The Crooked Street

4

“A fourteen-year-old kid dumped you in the water?” Frost’s brother, Duane, chuckled to him over the phone. “I’m sorry, bro, but I really wish I’d been there to see that. I’m never going to let you hear the end of it, you know.”

“I’m sure you won’t be the only one,” Frost replied.

He’d draped a towel over the driver’s seat of his Suburban, but his wet clothes had soaked through it. Heat blasted through the vents, but the air barely warmed him, and cold drips of harbor water continued to trickle from his hair. He’d been angry at first; then he’d felt like an idiot; now he was finally able to laugh at himself.

It was seven thirty in the morning under a clear blue sky. The Saturday streets were still mostly empty of traffic. He headed south out of the marina, and when he reached the intersection at Lombard, he decided to turn. He was still trying to decipher Denny’s message.

“Seriously, are you okay?” Duane asked him.

“Nothing but wounded pride and a splitting headache.”

“And the kid?”

“Long gone. I don’t know who he is or how to find him.”

“Well, when you do find him, run him over to meet the Niners. We could use a kicker like that.” Duane laughed again.

Frost heard the metal bang of kitchen pans in the background of the call. Duane was a San Francisco chef who’d sold his brick-and-mortar restaurant several years earlier to open up a food truck in the city’s SoMa District. He changed his menus daily to accommodate whatever food was freshest, and the result was long lines of organic-loving twenty-somethings crowding the truck at lunch and dinner. Duane didn’t make half the money he once did, but he loved it and didn’t seem to mind working eighteen hours a day. Sometimes he slept in his truck rather than make the hike back to his fashionable Marina condo in the middle of the night.

“You should come to dinner tonight,” Duane went on. “We haven’t seen you in a while. Don’t worry, the menu won’t be too gourmet for your Oscar Mayer palate.”

Frost chuckled. “What are you serving?”

“I’m bringing an Asian-Mediterranean spin to all things Canadian.”

“Why Canadian?” Frost asked.

“My new sous chef, Raymonde, is from Montreal, so I figured, what the hell.”

“What do they eat in Canada, other than moose?”

Duane snickered. “I’m still working up the menu. We’ll have some kind of poutine, I guess. Maybe I’ll do a pad thai version. Raymonde’s doing smoked meat. It’s Canada, so I’ll probably have to put a maple glaze on everything. I’m going to see if I can get a Mountie to show up, too. What’s Canada without a little Dudley Do-Right?”

“Well, I’ll be there if I can,” Frost said.

“Perfect. Tabby will be there, too. I want to see her face when you tell her about getting dunked in the harbor by a kid.”

“Sure,” Frost replied in a flat voice.

He knew there was no way he could avoid seeing Tabby Blaine. She and Duane were almost always together. Even so, she was the most dangerous person in Frost’s life. Just the mention of her name conjured the girl in his mind so vividly that she felt close enough to touch. She had lush shoulder-length hair that was mahogany red. She wore her emotions on her face, and her green eyes could go from innocent to wicked to funny to sad like the bay waters changing colors. From the moment he’d met her, they’d connected in a way that was intimate and deep. Talking to her was easy for him in a way that it had never been with any other woman.

That was a big problem because Tabby was Duane’s fiancée.

When Frost didn’t say anything more on the phone, Duane took that as an invitation to offer extra details about his Canadian menu and the intricacies of some odd pork spread made in Quebec called cretons. Meanwhile, Frost watched Lombard Street passing outside his truck. He climbed the hill at Larkin and found himself facing the famous intersection that wriggled down the other side. Apartment buildings stepped down the slope beside the red cobblestones. At this early hour, tourists hadn’t mobbed the area yet. He drove across the cable car tracks and down Lombard turn by sharp turn, eight turns in all, past green hedgerows that lined the winding avenue.

When he reached the bottom, he pulled to the curb and craned his neck to look behind him. He shook his head because he hadn’t learned a thing. Lombard was famous to outsiders, but it had no special meaning for him. He had no idea what Denny had meant with his message. He drove one more block and turned for home. Driving up and down the peaks of Russian Hill made him feel as if he were in a Steve McQueen movie.

On the phone, Duane was still talking about Canada.

“So, poutine,” Frost broke in finally when he couldn’t take any more. “That’s like French fries with gunk on top, right?”

“Don’t let Raymonde hear you say that, but yeah, that’s about the size of it. Plus cheese curds, don’t forget the cheese curds.”

“Well, count me in, eh?”

“Good. We’ll see you tonight. Oh, by the way, I heard something on the radio this morning about a murder in Russian Hill. Was that anywhere near you?”

“Inside my front door,” Frost replied.

Duane was silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry, what?”

“The guy died in my house.” Frost waited a beat before adding, “It was Denny.”

“Denny Clark?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you two talking again?”

“No,” Frost said.

“So why was he there? What happened to him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Wow, Denny Clark. That’s unbelievable. I’m really sorry, Frost. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s just strange, you know? There was still bad blood between us.”

“No kidding.”

Frost drove the last hill at Green Street. The yellow police tape still cordoned off the sidewalk, but the squad cars were gone. In the daylight, he could see the dark red of bloodstains running like a thin ribbon from the hillside stairs. Then he looked up at the steps of his house and had to cut off his brother.

“Duane? I have to go. I’ll see you tonight if I can.”

He didn’t wait for Duane to say anything more. He hung up the phone and swung his truck to the curb. Then he got out and ran.

The front door of his house was wide open.

Frost dripped on the white tile as he crept into the foyer. He closed the door silently behind him. His gun was in his hand again. One by one, he checked each room on the lower level. He started at the front of the house in the dining room that doubled as his office, then moved through the kitchen and living room. No one was downstairs. The blanket on the sofa was still crumpled where he’d thrown it off as Denny rang the doorbell in the middle of the night. The glass door leading out to the patio was securely locked. Nothing looked disturbed.

Then his eyes shot to the ceiling as the timbers of the old house groaned over his head. Someone was upstairs.

The hinges of the master bedroom door squealed as the intruder pushed it open. Frost could have told whoever it was that they were making a mistake. He waited. It didn’t take long. Above him, he heard the unmistakable hiss of an angry cat and a throaty growl that meant Shack was on the hunt. Someone howled in pain, and footsteps thundered in retreat from the bedroom. A man practically threw himself down the stairs to get away from Shack, and Frost launched across the floor, colliding with the man’s shoulder and knocking him to the carpet. He stood over him, his gun pointed at the man’s face, which bled in thin stripes from a swipe of the cat’s claws. The short, plump man threw his hands above his head in surrender.

“Who the hell are you?” Frost demanded.

The man winced at the stinging wounds on his face. “Holy crap, is that some kind of tiger you’ve got up there? You should have a warning on your door. That thing could have killed me.”

Shack took that opportunity to hop happily down the stairs. He climbed up Frost’s soaking-wet jeans and planted himself calmly on Frost’s shoulder and began licking his face to welcome him home. The tuxedo cat was full grown but unusually small, barely a foot from nose to tail; he had a black stomach with a single white stripe and white cheeks with a black chin. His tail was short, and he had stubby little ears.

“Meet the tiger,” Frost said. “Now, who are you?”

“My name’s Coyle. Dick Coyle.”

“Do you have ID?”

“Sure I do. Look, I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but could you stop pointing that gun at me? I’m not armed. And I’m not a thief.”

“Then why’d you break into my house, Coyle?”

“Hey, I’m sorry about that. It was stupid, I know. I rang the bell, but you weren’t home. Sometimes I can’t resist showing off my lockpick skills. I figured I’d be in and out before you were back.”

“And why exactly do you know how to pick locks?” Frost asked.

“I’m a private detective,” the man replied.

Frost groaned loudly as he holstered his weapon. If there was one thing he had no time for, it was private detectives. They all thought they were Sam Spade living in 1920s San Francisco. Frost stretched out a hand and helped Coyle back to his feet. The man eyed Shack nervously but didn’t protest as Frost steered him to the dining room and dropped him down in one of the wooden chairs.

“ID,” Frost repeated.

Coyle pushed his wallet across the table. His driver’s license showed that he was twenty-six years old with an address in an industrial section of town. Coyle’s dark hair was already thinning, and he had it greased over his head with a part on the side. He had skimpy stubble pretending to be a beard and deer-in-the-headlights brown eyes. His face was full, round, and flushed, and Shack had made sharp cuts down the side of his forehead. He wore a chocolate-colored mock turtleneck and khakis, both in extra-large sizes to accommodate his heavy frame.

Frost went into the kitchen and dampened a towel in the sink. He returned to the dining room and handed it to the detective, who dabbed it gingerly against the wounds on his head.

“Okay, Coyle, tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you,” Frost said.

“Because we’re both doing the same thing. Investigating a murder.”

Frost shook his head. Another Sam Spade. “Whose murder?”

“Denny Clark.”

“How do you know Denny? Was he a client of yours or something?”

“No, I never met him.”

“Then why are you so interested in his murder?” Frost asked.

Coyle pursed his thick pale lips and shot covert glances in both directions. He leaned across the table. “Is this room secure?”

“What?”

“Do I need to worry about bugs?”

Frost was ready to laugh, but then he thought about Denny Clark being killed with the kind of poison that was usually reserved for spies. And about hidden cameras on a multimillion-dollar yacht. And about Captain Hayden showing up at the crime scene in the middle of the night. He decided to indulge the detective’s paranoia. He synched his phone to the Bose speakers in the dining room and played Bastille’s “Pompeii” at a loud volume.

Frost crooked a finger at Coyle and spoke softly with the music thumping in the background. “Talk.”

Coyle used a conspiratorial whisper. “This murder isn’t what you think.”

“Then what is it?”

“There’s a serial killer working in the city,” Coyle told Frost. “He’s been at it for years, but nobody knows about him except me. He’s the one who murdered Denny Clark, and I can prove it.”