Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (37 page)

“That
would
be distracting,” Anatoly agreed. “What about the truck?”

“It was a green Ford.”

“Can you tell me anything more about it?” he pushed.

“Nope.”

“Wait a minute…” I put my fingers to my temples as if I could touch the memory that was coming back. “Right before Eugene was shot I saw a green truck…or an SUV. It was far away and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, but it was parked in a commercial district, which was weird because all the businesses had closed up, even the bars.”

Anatoly took a step closer to me. “Was it a Ford?”

“Anatoly, I can’t even tell you if it was an SUV or a truck and you want me to tell you if it was a Ford? Considering my lack of interest in cars, it’s amazing I took notice of it at all!”

Just then we heard a ringing. Anatoly looked pointedly at my handbag and I looked pointedly at his jacket pocket. But it wasn’t either of our phones. The noise was coming from the shopping cart.

“Damn thing won’t shut up,” the woman grumbled. “I don’t keep it on very much, but every once and a while I do just in case I need to make a quick call. I can’t be expected to wait for the damn thing to warm up if there’s an emergency, now, can I?”

“You have a cell phone?” I asked skeptically.

“Of course I have a cell phone. Can’t you hear it ringing?”

“Where did you get it?” Anatoly asked.

The woman took a protective step toward her cart. “It’s mine. I got it as a gift.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t yours,” Anatoly assured her. “It’s a nice gift. Whoever gave it to you obviously cares about you very much.”

“He does.”

“May I ask who that person is?” Anatoly asked.

“Jesus.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Jesus gave you a cell phone?”

“You got a problem with that?”

“No, not at all,” I said quickly. According to my Christian friends, the poor were already going to inherit the earth, so why not throw in a cell phone?

“What exactly does Jesus look like?” Anatoly asked.

“He looks like Jesus,” the woman snapped.

“I see,” Anatoly nodded solemnly. “Is there any chance that I could see the cell phone?” The woman studied him for a moment before shuffling through her shopping cart and eventually pulled out a top-of-the-line camera phone.

Anatoly put his hand out and waited for her to give it to him, rather than trying to take it from her, but the woman hesitated. “You’re gonna give this right back to me, right? I don’t know what I’d do without my cell phone.”

“I would never steal from you,” Anatoly said.

Reluctantly she placed it in his palm. Anatoly immediately f lipped it open and started going through the pictures. There were a few of a woman who looked vaguely familiar.

“I’ve seen pictures of this woman,” Anatoly said slowly, clearly addressing me rather than our new friend. “This is Marian Fitzgerald. Flynn Fitzgerald’s wife.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Why would there be pictures of Flynn Fitzgerald’s wife on the phone?”

“Because,” Anatoly said as he perused the numbers and names in the address book, “this is Flynn Fitzgerald’s phone.”

For a moment I couldn’t speak. Then all the questions started tumbling out of me, too hurried and frantic to be comprehensible. “How did you get Fitzgerald’s phone? Do you know him? Is he the one who gave it to you? Is he the Jesus you’re talking about? Does he
know
Jesus?” The woman was looking at me as if I had just lost my mind, and maybe I had. I couldn’t make sense of any of this and the pure effort of trying was making me dizzy.

“I told you,” the woman said, finally cutting me off, “I got this here phone from Jesus.” She snatched the phone from Anatoly and held it tightly in her gloved hand.

“But how did Jesus deliver it to you?” I demanded. “Did it fall out of the sky? Did you find it in a burning bush? What?”

“He wrapped it up in the tarp.”

I reached out and clutched Anatoly’s arm. “In the tarp? You found the phone in the tarp Melanie was wrapped up in?”

“Is Melanie the woman the bear killed? Yeah, that’s where Jesus wrapped it up. Probably should have found different gift wrap, though. It got tangled up in the fabric of that dead woman’s skirt. There was blood all over this thing.” She waved the pristine phone in front of me. “Took me two days to get it all off.”

“To get it
off?
There was blood on it and you cleaned the blood
off?
” I let go of Anatoly’s arm and spun around so my back was to both of them. I might be able to resist strangling her if I didn’t have to look at her. There had been DNA evidence that would have linked Flynn Fitzgerald to a murder. A tarp
and
a bloody phone. And now it was all gone. Anyone who would pay three dollars to buy a bloody tarp wouldn’t think twice about wiping off that blood before using it as a makeshift tent, and even if they hadn’t, a few days of exposure to the San Francisco drizzle would have done most of the job for them. Of course this woman was an eyewitness, but as witnesses went she couldn’t have been less reliable. And in a city where over a third of the population was Asian, the grandmother with the toddler description wasn’t going to help me at all. For once I
wanted
to confide in the police, but thanks to this woman I had nothing helpful to bring them.

“Any chance you’d consider selling the phone to us?” Anatoly asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said slowly. “It’s special to me, it being from our savior and all.”

“Here.” I dug into my purse and waved a twenty and a ten over my shoulder, still not trusting myself enough to look at her. “Here’s thirty dollars for the phone.”

“You really want to pay me thirty dollars for this thing?” the woman gasped.

Finally I turned around. “That’s right. Thirty bucks cash right now.”

The woman’s mouth was hanging open and she stared at the bills in my hand. “Thirty dollars for this here phone.”

I nodded impatiently.

“Child, did you not hear me when I said this here phone was a gift from the one and only son of
God?
Wasn’t too long ago that some man sold a pancake with Jesus’ face on it on eBay for a cool sixty. Sixty dollars for Jesus’ leftover breakfast! This here’s a Motorola i880 phone! It’s got polyphonic ring tones and everything! The pope ain’t got a phone this nice! And you think you can buy it off me for thirty dollars? I may be crazy but I ain’t
that
crazy.”

“But thirty dollars is all I have on me!”

Anatoly already had his wallet in his hand. “I have another ten, that brings it to forty.”

“I want a hundred, and that there’s a deal. You be robbin’ me at a hundred, but I’ll do it for you folks since you’re anti-bear and all.”

“But we don’t have any more money on us right now!”

“That ain’t my problem. You come back with a better offer, and if I still has the phone, I might still be willing to sell it for a hundred.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no.” I waved my hand in the air as if I was wiping her words off an invisible chalkboard. “It took us days to find you. I’m not going to walk away and hope that I’m able to find you again.”

“Well, you ain’t takin’ it for no forty dollars and I ain’t offerin’ no installment plan.” The woman glanced toward our car. “What’s that there on your dashboard?” She walked forward to get a clearer view. “Is that a box of chocolates?”

“From the Chocolate Café on Fillmore,” I confirmed.

“Dark chocolates?”

Anatoly went to the car and took out the box. “It says they’re extra dark.”

“Tell you what I’ll do, you give me the forty dollars, the chocolates and those diamond earrings of yours and I’ll give you this here phone.”

“Deal!” I shouted. I gave her my money and earrings (praying that she wouldn’t realize that the diamonds were about as real as Pamela Anderson’s breasts) and Anatoly gave her his money and Marcus’s chocolates.

The woman smiled and handed me the phone. Then all of a sudden her hands flew to both sides of her head. “It’s him, it’s him!”

I spun around expecting to see a pink bear, but there was nothing there. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The devil! Don’t you hear him? He’s coming! He’s f lying in on that f lying pig!”

I searched the sky, but the only thing f lying was a beleaguered-looking moth. I was suddenly filled with a deadly sense of hopelessness. I honestly did feel for this woman. She needed help. Furthermore, there was no way to tell what part of this woman’s story was true and what was a delusion. Maybe she only
thought
she saw a pink bear, or maybe Jesus really did give her Fitzgerald’s Motorola. In a world where people could be sexually attracted to stuffed animals, anything was possible.

The tinfoil-hat woman grabbed the handle of her shopping cart and rushed off, periodically looking over her shoulder. Anatoly and I watched her disappear and then got back in the car. For a moment we just sat there staring at Fitzgerald’s cell phone, which I still clutched in my hand. “We could call the police,” I suggested.

“We could,” Anatoly agreed, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“We could tell them that a Darth Vader soundalike has been calling to inform me of his love of animals,” I said, “and that a woman who wears a tinfoil hat and thinks that the devil rides on a f lying pig had possession of a camera phone that belongs to a right-wing congressional hopeful who may or may not dress up like a pink, rainbow-tattooed bear while dumping the bodies of his murder victims.”

We both fell silent. I stared at the phone some more and all of a sudden it hit me. “Get us to Park Presidio and then take a right on Lake Street.”

“But your car’s right off Fillmore—”

“We’re not going to my car,” I said. “We’re going to see Mary Ann.”

24

I always choose the most open and honest people to share my darkest secrets with. I worry that they don’t have enough to be ashamed of so I try to share some of my guilt.

—C’est La Mort

MARY ANN LOOKED LIKE SHE WAS ABOUTREADY TO GO TO BED. HER
hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing a fluffy pale blue robe. “Is everything okay?” she asked as she ushered us inside.

Anatoly sat down on one of her dining chairs but I remained standing. “What aren’t you telling us about Fitzgerald?”

Mary Ann’s eyes f licked to Anatoly, and then back to me. “I really can’t—”

“Mary Ann, I have reason to believe that Fitzgerald might have had a hand in Melanie’s death.”

“What?” Her hand fluttered to her mouth. “But that’s not possible! Fitzgerald may not be perfect, but he would never…there’s just no way!”

“What did Rick say about him, Mary Ann? I need to know this.”

Again Mary Ann looked over at Anatoly. She barely knew the man and it was unlikely that she was going to talk with him listening in.

Picking up on this he sighed and got back to his feet. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze as he walked out. Now it was just Mary Ann and myself, in a face-off. Mary Ann looking flustered and worried and me feeling seriously pissed.

“Mary Ann, how long have we been friends?”

“Sophie, this isn’t about
us.
Rick confided in me, and I really
like
him! I can’t just tell you his secrets!”

“Not even if breaking his confidence could save lives?”

Mary Ann looked down at the floor. “I’ve met Fitzgerald a few times. He can’t be a murderer. I would know.”

“Mary Ann, I’ve had the dubious honor of becoming acquainted with a few murderers over the past few years and I’ve never suspected a thing until they waved a weapon in my face and issued me a death threat.”

Mary Ann swallowed but still didn’t look up. “Do you really think Fitzgerald is a murderer?” she asked in a small voice.

“Just tell me what you know. If the information you have doesn’t fit with the evidence I’ve gathered, then nothing you say to me will leave this room. But, Mary Ann, Melanie is dead. Eugene is dead. The time for keeping your mouth shut is over.”

Mary Ann’s eyes got a little wider and I could make out the sparkling of tears. “It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal,” she whispered.

“What didn’t?”

“Fitzgerald’s extramarital affair. It happened while he was at that political convention in Iowa. Rick walked in on him while he was having kinky sex.”

“
Kinky
sex?” I repeated.

“A threesome. A woman and another guy.”

“That’s all Rick told you about the encounter?”

Mary Ann shrugged. “I didn’t ask him for details. He just said it was a kinky ménage à trois. Fitzgerald promised Rick that he wouldn’t do it again, but there were…complications.”

“What kind of complications?”

“Fitzgerald contracted an STD. He was fine, but he passed it on to his wife, and now she can’t have any children.”

“What kind of STD…oh, my God.” Now it was my turn to put my hand to my mouth. “Did Fitzgerald give his wife chlamydia?”

Mary Ann looked up quickly. “How did you know?”

“So what now?” I asked. After interrogating Mary Ann for another fifteen minutes, I had determined that she didn’t have anything more of interest to share and Anatoly and I had gone back to my apartment. We were now both sitting on my bed, me cross-legged, him with his feet planted firmly on the floor, knees supporting his forearms. It was probably the first time we had been in a bedroom together without thinking about sex. Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate, we
were
thinking about sex, furry sex, which was kind of like thinking about your parents going at it—it shouldn’t freak you out but it absolutely does.

“We can’t go to the police yet,” Anatoly said to the floor.

“That’s usually my line.”

“Yes, and for once I’m agreeing with you.”

“Hmm, I should probably take some satisfaction in that, but the thing is, I’m waff ling.”

“Ah.”

“I just think that if we bring the police a boatload of circumstantial evidence they might actually take the time to sift through it. Right now we have an eyewitness who saw Fitzgerald engage in extramarital sex, a letter from a known furry begging Eugene, who has a history of turning on his bosses, not to use some undisclosed bit of info to ruin both political careers and personal lives. We know Peter had chlamydia, we know Fitzgerald had chlamydia. We also have Fitzgerald’s cell phone that someone found on the body of a murder victim and at least one eyewitness, possibly three, who saw a man dressed up in a furry costume dumping that body. This feels like the makings of an arrest warrant.”