Cases

Chapter Forty

Christmas Eve. Dunc was lying on his bed, drinking canned beer and eating pretzel sticks and pretending he was going to catch up on his notebook, or walk up to the office to start a short story. Instead, he sat up.

“Mickey, how about some poetry?” Mickey eyed the pretzels. Dunc began mashing two of them in one palm with the other thumb.

He got silently to his feet, holding the crumbs and his beer can.

“That’s from a Red Skelton movie, and my gal ain’t here to give any garters to.”

Mickey sat up, nose wiggling, when Dunc crossed to the kitchen counter. Mouse-gray — his native color — and less than two inches long if you didn’t count his tail. He lived in the kitchen walls and occasionally emerged for these one-way chats.

“She’s holding high wassail with her mom and her sister’s family in Dubuque, so for Christmas I mailed her a half month’s pay. And my mom can’t understand why I didn’t go home for the holidays.” He stretched out his hand, very slowly, to dribble a little salt-glinting mound of crunched-up pretzel sticks onto the aged linoleum countertop. “I also have four rosaries to finish”

Mickey gave two sudden hops to snatch up pretzel morsels with delicate busy front paws and nibbled at them with tiny incisors. He seemed to especially favor the salt crystals.

“How can I do penance when everybody I know gets killed? Is it me? Is that what the priest was trying to tell me?”

Mickey nibbled. Dunc looked at his watch: 12:03 A.M. He toasted Mickey and drained his beer.

“I am now twenty-two years old, mouse,” he said.

Heavy knuckles hit the door. Mickey vanished. Drinker Cope strolled in as if things were not still strained between them. He stopped at the foot of the bed to take it all in.

“Great place you got here, spacious, elegant — but where’s your ten-foot spruce? Eggnog? Hot buttered rum? Mistletoe? Get your fucking shoes on, I’m taking you out to dinner for your birthday. Afterwards we’ll listen to some jazz.”

Cypress-shaded St. Francis Yacht Club was expensively ablaze, hordes of people visible behind big bay windows. Sleek sports cars and luxury sedans big enough to live in jammed its parking lots. The rigging of the snailboats was hung with colored Christmas lights; the stinkpots were similarly festooned.

Two men came up a private landing quay on synapse-silent deck shoes. The quay was unlighted, the moon in its first quarter. The larger man checked his luminous wristwatch.

“Twelve-fifteen, Lee. Home for the holidays.”

Lee Fong was diminutive, not over five-three, 130 pounds. “I leave the car in left-hand lot, Mr. Wham.”

Harry Wham was six-six, wide as a barge. He went past a De Soto parked facing the water in a spot favored by lovers on moonlit nights. This was not such a night. A man wearing a hat and brown overcoat came erect from behind the fender to swing a rubber truncheon at the back of Wham’s head.

But Wham had spun down and away, landing on his hands, scissoring with his legs. His assailant’s head struck the blacktop to rebound into a fist as hard as a thrown rock.

The blackjack of the other man, coming very fast around the front of the car, also missed, even as Lee Fong’s right foot sank sideways into his gut nearly to the ankle. He bounced off the De Soto making a noise like a car with a faulty starter.

“Pigeons,” Wham said. “I’m pretty sure who sent them.”

Their attackers’ car keys made a little splash far out in the channel. Also, in the spirit of Christmas, their shoes.

It was 2:00 A.M. Drinker Cope was eating waffles with a double side of sausage at the counter of Jimbo’s Waffleshop on the corner of Post and Buchanan. Dunc ate chicken in a basket because the marquee read Chicken Hot or Cold, Good as Gold.

“I thought you said we were going to a jazz club?”

“What can I tell you? There’s Club Alabam, Wally’s Soulville, Elsie’s Breakfast Club — but we’re staying right here at Jimbo’s Bop City. When the clubs close in the Tenderloin and North Beach and Nob Hill, half the musicians come here to jam.”

At the cash register was a slim cool fortyish Negro with a porkpie hat and a cigarette sticking straight out from the middle of his mouth. “Drinker my man! How’s the sleuthin’ business?”

“Everybody’s sinnin’, nobody’s winnin’, Jimbo.”

The walls of Bop City’s back room were crowded with bigger-than-life photographs of some of the greats who had performed or sat in there — Duke Ellington, teenaged Johnny Coltrane, Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis, and of course the Bird. Drinker grabbed them a table and ordered setups.

“Jimbo Edwards got this place when Slim Gaillard tried to stiff the police.” He poured a pitiful dribble of Coke into each glass, added ice and booze. “The cops somehow found a pint of liquor on the premises so they closed him down. Slim gave Jimbo the keys, took a cab to L.A., and nobody’s seen him since.”

By the Art Deco foyer’s indirect lighting, Harry Wham was too hawk-nosed to be handsome, with thick blond hair dissheveled from the roughhouse outside the St. Francis Yacht Club. Beyond the Moorish archway into the living room, his wife was swizzling two cocktails at the marble-topped wet bar.

He began, “I see I caught you and Ferris...” and when she whirled, alarmed, added, “just getting back from midnight Mass.”

April was five-nine and elegant as crystal in a Christmas-red I. Magnin original. Coiling black hair shot with rich bluish highlights danced around a flawless oval face. A jade pendant glowed sullenly at her throat. Her long-lashed gray eyes had turned merry.

“Mass? Hardly, darling. There’s a new comic at the Purple Onion, she’s very funny, she calls her husband Fang. A Gibson?”

“Sure. Three onions. Pearl, not purple.”

“Find your galleon this time?”

Crossing to the hallway, Harry chuckled. “You think I’m nuts but I’ll fool you yet.”

Ferris Besner drifted out of the kitchen. He called himself an art dealer, was ferret-slim in a $300 hand-tailored suit and $20 silk foulard she had bought him with Harry’s money.

She handed him a Gibson, said in a low vicious voice, “I thought you told me he’d be laid up for hours while they went through the boat. Even Harry isn’t entirely stupid, you know!”

Wham reappeared in a white sport coat that would have fit a Shetland pony. He downed the proffered Gibson like a spoonful of cough syrup, set the glass on an inlaid hardwood sideboard.

“Ferris, could you keep April company for an hour or so? When I get back, we’ll mull wine and the meaning of Christmas.”

He kissed April on the forehead and was gone. Ferris was already at the pink telephone dialing a GRaystone number. He stared bleakly out the bay window at the lights of the International Settlement and Chinatown while he talked, listened, swore, and hung up.

“Harry and the Chink used them for batting practice and threw their car keys and their shoes into the harbor.”

“That’s Harry’s weird sense of humor, all right.” April tapped her cocktail glass absently against her small dazzling teeth. “Ferris, I must find out what sort of game he’s playing.”

“Why not just divorce him? This is California, with your looks any judge would give you—”

“In that wall safe are the keys to three safe-deposit boxes of undeclared currency no judge would give me.”

Besner fingered his mustache. “We grab the money and—”

“— and look over our shoulders some dreamy afternoon in Rio and see Harry coming down the beach after us.”

Besner shuddered. “What do we do, April?”

She crossed the room with long, sensuous strides. Her gray eyes were level with his blue ones. “Neutralize him. Find your little April a shrewd, tough, unethical P.I. who’s a sucker for brunettes.” She took his right hand and cupped it around one of her breasts. “Meanwhile, he won’t be back for another hour...”

Charlie Parker’s alto sax was doing things to “Sweet Georgia Brown” no man had ever done before, flying her out to the edge of the solar system on a flurry of diminished fifths. Drinker Cope said, “Bird must of gotten his saxophone out of hock again.”

The placed was jammed with colored and white. As they all went wild at the end of the set, a huge craggy-faced man sat down uninvited at their table. His formidable belly was out over his belt, his suit coat was strained around a massive torso.

“This place taken?” he growled.

“Fuck off, asshole,” snapped Drinker.

The man grabbed up Drinker’s glass to sniff it. “There’s booze in this drink!” he roared, and plopped a heavy gold SFPD inspector’s shield down on the table. Bottles began disappearing as if by magic. “Show me some ID, mister, and damned quick!”

“How about I show you the back of my lap?”

Both men started to laugh, wrung one another’s hand. The bottles were reappearing at adjacent tables.

“Dunc, this is my old SFPD partner, Wee Jimmy Haggerty. Jimmy, my associate, Pierce Duncan.” It was like shaking hands with a two-by-six oak plank. Drinker was paying the waitress for more setups from a large roll of bills. He said to Wee Jimmy, “I’m surprised Colleen would let you out on this holy night.”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, first it was midnight Mass at the cathedral, and then it was to be trimming the tree, so I told herself I had to check on a couple of suspects.” He drank spiked Coke and roared with laughter. “And be jaysus, here ye both be!”

Lee Fong stopped the Cadillac directly across from a narrow alley called Old Chinatown Lane. The few pedestrians were all Chinese, the parked cars were beaded with night mist that had settled in the last hour. Harry Wham opened his door, paused.

“You go on home, Lee,” he said.

“I park on Stockton, wait for you, boss.”

“I’ll be at least an hour, maybe two.”

“I wait for you, boss.”

Harry got out, disappeared into the shadows of Chinatown.

Five-thirty Christmas morning and Dunc had to go to the bathroom, really bad, but didn’t want to miss Bird, who had landed on “Scrapple from the Apple” and wouldn’t leave. Wee Jimmy Haggerty and Drinker Cope were reminiscing about their police department days, and Dunc didn’t want to miss that, either.

“That elevator at the Hall of Justice still get stuck between floors?” Drinker turned to Dunc in explanation. “The felony tank is down on the ground floor, but three, four cops and one felon, they take the elevator up to the court floor.”

“Only it stalls between floors,” explained Wee Jimmy.

“The felon leaves the first floor pleading innocent, by the time he gets to court, he’s beggin’ them to plead him guilty.”

“Rolled newspapers across the kidneys,” chortled Wee Jimmy.

The set was finished; Dunc got unsteadily to his feet.

“Gotta tap a kidney of my own,” he told them solemnly.

He had just unzipped in front of one of the urinals when a woman six-three in her three-inch silver heels sashayed in. Jet-black hair danced around her broad café au lait face in saucy shimmering ringlets. A skintight silver-sequined dress showed cantaloupe breasts, ripe racehorse buttocks. Her eyelashes were an inch long, her mouth, impossibly juicy, impossibly red, was half a foot wide, her fingernails three inches long and even shinier red than the outrageous mouth.

Dunc scuttled to the door, jerked it open, craned around to see what was written on the outside. MEN. He pulled back in.

“You all right, honey,” the woman exclaimed in a rumbling basso voice. “You in the right place.”

Dunc had to relieve his aching bladder; he returned to the farther of the two urinals. The Amazon hunkered up to the adjoining urinal and flipped up her skirt, pulled down the front of her white lace panties, and from a massive set of masculine equipment directed her own stallion-like stream into her urinal. As she did, she looked over at Dunc and winked.

“Jes our little secret ’twixt us girls.”

When Dunc staggered back to the table, Drinker and Wee Jimmy were laughing even harder than the transvestite. “Jesus, the look on your face when you stuck your head out of the door to check which crapper you were in...”

“I need a drink,” croaked Dunc.

Chapter Forty-one

Desk work today. Dunc was trying to track down a man who lived on a Chinese junk moored out in the middle of the Sausalito harbor and might or might not have been involved in a drunken hit-and-run accident on Christmas Eve.

Drink and the Devil had done for the rest...

Dunc was still queasy from his own Christmas Eve. Better ask Sherry how to find the guy and get him to admit liability.

As he walked up to Sherry’s desk, a woman came up the stairs. She wore a gray tailored suit to match her eyes, white gloves, high-heeled gray shoes, and a flat little ecru hat.

She told Dunc, “Surely you’re not Edward Cope.”

“Surely not,” he agreed.

She turned to Sherry. “April Wham for Mr. Cope.”

Sherry headed for Drinker’s office. No intercom for this baby, thought Dunc. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Drinker appeared in his doorway. April Wham drifted that way.

Drinker bowed slightly. “Mrs. Wham.”

He closed the door, April was already seated and crossing her legs. Instant lust warmed Drinker Cope’s cold heart. From her silver-clasped gray purse she took a silver cigarette case and a silver lighter, extracted a Herbert Tarryton. Drinker almost lunged across the desk to light it for her.

Back at her desk, Sherry was looking daggers at the door.

“She’s trouble,” she said. Dunc was going to make a crack about trouble being their business, but Sherry went on, “I know her type. I. Magnin originals, Joy at a hundred bucks an ounce...” She sat down, gave an angry toss of her head, and lit a cigarette. “Okay, what did you want to ask me about, kid?”

In Drinker’s office April was looking at him through her drifting cigarette smoke. Her eyes were very limpid and direct.

“Would it shock you if I said I loathe my husband?”

Drinker waved a dismissive hand. She nodded.

“I want you to find out all about Harry — Harry Wham, my husband. He had what you men call a good war — marine captain in the Pacific island-hopping campaign, a chestful of medals.”

She ground out her cigarette very carefully, every spark.

“We’ve been married for three years. After the war he lived in China, came to San Francisco four years ago with that ridiculous name, money, and many oriental friends. He says he’s an engineer but doesn’t work at it. No office, no clients, his only employee a Chinese boy named Lee Fong. They spend a lot of time on Harry’s motor yacht looking for sunken Spanish galleons.”

“I thought Spain’s galleons sank in the Caribbean.”

“Harry says there was a vast trade from the Orient across the Pacific — gold, jade, immensely valuable vases and pottery. Across the Isthmus of Panama by Indian slaves, transshipped from the Gulf of Mexico to Spain.”

Drinker felt stirrings of something other than lust.

“I think he takes a woman with him. I’ll pay you five thousand to find out who she is, what he does, where he goes.”

Drinker said, “Five hundred, not five thousand, would do it. I think you’re more intelligent than that, Mrs. Wham.”

She said without hesitation, “There isn’t any other woman. Harry’s past is completely hidden except for his war stories, and I can’t even find out if they’re true or not.”

“I did a little island-hopping myself with the Marines,” Drinker said in an almost dreamy voice. “Demolitions man, I blew a lot of Japs to hell and gone out of their little caves. I even knew a few captains with their chests full of medals. One of them saved my life once.”

“If you’re saying you don’t want to—”

“I’m saying I’ll know where to look for his war record.”

“Harry Wham!” she exclaimed. “Where did he get that — Marvel Comics? The gold hunting must be a front for something illegal. I want to know what it is!”

“Not the whole story but better,” said Drinker. “I’ll need a thousand now and a picture of Harry. In this town the Chinese complicate everything.”

“I don’t have a picture.” She was counting out hundreds. “But you won’t need one. He’s an enormous man with shaggy blond hair. The Chinese boy looks like any other Chinese boy. Harry berths his cruiser at the St. Francis Yacht Club. The Doubloon.” Her clear gray eyes met his. He felt their impact in his groin. “I want you to work this personally, full-time, you alone.”

“Me alone,” he lied.

He walked her to the door. Her perfume still lingered. Someone had told her he would do most things for a quick buck, and that he had a weakness for smart sultry brunettes with the kind of legs that would turn him stupid at just the right time.

Unless April Wham had figured that one out for herself.

He shook his head and said “Whew!” under his breath.

Lying in the sunshine along the dock in Gas House Cove at the blunt end of the Marina Green, the broad-beamed ketch Marie reminded Dunc of a battered club fighter who still had a good right hook. The old salt filling the kitchen chair by the wheel had his feet on the after-gunnel and a can of beer in one hand.

So far, seven interviews, seven big fat zeros. Overhead a brown and white gull dipped and cried raucously. The slatted quay sank under Dunc’s weight, sloshing water up between the boards. It was warm for San Francisco in December.

The old salt had gray-shot whiskers and the far-sighed blue eyes of a deep-water sailor. The black briar pipe clenched between his strong yellow teeth was upside down.

Dunc squatted on the dock. “Why upside down?” he asked.

“Won’t get put out in a squall. Shove that dottle down in there with your thumb real good afore you light her, she’ll do.”

“Nice boat.”

“Hell she is. Wouldn’t make it from here to the breakwater with a following wind. I’m MacDougal. Mac’ll do.”

“Dunc. Do you live aboard?”

The old man guzzled beer. “You from a quiz show?”

“Call-Bulletin, working on a story. I thought you’d probably know all the interesting yachtsmen around here.”

“Interesting yachtsmen like who?”

“I heard a guy at the St. Francis hunts for Spanish gold with his motor launch. Harry Wham, his boat’s the Doubloon.”

Mac gave a single burst of laughter like the bark of a seal. “What’d an old man like me know about them rich folks?”

“Everything,” said Dunc.

He rolled a ten-dollar bill into a cylinder, leaned forward to poke it halfway down a punch hole in the top of the beer can.

“Y’re a cutie. What d’ya want, son?”

“Whatever you’ve got worth ten bucks.”

Mac drank beer out of the punch hole without a greenback in it. “He goes out with the Chink six days exactly. Maybe three times every two months. The Doubloon’s forty-two foot, draws four and a half, looks slow but ain’t. Shortwave radio, ship-to-shore phone, even a phonograph, f’God’s sake! Has two British Spitfire engines in her. She’ll take anything on this coast.”

Dunc asked, “That include cutters?”

“Includes anything, gov’ment or otherwise. Also he’s got a Chicago typewriter and grenades behind a false bulkhead for’ard.” He shut one eye and tipped his head back as if commenting on the weather. “She could make Mexico and back in six days, easy.”

“Did you say Mexico?”

“Come around when you ain’t working, son, I’ll tell you some lies you don’t have to pay for.”

Dunc had just finished the day’s report when the phone rang. He picked up, answered, “Edward Cope Investigations.”

Penny’s voice, full of laughter and delight, said, “Your Christmas present arrives tomorrow afternoon on the two-thirty plane from Chicago. I told Mom I had to go back to school early, aren’t I an awful person?”

“A wonderful person. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“I’ll have to fly back to school on Sunday, but we get New Year’s Eve together. What should I bring to wear?”

“Anything — sexy underwear. Nothing.” He laughed into the phone in sheer delight. “Yeah, that’s it — nothing!”

He sat with the phone in his hand and a goofy grin on his face. Tomorrow he would hold her in his arms. Tomorrow...

Finished report in hand, he resolutely strode to Drinker’s private office. Couldn’t be helped. He knocked, went in.

Drinker shut his file folder and glared up at him. “Yeah?”

“The yacht is designed to outrun anything on the West Coast, including the Coast Guard, and Harry Wham and Lee Fong go to Mexico once a month, six days round trip...” He paused; Drinker had almost leaped to his feet to jerk the completed report from Dunc’s hand. “And I need five days off.”

Drinker looked up from his reading. “Five... No fucking way! You’ve worked here maybe three months. If you think—”

“My girl’s flying in tomorrow from back east.”

Subtly Drinker’s expression lightened. “The girl at the picnic, what was her name, Peggy?”

“Penny. Penny Linden.”

“Nice-looking kid. You stuck on her?”

Dunc felt himself coloring up. “Well, you know—”

“You’re stuck on her. Back in here Monday morning, early. And call in, tell Sherry where we can reach you in an emergency.”

The Richelieu Hotel was on the corner of Geary across Van Ness from Tommy’s Joynt. Just the sound of Penny’s voice on the phone, the knowledge that she would be in his arms tomorrow — tomorrow! — giving him twinges of excitement as he asked at the registration desk for a double for five days.

“Make it something... nice,” he said. “Something special.”

Chapter Forty-two

The room at the Richelieu really wasn’t anything special, but, bathed in the warm diffuse late afternoon light, it was made to seem so by the dozen red roses on the round writing table under the window. Their fragrance filled the room.

“Oh, Dunc! They’re so beautiful and they smell wonderful!”

She threw herself into his arms there in the middle of the room beside her suitcase and cosmetic case. The embrace warmed to kisses then leaped to fire. Beneath her skirt she wore a black lace garter belt to hold up her stockings, nothing else.

He picked her up and carried her over to the bed with her legs locked around his hips. He didn’t put her down that first time, neither of them even undressed.

It was nearly midnight when Dunc went over to Tommy’s Joynt to bring back buffalo stew. When he returned he thought the small snuggled shape had fallen asleep. He undressed by the bathroom’s dim golden light, and lifted the covers to slide his naked body in beside hers. She gave her marvelous laugh and rolled to meet him, fully awake, her eyes great joyous wells in the semidarkness, her legs opening to receive him.

At midnight Drinker Cope got out of Sherry’s bed, careful not to wake her. She made a little mewing sound and snuggled deeper into the covers. Drinker went to the window, nude, smoked a cigarette looking out over the semisleeping city.

Thinking of April, he had gone off like a skyrocket. April obsessed him, even though he saw through her to some grand design of her own. He didn’t even have to learn what it was, she would put it in motion soon enough.

“Drinker?” In the dim light Sherry was up on one elbow, watching him. “You’re thinking about Wham-Bam, aren’t you?”

“Oh, for Chrissake! I’m thinking about her husband.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hand on the swell of her hip. “How to get our hands on some of the guy’s money...”

“We don’t need it, Drinker. Dunc’s working out great—”

“Go back to sleep, Sherry.”

He kept his hand on her hip until her breathing evened, then went back to the window. Damn right, Dunc was working out great. He felt bad about screwing the kid out of his share of the loot from Kiely’s safe-deposit box back there in Kansas City, but the K.C. cop had been greedy. Besides, Drinker had given the kid a job, paid him good wages.

His mind returned to April. He was going to possess her, get his pound of flesh, and go after her husband. Meanwhile...

He woke Sherry, used her again, savagely, punishing her because she wasn’t the woman who obsessed him. Then he slept.

Since it was New Year’s Eve, Drinker got to the Customs House at 555 Battery early to catch Gar Cheevers behind his desk. Gar was career civil service, dry and precise and incorruptible, horn-rim glasses set low on his nose, his desk half covered with framed photos of his wife, his dog, his five kids in various stages of growth at their modest summer cabin up on the Russian River.

Incorruptible, sure, but there was corruption and there was corruption. Drinker had pulled one of Gar’s daughters out of that same river one summer before she could drown, so the man owed him. Drinker took it out in information.

“What’s new in the antismuggling trade, Gar?”

“Just the usual, Drinker — drugs and people.”

“Much of it done by boat these days?”

“Boat? Wetbacks wouldn’t be worth the trouble, and the border’s so leaky you can just walk the drugs across. We get ’em at the checkpoints if they’re amateurs or get nervous, but—”

“Private yachts don’t have to go through checkpoints.”

“We leave them to the Coast Guard,” he said with a chuckle.

“Anything else coming across besides wetbacks and dope?”

Gar mentioned gold. Drinker wished him a Happy New Year, went to the huge gray stone main library across the plaza from City Hall to spend three hours in the reference room, then to Western Union to send a long night letter to a man in Ensenada.

Dunc and Penny spent that morning in bed with the faint perfume of the roses lying over them like a new snowfall, talking, talking, voracious for each other’s lives.

For Dunc, deer hunting in northern Minnesota with his dad, one year he had gotten two bucks with two shots. Football. Fishing. Duck hunting at the shack on the Mississippi.

Penny’s dad had been killed in an industrial accident three months before she was born; her mom used his union insurance to open a coffee shop in a downtown Dubuque hotel and, working fourteen-hour days, had eventually sent Penny to college.

“We’re from the same kind of people, middle-class, Midwest, hardworking, Dunc. We’ll have to meet each other’s mom soon.”

“Soon — but not now.”

Oh no, not now. Now the sudden sharp stab of passion...

In the afternoon they bought fried chicken and climbed down the bluffs on Land’s End for a picnic on a minuscule beach of bright sand. Back at the motel to change for a New Year’s Eve celebration, they made love in the shower, and ended up seeing in 1954 without leaving their bed.

New Year’s Day, Dunc showed her his sorry little room and introduced her to Ma Booger, then up to the office to show her that, like a proud parent showing off his kids.

“What about your writing, Dunc?”

“I’m getting lots of material for the notebooks...”

“And not writing it down in them.”

“I’m keeping copies of my reports for the right time...”

On Saturday they went into the great glass Victorian conservatory in Golden Gate Park, and found themselves alone in the high-domed main room that was like a small, intense, steaming jungle; they played Tarzan and Jane in the dripping tropical foliage. Then went back to the Richelieu to play it for real.

Their last dinner together was at Alfred’s Steakhouse up beside the Broadway Tunnel, huge rare T-bones with garlic toast and baked potatoes and green salads and beer, since Dunc didn’t know anything about wine.

And so to bed. But not, for a long time, to sleep.

It was a blustery day at San Francisco International Airport, with isolated rain squalls running across the blacktop runways. Winter had returned to San Francisco.

They kissed a last time. “Keep up the notebook!” Penny whispered, then with a squeeze she was gone.

On the drive back from the airport, memories came crowding in on Dunc, surprisingly few of them sexual. He had showed her his city. Before too many months he knew she would return.

And then? Then... they would just be together. That was all they needed. He would write and try to sell his stories, she would work. They’d eaten at the Fleur de Lis in Sutter Street, where she had talked with the French chef about cooking. He’d never had an apprentice, but peut-être...

Meanwhile, going through the now-driving rain on the Bayshore, he felt the first stirrings of renewed excitement about the Wham case. Look out, Harry, he thought, here I come.

Since it was paid for, he slept a last night in their room at the Richelieu. He could still smell Penny’s scent on the sheets, her perfume and soap in the bathroom. The roses still bloomed bravely by the window, their fragrance a benison. He took them back to Ma Booger’s and kept them until they were dried and withered.

Chapter Forty-three

It was not until two weeks later that Drinker Cope brought him back into the Harry Wham chess game. While Dunc interviewed potential witnesses for an upcoming trial, and tailed an errant wife three times to her meetings with her lover at a Geneva Street motel, Drinker was working Harry Wham hard, including an international wireless and a long detailed letter to Hong Kong.

Dunc was glad that operatives who specialized in divorce work burst in to flash-photo the cheaters naked in bed, not he. What if someone had come smashing in like that on him and Penny at the Richelieu?

Then Drinker finally put him back on Wham. “My man in Ensenada says Harry and the Chink are coming in from Mexico tomorrow on his yacht. Talk to that old sailor pal of yours — I want you to eyeball Wham coming in, then I want you to stick to Harry like glue.”

“I haven’t done much tailing — what if he spots me?”

“Just make sure he doesn’t”

“Jesus, thanks, Drinker — great advice.”

Dunc, in navy watch cap and heavy blue wool pea jacket, secretly afraid of getting seasick, stood on deck as the Marie sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and kept his eyes on the horizon as Mac had suggested. His queasiness soon passed. He used Drinker’s binoculars to pick out the place beneath the bluffs where he and Penny had picnicked. It would be green and full of wildflowers by Easter. Their long letters had crossed in the mail, and they had talked on the phone twice.

“Them’re damn good glasses, them coated lenses don’t reflect the light.” Mac grinned slyly. “You’ll be able to watch Mr. Harry Wham whamming in the nude.”

“Erg,” said Dunc, and made a face, and they both laughed.

They hove-to in the lee of the Farallones, stark black shapes alive with restless squawking seabirds rising like ghostly frigates from the frothing water. In the cramped, tidy cabin Mac poured two thick white mugs full of tea as black as sin.

“The Marie is named after my wife. She’s dead now, God love her, but we sailed the seven seas, we two together, in this old boat...”

An hour before sunset the Doubloon met with an innocuous-seeming fishing boat. They watched with the glasses from the shelter of the Farallones half a mile away as Wham handed over two heavy boxes. Mac passed the glasses to Dunc. “Flying Fish, ties up at Pier 45 near Fisherman’s Wharf. They’ll move them boxes late tonight after all the tourists have gone home, probably in fish crates.”

“How do you know so much about smuggling, Mac?”

His only response was a wink. It was after dark when he maneuvered battered old Marie back into her berth at Gas House Cove. Dunc paid him in cash, dashed to a pay phone to call Drinker Cope and tell him, two boxes, Flying Fish, Pier 45.

“I’ll cover the boxes, you catch up with Wham and see where he goes. Stick close to him after you make contact.”

Dunc left Grey Ghost Two near Portsmouth Square to follow the tall Caucasian by foot through teeming Chinatown streets. Wham ducked into one-block Waverly Place, a narrow alley full of dark shadows. Dunc went down five steps to knock on a door with a faint penumbra of light showing under it. When a short dumpy middle-aged Chinese man in a dark suit and ornate vest answered, the light sent their shadows jumping crookedly up the stairs.

“Sorry” he said. His eyes were almost lost in his moon face. “Is Chinese American Club, is members only permitted.”

“Harry Wham. He just came in here.”

“Sorry. No Wham here.” He started to close the door.

Dunc’s foot was in it. “Big blond white guy. Wham.”

He suddenly kicked Dunc’s foot away, exclaimed “Wham!” in gold-toothed merriment, and slammed the door.

Disgruntled, Dunc went up the steps. He caught movement and got his guard up in time to block a slashing knife hand that numbed his forearm. He blindly fired a left jab where the attacker’s jaw ought to be, hit only air.

They shuffled cautiously, able to see only shadows. A foot came flying sideways toward his gut. He turned to take it on the hip, spun back with a good right cross to send Lee Fong crashing into the garbage pails with a clatter and surprised grunt.

Bearlike arms encircled Dunc from behind, pinning his arms to his sides and driving his breath out in one massive whoosh! He whimpered, thrashed erratically, let himself go dead-weight. The arms loosened, he tore free, but a fist like a foot knocked him sprawling against the rough brick wall. He ran.

At Grant and California he bent over the mist-wet black iron railing at Old St. Mary’s Church, panting, trying to get his breath back. His coat was ripped and his hands skinned; grease blotched one trouser leg. A cable car disgorged a brace of Chinese girls wearing tight skirts slit halfway up their thighs. They passed Dunc giggling to turn in at the Pink Pagoda.

He followed unsteadily, seeking a pay phone. Drinker picked up on the first ring, heard him out. “I didn’t tell you to climb in the guy’s hip pocket, for Chrissake. Anything broken?”

“Only my spirit.”

“Okay, go stake out the alley.”

Drinker hung up and the phone rang. It was April Wham.

“Harry just called from Half Moon Bay, he said he’d had trouble with the Doubloon and wouldn’t be home tonight. He—”

“Harry’s here in the City, not down the coast. I was out by the Farallones today to watch him come back from Mexico and tailed him to an alley in Chinatown. Waverly Place, something calls itself the Chinese American Club. Do you know it?”

“No, of course not. What—”

“We can’t talk over the phone. I’ll come up there—”

“No!” Very emphatic. “We’ll have to meet somewhere else.”

So she had someone there with her. Probably Ferris Besner.

“The Bocce Ball Cafe,” he told her. “Twenty minutes.”

Operatic arias sung full-voice by some of the City’s best professionals pulled people into the Bocce Ball off upper Broadway. Bartenders, waitresses, waiters, busboys — all had been hired because they had operatic aspirations; many of them sang in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera. Several times a night they would serenade the customers with arias, duets, trios.

April came through the door in a slinky skintight green silk sheath, just as, outside, a halted diesel Grey Lines Nightlife Tour bus had its doors levered open fore and aft. She slid onto a stool next to Drinker’s.

In a low voice, she said, “Tell me, quickly, what’s he up to?”

Half a hundred giggling tourists rushed toward the little round tables to fulfill their one-drink minimums. Few would ever see fifty again. The din was atrocious. The waiters began sobbing out “O Sole Mio” to accompanying accordions.

Drinker grunted as if he had been kicked in the stomach, grabbed his beer bottle with one hand, April’s arm with the other, and headed for a heavy hardwood door in the back wall.

Beyond it and down two steps was a long dim quiet room housing two bocce ball courts of hard-packed clay. During the day, North Beach’s old Italian men sat on the benches lining the walls to gossip and evaluate, with great solemnity, the quality of the play. Now, at one in the morning, the courts were deserted, the benches bare. Only the slightest shadows of song and clatter made it through the heavy oak door.

April sat down on one of the benches. “Why were you out by the Farallones?” she demanded with an impatience meant to dominate the situation. “What was Harry doing in Mexico?”

“Your hubby makes regular six-day trips to Baja.” Drinker stood over her with one foot cocked on the worn oak beside her thigh in symbolic imprisonment. “His Spanish-gold routine struck me as a perfect smuggling cover. After a while the Coast Guard chalks him up as a harmless nut and quits checking him out.”

“Harry’s too smart to get involved in anything like that.”

He gave her his big insincere grin. “Wetbacks or drugs, sure. But why is his cruiser outfitted for trouble and fast enough to outrun anything around, even cutters?”

“He likes expensive toys, he always wants the best.”

“Maybe so, but this afternoon he transferred two heavy cartons to a fishing boat outside the three-mile limit so the Doubloon could come in clean.”

“What was in those boxes, Drinker? Where are they now?”

He looked at his watch. “I might have more for you in a couple of hours, April.” He detached a key from his ring. “This is for my flat. Go there and wait for me.”

“Why your flat? Tell me what you know right now, and confirm it later.” Drinker just shook his head. Her lip curled cynically. “You want it all, don’t you, darling?”

He remained silent, a monolith towering above her. She stood. Smiled. Drew a fingernail along the line of his jaw. It burned like dry ice against his skin.

“I have to go home and get my overnight case first.”

“Just so you’re there when I get there.”

A battle-scarred tomcat groomed itself on the lid of one of the garbage pails behind which Dunc had stashed himself to watch the Waverly Place doorway. Half an hour after bar-close, headlights swung across the rough brick wall opposite him. A panel truck stopped with its motor running. Two Chinese males started pulling an obviously heavy FRESH FISH crate out of the back. One lost his grip; the crate landed corner-first to spill out one of the boxes Dunc had seen transferred from the Doubloon.

Muttering in Chinese, they lugged the box down the steps to the door which the portly Oriental held open. After the second crate was moved without mishap, they drove off.

Dunc rose creaking from his awkward crouch. The cat hissed away into the shadow. He went in search of a pay phone, but Drinker Cope was waiting outside a darkened chophouse across Clay Street from the alley mouth.

He told Dunc, “I followed the truck from Pier 45.”

“Which just delivered to the Chinese American Club the same boxes I saw off-loaded out by the Farallones this afternoon.”

“Perfect. Go home and lick your wounds.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take a shower first.”

Just after three in the morning Drinker Cope keyed his apartment door. He smelled coffee. A pulse beat heavily in his throat. April, curled up on the couch in a filmy dressing gown and puffy slippers, had come to her feet at his entry.

“The coffee’s strong and hot,” she said. “You can tell me what’s in those boxes in the kitchen...”

“I can tell you all about them in the morning.”

Her eyes flashed as if she were about to strike him; then the tension left her. She leaned against him like a stuffed toy.

“Aren’t you going to leave the lady with any illusions?”

“The lady doesn’t need any.”

Drinker Cope put his arms around her, his eyes burning hungrily as he bent his face to hers.

Chapter Forty-four

Dunc grabbed a quick workout in the Y’s weight room, took some steam to iron out the kinks from last night’s dustup, and got to the office just after 8:00 A.M. Sherry handed him a memo.

“Your lucky Penny called twice, she’s at this number.”

It was Penny’s sorority house pay phone. Dunc mumbled his thanks, from his desk asked the operator for time and charges.

When Penny answered, he said, “Hi, this is Dunc, I got—”

“Oh, darling! I’ve been hanging around here in the hall, going crazy.” She got her lips closer to the phone. “Dunc, I... I missed my period. I’m almost three weeks overdue.”

He sat in stunned silence, unable for a moment to breathe.

“Dunc, are you there?”

“Yes, I... I... What do... I mean, maybe you’re not. Maybe it’s just...”

“I... I made a doctor’s appointment, I’ll let you know what he says.” She turned away for a moment, came back with her voice even lower, very rapid. “There are girls waiting to use the phone, I’ve got to go.” In a lighter voice she said, “I’m sure you’re right,” in a whisper added, “Bye. Love you, darling.”

Somehow he got out “Love you, too” before the dial tone.

He sat behind his desk, too shocked to really think about what she had told him, just running fervid phrases through his mind: Please God, oh please please please, dear God...

You may not recognize the opportunity when it arrives, but when the time comes you’ll say, “This is it!” and you’ll do it.

He went into the Greek s, ordered tea, sat at a rear table facing the wall. He took out the rosary, fingered the beads. That was another thing about rosaries. They eliminated certain alternatives from the equation...

Bright slanting morning sunlight woke Drinker Cope. April slept on her side, one creamy shoulder uncovered, face angelic in its relaxed beauty. He pulled on a robe, carried her purse into the living room and rummaged through it. A snapshot stopped him cold: April and a man with a broad good-natured face dominated by a strong nose, set under a mop of bright unruly hair.

A long shudder ran through Drinker’s smooth, thick hide. He put the photo in the pocket of the robe, replaced the purse.

He bought breakfast things and a quart of milk at the little mom-and-pop down on the corner of Union. Back up at his second-floor flat, April was in the kitchen in her dressing gown, just brewing coffee. They ate in the old-fashioned breakfast nook; across Gough Street, the Octagon House basked in winter sunlight. April put unexpected perkiness in her voice.

“You promised that this morning you would unlock the riddle of my sphinx of a husband.”

He rebuffed her coyness with cold brevity.

“If you weren’t such a lousy wife, you might have realized sooner or later that what was in those two heavy cartons you were so steamed up about last night was just what Harry’s always telling anybody who will listen.”

Now her coldness matched his own. “You’re buying that? Spanish doubloons and sunken treasure?”

“No. Gold.” He spread opened hands on the table. “Just remember that he stayed on in China after the war, where to millions of Chinese gold means life itself — gold and nothing else.”

“Spare me, puhlees! Gold is frozen at thirty-five dollars an ounce, small potatoes for a guy like Harry.”

“In this country, yeah.”

All animation left her face. “He’s found out about you,” she said with conviction. “Now he’s conning you in some way, or...” She was on her feet, striding, fiery. “Or you’ve...”

“Yeah, I’ve sold you out. Get serious. Now, for Chrissake, siddown and listen. We’re not talking about this country, we’re talking about China — and Mexico.”

She glared at him for a moment, then dropped back into her chair. She lit another cigarette. Drinker marked off points.

“One. There’s plenty of gold in Baja, and plenty of old prospectors to bring it out to the coast for American dollars. Two. On mainland China the Commies need gold in lieu of hard currency. Three. Wealthy Chinese are smuggling gold to Hong Kong. Four. From there, it gets smuggled again to their relatives back in the old country who need it to bribe their way out if they can, or to keep on living if they can’t.”

“So why would they need Harry?”

“The Chinese can’t go to Mexico themselves for the gold, but Harry can. Handsome, Caucasian, good war record — I bet he’s got maps of sunken galleons he shows all over the place.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he can be very boring at parties. But why would the Chinese trust him? Or he them?”

“I think he does it for old friends from after the war.”

Her eyes got flat and vicious as if the concept offended her. “Nobody takes that sort of risk just for friendship.”

“Maybe not you or me, but...” He chuckled. “I have a feeling Harry Wham would. You can’t turn him in as a smuggler for the reward. If you report him, everything he owns — everything you own under community property laws — gets impounded along with the gold. So I can’t see what else I can do for you, April dearest.”

She went around behind his chair, put her arms around his neck, pressed her cheek to his. She used the same phrase she had with Besner. “I want him neutralized.”

He gave a bark of laughter.

“Neutralized? You want him dead.”

The word hung between them in the air like smoke from her cigarette, almost palpable, almost visible. He went right on.

“What makes you think I’m available for that kind of work? Ferris telling you I’ll do damn near anything for money? How do I know you’re not just looking for a fall guy?”

She slapped his face, hard, turned on her heel, and stalked out of the room. A very dangerous woman, April, but she had read him right. Eddie Cope always got his pound of flesh. He followed her into the bedroom and shut the door.

Dunc knew what he couldn’t do, but what should he do if Penny was pregnant? He tried to concentrate on his witness interviews. The instant he lost his concentration, his thoughts deteriorated into panicked babbling in his mind.

Please, dear sweet loving Jesus, let her not he pregnant...

Drinker would say: tell her to get an abortion. He’d even know someone who would do it. Or he would say, dump her. How do you know she hasn’t been sleeping around back there at Iowa State? No way to be sure the kid is yours.

But this was one problem he’d never take to Drinker. Penny loved him, they were faithful to one another. He was thinking only of himself here; what must she be going through right now?

Back at his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, he thought of his writing. Even now, that had to come first. Ultimately there was nothing he wanted to be except a writer. With a baby, that dream would be gone. He’d end up like those college professors who “someday” would write the great American novel. On the other hand, he wasn’t alone. There was Hemingway in Paris with a wife and baby, back in the twenties.

His thoughts kept colliding, he kept grappling with them, ignoring Mickey, crouched farther away from him on the counter than usual. As if everything roiling through Dunc’s mind was a betrayal of all that was small and vulnerable.

On the desk was the green blotter, on the blotter were Drinker’s elbows. Within easy reach was a bottle of Jim Beam.

Drinker asked the empty office, “Optimist or pessimist? Is the bottle half-full or half-empty?”

The office answered not. He poured Beam, fired it down. He just wanted the dilemma to go away. It wasn’t going to.

On one side was April. When he’d entered the bedroom after she’d slapped his face, she was nude, caught between negligee and underwear in the middle of getting dressed, and swung around to face him, eyes blazing. But then she simply fell back on the bed, arms and legs wide, totally open to him. Taking her had been the most erotic experience of a long sinful life. His back still burned where her claws had raked him when she’d come.

Beautiful, insatiable, immoral, greedy April.

On the other side, her husband.

No contest. Except...

He gulped from the neck of the bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. On his blotter he laid two photos side by side. The one he’d found in her wallet. And an old, faded, tattered black-and-white snapshot of a very large man in marine fatigues with a captain’s double bars on his shoulders. Dark unruly hair and a big nose, the face half masked by light and shadow laid across it from jungle foliage overhead.

“Too goddamn close to call,” he said at last as if he were studying the photo finish of a horse race.

This faded snap was all he had of the marine who had saved his life on Iwo Jima eight years before. What kind of odds would make him Harry Wham? Even if he was Harry, did it make any difference? Marines were trained to carry their dead and wounded off the battle-ground with them. You could say that Drinker’s life had been saved not by a man, but by a conditioned reflex.

“Goddammit” he said aloud.

The phone rang. “Drinker,” April’s voice purred in his ear, “guess who’s waiting all naked in your bed?”

He hung up without speaking, put the bottle back in its drawer, picked up the photos — and crumpled them in his fist. On the way to his car he dropped them in a corner trash can.

Chapter Forty-five

Dunc served subpoenas and worked himself closer and closer to a self-righteous decision about what he would do if Penny turned out to be pregnant. When he trudged up the office stairs two mornings after her call, Sherry was waiting to pounce, her normally cynical eyes hot and angry.

“Dunc, you got a minute?”

Sitting beside her desk was a slight woman in a summer blouse and peasant skirt too light for winter. Her mousy-brown hair was streaked with blond and her narrow face had a delicate pointed chin that was bruised and swollen on one side. The skin around her left eye was a faded mustard color. Another bruise was visible above the collar of her high-necked blouse.

“Dunc, this is Julia Demchuk — Mrs. Stanley Demchuk. Her husband is a journeyman machinist at Kleist Tool and Die down in the Mission. As you can see, he’s good with his hands.”

“Glad to meet you, ma’am.” Dunc said awkwardly.

Julia Demchuk bobbed her head at him, quickly.

“Mrs. Demchuk’s pastor has advised her to move out of their apartment. She can stay with two girlfriends from work who have a big flat out in the Avenues near the V.A. Hospital.”

Julia raised her head. “I’m afraid what he’ll do if he comes home when I’m... when I’m packing up my... my things.”

Sherry said, “Julia, hon, why don’t you go down and wait in Dunc’s car?” Julia left with Dunc’s keys. Sherry said, “Her hubby keeps a collection of porn under the bed. Grab it, okay?”

He didn’t know why she wanted it, but he said, “Okay.”

It was a third-floor walkup at Hyde and Jones, with a liquor store underneath. Dunc parked two doors down. Julia insisted on taking only her clothes and personal items; he carried them downstairs and locked them in the trunk of the car.

Julia came out of the bathroom with a shoe box full of cosmetics when Dunc came out of the bedroom with the cardboard box of porn. Nothing erotic or artistic about them, just people pumping away. She dropped the shoe box, flushing bright scarlet.

“No! No, oh please... You mustn’t...”

Dunc was blushing by this time, too, but he said, “He’s the one to be ashamed, Julia, not you. Let’s get out of here.”

A key turned in the lock. Dunc thrust Julia behind him. Stanley Demchuk was like another Stanley — Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando in a torn T-shirt. This guy was in a leather jacket and jeans and metal-toed work boots. He reeked of booze and his eyes were red and a bit unfocused.

“Hey, who the fuck’re...” Then he saw his white-faced wife behind Dunc. He roared, “Julia! What’re you an’ him—”

“She’s moving out,” said Dunc.

“The fuck she is!”

He put an unexpected hand in Dunc’s face, shoved him aside, starting for his wife. Dunc swung him around, put a foot in the small of his back — and shoved with all his might.

Demchuk crashed face-first into the couch. Dunc squeezed his keys into Julia’s free hand, pushed her toward the door.

“Go! Lock yourself in the car.”

Demchuk bellowed and scrambled to his feet. But Dunc was between him and the door and was a lot bigger than his wife. He skidded to a stop. Cunning entered his bloated red face.

“I’m swearing out a warrant against you, wise guy. Come in here, take my wife, attack me...”

“I’m a licensed private investigator, protecting her while she exercises her constitutional rights.”

“Shit, you think I won’t find her? And when I do—”

“We’ll take photos of you following her around,” said Dunc. “We’ll put a listening device on her phone so we’ll have you on wire. We’ll get court orders, we’ll haul your ass up before a judge and” — he showed Demchuk the box of smut — “introduce all this shit into evidence with your fingerprints all over it.”

“Hey, listen, you can’t—”

Dunc simulated masturbating with his right fist. “The guys at the machine shop’ll get a kick out of going through it. Unless...” He paused. “We understand each other?”

Demchuk choked out a strangled “Yeah.”

Driving Julia to her new home, Dunc realized how smart Sherry was. He shuddered. Was this where marriages ended up? He gestured at the carton of porn on the backseat, said to Julia, “When you file for divorce, use that stuff in court.”

“Oh, I could never do that!”

But there was a new speculative gleam in her eye. Who was it had said that getting even was the best revenge?

He had been back in the office for five minutes, regaling Sherry with his exploits and feeling almost human again, when the phone rang and it was Penny. He went back to his desk, sat down, heart pounding. Made himself breathe deeply and easily to keep all tremors out of his voice, then picked up.

Her voice was small, frightened. “I... had the rabbit test and... it was positive.”

Dunc just sat there, unable to speak, move, think, breathe.

“Dunc?” An edge of terror in her voice. “Dunc? Are you there? Say something, honey, I...”

He’d rehearsed it in his mind often enough. Just do it. Quickly. Brutally. Five utterly horrible minutes and he was home free. But the dam burst, she was pouring it all out, low intense words, getting them out before they stuck in her throat.

“Dunc, I... we... have to get married real quick — so when our baby’s born it’ll just seem like it’s a month early. It would kill my mom to know I was pregnant before... out of wedlock. I’ve got three days of finals, then...”

Dunc plunged into his rehearsed speech, instead heard himself saying, “Penny, sweetie, we’ll... get married as soon as you can get out here. I... I’ll send you the money for a one-way ticket through Western Union. Okay? Just don’t cry, baby.”

She got out, “I’m crying ’cause I’m so happy, my darling!”

When they had hung up, he sat there with the phone in his hand, stunned. How had that happened? What had he done?

He straightened up slightly. What he’d had to do.

A great weight shifted from his shoulders — and another settled there. The one that said in a dry, biting voice that he’d never be a writer. His life as a free spirit had just begun, to be ended by a little wiggly sperm, swimming upstream.

Sean set out a glass of hot clam juice as Drinker Cope came through the door of the Old Clam House. Drinker lifted the four-ounce glass in salute, fired down the hot salty liquid. The very air was awash with the briny smell of fresh shellfish.

The walls were crowded with darkened oil paintings, the hardwood floor was worn, hard drinkers studded the bar. The jukebox was sobbing out Eddie Fisher’s “Oh My Papa.” A woman’s glossy jet-black hair just showing above the back of the farthest booth. The stirring in his groin told Drinker who she was.

April was wearing chocolate slacks and a fawn-colored ribbed fisherman’s sweater that would have come halfway down her thighs if she were standing up. She got right down to the reason for her call.

“Harry told me he’s going out on the Doubloon again in just two weeks. March tenth. He said they have a galleon called the Cinco Llagas pinpointed somewhere up the coast around Point Arena. It was supposed to be carrying gold and vases and jade.”

“D’you have anything on under that getup?”

Her grin was wicked. “For me to know and you to find out. But only if you do something about Harry.”

“Oh My Papa” ended. They stayed silent until Rosemary Clooney started inviting them over to her house.

“Neutralize him?” Drinker said then derisively.

“Neutralize him,” April agreed. She deepened her voice to a credible mimickry of Drinker’s. “ ‘I was a demolitions man, I blew a lot of Japs to hell and gone out of their little caves.’ ”

Drinker stood up abruptly, filled with lust.

“Come onna my house,” he said, thick-voiced.

Dunc met him at the head of the office stairs, so tense he was almost hostile. “Penny’s flying out, we’re getting married this weekend up in Reno.”

Drinker gave him a long slow smile, thinking, poor bastard, knocked her up and he’s doing the right thing. That’s why Dunc would never be dangerous to any man. Too much humanity in him. Pity they got tagged so soon — usually the guy at least got a few months of worry-free humping before the nickel dropped.

“Congratulations, kid. Me and Sherry, we’ll go up with you as best man and best woman, or whatever they call it. Okay? But meanwhile, I gotta make a phone call and I want you to go out and track down Harry Wham. Start at the yacht club. Call me here if you connect with him.”

An hour after leaving Drinker’s bed, April was sitting on her living room couch with her legs drawn up, head back as she blew Tarryton smoke luxuriously at the ceiling. Besner was in the pastel-green lounge chair across the room.

“Do you think we’re putting too much faith in Cope?”

“As much as a woman can put in any man. He wants me, bad.”

“He’s smart and he’s tricky and he’s mean,” warned Besner.

“That’s what we need, darling. I gave Cope a deadline of sorts — the next time Harry and Fong take a trip to Mexico, I told Cope they mustn’t come back.”

Besner blurted out, “Are you sleeping with him?”

“Ferris!” Her sparkling laughter contained only outraged delight. “He’s like a... a sausage!” She was on her feet. “Come on, darling, let Mama show you how much she loves you.”

Harry Wham slid onto a stool at the Buena Vista Cafe. “An Irish coffee, John. Lots of Irish, lots of whipped cream.”

Reversed in the backbar mirror, the Hyde Street pier reached a finger out toward the bulbous tip of the Municipal Pier to form Aquatic Park. Side-lit gulls flew low against the far dark mass of Angel Island, pink-stranded by a dying sunset.

A big man in a dark overcoat slid onto the next stool. He had a beaming rubicund face and blue twinkling eyes. Gray-shot hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead.

He pointed at Harry’s Irish coffee.

“I’ll have what he’s having.” He rubbed his hands together as if cold, then jerked a thumb at two swimmers just climbing out onto the pier. “How can those guys from the Polar Bear Club go swimming around out there all year round?”

“A hardy bunch. An hour a day in that water, you’ll live forever,” said Harry.

“You think so? Fish fuck in that stuff.”

They got to talking, as men do, ended up moving over to one of the tables looking out over Bay Street. Eventually they drifted to the war. It turned out they both had served in the Pacific theater. In the Marines. Had even hopped those same islands while driving the Japs back toward their Imperial homeland, had sunk their Land of the Rising Sun in defeat.

Chapter Forty-six

Penny was due in on Friday night. The four of them would drive to Reno on Saturday in two cars; Drinker got carsick in the backseat on mountain roads. Meanwhile, he was a slave driver, in a foul mood, something on his mind for sure, which meant one surveillance job after another for Dunc.

When Dunc stopped off at the office on Wednesday to type up the latest batch of surveillance reports, Drinker spun a case assignment sheet across his desk.

“Go up to Point Arena chop-chop for a witness interview.” Dunc had a vague idea that Point Arena was somewhere up the north coast. “Seven months ago this guy maybe witnessed a hit-and-run that left our client in a wheelchair for life. I need his statement.” His tone got almost tentative. “Also, find out if the Doubloon’s been up there in the past month or so.”

“I thought all of Harry Wham’s trips were to Mexico.”

The snap was back in his voice. “You ain’t paid to think.”

By the map, Point Arena was about seventy-five miles north of the Golden Gate on narrow, winding coast-hugging Highway I. The hills above the sea were turning rainy-season green, a light steady rain was falling. Every vista retreated in lacy pastel washes like Japanese prints, every range of hills was a series of dolphin backs, ever more distant, breaking the surface of gray endless seas of fog. The ocean off to his left was obliterated by a drifting water-color wash of mist.

His reaction to Penny’s pregnancy had just been panic. Hemingway’d been married when he’d quit being a reporter to try and be a fiction writer in Paris, had just kept on writing, even when they had a kid. Dunc could do the same. It was just that a baby right now made everything so damned complicated...

The only thing wider than Craven’s yellow streak was his mean streak. He looked like his name, jockey-sized, with greasy black hair parted in the middle so it hung down on either side of his thin face like an upside-down horseshoe. His small, nasty, close-set eyes, always on the move, flanked a nose that twitched often, like a rabbit’s smelling out danger. Or an illicit buck.

He was sitting on a stack of two-by-sixes in a corrugated tin shed where Giotti Construction was putting in endless row houses overlooking Skyline Boulevard in Daly City. As he bit into his sandwich, a small, surprisingly powerful hand closed around his shoulder. Craven jerked free indignantly.

“You ain’t with the cops no more, you got no right comin’ around hasslin’ me.”

Drinker Cope said with his big red-faced insincere grin, “Who got you this cushy job here with Giotti Construction?”

“Yeah, well, you had your reasons,” said Craven darkly.

“I’m glad you brought that up. Dynamite. Four sticks. The usual accessories to go with it — you know what I need. Electrical blasting cap, insulated wire, a crimper — just short inventory a bit, you’ve done it before. There’s even a few bucks in it for you.”

Greed made Craven’s nose twitch. “It’s my job if I get caught. I oughta get at least—”

The hand was macerating the shoulder again. “Remember that Ivory soap slogan? ‘It floats’? You say anything to anybody, anybody, y’understand, ever, and you’re Ivory soap.” Drinker got to his feet. “Floating facedown in the Bay in among all those assholes from the Polar Club, as in a corpse. You got a week.”

Craven watched the big, deceptively graceful man go across the raw earth toward his car. Could he profit from the knowledge that Drinker Cope wanted dynamite and detonators? No. If Cope was a diamond, he’d be the diamond used to cut other diamonds.

In Daly City Drinker had a beer and beat himself at shuffleboard. After two hours at the Buena Vista last night with Harry Wham, he still didn’t know if Harry was the marine captain who had saved his life.

He’d have to make up his mind soon — the dynamite was on its way and April was a dangerous obsession, becoming daily more compelling. But he had a pretty good hunch she wouldn’t dump him afterward. Besner was a lightweight, couldn’t go the distance. But Drinker wanted to be sure. One easy way to find out.

If Dunc found that Harry was innocent enough to actually be looking for a galleon up at Point Arena, it might make a difference in Drinker’s decision.

The assignment sheet read: BEN McKINNEY, 26, married. The only address was P.O. Box 174A, Point Arena.

Point Arena, in the fading light, was a small fishing community clinging to a broad sweep of hillside going down to the sea. Dunc got there at 5:12 P.M. The post office had officially closed at five, but there were lights on inside, a radio was playing, the American flag hung wetly from the flagpole. But nobody would answer his pounding on the door. Un-civil servants.

At his third gas station a teenager with big red knobby hands and a Uriah Heep Adam’s apple pointed through the rain.

“You drive down there a mile or so, you’ll find a wharf. Take the road leads off between two for them warehouses to the Standard Oil Bulk Plant. Mr. McKinney lives off to the right of the bulk plant, there, up on the hillside. Second house up.”

Dunc pulled into the driveway of the second house on a steep gravel road going up the hillside across from the bulk plant. The smell of crude filled the wet air. There were lights in the windows. He went up on the wooden porch and knocked. The rain was slacking off. The opened door spilled out yellow light.

A slight, bent, snuff-chawing man peered up at Dunc from beneath shaggy white eyebrows. He was bald as a boiled egg.

“Ben McKinney?” asked Dunc.

A head shake. “Nope. Father. Ain’t it a shame?”

“Sure is. Is your son home?”

“Nope.” Head shake. “Left for Santa Rosa five hours ago. Him and his wife. Ain’t it a shame?”

“Sure is,” said Dunc. “Will he be back tonight?”

“Can’t say for sure. Ain’t it a shame? Young Willem he drank some diesel oil, he’s in the hospital there. Seven months old.” A nod. “Yep. Musta thought it was milk.”

“Is the boy okay?” asked Dunc.

A nod. “Must be — hospital’s lettin’ him come home.”

Come back later. But as he was turning back into the street past the bulk plant, a 1949 brown De Soto Club Coupe was turning in. A man and woman in the front seat, a kid of maybe five or six in the back. The driver was a lean open-faced man with worried eyes. Dunc stopped and rolled down his window.

“Mr. McKinney? How’s your boy?”

The woman put her face in her hands.

McKinney said, “They thought he was all right, but then he got pneumonia and the whooping cough, thanks for asking.”

“Gosh, this is a terrible time, but do you think you could give me five or ten minutes for some questions?”

McKinney looked over at his wife, then shrugged.

“Come up to the house. We gotta pack a few things anyway.”

Ben McKinney’s wife, Marilyn, had been in the hospital at Santa Rosa having their little boy Willem, now on the edge of death, on the very night that Drinker’s client had been run down in a Petaluma street after bar-close by the man he was suing. McKinney’s car? He had lent it to his brother, now lived in Texas, he had the address around here somewheres...

Dunc handwrote a statement for him to sign, which he did with the father signing as a witness, got the brother’s address in Houston, and left them to their sorrow.

He found himself pulling for the little kid as he went systematically through Point Arena with a new set of questions: Did anyone know a yachtsman named Harry Wham? Well, then maybe a power cruiser called the Doubloon? How about a big blond guy who was followed around by a small quick Chinese kid?

He talked with fishermen, grocery clerks, gas-pumpers, a used-car salesman, two old women at the five-and-dime, the hotel clerk, the town’s only motel owner, bartenders, store clerks, the town librarian, a sheriff’s deputy, and two volunteer firemen.

If Harry had left footprints — or keel marks — in Point Arena, Dunc couldn’t find them. On the long drive home he had things to think about other than his own impending marriage.

A maybe dying baby. How a private eye seldom got the whole story on anything. Would Julia Demchuk get a divorce? Who had put Chauncey Jones in a Colma cemetery plot? What wasn’t Drinker telling him about the Harry Wham investigation? Who was their client in the search for Kata Koltai that ended in two murders?

Stories without climaxes. Now, if he were writing these cases as fiction... Maybe he should try some private-eye tales. He sure had enough background material...

Penny, emotionally and physically exhausted, woke to the voice of the stewardess over the cabin’s loudspeaker system. “...beginning our descent into San Francisco. Please extinguish all smoking materials and bring your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and locked positions...”

There was a shuddering rumble as the wheels were lowered. Penny shivered. She was scared. Did Dunc still love her now that she was... with child? The grandmotherly woman beside her leaned over to ask if she lived in San Francisco.

“I’m coming out to get married,” she said, suddenly proud.

But what if Dunc had changed his mind? When she had been out here for New Year’s, she had noticed changes in him. He was harder, not so naive, not so open. Detective work seemed to be making him cynical and tough.

Look at Drinker Cope. Look at Sherry. Hard and flip on the surface, but hopelessly in love with Drinker — who wasn’t in love with her. Both women had known it without ever speaking of it. Dunc hadn’t. Men did not understand.

Oh God, would he be good to her? Would he love her always? Panic washed over her. So often in shotgun weddings there were other women, anger, raised fists... She and her baby, alone...

No, Dunc would be waiting at the gate with open arms. She’d work at temp jobs as she’d done in L.A. until the baby came, and then maybe she could work at that Fleur de Lis place, or at an inn, anyplace she could learn while she worked. A few years down the road, she and Dunc would have the dude ranch she dreamed of. The three of them together. She would run the ranch, Dunc would write and become famous. Like Hemingway. And their baby would ride bareback like a wild Indian.

Twenty minutes later she came out of the accordion ramp from the plane and there he was, right in front of the gate, solid as a rock, not even aware of the deplaning passengers parting around him.

His arms were around her, tight, they were kissing, she kept her eyes shut, dizzy, feeling him start to harden against her just from this brief embrace, and she knew it was going to be all right.

Everything was going to be all right forever.