by Lee Killough
Irish through and through, true, despite his name, that she apparently heard as McSomething. Which it had once been — McAlan — until his grandfather’s apparent sudden move to Sacramento from Chicago in 1929. A fact he discovered accidentally as a boy, but asking his grandmother about turned her grim and earned him a tight-lipped order to never, ever mention it again. Some day he would really like to investigate his grandfather’s background.
A thought jerking him back to investigation at hand…where studying Lane as well as possible in the club’s dimness, he realized with surprise she was not really a beautiful woman. Her voice and the way she moved, and something radiating from her, almost irresistible in its magnetism, made her seem beautiful. She looked barely twenty.
“Now, what is this unfortunately official visit about?” she asked. “It can’t be a traffic ticket; I haven’t driven anywhere in weeks.”
“Were you working last week?” Harry asked.
She nodded. Oddly, her eyes reflected red in the flame of the candle. Garreth had never seen that in humans before. He watched her, fascinated.
“Do you remember speaking to a man on Monday who was in his thirties, maybe your height when you’re barefoot, wearing a red coat with black velvet lapels and collar? He was with four other men, and four young women.”
She shook her head. “I must have talked to dozens of people that night. I’m afraid I can’t recall any particular one.”
“Maybe this will help.” Garreth showed her the picture of Mossman.
She tilted it to the light of the candle and studied it gravely. “Now I remember him. We didn’t really talk, though. I flirted with him while I sang because he was nice-looking and the one member of the group who didn’t have a companion. As he left, he came over to say how much he liked my singing.” She paused. “You’re from Homicide. Is he a suspect or a victim?”
The lady was cool and fast on the uptake, Garreth reflected. “A victim,” he said. “Did he come back here on Tuesday?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. He asked me out, but I didn’t go. I don’t date married men.”
Harry said, “We need to know exactly what he said and did Tuesday. What time did he come in?”
She frowned in thought. “I don’t really know. He was here when I did my first set at eight. He stayed all evening and we talked off and on, but not too much. I didn’t want to encourage him. Finally I told him I wasn’t interested in going out with him. The bartender, Chris, can confirm that we sat there at the end of the bar. About twelve-thirty he left.”
Garreth made notes by the light of the candle. “Was that the last you saw of him?”
“Yes. Lots of men don’t know how to take no for an answer, but he did.”
“I suppose you have a fair number of guys hitting on you. Do you ever take anyone up on the offer?”
She smiled. “Of course, if the man interests me. I don’t pretend to be a nun. What business is it of yours?”
“Where do you usually go, your place or his?”
Her eyes flared red in the candlelight, but she replied evenly, “Yes.”
Garreth dropped the subject, recognizing evaporating cooperation. There would be time enough later to question her about Adair, if need be. “I’m sorry; that was irrelevant. I’ll need your name and address, though, in case we want to talk to you again.”
“Of course.” She gave him the address, an apartment near Telegraph Hill.
“Are you a permanent resident of the city?” Harry asked.
“I travel a good deal, but this is home base, yes.”
“Are you a native like Harry there, or an immigrant like me?”
“Yes,” she replied, and when their brows rose, she smiled. “Women are more fascinating with a bit of mystique, don’t you think? Leave me mine until you absolutely must have the information, can’t you?” She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost time for the next set. Please excuse me.”
She rose and left, walking gracefully toward the piano. Garreth fought an urge to follow her. If she affected Mossman the same way, no wonder he came back.
Harry grinned at him. “Do you still want to involve her in two murders?”
She began a song in sultry tones that made Garreth’s hormones cheer and brought quick speculation about the feel of those long legs wrapped around him. “I’d rather date than arrest her,” he admitted. “She seems cooperative enough and she didn’t hesitate to admit she’d seen Mossman Tuesday. Still…”
“Still,” Harry agreed. “You never know, so we’d better check her out.”
5
Lying awake in the darkness of his bedroom, Garreth heard the foghorns start. The years living here had taught him to recognize the patterns of a few, like the double hoot of the one on Mile Rocks and the single every-twenty-seconds blast of the one on Point Diablo. Fog moving in, he thought.
He stopped consciously listening when the horns and diaphone on the Golden Gate Bridge joined the chorus. The dial of his watch glowed on the bedside table, but he resisted the urge to look at it. Why see how long he had lain awake?
He folded his hands behind his head. What was wrong? Why should he be bothered that their interviews with the manager of the Barbary Now and the singer’s neighbors last night and today turned up nothing to connect her with the murders?
“I wish everyone I hired were as dependable,” the manager said. “She’s always on time, always polite to even the biggest asshole customers, never drunk or strung out. Lane never causes trouble.”
Her neighbors echoed the sentiment. One said, “You’d hardly know she’s there. She sleeps all day and comes home from work after we’ve gone to bed. If she brings anyone home, I don’t know it because she never makes a sound. She’s away on tour sometimes and it may be a week before I realize she’s gone.”
“Do you ever see any of her friends?” Garreth had asked.
“Once in a while. They’re men, mostly, leaving in the morning, but all very well dressed…none of the dirty, hairy, hippie types.”
Altogether their questions produced a picture of an ideal neighbor and employee. So what did he find so disturbing about that? Maybe just that. People who kept a profile low to the point of invisibility felt suspicious. Even granting differences between professional images and private lives, he could not quite reconcile such a life-style with the sexy, coolly sophisticated young woman from the Barbary Now. The maiden is powerful, I Ching said. One should not marry such a maiden. Beware of that which seems weak and innocent.
Yet, he could not picture her threading a needle into Mossman’s jugular, either…not with his present knowledge of her.
“I need to know more,” he said aloud into the darkness.
The midchannel Golden Gate diaphone sounded out of the fog in its bellow-and-grunt voice, as though replying to his remark.
He would talk to her landlord, he decided, lying back in bed, and then to more of the Barbary Now personnel. He would see if all their opinions matched the ones he had already heard.
That decided, he lay relaxed, listening to the hooting and bellowing of the foghorns reverberate through the night. The rhythmic chorus lulled him to sleep.
6
The woman inside the protective grille across the doorway wore a bathrobe and slippers. She blinked through the grille at Garreth’s identification. “Police? This early?”
“I’m sorry about the hour, Mrs. Armour, but I need to ask a few questions about a tenant of yours.” He himself had been up for hours, finding out who owned the house where Lane Barber lived.
Mrs. Armour opened the grille with a frown and led the way up a steep flight of stairs to a sunny kitchen looking out over the fog that shrouded the lower marina and bay. “Which one, and what have they done?”
“I don’t know Lane Barber has done anything. She merely knows someone involved in a case I’m investigating.”
The frown faded. She sat down at the table, returning to the toast and coffee that Garreth’s ring had obviously in
terrupted. “Coffee, Inspector?” When he accepted with a nod, she poured a cup for him. “I’m glad Miss Barber isn’t in trouble. Actually, I would have been surprised if you’d said she was.”
Mrs. Armour, too? Garreth added cream and sugar. “You know her well?”
“Not personally, but she’s one of my best tenants. I have a number of properties in that area and most of them are rented by restless young people who are here this year and gone the next. I wish you could see the state they leave their apartments in. It’s appalling. But Miss Barber pays her rent on time every month and when I have her apartment repainted, as I feel ought to be done every few years, her place is always spotless. She takes beautiful care of it.”
Garreth stopped stirring his coffee. “Every few years? How long has she been a tenant?”
Mrs. Armour pursed her lips. “Let’s see. I think I’ve had her apartment done twice. She must have been with me about ten years. No…I’ve painted three times. She’s been there fourteen years. She’s my oldest tenant.”
Fourteen years? Garreth blinked. “How old was she when she moved in?”
“Very young, but at least twenty-one. I remember she told me she was singing in a club.”
Garreth stared at her. The singer was twenty-one fourteen years ago? That face above the candle had not belonged to a woman in her thirties. Although her level of sophistication seemed more commensurate with that age than with twenty-one. Had she had a face-lift, perhaps?
“What has her friend done?” Mrs. Armour asked.
For a moment, Garreth struggled to think what the woman was talking about. “Oh…he died. In the time Miss Barber has been your tenant, have you ever had any trouble with her? Has the apartment smelled…strange, or have neighbors complained of strange people coming and going?”
Cult types. It occurred to him that if she lived in the middle of a shifting population, former neighbors may have seen things present ones could not know about.
“Smelled strange? Like marijuana?” Mrs. Armour sat bolt upright in indignation. “Certainly not! I’ve never had a single word of complaint about her.”
Garreth could not believe in this paragon. It was obvious, however, that Mrs. Armour was not going to add any clay to the lady’s feet, so he thanked her for her help and headed for the Hall.
As he came into the office, Harry said, “You’re supposed to call Narcotics.”
Garreth peeled out of his coat. “I hope it’s about Chiarelli.”
It was about Chiarelli. An Inspector Woodhue said, “It’s arranged for you to meet him. Join us in the garage at twelve-thirty.”
Garreth hung up. “Let’s hope Chiarelli can help us.”
“Maybe. But your hexagram this morning said, ‘Success in small matters. At the beginning good fortune; at the end, disorder.’”
Garreth grimaced. “Thanks. I really needed to hear that.”
He thought about his conversation with the landlady on the Barber girl’s age. A strange lady, this redhead. He ran her name through Records. It came back negative for local and state, negative NCIC. She never had even a traffic ticket. In fact, she had no driver’s license.
That brought a frown. She said something about not having driven for a while when they talked to her. Had she been only joking?
“Do you think she can be thirty-five years old?” he asked Harry. “She looks much younger.”
“Lighting in that bar would make Methuselah look like an adolescent.” Harry raised his brows. “Why so concerned about her age? Isn’t that part of the mystique?”
“Maybe there’s such a thing as too much mystique.” The first chance he had, Garreth decided, he would ask the lady a few pointed questions and dispel some of it.
7
A voice over Woodhue’s radio said softly, “It’s going down now.”
Suddenly the old warehouse filled with narcotics officers. Garreth hung on Woodhue’s heels, remembering his instructions: This is the drill. We’re busting a buy. Chiarelli, who’s going by the name Demesta, will be there. You’re a hot-dog cop along for the fun. When Chiarelli bolts, you go after him.
The men involved in the buy scattered like cockroaches before a light. Garreth searched among them hurriedly, looking for someone who matched the description Woodhue had given him — a lean runt in an oversize old army jacket — but he could not see Chiarelli. In the melee and half dark, he had trouble distinguishing any particular individual.
Then Woodhue pointed and barked, “Get Demesta!”
Garreth saw the army jacket then, faded to pale green, with dark patches where the insignia had been removed. It dwarfed the man inside it, a man who bowled over an officer and was vanishing into the junk littering the building. Garreth took after it.
Chiarelli went out of a broken window in a shower of flying glass from remaining shards in the frame.
Trying to avoid cutting his hands as he followed, Garreth swore. See the stupid cop jump out the window, he thought sardonically. See him break his leg.
Somehow he landed outside without crippling himself and looked up in time to see his quarry scramble across a set of railroad tracks and disappear into a passage between two more warehouses. Garreth pounded after him. At the beginning, good fortune? The hell. It looked more like disorder all day.
A hand reached out of a narrow doorway to grab Garreth’s coat and jerk him inside the building. “Let’s make this fast, man,” Chiarelli said. “You’re interested in cults?”
Garreth nodded, panting. “I have two men who’ve been bled to death through needles stuck in their necks. We think maybe a cult did it.”
“Like the Zebra murders? Christ!” Chiarelli shuddered and crossed himself. “So you want the names of people or groups who might use blood in their rituals.”
“Right. Can you help me?”
Chiarelli sighed. “I’m not really next to that scene, you know, not unless some group also uses drugs, but…I guess I’ve heard a few things. Give me paper and a pen.”
Garreth handed him his pen and notebook.
Chiarelli printed with the speed of a teletype and talked almost as fast as he wrote, passing on more information than he had time to write. “Some is just addresses, not names. There have been weird stories about this house on Geary. Screaming and smells like burning meat.” He had similar comments on every person or address he wrote down. When finished, he handed the notebook back. “Will that help?”
Garreth glanced over the pages, amazingly legible for the speed at which they had been written. “I hope so. Thanks.” He started to turn away.
“Wait a minute,” Chiarelli said. “We have to make it look good for me or I’m blown.”
“I’ll just say you outran me.”
He shook his head. “Not good enough. You don’t look like you’ve been chasing me all this time.”
“How do you want to handle it, then?” He saw Chiarelli’s fist double and stepped back, shaking his head. “Hey, not that — ”
But the fist was already in motion. It sank into Garreth’s stomach. He went down onto hands and knees in a wheeling galaxy of pain and light. His gut rebelled at the treatment by rejecting what remained of his lunch and he huddled retching on the dusty floor.
A wiry arm slipped under his and helped him to his feet as the paroxysm subsided. Chiarelli’s face floated beyond a blue haze, grinning. “Just relax. You’ll be all right in a couple of minutes.”
Garreth would have gone for Chiarelli’s throat, but he could only lean against the wall and concentrate on breathing.
“Sorry, man; it has to look real.”
No worry about that, Garreth reflected bitterly.
“See you around, man.” Chiarelli slipped out the door.
Garreth continued to lean against the wall for several more minutes, then made his way slowly back to the site of the bust.
Seeing him coming, Harry exclaimed, “Garreth!” and rushed to catch his arm. “What happened? Are you all right?”
Garreth lea
ned against a handy car, holding his stomach. “Bastard ambushed me. I thought I was never going to make it up off that damned floor.”
“So you let him get away, hot dog?” Woodhue said.
Several prisoners snickered. Garreth glared at them. “Next time I won’t bother chasing him. I’ll hobble the son of a bitch with a piece of lead.”
Harry helped him to a car. “Nice acting,” he whispered.
Remembering Chiarelli’s smirk, Garreth said, “Who the hell is acting?”
He sat silent all the way back downtown. Not until they had left the Narcotics officers and returned to Homicide did he give the notebook to Harry. “We’d better run these names, then find out who owns or lives in these houses.”
Harry regarded him with concern. “Are you sure you’re all right? Maybe you ought to go home and take it easy the rest of the day.”
“I’m fine. We have work to do.” He started to take off his coat and winced as the motion stretched bruised muscles.
Harry hustled him toward the door. “Go home. I’ll tell Serruto what happened.”
“I’m fine,” Garreth said.
“No one who refuses time off can possibly be fine. Go home.”
Eyeing Harry’s frown, Garreth sighed. “Yes, papa-san.”
He left Chiarelli’s pages of his notebook with Harry and headed for his car. After slipping the key into the ignition, though, he sat without starting the engine. As much as he hurt, he hated the thought of going home. He ought to give up the apartment with all of its sweet and painful memories and find another. Perhaps one of those places around Telegraph Hill that Mrs. Armour owned.
The thought of them told him what he really wanted to do. He wanted to see Lane Barber again, to talk to her by daylight and find answers for the increasing number of questions she raised about herself. Then he started the engine.
8
She did not come to the door until Garreth had rung the bell five times. He realized she must be sleeping and would find his visit inconsiderate and inconvenient, but he remained where he stood, leaning on the bell. She finally opened the door, wrapped in a robe, squinting against the light, and he discovered that even by daylight, she looked nothing like a woman in her thirties. If anything, she seemed younger than ever, a sleepy child with the print of a sheet wrinkle across one pale, scrubbed cheek.