“Just a second,” I said to Tamara, and rolled up the window. “Okay, better. What have you got?”
“Current address for Steve Niall. Seven-twelve Natoma. The Southwick Hotel.”
“Skid Row.”
“Crime doesn’t pay, huh?”
“Neither does stupidity, in the long run. You call the Southwick to make sure he’s still living there?”
“My mama didn’t raise no incompetent babies,” she said. “I called, he’s registered. Clerk doesn’t seem to like the man much. Sneered all over himself when I asked.”
“Anything on Charles Bright?”
“Goes by Charlie, first of all. Paroled last March. No hit on his current whereabouts. I did get the name of his parole officer, but civil servants don’t work weekends, right? Want me to try to get hold of the PO at home?”
“Not much point. He wouldn’t give out any information over the phone. What’s the name?”
“Ben Duryea.”
“Good, I know Ben. I’ll look him up if necessary.”
“Still checking Bright’s personal life and drug BG,” she said. “Born in Texas, home of Dubya and those other Cowboys. Broken home, father died of a heroin overdose. Genetic disposition to controlled substances, you know what I’m saying? Moved out here when he was sixteen, got his ass in trouble right away, been there ever since.”
“History of violence?”
“None on his record. User and small-time dealer, strictly — meth, blow, whatever. Walking pharmaceutical company.”
“What’s his relationship with Annette Byers?”
“Only connection I can find so far is they were both busted on the meth sting.”
I signed off and went to pay the gas tariff. Thirty-two bucks for fifteen gallons. If the prices kept climbing, as was being predicted, there were going to be riots one day. You could get away with disarming Californians, and taking away social services and most vices, and raising taxes to the limit, and jacking up gas and electric bills 10 percent or more, but the one thing they wouldn’t stand for was pricing them out of their cars.
10
Skid Row was a bad place for me today. On my best days its filthy sidewalks and gallery of bleak, wasted lives creates a dark and depressive mood in me. And this was anything but one of my best days.
A few years ago I’d come down here to see a small-time bleeder, ex-con, and self-proclaimed religious convert named Eddie Quinlan. One of the shadow men without substance or purpose who drift along the narrow catwalk that separates conventional society from the underworld. When he’d asked to see me, I thought it was because he had something he wanted to sell; I’d bought information from him from time to time for a few dollars a pop, in the days before Tamara and the Internet. But that wasn’t what he wanted that time. He bent my ear for half an hour about the things and the people he saw every day from the window of his Sixth Street hotel room — the crack and smack deals, the drunk-rolling and mugging, the petty thievery, the acts of sexual degradation. “Souls burning everywhere you go,” was the way he’d described the hookers, pimps, addicts, dealers, drunks, and worse. Doomed souls who were dooming others to burn with them.
Quinlan’s comments that night had seemed rambling and pointless, and I’d left him without a clear idea of why he’d asked to see me. I found out a few hours later. Among the last things he’d said to me was, “You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.” He’d found a way, all right. He’d used a high-powered semiautomatic rifle to shoot down fourteen men and women from his window. Nine dead on the scene, one dead later in the hospital — all with criminal records. And Eddie Quinlan had made himself the last victim, another burning soul, with a bullet through his own brain.
I’ve hated coming to Skid Row ever since. There was nothing I could have done to stop Quinlan, even if I’d had a clue to what was on his mind. Yet I was part of it just the same. He’d called me because he wanted somebody to help him justify what he was about to do; somebody to record a kind of verbal suicide note and who could be trusted to pass it on afterward, to the police and the media. And of course that was just what I’d done.
This little corner of urban hell was not as bad as it had been back then. The cops, the politicians, and the real-estate boom and tech-nomoney that had reclaimed much of the South of Market area had all had a hand in cleaning up and shrinking Skid Row to some extent. Now there was not quite so much street crime and wide-open drug dealing. But the addicts and pushers were still here, in alleyways and behind closed doors; so were the drunks leaning against walls in tight little clusters, the muttering mental cases, and all the others who had no place to go, no hope, only the bare exposed threads of humanity left. Many of the cheap hotels and greasy spoons and seedy taverns and barred-window liquor stores and porn theaters were still here, too. So was the effluvium of despair, the faint brimstone stink of souls burning.
Natoma is an alley that runs parallel between Mission and Howard for several blocks, through the heart of Skid Row. The Southwick Hotel was between Sixth and Seventh, a four-story residence hotel not quite as old or scabrous as the Majestic where Eddie Quinlan had lived and murdered and died. The lobby was similar — small, the only furniture a couple of crusty upholstered chairs that looked as though no one ever sat in them except spiders and roaches. The usual swamp-gas stench of disinfectant closed my throat as I crossed to a counter with an ancient rack of cubbyhole slots and a closed door behind it.
There was no sign of anybody until I slammed my palm down on a corroded bell. Then the door opened, and a guy about my age appeared in slow, wary movements. He had a smooth, round, unlined, benign face fringed with curly white hair — and the eyes of a maniac in a slasher movie. The contrast was both startling and disturbing, as if a war were going on inside him, his own private Armageddon, and the forces of evil were winning.
He didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at me out of those iniquitous eyes. I don’t flinch or look away from any man, but it was a small effort to keep my gaze locked with his as I said, “Steve Niall.”
“Not here,” in a voice as crusty as the two chairs.
“Where can I find him?”
Instead of answering he put his back to me and pretended to check the contents of the cubbyhole slots.
I said, tight and hard, “Turn around and look at me, Pop. Take a good, close look.”
For a few beats he didn’t move. Then, in that slow, wary way of his, he did what I’d told him to. The evil eyes crawled over me. His mouth quirked slightly, not quite a sneer, and he said, “Cop?”
“Close enough. Where can I find Steve Niall?”
“What you want with him? He do something?”
“Answer my question.”
“He’s an asshole. You gonna bust him?”
“Answer the goddamn question.”
He hesitated, but he did not want trouble with the law. Or with me, the way I looked. He said, “Rick’s Tattoo Parlor. Fifth and Folsom.”
“Niall work there?”
“Hangs out there. He don’t work anywhere.”
“Where else does he hang out, just in case?”
The clerk shrugged. “He’s around, like a bad smell. You’ll find him.”
“If I don’t, I’ll be back.”
He shrugged again; his mouth said, “I ain’t going nowhere,” and his eyes told me to go screw myself. I told him the same thing with mine. That’s the thing about evil, even this mild, diluted variety: face it head on, and a little of it gets into you as if by osmosis. Face the pure kind too often, and if you’re not careful, it can start Armageddon inside you, too.