San Francisco Noir (23 page)
Jude had seen but not touched her white shirt on her way to the bathroom, crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. The blood had puzzled her, because she didn’t remember spilling it. But now she saw another wide-angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light, and remotely she was aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding, not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come unmoored in her head. The disconnected wiring and foreign, splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate that she had lifted to her own lips. These broken memories and disturbing out-of-body images of herself were never intended for her, because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another, and as she drank she heard her father’s voice telling her to be unafraid.
Jude had spent the day shopping, or hunting, in the Castro. The easiest pockets to pick were those belonging to tourists, and the easiest of these were the gay men in their fifties who came to San Francisco on vacation from Atlanta or Denver or anywhere that the same-sex culture was kept hidden from view. These men tended to be soft and unaware, with pink faces and eyes milky behind rose lenses. They were either very thin or shaped like pears and wore khakis or jeans that were too tight with new sneakers, and their T-shirts were always tucked in. They traveled in couples, one of them carrying a city guide, the other an umbrella, and sometimes they wore those Velcro travel wallets around their necks. They walked around the Castro with eyes so wide they might have been exploring the far side of the moon, and they were such easy targets that Jude generally made a game of it, following them for a block or two after she hit them and then slipping up to put their wallet or sunglasses back into their pockets. It had been raining today, but warm, and the streets smelled of urine.
And even though animal and human prey alike tended to huddle together and become more wary of others in adverse weather, and their pockets that much harder to reach, Jude had grown bored of her shadow practice and resolved to work the financial district the next day, where the men deserved to have their pockets emptied and where it was infinitely more difficult for her to be a shadow, especially wearing the uniform. And she had by now come to understand that her father had not taught her to lift wallets as a means of supplementing her allowance. The object had been to learn stealth.
Jude saw the man as she entered a coffeehouse called Last Drop, a long narrow place that had a cheerful plastic art deco–meets–
The Jetsons
feel, with Japanese nudes on the walls and funky details like barbers’ chairs. He was in a booth with two white girls. Jude scanned them as she crossed the room. The man had blond hair that just fell in his eyes. Long nose and a crescent scar on one cheek, narrow red mouth. He was thin and looked British, but that might have been a false echo of his clothes, a mint-green teddy boy suit and boots with pointed toes. His hands flashed silver as he made a point and Jude saw he wore rings on both thumbs. He sat in the corner with his back against the wall. He kept his hands and mouth at a safe distance that posed no threat, then lunged forward as he said something that made the girls laugh, and Jude saw his thin lips pull back for a heartbeat to show his teeth, sharp and white, as he palmed and disappeared the plastic envelope and flicked the crystals into the blond girl’s coffee cup while she laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.
The girls didn’t seem to notice.
Jude marked them in the space of one breath as nineteen or twenty, second-year students at the art institute or New College, who lived in a flat with three other people in the Haight. They had come to California after boarding schools in New Hampshire, where they had gone into the city on weekends and listened to Velvet Underground in their rooms and done a lot of ecstasy and experimented with being bisexual, though both were straight. The one with the tainted cup was pale and blond with fragile cheekbones and black eye shadow, Sylvia Plath gone to heroin. The other was rich-girl punk with a pierced nose and shocked blue hair, and they were both perfect targets for the man because they thought of themselves as streetwise but were not. They were rabbits in dark woods, and one or both of them would be hanging upside down with her skin removed before morning.
Animal urges
, she thought. She would be the thrush.
Jude made her decision with little deliberation. The man offended and fascinated her to equal degrees. That the college girls might be spared a blood-soaked washcloth was an afterthought. Jude was bored, and she thought she stood a better chance against him than they did. And she thought it would be interesting to try.
She went to the bar and ordered a cappuccino, walking with the shadow of a limp. He wouldn’t bite if she was too obvious. It was only a sore ankle, and not even wrapped. She twisted it playing soccer, she fell off her skateboard. She paid for her drink and dropped a dollar in the tip jar for luck, watching the table out of the corner of her eye to be sure Sylvia didn’t drink from her tainted cup. Jude hummed, waiting for her drink. When it arrived, she turned and limped across the café, her eyes skating left and right as if looking for just the right table. She held the cup to her face and blew on it with her lips curved into a bow, circling close to the table. Her one fear was that he had already made his choice, and would be reluctant to deviate.
But she could give him a push.
Jude stopped a dozen feet from their table, and winced. She crouched on one knee, her cup balanced precariously, and while she examined the sore ankle, her skirt slipped up her thigh just enough to flash the pink boy shorts.
Two heartbeats and he called her over to the table, insisting she join them. The college girls regarded her warily, then the one with shocked blue hair shrugged and slid over, and Jude sat down among them. She looked across the table at Sylvia and gave her a shy, nervous nod of hello, then turned her attention to the man. Jude looked first into the crosshairs of his eyes, and she had to admit the man had something, a hypnotic pull. The eyes were a shattering blue, the ghost of a smile in the crow’s feet on either side, and now she saw his left eye was graced with a splash of brown and he was staring at her without blinking, staring into her as if he could stop her breath. Jude realized what he was doing, and she made a note of it. He was staring at her as if he loved her, as if he had lost her in the wilderness and found her again, and she imagined he had left a few bodies behind him in shreds with that look. Jude blushed and smiled, and sent Sylvia a telepathic smoke signal saying that if she ever laid eyes on her again, her soul would belong not to her, but to Jude.
Because she had made him deviate.
Jude took two sips from her cup and placed it on the table next to Sylvia’s, so that they sat side by side like twins. Then it was a simple matter of redirecting the girls’ attention with a trivia question about Elvis, one that had no answer, and reaching accidentally for Sylvia’s cup, and drinking from it, and making sure that he noticed. And now she stood in his bathroom, seven hours later, exhausted and marking time by counting her heartbeats and wondering what she could use as a weapon, while blood ran down her thigh.
Jude was bleeding, still.
Maybe it was her period, she thought. Her cycle was altered, and almost nonexistent, but it did come around eventually. She was starting to hope that it was menstrual, after all, because the other choice was that he had ruptured something inside her and she was hemorrhaging.
Jude reckoned she had ninety seconds to act.
There was nothing under the sink. Nothing in the narrow closet but a few ratty towels and spare toilet paper. The medicine cabinet contained only the most essential toiletries. Mouthwash and hair gel, a blue toothbrush in a cup, a sliver of soap. She reached for the mouthwash, rinsed her mouth and spat. She looked left and right, listening to her heartbeat. This building was constructed in the 1920s, before there was plastic. The towel racks were slim pieces of iron bolted to the wall. She gave one a tug and imagined she could pry it loose without tools if she were locked in here for a week. The toilet tank lid was an option, but it wasn’t very graceful, and she would need to surprise him. Jude turned to the tub and scanned the wall above it, her thoughts circling the concept of surprise.
She no longer knew where he was. He had been in bed when he dismissed her to the bathroom but now might be anywhere in the dark apartment, and the moment she walked out of the bathroom the advantage was his. Jude would call him to her, when she was ready. She would bring him into her nest. And now her eyes settled on a small round button set in the wall above the bathtub, and she was glad for the days before plastic, because that button was the end of a clothesline that she prayed was not rotten. She climbed into the tub and plucked the button from the wall, and the blood surged in her, for the clothesline was a sturdy nylon cord six feet long.
Jude pulled the line until she reached its end. She took a breath and gathered herself, then yanked it from the wall in a single violent twisting motion that burned both hands and showered her with plaster and dust. He might have heard that button pop, she knew. She needed to be faster than him, she needed to act at the speed of animal reflex. Jude prayed for her thoughts to race ahead of her body and let go of her. She would need to draw his eye when she called him to the bathroom, so without agonizing over it she changed her mind about leaving her blood behind. Jude pressed one hand to her bloody thigh, then slapped the wall, and now her handprint was the only source of primary color in the room. And as she stepped from the tub she heard in a back corner of her head not her father’s voice but her own, rattling off a list of everything in the apartment that she had touched, that would need to be scoured for prints. Jude looked down and saw that she had already twisted the cord around one fist, and now the other. She coiled them around and around until she had an appropriate garrote, then unlocked the door and pulled it open with great care, as if she were peeling back the sky and expected a fury of angels to flood through the narrowest crack.
She called his name.
Jude called for help and stepped aside, and waited for him to come.
Horatio:…think of it!
The very place puts toys of desperation
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, I, iv
B
aby and I were walking the bridge the day it happened. We had a beautiful afternoon—clear, breezy, plenty of sunshine, bright blue sky—though the traffic thrashed loudly. It was a Sunday, so we’d expected traffic, and all the pedestrians didn’t seem unusual either, at first. Knots of them congregated here and there at the rail, mostly on the western or panoramic side of the bridge, the side that faces the ocean. They pointed and hollered at the sights and at each other, as most strollers on the bridge were wont to do; for the bridge is an exhilarating place, with its soaring height and the constant bluster of salt wind and automobiles.
What was unusual—so it seemed to us—was the range of interest or concern common to every face we were able to see, and, as we looked over the rail, the really extraordinary number of people already caught in the forcefield beyond. Among the latter many were yelling and gesturing at the people still on the sidewalk, as if daring or enticing them to jump. Some were squirming around, practicing their backstrokes midair, and some lay still, in a meditative pose, or cupped a roach against the wind, suspended and quiet.
I should diverge a bit here, as some of you may not be from around these parts. A little over one year ago this particular bridge was a favorite place to go if you were looking to kill yourself. Its central span arcs 254 feet above the sea’s level, at which, because the bridge crosses the entrance to the bay at its most narrow stretch, there is always a powerful current, sometimes as swift as six knots, going one way or another with the tides through this natural venturi. Many bodies of jumpers were never recovered and, up until last year, out of some 700 recorded attempts, only twelve people had survived the plunge.
Upon jumping—whether west, toward the ocean and into the sunset, or east, toward the bay and into a view that commands half the city—if a body didn’t have a heart attack on the way down, the impact at sea level was almost certain to do the job; failing these, one could be swept out to sea and drowned, or die of exposure in the chill waters. Sharks, too, were known to lurk below. In any case, a suicide attempt from this bridge virtually contracted to be beautiful and deadly, a sure combination.
For some time there had been editorial campaigns, meetings, and committees about doing something to prevent these precipitous exits, but the taxpayer’s good money being short, and other problems more pressing within the municipality, and the lack of any effective preventive technique hobbled and bogged down any real progress toward airbrushing this stain off the reputation of the city’s most famous land-mark. The thrust of such prophylactic thinking some took to imply that any time Joe Blow so much as looked at the bridge, all other factors being equal, he must be nearly overwhelmed by an urge to kill himself. These people would have it that such malefic urges must occasionally torque at the breast of the most established citizen, as well as the least, and that such urges are an actual furniture of good citizenship. This eccentric opinion, unexpectedly amplified, moved those sensitive organs of citizenship, the newspapers, to reflect noisily that the citizen might prefer to be insured against the possible or at least facile realization of his own self-destructive impulsions.