Labyrinth

TWO

It was after nine when I reached the Tenderloin and parked my car in the Taylor and Eddy lot, not far from where I have my office. I thought about going into a nearby greasy spoon for some breakfast, but I had no appetite; the image of the dead girl was still sharp in my mind. Instead I locked the car and hustled straight up the hill on Taylor.

The rain kept on coming down, alternating between a drizzle and a fine mist, and the wind was gusty enough to slap the coattails around my legs. At this hour and in this weather the streets were pretty much empty. The dark wet sky made them and the old buildings look dingier and more unappealing than usual. Even the faint pervading smell of garbage seemed stronger.

The Tenderloin used to be, and on the surface still was, a section of lunchrooms and seedy bars and secondhand bookstores; of low-rent apartment buildings and cheap hotels inhabited by transients, senior citizens with small pensions, nonviolent drifters and the Runyonesque street characters that were as much an institution in San Francisco as they once were in New York. It used to have character, the way Broadway-Times Square did in the old days, and you could walk its streets in relative safety. But in the past couple of decades it had changed-had lost all of its flavor and taken on instead a kind of desperate sleaziness. The transients and senior citizens were still there, but the street characters had been replaced by drug addicts and drug pushers, small-time thugs, fancy-dressed pimps and hard-eyed whores. You walked on Eddy or Mason or Turk or lower Taylor these days, and you saw porno bookstores and movie houses spread out like garish weeds; you saw men and women openly buying and selling smack, coke, any other kind of drug you can name; you saw spaced-out kids, drunks sleeping it off in doorways, elderly people with frightened eyes watchful for purse-snatchers and muggers because the Tenderloin has the highest crime rate in the city.

I asked myself again why I didn’t, for Christ’s sake, move my office to a better neighborhood. Business had not been all that good recently, and maybe part of the reason was my location. Who wants to put his trust in a private investigator with an office on the fringe of the Tenderloin?

Moving made good sense-but the problem was, I couldn’t really afford to move. The rent in my building was reasonable enough, even though the landlord was making noises about kicking it up again; the price of an office in a more respectable area was beyond my means. Besides which, I had occupied this one ever since I left the cops and went out on my own fourteen years ago; I liked it there, I felt comfortable there.

So I was not going to move and that was that. Just keep on toughing it out, I told myself. Hell, you’ve had plenty of practice at toughing things out, right? Particularly in the past year and a half.

When I entered my building and started across to the elevator I noticed the white of an envelope showing inside my mailbox. There were envelopes inside all the other boxes, too. Uh-oh, I thought, because it was too early for the mail; and there was only one other person with access to the boxes. I opened mine up and took out the envelope: my name hand-written on the front, the building owner’s name and address rubber-stamped in the upper left-hand corner. Greetings from your friendly landlord.

I said something under my breath, stuffed the envelope into my coat pocket, and took the elevator up to the third floor. My office was cold; and it still seemed to retain the faint smell of stale cigarettes. I had not smoked a cigarette in seventeen months, ever since finding out about the lesion on my left lung, but I had averaged two packs a day before that. Maybe the walls and furnishings had permanently absorbed the smoke odor. But probably it was just a ghost smell-a similar kind of thing to the imagined sensations an amputee feels once he has lost an arm or a leg. When you live with something for most or all of your life you never quite adjust to the fact that it’s gone.

The first thing I did was to check my answering machine. Up until the beginning of this year, I had subscribed to a regular service; but then inflation had forced them to raise their rates, and that in turn had forced me to go out and buy the machine. It was something I should have done years ago, maybe, except that I had an old-fashioned outlook on the conventions of the private detecting business.-I suppose because I identified strongly with the fictional eyes and cops in the pulp magazines I had read and collected for more than thirty years. I had always wanted to emulate the Spades and Marlowes and Race Williamses, and if that was childish and self-deluding, as a woman named Erika Coates had once claimed, then so be it. It was my life and the only person I had to justify my feelings to was myself.

I did not expect to find anything on the machine: I list my home number on my cards and in the phone book in case anybody decides on the weekend that he needs a private investigator, reasonable rates, strict confidence at all times. But I had had at least one call because the little window on one corner had a round white spot in it. I worked the controls and listened to my voice play back the message I had recorded. Then a woman’s businesslike voice said, “Yes, this is Mrs. Laura Nichols. Would you please call me as soon as possible?” She gave a number, repeated it-and that was all.

I wrote the name and number down on a pad. Then I went over and fiddled with the steam radiator until the pipes began banging and thumping. Took my coffeepot into the alcove, emptied out the dregs of last Friday’s coffee, filled it with fresh water from the sink tap in there, and put it on the hotplate to heat. Morning ritual.

Sitting at the desk, I opened the letter from my landlord. It said what I expected: my rent was being raised thirty dollars a month, effective December 1. No explanation, no apology. Nice. Some time ago the California voters had passed the Jarvis-Gann tax-reform initiative, Proposition 13, which gave property owners a 60 percent tax cut per annum; and ever since the governor had made a lot of noise about owners passing on some of that savings to renters. Result: a thirty-dollar increase on an office in the goddamn Tenderloin.

I threw the letter into the wastebasket. The thing with Christine Webster and my business card had already made it a lousy Monday; this was just the icing. Well, maybe Mrs. Laura Nichols, whoever she was, had something positive to offer. Like a job. I had not worked at anything in five days and I needed both the activity and the money.

So I pulled the phone over, dialed the number I had written down. While I waited I sat looking at the poster blow-up of a 1932 Black Mask cover that I had tacked up on one wall. It was not exactly appropriate for a business office, but I liked it and that was what counted. Eberhardt, on one of his infrequent visits here, had said that it made the place look like something out of an old Bogart movie. Me and Bogie and Sam Spade The same businesslike female voice said hello in my ear. I asked, “Mrs. Nichols?” and she said yes and I identified myself.

“Oh, yes-good. Thank you for calling.”

“How can I help you, Mrs. Nichols?”

“Are you free to accept a confidential job? It would be on a full-time basis for at least two weeks.”

“Yes, ma’am. Depending on what it involves, of course.”

“It’s a rather delicate family matter, concerning my brother. I’d prefer not to discuss the details on the phone, but it isn’t anything unseemly. We can discuss it at my home, if you don’t mind driving out. I’m sure it will be worth your time.”

“When would you like me to come?”

“As soon as possible,” she said. “The address is 2519 Twenty-Fifth Avenue North. In Sea Cliff.”

I raised an eyebrow. Sea Cliff is a synonym for money in San Francisco; you don’t live there unless your yearly income is around six figures. “I can be there within the hour,” I said.

“Fine. I’ll expect you.”

She rang off, and I cradled the handset, gazing again at the Black Mask poster. Full-time job for at least two weeks, working for a lady in Sea Cliff? It was the kind of thing that always happened to the pulp private eyes, but that happened to me about as often as a woman who said “yes” on the first date. So there figured to be a catch in it somewhere that I was not going to like. The last time I had worked for a rich client-one of the few times in my career-I had wound up in the hospital with a knife wound in my belly. I still had the scars, one you could see and one you couldn’t.

But then, why expect the worst? Maybe it was all going to be fine; maybe for a change I was going to get a break. I stood up and poured myself a quick cup of coffee. Then I locked the office and went down and out to pick up my car.