The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

I bent to ruffle the silky ears of my lovely border collie, Sweet Martha, and called out, “Bye, honey,” to Joe.

Then I headed out to meet Cindy’s newest passion: a dead bum with a certifiably crazy name.

Bagman Jesus.

Chapter 3

CINDY STOOD AT the dead man’s side and filled her notebook, getting down the names, the descriptions, the exact quotes from Bagman Jesus’s friends and mourners.

“He wore a really big cross,” said a Mexican dishwasher who worked at a Thai restaurant. He sported an Adidas T-shirt and jeans under a dirty white apron. Had koi tattooed on his arms. “The cross was made of two, whatchamacallit, nails —”

“It was a crucifix, Tommy,” said a bent white-haired woman leaning against her shopping cart at the edge of the crowd, sores on her legs, her filthy red coat dragging in the street.

“’Scuuuuse me, boss. What I meant was, a crucifix.”

“And they weren’t nails, they were bolts, about three inches long, tied together with copper wire. And don’t forget that toy baby on that cross. A little pink baby.” The old woman held a thumb and forefinger an inch apart to show Cindy how small that toy baby was.

“Why would someone take his crucifix?” the heavyset woman asked. “But his b-b-bag. That was a real leather bag! Lady, write this down! He was murdered for his s-s-stuff.”

“We didden even know his real name,” said Babe, a big girl from the Chinese massage parlor. “He give me ten dollah when I had no food. He didden want nothing for it.”

“Bagman took care of me when I had pneumonia,” said a gray- haired man, his chalk-striped suit pants cinched at the waist with twine. “My name is Bunker. Charles Bunker,” he told Cindy.

He stuck out his hand, and Cindy shook it.

“I heard shots last night,” Bunker said. “It was after midnight.”

“Did you see who shot him?”

“I wish I had.”

“Did he have any enemies?”

“Will you let me through?” said a black man with dreads, a gold nose stud, and a white turtleneck under an old tuxedo jacket who was threading his way through the crowd toward Cindy.

He slowly spelled out his name — Harry Bainbridge — so Cindy would get it right. Then Bainbridge held a long, bony finger above Bagman’s body, traced the letters stitched to the back of Bagman’s bloody coat.

“You can read that?” he asked her.

Cindy nodded.

“Tells you everything you want to know.”

Cindy wrote it down in her book.

Jesus Saves.

Chapter 4

BY THE TIME Conklin and I got to Fourth and Townsend, uniforms had taped off the area, shunted the commuters the long way around to the station entrance, shooed bystanders behind the tape, and blocked off all but official traffic.

Cindy was standing in the street.

She flagged us down, opened my car door for me, started pitching her story before I put my feet on the ground.

“I feel a five-part human-interest series coming on,” she said, “about the homeless of San Francisco. And I’m going to start with that man’s life and death.”

She pointed to a dead man lying stiff in his bloody rags.