The Cheshire Cat's Eye

by Marcia Muller

  “What can I do for you, milady?” he called out.

  “I have a question. Victoriana said you might provide the answer.”

  “I have many answers. Come in, and take a seat on my throne.” He got up and, bowing, doffed his top hat toward the stool. His flowery speech and mannerisms completed his princely act, which was a little too cute for my taste.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” I climbed up there and fished in my bag for the metal fragment. “I need to locate the manufacturer of this.” I handed it to him.

  His face underwent a transformation, wide mouth pulling down and eyes clouding. “Where did you find it?”

  “In an empty house.” I waved my hand vaguely.

  “An empty house.”

  “Yes.”

  He stood close to me, tossing the metal piece from hand to hand. “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Al Prince, known in the trade as Prince Albert. Who’re you?”

  It wouldn’t do any good to conceal my identity. He could ask any one of a number of people here, and chances were he’d seen my name in the newspaper this morning. I admitted who I was and my connection with the Kaufmann killing.

  “So you must have found this in the empty house with Jake’s body.” Prince Albert stared at the fragment in his open palm, as if he could read the past from it. Then he shook his head. “Doesn’t look familiar.”

  “Oh.” I held out my hand.

  He gave the fitting to me. Then abruptly he spun around. “Let’s go outside. I can leave the booth for a while.” He led me through one of the big side doors to the boardwalk next to the building. In the distance was the Golden Gate Bridge and the sailboats that dotted the Bay.

  Prince Albert turned right, toward Alcatraz. We walked along slowly. The sunlight felt warm on my shoulders, and smells of creosote and seawater rose to my nostrils. Prince Albert didn’t speak until we’d rounded the end of the pier, where fishermen were casting their lines. They leaned on the rail, their jackets hung over the stanchions, timeless figures far removed from the organized chaos inside the building. When we turned down the shady side where the wind whipped cruelly, Prince Albert finally said, “What makes you think that fitting is from a light fixture?”

  “It had a broken bulb screwed into it, which I removed for safety’s sake.”

  He nodded. “It’s probably cast off an older fixture – from its shape I’d place it at late nineteenth century.”

  “But it’s relatively modern?”

  “Yes.” He leaned his elbows on the railing, staring down into the green water. I did the same. Off to the left, a harbor cruise loaded with bundled-up tourists churned back to port.

  “That piece isn’t from one of your fixtures, then?” I persisted.

  “I told you, no.”

  “And you have no idea whose it might be?”

  “It’s fairly typical. It could be anyone’s.”

  We were silent for a moment, the wavelets lapping below.

  “What does this fitting have to do with Jake’s murder?” Prince Albert asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know. I hoped you could tell me.”

  He jerked around to face me. His eyes were hazel, flecked with yellow. “Why me?”

  “You know your light fixtures, I’m told.”

  “Oh.” He looked away.

  “We were friends.”

  “Good friends?”

  “Good enough. He was like an older brother, gave me pointers on running my business.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He was silent.

  “When?” I insisted.

  “Yesterday around noon, he was in my workshop.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Inflation. The high price of liquor. What the hell do friends talk about?”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Seem?”

  “What kind of mood was he in?”

  “His usual.”

  “And that was…”

  Prince Albert sighed explosively. “He was the same as he always was. He was like Jake, that’s all.” He paused, then added, “Let me see that fitting again, will you?”

  I passed it to him. He took it, fumbled, and said, “Oops!” He straightened. The metal piece had flipped from his hand and dropped into the green water below.

  He turned to me, mock dismay twisting his wide mouth. “How clumsy of me!”

  Fury rose, but I controlled it. I didn’t want him to think his artifice a triumph. “Very clumsy, for a man who does intricate work with his hands.”

  “I hope I haven’t hindered your investigation.”

  “Not at all,” I replied smoothly. “I took pictures of the piece last night,” I hadn’t, but I was sure I could sketch it from memory.

  Chagrin flickered across his face, but he smiled. “Well, that’s a relief. I must make it up to you, though.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “Come by my shop tomorrow morning, before noon, when I have to be out here. I’ll give you the background on the fixture trade, show you how they’re cast. Maybe that will help, even if I have lost your…er…clue.”

  And in the meantime, he would pump me about my investigation. Still, I might take him up on it. I’d keep my guard up – more, certainly, than I had today. And perhaps I’d find out something about Prince Albert. “Thank you. It will be a pleasure.”

  With a courtly gesture, Prince Albert offered me his velvet-clad arm. I took it, and we continued down the shady side of the pier.

  8.

  Halfway back to my car, I saw a familiar figure lumbering toward the gate. “Paul!” I called. “Paul Collins!”

  The pudgy young man turned, puzzled, then raised a hand in greeting. I quickened my pace and joined him.

  “How come you’re leaving so early?” I asked. It wasn’t quite five, and the show would continue until nine.

  “David arrived, and Larry’s there. With more than two people, the booth is crowded.” His moonlike face drooped. “Besides, if you want the truth, I’m not feeling very well. That murder…”

  “Do you need a ride? I have my car.”

  He brightened slightly. “Thanks, I could use one. The bus service in our neighborhood…. Well, you hate to ride them. With those teenage thugs holding up the passengers…”

  Already I sensed Collins was a man who rarely completed a sentence, as if he had second thoughts on the worth of what he had to say. We walked in silence to the MG, and I waited as he squeezed his plump body into the passenger seat.

  “If the neighborhood’s so bad,” I said as I drove out of the lot, “why do you stay there?”

  “It’s David’s home.”

  “Don’t you have any say about where you live?”

  He looked surprised, as if the prospect had never occurred to him. “I suppose I would, if I bothered. But it’s much easier to go along with what David wants, since it means so much to him.”

  “Why does it?”

  “He’s very attached to the family mansion.”

  “The big Queen Anne on the corner.”

  “Yes, the one where…” He stared out the window.

  “Does he plan to live there when it’s restored?”

  “He did. Now…” Collins groped in his jacket pocket and produced a pill bottle. He poured two yellow tablets into his hand and gulped them. “Valium,” he explained. “For neck tension, but today they help other kinds.”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  “I don’t know what David will do about the house now,” Collins went on. “I could never understand his…well, I hate to call it an obsession, but it borders on that. Sure, Victorians are nice, I guess, but… Where I come from – Dayton, Ohio – we have big old houses too, but you don’t see all the fuss.”

  Dayton, Ohio. So Paul Collins was one of the legion of homosexuals who had fled the Midwest to find freedom and acceptance in San Francisco. I glanced at him a
s he sat, gripping his knees with his hands and staring rigidly ahead. A complaint of neck tension was an easy way to get a prescription for tranquilizers, and I was willing to bet there was nothing wrong with Collins’ neck. He probably took Valium because he hadn’t yet come to terms with emerging from the closet. It was not surprising, given Dayton, Ohio.

  I could well understand his discomfort. Look at my own background: Would the high-school cheerleader and navy brat from conservative San Diego have believed that, as an adult, she would not only tolerate what she then knew as ‘homos,” but also include a few among her circle of friends? And yet even now, wasn’t I, truthfully, uncomfortable when conversations with those friends turned to the details of gay life? Nine years in the Bay Area had changed me, but the vestiges of twenty in San Diego still clung.

  I pulled up in front of the houses on Steiner Street. Collins still sat gripping his knees. He turned to me and said earnestly, “They are pretty houses. I just don’t understand this obsession…”

  I felt much the same way. While I was not indifferent to the Victorians’ charms, I preferred the clean, sleek lines of contemporary architecture. But that was me: Why take a train when you can fly? Why figure by hand when you can use a computer?

  To Collins, I said, “You’re not required to share others’ enthusiasms.”

  He smiled at the words of support. “I guess. Look, would you like to come up for some tea? I have fresh scones, from the bakery on Union Street.”

  The idea appealed to the Scot in me, as well as to my stomach. I accepted his invitation and followed him up the stairway to the yellow-and-blue house.

  “Come to the kitchen. That’s my domain.” Collins led me through the double doors and dining room to a kitchen that was streamlined in every detail. Stainless-steel appliances gleamed. Gadgets for every possible purpose stood on the butcher block counters. At the rear, sliding glass doors opened onto a redwood deck with bright lawn furniture. The kitchen was spotless, artfully arranged. I reflected that it would fit with Collins’ personality to be compulsively neat.

  The suspicion was borne out by the precision with which he set the table, lining up red stoneware and Danish flatware on geometrically patterned placemats. He motioned for me to sit while he busied himself with teakettle, scones, and jam.

  “How long have you lived in San Francisco?” I asked.

  He poured tea and sat opposite me. “Four years, almost. I came out with David a couple of years after I graduated from college.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “In New York. I’d inherited some money and gone there because I was interested in the theater, but I was having a hard time breaking in. I don’t know how familiar you are with the gay scene.”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Then you know it can get pretty, well…rough. I’m a conservative guy, and the kinkier side of it isn’t for me. And it can get lonely, too. It’s hard to meet people. I guess it’s the same for any single person, but…”

  I nodded. I’d had my fair share of difficulty meeting men, although my work brought me into contact with more of them than the average job.

  “Well, I was about to give up and go home when I met David. He was ten years older than me, an engineer, with a good job. I could look up to him, depend on him. And David…well, I guess he needed a home.”

  I looked around the spotless kitchen. Indeed Collins provided that. My eyes lit on a large portable TV set rolled into a corner. When I looked at Collins, he was blushing.

  “My vice,” he admitted. “I like to watch TV while I cook, especially crime shows. That was why I wanted to talk to you – it fascinates me, meeting a private eye.”

  I grinned. “If only you knew how boring it can be. Some of our clients find the most humdrum reasons for taking legal action. And, speaking of clients, what’s David like? I haven’t talked with him enough to know.”

  Collins tilted back in his char, brown eyes thoughtful. “I’d describe him first of all as intense. He gets wrapped up in his projects, he can’t sit down, he zips around burning up these fantastic amounts of energy. You should see him on a job site. He’s always peering over the workmen’s shoulders, crawling on the scaffolding, pitching in to help. It tires me out to watch him.”

  “Was he close to his father?”

  The non sequitur startled Collins. “Why do you ask?”

  “He mentioned his father this morning.”

  “Oh.” Collins studied his plump hands. “I’d say it was an ambivalent relationship.”

  “How so?”

  “Mr. Wintringham was a very controlling person. Don’t get me wrong, he was also a nice man. I liked him, but…David was already a grown man in his thirties when we came back from New York, but his father tried to dominate his life.”

  “Did David resist?”

  “To a certain extent. You can probably guess his father wasn’t too happy about us. When David and I got here, we lived separately for a while, but we started restoring this house right away, and David made it clear that we would move in her together. And Mr. Wintringham didn’t approve when David started Wintringham and Associates, but he went ahead with it anyway. All in all, he resisted pretty well, but I know it was hard for him. Deep down, he loved his father and felt guilty because he hadn’t lived up to his expectations.”

  “What were they, besides being heterosexual?”

  Collins crumbled a piece of scone on his plate. “He wanted David to become an architect like him, but instead he studied engineering and even preferred construction work to that. When he became a general contractor, his father considered it…well, tacky, and…” The sound of footsteps distracted him.

  The swinging door from the dining room burst open, and Charmaine confronted us. Her bell-like hair was disarrayed, her face contorted in fury. “Where is that son-of-a-bitch?” she demanded.

  Collins’ hands clenched. “Charmaine, what is wrong? Where is who?”

  “You know damn well who! That slimy little bastard was supposed to wait for me at the show, but instead he took off in his goddamned Porsche with some blond. I let him have it, believe me I did, but he just walked out of there with her!” Her mouth trembled, and her eyes filled, washing out the anger.

  “Oh, Charmaine.” Collins held out an arm. “Come sit down and have some tea. That’s how Larry operates. You should know by now.”

  She sat, elbows on the table, hair swinging forward to cover her face, and her tears.

  So Larry French was the sleazy boyfriend van Dyne had mentioned. I should have known, from his treatment of Charmaine this morning. What an odd combination! Surely Charmaine could do better.

  Collins poured tea into a fresh cup, making comforting sounds. I looked at my watch. There was half an hour before my seven o’clock appointment with Nick Dettman, but I decided I would walk over to his law offices to kill the time rather than intrude further upon Charmaine’s distress.

  9.

  At ten minutes to seven dusk had fallen. I had walked down Steiner and admired the old mansions around Alamo Square, but now I approached Haight Street, or more specifically the five-hundred block of Haight, known as “The Razor” because of its thriving drug trade.

  My hand tightened on the strap of my shoulder bag, and I walked in the center of the sidewalk, out of the reach of both the buildings and the parked cars. I was state qualified in firearms and owned two .38 revolvers. Unlike many in my profession, I liked guns and practiced regularly at a firing range. I did not usually carry one, however, because all too often a gun could intensify an already dangerous situation. In spite of that conviction, tonight I longed for its comforting weight in my bag.

  Black men lounged against the iron grilles of the storefronts. They congregated in the middle of the sidewalk, talking, gesturing, making deals. I could tell the pushers because they carried bottles of soda pop. A detective on the narcotics detail had once explained to me that the heroin was packaged in toy balloons and distributed out of apartments that
were changed every few days. The soda pop was a normal precaution for the street dealers. Should the law appear, they would swallow the balloons, washing them down with pop. The balloons, of course, could be recovered later.

  I made my way toward Nick Dettman’s storefront. I had decided not to bring my car to this area, where autos seemed to disappear as soon as they were parked, but now I regretted it. Lewd remarks followed me. An occasional hand reached out. I weaved, silently avoiding them. Soon the loiterers were behind, and I spotted the orange door Johnny Hart had described.