His name was Ike Quintana, and he had called late yesterday afternoon, saying maybe he’d been friends with the shooter some fifteen years before.
Now Quintana said to me, “It looks like the same guy for sure. If that’s him, we were both at Napa State Hospital in the late ’80s.”
I gripped the phone, pressing my ear hard against the receiver. Didn’t want to miss a syllable.
“You know what I mean?” Quintana asked me. “We were both locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.”
Chapter 15
I SCRIBBLED A STAR next to Ike Quintana’s phone number.
“What’s your friend’s name?” I asked him, pressing the receiver against my ear. But suddenly Quintana was evasive.
“I don’t want to say, in case it turns out not to be him,” he said. “I have a picture. You can come over and look, if you come now. Otherwise, I have a lot of things to do today.”
“Don’t you dare leave home! We’re on our way!”
I went out to the squad room, said, “We’ve got a lead. I have an address on San Carlos Street.”
Conklin said, “I want to keep working the phones. New videos of the shooting have been e-mailed to our Web site.”
Jacobi stood, put on his jacket, said, “I’m driving, Boxer.”
I’ve known Jacobi for ten years, worked as his partner for three before I was promoted to lieutenant. During the time Jacobi and I were a team, we’d developed a deep friendship and an almost telepathic connection. But I don’t think either of us acknowledged how close we were until the night we were shot down by coked-up teenagers. Being near death had bonded us.
Now he drove us to a crappy block on the fringes of the Tenderloin.
We looked up the address Ike Quintana had given me, a two-story building with a storefront church on the ground floor and a couple of apartments on top.
I rang the doorbell, and a buzzer sounded. I pulled at the dull metal door handle, and Jacobi and I entered a dark foyer. We climbed creaking stairs into a carpeted hallway smelling of mildew.
There was a single door on each side of the hallway.
I rapped on the one marked 2R, and a long half minute later, it squeaked open.
Ike Quintana was a white male, midthirties. He had black hair sticking up at angles and he was oddly dressed in layers. An undershirt showed in the V of his flannel shirt, a knitted vest was buttoned over that, and an open, rust-colored cardigan hung down to his hips.
He wore blue-striped pajama bottoms and brown felt slippers, and he had a kind of sweet, gappy smile. He stuck out his hand, shook each of ours, and asked us to come in.
Jacobi stepped forward, and I followed both men into a teetering tunnel of newspapers and clear plastic garbage bags filled with soda bottles that lined the hallway from floor to ceiling. In the parlor, cardboard boxes spilled over with coins and empty detergent boxes and ballpoint pens.
“I guess you’re prepared for anything,” Jacobi muttered.
“That’s the idea,” said Quintana.
When we reached the kitchen, I saw pots and pans on every surface, and the table was a layered archive of news-paper clippings covered by a tablecloth, then more newspaper layers and a tablecloth over that, again and again making an archeological mound a foot high.
“I’ve been following the Giants for most of my life,” Quintana said shyly. He offered us coffee, which Jacobi and I declined.
Still, Quintana lit a flame on the gas stove and put a pot of water on to boil.
“You have a picture to show us?” I asked.
Quintana lifted an old wooden soapbox from the floor and put it on the pillowy table. He pawed through piles of photographs and menus and assorted memorabilia that I couldn’t make out, his hands flying over the papers.
“Here,” he said, lifting out a faded five-by-seven photo. “I think this was taken around ’88.”
Five teenagers — two girls and three boys — were watching television in an institutional-looking common room.