by Mark Coggins
I was tempted, but I didn’t want him to clam up on me. “What kind of development?” I asked.
“I got the lab report back from the murder scene. They dusted for fingerprints like they always do. Hers are all over the apartment, of course. Teller’s are there in several places: the refrigerator door, the beer bottle, the photograph you said he was holding when you walked in.”
“But not enough places for him to have been over there before. Not enough places for him to have been having an affair with her.”
“Yeah, probably,” said Stockwell. “But that’s not where I’m going with this. If they were having an affair, they could have been meeting in hotels. Who’d want to have sex in that dump? No, the point is they found another print. A print that we can’t identify.”
“You’re sure it’s not one of mine?”
Stockwell snorted. “No, it’s not yours. Of course we did find yours all over the fucking place, Riordan. If we were going by volume, you’d be the one having the affair with her.”
I knew better than to respond to that. “All right, then. So what’s the big deal on the mystery print? Could have been left by a friend. Could have been left by the landlady-she seems like the sort to snoop.”
“The big deal is it was found on the framed photograph that Teller was holding. The photograph-you may not have noticed-that was back on the shelf by the time we got to the apartment. And it ain’t the landlady’s.”
“I see what you’re driving at. You think someone else was in the apartment that night and picked up the photograph and put it back on the shelf. I suppose that could be. It could also be Terri McCulloch put it back that night, and the print is from a friend who had handled it before.”
Stockwell pounded on the steering wheel. “Here I am providing evidence to shore up your cockamamie theory of a different killer- one, by the way, that I still don’t buy-and here you are arguing the other way. The print was found on the surface of the photograph, under the place where the glass broke off. And it seems to be fresh.”
“Oh.”
“Believe me, I know that doesn’t prove anything conclusively. We don’t know how long McCulloch had the photograph, who developed it, who framed it, etc. But what I need confirmed is that you really did see Teller drop the photograph and that neither of you picked it up and put it back on the shelf.”
“He dropped it all right. And neither of us was exactly in a good housekeeping frame of mind. It stayed on the floor for as long as I stayed conscious.”
Stockwell took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay then,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You got any other niggling contradictions you want to talk over?”
Stockwell gave me a searching look. “Chuck Hastrup’s do-it-yourself brain surgery in there isn’t a contradiction?”
“Sure. I said as much in my apartment, didn’t I? You think it’s tied in with Teller’s murder?”
“Well, I’m sure as hell going to check his prints against the one on the photograph. Maybe he was the one who came up from behind you at McCulloch’s place. Maybe he whacked Teller that night and got to feeling guilty about it later.”
I mulled that one over. It was an idea that had crossed my mind. “I like him because Terri McCulloch has used him for all her other heavy lifting,” I said. “But I can’t see him offing himself over guilt. And that photograph. He could-”
Stockwell cut me off. “Don’t say it. He could have put his print on there before. Give your skepticism a rest, will you Riordan? I’m not building the whole case around the photo.”
I let him cool off. “Anything else?” I asked after a decent interval.
He started to say something, then bit back the words. “No, that’s it.” He put the key in the ignition switch and started the motor. “Let’s blow,” he said abruptly.
There was clearly more that was bothering Stockwell, but I didn’t have much luck wheedling it out of him on the drive home. I regretted my remarks about the photograph because it made him reluctant to discuss anything else I might judge far-fetched. He did tell me that no one had brought in Todd Nagel for questioning, and that the Bay Area-and now state and nation- wide hunt for Terri McCulloch had turned up exactly zilch.
Stockwell dropped me off in front of my building at about 1:30. I did my ritual with the Samuel’s Jewelers street clock and then rode the elevator up to my office.
HONEST DALE’S USED CARS
BONACKER WAS TALKING ON THE PHONE WHEN I walked in. He was dressed casually in a faded polo shirt with the logo of his insurance company over the pocket, and a pair of khaki pants. He gave me an energetic military salute as I walked by, and I heard him say into the phone, “So, the hippie takes off his mask, and says, ‘Surprise, I’m the hippie.’ Then the nun takes off her mask and says, ‘Surprise, I’m the bus driver!’” He guffawed. “I’m the bus driver,” he repeated gleefully. “Get it?”
I walked past Gretchen’s desk, which was unoccupied, and into my office. On my desk was a bud vase with a single pink rose. Beneath the vase was a handwritten note from Gretchen. It read:
Auggie,
If you can’t have rosy cheeks, then how about a plain old-fashioned rose? And I don’t want to hear any complaints about women giving men flowers. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to look a gift bud in the pistil?!
I told Ben I was taking the rest of the day off (time for a little retail therapy), but I did check into the things you requested. Here’s the scoop:
You’re on for the gig at Undici this evening. Tony wants everyone there by 6:30. You’re supposed to play four sets, and he expects you’ll be out of there by one or so.
Todd Nagel’s landlord has no forwarding address for him. He says Nagel was a good tenant and always paid his rent on time. However, Nagel only gave him a few days notice before he moved out.
I checked through the phone numbers on the bill you gave me. Most of them were pretty innocuous (if you think $200 worth of 1-900 phone sex numbers is innocuous), but it does appear that Mr. Nagel called Terri McCulloch’s home number several times. He also made a lot of calls to a number with a Woodside prefix-not Bishop’s-that I can’t track down. It never picks up when I call, and it’s not shown in any of the reverse directories we have. Maybe you have some other tricks up your sleeve?
Take care of yourself!
xoxoxoxo,
Gretchen
It occurred to me-not for the first time-that Gretchen was better than I deserved. I picked up Nagel’s phone bill from the desk where Gretchen had left it and glanced at the number she had highlighted. It had an 851 prefix like Bishop’s, but apart from that, there was nothing familiar about it. I folded up the bill and put it in my breast pocket with the intention of getting Stockwell to use his official connections on it. Then I pulled out the yellow pages to refresh my memory on the address that went with the phone number and place of business I’d seen earlier today on a business card. Chuck Hastrup’s friend Dale was running a nice half-page ad to remind me that Pace Auto Sales and Brokerage was located on Market Street, just east of Laguna. I jotted down the street number and went out of the office.
Bonacker was still talking on the phone as I walked by. There was a concerned look on his face. He said, “Hey, come on, I’m Catholic myself. I went to Saint Ignatius and was taught by the sisters and everything. There’s no reason to cancel your insurance policy over a little joke. As a matter of fact, my good friend Father Murphy told it to me in the first-Hello? Hello?”
I jumped on the number eight bus just outside the building and rode it straight down Market to Laguna. Dale Pace’s used car emporium was on a narrow lot that ran under an elevated portion of Highway 101. There was a Quonset hut at one end for washing and prepping the cars, and a trailer on a raised platform at the back that housed the office. A tattered line of plastic flags was strung from the trailer to the hut-like colored pennants on a sinking yacht. There were about three dozen cars for sale, all of them five or more years old, and n
one of them costing much over six thousand dollars. It looked like the kind of place you bought your car if you were on your way up in the world-or were well on your way down. The oppressive rumble of freeway traffic fell on me like a weighted net as I came onto the property.
To my extreme right was a young couple eyeing a middle-aged Toyota with skepticism. In front of them stood a glib-looking man in a checked sports coat and a black turtleneck. He had bushy black hair, a black mustache, and he smiled a lot and made tight gestures with fingers extended as if he was coiling yarn. I left them to their rituals and made a beeline for the door of the trailer. Inside, there was a lot of dust, linoleum, low-wattage lighting, and a couple of desks. Behind one of these sat Dale Pace. He glanced up as I walked in and immediately jerked open a drawer and began groping for something at the back. I pulled open my jacket with my left hand and wrapped my right around the exposed butt of the Glock automatic. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I said. “But if you insist on swapping lead, you’re going to be doing a lot more catching than throwing.”
He looked at me impassively and slumped back in his chair, his hands folded on his lap. “If you think I’m going to hold still for more of that crazy shit you pulled on Chuck, best you take your piece all the way out and see can you find the trigger.”
I let my arms go back to my side and walked deliberately over to Pace’s desk. There were several pictures of him in a Steelers uniform on the wall behind, and a game ball resting on a stand on the bookshelf to one side. Pace was in shirt sleeves and a tie, and from the junk on the top of the desk, appeared to have been working on the company books. I sat down in a chair by the desk. “I came to talk,” I said. “That’s all.”
“That ain’t necessarily better,” he said. “Because I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to say to you. Unless you are in the market for a car, that is.”
“No. No cars. I took the bus today. Viva public transportation and all that. Have the cops been here yet?”
Pace took his time with that one. “So you filed a complaint, did you? Seems to me what you did to Chuck pretty much evened things out. Or did you figure you still owed me?”
“I owe you both plenty more as far as I’m concerned. But Chuck has put himself in a position where he is no longer eligible to receive payment. He committed suicide this morning. Blew his brains out at a shooting range in South San Francisco.”
Pace brought a finger up to his mouth and bit off a hangnail. He turned his head and spat out the harvest.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said. “I’m not used to coping with a display of such unvarnished grief.”
“I’d be an idiot to take your word for it,” said Pace. “But if it is true, then it don’t surprise me in the least. He was heading for a fall-no question.”
“Why?”
“’Cause he got himself wrapped up with that bitch. She manipulated him all to hell. Had him run interference for her. Had him drop the hammer on you and all sorts of other shit he never would have got involved with on his own. He thought it was true love. She thought it was a convenient way to scrape the mud off her shoes.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he killed himself. Not really. Did McCulloch dump him?”
Pace shook his head. “No. I mean, I don’t know, man. Hard to dump someone exactly when you’re hiding out from the cops. He must’ve got fed up with it is all. He must have finally seen for himself what she was doing to him. Took a look in the mirror one day and didn’t like the thing staring back at him.”
“I don’t believe it. There’s gotta be something else: drugs, financial problems, culpability for a big crime. Something.”
Pace cracked the knuckles on his huge hands absently. “Hey, it don’t make a never-no-mind to me what you think. I’m not even sure I believe he’s dead. I’m just telling you it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Did he shoot Roland Teller? Could that be what was eating him?”
“No, he did not shoot Teller. I think you got a wrong idea about Chuck Hastrup. He isn’t-or wasn’t-the killer type. He could be mean, sure. You can’t play defensive lineman in the NFL and not get a little mean. But on his own, he was basically a pretty good joe. He used to do volunteer work for the Big Brothers, donate blood, all sorts of do-gooder crap. Then he met her. She warped him something terrible-but not enough to kill.”
“So what’s your excuse?”
Pace smiled broadly. “Oh, I’m naturally bad. No one’s fault but my own. If I’d been working you over that night, you would still be in the hospital counting doctors’ fingers, as in, ‘How many am I holding up now, Mr. Riordan?’ But when I do shit, I do it for me. I don’t do it because some bitch squeezes my dick and pats me on the head.”
“You helped Hastrup that night. That wasn’t for you.”
“That’s different. I used to play ball with him. And you’d already knocked him around pretty good earlier in the day. I didn’t want him getting busted up any more.”
I should have let it go, but I said, “For someone who was so all fired eager to protect him, you sure don’t seem very upset now to hear that he’s dead.”
Pace went rigid in his chair. He seemed to grow larger. “I already told you: I don’t necessarily believe word one that you say. And if you expect me to start bawling or some shit like that after you come waltzing in with a loaded gun, you got another thing coming. I’d written Chuck off anyway. That McCulloch bitch took away his manhood.”
That was almost exactly what Terri McCulloch said Bishop had credited her with. “If that’s the case,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me where she is?”
“And why don’t you fly around the room with jet farts out of your ass?” Pace laughed. “I can’t is why. Chuck never told me, and I never asked. Truth be known, I don’t think McCulloch even told him where she was.”
“But she did call him after the murder?”
“So he said. Look, it’s not like I’ve been living with the guy. He called me once after you did your thing on him with the nail gun to give me the heads up. He said he talked to the bitch and he started to lay on the sob stuff about what a shitty deal she got, but I told him to can it. I didn’t want to listen to that load of boohoo.”
I picked up a rubber band from Pace’s desk and began twanging it like a bass string. I let my eyes wander up to the pictures of him in uniform. “I remember you now from the Steelers,” I said. “You were a heck of a linebacker.”
Pace grunted noncommittally, but I could tell he was pleased. “Well, them days are long gone. I wished I had a tenth of the money I made back then. I wouldn’t be sitting in a trailer on a used-car lot talking to you. But the coke and the women bled me white-so to speak. That’s why I don’t have much patience for Chuck. He’s too old to be making those kind of mistakes with his life.”
Pace looked down at his lap and seemed to go away for a moment. “You giving me the bona fides on this thing with Chuck? About him killing himself.”
“It’s true. You’ll probably be having a visit from a cop named Stockwell as soon as he can line up some cooperation from the SFPD.” Then, to explain the connection: “They found your card in his wallet.”
“So you’re not filing charges on the shit that went down outside In the Key of G?”
“No. There’d be a list with about twenty guys ahead of you if I started filing charges on everyone I tangled with. Stockwell’s an EPA cop, anyway. It wouldn’t do any good to take it to him.”
“Well, I’m not sorry we racked you up. That was just the way it was. But I am sorry I smashed your bass. I snuck into the club while we were waiting and I heard you play. You weren’t half bad-for a white boy.”
“Thanks. Crawford is the one with the juice in that band, though. While we’re talking about the club, mind if I ask you one more question? Then I’ll get out of your hair.”
Pace rubbed his shaved head. “Lucky I’m not a sensitive person or I mighta taken that for a crack. Go ahead, ask your question.”
> “There was a girl at the club that night named Jodie. She works for Edwin Bishop like Terri McCulloch used to. Do you know where she stands in all this? Did she have anything to do with you guys finding me at In the Key of G?”
“You must be the kind of guy that asks for double bags at the grocery store, Riordan. Chuck told me you wanted to know about her. All I can tell you is that she’s a friend of Terri’s, and Chuck said that she and Terri weren’t getting on so well since Terri left Bishop. But she didn’t have nothin’ to do with us being at the club. We tailed you there from your apartment.” I started to say something and Pace raised his hand. “And don’t ask me about that other dude you mentioned to Chuck because I don’t know nothing about him neither.”
“Nagel’s his name. But that’s not what I was going to ask. I was going to ask why Terri and Jodie weren’t getting on.”
“Who knows, man? Think I pay attention to crap like that? It was just some shit Chuck said while we was freezing our asses off in the van waiting for you to show. It wouldn’t surprise me that they weren’t so hot for each other now. One of ’em lost her job and the other one kept it. Envy, that’s what that’s called.”
I stood up. “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the information.”
Pace got up too and put out his hand. I shook it. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m happy to help a guy that lets me know I’ll be catching lead as he comes through the door.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly think you were reaching for a number two pencil.”
“You got that right, Riordan. Watch your back now.”
I went out the trailer door. The salesman and the couple I’d seen earlier were just coming up the steps. I left the door open and the salesman slipped through behind me. “Dale, I’ve got some bad news,” he said in a loud voice from inside. “The Hendersons here have just about stolen a car from us.”