Why?
Over what, really?
My fault. I could have prevented it; instead I'd provoked it by shoving him. Why had I shoved him Hke that?
Willing victim . . . surrogate for Grady Haas?
Maybe you ought to go see a head doctor, buddy boy.
Ah Jesus, I thought.
Then I thought: It'll be all right, it's just a thing that happened. He already feels as bad about it as I do. A few days, at most a week, and it'll blow over. No permanent damage to our friendship; I'll see to that. Someday we'll laugh about it, same as we laugh about the time at the police academy.
I didn't believe it.
Chapter 13
I drove around for a while, trying to work myself out of depression and a dull self-hatred. The aimless vehicular wandering didn't do much good; I kept right on not liking myself.
When night began to fold down I went home. I opened the refrigerator first thing, but I was on automatic pilot: I had no appetite nor even any desire for a beer. In the bathroom I washed my face with cold water and took another look at my hand. It still hurt, or maybe I was just imagining that it hurt. Guilt creates all sorts of little phantoms.
I sat on the bed, looked at the phone. I wanted to call Eberhardt, but even if he answered—and chances were he wouldn't—he would just hang up when he heard my voice. And what would I say to him anyway? "I'm sorry" wouldn't cut it, and I couldn't think of anything else worthwhile.
I felt, too, that I ought to call Bobbie Jean, tell her what had taken place. Or Kerry; Kerry would understand. But I just sat there. Truth was, I did not want to talk about what had happened between Eberhardt and me. Not tonight, not until the edge of shame dulled away and I quit feeling bad about myself.
I'd been staring at the phone for a good three minutes before it registered that the message light on the answering machine was on. Old Eagle Eye. I ran the tape back. One message, from Harvey, the bell captain at the Broadmoor Hotel. He had some things to tell me, he said; I could reach him at home, here's the number, call anytime before eleven.
So I called him, and he said, "I didn't find out much, but maybe there's something that'll help."
"I appreciate it in any case."
"Well, first, I talked to Sid, the night captain. He don't know much about Jack King, either, but he did see him with a woman one night a couple of weeks ago. At the hotel. They were together in the lobby."
"Could he describe the woman?"
"Young, slim, dark. Long wavy black hair. About thirty. That your daughter?"
"No," I said, "but I know her. Was there anything unusual about the meeting, did Sid say?"
"No. Just said he saw them together in the lobby."
"Anything else?"
"One night last week," Harvey said, "Mr. King came down and asked Sid to get him a cab. Sid heard him tell the driver he wanted to go to North Beach."
"Any particular place in North Beach?"
"Panotti's. I think it's a restaurant."
"It is. On upper Grant."
"You been there, then?"
"A couple of times. Not recently."
"Well, that's all Sid knows," Harvey said. "I checked Mr. King's registration card and bill, like I said I would, but he didn't give a home address or telephone number. No forwarding address either."
"He put down a home city?"
"New York. That's all."
"What about the company he works for?"
"No company name. He didn't take the corporate rate."
"And he didn't pay with a credit card, I'll bet."
"Afraid not. Traveler's checks."
"Any notation as to which bank issued them?"
"I couldn't find any," Harvey said.
Panotti's, in North Beach.
All right. At least it was a place to go tonight, something to occupy my time and my mind. The walls here were already starting to close in.
* * * * *
North Beach is not what it used to be. Not by a long shot. Like so many things that were once good, worth preserving intact, it has been caught up in the web of mindless change and its vital juices sucked out of it by the spiders of greed and exploitation.
For three-quarters of a century North Beach had been a rock-ribbed Little Italy, built on the slopes of Telegraph Hill by Genovese and Sicilian fishermen in the 1880s. Its decline began in the 1950s—Italian families moving to the suburbs, the expansion of Chinatown and the gobbling up of North Beach real estate by wealthy Chinese, the influx of beatniks and hippies and motorcycle toughs and drug dealers—and as far as I'm concerned the decline is still going on. There has been a small, new wave of immigrants from Italy in recent years, but they are mostly young and upscale; their interests lie more in realizing the American Dream than in preserving what's left of their countrymen's San Francisco heritage. The old North Beach is doomed. Nothing can save it because nothing can stop the accelerated rate of change, the unquenchable lust of modern society for the new, the easy, the now. Sic transit. Requiescat in pace. Hey, the past is dead and who the hell cares anyway, in the long run?
Parking in the Beach is the worst in the city. On weekends and evenings you can drive around its hilly streets for hours without finding a legal space. Upper Grant, where Panotti's was located, is narrow, traffic-clogged at night, and a parking-space nightmare; I didn't even bother with it. The fringes are where you're more apt to get lucky, and where I finally claimed a semilegal chunk of curb overlapping a comer on Filbert and Mason, eight blocks away. And it took me half an hour of looking to find that.
Panotti's was a narrow storefront near Green, squeezed between an Italian hardware store and the Sip Hing Herb Company. It specialized in Calabrian-Lucanian cooking: baked maccheroni with tomatoes, crocchette di came arrostite, spaghetti with squid ink, anchovy dishes such as tortiera di alici, and rich, fig-based desserts. Very good, all of it, but on the expensive side. The place was packed on Friday and Saturday nights; on weeknights, especially after nine o'clock, you could get a table without waiting. I could have had one this night, if I'd been there to eat dinner and if my appetite had come back. As it was, the fine spicy aromas from the kitchen made me faintly queasy.
Less than half of the twenty tables were occupied, and there was nobody at the short bar along the left-hand wall as you came in. I went to the bar first. The guy behind it was middle-aged, balding, and solemn; eating and drinking to the Italian is a serious business. I ordered a beer that I didn't want and asked him in Italian how he was this fine evening, to establish the fact that we were compaesani. One 'paesano will tell another what he won't tell anybody else.
But he didn't have anything to tell me. He listened to my heir-hunter pitch, and my description of Jack King, and then shook his head and spread his hands and said he didn't remember anybody who looked like that. Then, because we were compaesani, he suggested I go talk to Angelo, the head waiter. Angelo had a good memory for faces, he said.
I waited a couple of minutes for Angelo to come back from the kitchen. He was sixtyish, slender, and very elegant in a black tux and a bow tie. Amenities first, then the pitch and description of King. Angelo frowned, scratched his chin, nibbled at a couple of hairs on his neat little mustache—a ritual, I thought, designed to help with the memory-cudgeling process.
"Oh, sure," he said at length. "I remember him. Last week he come in, Monday . . . no, Tuesday night. For the special that night the chef makes coniglio alia cacciatore—you know, the rabbit in wine vinegar—and that's what he have. But his name, it's not King. Jack, could be, but not King."
"How do you know that?"
"I hear his name at the table."
"What name?"
"Blackwell. Sure, Mr. Blackwell."
"You're positive that's what it was?"
"I hear it two, maybe three times," Angelo said. "Big dark hole in the ground, that's how I remember."
"He didn't eat alone then. He was with somebody."
"Sure. He's eat with good customer, comes in all
the time."
"You know this customer?"
"Sure. He's compaesano too. But Genovese, I think."
"His name, Angelo?"
"Savarese," Angelo said. "Mr. Vernon Savarese."
* * * * *
So now I had a connection, or part of a connection. But just what was it I had?
More questions, a whole new set of them.
Savarese and Blackwell a.k.a. Jack King a.k.a. David Jones—and Grady Haas. It seemed pretty likely now that Grady had met Blackwell at or near Savarese Importing on April Fools' Day; any other explanation, in light of what I'd just learned from Angelo, was stretching coincidence a little too far. Did Savarese know about the meeting, know that Grady and Blackwell had become lovers? If he knew, why had he lied to me about it? What was his relationship with Black-well? And whatever the relationship, did it have anything to do with why Blackwell was on the hunt for Little Miss Lonesome?
Angelo had no more answers for me. No, he hadn't listened to what Mr. Savarese and Mr. Blackwell were talking about; did I think he was a spionaggio, an eavesdropper? No, it was just the two of them having dinner, nobody else. No, they didn't act like friends; if they were friends, Mr. Savarese wouldn't have called him Mr. Blackwell, hah? Sure—business associates, that's how they seemed. No, he hadn't seen Mr. Blackwell since that night. Nor Mr. Savarese. No, he didn't know where Mr. Savarese lived. Somewhere in the city, probably, on account of Mr. Savarese was a good customer, came in once or twice a month, and who's going to drive in from out of town that often, even for fine Calabrian food like you always got at Panotti's?
Angelo's patience was wearing thin by then; I was keeping him from work he loved. I let him get on with it and went to the restroom area, where there was a public telephone and a city directory. But that didn't buy me anything. There was a listing for Savarese Importing but none for Vernon or V. Savarese.
So I would have to put off another talk with him until tomorrow morning, down at his scabrous old warehouse on China Basin Street. In the morning, too, I would call up one of Eberhardt's cronies at the Hall of Justice, give him the Black-well and King and Jones names and the man's description and possible New York origin, and ask him to run a computer check through the National Crime Information Center, see if maybe they added up to a criminal record and a positive ID.
* * * * *
Only I didn't get to do either of those things as early as I'd planned. Because when I arrived at my office building on Friday morning, I found a nasty little surprise waiting for me.
Chapter 14
The front door to the building was unlocked. I might not have paid any attention to that, because the lights were already on in Bay City Realtors; the firm's owner, Martin Quon, was as much an early-bird workaholic as I am. But the latch had an odd, loose feel, and that caused me to look down at it— then take a closer look. That was when I saw the scratches on the plate, the edge of bent metal.
I was on one knee, still looking, when Martin Quon came out of his offices. He was a dapper guy in his thirties, calm on the surface and a dynamo underneath. He said, "I thought you'd notice it right away."
"Yeah."
"Somebody off the street looking for money, I suppose. But he must've been scared off."
"Why do you say that?"
"He didn't get into my offices. Door was still secure. Not that it would have done him any good; you'd have to be crazy to keep cash on the premises overnight in this neighborhood. But the potential damage . . . well, you know what I mean."
I got slowly to my feet. This was a borderline neighborhood, all right, with the Tenderloin and its drug and homeless problems just a few blocks away. Burglaries were common enough in this part of the city, although our building hadn't been hit yet. Still hadn't been hit: This was not your standard street-type B & E. Addicts and bums don't use picks and jimmy bars to bust through a lock, and they don't make the effort to do it in such a way that it might pass undetected.
I asked Martin, "You report this?"
"Not yet. I was only five minutes ahead of you."
"Well, don't. At least not until I check upstairs."
"Not much point in reporting it anyway," he said cynically. "If anything's missing, it's gone for good."
I didn't bother with the elevator; I climbed the fire stairs instead. On the second floor I stopped long enough to check the door to the Slim-Taper Shirt Company. Secure, no signs of disturbance. Tight-drawn, I went on up to the third floor.
The door to my office was locked but that didn't mean it hadn't been breached; the lock on it was the push-button snap kind—a hot prowler's dream. The landlord was a cheap bastard: I'd asked him twice to put in a deadbolt and both times he said he'd think about it and that was the end of that. I could have had one installed at my own expense, but I hadn't gotten around to it. Low priority, or so I'd figured. What was here for anybody to steal except Eberhardt's computer?
I used my key. At first glance everything looked to be as I'd left it yesterday. But there was a wrongness here, a residual aura of violation that I would have felt even if I hadn't been primed by the damaged lock downstairs. I shut the door, made a quick tour of the office and then a more careful one. Nothing obvious missing—I was sure of that. Some papers had been shuffled around on my desk, and the silver-framed photograph of Kerry that I keep there had been moved. The thought of him handling the frame, holding it up and looking at her in the light of a flash beam, drew me even tighter inside.
He'd been in the desk drawers, too, mine and Eberhardt's both. And in my lockbox—the catch had been forced—but he hadn't taken any of the papers or petty cash. And in the file cabinets; the drawer marked G-K had been pawed through. Getting a little careless by that time, goddamn him, because he hadn't found what he'd come looking for. I hadn't had time to make up a file on the Grady Haas investigation, nor had I done a written report for Arlo Haas; and I had deposited his retainer check yesterday. When he'd called on Monday I had written his address and phone number in my pocket notebook. And he hadn't called since, while I was out, and left a message on the machine; I ran the tape just to make sure.
Oh, Blackwell had been thwarted, all right—but he wouldn't stay that way for long. What would his next move be? Would he come after me in person? Not openly or in the daylight hours, he wouldn't—not if I was reading him correctly. It seemed important to him to find Grady on the sly, to keep himself from being seen by potential witnesses. The way he'd handled Todd Bellin proved that; so did his break-in here. And he didn't know that I already had a description of him. Figure him for a police record; he might even be wanted somewhere. That would explain all the names he used too.
I sat at my desk. The anger in me was combustible; I slammed my fist down on the blotter. I'd let myself believe he didn't know about me, didn't know I was hunting him. Well, he knew, all right; he'd known for a couple of days now.
Savarese had told him.
Savarese and Blackwell, thick as thieves, and Grady Haas —and now me—smack in the middle.
* * * * *
It was cold along the bay, with a big wind that blew in over the ruined piers and sent litter swirling along China Basin Street. Gray sky, gray water, gray scavenger gulls filling the morning with their hungry shrieks. Tuesday's sun had given Savarese Importing's crumbling warehouse a touch of warmth and nostalgia, as with a historical relic that has fallen into disrepair; today, under the low gray ceiling, it had no charm at all. It was just a rotting hulk that stank of salt-decay and birdlime. Looking at it as I parked in front of the black iron fence, I wondered how it had survived the October quake relatively unscathed, while some of the structures nearby had suffered serious damage.
I had my anger in check now. But as I started across to the warehouse I warned myself to go slow and easy. I was more likely to open up Savarese with guile than with hard-ass threats and bluster.
Inside, the same skeleton crew was working in the same lethargic fashion. None of them even glanced at me as I climbed the crea
ky stairs to the second floor. The thin birdlike woman, Mabel, was hunched over her desk with her beak aimed downward into some kind of ledger. The other desk was empty. Mabel finally decided to acknowledge my presence, but only after I'd walked over close to her desk; and when she looked up at me it was the way a bird looks at you, sideways, because they can't see you straight on.
"Yes?"
"Mr. Savarese," I said.
"He's not here."
"I can see that. Is he in the building?"
"No."
"When do you expect him?"
"This afternoon. He's working at home this morning."
"Where would home be?"
"I can't tell you that."
"It's important, Mabel—"
"Mrs. Butler, if you don't mind."
"Sorry. It's important, Mrs. Butler."
"Be that as it may," she said. "You'll have to come back this afternoon."
"What time this afternoon?"
"After one o'clock. Is there a message?"
"No message."
She made a darting movement with her head, like a sparrow after a worm, and pointed her beak at the ledger again. I turned for the door, stopped, swung around to her again—one of those sly little afterthought maneuvers that Columbo always used to catch people off guard.
"Has Mr. Blackwell been in recently?" I asked her.
Up came up the head. "Who?"
"Mr. Blackwell."
"I don't know anyone named Blackwell."
"No? How about Jack King?"
"I don't know that name either."
"David Jones?"
". . . Are you playing some sort of game?"
"Not hardly," I said. "The man I'm interested in was here on April Fools' Day. Same day the woman from Intercoastal Insurance, Grady Haas, was here about the damaged-shipment claim."
Sparrow-eyed look: bright, shiny, blank.
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