Death in North Beach by Ronald Tierney Read Free Book Online

Lang, and putting his iPhone on the bar. Tight clothes, Lang thought. Nowhere else to put it.
    â€˜Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,’ Lang said.
    â€˜I come down here most nights,’ Sumaoang said. It wasn’t a warm smile he had on his face, but a cold smirk. ‘Nothing special.’
    Lang took the slap without showing he understood it. ‘Buy you a drink?’
    The bartender was there with a bottle of water.
    â€˜You must be a regular,’ Lang said to the artist.
    â€˜Real regular. You want to know about Warfield?’ Sumaoang asked.

Five
    After cleaning up the dishes, Carly brewed a cup of coffee and settled on the sofa with her laptop to follow up on the people on the list. Frank Wiley had several links on Google. She discovered his photographs were used in magazine and newspaper articles. They were included or featured in several exhibitions over the years. There was an out-of-print book on Amazon. His specialty was North Beach – the neighborhood, its characters, and its celebrities.
    Some of the photographs she found were of the Beats, some of them about to make a name for themselves, the core group in their youngest San Francisco days. That meant Wiley was no spring chicken. Some of these photographs were taken in the fifties, late fifties probably, but still a long time ago. If he was twenty then, he’d be in his seventies at least. A murderer? Possibly, seventy is the new forty.
    His work was currently being represented by Reed Fine Arts on Geary, according to a fairly recent posting on an art-oriented website. That meant the gallery would likely know where to find him. Tomorrow she could visit the gallery. It was in what could loosely be called the ‘gallery district’ – a small area near Union Square with a mixture of fine arts targeted to serious collectors and lesser ones targeting less knowledgeable tourists. Reed was one of the former. Perhaps she could also locate Lili D. Young through the galleries. There were casual mentions on the Internet. And eBay had one of her watercolors listed for $1,200. There was an old newspaper article that indicated that, at least at the time of that writing, she lived on Potrero Hill.
    After the gallery visit, she’d check her email. If she hadn’t heard from the newspaper editor Bart Brozynski or city Supervisor Samuel McFarland, she knew where to find them and she would hunt them down.
    She felt as if she had put in enough time, even if half of it was in the comfort of her own home. She was beginning to like this new Carly Paladino, a little more laid-back, a little more spontaneous. Yes, it still made her a little nervous and she had twinges of guilt. But, she was getting the job done, wasn’t she?
    She poured herself a half glass of wine and stepped back out on to the deck. The cold had come in – good for sleep, but not so good for hanging out. She downed her wine, checked the locks on the doors, switched off the lights, undressed, and slipped naked into her luxurious bed.
    As Lang talked with Sumaoang, he noticed something odd. As the night wore on, people came into the bar, walked past the two of them toward the back and didn’t return. He thought, at first, they were going to the john. But it’d be quite a gathering in there by now.
    Richard Sumaoang was talking about ‘the scene’ and it didn’t take too much prompting to get him to talk. He said that when he came along, the old guard had either died or moved on. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and many of the other core members of the ‘Beats’ were traveling the world, no longer just North Beach talent. But by the mid sixties, the energy these legends had supplied mutated. The center of the new culture moved from North Beach and the ‘Beats’ to Haight Ashbury and the ‘Hippies’. With the media as an active accomplice there was dramatic, though philosophically slight,