The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Oh, that.” His eyes lingered on the phones; then he got up and went over to the window again. “I haven’t had any real beefs with anyone. I’m not all that big an operator, you know. I don’t have the first dollar I ever made, but I’m careful with my money, and it’s a decent enough living. I even offered to put Melody through the University of California, over there at Berkeley. She’s smart enough. She went for a little while, but then she quit. Said it bored her.” He turned back toward me. “Can you imagine that? The University of California. At Berkeley. And she was bored.”

  I shrugged. “I was bored when I went to school too. Do you ever lay off some of the bigger bets?”

  He looked away. “Sure. Most everybody does, if you ain’t with the syndicate.”

  “You get along okay with the people you lay off with?” He struggled with himself a moment. “There are little disagreements in every line of work involving people, Mr. Bragg. It’s no big deal.”

  “Not to you, maybe. What sort of disagreements?”

  “No. If I thought those people wanted to cause me grief, I wouldn’t hire someone like you. I’d just pack up and leave town.”

  I made a note of that too. I had a feeling that before I got to the bottom of things I’d have to come back and ask him some of these same questions all over again.

  “Does your daughter live at home here?”

  “She has her own place. Over in Marin County.”

  “How did your daughter meet the Anderson boy?”

  Moss looked at me and blinked. “I don’t think she ever said. Maybe through my brother Arthur. He and the boy’s father are involved in a big project over there in Sausalito. Marinship Shores. Maybe you heard of it.”

  “I’ve noticed they’re starting some kind of work in that area.”

  Moss nodded. “Hotel and convention setup of some kind. Marina too I think Arthur said. My brother’s an attorney. Used to work for the county over there, something to do with the housing projects in Marin City. My brother has connections there, of course, and he knows his way around the county government. Mr. Anderson was wise to hire somebody like Arthur to smooth the way.”

  “How do you and your brother get along?”

  He came back to the table and sat down again. “We’ve drifted apart some in recent years. But we’re cordial.”

  “What caused the drift?”

  “His law degree sort of went to his head. He’s a little snotty these days. Doesn’t like my line of work. Even though it’s what put him through law school.”

  “He worked for you?”

  Moss made a brief shushing noise. “Heck, no. But I paid his way through school. We didn’t come from a well-off family, Mr. Bragg. Our papa was a bread-truck driver. And Arthur could never get together much money of his own until he got out of school and had his law practice established. It didn’t bother me, so long as he kept his grades up. It just irritates me how he looks down his nose at me now.”

  “You said your daughter is a model?”

  “Some of the time, at least. One of the agencies here in the city signed her up when she still was going to high school. She’s had some training. Done a little TV work. I don’t know what all, but she never comes to me for money any longer. Maybe the Anderson boy pays part of her rent. I don’t pry about those things. They’re getting married in the summer.”

  “Okay,” I told him, getting to my feet. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’d like to take the photos with me.”

  “Why? I was planning to burn them.”

  “It might make it easier to find out where they came from. Don’t worry. I won’t show them around unnecessarily. They’re really pretty good photos, you know. Have a professional quality about them. Back lighting, things like that. Almost as if they’d been taken in a studio.”

  “No,” he told me quietly. “They weren’t taken in any studio. I recognize that print on the wall behind them. That’s a little cabin I own up the coast, just north of Jenner. I got a little sign out front, the way folks do at the beach. ‘The Sand Castle,’ that’s what I call it. That’s where my baby was when they took those pictures.”

  He turned back to the window. He was hurting inside more than he showed.

  “I guess then you were sort of kidding when you said these might be part of some advertising campaign.”

  He didn’t bother to answer me.

  I’d never had a daughter of my own, so on my way down to the car I could only guess at the sort of turmoil a man might feel when the mailman drops off a package like the one Samuel P. Moss had gotten. I drove back downtown and parked in the public garage across from the Chronicle building. But instead of walking up Market Street to my office, I headed on over into the Tenderloin. It was a gritty part of town, in the shadows of the downtown Hilton Hotel. More hotel projects were on the drawing boards for the area, and there was a bit of public outcry over that. The cheap flea-bag hotels in the area still had rents low enough to accommodate old folks on pensions, the recent waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, and anybody else struggling on the fine edge of down-and-out. Some people were afraid the new buildings would wipe out the only affordable housing left in San Francisco for low-income people. The city was trying to strike deals whereby the developers, for the privilege of building there, would have to renovate some of the old places to maintain the low-cost housing as well. Neighborhood activists were suspicious of such plans, and I felt they had good cause to be. Something generally goes haywire with such lofty schemes.

  The Tenderloin also had some adult book stores, a burlesque house and small movie theaters with names like Peek-A-Rama and the Kitty Kat. The theater I was headed for was a cut above those. It was called Salome’s, and was owned along with a couple of others in town by a man named Frankie Spain. Frankie not only showed adult movies, he produced them as well. They weren’t hard-core pornography, exactly, but then they weren’t the sort of film you’d take your mother to, either. Unless your mother was far different from the one I’d had.

  I entered the lobby and asked the spare-framed fellow behind the ticket counter if Frankie was in. He nodded toward a nearby door and went back to the book he was reading. I went over, rapped at the door and went inside.

  Frankie looked up from a sheaf of papers. A grin spread across his chubby face as he hoisted his squat frame out of the chair and came around to shake hands.

  “My favorite detective. How you doing, Pete?”

  “Fine, Frankie. Yourself?”

  “Business is good and the family is healthy—what more can I say?”

  We carried on in that vein for a couple of minutes. Small talk was our medium of exchange. I’d helped him out of a jam one time when a young hooker from Southern California tried to frame him into letting her appear in one of his movies. On film, she looked like dog meat, but it’s hard to tell that sort of thing to a girl. She told the District Attorney’s office he’d forced her to submit to him one night out behind the popcorn machine after the last show. She was willing to change her story if Frankie would put her in a film. I’d flown down to Los Angeles and spent four hours getting photocopies of her arrest record for prostitution. She left town the next day.

  After the small talk, I told Frankie what my problem was. He knew the other people in the Bay Area who dealt in adult movies, and kept current with their work. I showed him the photos of Melody Moss.

  “She’s the client’s daughter?”

  “That’s her. Does she look familiar?”

  “No, but I wish she did. She’s a pip. Maybe she’s new to the game. Certainly better-looking than any other black woman I’ve seen perform.”

  “How about the guy?”

  Frankie studied the photos with a screwed-up face. “Now, he looks familiar. I never used him, but I know I’ve seen him.” He studied the photos some more, then took them around behind his desk and sat down. He brought out a metal box full of file cards and started going through it. I went around and looked over his shoulder. The cards ha
d names, addresses and other information, along with photographs pasted to them. Some of the photos were just mug shots, but some of them were full-length frontal nudes. Most of those were of fellows who had unusual appendages.

  “Frankie, you have a stable of freaks here.”

  “I know. Not much call for them anymore, poor devils. They used to be useful for specialized shots. We used to use one or more in every film. You’d be surprised how hard it was to get some of the camera angles and things we managed. Here’s your man.”

  His hand stopped at a card with a head shot of the man in the photos with Melody Moss. It showed his name to be Red Dewer. His address was Marinship Basin in Sausalito. Maybe it was just a coincidence that it was right next to the Marinship Shores project going up on the north end of town.

  “I remember now,” Frankie told me. “He was around looking for work last month some time. Said he’d made a film for a guy over in Marin County. Coming here isn’t unusual for people who work in these things. They find out the names of other people in the business and look for work with all of them. No one producer can keep using the same cast of people, naturally.”

  “But you didn’t use him.”

  “No. His body looked okay, but he didn’t carry himself with much grace. Outside of that one film, I don’t think he’d had any experience. I can’t use a guy just because he’s hung like a horse, not anymore. I’m going very soft-core these days. More anticipation. Less action.”

  “How come?”

  He looked up with a crafty smile. “Video.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The wave of the future. Soft-core pornography for the bedrooms of America over cable television. Mark my word. Anybody still in the business five years from now will have to clean up their act and turn out a decent movie with good acting and something more than a piece of string for a story line. Along with the naked bodies.”

  “Could these photos be blow-ups from a movie?”

  “No way. These are the sort of stills sold in packets in the lobby. Part of the merchandising. If the customer likes what he or she saw on the screen, they can buy a package like this on their way out.” He studied the photos that had been sent to Moss again. “God, but she’s a beauty. Do you know her?”

  “Not yet. I expect we’ll meet before much longer.”

  “Hey, tell her if she ever needs work to come see me, will you? Tell her she won’t even have to screw anybody.”

  “I’ll pass it along, if the occasion ever seems right. Did this Dewer tell you who it was he made the movie for in Marin?”

  “Yes, a young black man out of Marin City named Jerome Poole. People call him Cookie. He has kind of a shaky reputation.”

  “Bad movies?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, the one or two I’ve seen were a respectable cut or two above most. As good as mine, maybe. He used nice-looking people who knew what they were doing and had a sense of humor about them. No, I was speaking more of the company he keeps. And the company his company keeps.”

  “You’re losing me, Frankie.”

  “A street-smart kid like Cookie Poole doesn’t have the money to finance these things himself. He’s got a money man. A weirdly aloof gentleman living over in Ross named Elliott Fitzmorris. The name mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  Spain nodded. “He lives a very private life. Scion of a wealthy family in the Midwest. He’s a bad seed, this Fitzmorris. Puts his money into a lot of enterprises. Rubs shoulders with a lot of people. The names of some of those people would ring bells in detective squad rooms across the country. I think there’s a certain cross-mixing of finances in some of Elliott Fitzmorris’s undertakings. Some of it being his money, some of it being these other people’s. I understand that’s how Cookie Poole’s movies are financed. It’s a shame. Gives everybody in the business a bad name. I’d hate to think your client’s daughter was mixed up in all that. And if you pursue this, Peter, between you and me, I’d go about it very carefully.”

  TWO

  I got my car back out of the garage and drove out Lombard, then across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. I took the Sausalito exit just beyond the Bridge. The road dips down between Forts Barry and Cronkhite, then runs through town along the water.

  Sausalito had been a good little town twenty years earlier—scenic, arty and relaxed. But local real-estate barons and Eastern insurance companies had spent two decades putting up high-rise office buildings in San Francisco. People flooded in from other parts of the country to fill them, but San Francisco didn’t have housing for all those people. The entire Bay Area felt the pressures, and grew bloated.

  I had moved to Sausalito just before the big influx began. By now the flavor of the town and its commercial community had changed. Tenants had been ousted from rambling, old homes looking out over the Bay along Bridgeway. Today, the buildings housed clothing boutiques and art galleries and sidewalk cafes. Land values were driven out of sight. The town fathers—the wealthy ones living in glass-enclosed aeries in the hills—or the ambitious shopkeepers looked the other way as the artists and writers who used to impart a creative and slightly whacky flavor to the community were driven out, one by one, to rural counties up north, to New Mexico and Oregon, to Baja California and Idaho.

  Sheer luck had allowed me to live there all these years. When I’d been a bartender at the No Name and knew a lot of local people, I’d found a snug basement apartment a couple of blocks up the hill from Bridgeway on the north side of town. It was off the beaten track, and still liveable. But going through town itself these days was like driving through a broken dream. Instead of artists and writers, and Ole’s Bakery and the seamen’s surplus store, you had carry-out food stands and places that sold posters and T-shirts that said I’ve been to Alcatraz. It wasn’t until Bridgeway curved west to follow the shoreline of Richardson Bay, a dog-leg off San Francisco Bay, that you could still get a feel for what it used to be like. Past the yacht harbors and the large, rambling building that housed the Army Corps of Engineers model of San Francisco Bay, over a rise and down to the lowlands that still carried reminders of World War II, when Sausalito had a bustling shipyard that turned out Liberty ships.

  There still were one or two big loft buildings, acres of concrete foundation stubs sticking into the air like cement thumbs, foundations supporting the memories of industries that helped win the War, clusters of arks and houseboats moored to rotting piers and docks that stretched into the Bay like arthritic fingers. There were small boat yards, bait shops, sports-fishing docks and rickety sheds. It was the sort of place that had a strong tug on me, and brought back childhood memories. It reminded me of the cluttered stretch of depression housing, scrap yards and marine industry along the ship canal running through Seattle’s Ballard District when I was a kid. The days of pollywog ponds, steel drawbridges and the salty tang of fishing fleets nestled in the shadow of blunt girders. They left the sort of memories a boy needs to sustain him after he grows up and learns how many assholes there are in the world.

  Now, the Marinship area was scheduled to go into the memory bank that held childhoods. Just beyond the Big G Supermarket a billboard standing in the field of cement thumbs proclaimed the coming of Marinship Shores—marina, hotel, convention center and shopping complex. They would be closing down dozens of small marine industries, forcing out a lot of the houseboats and pouring concrete so they could erect something quite different from pollywog ponds.

  Marinship Basin was just beyond Gate 5 Road. There was a fan-shaped dirt and gravel parking lot that was the hub of half a dozen piers and floating docks poking out into the water. Tied to these were the assorted floating homes and old boats where various free spirits and eccentrics lived. Some were quite elegant—two stories high and soundly constructed atop big boxy floats. Some were nautical A-frames, with steeply pitched roofs trailing down to the water’s edge. Most of the sailboats and power craft among them had lost the sparkle of paint and gleam of brass, the flashy
credentials which would have called for a better address in one of the yacht basins up closer to town.

  I got out of the car and looked around for something resembling an office. I couldn’t find one. To one side, an open shed had a bulletin board with notices of dogs lost and cats found, cars for sale and jobs wanted, along with a phone number you could call to inquire about berthing fees.

  A sea gull holding up one leg as if he’d lost the use of it stood atop a piling alongside one of the piers, giving me the beady eye. Despite the number of cars and old battered trucks parked in the lot, I didn’t see anybody around. I heard a dog barking down one of the docks, and started out on it. The gull guffawed.

  Halfway down the length of the pier an older fellow in a stocking cap and carpenter overalls was part way up an aluminum ladder propped against a piling. Electricity wires, phone lines and a string of lights were strung out between the spaced pilings. The man was leaning awkwardly out from the ladder, trying to replace a light bulb, when a black Labrador came bounding up the dock with a medium-sized mutt in pursuit. The Lab skidded against the ladder. It made the man lose his balance. He jumped to the dock with a curse at the dogs. They took off as he grabbed up a metal pinch bar and hurled it clattering along the walk after them.

  “Bustards!” he called. “They have no right. They have no right—no sir. Dogs on the docks. They don’t belong, no sir.”

  He was a man in his late fifties. He had a stocky build, gnarled hands and a gray stubble of beard dusting his seamed face. His eyes were steady and clear, but something wasn’t hooked up right inside his head. When I was a boy in Seattle, there’d been a pathetic man in the neighborhood people said had been kicked in the head by a horse. This man reminded me of him.

  “Here, let me hold the ladder for you,” I told him.

  “Yeah, thank you there, mister, thank you.”

  I held it while he climbed up and went back to work on the light. A cackle of laughter welled up from inside him.