Once we got finished in the autopsy suite, I cleaned up and drove over to the Hall of Justice to meet with Inspector Jones. I wanted to show him the rocky aggregate material I’d pulled out of Leopold Haring’s zippered jacket pocket. I brought along a morgue photo of the penetrating wound’s entrance in his back, too.
Keith Jones met me at the Investigations Division window and led me back to the Homicide bullpen, a mahogany-dark repurposed courtroom. His partner, Daniel Ramirez, sat at their shared desk. Ramirez didn’t offer his hand, and didn’t mitigate his steely cop scowl. I was getting a little tired of this stone-cold act he and Jones were putting on, all because they disagreed with my findings on a case we’d worked together more than a year before.
“You said you had something to show us,” Jones said.
“Chief Medical Examiner Howe sent me.” That made the pair of them sit up and take notice. “He agrees that Leopold Haring’s death was not due to a workplace accident. The injuries from the pipes were all postmortem. That, combined with the drag marks, points to a staging of the scene. Here.”
I spread out the pictures from the morgue. “This is the cause of death—a stab wound, made with a round, penetrating weapon approximately a quarter inch in diameter and at least five inches long. Like an ice pick, or a screwdriver.”
Jones looked over the photos. “Chief Howe saw these?”
“Yes,” I said, flat as I could manage, and produced an evidence bag with the yellowish aggregate stuff that I’d pulled out of the dead man’s pocket. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me what this is.”
Jones scrutinized the evidence bag, then handed it to his partner. Ramirez held it up, rotated it, and nodded knowingly to Jones. Both men turned to me.
“Rocks,” Ramirez said. “These are rocks.”
“You’re hilarious. So you don’t know?”
They just smirked back, in that way some men do when they’re saving a private joke for later. A joke about dumb blondes.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, and gathered the evidence off the desk. Just as I was putting the last of it into my bag, Inspector Jones had a thought.
“Dr. Howe said this is a homicide, right?”
“That’s my determination. He agrees.”
“Okay, but you’re saying the scene was staged, and the body was moved. If you’re right, then it’s possible only the killer knows about that. All the rest of those workers who saw the body under the pipes still think it was an accident.”
“That’s possible, yes.”
“Then we want the case restricted.”
“Sure. I’ll pend the death certificate for further investigation, cause and manner under wraps, no public disclosure.”
That response surprised them. Medical examiners usually hate the cloak-and-dagger nonsense of police-restricted cases. For this investigation, though, it sounded like a fine idea to me.
“The family’s going to be pissed that we’re holding on to it,” I added. “It’s high profile, all over the press already. They’re going to apply pressure on me, on you, on everyone.”
“No problem,” said Ramirez.
“You got anything else for us, Doc?” said Jones.
“Yeah.” I told them about my interview with Jeffrey Symond, Haring’s business partner. “He said Haring had been in a fight with a son, named Oskar. On autopsy I found Haring had a recent injury to his nose. It didn’t match the postmortem injury from the pipes, and it could fit the time frame if he was involved in a physical altercation within a couple of hours of his death.”
“Can you narrow it down more than that?”
“I might be able to age the injury with more precision once I look at the tissue under a microscope. It’ll be a couple of weeks before I get the slides, though.”
“Okay,” said Jones.
“Okay,” I said back.
Ramirez said nothing.
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry, I thought. Something my dad used to say. I turned my back on the detectives and saw myself out.
The Crime Scene Investigation Unit’s office was just downstairs from Homicide, so I figured I’d stop by to tell them to be on the lookout for screwdrivers. Or ice picks. Crossbow bolts.
The drab olive floor and gray marble walls sucked the life out of everything that moved through the Hall of Justice. Old furniture and burned-out fluorescent tubes cluttered an alcove where a row of public phone booths retained only a dangle of wires and the half-hinges of missing accordion doors. One entire section of wall had been ripped away and replaced with an enormous X of steel beams. A sign said it was part of an “interim/conditional” earthquake retrofit. I wondered what exactly that meant.
The door to room 419, Crime Scene Investigation, was locked. On the milky chicken-wire glass someone had posted one of those cardboard clocks with movable hands. They were gone until 2:00, either out to lunch or at a scene. If they were at a scene, it could be my scene, the SoMa Centre construction site. I remembered with longing a place around the corner from there that did pressed Cuban sandwiches. I could grab a pan con lechon and return to the scene of the crime to talk to the CSI guys, or to poke around myself and see what I could find in the light of day, now that I had a better idea how Leopold Haring had died. For one thing, I wanted to look for more of the rocky aggregate building material that the architect had thought so important that he had made a point of collecting a sample.
I could walk to the Cuban sandwich place. Hell, I could walk to a dozen restaurants within ten minutes of the Hall. Our new workplace stood on a spit of poisoned land across from a power grid substation and down the road from a sewage treatment plant and the city dump. So I enjoyed hoofing to the sandwich shop for my roast pork panino. I missed walking during lunch. Then again, having no eating options anywhere near our new office had made me more frugal, brown bagging most days rather than getting into the car to drive somewhere. And the more frugal I could be, the better: I was carrying two hundred thousand dollars in student debt. The BMW was an extravagance, but it was my only one.
No problem. My brother Tomasz and I had grown up way worse off. Our father was an abusive lowlife, our mother a depressive shut-in, and we never had enough money. I had always worried that my brother was likely to burn out young. He had a wild streak, a propensity for rule-breaking. Instead, God love him, Tommy had channeled those traits into success in Silicon Valley.
The panino place had the local news going. I picked up the words “prominent architect,” and scooted into the corner under the TV.
They had started with a wide shot of SoMa Centre and the morgue van leaving it, while the newscaster talked about the death of Leopold Haring. It was nothing I didn’t expect to hear. What came next, though, was. They cut to Jeffrey Symond, Haring’s business partner, looking rumpled and shell-shocked, facing a blob of reporters with microphones.
“...saddened by this shocking event, but we are going to continue to pursue Leo’s artistic vision, and we’re going to ensure that SoMa Centre takes its place in the Haring legacy.”
“Were you there when he died?” a reporter shouted. Symond shook his head and looked down in sorrow.
“Do you know how it happened?” another asked.
“Yes,” Symond replied, his head still down. My blood pressure went up. “It was a workplace accident. A tragedy.” He raised his eyes. They were clear, his expression grim but determined. “We’re working with the investigating authorities, of course.”
The newscast cut back to the anchor, who delivered a few more platitudes about Leopold Haring’s genius while the picture switched to a stock shot of a corporate sign reading Haring & Symond. Then it cut to a black car outside a nondescript glassy building, while a woman in a business outfit and giant sunglasses hurried from the one to the other.
“Leopold Haring is survived by a wife and son. Mrs. Haring was not available for comment,” said the newscaster.
So that’s Natalie Haring. I watched her disappear into the building and hoped that she was sticking to her no-comment policy, because Jeff Symond had just complicated my life. Why would he tell the reporters that Haring had died in a workplace accident? I mean, as far as he knew, it was one, sure—but why tell them anything at all?
“No way to run a railroad,” I muttered at the TV’s talking heads.
The sandwich was ready, with a big smile from the old man behind the counter. He remembered me, and asked why he didn’t see me so much anymore.
“They moved us down by the dump,” I said.
The panino man thought that was terrible. I agreed it was.
The pan con lechon was as good as I remembered; maybe better. I was still chewing the last bits when I signed in with the muscly kid standing watch at the SoMa Centre gate, his back to the scorching devil wind. I picked out another wobbly hard hat and made my way across the roaring and clanking work site to the crime scene. The pipes were still in the same place they had been moved to, but I was surprised to find that the spot where Leopold Haring’s body had been lying was trampled over with countless boot prints and a Caterpillar machine track. No yellow tape, nothing to keep the area secure. I was annoyed with Inspector Jones. At a scene like this, with a restricted homicide investigation, he should have maintained the perimeter for at least forty-eight hours.
It seemed kind of silly to search for screwdrivers in the trampled dirt. But, what the hell, I did anyway. I also pulled out the bag with the weird yellow rocks, and looked around to see if anything in the vicinity matched them. Nothing did.
“Hey...!”
Samuel Urias, the union steward, was coming through the windblown dust toward me.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing here? This is a work site—it’s dangerous.”
“I was here the other night, Mr. Urias.” I pulled out my badge.
He had a knee-jerk reaction to it. “You with DBI?”
“No,” I said, trying to be soothing as I assured him that I was not from the Department of Building Inspection. “I’m here from the medical examiner’s office, investigating the death of Leopold Haring. I need to reexamine the scene.”
“What for?”
I held up the evidence bag with the yellow cement. “Can you tell me what this material is, and where it might be used on this site?”
Urias took one quick look but didn’t touch the bag. “Lady, I don’t care what you think you doing. I’m the steward here. Safety is my job. You’re leaving. Now.”
“Well, no,” I said. “I’m not. I am here investigating a death. That’s my job.”
“What for?” Urias said again. “He was bound to get hurt down here.”
“How do you mean?”
“Like I said, this is a busy site on a tight schedule. Dangerous if you don’t know what you doing. That stupid man, marching round here in a suit, with no hard hat, no gear.”
“Is that unusual? For the architect to be so hands-on, I mean?”
“Hands-on!” He loosed a sour little laugh. “Yeah, hands-on. He think he knows everybody’s job. Think he’s better than everybody, getting on my crew and yelling at them they’re doing it too fast, too sloppy, whatever. He treated my men like dirt.”
Urias kicked some up. “Like dirt! I’ve seen men die on the job. It happens. Sometimes it’s their fault, sometimes not. This time? No question. He was a...a accident waiting to happen, like they say. I’m only glad he didn’t take none of my men with him.”
Urias spotted something behind me and whistled for attention. It was the site superintendent. Urias marched over to him, and the pair of them kept their eyes on me while they traded words. The superintendent nodded. He put on a hostile smile.
“Dr....Tesla?”
“Teska.”
“Sorry. I’m going to escort you off the job site now.”
“No, you aren’t. I’m conducting a death investigation.” I waved my shiny gold Deputy Medical Examiner badge. His smile only hardened.
“Sam here is right. We are in violation of union rules. And OSHA regulations.”
“I work for the city and I’m on official business.”
“No one from the city gets in here unless they’re from the police department or the Department of Building Inspection. And if they’re police, they need to produce a warrant.”
“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of my task here. The death of—”
“PD or DBI, and PD only if they have a warrant in hand. That’s it.”
Samuel Urias had made his way to the entry gate and was yelling something to the muscly young watchman. I glared at the superintendent but said nothing—because I knew he was right. When Dr. Howe had promoted me to deputy chief, I had sat through twenty tedious hours of training for the job. A couple of those hours were devoted to a lecture about the legal powers vested in the medical examiner’s office. Once the body is no longer at a scene, the scene becomes private property again, inviolable without a warrant if the property holder is unwilling to allow us in.
That was all I needed—Dr. Howe getting a call from the chief of police, yelling about me being arrested for trespass. I agreed to leave voluntarily.
The watchman was abashed about escorting me out, and kept his distance. I said something about not holding it against him, he’s only doing his job, chain of command. He graced me with a smile when I handed off the hard hat and signed out.
The Department of Building Inspection can waltz onto a job site anytime, eh? Okay boys. DBI you want, DBI you’ll get.
The receptionist at the Department of Building Inspection sent me down the hall to the permits counter and told me to ask for Peter. Peter was ruddy and round, clean-shaven but for his sideburns, which were tapered to a sharp point. It was a terrible look for a man closing in fast on forty. I couldn’t stop staring at them.
Peter asked what he could do for me. I told him I was investigating a death on a construction site, and that I had some questions.
“Like what?”
I handed the bag of yellow rocks over the counter. “What’s this stuff?”
Peter examined it. “Polypropylene fibrillated high-alumina cement. Is your site underwater?”
“No.”
He looked puzzled. “A furnace or something? High heat environment?”
Again I said no. “It’s part of an ongoing medical examiner investigation. I’m told that for safety reasons I need to arrange for a DBI escort to inspect the site.”
Peter perked up. “Who died?”
“I can’t discuss it. Who do I talk to about having one of your inspectors visit the site with me? This is an urgent matter.”
“What’s the site?”
“It’s called SoMa Centre. Corner of Sixth Street and Folsom.”
Peter blanched. “Hang on a minute,” he said. He went away from the counter to a desk, opened a drawer, fingered some files. He came back with a sheet of paper. “Fill out this form. We’ll start our own investigation and get back to you.”
“What? No—this is urgent, I said. Somebody died down there.”
Peter shrugged apologetically. “I understand, but we have our own procedures to follow. I need to get some information before I can direct your request to the right inspector. Just fill that out and send it back to us, by fax is best. The information is at the top of the sheet...”
Peter assumed a quizzical look and made a point of digging into his pocket. His hand came out with a phone. He glanced at it.
“Sorry, I have to take this.” He turned away, stuck the phone to his ear, and hurried through a back doorway and out of sight.
I hadn’t heard that phone ring. Maybe it was on vibrate. Or maybe Peter really, really did not want to talk to me about SoMa Centre.
“He shut down as soon as I named the building site,” I said. I was in the DBI garage, on the phone to my friend Sparkle from the privacy of my car. Sparkle is a bounty hunter. Her business, Baby Mike Bail Bonds—named after her gargantuan and reliably imposing cousin—sits across Bryant Street from my old office at the Hall of Justice.
“I know fishy when I see it, Sparkle. There’s something fishy about these rocks.”
“Maybe. I know someone you can talk to about it.”
“Baby Mike?”
“No, Cousin Michael is your man if you need to move a fridge or three. This is an old client of mine. He does exactly what you’re talking about—concrete pours and general masonry. Or he used to, at least, before some life challenges. He’s getting back on track, working a side job for now.”
Sparkle gave me the man’s name and told me where to look for him. Then we spent some time catching up. The bail bonds business had gone into a slump, so she had been expanding her range of services.
“Fingerprinting, background checks, due diligence screening. There’s tons of demand for private-sector security services. All the tech companies are getting deeper into them. Trouble is, demand has gone up but so has supply. And, well... Jessie, are you sitting down?”
“I am.”
“Some of these tech companies—? They aren’t eager to hire a Black woman and give her password access.”
“Goodness! I am shocked, shocked, to hear that.”
“Honey, it surprised the heck out of me, I will just tell you.”
“But you’re managing?”
“I’m managing.”
“I should hook you up with Tommy.”
“Do not hook me up with your brother.”
“I meant business-wise—”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant, too. I need to keep my nose clean, thank you very much.” Sparkle and Tommy had helped me out with some computer sleuthing the year before, and Tommy had spooked Sparkle with his willingness—eagerness, even—to hack into places he didn’t belong.
“Which recipes did you decide you wanted?” Sparkle asked. We were swapping, three each, for Thanksgiving, and had given one another a bunch of choices. I told her I wanted the candied yams, the collard greens, and the scalloped potatoes.
“Classics. Are you sure you don’t want the garlic crabs? That’s my favorite.”
“I don’t want to experiment. This is a big deal.” I had learned when I’d first moved to San Francisco about my new city’s passion for local Dungeness crab as a Thanksgiving dish. Sparkle, a native, was performing her due diligence in pushing it on me. But I was making a Thanksgiving dinner for Anup and his parents, and the stakes were too high.
“Anything new with the parents?” Sparkle asked, reading my mind.
“Radio silence.”
“How long you been dating that man?”
“Coming up on eight months.”
Sparkle tsked. “Long time without meeting the parents.”
“It is. That’s why I’m sticking with the Thanksgiving staples.”
“I hear you. They aren’t vegetarians?”
She had a point. Anup’s parents were immigrants from India. “They’ve lived in Cupertino for thirty years. They enjoy the occasional pot roast—and an annual turkey.”
“So Anup tells you.”
“Why would he lie?”
“I’m not saying he’s lying. I’m just saying you should’ve met them your own self by now, that’s all.”
Damn it, Sparkle. Nothing gets by that woman.
“Well, we’re all getting together to break bread over Thanksgiving, and I’m confident they’ll find me lovely and charming.”
“No doubt, no doubt. How the heck are you going to do all the cooking in that silly little cable-car kitchen of yours, though?”
“I’m not. We’re presenting the meal at Anup’s place. I’m doing all the cooking, but in his kitchen.”
“He gonna help?”
“So he says. Which of my recipes did you choose?”
“The sauerkraut thing, the corn pudding, and the dried-fruit poultry stuffing.”
“Bold. Bold choices.”
“I’m bringing it over to my mom’s, bunch of cousins coming. No one to impress and nothing to prove.”
That cracked me up. She joined in. I told Sparkle again how much I missed our semiregular lunches, back when I was working at the Hall of Justice. Now that I was deputy chief, though, and with our office still shorthanded, I just didn’t have the time to go out. We made a date to meet up for dinner instead, over the weekend.
The address where Sparkle sent me to talk to her old client the cement man was near the Hyde Street Pier. I parked in Ghirardelli Square and dove into the sidewalk crowd, surfing the stream of tourists sweating in the unseasonable heat, past the quick-sketch artists and amateur jewelry makers, until I found the right spot. It was a tour company that rented out those horrible little three-wheeled, canary-yellow tourist buggies.
I shouted at the guy working the counter, asking for Sparkle’s old client. He pointed to a mechanic who was bent over one of the machines. He was a dark-skinned Black man with short gray hair, wearing a jumpsuit the same ridiculous color as the buggy. He killed its engine and apologized for the noise.
I dropped Sparkle’s name, and the man lit up, asked how she was doing, how was her mom. I said Sparkle was fine, and her mom was in good health and looking forward to having everybody around for Thanksgiving. Then I said I was looking for advice on concrete masonry, and heard he was an expert. He worked some degreaser into his hands, told the guy at the counter he was going on break, and agreed to a cup of coffee.
I suggested a famous tourist trap on the corner, but the cement mason didn’t want to be indoors. We grabbed coffees from a cart instead, and sat on a shaded park bench, watching the snaking line of people at the cable-car turnaround. The mason asked me how I knew Sparkle and I told him. He reacted with the look some people take on when they find out I’m a medical examiner—the look of someone who has had to deal with our office. In the mason’s case, he’d been arrested at a death scene.
“Painkiller addiction,” he said. “It started with a work accident. Nothing serious, just everyday back pain that kept getting worse no matter what kind of brace I wore or how much lifting from the knees I did. So I went to the doctor and he gave me these pills, and...” The mason turned away from me. “Well, you must know the story. I’m lucky to still be breathing. Pills ran out, and I figured out how to buy them on the street. That got too expensive.”
“So you started using heroin.”
The mason turned away, put his eyes on the ferries and sailboats playing tag in the bay, and said nothing.
I apologized. Strzelić gafę, my mother used to call it, my talent for putting my foot in my mouth.
“I lost my job, went way down in a hole. Had a couple of arrests. That’s how I met Sparkle.” He swirled his coffee. “Anyhow. I’m trying to get my union card back. This—” he pointed his chin back to the garage “—is temporary.”
The mason asked why Sparkle was sending me to him. I showed him the bag of rocks.
“High-alumina cement,” he said right away. “HAC for short. This mix is a structural concrete reinforced with polypropylene fibers. I’ll bet it came out of a marine job, or someplace that has to handle high heating loads, right?”
“Well—no,” I said, and kept to myself that Peter at the DBI had made the exact same assumption. “It has to do with one of the new high-rises going up South of Market.”
“Which one?” the mason asked.
I balked. The case was restricted. That meant that I couldn’t discuss anything about the cause and manner of death. It didn’t mean I couldn’t talk about things that were known to the public, and Haring’s death had been all over the news.
“Before I tell you anything about this, I’m going to ask you to keep it confidential. Okay?”
“I’m no gossip,” the mason said.
“Thanks. The death I’m investigating happened at a job site on the corner of Sixth and Folsom. It’s supposed to be a building called SoMa Centre.”
“That place,” said the mason. “Oh, yes. That place is bent.”
“Bent...?”
“Oh, yes,” he said again, and nodded like he meant it. “Word gets around. I know people working that job.”
The cement mason, who was no gossip, lowered his voice and held his coffee cup close to his lips. “The whole thing is rushed. They’ve got deliveries down to the minute, tasks overlapping, heavy equipment always on the move. Everybody’s racking up overtime, but they’re still getting yelled at to pour on the speed. In my line of work, that’s how people get hurt. Or dead. Wait—is this that big architect, the one all over the news?”
I told him I couldn’t answer that question. Then I asked where on that site I might find the HAC aggregate being used—and what for.
“Well now, that’s something I can’t answer. Like I said, I would expect to find this in a wet job or a hot job, but SoMa Centre hasn’t got anything like that going on. HAC is a specialist’s material. The standard product you’ll find for all kinds of masonry applications is good old Portland cement. Reliable stuff. I love working with it. But a concrete put together this way...well, it’s different. Less forgiving. It cures three times faster than Portland cement. It’s resistant to high heat, which is why you find it in industrial applications like furnaces and such. Where did you find it?”
Zipped inside a dead man’s pocket? I couldn’t tell him that, either, and said so. The mason bristled and reminded me that I had come to him seeking free advice. He turned the HAC over in his hand for a minute, then went on.
“It also makes a decent emergency patch—and in my line of work, if there’s an emergency, it likely has to do with the foundation. My guess? Something’s gone bad in the foundation work, and someone is trying to fix it quick or retrofit it.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It can be. High-alumina cement is no substitute for properly poured, steel-reinforced Portland cement concrete. If you don’t mix HAC just right, it gets compromised when it sets. If you pour it next to Portland concrete that hasn’t fully cured, it can crack. It’s a great material for certain jobs, but it’s finicky.”
He handed the evidence baggie back to me. “My opinion? Something ain’t right. You use this stuff when you’re in a hurry. And if you’re in a hurry, at the stage of construction where they’re at now—? Something ain’t right.”
I thought about Peter at the DBI, and his tight-lipped reaction when I’d told him where the rocky stuff had come from.
Something ain’t right.
“What do you know about the Department of Building Inspection?” I asked Anup, right when the soup dumplings arrived.
We were out to dinner at one of our favorite local joints, House of Shanghai Taste—eight tables in a narrow glass storefront looking onto Balboa Street, with its dozen other restaurants, a yoga studio, a bakery, a florist, the two banks and the corner store and the bait-and-tackle shop. Directly across the street was the neighborhood’s anchoring landmark, a marquee cinema with a towering, blinking-neon sign. It had taken some getting used to after the move from Los Angeles, but I had grown to love the windswept, fog-bitten Outer Richmond District.
The lady at House of Shanghai Taste serves the soup dumplings, ten to an order, in a bamboo steamer, with a soy-ginger sauce on the side. The challenge with soup dumplings is the patience required to allow them to cool to a nonscalding temperature.
“Why you want to know about DBI?” Anup said. Lawyers. They always answer a question with a question. Prosecutors—or former prosecutors, like Anup—never fail to pull this stunt. Putting you off guard is a reflex.
“I dunno,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure there’s graft there, right?”
“Hard to imagine there isn’t some.”
“So...how much? What kind?”
Anup dug into a plate of cold jellyfish salad. The man would eat anything. He claimed to enjoy cold jellyfish. I grew up stepping on dead jellyfish on the beach at Lynn Shore Drive. I stared down the soup dumplings and willed them to cool.
“Not really my area,” Anup mumbled through his chopsticks.
“Did you ever charge anyone from DBI?”
“That’s the City Attorney’s Office. Civil litigation.”
“You don’t remember any criminal cases having to do with construction? You were at the DA’s office for five years, Anup.”
“It’s hard to prosecute cases like that unless there’s real, demonstrable, one-sided negligence. What you’ll typically find instead is a jumble of bad actors and incompetence. Everybody points fingers at everybody else, and they all end up getting off. Until it goes to civil litigation, and then they all get screwed.”
He picked up the special spoon, oblong and flat-bottomed like a miniature dinghy, and coaxed one of the soup dumplings onto it.
“Too soon,” I warned.
“The major players in the construction industry are all big donors—to the mayor’s campaign, the Board of Supervisors. The district attorney.” He shrugged cynically, blew on his dinghy spoon. “Let’s put it this way—there might be an investigation, but no one’s ever going to see an indictment.”
Anup dribbled a little of the ginger sauce onto his soup dumpling and tipped it into his mouth. Then he did that thing you do, opening your mouth and flapping your hands and whistling out steam, when you’re impatient with soup dumplings.
“Told you so,” I said.
Anup had left the DA’s office because he’d seen too many rich and powerful white-collar miscreants skate, and too many poor people, too many emotionally disturbed people, too many newcomers who didn’t speak the language and couldn’t work the system, too many drug addicts and sex workers and homeless and hopeless San Franciscans ending up with prison time instead. He used to believe it was a long game—that he or one of his colleagues would be able to build cases that would punish the powerful scofflaws one way or another, if they just had enough time and patience. He had run out of one and got tired of wasting the other. When he made the move out of the DA’s office, he was able to pursue the area of the law he really loved: appeals of factual innocence. Exoneration.
I gazed at Anup, gulping down his hot dumpling. Even grimacing, he was a handsome man—huge eyes, long lashes, deep brown skin. Soft cheekbones spaced wide beside a slender nose. I had fallen for Anup more than a year before, when we were working a case together, and found myself falling more passionately as time went on. Under his sharp, quick-witted facade was a soulful, caring, righteous person.
“I love you, Anup,” I said. “You silly creature.”
Anup dabbed his brow with his napkin and scooped another soup dumpling. “Why, how nice of you to say, Doctor.” He looked right at me with those big brown eyes, and I melted. “I love you too.”
The realization came suddenly: we weren’t spending enough time together, enough time like this, happy and relaxed, over a meal. The added responsibility of carrying the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner badge meant that the task of running the shorthanded morgue fell mostly on me. Anup sometimes accused me of caring about the job more than I cared about him. That was unfair, and would start us fighting. It was like blaming me for bad weather, I would tell him. Like blaming me for the summer fog.
I scooped a dumpling of my own, and sauced it, and waited. “I talked to Sparkle today,” I said. “She gave me a couple more recipes.”
Anup’s smile dropped off, and his gaze retreated.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“It’s not nothing. This happens every time I mention Thanksgiving. What is it?”
“Nothing. I just don’t want to talk about it.”
“It’s exciting!”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so! We’re going to have candied yams and collard greens and scalloped spuds... Do you think your parents will like that?”
Anup took another soup dumpling. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Well, good. Because if it isn’t, you just have to tell me, and I’ll—”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Okay. I’m going to go to that fancy meat market in Laurel Village and get a natural bird. I’ll aim for one on the small side, maybe twelve to fifteen pounds, if they can—”
I was stopped by a thud and a jolt. Anup bobbled his dumpling and it splashed open on his plate.
“What...” he said.
That’s when the real shock, the one the news people would talk about later as the shear wave front, hit. Something tossed me straight up in the air and I landed on the floor, my chair on top of me. The chair was jumping around. The floor was lurching. It sounded like a freight train was running across the restaurant’s roof.
“Earthquake!” somebody yelled.
I flipped onto my belly, saw that our table was still standing, and crawled toward it. Anup was already under there. He grabbed me and pulled me in.
The shaking got worse. People were screaming. Glass shattered somewhere close. The freight train roar was all around us, deafening, dizzying.
“This is bad!” Anup was yelling, right in my ear. “This is real bad!” He kept hollering that over and over. The earthquake was somehow jerking us up and down and back and forth all at once. It felt as if a giant had grabbed House of Shanghai Taste and was shaking it to see what would fall out. Plates and cutlery tumbled around us. Tepid tea was dribbling off the table into my hair. I brushed it back and turned to look outside, through the restaurant’s glass door that now had a huge diagonal crack. The apartment building across the street had scaffolding, for a paint job. It was swaying crazily. While I watched, it came crashing down. I tried to see if anyone was under it, but the room was still shaking so much that I couldn’t focus.
The lights went out—in the restaurant, on the street, over the marquee cinema, everywhere. The screaming around us got louder and more hysterical. A blue-white flash lit the darkness and hung there, trembling atop a telephone pole, till it flared out in a blossom of sparks and a sharp boom. There was another flash and boom, and then another, and another, marching east up Balboa Street. I remembered learning about that from my disaster training as deputy chief medical examiner: overloaded electrical transformers, exploding in a chain reaction.
I clung to Anup. I couldn’t see him, even skin to skin, in the total darkness. Under the earthquake’s rumble I could hear the building’s timbers groaning like a ship in a gale. I tried to yell that we had to get out before the roof came down on us, but I could hardly hear myself, much less if he was responding.
And then, just like that, it stopped.