“That’s it. Kind of funny for a girl that young to be carrying around a private eye’s business card, don’t you think?”
“I think. Christ.”
“But you’re positive you never saw or heard from her?”
“I’d remember if I had.”
“What about phone calls or letters from unidentified women. Anything like that recently?”
“No. I’m sorry, no.”
“You hand out many of those cards?”
“A fair amount, sure,” I said. “Insurance companies, lawyers, bail bondsmen, skip-trace clients, friends, casual acquaintances-hell, I must have distributed a thousand or more over the past few years.”
There were sounds on the slope behind us, and we both turned to look as the ambulance attendants struggled up with the stretcher. When they got to the top and started past us, a ripple of movement and sound passed through the watchers along Lake Merced Boulevard. You could almost see them all leaning forward for a better look, even though the shell of Christine Webster was just a small shapeless mound beneath the sheet and restraining straps.
Eberhardt said, “Bastards.”
“Yeah.”
He got a little box of wooden matches out of his pocket, hunched over to shield his hands from the wind, and used four of the matches to get his pipe lighted. “Okay,” he said then. “She picked up your card somehow, and maybe she was planning to contact you, but for whatever reason she never did. The point is, is there a connection between that and her death?”
I had been wondering the same thing. The idea of it bothered me; I had not known the girl existed until this morning, when she no longer did exist, and yet the fact that she’d had my business card was a thread linking her life and mine. If there was a connection, and if she had come to me about her problem, could I have done anything to prevent her murder? But that kind of thinking never got you anywhere. I had allowed myself to indulge in it in the past and I had promised myself, for a number of reasons, that I was not going to do it anymore.
For the sake of argument I said, “It could be she had the card as a gag. You know, the way kids do-flash it on her friends, make up some kind of story to go with it.”
“Maybe.”
I stared over at where the attendants were loading her body into the ambulance. “Could it have been robbery?” I asked. “Or attempted rape?”
“It wasn’t robbery,” Eberhardt said. “There’re thirty-three dollars in her wallet and a gold engagement ring on one of her fingers. And it doesn’t figure to be rape; she wasn’t molested or otherwise abused.”
“Street shooting?”
“Possible but not likely. She lived way the hell up on Edgewood, and with Thanksgiving coming up there won’t be any night classes at the college for the next couple of weeks. Seems doubtful she’d have been wandering around here alone at night. Coroner’s rough estimate as to time of death is between nine P.M. and midnight.”
“She could have been killed somewhere else,” I said. “Or picked up somewhere else and forced into a car and brought here.”
“Uh-uh. See that old blue Mustang down at the end there? Belongs to Christine Webster. Lab boys have been over it already; no bloodstains or anything else that figures to be important. The way it looks, she either drove here to meet someone or came willingly with the person who shot her.”
“Anything in the area that might point to the killer?”
“Nothing. She was shot at close range with a small caliber handgun-. 25 or. 32, probably. Then she either fell down the slope or was rolled down it after she was dead. College kid out jogging at six-thirty spotted the body and called us. That’s all we know for sure so far.”
The ambulance started up and eased out onto the street. The rubberneckers all turned to watch it fade out of sight toward the campus. End of show. They began to drift away singly and in small groups.
Eberhardt said, “So that’s that for now. You can take off, paisan. I’ll let you know if we turn up anything definite.”
“Do that, huh? A thing like this…”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Go on, get out of here. I’ll be in touch.”
I went over to my car and managed to get inside and away from there without being hassled by the media types that were still hanging around. The sky had grown darker; droplets of rain began to spatter against the windshield. I could still feel the chill of the wind and I turned the heater up as high as it would go.
Twenty years old, I thought, and somebody shot her dead. My business card in her purse and somebody shot her dead.
I stayed cold all the way downtown.
TWO
It was after nine when I reached the Tenderloin and parked my car in the Taylor and Eddy lot, not far from where I have my office. I thought about going into a nearby greasy spoon for some breakfast, but I had no appetite; the image of the dead girl was still sharp in my mind. Instead I locked the car and hustled straight up the hill on Taylor.
The rain kept on coming down, alternating between a drizzle and a fine mist, and the wind was gusty enough to slap the coattails around my legs. At this hour and in this weather the streets were pretty much empty. The dark wet sky made them and the old buildings look dingier and more unappealing than usual. Even the faint pervading smell of garbage seemed stronger.
The Tenderloin used to be, and on the surface still was, a section of lunchrooms and seedy bars and secondhand bookstores; of low-rent apartment buildings and cheap hotels inhabited by transients, senior citizens with small pensions, nonviolent drifters and the Runyonesque street characters that were as much an institution in San Francisco as they once were in New York. It used to have character, the way Broadway-Times Square did in the old days, and you could walk its streets in relative safety. But in the past couple of decades it had changed-had lost all of its flavor and taken on instead a kind of desperate sleaziness. The transients and senior citizens were still there, but the street characters had been replaced by drug addicts and drug pushers, small-time thugs, fancy- dressed pimps and hard-eyed whores. You walked on Eddy or Mason or Turk or lower Taylor these days, and you saw porno bookstores and movie houses spread out like garish weeds; you saw men and women openly buying and selling smack, coke, any other kind of drug you can name; you saw spaced-out kids, drunks sleeping it off in doorways, elderly people with frightened eyes watchful for purse-snatchers and muggers because the Tenderloin has the highest crime rate in the city.
I asked myself again why I didn’t, for Christ’s sake, move my office to a better neighborhood. Business had not been all that good recently, and maybe part of the reason was my location. Who wants to put his trust in a private investigator with an office on the fringe of the Tenderloin?
Moving made good sense-but the problem was, I couldn’t really afford to move. The rent in my building was reasonable enough, even though the landlord was making noises about kicking it up again; the price of an office in a more respectable area was beyond my means. Besides which, I had occupied this one ever since I left the cops and went out on my own fourteen years ago; I liked it there, I felt comfortable there.
So I was not going to move and that was that. Just keep on toughing it out, I told myself. Hell, you’ve had plenty of practice at toughing things out, right? Particularly in the past year and a half.
When I entered my building and started across to the elevator I noticed the white of an envelope showing inside my mailbox. There were envelopes inside all the other boxes, too. Uh-oh, I thought, because it was too early for the mail; and there was only one other person with access to the boxes. I opened mine up and took out the envelope: my name hand-written on the front, the building owner’s name and address rubber-stamped in the upper left-hand corner. Greetings from your friendly landlord.
I said something under my breath, stuffed the envelope into my coat pocket, and took the elevator up to the third floor. My office was cold; and it still seemed to retain the faint smell of stale cigarettes. I had not smoked a
