Death Bed Read online

  So Chet began to dig. And after three weeks he broke it. He spent every free moment hanging around the neighborhood where it all happened, and one night in the bar nearest the scene of the crime he’d noticed some red scar marks on the hands of a kid at the next table, marks that could have been made by a motorcycle chain tugged tight around a father’s throat. The kid in the bar turned out to be a biker the girl friend had jilted three years earlier and within a few days Chet wrapped it up in a bow and gave it to the cops in such a tidy package even they couldn’t resist opening it. My man walked, and today he’s a top investigator for the Oakland District Attorney. I’ve never paid Chet back for that one, although I’ve come close a time or two.

  A year or so later Chet began to feel uncomfortable with Bill Knowland’s editorial policy at the Trib, and after a short stay at the Chronicle he made another switch, to a newly established sheet that swore to tell San Franciscans, allegedly for the first time, the truth about their city and the people who ran it.

  Now Chet was managing editor of the paper. It was owned by an heir to a sugar fortune and its offices were in a converted processing plant down on Battery and, contrary to all expectations but Chet’s, it was making muckraking respectable again. Chet and his troops had caused a cell door to slam behind more than one civil servant and had blown the whistle on a couple of Ponzi schemes and pyramid scams along the way. The paper was called The Investigator. Rumor had it that an Investigator reporter named Covington had a good chance for a Pulitzer for his series on a Contra Costa County cult that slaughtered livestock with power saws and used the entrails and reproductive organs in their initiation rites.

  Chet was early and I was late and he was a drink ahead and I was a drink behind and that was the way things usually went with us. We had dinner together twice a year whether we were hungry or not—no more, no less—and we ate well. Chet said he only kept in touch with me so there would be at least two meals a year when he didn’t have to pretend to enjoy the greasy spoons that all newspaper people seemed to frequent.

  “Marsh.”

  “Chet.”

  We shook hands and I sat down and we looked each other over. If you’re fond of the notion that you’re not looking older you should see your friends every day or not at all, or find some way to convince yourself that what’s happening to them isn’t happening to you.

  “This isn’t too rich for your blood is it, Marsh?” Chet joked, gesturing around the room. It was a private nook on the second floor of a place laid out to look like an English inn, darkly paneled, dimly lit: rich.

  “Probably,” I said, “but at our age the blood can use a little thickening. You may have to co-sign a note to get me out of here, though.”

  “If I do, my friend, it will be the most succulent surety you’ve ever engaged.”

  “‘Succulent surety.’ My, my, my. Such a word-smith.”

  Chet laughed and so did I and we just left it that way for a minute. The thought that we will one day be without friends is never among our youthful nightmares, but as the years go by, friends become both rare and crucial. Chet Herk was one of mine who was still around; there weren’t many others.

  The waiter glided in and out, arranging the place settings, pouring the water, leaving the menus. I reached out and flicked the rim of a goblet with a fingernail, then sat back and grinned like a kid in the monkey house. Chet and I go first class when we get together, and it’s the only time of year I travel that way except when the guy in the office across the hall gives me his opera tickets.

  “So what’s up, Marsh?” Chet asked brightly.

  “Interest rates; blood pressure; accounts payable; the price of gold; international tensions. Everything but my actuarial tables. How about you?”

  “This and that,” Chet said and frowned. “I’ll tell you later. Let’s order.”

  I nodded and picked up a menu. Chet began with an appetizer that went for eleven bucks, à la carte. I started with the onion soup and figured I could escape for fifty if I kept my wits about me, but Chet blew that when he ordered the wine. I decided to think about something else, so I wondered if Maximilian Kottle was afraid to die, the camel through the eye of the needle and all that. I decided that with the kind of money Kottle had, you could buy an awfully big needle or an awfully small camel or both.

  After a debate with the waiter over the proper temperature for preparing beef Wellington, Chet began to bring me up to date. His daughter was studying law in Massachusetts and his son was studying fruit flies in Pago Pago and his wife was studying Mandarin in menopause. Chet was thrilled with each of them and, by the time he was through telling me about them, so was I. I used to discourage people from talking about their domestic bliss, partly because I saw so much of it that had gone sour but mostly because deep down I knew my own life would be more palatable if there were someone around to scramble my eggs other than the fry cook at Zorba’s. So it used to depress me to hear the kind of encomiums Chet was sending my way, but I’ve gotten over it. I still slump, though, when I see a little kid, about nine or ten, with a Giants cap on his head and a hole in the knee of his jeans, and I think of all I might have learned if I’d had one of those of my own.

  I tried to give Chet as much enjoyment as he was giving me, but the best I could come up with was a story about a client who wanted me to find the cat she had left back in Little Rock when she moved to San Francisco three years before, and about another who explained that his mother had died in her sleep two months earlier and wondered if he would get in any kind of trouble if he notified an undertaker at this late date to come get the body. Apparently the lemon juice he’d poured over the old girl to try to preserve her hadn’t quite done the job.

  The meal came and went, slowly and delectably, but by the time Chet’s mouth was full of mousse and I was toying with some blackberries in cream Chet’s eyebrows were still and the wrinkle on his pate had slipped to his forehead. I asked him what was wrong.

  Before answering he swiped at his mouth with a swatch of gold linen, then ignited a panatela. “Are you free now, Marsh?” he asked cautiously, looking at me through smoke.

  “You mean professionally?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not really. I’m just into something new.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. I’ll know better in a couple of days.”

  “If I said my thing was crucial, an emergency, could you take it on?”

  I thought about it and didn’t like my conclusion. “I don’t think so, Chet. Not right away. This other thing is kind of an emergency, too. The client’s dying, and I’m into it enough to want to see it through. Sorry.”

  “I understand. One thing at a time. I eat my food the same way.”

  “What kind of trouble have you got, Chet? Hell, maybe I could fit it in.”

  “No. Forget it.”

  “Come on. What’s the trouble?”

  He sighed. “That’s just it. I’m not sure we have any trouble. But if we do, it’s bad.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The paper.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The slice of mousse vanished before Chet said anything more. He rubbed his face and then he rubbed his head and finally said, “I’d better not say anything, yet, Marsh. But listen. Will you call me when you get free of this other thing? Will you touch base before you take on something else?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks. Let’s leave it there for now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Hey. It’s been nice. Let’s do it again.”

  “Let’s.”

  “Next time you pick.”

  I nodded. “Save those Ronald McDonald coupons.” A half hour later I was home in bed, thrashing around on a bed full of other people’s troubles, wondering when I’d last used the words “good night.”

  SIX

  The next morning I jumped in my car and followed up the second best lead I ha
d—the address the library lady had given me.

  It was raining when I started out, and raining even harder forty minutes later when I got where I was going. Along the way I slashed through puddles the way reality knifes through dreams and viewed the world through windows gray with steam. The opposing traffic spat at me, incensed at my dissenting direction. The people on the sidewalks scurried ineffectually from covering to covering or languished helplessly on the street corners under umbrellas that loomed over them like clouds of private doom.

  The block of Twenty-sixth Street I was looking for ran between Guerrero and Valencia in the Inner Mission. The area is predominantly Latin, but with real estate prices in more popular areas at irrational levels, writers and artists and working people of all ethnic backgrounds are finding the Mission one of the few places left in the city where they can afford a home.

  The place I was looking for was a typical San Francisco house—two levels, garage below, steps and portico on the left, bay window on the right over the garage, no yard in front. The artificial facade pasted onto this one sometime after the initial construction looked as though it was about to lose its grip. Above the broken sidewalk a telephone pole hoisted a cluster of wires high overhead, as tangled as my ambitions.

  I sat in the car for a minute, checking the place out. It could have been unoccupied or there could have been twenty people living inside; in this area you couldn’t tell. As I watched, the house seemed to slump even further into its own decay, confused by its past, fearful of its future, puzzled by its present. I run across a lot of Homo sapiens in the identical circumstance.

  Just as I started to get out of the car a man rounded the corner at Valencia and came up the block toward me. He was huge, three hundred pounds at least, his face broad and overinflated, the color of a cup of cheap tea. I thought for an instant he was going into the house I was watching, but he went on to the next building instead. The sign next to the door he entered had once read “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” but those letters had been pried off, leaving only a shaded outline. Over them, in black, hand-drawn letters, had been painted the words “Samoan Methodist Church.”

  I got out of my car and climbed to the front door of the house and pounded on it. Gunshots rang out from inside; “Gunsmoke” gunshots.

  The woman who opened the door was very black and very round. Her huge flat breasts were supported only by her belt and hidden only by her apron. She took one step onto the porch, backing me up. An odor came out of the house with her, a smell I hadn’t smelled since the last time I’d opened my grandmother’s cookie jar three decades ago.

  “You the Welfare man?” Her voice was loud, as deep as mine.

  “No.”

  “I told them to send somebody.”

  “I’m not him. Sorry.”

  “Then you best get down off my porch.” She took another step forward. My knees hit the low railing behind me and for a moment of vertigo I was sure I was going over.

  “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions if I can,” I said quickly, peaceably.

  “Got no time for questions. I got babies in there, and bakin’ too. None of ’em’s gonna behave less I close by.”

  “I’m looking for the man who used to live in this house,” I hurried on. “A man named Kottle. Do you know anything about him?”

  “Never heard of no ‘Cattle.’”

  “Kottle. Karl Kottle.”

  “Never heard of him, neither.”

  I held my ground, but barely, and decided to tack. “Gingersnaps,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “Gingersnaps. That’s what you’re baking, isn’t it? My grandma back in Iowa used to make them. I haven’t had one in years. You couldn’t spare one, could you?”

  She looked at me frankly, tilting her head forward as though she were used to looking at the world over the tops of eyeglasses. Enough time went by for her to absorb me with every ounce of her flesh. “I might,” she decided finally. “You wait.”

  She went into the house and made noises louder than Matt Dillon’s perorations. When she came back there was a small plastic bag in her hand. There were three cookies in it, and she thrust them at me. I took the bag and thanked her.

  “This man you want. He white or black?”

  “White.”

  “Don’t know him. Black man owns this place.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t recollect.”

  Then, because it’s so often the pragmatic thing to do, I got out my wallet. “Let me pay you for the cookies,” I said slowly, slowly enough to clarify my meaning.

  The fists that went to her hips loomed like gargoyles. “Now you insulting me,” she said angrily. “Get off this porch. Now. ’Fore I toss you off.”

  I followed orders and the door slammed shut behind me, properly punctuating my stupidity.

  On the way back to the car some movement caught my eye. Down at the end of the block was a grocery store, one of the Mom-and-Pop places the city is full of. A small, husky man was out front, taking some bread loaves from a delivery truck and loading them into a large wicker basket that hung from his left forearm. I went down there.

  He grunted when he saw me. “You want bread?” His accent and coloring were Middle Eastern—Lebanese, Persian, something. Inside the truck the driver was sleeping, his cap pulled over his eyes, his chin on his chest.

  I shook my head. “Have you had this store long?” I asked. “I used to live here a long time ago. Just back to check out the old neighborhood. Looks pretty good.”

  “Fourteen years,” the man said, without interest.

  “Sixty-five,” I calculated. “I moved out in sixty-two.” I looked down the street. “A nice neighborhood. I always liked this neighborhood.”

  The man shrugged. “Nice. Not nice. Who knows? I been robbed three times. My friend, four blocks down, he’s been robbed twelve times. Shot, even. Now they do this.” He pointed. On the front door someone had scrawled the words “Down with Iran” and “Fuck the Ayatollah.” “But, to do better I would have to be rich. The only rich in this neighborhood are the criminals.”

  I nodded wisely, as though I knew all about everything. “Say. A nephew of mine used to live around here someplace. Right up there, I think. Name was Kottle. Haven’t seen him in a long time. You know him?”

  “Kottle. Sure. I remember. Vienna sausages. Always eating Vienna sausages.” He shook his head sadly.

  “He still live there?”

  “Moved. Three, four years ago, I think.”

  “Any idea where?”

  The man shrugged and picked up the basket and carried it into the store. He jerked his head back toward the truck. “Lazy bastard. But the bread is good.”

  I followed him to the bread rack and helped him put the loaves on the shelves. The bread was warm and crusty, and the smell took me back to the place I grew up and the people I grew up with. I put one loaf to the side, and the little man smiled approvingly.

  “Do you have any idea where Karl Kottle lives now?” I repeated. All of a sudden the question made me tired. The life led by the little grocer made me tired, too.

  The man shook his head and rubbed the stubble on his chin. We finished stacking the bread in silence, and I followed him when he went over to the counter. I reached into my pocket for some money to pay for the bread. The man shook his head. “You keep. For helping.”

  I protested but the man’s smile grew firm. I thanked him and turned to go.

  “I do not know where Mr. Kottle lives,” he said to my back. “But I have seen him.”

  “When?”

  “Saturday. A week ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown. The Post Office. The Rincon Annex, I think it is called.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  He shook his head. “He did not see me. He was in a hurry. He seemed worried. Perhaps frightened. But then, that boy always seemed worried. He reminded me of the young men in my country.”


  “Did you see where he went?”

  “He went into one of the buildings down there; I don’t know which one. I had business. My brother was jailed by the Shah. Now the Ayatollah has released him. I send clothing, books, money. Every week.”

  “Does he get it?”

  “I do not know.”

  He turned back to his shelves and began to dust them with a feather duster. I thanked him again and left, bearing gifts I felt unworthy of.

  SEVEN

  I ate lunch in my office. Bread and cookies.

  After brushing the crumbs off the desk I dialed the number Shelley Withers had given me. Busy. I tried again later. Still busy.

  I still hadn’t gotten through to Amber when Peggy arrived for work. After straightening things that needed straightening and dusting things that needed dusting and watering the things that needed watering, she came in and placed a glass vase on my desk. In it were two rosebuds, one red, one white. Then she sat down in the client’s chair to talk to the thing that needed talking to.

  “So how was the feast?” Peggy didn’t approve of extravagance in any form, and her grin was bemused.

  “Fit for a king.”

  “What’d you have?”

  “Pressed duck.”

  “How adventuresome.”

  “I’m a wild and crazy guy.”

  She laughed. “Those might be the last two words I’d pick to describe you, Marsh. The very last.”

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked, gesturing at the flowers.

  “Oh, it’s raining, and Calhoun still hasn’t paid his bill, and you’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow. I thought your life could use a little cheer.” Peggy shifted position and redraped her skirt. “What account should I charge the dinner to?” she asked briskly.