Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

  “I know where he lives. But there’s a chance he might still be here in Chinatown. He didn’t come around to the parlor tonight?”

  “No. He did not.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Several days ago.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often did he come here to gamble?”

  “Once or twice a month.” Chuck’s mouth crooked sardonically. “He seldom lost. Mr. Emerson is quite a good poker player.”

  “Are you the one who introduced him to Jimmy Quon?”

  “Not directly so. Jimmy worked for me on occasion. Mr. Emerson is generous with gratuities when he wins; they struck up an acquaintanceship.”

  “When did Quon tell you Emerson had hired him? Before the shooting or afterward?”

  “Afterward. Jimmy was afflicted with a loose tongue.”

  “If you’d known about it beforehand, what would you have done?”

  A small shrug. “Would you have me say I would have attempted to prevent it?”

  “No,” I said. The anger was plain in my voice; I wanted him to hear it. “You wouldn’t have done anything. It wasn’t any of your business, was it?”

  “My business is herbs,” he said. “And games of chance. I do not concern myself with the folly of others.”

  “Very practical. You’re a sweetheart, you are.”

  “You may think of me what you wish. What you do about it is another matter.”

  “The same thing goes from my point of view,” I said. “That’s another reason why we’re having this talk. Where do I stand with you and Hui Sip, now that Mau Yee is dead?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do you fear tong vengeance?”

  “Not fear it, no. But I’d like to know what to expect. If Hui Sip considers me an enemy, then I’ll have to make it reciprocal. I’ll have to go after them—and you—the same way I’m going after Emerson.”

  Chuck smiled faintly; it did not come anywhere near his eyes. “That would be most foolish. You could not hope to succeed.”

  “Maybe not, but I’d have to try. And I could probably make things pretty uncomfortable for you before it was over. Neither one of us wants that to happen. So how do I stand?”

  “I cannot speak for Hui Sip. I can only speak as one of its elders.”

  “And?”

  “I have no particular quarrel with you. Your difficulties here were with Jimmy Quon—a personal matter. I do not concern myself with personal matters any more than I concern myself with human folly.”

  “You think the other elders will feel the same way?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You might want to talk to them about it,” I said. “Just to keep the peace.”

  “I will consider it.”

  “You do that.” I backed off from the desk. “This has been an interesting little chat. Wouldn’t you say so, Chuck?”

  “Most interesting.”

  I kept on backing until I reached the bead curtains. When I got there he said, “One final word before you leave. It is my wish that we shall never again have the pleasure of such a stimulating conversation. In view of that wish, my humble opinion is that you would be wise to avoid Chinatown in the future. Were I you, I would not even come here to eat in any of our excellent restaurants.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “You leave me alone, I leave you alone. The next time I want Chinese food, I’ll go somewhere out on the avenues.”

  “Then I wish you well in your search for Mr. Emerson. Good night, sir. And good-bye.”

  I backed through the curtains, across the shop to the entrance. Chuck and the doorman stayed where they were. When I opened the door my hand was shaking a little; I thought that it was a good thing I’d had it in my pocket the whole time, around the gun where Chuck couldn’t see it.

  Sometimes, like with the poker players upstairs, you can run a dangerous bluff and get away with it.

  Eighteen

  It was after midnight by the time I got to Burlingame, twenty-five miles south of the city, and found Camelia Drive. The street was two crooked blocks long, tucked back in a section that bordered on the even more affluent community of Hillsborough. The guy at the all-night service station on El Camino, where I stopped to ask directions, had never heard of it; I’d had to hunt up its location on a town map in his office.

  The houses along Camelia Drive were smallish but expensive-looking, set on wide woodsy lots with plenty of space between them. Number Thirty-seven was partially hidden behind a tall hedge and a couple of big shade trees; illuminated numerals on the gate post let me place it from the car as I drifted by. There were no other lights that I could see, either in the house or in the detached garage.

  I drove through a dogleg at the end of the block and parked under one of the trees that flanked the road, away from the hanging street lamps. But I did not get out right away. I was still as tense as I had been in Chinatown, but fatigue made me feel sluggish and achey; the coffee I’d bought from a vending machine at the service station didn’t seem to have done much good. I rolled the window down, lay my head against the seatback, and sat there like that for a time.

  When the chill air began to make me shiver I undipped the flashlight from under the dash, put it into the coat pocket with the .38, and stepped out and headed back to Number Thirty-seven. It was heavily overcast here but with none of the fog that had blanketed San Francisco; the shadows under the trees were as black as ink on blotting paper. The only lights I could see came from street lamps, house numerals, and a single window in a house two hundred yards away, across the street.

  I stopped at Emerson’s front gate and peered through it at the house. Ranch-style, with a porch alcove made out of brick; dark and silent. I moved over to the driveway, went up it along the bordering hedge. There was just enough room between the hedge and the garage wall for me to squeeze through into the yard. A door with a glass pane was set into the wall toward the rear; I eased down there, walking on grass now, and put my face close to the glass. Solid black. I got the flashlight out and butted the lens against the window. When I flicked it on, for just a second, the flare of light showed me an empty expanse of oily concrete floor.

  No car. No Emerson?

  Following a flagstone path, I moved over toward the house and around onto the porch. There was a control plate for an alarm system in the wall next to the door, but the little bulb above the keylock was dark; unless it was burned out, that meant the system was not turned on. I tried the doorknob, being quiet about it, but it was locked up tight.

  I went back onto the path, took the branch that led to the rear. More trees, a small flagstone terrace with some outdoor furniture on it, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool flanked by lawn on the other three sides. The same kind of tall hedges as out front separated Emerson’s property from his neighbors’ and gave it, and me, plenty of privacy.

  In the near back wall of the house were a set of sliding glass doors; I stepped on to the terrace and tried them first. Locked. Beyond was a short wing containing a door in the inside angle, with a window beside it and two more windows in the outer wall. The wing door had a bolt lock and was set solidly in its frame. But the window near it was fastened by a loose-fitting latch, so that when I eased the sash upward with my fingers, it rose maybe a quarter of an inch before binding. With it up like that, there was a hairline crack between the sash and the sill; I couldn’t see it but I could feel it with my fingertips.

  I took out my pocket knife, opened the longest of the blades, and poked it through the opening. It made faint scraping sounds when I wiggled it against the latch; I quit moving it to listen. Silence from inside the house. I did some more wiggling, making more noise now. But if Emerson was in there, and if he’d heard me, he was being damned quiet.

  It took me a couple of minutes to wedge the latch out of its slot. Only it slipped right back in again because I couldn’t hold it and slide the sash up at the same time, one-handed. I worked the latch
free a second time, then leaned my chest against the knife handle and shoved at the sash with my hand. The same thing happened with the latch. I had to do it twice more, sweating, gritting my teeth, before I managed to hold the latch long enough to get the sash moving upward.

  The thing made a grating noise when it went up, and the knife slid over the sill and clattered against something inside. I flattened against the wall with the .38 clear in my hand. Nothing happened in the house, but I stayed motionless for two or three minutes, listening hard, waiting. Still nothing, not even a creak.

  All right, I thought. Nobody home. The son of a bitch isn’t that good.

  But I did not put the gun back into my pocket. I used it and the edge of my hand to shove the sash all the way up. Climbing in was another matter; I could have hauled myself over the sill if I’d had the use of both hands, but with just one it was impossible. I went over to the lawn furniture, picked up one of the wrought-iron chairs, and brought it back to the window. When I got up on that I was able to swing my leg inside. I straddled the sill, eased my head and the left side of my body under the sash, and managed to make it the rest of the way through without hurting myself.

  Bulky shapes loomed in the darkness. I stayed where I was for half a dozen pulsebeats, listening to more silence; then I traded the gun for the flashlight and switched on the beam. An office or study. The bulky shapes were a desk, some cabinets and bookcases, three chairs, and a couch: all polished black teak bearing Chinese designs in gold leaf. The carpet was red and gold with a dragon motif. Even the pictures on the walls were Oriental, at least half of them erotic.

  I found my knife and picked it up. An open doorway led into the main part of the house; I followed the light through it. On my right, a bead-curtained arch gave access to a recreation room, the one with the sliding glass doors. Straight ahead was a hallway, and the first door off it on the left led to the master bedroom. The flash beam let me see a canopied teak bed, black-lacquered nightstands and dressers with more gold-leaf designs, a Chinese tapestry on one wall—and it also let me see that some of the dresser drawers were pulled open, spilling out articles of clothing.

  I went in there. Two or three other articles lay on the carpet; the gold-dragon bed quilt was mussed at the bottom, as if something heavy, like a suitcase, had lain there; inside a walk-in closet, a couple of suits and some shirts were pulled askew on their hangers and there were three empty hangers scattered on the floor. All of which could have meant that Emerson was the same kind of sloppy housekeeper as I was, except that the study and recreation room were neat and orderly. The other explanation, the obvious one, was that he had come back here tonight, packed in a hurry, and beat it away again.

  Opposite the bed was a doorway that led to an adjoining bathroom. When I played the light in there I saw a tan trench coat draped over the rim of the tub; one of its sleeves appeared to be damp. I moved inside for a closer look. The sleeve had been scrubbed with water and some kind of cleanser, probably not much more than an hour ago. And it had been a hurried job, because I could just make out the edges of several spotty stains that had not quite been washed out.

  Blood, I thought, he got blood on the sleeve when he killed Jimmy Quon. He’d been here tonight, all right. But where the hell was he now?

  I went back to the hallway and searched the rest of the house. All of the rooms had the same type of Oriental furniture and decor, even the kitchen, and all of them were as well kept as the study and the rec room. None contained anything that gave me a lead as to where Emerson might have gone.

  Back in the study, I drew heavy brocade drapes over the windows and then switched on the desk lamp. An appointments calendar next to the phone bore several notations in a near-illegible hand; but there was nothing under today’s date, and nothing under tomorrow’s, and none of the scrawled names meant anything to me. I pawed through papers in the desk and in a teak file cabinet. Bills, personal and business records, a checking account statement that showed a balance of three thousand dollars. No private correspondence, and nothing to link Emerson to Eberhardt or Polly Soon or Jimmy Quon.

  Once I was done in there, I had no reason to stay any longer. I shut off the lamp, climbed back out through the window, and closed it behind me. I left the lawn chair where it was, the hell with it. Camelia Drive was still deserted; I went out through the front gate and back to my car.

  I sat in the darkness again, fighting off lassitude, trying to think. Where did he go? It figured he was badly upset, panicked; the hasty packing job proved that, and so did his flight. But I could not see him going on the run. If he’d been inclined to run, he’d have done it when Eberhardt survived the shooting. And with Quon dead, and me apparently stymied, he had to believe he was more or less in the clear now. Then there was the trenchcoat. He’d washed it and left it in the bathroom, instead of getting rid of it; that had to mean he planned on returning home sooner or later.

  A short trip, then. Get out of the area for a few days, hole up somewhere until he could pull himself together. It made sense that way. Hiring somebody to kill was one thing, but doing the job yourself was a whole different ball game. It took some getting used to, it kept a person from functioning in normal patterns.

  Philip Bexley had told me Emerson made regular gambling trips to Las Vegas. Would he have hopped a plane and gone there? Maybe. But a much more likely possibility was the ranch in Mendocino County that Bexley had also told me about. Familiar surroundings on the one hand; a sense of isolation on the other. A place where he’d feel secure.

  Mendocino or Vegas or some other damned place, there was nothing I could do about it tonight, no matter how much I wanted to pursue him. I was like a zombie already; if I did not get some rest pretty soon, I was liable to wind up back in the hospital. I couldn’t do anything about Emerson from a frigging hospital bed.

  It was a constant struggle to stay alert on the drive back to San Francisco. When I finally got home I was asleep on my feet. I don’t even remember getting out of my clothes or crawling into bed.

  In the morning, rested, still a little achey, I called Mid-Pacific Electronics. The woman who answered—the secretary, Miss Addison, probably—said, “I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Emerson isn’t in,” when I asked to speak to him.

  “Will he be in later today?”

  “No, he’s gone out of town.”

  “For how long?”

  “He won’t be back until next Monday.”

  “Can you tell me where I can reach him?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “He didn’t happen to go to Las Vegas, did he?”

  “Las Vegas? No, he didn’t.”

  “Would he be up at his ranch in Mendocino?”

  “I really can’t say, sir. May I take a message?”

  “No message,” I said, and put the receiver down. And stood up and reached for my coat. Yeah, I was thinking. Mendocino.

  Nineteen

  It was raining in Mendocino County. I took Highway 101 straight up to Cloverdale, then cut over on 128 through the orchards and vineyards of Anderson Valley, through towering redwood forests to the coast; the rain started around Boonville, a thin misty drizzle. The north coast of California gets a lot of rain, even in the summer months—that, and a perpetual shroud of fog. By the time I got to the village of Mendocino, the mixture of fog and rain was so heavy you could barely see the ocean lying beyond the headland.

  The drive was a long one, better than five hours and a hundred and fifty miles, and I was pretty tired at the end of it. I had stopped twice, once in Santa Rosa for gas and once in Cloverdale for coffee and a sandwich, but the stops had not done much for me mentally or physically. My muscles were cramped, my back hurt, my shoulder hurt, I had a tension headache. And I was in a wicked frame of mind: wired up tight, with violence roiling just under the surface. I was a little afraid of myself, of what I might do when I finally came face to face with Carl Emerson. I could handle it all right if he didn’t make trouble, but if he provoked me in any way �
��.

  I quit thinking about that. If something was going to happen, let it happen. Worrying about losing control could make you do just that when you came up against it.

  The village had been built on a rugged, tree-dotted headland overlooking the mouth of the Big River and the sea beyond. It was the kind of place people called quaint, more New England than California in style and attitude— Cape Cod cottages, weathered Gothic buildings and towers, narrow streets lined with art galleries, coffee houses, shops dispensing a variety of local craftwork. A town populated by artists and artisans, most of them young, most of them dropouts from big cities like San Francisco. Mendocino was the heart of California’s art renaissance, a haven for people who wanted a quieter, rural life-style without giving up a sense of culture and sophistication.

  But the county wasn’t all a bucolic Utopia. Other kinds of dropouts had discovered it, too, back in the sixties; dope-dealing and marijuana-growing were two of its other thriving industries, and there were reputed to be training grounds for paramilitary and terrorist groups, right- and left-wing, in its more remote areas. Man builds and creates and lives in harmony with nature; man uses, tears down, turns beauty into ugliness, tranquillity into disorder. The age-old story, the biblical struggle between good and evil. A kind of Armageddon in microcosm, conducted in small daily skirmishes.

  Armageddon for me, too, I thought. That was what I was here for, wasn’t it? To finish my own personal battle with a force of evil?

  I parked near the Masonic Hall, an old frame building with a rooftop sculpture of Father Time braiding a woman’s hair, and dodged puddles and tourists with umbrellas until I found a shop that sold county topographical maps. I didn’t expect to find Seaview Ranch listed on it, but I thought that maybe there was a Seaview Road or Seaview Lane in the vicinity of the village. There wasn’t. So much for that idea.

  Outside again, I hunted up a real estate office; if there was anybody who would know where Seaview Ranch was, it was a local realtor, particularly since the place had to have been on the market before Emerson bought it six months ago. The woman I talked to was in her fifties, smiling and cheerful despite the weather. I told her I was looking to buy a home in the area and that I’d heard a place called Seaview Ranch was up for sale. She was familiar with it, all right; without hesitation she said I was too late, that property had already been sold.