Going on, he crossed the street and continued past a closed-up clothing store. Ahead of him was a group of people, and now that he looked, he noticed a parked police car. A police ambulance drew up to the curb, and he realized that something had happened.
The group of people had collected at the entrance of the old Pleasanton Hotel. Bits of debris were littered across the sidewalk: egg shells, pools of liquid, lettuce leaves and stalks of vegetables and trash and broken dishes and crumpled paper. The ambulance attendants were carrying the stretcher onto the sidewalk and the group of people were being moved back by a San Francisco cop.
“What happened?” he said to a couple of kids standing at the edge of the group.
“Some joker dropped a lot of crap off the roof,” the taller of the kids said.
“Yeah?” he said. They all watched, hands in their back pockets.
“Every damn kind of thing.” The kid bent down and picked up a fragment of glass. “Some sort of plastic.”
“Anybody get hurt?” Art asked.
“This lady, she was walking along. It must of landed on her. I don’t know; I just heard the noise.”
Art pushed up closer until he could see. The junk was heaped up on the sidewalk, and the remains of some globe-shaped transparent shell rested in the center of the debris and rubbish. A policeman was taking down information from an elderly gentleman with a cane.
Stepping from the pavement, Art walked on past the ambulance and away from the group. As he reached the corner, a police car slid in front of him and a light was flashed in his eyes.
While he was searching through his wallet, two cops stepped from the car and up to him.
“How come you’re out after eleven o’clock? Don’t you know there’s a curfew?”
“I was mailing a letter,” he said.
“Where’s the letter?”
“I mailed it.” He was still fumbling in his wallet; he started to reach inside his jacket to see if his packet of ID cards was there. Suddenly one of the cops grabbed his hand. The other cop shoved him back against the wall.
“What do you know about that stuff off the roof?” the first cop said.
“What stuff?”
“Off the hotel roof. Were you up there?”
“No,” he said, and his voice was thin, weak. “I was just coming by—” He pointed back in the direction he had come. “I was out mailing this letter—”
“There’s a mailbox back there.”
“I know,” he said, “I mailed it.”
Another cop appeared with three more kids. Each of the kids was trembling and scared.
“These were back of the hotel.” He gave them a shove, and they stumbled forward.
“They must have run out the back,” a cop said.
“Take them down,” another cop said, already starting off. At the curb the radio in the police car bellowed out calls and numbers.
“They’re out after the curfew; book them on that until we get some kind of story from them.”
He was yanked away from the wall and shoved, with the other kids, into the police car. As the car pulled away and into traffic, he saw that the police were picking up more kids. More police cars were entering the block, and he thought to himself: If I hadn’t come out to mail the letter.
“Honest,” one of the kids was saying, “we don’t know nothing about it; we were just walking along.” He was a Negro. “We were just going up to the drive-in, you know?”
None of the cops answered.
Art, looking through the window, held onto his wallet arid identification cards. The cops had not examined them; they had loaded him into the police car in too much of a hurry. He wondered if they would still want to see the cards. He wondered if they were going to ask him his name, or if they really cared.
21
During the weekend the paint was scrubbed from the furniture and walls of Jim Briskin’s apartment. The apartment, cleaned up, looked as it had before. Patricia put the easel and brushes and paints away in the closet, and neither of them said anything more about it. He let her do most of the cleaning and washing and scrubbing; in jeans and cotton shirt, her hair tied up in a turban, she sat on the floor, working with soap and water, a bucket, a heavy brush. She did not seem to mind. All day Saturday and Sunday they kept at it. On Sunday evening they invited Frank Hubble over. The three of them drank wine and talked.
“What happened to your hand?” Hubble said.
“I cut it,” she said, hiding her hand away.
“Can you type like that?” Hubble said.
“I’ll do as well as L can,” she said.
Hubble said, “Are you two married again?”
“Not quite,” Jim said. “We have the blood tests. We’ll pick up the license in a couple of days and then get married. There’s no rush.”
“You’re coming back to work tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “On Monday.”
“How about you?” he said to Jim.
“I’ll be back,” Jim said. “At the end of the month.”
“What happens when they give you a Looney Luke plug to read?”
“I’ll read it,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to stay on the air.”
Beside him Pat shifted about; she drew her legs up and tucked them under her.
“Jim is going to expand ‘Club 17,’ ” she said, “so it runs in the evening. He’s going to bring it back at eight and keep it going until sign-off.”
“If I can,” Jim said. “If Haynes can see it.”
“You going to spin a lot of rock-and-roll?” Hubble said. “The networks are starting to clamp down . . . you seen the latest list of banned discs? Mostly the small labels, the race and blues labels. Somebody showed me a BBC statement; they say they don’t have a list of banned records, just a list of music they don’t play.”
“Restricted,” Jim said.
“Yes, It’s their restricted list. You better be careful on that stuff. You’ll get the old ladies writing in. Better stick to the regular bands and tunes.”
“Guy Lombardo?” Jim said.
Hubble laughed. “Why not? A lot of people like that sweet stuff look at Liberace. You’ll draw a bigger audience with that. Rock-and-roll is on its way out. They’ve got Presley’s number, in another six months, nobody’ll remember him.”
Jim got up and walked across the room to the phonograph. An LP of Bessie Smith had come to an end; he turned the record over. The old ladies, he thought, the same old ladies who had supported his classical music. They would be writing in; they would start the pressure.
By the door of the apartment the bell rang.
“Who’s that?” Pat said. “Did you ask anybody else over?” She was still in her jeans and cotton shirt.
Opening the door, Jim looked down the hall. Two shapes appeared. They were Ferde Heinke and Joe Mantila.
“Hey, Mr. Briskin,” Ferde said, “the police picked up Art Emmanual.”
“What?” he said. The words did not make sense; he tried to get at their meaning.
Ferde said, “They got Grimmelman—you don’t know him—and they picked up Art because of this crap somebody threw off a hotel roof on Fillmore Street, and they claim it was some kind of plot the Organization had.”
Jim said, “What are they holding him on?”
“I don’t know,” Ferde said. “Rachael’s down there trying to whim. They say he isn’t of age, he’s a minor, and his parents have to get him out. And his parents don’t care. So he’s in juvenile hall or something. And they won’t let her put up bail because she’s a minor too, but she says she’s his guardian because they’re married.”
“It’s all fouled up,” Joe Mantila said.
“So maybe if you could lend us some dough,” Ferde said, “we could take it down and give it to her. And maybe she can get a lawyer or something and get him out. Because they’re married, so she ought to be able to get him out, don’t you think?”