Charlie was driving with no destination, heading into Pacific Heights just because the traffic was lighter in that direction. He pulled over to the curb and called information.
“I need a number and address for an Esther Johnson.”
“There’s no Esther Johnson, sir, but I have three E. Johnsons.”
“Can you give me the addresses?”
She gave him the two who had addresses. A recording offered to dial the number for him for an additional charge of fifty cents.
“Yeah, how much to drive me there?” Charlie asked the computer voice. Then he hung up and dialed the E. Johnson with no address.
“Hi, could I speak with Esther Johnson,” Charlie said cheerfully.
“There’s no Esther Johnson here,” said a man’s voice. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”
“Wait. Was there an Esther Johnson there, until maybe three days ago?” Charlie asked. “I saw the E. Johnson in the phone book.”
“That’s me,” said the man, “I’m Ed Johnson.”
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Johnson.” Charlie disconnected and dialed the next E. Johnson.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice.
“Hi, could I speak to Esther Johnson, please?”
A deep breath. “Who is calling?”
Charlie used a ruse that had worked a dozen times before. “This is Charlie Asher, of Asher’s Secondhand. We’ve taken in some merchandise that has Esther Johnson’s name on it and we wanted to make sure it’s not stolen.”
“Well, Mr. Asher, I’m sorry to tell you that my aunt passed away three days ago.”
“Bingo!” Charlie said.
“Pardon?”
“Sorry,” Charlie said. “My associate is playing a scratch-off lotto ticket here in the shop, and he’s just won ten thousand dollars.”
“Mr. Asher, this isn’t really a good time. Is this merchandise you have valuable?”
“No, just some old clothes.”
“Another time, then?” The woman sounded not so much bereaved as harried. “If you don’t mind.”
“No, I’m sorry for your loss,” Charlie said. He disconnected, checked the address, and headed up toward Golden Gate Park and the Haight.
The Haight: mecca for the Free Love movement of the sixties, where the Beat Generation begat the Flower Children, where kids from all over the country had come to tune in, turn on, and drop out—and had kept coming, even as the neighborhood went through alternating waves of renewal and decline. Now, as Charlie drove down Haight Street, amid the head shops, vegetarian restaurants, hippie boutiques, music stores, and coffeehouses, he saw hippies that ranged in age from fifteen to seventy. Grizzled oldsters panhandling or passing out pamphlets, and young, white-Rastafarian dreadlocked teenagers in flowing skirts or hemp drawstring trousers, with shining piercings and vacant pot-blissed stares. He passed brown-toothed crackheads barking at cars as they passed, a spiky holdover here and there from the punk movement, old guys in berets and wayfarers who might have stepped out of a jazz club in 1953. It wasn’t so much like the hands of time had stood still here, more like they’d been thrown in the air in exasperation, the clock declaring, “Whatever! I’m outta here.”
Esther Johnson’s house was just a couple of blocks off Haight, and Charlie was lucky enough to find parking in a twenty-minute green zone nearby. (If the time came that he ever got to talk to someone in charge, he was going to make a case for special parking privileges for Death Merchants, for while it was nice that no one could see him when he was retrieving a soul vessel, some cool Death plates or “black” parking zones would be even better.)
The house was a small bungalow, unusual for this neighborhood, where most everything was three stories tall and painted in whatever color would contrast most with the house next to it. Charlie had taught Sophie her colors here, using grand Victorians as color swatches.
“Orange, Daddy. Orange.”
“Yes, honey, the man barfed up orange. Look at that house, Sophie, it’s purple.”
The block did have its share of transients, so he knew the doors of the Johnson house would be locked. Ring the bell and try to sneak through, or wait? He really couldn’t afford to wait—the sewer harpies had hissed at him from a grate as he approached the house. He rang the bell, then quickstepped to the side.
A pretty, dark-haired woman of about thirty, wearing jeans and a peasant blouse, opened the door, looked around, and said, “Hello, can I help you?”
Charlie nearly fell through a window. He looked behind his back, then back at the woman. No, she was looking right at him.
“Yes, you rang the bell?”
“Oh, me? Yes,” Charlie said. “I’m, uh—you meant me, right?”
The woman stepped back into the house. “What can I do for you?” she said, a bit stern now.
“Oh, sorry—Charlie Asher—I own a secondhand store over in North Beach, I just talked to you on the phone, I think.”
“Yes. But I told you that it wasn’t important.”
“Right, right, right. You did, but I was in the neighborhood, and I thought, well, I’d just drop by.”
“I got the impression you were calling from your shop. You got all the way across town in five minutes?”
“Oh, right, well, the van is like a mobile shop to me.”
“So the person who won the lotto is with you?”
“Right, no, he quit. I had to kick him out of the van. New money, you know? All full of himself. Will probably buy a big rock of cocaine and a half-dozen hookers and he’ll be broke by the weekend. Good riddance, I say.”
The woman backed another step into the house and pulled the door partway shut. “Well, if you have the clothes with you, I suppose I can take a look at them.”
“Clothes?” Charlie couldn’t believe she could see him. He was completely screwed now. He’d never get the soul vessel and then—well, he didn’t want to think of what would happen then.
“The clothes you said you thought might belong to my aunt. I could look at them.”
“Oh, I don’t have those with me.”
Now she had the door closed to the point where he could see just one blue eye, the embroidery around the neckline of her blouse, the button on her jeans, and two toes. (She was barefoot.) “Maybe you’d better check another time. I’m trying to get my aunt’s things together, and I’m doing it all by myself, so it’s a little hectic. She was in this house for forty-two years. I’m overwhelmed.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Charlie said, thinking, What the hell am I talking about? “I do this all the time, uh, Ms.—”
“Mrs., actually. Mrs. Elizabeth Sarkoff.”
“Well, Mrs. Sarkoff, I do this sort of thing a lot, and sometimes it can get overwhelming going through the possessions of a loved one, especially if they’ve been in one place for a long time like your aunt. It helps to have someone who doesn’t have an emotional attachment to help sort things out. Plus, I have a pretty good eye for what’s valuable and what’s not.”
Charlie wanted to give himself a high five for coming up with that on the spur of the moment.
“And do you charge for this service?”
“No, no, no, but I may make an offer to buy items you’d like to get rid of, or you can place them in my shop on consignment if you’d prefer.”
Elizabeth Sarkoff sighed heavily and hung her head. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said.
Mrs. Sarkoff swung the door wide. “Thank God you showed up, Mr. Asher. I just spent an hour trying to figure out which set of elephant salt-and-pepper shakers to keep and which to throw away. She has ten pairs! Ten! Please come in.”
Charlie sauntered through the door feeling very proud of himself. Six hours later, when he was waist deep in porcelain-cow figurines, and he still hadn’t located the soul vessel, he lost all sense of accomplishment.
“So she had a special connection to Holsteins?” Charlie called to Mrs. Sarkoff, who was in the next room, inside a walk-in closet, sorting through yet another huge pile of collectible crap.