by Lee Killough
Lien frowned at him. “You don’t mean to tell me that’s all you’re eating?”
“Of course not,” he lied. “It’s just all I eat here at home, to keep from snacking.” Note to moron Mikaelian: if you want to pass as human, stock some human food.
He shut the refrigerator and herded her out of the kitchen to the front door, sweating. He had over-reacted. Would it make her suspicious? He wished he could think, but his mind felt turned to useless sludge.
“Go ahead and snack some,” Lien said. “ Losing weight too fast isn’t healthy.”
“Yes. You’re right.” Go, Lien! Her solicitude terrified him.
As he opened the door, the telephone rang.
“Thanks for bringing me home.”
He stepped into the hall, expecting her to follow him.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” she asked.
“Now that I.A.’s had me on the hot seat and I know Harry is going to make it, it can’t be anyone important. Let the machine pick up.”
But she marched back inside to answer it…and held the phone out to him. “It’s your father.”
He took it like a live grenade.
Phil Mikaelian’s voice snapped out of the receiver. “Finally! Where the hell have you been! We couldn’t get an answer here or at the Takanandas! You’re grandmother’s been going on again since Friday afternoon about that psycho bitch killing you so your mother’s frantic.”
A typical greeting. As much as Garreth idolized the man, a soft edge or two would be welcome, more Dad and less Deputy Chief. He could be worse, of course, an iron-fisted despot like Grandpa Mikaelian, at whose funeral Grandma Mikaelian looked radiant and Grandma Doyle whispered they ought to stick a pin in the corpse to make sure he was really dead.
“Harry got shot on Friday.” Answering in kind worked best with his father…cut to the chase, no apologies for not answering. “It looks now like he’ll live, though.”
His father’s tone changed instantly to concern for a fellow officer. “Shot! Not Garreth,” he said to someone at that end. “His partner. What happened!”
“I’ll give you all the details when I come home.” What fun that would be. “Probably toward the end of the week.” Give his father no time for questions now and avoid lies Lien could hear. “I promised the lieutenant I’d finish up reports for Harry and me. Since Grandma’s worried about me being dead, put her on the phone and let me talk to her.”
“She’s gone to Evening Prayer to pay for your soul but here’s your mother.”
“I don’t know what set Mother off again,” his mother said. “I thought she was over that after talking to Lien when you were in the hospital. I’m glad you’re coming so she can see for herself you’re all right. You are, aren’t you? How long will you be staying?”
A tricky question. Not long enough to satisfy her, of course, but probably longer than comfortable for him. So he lied. “Maybe a couple of weeks.” Way longer than he knew he could bear. Before going he needed to work out an escape plan.
“That’s wonderful. You’ll be able to spend time with Brian.” She paused. “Judith has been wanting to talk to you.”
“Judith?” Fear touched him. “Is something wrong with Brian?”
“Oh, no. He’s fine. It’s something else; she’ll tell you.”
“Do you know?”
She hedged and wandered off on a tangent, which told him she knew, all right.
“Tell me. Don’t let her hit me cold with it.”
“Well.” He heard her take a breath. “She wants your permission to let Dennis adopt Brian.”
With that sentence her forgot all about his impatience to be rid of Lien and on his way back to the Hall. “She what! You can tell her — no, I’ll tell her myself!”
He stabbed down the switch hook. Releasing it again, he punched Judith’s number. “What do you mean, you want me to let your husband to adopt my son? What the hell makes you think I’ll ever agree to that!”
Her breath caught. “So much for polite amenities. Like father, like son. No, it’s all right,” she said to someone on the other end. “Just a minute, Garreth.” He heard her moving and a door shutting, cutting off background sound. “Now. I thought maybe you’d agree because you love Brian and want what’s best for him. Brian and Dennis are so close already, and — ”
“And I’m his father. I stay his father!”
“He needs someone full-time, Garreth, someone he can feel he belongs to. What are you? He’s lucky if he sees you four or five times a year now.”
“You were the one who insisted on moving back to Davis. My job doesn’t give me enough time off to — ”
“Your job is exactly what you let it be!” Her bitterness came over the wire. “It wouldn’t have to be twenty-four hours a day every day, but you like it that way. You chose that job over Brian and me.”
Oh lord here they went…not even a minute of conversation and down into the same old rut. “Judith, I don’t want to start that again.”
“With Brian adopted, you wouldn’t have to pay child support anymore.”
She thought she could buy Brian for her precious Dennis? “Forget it!” he snarled. “Brian is my son and I’m not giving him to anyone else!”
He slammed down the receiver, shaking, and turned to find Lien regarding him with sympathy.
All the anxiety about her presence here returned in an icy flood. “I’m sorry you heard that. Thanks for bringing me home. I’m sorry again for not visiting Harry earlier.”
“It means more now that he’s awake. Come again tomorrow.”
He closed the door behind her, thinking longingly of his pallet. Only now, feeling the sun starting to set, life crept back into him. And he had things to do. He peered out the window to be sure she was out of sight, fetched a notebook from his desk, and headed for his car.
5
The Records clerk took a while time finding Claudia Darling’s record. “She goes way back,” she said. “You’re lucky there’s an entry recent enough for the record to still be here, not shipped off to storage.”
Yes, thank you Lady Luck.
“No, I don’t need to check out the record, just copy a few facts from it.” Avoiding a paper trail betraying his continued interest in Lane Barber.
He noted all the names and dates and carried them to Homicide. This time he found himself alone in the office, freeing him to study the notes with no pretense of writing reports.
Claudia Darling had been born Claudia Bologna in 1920. Her yellow sheet listed twelve arrests for solicitation between 1934 — she had been turning tricks at fourteen? — and 1945. No criminal complaints after that, but involvement in two no-injury traffic accidents, in 1952 and 1965 — by which time her name had become Mrs. William Drum with a Twin Peaks address — and victim of a purse snatching in 1970.
If Lady Luck remained with him, she still lived in San Francisco. He pulled out a phone book to look up listings for William Drum.
While he turned pages, his mind slipped back to his conversation with his ex-wife. Anger boiled up again thinking of it. Let Dennis have Brian? No way in hell! Yet he recognized that Judith had a valid argument. Maybe that was what he found so infuriating. He had never been much of a father…and what kind could he ever be now? Come on, son; let’s go out for a bite. You have a hamburger and I’ll take the waitress.
Three William Drums lived in San Francisco, none in the Twin Peaks area. Dialing the number of William C. Drum, he connected with a woman too young to be Claudia, and who knew no Claudia Drum. No one answered William R. Drum’s phone.
He dialed William R. Drum, Jr. A child answered.
Hearing the high-pitched voice, Garreth grimaced. This did not sound promising. “Is your mommy there?”
“Mommy?” The voice rose, calling. “Mommy!”
A woman’s voice came on the line a few moments later. He introduced himself. “I’m attempting to locate a Mrs. Claudia Drum.”
“I’m sorry; no one by th
at name lives here.”
He swore silently. Had he hit a dead end? “Do you know a Claudia Drum? She’s an older woman, in her sixties. Her husband’s name is William Drum.”
“Just a minute.” Her voice became muffled as she called, “Bill, what’s your mother’s name?”
Several voices murmured, unintelligible to Garreth, then the voice of an older man came on. “This is William Drum, Sr. You’re looking for a woman named Claudia? Can you describe her for me?”
“Five-one, blue-eyed, brunette. Her maiden name was Bologna and in 1970 she lived in the Twin Peaks area.”
“You say you’re with the police?”
Garreth gave Drum his name and the phone number and invited him to call back. Drum did, then explained that Claudia Drum was his first wife. “We divorced in 1971.”
“Do you know what her name is now and where she is?”
Drum hesitated. “I’m curious what you want with her. If all you know is that name and address, this must concern something old.”
“We’re looking for information on a woman who assaulted her in 1942.”
A long silence greeted that remark. Garreth pictured Drum staring nonplused at the receiver, wondering why the police cared about a forty-year-old assault. Finally, with a shrug and a dry note in his voice, Drum said, “Her name is Mrs. James Emerson Thouvenelle and she lives on the wall.” He gave a Presidio Heights address and phone number.
Garreth wrote them down, impressed. Claudia had done well for herself, rising from hooker to the mansions overlooking the Presidio. He wondered if Drum’s dry tone indicated he knew he had been a mere stepping-stone to that mansion. Garreth made sure he thanked William Stepping-stone Drum warmly before hanging up and dialing the Thouvenelle number.
How would his request to see her be received? As a rude reminder of her past?
When he mentioned Mala Babra, however, the rich voice on the other end of the line laughed. “What do you want with that crazy singer? Are things so slow for you boys you’re digging into the basement files? Yes, I’ll talk to you.”
Garreth saw one problem: identification. It was all very well saying on the phone he was from the police. What did he do when she asked to see ID at her house? Well, he could put in the fix if necessary. “Will this evening be convenient?”
“This evening? You’ve made me curious about what’s so urgent. How old are you?”
His turn to stare baffled at the phone. “Twenty-seven.”
“That’ll work. Come on out.”
That baffled him even more. What would work?
The heavy front door at her address bore an ornate lion’s head knocker in the middle. Before he touched it, the door swung open. A pouter pigeon of a woman looking the epitome of grandmother and matron eyed him, then nodded. “Yes, you’ll do. You even look a little travel worn.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You are the detective who called, aren’t you? Mikaelian?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re Claudia Thouvenelle?”
“Yes. Please come in, and follow my lead. What’s your first name?”
“Garreth.” He followed her to a set of double pocket doors down the hallway.
She slid open one and leaned into the library behind it. “James,” she said to the man sitting in a leather chair, “This is Garreth Kane, the son of my old girlfriend Katherine. You remember me telling you about her, don’t you? Gary’s on a five-hour layover to Tokyo and Kathy asked him to come by while he was here. We’ll be across the hall chatting if you need me.”
That explained her remarks.
The man nodded, and she led Garreth across the hall to a living room, where she settled on a sofa. She met his eyes with her own, unnaturally blue — contact lenses? — and cool as ice. “I see no need to reveal the long-dead past to my husband, though understand I’m not ashamed of it. I even find the idea of talking about those days after all these years a bit nostalgic. What do you want to know about that madwoman?”
“Everything you can tell me: who she was, where she came from, who her friends were.”
She blinked, in disappointment, Garreth would have sworn. “I don’t know anything except that she nearly disfigured me. She was crazy. It wasn’t my fault if the naval officer preferred me to her. Who wouldn’t prefer a woman-sized woman to that great galumphing elephant?”
Garreth silently compared the matron with her blue hair and crepe-skinned neck to the redhead still looking twenty, who had her choice of men to bed and bleed. Yes, a woman her height in those days might meet some ridicule but Lane had the last laugh on her generation now.
“May I ask what your interest in her is after all these years?”
“We think she has information we need on a current investigation.”
“Have you checked the state mental institutions? She was quite unbalanced and should have been confined.”
Garreth wrinkled his forehead. “Then why did you drop the charges?”
Claudia shrugged. “As a favor for a friend, Don Lukert, the manager of the Red Onion. He was afraid the owners might be upset by the implication prostitutes worked the club, though of course we did, and openly…so I agreed to drop the charges if he’d fire her and use his influence to see that she couldn’t find another job in North Beach. He did and I did.”
Vindictive bitch, Garreth thought. Aloud he said, “This manager. Is his name Donald Lukert?”
“No, Eldon.”
“Do you know where he is today?” Mr. Lukert might have known something about his singer.
Claudia shook her head. “I could afford to get out of the game after Armistice and dropped my old acquaintances.” She smiled. “I was a war profiteer…all those young soldiers and sailors with pay burning a hole in their pockets, hungry for female companionship and sex as an affirmation of life, even if they had to pay for it. And I saved every penny I could, eventually investing in construction when one of my last johns talked about how all those returning soldiers were going to create a housing boom.”
Her eyes focused past him. “You know the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett swears she’ll never be hungry again? That was me in 1933! My family almost starved during the Depression. I started turning tricks at thirteen to help us eat…skinny as a rail, dressed in rags, giving head jobs and stand-ups in alleys, as often for a loaf of bread or can of beans as cash.” She grimaced at the memory
Thirteen! Garreth shuddered inwardly at the thought of being that desperate.
“Until I used some money from one trick to go to Gone with the Wind. It changed my life! The scene where Scarlett turned curtains into a dress to go visit Rhett Butler was my light on the road to Damascus. If you’re going to sell yourself, it told me, do it with style and don’t sell yourself cheap.” She glanced around complacently, caught him checking out the room, too, and laughed. “As you see, I haven’t.”
The story showed him what drove her social climbing, and brought admiration for her survivor and opportunist skills. Lane’s youth spanned the same era. Had it turned her into a killer?
That jerked him back to his reason for talking to Claudia. “So you lost track of Lukert?”
She nodded. “I did go by the Red Onion a few years later but it had changed name and ownership. Don wasn’t there. If he’s still in the city, he’s probably in a nursing home now. He was in his late forties back then.”
“Did Mr. Lukert ever talk to you about Miss Babra?”
“Oh, a couple of times perhaps. We had some laughs over how grotesque she was.”
A determined survivor, but still a bitch, Garreth reflected.
“She tried to claim she was a Balkan princess. She carried the blood of ancient nobility in her veins, is how she put it. She gave Don some fantastic story about having escaped from eastern Europe ahead of Hitler’s storm troopers. But she wasn’t European. That Bela Lugosi accent she used came and went all the time, and a client of mine heard her speaking what she claimed was her native language and said it w
as nothing but a hodgepodge of German and Russian.”
Garreth made a note of that. German matched Lane’s choice of names, but where did the Russian fit in? Possibly hers had been a mixed German and Russian community? Insular enough to keep speaking their own languages in addition to English.
After asking questions for another ten minutes without learning anything more useful, he closed the notebook and stood. “I think that’s all I need. Thank you for your time.”
She escorted him to the door, speaking in a voice pitched to carry. “I’m so glad to hear Kate’s doing well. I really must give her a call. Thank you so much for her number.”
Garreth sighed in relief as the door closed behind him. She never came close to asking for his ID. Keep smiling, Lady Luck.
6
Anything Records had on Eldon Lukert had long since gone into deep storage, and he found no telephone listing for an Eldon Lukert in the greater San Francisco area. Garreth went through all the office’s phone books, including Oakland, Marin County and as far south as Palo Alto and still came up empty. Claudia might be correct in her opinion he was in a nursing home. That was something impossible to check at this hour, so he spent the rest of the night writing up reports. Alone and with no interruptions he finished them shortly before dawn.
He crashed onto his pallet at home as daylight mashed him.
Until the piercing beep of his alarm clock dragged him back to consciousness after noon. Being a creature of the night in a mostly daylight world sucked. Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved, he forced a smile. It’s showtime, folks. Time to play human. And he went off to visit Harry.
That, at least, he enjoyed. They still had Harry plugged into a battery of machines and a web of tubes plugged into him, but his eyes looked less sunken and his voice had improved from a croak to a breathy rasp. Lien looked more like her old self, too.
“And how are you,” she wanted to know.
