Dragonfire

Eighteen

It was after midnight by the time I got to Burlingame, twenty-five miles south of the city, and found Camelia Drive. The street was two crooked blocks long, tucked back in a section that bordered on the even more affluent community of Hillsborough. The guy at the all-night service station on El Camino, where I stopped to ask directions, had never heard of it; I’d had to hunt up its location on a town map in his office.

The houses along Camelia Drive were smallish but expensive-looking, set on wide woodsy lots with plenty of space between them. Number Thirty-seven was partially hidden behind a tall hedge and a couple of big shade trees; illuminated numerals on the gate post let me place it from the car as I drifted by. There were no other lights that I could see, either in the house or in the detached garage.

I drove through a dogleg at the end of the block and parked under one of the trees that flanked the road, away from the hanging street lamps. But I did not get out right away. I was still as tense as I had been in Chinatown, but fatigue made me feel sluggish and achey; the coffee I’d bought from a vending machine at the service station didn’t seem to have done much good. I rolled the window down, lay my head against the seatback, and sat there like that for a time.

When the chill air began to make me shiver I undipped the flashlight from under the dash, put it into the coat pocket with the .38, and stepped out and headed back to Number Thirty-seven. It was heavily overcast here but with none of the fog that had blanketed San Francisco; the shadows under the trees were as black as ink on blotting paper. The only lights I could see came from street lamps, house numerals, and a single window in a house two hundred yards away, across the street.

I stopped at Emerson’s front gate and peered through it at the house. Ranch-style, with a porch alcove made out of brick; dark and silent. I moved over to the driveway, went up it along the bordering hedge. There was just enough room between the hedge and the garage wall for me to squeeze through into the yard. A door with a glass pane was set into the wall toward the rear; I eased down there, walking on grass now, and put my face close to the glass. Solid black. I got the flashlight out and butted the lens against the window. When I flicked it on, for just a second, the flare of light showed me an empty expanse of oily concrete floor.

No car. No Emerson?

Following a flagstone path, I moved over toward the house and around onto the porch. There was a control plate for an alarm system in the wall next to the door, but the little bulb above the keylock was dark; unless it was burned out, that meant the system was not turned on. I tried the doorknob, being quiet about it, but it was locked up tight.

I went back onto the path, took the branch that led to the rear. More trees, a small flagstone terrace with some outdoor furniture on it, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool flanked by lawn on the other three sides. The same kind of tall hedges as out front separated Emerson’s property from his neighbors’ and gave it, and me, plenty of privacy.

In the near back wall of the house were a set of sliding glass doors; I stepped on to the terrace and tried them first. Locked. Beyond was a short wing containing a door in the inside angle, with a window beside it and two more windows in the outer wall. The wing door had a bolt lock and was set solidly in its frame. But the window near it was fastened by a loose-fitting latch, so that when I eased the sash upward with my fingers, it rose maybe a quarter of an inch before binding. With it up like that, there was a hairline crack between the sash and the sill; I couldn’t see it but I could feel it with my fingertips.

I took out my pocket knife, opened the longest of the blades, and poked it through the opening. It made faint scraping sounds when I wiggled it against the latch; I quit moving it to listen. Silence from inside the house. I did some more wiggling, making more noise now. But if Emerson was in there, and if he’d heard me, he was being damned quiet.

It took me a couple of minutes to wedge the latch out of its slot. Only it slipped right back in again because I couldn’t hold it and slide the sash up at the same time, one-handed. I worked the latch free a second time, then leaned my chest against the knife handle and shoved at the sash with my hand. The same thing happened with the latch. I had to do it twice more, sweating, gritting my teeth, before I managed to hold the latch long enough to get the sash moving upward.

The thing made a grating noise when it went up, and the knife slid over the sill and clattered against something inside. I flattened against the wall with the .38 clear in my hand. Nothing happened in the house, but I stayed motionless for two or three minutes, listening hard, waiting. Still nothing, not even a creak.

All right, I thought. Nobody home. The son of a bitch isn’t that good.

But I did not put the gun back into my pocket. I used it and the edge of my hand to shove the sash all the way up. Climbing in was another matter; I could have hauled myself over the sill if I’d had the use of both hands, but with just one it was impossible. I went over to the lawn furniture, picked up one of the wrought-iron chairs, and brought it back to the window. When I got up on that I was able to swing my leg inside. I straddled the sill, eased my head and the left side of my body under the sash, and managed to make it the rest of the way through without hurting myself.

Bulky shapes loomed in the darkness. I stayed where I was for half a dozen pulsebeats, listening to more silence; then I traded the gun for the flashlight and switched on the beam. An office or study. The bulky shapes were a desk, some cabinets and bookcases, three chairs, and a couch: all polished black teak bearing Chinese designs in gold leaf. The carpet was red and gold with a dragon motif. Even the pictures on the walls were Oriental, at least half of them erotic.

I found my knife and picked it up. An open doorway led into the main part of the house; I followed the light through it. On my right, a bead-curtained arch gave access to a recreation room, the one with the sliding glass doors. Straight ahead was a hallway, and the first door off it on the left led to the master bedroom. The flash beam let me see a canopied teak bed, black-lacquered nightstands and dressers with more gold-leaf designs, a Chinese tapestry on one wall — and it also let me see that some of the dresser drawers were pulled open, spilling out articles of clothing.

I went in there. Two or three other articles lay on the carpet; the gold-dragon bed quilt was mussed at the bottom, as if something heavy, like a suitcase, had lain there; inside a walk-in closet, a couple of suits and some shirts were pulled askew on their hangers and there were three empty hangers scattered on the floor. All of which could have meant that Emerson was the same kind of sloppy housekeeper as I was, except that the study and recreation room were neat and orderly. The other explanation, the obvious one, was that he had come back here tonight, packed in a hurry, and beat it away again.

Opposite the bed was a doorway that led to an adjoining bathroom. When I played the light in there I saw a tan trench coat draped over the rim of the tub; one of its sleeves appeared to be damp. I moved inside for a closer look. The sleeve had been scrubbed with water and some kind of cleanser, probably not much more than an hour ago. And it had been a hurried job, because I could just make out the edges of several spotty stains that had not quite been washed out.

Blood, I thought, he got blood on the sleeve when he killed Jimmy Quon. He’d been here tonight, all right. But where the hell was he now?

I went back to the hallway and searched the rest of the house. All of the rooms had the same type of Oriental furniture and decor, even the kitchen, and all of them were as well kept as the study and the rec room. None contained anything that gave me a lead as to where Emerson might have gone.

Back in the study, I drew heavy brocade drapes over the windows and then switched on the desk lamp. An appointments calendar next to the phone bore several notations in a near-illegible hand; but there was nothing under today’s date, and nothing under tomorrow’s, and none of the scrawled names meant anything to me. I pawed through papers in the desk and in a teak file cabinet. Bills, personal and business records, a checking account statement that showed a balance of three thousand dollars. No private correspondence, and nothing to link Emerson to Eberhardt or Polly Soon or Jimmy Quon.

Once I was done in there, I had no reason to stay any longer. I shut off the lamp, climbed back out through the window, and closed it behind me. I left the lawn chair where it was, the hell with it. Camelia Drive was still deserted; I went out through the front gate and back to my car.

I sat in the darkness again, fighting off lassitude, trying to think. Where did he go? It figured he was badly upset, panicked; the hasty packing job proved that, and so did his flight. But I could not see him going on the run. If he’d been inclined to run, he’d have done it when Eberhardt survived the shooting. And with Quon dead, and me apparently stymied, he had to believe he was more or less in the clear now. Then there was the trenchcoat. He’d washed it and left it in the bathroom, instead of getting rid of it; that had to mean he planned on returning home sooner or later.

A short trip, then. Get out of the area for a few days, hole up somewhere until he could pull himself together. It made sense that way. Hiring somebody to kill was one thing, but doing the job yourself was a whole different ball game. It took some getting used to, it kept a person from functioning in normal patterns.

Philip Bexley had told me Emerson made regular gambling trips to Las Vegas. Would he have hopped a plane and gone there? Maybe. But a much more likely possibility was the ranch in Mendocino County that Bexley had also told me about. Familiar surroundings on the one hand; a sense of isolation on the other. A place where he’d feel secure.

Mendocino or Vegas or some other damned place, there was nothing I could do about it tonight, no matter how much I wanted to pursue him. I was like a zombie already; if I did not get some rest pretty soon, I was liable to wind up back in the hospital. I couldn’t do anything about Emerson from a frigging hospital bed.

It was a constant struggle to stay alert on the drive back to San Francisco. When I finally got home I was asleep on my feet. I don’t even remember getting out of my clothes or crawling into bed.

In the morning, rested, still a little achey, I called Mid-Pacific Electronics. The woman who answered — the secretary, Miss Addison, probably — said, “I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Emerson isn’t in,” when I asked to speak to him.

“Will he be in later today?”

“No, he’s gone out of town.”

“For how long?”

“He won’t be back until next Monday.”

“Can you tell me where I can reach him?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“He didn’t happen to go to Las Vegas, did he?”

“Las Vegas? No, he didn’t.”

“Would he be up at his ranch in Mendocino?”

“I really can’t say, sir. May I take a message?”

“No message,” I said, and put the receiver down. And stood up and reached for my coat.

Yeah, I was thinking.

Mendocino.