I put in a call to Lieutenant Heidegger in Santa Rosa, or tried to; he wasn’t available. I left my name and both office and cell numbers and asked for a callback at his earliest convenience. It being Friday afternoon, I didn’t expect to hear from him until Monday, but he surprised me. The return call came in less than half an hour. I was still at my desk; going straight home would have meant finishing up the plumbing job and dealing with more household chores. So I’d decided to stick around and do some paperwork on an employee background check for one of the new dot-com companies that had infested the city—infested being an apt term because the proliferation had driven real estate prices to exorbitant levels and caused a lot of small businesses and private residents to sell out and move elsewhere.
Heidegger had no objections to what Mrs. Fentress wanted me to do. He’d have to check with his superiors, he said, but as far as he was concerned I could go ahead as long as I stayed within the established boundaries and immediately turned over to him anything pertinent I might happen to find out. Then he said, “Frankly, I think it’s a waste of time. Pretty clear-cut that Fentress went to see Mears to buy or steal weed and the two of them ended up blowing each other away. I just don’t see any other explanation.”
“So the case will probably end in the closed file.”
“Looks that way. You sure you want to work for the widow? She’s bound to wind up disappointed.”
“I know it. But she practically begged me and I never could say no to a bereaved party.”
“Well, it’s your time and her money. Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.”
I went into Tamara’s office, waited until she finished what she was working on and looked up from her Mac before I spoke. “Looks like it’s a go. Can you squeeze in a few searches for me?”
“Grumbling all the while,” she said, and softened the words with one of her quirky smiles. “Fentress, Mears. Who else?”
“Fentress’ friends and former employer. Short list of three.”
“Names?”
“What, you mean you didn’t write them down while you were eavesdropping?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Joseph Buckner, bartender at the Bighorn Tavern in the Excelsior,” I said after consulting my notes. “Peter Retzyck, R-e-t-z-y-c-k, works in a sporting goods store in the same neighborhood. As far as Mrs. Fentress knows, those are the only two her husband had any contact with since he got out of Mule Creek. The former employer is Philip Kennedy, owner of Kennedy Landscape Designs in Millbrae. Fentress had been on the job there seven years when he was arrested on the assault charge.”
Tamara finished typing the names into a new file. “Okay. That all for now?”
“Unless you turn up some other names.”
She didn’t. Her preliminary searches revealed no new names worth consulting and no new information that pertained to Fentress. Mears had no criminal record, the only official blot being a domestic violence incident with a woman in Monte Rio who refused to press charges. Buckner and Kennedy were solid citizens, at least insofar as the law was concerned. Retzyck had one D&D and one arrest for the illegal purchase of an assault weapon that had gotten him a slap-on-the-wrist fine, both more than four years ago.
So the leads I had to work with were pretty slim, as expected. I’d closed cases starting with fewer and slimmer before; maybe I’d get lucky with this one, even though the odds were stacked against it. And maybe if I did get lucky, it would be in a way that gave Doreen Fentress some closure and peace of mind. Depressing as hell, the prospect of having to face her one final time with dead-end news.
Well, I’d have no one to blame but myself if that was how it turned out. Me and my ever-bleeding heart.
* * *
I dislike and begrudge conducting agency business on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays are reserved for time with Kerry and Emily—picnics, museum and aquarium visits in Golden Gate Park, baseball games in season, drives in the country, lunches and dinners at old-favorite restaurants. So optimally I would have spent this Saturday in the bosom of my family and started in on the Fentress matter on Monday. But circumstances conspired to change the game plan.
Emily had made a bowling date with some of her friends and didn’t want to break it. The friends included a couple of males, a fact she readily admitted, but that was all right. My adopted daughter is as trustworthy as any almost-fifteen-year-old can be, and brighter and more grounded than at least 95 percent of her peers. Proud papa, sure, that’s me, but one with justification and without blinders; she truly is an exceptional young lady. And I’d learned to accept the fact, somewhat grudgingly, that teenagers as they grow older neither want nor need to spend as much of their free time in the company of Mom and Pop as they had in their younger days.
Kerry was busy, too. One way in which she was coping with her mother’s death in late November was the assembling of a three-volume collection of Cybil’s pulp magazine stories about hard-boiled detective Samuel Leatherman. Together we’d found a small e-book and print on demand publisher who agreed to bring out all three volumes, as well as to reprint Cybil’s two retro Leatherman novels, Dead Eye and Black Eye. Kerry was in the process of writing lengthy introductions to each of the five editions—a highly therapeutic undertaking that I had no intention of interrupting. Her health was good now, no recurrence of the breast cancer and no more lingering physical or emotional effects of the abduction ordeal she’d suffered last summer, but Cybil’s death had been another harsh blow to her still-fragile psyche. The loss would have been even more devastating without the creation of what amounted to a shrine to her mother’s memory.
So I was at loose ends this day, and the prospect of sitting around the condo by myself held little appeal. And it so happened that Joe Buckner worked the day shift weekends at the Bighorn Tavern—Tamara was nothing if not thorough in her searches. Why not drive over to the Excelsior District, then, and conduct the interview with him today? It shouldn’t take long and it would be one less task I’d have to face next week. Two, maybe, if it turned out that Pete Retzyck worked Saturdays at Mission Sporting Goods.
7
The Excelsior District runs along Mission Street east of San Jose Avenue and south of Highway 280, on the way into Daly City. I’d known the neighborhood well at one time, the Outer Mission being where I was born and raised, but it had changed quite a bit since I was a kid. Once mainly an Italian and Irish enclave, it was now a polyglot of ethnic groups—Chinese, Mexican, Central American, and Filipino predominating—and working-class Caucasians, most of whom had been longtime residents. It has been described as a kind of urban Main Street, U.S.A., with restaurants, coffee shops, markets, bakeries, boutiques, hair salons, and hardware stores all within a range of several blocks, but then you could say the same about other San Francisco neighborhoods. For me it had become less and less familiar over the years. Whenever I went there, I couldn’t help feeling pangs of nostalgia for what it used to be—for the old days even though they hadn’t all been good old days growing up.
The Bighorn Tavern, to my surprise, was a relic of those old days. Tucked between an Asian market and a dry-cleaning business, it had an old-fashioned, neon-free façade, its only advertisement being its name imprinted on the opaque window next to the entrance door. Ray Fentress had probably been drawn to it because it was located within a couple of blocks of where he’d lived with his wife on Lisbon Street, and because it would cater to his type of nonethnic clientele—a blue-collar white man’s comfort zone.
The interior bore out my external assessment. Weakly lit, musty with the smells of beer, alcohol, ingrained traces of tobacco smoke from the days before the no-smoking laws were passed. As you’d expect from its name, the walls were decorated with deer heads and racks of antlers, all very old and dusty looking; otherwise there was nothing to distinguish it from dozens of similar watering holes in the city, thousands of others spread across the country. The foot-railed bar extended the length of the right-hand wall; a line o
f high-backed wooden booths ran along the wall opposite. Two pool tables and two pinball machines were stuffed into an alcove at the rear.
The Bighorn had been in business for a lot of years, obviously. It might even have been in operation when I was growing up not far away with my alcoholic father and long-suffering mother. Hell, the old man might even have hoisted a few here himself on one of his all too frequent pub crawls.
There weren’t many customers now, at a few minutes past one o’clock. The booths were all empty and only four people, three men and a woman, occupied the cracked leatherette stools at the bar. The men, all middle-aged and dressed in work clothes, were drinking beer; the woman, a blowsy blonde whose age could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, was sipping on something that, judging from the shape of the glass and the pale color of its contents, was either a gin or vodka martini. She gave me a blearily hopeful look as I slid onto a stool as far from her and the men as I could get, but when I didn’t return her smile she wiped it off and put her attention back on her drink.
The man behind the plank looked to be in his mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders, lantern jaw, a tonsure of light-colored hair around the back of his skull and a lone patch in front like a tiny island in a dry lake bed. He looked me over long enough to determine I was a stranger, but he seemed welcoming enough when he said, “Afternoon. What’ll it be?”
“Anchor Steam, draft if you have it. And some conversation.”
“The beer I got.”
He moved down the bar to fill a glass. When he brought it back and set it down, I said in a lowered voice, “Are you Joe Buckner?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“I’d like to talk to you about Ray Fentress.”
That put him on his guard. “Why?” he said again.
“You know what happened to him?”
“Yeah, I heard. Who’re you?”
I said, “The man who found him and Floyd Mears,” and added my name and a reminder of my profession.
“I don’t believe it,” Buckner said.
“You don’t believe what? That I’m who I say I am?”
He leaned forward. “No, that Ray shot it out with some backwoods marijuana dealer. That’s bullshit, plain and simple.”
“Not according to the evidence.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. But the Ray I knew was no killer. And no damn pothead. He had bad asthma, he couldn’t stand smoke.”
“So his wife told me.”
“Doreen? How do you know her?”
“She doesn’t believe the evidence, either—she thinks he had some other reason for going to see Mears. She came to my office yesterday, begged me to try to prove her right. She told me you were a good friend of her husband’s; that’s why I’m here.”
“Good enough not to blow him off like most of his other so-called friends when he got sent to prison. The only one besides me who’d have anything to do with him when he came home was Pete Retzyck. Doreen give you his name, too?”
“Yes. You know Retzyck, I take it.”
“Sure I know him. He’s a regular here like Ray was. Two of them used to go hunting together.”
“Do you happen to know if he works Saturdays?”
“I don’t think so. But I can tell you where he lives. He—”
The blowsy blonde rattled her glass on the bar and called out in a wheedling tone, “Hey, Joe, I’m dry here, Joe.”
Buckner said to me, “Just a minute,” and went down to the blonde. “No more, Angie, I told you that before. You’re over the tab limit.”
“One more, huh? Just one?”
“No.”
“C’mon, sweetie, be nice. Just a little one?”
“Go home, Angie.”
“I’m good for it, you know that; I always pay my tab.”
“Yeah, sure you do. A few bucks a month, like interest on a credit card.”
She looked my way, looked at the beer drinkers. “Would one of you gentlemen be so kind as to buy a lady one little drink?”
None of us answered her. I knew her type well enough—alone, lonely, desperate for companionship, and looking for solace in the bottom of an empty glass when it wasn’t forthcoming—and I felt a little sorry for her. But not enough to act as an enabler for her alcoholism.
Buckner said, “You going to walk out under your own power, or you want me to carry you?”
“Well, all right, you don’t have to get tough about it.” She lifted herself off the stool with the aid of the beveled edge of the bar. “I’m never coming back here again. Pay my tab with a check. You’ll never see me again.”
“Promises, promises,” one of the beer drinkers said. For some reason the other two thought this was funny. The blonde glared at them, straightened her skirt, and went out with a slow, walk-a-straight-line kind of dignity.
Buckner came back to me. “Drunks,” he said. Then he said, “I’ll tell you something about Doreen. Woman’s a saint. Ray, well, he was no world-beater, but she stood by him through the rough patches, waited for him while he was in Mule Creek. Visited him whenever she could; I drove her up there a couple of times myself. Loyal, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you do a good job for her, man; don’t try to take advantage.”
“I won’t. You don’t have to worry about that.”
He nodded his head, then flicked it sideways. “That’s another thing I can’t figure,” he said. “Ray doing what he did that got him put in prison. Driving drunk, resisting arrest, assaulting a cop. Just not like him at all.”
“No?”
“Hell, no. He wasn’t a heavy boozer, didn’t usually drink more than a few beers. I only seen him drunk a couple of times in the ten years I knew him. Not aggressive, neither. No fights, no trouble. Easygoing.”
“Why was he drinking heavily that night?”
“He never told nobody. But he wasn’t his old self for a month or so before it happened, all wound up about something and hitting the sauce kind of hard—I figure it must’ve been money worries. You know, bills piling up and all that.”
“One of those rough patches you mentioned.”
“Yeah. Him and Doreen, they were doing all right until she had some female problems a few years ago that cost a bundle. They didn’t have no health insurance.”
Like too many others in this best of all countries. “How often did you see Ray after he got out?”
Buckner hesitated before he said, “Twice. We had a meal together a couple of days after.”
“Did he say anything at all about the Russian River?”
“No.”
“Ask you for a loan?”
“A loan? No. Why should he?”
“He told his wife he was going to.”
“Yeah? That doesn’t make sense. I don’t have an extra pot to piss in and he knew it. What would he want a loan for?”
“To help finance a move to Arizona or New Mexico. You knew about that?”
“Sure, Ray told me. He was stoked about it, making a new start somewhere that was better for his asthma, buying an orchard farm. That was always his big dream.”
“Buying a farm? How would he pay for it?”
“Money Doreen saved while he was away. She worked two jobs after he went to jail. Worked like a dog.”
I didn’t doubt that. But her two jobs were department store clerk and part-time housecleaner, neither of which paid well enough to cover monthly bills and leave enough left over to build the kind of stake it takes for a property purchase. The impression I’d had from her was that the amount of her savings was modest at best. And their chances of getting a bank loan, with his record, were slim and none. Ray Fentress might just have been blowing smoke. Either that, or he expected to make a substantial score on his own. By robbing a small-time pot dealer at gunpoint?
While I was ruminating, one of the beer drinkers called for a refill. Buckner went to accommodate him, and when he returned he said, “Listen, I probably shouldn’t tell you thi
s, but I guess you oughta know as long as you don’t say anything to Doreen about it. She’s had enough grief as it is.”
“That bad, whatever it is?”
“No. It’s just … ah, hell, I don’t know if it means anything or not. Just keep it to yourself, all right?”
“If I can. I’m obligated to inform a client of anything directly related to my investigation.”
“I don’t see how this could be related.”
“Then it’ll just be between you and me.”
“Okay, then. Second time I saw Ray was in here two days before he was killed, with a woman I never seen before.”
“You know who she was?”
“Mary something, that’s all. Thing was, Ray didn’t expect me to be here.”
“Oh?”
“Late afternoon and I was working nights that week. I come in early, like I do sometimes, and the two of them was in one of the booths over there, drinking beer with their heads together. Ray jumped a little when he saw me, had this kind of guilty look on his face. You know, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”
“You think she might’ve been a working girl?”
“I didn’t get that hit off her,” Buckner said. “Hell, this is the last place he’d have met up with her if she was. Besides, Ray, he wasn’t the type to traffic with whores.”
“How about other kinds of women?”
“You mean was he a chaser?” Buckner barked a scornful laugh. “Not Ray, uh-uh. As faithful to Doreen as she was to him, swear it on a Bible.”
Faithful before he got sent up, okay, but prison changes a man. In some cases gives him appetites he didn’t have before. But I kept the thought to myself. “What do you suppose their relationship was?”
“Beats me. I asked him, ‘Who’s your friend?’ and he said, ‘Mary,’ kind of blurted it out. She didn’t say anything, just glared at him as if she didn’t like him saying even half her name. They left right after that. I asked Larry, the day barman, how long they’d been there and he told me about fifteen minutes. They didn’t come in together—her first, then Ray.”
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