Scenarios

I said, 'I'll be going now.'

'Going?' he said. 'Telephone's right over there.'

'I won't be calling the police, Mr. Weaver. From here or from anywhere else.'

'What's that? But… you know I killed him…'

'I don't know anything,' I said. 'I don't even remember coming here today.'

I left him quickly, before he could say anything else, and went downstairs and out to O'Farrell Street. Wind- hurled rain buffeted me, icy and stinging, but the feel and smell of it was a relief. I pulled up the collar on my overcoat and hurried next door.

Upstairs in the office I took Iry Feinberg's two hundred dollars out of the lock box in the desk and slipped the envelope into my coat pocket. He wouldn't like getting it back; he wouldn't like my calling it quits on the investigation, just as the police had done. But that didn't matter. Let the dead lie still, and the dying find what little peace they had left. The judgment was out of human hands anyway.

I tried not to think about Nick Damiano anymore, but it was too soon and I couldn't blot him out yet. Harmless old Nick, the happy whack. Jesus Christ. Seven people-he had slaughtered seven people that day in 1957. And for what? For a lost woman; for a lost love. No wonder he'd gone batty and developed an obsession for skeletons. He had lived with them, seven of them, all those years, heard them clattering and clacking all those thousands of nights. And now, pretty soon, he would be one himself.

Skeleton rattle your mouldy leg.

All men's lovers come to this.

Incident in a Neighborhood Tavern

When the holdup went down I was sitting at the near end of the Foghorn Tavern's scarred mahogany bar talking to the owner, Matt Candiotti.

It was a little before seven of a midweek evening, lull-time in working-class neighborhood saloons like this one. Blue-collar locals would jam the place from four until about six-thirty, when the last of them headed home for dinner; the hardcore drinkers wouldn't begin filtering back in until about seven-thirty or eight. Right now there were only two customers, and the jukebox and computer hockey games were quiet. The TV over the back bar was on, but with the sound turned down to a tolerable level. One of the customers, a porky guy in his fifties, drinking Anchor Steam out of the bottle, was watching the last of the NBC national news. The other customer, an equally porky and middle-aged female barfly, half in the bag on red wine, was trying to convince him to pay attention to her instead of Tom Brokaw.

I had a draft beer in front of me, but that wasn't the reason I was there. I'd come to ask Candiotti, as I had asked two dozen other merchants here in the Outer Mission, if he could offer any leads on the rash of burglaries that were plaguing small businesses in the neighborhood. The police hadn't come up with anything positive after six weeks, so a couple of the victims had gotten up a fund and hired me to see what I could find out. They'd picked me because I had been born and raised in the Outer Mission, I still had friends and shirttail relatives living here, and I understood the neighborhood a good deal better than any other private detective in San Francisco.

But so far I wasn't having any more luck than the SFPD. None of the merchants I'd spoken with today had given me any new ideas. And Candiotti was proving to be no exception. He stood slicing limes into wedges as we talked. They might have been onions the way his long, mournful face was screwed up, like a man trying to hold back tears. His gray-stubbled jowls wobbled every time he shook his head. He reminded me of a tired old hound, friendly and sad, as if life had dealt him a few kicks but not quite enough to rob him of his good nature.

'Wish I could help,' he said. 'But hell, I don't hear nothing. Must be pros from Hunters Point or the Fillmore, hah?'

Hunters Point and the Fillmore were black sections of the city, which was a pretty good indicator of where his head was at. I said, 'Some of the others figure it for local talent.'

'Out of this neighborhood, you mean?'

I nodded, drank some of my draft.

'Nah, I doubt it,' he said. 'Guys that organized, they don't shit where they eat. Too smart, you know?'

'Maybe. Any break-ins or attempted break-ins here?'

'Not so far. I got bars on all the windows, double deadbolt locks on the storeroom door off the alley. Besides, what's for them to steal besides a few cases of whiskey?'

'You don't keep cash on the premises overnight?'

'Fifty bucks in the till,' Candiotti said, 'that's all; that's my limit. Everything else goes out of here when I close up, down to the night deposit at the B of A on Mission. My mama didn't raise no airheads.' He scraped the lime wedges off his board into a plastic container, and racked the serrated knife he'd been using. 'One thing I did hear,' he said. 'I heard some of the loot turned up down in San Jose. You know about that?'

'Not much of a lead there. Secondhand dealer named Pitman had a few pieces of stereo equipment stolen from the factory outlet store on Geneva. Said he bought it from a guy at the San Jose flea market, somebody he didn't know, never saw before.'

'Yeah, sure,' Candiotti said wryly. 'What do the cops think?'

'That Pitman bought it off a fence.'

'Makes sense. So maybe the boosters are from San Jose, hah?'

'Could be,' I said, and that was when the kid walked in.

He brought bad air in with him; I sensed it right away and so did Candiotti. We both glanced at the door when it opened, the way you do, but we didn't look away again once we saw him. He was in his early twenties, dark-skinned, dressed in chinos, a cotton windbreaker, sharp-toed shoes polished to a high gloss. But it was his eyes that put the chill on my neck, the sudden clutch of tension down low in my belly. They were bright, jumpy, on the wild side, and in the dim light of the Foghorn's interior, the pupils were so small they seemed nonexistent. He had one hand in his jacket pocket and I knew it was clamped around a gun even before he took it out and showed it to us.

He came up to the bar a few feet on my left, the gun jabbing the air in front of him. He couldn't hold it steady; it kept jerking up and down, from side to side, as if it had a kind of spasmodic life of its own. Behind me, at the other end of the bar, I heard Anchor Steam suck in his breath and the barfly make a sound like a stifled moan. I eased back a little on the stool, watching the gun and the kid's eyes flick from Candiotti to me to the two customers and back around again. Candiotti didn't move at all, just stood there staring with his hound's face screwed up in that holding-back-tears way.

'All right all right,' the kid said. His voice was high pitched, excited, and there was drool at one corner of his mouth. You couldn't get much more stoned than he was and still function. Coke, crack, speed-maybe a combination. The gun that kept flicking this way and that had to be a goddamn Saturday night special. 'Listen good, man, everybody listen good. I don't want to kill none of you, man, but I will if I got to, you better believe it.'

None of us said anything. None of us moved.

The kid had a folded-up paper sack in one pocket; he dragged it out with his free hand, dropped it, broke quickly at the middle to pick it up without lowering his gaze. When he straightened again there was sweat on his forehead, more drool coming out of his mouth. He threw the sack on the bar.

'Put the money in there Mr. Cyclone Man,' he said to Candiotti. 'All the money in the register but not the coins, I don't want the fuckin' coins, you hear me?'

Candiotti nodded; reached out slowly, caught up the sack, turned toward the back bar with his shoulders hunched up against his neck. When he punched No Sale on the register, the ringing thump of the cash drawer sliding open seemed overloud in the electric hush. For a few seconds the kid watched him scoop bills into the paper sack; then his eyes and the gun skittered my way again. I had looked into the muzzle of a handgun before and it was the same feeling each time: dull fear, helplessness, a kind of naked vulnerability.

'Your wallet on the bar, man, all your cash.' The gun barrel and the wild eyes flicked away again, down the length of the plank, before I could move to comply. 'You down there, dude, you and fat mama put your money on the bar. All of it, hurry up.'

Each of us did as we were told. While I was getting my wallet out I managed to slide my right foot off the