The Dead Do Not Improve Read online

  “Marichal. Was he any good?”

  “What a question.”

  “I’m trying to change the subject.”

  Kim stood up, a laborious process of bulk adjustments and belt pulls, and took a step toward Finch’s desk. He squinted down at the photos and then picked up the notepad where Finch had written “barefoot.”

  He chuckled, tossed the notepad onto Finch’s lap, and said, “You deserve a raise, Keanu. All these fuckers in Sacramento talking about budget crisis and cutting government jobs. If they just saw this notepad, they’d all sleep a lot better.”

  Kim’s cell phone buzzed. He slapped at it vaguely. He said, “Chron is calling already—shit’s about to get terrible.”

  “Well, then, I’m going to cut out.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Surfing.”

  “Smart man. That’s gotta be the only way anyone can stay out of cell phone range in this city. There aren’t even any decent tunnels.”

  “You could move to Marin. Drive around the hills.”

  Kim sounded a Bronx cheer and said, “The line of hippie tolerance ends at the Golden Gate Bridge, my friend. They’d string me up in the middle of the Mill Valley Strawberry Festival. Or they’d make me bang their ugliest women in the hopes of producing exotic kids who show aptitude at math and the violin.”

  “Nothing coming out of that stubby cock is going to be attractive.”

  “Stereotypes.”

  “Ugly is not a stereotype.”

  “You want to go interview some witnesses when you get back?”

  “Sure. That sounds detectivey.”

  “All right, then. Go paddle out there and bust Swayze for me.”

  FINCH DID NOT drive to the beach. Instead, he drove down to the Mission. His wife, Sarah, poured drinks at Parea, the neighborhood’s first wine bar. They had met there ten years ago. She, wearied by four years at Cal Arts and two grad years at Pratt; he, two years out of the academy and fully tanned from his newfound surfing habit. Some college friends had come into town. Finch, whose postcollegiate social life consisted almost entirely of playing poker in a local casino, was forced to consult the Internet for suggestions on what to do. The wine bar was the first place to pop up on a restaurant/nightlife review site.

  He had spent most of the night sulking in the corner. His friends talked wine and asked the bartender a lot of questions about vintages and vineyards and whether or not the cheese plate was made of copper. Finch, of course, hated all of them. This fact, though, wasn’t what bothered him. He had expected to hate them. Instead, he was concerned, embarrassed, really, over his hatred’s easy circuitry. Was he really so simple?

  When a party of overdressed Stanford grad students walked up to their booth and demanded they at least try this Malbec, Finch excused himself and walked outside. Sarah was leaning up against a bike rack, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was curlier back then and hung about her broad, octagonal head in those enviable clusters that arrange themselves, almost magnetically, with all the erratic grace of a morning glory vine. Finch, as he usually did in the presence of beautiful women, composed his face into its most bitter iteration and said hello. She asked him how long he had known those guys in the bar. He said they were friends from college. She frowned and said that she had been positive that they were cousins or something. Who but family could make a man as tanned as Finch look so miserable?

  He blushed, and in the rapid-fire, overcompensatory way shy men talk to girls who are slightly out of their league, Finch said that he couldn’t recognize the neighborhood anymore. She asked if he had grown up in San Francisco. Over the next half hour, they went through the entire litany of orienting questions: Did you know so-and-so from St. Ignatius? Remember when this corner sold real ice cream? What was up with that year all the kids at Lick started wearing leather jackets? You were on the swim team? Did you know that coach who slept with the fat Getty girl?

  Once the comparing of schools had exhausted its always reliable grab bag of insights, Finch found himself talking, for the first time in years, about the trips he and his mother would take down to a run-down textile store on 17th and Mission. It was the only time she held his hand, and although Finch knew, even at a young age, that the gesture shaded powerfully toward protection and almost none toward affection, he always imagined that his mother was proudly displaying their filial love to the itinerant drug addicts and prostitutes who roosted around the nearby BART station. The smell that rose up off those blocks—sun-dried piss and rotting vegetables mixed with McDonald’s inimitable version of French-fried exhaust and the sinus-scraping, pungent scent of dying people—those blackening smells were his ahh smell of San Francisco. Strangely, only the memories of squalor could bring forth everything else—the cool, well-lotioned texture of his mother’s palm, the sticky, hard seats of the family’s tastefully old Benz, the succession of Buddhist nannies, the parties in art galleries, the Clinton fund-raisers, the Nader fund-raisers, the faint smell of peanut oil carried in the fog rolling down from the Inner Richmond, the fall afternoons spent in Golden Gate Park in the company of homeless kids with dreamy, incandescent angst, the morning swim practices in the JCC’s chlorine-free pool, the endless games of Ping-Pong in the cramped student lounge at his neighborhood private school for the unmotivated children of San Francisco’s liberal elite.

  Sarah remembered all the same things, and although the intervening years would reveal just how differently she remembered them, at least the words used to describe those San Francisco things had matched up back then. Sometimes—most of the time—that’s all it takes.

  BEFORE WALKING THROUGH the front door, Finch stopped at Parea’s picture window and stared in at his wife. Through the window’s glare, partially obscured by the reflection of the pink and orange faces of the kooky Edwardians across the street, bathed in a synthesis of the vinegary murk that shone down from Parea’s artisan skylight and the blue glow of financial news, Sarah was still the main draw, El Greco’s girl in red. She leaned up against the bar, head cupped in her hands, evoking an old yet undoubtedly timeless coquettishness whose sole benefactor was the bar’s projection screen. At night, when the bar filled up with its healthy rotation of regulars, the manager played old movies off a refurbished 16-mm reel-to-reel. The nightly exposure to Ann-Margret, Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jayne Mansfield had filtered a series of alterations into Sarah’s routine gestures—her posture sagged, her speech slowed, the waistlines on her dresses crept up toward her ribs, her lipsticks reddened. In the body of a less graceful girl, such alterations might have read as affectations, but Sarah, as she did with most things, bludgeoned any doubts of authenticity with the certainty of her beauty. As he watched, Finch felt, not quite subconsciously, the pleasure of playing husband to a girl who looked like that. The slight pull—the straightened back, the confident swing of the arms—still satisfied the man in Finch, and, had he been able to logically sort and rank his feelings toward Sarah, the power to make him stand with better posture and walk steadily was what he loved most about his wife.

  Can any of us who have lived through love and found mostly ourselves at the end really ask for too much more?

  WHEN HE FINALLY walked into Parea, Sarah did not turn around. Finch wondered what she could possibly find interesting about the news anchor or the litany of numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen. They owned no stocks or bonds or anything that might necessitate a familiarity with or even passing interest in the greater fiscal vocabulary.

  He sidled up next to her at the bar. Before she could turn to notice him, he asked, “How’s our money?”

  She turned her head, slowly, and smiled.

  “Didn’t expect to see you down here till later.”

  “Got some work in the neighborhood.”

  “How’s Jim?”

  “He’s a Jew today.”

  She paused and, with all of Hepburn’s theatrics, pursed her lips, pensively, before saying, “His nose is so tiny.”


  Finch laughed. She looked up at him. For a good second, her eyes softened.

  “I think he meant a fiscal Jew.”

  “I thought he just bought a Lexus.”

  “Nobody said he was right.”

  “Are you down here because of that old lady?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw something on the news.”

  “When?”

  “Couple hours ago.”

  “Goddammit.”

  “They didn’t say much. Just that she was, you know, dead.”

  “That’s it?”

  “More or less. They interviewed some old Mexican lady, but the translator was terrible.”

  “I think I know that guy.”

  “The translator?”

  “Yeah. He is awful.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “I’m straight.”

  “All right. What time are you getting home?”

  “Depends on the surf, I guess. Six or eight?”

  “I’ll pick up some bread from next door.”

  “Great.”

  FINCH DROVE A few blocks north of the housing projects on Valencia and parked his car in front of a corner Laundromat.

  Because his phone told him the tide was swamping out the surf and because he wasn’t hungry enough to take an early lunch, Finch sat down on a stoop across the street from the crime scene and took out his notebook. He doodled randomly: a topless Carmen Miranda on a surfboard, plunger nipples stuck straight up in the air, a snail, a martini glass. Then, bored and a bit guilty, he stood up and crossed the street to go through some investigative motions.

  The yard was clean, as were both sidewalks, but in Dolores Stone’s mailbox, he found a package wrapped in unmarked brown paper. On the night of the murder, a beat cop had handed Finch an armful of supermarket ads, neighborhood coalition newsletters, and credit card offers, all addressed to Stone’s apartment. The exchange had been a bit strange—Finch had never seen this cop before, and although that in itself wasn’t too uncommon, the cop seemed nervous and shifty. And then there was the issue of what he had said when he handed over the mail: “Here, sir, the last letters to the deceased.” It was too formal a thing to say, too respectful. At the time, Finch had ascribed the beat cop’s irregular behavior to his youth and, perhaps, the whiteness of the victim.

  The package held a book with a plain brown cover that tried, unsuccessfully, to give the impression of leather. The title, Mr. Brownstone, was printed across the top in old typewriter font. There was no mention of an author or illustrator. The back cover was blank as well, as was the spine. The rest of the book, however, conformed to the usual bookish standards: a page with the Library of Congress information, an inside cover page with the title again, this time with the mark—Blacksburg Publishing—a dedication page: “To CSH.” Finch recognized the title but couldn’t quite place it.

  Book in hand, Finch walked back to the stoop and wrote down a series of notes. A silent cheer went up in his heart as he, for the first time in many months, felt his brain unclunk. As he was drawing a mostly needless sketch of the entryway, complete with an arrow pointing out Dolores Stone’s mailbox, a young woman in a black fleece exited the condo, stepped over him with an apology, smiled, and walked down to the end of the block. Finch noticed her stellar ass, of course, but then her stiff posture, the way her hands swung mechanically at her sides. He recalled one of Sarah’s paintings, part of the stockades of juvenilia she kept locked up in her studio space. On an expansive spray-painted canvas, five blond girls sit in a circle around a dark wood table. Each of the girls possesses some of the traditional markings of beauty: cleavage, pearls, curls, white teeth, sloped shoulders. The girl to the extreme right has one arm laid out on the table. The girl to her left, the one with the magnificent hanging breasts, is cutting open her neighbor’s wrist with a scalpel. A thick stream of blood runs down the center of the table, running in the ugly static way that things move in Frida Kahlo paintings. The expressions on the faces of all the girls, including the one being mutilated, are directly stolen off the faces of the boaters in Renoir’s The Boating Party.

  When the girl in the black fleece marched back down the block, this time with a black plastic bag from the corner store swinging arrhythmically at her side, Finch thought again of the painting and of all the girls his wife must have hated and how all their shared hatreds had hewed out an easy compatibility during those first years of marriage, and how now, as his mother had predicted, the coloration of hatred had started to fade in Sarah, leaving them with little to discuss. His work had ceased to be interesting to him. There was, and remains, no interesting way to discuss surfing with those who do not participate in the sport. She had endured ten years of similar artistic embarrassments and now relegated herself to very pretty, very well-composed paintings of buildings. Neither had any interest in music or politics, outside of what was expected of Sarah as a youngish, artsy girl in the Mission, and, as Finch had begun to realize, what was expected out of him, a trustafarian turned against his own kind.

  And with that thought, he picked himself up off the stoop and started walking the two blocks over to the Porn Palace.

  TODAY WE KILL, TOMORROW WE DIE

  1. I awoke at an ungodly hour, stuck in the early morning fog that loiters somewhere between consciousness and the vault of my anxieties. Whenever I find myself there, some absurd worry pokes its head out of the vagueness. This time, I worried all my friends had died in their sleep. But then Geronimo Rex dug his claws into my foot, and the panic dispersed, leaving me alone with my senses. Through the apartment’s only window, I listened to two guys talk about their jobs. Some coworker wasn’t showing up on time. I felt implicated, so I picked up Adam’s laptop and tried to find a wireless network. But everything—belkinauto, beanmafia, loves2spooj, dukesucks, Eric’s network, cafed’tazzo, thoroughbread, davis, even trusty old Linksys—was locked.

  One day, when we feel a bit less embarrassed about it all, the next generation’s great poet will write an elegy for the despair you feel when you, without even the hint of a password, look over a list of wireless networks and see nothing but padlocks. But until then, people like me are just going to have to feel ashamed.

  I PUT ON my pants and walked down to the twenty-four-hour Laundromat/Internet café. Nobody was there save the old Chinese woman at the attendant’s station. She pointed at the empty row of Internet kiosks and then at a sign. I put five dollars on the counter and sat down.

  There was an e-mail from Bill admonishing me for not giving my opinion on a bukakke video and another, sent a couple minutes later, asking if I was planning on coming in to work tomorrow. I opened up the drafts folder to see if there were any e-mails I had started but never bothered to finish. I read a couple of lit blogs, but they weren’t depressing enough, so I read the local news. The Baby Molester led the crime section. The story hadn’t changed, save for the proliferating comments, which were all awful because they made the world seem like it was filled only with people who cared very deeply about the fate of the world.

  At the bottom of the third page, there was an ad for something called the Dignity Project.

  CLICK TO GO TO THE DIGNITY PROJECT. WE PROVIDE YOU WITH MORE THAN THE CHRON’S POLICY OF TURNING VICTIMS INTO STATISTICS!

  I complied.

  THE DIGNITY PROJECT

  thedignityproject.com

  … MORE THAN JUST STATISTICS

  DOLORES ALLISON STONE

  B: DECEMBER 15 1951. BAKERSFIELD, CA

  D: MAY 12 2009. SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  Dolores Allison Stone was born in Bakersfield, California, on December 15, 1951, the third child and second of twin daughters born to Frederick Jackson Stone and Elizabeth Davis Stone. Like so many young women who grew up in Southern California, Ms. Stone was drawn into acting at an early age, appearing in minor roles in a series of television sitcoms. At the age of seventeen, most likely frustrated by her seeming lack of headway in show business, Ms. Stone ran away to San Franci
sco, where she quickly became a Haight Street celebrity named Brown Beaver, best known for her brazen sexual exhibitionism and her revival (political) of ancient Native American dress. This second San Francisco act led to much media exposure for Ms. Stone, who most notably appeared in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s fabled essay on Haight Street during the Summer of Love. Not much is known about Ms. Stone’s life in the 70s. A marriage certificate from Modesto, California, shows that she was married to an Andrew Stein on April 5, 1975, a union that, according to state records, ended less than a year later. There are no tax records for Ms. Stone during this period.

  Ms. Stone reentered the public record in 1978, when she starred in a series of adult films for Stable Abel Productions, a San Francisco–based company led by fabled pornographer Abel Brill. According to a variety of sources, most notably Ms. Stone’s much-updated livejournal.com page, she and Mr. Brill shared an on-again, off-again romance for the good part of a decade before Brill succumbed to liver cancer in 1987. Throughout that period of time, Ms. Stone appeared in over 350 Stable Abel films under a variety of aliases.

  Starting in 1992, Ms. Stone worked as a volunteer at a Hunters Point orphanage. Although the details of her duties cannot be adequately confirmed, it is assumed that she did mentoring work for at-risk urban youth.

  In addition to her film and philanthropic work, Ms. Stone remained actively involved in the local music scene, rejoicing in the Bay Area’s wealth of concerts and festivals. Here is an excerpt from her live journal, dated December 12, 2005.

  Music is everywhere! Every morning, I wake up to the sweet, somber sounds of ranchero music floating up the alley by my bedroom window. How wonderful and soul affirming to wake up to all those sad men weeping over lost loves. Then I walk out to my front stoop and hear the music of the block, the grinding of the cars, the flutterings of paper being blown over the sidewalks, the honking horns and the thump-thump of the neighborhood kids kicking soccer balls against the buildings. This is my song of San Francisco, the beautiful music of transitions and all the countries congealing together into a beautiful music. Screw the Opera, I always say, give me the moment of clarity within the chaotic music! And enjoy the chaos, too!