Death in North Beach (5 page)

The wine was perfect, cool, its ability to quench a thirst probably less endearing to wine critics than it was to her at the moment.

The afternoon at her keyboard yielded quite a bit more in the way of biography for those on her list, except for Mickey Warfield, who didn't come up at all. Unfortunately, there was nothing on the surface that connected any of them to Whitney Warfield in any meaningful way, or helped to explain the various animosities. She found that she could reach Brozynski and McFarland by email through their websites. She could go through the galleries to connect with Wiley and Young. There were no phone listings for anyone and that meant young Mickey Warfield and Nathan Malone would be a little more difficult to locate.

Before the second glass of wine on an increasingly empty stomach mellowed her a little more than she anticipated, she had gotten phone numbers for the two artists and sent emails to the two who had published email addresses.

She decided that life was good after all as she prepared the scallops she had bought at the Marina Market. She lightly roasted some asparagus sprinkled with pecorino and sliced some tomatoes. She dined on the back deck as the sun declined, which it was doing earlier and earlier each day. The third glass of wine introduced a little melancholy. Why not, she said, giving in. Enjoy it all. She took a sip of wine and remembered she liked William Blake's sly smile. There was, though, at the edge of her mind, something dark that tugged at her newfound sunny disposition.

Gratelli napped. He had already put in a day's work and he was planning to canvas the North Beach bars this evening. There was a lot of pressure these days. On one hand citizens were complaining about too much police overtime. On the other, they were complaining not only about the rise in the murder rate but about how few murders were solved. Lab reports on DNA were taking months in some cases and there was bickering between the medical examiner and the police and the District Attorney.

He had just met with the chief and the DA. Because this was a high-profile case, Gratelli would have whatever resources he needed. His lab requests would be priority. He was paired again with Rose and Stern, two homicide inspectors who helped on an earlier case involving people who were just a little more important than the average citizen. The two cops could get on his nerves, but they were more than competent. Now he snored, feet up on the sofa, trying to store a little energy for a reluctant night on the town.

Lang tried to keep his work at work. Through the afternoon – and with Thanh's expert search skills – Lang worked his own list:

While Thanh pounded the Internet, Lang found a phone number in the White Pages for Richard Sumaoang, among the last, it appeared, to give up a landline. The guy proved amenable to a discussion of Whitney Warfield and a meeting was set up for the evening.

Thanh provided Lang with files of information gleaned from newspapers, websites, and other sources. One page was a photograph of Agnes DeWitt. She had to be eighty. There was a sense of spirit in her eyes, but she was quite likely incapable of chasing down Whitney Warfield, hopping a fence, and stabbing him in the neck. Even so, she was added to the list of people to talk to. The murderer, after all, might not be on the list.

The other thing that struck Lang was that not only was Agnes DeWitt too old to be chasing Warfield around North Beach in the middle of the night, Marshall Hawkes and Elena Warfield weren't exactly young gazelles.

A number of articles were written about Hawkes. He had endless mentions on Google, was listed in Wikipedia, and the stories about him were published in very reputable publications –
The New York Times, The Financial Times, Art World, Art Forum
to name a very few. His work had been auctioned at some of the prestigious auction houses – Sotheby's, Christie's and, locally, Bonhams & Butterfields.

Lang skimmed the articles and found a Q & A on how Hawkes fit in with the history of art. He was smug, condescending and funny. His comment about there being no great women artists in history set up a long discussion that fell victim to Lang's short attention span.

Thanh also included a sheath of documents on Warfield himself. Fascinating reading. No one, it seemed, really liked the guy personally, though he had admirers of his work and his ‘take-no-prisoners' philosophy. He was among the early practitioners of fictionalizing fact or factualizing fiction. It was difficult to tell which was which sometimes. Warfield's language was colorful, strong, passionate and his characterizations often mean-spirited.

‘Life is mean,' Warfield was fond of saying. ‘It's a battle.' He was a fan of the rebelliousness of the Beats, of the truth-telling of the movement's artists and writers. They wrote about things that weren't necessarily pretty. They challenged the status quo. They didn't mind insulting what they considered the uptight middle-class masses with their words and actions. But for Warfield, there were those who simply abdicated responsibility, a kind of ‘the-world-is-screwed-up, let's-dance' mentality. He didn't like them. He didn't like those who opted for some sort of humbling spirituality either.

He didn't like ‘sissies'. He didn't mind ‘queers', though. He said so. That's not what he meant when he used the word ‘sissy'. He meant anyone who wouldn't fight – verbally or physically – for his or her beliefs. He disliked dissemblers. Stand up for what you believe. Call things as you see them.

‘Let the chips fall where they may,' Lang said.

‘Kill or be killed,' Thanh said, standing over Lang as he scanned the information about the victim. ‘Ironic, isn't it?'

‘Killed in the line of duty, maybe.'

Lang left at four, earlier than any ambitious businessman would. His approach to work was creative but not necessarily entrepreneurial. He locked the office. Carly was gone. Brinkman hadn't come in. And Thanh had run off to who knows where. Outside, Lang got into his banged up old Mercedes and drove to the Western Addition. Home, a former Chinese laundry, still looked like one from the outside. A Chinese name and characters, though scratched a bit, were painted on the windows. Inside, there was no trace of the former business. It was a big room. A skylight – two stories up – let in a bit of soft afternoon sun. Buddha, a brown, golden-eyed Burmese cat, waited at the door to welcome his human room-mate to
his
domain.

‘You're on your own this evening,' Lang said to Buddha. He changed Buddha's water, filled in some dry food. ‘You can meditate, contemplate your navel. Do cats have navels? Do bees have knees?'

Buddha walked away.

‘I see. No sense of humor today.'

Buddha was his sister's cat and a reluctant adoptee. Shortly before she died she made Lang promise to watch over him. It was a situation neither he nor the cat wanted. But after a period of distrust, they bonded, and Lang was happy to have another living being nearby, especially one that, in the end, was far less demanding than one of his own species.

Lang watched part of an early Oakland Athletics game, then fixed dinner. It wasn't a demanding exercise. He opened a package of pot stickers he bought from King of Dumplings out on Noriega. They made them fresh. Three Chinese women sat around a table in the back rolling and pinching the product – and freezing them immediately. No MSG. No preservatives. He boiled a dozen of them for 10 minutes, then tossed them into a skillet with some peanut oil. He opened a beer and retrieved a bottle of Pearl River soy sauce from the cupboard.

Buddha sniffed the pot stickers on Lang's plate, but left, curiosity quickly quenched.

‘You see, that's how you keep your slender figure.'

Lang felt a little disloyal preferring the Athletics to the Giants since he was living in San Francisco. But the Oakland team – and after all Oakland was just across the Bay – always seemed to have a little more spirit, had a little more fun playing the game, and they took some risks.

He had a few more hours to kill before meeting Richard Sumaoang at Alighieri's. It was to be a purposeful evening. He'd meet the poet and painter, have a little chat about Warfield and, when that was done, he'd quiz the bartender.

It had been a long time since Lang was in North Beach at night. His days hanging around bars were largely behind him. But when he first arrived in San Francisco, a couple of decades ago, he made the rounds of hotspots in the city. Many of them were in North Beach. In those days he frequented places that could be counted on to provide the kind of opportunities a young man appreciates – cheap beer, warm women and eight-ball. He was no longer that young or that interested – in eight-ball.

The North Beach he and Carly saw at noon wasn't the same as North Beach at night. Bars and restaurants, closed during the day, were open and busy. Neon glowing in the darkness gave the whole area a sense of mystery and adventure.

While the old, respected and authentic bars on Columbus – Tosca, Specs and Vesuvio – offered both locals and tourists pleasant spaces for friends to meet and talk, much of the action was on the oldest street in the city, Grant Avenue. Grant, which began near the upscale shopping district of Union Square, turned into the main tourist street of Chinatown, and eventually, as it crossed Broadway and Columbus, into the real heartbeat of the Italian village.

And it was in an alley off Grant that Alighieri's was inconspicuously located. The sign was small and blue. People who didn't know it was there would likely not find it. The result was that this was a special crowd, generally people who knew each other, and their guests. Being there meant, in a way, you had been vetted as a genuine San Franciscan, if not a genuine San Francisco character.

Inside, Alighieri's was a long, narrow room, with a long bar. There was enough space for a row of booths to line the wall opposite the bar. Conspicuously missing was a pool table and jukebox. Tony Vale's mellow voice rose slightly above the chatter.

The bar was half full. Customers there had come solo. The evidence was that a stool or two separated the half dozen men at the bar. Maybe half the booths were occupied as well, with couples or threesomes. The low-backed stools were upholstered in black leather, the same leather that covered the seats in the booths. The tabletops were shiny black. The one he could see clearly was cracked. Halfway down the bar room, there was a break in the pattern of booths and a large poster hung on the wall. It was a large, old, framed illustration of a red devil and a bottle of booze. Lang could make out the words ‘
Anis Infernal
'.

The room was dark, the conversation low. From what Lang could see, the customers, mostly men, were middle-aged or older. They wore dark clothes, sported either beards or long hair or both. It was pretty clear none of them had day jobs in the financial district.

Lang looked around for someone who would fit the description of a Filipino artist and poet. No one. He looked at his watch. Nine. Lang found a stool that wouldn't disturb the protocol of keeping at least a stool away from the next guy and sat.

‘Peroni,' Lang said, when the bartender came up. Seemed fitting to order an Italian beer. The bartender took no note. His look was neither welcoming nor discouraging.

‘How's Mr Alighieri?' Lang asked when the beer arrived.

‘Dead,' the bartender said.

‘Sorry to hear that,' Lang said.

‘About seven hundred years.'

‘Has it been that long?' Lang asked. ‘Time goes by so quickly.' He'd hoped he could get beyond the bartender's complete indifference, tap into a sense of humor. Not even a smile. That would make questions later a little more difficult.

Behind the bar was a wall of liquor bottles, the shelves interrupted in the middle by another large poster, this one showing a lithe and sly-looking green devil holding a bottle of spirits.

We've got a theme here, Lang thought. Drink and go to hell. Or, as he thought more about it, maybe they serve drinks in hell. He liked the idea.

Sumaoang appeared in that sudden way that Lang's cat Buddha appeared – one second nowhere to be seen, the next right beside him.

He was a slender man, short, fit, looking to be fifty maybe, though probably older. Jeans, a worn silk sport jacket over a dark shirt. Big eyes, soul patch just below his lower lip. A smile on his face.

‘Noah?'

‘Yeah. You picked me right out.'

‘I know everybody else,' he said, slipping on to the stool beside Lang, and putting his iPhone on the bar. Tight clothes, Lang thought. Nowhere else to put it.

‘Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,' Lang said.

‘I come down here most nights,' Sumaoang said. It wasn't a warm smile he had on his face, but a cold smirk. ‘Nothing special.'

Lang took the slap without showing he understood it. ‘Buy you a drink?'

The bartender was there with a bottle of water.

‘You must be a regular,' Lang said to the artist.

‘Real regular. You want to know about Warfield?' Sumaoang asked.

Five

After cleaning up the dishes, Carly brewed a cup of coffee and settled on the sofa with her laptop to follow up on the people on the list. Frank Wiley had several links on Google. She discovered his photographs were used in magazine and newspaper articles. They were included or featured in several exhibitions over the years. There was an out-of-print book on Amazon. His specialty was North Beach – the neighborhood, its characters, and its celebrities.