Labyrinth

ELEVEN

I stopped for lunch at a cafe on Irving Street. Not because I wanted food; I had no appetite after the interview with Lainey Madden. But I had not eaten breakfast and my stomach was kicking up hunger pangs. It was already a quarter of one, and it seemed like an intelligent idea to give the digestive juices something to work on.

Over a tasteless hamburger and a cup of coffee I took my first look at what the Chronicle had to say about the murders. Both stories-a news report on the Carding homicide and an update on the death of Christine Webster-were on page two, the front page being given over to reports of trouble in the Middle East and a big Gay Rights march through Civic Center. There was suggestion of a possible link between the two cases and some attention was paid to Jerry Carding’s mysterious disappearance from Bodega Bay; otherwise it was pretty straightforward stuff, no open speculation, just the basic facts. Martin Talbot was said to have confessed to the Carding murder, but the police were still investigating. My name was mentioned three or four times. There was even a paragraph on my career background in which I was referred to as “something of a Sam Spade type, the last of San Francisco’s lone-wolf private eyes.”

When I finished forcing down my hamburger I took the paper outside and deposited it in a trash receptacle. Then the last of San Francisco’s lone-wolf private eyes got into his car and drove through the cold gray fog to S.F. State College.

There was no street parking near the Nineteenth Avenue entrance, so I turned into Park Merced and left the car in front of an apartment building on Cardenas. The woodsy campus, when I finally got onto it, was crowded but relatively quiet. It had not always been that way. I remembered the television footage from back in 1968: a student strike protesting the war in Vietnam and demanding a Third World Studies department and an open admissions policy; disruption and cancellation of classes, rock-throwing incidents; and our present U.S. senator, S.I. Hayakawa-then president of S.F. State-calling in the police riot squad to bust a few heads. Sad times back then. Ugly times. And all because of a war that we should have stayed the hell out of in the first place.

Well, things change-even for the better sometimes. The kids still looked the same, though, at least to my crusty old private eye: long hair and frizzed hair and Afros, beards, the kind of clothing my generation would have called Bohemian. Whatever happened to suits and ties and girls in winter outfits and summer dresses? The question made me smile mockingly at myself. Pining away for your lost youth, huh? I thought. You Sam Spade type, you. Come on, who cares what college students wear as long as they’re happy and getting themselves an education? And most of these kids looked happy enough-maybe because it was Friday and they had the weekend and Thanksgiving vacation to look forward to, or because, for now anyway, all was right in their world.

But then I remembered that Christine Webster had been one of them not too long ago, and I stopped smiling. She had no world anymore-not this one, at least. And neither did her unborn child.

I bypassed the Administration Building; I had already decided that there was no point in trying to locate Dave Brodnax through the Registrar’s Office. College administrators are chary these days of giving out any information on students, including class schedules, and the fact that I was a detective would carry no weight at all. Lainey had said Brodnax was on the football team; I thought that maybe I would be able to get to him through the coach or somebody else in the Physical Education department.

As it turned out, finding Brodnax was easier than I had anticipated. The first young guy I stopped for directions told me the football team had just begun its daily practice in Cox Stadium; the last game of the season was tomorrow afternoon. He explained how to get to the stadium, over on the north side of the campus, and I made my way in that direction. Halfway there, I heard voices yelling the way football players do. They led me straight to the backside of a press box and an open gate in a cyclone fence.

Cox Stadium was laid out below in a kind of grotto, surrounded by wooded slopes, with more trees and undergrowth beyond the north end zone. Picturesque. The stands were made out of concrete and had rows of wooden benches; I was on the home side. I went through the gate and down fifty or sixty steps toward the field. The players, about four dozen of them in pads and practice jerseys and maroon helmets, were spread out across the turf running plays and banging into tackling dummies and doing wind sprints. The grass was pretty chewed up and deep furrows striped it where the yardlines were. It was not getting as much care as it should, probably because of maintenance cutbacks by the college when Proposition 13 limited their tax revenue.

I left the stands and crossed the track that ovaled the field and went to the sideline benches. A dark guy in his thirties was standing there, writing something on a clipboard. He wore a maroon windbreaker and had a whistle strung around his neck; I thought that he must be one of the coaches.

He glanced up as I approached him. It was cold down there and his cheeks had a brick-colored tinge. “Something I can do for you?”

“I’d like to see Dave Brodnax, if that’s okay.”

“Is it important?”

“Yes, sir, it is. Just tell him it’s about Jerry Carding and Christine Webster.”

The names seemed not to mean anything to him; maybe he only read the sports sections in the daily papers. But he said, “All right, I’ll send him over,” and moved away toward where a group of beefy-looking kids were just starting to practice the recovery of fumbles.

I watched him pick one out of the group, say something to him. The kid looked over at me, nodded at the coach, and then came trotting over. He took off his helmet just before he got to me, and I saw that he had a wild shock of reddish hair and two or three hundred freckles. He was at least four inches over six feet and would weigh in at around 240-some big kid. The knuckles on his hands looked as large as walnuts.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m Dave Brodnax.” His voice was surprisingly soft for someone his size, and it matched the look in his eyes: grave, troubled. “You another policeman?”

“Not exactly.” I introduced myself. He knew my name from the newspapers and seemed willing enough to answer questions when I explained to him why I was investigating.

“But there’s not much I can tell you,” he said. “I don’t have any idea who could’ve killed Christine or what happened to Jerry.”

“The last time you talked to Jerry was when?”

“About a month ago when he and Steve came down from Bodega Bay for the weekend.”

“Steve Farmer?”

“Right. Steve lives up there now, but his folks are here in the city. He brought Jerry down a few times, so he could visit them while Jerry was seeing Chris.”

“Jerry doesn’t have a car?”

“No. He did have one until last spring, but he sold it because he needed money to finish out the semester here at State.”

“How did he get to San Francisco when Farmer didn’t bring him?”

“Borrowed Steve’s car or took the bus.”

“Uh-huh. What was the job he had up there?”

“Deckhand on one of the commercial salmon boats,” Brodnax said. “I don’t know which one.”

“Did he like doing that?”

“He thought it was okay. But it was just a way for him to make enough money so he could come back to school. He wants to be a writer, you know. One of those investigative reporters, like Woodward and Bernstein.”

“Then as far as you know, he wasn’t having any problems in Bodega Bay? Nothing that would make him drop out of sight as suddenly as he did?”

“Not as far as I know. I guess Steve could tell you if he was.”

“Where does Farmer work?”

“At a place called The Tides. As a tally clerk and warehouseman at the fish market there.”

I asked him about Jerry Carding’s relationship with his father. His answers were pretty much the same as the ones Lainey Madden had given me: they’d got along fine, no major disagreements that Jerry had ever mentioned. Brodnax had met Victor Carding on a couple of occasions and professed a general liking for him, although “he was into booze kind of heavy and made some slurs about blacks once.” And if he had disapproved of Christine for any reason, Brodnax did not know about it.

“I understand you introduced Jerry and Christine,” I said then. “Is that right?”

“Yeah. She was in my psych class during the spring semester and I took her out a couple of times. But the vibes weren’t right for anything heavy between us. She and Jerry connected right from the first; it seemed to be the real thing for both of them.”

“Did you see much of her after she began going with Jerry?”

“Not too much. With Jerry a few times and around campus.”

“Did she ever mention anything that might have been bothering her?”

“You mean those threats she’d been getting?” Brodnax shook his massive head. “I didn’t know about them until the police told me. Chris never talked much about herself.”

“Do you know the names Martin Talbot or Laura or Karen Nichols?”

“No. I didn’t recognize them in the papers this morning and I still don’t.”

“How about Bobbie Reid?”

He frowned at that and shifted his helmet from one hand to the other. “Bobbie? What’s she have to do with Chris’ murder?”

“Maybe nothing, but her name came up. You knew her, then?”

“I met her a few times, yeah.”

“Here at the college?”

“No. Steve Farmer used to go with her.”

Now that was interesting. Christine and Bobbie knew each other, Bobbie used to date one of Jerry Carding’s best friends, Bobbie commits suicide and Christine is murdered. Another connection-but where, if anywhere, did it lead?

I asked, “How long ago was this?”

“A year or so. They were pretty involved for a while.”

“Why did they break up?”

“I don’t know. Steve wouldn’t say anything about it afterward; I don’t think it was a friendly split.”

“Was he hurt? Angry?”

“Both, I guess. But he got over it.”

Did he? I wondered. “Did you see Bobbie at any time after the break-up?”

“No, not once.”

“Do you know any of her other friends?”

“Just Steve.”

“Jerry knew her, though?”

“Sure. Same way I did, through Steve.”

“Did he ever talk about her?”

“I can’t remember if he did.”

“Why would she take her own life? Any ideas?”

“No. But she was a spacey chick.”

“How do you mean?”

“Emotional, hyped up all the time.”

“Drugs?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think she was into that. A little pot, maybe, but that’d be all. She was just… I don’t know, intense, freaky. Like she couldn’t get her head together. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

The wind blowing across the floor of the stadium was bitter cold; I could feel my ears and cheeks burning. And I had run out of questions. So I said, “Okay, Dave, thanks. I won’t keep you any longer.”

He nodded solemnly. “I wish there was more I could do to help,” he said. “I keep thinking something’s happened to Jerry too. If he’s all right, why hasn’t he shown up all week? Or why hasn’t somebody found him?”

“Somebody will, son. Sooner or later.”

He nodded again and gave me his hand: his grip was as gentle as his voice. Then he put his helmet on and trotted onto the field, and I turned back toward the stands.

On the way there I noticed that the team’s place-kicker had begun practicing field goals at the north end. He was a soccer-style kicker and pretty good, judging from the forty-yarder he put squarely between the uprights. The second kick I watched him try, from forty-five yards out, hit the crossbar, caromed straight up, hit the crossbar a second time, and fell through: good.

For some reason, my mind being what it is, that made me think of a country-and-western song that had been popular several years ago, a religious novelty item with the more or less unforgettable title of “Drop-Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life.” Uh-huh. Well, some of us got drop-kicked through, all right. But some of us missed wide right or wide left, or just by inches, and some of us-like Christine Webster-got blocked at the line of scrimmage.

And then there were the ones like me. We made it through, but not without hitting the damned crossbar a few times on the way…

From the college I drove downtown and stopped at the main library in Civic Center where I spent half an hour looking through month-old issues of the Chronicle and Examiner. I found nothing at all about Bobbie Reid-no news story, no obituary, not even a funeral notice. Which meant that her death, like so many deaths in a city as large as San Francisco, had not been deemed important enough or unusual enough to warrant coverage; and that her body, like Christine Webster’s, had been claimed by out-of-town relatives and her funeral held elsewhere.

There would have to be a police report on file, though, because the Homicide Detail is required by law to investigate all suicides. Eberhardt could look it up and use it to begin digging into Bobbie’s background.

As for me, it seemed that a drive up to Bodega Bay was the next order of business. I had no leads to pursue here, no leads at all except for the tenuous link to Steve Farmer’s involvement with Bobbie Reid; maybe I could find out something by talking to Farmer or by nosing around among the people in Bodega who knew Jerry Carding. On the way out of the library, I decided I would head up the coast first thing in the morning.

It was almost five o’clock by then. I had not been to my office all day and I had been out of touch since before eleven; it was possible that there was a message or two on my answering machine. Better check it out, I thought, and then call Eberhardt from there before he knocks off for the day.

Taylor Street was only a few blocks from the library, but it took me ten minutes to get there because of the rush-hour traffic. I coaxed the car into a narrow parking space near my building, went inside and looked through the slot in the mailbox. Nothing. The elevator was being cranky again: it made grinding noises and shuddered a lot on the way up. But it determined not to break down and strand me between floors, as it had once for twenty minutes a couple of years ago. I got out of it in a hurry, making a mental note to use the stairs until the landlord got the thing fixed again, and moved down the hall to the office door.

And pulled up short when I got to it.

The door was cracked open about six inches.

The skin along my back prickled; I could feel my stomach muscles begin to wire up. I had locked the door last night-I was always careful about locking it when I left the office because of the kind of neighborhood this was. The building had no janitor, and the only other person with a key would be the landlord; but he was not in the habit of paying uninvited calls on his tenants.

It was quiet in the hall except for the muffled, desultory clacking of a typewriter from one of the offices at the far end. But when I edged closer to the door I could hear another sound-a low pulsing beep, the kind a phone makes when it’s been off the hook for more than thirty seconds. The slit between the door and jamb let me see nothing but darkness and the faint smeary glow from the lights in the building across the street.

I stayed where I was for another ten seconds, listening to the beep from the phone. Then I put the heel of my hand against the panel, held a breath, and gave the door a hard shove and went in across the threshold by one step, reaching out for the light switch on the inside wall.

There was nobody in the room or in the little alcove off of it; I could see that and sense the emptiness as soon as the overhead lights blazed. But what I did see made me recoil, stunned me with an impact that was almost physical.

The office had literally been torn apart.