“She’s not home.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She went out.”
“Well, I’ll try her anyway. Meanwhile, you wait. Just sit there and have a club soda. Fish avoid club soda like the plague. The bubbles make ’em fart.”
Twenty minutes later, after double-parking around the corner, Mickey pushed his way through the door of the Little Shamrock, Jim’s local hangout.
One of the oldest bars in the city, founded in 1893, the Little Shamrock started out very narrow up by the front door. A couple of large picture windows facing Lincoln Boulevard let in some natural light. A bar with a dozen or so stools ran down the left side of the room, and on the right, in front, an eclectic selection of memorabilia, including an antique bicycle, black-and-white photos, old election posters, and a grandfather clock that had stopped during the Great Earthquake of 1906 hung on the wall. Halfway back, the place opened up slightly to accommodate dart players and a jukebox, and in the very back, under the faux Tiffany lamps, the room took on the look of a dilapidated old living room, with a couple of sagging couches facing a cluster of overstuffed easy chairs.
Jim Parr sat at the far end of the crowded bar with an empty glass in front of him. Maybe the bartender had coaxed him into something nonalcoholic after all. Jim was staring at the television set. His cheeks were wet. Excusing his way through the press, Mickey got back next to him and put a hand on his grandfather’s shoulder, gathering him in a half hug. He kissed him on the top of his cue-ball head. “Hey.”
Jim leaned into him for a second, then pulled away, grabbed the bar napkin, and wiped at his eyes. “How’d you get here so fast?”
“I ignored the speed limit. And I’m double-parked. You think you can walk?”
“ ’Course. I could walk home if I needed to.”
“Well, luckily you don’t need to. You paid up here?”
“Paid as I went. Only way to live.”
“So I’ve heard. Like a million times. Okay. Let’s go.”
The old man got his feet onto the floor and straightened up, leaning into Mickey. The bartender saw what was happening and gave Mickey an approving nod. He mouthed a silent thank-you.
Parr managed to keep upright as the two of them negotiated their way out of the bar and out onto the sidewalk. It was still a clear, warm day, and the sun was in their eyes as they made their way to the car. After Mickey poured Parr into the front seat, he went around and got in.
“This about Dominic Como?” he asked.
His grandfather, head back against the seat with his eyes closed, turned toward Mickey and another tear broke. “I loved that guy,” he said.
Mickey facilitated his parking around the city by the judicious use of a handicap placard that he kept in his glove compartment and that he could put onto his dashboard whenever he needed it. His grandfather had given him this surprisingly valuable little blue item. In theory, only handicapped individuals had access to them, and there was nothing handicapped about Jim Parr.
And there had been nothing handicapped about Dominic Como, either, for that matter.
But Como nevertheless had always possessed a handicapped card for those special occasions when nothing else would do. When Parr had retired eight years ago, Como gave him one as a present. Como could get things that other people didn’t seem to have access to. It had been one of his talents, and access to those things was one of the perks of Parr’s old job.
So parking wasn’t its usual awful and automatic hassle. Today Mickey pulled up into a spot by the emergency entrance to the UC Medical Center, only a couple of blocks from their apartment. By this time, Jim was snoring.
Fifteen minutes later, the old man was in his bed, still dressed except for his shoes, and with the covers pulled up around him. Mickey closed the bedroom door and, sweating from having basically carried Jim up to the second floor where they lived, he took a dispirited glance around the cluttered living room: Tamara’s Murphy bed pulled down from the wall and unmade. Newspapers from several days scattered around. Coffee mugs on just about every flat surface.
He straightened up, and when he’d finished, he opened the door to his own bedroom, essentially a large closet with a window facing the wall of the apartment behind them. Here was his bed, a board-and-cinder-block bookcase, a small dresser/desk combo unit, a few prints on the walls.
But he didn’t go into his room. Dead in his tracks, he stopped in its doorway. No wonder he fled from this place as often as he could.
This was no way to live.
The death of Dominic Como, now confirmed as a murder, led off the five o’clock news. The cause, as Mickey had suspected, was not drowning, but rather someone had hit him with a blunt object on the back of the head. Como had already been missing for four days by the time he was found partially submerged in the lagoon at the Palace of Fine Arts by…
Mickey, sitting in front of his television, came forward in mild shock as his own image appeared on the screen as part of the big story of the day. He had talked to several reporters that morning at the scene, of course, but never really believed that they’d run with any of the footage of him, since his own role in the larger story was at best only a footnote. But there he was on TV, describing how he’d come upon the body. He thought this was pretty cool in spite of how young he looked, and how disheveled, which he suddenly realized was what sleeping out under trees could do to you.
But when they identified Mickey as “an associate with the Hunt Club, a private investigating firm,” it occurred to him that maybe his unshaven mug and slept-in clothing weren’t the best advertisements in the world. That realization brought him up short-the idea that he might actually be a liability of some kind for Wyatt’s business. Maybe while he was cleaning up his apartment and his physical surroundings, he thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to work on his own hygiene and appearance.
But then his image left the screen and Channel Four’s perky anchorwoman was going on with more about the crime and the victim. Because of his grandfather’s longstanding job as Como’s driver, Mickey knew a lot about him, but he hadn’t ever really focused on the breadth of his charitable work. Now he learned that Como had either founded or sat on the boards of no fewer than six major charities in San Francisco-the Sunset Youth Project (of which he was executive director), Braceros Unidos, the Mission Street Coalition, the Rainbow Workshops, the Sanctuary House for Battered Women, and Halfway Home.
The police investigation was continuing, but so far there were no suspects.
3
Cleanly shaven and showered, in slacks, a button-down dress shirt under a Mountain Hardware jacket, and tennis shoes, Mickey walked down to Golden Gate Park, then, in another quarter mile or so, found himself at the de Young Museum.
Off to his right loomed one of his favorite recent additions to the city’s landscape. Adjacent to the museum, a strange- looking tower thrust itself nine stories up into the now-darkening sky. The exterior of the tower looked to be made of metallic panels-copper?-into which the builder had punched various imperfections, from bumps to indentations to holes. More unexpectedly, especially upon the first viewing, the tower twisted as it went up. What started as a rectangle at the base shifted as it rose until at the top it was a gravity-defying parallelogram. From the top-an enclosed viewing platform-Mickey had been pleased to recognize that the bottom of the tower was aligned with the east-west grid of the park, while the top’s orientation was turned to match the grid of the city’s downtown streets.