Alain said, “I’m not saying I agree with defacing property, but that artwork is very good. The whole idea is clever.” He looked at me and added in his wonderful accent, “I realize I am in the minority on this issue.”
As we got closer to the hotel, the same girl I’d seen this morning smiled and said hello to me. She was wearing a different dress, less flashy but more revealing. She also had her hair up in two perky pigtails, which made her look even younger.
“How are sales tonight?”
She flashed a spectacular smile. “Let’s put it this way: I might not need to look for that job in marketing.”
She strolled on in the opposite direction.
Alain waited a beat and then asked, “How do you know that young lady?”
“We bonded earlier over a woman’s need to be self-reliant.”
“Ahh, the best possible subject to bond over.”
After we had walked a few steps more, Alain turned to me with a serious expression. “I’m somewhat surprised not to have seen any uniformed police presence here. This is quite an active area. I would think the SFPD would want to ensure everyone’s safety.”
“Actually, this is exactly where I patrolled back when I was a beat cop,” I told Alain. “But over recent years people have become uneasy with the number of arrests of individuals who simply don’t have a place to sleep or are struggling with mental health or addiction, prevalent in the Tenderloin. Plus police are overstretched. We all just do the best we can.”
We stood and watched more of the activity. There was a sizable crowd in front of the hotel and on the sidewalk. Not thick enough to block your way, but it was definitely busy.
I said, “Do you think any of these girls will speak with us?”
“Will we lose anything by asking?”
“Maybe our anonymity.”
“Let’s see if we can talk to someone off to the side. But I don’t know how we do that without making it look like we want to hire them.”
I saw a girl with a serious purple streak in her otherwise bleached-white hair. She was sitting on the farther end of a two-foot-high wall around a raised garden bed. Or what would be a garden, though of course there was nothing growing in it. Its soil didn’t even look like potting soil. Just black, sandy runoff. The bed ran along the patch of ground between the sidewalk and the front of the hotel. I pointed the girl out to Alain.
He said, “You mean the girl on thepotager?”
“The what?”
“Well, apotageris more of a kitchen garden. But it’s usually raised with a wall around it like that one.”
I said, “Then, yes, the girl on thepotager.”
Alain rubbed his hands together and said, “Now we are speaking the same language. Literally.”
We turned toward the bleached-blond girl.
CHAPTER76
CINDY THOMAS HADthe lights down low. She thought it made the apartment feel like a cave. Dark, quiet, empty. She would never admit it, but she was currently pouting in her apartment. She knew Lindsay Boxer and Alain Creasy were working on her investigation. She understood it wasn’t safe or commonplace for a reporter to tag along with detectives. But those facts didn’t make it any less frustrating.
She glanced at the cherrywood dining room table that doubled as her desk. She made a point to keep it in order. When she lived alone, that sort of thing had never occurred to her. Living alone had been quite a while ago. She tried to match her husband’s considerate behavior.
Cindy already had a stack of filled notepads on this case. Somehow she had to turn them into a full-blown book. She hadn’t worked out a title yet, but she supposed that would come when she had some kind of resolution of the investigation. For now, the stack of notepads was nothing but a giant question mark. And it gnawed at her.
Her phone played Katy Perry’s “Roar.” Cindy answered it immediately. There was silence after she said hello. And she heard someone say something. Finally, she asked, “Who’s this?”
After another moment of confusion, a male voice said, “It’s me, Eric.”
“Eric Snaff?”
“The one and only.” The words were slurred.
