The Man on the Washing Machine Read online

  “You know my store opens at ten, but you don’t know my address?” She waited, pencil poised, eyes on me with the kind of resolution that could wear away mountains. I gave her my address.

  She raised her voice slightly. “Did anyone else see anything at all?” She passed an eye over our dispirited group and apparently found us wanting.

  “I heard him scream, looked out, and there he was,” Helga said. She glanced over at Kurt and then down at her pink Crocs. Kurt and Sabina said much the same thing. Lichlyter wrote it all down.

  Davie shifted his grip on the broom in his hand and gave me a worried look. Lichlyter frowned slightly at the broom, closed her battered notebook, thanked us all with a touch of irony, and went to confer with her colleagues. They stood back respectfully as she joined them. They had everything necessary to record the scene, from iPads and tiny video cameras to laptops, and I wondered why she bothered with the notebook.

  They let us leave eventually. Sabina suggested we all go to Helga’s for coffee. I gave her big eyes and she looked away quickly, hiding a smirk with a splutter and a cough. Inviting us all to coffee as if we were some new book club she’d organized earned her some shit later on and she knew it. Kurt left without responding. He smiled absentmindedly at Helga, who watched him walk away. She pulled herself together and she and Sabina headed in the direction of her coffee shop.

  Davie had to go to school and I went to Aromas, where Haruto pumped me for details of what he insisted on calling our police grilling. Haruto looked like a hippie Mikado and lived in my middle-floor apartment. He’d been working for me a couple of days a week in the store. Before I went inside I heard Lichlyter’s harsh voice tell a uniformed officer to arrange a search for Tim Callahan’s missing paintbrush.

  Within hours—gossip traveling at twice the speed of light—we all knew Tim had been hired by a new tenant to paint the inside of number twenty-three. Tim’s paintbrush wasn’t found, although the yellow paint in the attic room had been wet.

  Inspector Lichlyter telephoned. She asked me odd questions, as if she was hoping to surprise me into saying something new. I told my bald little story twice more, but it didn’t seem to discourage her. Without knowing why I felt anxious about it, I reminded her that Davie had seen me up on the third floor a couple of minutes before Tim’s accident.

  She said: “Ah?” but that was all the reaction I got.

  She asked me about Davie, and whether I had definitely seen him in the yard at the time Tim Callahan fell. I insisted, with more emphasis each time she asked, that I had, although in truth there were several minutes between when I saw him and when Tim fell to his death. That’s the horrible thing about police investigations—and believe me, I know. Everything suddenly has grave significance and the difference between “now” and “a few moments ago” feels like an hour. By the time she hung up I was covered in sweat. I couldn’t decide if I should be more worried about Davie or about myself. Before I had time to decide, he climbed heavily up my back stairs.

  “Hey, Theo,” he said.

  I knew he was nervous about going home, where by this time of night his father would be drinking and waiting to pick a fight.

  He sat on the kitchen floor picking at his thumbnails while I heated a couple of cans of chili. Canned chili is Davie’s favorite food. He says his mother used to fix it for him. I sometimes wonder how he grew so big and strong on a childhood diet of canned chili and Dr Pepper. I usually try to feed him some vegetables, but I couldn’t summon the energy to steam broccoli. We ate the stuff with corn tortillas torn into pieces with our fingers. Davie sat on the floor and I perched uncomfortably on an upturned spackle bucket.

  “Did she ask you anything else?” Lichlyter had called him, too.

  “Sure. She asked if I’d ever argued with Tim. But don’t worry,” he said. “I told her the truth.”

  That gave me a jolt on several levels. I thought she would only ask him about what he’d witnessed; she hadn’t asked me much more than that. “You told her you worked for Tim?”

  “Yeah. And I told her Tim cheated me and wouldn’t pay me, the asshole.”

  My fault—I asked Tim to hire Davie before I noticed the missing earrings. “I remember. Did you—did she ask anything else?”

  “I told her Tim and I had a fight and Tim hit me.”

  My fault again—Davie got my mother’s earrings back for me. “Did you tell her you didn’t hit him back?”

  “Sure. Don’t worry. If I hit him, he wouldn’t get up again.” He grinned.

  “Don’t say things like that to her, okay?”

  I told him everything would be fine and hoped I wasn’t lying. He hung around helping me shift lumber and drop cloths out of my bedroom until nearly eleven, by which time his father was usually unconscious and Davie could get into their apartment unnoticed. I went to bed and, as usual, didn’t sleep.

  * * *

  So nothing much was different about the day Tim Callahan died. He was a petty thief and a bully, and I couldn’t think of anyone who would miss him. But it was pretty clear Lichlyter thought he’d been shoved from that third-story window, which meant intense police scrutiny for all of us, which meant our secrets might no longer be our own, which meant my life was going to be even more complicated than it was already.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A friend of mine says she becomes a different person every few years. I think she means it literally—she lives in a Northern California ashram—but I’ve noticed the same thing about myself. University flunk-out, society bubblehead, celebrity photographer—I’d worn a series of personalities. But I’d never literally become a different person until I survived the worst time of my life.

  The day after my father somehow managed to hang himself in his temporary cell at the Old Bailey during his murder trial, I fled my home in London with a swarm of paparazzi on my trail, willing to pay anything for a ticket on the first plane flying anywhere English was spoken. On a different day, I might have ended up in Australia or East Africa. Instead, nearly staggering with jet lag and emotional overload, I registered at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton under an assumed name and didn’t stir from my room for three days. When I felt the trail was cold, that photographers weren’t going to be jumping out of the lobby palm trees (and believe me, the irony was not lost on me), I began to walk the hilly city streets. For three more days I walked, falling into bed late at night, exhausted and aching and mentally blank. On the fourth day I raised my head sometime before dark and saw a For Sale sign on an empty storefront.

  I had no idea where I was—it turned out to be the nicer end of Polk Street, away from the rent boys and SRO hotels farther south—but it didn’t matter anyway. I don’t know why the building interested me. It was in terrible shape; most of the wood was bare where the paint had simply cracked and fallen away. Window boxes full of dead grass hung at each of the four upstairs windows and a rambling rose with no blooms but plenty of thorns smothered most of the street level. The rose was flourishing somehow in a broken brick planter full of old coffee cups and evidence that the neighborhood was home to at least a couple of dogs. The jewelry store on one side and the gourmet chocolate store on the other looked busy and prosperous; same for the produce place and the dry cleaner opposite. This ugly, derelict building was the neighborhood blight.

  I rubbed a peephole in the dirty front window and saw an empty retail space with shelves around the sides and a counter at the back. I remembered something my grandfather once said, when he was urging me to buy a highly charged Thoroughbred he approved of: “It might be a risk, Theophania, but impulsive isn’t necessarily the same as imprudent.” I wasn’t exactly feeling impulsive, but mildly curious and grateful to be feeling anything, I called the number on the For Sale sign and the Realtor hotfooted it over there to meet me within ten minutes. Her eagerness was understandable once she led me inside; it clearly hadn’t been occupied in a very long time. She described it as being in “original” condition.

  “Probate,”
she said. “The heirs were split on whether to sell and then couldn’t decide on an asking price. It’s been empty for seven years. If you decide to open a business here, the neighborhood will welcome you with open arms.”

  When I didn’t respond she glanced down at my Christian Louboutins and smoothly changed gears. “And it’s a great investment property. A few improvements and you’d have a real jewel. Rents here are sky high.” She walked me through the pair of full-floor flats, the garage with its entrance on a side street, and the studio apartment behind the retail shop on the ground floor. She clearly thought the cracked, sooty fireplaces and the pitted claw-foot tubs were desirable features instead of expensive renovations waiting to happen. I opened a small door high on one wall and shut it hastily on a jumble of fabric-covered wires and round glass fuses.

  Ten minutes into the tour it was time to shut things down. I had no idea what I was doing anyway. Before I could get the words out, she seemed to sense I was done. She led me down the outside back stairs into a small, dirty paved yard and through a tangle of head-high shrubs blocking a narrow pathway. I assumed it led to an access alley behind the buildings and that we would soon be back on the street where I intended to thank her for her time and get back to the Ritz-Carlton. Instead I sidled through a broken gate into a different world. Blooming flower beds, trees, a pond with floating lilies, a neat vegetable garden, a set of children’s swings—it was unexpected peace and order, a haven, a sanctuary.

  In a change of heart that should have given me whiplash, the city block of small apartment buildings and retail stores with their faces to the busy street and their backs to a hidden park was suddenly and urgently irresistible. That same evening I e-mailed my grandfather in England. He sent me a chunk of my mother’s estate and a letter full of admonitions and reservations, all of which I ignored and later wished I hadn’t. His solicitor made a connection for me with an American lawyer with the unlikely name of Adolphus Pratt who practiced in a large law firm in the city’s Financial District. He was expensive, efficient, and discreet and handled the purchase through a corporation he set up for me to avoid revealing my name or my identity to the sellers. Before the end of the month Safe Haven Enterprises and “Theophania Bogart” owned a ramshackle building in Fabian Gardens. I hired a local architect who got the entire building rewired, set up with Wi-Fi, and largely replumbed before I left the Ritz-Carlton six weeks later. I paid for quick results and I got them. There was still a lot to do in the way of surface repairs, built-ins, and some painting, and the kitchens and bathrooms needed gutting, but at least I could take a hot shower, use my laptop, and even cook a meal without setting the place on fire.

  Aromas came about almost by accident while I was still wandering around like a shadow in my new neighborhood. I was camping in the building, making life bearable if not luxurious with an Arctic sleeping bag and some backpackers’ supplies from the big sporting goods store down the hill. It wasn’t the Ritz, but that was okay with me. The one suitcase of clothes I’d brought with me from England didn’t suit my new life. I bought the first of my new jeans wardrobe and seven long-sleeved T-shirts at a neighborhood store and gave my other clothes, along with three pairs of Christian Louboutin heels and two Chanel handbags, to the Salvation Army thrift store in the Mission District. I didn’t have any particular plans; I was fine being anonymous.

  I was mostly eating in cafés and coffee shops and the regulars were starting to look vaguely familiar and exchange fleeting eye contact when Nicole collided with me one morning and sent my tea flying. After she replaced it, with a stream of breathless, laughing apologies, we were somehow sitting at the same table.

  She was thin and vivacious and her face was bright with curiosity as I clumsily deflected her questions about my family, job, interests, and preferred movies. Nightmares and night terrors were still making sleep difficult; I wasn’t sharp enough for the machine-gun questions and random factoids that she kept shooting at me without letup. She told me the best place for organic produce was three doors down; that the antique store on the corner was run by two lesbians from Texas whose Limoges box selection was the best in the city; and that the variety store two blocks up was where to buy anything from plastic Slinkys to case-hardened steel wrenches. Nicole confided another tidbit of insider information: “Whenever anyone says they’re ‘from the neighborhood’ around here, it means they live in Fabian Gardens,” she whispered. “These folks are all from the neighborhood.” She seemed to know everyone and introduced me casually to several people sitting at nearby tables and the large blond woman who was filling the countertop display cases with muffins and scones.

  “Everyone, this is Theo Bogart,” she said. “She’s English and just moved into the neighborhood. I go way back with a few of these guys,” she added to me as people waved or smiled vaguely from various tables. “San Francisco’s kind of like that. People you thought were out of your life keep popping back up.”

  The Japanese-American man with the raffia-wrapped, silver-streaked ponytail was Haruto Miazaki, garden designer (and, I learned later, a sort of freelance security consultant who was paid to hack computer systems to test their firewalls). He looked up from his laptop and waved cheerfully as Nicole said his name. His coarse, powerful hands made the keyboard look several sizes too small.

  “You bought the vacant place down the block on Polk, right?” So much for the anonymity of my new corporation. It was my first experience of the neighborhood bush telegraph. It hadn’t occurred to me to swear the architect to secrecy. Haruto kept talking over my internal muttering. “Place was empty forever. Lemme know if you need help with the back. Man, those shrubs.” He shook his head. “Way gnarly. Do you have a tenant for the middle apartment yet?” He hardly waited for me to shake my head. “I’m looking for a new place. Here’s my number.” He leaned over and handed me a business card. “Call me when you’re ready. Save you advertising. It’s me and my cat and the occasional overnight visitor. No one permanent yet. May be too late for me.” He didn’t seem unhappy about that; he grinned and turned back to his laptop.

  A movie-star handsome, multiracial god in a pale yellow cashmere sweater came over to take my hand. “Welcome, and don’t worry; you’ll get to know everyone. You’re the newest member of the neighborhood association and we have regular meetin’s. Nearly everyone shows up.” His mouth twitched as if he was suppressing laughter, and his intelligent eyes smiled, too. “I’m Nat. My lover and I have a jewelry showroom above Union Square. He trained at Tiffany, and if you ever want to commission a piece—” He handed me a business card, winked at me, and went back to his iPad. I was still staring at his profile when I realized Nicole was moving on with her introductions. Seriously, he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen. And he had a beautiful, syrupy Southern accent of some kind. And gay. Damn.

  Sabina D’Allessio was a sultry-eyed twentysomething in black leather with fiery hair like young snakes and leather gauntlets flung over one shoulder. She stood and brushed a gentle hand against the cheek of the man she was sharing a table with. He was good-looking, with Nordic, white-blond hair and pale gray eyes. “Welcome. Us redheads have to stick together, right?” she said with a grin. Except her red hair was probably genuine while mine was an expensively maintained disguise for my natural blond. She raised a hand in farewell to the room generally before striding out to the green Kawasaki parked at the curb. At nearly six feet tall, the girl moved like an athlete and looked like hell on wheels astride that motorcycle. She roared off down the street and the light in the coffee shop was dimmer somehow after she left.

  Her table companion was Kurt Talbot, a surgeon at SF General. His eyes stayed aimed in her direction and didn’t drop to his phone until she’d been out of sight for a full minute.

  The stern-faced elderly man with a double espresso was Damiano D’Allessio, Sabina’s grandfather, “one of my favorite professors back in the day,” Nicole added. She gave him a dazzling smile and he made an irritable little fanning motion with on
e hand in front of his face as if to brush away the compliment.

  Helga Lindstrom was the thirty-ish buxom blonde behind the counter who I learned was the coffee shop’s owner. “Bring in a mug and we’ll keep it here for you—saves using the paper ones. I bake everything fresh every day—the best muffins and scones in the city. Right, guys?” she added loudly to the room. A ragged chorus of “Right, Helga!” came from the tables all around and she laughed. Her eyes flickered to the pale and beautiful Kurt Talbot, but his eyes were still on his phone.

  “You have a nice place here,” I said to her, looking around at the artwork on the walls.

  “Local artists,” she said with a wink at Nicole. “Those paintings are Nicole’s, and the skateboard collages are by a guy I went to school with. They’re kind of large for the space, but I like ’em,” she said with a shrug. “The photography is mine.”

  “You’re a photographer?” I perked up a little. A kindred soul, perhaps. Not that I could tell her.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “I’m all about muffins and lattes now. You look as if you could put on a few pounds.” She clearly thought it was fine to make personal remarks. Good to know. I shook my head, a little embarrassed.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Nat said without looking up from his iPad—seriously he looked really good. “You look great the way you are.” But Helga wasn’t wrong; I was underweight and hollow eyed and my T-shirts and jeans were two sizes too big because I’d bought them without realizing I’d dropped twenty pounds. Nat told me later, when we were each other’s best friend and he had saved my life, that I looked so fragile the day we met he thought I’d been seriously ill.