggars, the Street Sheet newspaper sellers, the drunks and addicts and petty thieves hunting a quick score, the mentally ill like Spook who existed in a twilight world haunted by demons and ghosts.

  Every large city in this brave new world has a homeless problem, but San Francisco’s seems worse than most. Aggressive sweeps and innovative social service programs have made inroads in alleviating the problem in New York City and Seattle. In my city, however, there is polarization and paralysis caused by guilt, name-calling, political infighting, incompetence, and constant bickering among homeless advocates, the media, neighborhood watchdog groups, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, and the Department of Human Services. This year alone the city has shelled out well over a hundred million dollars on homeless expenditures. Nobody can agree on an exact figure because accounting procedures are lax; some earmarked tax money just seems to disappear into a bottomless pit. An estimated thirty million alone goes to pay for the jailing of homeless lawbreakers — an average of nearly a thousand arrests per night — and another three million or so for cleanup costs.

  Everybody has an opinion, a solution, an agenda: All homeless are needy, disadvantaged folk who should be given aid regardless of who they are; many if not most homeless are part of a disorganized mob of drunks, drug addicts, crazies, criminals, and plain bums who feed off the system like parasites, destroying San Francisco’s beauty and damaging its tourist-based economy. Raise taxes to provide more money; quit throwing good money after bad. Sponsor a regional summit on homelessness. Improve conditions in existing shelters; build more shelters as New York City did by rehabilitating 30,000 units of tax-delinquent and abandoned buildings (blithely ignoring the fact that S.F. has little property-tax delinquency and abandoned buildings are virtually nonexistent). Ban panhandling on median strips, use ID cards and fingerprinting to track everyone who uses homeless services. Form a centralized intake system and hold city government agencies responsible for keeping accurate and detailed records of expenditures. Initiate a constitutional amendment to require the state to provide the mentally ill homeless with housing, health care, and food. Stop the free handouts and put the homeless to work clearing up graffiti, repairing vandalized bus shelters, and picking up trash. Set up a twenty-four hour hotline for citizen reports of public drinking, open-air toilet use, drug use, illegal camping, and excessive noise. Create “nautical shelters” by floating some of the fleet of World War II battleships mothballed in Suisun Bay down to the S.F. waterfront, and letting the homeless live on them while performing daily maintenance services.

  Good ideas, bad ideas, silly ideas. And meanwhile tempers grew shorter and residents’ and visitors’ sympathies continued to erode in the face of escalating violence and incidents of public indecency.

  My own sympathies lay somewhere in the middle. Compassion for the genuinely disadvantaged — those forced to live on the streets by circumstances beyond their control while seeking to regain a responsible lifestyle, the legion of mentally disturbed turned out of state-funded hospitals during the disastrous Reagan governorship and desperately in need of care and treatment. Zero tolerance for the professional panhandlers, Skid Row drunks, hardline junkies, abusive drifters and home-grown predators allowed to roam free on a city-sponsored, advocate-sponsored mandate. The difference between me and most other taxpayers is that I don’t have any easy answers. I want the problem fixed in the best way possible for all concerned, but I lack the knowledge, the tools, the wherewithal to help accomplish the task.

  The job I’d just taken on for Steve Taradash didn’t make me feel any less frustrated or impotent. The homeless person called Spook was dead; there was nothing I or anybody else could do for him. Identifying him might help to ease Taradash’s conscience, but not mine. It meant my taking to the mean streets yet again, dealing with its denizens, and it figured to be a depressing experience no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

  By the time I got to where I’d left the car, I knew I wasn’t up to it. Semiretired, promises to Kerry to back away from shadow-world cases, overload of empathy... a nice little bunch of rationalizations, maybe, but there they were. And if I needed one more, it was the fact that it might be necessary to talk to Joe DeFalco, since he’d have compiled a background file for his Spook article, and I was trying to avoid him as much as possible these days. He kept threatening, since I’d made the mistake of telling him about my semi-retirement, to write a feature about me and my career. The last thing I wanted was any more publicity of the hyperbolic variety he indulged in.

  So I took the coward’s way out. I decided to pass the buck to the agency’s brand-new hire.

  Jake Runyon was still home when I called his number on the car phone. I jumped right in, saying, “How would you like to start work tomorrow instead of on Monday?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he said.

  “Time and a half for weekends.”

  “No problem either way. What’s the job?”

  “ID and background check on a homicide victim. How do you feel about the homeless?”

  “You mean in general?”

  “In general, and any specific feelings you might have.”

  “Some good people, some bad, like any other group. I feel for the genuinely hard-up. The system parasites... I can’t work up much sympathy. Why? The homicide victim homeless?”

  “That’s right. You work many street cases for Caldwell?”

  “No. They’re mainly high-tech and white-collar,” Runyon said. “But I spent a lot of years on the down-and-dirty end for the SPD. San Francisco’s streets can’t be much different from Seattle’s.”

  “Not much, except that the homeless problem here is out of control.”

  “So I hear. Political hot potato.”

  “No politics involved in this case. Personal variety.”

  “Who’s paying me bill?”

  I told him who and why and as much as I’d learned about Spook from Taradash and DeFalco’s article.

  “Robbery, grudge motive, or random shooting,” he said, “one of the three.”

  “Probably. Not our concern, though, unless something shakes out during the ID investigation.”

  “Suits me. I’ve had enough of that.”

  “Okay, then. Meet me tomorrow around eleven-thirty at the office. I’ll brief you and then we’ll head over to Visuals, Inc. and I’ll introduce you to the client.”

  I’ve had enough of that. Homicide investigation, he’d meant. But I thought that he’d also meant death, enough of death. Amen. I’d had enough of it, too, the professional kind and the personal kind. None in my life as painful as Runyon’s recent loss, but a few, such as Eberhardt’s, that had been bad enough. Spiritually we seemed to have a lot in common, Jake Runyon and me. Brothers under the yoke.

  Kerry said, “You really have turned over a new leaf.”

  “New leaf?”

  “Giving this Spook case to your new man instead of handling it yourself. Isn’t it better being home on a cold December night than out on the streets?”

  “I’ve already been out on the streets tonight. And I’d be home now even if I was handling the case. There’s no real work to be done until tomorrow.”

  “You know what I mean. Don’t obfuscate.”

  “Don’t which?”

  “You also know what obfuscate means.”

  “Sure do. Wanna obfuscate before dinner?”
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br />   “Smart-ass. You think he’ll work out all right?”

  “Who?”

  “Jake Runyon. He sounds like a man with problems.”

  “Everybody’s got problems,” I said. “He’s dealing with his the best he can. Besides, he’s a pro. Tamara was right — best man for the job.”

  Kerry pulled a face. “I can’t believe you wanted to hire a black man just because you thought it would make her happy.”

  “That wasn’t the only reason, I told you that. Deron Stewart’s qualifications—”

  “— weren’t quite as good as Jake Runyon’s. Which you also told me. Sometimes you try so hard to please, you don’t think things through.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You might have really offended her.”

  “She wasn’t offended.”

  “But she might’ve been.”

  “Might’ve been doesn’t count. She wasn’t.”

  Kerry said musingly, “She’s only twenty-five.”

  “So?”

  “I wish I’d been that smart and insightful at her age.”

  “And you wish I was now, at my age.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Didn’t have to. Anyhow, you’re right. By the time she’s sixty-one she’ll probably have gone national, head up a dozen branches and be a multimillionaire.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. She has that kind of potential.”

  “Whereas I never did.”

  “I didn’t say that either. Are we feeling a bit gruffly tonight?”

  “No, we’re not. Not if we don’t spend the evening picking on us.”

  “If only you weren’t so pickable,” she said. Her face was straight, but her eyes said she was yanking my chain a little. All the women in my life — Kerry, Tamara, even Emily — seemed to take an unholy joy in deviling me now and then. The reason for it escaped me. Pickable. What makes somebody pickable, anyway?