The walk had taken Freeman across the top of Nob Hill and back down its north side. He became subliminally aware that his steps were leading him somewhere, and he let them. Slowly, no hurry. He still chewed the cigar.
By night, the corner that May lived on was quiet. The cable cars had stopped running. The surrounding hills were steep, and people heading for North Beach or back out to the Avenues would take one of the larger thoroughfares, Broadway or Van Ness, Gough or Geary. He crossed the street and stood leaning against the window of the French deli, looking up. There was a light on in what he knew to be May’s kitchen. The front of the apartment, the turreted window, was dark.
Across the street in Mrs Streletski’s building shadows danced across the turret, and suddenly Freeman remembered a fourteen-year-old boy named Wayne Allred who’d been hiding in a closet when his mother ran from their apartment, who’d come out to shoot his father dead.
He threw his cigar butt into the gutter. He wasn’t quite disgusted with himself for being less than completely thorough earlier. It had been the end of another long day and he hadn’t been holding out any hope that May was innocent. In fact, he still didn’t.
But his feet, his subconscious – something – had taken him here, and now he knew why. He crossed the street and rang the bell to number 17, Strauss. The speaker squawked by his ear.
‘Who is it?’
Freeman apologized and explained briefly.
‘It’s ten o’clock at night. Can’t this wait until morning?’
He apologized again, and for a moment it appeared that he was going to strike out. But then the buzzer sounded and he was quietly climbing the carpeted steps. The door stood ajar and Nick Strauss leaned against the jamb, wearing white socks and a terrycloth robe. He was a big man, far bigger than Freeman, his black hair still wet from the shower.
‘I’m sorry,’ Freeman repeated. ‘But a person’s life is at stake here.’
‘Could I see some ID?’
The lawyer smiled. ‘Of course.’ It was the standard first line of protection, as foolish, Freeman thought, as most human endeavor. As if – were he a burglar or a murderer – possession of a driver’s license would make him any safer, as if all IDs weren’t routinely, expertly, forged or altered.
But he took out his wallet and offered it. He had a business card in his jacket breast pocket and he gave Strauss one of those too.
The man opened the door further. Freeman saw two boys – teenagers or a little younger – sitting together on the couch, trying to get a look at him. He gave them a little friendly wave, and Strauss said to come on in. ‘But I’ve already told you we didn’t see anything.’
‘Well, Mr Strauss, actually you told me you didn’t see anything. You said you’d ask the boys and get back to me.’
‘If they saw anything -’
‘What, Dad?’
‘Just a second, Nick. I’m talking to this man. This is Mr Freeman, guys. These are my boys – Alex, the big guy, and Nick, the big little guy. Aren’t you, Nick?’
The younger boy, Nick, seemed an echo not only of his father’s name but of the attitude – cautious, watchful. Freeman kept his hands in his pockets, the supplicant. ‘I don’t mean to push. People forget these things all the time. It’s just so terribly important.’
Strauss made some motion that Freeman took for acquiescence; he looked to the boys, then back to Strauss. ‘Would you guys like to show me your room, if it’s okay with your dad?’
The older boy, Alex, said ‘sure’ and jumped up. This was an adventure.
‘How about you, Nick?’
‘Naw. I’ll just wait here.’
Freeman said fine, but Alex was all over him. ‘Come on, you wimp, chicken-liver, baby.’
‘Alex!’
But that did it. Nick got up. ‘It’s all right, Dad. Alex is such a nerd.’ Then, to his brother, ‘you jerkoff,’ remembering the last time he had seen the Chinese woman through the telescope…
Nick Strauss loved his dad’s apartment at the corner of Hyde and Union, especially after the month of traveling with his mom and Alex, staying in those tiny stuffy rooms in Europe. First of all, Dad’s place was humongous, twice the size of his mom’s in Van Nuys, rickety-rackety pink stucco with peeling paint and cars parked all over the place where there should have been grass. Then, at Dad’s, nobody was above them – no Mrs Cutler and her two sons and the bass and drums coming down through the ceiling all day and night like in the Valley. No adjoining hotel rooms with people staying up all the time.
Plus the cable cars; it was a snap to get on and off without paying. And hills for skateboarding like you couldn’t believe, and no damn palm trees. In fact, no trees.
And finally this glassed-in turret in the front upstairs corner of the apartment, which was part of his and Alex’s bedroom when they came to visit on Saturday. And this time, since they’d been with Mom so steadily with school and then Europe and all, they were staying three weeks.
So after the lights went out you could take out the telescope and spy on anybody in the neighborhood, nobody noticing a thing. Or in the daytime, just drawing the drapes and making it all dark in there, looking all around, checking it all out.
And since they’d gotten here, checking her out.
Alex saw her first – across the street, upstairs just like them, probably figuring nobody could see her. It was supremely worth the fifty cents Nick had to pay for the first look – he wondered what Chinese custom it was to walk around your house naked, but he wasn’t complaining. Except for Mom (and she didn’t count anyway), he’d never seen a live naked woman. Even Playboy was hard to get when you were eleven.
And he thought this woman looked as good – at least -as anybody in Playboy, except for the smaller boobs. And being Chinese was a little funny at first. He kind of wished she was a regular American – he wondered if it really counted as seeing a naked woman if she was Chinese, but he asked Alex and Alex said it sure counted for him, and he was thirteen so he ought to know.
She hadn’t been there for a few days; the last time had been a couple nights ago. It had been almost eleven o’clock. He couldn’t get his weenie to go down and he couldn’t get to sleep. He also didn’t want to waste a minute when her lights were on. He put his eye to the telescope. It looked like she was doing some kind of exercise taking things down off shelves, reaching up, then bending over. She turned toward him, her face so full in the telescope he almost jumped back. It looked like she was crying, and that made him feel guilty, spying on her and all.
‘See anything?’ Alex had whispered.
Darn. Nick thought Alex had been asleep. He quickly stuffed a blanket down over his hard little weenie. He took a last look, thinking about the way boobs changed shapes when women moved around, leaned over, stretched up. His brother had called him a ‘boob man’ last week. Well, he guessed he was, if that’s what interested him, and he wore that knowledge like a badge of honor. A man, not a boy.
He pulled the drapes closed in front of the telescope. He’d keep the crying a secret between just him and her. ‘Naw,’ he had told Alex, ‘I think she went to sleep.’
David Freeman, Nick, Alex and their father walked through the living room, Mr Strauss saying he was sorry about his sons’ language, referring to Nick calling Alex a jerkoff. Their mother wasn’t very strict with them and the language thing was impossible to correct in the six weeks or so he had them every year. You had to pick your fights.
Freeman saw the telescope as soon as he entered the room, and walked over to it. ‘This is pretty cool,’ he said. ‘This looks like a real telescope.’
‘It is a real telescope,’ Alex said.
Freeman put his eye to the glass. ‘What can you see through it?’ What he was looking at, what it had been set on, was the turret across the street, the room beyond. He saw May at her kitchen table, drinking something, so close he could see the steam rising off her cup.