Cases

Chapter Twenty-seven

Dunc drove north on Highway 99. That way he had started through familiar territory, going across the San Fernando Valley past Eagle Rock, out past the mission and half-completed seminary buildings. Then up and over the San Gabriel Mountains on the Grapevine and down into California’s great central valley. This was a three-hundred-mile oval bowl with the Sierra on one side, the Coastal Range on the other.

When he got to Chowchilla, the sun was near the tops of the Coast Range, silhouette after receding silhouette of hills the most intense purple he had ever seen. From here California 152 meandered west some one hundred miles to Highway 101, which would take him up through the Peninsula into San Francisco itself.

At Gilroy he turned north on 101. It was dark and he was tired and hungry, so he ate steak and eggs and cherry pie and drank three glasses of milk at the diner attached to the all-night station where he gassed up. He felt lonely and depressed; where was Penny right now?

The way north became endless: endless lights o£ oncoming cars, endless light-festooned trucks to pass when the opportunity offered, then, after San Jose, endless stoplights where important Peninsula arteries joined 101.

So he almost missed it: stopped by a red light for University Avenue, he was already moving before he saw a city limits sign: PALO ALTO. Palo Alto, where Jack Falkoner lived, the man with his duffel bag and precious notebooks in the boot of a little red MG.

He jerked the wheel over for a right turn, wandered around until he found a narrow raised earthen road that went out across a vast mud flat stretching too far for his high beams to reach. No houses, no traffic. Perfect place to find a wide place in the track and go to sleep.

At morning light he stretched, yawning, and stepped out to take a whiz and look around. He was so startled that he yelled “Hey!” out loud. He was surrounded by water a bare two feet below the road. Last night it had been five mud feet below the track.

He started to laugh. He’d obviously parked on a tidal mud flat and the tide had come in. What did a Minnesota kid know about tides? Good thing nobody had seen his momentary panic. Something to write Penny about. Penny...

Jack Falkoner was in the phone book. Dunc parked the Grey Ghost in front of a brown-shingled bungalow on the corner of Melville and Bryant off a wide through street called Middlefield Road. A sparkling neighborhood with overarching trees.

A curving walk led up between two carefully trimmed pine trees to the front door. The woman who answered the bell came to his shoulder, a vest-pocket Venus with an oval face and full sensuous lips. A tight halter and skimpy shorts barely contained rounded breasts and molded hips. She had it all: easy to imagine her handling a couple of lovers and a husband besides.

Except she had a beauty of a shiner, the flesh almost purple around her right eye. She must have reconsidered divorce.

Dunc managed to ask, “Mrs. Falkoner?” in a normal voice.

“Yes, I’m Ginny Falkoner.”

“Does Jack, uh, still live here?”

“Of course he does, why...”

She had a quick, almost strident voice. Dunc explained who he was and why he was there.

“Oh, that guy. Well, Jack’s at the gym, working out.”

Floyd Page’s Gym was over the Western Union office, with ceiling-to-waist windows overlooking High Street. Falkoner was the only person on the floor, doing seated dumbbell incline presses with one hundred pounds in each hand. Dunc waited until the set was finished, then spoke Falkoner’s name.

Falkoner whirled to look at him, feral-fast, stared for a moment, then grinned. “What the fuck’re you doing here?”

“My duffel bag,” said Dunc.

He slammed himself in the head with the heel of his hand.

“Shit! In the boot of the MG! Shit! That night in El Paso, I sort of forgot all about your stuff. It’s probably sprouting mushrooms by this time, the way that fucking car leaks. Gimme another half hour, forty-five minutes. Grab yourself a workout if you’d like. Floyd isn’t here but he won’t care.”

Dunc had never seen a professional layout like this before. He got his workout stuff from the car, went through a full workout using maximum poundage for each exercise, three sets of ten each. He was pouring sweat when he finished. Heel waited three months for his duffel bag, Jack Falkoner could wait an extra thirty minutes for him.

When he came out of the shower, Falkoner had already brought the duffel bag up from his MG, had left it at the desk, and had departed. So much for Auld Lang Syne.

Dunc went off the Bayshore Highway, as 101 was called, on San Francisco’s Third Street. It was a tough-looking industrial area, mostly colored, with Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard and government housing projects covering the low hills.

Downtown was totally confusing, bursting with life and traffic, trolleys running up and down Market Street. One-way streets, honking cars, gesturing cops. He finally found Bush, but it was one-way the wrong way. One block up, Pine was going the right way. At Powell he had to wait while a boxy little open-sided cable car passed, clanging its bell cheerfully.

It was after four o’clock when he finally parked in front of a Chinese grocery store to walk down the steeply slanting street to 1610 Bush, upstairs over a beauty salon on the corner of Franklin. On 1610’s street door was:

The narrow interior stairway went straight up from the street. He climbed it to the tune of a rapid-fire typewriter. When his eyes were level with the floor, he glanced to his right and was staring at the high-heeled shoes and shapely calves of a woman behind a desk beside the stairs. Her thighs were hidden in the desk’s cubbyhole.

The office was made into an L by a supply storeroom at the head of the stairs. Windows with Venetian blinds ran the length of the long wall overlooking Franklin Street. More windows over Bush Street. There was a partitioned private office with windows on both streets and the door closed.

On the desk were two telephones, a typewriter, an intercom box, In and Out baskets stuffed with letters, papers, and file folders. The woman herself was in her mid-thirties, blond, tall and slender but well formed. Her shirt was white, man-tailored, with a gold stickpin holding it together at the throat. What he could see of her skirt was dark blue.

“You come to repossess the furniture?”

Dunc started. “I beg your pardon?”

Her narrow sharp-featured face had good cheekbones, a thin wide lipsticked mouth, and smart brown eyes under pale brows. “You were looking the place over pretty good. Or did you just come up to try and see my legs from the stairwell?” Dunc felt himself coloring up. He had been, without realizing it. “Don’t worry — better men than you have tried and failed.”

Dunc cleared his throat. “I... I’d like to see Mr. Cope.”

She pushed a button on a box on the top of her desk. There was no answer, but she seemed to expect none. Drinker Cope came out of the private office in his shirtsleeves. He looked solid and somehow very tough despite his benign pink features.

“My fucking sins catch up with me.” He turned to the woman. “Sherry, this is the one I was telling you about.”

“Your bastard son from Toledo,” she said without levity.

Dunc felt like someone who’d come into the film at the start of the second reel. “I... Down in L.A. at the Labor Day picnic you said—”

“I was drunk at the Labor Day picnic.”

“Your bastard son from Los Angeles?” asked Sherry.

“You said I’d make a good detective,” Dunc blurted out.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” said Sherry, and threw up her hands.

“I said you might develop into a good investigator. Might. With hard work and experience I ain’t gonna pay you to get.”

“You told me to look you up,” said Dunc stubbornly.

“You’ve looked me up,” said Drinker Cope. “G’bye.”

“Try me out for a week. If you don’t like my work, you don’t owe me anything.” Cope turned on his heel. Dunc said to his back, “And I can outshoot you any fucking day of the week.”

Sherry laughed out loud. Cope’s hard eyes were unreadable in that rubicund face. “One week, be here at eight tomorrow.”

The blonde stuck out her hand. “Sherry Taft. Charmed.”

“Pierce Duncan. Dunc.”

“The sign says investigations, commercial and domestic. We take any case that walks in the door,” said Drinker. “Good guy, bad guy, legal, borderline, we go all the way. That bother you?”

“No.”

Sherry said, “Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere yet. But I—”

“Ma Booger’s. We stash witnesses there sometimes.” She was writing on her memo pad. “Mrs. Adelaide Boger. Three blocks down Franklin and a half-block to the left, 1117 Geary just up from Tommy’s Joynt. Seven bucks a week.” She handed him the memo slip. “Welcome aboard.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

The room was big, with twelve-foot ceilings and two eight-foot windows with frayed lace curtains and pull-down shades. Two single beds, made up, and a small round table with a floor lamp and a sagging easy chair under the window. An open closet was in the left wall, half taken up by a narrow chest of drawers.

“It’s got a nice little kitchen counter and its own sink and a two-burner gas hot plate,” said Mrs. Adelaide Boger. “But I’ll only charge you seven a week ’cause Sherry recommended you.”

He didn’t much care what the room looked like as long as it was clean. He wouldn’t be spending a lot of time there.

“There’s a shower and a bathroom at each end of the hall, very convenient.”

The chest-high kitchen counter had two tall straight-back stools beside it. Inside the cubbyhole beyond were a sink and a counter with the gas hot plate beside it. Cabinets overhead.

“This is great,” said Dunc, wreathing her face in smiles.

“You just stop by the office and sign the register when you’re unpacked,” she said.

He hung things in the closet, stuck his underwear and shirts in the chest of drawers, bounced on the bed a couple of times, put his notebooks on the round table, then went down to his landlady’s office at the head of the street stairs.

Adelaide Boger was in her late sixties, a fleshy German lady with a kindly face and concerned eyes behind thick glasses; her big nose, red from allergies, made Ma Booger a natural.

Confident Cope would hire him, Dunc paid a month’s rent up front. Ma Booger gave him a front door key and a room key on a ring with a tab that had 1117 Geary stamped into it. She also told him Tommy’s Joynt on the corner was a San Francisco tradition.

It was jammed. Along the left wall was the bar with a hundred different kinds of beer. At a hot-food counter on the right wall under the Geary Street windows, beefy chefs with tall white hats and long carving knives cut sandwiches to order — “carved before your eyes!” A house special was buffalo stew. Dunc had to have that; it tasted pretty much like stringy beef.

He was up at six and beat another guy to the shower. Foster’s all-night cafeteria, catty-corner across the Van Ness/Geary intersection from Tommy’s Joynt, had something called toasted English muffins: an order was two of them, hot and crispy and drenched in butter. Wonderful!

He opened the agency street door at 7:45 to the rapid-fire staccato of Sherry’s typewriter.

“You’re early. I like that. Coffee?”

“No thanks. I... don’t like it much.”

Today she wore a navy-blue dress and white trim at throat and wrists. Her desk was covered with case folders — one opened — and a yellow legal pad with scrawled notes on it, some underlined, others with exclamation points beside them.

“Skip-tracing,” she said. “When a subject — the person the case is about — takes off and doesn’t want to be found, he’s called a skip. He’s skipped out. We try to track him down, trace him — skip-trace. You’re a field agent. You talk to people, follow people, find people, window-peep, serve subpoenas, go undercover to stop employee theft, check government records — everything that can’t be done by phone from the office.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Only Drinker deals with the clients. The client doesn’t want to hear that Drinker’s working a slew of other cases at the same time, he doesn’t want to hear that some field agent is working his case instead of Drinker. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Dunc.

“Not yet, but you will, believe me. Drinker is going to assign you just one single case, because you’re new to the game. But it’s a tough nut we haven’t been able to crack. Subject, Chauncey Jones, who was a municipal bus driver in Dayton, Ohio. Walked out on his wife and kids three years ago, left ’em without a bean. Nine months ago he came into a sizable inheritance.”

She flipped open a case folder. Inside was a single printed form with scanty typed information on it.

“Only he doesn’t know he’s got an inheritance, and they can’t collect without him. He was traced as far as San Francisco from their end. We found he was driving a bus again, and developed a residence address. He’s gone from both places. Drinker expects written reports every seventy-two hours.”

She handed him the case file, took him to a desk in the back of the office, near the mimeograph machine. There was a swivel chair, phone and phone book, letterhead and work sheets, multiple report forms, and a typewriter.

“Familiarize yourself with it, then go knock on doors.”

The form had in re with the subject’s name typed in, CHAUNCEY JONES. Last known address: 1144 Eddy St., Apt. 4. There were two further lines for Previous addresses: one had Toledo, Ohio, typed in, the other was blank.

Last known employment was Municipal Railroad, San Francisco. Personal references was blank. Relatives had only Mrs. Jones, Dayton, Ohio. No given name, no address. He guessed Drinker thought he didn’t need to know them, at least not now.

Enough time in the office; he was dying to get out into the City. He headed for the door with his file, stopped at Sherry’s desk. “What do I tell this guy when I find him?”

“ ‘When’? I like that. When you find him, say you’re employed by an attorney in Dayton with an inheritance for him.”

“Check.” Dunc clattered down the stairs to the Grey Ghost.

Drinker Cope came out of the private office where he had been silently waiting and listening. He stopped at Sherry’s desk, stood behind her massaging her neck with small delicate fingers. “So, what do you think?”

“I like him.”

“That’s the hell of it, so do I.”

“What if he finds our Mr. Jones and talks with him?”

“That would put Sam Spade to shame. And in his own city, yet.” Drinker gave a snort of laughter. He went back into his own office and this time left the door open.

Eddy was three streets below Geary, but 1144 was three blocks farther out than Dunc’s 1117 Geary, between Octavia and Laguna, across the street from a small green city park called Jefferson Square. It was in a row of converted gingerbread Victorians, with no tenant’s name in the slot for apartment 4. But when Dunc pushed the bell he was buzzed in.

A young Negro woman answered the door with cool eyes and a wary manner. Dunc asked for Chauncey Jones.

“Ain’t no Chauncey around here, ain’t been no Chauncey, ain’t gonna be no Chauncey. We moved in three months ago.”

Dunc thanked her, went back out into the sunshine and paused. Landlady. She might have a forwarding address. He rang the MGR bell. She was short and hunched, with streaky blond hair and nicotine-stained fingers and bags under her eyes.

“Son of a bitch moved out on me three months ago.”

“Did he leave you any forwarding address?”

She glared at him. “Bastard left owing two months’ rent, you think I got a forwarding? G’wan, get outta here!”

Gone three months. He sat in his car and watched kids playing in the park while he tried to figure out what to do next. The kids were mostly colored. Chauncey Jones was white. A mixed neighborhood. Okay, San Francisco Municipal Railroad. He should have looked up the address while he was still in the office — or brought the phone book with him.

The corner grocery store would have a phone book.

The Up To Date Market was narrow and cluttered and smelled of onions and garlic. A husky guy in a white apron was stocking the shelves down its single narrow aisle.

Dunc asked him, “You have a phone book I can use?” He did. Muni Railroad, 949 Presidio Avenue, phone Fillmore 6-5656. On an impulse he asked, “Do you know a man named Chauncey Jones? He lived up the block, drives a bus for the Municipal Railroad, maybe bought his groceries here?”

The clerk was frowning. He had a wide open Irish face, pale hair. Then he gave a chuckle.

“Yeah, Chauncey — the streetcar driver. More like he bought his booze here, not groceries. He drank, he didn’t cook.”

Dunc could get no leads to girlfriends or associates, so he thanked him and left. He had brought no notepad, either; he had to write down everything he had learned on the back of the case assignment sheet. He looked up Presidio Street on the map.

It intersected — indeed, dead-ended at — Geary Street.

The yard of the hulking brick Muni Railroad building was half filled with idle streetcars and buses. Inside the door marked OFFICE a hard-bitten man in his fifties strolled up to the counter where Dunc waited. He had a gray cardigan sweater and steel-wool hair and a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth. He squinted at Dunc through the smoke.

“I’m trying to reach one of your drivers, Chauncey Jones.”

“All employee records are private.”

Dunc found himself back on the street. He wandered around the cavernous yard until he found a high window labeled DISPATCH OFFICE. A thickset balding dispatcher in a lumberjack shirt slid open the window to look down at Dunc in the yard below.

“I’m looking for one of your drivers — Chauncey Jones.”

“Sec.” His head disappeared for a moment. “Don’t show him on the dispatch sheet. You sure he’s working outta this barn?”

“All I had was Muni Railroad.”

“They can tell you at the office.”

“Guy in there told me to go to hell.”

“That asshole,” he muttered under his breath. “Sec.” He left, came back. “The Potrero Barn out at 2500 Mariposa.”

Mariposa ran west from the Bay to end at Harrison, but it didn’t go all the way through. It took Dunc thirty minutes to find his way to the Muni’s Potrero Barn off Hampshire. Jones had quit six months before. The dispatcher’s records didn’t show why.

The shift was changing, so Dunc talked to some of the off-duty drivers. A Negro with shifty eyes and nervous hands said he thought Jones had taken a job with Yellow Cab.

“Why leave a steady job like this for pushing a hack?”

He looked around unhappily. “Some guys come around...”

Dunc looked up Yellow Cab. His map said he could backtrack to Potrero, go to Division, which intersected Townsend, which...

The Yellow Cab dispatcher had a round face and Shirley Temple ringlets. She was smoking and drinking coffee and eating a doughnut and talking into her radio all at the same time.

“A woman in red’ll be outside. She needs to get to the airport pronto.” She released the transmit button, looked at Dunc. “Tell me something’ll make me wet, cutie.”

“One of your drivers? Chauncey Jones?”

“That don’t make me wet.” She snapped her fingers and held out a palm. “A buck.” Dunc put a crumpled dollar bill on it. “A month back he got let go, as the feller says.”

“Feller say why?”

She tipped back her head. “Glug, glug, glug.”

“Know where he’s living now?”

She flopped a ledger open on top of her other paperwork. “Yeah — 1563 Revere Avenue.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Revere intersected Third at Bayview, in that tough industrial area Dunc had driven through the day before. The door at 1563 had been split in half from top to bottom, then clumsily patched with a sheet of plywood. A woman opened the maimed door a crack.

“He just roomed here.” she said in quick alarm. “Been gone two months, honest. He just went out one day, never came back.” Memory emboldened her. “He still owes two weeks’ rent...”

Dunc shook his head. She slammed the door in his face. He heard the dead bolt being shot home. The nearest liquor store was a narrow storefront on Bayview.

He asked the colored clerk bluntly, “Did Chauncey Jones get his booze here?”

“Who’s askin’?”

“Mr. Green.”

Dunc’s dollar disappeared with dazzling speed.

“Jes ’fore he quit comin’ in here, he bought him a jug of Wild Turkey. That stuff costs, man. Said the ponies was gonna make him well. Had him a lady ovah in the East Bay. Near to Golden Gate Fields.” He squinted his eyes. “Amanda. Brought her in here once, she shook my hand.”

“You don’t remember her last name, do you?”

“No, I... Wait a sec! Amanda... Harris. That was it! Amanda Harris. I ’member ’cause I got me a Uncle Harris.”

Dunc wasn’t even sure what — or where — the East Bay was. He drove back to the office. Since it was his first day, he felt he ought to write a report. Sherry said, “Even your shoes sound tired. Did you hit the wall?”

“I’ve got a lead, I just don’t know what to do with it.”

Dunc told her about his day. She said, “Nice. Meaty. You go type your report, I’ll see what I can do about Miss Harris.”

The report forms were white, green, pink, and yellow snap-out sheets interlarded with thin carbons. White to the client, green into the file, yellow for memos to other field operatives or skip-tracers, pink to be stapled face-out to the back of the operative’s assignment sheet.

Standing beside Sherry’s desk, Drinker read the original of Dunc’s report. He dropped it with a grunt, went into his office, and closed the door.

“Does that mean he likes it or he doesn’t like it?”

“Drinker’s grunts enlighten no man. Or woman.” She handed him some scribbled notes. “Amanda Harris was a junior at UC-Berkeley, dropped out last year. She has — or had — an apartment in the Berkeley flats and works — or worked — as an admission ticket taker at Golden Gate Race Track in Richmond.”

“How did you get all that?” demanded Dunc, amazed.

“Cross-directories, a few lies on the phone. Tomorrow cross the Bay on the Oakland car ferry. It’s really fun.”

At eight the next morning Dunc drove Grey Ghost into the wooden belly of the beast by the Ferry Building at the foot of Market. He could see Alcatraz and beyond it the green mound of Angel Island, nearer at hand wooded Yerba Buena and the flat man-made pancake of the navy’s Treasure Island.

Bright sun, no fog, crisp air, the gulls whirling and crying as they looked for handouts behind the boat, occasionally dipping to grab something out of the white, churning wake. Passing under the Bay Bridge, he looked up, saw a passenger train on the lower deck going west toward the City. The noise of the bridge traffic was like muted thunder beyond the horizon.

When he figured out how to get to Berkeley from the Oakland Ferry Terminal, he sought out Amanda Harris’s address on Prince Street off Shattuck. She was long gone — of course — but he knocked on the apartment door anyway, and a stocky, bright-eyed girl answered. She had been one of Amanda’s roommates.

“She’d be graduating this year if she hadn’t met him.” She twirled a dark curl around a forefinger, twisted it. “He was... She just... fell for him. Like that. I couldn’t stand him.”

“She got the job at the racetrack after she met Jones?”

“Yes. He talked her into it.”

She didn’t know if Amanda was still working there. Dunc used his map, drove up the sweeping blacktop road to the parking lot behind the grandstands, tried to find someone who would tell him more than terminated “for cause.” He was in luck; a former coworker was delighted to have lunch bought for her.

Amanda had been fired for dipping into the till, and soon after had moved down the Peninsula. Near Tanforan Race Track.

The last solid information he got on Jones himself was from an exercise boy — the boy was older than Dunc — walking a horse at Tanforan. Jones had been working for a horse owner named Al Eisner as a trainer, had been fired for an undisclosed cause.

“I think he was trying to dope one of the old man’s horses. Mr. Eisner just gave him the boot. Myself, I’d of liked to of put the boot into the bastard’s face.”

Dunc abandoned Jones, for the rest of the week crisscrossed the City in his search for Amanda Harris. He learned how to set up a “swing” for the day’s investigations in geographical sequence. From Sherry he learned how to work the phone for information, how to lie and dissimulate and make promises he couldn’t keep. In those brief days he drove two thousand miles without ever leaving the Bay Area. He loved every minute of it.

On that Friday evening he knocked at the door of an apartment in a brown wood four-unit building on Worden, a half-block alley below Telegraph Hill. The fog was in, swathing the City in a clean wet gray blanket.

Amanda Harris was a slight brown-haired girl with the first genuinely green eyes he had ever seen. She still dressed like a college coed, sweater and plaid skirt and penny loafers, and was calm, sad, resigned to something Dunc had come to already suspect.

“He was no good, I knew that from the very start.” She had served tea, their cups were cooling on the coffee table. “But somehow, whatever he asked me to do...”

He’d wanted her to steal from the admission office at Golden Gate Fields. She had. Heel wanted her to do the same thing at Tanforan. She had. She said he had been ruined by a big killing at the track he’d made while still a Muni driver.

“He became obsessed with it, and then he got in with some men who doped horses, and then he tried to steal from them...”

The next day, a Saturday, Dunc drove down to Colma to finally find Chauncey Jones. Even with Amanda’s directions, it took him the better part of two hours.

On Monday morning he trotted up the steps to Drinker Cope’s office with his bulging case file on Chauncey Jones. Sherry was at her desk, Drinker by the coffeemaker.

“So, Dunc, how goes the great Chauncey Jones trackdown?”

It had been ten days since Drinker had handed him the file. He had been to fifty-seven addresses, had talked with 122 people. He hadn’t filed a report since the first one.

“Over the weekend I stood over his grave and told him what a rotten son of a bitch he was. The bastard’s dead — as both of you very well knew when you sent me out after him.”

Sherry sat up straight behind her desk. “You what?”

“I crossed your tracks a dozen times, Drinker. It was a hit-and-run, but the gamblers he crossed killed him. Tell me straight — is Amanda Harris in any danger?”

Drinker Cope was still for a moment, then shook his head.

“Was there ever a wife back in Dayton?”

“No. Different client, different assignment, but it seemed a nice file to dummy up for you to cut your teeth on.”

“You know what pisses me off the most?” asked Dunc. “I never even saw the guy. It feels unfinished somehow.”

“They often do,” said Sherry.

Drinker straightened up, set down his coffee cup.

“Just ten fucking days,” he said. “Okay, three hundred a month, retroactive to the day you started. You can charge your gas and oil at Emil’s 76 station around the corner on Pine and Franklin. Keep receipts of your expenses. And kid, go out and get drunk tonight — you earned it. A hell of a job.”

He picked up his coffee, retreated to his private office.

Sherry said, “Since you don’t like coffee, Dunc, I bought a box of tea for you.”

Penny met Gerald at the student union after her Monday afternoon class. He had been calling the sorority every few days since school had opened, asking her to meet him, and she’d been putting it off. Not that she was afraid of her own feelings. She knew her own feelings. But he had dominated her life for over a year, he might assume he still could...

He sat down at her table. “Hello, Penny.”

She nodded coolly. “Gerald.”

He looked the same as ever, a lean and hungry man with pale eyes — what had she ever seen in him? “I... Look, Penny, I... owe you a great apology for the way I acted that night...”

“You apologized the next day, Gerald. There’s no need—”

“I... Nothing like that will ever happen again.” He reached for her hand, took her unresponsive fingers in his own. “I want things to be the way they used to be. I need—”

“They never will be, Gerald. You have to know that.”

“All right. Of course.” His blue eyes were very earnest. “I know that. But I can make you happy, I...”

And his other hand came out of his pocket and he tried to slide a diamond engagement ring onto her finger. Penny jerked her hand back as if the tabletop were hot. She was glad he had done this. It made her remember, really remember, who he was.

“Gerald,” she said low-voiced, intensely, “don’t call me again. Don’t write. Don’t drop around.” She was on her feet, looking down at him. “I don’t want to see you again.”

She walked away from the table. Gerald started to cry.

Chapter Thirty

Dunc let the Monday night crowds carry him down Market. Instead of getting drunk, he’d gone to the movies, a triple feature, any seat in the house thirty-five cents. One of them had been The Asphalt Jungle, Marilyn Monroe baby-faced and luscious, kissing suave corrupt Louis Calhern. There had been a drawing for a set of dishes, and a washed-out blonde with big knuckles and veiny hands had almost cried when Dunc’s stub held the winning number. She did cry when he gave her the dishes.

The night was clear, without a hint of fog. This was his city. Already he loved it. On impulse he turned in at the Fog Horn, a dark narrow bar just off Seventh. It was a typical Market Street watering hole, full of sad men sucking on draft beers, their pockets full of nickels and their heads full of ghosts. The bartender swished a damp rag around in front of him.

“What’ll it be?”

“Draft.”

Behind the bar, painted on black velvet, was a huge mural of the San Francisco/Oakland car ferry passing under the silver Erector Set arch of the Bay Bridge, a bone of white water in its teeth. It made him nostalgic for this city he still barely knew. He and Grey Ghost had used that ferry during his dead-man hunt; soon it would be no more. The lower deck of the bridge would be converted from trains to autos, and the ferries would die.

He finished his beer, wandered down Market Street. There was always something astounding — and instructive — for a rookie private eye to see on the City’s midnight streets.

At the foot of Powell, a man and woman stood arguing on the cable-car turnaround. He was young, blond, well dressed, she was blond, dark-eyed, good-looking. He was crying, tearing bills from his wallet and throwing them down on the gleaming rails.

“Go ahead, take it, take the money! That’s all you’re after, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That’s all you’re after!”

The girl didn’t answer. She was on her hands and knees like a scrubwoman, scrabbling after the greenbacks.

When Dunc came out of a Third Street greasy spoon after a piece of tired cherry pie and a glass of milk, a gray-haired man wearing rumpled clothing and tired whiskey eyes was arguing with a short dapper Mexican. One of the Mexican’s hands waved a nearly empty Tokay bottle while the other tried to fit his new white Stetson on the old bird’s head. Thrust away, he spread his arms wide and ran into a parking meter. Then he grabbed the other man’s arm and tried to drag him down Third Street.

“No! You already sank me in a sea of troubles down there.”

The Mexican wandered off singing to himself. The gray-haired man said to Dunc with an almost sheepish grin, “I spent my last dollar on a good bottle of Tokay, and then I gave it to that Mexican. Then I found out he already had plenty of glue — folding glue. A fool and his money, et cetera.” His faded blue eyes stared worriedly after the Mexican. “And down there where he’s going he’ll lose it all.”

“Where’s down there?” asked Dunc.

“South of Market. Like going north of the bridge on Clark Street in Chicago, or down Washington Ave to Second in Minneapolis. I’ve seen them all. Pawnshops outnumber everything but liquor stores and at night only the bars are bright. Cops work in pairs, winos like me sleep on street corners until the wagon takes them to the drunk tank at Kearny and Washington.”

South of Market. Dunc had never heard the term before. He said to the gray-haired man, “You’re very poetic.”

“Cowper said that poetry is mere mechanic art. I used to teach it. Poetry.”

“I used to be an English major.” Dunc stuck two dollar bills in the jacket pocket. “For a new bottle of Tokay.”

“A decent man.” He chuckled. “I think I’ll fool you. I think I’ll get something to eat with this. I have a room at the Wessler Hotel, Third and Twenty-second. Ajax Kiely. If you ever find yourself way to hell out Third Street...”

Way out Sepulveda, thought Dunc. “Maybe I’ll drop by.”

He watched the old man slouch off. At first glance he had seemed just another grifter among the Third Street juiceheads and happy girls and silent drifting Negroes, but he reminded Dunc of Frank O’Malley, the fabled Notre Dame prof who was also a fabled martini drinker. Last St. Paddy’s Day, O’Malley had held his Modern Catholic Authors class in the Oliver Hotel bar.

South of Market, Kiely had told Dunc. When you’d quit shaving every day and your hand shook reaching for that first quick one in the morning, you were said to have gone south of Market. As much a state of mind as a location. Dunc liked it.

In a dark deserted stretch of Folsom between puddles of street light, a lean black 1951 Lincoln slid to the curb, its exhaust murmuring poh-poh-poh in night air now turned cold. A heavy blue-chinned face with a cigar screwed in the middle of it was poked out of the open window.

“Hey, give ya a lift, boyfriend?”

Dunc kept walking. The car shot ahead, rocked to a stop as the short fat man who belonged to the cigar bounced out and gouged Dunc’s belt-buckle with a switchblade knife. The blue chin joggled the spitty cigar up and down like a frayed brown finger waggling in his face.

“In, boyfriend.”

Twist away from the knife, smash an elbow into that cigar — nonsense. Despite forty extra pounds of rich Italian cooking stuffed under his topcoat, the knife gave the fat man the edge.

His partner had the build of a fast light-heavy, wavy blond hair, and cold blue eyes that seemed to focus on something a foot behind Dunc’s head. He took the Lincoln out Eighth with the lights to Bryant, then cut left toward the waterfront. The stubby Italian worked the car lighter.

“Call me Emmy,” he suggested.

“Listen,” said Dunc in a voice wobbling with earnestness, “you have the wrong guy. You made a mistake.”

Emmy leaned forward to speak around him. “He says we make a mistake, Earl.” He shook his head. “We ain’t made any mistake. Right, Earl?”

Earl swung the Lincoln into the dead end on First Street across from the squat gray mass of the Seaman’s Union, and parked facing out toward Harrison with dimmed lights.

He had a soft burring voice. “What’s the handle, kid?”

Dunc, drenched with sweat, realized he was terrified.

“Pierce Duncan. Everybody calls me Dunc. But you got—”

“Make it easy on yourself, Dunc. Tell us about Kiely.”

“I don’t know anybody named Kiely.”

On the corner was a dive with a red neon sign above the door. Two men came out, glanced incuriously at the Lincoln, and angled across Harrison. Yell for help? Try to shove Emmy out and dive out after him, run like hell? Emmy waggled the switchblade; light shimmered off the gleaming steel.

The dark figure came hurtling down at Dunc, led by gleaming steel. In her bedroom upstairs was Artis, dying.

“We tracked him here from L.A., so we knew he was in town,” Earl said reasonably. “Tonight we spotted him talking with you outside that slophouse on Third — but there was a prowlie behind us, so we had to go around the block. When we got back, he was gone. You weren’t. We followed you.”

“That’s the guy you’re looking for? That old wino? Hell, he was just a juicehead, bummed me for a buck.”

“Did he say where he lived?”

“No. Nothing. Not even thanks for the handout.”

Earl was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He said abruptly, “Emmy, let him out.”

“Hey, listen, Earl, how do we know—”

“Let him out.”

Emmy clambered out and Dunc slid over. He felt he was visibly shaking, but knew it was internal. When he was standing beside the car, Emmy shoved a face wreathed with garlic fumes into his. “Go down Harrison without trying to look-see the license plates, boyfriend.”

“Can the musical comedy act and get in here,” snapped Earl.

After walking a block on Harrison without looking back, Dunc leaned against a wall and held out his hand. It was steady. He was glad. It seemed important that the hand be steady.

What did he do now? Call the cops? Forget the whole thing and start the long trudge back to Ma Booger’s?

A hot Las Vegas wind seemed to blow through him, raising sweat in the cold San Francisco night. It left him no choice.

Chapter Thirty-one

The bus dropped Dunc in front of the Third Street precinct house, and he walked two and a half blocks to the Wessler. It was a flophouse over a saloon. Apart from a car sliding into a parking place in the next block, he had the street to himself He could see his breath.

Twenty minutes before the 2:00 A.M. bar-close. The downstairs saloon was an old-fashioned place with high ceilings; plain heavy glass bowls filled with hard-boiled eggs were set out on the bar. Two Italian laborers were drinking draft beer, one shaking salt into his glass to raise the head.

A balding heavyset barkeep who probably had a blackjack on his hip and a .38 under the bar said, “What’s yours, Jack?”

“I need to talk with a guy named Ajax Kiely.” He pointed at the ceiling. “He lives upstairs. He wants to see me.”

The barkeep’s wet dirty towel moved around on the top of mahogany as if by its own volition. “Go ask at the kitchen.”

Dingy yellow light shone from the connecting doorway. Dunc could smell garlic and frying steak. The kitchen barely held a fat black iron stove and a fat red-faced Italian lady with a fine assortment of chins and her hair pulled back in a wispy bun.

“I ain’t doing anything but steak sandwiches tonight.”

“Ajax Kiely told me to meet him here.”

She flipped over the sizzling steak, cut it enough to peek in, took down a heavy platter, and reached for a loaf of French bread as she made up her mind about him. She cut the bread with a broad serrated knife, added the steak, shoved silverware and the platter with the sandwich on it into Dunc’s hands.

“He’s out back. Tell him he owes me a buck.”

Beyond a washed-out green curtain was a big barren room with long tables pushed back against the walls to open the hardwood floor for Saturday night dancing. Kiely was in the second of the dark-wood booths along the left wall, staring into a glass of dark amber liquid he held in both hands like a chalice. He looked up, startled, when Dunc slid the platter across the table and himself into the other side of the booth.

“The lady in the kitchen says you owe her a buck.”

Kiely grinned. “Hey, sport! I bet you’re here to ask me about the New Criticism.” Dunc shook his head. “Then ‘why meet we on the bridge of Time, to ’change one greeting and to part?’ ”

“Who said—” He stopped. “Yeah, I know, you said it.”

“No, Sir Richard Burton said it. Guy who translated The Arabian Nights.”

“Listen, there’s really something I have to tell you—”

But Kiely kept talking as he chewed and hot beef juice ran down over his fingers, his drink temporarily abandoned.

“It was in the service during the war that I developed my fondness for strong drink. I’d enlisted in the air force and captained a flying squad in Australia, never’ve liked a limey since. One of ’em sold me a jug of juice for ten bucks American, when I opened it, I found out it was tea.”

“Maybe he was trying to save your life,” said Dunc.

Kiely laughed, picked up his glass. “ ‘I wonder often what the Vintners buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell.’ ”

That one Dunc knew. The Rubaiyat. “Two guys,” he said. “They’re looking for you.”

The change was remarkable. Kiely’s fork hit the plate and spanged off onto the floor. In the bar the jukebox was blaring “Goodnight, Irene” as a reminder to all that it was closing time.

“Earl and Emmy, is it? ‘Machinations, treachery, and all ruinous disorders.’ How’d they slice it for you, sport?”

Dunc was on his feet. “To hell with you, Mr. Kiely.”

Kiely pointed at a scratch on Dunc’s silver belt buckle. “From Emmy’s knife, ain’t it? Oh, I know those guys! Spend three years on the lam from Philly to New York and Chicago and Kansas City and L.A., with amiable lovely death looking over your shoulder, and your nerves get galvanized like a frogs. How d’you think they knew I was here?”

“Probably an L.A. skip-tracer. Why are they after you?”

“Teaching seemed tame after the war and besides alcohol I’d become addicted to high-stakes poker. Three years ago I got in very deep to very bad people, there was a heavy-money game...”

“You knocked it over.”

“Helped to. I was inside man, Earl and Emmy pulled the actual robbery. It went swell — except Earl shot the dealer dead, tried to kill me, too. I ran — with all the money.”

He clawed open the top buttons of his shirt. A small leather pouch was slung around his neck on a leather cord. From it he took a flat metal toothed key with “181” stamped on it. He laid it reverently on the table between them.

“There it is, sport, wealth arithmetic cannot number. Eighty grand. Safe-deposit box, but only Kiely knows the bank and the city and the name it’s under. Fact is, I’d give it all to Earl, but he’d just kill me any-way.”

Dunc said, “Pickwick Stage Depot at Fifth and Mission — I’ll front you a Trailways ticket out of here, right now.”

A forefinger pushed the key across the table. “Hold this for me, will you, kid? I just got a feeling. Give it back when I get on the bus, and we’ll laugh about it. Okay?”

Dunc said, “Okay,” and stuck the key down inside one sock.

They went in the adjacent door with a single light over it and up a flight of creaky stairs. The small, stuffy office at the top was empty. A strip of faded maroon carpet led them down a narrow hall and around two right angles to Kiely’s door. It was narrow as a pauper’s grave, sour with recent cigar smoke.

Kiely chuckled as he switched on the light- “They’d give a lot to know what they want is right here.” Dunc turned back to set the night chain when Kiely used a sudden breathless voice.

“I was playing poker with a fellow m K.C. named Moran—”

He drew in a sharp breath. Dunc tried to turn. Was gone.

Obscenely gay flowers were painted around the cheap tin waste-basket, and the brown carpet tickled Dunc’s nose. A middle-aged man regarded him thoughtfully from a broken-down easy chair across the narrow room. He looked slightly familiar.

“What the hell?” said Dunc.

Kiely? Yeah. A]ax Kiely. Memory trickled back. Former poetry teacher, high-stakes poker play. Always quoting.

“What the hell?” Dunc asked him again, thickly.

He got to his hands and knees, got himself erect. His pockets had been turned out. He bent to gather up his money and wallet, straightened quickly. Jesus! Pain had shot through his head. Bent again with exaggerated care for his belongings. His k shoe skittered something metallic across the rug to rattle against the baseboard. A knife. He picked it up to peer at it as if he needed reading glasses.

Switchblade. Smell of cigar smoke in the room. Emmy. Ki shirt wore a new red necktie. The end of it lengthened to drip twice in his lap. In Dunc’s memory a car slid to the curb in the next block. Christ! He’d fingered Kiely, after all. And Kiely’d been halfway afraid of it.

The room had been torn apart. Kiely’s meager belongings scattered about, his pockets turned out as Dunc’s had been.

Outside, a lightly touched siren growled. Precinct station a couple of blocks away. Anonymous phone call...

Hide the knife. Blood on it. Blood on his jacket, smeared on. His head throbbed, he was still woozy. He closed the knife, dropped it into his jacket pocket, thought, I can’t hide Kiely.

Heavy shoes were pounding up the stairs. He wrapped his jacket around his arm, slammed it against the window. The glass burst outward, taking the shade with it. Fresh air stung his sluggish brain awake. An equally heavy fist made the door quake.

“Police! Open up in there!”

Dunc cannonballed into darkness. His heels crunched a pail and flipped it over, landing him in a shower of garbage. He dodged through a junk-littered yard to the back fence, made the top on first try. A flashlight beam probed the yard and voices shouted from Kiely’s window. Dunc went over without pause.

At the foot of a shallow muddy embankment he trotted along railroad tracks to Twenty-fifth Street, turned uphill, away from Third, climbing toward the Potrero Terrace housing projects where he had interviewed a witness just last week.

Closed-up little grocery store. Pay phone. He leaned against the side of the booth with his eyes shut, ringing Drinker Cope’s home phone, belatedly standing on one foot to check on the safe-deposit box key. Yes. Still in his shoe. Drinker answered on the third ring, voice thick with sleep.

“It’s Dunc. I’m in real trouble.”

Voice bright and clear now. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“Two guys killed a third guy tonight in a Third Street flop. I was there. The law is looking, but not for me specifically.”

“The bad guys looking for you?”

“They got my keys, so they’ll know where I’m staying.”

“Where are you now?”

“Potrero Terrace.”

“Walk down to the foot of Connecticut, have a Yellow pick you up by that big green warehouse on the southeast corner...”

Dunc’s shoes echoed hollowly on the concrete ramp down to the all-night auto park in the basement of the Bellingham Hotel on Sixth and Mission. A husky Negro about his own age was dozing on a cot in the bright cramped office. The name of the garage was stitched in neat red script across his blue coveralls.

Dunc said, “Nat?”

The Negro’s brown eyes opened, focused, sharpened.

“You’re Dunc? Little cool to be running around outside without a jacket.” He jerked open a desk drawer, took out a bottle. Dunc shook his head, instantly regretted it.

“Wow! You got any aspirin?”

He washed four of them down with a paper cup of water. Nat dropped a key onto Dunc’s open palm.

“Geary and Octavia, third house from the corner, yellow with lots of gingerbread. Front room on the first floor. Ground floor’s the garage. I got a shackrat’ll put me up for a couple days. Don’t let the landlady see you — she’s death on whites bein’ in her house.” He reached an army field jacket down off a hook in the wall. “Be sunup when I leave, I won’t need this.”

Dunc laid his rolled-up jacket down on the desk to shrug into the field jacket. When the warmth it fostered hit him, he shivered. Nat had picked up the jacket.

“You look all used up, man. I’ll get rid of this for you after I call a cab.”

Chapter Thirty-two

At noon Dunc sat on the edge of the bed looking out between lace curtains at a slanting street drenched in golden light. No town was lovelier than San Francisco when the sun was shining. A little colored girl was skipping down the sidewalk in a bright red cloth coat, her hair sticking straight out from the sides of her head in two tight black braids. Behind her came three Negro boys and one Chinese boy, all dressed in gaudy windbreakers and brown corduroy trousers. Two of them carried schoolbooks.

Down at the corner by the bus stop, Drinker Cope was just getting out of his powder-blue ’51 Plymouth. Five minutes later he was sitting in Nat’s easy chair gulping black, steaming coffee fresh from the hot plate. Dunc told Drinker everything, starting with the movies and ending with Kiely’s key in his hand.

“You’re good at finding trouble, ain’t you, kid? Gimme.” Dunc tossed him the key, he stuck it in his watch pocket. He chuckled. “But you’re lucky at winning things, too, ain’t you?”

“You call a dead man in my lap lucky?”

“I call a key to eighty grand in your hand lucky.”

He started to prowl the room, deceptively soft-seeming but moving like a much smaller, quicker man. He dropped back into the easy chair, shook his head, gave an exasperated chuckle.

“Jesus, you’re green, kid. Any way I look at it, I gotta think you’re trouble. You get mixed up with a guy gets dead, then you give your jacket with the blood on the sleeve and the murder weapon in the pocket to Nat because he says he’ll get rid of it.”

“I figured he was one of your field agents. What was wrong with that?”

“It was the fucking murder weapon, for God’s sake. With your fingerprints m the victim’s blood all over it.”

“Nat said he’d—”

“Fuck what Nat said. Never put yourself in another man’s hands that way. You can trust Nat, don’t get me wrong, he gave them to me and I got rid of ’em for you. But if you’re gonna work for me, you can’t be stupid.”

“I’m sorry” said Dunc.

“Don’t be sorry. Be smart. What was this Kiely to you, you go warn him? You didn’t know about the eighty grand vet.”

Emmy with his gleaming knife evoking Raffetto, coming at him after murdering Artis, that’s why he’d done it. But he hadn’t told Drinker anything about Las Vegas, wasn’t about to.

“It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do.” Drinker shook his head again in disbelief. “I assume they followed you to Kiely’s place.”

“Yeah,” said Dunc bitterly. “It was their Lincoln I noticed pulling in down the street just after I got there.”

Instead of the justifiable scorn he expected, he saw interest light up Drinker’s round red face. “And then?”

“They see me go into the bar downstairs, one of ’em stays outside—” God, how could he have been so stupid? “and the other goes upstairs and checks the hotel register, jimmies Kiely’s lock, when we come in he takes out Kiely and saps me down and it’s all over.”

“Why d’ya think one downstairs and one upstairs? Why didn’t they make sure of the money before they killed their man?”

Dunc thought about it, finally sighed. “Because Kiely went in saying what they wanted was right there in the room. He was stabbed. Emmy likes the knife.” He caught Drinker’s glance at his gouged belt buckle. Guy didn’t miss a trick. “Earl would have made sure of the money before he killed Kiely. Emmy, no.”

“Why didn’t this Emmy character do you, too?”

“Wanted a fall guy?” He made it a question.

“He smart enough for that? If he was too dumb to—”

“The fall guy would have been Earl’s idea.”

Cope chuckled. “Maybe so, kid, but I doubt it. He’d wanta turn you upside down and shake you for what’d fall out — only now he’s gonna have to turn me upside down and shake me instead.” He opened his briefcase, tossed the morning Chronicle on the bed. “Educate yourself. You can go out to eat, they won’t be looking for you here in boogietown, but stay close.”

“Don’t you want me to go out and try to track ’em down?”

Drinker looked at him like he was nuts. “I don’t keep heroes on my payroll. I’ll put people on the street and get word to you when I want you to move.”

“What are you going to do with the key?”

“I’ll talk to the chief of detectives in the Kansas City P.D We’ve tipped a jar or two together. He’ll check for a bank box under the name of Moran. If there is one, he gets a court order, if the money’s there, we all split the reward.”

Dunc merely nodded. He doubted the box would be found.

After dark, he walked four blocks out Geary to Fillmore and ate at the counter of a rib joint, the only white face to be seen. Back at Nat’s place, a teenager was pleading outside an open hallway door with a woman in her thirties. She smelled of strange sins. They stopped talking as Dunc passed, staring at him across the racial gulf.

A little before ten, there was a light tapping on the door. Dunc crossed the room on silent stocking feet, stood by the closed door, sweat sheening his forehead. “Y-yeah?”

“Got a message fo’ you.”

It was the woman of the exotic perfume. She had clear brown eyes slightly slanted, a beautiful brown oval face, black hair lustrous and coiling. Her house robe showed enough cleavage to cause a stirring in Dunc’s groin.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“ ‘Ma’am’?” She gave a throaty chuckle. “Drinker say, jes parade round Market Street where you was last night, you be met.”

Dunc thanked her and started to shut the door, but she put out a detaining brown hand. “Scared, ain’t you, white boy?”

“No, I’m just... Yeah.”

“Don’t gotta be ‘shamed ’bout bein’ scared. You got the time, honey, I got the time, too. Don’t cost you nothin’. But you ain’t got the time, has you?” Again, the big belly-shaking laugh. “Too bad, shugah. I’s the bes’ you’ll nevah have.”

“Hey, buddy, got a light?”

Dunc stooped to light a cigarette for the legless man who peddled pencils on Market Street. The man rested on his square castored board, cataloging every person who passed without even turning his heavy handsome head. He spoke around his cigarette.

“The fat one’s been using Yellow Cab 238.”

“Thanks,” said Dunc, “can I—”

“No. The Drinker asked me to keep an eye out.”

Half an hour later Yellow 238 drove up to the cabstand by the Greyhound Depot on Seventh Street. The driver was a tall stooped number with brown hair and brown teeth.

“Fat guy I picked up? Sure, if...” He rubbed thumb and forefinger together. Dunc dealt him an ace. “He barhopped down around Third and Folsom for an hour, kept me on the meter. Then to Jones and Eddy. Cheap bastard. No tip.”

The driver buried his nose in a movie magazine as if it were a schooner of beer. Dunc started away. The fat man running the nearby newspaper stand called out to him.

“Stan, newsstand on Market and Kearny, he’s got something to tell you, said it was important.”

“Hey, thanks.”

“Thank the Drinker.”

The downtown streetcar passed Powell, Dunc remembered the young guy throwing money in the street. Just twenty-four hours ago!

Stan was huddled up in the corner of his square green booth wrapped in a bulky blue sweater against the cold. He came up to the counter when Dunc showed. “You’ll be Dunc.” His heavy bohunk accent was that of the line workers at Studebaker’s South Bend plant. He had a square, honest face. “Tall one, hard eyes, he go down Third Street maybe two hours ago. Looking.”

“For me,” said Dunc.

“Other one, fat one...” He blew out his cheeks like a squirrels and patted his belly above his gold watch chain. “Barbary Coast Hotel bar. Eddy between Leavenworth and Jones.”

“Many thanks, Stan.” Dunc offered to shake hands. Stan shook. Dunc offered him money. Stan shook his head.

“On the Drinker. Listen, they got a big Lincoln in the lot on Eddy between Larkin and Leavenworth. They the bad guys?”

“They’re the bad guys.”

“Then you and Drinker, you get ’em, hokay?”

“Hokay,” said Dunc, with a certainty he didn’t feel.

Chapter Thirty-three

Fog-shrouded midnight streets threw his footsteps back at him. The Golden Gate Bridge’s foghorn bellowed desolately about being out in the Bay on such a night, the Alcatraz foghorn agreed. He thought fleetingly of lifers tossing on iron cots, insomniac in dank cells, then of Kiely, permanently somniac.

Swirled pearl hazed the streetlights. Passing cars were muted moving shadows, were gone. Men of chilled smoke hurried by in search of warm rooms and good drinks and maybe soft women to make them human again.

And somewhere in the muck was Earl, moving as a hungry tiger moves, his fist full of bills to buy Dunc’s whereabouts. What was Dunc searching for? The answer to a question posed in Las Vegas, with only a shadow to go on?

He shivered in Nat’s army jacket and wished for a topcoat. He’d check out the Lincoln, then at least confirm that Emmy was drinking at the Barbary Coast Hotel. That would suggest they were staying there and Emmy was waiting for Earl to return.

The Lincoln was parked nose-out amid a dozen other cars in a narrow unlighted gravel lot sandwiched between two red brick office buildings put up just after the ’06 quake. No attendant, maybe he could even the odds before he called for help.

No doorman at the Barbary Coast Hotel, either. He went in — gingerly. Dim lighting, stuffed chairs with nobody in them, dusty potted palms, a desk with a half-dozing clerk. In one sidewall unlit red neon, Coffee Shop, in the other a doorway screened by a beaded curtain with Shanghai Lil’s in red neon above it.

Dunc stuck a quick head through the curtain, withdrew instantly. The beads made a muted tinking sound. It was a dim place with indirect lighting and a nautical motif, fishnets draped from the ceiling, potted palms to suggest the tropics, big glass floats a foot in diameter from the nets of the Japanese fishing fleet. Chinese fans above the bar, atmospheric oriental screens to give privacy to the couples at the tables. Half a dozen drinkers studding the stick, Emmy among them.

At a phone booth by the parking lot, Dunc used street light to look up Shanghai Lil’s in the directory, dropped his dime, gave the heavy-voiced bartender a nasal, whiny voice borrowed from a pecker-wood chain-gang guard in Georgia.

“Fat guy at the bar. Name of Emmy. I wanna talk to him.”

Emmy couldn’t refuse a call. He didn’t. “Yeah?”

“You lookin’ for a joker name of Dunc?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah, I, uh... wanna talk to him.”

“Talk! You think I’m crazy, boy? Talk’s fer Church. Meet me at the 76 station on Franklin and Pine in ten minutes. Bring plenny green an’ be ready to travel. He’s got his mitts on heavy money, he’s checkin’ out tonight. Ten minutes, dickhead.”

Emmy waddled up to the Lincoln panting, sweat gleaming on his forehead. Dunc, remembering the labor union goon in L.A., hit him in the kidney with the hardest right hook he’d ever thrown. Emmy shrieked and hurled himself backward against the Olds next to his car, his back arched like a bow.

But when Dunc went in swinging to finish him off, a fat hand flicked a deadly steel finger at him. Dunc’s left hand locked around Emmy’s wrist, his right hand broke Emmy’s left thumb as it tried to gouge his eye. Emmy yelled again, but for thirty seconds they hung there between the two cars, veins cording their necks and sweat burning their eyes. Holding that right wrist was like trying to hold the greased pig at the fair.

His right hand covered Emmy’s face, slammed the back of the head against the car window. It starred. Again. Shattered glass spattered them. Dunc snarled through his teeth.

He used a knee between Emmy’s fat thighs. Emmy’s foot growled on the gravel, he tried to fold down on himself. Dunc slammed the head against the door of the Olds. Emmy’s head left dark vertical smears on the metal. He was making wheezing noises.

The switchblade hit the gravel, Emmy sat down suddenly, like a fat man at a picnic, fell over sideways and stayed there. From the entrance of the lot came a whiskey-burred male voice.

“Yeah, this is the one.”

Dunc groped for the switchblade, found it. He felt sick.

“This goddamn fog!” exclaimed a woman’s loose voice. “Which goddamn car is it?”

“Down at the end. By the Lincoln”

He made himself grope in Emmy’s pockets, find a tabbed hotel key with a room number stamped into it. He found his own keys, too. As long shadows came jerkily up the gravel, he edged around the back of the Lincoln away from the Oldsmobile.

Sloppy kissing noises. The woman’s drunken giggle. They would find Emmy, call for help... A sudden scream.

“What the hell’s the matter with...” The male voice trailed off. “Jesus Christ! Let’s get to hell outta here!”

Doors slammed, a motor grumbled to life, wipers snicked at the haze, tires scrunched gravel as they backed out. Dunc was already three cars away, his adrenaline rush gone, throwing up against the side of someone’s new Ford.

He felt groggy, punch-drunk; he’d come this far, he’d do it alone. No Drinker Cope. No ambulance call, either. If Earl learned his partner was down and out, he’d be wary, on guard. Dunc wanted to be waiting, lamp in hand like in his dream, when Earl entered their hotel room, all unsuspecting.

He did his quick check through Shanghai Lil’s beaded curtain. No Earl. Used the men’s room to wash out his mouth, splash his face, then used the house phone to dial their room. No answer. He rode the elevator up to seven, went down the fire stairs to six, found the room, knocked on the door.

“Room service.”

Nothing. He eased the key into the lock, palmed the knob, drifted the door open. Ambient city light through lace curtains showed him an empty bathroom, empty closet alcove except for a suitcase on the floor, dimly seen, a spare suit on a hanger.

The brass lamp on the dresser would make a passable club. The adrenaline was pumping again, his throat was almost closed off as he waited against the wall beside the door, holding the lamp at his side. Where was Earl now? Did he know about Emmy?

Clang of elevator doors, muffled chirrup of operator.

“Good night, sir.”

He could smell his own fear. Would Earl? He could taste it, too, as if he held a brass cartridge case between his teeth.

A key in the lock. Then nothing. A minute, nothing.

The room was flooded with light. Dunc whirled. Earl stood just inside the open connecting door to the next room, grinning, a Colt .22 Woodsman target pistol dangling from his right hand.

Stick the key in the lock to keep Dunc focused on the door, slip around to his adjoining room. This had been Emmy’s room — a single suitcase in the closet. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Earl waggled the automatic. “Drop the lamp.” Dunc dropped it. “I always figured Kiely stashed my money in a safe-deposit box, gave you the key to hold last night. I checked your room — no key. So, turn around — hands on the wall.”

Dunc didn’t move.

“I catch a prowler in my room, I shoot him dead. Turn around so I can search you.”

“And then shoot me in the back.”

Earl stared at him for a long moment, then gave a slight shrug. “You want it in the face or the back of the head?”

Dunc threw himself bodily at him, as if tackling a fullback coming through the line. A gun roared, Earl leaped to meet him, they fell to the rug in a bloody tangle.

“The back of the head,” said Drinker Cope conversationally.

He stood inside the door Earl had used, in his right fist a huge old Army Colt .45 faintly wisping black-powder smoke.

Dunc rolled free. The blood was Earl’s, most of his face was gone. Little chips of skull bone stuck to Dunc’s face. He would have vomited again except he had nothing left to throw up.

“When did you... how did you...”

“I’ve been behind you all night. You okay?” Dunc reached for the cloth doily off the dressertop to wipe his face. Drinker said, “Don’t touch that. You’re gonna be gone before the cops get here, you weren’t here tonight. Just me and...” He gestured with his gun barrel. “The boyfriend here.”

“But why...” Dunc began, then broke off. “Emmy! He’s—”

“— dead in the parking lot. Somebody ran over his head. G’wan, get to hell out of here, quick.”

“But why are you—”

“It’s simpler this way. I was tailing Kiely for the agency, these two killed him, wanted to kill me, too.”

“For the agency? But we don’t have a client to—”

“Sure we do. The chief of detectives in Kansas City asked me to look for Kiely. Hell, I used to be a cop in this burg, the police and the hotel’ll want this buried on the obituary page.”

Dunc said belatedly, still dazed, “You saved my life.”

Drinker straightened from leaning over the corpse. He gave an ironic snort.

“The safety was on. He wouldn’t have shot you before he got that safe-deposit key. He wanted that fucking eighty grand just too much. I got your marker on this one, kid- Now get to hell outta here before the cops arrive.”

Dunc was going down the fire stairs as the police were going up in the elevator. He sloshed water on his face in the men’s room off the lobby, asked the deskman what had happened upstairs, got a noncommittal grunt, and walked free and clear out into the San Francisco fog.