Impersonal Attractions Read online

  “Okay, this one’s a friend of a friend of a friend.”

  “Just tell it.”

  “Who’s the writer here?”

  “You’re the writer, I’m the reporter. Who, what, where, when, why?”

  Annie ignored her and went ahead in her own style. “Anyway, this Frenchwoman answered her phone in Paris. Wrong number. But a charming man. They started talking. One thing led to another and now they’re married. He’s Greek, a shipping tycoon, no less. In addition to lovely, sweet, handsome, gentle—”

  Sam interrupted. “This could drive me back to booze.”

  “Wait. I have another one.”

  “One more and that’s it.”

  “Okay. My friend Jane—you remember Jane—anyway, she has a friend, Estelle, who’s lived over by Grace Cathedral for ten years. Knew practically no one in her building. Anyway, she got a home computer. One day there was a notice in the elevator. Seemed as though someone else in the building was getting her computer stuff on his TV screen.”

  “Just a minute,” Sam protested.

  “I don’t understand the complexities of computers. This is a true story. You want to hear the end of it?”

  “I think I know it.”

  “Of course you do. Estelle responded to the note in the elevator with an apology and an offer to meet with whoever it was to talk about the problem. Turned out to be the man who’d lived directly above her for five years, whom she’d never met. They worked out the crossed signals, and now they’re a two-computer family.”

  “Is there a moral to these stories?”

  “Sure. You want to meet a nice man? Hang out in Perry’s, talk to wrong numbers, get a computer. What do I know? Am I married? Am I an expert?”

  “No, but as they say, sweetheart, you’re writing the book.”

  Annie laughed. She was indeed. It was called Meeting Cute. The book was a collection of anecdotes about how people met. It began as notes in her journal—her own adventures and tales people told her. As the notes grew, the idea for the book began to take shape.

  Millie, the New York literary agent who had sold her collection of restaurant reviews, thought it was a great idea. Singles were a hot market, Millie thought. Tell me about it, said Annie.

  She’d been single again for six years since her divorce from Bert. And though she hadn’t run across Prince Charming, she’d sure met her share of frogs.

  For example, the tall, Christlike young man playing Frisbee in Golden Gate Park. He’d asked her to hold his shopping bag, then treated her to garlic pizza. On their second date she’d held the same shopping bag while he played karate with strong, young Japanese men in white jackets belted in bright colors. On their third date she learned that the bag held five thousand Quaaludes.

  But whether the meetings took or not, the possibilities of who might be around that next corner continued to fascinate her.

  One of the things about being married was that when the phone rang she knew it was never going to be someone she had just met in a grocery checkout line asking her to a ball.

  Which was always a possibility now. Especially with the Marina Safeway so close at hand.

  The Safeway was just across the street from the Marina Green, where the city’s most beautiful bodies ran against the backdrop of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, the hills of Marin County. Scenery and cruising just didn’t get much better than that.

  After running off a pound or two the pretty people in Adidas and running shorts would jam the Safeway. Cheeks flushed, bathed in a light glow of perspiration, they would cool down while wheeling their baskets around, picking up an artichoke here, a yogurt there, and, with any luck, another trim body to take home. Who knew how many of San Francisco’s healthiest couples had met over a half gallon of chocolate chip wearing little more than their underwear?

  It was as good a way as any. Better than some.

  A woman she knew named Trudy swore by puppies. “It’s simple,” Trudy had said. “Who can resist a darling puppy? I just get one and walk it at six o’clock when everyone’s coming home from work. You’d be amazed how many men I’ve met when they stopped to pet a cute little cocker.”

  Annie had never wanted to know what she did with the puppies when they got too big to help her meet cute.

  “Meeting cute” was movie talk for the serendipitous coming together of couples like Tracy and Hepburn, Stewart and Kelly. A dropped glove, a mistaken room assignment—it was a phrase Annie had always liked, and so it became her title.

  When dessert was suggested Sam and Annie both protested. The waitress just patted her rubber-soled foot. She’d heard this a thousand times before. They looked like chocolate cheesecake to her.

  She was right.

  “Two forks,” Annie said.

  “You’re going to have to take your fanny to exercise five times a week if you keep this up,” said Sam, who never put an ounce on her curvy but slender 5′ 7″ frame. Not that Annie was ever anything but thin. But to her mind, the whole point of exercise was cheesecake without guilt.

  “Can’t go any more often,” said Annie, adding saccharin to her coffee. She was addicted to the stuff in the pink envelopes. “Three workouts a week is the limit. No time. My classes started again last week, remember?”

  “Right. How’re they going?”

  “Okay.” She shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. But I hope I have some live wires. I want to use them as guinea pigs.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked through a mouthful of dessert.

  “Not exactly guinea pigs. ‘Contributors’ would be more like it. More stories for the book. Their first writing assignment is a piece on the most interesting way they ever met anyone. Better than ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ don’t you think?”

  A couple of years earlier Annie had escaped from full-time teaching for almost full-time at her typewriter. A regular food and restaurant column in a city magazine plus free-lance assignments had brought in enough cash to keep her in a state of ecstatic poverty, delighted to be doing what she’d always wanted. She didn’t mind supplementing her income with a couple of evening classes in creative writing. San Francisco State was a far cry from a high-school English classroom, and it was nice to keep her hand in.

  Sam’s writing was of a different sort. In the process of saving her life from the bottle she’d discovered that she’d gone to law school only to impress her father, the attorney. The things she really liked about law were the writing of briefs and murder. She was a real bloodhound when it came to gore.

  So she put it all together and became Samantha Storey, Girl Reporter, Cops and Courts Beat, San Francisco Chronicle. It didn’t hurt that one of her uncles owned a big chunk of the paper.

  Not that Sam didn’t earn both her stripes and her keep. She could live for weeks on coffee and adrenaline when a story was hot. And there had been a lot of opportunity for a reporter with a specialty in murder during the past few years in the Bay Area.

  For a while, Santa Cruz County, fifty miles south of the city, had been dubbed the “U.S. Murder Capital.” Three separate maniacs, John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin, and Edmund Kemper had been killing people wholesale. They were all behind bars, and the Santa Cruz Mountains were open to hikers and picnickers once again.

  But now Mt. Diablo wasn’t. In the past year three women hikers had been brutally murdered on its sunny slopes in the country just east of Oakland. Having proved her mettle as a cub in Santa Cruz, Sam was the Chronicle’s principal reporter on the story.

  Annie shared Sam’s fascination for murder, but she preferred hers in bed—on the pages of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard. She loved to be terrified, but at home, where she could tuck herself under the covers with her book and a flashlight as she’d loved to do since childhood.

  “What do you think a person has to do to get another cup of coffee in this place? Scream ‘fire’?”

  “Try ‘murder,’” said Sam.

  “Hey, that’s not funny.”


  “I know. Sorry. I’m just preoccupied with this Diablo case. It’s beginning to get to me.”

  “Anything you want to tell me about?” Annie hunkered forward in anticipation.

  “I’m not supposed to, you know.”

  “I know. So tell me.”

  “Cross your heart.”

  “Cross my heart. Spill.”

  “Off the re—”

  “I won’t tell a soul, I promise. Anyway, you’re a reporter. Aren’t you supposed to be filling us all in? Or have I missed something here?”

  “What you’ve missed is that sometimes we learn things that we’re asked to sit on. Now, do you want to hear this or not?”

  Annie nodded yes, her lips tightly sealed.

  “The police found a pair of glasses on the trail where the last woman was shot. What’s great is that they’re an unusual prescription—should be traceable. Bulletins have gone out to all the optometrists and ophthalmologists in the area. It should be just a matter of time now. If they’re not the killer’s, at least maybe there’s a witness.”

  Annie was pensive. She stirred her coffee quietly for a few minutes.

  “Sam, what’s with these guys? These psychopaths?”

  “You mean why do they do it?” Sam pushed her black curls off her forehead. “I guess I’m supposed to be the expert.” She sighed. “God knows I’ve met enough of them.”

  “Is it sex? Do they get off on it?”

  “That’s part of it. There’s something pent up that seems to be released in the act of murder. But I don’t think it’s ever quite that simple. They’re always complicated, lonely, screwed up. We could just say they’re crazy, sociopaths, but what does that mean? Most of us are crazy, but we don’t go around killing people.

  “Revenge, a distorted revenge plays a role too. He blames everything that’s wrong with his life on girls with long, dark hair because a girl like that turned him down when he was twelve. Or on women who look like his mother. Or blacks, people who whisper, whatever.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter what the motive is,” said Annie, “except that the pattern helps to catch him.”

  “Sure. And meanwhile there are an awful lot of nervous people out there who are afraid to go for a walk in their own neighborhoods, not to mention on Mt. Diablo.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Annie shivered. “Not even if Prince Charming were waiting for me at the top.”

  “Where do you think he’s going to be waiting for you, in the ads?”

  Sam’s smirk made Annie want to reach over and pop her one, best friend or no.

  “I think you’re very cute, Sam, and if you don’t stop giving me such a hard time, I’m never going to write those two ads.”

  “No, really, I think they’re a great idea. You place a research query ad asking to talk with others who have already placed ads and then another ad as a personal of your own—and who knows what you’ll get.”

  “Samantha, I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m just doing .this for the book. Otherwise, I would never place an ad.”

  Sam stared at her guilelessly.

  “Okay, okay,” Annie said, “so I’ve answered a few thousand. But I’ve never placed one.”

  “And you never will, either, if you don’t get it written. Or did you say you’ve done that?”

  A quick look at Annie’s face answered her question. “Well, we’ll do it later on the phone.” She waved her credit card at the waitress. “I’ve got to get back to the office. You never can tell when a new loony may hit the streets with a story just for me.”

  “God, are you a ghoul. Don’t worry, there’ll always be someone waiting for you.”

  “Not so, my dear, not so. Sometimes you have to go out looking for a good murder, just like a good man.”

  Annie waved her away, dismissing Sam’s last words as their very own brand of smart mouth.

  But, on down the road, she would remember them.

  FOUR

  The bar where the blond man smiled at his reflection in the fly-specked mirror was on Folsom Street, in the gritty South-of-Market area. The streets were lined with big semis, tractor-trailer trucks bearing license plates from all over the country. Vagrants slept in bottle-littered empty lots, pulling blankets of old cardboard over them. Some of the bars attracted that segment of the gay world drawn to a little rough and tumble, the clink of chains, the smell of oiled black leather. But most of them were 6 A.M. to 2 A.M. joints, peopled with lonely men and women for whom the distinctions of desire had long been blurred by the bottle.

  The blond man knocked back a shot of bar bourbon. He took a long pull on his beer chaser, set it down on the slightly sticky bar, and held his hands straight out in front of him. No shake, no tremble. He was relaxed.

  Earlier he’d been nervous. It had been such a long time.

  Looking in the mirror again, he flexed his biceps. He liked to watch his muscles move beneath his black T-shirt.

  It was a fresh shirt. He’d been home to shower and change. He’d had to.

  How surprised she’d looked when she realized that his present wasn’t what she’d thought. He’d had something to give her, all right.

  She’d smiled at first, right after she’d opened the door. So excited. They always were. Talked about how pretty the flowers were. How sweet they smelled.

  The roses did smell good, but not good enough to cover up her smell.

  He took a deep breath. Old whiskey, cigarette smoke, stale beer. Smells he was comfortable with.

  She was so stupid to have let him in.

  “Dumb bitch,” he muttered to himself.

  “I know what you mean, pal,” said the man drinking next to him. “They’re all alike.”

  The blond man wasn’t looking for company or conversation. He liked to savor the time afterward, to roll it around in his mouth like the taste of a good steak.

  “Women!” The man next to him spat on the already filthy floor. “They’ve ruined a lot more men than this.” He gestured toward his half-empty glass of beer. “One of them break your heart, mister?”

  “No,” the blond man answered curtly as he stood up. He drained his beer and laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Nope, not my heart. Her heart, that’s more like it.” He flipped onto the bar the dollar tip he’d picked off a red and blue carpet an hour earlier and walked out. On the street, he squinted into the bright afternoon.

  FIVE

  Leaving The Deli, Annie strolled west on Union Street, enjoying the shops and the warm afternoon. September was the time to enjoy San Francisco, during the Indian summer the poor August tourists had just missed.

  She always felt so sorry for them, enshrouded in the bone-chilling, blowing fog that mischievously hid the Golden Gate Bridge from them day after gray day. Annie thought travel agents had a moral obligation to mother summer tourists into bringing plenty of warm clothing. Or to warn them to hold off their visits until September or October, when the fog went back out to sea and the crystalline blue days rivaled the postcards they all sent back home. Then the view from a thousand different spots could stop the heart of even a native.

  But maybe this was better. The tourists were gone and San Franciscans could enjoy their city at its best, at the beginning of fall.

  The beginning of the year would always be in September for Annie. She had been conditioned by so many sharpenings of pencils for school’s opening both as a schoolgirl and, later, a schoolmarm. Nature seemed to be of the same mind here in California. The fall brought warmth and sunshine, and then the rains that would turn the hills from sere brown to luscious green.

  Annie strolled and stretched, catlike, in the afternoon sun. It was so nice to be dressed in only a T-shirt and jeans—one of the rare days when she didn’t need a sweater.

  When she’d first arrived from Atlanta, her hometown, she hadn’t believed the advice of her friends: always, and especially in summer, take a jacket. Now the wrap was a given, as was the phenomenon
of San Francisco air conditioning—a confluence of ocean, bay, and inland heat that produced the city’s clean, cool breath.

  She reached the corner of Fillmore and turned to begin the steep climb up Fillmore Hill to her apartment over the crest of Pacific Heights. A young couple, out of control with downward momentum, almost crashed into her.

  “Sorry, sorry,” they apologized breathlessly. She watched their backs as they crossed the street. Clad in twin yellow sweat shirts and jeans, they were a couple out of a soft-drink commercial. Laughing, secure in their world. Annie felt a twinge of envy.

  She knew that feeling. Us against the world. She’d had it before. And she’d have it again.

  In the meantime, she had David.

  David, her once-a-week lover. Like refined sugar, he was good for a quick surge, but always left her hungry for something substantial, something more. But as Samantha said, at least men like David kept women from gobbling up handsome young boys on the street.

  Like the one who was smiling down the hill toward her. Blond, blue-eyed. The quintessential California kid. She was old enough to be his mother, if, of course, she’d been a child bride. She tried to control her puffing. She hoped she wasn’t as noisy as her Volkswagen, Agatha, as she ground up the hill. San Francisco was not a city kind to old cars and old ladies with crunchy noises in their knees.

  Shut up, she said to herself. You’re beginning to sound like your mother, old before her time. At thirty-seven, you’re not ready for the home yet, or worse, the endlessly boring flatlands of the South.

  She picked up the pace and lengthened her stride, taking the steps up the hill two at a time. It was indeed a lovely day, a great day to be alive.

  A lucky day to be alive. She could never walk up this hill without remembering what had once happened here to Sam, who almost hadn’t been lucky or alive.

  *

  Sam, like Annie, tromped through cities whenever and however she pleased. With a sane person’s healthy respect for dark, lonely streets, alleyways, and neighborhoods that everyone knew meant trouble, she was independent but not foolhardy.

  One night, a year ago, having finally found a parking place in the neighborhood, a feat akin to winning the Bay to Breakers Race, Sam decided to pop in on Annie. She’d been with some friends six blocks away, a small party that had broken up at about nine.