The Man on the Washing Machine (3 page)

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 one 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.

I needed to get the hell out of there. I didn't expect to need a cover story so soon and I was telling lies at random, making things up on the fly and hoping to God I remembered everything. Before I could make my excuses to Nicole and flee, she started on a funny story about organizing a busload of Berkeley professors and multicolored, pot-smoking students to picket the whites-only Adelphi Club's golf course. Chaos had ensued and the color bar had come down. But that was in the past, she said; now she was an artist with an entrepreneurial, creative spirit and a hunger for success. As she chattered I felt myself relax. Being near her was like warming my cold hands by a campfire.

She told me the idea she'd had for a luxury bath and body shop. A chemist friend of hers made creams and lotions and vitamin face masks. I got the impression he was transitioning from a less acceptable line of chemical products and Nicole was anxious to support him in his new, legal endeavor. We tossed ideas for a store name back and forth as a joke and within minutes had agreed on Aromas. When she showed up a few days later with a business plan, we sealed the deal and within weeks we were open for business.

Haruto moved into my middle flat with his Siamese cat, Gar Wood (don't ask). Haruto tamed my overgrown shrubs, refinished the hardwood floors in both flats, installed new light fixtures, and offered to maintain the window boxes on the front of the building in exchange for a break on the rent. So with a series of what-the-hell impulses I became property owner, landlord, and shopkeeper in one dramatic month. Oh, and dog owner. Lucy showed up at the back door and soon shredded my $400 sleeping bag. No one claimed her at the city pound—big surprise—and I felt sorry for her.

Things hadn't always been perfect in the last year and a half (that's more English understatement there), but nowadays I had a quiet life and I was willing to do a lot to preserve it. I selfishly—and fervently—hoped that witnessing Tim Callahan's death wouldn't change that.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The second shoe dropped on Friday, two days after Tim died, although at the time it felt inconsequential. Nicole had asked a month before if a friend of a friend could stay in the studio for a few weeks without paying an arm and a leg in rent. He worked for a nonprofit, he was in the city temporarily, nonsmoker, no pets. I vaguely wondered which of her discarded lovers this was. Sure, I said. I've got to stop doing that.

A few minutes before ten o'clock I walked up the hill from the bank and Helga's with my morning mug of tea in one hand and my phone in the other. My new tenant was Bramwell Turlough—great name—and he wanted to move into the studio behind Aromas at the end of the week. And that was the other shoe. Doesn't seem all that dramatic, right? That's what I thought at the time, too.

I stuffed my phone in the back pocket of my jeans as I got to the front door of Aromas and watched my reflection in the glass door tweak a couple of dead leaves off the rose. I looked pretty much the same as usual, which is to say unremarkable. I'd gained a few pounds in the last year but I was still pretty lean. I always wear jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. The long sleeves cover some scar tissue. I'm self-conscious about my nose, which isn't so easy to hide; one of these days I should get it fixed. It's not hideous, just a little off-kilter from the time it was broken.