Jenner couldn’t like where this was pointing.
Their eyes met again and Jenner shook his head, then nodded with his chin toward the kid. He wanted Carver to go on, wherever the trail went. Carver loved him for that.
“Patrick got family?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Ever meet his uncle, Johnny Wong?”
“No.”
“How about his business partners?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone tell you it was okay to strip the place? Punch out the walls and pull up the floorboards?”
“But—Patrick’s gone. He owed us.”
“That makes this yours?”
The kid shook his head and looked back at the table.
“You know where Patrick lives?” Carver asked.
“No.”
“What if you need to get in touch with him? How do you do it?”
“Cell phone. He wants a face-to-face, he’ll just turn up.”
“You’ve tried calling?”
“The first two, three days. Now it just goes to voice mail.”
“You said you can’t pay the vendors, can’t schedule deliveries. Patrick handles that?”
“Used to handle it,” the kid corrected. “But not anymore.”
“Business mail comes here. Bills and bank statements?”
“No.”
“They get mailed where he lives?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who delivers the kegs? What company?”
“Golden Gate Beverage.”
“That’s here, in town?”
“In the Mission,” Samantha said. “Everybody uses Golden Gate. They’re fast.”
“You can call any time, they’ll bring it over?” Carver asked.
“Any time if you’ve still got credit,” Joe said. “We used ours up. Patrick wasn’t paying. So they stopped coming.”
Jenner took his phone from his pocket and walked through the bead curtain. Carver heard him open the back door and step into the alley. The closing door cut off the first words of his call. Carver looked back at Joe and Samantha.
“You seen my partner come in here before?”
“Couple of times,” Joe said. “I figured him for a cop.”
“He was here Thursday night, Friday morning?”
“Last I saw him was Tuesday.”
“You sure about that?”
“Cop comes in, I remember.”
“You know why we’re looking for Patrick?”
“Everyone knows about Hadley,” Samantha said. “But Joe was still manager at the House of Shields when she was singing here.”
“That right, Joe?”
The kid nodded.
“I wasn’t here,” Joe said. “But it got around—I heard the cops wanted to talk to Patrick. So he started coming less and less. If he came at all, it’d be through the back. We’d talk in the storeroom. Then he stopped coming at all.”
“He ever talk about it? The girl, or why we’re looking for him?”
“Never.”
“You both work in bars,” Carver said. “You and Joe.”
Samantha nodded.
“You ever see the singer—Hadley?”
“No,” Joe said.
“I did,” Samantha said. “She had a two-week set, at my last job. Up near Nob Hill.”
Carver pulled a stool away from the table and sat on it. He put his gun on his knee.
“What’d you think? About her singing. About her.”
“She was good. And she was pretty. A lot of men would come to watch. A lot of the same men, each time.”
He knew how true that was. There’d been two dozen men to investigate, and almost half looked like good suspects. Some of them were sick enough, they probably would’ve killed Hadley Hardgrave if they’d gotten the chance. But he and Jenner had patiently winnowed it down to one man. Johnny Wong. He wasn’t just sick; according to the rumors coming out of Folsom, he’d had a motive. And Joe’s boss, Patrick Wong, was the only key they had to finding him.
He looked up. Samantha had asked him something, but he’d missed it.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Is it true?”
“Is what?”
“She looked like the Black Dahlia, when they found her. All cut up like that.”
“The black what?” Joe asked.
The girl shook her head at him and looked at Carver. Her hands were still folded on the table, but she was leaning on them.
“It’s true,” Carver said.
“Even the face?”
She traced her fingertips along her cheeks, from the corners of her lips back to her ears.
“That, too,” Carver said. “He did that to her.”
He thought she might have shivered. She should have, if she knew what they were talking about. Joe tried to take her hand, but she swatted him away.
The three of them sat in silence for half a minute, and then Jenner came back. He stepped through the bead curtain and touched his temple. Carver glanced at the kids, and then toward the back door. Jenner nodded. Carver wanted to cut them loose, and Jenner didn’t have a problem with it. It was Patrick they wanted, and Johnny. Not these two. But they were too good to let go without some kind of warning.
They deserved at least that.
“I’ll tell you what,” Carver said, to Joe. “You may not know anything about Johnny Wong, but I do. And Johnny Wong is not the kind of guy you want to rob. That girl, the singer, she found that out —”
“It was him?” Samantha asked.
He ignored her. He focused on Joe, because that was what they would expect of him. But he knew it was Samantha who would make the decision.
“He may not own this place. Not on paper. But he owns it in his mind. A guy like him, what’s in his mind is all that counts. You can do what you want. But if I were you, I’d take the shit in the truck, and I’d put it back. Right where I found it. I’d lock it up tight and clear out. I wouldn’t want to give him a reason. Not that he needs a reason.”
They watched in silence as he took one of his cards and dropped it on the table in front of them.
“Call me if you need to.”
He stood and started for the curtain, but stopped halfway. He turned and looked down at Joe.
“If you’re still not sure what to do, ask Samantha. Ask her about the Dahlia. She’ll tell you.”
He thought of the way she’d traced her fingers along her finely drawn cheeks, toward her ears. He thought of the body in the moonlight at the edge of the redwood grove in Golden Gate Park. Her black smile, showing teeth as far back as the molars. Her pelvis and legs a meter or more away from her torso, the ants making a carpet on the grass.
He nodded again at Joe and left them that way, their hands on the table, their heads turned to watch him go. On his way through the storeroom, he heard them speaking in Chinese. Samantha was doing most of the talking. Fast and desperate. He didn’t understand a word of it, but he could guess. He wondered if they’d take his advice. If they didn’t, he hoped they’d make it through. He kicked the wedge from beneath the alley door, then pushed it closed behind him, feeling it lock from the inside.
They were safer with a bolt between them and the street. He wanted that for them, wanted them to have the thirty seconds it might buy. He looked up and saw Jenner standing with his hands in his coat pockets, the rain running off his bald head.
“You sit in the car,” Jenner said, “and I’ll go get your cuffs off the front. You could use some rest.”
“The address—you got it?”
“I got it,” Jenner said. “In the Richmond, down in the avenues. It’ll take us fifteen minutes. We can go right now, if you want.”
8
THE ADDRESS JENNER had gotten was at the corner of Twenty-Third and Geary, opposite Our Lady of Fatima. Half the signs in the neighborhood were in Cyrillic, but the church and the school beside it might have been built by Spanish missionaries.
“That’s it,” Jenner said, pointing at a building on the opposite side of the street. “Third floor, I guess.”
Carver nodded but didn’t slow the car. There were empty spaces along the curb in front of the church, but he didn’t pull over. He wanted to watch the building before they went up and knocked on the door, and he didn’t want anyone looking out an upstairs window to see a couple of cops idling a car and checking the place out. He went another block, turned north onto Twenty-Fourth, and found a parking spot alongside the St. Monica School.
“There’s a good spot to watch, from the door of the church,” he said.
“I saw it.”
They got out and went along the sidewalk. Some of the streetlights were dark, and Carver noticed the access panels at the post bases had been pried open. The thieves must have ripped the copper wiring out. He wondered how much they could get for it.
“That can’t be where he lives,” Jenner said. “Guy like Patrick. Or else, why do it? Why work for Johnny Wong?”
Carver looked across the street at the building. The top two floors were apartments, maybe only two units per level. The curtains were dirty and the light from behind them was dim. There were shops along the sidewalk: a Chinese bakery, a Russian toy store that doubled as a notarial service, a dry cleaner.
“We even know what else he can do?” Carver asked.
“I was just making an observation.”
“So was I,” Carver said. “What do we really know about him? What do we really know about either of them?”
Jenner pointed at the church’s front entrance, where there were deep shadows from the pilasters on either side of the door.
“That where you figured on standing watch?”
“Yeah.”
They went up the steps and stood in the darkest places they could find close to the stucco wall. Carver knew that most detectives would have just parked at the address and walked straight to the building. But he was five years short of mandatory retirement—too old to walk into anything without finding out about it first.
“You see how to get upstairs?” Jenner asked.
“There’s a gate. Between the toy shop and that Chinese place. Glass door behind it, probably opens to a stairwell or an elevator.”
“Got a lock on it?”
“Yeah, but I can’t see what kind.”
“Here.”
Carver looked down. Jenner was offering him the pair of compact binoculars he kept in his lapel pocket. He took them and looked back across the street at the gate.
“It’s old,” he said. “The lock, I mean. Looks like a pushbutton combo job. No electronics.”
“Figures.”
A modern gated building would have electronic keypads coded to open with a squawk from a police radio, or a close swipe of the RFID chip in a detective’s badge. Even older buildings were upgrading. But that took money, and Carver didn’t have to make a hard study of this building to understand its owner’s plan. He was going to wring what he could get from it, then walk away.
“But you’re pretty good with those,” Jenner said. “You’ve got a way with locks.”
“Sometimes,” Carver said. “Which floor?”
“Third.”
“And the unit?”
“It’s three-oh-one,” Jenner said. He leaned out, looked at the apartments, and pointed. “That’d be the corner, above the intersection.”
Carver studied it. Three bay windows faced Geary, and three looked across Twenty-Third Avenue. All of them were lit. Carver brought the binoculars to his eyes. He found the windows and twisted the dial to focus. When the image resolved itself, and he could see the movement on the glass more clearly, he took a quick step back, nearly tripping over Jenner. He pushed the binoculars against Jenner’s chest.
“Jesus,” Jenner said. “What is it?”
“Flies. On the glass. Thousands of flies.”
They were crossing the street, walking as fast as Carver could go. Jenner was in front, talking over his shoulder.
“You get us through the gate,” Jenner said, “and we’ll go up to the door and knock. No one lets us in, we’ll pick it open or kick it down. Whatever happens once we’re in, the DA won’t jump on our asses. Exigent circumstance.”
“She’s probably never seen a case where the exigent circumstance is flies.”
“I bet she’s never seen that many flies. Shit, Ross. Nothing else, we’ve got probable cause on a health code violation. A serious fucking health code violation.”
“I don’t disagree.”
They reached the gate and stopped. Jenner stood with his back to the building, watching the sidewalk in both directions. His hand slipped inside his coat, and Carver thought again that there was a reason they were the longest-lasting pair of inspectors working homicide. He could get up after a beating, and Jenner was usually smart enough to avoid whatever got thrown his way.
“See if you can’t open that thing,” Jenner said.
Carver crouched in front of the gate and used his flashlight to illuminate the lock’s face. There was a row of ten brass buttons. Any engraved numbers had long since worn off. But he’d seen these locks before. Zero was on the left, and nine was on the right. You hit a four-digit code and felt a click on the last button, and then the gate would swing out when you pulled it.
“You got any ideas?” Jenner asked.
“I don’t know.”
He reached to the numberless lock and punched what he guessed was 8-0-0-0. Something clicked behind the faceplate. Carver pulled the gate, and it swung out.
“How the hell?” Jenner said.
Carver stood, feeling his knees pop as he came up from the crouch.
“The old Richmond District police station,” he said. “Used to be at Sixth and Geary. That was its phone number—the last four digits.”
“That’s how they did it back then, to let the cops in?”
Carver nodded. He held the gate back for Jenner.
“After you.”
“Put the junior guy on point,” Jenner said. “Sure.”
“Wiseass gets shot at a few times, he’ll get perspective.”
“There you go.”
Jenner opened the glass door and they stepped into the small lobby. A plastic plant and a metal trash can flanked the elevator. There was a stairwell, but the door was locked when Carver tried it. Jenner was standing in front of the brass mailboxes.
“No names,” he said. “Just numbers.”
“Anything in it?”
Jenner poked his finger through the metal slot.
“It’s full,” he said. He hooked his finger farther into the box and began fishing out the top piece of mail. “We’ll just take a look, put it back.”
“Fine.”
What Jenner slid from the box was a postcard-sized Interruption of Delivery Notice. He handed it to Carver and the flexible glowcard screen lit up. Patrick Wong’s name flashed in bright red print.
“The mail has to stack up three weeks before these go out,” Carver said. He passed it back.
Jenner turned it over and looked at the time stamp.
“It went out last Thursday.”
“So we’re looking at a month, maybe,” Carver said.
“Fits what the kid told us.”
“Let’s go see.”
They stood outside the door to 301 and listened to the flies buzzing on the other side. Carver could hear them tapping against the wood. He looked down. Someone had sealed the outside of the door with clear packing tape, covering the gap at the bottom and then going all the way around the jamb.
“That’s a new one,” Jenner said. “Keeps the smell in, I guess.”
“Hard to make it look like an accident or a suicide if it’s taped from the outside.”
“You’d think his neighbor would’ve said something.”
Carver looked down the hall.
“I don’t think his neighbor’s saying anything.”
Jenner followed Carver’s glan
ce, saw the tape wrapped around the neighbor’s door.
“Shit,” he said, then turned back to 301 and hammered on it with the side of his fist.
“Patrick Wong!”
The buzzing reached a crescendo, as if ten thousand flies had taken to the air. Carver and Jenner looked at each other. The only sound from the other side of the door was the flies. No one was coming in response to the knock. They went to the neighbor’s door and tried there, too. If anything, the flies in 302 were louder.
When Jenner was finished photographing the tape seal, Carver took the leather kit from the crime scene bag and knelt with it in front of the doorknob. He looked at the lock, then selected a metal forcing tool and a pair of vise grips from the kit’s selection of picks. The first tool didn’t fit the lock, but his second choice did. When he held it with the vise grip and twisted, he could feel the deadbolt sliding back. His stomach was sliding too. The flies were humming behind the door, and though he couldn’t smell anything yet, he knew what was coming.
“Okay,” he said.
He stood up and put the kit back in its place. He was already wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask. He’d wiped menthol cream under his nose.
“You rolling?”
Jenner tapped the side of his safety glasses with his fingertip. The pen-sized camera was clipped to the frame.
“Rolling,” Jenner said. “Started with you opening the lock.”
“All right.”
He checked his own camera and then turned to the door. The taped seal broke in a prolonged rip, and then the flies were swarming out into the hall. They were fat and had shiny, green-black bodies.
“Blowflies,” Jenner said. “Corpse eaters.”
Carver brushed a dozen of them off his arm and then stepped into the apartment. The smell inside was as thick as the flies. Carver’s eyes blurred with tears and he heard Jenner choke back a cough. They left the door open and walked into the apartment, letting the flies billow out. The death smell was so strong that it seemed to color the air. They’d entered into the living room, which was lit by table lamps, and there were flies moving across the lampshades. Every surface crawled with their shadows. There was a red and white Chinese carpet on the floor. It might have been valuable once, but definitely wasn’t anymore.
The Night Market Page 8
