Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I expected 2789 De Haro to be one of the private houses, but I was wrong. It was a weathered warehouse-type structure set behind a chainlink fence that had some kind of climbing plant growing thickly over it, so that from the street you couldn’t see much of the building or the grounds. A metal sign wired to one half of a pair of closed gates read:

  EKHERN MFG. CO.

  Industrial Solenoid Valves

  I parked and walked back to the gates. There was none of the climbing plant on them; through the links I could see a deserted blacktopped area, a loading dock, and two closed metal roller doors into the building. Nobody was around. Closed Saturdays, maybe. But there was no padlock at the joining of the gate halves, and when I pulled up on the bar that held them together, one half swung open.

  I walked in, shutting the gate behind me. No sounds came from the warehouse or anywhere else on the grounds; my shoes made little flat, hollow sounds as I crossed to a set of cement stairs that gave access to the loading dock. I climbed those, followed an extension of the dock around to the east side of the building.

  A car was nosed up in front of what looked to be an office at the far end. Cadillac—dark gray and shiny new, with nobody inside. I went on down to the office. One door, with a sign on it similar to the one on the gate; one long window with venetian blinds pulled down on the inside. I tried the door. Locked. I leaned over to see if I could get a squint past the blinds, but they were drawn tight.

  I was thinking about knocking on the door when a voice behind me said, “Looking for something, soldier?”

  It startled me, brought me half around in a crouch. Since Deer Run, I have been overly sensitive to sudden noises, unexpected movements. The man standing ten feet away on the dock walked soft for a big guy; he hadn’t made a sound coming along. He was a couple of inches over six feet, wide at the shoulders and hips, with brown hair cut long and in puffy wings so that he seemed not to have any ears. Wearing a chocolate-brown business suit and a plaid shirt open at the throat.

  He stood still, hands down at his sides, watching me out of eyes that did not blink. Pale eyes, without expression. His whole face was expressionless, almost a blank, like one of the half-formed pod creatures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One good look at him was enough to make me edgy again, to put a coldness on the back of my neck. Hardcase. Not one of the swaggering macho types that frequent bars on the weekends, looking for ways to prove their manhood. The genuine article.

  “Man asked you a question, soldier.”

  Another voice, behind me again. This time I was not startled. I turned and backed up two steps, doing it slow, until my back was against the building wall and I could see the other man. Shorter, leaner, with blond hair that grew light on top and streaky dark at the temples; dressed in a tan suit and a blue sport shirt. Same blank expression. Same mold. He was a soft walker, too: if he had come out of the office door, I would have heard it click open.

  The blond one said, “Well, soldier?”

  “I’m looking for Manny.”

  “Manny who?”

  “I don’t know his last name.”

  “Nobody here named Manny,” the dark one said.

  “I thought there might be.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Somebody I know had his name and this address.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “David Burnett.”

  The blond one said, “We don’t know anybody named David Burnett. Or anybody named Manny. You must have the wrong address.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybes about it.”

  “We’re closed today,” the dark one said. “Closed weekends. Couldn’t you tell that from out front?”

  “The gate was open—”

  “No, the gate was closed. It just wasn’t locked.”

  “Then you should lock it if you don’t want anybody to walk in.”

  “That’s right,” the blond one said, “we should lock it. Usually we do. Today we forgot. We won’t forget again.”

  “What’s your name, soldier?” the dark one asked.

  I told him.

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “That so?” the blond one said, but not as if he cared. “What would a private investigator want to come here for?”

  “I told you, I’m looking for Manny.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to ask him a few questions.”

  “What about?”

  “His relationship with David Burnett.”

  “Why?”

  “Burnett killed himself last week. His sister wants to know the reason.”

  “That’s too bad,” the dark one said. “We’d help you out if we could but we can’t. You must have got the wrong address.”

  The blond one said, “Tell you what, though. You give us your business card and we’ll keep it on file, just in case we hear anything about somebody named Manny. You got a card, don’t your?”

  I took my wallet out, slow, and removed one of my business cards. The blond guy made no move to come and get it; neither did the dark one. There was anger in me now, like a low, pulsing heat, but it would be foolish to act on it, or even to let any of it show. They were tougher than I could ever be and twenty-five years younger to boot; and I was technically trespassing on private property. I pushed away from the wall and walked to where the blond one stood and gave him the card.

  He looked it over, nodded once, put it away in his shirt pocket. Then he said, “Sorry we couldn’t help you, soldier. You have a nice day for yourself. And don’t forget to close the gate on your way out. We wouldn’t want anybody else to come wandering in by accident before we get it locked.”

  Without saying anything, I went past him and down the steps and across the blacktop. I looked back once, halfway to the gate. The dark one was walking along the dock, so that he could watch me all the way out. The blond one had disappeared.

  In the car, I sat for a while to let the anger and tension ease out of me. Then I started the engine and drove over to 16th and out Potrero to Army—on my way to Noe Valley.

  I kept thinking: Hired muscle, but not the garden variety. The Mob variety.

  San Francisco has never been a hotbed of organized-crime activity; there is none of the Family networking you find in East Coast cities. Mob operations in California are so poorly organized, in fact, thanks to internal disagreements back in the sixties, that they have a reputation as “the Mickey Mouse Mafia.” Still, the city had produced people like Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, a Mob underboss linked to illegal gambling, extortion, and pornographic film distribution. And over the years there have been instances of organized-crime ties to prostitution and union corruption. So it wouldn’t be all that unusual to find a Mob front operation here.

  But how would David Burnett have got himself mixed up with those people? Sure, there was the money he’d purportedly lost with the Reno and Vegas sports books, the debt he’d run up. The Mob does have a strong power base in Nevada; he might have picked one of their booking outfits. Or, for that matter, he might have hooked into an illegal gambling setup right here in San Francisco. But the problem with either possibility was, I couldn’t see the Mob taking a thirty-five thousand dollar marker from a kid who had no collateral and a job in a sporting goods store—not even after he’d blown more than a hundred grand in cash. They’d have known who and what he was; anybody who makes big-money bets with them and then wants to lay down more gets himself checked out thoroughly.

  The Mob and David Burnett ... it just didn’t add up. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe Ekhern Mfg. Co. was just what it seemed to be—a solenoid valve company—and maybe those two back there were something other than what they seemed to be. Maybe I was building sand castles here, the kind populated by armed enforcers and guys who put severed horse’s heads in other guys’ beds.

  Maybe.

  One way or another, I was going to find out.

&nbs
p; Chapter 6

  EBERHARDT WAS HOME when I got to his old two-story house in Noe Valley, just below Twin Peaks: working with the power tools in his garage workshop. He had always been good with his hands, always enjoyed making furniture and things. He’d let the hobby slide after Dana divorced him several years ago, and I was glad to see that he’d taken it up again. Another positive effect Bobbie Jean was having on his life, I thought.

  She was there too—not in the garage, inside the house somewhere. Her car was parked out front. The garage door was up, so I walked straight in there from the street and waited for Eb to finish fashioning an ogee molding with his band saw. From the cut pieces spread out over his workbench, he appeared to be making a table of some kind.

  As I watched him, it struck me again how leaned-down and gray he’d gotten. At least ten pounds thinner and a shade or two grayer than last December. The weight loss might have been the result of his relationship with Bobbie Jean, but I could not help feeling that it and the added gray were in fact the result of what had happened to me. Kerry had been thinner when I came back from Deer Run, though she had since put the lost poundage back on. Those three dead months had been an ordeal for them, too. Not knowing what had become of me, worrying, spending time and effort and money trying to find out. Eberhardt had worked day and night, Kerry told me, hounding SFPD’s Missing Persons Bureau, following small dead-end leads and exploring empty possibilities on his own and with the help of two other detectives he’d hired. Frustration, psychic drain ... and yet through it all he’d lent support to Kerry and somehow managed to deal with day-to-day agency business as well. When I’d tried to thank him, back in March, he’d turned gruff and growled something about paying back past favors. Sure he was. The first thing he’d said to me when I walked back into his life was, “Jesus, I never thought I’d see you again,” and he’d fought like hell to keep me from seeing the wetness in his eyes.

  And what was his reward for caring so much? A flatter belly, loose jowls, and some more dead hair follicles. It wasn’t my fault, but there was a feeling of guilt in me just the same. Guilt and love and pain and gratitude. I had never felt closer to him and to Kerry than I did now. And I had never felt more alone.

  It was a small relief when he finally shut off the saw; the whine and screech of the blade was like an abrasive on my nerve ends. He wiped his forehead with the back of one hand, getting sawdust on his gray forelock, and said cheerfully, “So what brings you by today, paisan?” He was in a good mood, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which meant that he had gotten laid last night. You can usually tell when he’s had his ashes hauled. Some men wear their hearts on their sleeves; Eberhardt wears his gonads there too.

  “I need you to do something for me, Eb.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re working? When are you gonna learn to take it easy on weekends?”

  “Probably never.”

  “Drop dead of a heart attack one of these days,” he said. “All right, which case?”

  “You don’t know about it yet. A thing I took on last night—favor to one of the secretaries at Kerry’s agency.”

  “You and your favors. Well?”

  I told him about it. He was not particularly interested until I got to the part about Ekhern Manufacturing Company; then I had his full attention.

  “What the hell?” he said. “The Mob?”

  “I’m not kidding. If you’d seen those two, you’d be thinking the same thing.”

  “Then for Christ’s sake why did you give them your card? You want trouble with people like that?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. Besides, it’s not going to come to anything rough.”

  “Depends on what’s going on. And whether or not you keep poking your snout in.”

  “It’s my snout, Eb.”

  “Ahh,” he said. “I suppose you want me to find out if there’s anything official on this Ekhern outfit?”

  “I’d do it myself, but you’ve got more pull than I have—friends who’ll tell you what they won’t tell me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Another thing I need is the name of the inspector who investigated David Burnett’s suicide. I want to ask him a few questions.” I paused. “Maybe you can set up a meet.”

  “Now I’m your social secretary.”

  “Indulge me, Eb, all right?”

  “Ahh,” he said again. Then he said, “Come on inside while I phone. Bobbie Jean’s making cornbread.”

  I could smell the cornbread as soon as he opened the inside door. It made my mouth water; I had not eaten anything all day, unless you counted coffee and the half a glass of orange juice with Bruce Littlejohn. We went through the utility porch into the kitchen, where Bobbie Jean was bustling about and the cornbread smell was overpowering. There was a fresh, steaming pan of it on top of the stove.

  Eberhardt said, “Look who’s here, hon,” and patted Bobbie Jean on the fanny for my benefit. She paid no attention to the pat, also for my benefit, and came over and kissed me on the cheek. Eberhardt went upstairs to make his call. I went and smelled the cornbread close up.

  “Go ahead, take a piece,” Bobbie Jean said.

  I took a piece. Nobody makes cornbread like a southerner; I don’t know why that should be true but it is. A northerner makes it, it’s just cornbread; a southerner uses exactly the same ingredients and it’s a culinary art form. I made myself eat slowly, to savor the taste and because one piece was all I was going to allow myself.

  Bobbie Jean stood watching me, smiling. She was a couple of years shy of fifty, tallish and slender in a pair of blue chambray pants and a dark red sweat shirt. The first time I’d met her, the same December night I was abducted, she had worn her brown hair in a shag cut; since then she had had it permed, a style that better complimented her lean, angular features and made her look younger. Eberhardt had met her during the course of a routine skip-trace—she worked as a secretary to a San Rafael real estate agent—and in December they had been dating casually for several weeks. Now they were a “hot item,” as Eberhardt put it. Translation: They were sleeping together. I was glad for both of them. I liked Bobbie Jean much more than any of Eb’s recent string of lady friends; she had a wry, sometimes bawdy sense of humor and a frank way of speaking, and she could handle him even better than Dana could, back in the days when their marriage was a good one. Kerry liked her too. She and Bobbie Jean had become fast friends.

  I finished the cornbread and said, “Good.” Eloquent praise is not one of my long suits. But Bobbie Jean didn’t seem to mind. She said, “Well, it’s my mother’s recipe, so I can’t take any real credit for it. But don’t tell Eb that. He thinks I’m in a class with Julia Child.”

  “Better watch out or he’ll chain you to the stove.”

  She sighed. “He keeps trying to do just that.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s asked me to marry him four times now,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Probably because I keep saying no. But just between you and me and the stove ... I think I’m weakening.”

  “I thought you were a card-carrying member of the I Hate Marriage Club.” Like Kerry, dammit, I thought.

  “I am. Or was. He looks at me with puppy eyes and tells me how much he needs me ... oh hell, I don’t know. It gets harder and harder to turn him down.”

  “He’ll keep right on asking, you know.”

  “I know. Mr. Persistence.”

  “He’s a good man, Bobbie Jean.”

  “I know that too. I wish I’d met him thirty years ago, before either of the two jerks I said ‘I do’ to.”

  She’d married the first jerk when she was eighteen, in her native South Carolina; he had taken her to Texas so he could fulfill his ambition of working on the Galveston docks, and she had divorced him a year later. (He’d been good-looking and a terrific bed partner, she had confided to Kerry, “but he had a brain the size of a lima bean. Did you ever try to hold a conversation with a lima bean?”) Th
e second jerk was an electronics engineer who had transported her from Texas to Silicon Valley, where he had fathered her two daughters. She’d divorced him after twenty not-so-blissful years, when she discovered he was actively bisexual and had been for most of their married life. With a track record like that, it was little wonder that she was gun-shy where marriage was concerned.

  Bobbie Jean said, “I’m not the first woman Eb’s proposed to since his divorce. You know that. I guess that’s the biggest thing holding me back. Is it me he wants, or any old body to take care of him and warm his bed?”

  I asked her what she thought—an old trick to avoid answering a difficult question.

  “I think he cares for me, but that he’s also tired of living alone. The trouble is, I think I feel the same way.”

  We talked for another twenty minutes, though not any more about the marriage issue, before Eberhardt finally reappeared. He motioned me out into the garage.

  “Well, you called it,” he said when we were alone. “Ekhern Manufacturing is a suspected Mob front, all right. Probably a low-level clearinghouse. I didn’t get that from anybody at the Hall, either. I was referred to the feds and I got it from the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force here. He wanted to know why I was interested so I told him. He wasn’t interested after that. But he didn’t mind talking a little.”

  “If the Strike Force knows about Ekhern, why don’t they shut it down?”

  “Why do you think? No legal cause. Besides, they’re after bigger fish.”

  “Who runs Ekhern for the Mob?”

  “Guy named Garza, Frank Garza. One of the new breed. He’s got an MBA, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I believe it.”

  “The suspected owner, though, is one Arthur Welker. Mob underboss, came out of Chicago about ten years ago. Garza worked for him back there.”