I followed a dark hallway back into the interior of the building with Liz shouting for me to stop and calling out the name Scott repeatedly.

  By the time I got to a large open area that was a combination of a playroom and children’s library, a man rolled into the room from an adjacent area.

  Yes, I said “rolled.” He was in a wheelchair.

  “Scott?” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, his hands rising, his fists clenched. Scott was older, likely in his fifties, and looked to be quite tall. He had a lean, wiry look to his face and upper body, but had a modest paunch resting on his lap. His chin and gaze projected firmness and strength.

  He wore a gray pullover sweater, dark blue jeans, and thick black socks without shoes.

  I held up my hands, palms outward. “There’s been a shooting, and I followed the suspect here. I heard the outside door open, and he disappeared inside.”

  Scott looked over my shoulder at Liz.

  “I’ve been out front the whole time. I didn’t let anyone in.”

  “I think the suspect had keys to the place,” I said.

  “No way. Nobody came through that door. Nobody ever does this time of night, except for a child every once in a great while. I’ve been here for three hours and never left the front office.” Liz was determined to remain uncooperative. Maybe she was right, considering the vulnerabilities of her charges.

  She did sound convinced and convincing, but I was having none of it. “Lookit, I heard someone enter. I mean no harm to anyone here, but the singer at the Black Canary has been wounded, and I need to search this place to make sure the shooter isn’t hiding here.”

  “Where are the police?” Scott asked, the grip in his hands loosening. He laid them back down on the rubber wheelchair armrests.

  “On the way. But every moment counts. By the time they get here, the suspect might be long gone. Please, help me.”

  Scott again glanced at Liz, then nodded. His gaze returned to me and he said, “I’m the Executive Director here. We do this my way. Right?”

  I nodded, and he spun the wheelchair with the skill of a NASCAR driver. I followed him farther back into the building.

  There wasn’t all that much to search. There were a total of three other small offices, and we quickly determined no place to hide in any of them. I checked a couple of closets, feeling foolish. I didn’t find any black hoodies hanging from swaying coat hangers.

  The only remaining rooms to check were the children’s dormitories. There were two—one for girls, the other for boys.

  Liz was dead set against letting me into either of them, telling me the children were sound asleep, had suffered enough trauma in their lives, and a big, strange man at night might induce even more nightmares.

  I know how damn scary I am, but I convinced Scott that I’d be quiet as a church mouse and tiptoe my way quickly through the tulips. My argument that it would be irresponsible to risk a murderer possibly lurking in the children’s bedrooms seemed to make some kind of sense to him.

  There was room for as many as twenty children stacked in bunkbeds in each room. The boys room currently held seven, and the girls nine. Once again, the search didn’t take long. There weren’t many hiding places. The spaces under the bunkbeds were too tight for even a rat, let alone a human being. I gave each berth a quick once over. All the children, save one little girl of about eight, were fast asleep. The little girl, startled awake as I walked by, sat up in bed staring at me with wide terrified eyes. Scott immediately went to her, whispered in her ear while petting her shoulder, and in a few seconds, she laid back down and closed her eyes.

  As I exited the children’s rooms, which lined the back wall of the building, I noticed a small kitchen area featuring a small, round granite table with two more fine leather chairs, a spanking new microwave, a fancy, gold-plated espresso machine like the kind you see behind coffee bars in Rome, a water cooler, and a wall full of built-in teak cabinets.

  The place didn’t seem to be your typical non-profit social service agency, struggling to get by with minimal funding. Some of the accoutrements here rivaled what you’d find at a fancy downtown law firm.

  I noticed a sturdy back door with a deadbolt lock.

  “Where does that go?” I pointed at the door.

  “Out to an alley. It’s where we put our garbage for pickup. Leads back out to the street.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  He looked up at me from his wheelchair perch and shrugged.

  I didn’t wait for a full approval. I moved to the door, slid open the deadbolt and stepped out into a narrow alleyway framed by a high wooden fence. Two dumpsters and one large rubber garbage can sat to the right of the entrance. To the left, the dusky street led to a roughly six-foot-high concrete barrier with another door that was currently propped open. I trotted the fifty or so feet to the door and had a looksee. It opened out onto the greater world.

  If the shooter escaped through the Children’s Network offices, as I was sure he did, he probably disappeared here. Someone had locked the deadbolt behind him.

  I returned to the offices, thanked Scott, and nodded to Liz, who gave me a disgusted look, and took my leave.

  I searched the rest of the triangle, jogging past a half-dozen trucks and semis and a eighteen wheeler, to the end of the alley letting out to Quint Street. There was another wall fencing in the area, and it was pretty high, but scalable by any desperado running for his life, so the shooter could have escaped that way too.

  But I didn’t think so.

  As I jumped back down from the wall onto the alley fronting the Black Canary, I found myself facing two members of San Francisco’s finest pointing Sig Sauer revolvers at me.

  I put my hands up high and let them spin-tumble-dry-me until they were satisfied I wasn’t armed. I told them who I was as enigmatically as I could get away with, and gave them the short version of my story, finishing with the fact that Q, among others at the club, could vouch for me. When I mentioned the Children’s Network and my investigation there, they both frowned on cue.

  Most cops don’t much like guys like me. They consider what I do to be amateur hour or vigilante interference.

  I’ve found that you can’t please all the people all the time.

  A life lesson you can take to the bank and deposit, and it’ll pay you compound interest.

  They escorted me back to the club none too politely.

  By the time we got back to the Black Canary, an ambulance had taken Sarah away, and cops had blanketed the club like a plague of cranky locusts.

  One officer kept me cornered while the other huddled with Q and the bartender. Q looked up from the officer a couple of times and glanced in my direction, but his expression stayed expressionless.

  After a few minutes, the officer talking to Q turned and nodded at the cop guarding me, who then muttered, “Okay. Detective Marley will need to speak with you.” He dragged a chair over and said, “Sit down there and don’t move till I come get you.”

  “Do you have any idea how the singer is doing?” I asked.

  “Do I look like a doctor?”

  “Now that you mention it...”

  “Just sit down and shut up.”

  “Yes, sir,” I barked, mimicking a buck private’s response to a surly drill sergeant.

  He had his back turned to me, and my tone of voice stopped him in his tracks. He pivoted, shot me a look, and said, “You being a smart ass, asshole?”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t use ass and asshole in the same sentence, at least not so close together. I don’t know that it’s grammatically incorrect, but it just doesn’t hit the ear in a pleasing manner.”

  “Fuck you.” He looked like he’d like to smack me one. I do have a knack for bringing out the best in people.

  “Sticks and stones,” I murmured.

  “Fuck you,” repeated, hammering his point home before leaving me all alone.

  Detective Marley and I sat at the table in the front of the club that Felix and Stanley had used for their card game.

  He was a small man in every sense of the word. He couldn’t have been over five foot three and had a small head, tiny ears, a snippet of a nose, and smaller than average eyes in his small face. The biggest thing about him was the chip on his shoulder.

  “I don’t understand why you chased after the suspect. You didn’t even know the girl. You didn’t know anybody here. You just a hero at heart or some kind of vigilante wannabe?”

  “Hmmm,” I said, touching my finger to my lips and looking up at the ceiling reflectively. “Let me think...hero at heart or vigilante wannabe? Tough choice. Can I get back to you later?”

  Marley shook his head as if he couldn’t believe a jerk off like me was sitting in front of him. So, he doubled down on sassiness. “Couldn’t get a date or do you go out all by your lonesome often to hear music?”

  “Jeez, Detective, you’re a master at confusing me with your dual choice conundrums.”

  “Lookit, asshole, a woman has been shot. She may not make it. You want to keep on joking around, maybe we can take you down to the precinct and let you entertain the other inmates with your jokes.”

  “You’re sending little shivers up and down my spine, Detective.”

  “What the hell were you doing here tonight, and why did you chase down a suspect?”

  Despite my inclinations, I decided to try to be reasonable. “I’m doing some investigative work for a client, which involves a couple of people at the club.”

  “You’re a P.I.?”

  “No.”

  “What are you then?”

  Not the first time somebody’s asked me that. “It’s complicated. I help people out sometimes. Strictly personal.”

  “That’s peachy, Plank. So, what’s this investigation all about?”

  “Sorry. Not at liberty to discuss it. I’m not trying to be difficult, but I can’t get into it without my client’s approval.”

  “You’re treading awfully close to the line here. Maybe hauling you in front of a judge for impeding a police investigation would help you see things right.”

  “C’mon, Detective. This isn’t about me and my asking a few questions. Have you sent officers to that Children’s Network? I’m telling you the suspect disappeared there.”

  “You telling me how to do my job?”

  I sighed. “Wouldn’t think of it. Just telling you what I know. You’re talking to all the others here. They know as much as I do. We all heard the shot and reacted. I don’t know anything more about it. I chased the suspect but didn’t catch him. Didn’t see his face. I told you what he was wearing. Don’t have a clue as to his or her motivation. As you said, I don’t know the singer or anyone else here.”

  It went back and forth like this for a while before Marley decided he’d had enough. He told me to stay right where I was until they finished talking to all the witnesses.

  After almost an hour, Q showed up at my lonely table. He sat down with a weary sigh. His eyes studied the table; his fingers gripped the edges.

  “You okay?”

  “Fuckin’ life,” he muttered under his breath.

  I put my hand on his arm. “Have you heard anything about Sarah?”

  “They haven’t told me a damn thing. Probably don’t know. They won’t let me go yet.”

  “What hospital did they take her to?”

  “San Francisco General is what the ambulance guys told me.” For the first time, he looked up and into my eyes. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the past hour. He closed his eyes.

  “Any idea who might have done this?”

  He opened his eyes. “Everybody loves Sarah. She ain’t got an enemy in this godforsaken world.”

  “You haven’t noticed anything unusual lately? Anything different about how she’s been acting? Anybody hanging around here that, thinking about it now, didn’t seem right, didn’t seem like they belonged?”

  “Police just asked me the same kinds of things. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I got to get out of here and go see about Sarah.”

  “Okay.”

  “You got a phone on you?”

  I reached in my coat and handed him my cell phone.

  “Hate these things,” he said, looking at it as if it might bite him. “How the hell you dial it?”

  “Here, let me do it.”

  He placed the phone back in my palm and gave me a number. I punched it in and handed the phone back to him.

  He brought it to his ear, and a moment later, I heard a woman’s voice. Q said, “Phoebe, honey, sit down, won’t you. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. I need you to get on over to the General Hospital...what...I don’t know...it’s Sarah, honey, she’s been shot...shit...yes...”

  While I listened, my heart pounding, my adrenaline spiking again, I thought back to forty-eight hours before and what had brought me here tonight in the first place to question a woman who, by the lights of her friends here, was a much different person from the evil femme fatale my client had described.

  Three

  That crisp, cool, September morning, Alexandra woke me up with a call as she was getting on a plane to London. She reminded me that I was responsible for picking up Frankie at school and, by the way, she was already missing me.

  I told her I missed her, too. Which was a little white lie.

  At that very moment I didn’t miss her, but knew I would soon enough.

  Through my porthole, I could see that it was shaping up to be a lovely day with a clear blue sky.

  I was ensconced in the cabin of my houseboat, Acapella Blues, a fully-reimagined World War II lifeboat, docked at the end of a rotting gangway on Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, when, for some reason, some old lyrics started playing through my mind.

  Some days are diamonds.

  Some days are stones.

  I tried to recall the song they came from.

  It took me a few seconds to remember the singer, John Denver.

  I’d been dragged to one of his concerts by a golden-haired female I was hankering after. Her devotion to the still boyish troubadour almost put me off her, but she was an otherwise exuberant woman, an entomologist fascinated by parasitic wasps. Come to think of it, that alone should have warned me away. But in the several months of our sporadic affair, she enlightened me to the point of a strange affection for the benefits of a species that laid their eggs in the bodies of unwitting hosts.

  Besides, I couldn’t resist her name, Veronica, or her long, lithe form.

  To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed the show and felt a pang of loss at the singer’s demise, as this was only a few months before Denver died crashing his experimental glider into the Pacific Ocean.

  Far Out.

  But Denver didn’t write the song, which was penned by a country singer named Dick Feller, who, later in life, admitted to being a transgendered human now living as a woman.

  Some days are diamonds.

  Some days are stones.

  My unexpected visitor put a damper on my immediate plans, but I had to admit that her case was not altogether unwelcome, although I wished I could turn her offer down.

  The woman facing me at the breakfast table reminded me of my aunt Florence. She had stiff-slick silver hair, high cheekbones in the early stages of collapse, a very large irregularly-shaped nose, and triangular diamond-studded earrings swaying back and forth from her tiny ears as she gesticulated, explaining her problem.

  She was dressed beautifully with an air of preciseness about her, but, for the sake of accuracy if not generosity, she was not a beauty. Those cheekbones, which often form the base of classic beauty, in her case clashed with otherwise blunt facial features. Big nose, small eyes, pinched brow, and thin, judgmental lips.

  I hadn’t much liked Aunt Florence, who was a beautiful woman but always seemed to subtly convey the notion that her family was wealthier and more accomplished than my own. The fact that it was true only served to aggravate more. But I wasn’t going to judge my new potential client negatively for her unwitting resemblance to my hardly dear, now departed aunt.

  As I listened to Mrs. Wambaugh with one ear, I kept the other alert for any sign of dinner, the tell-tale click of the fishing rod shoved in a tube off the stern of the boat. My eyes took in her dangling earrings.

  Earrings have always fascinated me. Whoever thought of decorating ears?

  “So, do you think you might be willing to look into this for me, Mr. Plank?”

  I pursed my lips, mimicking a mind in deliberation. “Perhaps, Mrs. Wambaugh.”

  “Money is not a consideration.”

  People like Mrs. Wambaugh had obviously transcended the needs and wants of the average mundane life. Most people, even in prosperous but declining America, were stuck on the lowest level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, enmeshed in the struggle to breathe, feed, have sex, and excrete. If Mrs. Wambaugh had ever had any trouble with any of those, I was sure that they were minor skirmishes, quickly dispatched, before effortlessly moving on to higher ground.

  She’d most likely been born to money, or married it. She didn’t look the entrepreneurial type to me.

  Nevertheless, I’d been idle for too long. I’d been turning down offers for many months, ever since my encounters with the unsavory characters in Frankie’s case.

  Perhaps because Frankie lived with Alexandra now, and I was, more or less, a surrogate dad, I still thought of the case often. I couldn’t seem to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

  Maybe I should have taken something else right away as it was unlikely I would meet a similar cast of ne’er-do-wells. Alas, my nature tends toward avoidance rather than confrontation. At least until I’m fully engaged.

  But now I was a little on edge. For too long I’d been out of the fray, floating along on calm waters. I was getting a bit rough around the edges, loose in the cage, accustomed to ease.

 

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