Spook

3

On the walk back to the car I saw fewer homeless. Cold night, with a stabbing Pacific wind, and the temperature would drop another ten to fifteen degrees before morning. Many of the displaced were already forted up in shelters or warming themselves with hot meals in soup kitchens; the less fortunate had gone to sit around illegal fires in one of the encampments, or staked out building doorways where they could spread their blankets and sleeping bags. The ones who were still wandering the streets were the hardcore panhandlers and traffic beggars, the Street Sheet newspaper sellers, the drunks and addicts and petty thieves hunting a quick score, the mentally ill like Spook who existed in a twilight world haunted by demons and ghosts.

Every large city in this brave new world has a homeless problem, but San Francisco’s seems worse than most. Aggressive sweeps and innovative social service programs have made inroads in alleviating the problem in New York City and Seattle. In my city, however, there is polarization and paralysis caused by guilt, name-calling, political infighting, incompetence, and constant bickering among homeless advocates, the media, neighborhood watchdog groups, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, and the Department of Human Services. This year alone the city has shelled out well over a hundred million dollars on homeless expenditures. Nobody can agree on an exact figure because accounting procedures are lax; some earmarked tax money just seems to disappear into a bottomless pit. An estimated thirty million alone goes to pay for the jailing of homeless lawbreakers — an average of nearly a thousand arrests per night — and another three million or so for cleanup costs.

Everybody has an opinion, a solution, an agenda: All homeless are needy, disadvantaged folk who should be given aid regardless of who they are; many if not most homeless are part of a disorganized mob of drunks, drug addicts, crazies, criminals, and plain bums who feed off the system like parasites, destroying San Francisco’s beauty and damaging its tourist-based economy. Raise taxes to provide more money; quit throwing good money after bad. Sponsor a regional summit on homelessness. Improve conditions in existing shelters; build more shelters as New York City did by rehabilitating 30,000 units of tax-delinquent and abandoned buildings (blithely ignoring the fact that S.F. has little property-tax delinquency and abandoned buildings are virtually nonexistent). Ban panhandling on median strips, use ID cards and fingerprinting to track everyone who uses homeless services. Form a centralized intake system and hold city government agencies responsible for keeping accurate and detailed records of expenditures. Initiate a constitutional amendment to require the state to provide the mentally ill homeless with housing, health care, and food. Stop the free handouts and put the homeless to work clearing up graffiti, repairing vandalized bus shelters, and picking up trash. Set up a twenty-four hour hotline for citizen reports of public drinking, open-air toilet use, drug use, illegal camping, and excessive noise. Create “nautical shelters” by floating some of the fleet of World War II battleships mothballed in Suisun Bay down to the S.F. waterfront, and letting the homeless live on them while performing daily maintenance services.

Good ideas, bad ideas, silly ideas. And meanwhile tempers grew shorter and residents’ and visitors’ sympathies continued to erode in the face of escalating violence and incidents of public indecency.

My own sympathies lay somewhere in the middle. Compassion for the genuinely disadvantaged — those forced to live on the streets by circumstances beyond their control while seeking to regain a responsible lifestyle, the legion of mentally disturbed turned out of state-funded hospitals during the disastrous Reagan governorship and desperately in need of care and treatment. Zero tolerance for the professional panhandlers, Skid Row drunks, hardline junkies, abusive drifters and home-grown predators allowed to roam free on a city-sponsored, advocate-sponsored mandate. The difference between me and most other taxpayers is that I don’t have any easy answers. I want the problem fixed in the best way possible for all concerned, but I lack the knowledge, the tools, the wherewithal to help accomplish the task.

The job I’d just taken on for Steve Taradash didn’t make me feel any less frustrated or impotent. The homeless person called Spook was dead; there was nothing I or anybody else could do for him. Identifying him might help to ease Taradash’s conscience, but not mine. It meant my taking to the mean streets yet again, dealing with its denizens, and it figured to be a depressing experience no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

By the time I got to where I’d left the car, I knew I wasn’t up to it. Semiretired, promises to Kerry to back away from shadow-world cases, overload of empathy... a nice little bunch of rationalizations, maybe, but there they were. And if I needed one more, it was the fact that it might be necessary to talk to Joe DeFalco, since he’d have compiled a background file for his Spook article, and I was trying to avoid him as much as possible these days. He kept threatening, since I’d made the mistake of telling him about my semi-retirement, to write a feature about me and my career. The last thing I wanted was any more publicity of the hyperbolic variety he indulged in.

So I took the coward’s way out. I decided to pass the buck to the agency’s brand-new hire.

Jake Runyon was still home when I called his number on the car phone. I jumped right in, saying, “How would you like to start work tomorrow instead of on Monday?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said.

“Time and a half for weekends.”

“No problem either way. What’s the job?”

“ID and background check on a homicide victim. How do you feel about the homeless?”

“You mean in general?”

“In general, and any specific feelings you might have.”

“Some good people, some bad, like any other group. I feel for the genuinely hard-up. The system parasites... I can’t work up much sympathy. Why? The homicide victim homeless?”

“That’s right. You work many street cases for Caldwell?”

“No. They’re mainly high-tech and white-collar,” Runyon said. “But I spent a lot of years on the down-and-dirty end for the SPD. San Francisco’s streets can’t be much different from Seattle’s.”

“Not much, except that the homeless problem here is out of control.”

“So I hear. Political hot potato.”

“No politics involved in this case. Personal variety.”

“Who’s paying me bill?”

I told him who and why and as much as I’d learned about Spook from Taradash and DeFalco’s article.

“Robbery, grudge motive, or random shooting,” he said, “one of the three.”

“Probably. Not our concern, though, unless something shakes out during the ID investigation.”

“Suits me. I’ve had enough of that.”

“Okay, then. Meet me tomorrow around eleven-thirty at the office. I’ll brief you and then we’ll head over to Visuals, Inc. and I’ll introduce you to the client.”

I’ve had enough of that. Homicide investigation, he’d meant. But I thought that he’d also meant death, enough of death. Amen. I’d had enough of it, too, the professional kind and the personal kind. None in my life as painful as Runyon’s recent loss, but a few, such as Eberhardt’s, that had been bad enough. Spiritually we seemed to have a lot in common, Jake Runyon and me. Brothers under the yoke.

Kerry said, “You really have turned over a new leaf.”

“New leaf?”

“Giving this Spook case to your new man instead of handling it yourself. Isn’t it better being home on a cold December night than out on the streets?”

“I’ve already been out on the streets tonight. And I’d be home now even if I was handling the case. There’s no real work to be done until tomorrow.”

“You know what I mean. Don’t obfuscate.”

“Don’t which?”

“You also know what obfuscate means.”

“Sure do. Wanna obfuscate before dinner?”

“Smart-ass. You think he’ll work out all right?”

“Who?”

“Jake Runyon. He sounds like a man with problems.”

“Everybody’s got problems,” I said. “He’s dealing with his the best he can. Besides, he’s a pro. Tamara was right — best man for the job.”

Kerry pulled a face. “I can’t believe you wanted to hire a black man just because you thought it would make her happy.”

“That wasn’t the only reason, I told you that. Deron Stewart’s qualifications—”

“— weren’t quite as good as Jake Runyon’s. Which you also told me. Sometimes you try so hard to please, you don’t think things through.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You might have really offended her.”

“She wasn’t offended.”

“But she might’ve been.”

“Might’ve been doesn’t count. She wasn’t.”

Kerry said musingly, “She’s only twenty-five.”

“So?”

“I wish I’d been that smart and insightful at her age.”

“And you wish I was now, at my age.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t have to. Anyhow, you’re right. By the time she’s sixty-one she’ll probably have gone national, head up a dozen branches and be a multimillionaire.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. She has that kind of potential.”

“Whereas I never did.”

“I didn’t say that either. Are we feeling a bit gruffly tonight?”

“No, we’re not. Not if we don’t spend the evening picking on us.”

“If only you weren’t so pickable,” she said. Her face was straight, but her eyes said she was yanking my chain a little. All the women in my life — Kerry, Tamara, even Emily — seemed to take an unholy joy in deviling me now and then. The reason for it escaped me. Pickable. What makes somebody pickable, anyway?

We were in the living room with a wood fire going, white wine for her and beer for me. Emily was in her room with Shameless the cat, her door shut and locked; she’d disappeared in there as soon as she and Kerry walked in. Fast hug, peck on the cheek, and she was gone. I figured she was either working on her costume for her school’s Christmas pageant next week, or wrapping presents. She’d been carrying a big sack and wouldn’t let either of us see what was in it.

I drank some of my beer-flavored water. New Year’s resolution: Start treating myself to a better quality of beverage. The stores were full of local microbrews, among them some hoppy IPAs that people kept touting to me.

“Did you find out what Emily wants for Christmas?” I asked.

“Yes, she told me. Her fondest dream wish... her words.”

“And?”

“Her own cell phone.”

“What? At her age?”

“A lot of kids have them now.”

“Ten-year-olds going around ringing and yacking in public? Who do they talk to?”

“Friend’s, family. It keeps them connected.”

“Connected,” I said. “When I was a kid, we didn’t need to be jabbering on the phone to feel connected.”

“Did they have telephones when you were a kid?”

“Hah. Funny.”

“Well, you sound like an old fogey.”

“Maybe I am. But most people of my generation... our generation... turned out just fine without portable phones and pagers and handheld computers and all the other techno gadgets they have nowadays.”

“Times change, darlin’. Lifestyles change. Kids grow up a lot faster, and there’s a greater need for connection. It’s anything but a kind and gentle world out there, as I don’t have to tell you. Cell phones aren’t just for kids’ amusement, they’re for emergencies too. And to keep emergencies from happening.”

No way I could argue with that. “Okay,” I said. “Still, those things are expensive.”

“The one Emily wants is reasonable enough.”

“You mean she’s got a specific brand all picked out?”

“Oh, yes. The same kind Carla Simpson has. Nokia 3360, AT&T model. It comes with battery, charger, and headset, but she’s also lobbying for a couple of accessories.”

“What kind of accessories can a cell phone have?”

“A leather carrying case with belt clip, for one. And... let’s see... an extra face plate in either polar blue or Vesuvius red.”

“My God.” I took another hit of watery beer. “Just how much does all of that cost?”

“Under two hundred dollars.”

“Under two hundred. A bargain.”

“It’s not bad, really, at today’s prices. And it’s the only thing she’s asking for. I thought if you’d get the equipment, I’d pay the monthly rate for six months. If she doesn’t abuse the privilege, and consents to doing a few extra chores, then she can keep it for another six months. And so forth on that basis.”

“So you really think we ought to do this.”

“Well, it’ll grant her wish and teach her care and responsibility at the same time. Why not indulge her a little?”

I thought it over. Kerry was right. After all Emily had been through in her young life, the tragic loss of both her birth parents and the knowledge that they’d been living a double life, and the restructuring of her entire existence, she was entitled if any ten-year-old was. For the first few months she’d been with us, even though she’d wanted the adoption as much as we did, she had been frightened, withdrawn — a state worsened by a shooting incident that had nearly cost me my life. Lately, with both my life and our home life back on an even keel, there’d been positive signs that she was emerging from the crisis period, like a butterfly from its cocoon. She had started to make friends among her classmates at her new school — she and Carla were inseparable these days — and her grades were improving as well. She smiled more often, was more communicative. And she’d stopped sleeping with all the lights on in her room.

“Okay,” I said, “so we’ll play extravagant Santa this year. As long as she doesn’t expect to get expensive gifts every Christmas.”

“I don’t think she will.”

“What was that model number again?”

“Nokia 3360.”

“Right. Charger, headset, carrying case, and, uh, red or green face plate.”

“Vesuvius red or polar blue. And the charger and headset are included with the phone. You’d better write it all down.”

“I’ll remember.”

“No, you won’t. Write it down.”

“Later,” I said. “Now, how about you?”

“How about me what?”

“What do you want for Christmas, little girl?”

She smiled, then got up in that languid way of hers and came over and plunked herself down on my lap. “I already have everything I want, Santa,” she said.

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. I’m content.”

“Must be something you need or would like.”

She wagged her auburn head. “Your turn. What do you want for Christmas?”

“You to stop picking on me.”

“I don’t know, that’s a pretty tall order. What else?”

“Easy. You for the rest of my life, just like this.”

“Snuggled up in your lap?”

“Until my bones get too brittle to support the weight.”

“Well, I guess that’s do-able. Say another thirty years’ worth?”

“I’d settle for twenty.”

“Thirty, minimum,” she said and kissed me.

The kiss started out light and tender, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Never does with Kerry and me. We went at it enthusiastically for awhile, hanging on tight, before we came up for air.

And there was Emily, grinning at us from ten feet away.

“Boy,” she said, “you guys. Carla’s parents don’t do that anymore and they’re a lot younger.”

“Is that so,” Kerry said. “How do you know they don’t?”

“Carla told me.”

“And how does she know what her folks do when she’s not around?”

“She heard them talking once in their bedroom. Arguing, I guess. Her mom said she was glad it happened because she was tired of being pestered all the time.”

“Glad what happened?”

Emily said matter-of-factly, “Her dad can’t get it up anymore. But don’t tell anybody, it’s supposed to be a secret,” and then went skipping off into the kitchen.

Kerry and I looked at each other. She sighed and got slowly off my lap.

“Kids,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.