Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  We rode the elevator down to the Traffic Bureau on the main floor and went in to see an inspector named Aldrich, who was in charge of the Hit-and-Run Detail. He was a big, red-haired guy with a lot of freckles on his face and hands. Eberhardt told him what we wanted, and Aldrich dug around in one of his file cabinets and came up with a thin cardboard folder. He spread it open on his desk, squinted at the contents; I had the impression that he needed glasses but was too stubborn or too proud to admit it.

  He said at length, "Woman named Jenny Einers, sixty-three years old, hit-and-run at Fifth and Folsom streets three weeks ago. That the one?"

  "That's the one," Eberhardt said.

  "We've got damned little on it," Aldrich told him. "Happened at approximately twelve-thirty A.M., and there were no witnesses."

  "Yes there were," I said. "Two, in fact."

  "Oh?"

  I filled him in on what Nello had told me. Then I asked, "Was there any broken glass at the scene?"

  "Yes. From one of the headlights, probably. No way to identify the make and model from it, though."

  "What about paint scrapings?"

  "Uh-huh. Forest green. General Motors color, 1966 to 1969. Same thing applies. It could have come off any one of several GM cars."

  "Was there any fender or grille dirt?"

  Aldrich nodded. "The lab put it through chemical analysis, of course. Common ground dirt, a little sand, some gravel chips, a few other things. But nothing unusual that we could work with."

  Eberhardt asked, "You find anything else?"

  "Just some sawdust," Aldrich said.

  "Sawdust?"

  "Several particles on the street near the point of impact. White pine, spruce, redwood. You make anything conclusive out of that? We couldn't."

  Both Eberhardt and I shook our heads.

  "We sent out word to all the body shops in the Bay area right away," Aldrich said. "That's the standard procedure. There were a couple of late-model GM's with forest-green paint jobs brought in for bodywork, but one was involved in a routine fender-bender and the other had the left front door banged up. We checked the accident reports on both; they were clear. Nothing else came up." He spread his hands and shrugged. "Dead end."

  We thanked Aldrich for his time and went out to the elevators. When Eberhardt pushed the up button he said, "I can't take any more time on this right now, so you can poke around if you want. But make sure you call me if you turn up anything."

  "You know I will."

  "Yeah," he said. "But it doesn't hurt to remind you."

  The elevator doors slid open, and I watched him get inside and press four on the panel. Then I crossed the lobby, went out to Bryant Street. Fog banks were massing to the west in puffy swirls, like carnival cotton candy. The wind was up, carrying the first streamers of mist over the city. I buttoned my coat and hurried to where I had parked my car.

  For a time I sat inside with the engine running and the heater on, wondering what to do next. Nello had said he'd last seen Chaucer early yesterday afternoon, apparently just before Chaucer left the Row; and Eberhardt had told me that the coroner had fixed the time of death at between midnight and two A.M. That left close to twelve hours of Chaucer's time unaccounted for. Assuming he'd had the money found on him for some time prior to his murder, and knowing the type of person he'd been, it seemed logical that he would have circulated on the Row even though Nello hadn't come across him. If that was the case, then one of the other habitués had to have seen him, maybe even spent some time with him.

  I drove over to Mission Street and put my car in the lot near Seventh and Mission, opposite the main post office. Then I walked to Sixth and began to canvass the Row from Market to Folsom north-south, from Sixth to Third west-east.

  During the next three hours, I walked streets littered with debris and windswept papers and hundreds of empty wine and liquor bottles, even though the city sanitation department works the area every morning. I talked to stoic, hard-eyed bartenders in cheerless saloons; to dowdy waitresses with faces the color of yeast in greasy spoons that sold hash and onions for a dollar; to tired, aging hookers with names like Hey Hattie and Annie Orphan and Black Manah; to liquor store clerks who counted each nickel and each dime with open contempt before serving their customers; to knots of men white and black huddled together in doorways, on street corners, in the small "Wino Park" on Sixth just south of Mission that had, amazingly enough, been sanctioned by the city in an effort to keep the Row people from clogging the sidewalks — men called Monkeyface and Yahoo and Big Stick, who spent their days panhandling indifferent passersby and drinking from paperbag-wrapped bottles with only the necks showing.

  I learned nothing.

  By the time I got to Third and Folsom, I was cold and tired and my feet had started to hurt. But I wasn't ready to give it up yet; I kept thinking about Nello and the hopeless way he had shuffled out of my office. So I wandered down past Harrison toward where South Park used to be and went into a place called Packy's.

  One of the men sitting at the bar was a study in various shades of gray — dirty iron-gray hair, washed-out gray eyes, red-veined gray skin, a soiled gray pinstripe suit that had not been new when Eisenhower was President. His name was Freddy the Dreamer and he was an old-timer on the Row, like Nello and Chaucer. I went up to him, told him why I was there and asked my questions again for the hundredth time.

  And he said in the dreamy voice that had given him his nickname, "Sure, I seen Chaucer yesterday. Hell of a thing, what happened to him. Hell of a thing."

  "What time, Freddy?"

  "Around six. He just come off a bus up at the Greyhound depot."

  "Which bus?"

  He shrugged. "Who knows?"

  "Think, Freddy. Was it a Muni bus? Or a Greyhound?"

  "Daly City," Freddy said. "Yeah. He said he come from Daly City."

  Daly City was a small community tacked onto San Francisco to the southwest. I said, "Did he tell you what he was doing there?"

  "Nah." Freddy grinned reminiscently. "We had us a party," he said. "Scotch whisky, can you believe? Old Freddy with his very own jug of scotch whisky."

  "Chaucer paid for it?"

  "He was carrying a nice little roll. He bought that scotch and we went to my flop on Natoma."

  "Where did he get the roll?"

  "Chaucer was a kidder, you know? Him with his fancy education, a great kidder. I asked him where he picked it up, who did he mug, and he just laughed. 'Robin Hood,' he says. 'I got it from Robin Hood."

  "Robin Hood?"

  "That's what he said."

  "Is that all he said about it?"

  "Yeah, that's all."

  "What time did he leave your flop last night?"

  "Who knows?" Freddy said. "With a jug of real scotch whisky, who knows?"

  "You know where he went when he left?"

  "To see Robin Hood."

  "Is that what he told you?"

  "He was a kidder, you know? A great kidder."

  "Yeah."

  "Good old Chaucer," Freddy said dreamily. "Man, I can still taste that scotch whisky . . ."

  I got out of there. Robin Hood, I thought as I walked back toward Mission. It could have meant something, or nothing at all. The same way the sawdust Aldrich had mentioned could mean something or nothing at all. The only thing definite I had, found out was that Chaucer had been in Daly City yesterday — but without some idea of where in Daly City, that information wasn't Worth much.

  I picked up my car and drove over to a restaurant on Van Ness and had something to eat; the food, through no fault of the management, was tasteless. I felt a little depressed, the way I used to feel when I was working the Row as a patrolman. There didn't seem to be much else I could do for Nello, no leads I could follow that might identify Chaucer's killer.

  When I got back to my building on Taylor Street I found a single piece of mail in the lobby box. I carried it upstairs, turned on the valve on the steam radiator — it was cold in there, as usual — an
d then sat down and opened the letter. Another bill from a magazine readership club. In a weak moment some time back I had succumbed to the sales pitch of a doe-eyed college girl; but I had never received any of the magazines I'd subscribed to. Across the bottom of the bill was typed: Your continued refusal to pay will leave us no alternative but to turn your account over to our legal department. This could seriously damage your credit rating. Remit the above amount today!

  I crumpled the bill and the envelope, said aloud, "What credit rating?" and threw them into the wastebasket. Then I sat there and smoked a cigarette and looked at the wall and listened to the ringing knock of the radiator as it warmed up.

  Robin Hood, I thought.

  Sawdust.

  I stood after a time and took the pot off the two-burner and looked at what was left of my morning coffee. A thin sheen of oil floated on the surface, but I put it back on the hot plate anyway and turned the thing on. And sat down again and checked with my answering service to find out if there had been any calls. There hadn't. I got out one of the issues of Black Mask I keep in a desk drawer to pass idle time, but I couldn't concentrate on the Frederick Nebel story I tried to read. I put the pulp away and lit another cigarette.

  Sawdust, I thought.

  Robin Hood.

  And Daly City . . .

  Damn! I thought. Well, maybe the police could make those three things connect up. Before I left the office for the day – my watch said it was quarter of five – I would call Eberhardt and tell him what I'd found out from Freddy the Dreamer. After that, like it or not, I would be out of it.

  The coffee began to boil. I poured some into my cup, carried it to the window behind my desk. The city looked cold and gray through the restless patterns of fog. I glanced down at Taylor Street; rush hour had started and there were a lot of cars jammed up down there. A large flatbed truck was blocking two lanes of traffic, trying to back into a narrow alley across the way. It was carrying a load of plywood sheeting, and the driver was having difficulty jockeying the truck into the alley mouth.

  I watched him for a time, listening to the angry horn blasts from the blocked cars, still thinking about sawdust and Robin Hood and Daly City — and my subconscious opened up and disgorged the memory of a place in Daly City I'd visited several months ago, on a routine skip-trace. I spilled some of the coffee getting the cup down on the desk. From the bottom drawer I dragged out the San Francisco telephone directory, which included Daly City, and opened it to the yellow pages. Half a minute later, my finger came to rest on a boxed, single-column advertisement on one of the pages under Lumber - Retail. Freddy the Dreamer had been right, I thought then. Chaucer, the former teacher of English literature, had been a great kidder.

  I caught up the telephone, dialed the Hall of Justice. Eberhardt was in, and he came on the wire right away.

  "I think I might have a line on the man who killed Chaucer," I said. "I've got a hunch he works for a lumber outfit in Daly City."

  "What lumber outfit?"

  "A place called Sherwood Forest Products."

  "It was the owner's son - Ted Sherwood," Eberhardt said. "The car, one of those El Camino pickups – a jazzed-up '68 model – was parked in the company lot when Branislaus went there this morning to check out your hunch. Registration told him it belonged to the Sherwood kid, and he went and questioned him. The kid got nervous, made a couple of slips, acted guilty enough so that Branislaus brought him in."

  I nodded and drank a little of my beer. We were sitting in a small tavern on Boardman Place, near the Hall of Justice. It was after five o'clock the following day, and Eberhardt had just come off duty. He'd called me forty minutes ago; I had been waiting for him for about fifteen. I asked, "Did he confess?"

  "Not right away. The old man insisted he have his lawyer present before the kid did any more talking, so that took a while. But the lawyer's one of these smart young pricks; he advised Sherwood to tell it straight. The idea being full cooperation so he can cop manslaughter pleas on both homicide charges and get the kid off with a reduced sentence. He'll probably get away with it, too."

  "Did Sherwood tell it straight?"

  "He did. The night he ran Old Jenny down, he'd been out cruising with his girlfriend and had just taken the girl home up on Potrero Hill. We figure he was probably stoned on pot or booze, or both, although he won't admit it. In any case, he swears the light was green at the intersection, the bag lady was crossing against it and he didn't see her until he hit her. Then he panicked and kept on going."

  "The sawdust must have been jarred out of the pickup's bed," I said. "Am I right it got there because Sherwood made small deliveries of lumber from time to time?"

  Eberhardt nodded. "So he told us."

  "How did he get the dents ironed out?"

  "Some friend of his works in a body shop, and the two of them did the job at night; that's why Hit-and-Run didn't get a report on the repairs. With the new paint job, and the fact that nothing happened in three weeks, he figured he was home free."

  "And then Chaucer showed up."

  "Yeah. He wanted five hundred dollars to keep what he'd seen quiet, the damned fool. Sherwood put him off with fifty, arranged to meet him down on the Embarcadero last night with the rest. He picked Chaucer up there and took him to that alley on Hubbell Street. Sherwood swears he didn't mean to kill him; all he was going to do, he said, was rough Chaucer up a little to get him to lay off. But he's a pretty big kid, and he waded in too heavy and lost his head. When he saw Chaucer was dead, he panicked the way he had after the hit-and-run and beat it out of there."

  "Which explains why Chaucer still had the rest of the fifty dollars on him when he was found."

  "Uh-huh." Eberhardt watched me finish the last of my beer. "Listen," he said then, "I called Dana before I left the Hall and told her to put on some steaks. You want to come for supper?"

  "Rain check," I said. "I've got something to do."

  "What's that?"

  "Go hunt up Nello. I promised I'd let him know if anything turned up. Maybe when I tell him about Sherwood, it'll restore some of his faith in humanity. Or at least in the minions of the law."

  "After fifteen years on the Row? Fat chance."

  "Well, you never know."

  Eberhardt lifted his glass toward me in a kind of mock salute "So long, social worker," he said.

  "So long, cop."

  I went out into the cold, damp night.

  ONE OF THOSE CASES

  It was one of those cases you take on when you're on your uppers. You want to turn it down — it's an old story, a sordid one, a sad one — but you know you can't afford to. So you look into tear-filmed eyes, and you sigh, and you say yes.

  Her name was Judith Paige. She was in her late twenties, attractive in a quiet, shy sort of way. She had pale blond hair, china-blue eyes, and the kind of translucent white skin that seems brittle and makes you think of opaque and finely blown glass. Until the previous year, she had lived in a small town in Idaho and had come to San Francisco "to search for some meaning in life." Which probably meant that she had come looking for a husband.

  And she'd found one, a salesman named Walter Paige. They had been married six weeks now, and it was something less than the idyllic union she had expected. It wasn't that Paige abused her in any way, or was a drinker or a gambler; it was just that, in the past month, he'd taken to leaving her alone in the evenings. He told her it was business — he worked for a real estate firm out near the Cow Palace — and when she pressed him for details he grew short-tempered. He was working on a couple of large prospects, he said, that would set them up for the future. She figured he was working on another woman.

  Like I said; an old, sordid, sad story. And one of those cases. She wanted me to follow him for a few days, either to confirm or deny her suspicions. That was all. You don't need to prove adultery, or much of anything else, to obtain a divorce in the state of California these days, so I would not be required to — testify in any civil proceedings. It was just
that she had to know, one way or the other — the tears starting then — and if she were right, she wanted to dissolve the marriage and go back to Idaho. She had a little money saved and could pay my standard rates; and she was sure I was honest and capable, which meant that she hoped I wouldn't take advantage of her in any way.

  I sat there behind my desk feeling old and tired and cynical. It was a nice day outside, and I had the window open a little; the breeze off the Bay was cool and fresh, but the air I was pulling into my lungs tasted sour somehow. I lit a cigarette. And then took one of the contract forms out of the bottom drawer and slid it over for her to examine.

  When she had, without much interest, I drew it back and filled it out and had her sign it. Then I said, "All right, Mrs. Paige. What time does your husband come home from work?"

  "Usually about six o'clock."

  "Does he use public transportation or drive?"

  "He drives."

  "What kind of car?"

  "A dark-blue VW."

  "License number?"

  "It has one of those personalized plates. WALLY P."

  "Uh-huh. What time does he leave again when he goes out?"

  "Right after supper," Mrs. Paige said. "Seven-thirty or so."

  "He comes back at what time?"

  "Around midnight."

  "How often does this happen?"

  "Four or five times a week, lately."

  "Any particular nights?"

  "No, not really."

  "Saturdays and Sundays?"

  "Saturdays, sometimes. Not Sundays, though. He . . . he always spends that day with me."

  Never on Sunday, I thought sourly. I said, "Which real estate company does he work for?"

  "I'm sorry," she said, "I don't know. Walter is very closemouthed about his job."

  "He's never told you where he works?"

  "Well, he did once, but I can't remember it. Is it important?"

  "Probably not." I put down the pencil I had been using to take notes. "I think I have everything I need for now, Mrs. Paige. I'll be on the job tonight if your husband goes out."