Trick of Light Read online

  The cemetery is austere, smelling faintly of pine. I enter through a wooden portal, find myself in a kind of garden in which stone markers are sunk to the level of the earth amidst a variety of mosses clinging to randomly placed rocks.

  A group is gathered at the grave site. I recognize several famous photographers: Ernest Caprio, Jerry Rosen from New York, landscapist Donatella Bruce from Santa Fe.

  But it's the photojournalists, masters of black-and-white photography, who are Maddy's real colleagues: Lloyd Summer-Jones, now in his eighties—in 1944 he photographed the liberation of the German death camps; David Hirsch, famous for his prison photographs, so filled with rage and despair; Anna Lars Stapleton, whose brilliant coverage of fighting in Bosnia reminded people of Maddy's coverage of the Vietnam War.

  Bay Area arts leaders are also present: curators, teachers, dealers, as well as not so famous people—Maddy's haircutter, her housekeeper, neighbors, friends. There are people I don't recognize too, including a small handsome woman with silver bangs who, weeping copiously, stands apart.

  I stand with Maddy's other students, the four of us who went to her for private coaching. We listen, awestruck, as Lloyd Summer-Jones, leonine, voice tremulous, gives the formal eulogy.

  "Maddy was a great observer of life, also a great participant. Never one to hide behind the camera, she engaged herself with the great issues of her time. When Harry Bridges rallied the San Francisco longshoremen, Maddy stood among them in the crowd. Soon as she got to Vietnam she demanded to go to where the fighting was. There she slept in trenches and suffered the hardships of the men she'd come to photograph. When, in 1968, protestors were attacked by the Chicago police she was on the next plane to join and document them on the barricades. The same thing during the race riots in Watts, the Yom Kippur War, the rebellion in Eritrea. Funny thing—though she was honored many times, she never hung her awards on her walls. Rather she kept them in her closet in a tattered old box. 'It's the pictures,' she said, 'that are important. They're the best reward you ever get.'"

  Summer-Jones pauses. His cheeks, I note, are streaked with tears. "Oh, Maddy," he says, "hard to believe you're gone, old girl. The world's going to be a different place without you and your gorgeous melt-you-down eyes."

  The ceremony is swift. A Shinto priest says a few words; then a Japanese flutist plays as the casket is lowered into the ground.

  After most everyone else leaves, we, her students, stand around. We speak quietly of her death, the bizarre way she was killed, speculate about what she was doing in such a place at such an hour.

  Jim Lovell is certain she was shooting film. He was a self-taught street photographer who used to hang around Washington Square selling his pictures for twenty dollars apiece out of a portfolio propped against a park bench. One day Maddy walked by, looked at his stuff, bought several prints. Later, when he asked if she would coach him, she agreed. Since he couldn't afford her fees, she accepted payment in photographs, one per session. That was the kind of open, available person she was.

  "She sure wasn't up there buying burritos," Jim says. Looking at him in his old ill-fitting suit, I realize this is the first time I've seen him freshly shaved.

  "I don't think she was shooting," Lacy Harper says. She appears completely stricken. Formerly Maddy's darkroom assistant, she's become a successful portraitist under Maddy's tutelage. "A year ago I had this idea we should do a double portrait. She told me she'd stopped taking pictures and that was that. She refused even to touch the camera. She was adamant."

  "The cops didn't find a camera," I remind them.

  "Someone could have stolen it."

  "They found her purse with money inside."

  "Maybe she fell on her purse but her camera fell loose."

  "Could be the motorcyclist took it," Kevin Wang says. He's the youngest among us, a gifted graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute specializing in candid shots taken in smoky light on the streets of Chinatown. "Say he came back, saw what he'd done, spotted the camera, scooped it up. Or say she took his picture just before he hit her—he'd have to retrieve her camera to protect himself."

  "Speculative bullshit," Jim says. And of course, he's right. We stand awhile in silence.

  Then someone asks: "What was she doing there?"

  There's no explaining it. We knew Maddy as a teacher, a coach, but have no knowledge of what she did when we weren't around.

  The others drift off, but I stay on. Finally David and I are the only ones left. The cemetery workers have finished filling in the grave. David clutches one of Maddy's old self-portraits to his chest.

  It's time to leave. As we walk to David's car a flock of crows breaks from the branches of an exquisitely formed Monterey cypress.

  I turn to David.

  "Summer-Jones was right," I tell him. "Without her the world won't be the same."

  I want the hurt to go away. . . but it won't. Three days after Maddy's burial, I'm burning with fury. Hit-and-run! Only a coward abandons an old woman to die on the street.

  Early in the evening I take a bus up to Mission Street and Seventeenth, the heart of Hispanic San Francisco, the crossroads where our Latin citizens shop and meet. Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Nicaraguans . . . each group has its own enclave nearby, its street murals, coffeehouses, bars and restaurants.

  The Mission district is studded with labor union offices, all-night groceries, open-air fruit stands, storefront theaters, alternative galleries, radical newsstands, Santeria churches, as well as a tortilla factory, an anarchist meeting hall and a cooperative women-owned erotic boutique.

  Stores here don't close till late. I walk past a left-wing bookshop filled with serious-looking people browsing beneath a huge poster of Lenin. Spotting a florist's, I enter, then purchase a bouquet of somber irises.

  The stretch of Capp between Sixteenth and Twentieth streets, called "Capp Corridor," is notorious for its bottom-of-the-barrel prostitution scene. I did a photo story here once when I worked at the News, didn't see any beauties, down-on-their-luck actresses or adventurous literary Stanford grad-student types seeking material to deploy in their novellas and poems. Rather I found scarred old-timers and grungy disheveled "rock whores," so called because they work for the price of a rock of crack cocaine or a hit of meth.

  Turning into Capp, I feel myself tense up. The trick, I know, is to walk with purpose lest I attract the notice of johns cruising in pickups and cars.

  This is a tough area. Rapes and beatings are common, and there're ten to twelve unsolved homicides a year—Capp Corridor being a natural habitat for psychotics in search of prey. Joel Glickman told me of still another threat—rumors that the local homeowners association, upset by the effects of the prostitution scene upon property values, regularly pays Mission Street toughs to terrorize the women in hopes of driving them away.

  After crossing the intersection with Twentieth, I relax. Here Capp becomes a quiet, normal, working-class residential street, the buildings abutting one another, some with small, home-based businesses located on lower floors. There are groceries, nail salons and bars at the intersections. There's even an occasional church. At the corner of Twenty-fourth I pause beneath a streetlamp. Spotting a woman hauling bags of trash from her stoop down to the street, I approach, ask if she can tell me where the hit-and-run accident took place.

  "The señora?" she asks. She's middle-aged, speaks with a Mexican accent. She looks deeply into my eyes.

  I nod.

  "There," she says, rapidly crossing herself, then pointing toward a pool of darkness down the block on the other side. Feeling unsteady, I nod, thank her and move toward the site.

  Immediately I spot several packets of flowers lying together beside the curb. Their modesty endows them with special poignancy. There's wax residue too, where people have placed memorial candies. I lay my flowers beside the others, step back, spend a few seconds taking in the scene. Then, as in aikido class, I center myself and peer about.

  This
block, I realize at once, is not as I'd imagined. I thought it would be busy, active with street life; in fact, it's extremely quiet. Small apartment buildings, subdivided wooden houses, one-family residences. Cars are parked along the street, spaces left between to allow access to garages.

  This is not, I understand, a spot where one would stand waiting to photograph a street scene. Rather it's a place one might walk by to or from somewhere else. I ask myself: What was Maddy doing off the sidewalk? Was she trying to cross the street in the middle of the block?

  I stand back from the curb, turn and examine the house directly behind. Nothing special about it, just a nondescript wooden home in need of paint. I peer back across the street. If Maddy stepped off the curb here to cross, then what might she have been crossing to?

  I pick out three buildings: an ordinary four-story stucco apartment house, molded escutcheon above the door, and two wooden Edwardians on either side, one well kept, the other kept not so well. I peer at the windows of the apartment building. Through several I see the flicker of TVs.

  But suppose Maddy wasn't crossing the street here, rather had just crossed, reached this side, when she was hit?

  I pivot to look again at the house in need of paint, catching, as I do, a movement in a window as if someone looking out has quickly pulled a drape.

  Nothing strange about that. Rather, I realize, it's me, a stranger standing here in the dark, who's out of place.

  The woman who pointed out the spot is still watching me from her stoop. Deciding I'd like to speak with her again, I cross Capp as I imagine Maddy may have done. It's so quiet I can't imagine that the sound of an approaching motorcycle wouldn't have alerted her.

  The woman doesn't smile as I approach; neither does she grimace or retreat. Rather she stands her ground, forcing me to stop three steps below.

  "Do you know which way the motorcycle came?" I ask.

  She shrugs. "I did not see it happen."

  "Did you hear anything?"

  "I already talked to the cops."

  "I'm not a cop." Again she stares into my eyes. "The old woman who was killed—she was like a mother to me."

  She nods slightly to show understanding, crosses herself again.

  "My own mother died last year," she says.

  I feel she would like to be kind, but is uncomfortable speaking with me here.

  "Thanks for showing me the place," I tell her. "I left some flowers."

  She gives me another searching look. "I did too," she says, then turns and retreats into her house.

  Feeling something behind me as I head back toward Mission Street, I quickly turn. Again I see a glimmer in the same window across the street, a quick furtive movement. I think: They're watching me, everyone on the block. They know something's wrong with what happened here. Now they're wondering if I'm part of it.

  Detective Kostas Kremezi boasts that he wears two hats. "Night Investigations and Crime Response—I work both units," he says proudly.

  "Does that mean you work night and day?" I ask.

  He shows me a crooked grin. "I'll tell you this, I work damn hard," he says.

  It's ten A.M. We're sitting in his cubicle on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice, a huge structure on Bryant Street, a rabbit warren of bureaus and corridors. In theory, everything pertaining to criminal justice in San Francisco is handled out of here—police administration, investigations, prosecutions, bookings, jailings and trials.

  Kremezi's a husky, swarthy, mustachioed Greek-American with canny noncommittal eyes. I figure him for early forties. After numerous shufflings and unsatisfactory encounters around the Hall, I've finally landed at his desk, the correct place, he's just assured me, to discuss the investigation of the hit-and-run death of Amanda Yamada.

  Except, it turns out, he won't discuss it, though he's quite willing to hear what I have to say. It's police policy, he tells me, not to talk about ongoing investigations. But in a case such as this, in which the victim was fairly prominent, it's also policy to reassure friends and relatives of the deceased that everything possible is being done.

  "I went by there last night," I tell him. "A woman told me the cops had been around."

  "SOP with hit-and-runs. We always canvass the neighborhood."

  "Find out anything?"

  "Not much." Kremezi speaks in the manner of a man weighing his words.

  "Just what's that supposed to mean?"

  "Look, Ms. Farrow, no one saw it happen, therefore no ID on the motorcycle or the driver. Yes, people heard the accident, but by the time they looked out it was over and the vehicle was gone. Still, there're a lot of good citizens over there. Right away we got five, six calls. An ambulance arrived in under four minutes. Sadly too late. Your friend was DOA."

  "What was she doing there?"

  Kremezi shrugs. "No one including her stepson seems to know."

  "You called it an accident."

  "Some reason you think it wasn't?"

  Now it's my turn to shrug.

  "Trying to tell me something?" he asks.

  "You sure as hell aren't telling me anything."

  "I explained—"

  "Yeah, you did."

  We stare at one another, each of us bristling. It's Kremezi who breaks the silence.

  "Why are you so confrontational, Ms. Farrow?"

  "Why are you withholding information, Detective Kremezi?"

  He bites his lip, ponders. "All right," he says. "Since you're so keen for answers, here's a little hypothetical for you, something to mull over just before you go to sleep."

  He tilts back his chair till it touches the wall behind.

  "Let's say there's this elderly individual in frail health, and he, or she as the case may be, is run down at a time and in a place when and where by all rights this person oughtn't to be. No one sees anything. The driver gets away clean. When the cops and medics arrive, they find neighbors out on the street shaking their heads and more or less securing the scene. There's this odd mood, least that's the way it seems to one of the investigators. Like the neighbors want to protect this old person, make sure the body isn't messed with, that nothing belonging to this person is stolen or moved. But they don't know the victim—least that's what they say. Never seen him or her before. Got no idea who he or she is. But the way they're standing there—it's like they're real upset, that he/she's not a stranger, that he/she's . . . well, like one of their own, if you get what I mean. It's strange, this feeling a cop might get . . . and . . . well, that's the odd thing, in fact the only thing about this . . . er . . . hypothetical case."

  During his recitation, Kremezi has looked past me at the wall. Now he resettles his chair and meets my eyes.

  "Fleeing the scene—it's run-of-the-mill these days. So many hit-and-runs you can barely keep up with 'em, and without any evidence—an eyewitness statement, a piece of the vehicle, a smudge of paint, something, anything—there's really no place to start. So you just keep the case in the back of your mind, hoping sooner or later something'll turn up. Often nothing does. So what're you going to do? An odd feeling at the scene that the neighbors' denials didn't quite ring true—that's not enough to put in the legwork . . . there being only so many hours in the day"—he smiles—"and the night."

  I stare at him, trying to glean his message. I receive little encouragement.

  "Like I said, Ms. Farrow, it's a hypothetical. What more can I tell you?" He rises to signal our meeting is over. He smiles weakly, extends his hand. "Nice meeting you. Sorry for your loss."

  David Yamada, like his father, is a CalTech graduate and engineer. Four years ago he started a business designing and building ingenious, expensive, high-tech kaleidoscopes. With his instruments, viewers can mix light of different hues, creating shapes which are then multiplied with mirrors into pleasing designs. Since I don't see colors, a portion of the effect of these devices is lost on me, but even within a range of grays I find the resulting images intriguing.

  David has never married, goes through girlf
riends too fast, can rightly be described as a ladies' man." His features are Japanese; his accent is pure American. He was nine when his mother died, twelve when his father, Harry Yamada, married Maddy. She mothered him through his teens, was immensely proud of him. To all appearances they were devoted.

  An hour ago he called to make sure I was home, so he could drop off Maddy's cameras. I offered to pick them up at her flat, but he said the load was too heavy and it would make more sense for him to drop them off.

  Now I'm waiting for him outside my building, thinking about my visit to the accident scene last night and my meeting with Detective Kremezi this morning. Something about the behavior of people on the block didn't seem right to us both. When Kremezi as much as said he couldn't justify following up on his hunch, was he, I wonder, handing me the cudgel?

  A cable car passes, tourists clinging to its sides. I hear the conductor announce the next stop: "Lombard at Hyde, crookedest street in the world, they say."

  Three cars behind I spot David's Saab. He waves, pulls into a loading space in front of my door, gets out, embraces me. His cheek smells faintly of aftershave.

  "You're not going to believe this," he says, moving to the rear of his car, unlocking the trunk, raising it with a flourish. I peer in. The entire space is stuffed with wine cartons. He opens the flaps of one to expose its contents. I see a bunch of old Nikon bodies nestled vertically in the wine bottle compartments.

  "Cameras and lenses . . . and more cameras and more lenses," he says. "I don't think she ever threw one away. There's another one filled with cameras, two more of lenses and accessories."

  I'm overwhelmed. "What am I going to do with them?"