I barely remember Augie Boyer, although I saw him numerous times, years ago, at Bobby Sabbatini’s poetry church in Guerneville. Boyer, a stout, disheveled looking detective, had actually taken over the church for a short period after the attack on Sabbatini, but I’d stopped attending the church by then. Yesterday he called out of the blue about a month-old murder he was investigating, just outside of Sonoma in Boyes Hot Springs.
I’d read about the killing in the Sonoma Index-Tribune. The victim had been a server at The Girl and the Fig, a man called Jesus—a hard-to-forget moniker—whose surname, of Latino origin, I’ve forgotten. All I recall from the newspaper’s profile of Jesus is that he was a graduate of Sonoma Valley High, had overcome a drug addiction, and was leading a productive life along the straight and narrow. I can’t remember any mention of how the victim was killed or anything about the investigation. I assumed, in my ignorance, that the case was drug related. Pina and I had talked briefly about the murder, because they are so rare in this area; you see a killing occasionally in Santa Rosa or Fairfield, but not in Sonoma Valley. Neither of us could recall a waiter named Jesus.
Augie Boyer wanted to come out to Sonoma and ask me a few questions about the case. I didn’t see how I could help him, as I didn’t know the victim and had no connections in Boyes Hot Springs.
“Have you eaten at The Girl and the Fig in the last three years?” Boyer asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Then maybe you’d recognize the victim. Perhaps he even waited on you.”
“Yes, but I don’t see . . .”
“Our mutual friend, Sabbatini, says you have an uncanny way of bringing clarity to difficult situations and, damn it, Charlie, I could use a little clarity after going around in circles the last few weeks. There are a couple of things I’d like to show you.”
I asked Boyer if he was working with the sheriff’s department and he laughed in a way that sounded as if that was an absurd idea. “No, no, I’m working for a private party.”
I agreed to meet him this afternoon in the square and he left me with a haiku that sent a chill:
Murder, Boyes Hot Spring:
strung up with black Rhino rope,
a dude named Jesus.
Meanwhile, I sent Sally the four videos of Roscoe I’d just finished editing this morning.
She responded quickly by email: “These spots are too generic. Where are Roscoe’s appeals to voters about the Georgia senate races? Where is his outrage re Trump pardoning his mob of criminal loyalists, about blocking the stimulus package and leaving millions of Americans to starve? Where’s the strategy, the political will, the urgency, the relevance? What you’ve made are feel-good ads, and feel-good is so twentieth century. Get a spine, pops.”
I decided to not respond and pretty soon Sally started to call. There seemed no reason to answer. Then the texts started flying and I turned off the sound. No way I was going to be terrorized by my daughter.
Walking to the square I got nervous—I remembered that the murdered Jesus had a history with drugs. Did Sally know him, know people who knew him? Anything was possible. Why else, I wondered, would detective Boyer want to see me?
I didn’t recognize the man when I got to the appointed spot in the park, but he came straight toward me. He’d either changed completely or I was thinking of another man. This guy had spiked red hair, wore platinum hoop earrings, and Ray-Ban aviators; he also appeared significantly lighter than the chubby man I remembered. The detective, if this was he, even appeared to have gained height, but his houndstooth Converse platforms may have accounted for that. The high-tops reminded me of Gita in her saffron Chuckies, and our brief tryst in San Francisco. She’s called a few times since but I haven’t picked up. If I’d only applied that strategy to the detective.
The guy wore a light tweed sport coat and pressed jeans, which, along with the hoop earrings, gave him the look of a pirate on his way to church. He stopped ten feet from me and I decided it had to be Augie Boyer because his facemask featured a haiku:
Winter evening—
It is not a piece of cake
To be born human.
“Good to see you, Charlie. Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.”
I nodded to Boyer.
“I know, how could you recognize me, Charlie? My wife Quince gave me a makeover. She wanted a little more edge from her man. What could I say; I adore the woman. I also lopped off fifty pounds, became a vegan, and jump rope every morning for forty-five minutes. Quince seems happy with the transformation, but I’m in perpetual mourning: I miss my hamburgers; I miss my baby back ribs. I woke yesterday morning from a dream of fried chicken, a platter of it with pork-braised collards.” The detective looked down at the ground like a man beset with grief. Of all things, he wore a display hankie in his breast pocket, monogrammed 5-7-5, the syllabic count of a haiku.
“I like your mask,” I said.
“It’s quite a bastardization of the original haiku by Issa.” Now he gazed at me intently. “But you, you look great, Charlie. Fit as a fiddle. Hey, that would make a decent first line for a haiku. Let’s see:
Fit as a fiddle
in the middle of the plague,
he counts his blessings.
“That’s my new thing—the speed-haiku. When we get to the end of the plague, I’ll be hosting speed-haiku slams, doing my best to promote the American vernacular. In summer contestants will be encouraged to wear their Speedos. I think it will be very popular with the post-Millennials. I bet they bring amazing velocity to their haikus, with vernacular that we can’t even imagine.”
It occurred to me that Augie Boyer had turned into a full-fledged nut case in the years since I’d seen him.
Sensing that he was losing me, he said, “But back to you, Charlie—I remember you and your daughter from the church. Sally, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” Here we go, I thought.
“And now you have Roscoe. ‘Roscoe here.’ He’s a marvelous manipulation, Charlie. I don’t know how you get him to look so real. If you’d only get him to recite haikus, the whole world might start writing them.”
Little did this chump detective know that Roscoe could compose his own.
“Oh, before I forget, Bobby and Blossom send their fond regards, and Bobby wants you to know that your one-syllable idea for his talking machine has been invaluable.”
“Glad to hear it.” I led Boyer to a bench near the duck pond. Once we were seated, the detective unzipped his canvas briefcase and pulled out a photograph. “Do you recognize him?”
“That’s Jesus?”
“Yes, before he was crucified.”
“He was crucified?”
“Well, I’m not sure about the technical requirements of a crucifixion. If you need to be nailed to a cross, then this Jesus doesn’t qualify. He was bound to two pillars in his family’s basement, with weighted jump rope, the same kind I use. Don’t tell anybody about that, Charlie, or they’ll come looking for me.” Boyer sniggered at his little joke. “But the poor guy’s arms were stretched out just like he was on the cross. You’d think they’d bring in the FBI to look at this as a religious killing—guy named Jesus strung up like that.”
“So it wasn’t the jump rope that killed him.”
“Nope, it wasn’t the rope.” The detective was in no hurry to tell me how Jesus died.
“So do you recognize him, Charlie?”
I looked again at the photo. “Matter of fact, I do. I haven’t been to The Fig during the pandemic, but he’s waited on me before.”
“Notice anything particular about him?”
“He was business like, not the overly friendly type server.”
“Anything else?”
I shook my head and gazed down at Boyer’s absurd houndstooth hi-tops.
“Was English his first language?”
“I believe so.”
“Have you seen him around town, Charlie?”
“Can’t say I have.”
The detective’s next question frightened me: “Do you have any reason to believe that Jesus had anything to do with your friend Pina?”
“Pina?”
“Yes, Pina.”
I expected him to say Sally, but not Pina.
“Have a look at this.” Boyer pulled a Girl and the Fig restaurant check from his briefcase. Nothing about it seemed remarkable. “Flip it over.”
I took the check and did just as the spike-haired detective said. The backside, in careful, looping handwriting, looked like this:
Pina
Pina
Pina
Pina
Pina
Pina
“Does the handwriting look familiar to you?” Boyer asked. He was watching me closely now. In shock after seeing the written repetitions, I simply shook my head.
“The handwriting is very deliberate. Very neat, wouldn’t you say? Almost fastidious.”
Again, I nodded.
“You can see that the writer strove to make each Pina identical to the others, which signifies I know not what, although it may underscore an obsessive tendency. Pina is not a common name, is it, Charlie?”
“No.”
“But it’s your girlfriend’s name. She lives with you in Sonoma and her favorite restaurant is The Girl and the Fig.”
“True, but I don’t understand the connection to the murder.”
“Maybe there is none. Maybe the customer, who Jesus waited on, just chose the word at random. Maybe the guy was thinking about another Pina when he doodled the name repeatedly.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a man. The handwriting looks like a woman’s.”
“You can’t tell these days, Charlie. It could be transgender handwriting, for all we know, but I’m betting it’s a man’s, a very special man.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you end up with the check?”
Boyer rocked his head sideways and I watched his hoop earrings jiggle. “How did I end up with the check? A lot of schmoozing and, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me, a good deal of hard work.”
“I still don’t get the connection between the handwriting and the murder.”
“What if I tell you that Jesus disrespected this customer?”
“Is that what happened?”
“Could be.”
It began to feel like I’d fallen into a surreal mystery with Joe Pesci as the detective. Boyer looked at his watch and then pulled a lidded tube out of his pocket. “Hope you don’t mind, it’s my cocktail hour.” He shook a joint from the tube and lit it. After taking a few tokes, always blowing the smoke away from me, he said, “Sorry to not be able to share it, Charlie. That’s yet another casualty of the virus, what my friend Coolican calls peace pipe phobia.” The detective dropped his hot joint back into the tube, capped it, and slipped it all back into his pocket. When he noticed my surprise, he said, “The flame needs oxygen to maintain, just as my suppositions need some form of corroboration to stay kindled.”
“I don’t see how I can help with that.”
“And if I told you that the disrespected customer waited until the end of Jesus’s shift and followed him home to Boyes Hot Springs, and attacked
him . . . ”
“This is more supposition?” I asked.
“Except for the fact—and I don’t want to upset you, Charlie, because this is a very disturbing crime—except for the fact that the name Pina was also carved into the victim’s back.”
“That actually happened?”
Boyer nodded and lowered his eyes. “The handwriting match isn’t identical; the back version is roughly twice the size as the names on the restaurant check, and I think one has to make exceptions—again, this is very upsetting—given the difference of writing with pen on paper and knife on flesh.”
I stood up, not to leave, but in an involuntary response to the horror that Boyer described.
“I know how upsetting this must be, Charlie.”
I sat back down. “Why Pina?” I asked in exasperation.
“That’s what I want to know. I hear she’s a very attractive woman.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I agree, it shouldn’t, but once in a while you get a sociopath who fixates on what he knows he can’t get.”
“Do you think Pina’s in danger?”
“If she were my wife, I wouldn’t let her out of the house for the time being.”
“You should speak with her old boyfriend.”
“Vince. Yes, I just met with him down at that food truck on Broadway, El Coyote. I knew that a Mexican food truck was unlikely to have vegan fare so I decided to emulate a Jewish fellow I know who won’t eat bacon in his house, but first chance he gets in a restaurant he’s talking BLT. Two carnitas tostadas with plenty of hot sauce later, I think I may be headed to an early grave. How are you with heartburn, Charlie?”
I ignored the question. Why the fuck did I have to listen to this joker go on about his digestion? “And Vince?”
“Yes, Vince. I met with him under false circumstances. Some times you have to do that. He doesn’t know what I told you. He sent some haikus into a contest I judge for 5-7-5 Magazine and I pretended he was one of the winners. Told him I wanted to meet him. Between you and me, Charlie, his haikus were for shit. But he’s the kind of guy that dicks like me dream about—all you need to do is flatter him. I told him that to make it personal we were collecting handwritten copies of the winning haikus, then I produced pen and paper, and he scrawled out his silly three lines. No way it was his Pina on the restaurant check. This quack has been knocking out cramped, illegible prescriptions for more than thirty years. And have you looked at his hands—knuckles twisted this way and that—that junkie’s got some serious arthritis.
“Yeah, I know all about Vince: his philandering; his fear and trembling as a doc; his subterranean journeys through the Tenderloin. I know how he wronged Pina in the past and how he took advantage of her recently after he got her drunk. I can only imagine how that made you feel, Charlie. I also know that he taunted you outside of the vegetable shack, and that you put him on the ground with a single punch; that’s enviable efficiency, Charlie.”
I could feel myself blush and wondered how Augie Boyer had found all this out.
“I took a distinct approach with him,” the detective continued. I let nothing out of the bag. The dude tried to flatter me, told me he admired my haiku book, Colloquial Man, which won the annual Seventeen Syllable Prize. I played a little speed haiku with him. The free-associations can be telling. Fed him the first line: He’s known as God’s son. Old Vince came back real flashy with, a messianic nightmare; I closed it out with: for nonbelievers.”
Boyer recited the haiku:
“He’s known as God’s son,
a messianic nightmare
for non-believers.
“Then it was Vince’s turn to commence. Man without courage, he said; I followed with, like an arthritic eunuch and he brought it home with, cries for his own soul.
Man without courage,
like an arthritic eunuch,
cries for his own soul.
“I started a final haiku for Vince: The woman I love; he came back quickly, was always too good for me; and then, in a switcheroonie, I asked him to finish it; the words must have been on his tongue: oh, how I miss her. You see, three speed-haikus tell you more about a man than a year on a therapist’s couch.
The woman I love
was always too good for me.
Oh, how I miss her. “
“So, what did you learn?” I asked, getting weary of Boyer’s hijinks.
“That Vince is a nonbeliever riven with guilt, but powerless to act, and that he’s sentimental about love, but incapable of it.” Augie Boyer pulled out his joint again and lit it. “My second martini. I’m incorrigible.” Again he blew the smoke away from me.
“So, what’s your next move, detective?”
“I’d like to speak with Pina, but I wanted to talk with you first, Charlie.”
“What do you want from her?”
“Just what you’d expect.” He holds his joint in the air. “To find out if she can think of anybody who’s obsessed with her.”
“Will you let me sit in with her when you meet?”
“You realize, Charlie, I have no legal means to compel Pina to talk with me. It’s a favor I’ll ask her, just as I asked you, but I believe it is to everybody’s benefit. By the time the sheriff’s department gets around to Pina, the killer might strike again.”
“You’re not going to play speed-haiku with Pina?” I asked, as a bad joke.
“I don’t see it as a game,” the detective said, slipping his joint back in its tube. “How about you, Charlie, you up for a quick round? Here’s the first line: The woman I love. What do you got?”
He was baiting me with the same hook he’d set for Vince. I spent some time thinking about the second line and Boyer finally barked at me: “It’s called speed-haiku, Charlie.”
“Has surprised me more than once,” I came back.
The detective said, “Why don’t you finish it, Charlie?”
With less deliberation this time, I said, “This winter alone.”
The detective recited the haiku:
“The woman I love
has surprised me more than once
this winter alone.
“Very nice, Charlie.”
Now this spike-haired creep was patronizing me. He opened his canvas case once more, pulled out a blank sheet of paper, and handed me a pen. “Would you mind writing it out, Charlie?”
For some reason I complied. I supposed I was now a suspect.