‘It is, Cheryl. Listen, the simplest way to start it off is by being open and frank with one another. So I’ll tell you some things about me. All right?’
She did not answer, and so I went on with it before I could change my mind. I said, ‘There was this woman, and I was in love with her, the first time I was ever really in love, an old bachelor like me. I asked her to marry me three or four times, but she always said no, with regrets. She’d been divorced a couple of times, and she said she was afraid of trying again, afraid of having to go through another divorce because the first two had been pretty rough on her. But she wanted security, her own kind of security, and I know she would have married me if it hadn’t been for my job. She didn’t like that, anything about it. She said it was foolish, a losing proposition, a childish fantasy-world of cops and robbers, and she kept after me to give it up. We argued about that, and about some other things, and finally she gave me an ultimatum: the job or her, take your choice. One or the other, but not both— never both.’
I got a cigarette out and put fire on it, and I could feel Cheryl’s eyes on my face. She would be trying to determine if what I was telling her was straight goods or just a fine old polished line, and that was all right; the answer was the right one.
She said softly, ‘And you chose your job.’
‘Yeah,’ I answered, ‘I chose my job. I had to do it that way, because even though I loved her, I couldn’t quit doing the thing I’ve done all my life, the only thing I care about doing, the thing that motivates me and keeps me alive.’
‘This all happened recently, didn’t it?’
‘Almost three months ago.’
‘Have you seen her since you ... made your decision?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be any good any more, for her or for me. It’s over and it’s dead and I keep telling myself that’s the best for both of us; but I keep thinking about her and wondering why she couldn’t have understood the way it had to be for me. That’s all it would have taken, just for her to understand.’
Silence formed and built between us. I had a grittiness far down in the back of my throat, but I was not sorry I had told Cheryl about Erika; except for Eberhardt—a close friend on the San Francisco cops—and his wife, she was the only person I had talked to about it. It had been festering inside me like pus gathering in a deep sore.
Cheryl drank what was left of her gimlet, set the glass down, and then turned slightly in her chair to look into the dancing flames inside the kiln fireplace. I smoked, watching her face, the set of her small jaw, the wisp of hair that curled like something spun by Rapunzel on the shoulder of her sweater.
She said, ‘You must be a very lonely man.’
Coming from someone else, those words might have been sharply painful; but from her, they served only in filling me with a sense of warmth and relief. We were all right, I knew that suddenly. It really was going to be fine between us.
I said, ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I am.’
‘It’s a terrible thing, to be lonely.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s worse to be hurt. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I think I do.’
‘I’ve been hurt a lot of times, in a lot of ways,’ she said in a faraway kind of voice. She was still staring into the fire, and the fluctuating shadows were deep on her face, hiding her eyes. ‘I’ve been deceived and used and slapped around, always giving and never receiving. If you’ve been hurt that way, enough that way, you reach a point where you can’t take any more hurt, and you’d rather be completely and forever alone than to be hurt even the littlest bit again. Can you understand how that is?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It was Tom, my ex-husband, that did it for me. I loved him, I thought he was everything good and sweet in the world, the one really wonderful thing to happen in my life. I gave him everything I had to give or knew how to give—emotionally, physically. I gave him everything and he ...’
She stopped, abruptly, and held her hands extended, palms outward toward the fire, as if warming them, as if warding off something cold and dark manifesting itself in the canyons of her memory. For a moment I thought she would not go on, and then she began talking again, so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.
‘One night, a Saturday, I was sleeping and there were some noises, laughter and some other sounds, and I woke up. It was four a.m. Tom had gone out that night without telling me where and he hadn’t come home when I went to bed at midnight. I got out of bed and put a robe on and went to the living room, and he was there—Tom—he was there on the couch with this woman and they were naked and just ... doing it, there on the couch, very drunk, both of them, and the woman was on top, she ... she was fat and she was old and she had lipstick and rouge smeared all over her face like a clown. It was ... it was ...’
She stopped again, and shuddered, and I wanted to get up and go to her and put my arms around her. But it was not the thing to do, not in this kind of situation, not at this time.
‘I moved out that night and went to a lawyer the next morning and filed for a divorce. A friend of mine got me the house on Vicente and I stayed there, and it was very bad for a while. I came close to a breakdown and—other things; but then I got over it, with Doug’s help, he was home then, and I was all right. Six weeks afterward Tom and some woman—a different one, I think—were drinking at a place up in Sonoma County and they went off the road coming back and ran into a culvert and killed themselves, both of them. That’s why I’m a widow now, instead of just another divorcee.’
And that’s why you took your maiden name again, I thought. I said nothing, waiting for her to go on.
‘I didn’t feel anything for him then, when I found out he was dead,’ she said. ‘He was ... just nothing to me any more. I didn’t even go to his funeral.’
I asked quietly, ‘How long ago did this happen, Cheryl?’
‘Two years now. Two years last October sixth.’
‘And you’ve been living alone since then?’
‘Except when Doug comes home for the holidays, or on one of his vacation leaves,’ she said. ‘We’re very close, Doug and I. He’s all I have left.’
She continued to stare into the fire, and I let her have a few moments with the privacy of her thoughts. The confessions each of us had made as to why we were the lonely people we were had established a bond and a foundation for our relationship, and I knew that when we spoke again, it would be much easier, more natural, between us. That was the way it was. She turned from the fire, and a moment later we were asking questions of each other and there were no hesitations with any of the answers.
Cheryl told me she was a waitress-cashier at Saxon’s Coffee Shop on 19th Avenue—she made the statement almost defensively, as if I might attach some kind of stigma to her position, the old nonsense about waitresses being dim-witted pushovers—and that Tuesdays were her days off, which was why she had been free today and tonight. She told me she had been born and raised in Truckee, in the High Sierras, but that she and Doug had been orphaned in their teens and had both come to San Francisco shortly after the death of their parents. She had gone to college for a year, liberal arts because that was what all the other girls who had no idea what they wanted out of life had studied, but she had not had the money to continue with her education. For a time she had been a secretary in the Traffic Bureau at Southern Pacific, and then she had been a cocktail waitress, and then she had met this Tom and gotten married, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’
I filled her in on my own background, my youth in the Noe Valley District, on the fringe of San Francisco’s tough Mission; my military and war service in Texas and Hawaii and the South Pacific; my desire to become a cop and my enrollment in the Police Academy; the fifteen years I had spent on the San Francisco police, and the afternoon I had gone out on a homicide squeal and found a guy who had hacked his wife and two kids to pieces with an ax and decided that I had had it with direct police work; the acceptance of
my application to the State Board of Licenses for a private investigator’s certificate; the lean years since; a little more about Erika, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’
We smiled at each other across the table, and there was more to say, more to ask. But we had talked enough for one night; part of any relationship is the anticipation of more knowledge, of stronger ties. She sensed it, too, and she said, ‘I’d better be going now. It’s almost eleven, and I have to be to work at eight in the morning.’
I nodded. ‘When can I see you again, Cheryl?’
‘You can call, if you like.’
‘I have to go out of town for a day or two,’ I said. ‘I’ll call as soon as I get back, and we’ll have dinner together, and dancing or a show afterward—whatever you like to do.’
‘All right.’
I helped her on with her coat, and we went through the long narrow section of the lounge and outside. A thick blanket of fog had come in off the ocean, and it was cold and damp on the sidewalk. I walked her to her car, at the end of the block, and it was there that we said good night.
For the first time, but not for the last.
* * * *
CHAPTER SIX
Fog drifted like tattered gossamer through the darkened streets of Pacific Heights. I had to leave my car a couple of blocks from my flat again, and trailing vapors of mist touched my face in a gray, feathery caress as I hurried along the wet sidewalk. They made me feel vaguely chill and apprehensive; it had been a night like this one, a fog like this one, that I had had my belly sliced open during the kidnapping business the previous autumn. The cut, which had required twenty-seven stitches, had scarred thin and white, and even though I had nightmares about it sometimes, I had for the most part been able to bury the terror of that night in my subconscious; but heavy fog, the feel and smell of it, always seemed to release the memory from the mental grave I had dug for it...
I reached the foyer of my building and worked the latch-key and stepped into warmth and silence and the dying odors of a corned-beef supper. The anxiety went away as I climbed the stairs, and immediately I felt a return of the high spirits with which I had driven home from the Golden Door. This seemed to be my day for shifting moods, all right. Maudlin in the morning, buoyant at night. I reached the landing at the top of the stairs, and in the semi-darkness there, aimed my key at the lock on my door. Oh, what a difference a day makes—Sinatra hit the nail right on the head. Or was it Tony Bennett who sang that one? Or was it Ella—
And that was when I heard the sounds inside my apartment.
The landing was very quiet, and the scrape of my key at the lock was indistinct, like a rat chittering somewhere in a wall. But the other sounds were graphic, unmistakable—the creak of a loose floorboard, the rustle of clothing, the jangle of coins. There was somebody in there, somebody in my living room, and I turned the key reflexively without thinking about what I was letting myself in for and shoved the door wide.
The knob cracked against a surface of the highboy set against the side wall, and I was two steps into heavy darkness, now thickly silent darkness. I got my hand up, fumbling along the wall to the right of the door for the light switch, and very suddenly a blinding, shimmering white hole appeared in the black fabric of the room, less than ten feet in front of me. Flashlight, I thought, large-cell flashlight—and I threw my left arm up and across my face to shield my eyes, still trying to locate the wall switch with my right hand.
Something came out of the brilliant, diffused aureole of the flash beam, something dark and bulky, and I stumbled awkwardly to the right to get out of the way and collided with the drop-leaf table there, upsetting it. I went down onto my hands and knees, painfully, burning my palms on the worn nap of the carpet; above and behind me the something shattered hollowly against the rose wallpaper. Porcelain shards rained on the backs of my legs like thin, cold hailstones, and I thought: the shit, he threw the reading lamp at me, the goddam shit.
The flash beam went out, abruptly, and the room once more diminished into a deep-black; the guy, whoever, was running through the flat now, banging into things in the darkness. I got my feet under me and lurched upright, turning back to the wall. I found the switch finally, and pale light from the glass ceiling bowl flooded the room. My eyes ached from the glare of the flash; it took a moment to focus them so I could see well enough to navigate the cluttered expanse to the doorway on the opposite side, and I could hear him out on the utility porch, trying to get the side door open.
I kicked a footstool out of the way, viciously, and staggered into the kitchen and then out to the porch. The back door was standing wide open. Footsteps pounded down the flight of steep wooden stairs which jutted outward like a prominent rib cage from the old Victorian lady’s side wall. I swung through the door onto the pocket-sized platform which serves as a landing for my flat, and a dark man-shape wrapped in a trenchcoat and gloves and some kind of long-billed cap was down at the foot of the stairs; fog and deep shadow helped to camouflage his features, the size and shape of him.
I yelled at him, foolishly, but he was already running along the narrow cement-floored alleyway where the garbage cans and storage bins for my building and the adjacent one were kept. The thought that he might have a gun, or another weapon, did not occur to me until some time later; I clambered down after him, hanging onto the side railing to maintain my footing on the mist-slick stairs, and went into the alley running. The dark figure had already turned the corner, east, at the building front by then; and when I made it up there and through onto the sidewalk, there was no sign of him.
I ran up to the near corner. A car was coming toward me, its headlights magnified by the gray cloak of the fog, but there were four people in it and it was going much too slowly to mean anything. The car passed and I looked up and down the steepness of Octavia; but the area seemed deserted. Whoever he was, he had gotten away clean.
I walked back to the alleyway, trying not to pay any attention to the burning in my lungs from the cold damp air and the exertion. Light spilled into the passage from several flats in both buildings now, and there were anxious faces behind the glass of locked doors and windows. The guy who lives below me, a retired fire captain named Litchak, was standing on his platform, wearing a plaid bathrobe and a sharp scowl. He had a bungstarter in his right hand—a souvenir he had collected somewhere or other.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked me as I started up the stairs.
‘I came home and found somebody in my apartment,’ I told him.
‘Sneak thief, huh?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Figured that might be what it was all about. I heard all the banging around up in your flat, and then him come clattering down the stairs and you after him. He got away, I guess?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sonsabitches,’ Litchak said. He made a motion with the bungstarter. ‘Well, it’s too bad the wife had the television blaring away or I might have heard him sooner. If I had, I’d have broken his goddamn head for him.’
‘Yeah,’ I said again.
‘You think he made off with much?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll check that now.’
I started past him, moving up the stairs. He called after me, ‘Keep your valuables in a safe deposit box, like I do. No sneak thief can hurt you when you’ve got your valuables locked up in one of those babies.’
I reached my own landing and went inside and looked at the door. The lock had been jimmied, hurriedly and unprofessionally; this was the way he had come in, then. I wedged the door closed with a broom handle and a piece of copper wire, and then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a couple of fingers of brandy to ease the jangling of my nerves. When I had that down, I walked through the apartment to see what, if anything, was missing.
Ten minutes later I rang up the Hall of Justice and told a desk sergeant that I had had a prowler, giving my name and address. He had already received one call pertaining to the disturbance, he said, and had di
spatched a unit to the area. I could make a report to the investigating officers.
So I sat down on the couch in the living room to wait—and to think about the three items I had found were missing from the flat: twenty dollars in silver dimes and quarters from a wooden bank shaped like a beer keg that I kept on the bedroom dresser; a small case full of cuff links and tie clasps and the like, also from the dresser.
And the sketch of Roy Sands that Elaine Kavanaugh had given me that morning, from the inside pocket of the suit coat I had worn that day.
What the bloody hell?
Twenty bucks in coins and a case of cheap men’s jewelry might incidentally interest a sneak thief, but why would one take a rolled-up chalk portrait that was obviously of no real and immediate value—and neglect such easily pawnable items as a clock radio and a radium-dial wristwatch in a nightstand drawer? For that matter, why would a sneak thief take the chance of coming down an open alleyway and up stairs past one door, with three sets of doors and porch windows facing him across the passage? Why would he take the chance of standing fully exposed on the platform while he jimmied open the side door, and of doing it quietly enough so as not to alert any of the neighbors? And why would he choose a time well before midnight, when most people are awake if not still up and around?
The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02] Page 5