A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “And was stabbed to death Saturday night not far from here.”

  “I heard that on the radio this morning.” His smile was cynical. “Are you going to the funeral?”

  I shook my head. “According to the morning paper he must have been carrying a gun. But he didn’t fire it.”

  “The news report on this morning’s radio station explained that,” he told me. “The safety catch was on.”

  “I didn’t hear it. What do you think that Kerman would bring today?”

  “Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, whatever the buyer would pay.” He studied me. “Are you suggesting that the murder and the rug are connected?”

  “You know I am. My theory is that Bishop got the call from the burglar on Friday and decided not to buy the rug, but to shoot the burglar.”

  “An interesting theory. Is there more to it?”

  “Yes. The burglar then stabbed him—and found another buyer. Bishop might have reason other than penuriousness. He might have known the burglar knew his history.”

  He said wearily, “You’re zeroing in, aren’t you? You’re beginning to sound like a detective.”

  “I am. A private investigator. I just opened my own office over Uncle Vartan’s store.”

  “You should have told me that when you came.”

  “You must have guessed that I was an investigator when we met on the beach. Why else would you have lied?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “If Janice’s real parents are still poor,” I said, “fifty or a hundred thousand dollars should help to alleviate it.”

  He nodded. “If the burglar has found the right buyer. It should certainly help to send her to a first-rate college. And now I’m getting tired. It’s time for my nap. I have leukemia, Pierre. My doctor has told me he doesn’t know how many days I have before I sleep the big sleep. I know what you are thinking, and it could be true. I’m sure you are honor bound to take what I have told you to the police. I promise I will bear you no malice if you do. But you had better hurry.”

  “There is no need to hurry,” I said. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Pressville.”

  “And thank you for your courtesy,” he said. “Give my regards to Vartan.”

  I didn’t give his regards to Uncle Vartan. I didn’t even tell him I had talked with his former customer. I had some thinking to do.

  For three days I thought and wondered when the police would call. They never came. Mrs. Bishop sent me a check for the balance of my investigation along with an acerbic note that informed me she would certainly tell her many friends how unsuccessful I had been in searching for both her rug and her daughter.

  I had no need to continue thinking on the fourth day. Duane Pressville was found dead in his house on Adonis Court by a concerned neighbor. I burned the records of that maiden quest.

  MARCIA MULLER

  Whenever you mention Marcia Muller (1944– ), you’re duty-bound to stake her claim as the first writer to ever write seriously about the female private eye.

  What gets overlooked in this statement, however, is the work itself, as if simply being first is justification enough to be honored at every mystery gathering she attends.

  Not so. Marcia is honored because she’s so good. While her early books are solid and technically sound, they don’t even hint at the way her talent would bloom just a few years later. The writing lost all traces of genre cliché; the characters became truer, deeper, richer; and the social landscape began to encompass a good amount of contemporary America.

  Many writers of her generation are reshaping the crime form in exciting new ways. And Marcia Muller—the first writer to create a believable female private eye series—is in the forefront with the best of them.

  Deceptions

  San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is deceptively fragile-looking, especially when fog swirls across its high span. But from where I was standing, almost underneath it at the south end, even the mist couldn’t disguise the massiveness of its concrete piers and the taut strength of its cables. I tipped my head back and looked up the tower to where it disappeared into the drifting grayness, thinking about the other ways the bridge is deceptive.

  For one thing, its color isn’t gold, but rust red, reminiscent of dried blood. And though the bridge is a marvel of engineering, it is also plagued by maintenance problems that keep the Bridge District in constant danger of financial collapse. For a reputedly romantic structure, it has seen more than its fair share of tragedy: Some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its deck.

  Today I was there to try to find out if that figure should be raised by one. So far I’d met with little success.

  I was standing next to my car in the parking lot of Fort Point, a historic fortification at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Where the pavement stopped, the land fell away to jagged black rocks; waves smashed against them, sending up geysers of salty spray. Beyond the rocks the water was choppy, and Angel Island and Alcatraz were mere humpbacked shapes in the mist. I shivered, wishing I’d worn something heavier than my poplin jacket, and started toward the fort.

  This was the last stop on a journey that had taken me from the toll booths and Bridge District offices to Vista Point at the Marin County end of the span, and back to the National Parks Services headquarters down the road from the fort. None of the Parks Service or bridge personnel—including a group of maintenance workers near the north tower—had seen the slender dark-haired woman in the picture I’d shown them, walking south on the pedestrian sidewalk at about four yesterday afternoon. None of them had seen her jump.

  It was for that reason—plus the facts that her parents had revealed about twenty-two-year-old Vanessa DiCesare—that made me tend to doubt she actually had committed suicide, in spite of the note she’d left taped to the dashboard of the Honda she’d abandoned at Vista Point. Surely at four o’clock on a Monday afternoon someone would have noticed her. Still, I had to follow up every possibility, and the people at the Parks Service station had suggested I check with the rangers at Fort Point.

  I entered the dark-brick structure through a long, low tunnel—called a sally port, the sign said—which was flanked at either end by massive wooden doors with iron studding. Years before I’d visited the fort, and now I recalled that it was more or less typical of harbor fortifications built in the Civil War era: a ground floor topped by two tiers of working and living quarters, encircling a central courtyard.

  I emerged into the court and looked up at the west side; the tiers were a series of brick archways, their openings as black as empty eyesockets, each roped off by a narrow strip of yellow plastic strung across it at waist level. There was construction gear in the courtyard; the entire west side was under renovation and probably off limits to the public.

  As I stood there trying to remember the layout of the place and wondering which way to go, I became aware of a hollow metallic clanking that echoed in the circular enclosure. The noise drew my eyes upward to the wooden watchtower atop the west tiers, and then to the red arch of the bridge’s girders directly above it. The clanking seemed to have something to do with cars passing over the roadbed, and it was underlaid by a constant grumbling rush of tires on pavement. The sounds, coupled with the soaring height of the fog-laced girders, made me feel very small and insignificant. I shivered again and turned to my left, looking for one of the rangers.

  The man who came out of a nearby doorway startled me, more because of his costume than the suddenness of his appearance. Instead of the Parks Service uniform I remembered the rangers wearing on my previous visit, he was clad in what looked like an old Union Army uniform: a dark blue frock coat, lighter blue trousers, and a wide-brimmed hat with a red plume. The long saber in a scabbard that was strapped to his waist made him look thoroughly authentic.

  He smiled at my obvious surprise and came over to me, bushy eyebrows lifted inquiringly. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  I reached into my bag and took out my private investiga
tor’s license and showed it to him. “I’m Sharon McCone, from All Souls Legal Cooperative. Do you have a minute to answer some questions?”

  He frowned, the way people often do when confronted by a private detective, probably trying to remember whether he’d done anything lately that would warrant investigation. Then he said, “Sure,” and motioned for me to step into the shelter of the sally port.

  “I’m investigating a disappearance, a possible suicide from the bridge,” I said. “It would have happened about four yesterday afternoon. Were you on duty then?”

  He shook his head. “Monday’s my day off.”

  “Is there anyone else here who might have been working then?”

  “You could check with Lee—Lee Gottschalk, the other ranger on this shift.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  He moved back into the courtyard and looked around. “I saw him start taking a couple of tourists around just a few minutes ago. People are crazy; they’ll come out in any kind of weather.”

  “Can you tell me which way he went?”

  The ranger gestured to our right. “Along this side. When he’s done down here, he’ll take them up that iron stairway to the first tier, but I can’t say how far he’s gotten yet.”

  I thanked him and started off in the direction he’d indicated.

  There were open doors in the cement wall between the sally port and the iron staircase. I glanced through the first and saw no one. The second led into a narrow dark hallway; when I was halfway down it, I saw that this was the fort’s jail. One cell was set up as a display, complete with a mannequin prisoner; the other, beyond an archway that was not much taller than my own five-foot-six, was unrestored. Its water-stained walls were covered with graffiti, and a metal railing protected a two-foot-square iron grid on the floor in one corner. A sign said that it was a cistern with a forty-thousand-gallon capacity.

  Well, I thought, that’s interesting, but playing tourist isn’t helping me catch up with Lee Gottschalk. Quickly I left the jail and hurried up the iron staircase the first ranger had indicated. At its top, I turned to my left and bumped into a chain link fence that blocked access to the area under renovation. Warning myself to watch where I was going, I went the other way, toward the east tier. The archways there were fenced off with similar chain link so no one could fall, and doors opened off the gallery into what I supposed had been the soldiers’ living quarters. I pushed through the first one and stepped into a small museum.

  The room was high-ceilinged, with tall, narrow windows in the outside wall. No ranger or tourists were in sight. I looked toward an interior door that led to the next room and saw a series of mirror images: one door within another leading off into the distance, each diminishing in size until the last seemed very tiny. I had the unpleasant sensation that if I walked along there, I would become progressively smaller and eventually disappear.

  From somewhere down there came the sound of voices. I followed it, passing through more museum displays until I came to a room containing an old-fashioned bedstead and footlocker. A ranger, dressed the same as the man downstairs except that he was bearded and wore granny glasses, stood beyond the bedstead lecturing to a man and a woman who were bundled to their chins in bulky sweaters.

  “You’ll notice that the fireplaces are very small,” he was saying, motioning to the one on the wall next to the bed, “and you can imagine how cold it could get for the soldiers garrisoned here. They didn’t have a heated employees’ lounge like we do.” Smiling at his own little joke, he glanced at me. “Do you want to join the tour?”

  I shook my head and stepped over by the footlocker. “Are you Lee Gottschalk?”

  “Yes.” He spoke the word a shade warily.

  “I have a few questions I’d like to ask you. How long will the rest of the tour take?”

  “At least half an hour. These folks want to see the unrestored rooms on the third floor.”

  I didn’t want to wait around that long, so I said, “Could you take a couple of minutes and talk with me now?”

  He moved his head so the light from the windows caught his granny glasses and I couldn’t see the expression in his eyes, but his mouth tightened in a way that might have been annoyance. After a moment he said, “Well, the rest of the tour on this floor is pretty much self-guided.” To the tourists, he added, “Why don’t you go on ahead and I’ll catch up after I talk with this lady.”

  They nodded agreeably and moved on into the next room. Lee Gottschalk folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the small fireplace. “Now what can I do for you?”

  I introduced myself and showed him my license. His mouth twitched briefly in surprise, but he didn’t comment. I said, “At about four yesterday afternoon, a young woman left her car at Vista Point with a suicide note in it. I’m trying to locate a witness who saw her jump.” I took out the photograph I’d been showing to people and handed it to him. By now I had Vanessa DiCesare’s features memorized: high forehead, straight nose, full lips, glossy wings of dark-brown hair curling inward at the jawbone. It was a strong face, not beautiful but striking—and a face I’d recognize anywhere.

  Gottschalk studied the photo, then handed it back to me. “I read about her in the morning paper. Why are you trying to find a witness?”

  “Her parents have hired me to look into it.”

  “The paper said her father is some big politician here in the city.”

  I didn’t see any harm in discussing what had already appeared in print. “Yes, Ernest DiCesare—he’s on the Board of Supes and likely to be our next mayor.”

  “And she was a law student, engaged to some hotshot lawyer who ran her father’s last political campaign.”

  “Right again.”

  He shook his head, lips pushing out in bewilderment. “Sounds like she had a lot going for her. Why would she kill herself? Did that note taped inside her car explain it?”

  I’d seen the note, but its contents were confidential. “No. Did you happen to see anything unusual yesterday afternoon?”

  “No. But if I’d seen anyone jump, I’d have reported it to the Coast Guard station so they could try to recover the body before the current carried it out to sea.”

  “What about someone standing by the bridge railing, acting strangely, perhaps?”

  “If I’d noticed anyone like that, I’d have reported it to the bridge offices so they could send out a suicide prevention team.” He stared almost combatively at me, as if I’d accused him of some kind of wrongdoing, then seemed to relent a little. “Come outside,” he said, “and I’ll show you something.”

  We went through the door to the gallery, and he guided me to the chain link barrier in the archway and pointed up. “Look at the angle of the bridge, and the distance we are from it. You couldn’t spot anyone standing at the rail from here, at least not well enough to tell if they were acting upset. And a jumper would have to hurl herself way out before she’d be noticeable.”

  “And there’s nowhere else in the fort from where a jumper would be clearly visible?”

  “Maybe from one of the watchtowers or the extreme west side. But they’re off limits to the public, and we only give them one routine check at closing.”

  Satisfied now, I said, “Well, that about does it. I appreciate your taking the time.”

  He nodded and we started along the gallery. When we reached the other end, where an enclosed staircase spiraled up and down, I thanked him again and we parted company.

  The way the facts looked to me now, Vanessa DiCesare had faked this suicide and just walked away—away from her wealthy old-line Italian family, from her up-and-coming liberal lawyer, from a life that either had become too much or just hadn’t been enough. Vanessa was over twenty-one; she had a legal right to disappear if she wanted to. But her parents and her fiancé loved her, and they also had a right to know she was alive and well. If I could locate her and reassure them without ruining whatever new life she planned to create for herself, I would feel I
’d performed the job I’d been hired to do. But right now I was weary, chilled to the bone, and out of leads. I decided to go back to All Souls and consider my next moves in warmth and comfort.

  All Souls Legal Cooperative is housed in a ramshackle Victorian on one of the steeply sloping side-streets of Bernal Heights, a working-class district in the southern part of the city. The co-op caters mainly to clients who live in the area: people with low to middle incomes who don’t have much extra money for expensive lawyers. The sliding fee scale allows them to obtain quality legal assistance at reasonable prices—a concept that is probably outdated in the self-centered 1980s, but is kept alive by the people who staff All Souls. It’s a place where the lawyers care about their clients, and a good place to work.

  I left my MG at the curb and hurried up the front steps through the blowing fog. The warmth inside was almost a shock after the chilliness at Fort Point; I unbuttoned my jacket and went down the long deserted hallway to the big country kitchen at the rear. There I found my boss, Hank Zahn, stirring up a mug of the Navy grog he often concocts on cold November nights like this one.

  He looked at me, pointed to the rum bottle, and said, “Shall I make you one?” When I nodded, he reached for another mug.

  I went to the round oak table under the windows, moved a pile of newspapers from one of the chairs, and sat down. Hank added lemon juice, hot water, and sugar syrup to the rum; dusted it artistically with nutmeg; and set it in front of me with a flourish. I sampled it as he sat down across from me, then nodded my approval.

  He said, “How’s it going with the DiCesare investigation?”

  Hank had a personal interest in the case; Vanessa’s fiancé, Gary Stornetta, was a long-time friend of his, which was why I, rather than one of the large investigative firms her father normally favored, had been asked to look into it. I said, “Everything I’ve come up with points to it being a disappearance, not a suicide.”