Bleeders

20

I was in a foul humor by the time I got back to the city. I could not shake the feeling that I’d abandoned Annette Byers, left Grant Johnson holding an empty bag. Irrational on both counts. Byers, for Christ’s sake, was an extortionist, a thief, an accessory to the murders of Carolyn Dain and Jay Cohalan and the near-murder of me. Cold, ruthless, mercenary, badly screwed up on drugs — nobody to feel sorry for. Unless you’d seen her lying there with the red drool coming out of her mouth, the savage bruises on her belly and abdomen, the evident internal damage. A scared, battered, pain-wracked kid — that was the image I’d carried away with me. And Johnson, for all his shortcomings, was another scared kid with a dependent wife and three little kids of his own. Yeah, I felt bad. But not bad enough to turn around and go back at any point, or to relinquish custodianship of the money.

If I was reading correctly what Byers had said in her delirium, she and Manganaris had had some sort of falling out — over the seventy-five thousand, likely — and he’d gone to work on her with his fists. Might have ended up killing her just as he’d killed the others, except that she’d managed to turn the tables somehow, put him out of commission long enough to escape with the briefcase. It was possible she’d made him dead, but I didn’t want to believe it. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone begging to a former lover she hadn’t seen in years, all scared and desperate; she could have holed up anywhere and felt safe enough. Fear of the police alone wasn’t enough to have sent her into hiding in that isolated fishing shack. Fear of Manganaris was.

And where was Manganaris? Out somewhere hunting for her? Hiding at the Pueblo Street address? Wherever he was, he had to be in a frenzy of hate, rage, frustration. And if he was using meth or some other drug, he was worse than a madman on the loose — he was a walking time bomb.

Oh, they were some pair, Byers and Dingo. Set up a bleeder scam, doublecross Cohalan, murder two people in cold blood, doublecross each other, do physical harm to each other — all for seventy-five thousand dollars that neither of them had held onto for very long and would never touch again. Senseless from start to finish. Crazy. And I was feeling a thin worm of pity for her? Hell, that made me crazy, too, didn’t it?

I drove straight to O’Farrell, took the briefcase upstairs to the office. Tamara’s mood was little better than mine; her computer had crashed, been down for nearly three hours, and she’d only just gotten it up and working again. So she had nothing more for me on Manganaris, nothing yet on the other three who shared the name.

While I locked the stacks of cash in the safe for the second time, I told her about Byers and Johnson. She had only two questions.

“What’ll you do if Johnson tells the law about you being at the shack?”

“I don’t think he will. But if he does I’ll stand up to the heat when the time comes. I can’t worry about it now.”

“And the money, what about that?”

“I don’t know yet. I doubt Johnson noticed my taking the briefcase, and Byers wouldn’t have let him see it or any more of the money than what she gave him for drugs. Maybe I’ll turn it over to Fuentes or Craddock. Maybe I’ll contact Mel Bishop and ask him if Carolyn Dain had a favorite charity and donate the money anonymously in her name. She had no living relatives.”

“Better some charity than the damn state,” Tamara said.

“Probably. But I just don’t know yet.”

The Pueblo Street address was an antiquated chipped-stucco apartment building in a low-income Visitacion Valley neighborhood across from the Cow Palace. Manganaris seemed to have downscaled rather than upscaled his standard of living when he moved. Or maybe he just hadn’t liked living in one place too long, cared little about his surroundings, and took whatever rental came along cheap.

Once I’d pinpointed the building, I drove around several blocks on the lookout for an Olds Cutlass. I spotted one, but it was the wrong year and had the wrong license plate. For all I knew, he was driving something else now, but it pays to cover all the bases.

I parked around the corner on Geneva and went to the building on foot, the .38 in my coat pocket and my hand wrapped around it. There was an iron-barred security gate, but it wasn’t locked; all I had to do was push it open and walk in. Some building. Byers’ address book had Dingo’s apartment number as 302. The elevator looked creaky and unreliable, and I did not want to be closed up in anything that small here. I climbed two flights of stairs that stank of Lysol and urine. Some half-wit had fastened a condom around the knob atop one of the railings; the walls were decorated with similarly unfunny sexual references and the inexplicable marks of taggers.

The third-floor hallway had a different odor: the olfactory remnants of somebody’s Mexican dinner cooked in lard. Mouth-breathing, walking on the balls of my feet, I eased my way along to 302. Laid an ear close to the thin door panel, heard nothing, and then flattened back against the wall next to the door and reached out to rap on the wood with my left hand. I had the gun halfway clear of my pocket as I waited.

No answer. No sound.

I tried again, got more of the same, and dropped my free hand to the doorknob. It turned freely. The only way to tell if that meant something or nothing was to go in there, fast and low, with the gun extended. I held a breath, started to open the door.

“Hey, you over there.”

Woman’s voice, behind me. I snapped my head around, letting go of the knob, shoving the .38 down out of sight. She hadn’t seen the weapon; she was in the doorway of an apartment across and down the hall, 305, and she stayed there when I turned to face her.

I put on a smile that felt tight and strained. “Yes, ma’am?”

“He ain’t there,” she said. “That crazy cueball better not show his face around here again, he knows what’s good for him. You wouldn’t be a cop?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s that mean, not exactly?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Relative of the cueball’s or what?”

“No. Business matter.”

“Business.” She snorted through her nose, a sound like a goose honking. “Monkey business, hah?”

I relaxed a little and moved over to where she stood. She was close to seventy, her round red face a mass of folds and seams like an apple that had been desiccated by the elements. Stringy gray-black hair lay in flat, sparse curls on a dandruff-flecked scalp. She wore a chenille bathrobe that looked as old as she was, and even at a distance of three feet I could tell that she had a fondness for sweet wine.

“He owes me something,” I said.

“Money?”

“Not anymore. When did you see him last?”

“Night I called the cops on him, that’s when.”

“What night was that?”

“Last Friday night. Hell, Saturday morning — three A.M.”

“Why? What happened?”

“What didn’t happen, you mean. Cussing, yelling, screaming, shooting, you name it. Woke up the whole damn building.”

“Shooting?”

“Fired a gun over there. Boom! I know a gunshot when I hear one.”

“Manganaris and a woman, is that right?”

“That’s what I told the cops. Him and his dolly, fighting, busting up the furniture, her screaming like a banshee. Then the gun went off, boom! and pretty quick she come running out like the devil himself was after her. I had my door cracked by then, and I saw her.”

“Was she carrying anything? A briefcase?”

“Had something in one hand, might’ve been a briefcase. All doubled over, clutching her middle. I didn’t see no blood, though. I don’t think she was shot.”

“What about him?”

“He come staggering out four minutes and eleven seconds after she did. I timed it on my clock.”

“Staggering, you said. Was he shot?”

“Didn’t see no blood on him, neither. But he was spitting cuss-words and holding his head. I hope she did shoot him. Serve that crazy cueball right for beating up women, wrecking a decent person’s sleep.”

“He been back here since?”

“Better not come back. I’ll call the cops again if he does, file another complaint against him.”

“You’re sure he hasn’t been here, even once?”

“Sure I’m sure.” Then she frowned, snorted, and breathed more cream sherry fumes at me. “What kind of question is that? You think I got nothing better to do than spy on my neighbors?”

“I didn’t mean it that way...”

“I’ll have you know I’m a respectable woman who minds her own business,” she said with haughty indignation and retreated into her apartment and slammed the door.

I walked soft to 302, eased the door open and myself inside, the .38 drawn in spite of what the woman had said. The apartment was two rooms of tasteless bargain-basement furniture, empty beer and wine bottles, the rotting remains of a couple of take-out meals. There’d been a fight in here, all right. Tables and chairs were askew, the shards of a ceramic lamp and cigarette butts from an upended ashtray littered the threadbare carpet, a cheap picture had been knocked off one wall and its glass splintered in the drop. There was a scorched hole in one of the sofa cushions that was large enough to have been made by a bullet; I dug around in the foam-rubber padding and found the slug, examined it briefly for traces of blood. Didn’t seem to be any. If Annette Byers had fired the gun, she’d evidently missed. Or possibly they’d struggled over it, and it had discharged that way. She must have smacked Manganaris with something — the gun, that busted lamp, one of the empty wine bottles — to put him down for those four minutes and eleven seconds.

There was nothing else for me in the living room, or in the pocket-size kitchenette, or in the equally tiny bathroom. In the bedroom, the sheets on the double bed were soiled and wadded together. The top of the single nightstand held an overflowing ashtray and a glass stained with red wine residue; the drawer under it was empty except for an opened package of condoms and a well-used crack pipe. The crack pipe said the police hadn’t bothered to search carefully; the fact that the door had been left unlocked confirmed their sloppy handling of the complaint.

The drawers in the bureau contained nothing that held my attention. Closet next. A few shirts and pants and a denim jacket on hangers, a pile of soiled clothing on the floor. Manganaris hadn’t spent much of his income, legal or illegal, on clothes or luxury items; most had probably gone for drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and food. The only other item in the closet was a battered old sailor’s duffel bag. It didn’t make him ex-navy or ex-merchant marine; you could buy duffels like that one in any army-navy store. At first I thought it was empty, but when I brushed my hand over an inside zipper compartment, something made a crinkly sound. I fished it out.

An old nine-by-twelve color photograph, wrinkled and torn along a couple of its edges. Posed group shot of a high school football team decked out in green-and-gold uniforms. A two-line boldface caption read:

Below that was a list of names, but the type was tiny and the light too poor in there for me to make them out. I took the photo into the bathroom, which had a stronger bulb, and used the little gadget magnifying glass on my keychain to scan the names. Second row, third from the left: Harold “Mean Joe” Manganaris. I squinted at the face that went with it. Yeah. He’d had all his hair then, but the bushy eyebrows and the snarling mouth were the same.

There was nothing on the front or back of the photo to tell me where East Central Valley High School was located. Tamara’s meat. I went back to the living room, to the phone I’d seen in there. It was still operational; I used it to call the agency. No problem, Tamara said, as long as East Central Valley was a California school. The State Board of Education would have a complete list. She’d know one way or another in a few minutes.

I folded the photograph, tucked it into my coat pocket, and let myself out. The mummified minder of her own business was peering out through her front door again. She said, “Hey, what you been doing in there? You ain’t got no right to be in there.”

“The door was unlocked.”

“Yeah? I thought those cops locked it when they were done poking around in there Friday night.”

“Evidently not.”

“You still ain’t got no right to be in there. That crazy cueball finds out, he won’t like it.”

“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like,” I said. “I told you, he owes me.”

“You didn’t steal nothing, did you?”

“No. There’s nothing worth stealing.”

“You sure about that? Nothing at all?”

“Why don’t you go over and have a look for yourself?”

She didn’t like that; she made a catlike spitting noise as I went past her and yelled at my back, “I ain’t that kind! I don’t trespass on other people’s property! Who you think you are anyway? I ought to call the cops on you!” She was still ranting as I went through the door to the stairwell.

I had just unlocked my car when the mobile phone went off. Tamara. Fast service — and the news was good. Very good.

“East Central Valley High’s a small school on the outskirts of Hollister,” she said.

“Hollister. Didn’t you tell me one of the other Manganarises lived there?”

“Near there, right. Mr. Adam Manganaris.”

“Address for him yet?”

She had one. Not much else on the man, but now that she knew about the school connection, she’d be able to ferret out any relationship between Harold Manganaris and his Hollister namesake.

Son and father.

It took Tamara just half an hour to turn up that information, and I was already on the road by then, heading south down 101. My gut feeling had been son and father; it felt right, and it was right. And where does a man like Dingo go, a man with no friends and no job and little or no cash left to feed his drug habit and no idea where to find Byers or the seventy-five thousand blood money and nowhere else to turn... where is he likely to go, at least for a short while, to regroup and refinance?

He goes home.

To his father’s place, the Outback Oasis, on Highway 152 east of Hollister.