The 8th Confession Read online

  “We didden even know his real name,” said Babe, a big girl from the Chinese massage parlor. “He give me ten dollah when I had no food. He didden want nothing for it.”

  “Bagman took care of me when I had pneumonia,” said a gray- haired man, his chalk-striped suit pants cinched at the waist with twine. “My name is Bunker. Charles Bunker,” he told Cindy.

  He stuck out his hand, and Cindy shook it.

  “I heard shots last night,” Bunker said. “It was after midnight.”

  “Did you see who shot him?”

  “I wish I had.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Will you let me through?” said a black man with dreads, a gold nose stud, and a white turtleneck under an old tuxedo jacket who was threading his way through the crowd toward Cindy.

  He slowly spelled out his name – Harry Bainbridge – so Cindy would get it right. Then Bainbridge held a long, bony finger above Bagman’s body, traced the letters stitched to the back of Bagman’s bloody coat.

  “You can read that?” he asked her.

  Cindy nodded.

  “Tells you everything you want to know.”

  Cindy wrote it down in her book.

  Jesus Saves.

  Chapter 4

  BY THE TIME Conklin and I got to Fourth and Townsend, uniforms had taped off the area, shunted the commuters the long way around to the station entrance, shooed bystanders behind the tape, and blocked off all but official traffic.

  Cindy was standing in the street.

  She flagged us down, opened my car door for me, started pitching her story before I put my feet on the ground.

  “I feel a five-part human-interest series coming on,” she said, “about the homeless of San Francisco. And I’m going to start with that man’s life and death.”

  She pointed to a dead man lying stiff in his bloody rags.

  “Thirty people were crying over his body, Lindsay. I don’t know if that many people would cry if it was me lying there.”

  “Shut up,” Conklin said, coming around the front of the car. “You’re crazy.” He gently shook Cindy’s shoulder, making her blond curls bounce.

  “Okay, okay,” Cindy said. She smiled up at Conklin, her slightly overlapping front teeth adding a vulnerable quality to her natural adorableness. “Just kidding. But I’m real serious about Bagman Jesus. You guys keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “You betcha,” I said, but I didn’t get why Cindy regarded Bagman Jesus as a celebrity, and his death as a major deal.

  I said, “Cindy, street people die every day -”

  “And nobody gives a damn. Hell, people want them dead. That’s my point!”

  I left Cindy and Conklin in the street and went over to show my badge to K. J. Grealish, the CSI in charge. She was young, dark-haired, and skinny, and had nearly chewed her lips off from stress.

  “I’ve been on my feet for the last twenty-seven hours straight,” Grealish told me, “and this pointless dung heap of a crime scene could take another twenty- seven hours. Tell me again. Why are we here?”

  As the trains rumbled into the yard, dust blew up, leaves fell from the trees, and newspapers flew into the air, further contaminating the crime scene.

  A horn honked – the coroner’s van clearing cops out of the way. It parked in the middle of the street. The door slid open, and Dr. Claire Washburn stepped out. She put her hands on her size-16 hips, beamed her Madonna smile at me – and I beamed back. Then I walked over and gave her a hug.

  Claire is not only San Francisco ’s chief medical examiner but my closest friend. We’d bonded together a decade and a half back when she was a plump, black assistant medical examiner and I was a tall blonde with a 34D bra size, trying to survive my first savage year of on-the-job training in Homicide.

  Those had been tough, bloody years for both of us, just trying to do our jobs in a man’s world.

  We still talked every day. I was her new baby’s godmother, and I felt closer to Claire than I did to my own sister. But I hadn’t seen her in more than a week.

  When we turned each other loose from the hug, Claire asked the CSI, “K.J.? You got your photos of the victim?”

  Grealish said she had, so Claire and I ducked under the tape and, no surprise, Cindy came along with us.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Grealish. “She’s with me.”

  “Actually,” Cindy said under her breath, “you’re with me.”

  We stepped around the blood trail, skirted the cones and markers, then Claire put down her bag and stooped beside the body. She turned Bagman’s head from side to side with her gloved hand, gently palpated his scalp, probing for lacerations, fractures, or other injuries. After a long pause, she said, “Holy moly.”

  “That’s enough of that medical jargon,” I said to my friend. “Let’s have it in English.”

  “As usual, Lindsay” – Claire sighed – “I’m not making any pronouncements until I do the post. But this much I’ll tell you… and this is off the record, girl reporter,” she said to Cindy. “You hear me?”

  “Okay, okay. My lips are sealed. My mouth’s a safe.”

  “Looks like your guy wasn’t just given a vicious beat-down,” Claire murmured. “This poor sucker took multiple gunshots to his head. I’m saying he was shot at close range, probably until the gun was empty.”

  Chapter 5

  THE KILLING OF a street person has zero priority in Homicide. Sounds cold, but we just don’t have the resources to work cases where the killer will never be found.

  Conklin and I talked it over while sitting in the car.

  “Bagman Jesus was robbed, right?” said Conklin. “Some other homeless dude beat the crap out of him and, when he fought back, blew him away.”

  “About those gunshots. I don’t know. Sounds more like gangbangers. Or a bunch of kids rolling a bum for kicks, then capping him because they could get away with it. Just look at that,” I said, indicating the crime scene: bloody footprints crisscrossing the pavement, tracking in nonevidentiary trace with every step.

  And to add to that mess, there were no witnesses to the shooting, no handy video cam bolted to a streetlight, and no shell casings to be found.

  We didn’t even know the victim’s real name.

  Were it not for the drama Cindy was about to create in the Chronicle, this homeless man’s case file would have gone to the bottom of the stack until he was forgotten.

  Even by me.

  But those multiple gunshots fired “at close range” nagged at me.

  “Beating and shooting is crazy for a robbery, Rich. I’m sensing a hate crime. Or some kind of crime of passion.”

  Conklin flashed his lady-killer smile.

  “So let’s work it,” he said.

  He turned off the engine and we walked down to the end of the block, where Cindy’s subjects still loitered outside the barrier tape.

  We reinterviewed them all, then expanded our scope to include all of Townsend as well as Clyde Street and Lusk Alley. We talked to bodega cashiers, salesclerks at a gay men’s novelty sex shop, hookers and druggies hanging out on the street.

  Together we knocked on apartment doors in low-rent housing and spent the afternoon questioning forklift operators and laborers in the warehouses along Townsend, asking about the shooting last night outside the Caltrain yard, asking about Bagman Jesus.

  Admittedly, many people scattered when they saw our badges. Others claimed to have no knowledge of Bagman or his death.

  But the people who knew of Bagman Jesus had anecdotes to tell. How he’d broken up a liquor-store holdup, sometimes worked in a soup kitchen, said that he always had a few dollars for someone who needed it.

  He was the elite, king of the street, we were told, a bum with a heart of gold. And his loss was tragic for those who counted him a friend.

  By day’s end, my attitude had shifted from skepticism to curiosity, and I realized that I’d caught Cindy’s fever – or maybe the fever had caught me.

 
; Bagman Jesus had been the good shepherd of a wounded flock.

  So why had he been murdered?

  Had he simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  Or had his death been specific and deliberate?

  And that left us with two big questions no good cop could dodge with a clear conscience: Who had killed Bagman Jesus? And why?

  Chapter 6

  CONKLIN AND I got to the Hall around five, crossed the squad room to Lieutenant Warren Jacobi’s small glassed-in office that once had been mine.

  Jacobi once had been mine, too – that is, he used to be my partner. And although we’d swapped jobs and disagreed often, we’d put in so many years and miles together, he could read my thoughts like no one else – not Claire, not Conklin, not Cindy, not Joe.

  Jacobi was sitting behind his junkyard of a desk when we walked in. My old friend and boss is a gray-haired, lumpy-featured, fifty-three-year-old cop with more than twenty-five years’ experience in Homicide. His sharp gray eyes fixed on me, and I noted the laugh lines bracketing his mouth – because he wasn’t laughing.

  Not even a little.

  “What the hell have you two been doing all day?” he asked me. “Have I got this right? You’ve been working a homeless DOA?”

  Inspector Hottie, as Conklin is known around the Hall, offered me the chair across from Jacobi’s desk, then parked his cute butt on the credenza – and started to laugh.

  “I say something funny, Conklin?” Jacobi snapped. “You’ve got twelve unsolveds on your desk. Want me to list them?”

  Jacobi was touchy because San Francisco ’s homicide-solution rate was hovering at the bottom, somewhere below Detroit ’s.

  “I’ll tell him,” I said to Conklin.

  I put my feet up against the front edge of Jacobi’s desk and said, “Time got away from us, Warren. This crime has a few odd angles, and the victim’s death is going to be written up in great big type in the Chronicle tomorrow. I thought we should get out in front of the story.”

  “Keep talking,” said Jacobi, as if I were a suspect and he had me in the box.

  I filled him in on the reported good works and the varying theories: that Bagman Jesus was a missionary or a philanthropist, that the baby on his crucifix was a pro-life statement or that it symbolized how we’d all once been innocent and pure – like Baby Jesus.

  “The guy had a way with people,” I concluded. “Very charismatic, some kind of homeless person’s saint.”

  Jacobi drummed his fingers. “You don’t know this saint’s name, do you, Boxer?”

  “No.”

  “And you have no clue as to who killed him or what the motive was?”

  “Not a hint of a clue.”

  “That’s it, then,” Jacobi said, slapping the desk. “It’s over. Finished. Unless someone walks in and confesses, you’re done wasting department time. Get me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Conklin.

  “Boxer?”

  “I hear you, Lieutenant.”

  We cleared out of Jacobi’s office and punched out for the day. I said to Conklin, “You understood that, right?”

  “What’s not to understand about ‘finished’?”

  “Rich, Jacobi was clear as day. He told us to work Bagman Jesus on our own time. I’m going down to see Claire. You coming?”

  Chapter 7

  CLAIRE WAS WEARING a surgical gown with a butterfly pin at the neckline, apron stretched across her girth, flowered shower cap covering her hair. On the stainless autopsy table in front of her lay a naked Bagman Jesus, his terrible bashed- in features facing up at the lights.

  A Y incision ran from clavicles to pubis and had been sewn up in baseball stitches with coarse white thread. He had bruises all over his body and overlapping lacerations and contusions.

  Bagman Jesus had been worked over with a vengeance.

  “I got back the X-rays,” Claire said. As she talked, I looked over at where they were pinned to the light box on the wall.

  “Broken right hand, probably took a swing at his attacker or it was stomped on when he was down. He’s got a lot of fractures involving his facial bones, as well as multiple skull fractures. Broken ribs, of course, three of them.

  “All this multiple blunt-force trauma might have killed him, but by the time someone took a bat to him, he was already dead.”

  “Cause of death? Give it to me, Butterfly. I’m ready.”

  “Jeez,” she said. “Working as fast as I can and still not up to Lindsay time.”

  “Please?” I said.

  Resigned, Claire reached behind her, held up a bunch of small glassine bags with what looked like distorted slugs inside.

  “Those are twenty-twos?” Conklin asked her.

  “Right you are, Rich. Four of the shots to the head did the old internal ricochet. Went in here, here, right here, and back here, whizzed around under the scalp, and laid there like bugs under a rug.

  “But I suppose there’s an outside chance Mr. Jesus could’ve survived those four slugs.”

  “And so?” I asked. “What killed him?”

  “Soooo, baby girl, the shooter plugged Mr. Jesus through the temple, and that was likely your murder round. Shot him again at the back of his neck for good measure.”

  “And then his killer beat his face in? Broke his ribs?” I asked, incredulous. “Talk about crime of passion.”

  “Oh, someone hated him, all right,” Claire told us. She called out to her assistant. “Put Mr. Jesus away for me, will you, Bunny? Get Joey to help you. And write ‘John Doe number twenty-seven’ and the date on his toe tag.”

  Conklin and I followed Claire to her office.

  “Got something else to show you,” Claire told us. She tore off her shower cap and peeled off her surgical gown. Underneath, Claire wore blue scrubs and her favorite T-shirt, the one with the famous quote on the front: “I may be fat and I may be forty, but here I is.”

  That line cracked Claire up, but since she’s now forty-five, I was thinking she might be getting a new favorite T-shirt one of these days.

  Meanwhile, she offered us seats, sat down behind her desk, and unlocked the top drawer. She took out another glassine evidence bag, put it on the desk, and bent her gooseneck lamp down to throw light directly on it.

  “That’s Bagman’s crucifix,” I said, staring at a piece of tramp art that had the patina of an ancient and valuable artifact.

  It was in fact as described: two bolts, copper wire, a toy baby lashed to the cross.

  “Could be some prints on the plastic baby,” I said. “Where did you find this?”

  “In Bagman’s gullet,” Claire told me, taking a swig of water. “Someone tried to ram it down his throat.”

  Chapter 8

  I WAS EAGER to hear Joe’s thoughts on Bagman Jesus.

  We were having dinner that night at Foreign Cinema. Although it is located on a crappy block in the city’s dodgiest neighborhood, surrounded by bodegas and dollar stores, Foreign Cinema’s marquis and fine design make it look as though a UFO picked it up in L.A. and dropped it down in the Mission by mistake.

  But apart from the way it looks, what makes Foreign Cinema a real treat are the picnic tables in the back garden, where old films are projected on the blank wall of a neighboring building.

  The sky was clear that early May night, the evening made even cozier by the heat lamps all around the yard. Sean Penn was at one of the tables with some of his pals, but the big draw for me was having a dinner date with Joe without either of us having to book a flight to do it.

  After so many gut-wrenching speed bumps, the roller-coaster ride of our formerly long-distance relationship had smoothed out when Joe moved to San Francisco to be with me. Now we were finally living together.

  Finally giving ourselves a real chance.

  As The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an old French film, flickered without sound against the wall, Joe listened intently as I told him about my astounding day: how Conklin and I had walked our feet off trying to fin
d out who had murdered Bagman Jesus.

  “Claire took five slugs out of his head, four of them just under the scalp,” I told Joe. “The fifth shot was to the temple and was likely the money shot. Then Bagman took another slug to the back of the neck, postmortem. Kind of a personal act of violence, don’t you think?”

  “Those slugs. They were twenty-fives or twenty-twos?”

  “ Twenty-twos,” I said.

  “Figures. They had to be soft or they all would have gone through his skull. Were there any shell casings at the scene?”

  “Not a one. Shooter probably used a revolver.”

  “Or he used a semiautomatic, picked up those casings. That kind of guy was evidence-conscious. Thinking ahead.”

  “So, okay, that’s a good point.” I turned Joe’s thought around in my mind. “So maybe it was premeditated, you’re saying?”

  “It’s not hopeless, Linds. That soft lead could have striations. See what the lab says. Too bad you won’t be getting prints off the casings.”

  “There might be some prints on that plastic baby.”

  Joe nodded, but I could tell he didn’t agree.

  “No?” I asked him.

  “If the shooter picked up the casings, maybe he was a pro. A contract killer or a military guy. Or a cop. Or a con. If he was a pro -”

  “Then there won’t be any prints on the crucifix either,” I said. “But why would a pro kill a street dweller so viciously?”

  “It’s only day one, Linds. Give yourself some time.”

  I told him, “Sure,” but Jacobi had already pulled the plug on this case. I put my head in my hands as Joe called the waiter over and ordered wine. Then he turned a big, unreadable smile on me.

  I sat back and analyzed that smile, getting only that Joe looked like a kid with a secret.

  I asked him what was going on, waited for him to sample the wine. Then, when he’d made me wait plenty long enough, he leaned across the table and took my hands in his.