Runaway Heart

FIFTEEN

It was raining in the Bay Area, and the flight was bumpy. They careened off cumulonimbus clouds and bounced violently on pockets of hard air, dropping hundreds of feet without warning, then straining up again. The passengers all had the same tight, anxious smiles people get when they're trapped in an elevator. Jack and Susan both heaved a sigh of relief when the plane finally touched down.

Rental car-map of the city-heading toward town, windshield wipers clicking. They said almost nothing until they passed the old Candlestick Park, each lost in separate thoughts.

A lot of things were on Jack's mind. First and foremost, his back had been battered on the plane ride and he was miserable. His thoughts had already begun to circle the pill bottle in his faded briefcase.

He was wearing ironed jeans, a brown corduroy sport jacket, a yellow shirt, a blue necktie, and his best Cole Haan loafers. He was dressed for bullshit because he had promised to get Eleanor Drake of the SFPD to cooperate, but it was more likely she'd yank out that little nine millimeter Titan Tiger she always carried and start blasting.

Jack had cheated on Eleanor. Not that they'd been exactly betrothed or anything, but they had been serious enough to be taking long weekends together, meeting up in Monterey, making love, walking on windblown beaches, holding hands. He should never have stepped out on her with Angela Macabe. Angela had a centerfold's body. He'd made a glandular mistake.

He was also thinking about how to get the Institute for Planetary Justice (an irredeemably corny name, he thought) to pay him something in advance. She was his first client, and he'd never done this before. He'd sort of been expecting Susan to write out a check, but all those natural opportunities had come and gone, and now he was just going to have to flat-out ask for it.

Susan sat in the passenger seat mulling over problems of her own. She was consumed by worry about her father. She had to get this job done fast and get back to L.A. so she could find a way to get him checked into the hospital. She was also praying that whatever was on those fifty pages would turn out to be nothing. A traitorous thought, but there it was. If that coded material was just more corn research, which they didn't need anymore, maybe she could get him back into Cedars-Sinai. Lastly, she was wondering how to avoid paying Jack Wirta anything in advance, because, quite frankly, they were selling the Washington, D.C., furniture and office equipment to pay for Melissa King's fine, so there sure as hell wasn't a thousand a day lying around for the Wirta Detective Agency.

"I usually get my money in advance… at least some portion of it," he said, startling her by reading her thoughts like John Edwards.

"Is that normal? I figured you'd just bill us and we'd handle it in the normal course of business."

"Some of the larger agencies do it that way, but us little guys go for cash up front. I'm already out my airline ticket, and expenses are supposed to be in advance."

She smiled at him and he melted like ice cream on a summer day.

"Well, that is… normally they are. Not always… sometimes, though," he stammered.

"Well, I suppose I could write you a check."

"Good! That works." Problem solved, he thought.

While they continued into the city she took out her checkbook, holding it up to her chest like a losing poker hand. Then she wrote him a thousand-dollar check, tore it off, and handed it to him. "There you go," she said brightly.

"Thanks."

The downtown San Francisco Police Department station house was a large brick job on Williams Street. By a stroke of good fortune-or karma, or dumb luck-a branch of his bank, Wells Fargo, was conveniently located just across the street.

He parked in the pay lot, fed the meter (another buck twenty-five on the expense sheet), and they walked inside the cop shop.

Now that he'd been paid, the next big problem was to make sure he avoided Eleanor Drake at all costs. Jack was going to have to find another way to get what Susan wanted. Since Juvie wasn't officed here, but over on Mission Street, at least he was confident he was not going to run into Eleanor. He walked up to the desk sergeant and opened his P.I. identification, laying it on the counter.

"Wow," the sergeant said. "Like Magnum or something?"

"I'm looking for Eleanor Drake," he said.

"Sergeant Drake-third floor-Special Crimes. Check with the desk sergeant up there.

"I thought she was in Juvie," he said, surprised.

"You haven't been reading the department newsletter. She's in Special Crimes now. You want her, she's upstairs." Already bored with him.

Susan led the way toward the stairs. Jack hurried to stop her.

"Listen, Ms. Strockmire." Jack reached out and took her arm.

"You can call me Susan."

"Right. Okay… look, Susan, this is one of those deals where, because I'm going to be asking her to give us access to a sealed department record, it might be better if I do it without witnesses-kinda cop to cop."

"Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I should get lost, then."

"Right." Uniformed police officers were streaming past them while they stood at the foot of the stairs. Jack was starting to feel very vulnerable and exposed. It was just noon, and any moment Eleanor Drake could come down on her way to lunch. Most cops were extremely punctual when it came to eating.

"Should I wait outside?" she asked.

"Yeah, maybe outside would be best." His plan was to go upstairs and hide in the men's room for a while, then come out, claiming she'd been sent to Oxnard on a case, something like that, and try to figure out an alternative plan.

"Wirta!" a woman's voice rang in the stairwell.

Jack spun around and there she was, standing on the landing not ten feet away with three uniformed cops. "What the fuck are you doing here?" Eleanor Drake demanded, glaring down at him. Like most female cops, Eleanor had a mouth on her.

Jack gave her his best smile. It had no effect. Zero. "I came to talk to you. My god, Eleanor, you look marvelous." Now he sounded like Fernando Lamas.

"You prick," Eleanor said. "You've got your full ration of nerve coming here." She was wearing a tailored suit with a short skirt. It was her legs that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.

"Is that her?" Susan asked, almost whispering.

"Uh… uh… yeah. Gimme a minute, here."

"Get outta my sight, you asshole. I'm not kidding. You'd better get the fuck outta my precinct house."

"One doesn't have to use foul language to make one's point." Stealing Miro's lines.

"I'm not fooling, Jack."

"Right. Let's go." He turned and grabbed Susan's arm and led her out of the building. He could feel Eleanor's eyes tracking him like gunsights until he was out the door and on the street. It had stopped raining, but his lower back was still a fire zone, his emotions in turmoil, his honor in question.

"I thought she was supposed to be a close friend-that you had an outstanding working relationship," Susan said angrily. "What kinda liar are you? She looked like she wanted to kill you." His karma with women hovered near zero.

Time to come clean. "Look, Susan, you're right. I lied, okay? I wasn't planning on running into her. She hates me. We used to date. I cheated on her and she damn near shot it out with me in a. motel room in Monterey. It ended about as badly as possible and I…" He paused. "Look, I needed the work, so I fudged a little."

"Fudged!"

"Yeah, but I still have a way to get what we need. Actually, this new way is smarter than asking sworn personnel to steal confidential records. That probably would have backfired. This idea is much safer, okay?"

She was really pissed. "What kind of an asshole are you?"

Some questions are better left unanswered. "How much cash do you have in your wallet?"

"I don't carry cash. I told you, we're a nonprofit institute. I need checks as receipts for our tax-exempt status."

"A check won't do it. Okay, in the spirit of cooperation, and because I see how upset you are, I'll front the Institute a couple'a hundred dollars. Deal?" She was calming down, he thought… hoped.

"Why? What are we doing?"

"We're gonna find a Chinese lab attendant and bribe him. The Chinese are easy marks."

"I'm really not much on racial slurs," she said, looking daggers at him now.

"It's not a racial slur. It's a cultural reality. I happen to know that a lot of Chinese people end up working in the police lab up here. They're good technicians and they work at minimum wage. Most are immigrants with big debts to the triads for getting them or their families over here from mainland China. Two hundred bucks will buy a lot of cooperation if I can find the right guy. We go downstairs in the ME's building on Turpin Street. It's not a secure location. We go to the cafeteria, do a little eavesdropping, pick somebody with a thick accent. Believe me, it works. I've done this before."

It pissed her off that he'd lied to her. But then, she reasoned, she'd lied to him, too. He'd be in for a big surprise when he tried to cash her check, so she figured they were even… more or less.

Before they got back in the car she watched him with concern as he sprinted across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank to deposit her bad check in the ATM.

His name was Shing Nam Shan, but he went by "Danny." He was twenty years old and weighed only one hundred and fifteen pounds all in, canvas shoes included. He had short, bristly hair and eyeglasses thick enough to start a fire. Danny snatched the cash out of Jack's hand like a lizard snapping up a fruit fly. After Jack explained that they wanted a copy of Roland Minton's crime scene and ME reports, Danny smiled and said in broken English, struggling with each sentence: "I know where keep. Make some… same kind… copies. You rait here." He turned and left them standing in the maze of hallways in the basement of the Medical Examiner's building.

The smells were putrid. A mixture of odors so dense and complicated that it was hard to separate them-except to say that the brutal tinge of Lysol enveloped everything.

"You were right," she said, feeling slightly better about him.

He smiled, then added a few slices of baloney to the sandwich. "When you hire the Wirta Agency, you get all the Bs of police science: basic brilliance and boundless bullshit."

She cocked her head at him as if she didn't quite know what to make of that. So he added, "But I don't charge for the bullshit. It's an agency extra."

Twenty minutes later Danny returned and handed them a light Xerox still warm from the machine. "It faded. We outta toner," he said. "You not say Danny get, hokay?"

"Don't worry, we're leaving town in two hours. Now all I need to know is how do we get outta here? This is a maze down here." That brought Danny's worst sentence to date.

"Go light, den reft… den up stair to erevator."

"Why don't you go ahead and pay for lunch. You can just put it on your expense sheet," Susan suggested.

They were at Fisherman's Wharf sitting in Alioto's Fish House. The windows overlooked a picturesque little tuna fleet adorned with outriggers, high bows, and women's names. He counted four Marias, a few Magdalenas, and a Madonna (probably not the one in the leather concert bra). The food was great and the bill was reasonable. Jack peeled off some twenties thinking he hadn't been a private detective for that long but that he was pretty sure this wasn't the way it was supposed to work.

Before lunch they had gone over the crime scene and the ME's reports, and there was still no getting around the fact that the death of Roland Minton was very violent and damned strange. Sergeant Lester Cole's crime sheet was very specific-he had particularly noted that there was no obvious way anything or anybody could have gotten in or out of Roland's room. Cole had speculated that somehow someone must have hung outside the window thirty stories up, pried open the frame, which he noted would be a superhuman feat, then had gained entrance to the hotel room. Sergeant Cole had no theory on how that could have been done or how the thick metal could have been bent.

The coroner's descriptions were unemotional but graphic: felonious homicide, extreme mutilation, blunt-force trauma, anti-mortem severance, multiple commuted fractures, decapitation, cutaneous subdural matter…

It went on like that, detailing shredded body parts and blood-splatter evidence. Jack read it but didn't comment, because Susan had become very quiet and seemed on the verge of tears. The coroner called the murder extreme homicidal mania. What it came down to was Roland Minton had been ripped apart while he was still alive.

The only other noteworthy thing was in the short paragraph listing stomach contents: a partially digested Big Mac approximately six hours old, Coca-Cola, minibar peanuts, and a note. According to the coroner, it had been swallowed seconds before Roland died but was still readable. Just one word: