Spook

by Bill Pronzini

  We wove and squeezed our way past some of the patriotic barrels, all of which were already stuffed full of canned goods, new toys, and warm clothing, and stopped in front of another, smaller barrel on a low wooden platform. Propped up there was a big sign:

  HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

  Season of Sharing Fund

  Be generous!

  Kerry transferred a folded twenty-dollar bill from her purse into the barrel. I took a ten out of my wallet.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said, “don’t be a Scrooge. Read the sign.”

  I said, “Be generous, Mr. Spade.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.” I exchanged the ten for two twenties, stepped up to the platform and slotted them into the barrel.

  “That’s better. Oh, here’s Sharon.”

  McCone came bustling up, as svelte and attractive as ever despite the furred Santa Claus cap she wore over her black hair. Just looking at the cap made my scalp itch. She hugged Kerry, waved some green plant-stuff over my head, and then kissed me on the mouth.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m a married man. And you’re almost young enough to be my daughter.”

  “Almost?”

  “Don’t mind him,” Kerry said. “He’s in one of his grumpy moods.”

  “I am not grumpy!”

  McCone said, “Well, whatever you are, Wolf, I’m glad you’re here.” She knew I didn’t care for that pet name — short for “lone wolf detective,” an allusion to the hardboiled pulp sleuths — which was probably one of the reasons she insisted on using it. Her sense of humor is a little bent and barbed, not unlike Kerry’s. “We were afraid you’d try to cancel out at the last minute.”

  “No way that was going to happen,” Kerry said.

  “Is Tamara coming?”

  I shook my head. “Not in a party mood, she said.”

  “The split with her boyfriend?”

  “Right. Worse time of year for something like that.”

  “There’s never a good time. She going to be okay?”

  “I hope so. Where’s Ripinsky?”

  “He had to fly down to RKI headquarters in San Diego. Urgent business.” Hy Ripinsky was a fellow investigator specializing in high-profile international hostage negotiation, and her significant other. “But he’ll be back in time for us to spend Christmas and New Year’s together.”

  She and Kerry proceeded to jabber about the party, the displays in general and something called “the galactic theme” in particular, the fund-raising goal of five thousand cash for the homeless. It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable women are. Put two together, even a pair of strangers, in any social situation and not only are they immediately comfortable with each other and their surroundings, they never seem at a loss for words.

  While they were chattering, I glanced around some more. What galactic theme? I thought.

  Pretty soon Kerry paused long enough to suggest I go and fetch drinks. “White wine for me,” she said. “Sharon?”

  “The same.”

  So I waded alone through the sea of partygoers to the bar. The noise level in the cavernous space, enhanced by a loud-speakered version of “Deck the Halls,” was such that I had to raise my voice to a near-shout to place my order. Two white wines, nothing for me. My brain gets fuzzy enough at parties as it is.

  Somebody came up and tapped my arm while I was waiting. Ted Smalley. His bookseller partner, Neal Osborn, was beside him. Both wore red stocking caps with tassels and somehow managed not to look ridiculous.

  Neal said, “Nice party, isn’t it? Didn’t Ted do a terrific job coordinating the displays?”

  “Terrific,” I said. “Great, uh, galactic theme, Ted.”

  He beamed at me. “Everyone cooperated, for a change.”

  Neal ordered for the two of them. Then he said to Ted, “Shall we spring it on him now or wait until later?”

  “Now. I can’t wait to see his face.”

  “Why don’t you do the honors?”

  “No, you go ahead.”

  “No, it was your idea.”

  “Well, mine and Sharon’s.”

  I said, “What’re you two talking about?”

  “You’ll find out,” Neal said. “It’s waiting for you upstairs in Sharon’s office, on her desk.”

  “What is?”

  “Look for Christmas wrap and a big bow.”

  “A present? Why would you get me a present?”

  “For your help on the Patterson case,” Ted said.

  “You’ve already paid me for that.”

  “A present isn’t payment.” He pressed a key into my hand. “Spare key to her office. It’s locked.”

  I didn’t know what to say except “I don’t know what to say.” I’m not used to gifts from anyone other than Kerry and, the past three years, Tamara. This Christmas, there’d be one from Emily too. And now McCone Investigations.

  “Don’t open it up there,” Ted said. “Bring it down so we can all watch.”

  Oh, dandy. Being the center of a ring of eyes is something else that makes me sweat.

  I delivered the glasses of wine, told Kerry where I was going — Sharon grinned when I mentioned the present — and then made my way upstairs. As I approached McCone’s private office, I had the spare key ready. But I didn’t need it. The door was closed but not locked.

  No cause for suspicion in that, but what I saw when I opened the door and walked in set off alarm bells in my head. A man had been hunched over her desk — a blond man who didn’t work for McCone Investigations. He wheeled, straightening, and flashed me a frightened-deer look. He seemed to teeter briefly on the edge of panic, then with an effort he got a grip on himself and pasted on a weak smile. He was familiar; I’d seen him around the pier before. An employee of one of the other firms... the architects on the opposite catwalk. His name was Kennett or Bennett.

  “You startled me,” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I’ll ask you the same question.”

  “Sharon asked me to get something for her. If you’ll excuse me...”

  He edged past where I stood, not making eye contact, one hand squeezed into the pocket of a pair of tight leather pants. In other circumstances, or if he’d lingered a few more seconds, I would have acted to restrain him; as it was I hesitated long enough for him to get past me and out the door.

  I followed as he hurried along the catwalk, close to the garland-festooned railing, his hand still in his pocket. He glanced back once, saw me coming and seemed to quicken his pace even more. Only fifty feet separated us when he reached the stairs. I had a clear look at him all the way to the bottom, but as I started down, the Model T Ford display cut off my view and the party swirl swallowed him.

  I ran down steps until most of the pier floor was visible again. No more than fifteen seconds ticked off before I spotted him again. He’d stopped and joined a small group near the loving cup, was now making a gesture with the hand that had been in his pocket. The hand appeared to be empty. And McCone was not one of the group.

  Another few seconds and I had her located. She was with Ted and one of her operatives, a former FBI agent named Craig Morland. I went straight to her, keeping my eye on Leather Pants all the way.

  “Did you send somebody up to your office a few minutes ago?” I asked her. “Somebody besides me who doesn’t work for you?”

  Frown. “No. Why?”

  I told her why. “Five-ten or so, blond hair, dressed in black leather pants and a thin-ribbed sweater. I think he works for the architects. Bennett, Kennett?”

  “Paul Kennett. He’s a draftsman for Chandler & Santos. My office door was locked — how’d he get in?”

  “I don’t know, but it wasn’t locked when I got there.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Couldn’t tell,” I said, “but he was at your desk. Claimed you’d sent him to get something for you, but he had a guilty, scared look. He got past me before I thought to stop him and hustled down here
. He’s over by the trophy now, talking to some people, pretending nothing happened.”

  McCone said, “That’s damn funny. Now that I think about it, he’s been hanging around the offices all week. I practically tripped over him once.”

  “In Julia’s and my office almost every day,” Morland said, “trying to put the moves on her. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, just kept coming back.”

  “Suspicious. He’s never bothered her like that before, has he?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t like him,” Ted put in. “Big ego and an attitude to match.”

  “We’ll find out what this is all about. Craig, keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t leave the pier.”

  “Right.”

  “Ted, find Julia, Mick and Charlotte. Just in case we need them.”

  The two men moved off. Sharon turned to me. “Let’s go upstairs, see what Kennett might’ve been after.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Yes, and I hope I’m wrong.”

  The blare of one of those stupid novelty songs, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” followed us up to the catwalk. I’d shut but not paused to lock the door to McCone’s office; we pushed inside. At her desk, she began pawing through the pile of stuff in her In-box.

  “Dammit! It’s gone.”

  “What is?”

  “Computer disk. My final report on the Patterson case.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “There’re all sorts of specific evidentiary references on that disk. If Patterson gets hold of it, he’ll know exactly what we’ve got. He might be able to cover up enough to keep the D.A. from convicting him and his cronies, maybe enough to forestall indictments.”

  “How’d Kennett know about the disk? What’s his connection to the case?”

  She didn’t answer. Something on the floor alongside her desk had caught her eye. She bent to scoop it up, looked at it and then held it out to me. Key. Shiny new, as if it had been recently cut. She compared it to her own office key. Exact duplicate.

  “Now I’m sure Kennett’s responsible,” she said. “I run a pretty open shop here; you know that. The same key operates all the doors so staff members will have access to the other offices if they need something. We trust each other, so we tend to trust the other pier tenants too. Made it simple for Kennett to snag a key while he was hanging around Julia and have a copy made. This isn’t the first time he’s used it, either, I’ll bet.”

  “No?”

  “Yesterday morning our creaky old office safe was open when I came in. I thought one of the staff must’ve left it that way, even though none of them owned up to it.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “Nothing. There’s not much in it except petty cash and my .357 Magnum, but they weren’t disturbed.”

  “Kennett looking for the disk.”

  “Yes. And I should’ve been more careful.”

  I asked again, “What’s his connection to the case?”

  “All I can do right now is guess,” McCone said. “He must know Patterson or one of the others involved. Architects and city planners all know one another. Somebody found out we were conducting an investigation — a leak somewhere, or a trail we didn’t sweep clean — and paid or coerced Kennett into finding out what we knew. As often as he was in and out of the offices the past week, he could have overheard one of us mention the disk.”

  I said, “He was only out of my sight for a few seconds. It’s either still on him or somewhere close by.”

  “Wherever it is, we’d damn well better find it. If we don’t, there goes weeks of work, a fat fee, and my hard-earned professional reputation.”

  17

  From the catwalk we located Kennett, drink in hand, wandering casually through the crowd. By the time we got to the pier floor he’d stopped by the Santa’s Village display, was standing there by himself looking at it. When he saw us, the grim look on McCone’s face, it was like watching somebody put on a mask. Blank, smiling innocence, the kind Nixon used to project in front of TV cameras.

  Sharon said, “Where’s the disk?”

  “What disk?”

  “The one you stole from my private office.”

  “Stole? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you deny you were in my office a few minutes ago?”

  “I certainly do. I haven’t been anywhere near your office.”

  I said, “We both know that’s a lie, Kennett.”

  “Who’re you? I don’t know you.”

  “You’re not leaving here with that disk,” McCone said.

  “I don’t have any damn disk.” Bluster now, but with an undercurrent of fear. He gulped what was left in his plastic cup, set the cup on the floor, and then extended his arms dramatically. In a loud voice he said, “Search me if you want to. Go ahead, search me!”

  People in the vicinity stopped talking, turned to stare — just what he wanted. Neither Sharon nor I moved. There was no point in searching him, we both knew that. His leather pants were skin tight; the outline of a disk would have shown clearly. Same thing with the ribbed pullover. A computer disk might fit inside one of the loafers he was wearing, but he hadn’t had time to stuff it in there; and even if he had, it would probably have changed the way he walked. He didn’t have it on him. He’d gotten rid of it somewhere, and not very long after he left McCone’s office.

  “All right, Kennett. You win this round.” She jabbed him on the chest with a sharp-nailed forefinger, as hard as I would have. “But we’ll find it if it takes all night. You’ll be under watch until we do.”

  “If you try to hold me against my will, I’ll sue you. You and this man and anybody else involved. Don’t think I won’t.”

  More bluster. Neither of us bothered to respond.

  Sharon McCone is as efficient an investigator as I’ve known in thirty-some years in the business. Doubly so in a crisis. She gathered and quickly briefed the members of her staff, individually and in pairs, telling Craig Morland to stay close to Kennett everywhere he went, assigning her nephew, Mick, and her newest operative, Julia Rafael, to watch the exits. The rest of us went upstairs to her office, Neal Osborn and Kerry included. Neal because we might need an extra hand, Kerry because she’d noticed Kennett hurrying downstairs with me in his wake.

  Once we were all settled, Sharon behind her desk, the rest of us sitting or standing, she said, “We need to brainstorm this, try to get some idea of what Kennett did with the disk. Wolf and I will do most of the talking, but if anybody has anything to contribute, jump in any time.” That was another thing about McCone: She ran a fairly loose ship, delegating a good deal of authority to her people, but when she took command she did it forcefully and got complete cooperation in return. In my idealized view of the future, Tamara would turn out just like her. You couldn’t ask for a better role model.

  She asked me to go over again, in detail, what had happened earlier. When I was done, she said, “So Kennett didn’t go around to the opposite catwalk before he went downstairs, and Craig said he hasn’t gone up there since. That eliminates the Chandler & Santos offices as a hiding place.”

  “We can eliminate one other possibility,” I said. “The unlikely one that Kennett hid the disk somewhere in here before I walked in. The old purloined letter trick. He didn’t expect to get caught and he’d be a fool to risk sneaking in another time, or trying to retrieve it while you were here.”

  She nodded. “You had him in sight the whole time after he left, except for those few seconds on your way downstairs?”

  “Right.”

  “How many seconds, would you say?”

  “No more than fifteen. That little window must be when he got rid of the disk.”

  “Unless he managed to hide it on the way. Up here among the railing decorations, for instance.”

  “I doubt it, but I can’t be a hundred percent certain. He did walk close to the railing all the way to the stairs. It’s remotely possible he slipped the disk in among
the decorations.”

  “The main argument against it is the same as hiding it in here — he couldn’t’ve been sure of getting his hands on it later. All the decorations between here and the stairs are ours. Still... Ted, go check and make sure.”

  As Ted went out, I said, “Kennett had one hand in his pocket on the catwalk, on the stairs, and when I lost sight of him. But when I spotted him again, the hand was out — he made a gesture with it when he joined the group by the trophy. It’s possible that he passed the disk to somebody in the crowd.”

  “Not likely. He’d’ve had no reason to arrange for an accomplice. It feels like a one-man operation to me.”

  “Which leaves a hiding place someplace on the pier floor.”

  “Did he turn straight into the crowd from the stairs?”

  “Yes. Hard left turn.”

  “So he passed right by the Model T Ford display.”

  “Right, because that was what cat off my view of him.”

  Charlotte Keim, Mick’s girlfriend and fellow computer whiz, said, “Another possibility is the nonprofit’s ecological display. It’s right next to the car.”

  McCone said, “Among the branches of one of the fir trees? Could be.”

  “The only problem with that is, he’d’ve had to go right in among them. That’d be inviting attention.”

  “Have a look anyway, Charlotte. As unobtrusively as possible.”

  Ted came in just then, shaking his head. “It’s not among the garlands or galactic decorations.”

  “Check the Model T next. Inside and out.”

  Neal said, “I’ll help him look.”