thoroughly. He’d also checked out Leonard thoroughly. And was satisfied that Leonard had had no violent old enemies, hadn’t professionally or personally offended or antagonized any individual or group of individuals in recent weeks, was not in serious debt to anyone, had no ties to any criminal element. His law practice had been small but thriving, with a mixed client list of gays and straights; and he was financially well off. The official police theory in his case was that he had been shot by an intruder on the hunt for money or valuables.
That was the way things stood-more or less in limbo-when I got to the office at nine o’clock on a Thursday morning, one week after the shooting. Eberhardt wasn’t in yet; he likes to keep executive hours, a habit that irritates me sometimes because the agency is mine, not his, and he wouldn’t be a part of it if I hadn’t felt sorry for him after his early retirement from the SFPD a couple of years ago and taken him in as a full partner. Still, coming in late most mornings was a minor annoyance. He was a good man to work with where and when it counted-a good friend. All things considered, the partnership had turned out much better than I’d expected it would.
I got coffee brewing on the hot plate and wished there were some way to turn the heat up; it was cold and drizzly outside and chilly in here. But no, the landlord-Sam Crawford, a cigar-smoking fat cat who owned buildings in every slum and depressed neighborhood in the city and referred to his tenants as “my people” — had decreed that the cost of heating this building was much too high. And to insure that the real estate outfit on the first floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor, and us on the third floor didn’t try to countermand his dictates, he kept the furnace turned on just twelve hours each day, as required by San Francisco law, and had it regulated so that just enough heat reached the radiators to maintain a sixty-degree maximum, no matter what the weather was like outside. Consequently, on mornings like this you had to either wear heavy sweaters or keep your overcoat on while you worked. The only reason Eberhardt and I were still here was that office space was at a premium in the city these days; we couldn’t have found a place as large as this, anywhere in the general downtown area where we needed to be, for less than the eight hundred a month we were paying Crawford. The son of a bitch knew that as well as we did. If you’d asked him he would have said he was taking care of “my people” by regulating the heat instead of raising the rent. He was a cutey, he was. About as cute as a vulture on a fence post.
Without taking off my coat I sat down and poked through the papers on my desk. Not much there; things were a little lean at the moment. I had wrapped up some work for the plaintiff in a civil case yesterday, a simple skip-trace two days before that; and last Saturday I’d had the matter of Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr., and his unpaid-for Mercedes XL wrapped up for me.
The reason Alfred Henry and his lady friend, Eileen Kyner, hadn’t shown up at her house was that they’d been on a gambling and boozing spree in Nevada. At approximately four A.M. on Saturday, they had staggered out of a casino in downtown Reno, gotten into the Mercedes parked in a nearby lot, and Alfred Henry had gunned it out into the street. Unfortunately for him, the street happened to be occupied at the time by a Reno police car on patrol. The cops up there take a dim view of drunks running into them at four A.M., particularly deadbeat drunks from California, so Alfred Henry was still in the slammer. Eileen Kyner had bailed herself out and come home; she had not bailed Alfred Henry out because, she had told the police, he (a) had lost a thousand dollars of her money playing blackjack; (b) had made a drunken pass at one of the lady blackjack dealers when he thought she’d gone off to the potty; (c) was lousy in bed anyway; and (d) deserved to rot in jail, schmuck that he was, for doing something so monumentally stupid as mating his Mercedes with a police car. The Burlingame auto dealer who actually owned the Mercedes was not amused, considering that Alfred Henry’s monumental stupidity had caused several hundred dollars’ damage to the front end of said Mercedes. Once the damage was repaired he’d either have somebody drive it back from Reno or sell it up there at a loss, just to be rid of it. As for me I got paid for my time even though I hadn’t managed to repossess the Mercedes; it wasn’t my fault Alfred Henry was a drunken schmuck as well as a deadbeat.
All I had working now was a background investigation on a guy in San Rafael who had applied to Great Western Insurance for a very large double indemnity policy on his life. Insurance companies get edgy when private individuals apply for such policies. Skeptics and cynics all, they worry that maybe there is some ulterior motive behind the application. Fraud, for instance. Such as an intention to commit suicide under the guise of a fatal accident. My job was to gather as much background material on the individual as possible and turn it over to the insurance people; I could also provide a recommendation, if I was so inclined, but they were the ones who made a final decision as to whether or not to issue a policy. If they did issue it and they got burned, they couldn’t put the onus on me. Not legally, anyhow. There were a couple of companies in the Bay Area who had got burned and who had refused to hire me anymore because of it. But I didn’t have to worry about that happening with Great Western: their chief claims adjustor, Barney Rivera, had been a poker buddy for years. He threw a good deal of business my way, and I handed it back with plenty of care.
I was looking through the application and the other papers Barney had given me yesterday when I heard the door open. I glanced up, expecting to see Eberhardt, but instead I was looking at somebody I had never expected to see again: Tom Washburn.
He said formally, “Good morning. I’d like to talk to you, if you have the time.”
“Of course, Mr. Washburn.”
He shut the door, looked briefly around the office before he came ahead to my desk. The place didn’t seem to make much of an impression on him, but that was all right: it had never impressed me either. It had once been an art studio and the owner of the studio had got permission to put in a skylight; the skylight was the place’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was just a big room full of furniture, a couple of pieces of which-Eberhardt’s mustard-yellow fiberboard file cabinets-were pretty hideous to look at. Also hideous to look at was a hanging light fixture that just missed being obscene, intentionally on the part of its manufacturer or otherwise.
Washburn sat stiff-backed on one of the clients’ chairs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He was wearing black shoes, black slacks, a black shirt, and a black leather coat-a typical getup for some gays in the city. But it didn’t look right on him, and the thought struck me that it was a mourning outfit. There was no question that the death of his lover had affected him profoundly: his face was pale, haggard, with discolored pouches under his eyes; and the eyes themselves had a tragic, haunted look. I felt a sharp twinge of pity for him. I understood what he was going through, because I had known too many others who had suffered the same kind of pain. It was what I would have been going through myself if I had lost Kerry the way he had lost Leonard.
I said, “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
He didn’t answer for a time. Then he seemed to shiver slightly and said, “Yes, all right. It’s cold in here.”
“The landlord’s a jerk. He won’t allow the heat turned up past sixty.”
I got up and poured two cups of coffee. When I asked him if he took anything in his he said no, just black. I gave him his cup, took mine around the desk, and reoccupied my chair. He sat holding the cup between both hands, as if they were cold; they were pale hands, delicate-looking, the skin almost translucent, so that you could see the fine blue tracery of veins running through them.
At length he said, “I came here because I want to hire you. I don’t know what else to do, who else to turn to. You were kind the night Leonard… the night it happened, and I thought…” He let the words run out and looked down into his cup, as if he might find more words in there.
“Hire me to do what, Mr. Washburn?”
“Find the man who killed Leonard.”
“There’s nothing I can do that the police aren’t doing,” I said gently. “Give them enough time and they-”
His head jerked up. “Enough time? My God, they’ve had a week, haven’t they? They haven’t found him yet. They won’t find him, damn them, because they won’t listen to me. They simply won’t listen. ”
“Listen to you about what?”
“About the phone call and the missing money,” he said. “About Leonard’s brother, Kenneth. I can’t make them believe me!”
“Take it easy,” I said, “slow down a little. You think there’s a connection between Kenneth’s death and Leonard’s?”
“I don’t think there is, I know there is.”
“How do you know it? Leonard’s last words aren’t really much to-”
“No, not that. The call last week, three days before Leonard was shot. The man on the phone.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know. A stranger-a voice I didn’t recognize.”
“He called you, this stranger?”
