Read The 8th Confession for Free Online Page A

black stretch pants. Purple-framed eyeglasses hung from a cord around her neck, and a badge pinned to her blouse read, MS. LUVIE JUMP, DAY ROOM SUPERVISOR.
    Ms. Jump continued to scan Cindy skeptically, then said, "Help you?"
    Cindy told the woman her name and that she was writing a story about Bagman Jesus for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
    "I'm following up on his murder," Cindy said, taking the morning's paper out of her computer bag. She flipped it open to page three, exposed the headline above the fold.
    The black woman squinted at the paper, said, "You had your coffee yet?"
    "Nope," said Cindy.
    "Then sit yourself down."
    Luvie Jump returned a minute later with two mugs of coffee, a basket of rolls, and foil-wrapped pats of butter.
    "Will you read me that story?" she asked, sitting across from Cindy, laying out plastic flatware and napkins. "I don't have my reading glasses."
    Cindy smiled, said, "
Love
to. I don't get to do readings too often." She flattened the paper, said, "The headline is 'Street Messiah Murdered. Police Have No Leads.' "
    " Uh-hunh. Go on."
    "Okay, so then it says, 'Sometime after midnight on May sixth, a homeless man was beaten and shot to death outside the Caltrain yard on Townsend Street.
    " 'More than a hundred homeless people die on our streets from neglect and violence every year, and the city buries and forgets them.' "
    "Can say that again," Luvie murmured.
    Cindy went on, " 'But this man won't be forgotten easily. He was a friend to the castoffs, the shadow people of the underclass. He was their shepherd, and they loved him.
    " 'We don't know his name, but he was called Bagman Jesus.' "
    Cindy's throat caught and she looked up, saw Luvie Jump smiling at her, the woman's mouth quavering as if she might cry.
    "He delivered my oldest child in an alley," Luvie said. "That's why he wore that baby on the cross around his neck. Jesus saves. Jesus
saves
. What can I do to help you, Cindy Thomas? Just tell me."
    "I want to know everything about him."
    "Where should I start?"
    "Do you know Bagman's real name?"

Chapter 17
     
    C INDY WAS IN the grip of a dead man—heart, mind, and soul. Conklin and I sat with her at MacBain's Beers O' the World Pub, a cop hangout on Bryant. The jukebox pumped out "Dancing Queen," and the long, polished bar was packed three-deep with a buoyant after-work crowd who'd streamed here directly from the Hall of Justice.
    Cindy was oblivious to her surroundings.
    Her voice was colored with anger as she said to us, "He delivered her
baby
and she doesn't know his
name
. No one does! If only his face wasn't totaled, we could run his picture. Maybe someone would call in with an ID."
    Cindy downed her beer, slammed her empty mug on the table, said, "I've got to make people understand about him. Get their noses out of the society pages for a minute and realize that a person like Bagman Jesus
mattered.
"
    "We
get it,
Cindy," I said. "Take a breath. Let someone else speak!"
    "Sorry." Cindy laughed. "Sydney," she said, raising a hand, calling our waitress over, "hit me again, please."
    "Rich and I spent our lunch hour sifting through missing persons and running Bagman's prints."
    "Your lunch hour. Wow," Cindy said facetiously.
    "Hey, look at it this way," I said. "We bumped your Bagman to the top of a very thick pile of active cases."
    Cindy gave me a look that said "sorry," but she didn't mean it. What a brat. I laughed at her. What else could I do?
    "Did you find anything?" she asked.
    Conklin told her, "No match to his prints. On the other hand, there are a couple of hundred average-size, brown-eyed white men who've gone missing in California over the last decade. I called you at two thirty so you could make your deadline. When you dump your voice mail—"
    "Thanks, anyway, Rich. I was interviewing. I turned off my cell."
    More beer came, and as dinner arrived, Cindy served up the highlights of her other interviews at From the Heart. It took a little while, but soon enough I