Death in North Beach

by Ronald Tierney

  Lang looked up at Brinkman, whose face would do well in a poker game.

  ‘Very droll. I’ll remember that in any future dealings with him.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Brinkman asked, looking down at the slender, doe-eyed greyhound.

  ‘Pepe. New guard dog for the office.’

  Seeing Brinkman, the fawn-colored dog with a white face and chest backed up behind Lang.

  ‘Trying to replace me? Won’t work. I’m tougher than the dog.’

  ‘You are scarier. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘A number of them will be arrested for conspiracy to commit theft or whatever the police call it. Sumaoang may be in worse trouble. But it looks like Malone did the dirty deed on Warfield.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘Related to Mr Chiu probably. The police will be investigating that for years. It wasn’t exactly “. . . Chinatown, Jake”, but the same rules may apply. Things tend to go unsolved there. We didn’t help by eliminating Scotty Markham. He was the connection to Chiu.’

  ‘Why did they do in Wiley?’ Brinkman asked, reaching down to pet the shy dog.

  ‘Looks as if poor Marshall Hawkes killed Frank Wiley. That’s a sad case. In the end though, Carly’s client is cleared. That’s what we were hired to do.’

  Lang went to the window to gather some light to read his watch. It was ten. He looked out to see Thanh parking his motorcycle, taking off his helmet and crossing the street to the office, shaking out his dark hair as he went. For Hawkes, hiding the secret was his undoing, Lang thought. For Thanh it was different. He wore his secret on the outside, reveled in it. He was comfortable with whatever gender he felt he was whenever he felt it.

  Carly came to the office, but didn’t stay long. She wanted to talk with Gratelli about various aspects of the cases. She also wanted to tell him that, for what it was worth, she wasn’t going to press charges against Hawkes. She wanted to tie up what loose ends she could and take a week or so off, go up to Sonoma County. Relax.

  ‘Hawkes’s dog?’ Carly asked Lang when she saw the greyhound.

  ‘Pepe. His only friend, I think. Probably for both of them.’

  ‘Where’s he going to stay?’

  ‘Haven’t worked that out yet. Maybe we could keep him here. Rename our agency. Greyhound Investigations.’

  ‘Sounds like we’re bus inspectors.’

  ‘OK, I’m working on it,’ Lang said, smiling. ‘I’d take him home but since he was trained to chase small furry creatures for a living, I’m a little concerned about Buddha.’

  ‘You are looking at me with some expectation on your face.’

  ‘Couldn’t you use a room-mate?’

  She shrugged. She hadn’t thought about it. And it wasn’t like her to make sudden, rash decisions, except when it came to such things as careers and relationships.

  ‘Unless, of course, you are already sharing your apartment with someone.’

  Her smile said, ‘You’re getting absolutely nothing out of me.’

  ‘Carly and Pepe. Has a nice sound to it. You could go running together. I’m sure he knows how to run.’

  ‘Give it up, Noah.’

  ‘Just thinking out loud.’

  ‘Believe me, you don’t want to do that,’ Carly said.

  ‘What’s going on in here?’ Thanh asked. He was in an androgynous mood, judging by the V-neck cashmere sweater, tight jeans and a diamond in each ear.

  ‘Carly may take Pepe.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ Thanh said before he saw the expression on Carly’s face. ‘Then again, one person’s wonderful is . . .’

  ‘We’ll figure something out,’ she said.

  And Lang knew this was the first step into giving in entirely.

  ‘Who’s Pepe?’ Thanh asked. The dog peeked around the corner. ‘Oh.’

  Carly had mixed feelings about meeting William Blake again. This time, though, it was in a public place and Anselmo Ruiz was going to be with him. They met at Café Puccini on Columbus. The day was at the turning point. The sun was nearly gone, but the night hadn’t arrived. The neon, the lights inside the stores, the flashing lights of automobiles and buses were faint, without contrast to the dusky evening. There was no hurry.

  They sat outside at a table on the sidewalk as pedestrians paraded by with dogs and bags. Some were natives and some of those were local characters. Some were merely on their way home after a day in the financial district, picking up something at Molinari’s for dinner. Others, and they were easily identified, were taking in the sights of ‘Little Italy’, as some visitors erroneously called the Italian enclave of North Beach.

  Carly and Anselmo had glasses of the house wine. Blake had an espresso.

  ‘This was Anselmo’s idea,’ William Blake said, grinning.

  ‘It was,’ said the large bearded old painter. ‘I wanted to thank you for going soft on Marshall. Troubled soul. There’s only so much of the universe you can control.’ He looked out over the streets. ‘We want to keep this the same, the way we remember it, or perhaps the way we want to remember it, but it changes. We can only slow it down.’

  ‘Why was Marshall so intent on being male?’

  ‘When Marshall started out, males had it made, didn’t they? Women didn’t go on the road and write about it. They didn’t write challenging poems society thought were obscene or create images that shocked the public. Men were the heroes, not just in comic books, but also in literature, in public figures. Marshall wanted to be one of the boys and yet this troubled soul could not relate to anyone or anything. The more you have to control, the smaller your world becomes. No other way to manage it.’

  ‘So sad.’

  ‘Just for you to know,’ Anselmo said, ‘Mickey was Hawkes’s kid too. The lovely Whitney Warfield – in New York – raped her. He regretted it. She refused an abortion, but wanted nothing to do with the child. Whitney brought her out here. I think she decided she’d never be vulnerable again.’

  For Carly, it seemed as if the world went silent. In a moment she felt a hand on hers.

  ‘Thank you for helping me out of my predicament,’ William said.

  ‘Look at Sweet William,’ Anselmo said. ‘He grows old, but oh so slowly.’

  ‘It’s speeding up. Every minute passes more quickly than the last.’

  ‘It does, it does.’ Anselmo laughed. His body shook and Carly wondered if he might not start an earthquake. ‘You have it, William. You know. But you are free again.’

  ‘Shame about the deaths.’

  ‘I know. I feel bad we couldn’t have brought this thing to a close earlier.’ Carly said.

  ‘Being the self-centered Narcissus that I am, at least I have my life back and I won’t forget you for that.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll settle down before too much longer,’ Anselmo said, looking from William to Carly. Neither returned his glances. ‘And perhaps, Carly, you will sit for a painting sometime soon?’

  McKinney’s was one of those places that offered escape to workingmen wanting to escape domesticity without much risk. No strippers, no gambling. Just listen to some rock ’n’ roll and drift back to your youth when the world held some promise. Some would call the place shoddy, some merely unpretentious. What light there was came from a bulb over the pool table, the television at the end of the bar, and the beer signs. There were hundreds of these bars around town – all pretty much the same.

  Other than the fact that he wasn’t a regular, Lang, in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball cap, didn’t stand out. The bartender, a heavy-set man hovering somewhere between a hard forty and a soft fifty, came up. Though Lang preferred something a little more complex, he ordered a Budweiser. He wanted to be one of the guys.

  ‘Hey, Marty, while you got your hand in the fridge, get me one too,’ a guy at the pool table yelled out.

  When the guy came back with his beer, Lang told him that he stopped by to pick up Scotty’s package. The bartender gave him the ‘W
ho in the hell are you?’ look.

  ‘You know our friend is dead, right?’

  ‘Heard that,’ the bartender said.

  ‘He gave you a package. He give you instructions about the package?’

  The bartender maintained an appraising attitude.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Lang said. ‘He always puts things off. He probably hadn’t got around to it.’

  ‘What’s your interest?’ the bartender asked.

  ‘Just doing a favor for a friend,’ Lang said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m supposed to deliver the package to someone. Scotty said that if anything ever happened to him, I should get the box from you.’

  ‘How do you know Scotty?’ the bartender asked.

  Lang took out his wallet, showed him his PI license.

  ‘Partners in crime,’ Lang said.

  ‘He never talked about you.’

  ‘I never talked about him. Maybe I got the wrong guy. You Marty?’

  The bartender nodded.

  ‘I think the least we can do is follow Scotty’s wishes, don’t you, Marty?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the bartender said.

  ‘Scotty’s dead. Look inside. There’s no gold in there. The stuff’s no good to anybody but the person I’m supposed to give it to.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘Man, it’s Scotty’s wish.’

  Pepe followed her, but stayed a few feet back. Carly put down a bowl of water in the kitchen. This would take some getting used to – having another live being hanging around on a regular basis. And it was a far cry from having Sweet William fixing her a Martini after a hard day. But Pepe’s reticence was sweet. It was as if he didn’t want to intrude.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Carly told him. ‘We’ll go running in the morning.’

  There was a half moon. It was perfect. Lang had wrapped the plastic container in a trash bag and brought it out to the back, just beyond the little patio where he enjoyed a late-night drink. With just a touch of light he could see what he was doing and that the neighbors wouldn’t. He used the old, rusty spade previous tenants had left behind to dig the hole.

  What he was doing, he reminded himself, was concealing evidence. But after reading the manuscript he thought only unnecessary harm could be done by its existence. The sins Warfield exposed, if you could call them sins, were far more venial than mortal – with the exception of one. And with that one notation, the world didn’t need its pound of flesh. But that one revelation caused Lang to bury the material rather than destroy it. The unnecessary death of Angel LeGard, who was in fact Hui Zhong Chang, could be linked in an unflattering way with Ralph Chiu. And it was her death that remained unsolved. When the time came, facts could be unearthed.

  As he patted down the soft earth, Buddha became visible in the scant light. His eyes gave him away. He appeared to criss-cross the burial ground before slipping away again.

  ‘Was that your way of saying goodbye to Pandora?’ Lang asked.