Deadfall

Chapter One

Stakeouts are a pain in the ass.

On rolling night stakeouts this is true literally as well as figuratively. During the day you can people-watch, read a little, get out of the car and walk around for short periods. After dark you’re pretty much confined, particularly when the weather is bad and even more particularly when you’re staked out in a residential neighborhood. Citizens might not notice a strange car, or somebody hunkered down in the shadows inside, but once you start prowling around on foot they notice you damned quick-and the next thing you know, you’re exchanging amenities with a couple of prowl-car cops. About all you can do on a rolling night stakeout is sit and think and try not to fall asleep while you wait for something to happen.

That was what I was doing for the second night in a row, on Cerritos Street in San Francisco’s Ingleside District, at eleven???o’clock of a cold, overcast, but no longer rainy November Thursday: bored to tears, developing calluses on my backside, and reflecting on the metaphysical nature of stakeouts. I had been in the neighborhood since 8:15, at three different locations within two blocks, from all of which I could watch a particular gray-stucco house that belonged to a woman named Eileen Kyner. She hadn’t shown up yet; neither had the guy I was waiting for, one Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr. For all I knew they had run off to the North Woods or the North Pole, never to be seen or heard from again. Another long, dull, empty night. And for what? Was I suffering like this in order to apprehend a dangerous felon? I was not. Nothing half so glamorous or noble as that.

I was sitting here waiting to swipe a car.

Admittedly, Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr., was what they used to call a blot on society’s escutcheon. Not that he was a crook, not precisely. Alfred Henry was, in fact, a deadbeat of the first magnitude. He had a charming habit of buying things on credit and then forgetting to pay for them. He also moved around a lot, so that when people like me got hired by finance companies and/or various merchants to either collect what was owed them or repossess the goods, Alfred Henry was nowhere to be found. Why merchants kept selling things to him was beyond me, but they did; and of course he kept disappearing. He was very good at disappearing, Alfred Henry was. It had taken me almost a week to get a line on him, the line being Eileen Kyner. La Kyner, a recent divorcee, was reputed to be his current lady friend; she was also reputed to be harboring his silver 1985 Mercedes XL in her garage. Said Mercedes having been purchased by Alfred Henry from a dealer in Burlingame, and said dealer now wanting it back because Alfred Henry had neglected to pay him a dime on it in four months. The Mercedes had not been in Eileen Kyner’s garage yesterday morning, when I’d first come out here, and it hadn’t been there last night or today at any time. Neither had Eileen Kyner or Alfred Henry or anybody else, so far as I knew. I was beginning to view the past two days as a wild-goose squat. Still and all, I was getting paid to sit here, and so here I would sit for at least one more day and night, if necessary, gathering additional proof (as if I needed any) that stakeouts are a pain in the ass and that the life of the private eye is generally overrated as far as excitement is concerned.

I shifted position on the seat for the two-hundredth time, to ease the pressure on my tailbone, and stared out at the street. After two nights here I knew it as well as I ever wanted to know any street in the city. It was a very ordinary street, lined with medium-sized houses of several different architectural styles, the dominant one being Spanish. The houses on the north side, where I was parked in the heavy shadow of a Monterey pine, were built on higher ground ten feet or so above street level; the ones on the south side were at street level, set back behind short lawns or gardens. Among the latter group was Eileen Kyner’s gray-stucco. Nothing much happened on Cerritos after dark, it seemed, which meant that there was hardly anything to occupy my attention while I waited. Once, an hour ago, a guy had come out of a house down the block, hauling a fat schnauzer on a leash, and I had been so grateful for something to look at that I had watched with rapt attention while the schnauzer lifted his leg against a tree and then left his calling card on a neighbor’s nice green lawn. The dog’s owner made no attempt to scoop up the calling card, so I had got another couple of minutes out of cursing inconsiderate dog owners who made no attempt to curb their mutts.

More time passed-at least an hour, I thought. I glanced at my watch to confirm that, and saw that seven minutes had elapsed since the last time I’d looked at it. I shifted position for the two-hundred-and-first time. It was stuffy in the car, probably because I was wrapped up in my heavy tweed overcoat-I was just getting over a touch of bronchitis-and so I opened the window a little to let in some of the cold night air. From somewhere nearby I could hear the faint sound of a television turned to a late-evening rerun of a sitcom: the rise and fall of canned laughter. That was how quiet it was in this neighborhood.

I glanced over at the GTE mobile telephone unit mounted under the dash. It was brand new, that unit. I had always felt that mobile telephones were an unnecessary affectation, and I had put up something of a squawk before yielding to Eberhardt’s insistence that we each outfit our cars with one. Now, after two nights on Cerritos, with the most interesting thing I’d witnessed being a schnauzer having a bowel movement, I had begun to change my mind. I had used the mobile phone twice already tonight, once to check in with Eberhardt and once to let Kerry know that she was probably going to have to sleep alone again-a fact that depressed me, if not her. Too late to call either of them again, much as I would have liked to. Besides which, the mobile phone was for business and emergency use, not for idle chitchat to alleviate the boredom of a rolling stakeout. I had gotten through thirty-odd years of stakeouts without a telephone as a steady companion; I could likewise get through the next couple of hours of this one.

Come on, Alfred Henry, I thought. Come on, you deadbeat son of a bitch.

I sighed. I shifted position again. I poured a little more coffee from the thermos I’d brought along and tried to drink it too fast and spilled half of it down my chin onto the front of my coat. I said some rude words. I sighed again. I poured more coffee and managed this time to find my mouth with the cup. I yawned. I stared out at the street. I switched on my Sony portable radio and listened to five minutes of news, local and national, none of which was worth listening to. I switched off the radio and looked at my watch again.

11:28.

Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. I pulled my head down lower on the seat and sat still, watching and listening to the sound of the car as it approached and then glided past. It might have been a Mercedes XL; it had the shape of one. But if so it wasn’t Alfred Henry’s Mercedes XL. It drifted on past Eileen Kyner’s house and turned right on Moncada and disappeared.

11:29.

I had hung around until after two last night. Not tonight, Alfred Henry. If he and his Mercedes didn’t show by 1:00 A.M. I was going home to sleep. Alone, damn it.

I thought about Kerry again. She was nice to think about-the love of your life always is. Almost always, anyway. I wondered what she was doing right now. Probably getting ready for bed in her Diamond Heights apartment. That coppery hair of hers brushed out smooth and shiny, her face scrubbed free of makeup. Wearing that flimsy peach-colored thing, maybe, the one that ended halfway down her thighs and was sheer all around except for little wisps of lace here and there, here and there…

Terrific, I thought. As if this stakeout isn’t difficult enough. Now you’re having erotic thoughts and giving yourself an erection.

I forced myself to quit thinking about anything and stared out at the street some more. Most of the nearby houses were dark now; the only ones that showed light were the two directly opposite where I was parked-a smallish Spanish-style job with a red tile roof and a round, squat central tower that bisected it into wings, and its east-side neighbor, a bulky wood-and-brick structure that had an old-fashioned front porch. A chest-high hedge separated the two. The TV sounds-the droning voices of news commentators, now, replacing the canned laughter-were coming from one of them, but I couldn’t tell which.

Another set of headlights appeared, headed toward me this time from the other end of Cerritos. But they didn’t mark the appearance of Alfred Henry, either; they came past the Kyner house, past me without slowing, and eventually swung into a driveway back near Ocean Avenue.

I told myself I was not going to check the time again. I told myself it was pointless and counterproductive and besides, a watched pot never boils. So then, having convinced myself not to look at my watch, I proceeded to look at my watch.

11:37.

Across the street, in one of the two lighted houses, somebody fired a gun.

I sat up straight, tensing, on the seat. TV, I thought-but it hadn’t been the TV. I had heard enough guns going off in my life, too many guns going off, not to recognize the real thing even at a distance.

After a couple of seconds there was another bang, followed this time by a series of muffled noises that I couldn’t identify. I was out of the car by then, acting on impulse and instinct, running across the empty street. It was the Spanish-style house that the shots had come from; the television noise was pouring out of the bulky one next door. The lights in the Spanish house were at the back; the front part was obscured by darkness. I cut over onto an asphalt drive that paralleled the hedge, ran past a Chrysler parked there, through heavy darkness toward the rear.

I was twenty yards from the corner when I heard a door whack open around back, then the thud of running footfalls. But whoever it was didn’t come my way. I pounded around the corner, into a shrub-cluttered yard bloated with shadow. At the far end I could make out a human form pushing through a gate in a tall grape-stake fence-somebody wearing a floppy rain hat and a trench coat, the tails of the coat flapping like half-folded wings.

I yelled, “Hey, you there!” but whoever it was didn’t break stride or turn his head. Two seconds later he was gone, melted into the deeper blackness thrown by a yucca tree that leaned out above the fence. I ran across the yard, dodged past some kind of fountain… and something caught hold of my foot, pitched me sideways and down onto a damp patch of lawn. The thing still had hold of my foot when I rolled over onto hands and knees; I kicked loose of it-damned garden hose-and lumbered up and made it to the fence in time to hear a car engine surge to life, tires squeal on pavement a moment later. There was a narrow alley back there, of the type that runs through the middle of some residential blocks in this part of the city to give access to rear garages or parking spaces; the car, running without lights-another shapeless blob-was sawing along it forty yards away, pointed in the opposite direction. Then it was gone, too, and the night got quiet again except for vague disturbed sounds in the nearby houses.

My right knee began to throb: I had whacked it pretty good when I’d tripped over the hose. I limped back across the yard, bent over so I could rub it and so I could see to avoid any other obstacles. The rear door of the house was wide open; a wedge of light spilled out across a shadowed interior porch, coming from a brightly lit kitchen. I went that way, fighting myself a little because I didn’t want to have to go inside, I did not want to see what was in there.

I was ten paces from the open door when a window went up in the bulky house adjacent and a bald guy in a bathrobe leaned out and called nervously, “What’s going on over there? Who are you?”

“Detective,” I said, because I didn’t want to get into a discussion with him. “Everything’s under control, sir.” He took it the way I’d intended-that I was a police detective, not a private one. He ducked back inside and the window sash slammed shut. But he was still there behind the pane as I went ahead, peering out through it marble-eyed like a kid watching a bug do something ugly and fascinating inside a big glass jar.

When I got to the open door I stopped and poked my head inside and listened. Faint sounds, not quite identifiable-a kind of dragging, a kind of crunching. The hackles were up on my neck now; the sweat that came rolling down out of my armpits had a cold oily feel. I thought about calling out, but that would have been stalling, wasting time. Get it over with, I thought. And I went inside.

Laundry porch, with nothing in it to hold my attention. I kept going into the kitchen. Empty. Wall telephone, table with a coffee mug on it, chair with a dark blue gabardine suit coat draped over the back-I saw those things, and then I heard the dragging, crunching sounds again. They were coming from beyond an archway on the far side, past a breakfast bar that divided the kitchen into two halves. I went around the bar to the archway. The room on the other side was a lamp-lit formal dining room, and when I saw what was inside it my stomach heaved and I said something half reverent, half profane under my breath and then tried to swallow the bile that pumped up into my throat.

The room looked like a war zone.

Blood, that was the first thing that struck the senses-a trail of it, smeary and glistening in the ochre-colored light, like an obscene parody of a slug’s passage. Mahogany dining table broken in half, chairs overturned and two of them smashed, matching china cabinet lying face down across the other wreckage. Broken glass on the hardwood floor, broken china plates and cups and saucers, blue-and-white patterned stuff with some of the shards speckled with crimson. And the man crawling away toward another archway at the opposite end, a big man, fortyish, mane of gray-black hair, wearing dark blue gabardine trousers and a light blue shirt with a wet red front; one hand clawing at the wood, the other crooked under him in a vain effort to stem the flow of bright arterial blood. Dragging sounds, crunching sounds: trying to crawl away from death. Moaning, too, as he crawled, little rattles of sound that were not quite words.

For a couple of seconds I leaned hard against the inside of the arch, struggling to get the wall up between what I was seeing and my emotions. It wasn’t much of a wall, it never had been, but when I got it in place it allowed me to function. I took a couple of deep breaths, keeping my throat clamped shut against the bile, and picked my way across the room-avoiding the trail of blood, the shards of glass and china. When I reached the wounded man he was almost to the far archway. I got down on one knee beside him, gripped his shoulder gently and put my mouth close to his ear.

“Easy, I’m here to help you. Don’t move, just lie still while I call an ambulance. You’re going to be okay.”

A lie, that last; he wasn’t going to be okay. Up close like this I could see that his face was gray, pustuled with sweat, already waxlike-stamped with the unmistakable imprint of death. But the lie didn’t matter: shock and pain had deafened him. He kept trying to crawl, not getting anywhere now, just wriggling in place as the strength and the life ebbed out of him. Gut-shot once, maybe twice-I couldn’t tell for sure with all the blood. No exit wounds. And no sign of the gun. Standing in here when he got it, I thought; force of the slug knocked him back into the china cabinet and he pulled it over with him when he fell.

I started to lift up away from him, to go call the ambulance even though he couldn’t have more than a couple of minutes left, but the rattling in his throat stopped me. It formed a word now, a liquidly audible word.

“Deadfall,” he said.

He said it again, not quite as clearly, and kept trying to crawl out from under my hand, away from the grinning skull-face that beckoned him. And then he said, mumbling, delirious words that I had to strain to hear: “So sorry… fall, how could you…” And then he died.

I felt him die. I felt him shudder, stiffen; I felt the life force desert him all at once, as if it somehow came winging out through my hand. The sensation put racking chills on my back, drove me to my feet, and sent me stumbling back into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink, staring at my left hand, willing the shakes to go away so I could use the telephone.

Deadfall. So sorry… fall, how could you…

There was a stain of blood on my left palm, like a vestige of the life force that had passed through it.