Switchback: A San Francisco Mystery (A Darcy Lott Mystery) Read online

  His eyes shut, his head fell back and the paramedics seemed to double their speed. They didn’t pause to ask if I wanted to ride with him.

  The ambulance siren’d off and I stood on the sidewalk not even knowing where it was headed. No one to be outwardly cool for. All the panic I’d kept leashed in burst forth. My hands were shaking, fluttering against my legs; my breath moved in useless little chugs.

  I didn’t notice the cop till he spoke. ‘Are you related to Mr Garson?’

  Mr Garson? Like he was a supervising clerk in some county office?

  ‘Wife? Domestic partner?’ He was stocky but not fat, round-faced with a shaven pate stubbled with brown and gray. Mid-forties – old for a uniformed cop, like he’d joined the force after another career. Or he’d been busted back to patrol.

  ‘He’s the abbot here. I’m his assistant. You’re taking me to the hospital, right, Officer …?’

  ‘Snell.’

  Snell? I’d heard that name before. Why? ‘Let me grab my phone and wallet and lock the door.’

  I couldn’t have been gone more than ninety seconds, but it was enough time for him to check messages, make a call, whatever. He said, ‘You’re Lott’s sister, huh?’ with an edge to his voice that I’d heard all too often from other cops who knew my recently retired oldest brother. This wary tone could have come from any of John’s fellow sworn officers whom he’d chewed out, turned in, gotten suspended, fired, indicted, or who just found him a pain in the ass.

  ‘SF General?’ I prodded. Are they taking Leo to the San Francisco General trauma unit?

  ‘You witness the attack?’

  ‘I’ll answer your questions at the hospital.’

  ‘I’m afraid, Ms Lott—’

  As in, fat chance.

  I could have argued. Feel free, he’d say. We get paid by the hour. I sighed and said, ‘Let me speed things up for you, Officer Snell. I’m Darcy Lott. This is the Barbary Coast Zen Center. The ground floor has the meditation hall, the interview room, a tiny kitchen and toilet. I live upstairs, across the hall from Leo Garson. So, there are two rooms and bathroom up there. We have two zazen – meditation – sittings a day, Monday through Friday. Two days a week, during the afternoon sitting, Garson-roshi – that’s what we call our teacher, the roshi is a term of esteem that we – his students, I mean, give him. Garson-roshi, see?’

  Snell didn’t see, didn’t care.

  I continued: ‘Twice a week, mornings, and in the afternoons after zazen, he offers private interviews in the room in which he was attacked.’ I had to take a long breath to maintain outwardly cool.

  Snell was focused on his notepad like the universe depended on each blot of ink. Didn’t the San Francisco Police Department have computers or iPads or something more up-to-date than paper and pen? Maybe Snell just couldn’t be parted from his paper and graphite security blanket.

  I took another breath and described the attack in more detail than I ever wanted to think about again. ‘The attacker – I can’t tell you whether it was a man or a woman.’

  For the first time he looked up skeptically. ‘Try.’

  I tried. ‘They wore a hoodie. I only had contact with their shins.’ I tried to pull up the feel of those legs. ‘Not a woman who wears high heels. Not that shape of calf. But a runner, even a walker … Could be a woman. Mid-height. Never spoke.’

  ‘Rushed in, attacked Mr Garson and didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No. Shoved past me … OK, here’s what it seems like now, like he wasn’t expecting a second person, just assuming he’d find Leo, find Garson-roshi. So finding me in the hall, right outside the interview room unnerved him. Big time. Maybe he thought about turning and running. But then, maybe, and this is just a guess – he saw Leo’s kotsu—’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘A stick, but a thick one. Polished. Eighteen or so inches. It’s a sign of a teacher. Old-time teachers in China and Japan would hit students with it to’ – how could I explain this to him? – ‘to make them focus on that moment.’

  ‘Bet that worked.’

  Sarcasm? More than I’d expected from him.

  Snell seemed equally surprised by his comment, as if the words had popped out of a trapdoor in his head. He cleared his throat, looked hard at his notepad.

  ‘Leo had the kotsu beside his leg, near the middle of the room, visible from the door.’

  ‘So you’re thinking it was a crime of opportunity.’

  ‘I’m just saying.’ Saying too much. A chatty witness is a stupid witness. That one from my brother Gary, the attorney. In his lexicon the only words spoken to the police should be I’m calling my lawyer. Still, the sooner SFPD found Leo’s assailant the better all around.

  ‘And then, Ms Lott?’

  ‘The attacker ran.’

  ‘You see where he went?’

  ‘Out. Out of the building.’

  ‘And then where? Which direction? Did you see that?’

  ‘No, dammit! I had Leo to worry about. Leo, bleeding!’

  ‘Leo? The abbot you live with.’

  Yeah, that one. ‘Yes.’

  Behind him two beat cops and a plainclothes detective huddled by the zendo door. Snell nodded to me and sidled off, as if from one ominous dark puddle to another. The man made me think of a shelter dog.

  A UPS truck rattled down the street like a brown marimba racing against the February dark and groaned to a stop at Columbus. I thought I could hear the bubble op-op-op of the ambulance speeding Leo to the emergency unit, but more likely it was from the crash on Columbus.

  Ten minutes had passed and I wasn’t at the hospital running interference for Leo. Leo was slight, but under those black robes or the sweats he wore around here he was a tough middle-aged fellow. If the assailant had gone for anything other than his head he’d probably be fine. Still, he needed someone there with him. The last thing I wanted was to have to call one of my siblings to help, have them tell the rest of the family there’d been an attack where their youngest sister lived and I was paying the ongoing price.

  ‘Not any more,’ the plainclothes cop was saying. He was laughing! ‘Before he retired …’ He spotted me and lowered his voice. But sotto voce clearly wasn’t his style and his volume rose steadily till I heard, ‘Yeah, he’s her problem now.’

  My problem.

  I had the feeling he wasn’t bothering to hide his laugh. There was a time when I could have dropped the name of Detective John Lott and gotten a free pass. Then my concern would have been whether a specific cop hated him or feared him. Now that John had retired, no one feared him. There was only one option left. And being John Lott’s sister had only one side – down.

  The detective said something else and Snell strode back to me.

  I answered questions I’d already answered more than once. Another ten minutes shot. When Snell finally pulled open the patrol car’s back door and motioned me into the cage I didn’t comment that it was preferable to sharing a seat with him.

  But I couldn’t stop myself from saying, ‘How about the siren?’

  He pulled away from the curb, hung a U and headed the wrong way on the one-way street to the corner. It was just after seven; the sky heavy with the promise of rain. Buildings looked damp, the reds and whites of headlights and flashers shimmering across them. Traffic was still snailing. The ambulance with its lights and siren would be ‘brushing road,’ clearing traffic to the sides. But far ahead as it was, it wouldn’t help us. It was probably already at the ER door. We needed to move! Lights, siren and speed. ‘How about code three?’

  ‘You are Lott’s sister. But, listen, we got rules.’

  ‘John’s not a rule breaker.’ Do not get into this! Not John and the department.

  ‘No, he is not.’

  I couldn’t read Snell’s tone: approving or sneering or just – I should be so fortunate – not getting into it.

  ‘You live in the Buddhist place there? The two of you?’

  ‘Yeah, upstairs, like I said. Not togethe
r. Are you going to use the siren?’ I said in exactly the same tone as my brother, but I didn’t care. Like, I suppose, John hadn’t cared.

  Snell started to make some comment. Then he caught himself and hit the siren instead and the flashers, leaned forward and stepped on the gas.

  Ahead, a line of freeway hopeful vehicles idled two blocks from the entrance. Snell cut into the oncoming turn lane, sweeping away the cars ahead right and left with his flashers. Drivers jerked toward adjoining lanes, frantically trying to squeeze into spaces that didn’t exist. Snell threaded through to the corner, shot straight across the intersection and into the next oncoming lane, sweeping away a new set of cars, trucks and two motorcycles like he was a tsunami. My feet were braced, my hands against the back of his seat, my arms ready to protect my neck if he crashed. I’d been with John and I’d braced myself then. I trusted him. But Snell? Who knew? He could be as good as John or he could have Code 3 Delusion, in which the driver assumes the lights and flasher throw a shield over him that will protect against all vehicles in all forms in all places. I’ve done my share of car gags; I’ve rolled cars, exploded them, driven them between oncoming trucks and over cliffs – small cliffs. I hate driving with amateurs. And Snell? He could have killed us six ways a minute.

  I thought about Leo’s face draining color like he was a sieve. I kept silent, and hoped.

  Face steeled in outwardly cool, I was ready for Snell’s glance in the rearview to see how much he’d scared Lott’s little sister. He did it just as he was turning on the freeway.

  Even this late, 101 was crowded. Around San Francisco, rush hour has become rush day. Now it was thick with techies who’d lost track of time, clerks commandeered into unpaid overtime, city workers anxious to get out of the city they couldn’t afford to live in. Cars moved close together but they moved fast.

  We pulled off at Cesar Chavez, buzzed a couple red lights and swung into the ER just behind the ambulance. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Let me out!’

  The medics were racing a gurney through the doors as Snell released the lock and I leapt out and ran to catch up with Leo.

  Of course, it wasn’t him. The body on the gurney was an African-American woman.

  Too much time had passed. Surely Leo was already inside, behind the double doors.

  A guard blocked me. ‘You can’t go in there.’

  I knew that, really. ‘How can I find out—’

  ‘The doctor will come out when he’s done.’

  I knew that, too. I checked with the admitting desk, badgered Snell about pulling rank which he either didn’t have or had no intention of using. If he’d been John … But he wasn’t.

  There was nothing to do but sit here in this room of barely contained panic and wait. Wonder about concussion, brain damage, paralysis. Try not, as Leo would tell me, to mentally replay the attack with a better outcome.

  Sirens screamed and burbled to stops. Engines roared and slowed. Ambulances disgorged gurneys and paramedics to race and rattle through the double doors to the ER. San Francisco General is the trauma center for the city and the citizens were keeping it in business with families arriving, huddling in clumps, crying, yelling at each other, shouting over the noise into the phone to repeat again and again that Dirk had been hit by a bus, yes, in his new car, that Shane had been shot, Mom squashed by dump truck in the crosswalk on Market Street. Sounds banged off the walls. It was like an eight-plex cinema of tragedies.

  I found a seat. Sitting, watching the seconds extend themselves as if nourished by the fear, I was almost grateful for the diversion of Snell’s cowboy driving.

  Snell settled himself next to me. Sadly, he was one of the freckled Irish whose pale skin was not improved by exposing previously protected regions, like his pate, to the sun. With hair, he might have been appealing. His features were chiseled, his eyes a pale blue, but fronting the great ball of bald, his face seemed like an afterthought. Like a spit of gum on a bongo.

  ‘Thanks for driving me,’ I said, ‘but I’ll be OK. You don’t have to stay with me.’

  ‘No, I do. Till one of the new detectives gets here.’

  ‘But—’

  Snell turned full face to me. He clenched his fist on this thigh and pressed. The indentations were clear on his pant leg. ‘You could be back at your Zen place, waiting for your statement to be typed up. Or at the station waiting for the detective.’

  ‘Even so—’

  He lowered his voice. ‘I stuck my neck out for you.’

  ‘For the friend of an assault victim? The very worried friend. The friend who was in the room and …’

  Oh, shit! The friend who was the only witness to an assault by a stranger she couldn’t even identify by gender.

  The friend who lived in the building with the victim.

  The unmarried female who lived there with the male victim.

  Snell had done me a favor. John Lott couldn’t have done better. I said, ‘Thanks.’

  I was considering whether to ask why or just be grateful when the outer doors sprang open. A gurney sped through. Then another with a paramedic supporting an IV. And a third.

  The entire waiting room crowd perked up. Questions bubbled. House fire? Minibus crash? Big accident scene?

  ‘Columbus Avenue,’ a woman called out. She was eyeing her phone. ‘Multi-car pile-up. Hit and run.’

  Columbus! I moved in front of her. ‘Does it say any more? About the victims?’

  ‘Let me see here.’ She scrolled down, lost the page, reloaded it.

  By the time she found the report again it was no surprise. ‘Victim came running out of a side street into traffic. A Mazda hit him. Couldn’t stop in time. Second victim was the driver. Third – on foot, just trying to get across the street.’

  I grabbed Snell. ‘Number one – that’s him!’

  THREE

  The doors had swung shut, the gurney and paramedics inhaled into the hospital innards. Snell was staring after them. ‘That’s who?’

  ‘That’s the one who attacked Leo! The patient on one of those gurneys.’

  ‘The man you didn’t see well enough to describe? In the hoodie? The one you’re not sure is a man or a woman?’

  ‘Yes! You’re a cop, go after him! Before he’s swallowed up in there.’

  ‘Just calm down!’

  As one, Snell and I turned to the speaker. It was hard to say which of us was less surprised. Snell because he’d been talking about him, or me because in any bad situation it’s just a matter of time till my brother John shows up and manages to irritate everyone involved, which he’d just managed to do. Calm down! Had those words, ever, in the history of humanity, calmed anyone? Had they not enraged anyone?

  ‘John, we’re losing the attacker!’ I eyed Snell. ‘Go!’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere till I know what’s happening.’

  Snell eased half a step back.

  ‘So, Darcy, just what is this business?’

  I gave him a quick rundown. I didn’t waste time asking how he heard about the assault or discovered where we were. After thirty years on the force he was thick with sources. ‘And the guy—’

  ‘Or woman—’ Snell put in.

  ‘—who attacked Leo was just wheeled inside here. Officer Snell was headed to ID him.’

  ‘Why are you still standing here?’ John barked.

  ‘Sorry, sir, but my orders are to stay with Ms Lott.’

  ‘I’ve got her.’

  Snell looked at his feet. He didn’t actually shuffle, but came as close as possible without moving his shoes. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but my orders …’

  ‘I am ordering you to go.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, but aren’t you retired?’

  ‘Don’t you—’

  ‘Officer,’ I said, ‘I will stay in this spot until you come back. There could be an earthquake and I’d still be here, under the rubble, waiting for you. Being lectured by my brother.’

  No response.

  ‘Or John can call your super
ior – right, John? – if that will smooth things.’

  Still Snell hesitated.

  A woman behind him leaned in closer. ‘Go, you little …’

  ‘Go! Go! Go!’ a toddler chimed. He started to clap. ‘Go!’

  Snell pushed through the swinging doors.

  John put his arm around my shoulder so we were side to side, close. Way too close. He walked us to the window. ‘You can’t stay in that place. I’ll take you home.’

  That place, i.e. the Zen Center. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Hardly. Garson runs that place like an all-night diner. Come. Go. No questions asked.’

  ‘Hey, we have hours.’

  ‘A couple of pimps go knives-out after each other in your courtyard—’

  ‘Once! Only once.’ And, boy, were we sorry about that. Leo and I dealt with the cops and reporters till dawn. John was still chewing on it. ‘It happened once, weeks ago. In the middle of the night. We’re careful. We have set zazen hours and Leo locks the doors other times.’

  ‘And still, Darcy, a mad man races in and clobbers him. With his own stick. What kind of idiot keeps a stick by his side for anyone to grab?’

  ‘A patrolman?’

  Behind us a couple guys laughed. John shot them a look. They stopped. ‘The point is,’ he said at slightly nearer to normal volume, ‘you’re asking for trouble.’

  ‘I’m staying.’ I could have explained that there were still periods of zazen scheduled morning and afternoons and I had to be there. The students who sat then would be desperate to know how Leo was. Our stalwart friend, Renzo, at Renzo’s Caffe on the corner, would be frantic. Plus … But none of that would matter to John. Fifty–fifty he wouldn’t even be listening.

  ‘Mom won’t—’

  ‘Don’t even think of involving Mom!’

  He stared. Mine was, I realized, a tone he’d almost never heard from me.

  ‘Look, John, forget about me. You’ve got a crazed person running loose, or more to the point who was running loose and is now in this hospital. We don’t know if he targeted Leo or if Leo was his flavor of the day. He could be eyeing the Bishop of San Francisco tomorrow, if he’s out of here by then.’