Free The Man on the Washing Machine by Susan Cox Page A

said: “I have some records stored in that attic and the police have been preventing me from retrieving them.”
    I wondered what kind of records he could be storing in an unsecured attic. Not medical records, surely? Everyone supported his complaint with enormous relief. “I’ve got stuff in the building, too,” someone said. “No one told me the place was leased for this shelter. The property manager said my mother’s furniture would be safe.”
    The grumbling and yelling went on until it sounded as if everyone at Fabian Gardens had junk stored at number twenty-three.
    I told them the police had freed up the attic and they had to move their belongings by Saturday. Then I started a sign-up sheet for Inspector Lichlyter. That gave them all something else to get steamed up about. I felt as if I were drowning. I looked over at Nat. His lips were twitching and he avoided catching my eye.
    I opened a note addressed to the association which I hadn’t had time to read earlier. As secretary I get a lot of random mail and it’s usually uncontroversial. I hoped it would give everyone a breather and calm them down a little. Thank God I glanced at it first. It was from the director of the new group home. At first it sounded harmless enough. It said polite things about hoping to be a credit to the neighborhood he’d heard so much about. I read the signature and realized for the first time that my nonsmoker, no-pets, works-for-a-nonprofit, moving-in-today, old friend-of-a-friend of Nicole’s, new tenant Bramwell Turlough was also the shelter director. Telling them I’d allowed the Trojan horse within the gates would have been like dropping an ice cube into boiling oil—it would have frothed up and covered me before I could catch a breath. I cravenly stuffed his note back in its envelope, grabbed my jacket, and fled as soon as the meeting broke up.
    If I’d gone straight home, three indignant people would have overtaken me before I got there, so I avoided my usual route across the darkened garden and took the street route, ducking into Coconut Harry’s to give the meeting attendees time to drift away. Harry’s is the kind of neighborhood bar strangers aren’t inclined to walk into but we all use it pretty much as our personal clubhouse. It has red Christmas tree lights hanging from the ceiling and a general air of having been last painted in 1947. The strong smell of very old cigarette smoke and beer is tinged with the faint aroma of disinfectant. No one is permitted to smoke in San Francisco bars nowadays, but that doesn’t stop a few of Harry’s older patrons. I sat at the bar, nodded to Joe the bartender, and ordered a gin and tonic. Each booth has a bamboo-and-rattan sign with the name of a tropical island. I sipped my drink and mindlessly read them backward in the gold-veined mirror behind the bar, and accidentally caught the eye of the man in Haiti. What a choice, when there was Bora Bora, not to mention Fiji. I looked away, but not without noticing powerful shoulders in a black leather jacket, a rough profile, and a gold earring. In San Francisco, the earring and the leather could mean literally anything—Hell’s Angel; gay; leather fetishist; or I suppose even gay Hell’s Angel leather fetishist. I wasn’t in the mood to translate. I stared up at the reflection of the Christmas lights in the gold-veined mirror but I could still see him. He looked me over in a too-explicit way as he picked up his glass and brought it over to the bar. I straightened my back and projected mental images of third-degree black belts.
    â€œMs. Bogart?”
    I gave Joe a filthy look when he delivered the gin and tonic, assuming he’d spilled the beans. He gave me a wide-eyed shrug, wiped a damp cloth across the bar, and leaned within earshot, pretending to read the Sporting Green.
    Without any encouragement, the stranger went on: “My name is Bramwell