do. You might be able to prevent another tragedy. If no one watches over Martin, then no one can prevent anything from happening in an emergency.”
She more or less had a point. But I said, “You’d want me to keep this watch on your brother for at least two weeks?”
“Yes. If nothing were to happen in that time, I would feel satisfied that Carding’s threat was meaningless.”
“Would you want a full twenty-four hour vigil?”
“Certainly.”
“That’s a three-man job,” I said. “I’d have to hire two other operatives and pay them full salary.”
Karen said, “You know what he’s saying, don’t you, mother? It would cost a small fortune-”
“I know what it will cost.” There was frost in the lady’s voice now; she did not like to be argued with. “The expense is of little importance. Your uncle’s safety is all that matters.”
“I still don’t think it’s a good idea-”
“I don’t care what you think, young woman. And I’ll thank you to be quiet from now on or else leave the room.”
Karen glanced at me, looked back at her mother, and then lowered her eyes to her folded hands. I thought I saw her lips form words, thought I recognized what they were; but it was difficult to be sure with her head bowed and the lighting in there. If I was right, though, the words explained a good deal about her side of this mother- daughter relationship.
What she seemed to say was, “‘Stubborn old bitch.”
Mrs. Nichols asked me, “Do you have any more questions or observations?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, then? Will you accept the job?”
I thought it over. It was screwball, all right. Judging from what she had told me about Martin Talbot, he needed the services of a psychiatrist a lot more than those of a private detective. But if the surveillance did last at least two weeks, the kind of money involved would pay my groceries, the rent on my flat, and the just-raised rent on my office for the next few months. You can turn down a prospective client when there’s a question of ethics; but when you’re dealing with sensitivities, and when you have to worry about making ends meet, it’s no damned contest at all.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll accept the job.”
FOUR
Martin Talbot’s house was located on the corner of Twenty-first Avenue and Wawona, directly across from the north-side entrance to Stern Grove-a fourteen-block-long park and recreation area on the west side of the city, a mile or so from San Francisco State College and Lake Merced. It was a modest stucco affair, boxy-looking, painted white with a red tile roof, that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with its immediate neighbors. In front were a tiny patch of trimmed lawn, a brick staircase, a built-in garage under what would probably be the living room windows. Behind the house was a tiny fenced yard; you would be able to see the side gate and at least part of the rear porch from within the park.
It was after two o’clock when I got there. I parked my car on Wawona, facing east, and entered the park through the gate in its cyclone border fence. The rain had not started up again, but it was in the air and in the bite of the wind. Nobody else was out and around that I could see; the rolling lawns, the kid-sized soccer field, the short driving range for golfers to practice their chip shots, the sunken putting green, all looked deserted.
There were no benches to sit on, but in this weather it would not have mattered if there had been; it was too damned cold to sit out in the open. I wandered around for a time on the wet grass, to refamiliarize myself with the landscape and to see how far I could go east and west and still have a clear view of Talbot’s house. Cars drifted by now and then and there was a steady whisper-and-rumble of traffic over on Nineteenth Avenue; otherwise it was a pretty quiet area. You could even hear water dripping off the eucalyptus and other trees that lined the north rim of Stern Grove’s deep, wide central grotto.
When my nose and ears began to burn I went back out to sit in the car. What I wanted more than anything right then was some hot coffee. I wished I had thought to buy a thermos and fill it from the pot in my office; I had driven there after leaving Sea Cliff, to make some calls and check my answering machine, and there were stores in the vicinity where I could have got a thermos. I made a mental note to do that tomorrow, before I came back out here.
I started the engine, put the heater on full blast until I was warm again. Then I opened up a 1943 issue of Black Mask. But trying to read on a surveillance is not much of an idea; you can’t concentrate because you have to keep glancing up after every paragraph or two in order to stay alert. At the end of fifteen minutes I gave it up-and just sat there.
Nothing happened over at the Talbot house. Nothing happened anywhere, except that a woman with a poodle on a leash came walking down Wawona behind me, crossed the street in front of my car, and entered the park. She gave me a curious glance as she passed, the kind that meant she was wondering what I was doing there.
I sighed a little. Curious neighbors, like as not, were going to present a problem eventually; you could run a two-week, round-the-clock stakeout in a residential area without arousing suspicion, but the odds were against it. Both Bert Thomas and Milo Petrie-a pair of retired cops who worked part-time as guards and field operatives-had mentioned the fact to me when I called them from my office. They had been willing to take the other two eight-hour shifts, but neither of them figured the job to last the full two weeks. Which made three of us. Sooner or later one of the neighbors was liable to get suspicious enough and worried enough to make a police complaint, and that would be the end of it. Not because the police would hassle us, although they might if there was pressure applied; there was nothing illegal in a surveillance conducted by licensed private investigators. But because word would get around the neighborhood, and if we tried to keep on watching the Talbot house, the whole thing would turn into a circus full of rumor-mongering and gawking citizens. And that wouldn’t do anybody any good, least of all Martin Talbot.
A crazy damned job. But I was committed to it now, for as long as it lasted. I shook my head and wondered why I never got the kind of cases the pulp private eyes did. No slinky blondes with bedroom eyes and horny dispositions. No stolen jewels or missing heiresses. No danger and intrigue among the decadent rich. Well, maybe I ought to consider myself fortunate. If I never got laid by my lady clients, I also never got hit on the head or had shoot-outs with hired gunmen in dark alleys. Better a nice safe dull stakeout like this than a knife wound in the belly. Or being trapped in a mine cave-in in the Mother Lode, which was another thing that had happened to me on a past case.
Over in the park, next to where her poodle was squatting and soiling the grass, the woman stood peering in my direction again. So I got out of the car and hoisted the hood and pretended to fiddle around with the engine. That made her lose interest in me; when she came out a couple of minutes later she passed by without a glance. And she did not look back as she followed the poodle along the far sidewalk.
I waited until she turned out of sight on Twenty-third Avenue; then I closed the hood and got back into the front seat. And sat there again, trying not to look at my watch every minute or two. It was only a little past three- thirty: four and a half hours to go on my abbreviated shift. We had settled on a regular timetable beginning at eight tonight-Bert Thomas would be on from then until four A.M., Milo Petrie from four until noon, and me from noon until eight P.M. Which gave me the best of the three shifts, but they didn’t mind and the prerogatives were mine.
My mind fidgeted from one thought to another, the way minds do when you’re just sitting somewhere and not doing anything with your hands. One of the things it kept coming back to was the murder of Christine Webster. I had called Eberhardt while I was in the office, but he had no further information to give me. The city coroner had not finished his post-mortem examination at that time, and the Homicide inspectors assigned to the case-Klein and Logan-had only just begun interviewing the dead girl’s friends and relatives.
Why did Christine have my business card when they found her? That and other questions kept on nagging at me. What kind of trouble had she been in that would make her consider seeing a private detective? Did the trouble have anything to do with her murder? If she’d had the card for any length of time, why hadn’t she called me or
