LAST CALL FOR GUMSHOES

Something’s gone missing from the shadowy streets of San Francisco, a precious, revealing relic already mostly vanished long before the thieving suction of COVID-19. A piece of it is still with us, though who knows whether even that will survive.

Few have noticed its disappearance, which is a tragedy because it is a deliciously naughty, rich vein of life; the city and its rough-edged, romantic culture will suffer without it.

So, what is this about? What happened? There are clues: the curl of cigarette smoke, turned-up overcoat collars, steel revolvers, bare knuckles, rumors of a black bird swathed in jewels. But wait! That’s just the fictional version.

Or is it?

CLUE: TRUE CAMARADERIE

David Fechheimer’s giant head, grinning, bearded, and bespectacled, floated above the crowd, attached to the ceiling with a piece of fishing wire tied around a light fixture.

The 100-plus people, an unlikely, largely older set of lawyers, journalists, writers, vintners, calligraphers, tap dancers, poets, and philosophers, had come to the North Beach bar Tosca to say goodbye to Fechh (pronounced “Fetch”), though not necessarily to be stared at by him in silence, a Fechheimer specialty. His son, Zach, called the three-by-two-foot photo of his dad wafting overhead “a little demented and still kind of sweet.”

Hardly your typical adjectives to describe what Fechh had been: arguably the best private eye in San Francisco. And a zen master of a unique era of private investigator characters and practices that blossomed here in the 1970s and is now sadly waning, marked more by funerals and retirements than by investigative adventures.

“To me,” says Alex Kline, Fechh’s lifelong friend, a Stanford grad, and a PI colleague, “he’s part of a lost world I just don’t think exists anymore.”

A revealing Fechh anecdote begins with a pathologist at San Francisco’s then-independent Davies Medical Center and a human skin mole packed in paraffin.

Larry Hillblom, the multimillionaire cofounder of express parcel service DHL, had died in a 1995 plane crash, leaving almost no traces of DNA to resolve claims of paternity made by a number of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander women who were underage girls when Hillblom was engaging in unprotected-sex safaris and pedophilia throughout the region.

The mole was Hillblom’s only genetic marker, and it turned out to be botched evidence. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. So Fechh, working with lawyer Peter Neufeld—who was representing one of Hillblom’s alleged children—came up with a plan: get DNA from Hillblom’s mother, who was living on a small farm in the Central Valley and had so far refused to comply with a court order to provide blood samples.

Fechh discovered that she “didn’t leave her house very often,” Neufeld tells me. “But she did go to church on Sunday.”

The private eye went and sat in the pew behind her. At the end of the service, he followed her out, stopped her, and asked for help; he said he had Parkinson’s (he didn’t) and was having trouble licking the church’s donation envelope. The mother kindly obliged, leaving DNA-infused spittle behind (and the church a few dollars poorer).

Neufeld’s client was one of four children awarded some $50 million each thanks to shared genes. As a PI, Fechh had “extraordinary creativity,” says Neufeld.

Zach Fechheimer refers to his late father as having “vanished” or “disappeared,” not as deceased, as though this is another mystery to be solved.

The night at