Spider’s Cage (8 page)

“Hey,” said Bdeniowitz, standing up.

“I'm all right,” said Windrow. “Just excited about getting on the case for my client.”

“You got a client? Who?

“Woodruff.”

“Woodruff?”

Windrow breathed deeply and screwed his eye up so the bruise smarted. That gave him something to concentrate on. “Hand me my duds. I'm checking out of here.”

M
AD BRUCE KICKED A TIRE ON A
1964 F
ORD
F
AIRLANE.
“Listen,” he said, “It's red, dearie, inside and out.” He shrugged. “So there's a little chrome missing.” He waved. “You can restore it on weekends.” He pulled open the door on the driver's side, and the sheet metal at the hinge jamb popped. “Steering wheel, radio, dash pocket, ash tray, the seats in fair shape…” He patted a thatch of duct tape on the driver's seat. “Two visors, dome light.” He flicked the switch on the dome light back and forth, and shrugged. “Needs a bulb.” He pulled the seatback forward, revealing two empty oil cans sitting on a nest of brown pine needles and yellowed newspaper. “Plenty of room in back. You could practically live in it, and you definitely,” he winked lasciviously, “could spend some time in it at the drive-in, my man my man.”

Windrow looked under the hood. “Start it,” he said. Mad Bruce ground the starter and the motor caught. “Rev her up,” Windrow shouted. Mad Bruce floored the accelerator. The four-barrel carburetor moaned, the V-8 roared under it, the fan belt squealed. Blue smoke began to fill the car lot behind the Ford. There didn't seem to be too much blowby, judging by the breather on the valve cover, and the pollution equipment had already been added. He took the cap off the radiator. The water was only about an inch low. “Turn it off,” he shouted. The motor continued to run wide open.
Windrow looked out from under the hood and drew a finger across his throat. Mad Bruce made a fist over his shoulder and let his eyes and head droop, like a hanged man. He opened one eye and looked at Windrow. Windrow looked at him. Mad Bruce raised his head and drew one forefinger rapidly in and out of his closed fist, grinning and jerking his eyebrows wildly. Windrow stared dully at him. Mad Bruce shrugged and killed the motor.

Windrow checked the brakes, the automatic transmission fluid, the lights, the dimmer switch, the turn signals, windshield wipers, and the tires. Everything he tested was legal. He slammed the hood and they took a drive. Mad Bruce tuned in a salsa disco station, loud, and made yipping noises along with the music.

The sun was out in the Mission District. Windrow let the red Ford loaf along under the palms of Dolores St. At the end of the block, pigeons circled the tower of Mission Dolores and the brakes did their job at the stop sign. Young girls in uniforms, just out of Catholic school, stood in groups in front of an ice cream store. Each clutched an armload of books, and wore a pleated skirt and knee socks, in brown or grey or navy blue, with matching sweaters and white blouses. Without exception, they all looked too big for their clothes.

Windrow turned down 16th street. A 1967 Impala with fender skirts, curb feelers, twinkling wheel covers and its rocker panels perhaps two inches off the ground came the other way. Its rear end suddenly leaped up with two discreet bounces and just as suddenly collapsed, until it seemed that its undercarriage must surely drag the ground.
En passant
, its radio was louder than the Fairlane's.

Mad Bruce leaned between Windrow and the steering wheel, honked the horn, and screamed at the Impala as it passed.

“Aieee hermanito! Arriba arriba abajo abajo. Low and slow del camino!” He leaned back and slapped Windrow on the arm. “Cruisin con la gente Martín, aieee!” He threw his head back and howled like a Bedouin woman in mourning. In his rear view mirror Windrow could see the Impala, stopped for the light at Dolores. The Impala's rear end raised and lowered, raised, raised some more, dropped again, like an insect deep into a mating ritual.

Mad Bruce adjusted his shades and grinned. “$595,” he screamed over the blast of the radio.

Windrow drove and said nothing. At the intersection of 16th and Guerrero the light was red. He stopped. An early seventies model Pontiac, immaculately waxed, pulled up next to them. It contained a man and a woman. As they all waited for the light to change the Pontiac's front end slowly began to rise in the air, until the entire car was at about a fifteen degree angle to the street. Then its rear began to rise. The man and woman stared straight ahead. The man's teeth were clinched in a grin. His passenger was trying not to laugh, but the side of her face close to Windrow wrinkled and contorted. Her eyes stole a glance at Windrow and she blushed and giggled as she jerked them forward again. The front end of her car lowered a few inches and stopped. The back end lowered a few inches, stopped, then fell a foot. The woman was giggling. Abruptly, the front end dropped all the way to the street, and the rear end of the car shot back up. The woman could no longer control her laughing, and she slapped the driver on his shoulder, as if to make him stop. The front end of the car rose again in a series of coy increments. The woman hid her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking with laughter. The driver stared straight ahead and grinned sheepishly.

The light turned green. Windrow left them at the crosswalk, the Pontiac still jerking about, going nowhere.

“Awright,” Mad Bruce said, squirming in his seat and looking out his window. “You're buying today, right? Cash? O.K. For you-today-only-right-now; E-Z terms; five seventy-five take it home.”

Windrow said nothing. At the intersection the light was red. As he stopped he turned the radio down and looked at Mad Bruce. The Pontiac pulled up next to them. Mad Bruce looked at Windrow. Windrow turned and yelled to the driver of the Pontiac.

“Hey 'migo, how much you think this Ford is worth?

The woman, closer to Windrow, looked at the driver. The driver slowly turned his head toward them and raised his sleepy eyebrows fractionally. He lifted his chin about one-half of an inch and surveyed the length of the Fairlane. A conversation ensued between the man and the woman in Caló undertones so rapid and full of slang that Windrow couldn't understand it. The light turned green. A car behind the Pontiac honked its horn. The driver of the Pontiac made a face and stroked his chin.

“Four hundred fifty simoleons, conquistadór,” he said.

“Gracias,” Windrow said. He turned right through the intersection. Mad Bruce protested loudly by yelling Caló imprecations past Windrow at the Pontiac as it disappeared behind them.

Windrow made a couple of turns and soon they found themselves on the South Van Ness on-ramp to 101. Once on the freeway, he pressed the accelerator. The speedometer wound easily to ninety. No doubt about it, the car had power, leg room and comfort, three things he'd missed in the Toyota. Bruised as he was, each trip to the grocery in the
Toyota would have been a hejira of endurance and discomfort; whereas now, in this red Ford, though a case should pound him into the ground, he might ride from beating to beating in style.

There was something satisfactory in that.

They drifted over the city, past the old Hamm's brewery building, and merged onto 101 South, the road to San Jose, and ultimately Los Angeles. The Ford was smooth. Neither the front end or the recapped tires betrayed telltale vibrations at cruising speed.

He saw her as he was decelerating onto the army Street off ramp.

Jodie Ryan was in the passenger seat of some kind of station wagon, a Chevy, heading north. Her blonde hair, her face, were unmistakable. Her features waxed golden among the flat blur of concrete, metal and sun-faded automotive enamels flowing up the other side of the freeway. Someone wearing a ten gallon hat was driving her car; he hadn't time to see who, but it could have been Sal. Could have been.

On the other hand, might not somebody with a ten gallon hat, short one Caddy, have switched to Chevrolet?

He pressed the accelerator, then braked and cursed. A huge, slow-moving truck filled the lane marked Army Street East. He guided the squealing car down and through the maze of ramps that led to Army Street West. At the first intersection, he slid around the median—an illegal U turn—and put the accelerator to the floor. Much to Windrow's purpose the Fairlane leaped toward, though also sideways a little bit. He flicked the wheel a couple of times as the car sloughed east down under the freeway and up again, and regained control of its forward motion in time to spin the wheel left, snatch the emergency brake and slide around the median again, another illegal U turn. The car wallowed sideways
across two lanes of oncoming traffic as it slid right, then left, then right again, and onto the northbound on-ramp. Again he put the gas pedal to the floor, and the little V-8 torqued the red car up the ramp and onto the Bay Shore again, now heading north at 75 mph.

Through all of this maneuvering, Mad Bruce, holding onto the dashboard with one hand and the armrest on the door with the other hand, yelling over the din of engine and tires, had begun to lower his price. He started with $560, clipped to $550 as they slid around the first median, went to $545 as they dropped under the overpass, feebly as if seasick mentioned $525 as they slid around the median for the second time, and finally, after shouting “OK OK OK charo, five hundred, five hundred dollars,” gloomily retreated to four ninety-five after the armrest came off the door in his hand.

Windrow ignored him and accelerated up the hill as fast as the car would go. He weaved among cars across all five lanes until he gained a clear lane in the middle of the freeway. They hurtled past the Vermont St. exit, and topped the hill, where the vast network of the city spread below them. They could see all of downtown, the pyramid, the Bank of America building, Coit Tower beyond, they could see Marin County and the Bay Bridge. The freeway split in two at the bottom of the hill and there, Windrow thought, he saw the two-tone Wagonaire heading to the right, where 101 split onto Interstate 80, heading East. If so, the Fairlane was in the wrong lane.

The speedometer bouncing on ninety-five he swerved right across three lanes of traffic just in time to narrowly miss the impact-drums around which the freeway divided at the bottom of the hill. Distressed automobile horns sounded all around the wake of the red Ford, but he was gaining on the station wagon. Windrow adroitly maneuvered through
the congestion to the right rear of the two-tone wagon. Its license plate read GUSH. The full head of blonde hair and the western-cut shirt in the passenger seat could have belonged to Jodie, but when he saw the tortoise shell hairpin, shaped like a big eighth-note, he knew it was her. Never would he allow more than this thirty feet of asphalt to come between him and her again.

The hood was drawing even with the rear of the wagon when the Ford ran out of gas.

At first Windrow didn't realize what had happened; he just knew the motor had died with the accelerator pressed all the way to the floor. Its momentum caused the Ford to hold even with the wagon, just for a second, before it began to fall back, and he pressed the hornring, hard.

It didn't work. He slammed the hornring with his fist, the entire mechanism sprang out of the steering wheel hub and into his lap. He cursed and yelled. He screamed out the window as the Ford began to slow and the wagon slowly pulled ahead. The blonde never turned around.

The hardest thing Windrow could remember having to do in a long time was resisting his urge to sideswipe the station wagon. The two cars were running side by side on a crowded freeway at sixty miles an hour. Cars were merging from a blind left ramp into the lane that contained the station wagon. Cars were all around them. To ram his Ford into the Chevy would be to invite disaster. Windrow gripped the wheel and cursed. He pumped the accelerator. Nothing. He glanced at the gas gauge. The needle rested in the unindexed void below Empty.

Seething with rage, he merged right and coasted down the off ramp of the Seventh St. exit. The light at its end was green, and he let the car roll across the intersection and down Bryant St., until it came to a stop. Windrow ground his teeth
so hard he could taste shavings off his fillings. His knuckles glowed whitely along the rim of the red steering wheel. He angrily backhanded the hornring out of his lap. It was a gesture of impotence. Several little parts rolled around on the floor.

Mad Bruce huddled against the right hand door, clutching the severed armrest with both hands. He shook like he had yellow fever compounded by hypothermia.

“F-f-f-our h-h-hund-d-d… t-t-t-tw…,” he said.

Windrow turned off the ignition switch. Putting the gear lever in park he glanced in the rear view mirror. The glass was full of alternating blue and red lights. He turned and looked out the back window. The colorful lights were on the roof of a California Highway Patrol car.

To his left, out the window, wide gray steps rose between green hedges to a row of glass doors that opened into a building he knew only too well. The red Ford had come to a stop in the six hundred block of Bryant Street, directly in front of San Francisco Police Headquarters.

Windrow turned and looked at Mad Bruce.

“Sold,” he said.

“L
OOK, APPLE.
I'
M NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ECCEN
tricities on the highway. You got a private ticket? So what? It doesn't give you license to drive sideways on the Bay Shore. Only cops can get away with that and, lest you forget, you are not a cop no more, ever.”

“Max,” said Windrow patiently, “I'm telling you. It was Jodie Ryan in a late model Chevy Wagonaire. The goddam license plate said GUSH. A ten gallon hat was driving. A ten gallon hat tried to kill me with a Cadillac. The Ryan girl has these two tortoise shell hairpins; they're shaped like musical notes; I saw one on this blonde's head… It had to be her…”

Bdeniowitz slammed his fist on his desk, his face reddened. “So what? All she did was stand you up. As far as we're concerned, she's done nothing. Nothing! Sure we'd like to talk to her. But there's no evidence connecting her with this Neil case. Sure there's a lot of ten gallon hats in this. Are you telling me that's a lead? I mean, you got
one hard fact
?”