As I was passing Lum Kee’s shop on the other side of the street, the shop door opened and Lum Kee came out backward, looking like an overweight beetle in his black coat
“Hello, Lum!” I said, just for the hell of it.
You’d have thought I’d touched him with a high-tension wire. Lum started, jumped back about a foot, and looked as though he was going to run back through the closed door.
Instead, he turned around with the awkward speed of a man who didn’t want to see something but knew he had to get it over with. “Joe Goodey?” he said. “Can it be you?”
“Sure it can,” I said. “The police decided that they didn’t want me after all.”
“What?” he said, and I could tell that he didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. He was still staring at me as if he couldn’t believe what he saw before him. “But the boy said—” he started. Then he stopped, clamped his mouth shut, and just stared some more.
“I’m glad to see that you’re so touched to have me back,” I said. “I never suspected that you cared.”
“Sure, sure,” Lum Kee muttered in a distracted way. “I’ve got to go now. I must go.” He shuffled toward the corner at high speed.
Shrugging, I continued on to my car. I checked the trunk, and my suitcases looked untouched. There was no reason to go upstairs at all.
I started driving toward Sausalito. It was only a twenty-five minute drive, even on a busy Friday night, so I had a bit of time to spare. For thinking. When I got to the Marin County end of the Golden Gate Bridge, it was still only ten minutes to eleven. I didn’t want to get in on the tail end of Rachel’s dinner party, so I cut into the lane leading to the observation area at the end of the bridge.
The night was too hazy to let viewers get much out of the San Francisco skyline, but a parking place was hard to find. As a semipro voyeur, I canvassed the parked cars I passed and was surprised to find so many contained only one person. Maybe a lot of other people had things to think out.
I found a slot between an MGB and a big Buick convertible. Outside, Led Zeppelin and Mozart bumped heads, and I settled down for a few minutes of concentrated thought. It’s times like that when a detective ought to smoke. A cigarette somehow lends credibility to heavy thinking. A man slowly destroying his lungs is hardly open to charges of daydreaming. But I didn’t even have a stick of gum.
What I had was a murder—or maybe two, if I took a professional interest in Chub’s death—to solve. But first Tina D’Oro. Who had something to gain from Tina’s death? Or, on the other hand, who disliked her enough to kill her whether there was anything to gain from it or not?
I didn’t yet know all the players in the final drama of Tina D’Oro, but any way I looked at it, Mayor Sanford F. Kolchik looked like the odds-on favorite. Who was involved romantically with Tina? S.F.K. Who stood to lose a great deal if that involvement became known? S.F.K. Who was the most likely target for blackmail if that was Tina’s game? Three out of three.
Kolchik had a whole lot of other credentials which qualified him to be my man. Not the least of which was a hard, ruthless brother whose career was as firmly attached to Sandy Kolchik’s as the earth is to the sun. If Sandy took a fall, The Brother was a goner. Perhaps outweighing all this was the fact that Kolchik was the one potential suspect that Johnny Maher wouldn’t touch. He was virgin territory, and he was all mine. I had the additional satisfaction of knowing that if Sandy was had for Tina’s murder, he couldn’t very well get tough with me over his cousin. Or could he? It was worth thinking about.
But not just then. A Sheriff’s Department prowl car had pulled into the parking area and was making the circuit with his spotlight. It was probably just some young punk deputy getting revenge on the parkers for having a better time than he was, but I wasn’t in the mood to find out. There’s something about being a recent ex-cop which encourages paranoia. Mine didn’t need much encouragement. I rapidly started the Morris and got out of there, which was probably what the Sheriff’s boy wanted in the first place.
Sausalito was a small fishing village. About fifty years ago. But now it was a strange mélange of the idle rich, hustling merchants, and descendants of the original fishermen, who hated, scorned, and envied the first two categories. Rachel Schute fell into the first class and lived in a cantilevered, multidecked phantasmagoria high up over the waterfront, with the San Francisco skyline as its private light show.
Rachel was saying goodbye to the last of her departing guests as I pulled into the shallow parking area under the lower deck. I recognized Moses Stanfield’s showy, green Continental. Ho-hum, I thought, it’s old home night. The Stanfields were being shepherded down the steep wooden steps as I came up them with a suitcase in my hand. I could have been the Fuller brush man on a night call.
“Oh, hello, Joe,” Rachel said easily. “You’re just in time to meet Justice and Mrs. Stanfield.”
“A pleasure, Justice,” I said, giving him the old fraternity grip and a winning smile. “Mrs. Stanfield and I are old friends.” I slipped her a half wink. “Not leaving so soon, I hope?” Like hell I did.
Mrs. Stanfield had had just enough to drink to be caught midway between ladylike gaiety and slatternly sullenness. A drink sooner, and she’d have greeted me like an old shipmate. A drink later, and she’d have bitten my head off and spat it in my face. As it was, she paused, one foot in the air, and looked at me as a poker player would at a hand containing two jacks of diamonds. She didn’t miss the suitcase, either.
The justice obviously didn’t remember my name. “A pleasure,” he lied absent-mindedly. “We really must be going, Rachel. Lovely dinner.” And they were gone. The big Lincoln sucked a couple gallons of gas into its carburetors and ate up several hundred yards of street. We were alone.
“Evening,” I said to Rachel. “Are there any leftovers? I didn’t have any real dinner. Let’s go into the kitchen, and I’ll tell you where I didn’t eat it.”
Rachel stood poised on the top step. She was smiling, but as usual she looked as though she couldn’t decide whether to fall into my arms or kick me into the street. It may sound fishy for me to keep insisting on it, but Rachel Schute was a hell of a good-looking woman. Especially all kitted out in a jade-colored dress that cost more than I ever made in a month and with that pale strawberry hair pushed up over her pointy ears like small ostrich plumes. Rachel’s pale-blue eyes were a bit naked and raw-looking, the way redheads’ often are, but she knew how to get the best out of them with make-up. At three in the morning, with a face full of tears and a mouth full of recriminations, she was dead ugly, but right now she’d do just fine.
“Sure, Joe,” she said, weakening as usual. “Let’s go see what’s left.” She held out a warm, freckled left hand to me, and I took it. The strength of the squeeze she gave my hand told me she hadn’t quite given up on me. She should have known better. Hell, I should have known better and married her. But neither of us did.
Rachel’s spade housemaid-cook shot me her usual I-know-you-hustler look, adding, “Good night, Mrs. Schute,” before leaving us really alone. I sat down at the kitchen table and started ravaging what was left of the prime rib and potatoes julienne, while Rachel perched herself across the table and waited for me to bring her up to date.
I didn’t disappoint her. I told her most of what I knew, leaving out only the mayor’s involvement and Tina’s diary. I could tell from the way she was listening that she didn’t necessarily believe that the department brought me back—me, whom they’d just thrown out—just to look into the murder of a go-go girl, even Tina. So she didn’t have to believe me.
I finished off the prime rib and about a pint of chocolate-rum ice cream. Then I put my hand on hers across the table.
“Come on,” I said, partly because I knew it was expected of me, “let’s go to bed.”
“Sometimes, Joe,” Rachel said, “I think you’re just using me.” But the way she turned her hand to meet mine said this wasn’t yet a Federal offense.
> “Could be,” I said, tugging her to her feet.
11
It was in the morning that I always wished I could bring myself to marry the Widow Schute. We were sitting on the top deck, blinking in the soft-lemon sunshine, with Sausalito and the bay laid out for us to spit on if we felt like it. Miss Black Power was back dishing out the scrambled eggs, bacon, croissants, and fresh grapefruit juice. I could tell she didn’t like me because she always put my eggs off-center on the plate.
Rachel was sitting there in a hundred-and-fifty-dollar dressing gown, looking well-laid and altogether too content with life to bother settling the guerrilla warfare going on at the end of the table between Ramsey and Donald, the two older boys. And Joey, the baby, was busy mashing his scrambled eggs into his highchair tray. He’d not yet been born when his father, the late, rich Howard Schute had driven his car off a seventy-five-foot cliff above Stinson Beach. I hadn’t known Howard Schute, but he couldn’t have been too bad if Rachel liked him.
My friend, the maid, brought me the Chronicle as if she were giving up one of her kidneys, and it didn’t take me long to find the report of Chub’s untimely end. Not that it carried screaming headlines. The story was all but buried on the back page next to a laxative ad and simply said that a Mr. Seymour F.—for what? I wondered—Kroll of New York City had been found in a North Beach apartment house dead of stab wounds. The police were pursuing their investigations. A one-day non-sensation. I wondered if there was somebody in New York who would care.
On the front page, the Chronicle was still pumping Tina’s death for what it was worth and quoting Johnny Maher’s noncommittal statements about the likelihood of the killer being caught, tried, and executed in time for Sunday brunch. There was a good deal of lip-licking over preparations for the memorial service at midday at St. Timothy’s, the hippest church in North Beach. It promised to be a four-star occasion. It was bound to be open-coffin, but would Tina be topless?
Breakfast can’t last forever, and I had a visit to pay across the way on Belvedere Island. If I turned slightly to the left, I could see Belvedere, but couldn’t pick out the house.
The boys kicked up such a fuss when I said I had to leave that Rachel didn’t have a chance really to get started. Not that she was much of a fuss maker. She could say things with her eyes and a slight lift of her upper lip that you couldn’t get across with forty-five minutes of shouting. I kissed her warmly but noncommittally, wrestled with the boys all the way down the three flights of outside steps, and waved like hell until my car was out of sight. There was a damned fine family for somebody who wanted a family.
It was a pleasant, sunny ride from Sausalito to Belvedere, right around the blunt blade of bay which splits that end of Marin County. When I passed through Mill Valley I gave a thought to Ralph Lehman up there on his little hill, trying to hold everything together for another nine months so that he could retire. He’d be lucky.
Belvedere’s not really an island, but it likes to think it is. Since most of the houses on Belvedere have their backs rudely turned to the narrow road that spirals around it, the casual rubbernecker wouldn’t know how really luxurious the houses are.
About two thirds of the way up, I pulled off the road into a little carport in front of a three-car redwood garage. Even the garage had a good view over Tiburon toward the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. I was just putting a foot on the carefully graveled ground when a voice said, “What do you want here, Goodey?”
I couldn’t see who it belonged to, but I knew the voice. It was Stoney Karras, Sgt. Stoney Karras, late of the Docks Squad, now detached for rather special duty. I hate talking to people I can’t see, so I waited until he appeared from behind a thick, stunted cypress tree next to the garage. Karras didn’t look like much in a cheap Robert Hall special the color of grape pulp and ancient oxblood loafers, but I respected him as a hard man in a hard job.
“I want to see the man, Stoney.”
“What if he don’t want to see you?”
“Try him and see,” I suggested.
Stoney shrugged and went over me with his fat fingers like an amateur pianist. He didn’t find anything because my police special was still in the suitcase. Then he told me not to bother wandering around while he checked out my popularity rating with the squire. I could have told him the answer to that one, but I didn’t think Kolchik would refuse to see me. He was too interested in the job I was supposed to do to play it that cool.
“Okay, come on,” said Stoney when he reappeared from the house, but I could tell from his expression that he thought the mayor was making a mistake. Stoney would have had me thrown into the bay. That’s why Stoney wasn’t the mayor. Maybe he should have been.
Stoney herded me out onto a brick terrace at the front of the house, grunted something, and left me standing there. I was alone. A couple of leather-strapped sun loungers pointed out to sea, and a low, driftwood table held a big, kidney-shaped ceramic ashtray and a Mexican silver cigarette box. On the silver box was a small brass bell.
Somebody cleared his throat theatrically behind me. I turned around to see Mayor Kolchik coming out of the dark recesses of the house.
Kolchik was a short, dark man with a potato nose and the physical stature of a natural clown. But there was nothing clownish about his black, deep-set eyes. They told you that everything you assumed about him at first glance was a mistake, and you’d better know it. They meant business. His outfit was sporty—a three-quarter-sleeved mustard shirt, Balboa-blue slacks with a razor crease, and open-weave sandals. But his heart wasn’t in it. He could have really relaxed in a midnight-blue pinstripe with one-inch cuffs.
Neither of us knew exactly how to start. We knew too much about each other to be strangers. He knew I’d shot his cousin, and I knew about Tina. We couldn’t start with a businesslike handshake.
“You’re Goodey,” he said.
I wanted to say, “You’re Kolchik,” but chickened out and just nodded.
“You wanted to see me?” he said.
“Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Tina D’Oro,” I said, feeling a bit silly and exposed.
Kolchik looked as though someone had given him a tough riddle, and he was working on it. Apparently he hadn’t expected such a call on this sunny Saturday morning. He peered at me as if I were a junior accountant who’d lost a decimal point. He frowned.
“Does my brother know you’re over here?”
“He told me to investigate Tina’s murder,” I said, “but he didn’t tell me how. I’m one of those self-starters you hear about.”
He didn’t like that. It came too close to wise-guyism to suit him, and he frowned again. He was a good frowner.
“So I’m your number-one suspect, eh?” he said. That brought out a small, wrinkled smile, and I began to like him a little. But only a little.
“If you weren’t a possible suspect,” I said, “you wouldn’t have wanted to try to find out who killed Tina and eliminate you as a suspect. When Lehman told me just how it was, I volunteered to come back.”
“You wanted to help me,” he said.
“I wanted to help myself. The way Lehman told it, unless I came back willingly and tried to bail you out, you and The Brother were going to get nasty about me shooting your cousin.”
“If that’s what Lehman said, there must be some truth in it,” Kolchik said. He smiled again. “So that’s what they call Bruno, eh? The Brother.”
“That’s what I call him. I’ve heard him called worse.”
“A lot of people have the wrong slant on Bruno,” he said. “He’s a bit rough, perhaps, but he’s got one great quality that makes up for everything. He’s loyal.”
“Loyal to what?”
“To me, Goodey. To me,” Kolchik said complacently. “What are you loyal to?”
Before I could answer, he moved over to the driftwood table and took up the small bell. He gave it a few brisk shakes, and almost immediately a short, ugly girl with a Little Nemo haircut came out onto the terrace wit
h an expectant look on her face. She was wearing a mauve slack suit with a small apron which seemed to turn it into a uniform. She ignored me and turned her face to Kolchik as if he were the sun.
“Let’s have a drink, Goodey,” he said. “I make some very good beer. Irina, will you please bring us a bottle of the homemade beer from the cellar?”
She moved back into the house with a slightly pigeon-toed walk, and Kolchik gestured toward the deck chairs. “Let’s sit down and enjoy the sun,” he said. “It’s one of God’s great gifts. Now, you were about to tell me what you’re loyal to. Or maybe to whom.” The “to whom” came right out of Business English IA (night school division), but he got it out without falling flat on his face.
I didn’t have to think very hard. “To me,” I said.
I could see that he thought this was a bit crass. It offended his Polish-American sense of respect for family, nation, and institutions.
“Not to the police force?” he asked with raised eyebrows. He meant, “Not to me?”
“I’m not on the police force anymore,” I said. “You had me kicked off.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, shrugging as if he’d forgotten to pay the milkman or some other small oversight. “But you’ll be back on the police force, won’t you, after you clear up this…other matter?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But about this other matter—”
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking past me at the sliding door into the house, and I turned to follow his eyes. Coming onto the terrace was a woman in a shiny, chromium-plated wheelchair which she was propelling with thin, muscular arms. On a tray over her lap was a pitcher of beer with a thick head of foam and two tall pilsner glasses. She maneuvered the wheelchair with the expertise of long practice.
Everything about the woman was gray, and she fought the somber shade by wearing a vividly flowered red dress and a shocking shade of carmine lipstick. Her tapered nails were drops of fresh blood. But behind this show of color, she was like a vampire’s victim, drained of all but the dregs of life and fighting every inch of the way. Behind her dull silver skin, veins like very minor roads on a map seemed to be fading out before my eyes.
Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) Page 8
