By the time I turned northeast on Larimer my feet hurt, my armpits itched, and my T-shirt was plastered to my back.
I crossed Twentieth Street, the present shoreline in the ever-shifting ebb and flow of urban decay and redevelopment. Behind me were high-rises, good restaurants, and clever shops in carefully restored old buildings. Ahead lay depression. Gin mills, pawnshops, and cheap hotels stood side by grimy side, their windows either boarded up or covered with heavy wire mesh. Men slumped together in small groups or sat alone in doorways. Some of them watched me pass. Most watched nothing at all.
The Ace Cafe was conveniently located between a liquor store and a pawnshop, in case you wanted to hock your shoes for a meal and an after-dinner drink. Inside it was all red linoleum, brown vinyl, and greasy food.
I sat at the counter elbow to elbow with a big drunken white guy using his hair for a napkin and eating chili for breakfast, managing occasionally to get some of it in his mouth. I opted for the burned hash browns, slimy eggs, and coal-tar coffee.
There were six men and one woman in the cafe. None of them looked like the photos I’d seen of Zack Meacham. In fact, it was a thousand to one against finding him in here, since all I had to go on was a couple of matchbooks. But Meacham was hiding someplace, and if you wanted to hide out, this was the perfect neighborhood, because it was doubtful that you’d bump into anyone you knew.
I sauntered around the neighborhood for the next few hours, digesting my meal and searching faces and thanking the Great Spirit for the hundred thousandth time that I hadn’t been raised by depraved or deprived parents or born with a brain defect or predisposed toward masochism or afflicted with dumb blind rotten luck or whatever the hell it was that dumped people in this hopeless dead-end corner of life.
Lunch was a sack-wrapped bottle of port shared in a vacant lot with some of the guys—“Dutch” and “Benny” and “Jonesy” and “Red.” I was “Jake from up north.”
I spent that afternoon on the streets, that evening in the bars, and that night on a buck-and-a-half cot in a two-story, two-room hotel with about forty other lucky gents. The unlucky ones had to sleep outside in thirty-degree weather.
The next day was Saturday, but down here it could have been any day of the week. They were all the same—stay warm, get a little food, a little booze, stay alive.
All morning and afternoon I walked the streets between Twentieth and Twenty-fourth, Larimer and Champa. There were scores of down-and-outers roaming the area, but no Meacham. Maybe it was time to check in with my client. Or maybe I just wanted to have a conversation with someone who used soap. I dialed Helen Ester’s hotel room from a pay phone near the Sixteenth Street Mall.
“Have you found him?” she asked.
“Not yet. What say we talk about it over dinner.”
At eight o’clock I was scrubbed and suited and waiting in the foyer of the Augusta Restaurant in the Westin Hotel across from the Tabor Center. It was the type of place Horace and Augusta Tabor would have approved of. Baby Doe would’ve loved it.
Helen Ester was right on time. She seemed to look better each time I saw her. Maybe it was the clothes. This time she wore a shimmering pale melon-colored silk dress, which did something to my throat, or else I’d tied my tie too tight. The maître d’ led us to a table near the center of the room, and soon we had linen napkins in our laps, polite waiters at our elbows, and murmured conversations in our ears. There was crystal overhead and crystal on the table and I didn’t see one drunk eating chili. I ordered a scotch and soda for Helen and Glenlivet on the rocks for me.
“The waiter was staring at your whiskers,” she said with a smile.
“He envies us rugged types.”
“I assume your not shaving has something to do with your search for Zack Meacham.”
I filled her in on the past few days—discussions with Nolan and Lou at Meacham’s Garage, my talk with Wendy Apple, the search of Meacham’s house, the matchbook, the skids.
“It seems like a long shot, looking for him down there.”
“Right now it’s all we’ve got,” I said. “Has Meacham phoned Soames in the past few days?”
“Yes, and Charles merely laughed at him and hung up. I don’t know, perhaps he’s right after all, perhaps Meacham truly isn’t a threat.”
“I’m afraid he is,” I said. “He bought a gun a few weeks ago.”
“Oh, no.”
“Something else. It could be just a coincidence, but The Ace Cafe is only two blocks from Fontaine’s office.”
“Oh, my God, then maybe he did kill poor Lloyd.”
“Maybe. And you say ‘poor Lloyd’ as if you knew him.”
“I did.”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t we order?” she said.
I signaled our waiter and he listened to us and nodded politely and averted his eyes from my unkempt face. When he left, I asked Helen how she knew Lloyd Fontaine.
“It was twenty years ago,” she said. “Lloyd showed up just before Charles’s trial. I think he talked to everyone involved—me, Charles, the police, Charles’s daughter, and her husband. Now that I think about it, he probably questioned Zack Meacham. Lloyd didn’t seem to care about innocence or guilt or punishment, he just wanted the jewels back.”
“You haven’t seen him since then?”
“No. I’d forgotten all about him until I heard of his death.”
After our appetizer of shrimp consommé with red pepper and black mushrooms, Helen asked me if the police had any leads on Fontaine’s murderer.
“The police rarely confide in me,” I said.
“No, I suppose not. I was wondering, though, when I came to your office Thursday and it was all upside down and you said you’d been burglarized …”
“Yes?”
“Did that have something to do with Lloyd?”
“No doubt. Fontaine had left an envelope with me, and I think that’s what the guy was after.”
“An envelope?”
“It contained mostly old newspaper clippings of the Lochemont robbery, plus a journal of some sort, but it’s in code and so far I haven’t made any sense of it. And some photographs.”
“Photographs of what?”
“Ed Teague and a pal being stopped by a traffic cop.”
“Teague? From the Lochemont robbery?”
I nodded yes.
“Did you give it all to the police?”
“No.”
Dinner arrived—spit-roasted Long Island duckling with raspberry mint butter sauce for her, grilled Hawaiian swordfish with preserved oranges and a Moroccan sauce for me, and a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé.
Later, after our waiter retrieved the bottle from the ice bucket and poured the last of the wine, Helen asked me why I hadn’t given Fontaine’s envelope to the police.
“Good question,” I said. “Maybe the answer is the Lochemont jewels.”
“What do you mean?”
“It could be a treasure map. Fontaine said he knew approximately where the jewels were hidden.”
“Lloyd said that?”
I nodded yes. “He also said Charles Soames knew exactly where they were hidden.”
She put down her wineglass. “That is simply not true.”
“Is that what Soames told you?”
“Jacob, I was very close to Charles back then, and I’m close to him now, and believe me, if he knew where to find a fortune in gems, I would most certainly know about it.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“I suppose, then, that the material Lloyd gave you is worthless.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “It could still lead me to his murderer.”
When the bill came, Helen insisted on paying. I like that in a woman. I liked it even better when she invited me up to her room for an after-dinner drink.
The windows faced northwest and were filled mostly with the towering Tabor Center acr
oss the street, but I could still see beyond the buildings of lower downtown and over the railroad yards and past the strung-out lights of the suburbs all the way to the mountains, black against a clear, starry sky. Helen Ester poured Cordon Bleu into a pair of snifters and handed me one. She looked different than she had in the restaurant and I suddenly realized it was her eyes—they seemed to change color with the ambient light. Now they were more green than brown. We sat on a large divan and looked out on the night lights and she asked me how in the world I’d ever become a private eye.
“I sort of fell into it after I left the cops,” I said.
“You were a policeman?”
“For a while.”
“You don’t seem like a policeman.”
“How do they seem?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Insensitive, I suppose. What made you join?”
“Guilt.”
She laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well, maybe.”
“What did you feel guilty about?” she asked, still smiling.
“Would you believe not going to Vietnam?”
“Now you are kidding.”
“Maybe I felt guilty about not fighting over there, so I decided to fight the bad guys over here. Anyway, I didn’t have the correct genes to make it as a physician or a politician or a priest or a plumber.”
“So you picked policeman.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Then why did you quit?”
“That’s another story,” I said. “Let’s talk about you. For instance, I don’t even know where you live.”
“San Francisco,” she said, turning toward me, crossing her legs, making her silk dress whisper. “I’ve lived there off and on for years. I love the city and so did my husband.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. He died there four years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. He’d suffered through a long illness and it was … it was a blessing when he passed away.” She sipped her brandy and looked away.
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You’re not prying.”
“We can talk about something else.”
She put her snifter aside.
“We don’t have to talk,” she said, her voice soft and low.
I was close enough to her to smell her faint perfume and see the light glistening on her lips. I found myself thinking that Charles Soames was a lucky man to have a woman like this. No, that wasn’t quite it. He didn’t deserve a woman like this. And I wanted nothing more than to take her away from him, to have her right then, right there on the couch. But something held me back. Guilt? Because she was, as they used to say, spoken for. Or fear? Because of the possible commitment. Or maybe I was just heeding that simple rule laid down by an early private detective, perhaps the earliest: Don’t sleep with your clients.
I held her shoulders, gave her a brief kiss on the lips, and stood up.
“I’d better leave,” I said.
She looked surprised, then angry. Then embarrassed.
“I … I’m sorry. Perhaps inviting you up here was wrong. Perhaps I, I mean we—”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “I’ll call you in a day or two.”
That night, alone by choice, I struggled with sleep and tried to decide if I was fucking stupid or what.
The next morning, Sunday, found me at The Ace Cafe, wearing smelly clothes and choking down greasy food. I roamed the streets and low-life bars, searching faces. I slept that night on a cot under a buggy blanket and dreamed of island women and rare rum and silk sheets.
Monday morning I was back on the streets wondering just how much more cheap chow and bad booze my stomach could handle. By nine that night I was cold and tired and nearly ready to give it up. I walked into some nameless dive to get a drink.
Zack Meacham was sitting at the end of the bar.
10
MEACHAM HAD GROWN A beard, but otherwise he looked the same as his pictures—stocky body, coarse features, and one bushy eyebrow that ran nearly from temple to temple and dipped down to the bridge of his nose. He was leaning forward with his elbows on the bar and his hands wrapped around a glass of flat beer. There was an empty stool beside him. I took it.
“What’s yours?” the bartender said when he was finished blowing his nose.
“Beer.”
He slapped a foamy one down in front of me and only charged me six bits, but then I didn’t get a cocktail napkin.
Meacham nursed his beer for twenty minutes and I kept pace with him. Neither of us spoke. I listened to the rise and fall of background voices and waited for Meacham to drain his glass.
“Gimme another one,” he said.
“Me, too. I’m buying.”
He looked at me from under his bushy brow, eyes like an animal’s peering out of a cave. “I buy my own goddamn beer.”
“Just being neighborly.”
“Fuck off,” he said and moved to the other end of the bar where he could drink without being hassled by creeps like me. He had a few more and so did I, and then he climbed off his stool, zipped up his ski parka, and walked out. I followed.
Meacham walked in a semistraight line down Larimer, leaving the tall city lights farther behind us, then turned right on Twenty-third. He crossed Lawrence, then the wide intersection where Broadway angled through, then Arapahoe. Near the corner of Twenty-third and Curtis he went into a three-story sagging brick building that threatened to collapse at any minute. The neon sign hadn’t worked for a decade, but the flaky painted letters declared the place to be the Frontier Hotel. I gave Meacham a few minutes, then went in.
The night clerk looked like a vampire. He was skinny and pale with slicked-back black hair, red lips, and buck teeth. His black shirt was buttoned at the throat, no doubt to hide the fang marks from his pals.
“I’m supposed to meet my friend in his room and I forgot the number,” I said.
He stared at my jugular vein. “What’s his name?”
“Stocky guy with a beard. He just walked in.”
“You mean Cliff.”
“Yeah, Cliff.”
“Room twelve, third floor rear.”
The stairs creaked and sagged and the banister threatened to come off in my hand, but I made it to the top floor. The hallway smelled as sour as despair, as stale as death.
Light seeped out from under Meacham’s door. Through the keyhole I could see the bottom of a window, the corner of a battered dresser, and the end of a bed. Meacham crossed my view, then the bedsprings creaked and his stockinged feet moved to the end of the bed, toes pointed at the ceiling. After a few minutes he was snoring.
I was tempted to kick in the door and ask him a few pointed questions about Lloyd Fontaine, perhaps expediting his replies by breaking a finger or cracking a rib. He might even give me a hint about where to find a pile of jewels. But patience. Helen Ester deserved first try at him, and Meacham didn’t look like he was going anywhere soon.
I walked out past the night creature downstairs, took the bus home, and phoned Helen.
“I found him.”
“Where?”
I told her, then asked her how she wanted to proceed.
“I want to offer him money to leave Charles alone.”
“I’m not sure this guy will listen to money.”
“A lot of money, Jacob, and in cash.”
“It might be more effective if I just beat the hell out of him, then turn him over to the cops.”
“Let’s try it my way first, okay? I’ll meet you at your office tomorrow night—say, around eight. I’ll have the money with me and we’ll go talk to him together.”
Dumb idea. “Fine,” I said.
Tuesday morning I shaved for the first time in days, ate a steak-and-eggs breakfast, and drove to the office. There were three messages on my machine. A guy selling storm doors; another guy selling Jesus; and Abner Greenspan, at
torney-at-law, the man who four years ago had introduced me to Lloyd Fontaine.
I’d worked with Greenspan a number of times in the past—enough times so that we gave each other discount rates on services provided. Of course, his base rate was a hell of a lot higher than mine. On the other hand, I’d saved his life once, so I suppose that counted double.
Actually, it wasn’t his life I’d saved, it was his client’s. But Greenspan was egotistical enough to believe that when the husband in a big alimony suit brought a gun to the courtroom and pointed it at the plaintiff’s table, he was pointing it not at his wife, but at his wife’s attorney. In any case, I’d jumped on the guy and knocked him to the floor before any shots were fired, and Greenspan had wept with gratitude.
All that aside, I knew Greenspan wasn’t calling just to be sociable. He socialized only with people who had money, power, or political influence—in short, anyone who had something he wanted.
I phoned him, and he answered on the first ring.
“Jake, how goes it?” he said.
“Okay.”
“I heard you were the one who found Fontaine. Rough stuff.”
“Yeah. Rough.”
“I’m the executor of his will.”
“Oh?”
“You’re in it,” he said.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m in it, too. Apparently Fontaine had few friends and no relatives. Of course, a few may pop out of the woodwork before the will gets through probate, but I doubt it. So you and I get to split the meager pickings.”
“What pickings?”
“As executor, I am to liquidate all his assets, of which there are few, and pay off all his bills, of which there are fewer, and keep the rest. Except for the contents of his office. You get that—desk, files, and so on.”
“I don’t want it.”
“How do you know?”
“Abner, please. I was there, remember? The place is a dump. If he had cases pending, I don’t want them. And I don’t want his desk—I think it’s got blood on it.”
“He had a safe, too, Jake. A man from the safe company is meeting me there today to open it up.”
“Let me know what you find.”
“I need two witnesses.”
“You and the safe guy.”
Blood Stone (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 2) Page 6