Scattershot

FOURTEEN

Eberhardt said, “You’re an idiot, you know that?” We were sitting in his too-hot office at the Hall of Justice, drinking coffee; it was almost three o’clock. His eyes were meeting mine today, but that may have been because he was miffed. I was not very happy, either. I had a bruise on my hip, a boxed ear, and a headache. Eberhardt had a headache, too, he’d informed me-and I was the cause of it.

“Yeah,” I said.

“All you had to do when you had your brainstorm was call us. But no, you had to go running over to the library yourself.”

“I wanted to get a name for you. I wanted to make sure I was on the right track.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you were on the right track, all right, but you went and derailed yourself. We’d have Carolyn Weeks in custody right now if you had the sense Christ gave a peanut.”

“You’ll find her, Eb. She won’t get far.”

“You’d better hope not.” He looked at his watch.

“Thirty-five minutes before we go upstairs and talk to the Chief. If Klein doesn’t call in by then, your tail is back in the sling-but good.”

Klein and another inspector, Jack Logan, were out hunting for Carolyn Weeks. The fat woman at the library had supplied her address-an apartment building on Arguello-and we’d all figured that was where she’d go from Russian Hill; it was the most likely place for her to have Hornback’s money stashed. Eberhardt had put out an APB on her as soon as I called him, and the first patrol units had arrived at her building within fifteen minutes. But she hadn’t shown up, not yet. Either the money was somewhere else, or she was too scared to go after it at the apartment. A search warrant had already been issued; getting that and tossing Weeks’s apartment were part of what Klein and Logan had been sent to do.

I said, “I turned her up, didn’t I? I figured out the disappearance and the murder. That ought to count for plenty.”

“Maybe it does, in my book. The Chief might have other ideas. Not to mention the media.”

He opened up a drawer in his desk and came out with a carved monstrosity of a pipe: the bowl was full of curlicues and shaped like a head with the top of its skull cut off, and the face in front wore a cherubic leer. He began to tamp tobacco into it. While he was doing that I got up and yanked the plug on his portable heater.

When I sat down again he said irritably, “What did you do that for?”

“It’s too hot in here.”

“If you think it’s hot in here, wait until you sit down in the Chief’s office.”

“Stop ragging me, okay? I know I screwed up.”

He made a disgusted noise, set fire to his tobacco, and blew smoke at me across the desk. That hideous pipe stuck in one corner of his mouth gave him a ghoulish look, as if he were smoking somebody’s shrunken and lacquered head.

“All right,” he said, “you want to explain this brainstorm of yours now or wait until we go upstairs?”

“I’d better give it to you first. I want to make sure I’ve got all the details straight.”

“Fine. So how did you tumble to the librarian?”

“I’ll get to that later,” I said. “Let me ask you a few questions first, so I can lay out Hornback’s disappearance.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you see the body when it was brought in?”

“No.”

“But you read the coroner’s report.”

“Sure I read it. Why?”

“Were there any marks on the body beside the stab wound and the scratches? Any other sort of wound, no matter how small?”

He thought about that. “No. Except for a Band-Aid on one of his fingers, if that matters.”

“You bet it does,” I said. “In Klein’s report, did he say whether or not the emergency brake on Hornback’s car was set?”

“Not that I remember. What does that have to do with it?”

“Everything. If the brake wasn’t set and the transmission lever was in neutral instead of park, then it all fits. Klein can verify that part of it when he gets back.”

“I still don’t see the point,” Eberhardt said. “How do those things connect with Hornback’s body disappearing from the car?”

“It didn’t disappear from the car. That’s the point.”

He frowned at me. “Well?”

“The body was never inside it,” I said. “Hornback wasn’t murdered on the lookout; he was killed later, somewhere else.”

“Then what about the blood in the front seat?”

“He put it there himself, purposely-by cutting his finger with something sharp, like maybe a razor blade. That’s the reason for the Band-Aid.”

“Why would he do a crazy thing like that?”

“Because he was going to disappear.”

“Come on, you’re talking in riddles.”

“No, I’m not. The Hornback woman was right about him stealing money from their firm, so he was wide open to criminal charges. And he knew better than anybody that she was the type who’d press charges. He had no intention of hanging around to face them; his plan from the beginning had to be to stockpile as much cash as he could, and when his wife began to tumble to what he was doing, to split with it. And with Carolyn Weeks along for company.”

“Keep talking,” Eberhardt said.

“But he didn’t want to just hop a plane for somewhere,” I went on. “That would have made him an obvious fugitive. So he worked out a clever gimmick-what he thought was a clever gimmick, anyway. He intended to vanish under mysterious circumstances, so it would look as though he’d met with foul play: abandon his car in an isolated spot, with blood all over the front seat. It’s been tried before and it probably wouldn’t have fooled anybody, but he had nothing to lose by trying it.

“Okay. This little disappearing act of his was in the works for Monday night, which is why he stopped at the drugstore in North Beach after dinner-to buy razor blades and Band-Aids. But something happened long before he headed up to Twin Peaks that altered the shape of his plan.”

“What was that?”

“He spotted me,” I said. “I guess I’m getting old and less careful on a tail job than I used to be. Either that, or he just tumbled to me by accident. I don’t suppose it matters. The point is, he realized early on that he had a tail, and it wouldn’t have taken much effort for him to figure out I was a detective hired by his wife to get the goods on him. That was when he shifted gears from a half clever idea to a clever one. He’d go through with his disappearing act, all right, but he’d do it in front of a witness, and under a set of contrived circumstances that were really mysterious.”

“It’s a pretty good scenario so far,” Eberhardt said. “But I’m still waiting to find out how he managed to vanish while you were sitting there watching his car.”

“He didn’t.”

“There you go with riddles again.”

“Follow me through. After he left the tavern, Dewey’s Place-while he was stopped at the traffic light on Portola or while he was driving up Twin Peaks Boulevard-he used the razor blade to slice open his finger. He let blood drip on the seat and then bandaged the cut. That took care of part of the trick; the next part came when he reached the lookout.

“There’s a screen of cypress trees along the back edge of the lookout, where you turn off the spur road. They create a blind spot for anybody still on Twin Peaks Boulevard, as I was at the time; I couldn’t see all of the lookout until after I’d turned onto the spur. As soon as Hornback came into that blind spot, he jammed on his brakes and cut the headlights. I told Klein about that-seeing the brake lights flash through the trees and the headlights go dark. But when you think about it, it’s a little odd that somebody would switch off his lights on a lookout like that, with a steep slope at the far end, before he stops his car.”

Eberhardt said, “Now I’m beginning to see it.”

“Sure. He hit the brakes hard enough to bring the Dodge almost but not quite to a full stop. At the same time he shoved the transmission into neutral and shut off the engine and opened the door; the bulb for the dome light was defective so he didn’t have to worry about that. Then he slipped out, pushed the lock button down-a little added mystery-closed the door again, and ran a few steps into the trees. Where there were enough heavy shadows to hide him and to conceal his escape from the area.

“Meanwhile, the car drifted forward nice and slow and came to a stop nose-up against the guardrail. I saw that much, but what I didn’t see was the brake lights flash again. As they should have if Hornback was still inside the car and stopping it in the normal way.”

“One thing. What about that match flare you saw after the car was stopped?”

“That was a nice touch. When the match flamed I naturally assumed it was Hornback lighting another cigarette. But afterward there was no sign of a glowing cigarette end in the darkness- that was the second thing I didn’t see. What really happened is this. He’d fired a cigarette on his way up to the lookout; I noticed a match flare then, too. Before he left the car he put the smoldering butt in the ashtray, along with an unused match. When the hot ash burned down far enough it touched off the match. Simple as that.”

Eberhardt made chewing sounds on the stem of his ghoulish pipe. “Okay,” he said, “that takes care of the disappearance. Now explain the murder.”

“Carolyn Weeks killed him; I think that’s obvious now. He went straight to her after he slipped away from the lookout; I make it that she picked him up in her car. Either they had an argument or she’d been planning to knock him off all along for the money. You’ll find that out when she’s in custody. But she stuck the knife in him somewhere along the line and then dumped his body in the park.”

He nodded. “Which leaves how you knew where to find her.”

“Well, I followed Hornback around to a lot of places that night,” I said. “Restaurant, drugstore, newsstand for a pack of cigarettes, Dewey’s Place for a couple of fortifying drinks-all reasonable stops. But why did he go to the branch library? Why would a man plotting his own disappearance bother to return library books? It had to be that the books were just a cover. The real reason he went to the library was to tell someone who worked there, tell his girl friend, about me and what he was going to do and where to come pick him up.”

Eberhardt started to say something, but the phone buzzed just then. He picked up, said, “Eberhardt,” listened for a time, and then said, “Right, stay with it.” He looked in my direction as he put the handset down. “That was Klein.”

“Anything?”

“He and Logan just finished searching Carolyn Week’s apartment,” he said. “There’s no sign of the money.”

“Damn. And still no sign of Weeks, either, I suppose.”

“No.”

Two minutes later, while we were sitting in silence, each with our own thoughts, Charles Kayabalian showed up. I had called him from the Library, after listening to Eberhardt yell at me, because I wanted legal representation while I argued my case with the Chief. He’d had an appointment but said he’d be at the Hall by three-thirty, and he was as good as his word. I spent five minutes alone with him, outlining the situation. Then he and Eberhardt and I took the elevator upstairs.

The session in the Chief’s office lasted almost an hour. It was a good thing I’d had the foresight to request Kayabalian’s presence, — he didn’t say anything during my recap of the Hornback mystery, but afterward he offered an eloquent defense of my reasons for going alone to the library and of my professional conduct in general, stressing my record as a police officer and as a private investigator. I let him do most of the talking in that vein; he did a far better job in my behalf than I could have. Even Eberhardt, in his grudging way, allowed as how I had assisted the Department on a number of occasions and was always cooperative and aboveboard in my dealings with them.

But the Chief wasn’t convinced. The stern set of his face throughout told me that even before he launched into a speech about how much pressure he was getting from various sources, including the Mayor’s office, and how all this sensational publicity was harmful to the police image. There would be even more pressure after today’s events came out in the media, he said. It was a public relations matter, he said. A private detective wasn’t supposed to go around involving himself in homicide cases, he said, particularly when he kept making the cops look bad by upstaging them. He admitted that I had more or less exonerated myself of any wrongdoing in the Hornback case, but, he said, that didn’t necessarily mean he could allow me to keep on working as a private detective in the city of San Francisco. He had the matter under advisement and would make a decision “in a couple of days” as to whether or not he would recommend suspension of my license. Meanwhile, it would behoove me to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. That was the word he used: “behoove.”

When he finally threw us out of his office, and Eberhardt and Kayabalian and I were standing in the outer hall, I said, “It doesn’t look good, does it?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Kayabalian said in his optimistic way. Eberhardt just grunted.

“Nice irony,” I said. “He wants to yank my license because I’m too good at what I do. I’m not supposed to solve crimes; I’m not supposed to prevent crimes. What the hell am 1 supposed to do?”

Eb said, “Stay out of trouble. It could still go your way.”

Kayabalian nodded agreement. “Let me handle this. You’re not going to get railroaded out of a job because you devote your time and effort to upholding the law, not if I can help it.”

Eberhardt grunted again.

I said, “Yeah. All right.”

But I felt like a goddamn prisoner as we rode down in the elevator.