It could be one of the people I had met and talked to in the past few days. Or it could be somebody I had yet to meet and talk to; my name had been all over the papers. Jerry Carding? Steve Farmer?
Somebody.
Why?
The beeping from the disabled phone penetrated and sent me wading through the debris on the floor, around to the far side of the desk. The phone was lying there in two pieces, the receiver hooked over one of the chair legs. I picked it up and put it back together and set it down on the slashed chair seat. The answering machine was upside-down under the window; I picked that up too and laid it on top of the typewriter.
I dialed the Hall of Justice and asked for Eberhardt. Got him half a minute later. “It’s me again,” I said.
“Now what? I was just on my way home.”
I told him what now. There was a silence. Then he said, “Christ, can’t you stay out of trouble for one day?” but he no longer sounded annoyed or irascible.
“Lecture me some other time, will you? This isn’t my fault.”
“Bad, huh?”
“It couldn’t be much worse.”
“You think it’s connected with the Webster and Carding cases?”
“I don’t know what to think. Maybe.”
“All right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Bring a couple of lab boys with you. There might be prints.”
“Twenty minutes.”
I hung up and fiddled with the switches on the answering machine. It seemed to be working okay-and there was a message on it, from Donleavy. His voice said I should call him at his office in Redwood City and then proceeded to give the number.
The message told me something else, too: my office had been vandalized sometime today, during business hours. If it had happened last night Donleavy would not have been able to reach me because of the disabled phone.
I dialed his number right away; it was better to be doing something constructive than brooding at what was left of this place. And it turned out that he was also still in.
“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I had a couple of my men make another search of the Carding garage and the grounds around it; they found the second bullet.”
“Good. Where?”
“Outside the garage window, in a bush.”
“So that’s what happened to it. Sure, the window was part way open, now that I think about it; I should have remembered that before. You going to withdraw the charges against Talbot now?”
“Not yet. Chances are he fired the bullet through the open window, considering where it was found and a Ballistics report confirming that it came from the murder weapon; but there’s no way of proving he did. Carding could have fired it himself, sometime prior to his death.”
“But you do believe Talbot is innocent?”
Donleavy made a sighing sound. “What I believe doesn’t seem to hold much water around here. The DA’s still planning to prosecute.”
“Has Talbot’s condition changed any?”
“Status quo. He’s been under sedation most of the day. That’s a preliminary treatment in cases of suicidal depression, the doctors tell me.”
“No other developments, I guess?”
“Nope. How about with you? I talked to Laura Nichols this afternoon at the hospital; she said she’d hired you to do some investigating of your own.”
“Yeah. I was going to call you about that tonight. You mind?”
“Your buddy Eberhardt doesn’t mind. Why should I?”
I told him about Bobbie Reid and her connection with Christine Webster and Jerry Carding. “Might be something in that, at least where the Webster case is concerned; I’ll pass it along to Eberhardt. I don’t see how it could tie in with the Carding homicide, though.”
“Neither do I,” Donleavy said. “Anything else?”
“My office was vandalized today. Torn apart. I’m standing here in the wreckage right now, waiting for Eberhardt.”
“Rough. Any idea who did it?”
“No. But I’m not so sure it’s coincidence.”
“How come?”
“Nothing stolen, for one thing. What time did you leave your message on my machine?”
“About eleven. Why?”
“Whoever did it knocked the phone off the hook,” I said. “So it had to have happened sometime between your call and when I got here a little after five. Which pretty much lets out street kids; they don’t vandalize business offices in broad daylight.”
“So you think it ties in with the two homicide cases?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
After we rang off I looked around at the destruction again, in spite of myself. My gaze settled on the shredded Black Mask poster. It was no special loss; I could get another one made from the magazine cover. But it made me think of my collection of pulps. The damage here would amount to no more than a few hundred dollars- but what if the same kind of thing happened at my flat? Those six thousand pulps had to be worth more than thirty thousand dollars at the current market prices; most were irreplacable, at least where I was concerned, and I had damned little personal property insurance. The thought of them being demolished started me shaking all over again.
I got on the horn to Dennis Litchak, a retired fire captain who lives below me, and asked him to go upstairs and check on my flat; we had exchanged keys sometime ago, as a general precaution between neighbors. He was gone the better part of ten minutes and I did a lot of fidgeting while I waited. But when he came on again he said, “Everything’s okay. You didn’t have any visitors.”
I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dennis.”
“What’s up, anyhow?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
I went over to the window and stood looking down at the misty lights along Taylor Street. The pulps were still in my mind. My flat was not nearly so easy to get into as this office, but it was a long way from being impregnable; sooner or later, somebody could get inside and destroy or even steal those magazines. That was a fact and I had damned well better pay attention to it. Have another lock put on the front door and the back door. And increase my personal property insurance right away, no matter how much it cost for the premiums. And then just hope to God I did not come home someday to find what I had found here.
A couple of minutes passed. Then two cars pulled up at the curb below-Eberhardt’s Dodge and an unmarked police sedan-and Eb and two other guys got out and entered the building. I returned to the desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it, where there were none of the drying worms of white glue. Pretty soon I heard the grinding of the elevator, then their steps in the hall, and the door opened and they came in.
Eberhardt took one long look at the office and said, “Jesus Christ.”
“I told you it was bad.”
“Looks like a psycho job,” one of the other guys said. He had a field-lab case in one hand. “Somebody doesn’t like you worth a damn.”
“Yeah.”
While the lab boys went to work, picking their way through the mess on the floor, I stepped into the hall with Eberhardt. He said then, “Hell of a thing to walk into. You okay, paisan? ”
“More or less.”
“Don’t make a grudge deal out of it, huh?”
“You know me better than that, Eb. Besides, if anybody finds out who did it, it’ll be you. Or Donleavy, maybe.”
