“Anyway, like I said, I hardly knew that poor man. Murdered... my God, of all people. I still have trouble believing it. But I don’t know a thing about him or why he was killed.”
“You told Snyder you’d had an inquiry about Spook. A caller who wanted to know where to find him.”
“Well, I didn’t have an inquiry. I mean, the man on the phone didn’t t ask for me, specifically.”
“Who did he ask for?”
“Spook’s caseworker. Janet Coolibra.”
“By name?”
“No, I don’t think so. The call was referred to Janet’s number. She had to go out for a few minutes and she was expecting another call, so she asked me to pick up for her. That’s how I happened to talk to the man.”
“Did he identify himself?”
“No. All he said was that he was trying to locate a homeless man named Spook.”
“You ask him why?”
“He said Spook might be somebody he knew once. And if so, maybe he could help him get off the streets.”
“And you told him about Visuals, Inc.?”
“I didn’t know about Visuals, Inc. then. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have given out the information to a stranger over the phone.”
“Did you give him Janet’s name?”
“Yes. He said he’d contact her.”
“Did he, do you know?”
“He didn’t. She never heard from him.”
“How did he sound to you? Young, old?”
“Not young.”
“How old, would you say?”
“Well... not ancient, but... you know, an older man.”
That statement was accompanied by a sidewise flick of her gaze, as if she were thinking, You know, somebody your age. Youth is a wonderful thing — if you happen to be looking at the world through young eyes.
I asked, “How would you characterize his tone?”
“Characterize?”
“Casual, determined, angry?”
“I don’t know, sort of... cold and flat, I guess. The only time it changed, got a little angry, was after I put him on hold. Oh, and there was something funny about his voice.”
“Funny how?”
“Well, kind of slurred. But not as if he was drunk.”
“Speech impediment?”
“Something like that.”
“You said you put him on hold. Why?”
“Janet’s other call came through — call forwarding.”
“At what point in the conversation?”
“We hadn’t been talking long,” Ms. Sukimoto said, “less than a minute. I think I’d just said I couldn’t help him, I wasn’t Spook’s caseworker, and he was saying couldn’t I just give him some idea of where he could find Spook.”
“How long’d you keep him on hold?”
“Oh, a couple of minutes. I had to take a message for Janet.”
“And he didn’t like being kept waiting.”
“No. I didn’t mean to but I guess I cut him off kind of abruptly to answer the other call. He said something about that, told me not to do it again — don’t put him on hold again because he was calling long distance.”
“Those were his words, long distance?”
Wrinkles appeared in Ms. Sukimoto’s brow. “Actually, that wasn’t what he said. He said he was calling from... some county. What was it? Oh, right. Mono County. ‘I’m calling from Mono County.’ ”
“Is that all? No specific location?”
“That’s all.”
Mono County was in the eastern part of the state, in the high desert along the Nevada line. Large in terms of square miles, but with a relatively small population. There were no towns of any size, and only one or two with more than five thousand inhabitants.
Not much of a lead without additional information. “Older but not ancient” and the speech impediment indicated he might not be the same mole-cheeked man who’d been asking Spook’s whereabouts among the homeless along lower Potrero. Which meant what, if that were the case? Two men looking for Spook for different reasons, or for the same reason independently? Or was there some sort of connection between the two?
11
Jake Runyon
It took him three and a half days to track down Big Dog.
He might’ve cut that time in half if he’d been able to devote all his working hours to the task. But Tamara Corbin had given him a handful of interview assignments on another case that took up all of Wednesday afternoon and half of Thursday. Routine work — white collar offices in the city, an upper middle-class home in Palo Alto. He preferred the streets, bleakness and all. His meat, his comfort zone.
He found out a couple of things on the Spook investigation before he found Big Dog. One was what Pete Snyder had told him, the only new information he’d gotten out of anybody at Visuals, Inc. The other came from one of the homeless who’d known Spook, the one called Pinkeye. Why he had that street name Runyon never did find out. Both his eyes were brown, milky with cataracts, the whites more or less clear, and there wasn’t anything else pink about him. Big, loose-jointed black man, face mostly hidden behind a grizzled, gray prophet’s beard. And eager enough to talk once he had two dollars of Runyon’s money tucked away in a saggy pants pocket. He knew Big Dog, too, well enough to steer clear of him. (“Bad dude, cut your throat for a dime and drink your blood afterward.”) Couldn’t help with Big Dog’s whereabouts; his information had to do with Spook.
“I wonder what happened to his stuff,” he said.
“What stuff?”
“His stuff, man. Everybody out here’s got stuff.”
“Police didn’t find anything on him.”
“Sure they didn’t. Don’t keep your stuff on you, not if you want to keep it.”
“Where, then?”
“Got to have a hidey hole,” Pinkeye said. “Everybody got a hidey hole somewhere. You got one yourself, I bet.”
“You know where Spook’s was?”
“No idea, man. You tell anybody where you got your stuff hid, ain’t gonna be yours for long.”
“What kind of stuff did Spook have?”
“Bright and pretty, that’s what he collected. Sidewalks, gutter, garbage cans, Dumpsters... scoured ’em all. All kinds of bright and pretty.”
“Such as? Give me an example.”
“One time,” Pinkeye said, “I seen him pick up a gold earring. Yeah. One big old gold earring, right off the sidewalk. Not real gold, just a bright and pretty, but the way he grinned and hopped around you’d’ve thought it was. I asked him what was he gonna do with it. ‘Give it to Dot,’ he says.”
“Dot. His ghost woman?”
“Yeah. One of old Spook’s head people. ‘She likes pretty things,’ he says. ‘Gonna give it to her, she’ll look real pretty, maybe she’ll forgive me.’ ”
“Forgive him for what?”
“Wouldn’t say. Talked to his head people but wouldn’t talk about ’em.”
“So you figure he kept the earring with the rest of his stuff.”
“What else, man? Dot wasn’t no real woman. Can’t give no bright and pretty to somebody only lives inside your head.”
Runyon had gone back to Visuals, Inc. and talked to the client and to Meg Lawton. Both were surprised to hear that Spook had had a hidey hole, collected shiny objects; he’d never said anything on either subject. Franklin Square had been next. No help from Delia or any of the other homeless who hung out there. No help from anybody else he talked to.
After he finished up the last of the interviews on Wednesday afternoon, he drove to the Potrero neighborhood and picked up where he’d left off, widening the radius of his search. Lower Potrero from Duboce to Twentieth on the north; all the way past Highway 280 to Third and the area called Dogpatch on the south; back north and then west toward Army. Street people, liquor store clerks, employees and inhabitants of greasy spoons and bars, plus a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen he hadn’t tried before. And finally, midday on Friday, all the legwork paid off.