The Hunt Club

7

Snapping his fingers, Amy Wu's boss Dismas Hardy had told Wyatt Hunt that he could set himself up as a private investigator just like that. But it hadn't been exactly just like that. First Hunt needed to convince the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs that his time in the army as a member of the CID should count as the required education in police science, criminal law, or justice, and then that his years of work in the CPS gave him at least the equivalent of six thousand hours of investigative experience. Then there was his evaluation by the federal Department of Justice and the criminal-history background check. To say nothing of the two-hour written exam on laws and regulations. And finally the additional requirements for a firearms permit. All that took the better part of two months.

Then four years ago tonight, he had hung up the shingle.

Now he sat against the wall at a large round table in the power corner at Sam's, the classic restaurant and watering hole at Bush Street and Belden Alley. Fresh from a successful day locating a Piedmont dentist's nineteen-year-old daughter who'd dropped out of the USF dorms and moved in with her boyfriend in the Mission District, Hunt was the first one here for the anniversary party. Sitting alone at the table, he took a first sip of his Bombay Sapphire gibson and sighed with contentment.

He knew that in a few minutes he was going to be all but holding court with a high-energy, even slightly famous group of some of the city's most successful legal professionals. He wore a suit and tie. He could spout some of his high school Latin, his college French, and everyone would know what he'd just said-more, they wanted to know what he would say. They would be drinking fine wine and their waiter Stephano would call them all by their first names.

It almost seemed impossible. From where he'd been to here.

Hunt had been a foster kid in a succession of homes until he was eight when the then-childless Richard and Ann Hunt had miraculously decided to adopt him (and then proceeded to have four natural children of their own in short order).

When he opened his agency, there was never a question as to what he'd call it. In a practical sense, as a business name, The Hunt Club sounded substantial, as though a bunch of like-minded professionals hung out together and did good work. There might be fifty employees in an organization called The Hunt Club.

In fact, at first it was just him.

Next had come Tamara Dade. She and her brother Mickey were two of the very few kids Hunt had met in the course of his emergency work at CPS with whom he'd kept up. Tamara had looked Hunt up when she was about fourteen to thank him for saving her life back when she'd been Tammy and down to her last spoonful of peanut butter.

Beginning with that unexpected phone call, they'd stayed in touch with one another in a haphazard way. A few years ago, Hunt had attended her graduation from San Francisco State. After that, Tamara did some clerical work while she looked for a "real" job, but nothing exciting presented itself. Then Hunt opened his agency and found that business was good and he needed at least both an assistant and a part-time field guy. Now Tamara came in to the office every day, serving as receptionist, office manager, bookkeeper, secretary, and since she was going back to school in criminology and starting to log her investigatory hours, occasional partner. Though she was an efficiency machine in the office, she was even better getting her hands dirty in the field-totally fearless and a crackerjack interrogator in whom people naturally confided.

They weren't long in the business before Hunt had occasion to call on Devin Juhle for some classified DMV information he couldn't get through normal channels. Hunt got acquainted with some of the homicide guys' snitches, who tended to know where witnesses went to hide out. After that, Juhle and his partner Shane Manning had started to refer to themselves as Hunt Clubbers. Then one night when Hunt was over at Juhle's house for dinner-a regular occurrence-his wife, Connie, refused to put food in front of him until he made her a member as well.

After that, the whole thing took on a kind of insider's cachet. One evening Amy Wu had stopped into Lou the Greek's with Wes Farrell, one of the partners in her firm, for a drink while Hunt, Juhle, and Manning, already a bit in their cups, were working on the club's bylaws, in this case, formally adopting Will Ferrell's Saturday Night Live bit, itself based on the original Fishbone lyric, as their official club cheer-"U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you Ul-ly, hey, hey, you Ul-ly."

Naturally, Amy and Wes lobbied for admission. Hunt and the guys played hard to get. After all, what was the point of having a club unless there were standards? What could Amy and Wes bring to the party? Wes didn't hesitate. He unbuttoned his dress shirt and showed off the T-shirt he wore under it, on which were written the words,

EVERYTHING'S BETTER ON ANABOLIC STEROIDS.

"I wear a new one of these every day," Wes said. "I may have the world's most complete obnoxious T-shirt collection."

Nodding in admiration-Farrell passed the attitude test and was going to make the cut-Hunt and the cops turned to Amy.

She wiped away the tear that now somehow glistened on her cheek. "I have never, ever been in a club in my life," she whispered. "No one's ever let me join in. Oh, never mind, anyway." Obviously hurt, she turned, took a few halting steps away. Hunt, feeling awful, rolled his eyes and got up to undo some of the psychic damage if he could-after all, she was his friend, to say nothing of a significant source of his income. He gently put his hand on her shoulder. "Amy, we didn't mean…"

And she whirled around, beaming at him. "Are you kidding me?" she said. "You don't think people would kill to get me in their clubs?" She pulled him down and kissed his cheek. "Great liars are always in demand, Wyatt. You never know when you're going to need one."

Eventually, Amy hooked up with and was now engaged to Jason Brandt, another lawyer who worked mainly in the juvenile division but who made the club after he won a bet with Hunt that he could get the three of them into any Giants game any time they wanted without tickets or reservations. Or any other public concert, event, happening. Brandt didn't seem to understand why anybody ever paid or bought tickets to do anything. He told Hunt, who had come to believe it, that over the course of his senior-year summer-and granted, it had been before 9/11-he had toured the U.S. by commercial airliner, with stops in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, without buying one ticket.

Finally, Hunt hired another young stringer, Craig Chiurco, to help out with surveillance, and soon enough Chiurco and Tamara became an item. So now, since Shane Manning had been killed, there were eight of them-four, including Hunt, on the payroll-and another four irregulars who took the occasional break from their day jobs as lawyers and cops and even mothers to have a little fun on the edge of things, break up the routine.

This morning at the office, Hunt had given his employees each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. For the irregulars, the anniversary was a reasonably good excuse to have a dinner and a few laughs at Sam's.

Wes Farrell had grown out his hair again, though not as extreme as a few years before when it had gotten below his shoulders. Still, in a ponytail, the hair was a statement, like tonight's T-shirt he'd just shown everyone under his dress shirt that read, I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH. He was explaining that he generally preferred nonverbal statements, such as his hair.

"So what's with the hair, anyway?" Wyatt Hunt asked him.

"You don't like it?" Farrell, hurt, put a hand to his heart. "I've been working on it for weeks."

"I know. I love the hair. I do. It's just not exactly the standard lawyer look."

"Tony Serra has it," Amy Wu said, referring to the defense legend they'd once made a movie about. "Long hair, I mean."

"Tony Serra's not your run-of-the-mill standard lawyer," Hunt said.

Farrell took umbrage. "Nor, might I point out, am I."

"No," his girlfriend said, "that you're not." Samantha Duncan-no relation to the restaurant Sam's-put a hand over his and leaned over to answer Hunt. "And as for the statement, he's not cutting his hair until something makes sense. I tell him that's not going to happen until we've got a new administration in Washington." Sam was rather flamboyantly a Green Party person, which in San Francisco put her close to the mainstream, though not necessarily among this crowd of law enforcement types.

"Don't start, my love." Farrell covered her hand with his. "It doesn't have to be on the national front. A sign of anything making sense anywhere could propel me to a barber. But I see little evidence of it." Farrell looked around the table.

The dinner was going very well but hadn't exactly turned out to be the Hunt Club anniversary extravaganza that Hunt had originally billed it. Devin Juhle had pulled a huge case just this morning-a federal judge had been murdered-and he and Connie had had to blow it off. Hunt had reserved a table for nine, the empty chair for Shane Manning's memory and rather emphatically not for Juhle's new partner. When Amy had seen the crew from Trial TV-in for the current tabloid-fodder murder trial of Randy Donolan that was now in its sixth week at the Hall of Justice-which included her friend Andrea Parisi, she'd invited them to fill in the three open spots at the table. Now the party included Spencer Fairchild, the location producer; Parisi; and Richard Tombo, a black attorney, who along with Parisi worked as a talking-head expert on the trial.

"For example," Farrell said, pointing at Tombo, "if you, Rich, or Andrea, or both of you, actually do go large with Trial TV, that would make some sense."

"I'd make an appointment with your barber now, then," Tombo said. "Andrea's a lock for national anchor." He looked to his location man. "Isn't she, Spence?"

Fairchild tried not to wince. "As I believe I've mentioned, my friends, I just do local. This current Donolan circus ends in a couple of weeks, and I'm off to Colorado or Arkansas for the next hot trial. The big decisions are made in New York, not in the field."

But Brandt, always up to talk legal cases, got Fairchild off the hook. "You think Donolan's going two more weeks? I'm thinking after what he did on the stand today…"

Andrea Parisi finished applying her lipstick and looked at herself in the mirror in the women's room. She'd been trying not to think about yesterday and felt that she'd needed a couple of glasses of wine at lunch to keep her spirits up for the daily wrap-up broadcast. She and her producer and her male counterpart had had a little champagne in the limo on the way over here. In the past ninety minutes since they'd arrived, she'd had a vodka martini ("Belvedere, a little dirty, up") at the bar before they'd all sat down, then a glass of pinot grigio with her half-shell littlenecks, some Jordan cab (two glasses? three?) with the sweetbreads. She weighed 122 pounds and knew that she was probably legally drunk, although she felt fine.

She checked to make sure that the bathroom door was locked. Then, closing her eyes, she lifted her right foot slightly off the ground, touched the tip of her nose, and counted to five. Opening her eyes, she put her foot back down, and forced a bright smile at her reflection. "She sells seashells by the seashore," she whispered. She repeated it three times perfectly.

She would have bet that she'd be rock steady, and she was, but it never hurt to do a little inventory. Now she had verified for herself that she would easily be able to handle having some Amaretto or maybe, depending on her dinner partners, some Grand Marnier or a snifter of cognac with dessert. Then at least some of them would go around the corner to the cigar bar and have another round or two with their smokes, and she intended to be among them if that was the way the night went.

She took a last look, and something in her gaze held her for another moment. Oh, she supposed she was glamorous enough, to be sure. Her dark hair, a little below her shoulders, gleamed with red highlights-natural, thank you, since she was only thirty-one years old. A bridge of pale freckles rose off each smooth cheek and crossed a nose Modigliani might have painted. Perhaps in a technical sense her chin was too small, her lips too full, but for television, they were if anything a plus. Still, the mirror caught the trace of doubt, of what might be a flash of insecurity. At the corners of the startling green eyes, she saw a tiny web of worry lines form and then dissipate like an apparition. Leaning forward, she tried to see what was in those eyes that stared back at her. But there was no ready answer, and she couldn't stay in here any longer, not if she didn't want to call attention to herself as less than one of the guys, and she wouldn't do that. She would never let herself do that.

She pulled back, ran her tongue over her lips, over the bright red lipstick, and smiled at herself. A small sigh escaped, but she was unaware of it. "It's all good," she said aloud to her image. "Be cool. Don't push it." Now drawing a deeper breath, she steeled her shoulders, reached for the doorknob, and walked back out into the main dining room.

Hunt reached for his cabernet, brought the glass to his mouth, and a vision stopped him before he sipped. With the ongoing discussion into the fate of Randy Donolan playing in the background, he watched the sublime Andrea Parisi weave her graceful way back through the packed restaurant to their table. Because of his lucky seat against the front wall, she was going to be in his line of vision all the way.

The sound around him faded.

Dessert, and back with Trial TV. "Spence isn't leaving, anyway," Hunt said. "Not after the Palmer thing this morning hits. A federal judge gets shot, it goes national."

"But not right away," Farrell said. "Even if they find somebody and charge him, it won't get to trial for years."

"I'll bet a million dollars it's the prison guards' union," Brandt said. "He was going to shut 'em down; they took him out."

Farrell was shaking his locks. "Too obvious."

Wu agreed. "And the girl just happened to be there? I don't think so, Jason."

Tombo slugged back the rest of his wine. "Amy's right. We don't have to cherchez la femme here. She's already in it, the wife. She's going to be what it's about, guaranteed."

"Definitely the wife," Sam said. "She found out, confronted them, adios."

"Except I hear she wasn't home," Tombo said.

Sam shook an index finger. "You wait. It'll come out that she was."

"I'm with Sam," Fairchild said. "Either the wife did it, or she paid somebody."

"Any word on who the other victim is yet?" Wu asked.

Hunt realized that he probably had the latest news. "Devin says no. And even if he did know, he wouldn't tell me."

"Not even you, his close personal friend?" Brandt asked.

A nod. "I told him it didn't seem right and then cried a little, but it didn't work."

"Hunt breaks down," Wu said. "That I would like to see."

"Hey, now! That is so cruel." Hunt put a hand to his heart. "I cry. I feel things. I cry at Hallmark commercials, weddings. Sometimes I cry just for fun. Crying is the new laughing."

"I'll try it sometime," Wu said. "So how old was she? The girl?"

"Devin did know that," Hunt said. "Low twenties." Pause. "Palmer was sixty-three."

"Okay," Fairchild said, "now we're talking. That trial opens, every camera in America comes back to San Francisco. Especially if it's the wife."

"It's going to be the wife," Sam said again. "It's always the wife, except when it's the husband." She patted Farrell's hand next to hers. "That's the main reason Wes and I aren't married, in fact. So we don't kill each other."

Wu looked down at her engagement ring, then over to her fiancé. "I still want to get married," she said. "I promise not to kill you."

Brandt planted a peck on her cheek. "Me, too."

Tombo said, "You ought to put that in your vows."

Everybody had a laugh, and in the middle of it, Hunt glanced at Andrea Parisi, who seemed to be somewhere else until she caught him looking and put on a smile that was no less appealing for being so obviously forced.

Sam and Wes went home after dinner, while the rest of the party decamped to the Occidental Cigar Club, a short walk around the corner from Sam's, on Pine. The Occidental had a sign on its front door, THIS IS NOT A HEALTH

CLUB, for those oblivious to the clouds of cigar smoke who might otherwise have wandered in to work out, wearing their Lycra and sweatbands.

The Occidental's owners had figured a way to beat the city's stringent antismoking ordinances. No purveyor of alcohol, quoth the city fathers, could permit smoking in enclosed premises since secondhand smoke was unhealthy for the people who worked inside. The exception was where the owner of a small bar was the only employee of that bar. So at the Occidental, all the employees had a share of the business.

Hunt, sitting with Jason and Amy in the front window-they all had to work the next day-had backed way off on the alcohol during dinner and drank decaf coffee. Wu smoked a small Sancho Panza, and Hunt and Brandt smoked Monte Cristos.

Hunt's eyes kept returning to the bar. He saw that Fairchild, Tombo, and Parisi were now working on fresh rounds that came in snifters. Serious drinks. "They're going to be hurting tomorrow," he said.

Wu glanced over. "Andrea's been slamming 'em back all night, Wyatt, as if you didn't notice. She's going to be dying, but look at her now…"

"You don't have to tell Wyatt to look at her," Brandt said. "He's got that part down."

Hunt deadpanned him. "I'm facing them, Jason. Should I avert my eyes? Besides, there are far worse things to look at."

"Whoa, screaming endorsement," Wu said. "I'll tell Andrea you said that."

Hunt sipped his coffee. "I don't see my opinion impacting her worldview."

"Don't kid yourself," Brandt said. "She speaks very highly of you from time to time."

Hunt said, "I'm sure." Then trying to sound casual, "What does she say?"

Brandt blew some smoke. "She likes when you happen to meet up on your morning runs. Says it's often the high point of her day, just the two of you, puffing along the Embarcadero."

Hunt had been doing business with Parisi as the representative of her firm-Piersall-Morton-for nearly a year. He thought she was attractive enough, but the relationship was strictly professional. Then they had inadvertently met up during their respective jogs one morning a couple of months ago. Six A.M. in dense fog, Parisi telling him she didn't realize he was as much an idiot as she was. He'd run with her until she turned off at Bay, neither of them saying much.

Since then, it hadn't been inadvertence. Now most mornings, Hunt left his place at the same time and ran the same route, and without ever discussing it, they'd met up more than a dozen times. He never considered that she might have been timing it herself.

"What does she like about it?" Hunt asked.

"You don't hassle her," Wu said.

"That's true enough. I don't think I've said a hundred words to her."

"That's what she likes," Brandt said. Obviously, he and Wu had talked about this. "You treat her like a normal person."

"She is a normal person," Hunt said, his eyes flicking over to the bar again, "in sweats with her hair up." He lifted his chin, indicating the media trio. "But that person over there, that's not a normal person. That's a star."

"Well," Brandt said, "she's that, too. Although I don't think she's as happy with that or committed to being that person."

"She doing a great imitation, then," Hunt said.

"She's trying to figure it out." Wu exhaled smoke. "I mean, can't you see the attraction? New York. Fame and glamour. On TV every day. Huge bucks. You know what she's been making all this time she's been doing Donolan?"

"I guessed minimal," Hunt said. "I thought mostly it was advertising for her firm."

Brandt shook his head. "Nope."

"She started at five grand a week," Wu said, "and got great ratings. Now it's twenty."

Hunt nearly choked on his drink. "Twenty thousand dollars a week? For three sound bites a day if she's lucky?"

Brandt said, "She goes to New York, it's five hundred K a year-and goes up fast."

"Which," Wu added, "beats seventy hours a week with Piersall."

"It beats anything I've ever heard of," Hunt said. He took in the scene at the bar. "No wonder she's hustling it."

"Well." Wu, almost wistful, turned her head to look. "But as you say, she's a normal person at heart." Over at the bar, as they watched, Parisi clinked glasses with Fairchild, and her wonderful contralto laugh carried across the room. Wu sipped her espresso. "I'm just afraid she's fighting herself."

Hunt leaned in closer to Wu. "What do you mean?"

"She wouldn't have to tank herself up so much if it came easy. I mean the big personality, the star stuff. You don't need to drink that much if you're happy, Wyatt. Believe me, I know whereof I speak."

Hunt had his eyes on Andrea. "Maybe she's just partying."

"Maybe," Wu admitted, "but when I was partying like that not so long ago, I wasn't happy. I was hiding."

"And I found you," Brandt said.

She lifted his hand and kissed it. "And thank God you did."

"You guys should get a room," Hunt said.

Brandt's hand moved over Wu's back. "Maybe we should," he said.

Again Parisi's laugh carried over to them. At the bar, they seemed to have ordered yet another round and clinked their glasses again.

A half hour later, Wu and Brandt were gone. His cigar finished, Hunt got up to leave at the same time they did, but after stopping by the bathroom on his way out, he caught another glimpse of Parisi at the bar. Without conscious thought, he boosted himself up onto an empty stool against the wall in the back corner, where he was all but invisible.

Tombo was gone, too. It was just Fairchild and Parisi, heads close to each other. From the suddenly drawn and empty look on Parisi's face, Hunt found it hard to imagine her laughing about anything. She turned her face away from Fairchild, and the bar's dim amber light reflected off the line of her cheek, and Hunt realized with a start that he was looking at the track of a tear and that she was crying.

Fairchild was leaning over, in toward her, when in a flash, she straightened and turned back to him. Her hand moved in a blur. At the same instant, Hunt heard the bitterly angry "Fuck you!" that brought the bar to a sudden silence along with the report of the slap against Fairchild's cheek. Again, "Just fuck you, Spencer!"

And then she was off her stool and moving unsteadily around the end of the bar to the front door. In the tense silence, Hunt heard a throaty sob escape as she pushed the front door open roughly enough to slam it against the side of the building. Outside, she stood for a half second, looking both ways, and then turned to her right and began to run.

Hunt was on his feet before the door closed, out onto the sidewalk and after her. She had less than a hundred feet on him. The sound she was making echoed between the downtown buildings. She seemed almost to be wailing-a continuous if staccato moaning punctuated by her footfalls. Hunt called her name and broke into a run after her.

Before the next corner, the street fell off more sharply and Parisi's voice rose in a startled yelp as she pitched forward, went down, and rolled to a whimpering stop into the gutter on Montgomery Street. In seconds, Hunt was next to her, trying to turn her over, see if she was all right.

But hearing a man's voice, her eyes clouded with tears and she lashed out at him wildly, screaming, "No! No! No! Leave me alone."

He didn't let her go but held her as she struggled against him. "Andrea, it's okay. It's okay. It's Wyatt."

Parisi, struggling against him, saying, "No, no, no, no."

"It's Wyatt, Andrea. Let's get you up."

"Can't." Closing her eyes, "Going to be sick."

Her body began to spasm. Hunt turned her head and held her as she lost her last couple of drinks and most of her meal.

"Okay," he said, "it's okay. Just let it go. You'll be all right."

When she seemed to have finished, he pulled off his tie and cleaned her face with it, leaving it in the gutter. Getting her to her feet, he backed her away from the curb. Her purse had flown away from her on her fall and was now in the middle of the street. He set her down against the nearest building while he went to get it. When he came back, her eyes were closed, her breathing ragged. Going into a squat, he touched her cheek.

"Andrea, can you hear me?"

She barely moved.

"Do you think we can get you home?"

No response.

He opened her purse, found a wallet, opened it up for her address. She lived someplace on Larkin Street, which ran way the hell up to the north end of the city. Hunt looked at his watch-nearly midnight. For all of its congestion during the workday, this time of night Montgomery was deserted. No cars had passed the whole time he'd been here.

Now he saw a cab on its way toward them. He got to the side of the road, put his hand out. The cab pulled up and stopped, and Hunt went to the driver's window. "My girlfriend's had too much to drink," he said, pointing over to Parisi. "If you can just give me a minute."

The cabbie was a middle-aged black man in a Giants cap and jacket. "You need some help?" he asked.

In a minute, they had her in the backseat, passed out.

"You want to take her to emergency?"

Hunt almost said yes, then decided that it might cause her more trouble. She was breathing. She'd had way too much to drink, but she wasn't going to die. And the emergency room meant complications with her job and her TV work. He didn't want to cause her any further problems. He just wanted to get her through this.

"I don't think so. Just home." He gave his address.

The cabbie turned the corner and stepped on the gas.