Quicksilver nd-11

by Bill Pronzini

  Quicksilver

  ( Nameless Detective - 11 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Quicksilver

  Chapter One

  The loft was about twenty feet square, which made it plenty big enough for an office. The walls were a sort of beige color, the floor was half linoleum and half bare wood, the ceiling was high and had a skylight and a suspended light fixture that looked like an upsidedown grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass testicles. There were two windows in the wall opposite the door, set apart from each other, and another window in the left-hand wall. That was all-no furnishings of any kind, no anteroom or alcove or closet, nothing else to see except for some miscellaneous streaks and blobs of vari-colored paint on the linoleum half of the floor.

  Eberhardt said, “Well? What do you think?”

  I didn’t know what I thought yet; we’d only just walked through the door. Without saying anything, I went over to one of the windows in the far wall. Wonderful downhill view of the back end of the Federal Bunding-or there would be on a clear day. Now, with early-December rain pelting down and the noonday sky as dark as dusk, that building and the others nearby were blurry shapes with their tops cut off by low scudding clouds. I moved over to the side-wall window. Out there you had an even more wonderful view of the blank brick wall of the building adjacent to this one.

  “Well?” Eberhardt said again. He had followed me from window to window and was breathing on my neck. “Not too bad, is it?”

  “Not too bad,” I admitted, turning.

  “It’s not Montgomery Street or the Transamerica pyramid, but what the hell. There are worse neighborhoods; O’Farrell Street’s not a bad address, not over this close to Van Ness. And the other tenants are pretty respectable-a custom-shirt company below us and a real estate outfit on the first floor. It’s better than that office you used to have on Taylor.”

  I nodded: he was right on all counts.

  “It’ll look good when we get it fixed up,” he said. “Put down some carpeting, put some pictures on the walls, get the furniture moved in. Have our names painted on the window too, maybe. You like that idea?”

  “It’s an idea,” I said. But I didn’t like it; it made me think of Spade and Archer, and how things went with them before Spade got mixed up with the black bird. “What’s all that paint on the floor?”

  “There was an art school in here before,” Eberhardt said. “That’s how come the skylight; guy who ran the school had it put in at his own expense. He died a couple of months ago. Ran the school by himself, so it died when he did.”

  “Who told you all that?”

  “Sam Crawford, man who owns the building. He’s a friend of Cap Turner, down at the Hall; Cap’s the one told me about the place being available.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’s anxious to rent it. Crawford, I mean. He told me he’ll take care of the electric bill, no charge to us. All we got to pay is the telephone and the rent.”

  “So how much does he want?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  He knew damned well he hadn’t told me. He hadn’t said anything on the phone except that he’d found a place and I should come take a look at it. “No,” I said, “you didn’t tell me. How much?”

  “Eight-fifty.”

  “How much?”

  “Including the electric bill, remember-”

  “Eight-fifty a month is too steep, Eb.”

  “For a place this size? And practically downtown? Besides, I told you before, I can cover the rent for a couple of months if it comes to that.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “We won’t find a better deal,” he said. “And you admitted the place isn’t bad. You could work here all right, couldn’t you?”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “Well then? I say we take it before somebody else does. Go over to Crawford’s office right now and sign the lease. How about it, paisan?”

  His eyes were eager; it was only the second time in the past four months, since an assassin’s bullets had nearly ended his life, that I had seen some of his old enthusiasm come back. The first time had been two and a half weeks ago, just before Thanksgiving, when I’d quit waffling and done what he’d been after me for weeks to do: agreed to take him into my investigating business as a full partner.

  I’d made that decision against my better judgment, and against the advice of Kerry Wade and a few other people, and I had thought more than once of backing out of the commitment. Hell, I was thinking about it again right now. But I had given him my word; that was as much as I had to give anybody, and it was something I did not take lightly, especially with a friend as close as Eberhardt.

  Still, I had trouble taking this final step, saying, “All right, Eb, we’ll take the place, we’ll go sign the lease.” The words seemed to lodge in my throat. Because once I said them, I would lose something that had been mine alone for twenty-three years, something I had built and that was an extension of me. The partnership would change it, reshape it into a thing shared, an uncomfortably intimate thing like a sexless marriage. I felt as if I were standing in front of an altar on my wedding day. I felt as if I were losing my freedom.

  But it no longer mattered how I felt, really, because I was committed, and so I got the words said. And he grinned a little, with relief as much as anything else, and smacked me on the arm, and for those few seconds he looked like the old Eberhardt-the one without the extra gray in his hair, the one I’d known before his wife left, before he made the mistake that had led to the shooting and to his self-imposed retirement from the San Francisco cops. The one who once had cared. The one who might still care again.

  So it was worth it after all, taking him in as a partner, giving up my little chunk of freedom. If it made him happy again, if it made him care again, then it wasn’t really that much of a sacrifice, was it?

  No, damn it. It wasn’t.

  Sam Crawford’s office was a gaudy two-room suite over on Bush Street, with a gaudy blond secretary to go with it. Crawford himself wasn’t gaudy, though. He was fat, he wore a three-piece suit, he smoked fancy cigars in an onyx holder, and he had a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand that was probably worth enough to feed a starving family of six for a year. He looked like a photograph I had seen once of a Tammany Hall politician.

  He drew up the lease, gabbling the whole time, telling us what a terrific deal we were getting. He also told jokes and laughed a lot, because he had money and money made him a very happy man; he was the kind who would laugh at funerals and make comments like, “Poor schmucks-they never had nothing and now they never will.” And he volunteered the information that he owned a dozen other buildings around the city, including three in Hunters Point and five in the Fillmore district. But he wasn’t a slum landlord, he said. Perish the thought. He gave his people a break whenever he could, damn right he did. That was the phrase he used: “his people,” as if he were talking about expensive livestock.

  Yeah, I thought, some benefactor. I liked him about as much as I liked potato bugs and rodents with fangs. But then, I would have had trouble liking anybody I met about now. I was feeling blue and a little “grumy”-Kerry’s word to describe that low, snappish mood you get into sometimes, when nothing seems quite right and everything and everybody annoys you. It was a reaction to finalizing the partnership with Eberhardt, of course; I knew that, but I couldn’t find a way to bring myself out of it. I had enough trouble trying to control myself so I wouldn’t tell Crawford what I thought he ought to do with his three buildings in Hunters Point and his five in the Fillmore.

  We signed the lease finally, and Eberhardt wrote a check, and we got out of there. The last thing Crawford said to us was t
hat we could move in any time, he’d only charge us a half-month’s rent from the fifteenth; he blew cigar smoke in my face as he said it, making my stomach lurch. So I was doubly glad to get outside into clean air again, even though the rain was coming down in sheets now and the wind howled and moaned and assaulted the cars parked at the curb.

  When we reached my car in the next block we were both sodden. I started the engine and put the heater on high, and we sat there for a time trying to dry off. Pretty soon Eberhardt said, “Crawford’s a jerk.”

  I looked at him. “You noticed, huh?”

  “Sure. This morning, the first time I laid eyes on him. But we don’t have to deal with him much; he’s not the kind of landlord who comes around poking his nose into things. And I still say we lucked out.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “How about if we open shop next Monday?” he said. “The State Board’s approved my application for a license, so we don’t have to wait on that account. And we’ll have four days to get the stuff moved in.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’ll ring up Ma Bell, make arrangements for the phones. Two, you think?”

  “Any more and they’d think we were going to make book.”

  He laughed. It startled me a little; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh. “I’ll buy a desk for myself,” he said. “From one of those office furniture places on Mission that sells used. Anything else I should get?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “What outfit did you store your stuff with?”

  I told him.

  “Can they get it delivered by Monday?”

  “I don’t see why not. I’ll give them a call.”

  “So then we’re just about set.”

  “Just about.”

  “Listen,” he said seriously, “it’s going to work out, you’ll see. I’ll carry my weight; and I won’t try to throw any of it around with you. You’re the boss-you tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew Eberhardt from way back; he was used to being in charge, he was stubborn, he had his own way of doing things and he always thought it was the right way, and on certain issues he was either blind or had tunnel vision. He meant what he said about following orders-at this moment. But later on, when push came to shove on this or that case? I didn’t want to think about that, because I was fairly sure I knew how it would go. What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t until it happened, was how I would handle it.

  He got one of his scabrous pipes out of his overcoat pocket and clamped it between his teeth. “I don’t know about you,” he said around the stem, “but I’m starving. What say we go somewhere and put on the feed bag? Out to the Old Clam House, maybe, get some fried oysters …”

  Fried oysters, I thought, and my stomach lurched the way it had when Crawford blew his cigar smoke at me. But not for the same reason. “I can’t, Eb,” I said, not without reluctance.

  “Why not? Ah, Christ, you still on that diet?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “You’re no fatter than you ever were,” he said. “What the hell do you want to lose weight for?”

  “My health. It’s not good to have a gut like mine at my age.”

  “You never worried about your gut before. Kerry’s behind this diet business, I’ll bet.”

  She was-she’d been after me for months to take off fifteen or twenty pounds-but I didn’t want to tell him that. I hadn’t told him or anyone else about her abortive attempts to get me to go jogging on a regular basis and I shouldn’t have told him about the diet either. He was tall and slender, all angles and blunt planes, and he’d never had a weight problem. He didn’t understand the way it was for guys like me.

  “Nah,” I said, “it’s not Kerry’s doing, it’s mine. I’m tired of having to lift up my belly every time I want to see what I’ve got hanging underneath.”

  Eberhardt laughed again. It was a joke at my expense this time, but that was all right. At least it got him off the subject. I had enough trouble with the diet as it was, without talking about it. All that did was make me think about food.

  I drove him back to O’Farrell Street, dropped him off at his car, and then went home to my flat in Pacific Heights. There was nothing else to do; I had no work right now. I wished to Christ I did-one more case that I could call my own, one last solo investigative fling. Well, maybe something would turn up today or tomorrow, something simple that I could dispose of before next Monday, without involving Eberhardt.

  I had to park the car a block and a half away from my building, and even my underwear was wet by the time I let myself into the foyer. From inside the ground floor apartment that belonged to my friend Litchak, the retired fire inspector, I could smell something cooking. Stew, maybe, or some other Lithuanian dish with lots of garlic in it. My mouth began to water. And my stomach began to ache. All I’d had to eat today was two eggs and an orange for breakfast. For lunch I was supposed to have a green salad and some more eggs. Every day now for ten days, eggs for breakfast and eggs for lunch and sometimes even eggs for supper. Jesus Christ. What kind of food was that for a big, active man? Pretty soon I would start flapping and squawking and pecking the ground like an undernourished chicken.

  I went and stripped out of my sodden clothes and got on the bathroom scale. Same reading as this morning and yesterday morning, too: 228 pounds. I had lost exactly two pounds in ten days. I said a nasty word. And then took a hot shower to get myself warm again. That was another thing about dieting; you were cold all the time, because you weren’t getting enough fuel to stoke the furnace.

  My stomach kept growling. I didn’t want the eggs, I was beginning to hate eggs, but I was so hungry I could have eaten the carton. I couldn’t even fry the damn things, oh no, because there were too many calories in butter and margarine and oil; I had to softboil them. So I put water on and made a salad out of lettuce and cucumbers; no dressing, too many calories in dressing, just a little vinegar and some salt and pepper. I ate the salad while I waited for the water to boil. Rabbit food. Rabbits and chickens. Bah!

  After I started the eggs cooking I went back into the bedroom and checked my answering machine. Two calls. The first one made me cringe a little; it was from Jeanne Emerson and she said she was back in town and wanted to know when we could get together to do our article. The article was supposed to be all about me and my career and the trials and tribulations I’d had in recent months; Jeanne was a photojournalist. She thought I represented “the common man’s struggle to maintain his ideals while working within a restrictive system.” Which was something of a crock as far as I was concerned, but she was pretty serious about it.

  She was also pretty serious about me. Back in October, she’d kept calling and hinting around about us seeing more of each other, and it had made me uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have minded seeing all of her if she’d come into my life more than eight months ago, because she was a very good-looking Chinese lady; but as it was, I had my hands and my heart full of another very good-looking lady, Kerry Wade, who had come into my life exactly eight months ago. I didn’t want to do anything stupid to jeopardize my relationship with Kerry. So it had been a distinct relief when Jeanne picked up a lucrative magazine assignment and went off to the wilds of Mexico for six weeks.

  Only now my reprieve had ended and here she was again, and I still didn’t know how to handle the situation. Do the article and run the risk of succumbing to temptation. Don’t do the article and offend Jeanne and lose some free publicity. Terrific choice. I needed more time to think about it. So I wouldn’t return her call right away, I decided. For all she knew, I might be out of town myself.

  Some tough, brave private eye I was. Mix me up with a woman or two and I came apart like cardboard in a rainstorm.

  The other call on the machine, coincidentally, was also from an Oriental woman-a Japanese this time, who said her name was Haruko Gage and that she needed the services of an investigator. That perked me up a little; maybe it was t
he job I’d been lusting after. I wrote down her number, then went back into the kitchen to rescue my eggs. I put them on a plate and looked at them for about ten seconds. Then I opened the refrigerator and got out a celery stalk and put that on top of the salad in my grumbling stomach. I wasn’t eating these days; I was either swallowing chicken fruit or grazing like a bloody horse.

  Kerry, I thought, the things I do for you.

  In the bedroom again, I dialed Haruko Gage’s number. A man answered, and when I asked for the lady he wanted to know who was calling; he sounded timid and wary. I told him. “Oh, right,” he said, and the wariness was gone and he sounded timid and unhappy. “Well, she had to go out for a few minutes, but she’ll be back before long. I’m her husband. Art Gage?” He made his name into a question, as if he wasn’t sure who he was.

  “What is it your wife wants to see me about, Mr. Cage?”

  “These presents she keeps getting.”

  “Presents?”

  “In the mail. It’s driving us crazy.”

  “What sort of presents are you talking about?”

  Pause. “I guess I’d better let Haruko tell you. It was her idea to hire a private detective.”

  “All right. I’ll call back a little later, then-”

  “No, no,” he said, “why don’t you just come over to the house? She’ll be back by the time you get here.”

  “Where do you live, Mr. Gage?”

  “On Buchanan, just off Bush.” He gave me the number. “It’s on the fringe of Japantown.”

  The address was only about ten minutes from my flat. I looked out through the bedroom window to see if it was still raining so hard. It wasn’t, so I said, “I think I’ve got time to stop by. Give me about half an hour.”

  “I’ll tell Haruko you’re coming.”

  We rang off, and I put some dry clothes on and combed my hair. Then I called the outfit where my office stuff was stored and made arrangements for them to deliver it to O’Farrell Street tomorrow afternoon. And then I went back into the kitchen to eat those goddamn eggs.