The Broken Promise Land Page 3

  I tossed the envelope into his out-box and said, “Will you have that messengered over to Richman Labs, please?”

  “Sure.” He looked up from the papers on his desk and smiled craftily at me. Stood and ceremoniously held out a small gold box that I, from frequent experience, knew contained a single chocolate truffle from Sweet Sins. “For you,” he said.

  Eagerly I reached for it. “What’s the occasion?”

  He withdrew the box. “What’s tonight’s surprise?”

  “A bribe? The nerve of you! Where’s your integrity?”

  “I was corrupted by lawyers.” He motioned toward Altman & Zahn.

  “What, they can’t wait till six o’clock to find out?”

  “You know how lawyers are. They hate secrets. They’re nosy and sly. Much like investigators.”

  Thank God my passion for chocolate had tapered off in recent years! There was a time when I would have parted with my darkest secret for one of those truffles. “This investigator,” I said, “is incorruptible.”

  “Too bad. I’ll have to eat it myself.”

  “Enjoy.”

  “It’ll ruin my diet.”

  “Tough. See you at six.”

  “And where’ll you be in the meantime?”

  “With a former lover, I hope.”

  By my calculations, Don DelBoccio should by now have arrived home from his daily stint as a disc jockey at KSUN, the city’s wildest hard-rock station. I drove my red MG—which after a new paint and body job was nearly a classic car—over to his building on Luck Street in the industrial area near China Basin. When I rang the third-story loft, Don buzzed me in and I took the freight elevator that opened directly into his living space.

  As the cage rose, his bare feet appeared at eye level, then his blue-jeaned legs, and finally the rest of him. He smiled through the grille at me, eyes dancing with pleasure—a stocky man with a mop of dark hair and an extravagant, bushy mustache. I repressed a giggle, remembering the comment my older brother John had made the first time he saw Don: “My God, he looks as if he’s trying to eat a cat!”

  Don pulled the grille open and hugged me. “Why is it that you always appear whenever I’m thinking about you?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. What were you thinking?”

  He motioned me into the loft—one enormous space with a galley kitchen and sleeping alcove, crammed with enough books, audio equipment, musical instruments, and aquariums of tropical fish to amuse even the most easily bored individual for eternity. The loft was larger than the one he’d occupied when we were a couple, but during the year or so he’d lived there, he’d nearly managed to fill it. Of course, a set of drums, a baby grand piano, and a trampoline do take up space.

  “Wine?” he offered.

  “Kind of early, isn’t it? What were you thinking about me?”

  “Not so early. Besides, this is my evening.”

  What the hell. “Okay, thanks. What were you thinking?”

  “I’ll never tell.” He went to the kitchen, poured, and brought me a glass of red.

  “Hmmm.” I sank onto the pile of pillows that served as his couch. “What’s with the trampoline?” It was new since the last time I’d visited.

  Don sat beside me. “Guy at the station wanted to get rid of it cheap. He used to bounce on it in the mornings, listening to my show and holding onto a pair of weights. God knows why. Anyway, a couple of months ago he got carried away to Pearl Jam and bounced clear off the thing. Weights went through a plate-glass window, he got cut up, plus he broke his leg.”

  “No wonder he wanted to get rid of it. I guess now you’re bouncing with a pair of weights—”

  “No way.” He grinned wickedly. “But I am bouncing. You’d be surprised how many women’ve never done it on a trampoline.”

  “Lecher.”

  “Wanna try?”

  “If I said yes, you’d go into shock.”

  “I’m not very shockable. But I know I’ll never get that lucky again; I hear this thing you’ve got going with the guy you met up in Mono County is serious.” He toasted me, sipped wine. “So what’s your reason for stopping by?”

  “A trivia question, actually. You know my brother-in-law, Ricky Savage?”

  “Of him, yes. I never did have the pleasure.”

  “Well, he’s in town, and we were talking about song lyrics. There’s this line that’s been running through both our heads, and we can’t place it. With your memory of lyrics, I thought you might.”

  Don regarded me skeptically over the rim of his wine-glass. I looked down, sipped the excellent red.

  After a moment he asked, “What’s the line?”

  “‘Whatever happened to my song.’”

  “Mmm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Strangely enough, I can place it. But before I tell you where it’s from, I want to know why you’re lying to me.”

  “Lying?”

  “About this being a trivia question.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s not. I remember altogether too well the tone you use when you lie. Your voice rises, just a little but enough. Don’t ever try to fool someone with perfect pitch, Sharon.”

  Another person who saw clear through me. “Okay,” I said after a moment. “Can you keep this in confidence?”

  “You know I can.”

  I studied his face, remembering the good times and all the times I’d trusted him. And then I told him about the notes, Ricky’s new label, and the upcoming tour.

  Don listened thoughtfully, turning the stem of his glass between his fingertips. “I agree with you,” he said. “Savage has good reason to worry about those notes. Let me play you the song the line’s from.”

  “You have a recording of it?”

  “Uh-huh.” He went over to a bookshelf full of records, CDs, and tapes, and scanned the top shelf. “Lately I’ve gotten into collecting folk ballads—early stuff, from the southern hill country. There’s a woman from Bakersfield who’s been doing some interesting versions.” He selected a CD and carried it over to his sound system.

  Don’s range of interests never ceases to amaze me. In spite of a long career as a DJ for some of the most raucous and raunchy stations in existence, he is a classical pianist, trained at the Eastman School of Music; his tastes encompass everything except rap and heavy metal, and he cheerfully admits that spending a good part of his life taking phone-in requests from boorish and possibly brain-dead teenagers is merely a method of subsidizing his true passions.

  He slipped the CD into the player and rejoined me. “The song’s titled ‘My Mendacious Minstrel.’ The singer’s Arletta James.”

  A haunting voice filled the loft, accompanied by a simple guitar melody. The woman’s tone was pure and soaring, with an aching clarity that put a shiver on my spine. The words intensified it, heartrending in and of themselves—and all the more so because James made the pain behind them sound real. The ballad told a long story—as old as time and chilling as winter’s frost.

  A woman, walking in the hills, searching for the sweet berries that grow there in summer’s sun. A minstrel, wandering also, his homemade fiddle strapped to his back. A chance meeting in a clearing and a passion that ignites as he plays and sings his tunes. And a promise that he will create a song for her alone.

  And it will be like none yet heard, the song he’ll sing for me.

  More clandestine meetings in the clearing. More summer days as hot as the passion that runs in their veins. But still the minstrel fails to fulfill his promise.

  When will he sing my song, I ask, the song he promised me?

  An autumn day, and the minstrel fails to appear in the clearing. The woman waits in vain. Day after day she returns, until the snow is on the ground and a new life grows within her, then dies.

  Whatever happened to my child, the child he gave to me?

  Whatever happened to my song, the song he promised me?

  The woman leaves the hills and travels to a
town where the mansions of the wealthy stand on a bluff. There she finds her mendacious minstrel with his wife and his children, in his fine home. In despair she returns to the hills and wanders throughout the winter and into the spring. When the buds are on the trees and the jonquils in the grass she searches for the Carolina jessamine.

  It twines there in its deadly vines, its blooms more deadly still

  The woman prepares a potion and leaves the hills forever. By a ruse she gains a position in the minstrel’s household and exacts her revenge.

  The touch of the sweet jessamine fast took them by surprise

  And one by one they all died there, and one by one they died

  As she drinks the last of the potion, the woman remembers the clearing in the hills, the child she lost, and the lies her minstrel told.

  Whatever happened to my song, the song he promised me?

  Three

  I scarcely noticed when Don got up to turn the CD player off; my attention was riveted on the ballad’s message, and horrifying possibilities tumbled in my mind.

  He took advantage of my preoccupation to pour us more wine, then sat down beside me. “So,” he said, “what do you think?”

  “As usual, my imagination’s in overdrive. You say the singer, Arletta James, is from Bakersfield?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Ricky’s from there, too.”

  “Then he probably knows James. The music scene out in the valley’s pretty inbred. In fact…” He got up and fetched the booklet that was slipped inside the CD’s plastic cover. “Yeah,” he said after thumbing through it, “she mentions him in her liner notes. ‘With special thanks to Ricky Savage.’”

  “For what, I wonder? What’s their relationship?”

  “Ah.” Don leaned back on his elbows, smiling. “I know how your mind works. You’re thinking he had something going with her, knocked her up, and dumped her. And that she’s gone off the rails and plans to kill him and his family.”

  “Sounds pretty far fetched, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Is that the kind of thing he’d do?”

  “Well, it’s what he did to my sister—the knocking-up part, I mean. And I know he hasn’t lived like a monk all these years on the road. I asked him earlier if there was anything nasty in his past that might have surfaced, but he wasn’t very forthcoming, just said that there was stuff in the life of every performer, but he couldn’t think of anything that might’ve provoked a campaign of harassment.”

  “Stuff, huh?”

  I nodded. “He’s going to have to be more specific. And I’m going to have to ask him about Arletta James.”

  Don frowned. “Shar, even if he did have something going there, even if she did get pregnant, this is the nineteen-nineties. People don’t go around the bend over something like that.”

  “People go around the bend over anything. If you don’t believe me, take a look at my true-crime collection. Better yet, take a look at my case files.” I sipped wine, thinking of the investigation that had earned me the reward from the feds; its subject had been about as far around the proverbial bend as you can get, and for a reason that most people would consider insufficient.

  Don said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  I stared down into the burgundy depths of my glass, looking for answers and finding none. “I guess the idea is pretty far fetched.”

  “Maybe not. You read a lot about stalking cases lately.”

  “Stalking’s generally a male crime, though. And stalkers make themselves known to their victims. They come on nice at first—send flowers, ask for dates, whatever—then lash out when they’re rejected. The notes Ricky’s been getting don’t have that feel.”

  “What feel do they have?”

  “The sender’s obviously undergoing a rapid emotional deterioration. And it’s clear the person wants something, but unclear what. There’s a plaintive note… Oh, hell, that’s just the hit I’m getting; you could look at them and come up with something completely different. What matters is that the writer knows where Ricky lives and possibly could get at him, my sister, and their kids.” I set down my glass and stood.

  “You have to go so soon?”

  “Yes. Thanks for your help.”

  “Any time. Let me know how things work out.”

  From Don’s I drove to the Civic Center and spent an hour at the public library trying unsuccessfully to run down something in the trade journals on Arletta James. On the way out I detoured to the science section and checked a detail that was probably irrelevant to the investigation but interesting to me. Then I headed back to the Embarcadero.

  The day was unseasonably warm for July, a month which is usually cold and foggy in the city. I had the top down on the MG, but even the rush of breeze didn’t do much to clear the wine haze from my head. Near Pier 32, where the World War II memorial SS Jeremiah O’Brien is moored, I pulled over, parked, and hurried along the sidewalk to the squat gray clapboard shack that houses Miranda’s Diner.

  Miranda’s, along with Red’s Java House and the Boondocks, is a relic of the days when our piers actually catered to ships and cargo, and the longshoreman was king of the waterfront. All that is gone now, along with the seamen’s hotels and taverns, the hiring halls and tattoo parlors; condominium complexes and office buildings rise in their place. The Embarcadero, once crowded with freight-laden semis and rail cars, is now a spacious boulevard with a line of handsome new palm trees down its center. Instead of the old Belt Railway, streetcar tracks run along the median strip; when completed they will transport passengers from South Beach to the Muni Metro under Market Street. Only a few operating piers and the small eateries at the water’s edge remain to remind us of what our port used to be, and no one knows how much longer they’ll be able to hold out against the forces of change.

  A while back a client of mine had a grandiose plan to keep a part of our waterfront in maritime use by turning the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard into a megaterminal for one of the city’s venerable shipping lines. As it turned out, his plan was workable and would have changed the course of San Francisco’s history. But tragedy shattered his life, his financial backers withdrew, and in the end he decided he valued preserving what remained to him and those he cared about over preserving the port. It was the right decision, but every now and then I remembered his scheme and thought about what its abandonment had cost us.

  I pushed through the door of Miranda’s, waving to Carmen Lazzarini, the owner. I had no idea of the big bald man’s true first name; he’d gone by Carmen ever since his days as a longshoreman offloading South American banana boats. When anyone asked about the nickname, he’d say, “Carmen Miranda—get it?” and do a little dance, hands up, as if supporting a fruit-laden hat. The few things I did know about him were that he made a dreadful chicken-fried steak, a terrific burger, and that his “java” worked like a shot of adrenaline. Those few things, plus that behind the stained apron and gruff mannerisms beat a good and generous heart.

  Carmen surveyed me and reached for a coffee pot; I must have looked as though I badly needed a boost. As I headed toward the counter, I spotted Rae Kelleher in one of the booths by the salt-grimed bayside windows and signaled that I’d sit there. By the time I slipped in opposite her, Carmen was sliding a white ceramic mug in front of me.

  “Wake-up time?” Rae asked.

  “Yes. How you doing?”

  “Fair to middling. I wrapped up those two files you gave me this morning; they’re on your desk.”

  “Thanks. You ready for the surprise?”

  “What surprise?”

  “Aha! You’re trying reverse psychology on me.” Rae had been a psych major at Berkeley, and she still harbored certain pet theories about human behavior, in spite of strong evidence that they were rules made to be broken.

  “Actually, I don’t want you to tell me,” she said. “My life holds too few surprises as is.” Her voice was flat and her round freckled face held none of its usual cheeriness.


  “You have seemed down lately.”

  “Lately? Try six months. Everything’s gone stale on me. I haven’t even been taping my diary.”

  Rae was a fervent reader of what she called “shop-and-fucks,” and she often joked about quitting the business and trying her hand at writing one. Toward that end, she faithfully recorded her daily activities, complete with dialog, description, and philosophical asides. Her style struck me as not half bad, but her life was going to have to get a good bit more interesting, and her lifestyle a lot richer, in order to provide fodder for a steamy, semipornographic novel. Fortunately for both her and me, she was smart enough to keep her day job.

  I said, “Part of this depression could be Coso Street. It must be getting to you.” Since the remaining All Souls partners had reincorporated under their own names and put the big Victorian, where Rae still lived, up for sale, I couldn’t bring myself to call it by anything other than its address.

  “Yeah, it is. I feel like I’m living in a haunted house.” She ran her hand through her auburn curls, then nodded to Carmen, who was hovering nearby, to bring her another Coke. “Everybody’s gone, now that Ted’s moved in with Neal.” Neal Osborn was a used-bookstore owner whom Ted had met while browsing at the International Antiquarian Book Fair last winter; they’d taken a wonderful apartment in an Art Deco building on Telegraph Hill.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I wish I could get into that condo I’ve leased, but the owner won’t be out till August first. At night I lie in bed in my attic room and I’m all alone. It’s kind of spooky—and depressing.”

  I remembered how the Victorian’s creaks and groans could be eerie—even with other people there. “Then for God’s sake, why stay on?”

  “I don’t have a choice. I can’t afford a motel, and I don’t want to impose on my friends—”

  “You wouldn’t be imposing on this friend.”

  “Oh, Shar, I can’t do that. Hy’s staying with you—”

  “Only for a couple more days. He’s finished the project he was working on at RKI and wants to get back to his ranch. Besides, we’ve got a full schedule this weekend, so we won’t be around much. After the—” Damn! I’d almost given it away. “After the surprise, you’re to go back to Coso Street, pack what you need, and move into my guest room.”