Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Sure, that’s fine.”

  She led me through a narrow, cluttered living room whose walls were dominated by an odd combination of art deco and sports posters, into a small room that had been outfitted as an office: desk with a home computer and printer on it, filing cabinet, bookcase containing computer books and tapes. But there were frivolous male touches here too: a basketball on top of the bookcase, a jockstrap that had been turned into a hanger for a potted fern.

  A plastic dropcloth covered most of the carpet, and in the middle of it was a small, twenties-vintage smoking table glistening with a thick application of the paint stripper. Strip-Ease, it was called; there was a gallon can next to the table, along with a little pan of the stuff. The window sash was up, as she’d said, letting in cold puffs of wind, but the smell of the paint stripper was strong in the room anyway. What it reminded me of was a mixture of alcohol and nail polish remover. Spend enough time sniffing it, and it would make you light-headed-maybe even a little spacey.

  Karen invited me to sit down in the desk chair, the only chair in the room, but I said, “Thanks, I’ll stand,” and went over next to the window.

  Down on her knees, she began slathering Strip-Ease on the table legs. “Do you really think you can find out what made David kill himself?” she asked. Emotion underlay the words, even though she spoke matter-of-factly. She had her grief in check, it seemed, but not enough time had passed yet for it to begin to fade. Or for her to eliminate the reminders of him from her living space. Or for her to begin sleeping well again. The refinishing work was a kind of therapy, I thought—a productive way to keep herself busy on an empty Saturday.

  I said, “Well, I’m going to try.”

  “It means a lot to Allyn, I guess.”

  “Doesn’t it to you?”

  “Knowing won’t bring him back,” she said. A trace of bitterness had come into her voice. People who take their own lives don’t realize what it does to their loved ones; how much hurt and anger and resentment it engenders. Karen Salter was angry at David Burnett for leaving her the way he had, and she had every right to be. Suicide is the ultimate form of desertion.

  “No, it won’t,” I said. “But it’s better than not knowing. It might help you cope with it.”

  “I am coping with it. I’ll be all right. I’m a strong person, even if David wasn’t.”

  “Why do you think he did it?”

  “The money, of course. That damned money.”

  “Winning so much and then losing it all, you mean.”

  “If he hadn’t won it in the first place,” she said, “he’d still be alive.”

  “Was it like him to gamble so heavily?”

  “No.” She paused. “But it wasn’t like him to kill himself, either.” Her anger was closer to the surface now. I could hear it in her voice and see it in the hard, determined way she kept dipping the brush in the pan of paint stripper and slapping the stuff on the table legs, so that it splattered over the plastic cloth.

  “He must have been pretty excited about the jackpot,” I said.

  “At first he was. He was bubbling over when he got back and told me about it.”

  “He didn’t call to tell you, from Reno?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “Not really. He said he was too shaken up after it happened. I would have been, too, I guess, if I liked to gamble.”

  I wouldn’t, I thought. If I won two hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn’t be too excited to call Kerry. I’d call her first thing. Especially if we were planning to be married in a few months.

  But then, I wasn’t in my mid-twenties. Sometimes I wonder if I was ever that young.

  I asked, “Did David tell you he was making large bets with the sports books?”

  “Not until after he’d already done it.”

  “How upset was he?”

  “As upset as David ever got. He didn’t show negative feelings. Or positive ones very often. He kept everything locked up inside. He was a very private person.”

  “So you had no inkling he was thinking about suicide?”

  “My God, no.” The bitterness was sharp in her voice again. She savaged the tabletop for a few seconds, as if the scraping tool were a weapon and the table a victim. David, symbolically, I thought. “At least he didn’t do it here. At least he had that much feeling for me. If I’d come home and found him ... God, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “Where did he do it?”

  She looked up. “Don’t you know?”

  “No. Allyn didn’t tell me.”

  “In a motel,” she said, and slashed at the tabletop again. “He rented a room in a cheap motel. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?”

  I let a few seconds pass before I said, “I talked to Jerry Polhemus a while ago. About his relationship with David and David’s death. He wasn’t very cooperative. In fact, he seemed nervous, afraid of something.”

  “Afraid? Why would Jerry be afraid?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Have you seen him or spoken to him since the funeral?”

  “No.”

  “How did he act that day?”

  “Cold, not very sympathetic, but that’s Jerry for you.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  Wryly, “Not as well as he’d like.”

  “Oh?”

  “He tried to hit on me once,” she said, “after I started going out with David. I should have told David, I guess, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if he called me one of these days and tried to hit on me again.”

  “You don’t like him much, do you.”

  “No. If he does call ... well, that doesn’t matter. I’ll handle him.”

  “You have any other reasons for disliking him?”

  “Lots of them. He’s immature, for one. I went with David and him to a Giants game once. Jerry drank too much beer and started yelling things like ‘Dodgers give blowjobs’ at the top of his voice. A man with little kids told him to shut up and he threatened to punch the man out.”

  Blowjobs, I thought. When I was young, most girls didn’t know what blowjobs were, much less use the term in polite conversation. Or was I just being naive? I wondered again if I had ever really been twenty-five.

  “I don’t trust him, either,” Karen said. “He’s a sneak.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He just is. Trying to hit on me behind David’s back. I don’t think he cares about anybody but himself.”

  “How did he and David get along?”

  “Oh, as far as David was concerned, Jerry couldn’t do anything wrong. They were always going to baseball and football games or off to Tahoe and Reno—you know, the way guys do.”

  I nodded. “How did he feel about David’s big jackpot?”

  “I don’t know. David didn’t say. But I’ll bet he was jealous. Anyway, David must have felt sorry for him because he gave Jerry ten thousand dollars out of his winnings.”

  “Did he now. Jerry didn’t mention that to me.”

  “Well, David said it was the least he could do for a friend who’d been with him at the time. He was always so generous ...” She let the sentence trail off, and her mouth set tight again. She picked up the scraping tool again and worked on the tabletop, where the Strip-Ease had loosened the old varnish.

  “Would you have any idea what Jerry did with the ten thousand dollars?”

  “No. But if he hasn’t spent it yet, it’ll all be gone before the end of the year. That’s the way Jerry is.”

  “David didn’t try to get it back from him, did he? To pay off his gambling debt?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did. I know he borrowed money from Allyn and tried to borrow from others he knew. He asked me to try to get him a loan at the bank where I work but he just didn’t have any collateral.”

  “How large a loan did he want?”

  “Thirty-five thousand dollars.
”

  “He lost that much in addition to his jackpot winnings?”

  “I suppose he must have. He could be such a fool.”

  I watched her work for a time. The smell of the paint stripper was giving me a headache. I sat on my haunches, finally, so the cold wind from the window could wash over the back of my neck. Then I asked, “Are all of his belongings still here?”

  “What?” She had turned inside herself, to commune with her grief and anger. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “David’s belongings,” I said. “Are they all still here?”

  “Oh. Yes. I haven’t had a chance to ... Allyn said she’d come over and help me box them up, but ... I really should do it pretty soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Have you gone through them?”

  “You mean to see if there was anything that might help explain his suicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “I looked,” she said. “Allyn asked me to, and the police. But I didn’t find anything.”

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  “No, go ahead. There isn’t much. David didn’t have much, really.”

  “Will you show me where to start?”

  “The bottom two drawers in the desk there were his,” she said.

  I poked around in the two drawers. Souvenir-type junk, mostly: football and baseball programs and pennants, drink tokens from three different gambling casinos, a big yellow-and-red button that proclaimed the 49ers world champions of Super Bowl XVI. There was a folder full of bank statements and canceled checks; I shuffled through the checks, but none of them told me anything. The balances listed on the most recent statements, dated last month, were $39.54 in his checking account and $168.23 in his savings account. I hunted around for a checkbook or savings passbook. No checkbook or passbook.

  I asked Karen if she had them. She said, “No, Allyn does. There wasn’t much in either one—not even enough left to help pay for his funeral.”

  “Did he put all of his winnings into those two accounts?”

  “He didn’t put any of it into them.”

  “Any particular reason why not?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “Did he open a new account?”

  “If he did, I didn’t find a record of it.”

  “That’s a little strange, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “He might have thrown the new passbook away when he drew the money out to gamble with.”

  She may not have thought it was strange, but I did. Why would he open a new account if he intended to place large bets with the Vegas and Reno sports books? Even if he hadn’t decided beforehand to do some high rolling, why bother with a new account? Why not just funnel the jackpot winnings through his existing accounts?

  I asked, “Did he show you the check he got from the Coliseum Club?”

  “No. I asked to see it but he said he’d authorized the casino to send it straight to his bank.”

  “But he couldn’t have,” I said. “There’d be a record if he’d had it sent to one of his old accounts, and you can’t open a new account long-distance over the weekend.”

  She was frowning now. “No, of course you can’t. I should have thought of that before. But why would he lie to me?”

  I said, “To cover the fact that he took his winnings in cash, maybe.”

  “Cash? But that’s not—”

  “Not very smart, no.”

  “I can’t imagine why he’d do such a thing.”

  “Neither can I,” I said. “On big casino payoffs, the IRS demands its cut right off the top—so there’s no tax advantage to taking cash. Was David irresponsible where money was concerned? I mean in the sense of wanting a lot of cash around.”

  “No, never. He didn’t seem to care that much about money.”

  “Did he have a safe-deposit box?”

  “Not that I ever knew about. I didn’t find any record of one.”

  “If he did take the money in cash, where might he have kept it?”

  “Not here. I’m sure of that.”

  “Anywhere else you can think of?”

  “No. No.”

  “Would he have entrusted Jerry Polhemus with it?”

  “God, no. David wasn’t that foolish. He knew how Jerry was about money.”

  I said, “I’d like to look through the rest of his things. Where would they be?”

  “In the bedroom. I’ll show you.”

  Without taking off her gloves, she led me into the bedroom. This was entirely her domain, everything feminine but without frills, done in whites and yellows. If David Burnett had put his stamp on it, left any little pieces of himself behind, she had removed them from sight.

  “The nightstand by the window was his,” she said. “And the bottom two drawers in the dresser. The rest of his stuff is in the closet.” She started out.

  “Don’t you want to stay while I look?”

  “No, it’s all right. I want to get the table stripped so I can sand it down.”

  That wasn’t it at all. She did not want to be present while I went through more of his things; she just wasn’t ready yet to deal with his leavings, even in the role of spectator. She wouldn’t be, I thought, until her anger had spent itself and she was ready to get on with her life.

  I went to the nightstand first. Nothing in there but a paperback sports biography and a Prince Albert tin containing half a dozen joints. Allyn Burnett had told me that her brother wasn’t on drugs. So maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she and her brother didn’t feel that smoking a little grass now and then constituted drug use; a lot of people don’t. Or maybe these joints belonged to Karen Salter and she smoked dope and David never had.

  I moved over to the dresser. On its top, next to Karen’s jewelry box, was a silver photograph-size frame that had been turned facedown. I picked it up. Head-and-shoulders color photo of a smiling young man with shaggy blond hair and bright blue eyes, signed on the bottom in a bold but childish hand: To Kittyhawk, Love and Kisses, David. Kittyhawk. Some sort of pet name. I put the photograph back as I had found it, facedown, and bent to the bottom two drawers.

  Shirts, sweaters, underwear, socks—all neatly folded. Her doing, I thought; he wouldn’t have been that neat. Nothing hidden under or between or inside any of the items.

  The closet was big, not quite a walk-in. His things were bunched on the left: half a dozen pairs of trousers, two sports jackets, a flowered vest, some pullovers and sports-type jerseys, a 49ers jacket and a Giants windbreaker. I went through pockets, found nothing of any interest until I got to the windbreaker. A thin piece of paper was tucked into one of the slash pockets. I fished it out—ordinary memo paper torn off a pad—and read what was on it.

  Manny. 2789 De Haro St.

  The handwriting was the same as on the photograph. I held on to the paper while I rummaged through the rest of his clothing, looked at the man’s shoes and sneakers on the closet floor, poked among the things piled on the single shelf above. Nothing. I shut the closet door and went back into the room where Karen Salter was.

  She was kneeling before the smoking table with her head bowed, in a posture that was almost one of prayer—as if the table had become an altar. Her eyes were shut, I saw as I moved over to the window. Again I felt like an intruder, not just on her living space but on her grief: they were both places I had no right to be. We were strangers; and grief, like lovemaking, is too personal to be shared properly with someone you hardly know.

  When I cleared my throat she jerked upright and blinked at me. “Oh,” she said, “I—”

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  Her eyes were moist; she brushed at them with her forearm. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing except this.” I handed her the piece of paper. “Mean anything to you?”

  She looked at it for several seconds before she said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know anyone named Manny?”

  “No.”

  “Did David e
ver mention anyone by that name?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “What about the address? Ring any bells?”

  “De Haro Street ... no. That’s industrial, isn’t it?”

  “Some of it is. Not all. Where did David work?”

  “Halpern Sporting Goods, downtown. On Grant.”

  “All right,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help? Names of David’s other friends, someone he might have confided in?”

  “Jerry was the only person he was close to, except for Allyn and me. He knew a lot of people but ...” She was silent for a few beats; then she said, “It was a small funeral,” which was not a non sequitur at all.

  I asked her about his co-workers, favorite hangouts, but she had nothing more to tell me. She was working on the table again when I left—dull strokes with the scraper. Looking inward as she had been earlier, holding his memory against her pain.

  Chapter 5

  POTRERO HILL, on the eastern rim of the city, used to be a low-income, blue-collar neighborhood. To a large degree it’s still blue collar, but the Yuppies have changed the face of it in the past couple of decades. They’ve moved in in droves, bought up and restored hundreds of the old Victorians and two-flat houses that cling to the hill’s steep sides; and where the Yups go, so go the entrepreneurs who cater to them. Nowadays, the venerable Victorian ladies with their new coats of paint stand cheek by jowl with real estate offices, travel agencies, fashionable boutiques, trendy nightclubs and wine bars, and nouvelle cuisine restaurants.

  The gentrification of Potrero Hill is the main reason the face of the flatlands that fan out below is also changing. Once that area was heavily industrial. Southern Pacific tracks crisscross it; not far away is what’s left of San Francisco’s port business at Central Basin, Islais Creek, and India Basin. The area is still the home of small manufacturing companies, drayage warehouses, industrial supply houses, the Greyhound and Sam Trans bus yards, and Anchor Brewing Company, the city’s last brewer of quality beer. But mixed in among them are dozens of outfits, some entrenched in fancy new or renovated buildings, that cater to San Francisco’s burgeoning interior-design trade: designer showrooms, antique furniture cooperatives, import/export companies, graphic arts studios, and the Butterfield & Butterfield auction warehouse. There are also numerous upscale lunchrooms and taverns, and clusters of private housing that are slowly being taken over by less affluent urban professionals who can’t afford the prices that have grown as steep as the streets on Potrero Hill above.