Chapter 1
F.J. Kelly took a swan dive off the middle span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Like almost all the jumpers that went before him, he leapt facing east—looking toward the city that had tormented him. San Francisco. The cruel, beautiful city.
Kelly had left a suicide note wired to the bridge railing. It said: Ocean, ocean. I’ll beat you in the end. And in the postscript he wrote, I should like it very much if Max Bravo were to disperse my material possessions.
Well, I—being the Max Bravo in question—shouldn’t like it very much. In fact, when the police showed me the note, my pity for Kelly was soon dislodged by outrage, followed by simmering resentment. I don’t like doing housework, or moving. And I especially don’t like clearing up after some dead guy who I didn’t know all that well except to drink a bar dry together every few weeks over the course of, what I now realized, was nearly 20 years.
The problem was that the local gendarmes had also showed Kelly’s note to several of our mutual friends and acquaintances and a host of barflies and hangers-on. And, because those busybodies at the SFPD showed so many people, I was now bound by public scrutiny to go over to Kelly’s apartment and do as he’d asked. He probably knew that when he wrote it—that’s why the crafty little mick put his presumptuous request in the suicide note.
Three days after Kelly jumped, I drove to his apartment in the outer Richmond. It was a drab Sunday afternoon in June, and the diffuse light made objects look far away. The air smelled dank with frustrated rain.
Kelly lived in an old art deco building, a towering white monolith that dwarfed the surrounding homes—modest two-bedroom houses that sprang up like mushrooms all around it after World War II. The older building stood apart, on a grassy knoll like a lonely oaf. The Pacific roared in the background, and the tower was shrouded in salty mists while the ships’ foghorns lowed like cattle.
This was the borscht belt. Kelly was probably one of the only guys in his building that didn’t speak Russian. Maybe the Slavs don’t mind the moody microclimate—the cold wind lashing off the ocean, the fog curling round your ankles, the sky muffled with leaded clouds. Maybe it appeals to their sense of fatalism. Apparently, the Celts can be pretty fatalistic too.
I moved inefficiently around Kelly’s hollow apartment boxing up his books, sorting out his clothes, piling up items for donation. I searched for one or two personal effects that I could send to his mother in Canada—some keepsake that carried a whiff of her son, without freighting the stench of his tragedy. But everything Kelly had was crap: chipped plates and busted radios and ghastly acrylic sweaters in every shade of grey.
In one of his books, something by Tom Wolff, I found a photo of Kelly on the beach. It was taken on a sunny day and his black curly hair lifted in the breeze. He was smiling, showing off his false teeth. He looked happy. I put the photo in my jacket pocket. I’d send that to her.
The donation people arrived, a charity organization that provided work for mentally disabled adults. The crew was comprised of two stout Down’s Syndrome men and their attendant who was also the wheelman.
I, rather grandly, told them they could take everything, the whole lot of it. The mongoloid fellows tactfully informed me that some of the stuff was usable, but most of it was simply landfill. They volunteered to take the junk to the dump for free. I offered them a tip. They found this awkward and informed me that they didn’t accept gratuities.
They were just lugging Kelly’s desk out when I stopped them. I’d forgotten to check the drawer. I opened it and discovered his personal journal.
It had a black leather cover, soft and pliant. It felt oddly warm.
I riffled through the pages. They were scabbed over with a minute handwriting as tight as Breton lace. The journal seemed to be a living thing, like a heart beating in my hand.