“Bullshit. Do you know anything I should know?”
“Have you talked to his wife?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it. Don’t tell her I told you to, but talk to her, quick.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“Thanks, Marsh. You get anything firm, I want to know.”
“I know you do.”
After I put down the phone I was still feeling silly and unattached, the symptoms of an overdose of solitude. I tried to bring myself out of it by putting on some Mozart, but even that didn’t do it. The apartment seemed so tawdry, so small and tacky and irrelevant. I turned out the lamp beside me. That helped. I turned off the overhead in the living room and the one in the kitchen. Then I sat in the dark and waited, trying all the while to avoid figuring out what I was waiting for.
By the time the telephone rang again the air felt grainy and thin, like midnight or after. “Mr. Tanner?” The voice was flat, not fully inflated. I acknowledged it.
“They’ve called,” she said.
“When?” My stomach tightened, then hurt.
“Just now.”
“Where’s the drop?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. They just wanted to make sure the money is ready.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Two million. I can see it from here.” She stopped to consider her next words. “It’s obscene,” she added quietly.
“When will they get back to you?”
“Anytime. Walter’s supposed to be ready to travel at a moment’s notice.”
“What’s he drive?”
“A Mercedes. Black.”
“Figures,” I said involuntarily. “Okay. It’s the same deal. I’ll be here until nine in the morning. After that try the office first. I’ll check with my service every fifteen minutes if I have to go out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Did you talk with your husband? About me?”
“Yes. No. Not exactly. I started to, but he didn’t seem receptive.”
“So I’m sub rosa.”
“I guess that’s what you’d call it.”
“I’d call it stupid if I was in a better frame of mind.”
Mrs. Kottle inhaled sharply and audibly. “You’ll still do it, won’t you, Mr. Tanner? You’ll go along and see that nothing happens?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But if it looks like my presence is going to screw it all up I’ll have to pull out. You understand that?”
“Of course. Nothing must jeopardize Karl’s safe return. That seems to be all Max cares about.”
The words were mechanical, man-made, but then it was three o’clock in the morning. Nothing natural goes on at that hour of the night. “Is Karl going to be at the drop?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean is it going to be an exchange, Karl for the money, or do they claim they’ll release him later?”
“Later.”
“One more thing. What did they say about Max being dead? Supposedly.”
She thought it over. “That’s funny,” she said slowly. “They didn’t mention it. It’s as if they didn’t care.”
“Who answered the phone?”
“I did.”
“Who did they ask for?”
“Max. They asked for Max. It didn’t even occur to me. They knew he was alive.”
I spoke rapidly, without giving her time to think. “Keep your fingers crossed, Mrs. Kottle,” I said.
“They’ve been crossed for months.”
There was death in her words, death and dread. She hung up and I took off my shoes and climbed onto the bed and lay atop the spread and let my mind drift into whatever backwaters it chose. The next thing I knew someone was pounding on the side of my head with a hammer that rang like a bell every time it hit. By the time I figured out what it was, the sound had become intermittent, a sandwich around a center of pain. I picked up the receiver. “Tanner,” I said.
“They called again. It’s Ocean Beach. Walter’s just leaving. He has one of those CB radio things. They’ll tell him what to do when he gets there.”
She was whispering, talking faster than I could listen, getting it all out before something happened to cut her off. “I’m on my way,” I told her, and stumbled to the floor to fulfill my promise.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I wasn’t at all sure I could catch Hedgestone and the Mercedes, and even if I did it would be foolhardy to attempt anything but observation. Karl himself wouldn’t be at the drop, and I had to assume that any attempt to interfere would bring harm to him, quite possibly death. I hurried anyway, hopping into the Buick and slipping down Broadway to Franklin, then south on Franklin to Geary, then west on Geary toward the ocean.
It was a cold night. Steely cold. The car seats were as warm as a bench in an igloo. My hot breath condensed on the windows, creating a private, purplish cocoon.
Dawn was only a prediction. The city seemed broken into pieces, each clump of light separated from all the other clumps of light by black walls of apprehension and disappointment. The few night people I encountered stared at me with the frankness of kittens at the first sight of one of their own. But after the first glance the night people turned away. I had a purpose, so I was out of place in the early morning, a geometric stripe through the splashy formlessness of the predawn city.
Geary Boulevard became Point Lobos Avenue and Point Lobos took me to the Cliff House, a revived relic on the edge of a bluff overlooking Seal Rock and the sea. By day a major tourist attraction, complete with tour buses and foreign dialects and trashy souvenirs, by night it was a looming hulk of indeterminate intent. I pulled next to the curb and parked.
Mist dotted my windshield immediately, skewing my view of the beach below. The Monterey pines across the road to my left seemed to be slipping toward me, an implacable blob of danger. I started the car so the wipers would wipe and the heater would heat, then looked down toward the beach once again.
The Sons and Daughters had picked well. Ocean Beach ran the entire length of the city, from Point Lobos just behind me to Fort Funston and the Olympic Club some four miles to the south. The beach itself was more than twenty yards wide when the tide was out, flat and gray and uninspiring, separating a seemingly graven expanse of cold and unlovely ocean from an equally bleak seawall.
The Great Highway ran parallel to the sea and the wall, straight and sand-sprayed, dull and unlandscaped and badly misnomered. The highway was well lit just below me, but farther along the glow of the streetlamps became progressively fainter in the mist, dying stars in far-off galaxies.
At the north end of the beach, the end nearest me, the Great Highway broadened into an esplanade that formed the parking area for what used to be a static and dilapidated circus known as Playland-at-the-Beach. But Playland had been sacrificed to a real estate developer who immediately razed the rides and the peep shows and the concession stands and dug a huge hole in their place. Then the developer had in turn been razed by his creditors, so that what was once a place of fun and frolic had become a pit of silence and desolation, a ghostly Alexandria, lost city of time gone wrong.
South of the parking area the highway narrowed again, leading past the stub end of Golden Gate Park before bordering a stretch of breeze-bleached houses and apartment buildings which wore the faded, forlorn faces of seafarers everywhere. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen down there.
I couldn’t see very far from where I was, but I was starting to remember more and more about the surroundings, and I wasn’t happy with what I remembered. For one thing, the kidnappers could view the entire stretch of beach and highway from any of several points in the vicinity, including the Sutro Heights Park just above me. There was no way I could get close to the drop without being seen.
Then I remembered something else about the beach, and realized they were going to be able to pick up the ransom and get away without the slightest chance of being caught, even if anyone
had been there to catch them. I swore under my breath and put the Buick in gear and curled slowly down to the beach.
It was a netherworld of shape and void. In the distance a single car drove slowly south, its taillights flickering like smudge pots in the blackness. Other than that, nothing, except for the two cars in the parking area, lights off, immobile, apparently unoccupied.
I looked them over. One was a ’69 Chevrolet with a missing fender and a flat tire. In the light from a streetlamp I could see the ribbon of rot that decorated its rocker panels and wheel wells. The front windshield was a snowflake. It didn’t have anything to do with why I was there.
The other car was more interesting—a brown BMW, recent vintage, grazing like Secretariat in the exact center of the lot, equidistant from the nearest lights. Without seeming to, I checked it out as carefully as I could. No one was in sight, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t being watched.
I drove on my way, looking straight ahead, an uninteresting man driving his uninteresting Buick from one uninteresting place to another. It’s the best role I play. Somewhere behind me the BMW seemed to whinny.
By the time I reached the Lincoln Way intersection I’d decided to head back to the Cliff House, where I could at least see what was going on along the beach and the esplanade. I wouldn’t be close enough to provide a remedy if things went bad, but if I stayed where I was I would scare everyone off. Or worse. I slowed for the turn, but far down the road ahead of me I saw something that made me keep going straight.
It was a dark shape, another car, pulled off into a small parking square cut into the dunes to the right of the highway. I drove toward it, slowly but not suspiciously so. On my left the windmill in the park suddenly loomed out of the darkness, nudged toward me by the dawn. I thought of Don Quixote. I thought of me. I laughed silently and shook my head. The windmill didn’t have any arms.
My head started to ache. I fumbled in the glove compartment for a tin of aspirin, squeezed it open and ate two of the tablets. My mouth turned dry and chalky so I fumbled again and brought out a half-empty pint of bourbon and took a drink. I was better or worse, I wasn’t sure which.
I drove on. The sea sighed faintly at my side, warning me in the way it warns everyone who trespasses against it. The ice plant growing in the median between the lanes of traffic was black and puffy, like strips of putrid flesh. I was the only one on the road. The only man alive.
It was Hedgestone and his Mercedes all right, and by the time I realized it I also realized that I had done just what the kidnappers wanted me to do. From where I was there was no place to turn around until I got all the way down to Sloat Boulevard, more than a half mile away. I was stuck—helpless if I kept going, obvious if I did anything else.
I crawled past the Mercedes. There was only one man inside it, sitting in darkness, squarely behind the wheel. I assumed it was Hedgestone, but neither of us acknowledged the other. Once past him I fixed my eye on the rearview mirror to see if Hedgestone did anything. He didn’t.
As far as I could tell everything stayed the same until I got to Sloat. I turned left and drove east for a few seconds, in case I was being watched. Then I made a U turn at the Skyline intersection and headed back to the beach.
At the stop sign at the Great Highway I tried to spot the Mercedes but I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t where it had been, I was sure of it. My pulse shifted gears. It was a shade brighter out now, the morning light beginning to perform its magic act, but I still couldn’t see the car.
I looked south. Nothing. I looked in the northbound lane of the Great Highway. And there it was. Hedgestone was driving slowly northward along the highway, his lights off, the big black car as dauntless as the tanks that moved through the Ardennes. I didn’t know what else to do so I pulled onto the road and began to follow, a couple of hundred yards behind.
When the Mercedes was halfway back to the esplanade, in the middle of the stretch of road that intersected nothing, a light flashed up ahead of it, just once, small and bright, like a flashlight clicked on and off. I had been expecting something like it.
The brake lights on the Mercedes caught fire, and I could see Hedgestone get out and run to the edge of the road and throw something over it, then run back to the car and get in and drive on north again, faster this time, but still without lights.
I stopped and got out of my car and climbed onto the hood to get a better view, but it wasn’t good enough. Nothing moved except the Mercedes. Then an engine started up, a loud one, somewhere off to the right. After a couple of roars it settled into a steady growl, then got progressively faint, retreating. I still couldn’t see a thing.
It had happened just the way I’d figured it would. To the right of the Great Highway, running parallel to it but in a depression some twenty feet below it, was La Playa Avenue. La Playa intersected with ten or fifteen streets between the park and Sloat, but none of those streets intersected the highway. Hedgestone and I were high and dry and the kidnappers were somewhere down below us with the money and Karl Kottle and there was no way to get at them without a set of wings. A slick operation, almost foolproof. All hail the Sons and Daughters.
I was about to get back in my car when I heard another sound, one that forty years ago could have been mistaken for a backfire but now can’t be mistaken for anything but what it is.
Up ahead the Mercedes was stopped in the esplanade, right next to the old Chevy, its taillights smoldering. The brown BMW was parked across its hood, cutting off further progress. Two figures stood beside the car. I was too far away to tell what was going on, too far away to be anything but curious. I got in the car and headed for the men as fast as I could without lights.
When I was halfway there one of the men ran to the BMW and got in and roared off toward the Cliff House. I hit the lights and increased my speed and stopped beside the Mercedes as the BMW disappeared behind the Sutro Heights bluff.
Hedgestone was leaning against the car door holding his left arm, breathing heavily. He seemed dazed and incompetent, but still immaculate except for the stain beginning to spread through the fibers of his coat. I pried his fingers away from his bicep and checked his wound. It wasn’t serious, but gunplay had to be as foreign to Hedgestone as a callus. “The tweed’s hurt worse than you are,” I told him, then asked what had happened.
“Tanner,” he observed roundly, as though he’d just realized who it was who was ministering to him. He shook his head as he absorbed the situation. “I don’t know what happened. That is, I know what happened but I don’t see how. I did everything I was told. Everything. Parked where I was supposed to, started out with the first flash of light, delivered the money at the second. But something went wrong.”
“What?”
Hedgestone shook his head. “It seems impossible, but apparently I gave the money to the wrong people.”
“You what?”
“Unbelievable, isn’t it? The man who shot me, the one in the brown car, he said he was the one who was supposed to get the money, who was supposed to give the signal to deliver it. But someone beat him to the punch. He accused me of trying some sort of trick. He was furious. He said I’d be sorry.”
“You won’t be as sorry as Max Kottle will be,” I said, a bit cruelly.
Hedgestone shifted position, grimacing at the pain in his arm. “I know that,” he said. “I feel wretched. But I don’t know what else I could have done, do you?”
I told him I didn’t, not if he’d followed instructions. He assured me again that he had. I asked if he’d gotten the license number of the brown BMW. He shook his head helplessly. I didn’t tell him that he wasn’t the man for the job he’d been asked to do, but I thought it. Then I asked him about his arm.
“It hurts,” he said. “I’ve never been shot before. Have you?”
“You can’t get a P.I. license in this state unless you’ve been shot at least twice. Regulations.”
“You’re joking.”
I nodded. “But only about the regulations. Do you w
ant me to drive you home?”
“I can manage,” Hedgestone said, pleased with his bravery. “But follow me. Max will want to know everything. Perhaps you saw something I didn’t.”
“I didn’t see much, but promise me a cup of coffee and a fried egg and I’ll follow you anywhere.”
Hedgestone smiled tightly. “Of course,” he said. Then he looked at me directly for the first time that evening. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.
“First the eggs,” I said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
There were three of us sitting around the table in the breakfast nook—Hedgestone, Belinda Kottle and I, snuggled together under a white globe of light like a brood of oversized, oversedated pullets. Max Kottle wasn’t with us because he had fallen asleep just before we arrived and Mrs. Kottle didn’t want to wake him unless there was something crucial to be done. There wasn’t. It was six A.M. I hadn’t slept since Easter.
Hedgestone had lost a little of his luster during the night but not nearly all of it. His hair was still as smooth as the pelt of a gray fox and his tie was still snug at his throat. Compared to the rest of him the gauze around his bicep seemed a band of eccentric panache. Despite his wound, or maybe because of it, he was more awake than I was.
We both had our eyes on Mrs. Kottle. She was impossibly lovely, given the hour and the event that had preceded it. The shiny satin of her blousy pajamas touched her in several appropriate places. Her lack of sleep gave her eyes an almost mystic sheen.
She made both of us breakfast, and a good one, but now she was listening as Hedgestone began his report on the night’s events. It took him a while. In the meantime I counted the electric appliances I could see from where I sat, the blenders and food processors and coffee grinders and can openers and the like. There were eleven of them.
When Hedgestone was through Mrs. Kottle looked at me quizzically, as though for assurance that her decision to engage me had been both correct and productive. I wanted to give it to her but I couldn’t.
“I don’t have much to add,” I said instead. “I do know that the money ended up with someone on a motorcycle who zoomed off into the Sunset District as free as the proverbial bird. I was about to go after him when Hedgestone got himself in trouble, but I couldn’t have caught him anyway. It was a good plan.”
Death Bed Page 19
