Crime Scene

Chapter 25

The next day, I was a zombie at work, jittery and fatigued and doing a poor job of hiding it. On my lunch break I dashed out to the intake lot to call Nate Schickman. He hadn’t heard about the incident at Rennert’s house. As expected: a false alarm wasn’t sufficiently noteworthy to make the rounds. And while he sounded duly concerned to learn about the gun, his responses were guarded. I’d worn out the welcome mat.

I said, “I’ve been trying to track this Triplett guy down for a couple of weeks now. My best guess is he’s on the street.”

“You have a recent photo?”

“Just the mugshot from his file.”

“From twenty years ago?”

“I know,” I said. “It’s not ideal.”

“No shit.”

“You’ll keep it on your radar, though?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

I came home that evening to a quiet apartment, a note from Tatiana stuck to the TV. She needed to get out a bit, clear her head, had gone to dinner with a friend.

Don’t wait up.

I ate a bowl of cereal, using my free hand to chicken-peck at my laptop. Got the data I needed, made a quick confirmation call, took a shower, and changed into street clothes.

The urban Foundry occupied half a square block on 7th Street, about a mile west of downtown Oakland but light-years removed from any spirit of renewal. I parked up the block and stepped out into a puddle of safety glass; walking along, I passed several more, as if to suggest that the price of a spot was having your window smashed.

Even so, optimistic developers had begun to nose around, erecting a run of townhouses in full view of the freeway. On the other side of a weedy lot, a BART train shuffled toward the city, never looking back.

The Foundry itself was a hump of corrugated sheet metal, part hangar, part bunker. The first sensation that registered as I entered — before I could take in the concrete vastness; before I smelled the slag or heard the grinding of machinery — was heat. Immense, pressing heat; heat with mass and force.

The floor plan was sectioned by craft, with signs rendered in the appropriate medium. SMITHY in black iron. BIKE SHOP in gears and chains. Multicolor NEON. Closest to the door was GLASS, three bellowing furnaces that were the source of the roasting air.

The folks working the various stations wore goggles and steel-toes and old-timey facial hair stylings. I had the feeling most of them had been to Burning Man and found it too corporate. They reminded me of kids I knew in high school who built the sets for plays, sneering and striding around purposefully, fistlike masses of keys clashing on carabiner belt clips.

The woman at the front desk had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist: a unicorn, vomiting up a rainbow. I asked for Ellis Fletcher and she pointed me toward the woodshop.

Class was winding down, nine men and three women doing last-minute sanding or returning tools to wall racks. A dozen incomplete Shaker tables sat out, degrees of wonkiness attesting to the broad range of native ability. Anyone could, and did, enroll.

It was easy to spot Fletcher; he was the one eyeballing the surface of a tabletop, checking it for evenness while its maker looked on anxiously. Age was also a clue: mid-sixties, the only person there over thirty.

He wore a broadcloth button-down shirt tucked into Levi’s. Both belt and suspenders had been enlisted in the battle between pants and gut. I liked the gut’s chances. It had gravity on its side.

I waited till the last student had finished sweeping up to make myself known.

“Reverend Willamette said you might be by,” Fletcher said. His hand felt like one single callus.

“I saw you were scheduled to teach tonight,” I said.

“Wish you’d called first,” he said, settling on a work stool. “I could’ve saved you the trouble of coming down here.”

“You’re going to tell me you don’t know where Julian is.”

“I do not. Haven’t seen him in ages.”

For form’s sake, I asked how long, expecting the same answer I’d gotten from everyone I’d spoken to so far: more than ten years. But Ellis Fletcher said, “Hell,” and removed his cap, blue with VIETNAM VETERAN stitched in gold. He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Must be two or three years now.”

“No kidding,” I said. “That recently?”

He gave me a strange smile. “You call that recent?”

“No one else’s seen him since two thousand five,” I said.

Fletcher looked puzzled. “I — okay, I guess.”

“The pastor told me you let him come in to use the shop in off hours.”

“That was way back in the beginning,” Fletcher said. “Geoff said he had this boy, special case, would I show him the ropes. All right, why not, send him on over. For a little while Julian was here all the time. Then he sorta dropped out of sight.”

“When was that?”

He paused. “Come to think, right around when you said.”

“Oh-five.”

“That sounds about right.”

“But you did see him after that,” I said.

He slapped the cap against his knee, knocking loose a cloud of sawdust. “Not frequently. Once a year at most. He didn’t give me any warning, he’d just turn up. Like you.”

I smiled. “What did he come to see you about?”

“Nothing special. Showing his face, I think.”

“You’re the one he chose to show it to.”

The suggestion seemed to unsettle him. “If you say so.”

“His mother. His sister. Reverend Willamette,” I said. “They haven’t seen him. You must’ve meant a lot to him.”

“I really don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

Aware of his growing discomfort, I backed off a hair. “What’d you two discuss?”

“We didn’t ‘discuss’ anything,” he said. “That wasn’t the nature of the relationship. I’d ask him what he’d been building, so forth. You know, chitchat.”

He tugged the cap back on. “The man’s not one for talk.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Good with his hands, though.”

“Heard that, too,” I said. “Did he mention where he was living, or who with?”

“I always assumed he was with her. His mother.” Concern came into his face. “You’re here because he’s done something.”

“Not necessarily.”

“You’re here,” Fletcher repeated.

“I’m trying to be careful, Mr. Fletcher. Stay ahead of things. For Julian’s sake, as much as anyone’s. When he came by did he talk about having a job?”

“No.”

“Do you know how he got by?”

He shook his head.

“All right,” I said. “More generally, could you get a sense of where his head was at?”

Fletcher stared out the shop window, at the main floor. The presses and saws and lathes made a gruff but steady chant, oddly soothing. “I get these students,” he said, shifting on the stool, “kids. They buy everything on the internet. They don’t need to touch it first. You bet they never stopped to think how it got that way. Where it started from. It’s click click click click, until one morning they wake up starving and they don’t know why. They can’t put a name on it. It doesn’t have a name. So away they go on the internet again, click click click, until they end up in my class, asking me questions. They want to lock everything down in rules. ‘How do I know when to change the grit?’ ” He paused. “I do what I can. But I can’t make them feel.”

“And Julian?”

“Nothing was for show. He didn’t crave praise, or attention. He did what he did.”

“You taught him well.”

Fletcher shook his head. “Can’t teach talent. Intuition for the wood — you’re born with it or you’re not. I gave him pointers now and again. Showed him pictures or plans from my books and magazines. Most the time I just kept an eye out so he wouldn’t steal my tools.”

“You thought he might?”

“In the beginning, sure. All I knew about him is, here’s this kid just came out of prison. After a while I got to see him for who he was.”

“You know what he went to prison for.”

“I do,” he said and left it at that.

“Did he ever speak to you about the murder?”

“Never.”

“Did the name Walter Rennert ever come up?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Nicholas Linstad?”

“Him neither.”

“Did he ever talk about wanting to hurt anyone? Get revenge?”

“No,” Fletcher said. “You’re worrying me, Deputy.”

“Please don’t.” Yet. “Like I said, this is me being extra-careful.”

“Ounce of prevention,” he said.

I nodded.

He gave me a long look, let his features go slack. “Hell, you’re just doing your job.”

I wasn’t. But I appreciated his attitude.

Fletcher said, “Ask me, it’s hard to see him hurting anyone. Ever. Not by the time I met him.”

He raised his arm. “That was his table, in the back. He’d shove himself in there and put his earmuffs on, working by himself, not talking, not asking questions. Maybe I go over there to see how he is, and he shows me. But otherwise he does his thing in peace.” A crooked smile. “Big as he was, I sometimes forgot he was there.”

A chop saw howled, devoured, was satisfied.

“This way a second,” Fletcher said.

Exiting the shop, he led me past an emergency eyewash station and through a door marked STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT THANK YOU. He stopped at a stainless-steel trough sink to rinse his hands before heading down a row of school lockers. A pale young woman with black ear gauges and a purple Mohawk sat on the bolted bench, blotting her armpits with a hand towel. She waved to Fletcher, who acknowledged her with a salute.

His was the second-to-last locker on the left. He dialed in the combination. “I keep this around for when folks get in their heads they want me to make them something.”

The locker didn’t hold much: a crusty bottle of Gold Bond, a brown paper lunch sack, a spare shirt on the hook. From the shelf, he took down a photo album — not the twenty-first-century ready-made version, but crack-spined, with pocket pages housing three-by-five snapshots.

It was a portfolio of sorts, although it focused more on process than on results, documenting the creation of several pieces, step by step, from raw material to finished product. Fletcher himself hovered at the margins, like some almighty set of hands. He did beautiful work.

He flipped a page, put his finger down. “That’s him.”

I had yet to see a picture of Triplett as an adult. The Zhao murder file contained his mugshot, one of six in a photo array provided to Nicholas Linstad, who had circled him and written in the margin this is the person I saw outside Donna Zhao’s apartment building on 31-10-1993.

The photo in the album was a candid, taken while Triplett leaned over a plane.

He sure hadn’t grown up any smaller.

Wearing a gray hoodie. Same as the guy I’d chased. Same as the person Linstad spotted lurking near Donna Zhao’s building. The same gray hoodie found blood-soaked and wrapped around the murder weapon.

I said, “That his usual getup?”

Fletcher laughed softly. “I guess you’d call it his uniform. I told him he could keep it on as long as he left the hood down. So as not to obscure his peripheral vision, you know? Can’t have people bumping into each other, especially not someone his size. But he’d forget.”

“Is this the only photo you have of him?”

He paged forward, finding a second candid. Useless, because Triplett had spotted the camera and was averting his face, blurring his features.

I said, “He didn’t like having his picture taken.”

“You got that right,” Fletcher said. “Shy boy. Afraid of his own shadow, except when he got into the work.”

I pointed to the adjacent photo. “What’s that?”

Fletcher squinted. “The rocker? Julian made it. Based on a Hans Wegner design. I’d gotten him away from my stuff, away from Chippendale, the usual. I wanted him to have a broader notion of what was possible. Yeah, I forgot about that. He worked on it a long time. The original has a woven seat, but we didn’t want to start messing with caning, and the grain was nice, so we kept it plain mahogany. Real pretty. And that’s before we put the stain on. Finish it in cherry, you get some good depth of color.”

I said, “May I?”

He waved consent, and I slipped the print out of the sleeve. I turned it over to read the date printed on the back: Mar-19-03.

“Chairs were his thing,” Fletcher said. “He loved making them. Regular sitting chairs. The rocker was a one-off.”

I’d sat in one of Julian Triplett’s chairs, in the reverend’s office.

I’d seen the rocker, too, before. Or its twin.

“What’d he do with it?” I asked. “Did he sell it to someone?”

“I told him he should go around to the local stores, he could get some good money. He didn’t care, gave all his work away. Mostly we auctioned the pieces off. We do an auction every June, to raise money for this place.”

“This particular piece, though, the rocker,” I said. “Any idea who has it?”

“Shoot, I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

I nodded. “Mind if I borrow this? The ones of Julian, too. I’ll get them back to you, promise.”

He hesitated, then removed the prints from their plastic, taking a last look before handing them over to me. “You’ve seen it, now. He did some fine, fine work.”