The Immortal Game (August Riordan Series Book 1)

by Mark Coggins

  “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.”

  I flagged a cab on Market and rode back to my apartment. I tried calling Jodie at Bishop’s mansion, but I got the answering machine twice and the third time Bishop himself picked up-and I had no intention of talking to him. Just for yucks I tried the number from Nagel’s phone bill. It didn’t pick up at all.

  I thought about calling Margaret Teller, but I wasn’t sure what I would say to her. I wondered what made me think of her at all. When I got bored asking myself questions I couldn’t answer, I took a long, hot shower and changed for my gig at Undici. At around six o’clock I carried my electric bass and amp down to the Galaxie 500. The first drops from some nasty looking storm clouds flattened against my windshield as I rolled down Post Street.

  CHECKED

  THE GIG WENT WELL. TONY RUELLAND’S GROUP, Zugzwang, was cut a little too much in the pattern of fusion groups like The Yellowjackets to suit my reactionary tastes, but I enjoyed having the opportunity to do some slap-plucking, and Tony gave me a good lead on a replacement for my string bass. I got home about 1:30, too wired to go straight to bed. I was drinking bourbon and listening to Zoot Sims’s 1952 recording Zootcase when the phone rang.

  I uncoiled from the couch and walked over to the phone. I had a sudden feeling of edgy apprehension: like I’d seen a violent flash of lightning and was bracing for the accompanying clap of thunder. The display from my caller ID showed the person phoning had blocked his line, which only added to my misgivings. I picked up the phone and put the receiver to my ear without saying anything. It was a cell phone connection, but apart from static, nothing came through-not even breathing. I waited for what seemed like a very long time-gripping the phone tightly, staring at my shoes-and finally gave in. I said:

  “You never let me get a word in edgewise.”

  A voice came on, deep and somewhat muffled. It seemed familiar and then it didn’t. “Package for you, Riordan. Hotel Cavalier on Eddy at Taylor. Room 312. It’s perishable goods so snap it up.” The line switched off with a metallic snarl.

  I put the phone down and massaged the back of my neck. Eddy at Taylor was the heart of the Tenderloin. I could imagine few places worse to go running off to in the middle of the night. The only good thing about it was that it was convenient. Given the marginal placement of my own apartment, the Hotel Cavalier would only be about six blocks south and east.

  For no good reason that I could see, I decided to go. I went to the closet and got out my raincoat. I shrugged that on, and then yanked the Glock from its holster and dumped it in a pocket. I felt undergunned-or more accurately, just plain scared-so I pulled the lockbox from underneath my bed and took out my Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. That went in the other pocket. It didn’t help much with being scared, but at least I wasn’t lopsided. I put on a beat-up fedora and left.

  Outside, storm clouds still spat rain and my breath billowed in front of me as I walked up Hyde. In a strange form of natural selection, the character of the neighborhood changed the further I got in the Tenderloin. It went from a broad mix of shops, restaurants, bars, and apartment houses to the specialized amalgam of sleazy adult bookstores, massage parlors, residence hotels, and fly-by-night auto repair shops that was better adapted for survival. Few people were out and about, but there were plenty of bodies curled in doorways, covered in blankets if they were fortunate or cardboard or newspapers if they were not.

  When I got to Eddy I took a left and continued on past Leavenworth and Jones. Part way down the block between Jones and Taylor was a tiny city park. Notorious for drug and prostitution traffic during the day, even now there were groups of people huddled under trees, smoking cigarettes and taking pulls from bottles wrapped in brown paper. One of the city’s new pay toilets stood at the perimeter near the street. The toilets had been acquired from a company in France, were self-cleaning, and were supposed to solve the problem of public facilities in San Francisco as they had in Paris: with economy, decorum, and Gallic je ne sais quoi. As I walked by, the door to the green, oval-shaped structure lurched opened and out tumbled a middle-aged black man with his pants around his ankles. He hit the ground with a heavy grunt and the bottle he was holding slipped from his grasp and rolled past me into the gutter. Somebody in the park yelled, “Yo, Jerome! Your bottle or your pants-you best be holdin’ on to one of them.” Stifled laughter followed.

  I detoured around the man and crossed the street to where I could see the words Hotel Cavalier written in a faded script on a dingy, narrow building sandwiched between a head shop and an adult bookstore. A metal grating covered the entryway to the building, but the door to the grating stood wide open. Likewise the front door itself was ajar. All this seemed a little too convenient. I put my right hand in my raincoat and took firm hold of the automatic, snicking off the safety with my thumb. Then I stepped inside.

  There was a minuscule lobby lit by a dusty, art deco chandelier that had spots for five bulbs with two missing and one burned out. A threadbare carpet stretched tight over too much rubbery padding covered the floor. It was like walking on a sponge sausage. To the right was a barred window with a narrow counter looking into an office. No light came from the office and no one was sitting at the desk inside. A staircase with a carved oak banister and solid streak of black grime running along the wall at waist level opened in front of me. I crept up the stair, staying close to the banister so that I might be harder to spot from above.

  The second floor landing had a tile floor with dust balls the size of hens’ eggs, cluttered with a ruined bicycle and a rusted folding cot that wouldn’t have opened if you used a hydraulic jack. A quick check confirmed the rooms on the corridor were numbered in the two hundreds, so I continued up the stairs. Thus far I’d seen no one and heard nothing-not even a muted TV. The third floor landing was as cluttered as the last with the added attraction of floor tiles chipped out of the grout. I went down the hallway on spongy carpet, watching the even-numbered rooms on the right. 312 was next to a busted ice machine filled with empty Chinese food containers, dead soldiers from the Mogen David platoon, and a savory scattering of used condoms. I saw light coming from the bottom of the door of 312 as I tapped on it with the butt of my automatic.

  There was no response. I cleared my throat to speak. It seemed like I hadn’t talked since I changed the shelf paper in my kitchen. “Open up,” I said. “The fall guy is here.”

  Still nothing from inside. In true fall guy fashion, I took hold of the doorknob and twisted. It wasn’t locked, but then it wouldn’t be. I gave the door a shove and jumped to one side, dodging the spread of buckshot I knew to be coming.

  None obliged me by coming. The door hit the interior wall with a crash and rebounded part of the way back. I pushed the automatic across the threshold and craned my head around the doorframe to see into the room.

  Terri McCulloch was sprawled facedown on a bare mattress in a cheap iron bedframe. One arm flopped over the side like she was trailing her hand in the wake of a canoe. On the floor, a few inches from her outstretched fingers, was a hypodermic syringe. Her face was flattened against the mattress and the flow of saliva from her gaping mouth had darkened the fabric in an irregular stain. Her hair was a tangled mop, the tips of it damp with sweat or rain. She wore black panties and black socks and nothing else.

  I swept into the room and searched it, still wary of being jumped from behind. No one was in the bedroom or the closet, and the revolting little bath was home only to fat, shiny roaches. I closed and bolted the room door and went to the woman on the bed. The pulse in Terri McCulloch’s neck throbbed when I touched it, but it seemed very slow and irregular. Lying next to her was a leather purse as big as a knap
sack, and next to that a number of items that had spilled from it. One of these was a spoon with a blackened bottom and a handle bent in a flat ring. A crust of brown scales adhered to the bowl, residue from the heroin Terri McCulloch had shot in her veins. Of more immediate utility was a cell phone-very possibly the one used to call me.

  Without bothering about fingerprints, I grabbed the phone from the bed and dialed 911. I told the emergency operator to send an ambulance to the hotel for a drug overdose victim. She asked me to stay on the line so she could collect more information, but I told her there wasn’t any and hung up.

  I shook the remaining contents of her purse onto the bed. Terri’s pearl-handled automatic, a disposable lighter, some currency, and several white packets that looked like drugs fell out. The last thing to come cartwheeling down was a fat card about two inches by three. I retrieved it from the side of Terri’s leg where it had landed. It had the letters PCMCIA printed on it, along with Flash Memory Card and 1GB. I didn’t know much about electronics, but this had to be some kind of computer media. I slipped it in my hip pocket behind my wallet and then pushed the rest of the stuff back in the purse, covering my hand with the material from my raincoat so as not to leave prints.

  I looked down at Terri McCulloch. I wondered if there was anything I could do before the paramedics arrived. She hadn’t ingested the heroin so there was no point in trying to make her throw up. I could try slapping her and marching her around the room, but I suspected that was only done in Hollywood movies to make with the dramatic scene.

  I settled on flipping her over so that she might breathe easier. She made a blubbering noise as I turned her and I noticed for the first time that her left arm, which had been hidden under her body, had a rubber tube tied around it. A puncture mark was visible above the tube on top of a distended vein. I pulled off the tubing and covered her with my raincoat, as much to keep her praying mantis tattoo and pierced nipples from my view as to keep her warm.

  I spent the next few minutes pacing back and forth in front of the bed, pausing occasionally to check if she was still breathing. A heavy pounding on the door put an end to that. “Did somebody here call for an ambulance?” yelled a voice in a faint Irish brogue.

  I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Standing in the hallway was a stocky paramedic with red hair, a florid complexion, and freckled horse teeth. It was my friend Ronan O’Grady. Behind him was another uniformed paramedic: a bulky woman with shoulder length black hair, no makeup, and a butt big enough to smother a grizzly.

  “God’s teeth!” said O’Grady. “What are you doing here?”

  “If we had two hours I would tell you. Your meat’s over there. And she’s not looking any too good.”

  O’Grady swaggered through the door like Marshal Dillon and went over to the bed. His partner manhandled a gurney in from the hallway. O’Grady picked up Terri McCulloch’s limp arm to check her pulse and then got a small flash from his belt to shine in her pupil. “Sure, it’s as bad as you could wish for,” hissed O’Grady. His eyes strayed to the syringe where it still lay on the floor. “It’s heroin, is it then?”

  “Yeah. The spoon she used is on the bed.”

  The female paramedic was rummaging through a medical bag on top of the gurney. She pulled out a syringe of her own and passed it over to O’Grady without being asked. O’Grady found a choice vein in Terri McCulloch’s right arm and plunged the hypodermic home. He yanked the raincoat off her and roughly maneuvered her arms to the center of her torso. “Come on,” he said to me. “Take her feet and we’ll swing her onto the stretcher.”

  As we hefted her off the bed, the silver rings in her nipples flashed in the thin light from the ceiling fixture. Bent between us like a deflated air mattress, she looked weak, pale, and feverish. We placed her down carefully on white sheets and O’Grady’s partner pulled a blanket over her and buckled two nylon straps across her body.

  “Right,” said O’Grady. “Let’s roll.”

  “What about the IV?” asked the woman.

  “Fuck the IV. We’ll start it once we get her in the wagon. Now move.”

  The two of them maneuvered the gurney out the door and into the hallway. As they raced toward the stairwell, I yelled at their backs, “Can I ride with you to the hospital?”

  “No,” said O’Grady, lifting the gurney to start down the stairs. “You have to wait for the cops.”

  “My favorite thing,” I said, but they had already gone out of view.

  A door across the corridor opened and out stepped a sleepy old geezer in a tee shirt and boxer shorts. His hair stood up like dead weeds, and he’d left his teeth soaking in the glass. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Drug overdose,” I said. “You know the party in this room?”

  “Yah, I seen her.” His words were slurred without his dentures. “She can make even my old pecker snap to.”

  “Great. Something to look forward to in my golden years. You see anybody else go in or out of this room tonight?”

  The old guy scratched his crotch thoughtfully. “Thought I mighta heard somebody a while ago, but I didn’t get up to check. There’s always some damn thing going on around here.”

  I heard the tromp of feet on the stairs and the old guy and I turned to see the hats of two uniformed officers rise over the banister. The old man said, “Better you than me, son,” and ducked back into his room.

  I stood my ground in the corridor as the cops approached. As it turned out, they were like scout ants sent to find food at a picnic. They were quickly joined by two more patrol cops, and after I explained that the woman who OD’d was Terri McCulloch-chief suspect in the Roland Teller murder-there were soon plain-clothes officers, lab technicians, and eventually a Captain of Detectives. They cordoned off the room, took photographs, collected samples of the heroin, dusted for prints, interviewed people on the hotel corridor, and most of all, grilled the heck out of me.

  By four AM I’d been taken down to headquarters and my story of being alerted to Terri McCulloch’s whereabouts by a mysterious phone caller was being received with fresh skepticism by an entirely new set of faces. Somewhere along the way I got permission to make a phone call myself, and I used the privilege to leave a message for Stockwell at his office. At the very least I owed him a personal call, and in any case, I didn’t trust the San Francisco cops to get the story to him promptly.

  When dawn came, I was sitting in an interrogation room by myself with my head cupped in my palm and a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table in front of me. Without non-dairy creamer, it tasted like lukewarm tobacco spit. With it, lukewarm tobacco spit and flea powder. I amused myself by stirring the coffee and watching the undissolved creamer flakes swirl around like stars in a muddy little galaxy. Eventually, I must have nodded off. The next thing I knew a rough hand was shaking me by the shoulder. “You’re free to go, Riordan,” said a voice.

  I looked up and found a weathered cop with gray hair combed straight back standing over me. He had suspicious eyes and if he knew how to smile it would only be from reading about it. I stood up wearily and slung my raincoat over my shoulder. I walked to the door of the interrogation room and pulled on the knob.

  “By the way,” said the cop behind me. “Terri McCulloch died this morning at 4:36. Heart just stopped. Nothing they could do.”

  E HOME MOVIES

  FOR THE SECOND DAY IN A ROW, Stockwell interrupted my morning routine-this time by waking me up. The phone rang angrily. I fumbled the receiver off the prong and laid the cool plastic against my cheek, not raising my head from the pillow. “Yeah,” I grunted.

  “How’re the Pop Tarts this morning?” asked Stockwell in a too loud voice. He sounded like a guy who’d had a full night’s rest, a nice breakfast, and a kiss good-bye from his wife. I hated him.

  “I haven’t gotten that far.”

  “Tsk, tsk, I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

  “No, it’s like Neil Young says: rust and Riordan-we never sleep.”

 
“Well, I called you to thank you for telling me about McCulloch. You beat the SFPD by six hours and the San Francisco Chronicle by four.”

  “Guess I’m getting good at finding dead bodies. The College of Mortuary Sciences ought to follow me around.”

  “Maybe they should. But Terri McCulloch wasn’t actually dead when you found her.”

  “No, she wasn’t. That just shows the depth of my talent. I can find ’em even before they go.”

  “I suppose you can at that.” He paused. “Well, be seeing you. I’d tell you to keep your nose clean, but there ain’t a big enough handkerchief.”

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s it?”

  “What else would there be? ‘Roland Teller’s Murderer OD’s in Tenderloin Hotel.’ That’s the Chronicle headline this morning.”

  “You believe that? What about all your complicated theories from yesterday?”

  “What you said. Just complicated theories. It wasn’t Hastrup’s fingerprint on the photograph in Terri McCulloch’s apartment. We ran it.”

  I sat up in bed, putting my feet on the cold hardwood floor. “Doesn’t anyone care about the identity of the guy who phoned me last night? That seems like a pretty big loose end to tie up before declaring victory.”

  Stockwell grunted. “I don’t think that’s such a big mystery, do you? Who else would know where Terri McCulloch was hiding out besides Chuck Hastrup? His friend Dale. If you hadn’t gone over to his car lot yesterday and muddied the waters before I could talk to him, he might have told us where she was in time to save her.”

  “He admits he called me, then?”

  “Yeah, the San Francisco cops sweated it out of him. He says he went over to confront her about Hastrup’s suicide and found her on the bed. He didn’t want to be left holding the bag, but he didn’t want to see her get away or die so he passed the buck to you.”

  “How do you know that he didn’t pump her full of dope himself? He might have killed her because of Hastrup.”