Dragonfire

Five

Outside it was cold and foggy again, the kind of heavy dripping fog that tends to linger for days during the summer months. I was shivering when I got to where my car was parked a block from the flat. Doctor Abrams had told me to stay inside, get plenty of rest, don’t exert myself. The hell with him. The hell with everybody. It was my life and I could do what I damned well pleased with it. I didn’t have a license anymore, I only had one good arm, but I still had the freedom of choice; they hadn’t taken that away from me yet.

I started the car, put the heater on high, and sat there until some of the chill went away. Driving with one hand was no real problem because the car had an automatic transmission; I wheeled it around and took it to Van Ness. Twenty minutes later I rolled down the steep Castro Street hill into Noe Valley.

There was not much activity on Eberhardt’s block of Elizabeth Street. No kids playing; nobody out puttering in his garden or mowing his lawn or washing his car; nobody drinking beer and cooking steaks on the backyard barbecue. The absence of sunshine kept everyone indoors or off on day trips somewhere. The weather made a big difference in people’s lives in this city. So could a few weeks, and one week in particular. Seven days could make all the difference in the world — turn you upside down and inside out, reshape your thinking, restructure the patterns of your life. And maybe force you to accept things you never would have believed and never wanted to know.

The curb in front of Eberhardt’s house was empty; I parked there, went up the path, and climbed the stairs onto the porch. The house was locked tight, but there was no problem in that. Eb had given me a key years ago, the way friends do. I found it on my key ring, slid it into the latch, and let myself in.

The living room was dark, full of shadows again. The blood was there too, dried into the carpet where Eberhardt had lain, where I had crawled across it from the sofa. His blood, my blood. I imagined I could smell the burnt gunpowder on the cold musty air. Little shivers crawled up my back; a ghost pain slid along the length of my stiffened left arm. The whole thing from last Sunday replayed itself in my mind in ragged blips, like scenes in a badly cut film noir.

Dry-mouthed, I crossed to the staircase and clumped up to the second floor. It was better up there; the images faded, the phantom smell was gone. I bypassed Eb’s bedroom and the adjacent guest room and opened the last door on the left. Originally it had been a third bedroom, but he had converted it into an office for himself when he and Dana bought the house.

More shadows; I went over to the window, opened the curtains to let some light in. Desk, sideboard, Naugahyde couch, over-stuffed chair, a small bookcase with some police manuals and a few other books jammed into it in haphazard fashion, a long table supporting a partially finished model railroad layout that he had been fiddling with for years; an electric Olympia beer sign on one wall, on another a framed photograph of our Police Academy graduating class. It was Eberhardt’s room in every way, a perfect reflection of the man I had known for three decades. His sanctuary, he’d called it. Nobody touched anything in there but him.

Except that somebody had touched things — Marcus or Klein, probably, looking for a lead to explain the sudden attack. A couple of the desk drawers were half open, papers were spread around on the desktop in a non-Eberhardt way; an accordian file stood open on the sideboard. If there was anything incriminating among his papers, had they found it? Either Marcus or Klein might have told me if they had, but then again they might not have. Cops did not go around spreading the word when one of their number turned up dirty; they would keep it under wraps as long as they could, until a full investigation had been conducted.

Still, they would have made the search early in the week, not later than Monday when no other leads opened up and it became clear that Eberhardt wasn’t going to regain consciousness right away, and I had talked to both Klein and Marcus later on. If they had discovered something incriminating, I should have been able to tell it from what they said and the way they acted. Klein especially, because he was almost as close to Eb as I was; he wore his feelings as openly as he’d worn his patrolman’s badge.

So the odds were that they had come up empty. But did Klein know about Eb’s hideaway safe? I knew about it because he had told me, shown it to me once. He had also given me the combination, for the same reason he had given me the key to the house. In case of an emergency, he’d said. In case anything happened to him.

The safe was built into the bottom of the sideboard, concealed by a horizontal sliding panel. A small thing, just large enough to hold documents and a few valuables. I squatted in front of the sideboard, opened the doors. On top of the panel were some glasses and a bottle of brandy; I took them out, slid the panel aside to expose the combination dial, and opened my address book to the set of numbers I had written down in back. Half a minute later I hauled the safe door up and peered inside.

There was not much to see. A small jewelry case that contained his wedding ring; I remembered that he had stopped wearing it after Dana moved out. An envelope with five twenty-dollar bills in it — but that didn’t mean anything. Mad money, probably, or a small cache for emergencies. His marriage license. A packet of U.S. savings bonds that amounted to fifteen hundred dollars. An insurance policy. A savings account passbook that showed a balance of $532.57. And a stock-transfer form, made out in Eberhardt’s name, turning over to him one thousand shares of Mid-Pacific Electronics.

I knelt there for a time, staring at the stock-transfer thing. I did not like the look of it; it made my stomach feel hollow and made me afraid. Eberhardt had never dabbled in the stock market, never owned any stocks so far as I knew. He wasn’t a gambler and he didn’t trust that sort of investment. So what was he doing with a piece of paper like this? It was not a regular transaction, the kind where you go to a broker and buy shares of a common stock. Somebody owned those thousand shares — somebody whose name did not appear on the form, who had neither filled it out completely nor signed it to make the transfer binding. Eb had no close relatives; it couldn’t be anything like that. Then who? And why?

Mid-Pacific Electronics. I had never heard of it. There were plenty of electronics firms in Northern California, with the boom in the computer and related industries; it could be a large or a small company, and the value of those thousand shares could also be large or small. If they weren’t worth much, maybe Eb was taking a flyer — maybe somebody had given him a tip and the owner of the stock was unloading it piecemeal to friends and other investors. He might have changed his mind about gambling in the market. Dana’s defection had changed him in a lot of ways; this could be one of them.

Big bribe. Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.

But he could have changed that way, too, I thought bitterly. Honest people do turn crooked; honest cops do start taking bribes. And the bribes they take don’t have to be in cash, either, not in this day and age.

I put the form in my coat pocket, returned the rest of the stuff to the safe, closed the lid and spun the dial to lock it, and then slid the panel back into place and rearranged the glasses and the bottle of brandy. When I straightened up I took another look around the room. But there did not seem to be much point in doing any more searching; Eb had no other safes or hiding places that I knew about, and the police would have been through everything else.

Downstairs again, I tried not to look at the bloodstained carpet. No good; it drew my eyes magnetically. They could have cleaned it up, I thought. Or Dana could have come and done that — aired the place out, made it decent for Eb when he came home. It didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t been here. She wanted no part of this house anymore, no part of Eberhardt’s life; she was back in Palo Alto, waiting in her law professor’s bed to find out if Eb lived or died.

I hope she’s still suffering a little, I thought. I hope she has long nights and bad dreams.

I made a promise to myself that I would come back in a few days and call a cleaning service and have them pick up the carpet. Maybe nobody else cared about those stains, but I did. At least I could see to it that they were erased from the carpet, even if I could never erase them from my memory, or Eberhardt from his.

On the way back to Pacific Heights I made two stops. The first was at a liquor store on 24th Street, where I bought a copy of the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle. There was nothing on the front page about Eb or the police investigation. Other news, national and local, had kicked it onto one of the inside pages, or maybe too much time had passed and they had quit writing about it altogether; I didn’t bother to look. Instead I turned to the financial section and checked for a stock listing on Mid-Pacific Electronics.

No listing. Which meant what? Either the company was too small or too insolvent to warrant one, I thought, or else they had not gone public with their stock. In any case, it would take some checking to find out how much a share of Mid-Pacific was worth, and just what kind of outfit it was.

My second stop was at a service station on Market, to get a tankful of gas and to have a look at the directory in their public telephone booth. There was a local listing for Mid-Pacific Electronics, it turned out: an address on Pine Street in the Financial District. I thought about dialing the number, but I didn’t do it. Even if anyone was around on Sunday, which was unlikely, I wanted more information before I started asking questions of the company personnel.

All the parking places near my building were taken; I had to leave the car three blocks away and walk uphill. By the time I let myself into my flat, I was winded and coated with an oily sweat. I shrugged out of my overcoat — and the telephone bell went off.

It was Kerry. “My God,” she said, “where have you been?”

“Why?”

“I tried to call you a little while ago and there was no answer. You didn’t go out, did you?”

“No. I was sleeping.”

“Didn’t you hear the phone?”

“I turned the bell down on it.”

Pause. Then she said, “You sound... odd.”

“I just woke up. I’m a little groggy.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“How’s your arm?”

“Still stiff. No pain, though.”

“That’s good. Did you eat something?”

“I fried a couple of eggs,” I said.

Another pause. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “How about if I bake a lasagna and bring it over? We could have a quiet dinner together—”

“No. Not today.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t be very good company. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. Just not in the mood for visitors.”

“Well... I’ll be here if you need me.”

“I know you will.”

“I’ll call you in the morning, if I don’t hear from you sooner.”

“No, let me call you.”

“Why? You’re not planning to go out somewhere tomorrow...”

“I’ll call you,” I said and put the receiver down.

My stomach was growling; I hadn’t eaten the eggs I’d fried earlier; I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I dumped the cold eggs out of the pan, fried some more, and washed them down with gulps of milk. Then I went back to bed. There was nothing I could do until tomorrow; Mid-Pacific Electronics would have to wait until then.

So would Mau Yee, the son of a bitch, whoever and whatever he was.