There were those parts of the city that the tourists pretended not to see on their way to the Golden Gate: the Tenderloin, the Mission, the dark corners of old Chinatown, where the city felt real and feral, like the New York City nobody remembered correctly from the 1970s. And sometimes the city didn’t feel real at all-like Night of the Living Dead. It was as if the worst of the derelicts and addicts had some unspoken arrangement to stay in their zones, except sometimes they’d be seen roaming around downtown alongside shopping tourists, looking like lost zombies escaped from their pens.
Or was it Jon Nunn who was the escaped zombie?
Nunn saw a sign he tried to make sense of like a riddle of the meaning of life on one of the streets where small residences backed onto dangerously vacant lots. IF YOU DEFECATE ON MY HOUSE AGAIN, I WILL COME OUT AND SHOOT YOU WITH MY GUN.
What the-
Ex-detective Nunn was still learning to see San Francisco from a civilian side. San Fran was seen as a tolerant place, but inside it was a city with judging, searing eyes everywhere. The hordes of homeless, who took up whole city blocks in the zombie districts, even seemed to judge. Most of all, the police he once knew. They judged the harshest.
“Jon, you know I can’t help you.”
“I’m just taking a walk,” Nunn had answered on that day, six years after turning in his badge, almost smiling. Help me? No one can help me until I know. “I’m just walking around,” he told the other cop.
“Yeah, here you’re walking,” replied Todd Drainer, a vice cop Nunn had run two or three cases with fifteen years before. They both turned their eyes in unison to the worst of the run-down buildings lining the crumbling Chinatown block that Nunn had turned onto. A million miles, it seemed, from Jon Nunn’s apartment. Yet, here gave him some hope for peace.
“I heard there’s a fortune-cookie factory here,” Nunn had said, as if he’d only just learned of its existence. “The tourists like it.” He turned to face Drainer. “What’re you doing here, Drainer?”
“Scaring up some cooperation for a case,” Drainer said. “And unless you’ve become a crack addict instead of a raging drunk-” Nunn gave him a dark look. Maybe he was about to sock Drainer in the face, maybe not. “Sorry, Nunn. Didn’t mean anything. My partner had a hard time after he retired, would wander around the red-light district like he was goddamn Batman and Robin. Fortune-cookie factory is that way, I think. I’d rather not ever see you back here.”
“I’d rather not see you either, Todd.”
Drainer had snickered and mumbled to himself as he walked away, and Nunn was sorry he hadn’t socked him.
Nunn had gone through the back of the factory, stood in a dingy hallway watching a room filled with coughing and smoke, indistinct bodies in slow-motion decay. Nothing had changed from the last time he’d been here, years ago, looking for Christopher Thomas, who had been seen here several times in the months before his murder. Why? If he had a drug habit, that could have opened up all kinds of trouble for him. But the witness pool in this neck of the woods was too unreliable and high to make much out of this lead during the investigation or the trial.
In the meantime, a man known as Hong, the main drug dealer for this area, and a man not unknown to fencing anything-a television, a car, a piece of rare art-was arrested with a few of his men on drug charges. Nunn had pleaded with Drainer to hold off on the raid while he was investigating Thomas, but Drainer went ahead. Hong’s coded ledgers noted payments to a scribbled name that looked like Odd Body. Two right before the date of Chris’s disappearance. Nunn wondered if there was some connection. He wasn’t sure what but had ideas. He had combed through the records of the museum and found that several pieces of art had gone missing in the years before Chris’s death. If he had been in deep with Hong, was he keeping himself alive by paying him back in stolen artwork, or was Hong fencing it for him? Nunn couldn’t find evidence that Chris had been anything more than a recreational drug user. Hong wouldn’t say a word, then was stabbed in the neck in a holding cell by another prisoner with an old grievance and bled out. It had been a dead end then. It was still a dead end. For now.
Nunn had never turned up anyone named Odd Body either, though he’d looked.
Jon Nunn had felt the empty eyes of some of the habituals mark him and follow him out when he had passed through pretending he was looking for a lost drug-addled uncle.
When he got home one of those aimless days, something else had clicked in him. And Nunn had put a call in to Regina Cooper.
No, Jon Nunn wasn’t running the case again-the case was running him, completely.
“I’m not buying,” Regina said when she saw him there with that stubborn look on his face.
Nunn held up his seltzer with cranberry in a short glass. The favorite drink of the ex-drinker because it looked like something that could contain alcohol. Inconspicuous. “You won’t return my calls.”
“I should start changing up my haunt,” said Regina, frowning a luminous, humorous frown as she took her usual place at the Mad Dog in the Fog, and her usual Jameson neat and a Bud were placed in front of her without her asking. “You remember something about real life, don’t you? Imagine how much I’d get done if I tried to entertain every dying ex-cop.” Regina Cooper had written several books about the big cases her office had helped crack during her time as chief medical examiner of San Francisco. They were considered masterworks in the field of forensic sciences, and she had become a staple on the cable crime show circuit before quickly tiring of it. During that time, a television network had bought the rights to her life and hired a former swimsuit model to play a funny and quirky version of her, though Regina was funnier, quirkier, and smarter in real life.
“What have you heard? I’m not dying,” Nunn said, hearing himself laugh under the rumbling din of the Irish pub. It smelled like cardboard and old beer, the wood below his hand knotty and warped from slipshod cleaning.
“Yes, you are, of boredom, if you’ve called me. ‘For a good time, call the chief medical examiner of the city of San Francisco.’”
“You know why I called,” Nunn said soberly.
Regina closed her eyes shook her head. “Na-ah. No way, my friend.”
“What does it hurt?”
“To look into a case that was closed ten years ago, with all the original examinations done in Germany? That hurts my head, Jon.”
“Just noodle it a little before shooting me down.”
“The thing about you, my friend, is you’re timeless. You could have lived a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now, and people would still know what you are.”
“Which is what, Regina?”
“Lost.”
“Don’t you care that we might have had a part in sending an innocent woman to death?”
“You’re looking for the TV version of me, I think.” Regina stood and fished in her pocketbook for a few dollars.
“Wait!” Nunn put his hand on her wrist as an earnest Bob Dylan song came on. She froze.
“Everything all right, Regina?” Mick, the globular and imposing bartender, appeared, looming over Nunn.
“Yeah, fine,” Regina said.
“Please,” Nunn said to her when the bartender had warily scooted back to his spot. “You used to trust my instinct.”