Bleeders

15

The Alamo was a big hacienda-style place, stucco and exposed beams and tile roof, that took up most of a block just off El Camino Real. A neon roof sign spelled out the name in a garish dazzle of pink and green and yellow. All of the exterior was brightly lit. Floodlights trained on the stucco walls showed them to have been painted pink; other floods illuminated a good-sized parking lot that extended from the front around on one side.

The lot was half full when I got there at seven o’clock. I found an empty space about equidistant between the two main entrances, one neon-marked Restaurant, the other Salsa, and went in through the latter. More bright neon tubing, muraled walls, booths and tables, and a slick-looking dance floor ringing a center bar. At the far end was a dais, empty now except for half a dozen standing microphones; it was too early for live music, if they even had a band performing on Mondays. Canned Latin music blared from loudspeakers. Two large TV sets mounted on opposite walls showed a Monday Night Football game in progress. Most of the twenty or so patrons were watching the game — silent, violent action played out in pantomime to the hammering salsa beat, not my idea of an ideal combination.

I made my way to the bar, scanning faces as I went. Nearly all were young, twenties and thirties, and none was familiar. I ordered a bottle of Dos Equis, in keeping with the motif, and when the black-shirted bartender served it, I showed him the photo printout of Charlie Bright, saying that Bright was the son of an old friend, and I’d been told he was a regular here. The bartender squinted in the dim light, shook his head. “Don’t know him, man.” I asked if he knew anybody named Dingo. Another headshake and a walkaway.

There was one cocktail waitress on duty; I got the same negative response from her. For twenty minutes I stayed put at the bar, nursing the beer. People came in, people went out. No Charlie Bright. A pair of swing doors had a green-neon Restaurant sign over them; I walked over and entered the other half of the Alamo.

Crowded in there, men, women, and kids stuffing themselves in booths and at tables. A young hostess outfitted in a peasant blouse and a flaring Mexican skirt led me to a corner table. Her reaction to the photo was a shrug, a half-smile, and “Sorry, I never seen him before.” Mexico by way of Brooklyn or the Bronx.

I hadn’t eaten since lunch, so I ordered a small plate of barbecue beef brisket and managed to get most of it down. Too edgy to care much about food. Stranger surrounded by strangers in a strange land, waiting for one familiar face that didn’t appear.

Back into the club. More young people now, none of them Bright. A second waitress had come on duty; I took a table in her section. Well, she said when she’d had a look at Bright’s likeness, maybe she’d seen him once or twice, but she couldn’t be sure. “We get a lot of customers — this is a real popular place, you know?” As for Dingo: “That’s a funny name. I don’t know anybody with a funny name like that.”

I nursed another bottle of Dos Equis. The big room kept filling up, a good crowd for a Monday night. More strangers. And I began to stand out among them: I was more than twice the age of ninety percent of the clientele. Glances, open looks, a few whispered exchanges. I kept glancing at my watch, fidgeting, staring toward the entrance — making it plain that I was waiting for somebody who should have shown up long ago. But I couldn’t keep up the pretense indefinitely. And the canned music seemed louder, more strident, and strobe lights had begun flashing over the dance floor. The racket, the assault of colored lights created a surreal atmosphere, impairing my vision and giving me a headache. In that pulsing, light-and-dark crush of bodies I would have had trouble recognizing Kerry from more than a few feet away.

I gave it up, went out into the cold night and walked around until my head cleared. Then I got into the car, rolled the window partway down, and sat there feeling frustrated. After nine now. Long damn day, and nothing much to show for it. No news from Joe DeFalco that I didn’t already know, no word from Nick Kinsella, no new leads or additional data on Annette Byers’ illegitimate son. And now tonight, no Dingo and no Charlie Bright.

Hang around here how much longer? Couple of hours? Until midnight? I ought to go home, get some sleep. Sure, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep much; mostly lie wide-eyed in the dark, listening to Kerry’s breathing, listening to the clicks. Might as well stay put, wrapped in the dark cocoon of the car, for as long as I could stand it.

I called the condo to let Kerry know I would be late. We didn’t talk long. She was fine, Emily was fine, I was fine — there did not seem to be much else to say long distance.

Minutes died slowly after that. Another stakeout, another handful of lost time. Most of my life spent in situations like this, waiting, vegetating. Suspended animation. Dying by inches and clock ticks.

Better than already being dead, I thought.

Better than lying in cold storage like Carolyn Dain and her husband.

Yes, sure, but they didn’t know it. Awareness for them had ceased; time for them stood still. By the grace of God I had been granted more minutes, hours, days, months, maybe years, and here I was killing off some of that precious gift in another dark, lifeless stakeout. Didn’t I owe it to myself, to Kerry and Emily, to use what time I had left in healthier, pleasanter ways?

Kerry’s voice echoed in my mind. You can’t keep on doing the things you did twenty or thirty years ago... The hunter, always the hunter... Can’t you understand I need you, Emily needs you — alive safe?

And Ben Duryea’s. Christ, some days. I’m getting too old for this job... My problem is, I never learned how to relax. Maybe guys like us can learn, though.

And mine to Duryea: Maybe we can. And mine to Kerry: Maybe you’re right.

Maybe, maybe, maybe...

Ten o’clock. Cars rolled into the lot, faces appeared and then disappeared inside the Alamo. A parade of unknowns. A wasteland of strangers.

Ten-thirty.

Ten-forty.

And another car entered the lot, this one moving a little too fast so that its tires squealed on the turn and when the driver braked on the blacktop. I watched its lights swing away from where I was, loop around to the side, and then come back again. Looking for a parking space, finally finding one in the row behind me. The driver hopped out, passed alone between two cars twenty yards to my left — into the garish light from the neon and one of the floodlights.

Charlie Bright.

Tall, thin, red-haired, wearing a Western-style shirt and Levi’s and sharp-toed cowboy boots. Unmistakably Charlie Bright.

He was in a hurry, almost running. Man with a purpose, heading straight for the club entrance. Briefly I thought about going in after him, but it would have been a mistake; too many people in there, too much chance of him either making trouble or disappearing on me. Wiser to wait out here, brace him when he returned to his car... no matter how long it took.

Didn’t take long at all, as it turned out. Less than ten minutes. And there he was coming through the club entrance, still in a hurry, moving on a line toward where his car was parked. But I didn’t get out and brace him as I’d planned because he was no longer alone.

The guy with him had a fireplug build, wore a black hat and a fringed suede jacket. He moved at an almost leisurely pace, forcing Bright to lag back to keep from outdistancing him. When they passed parallel to me, I heard Bright say in an agitated Texas drawl, “Come on, man, let’s don’t take all night,” and the fireplug answer, “Stay loose, will you,” and Bright again, fading, “... told you, I got to have...”

I adjusted the rearview mirror, couldn’t see them, and put the window down and fiddled with the side mirror until I picked them up in the shadows alongside Bright’s wheels. Two blobs doing something that I couldn’t make out, but it did not take much imagination to figure what it was. Drug deal, money and methamphetamines or some other controlled substance changing hands. From the snatch of dialogue I’d overheard, it seemed Bright was the buyer.

I started the engine, put on the lights, crawled out of the space and around toward the street exit. From the edge of the row where Bright was parked I could see that the two of them had finished their transaction; the fireplug was backtracking to the club and Bright was getting into his car. I stayed put, idling, a wait of no more than five seconds. He fast-backed out of the space, came flying past me and aimed for El Camino when he cleared the lot.

The red light there slowed him up, gave me time to roll close behind and get a good look at what he was driving. Ford Taurus, light-colored, newish. The license plate was dirt-smeared, and in the uncertain light I couldn’t tell if one of the numerals was a three or an eight. The light changed; he was off again, not quite jumping it, into a left on El Camino.

I repeated the Ford’s plate number aloud half a dozen times, committing it to memory with both a three and an eight in sequence. Half a mile north, another red light caught Bright, but an SUV slid in behind him before I could get there. I drew up alongside him, going slow. The angle was wrong for a clear reading of the Ford’s plate.

He led me straight up El Camino through San Carlos. Still driving fast, but not recklessly — not with drugs in the car. Red light again at the San Mateo line; I couldn’t maneuver in behind him there, either. I hung back in his lane this time: changing lanes and speeds is an effective way to keep a subject from spotting a tail.

A few streets beyond the Hillsdale Shopping Center, Bright made a sudden sharp left turn without either slowing or signaling. The move caught me fifty yards back; and I had to wait for a couple of sets of oncoming headlights to clear before I could swing after him. He was two blocks away by then. As I accelerated, the Ford’s taillights flashed and he went sliding around another corner, pointing north once more.

When I got there and started my turn I saw him again — making an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street. My first thought was that he’d spotted me after all, was going to try some crazy stunt to elude me or force a confrontation. But that wasn’t it. A parking place was what he was after, in front of a four-story apartment complex that took up the entire east side of the block.

Along the west side was a solid line of parked cars; there was nothing I could do but keep on going, past where Bright was now jockeying the Ford into the space — the only damn space on the entire block. I had to go all the way to the next corner before I could pull off, and at that I had to park illegally in front of a fire hydrant.

On foot I cut across the street, not quite running. When I came onto the sidewalk I could see Bright leave the Ford, head up the front walk to the apartment building’s main entrance. Seconds later he was gone inside. By the time I got there, there was no sign of him in the lighted lobby.

The banks of aluminum mailboxes lining both vestibule walls totaled twenty-four on each — forty-eight apartments. All but two of the name slots were filled, and none of the names was Bright. Living in one of the unmarked apartments, or living here under another name, or visiting one of the tenants, or holed up with one of the tenants. And I had no good way of immediately finding out which. You can’t start ringing door buzzers at eleven o’clock at night and expect to get cooperative responses.

I went back down to the curb and found the Ford Taurus. The street was empty; I tried both doors. Locked. Naturally. Even screwed-up parole violators locked their cars nowadays. At the rear I squatted to check the license plate. The one numeral in question was an eight.

Bright’s car? Or somebody else’s that he’d borrowed? Unless I wanted to hang around for another, almost certainly futile stakeout, I’d have to wait until tomorrow for the answer. And to find out what, if anything, Charlie Bright knew about the bald man.

Tomorrow was soon enough, I decided. I’d waited this long; I could wait a few hours longer.

A Department of Motor Vehicles check used to be a simple proposition. The names and addresses of California’s registered vehicle owners were a matter of public record and could be accessed by anyone. That all changed some years ago when a TV actress was murdered by a stalker who’d gotten her address through the DMV. The new antistalking laws, which included the sealing of DMV records to the general public, are necessary and laudable, and I wouldn’t have them any other way, but they do make my job more difficult. Even with Tamara and her computer skills and a cultivated DMV contact, it takes a while for a detective agency to get a plate number run and the particulars on its owner.

I sat in the office, fidgeting, waiting for Tamara to lay the necessary groundwork. It was one of those cold, gray, bleak mornings that give vent to indecision and self-doubt. The fact that I was tired and headachey after a dream-plagued night didn’t help matters any. I kept wondering if I’d have been better off going straight to San Mateo and staking out the apartment complex and the Ford Taurus; calling Tamara for the DMV check instead of coming here to the office. What if Bright was gone when I finally did get there? What if the name of the Ford’s owner didn’t match any of the building’s tenants? What if, what if.

I called Eastside Meat Packers, to find out if Bright had gone to work today. Negative. This time he hadn’t even bothered to call in and it had cost him his job. So if what I’d witnessed last night was in fact a drug buy, it could be that Bright was too stoned or strung out today to drive to Emeryville, which in turn made it likely that he was still somewhere in that San Mateo apartment complex. The thought made me feel a little more positive.

As I watched Tamara at her Mac computer, it occurred to me that if I wasn’t so damn stubborn and technophobic and rooted in the old ways, and had learned computer skills myself long ago, I could run DMV checks myself instead of having to rely on her all the time. I could be sitting down there in San Mateo with a laptop doing two things at once, not killing time but making good use of it. Too late for this old dog to learn new tricks? Probably, given my disposition and temperament. The world wasn’t mine any longer; it belonged to Tamara and her generation. And that included the detective business... her business now as much as mine. Why not step aside then, let her take it all the way into the twenty-first century? She was fully capable of making it grow and prosper in the new millenium as I never could.

I was brooding on that when she said, “Got it. Want me to print it out for you?”

“No. Just read it off.”

“Ford’s registered to Kirsten Sabat, S-a-b-a-t, nineteen-o-nine Third Avenue, San Mateo.”

Nineteen-o-nine Third Avenue was the address of the apartment complex. I worked my memory, but I couldn’t recall if Kirsten Sabat had been one of the names on the mailboxes. Too many names, too late at night, and I’d been too focused on Charlie Bright.

Tamara asked, “Want me to run a driver’s license and employment check on her?”

“Might as well.” I was already on my feet, shrugging into my overcoat. “But it’s low prority. Dingo, Jackie Spoons, Annette Byers’ background first.”

“Right. I should have something pretty soon on the father of her bastard kid. You going to San Mateo?’

I nodded. “Keep me updated.”

“You do the same, hear?”

Tamara called sooner than expected, and not for the reason she’d indicated. I was still in the city, just climbing the entrance ramp to 101 South near the city’s best new construction in years, Pac Bell Park, when the car phone buzzed.

She said, “Man just called for you. Nick Kinsella.”

“About time. What’d he say?”

“Wants to see you. Said he’s got something for you.”

“Tell you what it is?”

“Wouldn’t say.”

“Where is he? Blacklight Tavern?”

“Yup.”

“Change of plans then,” I said. “The Blacklight and Kinsella first, then San Mateo.”