Games to Keep the Dark Away

Chapter 8

As I was leaving the Port San Marco police station at a little after midnight, I saw a plainclothes detective bringing Sylvia Anthony in. They had located her, Lieutenant Barrow had told me, at a church bingo game, and by now she presumably had identified her daughter’s body. The police had not been so lucky in finding John Cala. The fisherman was missing from his unusual haunts. Barrow had run a check on him, and it turned out he had a record, including a conviction for assault.

Mrs. Anthony’s head was bowed and she clung to the plainclothes detective’s arm. She seemed frail and even older than she had that morning. When I started over to her, she looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, and the bitter lines I’d seen before were deeply set on her face.

She said, “Get away from me.”

I stopped.

“Get away,” she repeated. “If you hadn’t come snooping around here, my girl would still be alive.”

The detective raised his eyebrows, shook his head at me, and steered her across the lobby toward the squadroom. I watched them go, then went out to my car. A fine mist hung around the lights in the parking lot and the MG’s windshield was covered with salt cake moisture. I got in and turned on the defroster, then sat there waiting for the glass to clear. There was nothing I could do now except go back to my motel and call Snelling. My case was finished-or was it? Maybe he would want me to follow up and see what the police found out about Jane’s murder.

When I entered my room I saw that the red message button on the telephone was lit. A sleepy-sounding voice at the desk told me I should call Hank Zahn. It was late, but I knew my boss habitually stayed up until all hours, so instead I dialed Snelling’s number. The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer.

Odd, I thought. Where would the reclusive photographer be at almost one in the morning? I dialed again, to make sure I’d called the right number, but the result was the same. Very odd. I pondered it for a moment, came to no conclusion, and called Hank.

He answered immediately, sounded as fresh as if it were nine in the morning. Hank was a restless man whose lean, loose-jointed body needed little fuel other than coffee and the horrible concoctions he whipped up in the All Souls kitchen-and that the other attorneys steadfastly refused to eat. His keen mind thrived on massive doses of information collected from such wide-ranging sources as the newspapers of several major cities, lectures by little-known experts on esoteric disciplines, and advertisements on the backs of cereal boxes. Neither his mind nor his body required much in the way of sleep.

“I just called to see how the investigation’s going,” he said.

“Not so good.”

“How come?”

“The woman Snelling hired me to find is dead. Murdered.”

There was a pause. “You do manage to get mixed up in this stuff, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I’d been involved with six murders in the three years I’d worked for All Souls. Jane Anthony’s made it seven. “It’s depressing. The victim’s mother claims if I hadn’t been, as she puts it, snooping around, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Do you believe that?’

“No. It was just an emotional statement.”

“You don’t sound like you don’t believe it.”

I shrugged, then remembered Hank couldn’t see me. “Intellectually, I don’t. Otherwise-who knows?”

Hank seemed to sense I didn’t want to talk anymore. “Well, I’m sorry it turned out that way. When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow, maybe. After I report to Snelling, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.” Again he paused. “And, Shar…”

“Yes?”

“Try to get some sleep now.”

“Sure. Take care.” I hung up and sat on the bed a while, staring at a crack in the beige wall. Then I got up, undressed, and crawled between the sheets.

For a long time, sleep wouldn’t come. I shifted positions, bunching up the pillows this way and that, trying to clear my mind of images of Jane’s lifeless body. When I finally did doze off, I was half-conscious of tossing and turning, coming fully awake in the midst of unclear but disturbing dreams to find myself tangled in the covers, drenched in sweat. As grey light began to seep around the edges of the curtains, I gave up and propped myself against the headboard to think.

I’d certainly never intended my life to take the direction it had. The job with the detective agency that I’d taken after leaving college had been a stopgap measure for an out-of-work sociology graduate who was waiting for her real opportunity to come along. But the flexible hours and freedom from the confining walls of an office suited me; and when the agency had fired me for my inability to bend to authority, my old friend Hank had hired me on at All Souls. The unconventional atmosphere there had suited me even better. I was good at what I did, and proud of it.

If it had stopped there, it would have been fine. Or even if it had stopped with the first murder case, it would have been all right. But there were other deaths, and the older I got, the more violence I saw, the more I wondered if I could go on like this indefinitely. And when I wondered that, I also wondered what I would do if I couldn’t go on. What on earth could a former private eye with a useless sociology degree do for a living?

I got up, took three aspirin, and stepped into the shower. It helped some. When I was dressed, I picked up the phone and called Snelling. As before, his phone rang eight, nine, ten times with no answer.

What now? I asked myself. Go back to the city? But what if Snelling-when I finally reached him-wanted me to follow up here? I’d only have to turn around and drive south again. I decided to get some breakfast and then go see Don Del Boccio, as I’d planned to before I’d found Jane’s body.

The disc jockey was listed in the phone book. He lived in the old section of town, near the harbor. The houses there were great clapboard castles built by the families who had gotten rich during the city’s heyday as a fishing port. Now they were broken up into apartments or converted in to rooming houses.

I rang Del Boccio’s bell and received an immediate answering buzz. Inside was an entryway with scuffed parquet floors and a central staircase. Since none of the doors off the entry opened, I went to the stairs and looked up. A man with a lean, tanned face stared down at me, a mass of black hair falling onto his forehead. When he saw me, his mouth, beneath a shaggy moustache, curved into a wide grin.

“A pretty lady to see me! You’ve made my morning.”

His smile was infectious, and I grinned back. “By saying that, you’ve made mine.”

“You are here to see me?”

“If you’re Don Del Boccio.”

“I sure am. Is this a social call?”

“I wish it were.” I told him my name and that I worked for All Souls in San Francisco.

He looked surprised but motioned for me to come up. I climbed to the third floor landing where he stood in an open doorway. He was about six feet tall, a little on the stocky side, and wore faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. When I reached the top of the stairs, he gave me a quick appraising look, his hazel eyes moving appreciatively but not offensively over my body. Then he turned and said, “Come on in.”

We entered a large, sun-filled room. The far wall was all kitchen, separated from the rest of the space by a bar with stools. An alcove to the right was all bed. The rest of the long room contained a baby grand piano, a set of drums, a stereo, hundreds of records, stacks of books, and a huge blue rug. Large pillows were strewn on its thick pile, but otherwise there was no furniture

I stood looking around. In spite of the lack of furniture, it was one of the homiest places I’d ever seen. If only I could find something half this nice in San Francisco! “This is a wonderful apartment,” I said.

“Thanks. Have a seat. I hope you don’t mind the floor.” He dropped onto one of the pillows. “I just moved in last month, and I’m delighted with the place. I’ve always dreamed of an apartment where I could gather all the essentials of my life into one room. I can leap from my bed to my piano to my kitchen to my stereo to my drums…back and forth, any which way. All with the least possible effort. I like to make the most of my leisure time.”

Don Del Boccio was as much of a motor-mouth in person as on the radio-although far more charming. “I know what you mean about leisure time; when you get it, it’s precious. And I guess you keep unusual hours, what with your radio show.”

He clapped a hand to his forehead in an extravagant gesture of dismay. “Jesus, don’t tell me you’ve heard that!”

“Well, I tuned in for a few minutes yesterday afternoon.”

“A few minutes is long enough. It’s a terrible show. I hate rock and stupid commercials and teenage callers. I do the whole show wearing ear plugs.”

“What?!”

“Except for the part when I have to talk on the phone and take requests. But as soon as that’s over, in go the old plugs.”

I laughed, shaking my head. Perhaps that accounted for Del Boccio’s noisy style. If he couldn’t really hear himself…”Good Lord, if you hate it so much, why do you do it at all?”

“Groceries. Rent. You see, I trained as a concert pianist.” He rippled his fingers, playing a scale in the air. “Unfortunately, I’m not very good. And actually the job is fun. Nutty, but enjoyable in an odd way.”

I’d once had a boyfriend who was a pianist-but he’d ended up a third-rate rock musician. The job market for serious pianists was about as good as it was for sociology graduates. “Where did you go to school?”

“New York. Rochester, specifically. The Eastman School of Music. I never finished, though; it was so goddamn cold back there that my fingers froze and I couldn’t play. So I came back to sunny California and the low-brow life of a deejay.”

‘But you keep up with your music.” I motioned at the piano.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s my first love.” He paused, studying my face. “But what about you? You said you’re a private investigator. What can I help you with?”

I sobered instantly, realizing he probably hadn’t heard about Jane Anthony’s murder. “I came down here on a missing person’s case. An old friend of yours-Jane Anthony.”

His mouth twitched beneath the shaggy moustache. “Huh. Janie?” Then his eyes moved from my face to a point beyond my right shoulder. “Funny, I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”

“You’re not close anymore, then?”

“No. We’re not exactly what you’d call friends either.”

“Why not?’

He shook his head. “Sorry. My business.”

“It may not be.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Your relationship with Jane may be police business. She’s dead.”

His eyes jerked back to mine. “Dead?”

“She was murdered last night, stabbed to death, at the old pier in Salmon Bay.”

He flinched. “That can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, it is.”

“Jesus.” His face was pained and he looked down at the blue rug. Finally he said, “Who did it?”

“They don’t know.”

“God. Janie.”

“Do you want to talk about her now?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. We went together for a couple of years. She was a bright woman, knew about music and art. Had a lot of interests-photography, science fiction. She liked to sail. She was a strong woman. Knew what she wanted in life.”

I waited and when he didn’t go on, I said, “What was that?”

He raised his eyes to mine. They were moist and sad. “Well, it wasn’t me. If it had been, she’d be here with me right now.”

“It sounds like you cared a lot for her.”

“I guess I loved her.”

We sat in silence for a minute, and then I reached for my purse and started to get up. Del Boccio put out a hand. “No, don’t go.”

“I thought you’d want to be alone.”

“No. I’d rather not be. How about if I give you breakfast?”

I’d only had coffee and toast before and, as with Allen Keller’s fried egg sandwich, I couldn’t resist. Besides, Don Del Boccio might tell me something that would broaden my picture of Jane, give me a clue as to why someone would want to kill her. “All right,” I said, “but nothing that’s too much trouble.”

He jumped up, obviously eager for activity. “You’re looking at one of the world’s great cooks, lady. Nothing’s too much trouble for Del Boccio.”

He went to the kitchen and began rumbling around, carrying on a monologue about his favorite restaurants, both here and in San Francisco. I wondered if he were the sort who felt a need to be on stage all the time, or if this was just his way of diverting himself from Jane’s death. Talking nonstop didn’t hamper his ability to cook, however; in less than ten minutes he had produced a feast and spread it on a large tray between us on the blue rug. I looked with growing hunger at the scrambled eggs, bacon, bagels, cream cheese, and dry white wine.

“No reason we can’t be elegant, even if we are sitting on the floor.” He poured wine into delicate stemmed glasses and motioned for me to help myself. Smearing a bagel with cream cheese, he launched into another monologue, this time about Port San Marco.

“Do you like it here? I do, even though the town’s changed a lot since I was a kid. It used to be the home of a whole fishing fleet. There were several generations of families who fished these waters. This house was built by one. Those must have been the days, I tell you. But of course, it all changed. Those families couldn’t compete with the big companies, and Port San Marco had to turn elsewhere for is bread.”

I was about to ask him where, but he went right on.

“Tourism. High-tech firms. The developments you see all over the hills are a consequence of that. Those hills used to be covered with trees and cows and horses-and now look at them. Of course, they’re expensive homes and in good taste for the most part. And Port San Marco’s never been in the best of taste anyway. The old amusement park is boarded up now. Going to be torn down and replaced by a performing arts center. I don’t mind-I’ll enjoy not having to drive to San Francisco for concerts. But, still, I’m going to miss that park. Pinball. Rides. Cotton candy. Saltwater taffy.”

He bit into a piece of bacon and I seized my opportunity. “Do you know much about Salmon Bay?”

A look of gloom crossed his face. “We’re back to that are we?”

“I can’t help it. It’s my job. And you asked me to stay.”

“That I did.” He smiled ruefully. “You’ve got to excuse me. Normally I wouldn’t babble at you, but…”

“I understand.”

“To answer your question, yes, I do know Salmon Bay. I was born there. My father was a fisherman, his father too…he and my mother still live in Salmon Bay. I don’t see much of them.”

“Are you on bad terms?” I thought of Jane’s relationship with her mother.

“Not really. We don’t have much in common, though, and I hate to go up there. The people in the village have a lot of pent-up hate. They blame Port San Marco for surviving commercially while their town failed. They just sit around talking about the good old days and try not to starve. And they resent anyone who has made good. I guess that includes me.”

“What about The Tidepools? How do they feel about it being so close by?”

He shrugged.

“Were you seeing Jane when she worked there?”

“At first.”

“And then?”

“Then I didn’t anymore”

“Do you know about the problems there?”

He ran a finger over his moustache.

“Please, Don. I need to know about it and no one will tell me.”

Carefully he poured us more wine. “How did you find out about it?’

“A friend of Jane’s who worked there too.”

He nodded.

“Will you tell me?”

“Why not? It’s no secret.” He picked up his glass and leaned back against a pillow, stretching his long legs out. “There was a series of deaths, three of them. Overdoses of the painkilling medicine they use there. With the first two, it appeared the patients had saved up their medication until they had enough to overdose. The staff was blamed for being lax. And, of course, there were the usual rumors.”

“Which were what?”

“That someone at The Tidepools had been deliberately lax, had wanted the patients-they were both old women with no living relatives-to die.”

“Why?”

“Because they had willed large estates to the place.”

I remembered Keller’s description of the arrangements that were often made. “You said three deaths, though.”

“The third was different. A younger woman with cancer. It appeared to be a mercy killing by her husband, a medical technician with the Port San Marco hospital.”

“Why did they suspect that?”

“He disappeared immediately after. With a lot of money. They’ve never been able to locate him.”

“Sounds more like murder than mercy killing-because of the money.”

“Yes.”

“Do they think he might have been responsible for the two older women?”

“There was some speculation, but it doesn’t seem very likely.”

“What about repercussions on the staff?”

“A number of people left afterward, including Jane. The Tidepools wasn’t a good place to work anymore.”

“But things are better now, at least according to Allen Keller, their director. He said-”

Don sat up straighter. “You know Keller?”

“Not well. Do you?”

“Not well.” But his face had darkened and now his eyes grew hard.

“Are you on bad terms with him?”

“I hardly know the man.”

“But-”

“I don’t know him well, and I don’t know anything more about The Tidepools. And, besides, what has Keller got to do with Janie’s death?”

“Nothing, as far as I know,” I admitted. We finished our breakfast in silence. When I left, Don accompanied me downstairs, tossing off a few comments about some new stereo equipment he was going to take a look at. I got into my car and he squatted down so he could look through the window at me. “Listen, even under the circumstances, I’ve enjoyed meeting you. Come back, okay?”

“I’d like to.”

“I’ll make you veal parmigiana.”

“Sounds great.”

“My lasagna’s not bad either.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

“I don’t usually talk too much.”

“I guessed that.”

He paused, then squeezed my arm and walked over to an antique Jaguar parked at the curb. It was painted a gauche disc-jockey gold. He got in, started it up, and roared past me, waving.

I liked Don Del Boccio. He was bright and funny and had the kind of good looks that had always attracted me. And right now I wished I were next to him in the gaudy Jaguar, taking a long top-down ride up the coast. Instead, I would have to go back to my motel and try once again to contact Abe Snelling.