Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  The house on the corner of “Chestnut and Larkin was a big white neo-colonial set a little way back from the sidewalks behind shrubbery and a five-foot brick-and-wrought-iron fence. There was a driveway on the downhill Larkin side, leading to an attached garage, and in the driveway was the dusty station wagon that Jason Booker had been driving last night. Through a shifting curtain of fog, I could see blurred light beneath the closed garage door and in one of the side windows; the rest of the house appeared dark.

  I found a parking spot near the driveway. On a clear day you would have some view from up there: the broad sweep of the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Angel islands, the Marin hills, part of the East Bay. Which was the main reason why Russian Hill was one of San Francisco’s moneyed neighborhoods; panoramic views do not come cheap. But tonight, about all you could make out down below were the vague misty lights that marked Fisherman’s Wharf and Aquatic Park and the Presidio.

  There were other cars parked in the area, but all of them were dark and nobody got out of any of them to approach me. So I stepped out myself after a moment, into the icy wind and the wet brackish-smelling fog, and walked up to Chestnut and down the sidewalk in front of the Cappellani house. More cars parked there, and all of them deserted too.

  Where was Alex? It had been a good thirty minutes since he called me, and he had said he was in a service station on Lombard Street; it should not have taken him much more than ten minutes —fifteen, maximum—to get from there to Russian Hill. Unless he had stopped somewhere on the way, for some reason.

  I came back to the corner and stood next to a lamppost there, hunching my shoulders against the wind. A pair of headlights appeared behind me, but they drifted on past, went down to where Larkin hooks into Francisco, and disappeared. Out on the Bay, a foghorn echoed in its mournful way; and over on Hyde, a cable car bell clanged tinnily. Otherwise the night held a kind of eerie stillness, the way it does in one of San Francisco’s heavy blanketing fogs.

  Five minutes went by without another car showing up, without any sign of life on the streets. Then there were two sets of fuzzy headlights on Chestnut and another set on Larkin, each of which vanished again without slowing as they passed me. I was getting damned cold, standing there, and not a little irritated. Where the hell was he?

  It occurred to me then that maybe he was already here. I did not know what kind of car he was driving; it could be any one of those parked nearby. And in spite of our agreement he could have gone into the house without waiting for me to show up. But was he that impulsive, that foolish? It would have defeated the whole purpose of getting me up here.

  I gave it another two minutes. Nothing, no other car. All right, damn it, I thought—and I went over to the front gate, through it and up the front walk to the house’s pillared entranceway. There was a doorbell button set into a recessed niche beside the door, and I pushed that and heard the distant peal of chimes inside. But I did not hear anything else in there: no one came to open the door.

  I began to feel uneasy, as I had up at the winery cellar—an intimation that something was wrong. Booker was supposed to be here, should be here; that was unmistakably his station wagon over in the driveway, and there were those lights showing in the garage and in the side window. But if he was here, why hadn’t he answered the door chimes? And where was Alex, if not inside the house?

  Maybe the two of them went off in Alex’s car, I thought. Only that did not make much sense. There didn’t seem to be any reason for either of them to have wanted to do that; and Alex couldn’t have gotten here more than fifteen minutes before me, which was little enough time for him or Booker to decide to go for a ride.

  I pressed the doorbell button again, listened to more chimes echo and then fade into unbroken silence. On impulse I reached down and tried the doorknob. Locked.

  The uneasiness took me away from the door, around the corner, and down to the driveway. A car came uphill through the fog, and I turned to watch it whisper past; it slowed at the top of the hill, but then it continued along Larkin and its taillights were swallowed by the mist. I went into the driveway, stopped beside the station wagon and glanced inside. It was empty. When I put my hand on the hood the metal turned out to be cold: it had been some time since the car was last driven.

  I stepped off into the shrubbery and went up to the lighted window. Past thin curtains I could see that the room there was a study, with a desk and some leather chairs and a leather sofa and wall shelves holding books and military-type curios. Like the car, it was empty—but draped over the sofa was a man’s shearling coat, and on the desk was a man’s tweed hat.

  Turning, I moved back to the driveway, walked along it to the closed garage door. No handle on its surface, which meant that it was probably remote-controlled. To the left, I saw then, away from the house, was a narrow concrete walk that led between a wooden property fence and the side wall of the garage. I went over there, onto the walk. It ended three-quarters of the way back at a raised wooden platform on which were two metal garbage cans; but halfway along was a side door set into the garage wall.

  The door was unlatched: a tiny strip of light shone between its edge and the jamb.

  I came to a standstill, and there was a clenching sensation in my stomach. Something wrong here, all right—the same kind of something, maybe, that had been wrong at the winery. I listened again, tensely. Silence, except for the wind rustling the shrubbery.

  Get it over with, I thought. And went up to the door, hesitated again, and then put my palm flat against the panel and shoved it wide.

  Worse than last night, much worse.

  Because the first thing I saw was the dead man lying on his side on the concrete floor.

  I said “Jesus” under my breath, went in there a couple of paces. He was sprawled out in front of an open door into the house, with one arm extended beyond his head. In that hand was a .32 caliber blued-steel automatic. But he had not been shot; the side of his head had been brutally caved in.

  Jason Booker.

  To one side of him was what looked to be a homemade black jack—a man’s sock filled with something like sand or buckshot—and it was matted with blood and hair: the murder weapon. Spatters and ribbons of blood stained Booker’s face, the back of his sports shirt, the floor around him. It had congealed, but still glistened wetly; he could not have been dead much more than half an hour.

  Alex, I thought. Alex?

  I started to take another step toward the body, stopped abruptly when I realized there was still more blood, a small puddle of it, down near my right shoe. Booker’s too? But the puddle was a good twenty feet from where he lay. I stared at the gun in his hand, and sniffed the air, and thought I could smell the faint lingering odor of cordite. Had Booker managed to shoot his assailant? before he died, or before a final death blow was struck?

  There were plenty of signs of a struggle. Firewood had been knocked from a stack along the wall to the left of the open house door, tools had been dislodged and scattered from a workbench to the right of the door. Half a dozen coins were strewn among the dislodged tools: two nickels, two dimes, a quarter and a penny. There were also a matchbook and a nearly empty package of Camels—and a piece of paper that looked as if it had been part of a 5X7 notepad, center-folded and resting tented on the fold.

  I could make out typeprint on the paper, and I detoured around the puddle of drying blood and went over to it and sat on my haunches. Without touching the paper, I leaned down to look at the words. They were in elite type, and they spelled out the address of this house. That was all, except for a single word in capital letters at the bottom, like a signature, that meant nothing to me at all.

  The word was Twospot.

  I straightened up, frowning. You could put together some of what had happened here, but there were other things that did not seem to add up. If Alex had murdered Booker, what was the sense in the piece of notepaper? He would have had no conceivable reason for carrying around the address of his own family’s house
. It could belong to Booker, but the same thing applied: he would not have needed an oddly signed paper to tell him where the house was situated.

  But if Alex was not the murderer, then why had Booker been killed? And by whom? And why hadn’t Alex kept his rendezvous with me?

  You’re wasting time, I told myself. Get the police out here, leave the speculating to them. I went to the open house door, entered a small storage pantry, passed through it into a central hallway. The house was deeply hushed, contained an almost palpable aura of emptiness. Light from the study I had seen from outside spilled into the hall, creating pockets of heavy shadow; I located a wall switch, flicked it with the back of my hand to keep from smearing any fingerprints that might be on it, and turned into the study.

  A telephone sat on one corner of the desk. I took out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my hand. Then I lifted the receiver and dialed the number of the Hall of Justice.

  When the switchboard operator came on I asked him if Lieutenant Eberhardt was on duty; Eberhardt was a close friend of mine, had been ever since we had gone through the Police Academy together after World War II. But he said no, Eb was gone for the day—did I want to talk to anyone else? I knew several other detectives, one of whom was a Homicide Lieutenant and a casual acquaintance I had played poker with on a number of occasions. I asked if he was on night watch, and the operator said he was and transferred the call.

  An unfamiliar voice said, “Homicide, Canelli speaking. Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let me talk to Frank Hastings.”

  PART TWO

  The Police Lieutenant

  7

  I watched Canelli bring my cruiser down the spiral parking ramp. The car bounced to a jerky stop at the broad yellow line at the bottom of the ramp—then stalled. Through the windshield, I could see Canelli’s lips moving as he restarted the car. To myself, I smiled. As long as I’d known him, Canelli had been on the losing side of a long, grueling battle with machines. Anything mechanical defeated him. A typewriter ribbon or a cassette cartridge left him helplessly muttering. Cheerfully, he volunteered to get coffee from the machine—but often returned to the squadroom apologetically carrying cocoa, or tea, or soup. Yet, before he’d wandered into police work, he’d been a skilled electrician. Electricity, he said, made sense.

  Finally the car stoppd at the curb in front of me, and the door swung open.

  “I think this car needs a tune-up, Lieutenant,” he said earnestly.

  Not replying, I closed the door, fastened my seat belt and motioned for him to get under way. “Go to Van Ness,” I said, “and turn right.”

  “Yessir.”

  Concentrating on his driving, Canelli maneuvered the car out of the garage and onto Sixth Street. The night was cold and damp; the fog was so thick the pavement glistened. On Folsom Street, the garish glow of neon signs was softened to misty pastels. As Canelli switched on the windshield wipers he asked, “Where’re we going?”

  “Chestnut and Larkin. The corner.”

  “Hey, that’s a pretty fancy part of town. One time when I was an electrician, I worked in a house on that block that had an observatory on top of it. Honest to God ”

  “An observatory?”

  “Right. No fooling. It had a telescope that I bet was ten feet long, at least. I was working on the servo system, that operated the overhead doors. They were half clamshells, I remember, just like the big observatories. It was unbelievable. Except that the servos shorted out when it rained.”

  I didn’t reply, but instead let my head fall back against the seat. I was tired and sleepy. At ten o’clock last night, Ann had called. She’d been deeply disturbed, almost in tears. She’d just had an unexpected call from her ex-husband, a society psychiatrist named Victor Haywood. The purpose of the call had been a demand that she “do something” about their younger son’s grades. In Haywood’s terms, the boy was a “low achiever.” Ann, a fourth-grade teacher, had protested. Billy was bright and happy: an imaginative, lively boy. A bitter argument had flared, during which Haywood had superciliously questioned Ann’s choice of a “bed part ner.” Translation: Haywood thought I was a low achiever, too. Ann had hung up on him—and then called me. We’d finished talking at midnight. At 2 A.M. I was still awake—still angrily brooding.

  Beside me, I heard Canelli elaborately clearing his throat. He couldn’t tolerate long silences. He couldn’t tolerate curiosity, either. So he began to probe:

  “The guy that called it in—” Canelli hesitated. “I had the feeling that he knows you.”

  “He does. We’ve played poker a few times.”

  “Is he on the force?”

  “He used to be. Now he’s private detective. He’s an old friend of Lieutenant Eberhardt’s. They served together on General Works.”

  “As long as I been on the force,” Canelli said, “I never knew a private detective. Not personally, I mean. But whenever I run across one in the line of duty, so to speak, I gotta say that they give me the creeps, sometimes. I mean, there’s this one guy I met that seems to make his living snatching kids from one parent to give to another parent. And he seemed to be proud of what he was doing. And he also seemed to be getting rich from it, too. He was driving a Mercedes, I remember. And he even said he had an airplane, too.” Canelli shook his head. “I couldn’t get over it.”

  I pointed ahead. “Van Ness is next. You’d better get in the right lane.”

  “Oh. Right.” Canelli glanced hurriedly over his shoulder and abruptly jerked the steering wheel to the right. His broad, swarthy face furrowed as a horn blared from behind.

  “Those sportscars,” he muttered. “They’re always coming up on you from out of nowhere.”

  I often wondered why I’d chosen Canelli as my driver—or, for that matter, why I’d picked him for my squad. At age twenty-eight, at a suety two hundred thirty, Canelli looked and acted more like an overweight fry cook than a homicide detective. His brown eyes were innocent. His normal expression was either puzzled or beguiled, depending on the problem. His only professional asset was a perpetual run of incredible good luck. If the entire squad spent days sifting through garbage for a murder gun, Canelli would accidentally stumble over the weapon lying under a rosebush. His luck protected him behind the wheel, too. In hot pursuit, Canelli drove with a kind of inspired lunacy—all the while muttering to himself. Once, mopping my face at the end of a chase, I’d told Canelli that he reminded me of W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Canelli’s large brown eyes had reproached me for days. He was the only detective I’d ever known who could get his feelings hurt.

  “If he’s a friend of Lieutenant Eberhardt’s, I suppose he’s all right,” Canelli ventured. He was probing again.

  I shrugged. “He seems all right to me. He’s one of these people who doesn’t talk unless he’s got something to say. And, if it’ll reassure you, I don’t think he’s got much money.”

  “That probably means he’s honest ”

  “It probably does.”

  My poker-playing friend—they called him Bill—was standing just inside an elaborate wrought-iron gate.

  “Hello, Frank. Good to see you.”

  I smiled and offered my hand. “Good to see you, too.”

  I introduced him to Canelli and turned to look at the house. It was an impressive sight: a two story neo-colonial with a pillared portico, Williamsburg-style windows and a gabled roof. The property was surrounded by an ornate iron fence supported by traditional brick pillars. The grounds around the house were meticulously landscaped. Situated on some of the most desirable real estate in San Francisco, the property could easily be worth a quarter of a million dollars. Seen shrouded in the fog that was blowing up Russian Hill from the Bay below, the house and grounds seemed strangely isolated, revealing nothing.

  I turned to Canelli. “You go inside and secure the premises. Then make the calls. When you call, make sure you get the best personnel available, even if they come from home. I want Parrington from the lab and Wal
ton from the coroner’s office—plus enough assistants to get the job done. I’ll call the D.A. myself, as soon as I get the details straight.”

  “Yessir.” Canelli turned to Bill. “Which phone did you use?”

  “The one in the study. The front door’s locked, so you’ll have to go in through the service door to the garage. It’s on the downhill side. That door was ajar when I came. So that’s the way I left it.”

  “Once you’ve made the calls,” I said to Canelli, “you may as well open the front door. Leave it wide open, and tag it in that position for the lab.” I hesitated a moment, surveying the large corner lot, with only the five-foot iron fence for protection against the curious. “Better call for three black and white units,” I added. “At least ”

  “Right.” Canelli lumbered down the sloping sidewalk toward the driveway.

  I turned to Bill. “Before the troops get here, I’d like you to give me everything you’ve got that’s relevant. We can talk there—” I gestured to the porch, where we would be sheltered from the fog. As I preceded the private detective, he carefully closed the gate behind us, using a handkerchief.

  For the next few minutes he talked and I listened. Midway through the report Canelli opened the front door, and I gestured for him to join us.

  Bill’s report was a good, solid one: concise but not too sketchy, perceptive but not too speculative. When he finished, I regretfully shook my head as I looked him straight in the eye.

  “At this point,” I said, “the man we want to question most is your client. He’s the one who’s missing—and probably running. I guess that’s obvious.”

  His only reply was a brief, rueful smile. But the expression on his squared-off face was easily readable. He was a serious, conscientious man—one who cared what happened to his clients. He hated the idea of his client in custody. But he wouldn’t ask me for a break. He was too proud.