Radio: Chapter Four - Mr. Druthers

Chapter Four: Mr. Druthers

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    While I tried to make sense of it all, the Embarcadero echoed with the incessant beeps of the fire truck as it took group after group of law professionals to see the sights of the waterfront and admire its newest attraction, “body in red mounted on giant plastic feather.”

    This took long enough for the sun to burn off all of the remaining morning fog as it rose over Yerba Buena island and reflected off the glass squares of downtown’s skyscrapers, throwing little flashes of light onto the crime scene.  The television live van masts wilted under the solar glare as the crews packed up and left with the end of the morning shows.  Soon the only reporters left on the scene were a couple of newspaper guys and me.

    I found a perch on the Bay side of the park where I leaned against a black and white three-quarter’s pole shooting up like a stunted beanstalk from the concrete sidewalk.  “Tomorrow lies west” the caption on the art piece’s base read as I pulled my camera from the pack and focused in on the crime scene technicians searching the body.

    From this perspective, there was something familiar about the victim but I couldn’t place where I had seen the guy before.  In the telephoto sight, the man’s eyes were still open staring at the bustling city to his west.  The crime scene tech reached inside the victim’s red down-filled coat and came out holding what appeared to be a wallet.  He put the find in a plastic evidence bag then dropped it the 60 feet to the ground.  One of Vince’s detectives caught it.  I wondered if that was really proper procedure but hoped that meant we would have a preliminary ID sooner rather than later. 

    I snapped out of my daydreams as I realized it was time to cut up the latest sound featuring the mayor’s less than inspiring words.  I fed in the bites then went back to the puzzle at hand.

    The scene brought several questions to mind.  How did this guy get to the top of the feather and why would he climb the sculpture in the middle of a foggy night in the first place?  Where would the shooter have to be to hit this guy?  I assumed there were officers searching for a sniper’s nest using the line of sight data that would intersect with the hole in our dead fellow’s head.  You might think the force of such a shot would have knocked the victim off the feather and sent him sprawling into the native grasses planted at the base of Cupid’s Span.  What kept the body stuck in place?

    I was so focused on the scene above that I nearly fell over when the cell phone in my pocket began to buzz.  I regained my balance while managing not to drop the camera onto the unforgiving ground. 

        It wasn’t a call but a text message. I recognized the sender as Vince’s personal, not his city, phone.

        “Meet me at Red’s Java House in 20.”

        I recorded what the TV people call a “look live”, a short taped report that might fool the audience into thinking I was doing another live shot and fed it in for the top of the 11:00 o’clock hour then began my walk to Red’s.

        I jumped at the sound of a loud horn marking the departure of one of the city’s fire boats from its moorings just to the south of the Bay Bridge.  My nerves were still shaky seconds later as I passed into the shade of the span then back into sunlight as I walked on the sidewalk past Piers 24, 26, and 28 before arriving at Pier 30/32, the home of Red’s.

        If Cupid’s Span was emblematic of modern San Francisco’s love of majestic pretension, Red’s was a reminder that this was once a working class city.  The tiny white stucco structure first opened its doors in 1912 serving coffee and cheap food to the people who worked blue-collar jobs on and around the port of San Francisco.  About 20 years after it opened, Red’s saw a new clientele, the hard hat workers who were charged with fulfilling Emperor Norton’s dream of a bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland and the railroads that would link the city to the rest of the United States.

        I found Vince at his usual table outside facing the giant parking lot of Pier 30/32.  Sometimes it’s hard to square the two young men who shared a dorm at Sonoma State with the not so young men we had both become. 

        I’ll never forget the day I met him.  I had walked into my assigned room, terrified at the prospect of sharing a space with someone I had never met.  Vince  had settled in a couple of days early since his parents had to report to their new duty stations at Fort Lewis in Washington State.  His belongings were already in place, his bed made into tight square corners, his pencils, pens, and a large magnifying glass stuck into a white porcelain coffee cup on his immaculate desk.  He was sitting at that desk, paperback book curled back, his eyes intense in concentration, his haircut as short and squared off as the blankets on his bed.  I glanced at the card with my roommate’s name and then back up at the teenager sitting in front of me.  He wore khaki pants, an honest to goodness polo shirt and leather loafers over argyle socks.

        Oh shit, I had thought, I’m rooming with a straight-ahead neat freak nerd. Later he had confided those were the exact first two words that went through his brain when he saw me.  I’m sure I cut a figure his parents had warned him symbolized everything that was wrong with decadent civilian America.  My dirty blond hair hung below my shoulders concealing a likely obscene rock-and-roll t-shirt.  My ripped jeans would have earned him ten demerits had he ever had the temerity to wear them in front of Colonel Dad or Major Mom. 

        We were each everything the other assumed he would despise so it came as a shock to both of us that we immediately became friends.  Vince taught me to play golf, helped me study chemistry, and introduced me to the benefits of matched socks and clean underwear.  I taught him to play guitar, to discover the joys of hacky-sack, and even the allure of a bottle of Jack Daniels and the thrill of a very occasional joint.  When our classmates moved into off-campus housing in their junior and senior years, we chose to stay in the dorm together.  Vince graduated near the top of our class in psychology.  I made it through with a much higher GPA in journalism than I could ever have imagined without him.

        My friend had the exact same look of concentration on his face at his table at Red’s as he wore that day with the paperback book in our dorm room. This time he was staring at his notebook, running through the evidence he and his team had already collected.  His haircut was just as short as it had been the first day of college but the dark black hair was now speckled with flecks of grey.  The crease of his white dress shirt’s collar concealed a conservative red and blue striped necktie.  Vince’s dark blue suit pants had two additions he had never sported in college, a gold shield on the left side of his belt and a service revolver in a holster on the right.

        “How does it feel to be taller than the most powerful people in this town?” I pulled the white plastic chair out from Vince’s table and sat facing him.

        “You’re an asshole,” the police captain tried but failed to suppress a grin as he looked up from his notebook. “One of these days I’m going to wipe that smirk off your face for good.”

        “And you’re a great judge of character, as always,” I smiled back at him.  It felt good to exchange barbs with my buddy. 

    “What will you two buzzards have,” Helda, a waitress at least as old as the bridge, interrupted our friendly sparring.  I ordered a Danish and a glass of iced tea. Vince took a coffee, black.

        “So how the hell does someone get his ass shot while stuck on top of the most butt ugly piece of artwork in this city?” I watched Helda’s uneven gait as she pushed through the door to retrieve our orders.

        “Too soon to tell,” Vince flipped a couple of pages back to the front of his notebook then circled something that must have been important.

        “Any idea who the vic was and what in creation he was doing on top of that bow at four in the morning?”

    “His wallet says he’s Clarence Druthers, 45, of Noe Valley,” Vince pulled an evidence bag out of the inside pocket of the coat that hung from the back of his plastic chair and tossed it across the table at me. “As for what he was doing up there, I was hoping you could tell me.”

    The plastic of the evidence bag was slippery in my hands as I recognized the victim’s face I had seen through the camera’s lens.  I looked through the clear side to see one of my business cards. The back read in shaky handwriting, “Ferry Building, 2 a.m., come alone and await instructions.”

    “Oh brother, not Druthers,” Vince almost laughed at my almost rhyme.

    “How do you know him?”

    “He’s been pestering me for weeks, telling me he has the goods on the Mayor,” I paused as Helda brought my Danish and our drinks. I stirred two faux sugars into my iced tea and savored the raspberry flavor in the center of my pastry.

    “Go on,” Vince tasted his coffee, winced, then gave me that look he once used when chemistry most bewildered me.

    “Vince, you gotta understand, I get this a lot from weirdoes who think I’m their ticket to vindication.”

    “I hear you.  After all, we never get strange calls into the detective’s bureau. Everyone we deal with is strictly on the up and up.”

    “Okay, okay.”

    “So tell me the story of McKay and Druthers.”

    “It does sound like a rundown funeral home doesn’t it?”  Okay, funeral home was probably the wrong image for this conversation.  “I first heard from him in mid-August.  It started with a series of e-mails.  Something along the lines of ‘I know the true power behind the Smith Administration.’  Essentially teases with no evidence to back anything up.

    “I made the mistake of writing back asking him for proof.  He grew hinky then implying it wasn’t safe to reveal too much.”

    “Wasn’t safe?” Vince’s pen paused above his notebook as he looked up at me and took another sip of his coffee.

    “He didn’t say anything specific about threats,”  I grabbed a napkin to wipe the raspberry filling off my mouth then drank the last of my tea. “Come on Vince, you know how these guys can be.  He started displaying classic signs of paranoia.  ‘They’ were reading his e-mails.  ‘They’ were following him on Muni. ‘They’ were tapping his phone calls.”

    “It doesn’t look so much like paranoia after this morning, does it my friend?”

    “I guess not.  But admit it, if you followed up on every kook who called the squad, you would never have time to investigate real crimes.”

    “True enough,” Vince drained his coffee.  Helda came over with a refill.

    “Who’s doing the notifications?”

    “We think he has a sister,” Vince sipped his refreshed drink.  “We’re trying to track her down now. The JJ’s are on it.”

    If the mayor was J.J. to his admiring public, every cop in the department knew “The JJ’s” as Tommy James and Hector Jones, the homicide team with the best record of closures in the SFPD.  James had been on the force since the days when they still busted hippie heads while Hector had come on board in the mid-80’s.  Between them they knew every crook in the city and county of San Francisco.  When that pair showed up on your door, you just knew bad news was just moments away.

    “I’m sure the JJ’s will be their usual sensitive selves,” Helda had returned with a pitcher of iced tea and poured me a refill. 

    Vince had just opened his mouth to reply when both of our cell phones went off at the same time.  We both conducted our conversations in whispers, hung up, and looked at each other with intense stares.

    “Oh shit, this is not good, not good at all,” Vince took a final sip of his coffee and stood. 

    “I dunno, I think it’s pretty good for me, or at least for my story,” I got to my feet and used a napkin to wipe the sticky filling off my fingers.

    “You get the address?”

    “Sure did,” we each left some money for Hilda, put on our jackets and headed for the Embarcadero.  “See you there in ten.”

    “Not good, my friend, this is not good at all.”

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