Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

He counted the hours. Tonight it would begin again.

When Frost needed to find someone in San Francisco, he turned to an unofficial network of homeless people and street performers known as Street Twitter. The way into the network was through his best friend, Herb, who was clued into everything that was happening in the city.

Wherever Herb went, he drew a crowd. Typically, Frost found him near one of the city’s sightseeing bus stops, painting three-dimensional sidewalk illusions that had made him a tourist attraction in his own right. At seventy years old, he was Mr. San Francisco. He’d spent his youth in the pot-drenched, pill-popping ’60s, and he’d reinvented himself in every decade since then. He’d been a microbiologist. A four-term city councilman. And now a famous street artist. For the most recent Bay Area Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium, he’d done a three-dimensional painting of Dwight Clark making “The Catch” in the 1981 NFC Championship Game. Herb had his own gallery on Haight Street and regularly held classes for aspiring artists.

Today, as usual, a crowd gathered around Herb, but he wasn’t painting. Instead, he sat on a tall chair in the open courtyard of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, posed in front of Rodin’s The Thinker . Like the sculpture, he was hunched in meditation, and like the sculpture, he was naked, except for a discreet loincloth draped between his wiry legs. Gold glitter flocked his skin, and a rainbow of beads adorned his long gray hair. A photographer swarmed around him, taking pictures.

“Performance art, Herb?” Frost asked, standing below him.

Without breaking his pose, Herb replied from the chair, “Magazine photo shoot.”

“Ah.”

Herb’s eyes flicked to the dark sky and then to the photographer. “Are we about done here, young lady? If it rains, this glitter is going to become paste, and I’ll be scraping it out of some very awkward places. Plus, I need to teach a class at my gallery in about an hour.”

“Yes, I have what I need,” she replied.

“Thank heavens. Frost, toss me that robe, okay? These tourists all have cameras, and I really don’t want my bare backside showing up on Snapchat.”

Frost chuckled and threw a black satin robe to Herb, who carefully slipped it over his tall, scrawny body and climbed down to the glistening marble floor of the courtyard. His friend limped as he stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Herb retrieved a canvas bag and slipped old-fashioned black glasses over his face. The bag also yielded an urn of coffee, and he poured himself a cup.

“How do I look?” Herb asked.

“Like a cross between Egyptian pyramid art and Madonna on her last tour.”

“Exactly what I was going for.”

As the crowd dispersed, the two of them drifted toward the white columns lining the museum courtyard. They had a bubble of privacy around them, but Frost spoke softly.

“Rudy Cutter has gone off the radar,” he murmured.

“So I hear.”

“It’s urgent that we find him as soon as we can. Jess thinks he’s already targeting a new victim. Can you help?”

“Of course, I’ll do what I can,” Herb replied. “Actually, I put out an alert to the network yesterday, because I figured you’d be looking for him. However, Cutter seems to be skilled at not being found.”

“No sightings?”

“Nothing at all, which is unusual.”

“Well, if anything comes in, let me know right away.”

“I will.” Herb added after a pause, “I’m sorry about Jess. What she did was egregious, but I don’t like seeing a smart, tough cop lose her career like this.”

“I wasn’t crazy about being the one to turn her in.”

“Of course. Have you talked to her?”

“Yes, I saw her last night.”

Herb knew all about his history with Jess. “I know you didn’t come looking for my advice, Frost, but—”

“Don’t worry, nothing happened between us,” he said, anticipating the question.

“Good. It’s better that way. To paraphrase what a wise young man said to me once, she’s not your Jane Doe, Frost.”

Frost rolled his eyes because he was that wise young man, and Herb liked to tease him about it. It made him think of his college days at SF State fifteen years earlier, when he and Herb had met for the first time. Back then, Frost had been a loner trying to figure out the world and not doing a very good job of it. His one point of pride had been getting a degree without any debt, so when he wasn’t in class, he was out on the streets, driving a taxi.

One September evening, near midnight, he’d received a call for a pickup at city hall. He arrived at the mammoth domed building on Van Ness to find a fifty-something man stretched out on his back on the steps, wearing a ’70s-era powder-blue three-piece suit. When the man staggered into the back seat of the cab, he’d brought an aroma of pot so overwhelming that Frost had been forced to open all the windows. Herb wasn’t his name, but that was the nickname he’d had for most of his life, and it was richly deserved.

Herb had nowhere to go; he just wanted company. They’d spent the next seven hours, until dawn, driving around the city. Although Frost was a San Francisco native, Herb had given him a tour unlike anything Frost had experienced before. As they left city hall, Herb had told him about seeing Dan White on November 27, 1978, and hearing the shots that had killed Harvey Milk. He took Herb to the Haight and heard stories of flower power and the Summer of Love from someone who’d lived through it. Herb talked about Jonestown. Joe Montana. The 1989 quake. AIDS.

Somewhere during the night, as the pot wore off, Herb had told him about a woman named Silvia. They’d met in July of 1968 and done what all young people had done that summer. Protested. Gotten high. Had sex. It was an era without promises, but back then, Herb had been convinced that he and Silvia had found something that transcended free love. Then she’d disappeared. He’d awakened alone one morning in August and never saw her or heard from her again. Since then, he told Frost, he’d never loved anyone else the same way.

That was when Frost had offered Herb his philosophy of love, which could only come from a twenty-year-old college kid who’d never had a serious relationship in his life. Which was still true today.

Sounds like she was your Jane Doe, Herb. You know, we all have one Jane Doe out there. That one girl who will change our lives. Some people die not knowing who she is. At least you found yours.

Herb, in his powder-blue suit, had taken in that dubious pearl of wisdom and roared with laughter. Eventually, so did Frost. By the next morning, when he dropped Herb back at city hall, they’d become close friends, and they’d been friends ever since.

“Mock me if you will,” Frost told him, “but Duane claims to have found his Jane Doe.”

“Duane? Pigs must be sprouting wings.”

“It’s true. They’ve been dating for six months. He only just told me about her. Her name’s Tabby Blaine. Redhead, pretty, thirty years old.”

“So about ten years older than Duane’s usual girlfriends?” Herb asked with a grin.

“Exactly.”

“Your mother must be thrilled.”

“No doubt. She and my dad are flying in from Arizona tonight, so I’m stopping over to see them this evening. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it.”

“Have you met this girl Tabby?”

Frost hesitated, which didn’t escape Herb’s eagle eye. “I have.”

“And do you like her?”

“I do. A lot.”

Herb tried to decipher the expression on Frost’s face, as if he’d already guessed that Frost was hiding something. The old man sometimes seemed to know Frost better than he knew himself. Herb’s next question was pointed.