I only had two autopsies on Thursday morning—an overdose and a hanging—and was delighted to find that Sparkle was available to meet for an early lunch. I needed to go down to the Hall of Justice anyhow, to talk to Jones and Ramirez about all the finger-pointing from the Haring family. We wouldn’t be able to keep both them and the press in the dark for much longer.
I stuck my Beemer in a loading zone right in front of Baby Mike Bail Bonds and popped my head in. Sparkle was at the small room’s only desk. She is a petite, light-skinned Black woman with a dancer’s delicate bearing and infallible fashion sense—that day, a pale blue blouse under a winter wool burgundy suit and matching cap. She had done her nails in French-tipped deep purple and wore just enough silver jewelry to impress without distracting. The effect was stunning. It made me grateful that I wore scrubs and personal protective equipment at my own workplace, because I would never have the style skills to pull off what my bondswoman friend Sparkle pulls off on the regular.
“I’ll run down to the taco truck if you’ll keep an eye out for anyone with a ticket book,” I said. “Lunch is on me if you chase them off. Bribe if you must.”
An eclipse fell across Sparkle, her desk, and most of the room as a figure slid into the back-office doorway, and filled it.
“You shouldn’t joke like that,” the figure said.
It was Baby Mike, Sparkle’s cousin, and he was dead serious. I have professional practice in sizing up human bodies. Baby Mike is six foot four and has got to weigh two hundred eighty pounds. Muscles, yes—but not a steroidal two eighty. Baby Mike is just plain large. Large, bald-shaven, and Black—with a nose that’s been bashed flat a couple of times, hands like iron fry pans, and no sense of humor.
I apologized to Baby Mike for my bad joke. “You want the Herrador regular, Sparkle?”
“Yes, please.”
“And what can I get for you, Michael?”
“Oh no,” Baby Mike—he preferred Michael—said. “I’m all right.”
“My treat.”
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah, babe,” added Sparkle, with a warning look. “Are you sure you want to offer to feed Michael?”
“Yes, I’m sure!”
“Okay then,” said Baby Mike. “I’ll have one carnitas burrito with everything on it, one chile verde burrito with everything on it, a quesadilla supreme, large nachos, and a Gatorade. Jalapeños and extra sour cream on the nachos.”
I mimed peeping behind him. “You hiding a crew of guys back there, Michael?”
“No.”
Sparkle grinned her told you so grin and I went off to El Herrador, our favorite taco truck, in the jury-duty parking lot half a block down Bryant Street. I managed to cart the order back without having to ask the cashier to help me, but just barely.
It was a damp and dreary day, so we stayed in Sparkle’s office to eat. Baby Mike wasn’t fooling around—he worked methodically and silently to demolish that meal. Then he thanked me and excused himself, saying he had fridges to move. He was out the door before I could ask him what in heaven’s name he meant by that.
Sparkle explained. I already knew her cousin had little to do with Baby Mike Bail Bonds. She’d named the business after him and had hung his portrait behind her desk as a boogeyman, but Baby Mike’s day job, she told me, was delivering refrigerators.
“My uncle, Michael’s dad, is a contractor. He gets regular work doing Section 8 maintenance for the county. Lots of units, lots of refrigerators. Michael brings the old ones out and the new ones in. He can pick up a fridge and carry it right into the apartment, alone, no hand truck or nothing.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus got nothing to do with it.”
Sparkle and I hadn’t seen each other since the earthquake, but before we’d even caught up on that news, she wanted to know how things were with Anup.
“How come you always know the number one thing that’s bothering me, Sparkle?”
“Professional hazard, I guess.”
I filled her in—his fears about my working conditions, my fears about his closing something off from me, hiding something, my working too hard, his working too hard. Sparkle shook her head, and her coiffed hair wobbled under the burgundy cap.
“Bad news. I’m telling you. You can’t keep going like this—something’s gotta give.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m having conversations with the dog.”
Sparkle rolled her chair away from her desk, stood, and paced. She said, “Now, look—”
I stopped her. “Nope. You are not setting me up, I don’t care how cute he is.”
“But he’s an artist! He builds things. With power tools! And he cooks, too.”
“No, thank you.”
“He plays guitar. Think how soothing that would be, after a long day cutting up the dead folks and all.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Artists have plenty of time, and they’re flexible with it. They’re generous with it. That’s what you need. Never mind these go-getter men. They’re never around! You need a man to take care of you, that’s all I’m saying.”
That stung. She didn’t mean it to—Sparkle didn’t know that taking care of me was exactly what Anup had promised he would not do.
“Think the rain’ll ruin the rhubarb?” I said.
Sparkle flopped back down in her chair. “Fine,” she said. “Be miserable.”
I looked around the office. “Looks like you weathered the quake just fine,” I said. “Everything okay at home, too?”
“Some plates and stuff fell out of the cabinets and broke, but nothing major. How about you?”
“Same. A little breakage.” I didn’t tell her that Anup had spent hours cleaning up the cable-car cottage in my absence, or that some of the breakage had damn near included my skull.
“There is something, though,” Sparkle said, suddenly quiet and serious. “About the quake. I have a favor to ask.”
“Go ahead. God knows I owe you.”
“That’s not... It’s—I’m asking you because I’m...” Sparkle trailed off and looked down at her desk. It rattled me—because in the year and a half we’d know each other, I’d never once seen her rattled.
She looked up and met my eyes. “It’s my uncle. He’s missing.”
“Okay. Tell me what’s going on.”
“My uncle has problems. He’s very ill, diagnosed as schizophrenic a long time ago. He bounces around addresses and sometimes goes missing for a while. My mom always finds him, though.”
Sparkle had told me before that Baby Mike Bail Bonds had been founded by her mother—but that her mom proved too soft-hearted for the business. Sparkle, who was less prone to getting ripped off by sob stories, took over when she was barely nineteen, and had kept the place afloat ever since.
“My mom can do that, you know what I mean? Like, if somebody can be found, she’ll find them.”
“This uncle of yours is her brother?”
“Yes. On my Burton side. Curtis Burton.”
I wrote it down. “Are you worried he might be dead?”
A sad smile crept up Sparkle’s lips. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I—”
“It’s okay. Lately Uncle Curtis has been living on the streets. He went off his meds again. He’s done it before. This time, though—last we heard about him was before the earthquake. Now we can’t find him.”
“We...?”
“My mom tried. She couldn’t track him down. She asked me to find him. Jessie, she’s never done that before.”
“You couldn’t find him?”
Sparkle shook her head.
That was bad news. Sparkle did not fail to find someone. It was her business to track down people who did not want to be found, people who are desperate to disappear.
“I’ll get on it. But, Sparkle—I work in the system. You know what I mean, right? I need any source of ID info you have on your uncle, anything that might turn up in a database.”
Sparkle snapped out of her funk, swung her chair to the computer, and danced her manicured fingers across the keyboard. “He has an arrest record. Loitering, trespass, stuff like that.”
“Threats of violence or self-harm?”
“None. But he’s been fifty-one-fiftied a bunch of times.”
A 5150 is a legal proceeding, an involuntary mental health hold. It meant that Sparkle’s Uncle Curtis had been hospitalized against his will for seventy-two hours while mental health professionals established that he wasn’t a danger to himself or anyone else. At the end of those three days, the law says the hospital has to let him go if they can’t diagnose such a threat. If he was homeless when he was last fifty-one-fiftied, he was likely homeless again after the hospital had turned him loose, with nowhere else to seek help.
“Did you call our office already?”
“My mom did. They couldn’t tell her anything.”
“Who’d she talk to?”
“Whoever answered the phone.”
I was about to chide her and ask why she hadn’t just come to me in the first place—but the look in Sparkle’s eyes stopped me. I knew why. She was afraid of what I might find.
“Give me his date of birth, medical record numbers, fifty-one-fifties, and I’ll see what I can turn up through my channels. But don’t jump to conclusions, okay?”
Sparkle was already up and heading to the printer. “Okay.”
“I’ll get right on it and let you know.”
Sparkle handed me the papers. “It’s probably just the quake, right? He’s just lost in the shuffle, right? He’ll turn up...”
I don’t lie to the next of kin of decedents—but Sparkle was my friend, and I didn’t know for sure that her uncle was a decedent.
“That’s right, honey,” I said.
Jones and Ramirez wanted to meet in a police interview room. It was small and white, with chipped laminate chairs, a cold silver table, and a camera mounted in one corner. At least it was quieter than the cavernous Homicide bullpen.
I spread out my notes and summarized the phone conversations with Natalie Haring and Jeffrey Symond, and my in-person interview with Oskar. It was a lot of material, but I sped through it. The two detectives listened and jotted the occasional note. When I finished, Inspector Jones said, “Thanks, Doc. We’ll investigate this new material if need be, but none of it appears to be relevant to the case at this time.”
That threw me. “How come?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the person we’ve arrested for the murder of Leopold Haring.”
“Arrested—? Who?”
“A man named Samuel Urias,” said Inspector Ramirez. “We picked him up on Monday.”
I remembered him. “The union steward at the job site? The one who pulled the pipes off the body?”
Jones smirked. “Showed us what a big shot he was, right? Well, a call came into the tip line saying that Urias had a major beef with our dead man.”
Ramirez said, “Apparently he got in Haring’s face at SoMa Centre the last time he was seen alive down there.”
“When was that?”
“Day before he died. Urias is a heavy equipment operator, so it would’ve been easy for him to stage the scene after he killed Haring. All he had to do was put the pipes in place over the body, and give that band holding them a little snip, or a good twist till it snapped. We can get our lab to do a tool mark analysis, and I’ll bet you that’s what happened.”
“But the body shows evidence of having been dragged. And there’s no bloodstain evidence at the scene to show Haring was killed on that spot.”
“Could be Urias stabbed Haring somewhere nearby and dragged the body over there before dropping the pipes on him,” Jones said. “Either way, he looks good for murder one.”
Ramirez picked up the thread. “Urias has a lot of power as union steward. We went down and interviewed a bunch of the workers, and they all had stories about him. It’s his job to be their advocate, and they all seem to think he’s a stand-up guy, but from what they’re telling us it looks like he was always making trouble, always in fights with somebody—usually management. We’ve got it in interviews that he was butting heads with the site superintendent, who kept hurrying the work while Urias was slowing it down to stick to union rules. We’ve also got his coworkers saying he fought with Haring whenever Haring showed up.”
“We talked to the widow, Natalie, too,” said Jones. “She’s never met Urias, but she listened to her husband complain about him plenty. That’s backed up by the workers at the site, who said Haring was constantly lurking around the place, seeing who he could piss off with his demands and complaints.”
“And insults.”
“Yeah, and insults. A swell guy, our Mr. Haring.”
“Urias didn’t take it well,” Ramirez said. “The anonymous tipster on the phone line claims to be a worker on the site. He had some details to prove it, and they checked out. He said Urias told him that he’d really like to find an opportunity to get Haring alone and give him a pounding.”
“Okay, so we pulled Samuel Urias’s sheet,” said Jones. “He’s got a couple of calls for service on domestic disputes, and a couple of arrests for bar fights.”
“No convictions,” said Ramirez, “but the violence in his record and the specific nature of the threat reported by the tipster were enough probable cause to pull a warrant.”
“We didn’t turn up anything at his house.”
“But then we tossed his pickup truck at the job site.”
“Guess what we found there, Doc.”
I just shook my head.
“Buried in the open bed, under a bunch of other tools, we turned up a bloody screwdriver.”
I almost jumped out of the chair. “You’re shitting me!”
“Just like you said.”
“So now it’s off our board and on to the DA,” Jones said. The two detectives shared a smug smile between them.
“Does that mean it’s not restricted anymore?” I said.
“Yup.”
“So I can sign the death certificate?”
“Yup.”
“Excellent.”
That meant I could call back the lawyers and insurance agents and Haring’s widow and his business partner and get all of them off my back. I didn’t need to worry about Oskar Haring at all, since he wasn’t even looking for the death certificate. He was looking for a receptive ear for his theories of the case—and that ear now belonged to some hapless assistant district attorney.
I offered my fist for bumping. The detectives obliged. Jones buzzed me out of the secure area, and I headed right down the hallway for my second police errand: Missing Persons.
The detective assigned to find Curtis Burton was a round man molded into his chair in a cramped office stuffed with overflowing evidence boxes and overburdened manila folders. He had watched retirement age stroll past him a while back, and wasn’t out looking for it, or anything else. He looked up at me through big square glasses and an air of unruffled permanence.
I pulled out a fresh notebook, expecting to gather plenty of data for Sparkle. The detective located the Burton file, which contained a single boilerplate form. It covered information I had already seen—date of birth, arrests, involuntary holds, etcetera.
“The last thing on here is his fifty-one-fifty release from the General on October twenty-eighth,” I said. “That’s the day before the earthquake. What have you turned up since?”
“What do you mean?”
I turned the single sheet over, hoping there might be an investigative report on the back. It was blank.
“I mean, what are you doing to find this guy?”
The round detective’s cell phone pinged softly and lit up. “Hang on.” He looked at it. While he was thumbing a response, he said, “We’ve put a flag on his name and DOB. If he shows up in the system, we’ll alert the family member who made the report.”
“You mean if he gets arrested?”
“Or fifty-one-fiftied again.”
I laid my pen down. “That’s it? That’s your investigation?”
The round detective took the question as provocation—which, to be fair, it was. “You know how many new cases we have since the earthquake?”
“You’re not the only ones. We’re stacking bodies like cordwood in the morgue.”
“Yeah? So did you bother to look for this guy in your own freezer before you came down here?”
Shit, that was a good question. I didn’t answer it.
“Leave your card and I’ll put it in the file,” the detective said, and went back to typing on the little screen smothered in his hands.
I took the stairs down to the Hall of Justice lobby, rather than waiting for the rickety elevators. I wanted to burn off a little of my anger before heading back to work. To Missing Persons, Curtis Burton was just another homeless man. There are a lot of homeless, and a lot of families looking for them, and the earthquake has made more work for everyone, sure. Sparkle’s Uncle Curtis had slipped through the cracks. The only way the round detective was willing to do his job was to wait for Uncle Curtis to crop up on his own, one way or another. I wasn’t about to let him get away with that kind of bullshit.
One of our day-shift 2578s was working the public counter. The other one was in the Ops Shop, swiveling back and forth between piles of paper and the computer screen. I interrupted him, and asked first about Uncle Curtis by name and date of birth. That didn’t come up in our docket. So I asked the investigator to look at all the current John Does we had in house to see if any of them matched him up by physical description: male, sixty-six years old, African American, five foot nine, approximately two hundred twenty pounds, no distinguishing scars or tattoos.
The investigator rolled his eyes so hard I worried he might sprain something. “That’s pretty open-ended, Jessie. We still have fourteen John Does right now, twelve of those from the viaduct collapse. Some have presumptive IDs, but you’ll have to give us some time to see if any of ’em match this description.”
“How much time?”
“A few days.”
I gave him a copy of the missing-persons report and asked him to be on the lookout for Curtis Burton, and to make sure the other 2578s got the message too.
The report had a phone number for the reporting party. I called it. Sparkle’s mom, Gayle, was, predictably, a sweetheart. I introduced myself and told her that Sparkle had asked me to help out, and that I would do all I could. I was careful to say only that I was a doctor friend of Sparkle’s, without mentioning where I worked—but Gayle was already one step ahead of me.
“Sparkle’s told me all about you, Dr. Jessie. I’m glad she reached out. Sparkle doesn’t want to say it, but I know there’s a chance my brother won’t turn up among the living this time—and if he’s in the morgue, we want to know.”
“I understand.”
“Please God, that won’t be the news we get. But if it is, I’m ready for it. Don’t feel like you need to hide anything from this old lady, please.”
“I won’t.”
Sparkle’s mother sighed. “Curtis. Curtis is my baby brother. He’s...got illnesses. Been in and out of institutions, on and off the streets, since he was twenty-four. We do what we can for him, but it doesn’t always help.”
She didn’t seem to have anything else to add. Or maybe there was too much there, too much to even start with. She thanked me again, and I promised I’d be in touch, and we said our goodbyes.
I thought of my own baby brother Tommy, and my own fucked-up family life. I gave him a call, but it went straight to voice mail, which meant he was deep in some secure chamber at some corporate office, doing whatever he does with computers.
I sat back at my desk and watched the phone. It was giving off that vaguely radioactive vibe again, trying to warn me away. I knew I had to do it, though. I had to pick it up and dial. My fingers went automatically to the buttons, starting with 1-781.
“Halo?”
“Co słychać, Mamusiu?”
“Czesia! Jak się masz, kociątko?”
“I’m okay. Everything’s fine.”
“What is this phone number?”
“My office. I’m in my office.”
“You had an earthquake.”
“We did.”
“You didn’t call me.”
“Here I am, Mamusiu.”
“Yes.”
The phone line from San Francisco to Lynn still had some static. I listened to it while my mother and I said nothing else.
“Why are you calling?”
“Just to say hello.”
“But you didn’t call after the earthquake.”
“Mamo...”
“Tomasz called.”
“Good for Tomasz.”
“Don’t be clever.”
My mother has lived and worked in the United States for forty years. Her English is good, if quirky.
“How’s everything in Lynn?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“How is the foliage?”
“All gone now.”
“Oh, right. How’s work?”
“I can’t work.”
“What d’you mean?”
My mother, a nurse, had always kept the family afloat while my father was busy getting fired from various jobs and drinking up the bank account. Then the hospital closed—or, rather, was consolidated into obsolescence—and she got a job at an old age home.
“I sprained my hand,” Mamusia said.
“What—?”
“Well, my wrist. I broke my wrist.”
“What—!”
“Stop that. You sound like a broken record.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“For what? How you could help?”
“I’m a doctor!”
“If you were here you could take me to the doctor. Instead the neighbor took me, all the way to Salem hospital. They gave me a splint.”
“O mój Boże, Mamusiu.”
“It’s getting better.”
“How did it happen?”
“I fell.”
“Where?”
“What does it matter? At the stairs, near the driveway. The neighbor spilled oil. The other neighbor, the bałwan. From that motorcycle he drives.”
“Is the splint off? Are you doing physical therapy? With a broken wrist, it’s very important that you—”
“Of course I do the therapy! I was a nurse in the OT at Union Hospital from before you were born, don’t forget, kociątko.”
Three thousand miles away, an MD to my name and a gold badge on my belt, and hearing my mother call me a kitten made me feel twelve years old and late for supper.
“When are you coming to visit?”
“I don’t know. We’re awfully busy here. Shorthanded, and the earthquake has made a lot of work for us.”
“Thank God you weren’t hurt.” Her eyes went to the Divine Mercy plaque in the hall by the bathroom and she crossed herself, I was sure of it. “So when are you coming?”
“Kozła doić próżno, Mamusiu.” You can’t get blood from a stone. She didn’t respond. So I added that I would be getting some time off after Christmas, and maybe I could come then.
“Why not Thanksgiving?”
“Can’t do it.”
“You have plans?”
“That’s not why I can’t fly to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, Mamo.”
“You have plans?”
“Yes. I have plans.”
“With the lawyer? The Indian?”
“Yes, Mamo. With Anup.”
“He isn’t a vegetarian?”
“Listen, Mamusiu, I’ve got to get going.”
“How come you gotta?”
“I’m still at work.”
“It’s eight o’clock!”
“Not in California, Mamo. Here it’s only five.”
She laughed the only way I had ever heard her do: dry as raked leaves. “I know that. I joke.”
“Yeah. You joke. Very funny.”
“Yes, it was.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Wait, Czesława.” Using my formal name: She knew something was up. Even if Mamusia didn’t know who Sparkle was, who Sparkle’s missing uncle was, who Sparkle’s worried mother was, she knew her only daughter, her Czesława. “Why you called now? You never answered me that.”
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“Sure I’m okay,” my mother said. “Don’t worry about me, kociątko. Worry about you.”