by Mark Coggins
We were driven to the East Palo Alto police station where Stockwell put me through my paces for two more hours. After a lot of warnings and tough talk about losing my license they released me. The landlady, it turned out, had been driven back to the apartment house an hour earlier, but an unexpected shortage of cars prevented them from providing the same service to me. I called a cab.
The driver was a chatty little bird who insisted on giving me his views on the rather arcane subject of women’s fashion. After a great deal of study and close observation he had developed what he called “Hooper’s three laws of women’s wear.” I can’t remember what the first two were about, but the third sticks with me: all women’s earrings that dangle from the earlobe look like fish lures. There seems to be something to that.
I picked up my car and drove back to my apartment in San Francisco. It was about 3:30 in the morning when I arrived. I stripped off my clothes and collapsed into bed like a demolished building. I fell asleep instantly, but the person who leaned on my doorbell less than one half hour later did not want me to stay that way. I pried myself off the mattress, donned a bathrobe, and buzzed open the outside door. When a knock sounded on the apartment door I yanked it open, expecting to find Stockwell smirking like a hyena, having remembered just one more question he wanted to ask.
TERRI COMES CALLING
THE TIGRESS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the doorway didn’t resemble Stockwell even faintly. She was sleek and dark and radiated sex appeal the way a Franklin stove radiates heat. She just about wilted me. She wore a black bolero jacket made of ultrasuede with little puffs at the shoulders over a flame-colored silk blouse. A long string of onyx beads trimmed in gold lay in the deep valley between her breasts. Her hips were poured into black leather pants that merged at her ankles with a pair of short, black boots with pointed toes and long spike heels. She had fluffy black hair and dark eyes with lashes that didn’t quite tickle her chin when she batted them.
She also had a pearl-handled .22 automatic pointed at an uncomfortable spot between my eyes.
“Terri McCulloch,” I said, “or pushy Avon lady-which?”
“Not funny, Riordan,” she said. “Not even mildly amusing. But we’ll make allowances for the lateness of the hour.” She lowered the gun to chest level and backed me into the apartment. “Now I want to know what happened tonight.”
Standing less than a foot away, I caught the faint scent of her perfume. It was like breathing rarefied air at high altitude. “I’m sure I’d like to tell you,” I said.“But I respond better to the carrot than the stick.”
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Sure Riordan, I understand. I fuck you and then you tell me everything you know. Well, here’s a little down payment to loosen you up.” She reached her fingers round the back of my neck and pulled my head to hers. Cushioning her lips against mine, she probed my mouth with a hot tongue that darted around like an agitated tropical fish. Her mouth tasted of fire and liquor. She stepped back when she was done and looked up at me with a kittenish expression.
Then she slapped my face.
“Plenty more where that came from,” she said.
My face stung where she hit me and I felt hot and foolish. I grabbed for the gun and she danced out of reach. “That was none too bright,” she said. “Think you’d be any smarter if I opened a hole in your head for your brains to breathe?”
“If that’s the same pitch you made to Teller, you were off by a good six inches.”
Keeping the gun leveled on me, she kicked the door closed. “Shut up and sit down on the couch.”
I backed into the living room and started to sit in the middle of the couch. “Not there,” she said sharply. “Sit at the end near that monster speaker.” She laughed. “You know, the era of the vacuum tube has come and gone.”
“So has the era of the tough-talking, hard-bitten moll.”
“And the new-age bitch has taken her place.” She reached behind her and produced a set of handcuffs. She slung them onto the couch. “Look familiar? Lock one on your wrist and the other through the handle of the speaker-and make sure they snap shut.”
I did as she asked. The Altec Lansings have a metal handle bolted to either side to make them easier to carry, but they each weigh over 60 pounds. I wasn’t going anywhere fast. I said, “I guess you’re pretty handy with the restraints, Mistress Tamara.”
“Can’t have a party without them.” She settled into a high-backed chair across from the couch. She held the gun casually, but there wasn’t any doubt where the muzzle was pointing. “I wish I hadn’t let Chuck talk me out of that session in the dungeon. I could have had quite a lot of fun with you.” She looked me up and down and smirked, as if she knew all my secrets. “You could be broken, Riordan. Easier than you think. But the really surprising thing is you would like it.”
It might have been the blows to the head, or the lack of sleep, or the mesmerizing, almost predatory nature of her attraction, but I halfway believed her. And it scared me. “What are you here for?” I said, wanting to change the subject.
“Like I said before, to find out what happened.”
“Forgive me if I sound a little jaded, but it seems to me you’re the last person in the world to be asking that question and I’m the last person in the world to be answering.”
“Since I’m holding the gun, maybe you’d find it in your interest to get a little unjaded.”
“I might. I might at that. But while we’re on the topic of the gun, where did you get it?”
“It’s my gun. I got it from my apartment-this evening.”
“And having gotten it from your apartment, did you use your little gun to shoot Roland Teller-who was also in your apartment-twice in the neck?”
Terri McCulloch leaned forward in her chair and gripped the automatic in both hands. “You sure take some chances. If I had shot anybody, I’d have no compunction about ringing your sale up, too. There were two men lying on the living room floor of my apartment when I got there. You and Teller. I thought you were both dead, but you groaned when I lifted your wallet to check your name.”
“What time did you get there?”
“It was around 12:30. I can’t tell you the exact time.”
“Let me guess. If you didn’t shoot Teller, I suppose you’re also going to tell me that you weren’t having an affair with him.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then what was he doing with a key to your apartment?”
She slammed the butt of the automatic down on the arm of the chair. “I don’t know what Teller was doing with a key to my apartment,” she said savagely. “What’s more, I don’t know what he was doing bleeding on my rug with two bullets from my gun. I don’t know any of these things. Quit asking me all these mysterious questions and tell me what the fuck happened.”
I didn’t like to see her pounding the gun on things while it was pointed in my direction. “Don’t slip your trolley,” I said. “There isn’t much to tell. I was parked out front waiting for you to show when Teller drove up. He went in through the front door and up to your apartment. I came in the back way and surprised him. We were snarling at each other when somebody hit me from behind, and when I woke up Teller was dead.”
“And the cops think I did it?”
“They probably wouldn’t except for three little things: motive, means, and opportunity.”
“Why don’t you refresh my memory about the motive part. It seems to have escaped me.”
“Does this ring a bell? You stole Bishop’s chess software and peddled it to Teller, who thought he was buying legitimate goods. Teller found out he’d been cheated and came to you to get his money back. Things got out of hand and you killed Teller to keep the money. And, if one thinks the way a certain police detective named Stockwell does, we could add that you were having an affair with Teller, which explains how he had your key and would also cause Teller to be even more angry when he found he had been cheated.”
She stared at me for a
long moment. “Okay,” she said. “I see what’s going on.”
“You gonna let me in on it?”
“No.”
“This is going to sound trite, but if you really didn’t kill Teller, the best thing to do is to turn yourself in and tell your story to the police. The longer you stay out, the worse it’s going to look.”
“Thanks for the sage advice.”
I yanked on the handcuffs in frustration. “You’re standing in the boiler room of the Titanic with the water coming up to your waist. Whatever revenge you hoped to extract from Bishop by stealing his software is down the chutes at this point. At worst, you’ve helped his lawyers earn a fat fee for suing Mephisto to recover it. If you give up now and return the chess game to Bishop, I doubt he would press charges. Then assuming you’re really in the clear on the Teller killing, you could walk away and everything would be jake.”
She looked at me pityingly. “You’re forgetting that Mephisto could still try to nail me for fraud. Besides, I never said I stole the software.”
I squeezed my temples with my free hand. “Right,” I said. “Let’s just make a quick tally of the problems with that idea. First, you should have said, ‘Who’s Mephisto?’ or something similar since I never mentioned them before. Second, Teller told me he purchased the software from you. Third, why send Hastrup and his band of hard cases after me as soon as I was hired? And fourth, there’s the tired old business of what Teller was doing at your apartment with a key.”
“Whatever.”
“Sorry to be a bore. You mind telling me why you and Bishop had a falling out?”
She laughed. “Oh, Edwin failed to explain that, did he? He’d become impotent. Well, virtually impotent. It got to the point where the only way he could get off was in extremely submissive roles in S&M. He held me responsible for his condition. Said I’d emasculated him with my dominant sexuality, or some such thing. In the end he couldn’t stand to have me around the house because he associated me so closely with his problem.”
“Were you responsible for his problem?”
She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her knees together slowly, looking at me from under her lashes. I vibrated like a tuning fork. “If little boys are going to play with fire,” she said. “They may get burnt. Think you could handle the heat?”
I tried not to gulp. “I heard a different story,” I said in a strained voice. “I heard you had a little too much Special K and went into a coma.”
“A K-hole.”
“A what?”
“When you overdose on K, you go into a K-hole. It’s like you have tunnel vision. All your senses shut down except for what you can see and hear through the tunnel. But that’s bullshit. I’ve never OD’d on K.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about it.”
She stood up, still covering me with the gun. “Yeah, I know a lot of things about drugs and sex and inflicting pain. Anything else you’d like to get educated on? Ask me now because I don’t intend on seeing you again.”
There were a dozen more things I wanted to know, but I knew she wouldn’t tell me. On a whim I said, “Just one thing: what do you have tattooed above your breast?”
Her lip curled provocatively. “Oh, you know about that.” She undid the first three buttons on her blouse. She pulled the silk material aside, cupped her left breast, leaned down. She was wearing a black half-brassiere and I could see the dark brown semi-circle of her areola peaking out above it. Above that was a three-inch-long tattoo of an insect done in dark green ink.
“It’s a praying mantis,” I said, surprised.
She straightened up and stepped back, rebuttoning her blouse. “You got it. Did you know that the female praying mantis will devour her mate after sex, if the male praying mantis is dumb enough to hang around? It gives her extra nutrients to bear her children. Scientists say that by studying many generations they’ve found a trend that more and more males are staying around to get eaten. In other words, the males are being bred to sacrifice themselves to the females through natural selection.”
This time I did gulp. “If that’s your worldview, you might want to get together with a bartender I met down in North Beach.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. I just hope you’re one half as tough as you think you are, Terri.”
“Wait and see.” She stepped forward and shoved the gun right under my chin. “Hold still now,” she said, digging the chrome barrel into my throat. She leaned over and I felt her soft hair tickle my face. She flicked her tongue across my lips, drew it broadly across my face to my ear. “Here’s a little something to remember me by,” she whispered, her breath warm and moist. She bit down violently on my earlobe. I yelped and felt the blood drip down my neck immediately. I shoved her away from me, forgetting the gun.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Hope you had your shots,” she said. “Now don’t go looking for me anymore because next time I’ll just bite your head clean off. Just the way a mantis does.”
I blotted my ear with the sleeve of my robe. “You’ll have a lot more people looking for you from now on. And tell Hastrup and Nagel and that black guy to back off because I’m through playing the patsy.”
She looked at me with a queer expression. “You’re not a patsy, Riordan. You’re a patzer. Look that up in your dictionary.” She walked casually out of the room to the door. “So long, my little patzer,” she said, and slammed the door shut.
COMPLETELY, IRREVOCABLY, AND WITHOUT REMORSE
I WAS SO TIRED I DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER with the handcuffs. I just swiveled around on the couch with my right hand above my head and went to sleep. It was 11:20 by the time I woke up.
The extra sleep must have done me good because I didn’t feel nearly as bad as I had the day before. I unhooked the wires on the back of the Altec Lansing and lugged the speaker into the kitchen where I had a spare set of lock picks I kept in the drawer with road flares, duct tape, and the largest collection of paper clips this side of the Mississippi. I dispatched the cuffs in relatively short order, and got some consolation from the thought that I now had a perfectly good set of handcuffs by which to remember Terri McCulloch-instead of just a nasty ear hickey.
The message light on my recorder was blinking faster than a shorted turn signal and it wasn’t hard to figure who had called me so many times. I pressed the reset button on the recorder without listening to any of the messages and dialed Edwin Bishop’s number. Jodie answered and I said:
“This is Pacific Gas and Electric. Is your refrigerator running?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to catch it. Boy, August, are you in trouble.”
“It’s just a harmless crank call.”
“You know what I mean. I’ll go get him.”
Jodie put me on hold and I was treated to several minutes of eighteenth-century violin concerto until that clicked off and Bishop’s high-pitched voice came through. “Bishop here,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Bishop. This is Riordan. I expect you’ve heard from Lieutenant Stockwell.”
“Where have you been? I’ve called your office and home repeatedly.”
“Today’s the day I have my sea-water colonic.”
“I hope you find yourself amusing because I certainly don’t. Where have you really been?”
“Asleep. Fast asleep.”
“I see. I suppose that’s not surprising. Well, let me say right up front that you are fired. Completely, irrevocably and without remorse-fired. Lieutenant Stockwell gave me a full account of the events at Terri McCulloch’s apartment, and try as I might, I could not identify a single redeeming feature in the narrative. I told you I wanted to secure the return of my chess program without involving Terri or me with the authorities. Not only have you failed to retrieve my software, but you have managed to link Terri and myself to a murder investigation. To top it off, the initial report of this disastrous performance comes not from my paid employee, but from a representative of the police department. Y
ou are a complete incompetent, Riordan. I am sorry I ever hired you.”
“Yeah, that makes two of us. But you should take a clear-eyed view of the situation before you lay the whole piroshki at my door. The person who killed Roland Teller is the one who’s responsible for your involvement in a murder investigation, not me. At the moment, Terri McCulloch is the leading candidate for that honor, as I’m sure the police have told you.”
“That may be so, but none of it would have happened if you hadn’t bungled the search for Terri. In any case, this debate has no bearing on my earlier statement. Our association is at an end. Good-bye Mr. Riordan.”
“Hold it,” I put in quickly. “One last question. You wouldn’t happen to know what the meaning of the word patzer is, would you?”
There was a pause. “What an odd question. Is this another one of your little bon mots?”
“No. Straight goods. Just tell me what it means.”
“A patzer is an inferior or amateurish chess player. It comes from the German word patzen, which means to botch or bungle. I believe that word came up earlier in the conversation, didn’t it? Now, good-bye.”
I kept my ear to the phone, listening to the buzz of the dial tone. I thought about Hastrup and Nagel and Terri last night, and I began to get very angry. I slammed the receiver down and a chunk of the plastic broke off and clattered to the floor. I was not walking away from this, Bishop or no. It wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t about doing the right thing, and it certainly wasn’t something romantic like seeking the truth at all costs. No-it was about me not drinking myself stupid tonight in a shabby bar feeling like I was a loser.
I took a couple of deep breaths, ruffled my hair and went downstairs to get the afternoon paper.
When I returned, I made myself a cup of instant coffee and poured out a bowl of my favorite kiddies’ cereal-the kind with the bright-colored marshmallows. I scanned the paper while I ate and found Teller’s murder had been given prominent coverage in the Peninsula news section. The story was correct as far as it went, but a lot of the whys and wherefores were missing. The tenant of the apartment was not named, nor was a motive given for the crime. Teller was identified as the victim of the shooting and was described as the savvy president of a well-respected Silicon Valley software firm. I got credit for discovering the body and was nominated as a possible suspect in a quote from Stockwell. A nice five-by-seven picture of me being shoved into the police car ran beside the article.