Bill Pronzini: Spook

“No trouble or friction with anyone here?”

“My people? Absolutely not. He got along with everybody, we practically adopted the poor bugger.”

“Any of your employees spend more time with him than others?”

“Meg Lawton, she’s my accountant. She was always talking to him, giving him spare change, feeding him. When he first showed up around here, she caught him taking a leak on the wall next to the loading dock, yelled at him for it. He didn’t yell back, like most of them. Told her he was sorry, he’d never do it again, and he never did as far as we know. Next day he brought her a little bunch of flowers that he got somewhere. That’s what started us looking out for him, him bringing Meg those flowers.”

“When was that, when he first showed up?”

“About six months ago.”

“Never saw him in the neighborhood before that?”

“No, never.”

“He spend time with any or the other homeless?”

“I don’t think so. Pretty much a loner.” Taradash finished slaughtering his second cigarette, this one more finely chopped than the first, and dumped the remains into his wastebasket. For a time, then, he looked out into the warehouse. The two workers had disappeared; there was nothing to see out there but stationary objects draped in light and shadow. “Well,” he said at length, “there was one guy I saw him with, once. Cold, rainy day and they were sharing a bottle of sweet wine when I came in to work.”

“How long ago?”

“Couple of weeks, maybe longer. Right around Thanksgiving.”

“Do you know the other man’s name?”

“Never saw him before or since.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Big, heavier than Spook, three or four inches taller. Dark. Not a black man, but dark. Wore a ratty red and green wool cap pulled down over his ears. That’s all I remember.”

“Did Spook ever say anything about himself, where he grew up, where he lived before he showed up here — anything at all that might help?”

“No. Nothing.”

“What did he talk about, aside from begging money and food?”

“He didn’t beg money or food,” Taradash said, “that’s the thing. He never panhandled any of us, we always volunteered. As to what he said... most of it sounded like gibberish to me. Particularly when he was talking to those ghosts of his. Truth is, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. Only one who did was Meg.”

“They have names, his ghosts?”

“If they did, I don’t remember what they were. Meg might be able to tell you.”

We’d covered enough ground for now. I’d brought a blank agency contract with me and we got it filled in and signed, and Taradash wrote out a retainer check for three days’ work. He said then, “How soon can you start on this?”

“Monday morning, first thing.”

“Not tomorrow? I know it’s Saturday, but we’ve got a local commercial scheduled to shoot and I’ll be here most of the day. So will Meg and some of my other people.”

“Well...”

“I don’t mind paying extra, if you could manage it.”

“That wouldn’t be necessary.” I thought it over. Christmas shopping wouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours in the morning, and the family outing we had scheduled to pick out a tree wasn’t until Sunday. Another couple of hours on the job wouldn’t cut too deep into the rest of tomorrow. “I suppose I could stop by,” I said. Old Easy Touch. “Say around noon or so.”

“I’d really appreciate it,” Taradash said. “You don’t need to call first, just show up.”

He walked me out to the front entrance, shook my hand again with even more enthusiasm. “This takes a load off my mind, I want you to know that. Or maybe I mean eases my conscience. Just being able to do something, no matter how it turns out.”

I said I knew how he felt. Just being able to do something is a major reason I’ve stayed in this business as long as I have. For a man like me it’s one of the job’s few nonmonetary perks.

On the walk back to the car I saw fewer homeless. Cold night, with a stabbing Pacific wind, and the temperature would drop another ten to fifteen degrees before morning. Many of the displaced were already forted up in shelters or warming themselves with hot meals in soup kitchens; the less fortunate had gone to sit around illegal fires in one of the encampments, or staked out building doorways where they could spread their blankets and sleeping bags. The ones who were still wandering the streets were the hardcore panhandlers and traffic beggars, the Street Sheet newspaper sellers, the drunks and addicts and petty thieves hunting a quick score, the mentally ill like Spook who existed in a twilight world haunted by demons and ghosts.

Every large city in this brave new world has a homeless problem, but San Francisco’s seems worse than most. Aggressive sweeps and innovative social service programs have made inroads in alleviating the problem in New York City and Seattle. In my city, however, there is polarization and paralysis caused by guilt, name-calling, political infighting, incompetence, and constant bickering among homeless advocates, the media, neighborhood watchdog groups, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, and the Department of Human Services. This year alone the city has shelled out well over a hundred million dollars on homeless expenditures. Nobody can agree on an exact figure because accounting procedures are lax; some earmarked tax money just seems to disappear into a bottomless pit. An estimated thirty million alone goes to pay for the jailing of homeless lawbreakers — an average of nearly a thousand arrests per night — and another three million or so for cleanup costs.

Everybody has an opinion, a solution, an agenda: All homeless are needy, disadvantaged folk who should be given aid regardless of who they are; many if not most homeless are part of a disorganized mob of drunks, drug addicts, crazies, criminals, and plain bums who feed off the system like parasites, destroying San Francisco’s beauty and damaging its tourist-based economy. Raise taxes to provide more money; quit throwing good money after bad. Sponsor a regional summit on homelessness. Improve conditions in existing shelters; build more shelters as New York City did by rehabilitating 30,000 units of tax-delinquent and abandoned buildings (blithely ignoring the fact that S.F. has little property-tax delinquency and abandoned buildings are virtually nonexistent). Ban panhandling on median strips, use ID cards and fingerprinting to track everyone who uses homeless services. Form a centralized intake system and hold city government agencies responsible for keeping accurate and detailed records of expenditures. Initiate a constitutional amendment to require the state to provide the mentally ill homeless with housing, health care, and food. Stop the free handouts and put the homeless to work clearing up graffiti, repairing vandalized bus shelters, and picking up trash. Set up a twenty-four hour hotline for citizen reports of public drinking, open-air toilet use, drug use, illegal camping, and excessive noise. Create “nautical shelters” by floating some of the fleet of World War II battleships mothballed in Suisun Bay down to the S.F. waterfront, and letting the homeless live on them while performing daily maintenance services.

Good ideas, bad ideas, silly ideas. And meanwhile tempers grew shorter and residents’ and visitors’ sympathies continued to erode in the face of escalating violence and incidents of public indecency.

My own sympathies lay somewhere in the middle. Compassion for the genuinely disadvantaged — those forced to live on the streets by circumstances beyond their control while seeking to regain a responsible lifestyle, the legion of mentally disturbed turned out of state-funded hospitals during the disastrous Reagan governorship and desperately in need of care and treatment. Zero tolerance for the professional panhandlers, Skid Row drunks, hardline junkies, abusive drifters and home-grown predators allowed to roam free on a city-sponsored, advocate-sponsored mandate. The difference between me and most other taxpayers is that I don’t have any easy answers. I want the problem fixed in the best way possible for all concerned, but I lack the knowledge, the tools, the wherewithal to help accomplish the task.