Bleeders

3

The apartment building was on Locust Street a half block off California and close to the Presidio. Built in the twenties, judging from its ornate brick-and-plaster facade; once somebody’s modestly affluent private home, long ago cut up into three floors of studios and one-bedroom apartments. It had no garage, forcing its tenants — like most of those in the neighboring buildings — into street parking.

I drove by slowly, looking for two things: a parking place and the low-slung black MG. I found the car easily enough — it was squeezed into a too-narrow space at the end of the block, its front wheels canted up onto the sidewalk — but there wasn’t space for my car on that block, or the next, or anywhere in the vicinity. Back on California, I quit hunting and pulled into a bus zone. If I got a ticket, I got a ticket.

Not much chance I’d need a weapon for the rest of it, but sometimes trouble comes when you least expect it. So I unclipped the .38 Colt Bodyguard from under the dash, slipped it into my coat pocket before I stepped out.

The building on Locust had a tiny foyer with the usual row of built-in mailboxes. I found the button for 2-C, leaned on it. This was the ticklish part; I was banking on the fact that one voice sounds pretty much like another over an intercom. Turned out not to be an issue: The squawk box stayed silent and the door release buzzed instead. Cocky. Hyped on drugs, adrenaline, or both. And just plain greedy-stupid.

I pushed inside, climbed the stairs to the second floor. Apartment 2-C was the first on the right. The door opened just as I reached it, and Annette Byers poked her head out and said with shiny-eyed excitement, “You made real good—”

The rest of it snapped off when she got a clear look at me; the excitement gave way to confusion and sudden alarm, froze her with the door half open. I had time to move up on her, wedge my shoulder against the door before she could decide to jump back and slam it in my face. She let out a bleat and tried to kick me as I crowded her inside. I caught her arms, then gave her a shove to get clear of her, and nudged the door closed with my heel.

“I’ll start screaming,” she said. Shaky bravado, the kind without anything to back it up. Fright showed through the bright glaze in her eyes. “These walls are paper thin, and I got a neighbor who’s a cop.”

That last was a lie. I said, “Go ahead. Be my guest.”

“Who the hell do you think you are—”

“You know who I am, Annette. And why I’m here. The reason’s on the table over there.”

In spite of herself, she glanced to her left. The apartment was a none-too-clean or tidy studio, and the kitchenette and dining area were on that side. The big cowhide briefcase sat on the dinette table, its lid raised. I couldn’t see inside from where I stood, but then I didn’t need to.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

She hadn’t been back very long; she still wore the heavy coat and a wool stocking cap that completely hid her streaky blond hair. Her cheeks were flushed — the cold night, money, lust, methamphetamine, now fear. She was attractive enough in a too-ripe way, intelligent enough to hold down a job with a neighborhood travel service, and immoral enough to have been in trouble with the law before this. Twenty-three, single, and a crankhead: She’d been arrested once for possession and once for trying to peddle meth to an undercover cop. Crystal meth, the worst kind there is.

“Counting the cash, right?” I said.

“... What?”

“What you were doing when I rang the bell. It’s all there — seven hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills, according to plan.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You said that already.”

“Fuck you.”

“Uh-huh.”

I moved a little to get a better scan of the studio. Sitting area on my left, sleeping arrangement behind that with a Chinese-style folding screen hiding the bed. I located the telephone on the breakfast bar that partitioned off the kitchenette, one of those cordless types with a built-in answering machine. The gadget beside it was a portable cassette recorder. She hadn’t bothered to put the recorder away before leaving tonight; there’d been no reason to. The tape would still be inside.

I looked at her again. “I’ve got to admit, you handle that MG pretty well. Reckless as hell, though, the way you went flying out of the park on a red light.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You came damn close to causing a fatal accident. If you had, you’d be facing a manslaughter charge right now. Think about that.”

“I don’t know what—” She broke off and backed away a couple of paces, one hand rubbing the side of her face, her tongue making snakelike flicks between her lips. It was sinking in, how it had all gone wrong, how much trouble she was in. “You couldn’t’ve followed me. I know you didn’t.”

“That’s right, I couldn’t and I didn’t.”

“Then how—?”

“Think about that, too. You’ll figure it out.”

Silence. And then sudden comprehension, like a low-wattage bulb coming on behind her eyes. “You... you knew about me all along.”

“You, the plan, everything.”

“The plan? But... how could you? I don’t—”

The downstairs bell made a sudden racket. Her gaze jerked past me to the intercom unit next to the door. She sucked in her lower lip, bit down hard on it.

“Now I wonder who that can be,” I said.

“Oh God...”

“Don’t use the intercom, just the door release.”

She did what I told her, moving as if her joints had begun to stiffen. I went the other way, first to the breakfast bar where I popped the tape out of the cassette player and slipped it into my pocket, then to the dinette table. I lowered the lid on the briefcase, fastened the catches. I had the case in my left hand when she turned to face me again.

She said, “What’re you gonna do with the money?”

“Give it back to its rightful owner.”

“Jay. It belongs to him.”

“Like hell it does.”

“Try to keep it for yourself, I’ll bet that’s what you’re really gonna do.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Well, it won’t happen.” She stamped her foot. “You hear me? You don’t have any right to that money!”

“You dumb-ass kid,” I said disgustedly, “neither do you.”

She quit looking at me. When she made to open the door I told her no, to wait for his knock. She stood with her back to me, shoulders hunched, face pale.

Knuckles on the door. She opened it then without hesitation, and he blew in talking fast the way he did when he was keyed up. “Oh, baby, baby, we did it, we pulled it off.”

“Shit! You’re not supposed to be here now...”

“I know, but I couldn’t wait.” He grabbed her, started to pull her against him. And that was when he saw me.

“Hello, Cohalan,” I said.

He went rigid for about five seconds, then disentangled himself from Byers and stood gawping at me. His mouth worked, but nothing came out. Manic as hell in his office, talking a blue streak — nerves and a hit or two of speed. He was a crankhead the same as her; that was the real reason he’d gone out to the john earlier. But facing me now, he was speechless. Lies were easy for him; the truth would have to be dragged out.

I told him to close the door. He did it automatically and then swung snarling on Annette Byers.

“You let him follow you here!”

“I didn’t. He already knew about me. He knows everything.”

“No, how could—”

“You stupid dickhead, you didn’t fool him for a minute. Not for a minute.”

“Shut up!” His eyes shifted to me. “Don’t listen to her. She’s the one who’s been blackmailing me, she—”

“Knock it off, Cohalan,” I said. “Nobody’s been blackmailing you. You two are the bleeders — a cute little shakedown to steal your wife’s money. You couldn’t just grab the bundle without facing theft charges, and you couldn’t get any of it by divorcing her because a spouse’s inheritance isn’t community property. So you cooked up the phony blackmail scam. What were you planning to do with the cash? Try to run it up into a big score in the stock market or in Vegas? Buy a load of crystal meth for resale, maybe?”

“You see?” Byers said bitterly. “He knows everything.”

Cohalan waggled his head. He’d gotten over his initial shock and he looked stricken; his hands had started that scoop-shovel trick at his sides. “You believed me. I know you did.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I didn’t believe you. I’m a better actor than you, is all. Your story didn’t sound right from the first. Too elaborate, loaded with improbabilities. Seventy-five thousand is much too large a blackmail bite for any past crime short of murder, and you swore to me — your wife, too — you weren’t guilty of a major felony. Blackmailers seldom work in big bites anyway. They bleed their victims in small bites to keep them from throwing the hook. We just didn’t buy it, either of us.”

“We? Jesus, you mean... you and Carolyn...”

“That’s right. You were never my client, Cohalan — it’s been your wife all along. Why do you think I never asked you for a retainer? Or suggested we mark the money just in case?”

He muttered something and pawed his face.

“She showed up at my office right after you did the first time,” I said. “If she hadn’t, I’d have gone to her myself. She’s been suspicious all along, and when you hit her with the big bite, she figured it for a scam right away. She thought you might be having an affair, that that’s where the money was going. Didn’t take me long to find out about Annette. You never had a clue you were being followed, did you? Once I knew about her, it was easy enough to put the rest of it together, including the business with the money drop tonight.” I showed him my teeth. “And here we are.”

“Damn you,” he said, but there was no heat in the words. “You and that frigid bitch both.”

He wasn’t referring to Annette Byers, but she took the opportunity to dig into him again. “Wise guy. I told you it was a bad idea to hire a goddamn private cop—”

“Shut up, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t keep telling me to shut up.”

“Shut up shut up shut up!”

“You son of a—”

“Don’t say it. I’ll slap you silly.”

“You won’t slap anybody,” I said. “Not as long as I’m around.”

He pawed his face again. “What’re you going to do?”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“You can’t turn us in. You don’t have any proof... it’s your word against ours.”

“Wrong again.” I showed him the voice-activated recorder I’d had hidden in my pocket the entire evening. High-tech, state-of-the-art equipment, courtesy of George Agonistes, fellow investigator and electronics genius. “Everything that was said in your office and in this room tonight is on tape. I’ve also got the cassette tape Annette played when she called your office number. Voice prints will prove you were talking to yourself on the phone, giving yourself instructions for the money drop. If your wife wants to press charges, you’re looking at jail time. Both of you.”

“She won’t press charges. Not Carolyn.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

“Jay,” Byers said, “don’t let him walk out of here with our money.” A frantic note had come into her voice. “Don’t let him.”

Cohalan said to me, “I suppose you intend to take it straight back to her.”

“No, he’s gonna try to keep it for himself. Stop him, for God’s sake. Stop him, Jay!”

“Straight back to your wife, that’s right,” I said. “And if you’ve got any idea of trying to take it away from her, tonight or any time, get it out of your head. That money’s going where you’ll never lay hands on it again.”

“No,” he said. Then, “I could take it away from you.”

“You think so?”

Byers: “Go ahead, do it!”

Cohalan: “I’m as big as you... younger, faster.”

That’s one of the things that makes crank such a nasty drug. It not only speeds you up, it creates a false sense of power and invincibility. On meth, cowards like Cohalan start to think they’re tough guys after all.

I repocketed the recorder. I could have showed him the .38, but I grinned at him instead — the kind of death’s-head grin I can work up at times like this. “Go ahead and try,” I said.

“I need that money, damn you.”

“Go ahead and try.”

Sweat made Cohalan’s face shiny; his stare seemed to be losing focus, the way eyes do when they’re about to cross.

Byers half-screamed, “Well, what’re you waiting for? Take it!”

He ignored her. Weighing the odds, wondering if he really was man enough, wondering if he’d loaded his bloodstream with sufficient crank to make him man enough.

“Make your move, Cohalan. Or else step away from the door. You’ve got five seconds.”

He moved in three, as I took a step toward him. Sideways, clear of both me and the door. Not enough drug, too much yellow.

“Bullshitter,” Byers spat at him, “pansy-ass!” And in the next second she charged me with her hands hooked into claws, one grabbing for the briefcase, the other slashing red-tipped nails at my face.

Men should not hit women; that’s an edict I believe in and live by. But in this case I had no choice. I twisted just in time to avoid being raked and backhanded her across the side of the head. It stopped her, put her enough off balance so that I could follow up with a hard shove. Cohalan caught her on reflex, held her. She fought free of him, glared at me but thought better of another rush. She turned on him instead, called him a name. He called her something worse. She one-upped him and then some; she had a mouth like a sewer rat.

I went out in the middle of it and closed the door against their vicious, whining voices. Bleeders, druggies, fools. Jesus.

Outside, the fog had thickened to a near drizzle, slicking the pavement and turning the lines of parked cars along both curbs into two-dimensional onyx shapes. I walked quickly to California. Nobody had bothered my tired old wheels in the bus zone. I locked the briefcase in the trunk, got rolling, then used the car phone to call Carolyn Dain. It was Dain because like a lot of women these days, Kerry included, she’d preferred to keep her own name after marriage.

She answered on the second ring, and as soon as I identified myself she said, “We were right, weren’t we.” Flat statement, not a question. “The whole thing was just a... scam.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dain.”

“Yes. So am I. Where is he now? Still with her?”

“At her apartment. Both high on methamphetamine. Did you know he was a user?”

“I knew,” she admitted. “It’s been going on for a long time, as long as... the other women. I should have told you.”

“Yes, you should have.” Not that it had taken me long to figure it out on my own. “I put a scare into them and I don’t think he’ll bother you tonight. But you’d be wise to spend the night someplace else.”

“I’ve already made arrangements.”

“Okay, good. Are you going to press charges?”

“I... don’t know yet.”

“Well, if you don’t do it immediately, I’d advise you to stay away from your husband so he can’t influence you in any way. And also not to waste any time putting the money into a safe deposit box or a bank account in your name only.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I have the cash with me, the full seventy-five thousand. I wouldn’t hold out any hope of getting the rest of your inheritance back.”

“I don’t care about that right now.”

“I can bring the money out to you. Or meet you wherever you’ll be staying...”

“I mean I don’t care about any of the money right now,” she said. “Please don’t be offended, but I don’t want to see anyone tonight except the person I’m staying with. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

“Yes, ma’am, but seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I don’t like being responsible for it.”

“You’re bonded. I trust you.”

“Still, I’d prefer to—”

“Don’t you have someplace safe to keep it? Just for tonight?”

“I suppose so, but...”

“Please. Just for tonight. I can’t... I simply can’t cope with any more of this. Please.”

“If you insist,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll keep it until tomorrow, but you’ll have to take possession as soon as possible.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Let me have the address and phone number of where—”

“I’ll call you at your office,” she said, and the line went dead.

Well, hell. Shaken up, the underpinnings of her life torn loose... who could blame her for needing time and space, giving short shrift to the money? It was the root cause of all this. And she didn’t much care about financial matters anyway, except to provide the basics; she’d told me that the day I took her on as a client. Music was what she cared about. She taught music appreciation and the history of classical music at White Rock School, one of the city’s private high schools. Played the flute “passably well” and was gathering data for a “probably-never-to-be-written” biography of an Austrian musicographer named Ludwig Köchel, who had cataloged all of Mozart’s compositions in chronological order. What a woman with her taste and interests was doing married to a sorry-ass specimen like Jay Cohalan was anybody’s guess.

I turned the car around and drove downtown to my office on O’Farrell. The neighborhood, on the westward fringe of the Tenderloin, is not the safest at eleven o’clock, despite some upscaling in recent years: a heavy influx of Vietnamese and Cambodian families and the reclamation of the nearby Sgt. John Macaulay Park, once a notorious drug gallery and open-air toilet, now a children-only playground. Still, crack dealers, homeless alcoholics, and recent parolees roamed the area at night, and it pays to be vigilant. Fortunately there was a parking space a couple of doors from my building. I made sure I had the immediate vicinity to myself before I unlocked the trunk and hauled the briefcase out.

The building is a tomb at this hour. Nobody in either of the other two businesses that occupy it — Bay City Realtors on the ground floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor — stays on the premises past 5:30. There’d been a brace of break-ins a few years back, though in neither case had anything been stolen from my top-floor office, probably because that was in the days before I’d hired Tamara to computerize the operation, and there hadn’t been much there worth stealing. Pressure on the owner had led to better security measures, and we hadn’t had any trouble since.

I rode the tiny, creaking elevator to the third floor, keyed myself in, put on a light, and went straight to the coat closet. That’s where the office safe is, bolted to the floor in one corner. It’s an old Mosler that anybody with a minimum of safecracking skills could have open in twenty minutes, but since I seldom keep anything of value inside, I’d never seen a need to pay for an upgrade. Carolyn Dain’s money ought to be secure enough overnight, given the fact that no one but me knew its whereabouts.

The briefcase was too bulky to fit into the safe, so I unpacked the stacks of bills and stored them in neat rows. It was an odd feeling, handling that much cash — as if I were doing something that was not quite wholesome. Maybe it had to do with all the people I’d encountered in thirty-some years as a cop and private investigator, all the scheming and violence and suffering I’d seen in quests for stacks of bills like these. Filthy lucre. Blood money. Cold, hard cash. Throwaway terms that had deeper, much more bitter meanings for men and women like me.

When I was done, I made sure the safe was locked, slid the empty case into the kneehole of my desk, locked up, and went home to a far better pair of human beings than I’d dealt with so far on this cold early-winter night.