Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  “Mrs. Cappellani is becoming less and less involved with internal matters every year. And Leo—and Alex too—is too busy with his private life to pay proper attention to what’s going on.”

  “That’s some way for an employee to talk.”

  “It’s the only way for an employee who gives a damn to talk,” Brand said. “If you’d accept the facts of the situation, we could go to Mrs. Cappellani and between us make her understand that changes have to be made before it’s too late.”

  “I won’t help you make unnecessary waves.”

  Brand stared at him with a mixture of exasperation and contempt. “No, of course you won’t. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil—that’s your credo. You’ve got no backbone, Logan, none at all.”

  “I don’t have to take that from you.”

  “No—you don’t have to take anything from me.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Brand slid out of the booth, got on his feet.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away from you.”

  “Damn it, Philip ...”

  “Oh go diddle yourself,” Brand said, and turned and stalked over to the entrance.

  Dockstetter glared after him. In profile his face was white and so pinched now it looked deformed. He sat there rigidly for several seconds; then he got out of the booth in slow, measured movements, took a couple of bills from his wallet and put them on the table, and walked out after Brand. His back could not have been straighter or stiffer if he had had a steel rod strapped to his spine.

  I watched him go, wondering if he was right about the status of the Cappellani Winery, or if Brand was. Well, in either case the Cappellanis appeared to have more than their share of problems. Dissension in the ranks along with everything else.

  I looked at my watch, and it was ten past one. So maybe Shelly had gotten tied up at the office, or maybe she was one of those people who are chronically late for appointments. Not that it mattered much, except that I could smell the aroma of barbecued meat coming from the chefs counter and it was making me pretty hungry.

  Waiting, I sipped my ale and glanced around at the boar heads and the other wall decorations. Now that I was alone with nothing to occupy my attention, the place gave me a certain nostalgic feeling. Five years ago, when I had been in love with a woman named Erika Coates who worked in the financial district not far away, I had had lunch with her here on several occasions. Good, intimate lunches that seemed, in retrospect, to have been filled with warmth and laughter.

  But it had not been quite that way. Erika had plenty of good qualities, but she was also an uncompromising, unyielding person: if you wanted to play with her, you had to play by her rules. Two of those rules were that I had to give up smoking for my own good, and that I had to give up my profession because it was shabby and pointless and I was living a lie by trying to emulate the detectives I read about in the pulps. She had been right about the first and wrong about the second, as I had finally proved to myself, but the combination of the two had built an unmendable rift between us.

  It took me a while to get over her——and I suppose I never really did get over her, despite not seeing her once in those next five years. I might have gone on that way; plagued by vague ghosts, if it had not been for the things that happened this past summer and the changes they had brought about in me. But with all of that, I had decided at last to put away my pride and get in touch with her if I could. I did not believe there was anything left between us; what has been lost and buried in the passage of time can seldom be resurrected. And yet I felt I had to know for my own peace of mind.

  I had no trouble locating her; she still worked for the same company, and she was still unmarried. At first she had not wanted to see me, but because it was my fiftieth birthday she had finally consented to have dinner. And it had turned out to be a strained evening, both of us reserved and uncomfortable. When I told her about the lesion on my lung, she was sympathetic but she could not resist an I-told-you-so. When I tried to explain about the changes in me, she said they were a step in the right direction but until I quit being a private eye I was still living in self-delusion. Uncompromising, unyielding—the same old Erika.

  At the end of the evening I told her I would call her, but we both knew I would not and that we wouldn’t see each other again. I did not know her and she did not know me; we no longer had anything at all in common.

  I had no regrets about seeing her, though, because in doing so I had gotten rid of the vague ghosts and put my soul at ease. Still, sitting here now in The Boar’s Head, with memories on the walls and memories playing across the screen of my mind, I felt just a little sad for what once was and for what might have been.

  I finished my ale, looked again at my watch. One-twenty. I considered calling the winery omce—and while I was considering the street door opened and Shelly came inside.

  When I leaned out of the booth and waved at her, she saw me and then came over wearing a lopsided grin. “Sorry to be late,” she said. “A couple of last-minute things to take care of.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  The waiter showed up as soon as she sat down, and we got our orders out of the way: two roast beef sandwiches, another Bass ale for me, a pint of Black-and-Tan—half Guinness and half lager —for her. After he drifted off, Shelly brushed a hand absently through her fine, short-cropped hair and looked at me in a frankly appraising way. She was dressed in a tailored three-piece wool suit and a blue silk blouse; the outfit, and some carefully applied makeup, made her look less hard-edged than she had last night. And even more attractive.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me what it’s like to be a private eye.”

  I shrugged. “Like any other job. Interesting sometimes but mostly pretty dull.”

  “Which category does what you’re doing for Alex fall into?”

  “What makes you think I’m working for Alex?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “If I am, I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

  “Top-secret stuff, huh?”

  “Nope. Professional ethics.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’ll bet it concerns Jason Booker.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s pretty obvious that Alex hates Booker and that he’s afraid Booker will marry Rosa. It would be just like Alex to hire a private eye to get something on Jason, or beat up on him, or whatever else it is you do.”

  “I don’t beat up on people,” I said a little sharply.

  Her gray-green eyes were amused. “No? How about me last night?”

  “That was a different matter altogether.”

  “God, you’re sensitive, aren’t you?”

  “A little, I guess. People always seem to have the wrong idea about the kind of work I do. I don’t strong-arm people and I don’t ‘get things’ on people. I operate strictly within the law.”

  “I stand corrected,” she said. Her gaze had turned speculative, as it had a couple of times up at the winery; but she did not seem to be put off. “Okay?”

  I smiled at her. “Okay.”

  Our sandwiches and drinks arrived, and we went to work on them. I said between mouthfuls, “If Alex hates Jason Booker, how does Leo feel about him?”

  “Booker? The same, I gather. But Leo says Rosa has no intention of marrying anybody and she’s too tough and too sharp to let Booker talk her into anything she doesn’t want to do. Alex is the only one who’s worried.”

  “What’s your opinion of Booker?”

  “He’s a turd,” she said.

  “That bad?”

  “At least. He tried to get me into bed with him not too long ago, at the winery; big macho come-on, as if there wasn’t a woman in the world who could wait to screw him. I laughed in his face.” The lopsided grin again. “He’s never bothered me since.”

  “Nice guy, all right,” I said.

  “Yeah. You don’t suppose he could
be the one who clobbered Alex—and you—with that wine bottle?”

  “It’s possible, I guess.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Shelly said. “He’s the type that’s capable of doing anything to get what he wants.” She paused. “If it was Booker, you know, he might try to go after Alex a second time.”

  “He might, yeah.”

  “So are you planning to stay on the scene?”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Keep on working for Alex. Give him protection.”

  “We don’t know that he needs protection. The man who hit him could still have been a sneak thief.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I can’t answer it,” I said. “I haven’t talked to Alex.”

  “Make you a bet that when you do, he’ll want you around. He needs people to lean on, particularly in a crisis. He’s not at all like his mother, or like Leo. Why do you think he’d hire a private eye in the first place, instead of working things out himself?”

  “If he hired me.”

  “Sure, right.”

  “Anyhow,” I said, “this whole business will probably be over before much longer. The Napa sheriff’s people should see to that.”

  “But will they?” She laughed ironically. “I doubt it. They haven’t found out a damned thing so far.”

  “You really are down on cops, aren’t you?”

  “You bet I am.”

  “Then how come the lunch with me?”

  She gave me a long look over her stein of Black-and-Tan. “Two reasons,” she said. “One is that I’m curious as hell about you and Alex and what happened last night. As if you hadn’t already figured that out.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s the other reason?”

  “Chemistry,” she said.

  That gave me pause. “Pardon?”

  “Oh come on, big man, don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”

  I knew what she meant, all right. I had been too tired and too battered to attach much significance to it at the time, but I remembered now the way she had looked at me inside the winery sales room, and later, just before I was ready to leave: the sort of looks a woman gives you when she’s interested in what she sees.

  So maybe I was interested too. She was a damned good-looking woman, and I do not know very many good-looking women who find me interesting—not at my age, and not with my shaggy looks and my overhanging belly. No great passion on either side, but you don’t need great passion to begin a relationship.

  Shelly said, “Mutual, right?”

  “Mutual.”

  “Good. Now we can go on from there.”

  We went on from there. I told her a little about myself, and she reciprocated. She was from Florida, she said, and she had been married to a county sheriff whose idea of fun was to get drunk twice a week and rape her—not make love to her, forcibly rape her. She divorced him finally, knocked around Miami and Fort Lauderdale for a while, came to California a few months ago to visit a friend, decided to stay on, and got the job with the Cappellani Winery through another acquaintance who knew Leo. What she did there was handle marketing matters. She thought San Francisco was a good place to live, “except that there are too goddamn many fags here,” but she would probably go back to Florida eventually because of the climate there.

  It was a relaxed and casual conversation, without much intimacy—just two people getting to know each other a little better. When she said at three o’clock that she had to get back to the office I was sorry to have it end. I liked her, despite her narrow opinions on some matters; she was frank and open, and she did not seem to play games.

  We left the Boar’s Head together, and out on the street Shelly said, “Call me tonight or tomorrow night, big man. I’m in the book. On Beach Street in Marina.”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  We touched hands. Standing close to her that way, I found myself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with her. Typical male: get to know a woman and right away you think about getting laid.

  The only thing was, there was a look in Shelly’s eyes which might have meant she was wondering the same about me.

  6

  It was three forty-five by the time I got back to my office. I checked in with my answering service—no calls—and then finished the report on Jason Booker and wrote a letter accepting the Mystery Writers’ invitation to speak at one of their meetings. At five o’clock I closed up for the day, stopped at a store on Van Ness to buy some groceries, and eventually drove up to my fogbound flat on Pacific Heights.

  The telephone started ringing as soon as I keyed open the door.

  I had an armful of the groceries and a handful of my overnight bag and my house mail; I kicked the door shut, put the groceries down on the highboy along the inside wall, the bag and the mail down beside them, and clicked on the light switch so I could see my way through the bachelor’s clutter of newspapers and magazines and clothing on the living room floor. I keep the phone in the bedroom and I hustled in there past the laminated wood bookshelves that contain my pulp collection, caught up the receiver on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Good—you’re in,” a man’s voice said. “Alex Cappellani.”

  I sat down on the rumpled bed. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Cappellani?”

  “Lousy. But not as bad as I’d feel if you hadn’t showed up at the winery last night.”

  “When will you be able to leave the hospital?”

  “I’ve already left it. Earlier this afternoon.”

  “But I heard you had a concussion—”

  “Mild concussion. They wanted to keep me in there for observation, but I wasn’t having any of that. I don’t like hospitals.”

  I could appreciate that; but I did not say anything.

  “Look,” Alex said, “what is it you found out yesterday about Jason Booker?”

  “You want me to give you the full report now?”

  “Just the meat, that’s enough.”

  “Okay,” I said, and told him about Booker’s marriage to Martha Towne, about the fifteen thousand dollars of her money that he had appropriated for private investments of his own.

  “I knew it,” Alex said grimly. He paused for a moment. “All right. Can you meet me in twenty minutes?”

  “Twenty minutes? Aren’t you calling from the winery?”

  “No. I just got into the city, I’m in a service station down on Lombard.”

  Well, Christ, I thought. Leo Cappellani had said Alex was headstrong and sometimes exhibited a lack of good judgment; driving seventy-five miles with a concussion and a bad scalp wound was a prime example of both.

  I said, “Why do you want me to meet you?”

  “Because I’m going to have a showdown with Booker and I want somebody there. I don’t trust him and I don’t trust myself.”

  I frowned. And Shelly had said he always needed somebody to lean on in a crisis: here he was wanting to lean on me, all right. “Why don’t you trust him, Mr. Cappellani?”

  “For all I know he’s the son of a bitch who hit me last night, that’s why. Maybe he found out somehow that I’d hired you to check into his background.”

  “That’s not much of a reason for attempted murder.”

  “Not for you and me, maybe. But how do we know how a bastard like Booker thinks? He stands to gain access to a lot of money if he’s able to convince Rosa to marry him. The kind of guy you proved him to be, if he realized how much of a threat I am he might have figured his only chance was to get rid of me.”

  You’re going off half cocked, I thought. But I said, “You wouldn’t be planning to accuse him, would you?”

  “That depends. Probably not; I don’t have any proof. But I damned well do want the satisfaction of telling him to his face what I know about him and what I think of him.”

  “That might not be a good idea,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be better if you talked to your mother first—?”

  “I
’ll talk to my mother later,” he said stubbornly. “Listen, you probably saved my life last night and I’m damned grateful—but I’m not after advice from you. All I want is for you to back me up when I see Booker.”

  I hesitated. Did I want to get mixed up in an emotional and potentially volatile scene between Alex and Jason Booker? The answer was no. But then again, if I refused and he saw Booker alone, there was no telling what might happen. Hell, Booker could be the one who had taken that wine bottle to Alex in the winery office ...

  He said, misinterpreting my silence, “I’ll pay you for your time, don’t worry about that.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about it,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

  “Okay—sorry. Will you meet me?”

  “Yeah, I’ll meet you. Where’s Booker?”

  “At our town house, up on Russian Hill. He told my mother he had something to do down here and she gave him permission to spend the night at the house.”

  “Anybody else there? Servants?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “Chestnut and Larkin.” He gave me the number.

  “I’ll see you out front, then. We’ll go in together.”

  “Right. Twenty minutes?”

  “As soon as I can get there.”

  We rang off, and I sighed a little and went into the bathroom and took four aspirin for my lingering headache. Then I got the groceries and carried them into the kitchen, talked myself out of taking time to have a beer and look through my house mail, and left the flat.

  When I got to my car a block away—parking on Pacific Heights is always a hassle—I found that in the half-hour since I had left it somebody had slammed into the rear end. There was a piece gone out of the left taillight and a big dent in the trunk lid. I scowled at the damage, went finally around to the front. And saw with amazement that there was a note on the windshield, under the wiper blade. I took it out and looked at it, and the amazement went away. Uh-huh, I thought.

  What the note said was, “Whoops, sorry about that.”