Labyrinth

TWELVE

Wanton, senseless destruction. All the drawers in the filing cabinets standing open and their contents strewn across the floor. The magazines from the table in the visitor’s area ripped apart. The Black Mask poster pulled off the wall and shredded out of its frame. Everything swept off the desk, everything emptied out of the desk drawers. The typewriter still on its stand but the ribbon unwound from the spools like twenty feet of jumbled black intestine. The dregs from the coffee pot splashed on one wall; granules from the jar of instant coffee hurled around over the scattered papers. Jagged slash marks in the padded seat and back of my chair. Worms of white glue squeezed out over part of the desk and part of the client’s chair. A long deep gouge in the desk top, made with a knife or maybe my letter opener. And in the alcove, all the supplies scraped off the shelves, my spare change of clothes cut into strips, and a can of cleanser sprinkled over the tangle on the floor.

I started to shake, looking at all of that. A savage, impotent rage welled up inside me; I had that ugly feeling you get when something like this happens, this kind of personal violation: a combination of pain and hatred and confusion that makes you want to smash something yourself.

The more I looked at the carnage in there, the wilder I felt. In self-defense I caught hold of the door, backed into the corridor, and shut out the sight of it. It was two or three minutes before the shaking stopped and the black haze cleared out of my head. Before I could trust myself to go talk to anybody.

The office across the hall was vacant and had been for weeks; I went back past the elevator, toward the clacking of the typewriter. A guy named Faber who ran a mail-order business had the office adjacent to mine, but there were no lights on inside and the door was locked. The fourth office, where the typewriter sounds were coming from, belonged to a CPA named Hadley. I opened the door and went in there.

Hadley was sitting at one of two desks across the room, hunt-and-pecking on a small portable. He looked up as I entered and gave me one of his smarmy grins. He was a thin bald-headed guy in his forties, with a fox-face and a wise-ass sense of humor.

“Well, if it isn’t the dago private eye,” he said. “How’s the snooping business these days?”

“Knock it off, Hadley. I’m in no mood for bullshit.”

He took a closer look at my face, and the grin wiped away in a hurry. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? You look-” He stopped there, but he did not have to say it; we both knew how I looked.

“You see anybody at my office today?”

“No. Why?”

“Hear anything down there?”

“Like what?”

“Like noise. Like a lot of damn noise.”

“I didn’t hear any noise. What-”

“You been here all day?”

“No. I was out from eleven until about two.”

“What about Faber across the hall? He come in today?”

“I don’t think so; he usually doesn’t on Fridays. Listen, what the hell happened?”

“Somebody busted up my office, that’s what happened.”

“Busted it up? You mean vandalized it?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Hadley began to look worried, but not for my sake. “You know who did it?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. You sure you didn’t see anybody or hear anything while you were around?”

“Positive. Busted up your office, huh?” He looked around his own office, as if he were visualizing the same kind of thing happening here. “This building isn’t safe any more,” he said. “Raise the goddamn rent and it isn’t even safe. Maybe we’d better think about moving out.”

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe we’d better.”

I left him and went back along the hall to my door. When I opened it and bent to look at the lock I did not see any fresh scratches or signs of forced entry. But it wasn’t much of a lock; a kid could have picked it with a bubblegum card. I got a tight hold on myself, stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

The destruction was not any easier to look at, but I could face it now without feeling as though I would come unglued. I stood still for a time and asked myself why. For God’s sake, why?

Tenderloin junkie looking for money to buy a fix? Maybe. One of the tenants on the second floor had had his office broken into a few months ago and his petty-cash box looted, and there had been a couple of other break-ins over the years. But never my office, never a detective’s; no money here, even a junkie knew that. Besides, what pawnable items there were, like the typewriter and the answering machine, had not been carried away.

Kids, vandals? More likely. Except that there were none of the vandal’s trademarks: words spray-painted on the walls, puddles of urine or piles of feces. Except that pure vandalism was one of the few crimes that did not happen much in the Tenderloin, and especially not to one office in a building that was locked up at night and full of people during the day.

Somebody looking for something in my files? But I had no information that anyone could want, or at least none I could imagine anyone wanting; just a lot of case-report carbons, most of which were old and nearly all of which were mundane. That sort of thief, looking for something he couldn’t find, might take out his frustration on the office itself-only this was not an act of frustration. It had taken time, a lot of time, to do all this damage. And that made it an act of frenzy, done by somebody with-a sick mind. And whoever had been threatening Christine Webster, who had maybe killed her, had a sick mind; the anonymous letter Lainey Madden had shown me confirmed that. The same person? Possible-and yet it didn’t seem to make much sense. Why come after me? My involvement was minimal enough and I knew even less and posed a far smaller threat than the police. And what would destroying my office accomplish in any case?

Still. The time was right: somebody vandalizes the office while I’m in the middle of two linked murder cases. It could be one of the people I had met and talked to in the past few days. Or it could be somebody I had yet to meet and talk to; my name had been all over the papers. Jerry Carding? Steve Farmer?

Somebody.

Why?

The beeping from the disabled phone penetrated and sent me wading through the debris on the floor, around to the far side of the desk. The phone was lying there in two pieces, the receiver hooked over one of the chair legs. I picked it up and put it back together and set it down on the slashed chair seat. The answering machine was upside-down under the window; I picked that up too and laid it on top of the typewriter.

I dialed the Hall of Justice and asked for Eberhardt. Got him half a minute later. “It’s me again,” I said.

“Now what? I was just on my way home.”

I told him what now. There was a silence. Then he said, “Christ, can’t you stay out of trouble for one day?” but he no longer sounded annoyed or irascible.

“Lecture me some other time, will you? This isn’t my fault.”

“Bad, huh?”

“It couldn’t be much worse.”

“You think it’s connected with the Webster and Carding cases?”

“I don’t know what to think. Maybe.”

“All right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Bring a couple of lab boys with you. There might be prints.”

“Twenty minutes.”

I hung up and fiddled with the switches on the answering machine. It seemed to be working okay-and there was a message on it, from Donleavy. His voice said I should call him at his office in Redwood City and then proceeded to give the number.

The message told me something else, too: my office had been vandalized sometime today, during business hours. If it had happened last night Donleavy would not have been able to reach me because of the disabled phone.

I dialed his number right away; it was better to be doing something constructive than brooding at what was left of this place. And it turned out that he was also still in.

“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I had a couple of my men make another search of the Carding garage and the grounds around it; they found the second bullet.”

“Good. Where?”

“Outside the garage window, in a bush.”

“So that’s what happened to it. Sure, the window was part way open, now that I think about it; I should have remembered that before. You going to withdraw the charges against Talbot now?”

“Not yet. Chances are he fired the bullet through the open window, considering where it was found and a Ballistics report confirming that it came from the murder weapon; but there’s no way of proving he did. Carding could have fired it himself, sometime prior to his death.”

“But you do believe Talbot is innocent?”

Donleavy made a sighing sound. “What I believe doesn’t seem to hold much water around here. The DA’s still planning to prosecute.”

“Has Talbot’s condition changed any?”

“Status quo. He’s been under sedation most of the day. That’s a preliminary treatment in cases of suicidal depression, the doctors tell me.”

“No other developments, I guess?”

“Nope. How about with you? I talked to Laura Nichols this afternoon at the hospital; she said she’d hired you to do some investigating of your own.”

“Yeah. I was going to call you about that tonight. You mind?”

“Your buddy Eberhardt doesn’t mind. Why should I?”

I told him about Bobbie Reid and her connection with Christine Webster and Jerry Carding. “Might be something in that, at least where the Webster case is concerned; I’ll pass it along to Eberhardt. I don’t see how it could tie in with the Carding homicide, though.”

“Neither do I,” Donleavy said. “Anything else?”

“My office was vandalized today. Torn apart. I’m standing here in the wreckage right now, waiting for Eberhardt.”

“Rough. Any idea who did it?”

“No. But I’m not so sure it’s coincidence.”

“How come?”

“Nothing stolen, for one thing. What time did you leave your message on my machine?”

“About eleven. Why?”

“Whoever did it knocked the phone off the hook,” I said. “So it had to have happened sometime between your call and when I got here a little after five. Which pretty much lets out street kids; they don’t vandalize business offices in broad daylight.”

“So you think it ties in with the two homicide cases?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

After we rang off I looked around at the destruction again, in spite of myself. My gaze settled on the shredded Black Mask poster. It was no special loss; I could get another one made from the magazine cover. But it made me think of my collection of pulps. The damage here would amount to no more than a few hundred dollars-but what if the same kind of thing happened at my flat? Those six thousand pulps had to be worth more than thirty thousand dollars at the current market prices; most were irreplacable, at least where I was concerned, and I had damned little personal property insurance. The thought of them being demolished started me shaking all over again.

I got on the horn to Dennis Litchak, a retired fire captain who lives below me, and asked him to go upstairs and check on my flat; we had exchanged keys sometime ago, as a general precaution between neighbors. He was gone the better part of ten minutes and I did a lot of fidgeting while I waited. But when he came on again he said, “Everything’s okay. You didn’t have any visitors.”

I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dennis.”

“What’s up, anyhow?”

“I’ll tell you about it later.”

I went over to the window and stood looking down at the misty lights along Taylor Street. The pulps were still in my mind. My flat was not nearly so easy to get into as this office, but it was a long way from being impregnable; sooner or later, somebody could get inside and destroy or even steal those magazines. That was a fact and I had damned well better pay attention to it. Have another lock put on the front door and the back door. And increase my personal property insurance right away, no matter how much it cost for the premiums. And then just hope to God I did not come home someday to find what I had found here.

A couple of minutes passed. Then two cars pulled up at the curb below-Eberhardt’s Dodge and an unmarked police sedan-and Eb and two other guys got out and entered the building. I returned to the desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it, where there were none of the drying worms of white glue. Pretty soon I heard the grinding of the elevator, then their steps in the hall, and the door opened and they came in.

Eberhardt took one long look at the office and said, “Jesus Christ.”

“I told you it was bad.”

“Looks like a psycho job,” one of the other guys said. He had a field-lab case in one hand. “Somebody doesn’t like you worth a damn.”

“Yeah.”

While the lab boys went to work, picking their way through the mess on the floor, I stepped into the hall with Eberhardt. He said then, “Hell of a thing to walk into. You okay, paisan? ”

“More or less.”

“Don’t make a grudge deal out of it, huh?”

“You know me better than that, Eb. Besides, if anybody finds out who did it, it’ll be you. Or Donleavy, maybe.”

“If there’s a connection.”

“The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”

“We’ll see.”

“Did your man find out anything new in Bodega?”

“Nothing positive,” he said. “The Carding kid left all of his belongings behind when he disappeared, but that may not mean much; none of what little stuff there is is worth anything. And if anybody up there knows where he is or why he left, they’re not talking. Friend of his, Steve Farmer, did say that he’d been kind of secretive for a few days. Maybe writing an article of some kind; that’s what Farmer thinks.”

I remembered Lainey Madden saying that Jerry had not come down to San Francisco last weekend for that same apparent reason. I said, “Farmer didn’t have any idea what this article might be about?”

“No. There wasn’t any sign of it among Jerry’s effects, either.”

“Well, I’m going up there tomorrow myself. Maybe I can nose up something. Okay with you?”

“Go ahead. But it’ll probably be a waste of time.”

“I know. One thing I can do, though, is ask Farmer about a girl named Bobbie Reid. He used to date her, and she was also a friend of Christine Webster’s. She committed suicide about a month ago, because of some sort of personal problem.”

Eberhardt cocked an eyebrow. “You find all that out today?”

“Yes. From Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax.”

“You can be a pretty good cop when you set your mind to it,” he said without irony. “What else do you know about this Reid girl?”

I filled him in on what few other details I had learned. “The suicide report ought to tell you her next-of-kin,” I said, “and maybe who some of her other friends were.”

“I’ll have Klein check it out.”

It was another fifteen minutes before one of the lab guys put his head out and said they were finished. Eberhardt and I went back inside. Most of the file papers and folders had been gathered up into loose stacks, and the rest of the wreckage had been stirred around in a methodical sort of way; the desk and chairs and file cabinets and a few other things had a fine dusting of fingerprint powder on them.

“We found two dominant sets of latents,” one of the lab boys said, “but one set is bound to be yours. Are your prints on file with the Department?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We’ll just have to hope the other set is on file too-somewhere. And that they belong to whoever laid into this place.”

“How long will it take to run a check?”

“Not too long, local and state. If we have to go to the FBI,” he said wryly, “it could take days.”

Eberhardt said, “Call him at home later tonight or first thing in the morning, either way. I’ll give you the number.”

“Right.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much,” the other guy said. “Lock on the door wasn’t jimmied; probably picked with a credit card or something. Smudges on a couple of the papers that seem to be oxblood shoe polish. No help in that, though, unless it’s a rare brand that can be traced to certain dealers.” He shrugged. “And that’s it.”

The three of them left not long afterward. When they were gone I spent some time scraping the dried glue off the desktop, putting things back into the drawers. But my heart wasn’t in it. It would take me at least a day to sweep up the floors, scrub the walls and furniture, sort out the files, get somebody to cart away the slashed chair and somebody else to bring in a new one. Next week-when some of the pain and anger had dulled and I could face the task with a sense of detachment.

I got out of there at eight-thirty. And home a little before nine. I forced myself to eat a sandwich I did not want and thought about calling Laura Nichols; but I had nothing of substance to report and no desire to talk to her in any event. I did call Dennis Litchak again, to tell him I would be away tomorrow and to ask him to check on the flat for me from time to time. He said he would.

At a quarter of ten, just as I was about to head into the shower, the phone rang. It was one of the lab guys: they had run the second set of latent prints through the state and local computers. No card match, no ID. Whoever the prints belonged to had never been fingerprinted in the state of California.

Terrific.

So I took my shower and went to bed and eventually to sleep. And had a nightmare about coming home, opening the front door, and being inundated by toppling stacks of pulp magazines, all of which had been ripped to pieces. Voices kept screaming accusations at me, saying things like, “Look what you’ve done to us! You’re supposed to be the last of the lone-wolf private eyes; why didn’t you protect your own kind?” Then the voices became eyes, thousands of eyes that glared balefully at me while I fought to keep from drowning in a sea of shredded pulp paper.

It was absurd stuff, of course, with comic overtones. But it scared hell out of me just the same.