18
My visit to Barber and Associates was unproductive. The agent in charge of the Dogpatch property lease was a middle-aged black woman named Royster; I got her to talk to me on the grounds that I was conducting a routine insurance investigation that peripherally involved R. L. McManus. Ms. Royster was unaware McManus was in the habit of subletting a room, but she didn’t seem to be particularly concerned about it. She checked the lease agreement to determine if there was a clause forbidding sublets; there wasn’t. Ms. McManus had been a model tenant, she said, always paying her rent on time, not once requesting repairs or improvements to the property, and making no complaint when the monthly nut was increased, as it had been twice in the seven years she’d lived there.
Ms. Royster knew nothing about McManus’s background or personal life, other than the fact that her references had been impeccable. Knew nothing about Jane Carson, either. Even if there had been something in the file that might have been pertinent, she probably wouldn’t have confided to me what it was. Privileged information.
The only new thing I learned from her-and it wasn’t much-was that the owners of the house, an elderly couple now residing in Burlingame, had also operated a dog-boarding service on the property. The established existence of kennels and dog run was probably what had attracted McManus to it seven years ago.
The visit to Barber and Associates may have been wasted, but a second trip to Dogpatch wasn’t. My first stop there, The Dog Hole, yielded a little info of the sort I was looking for-enough to put Tamara on the scent again.
The rail-thin elderly guy I’d spoken to the first time around occupied the same bar stool, sipping port and playing a quiet game of solitaire. Cheating at it, too: he switched a king and queen in a row of hearts as I sat down next to him. Lonely, bored, drinking just enough to maintain a mild sedative buzz-a man with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, marking time.
He remembered me, he was grateful for the company, and my offer to stand him to another drink made him friendly and gregarious. His name was Frank Quarles, he said, and chuckled and tacked on a mild joke he’d probably told a few hundred times before: “My late wife used to say we was well named because we sure did have a lot of ’em. Quarrels, get it?”
I chuckled to let him know I’d gotten it, then told him I was still looking for the man in the photograph. He hadn’t seen Virden since last Tuesday, he said. I eased the conversation around to McManus’s roomers. Quarles couldn’t recall any of the women, but when I brought up the old man Selma Hightower had mentioned, it struck a chord in his memory.
“Oh, sure, him,” he said. “I’m seventy, but he was a real geezer. One foot in the grave and the other on a bar stool.”
“He came here regularly, did he?”
“Pretty regular for a while. Two, three months.”
“Then what happened?”
“Just stopped showing up. Figured he must’ve passed over.”
“You spend much time with him?”
“Not much, no sir. Damn near deaf, so he kept pretty much to himself. Nice old bird, though. Wasn’t above buying a round for the house now and then.”
“Sounds like he had money.”
“Must’ve. Wore this old black overcoat with a velvet collar. Made out of lamb’s wool, he said.” Quarles aimed a glance at the muscle-bound bartender, lowered his voice. “Drank good Scotch, too. Not the blended bar crap they serve here. Twelve-year-old single malt.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Well… it’s been a while and my memory’s not what it used to be.” Up went the voice again. “Hey, Stan. You remember that old guy came in regular for a while last year? Drank single malt Scotch?”
“Glenlivet. What about him?”
“Remember his name?”
“Nope. My business is drinks, not names.”
I said to Quarles, “Maybe another glass of port will help you dredge it up,” and signaled to the bartender.
“Thank you, sir.” Quarles closed his eyes, his face screwed up with effort. Pretty soon he opened them again and sighed and shook his head. “Just can’t quite get it. Foreign name, that’s all I can remember.”
“He was a foreigner?”
“Not anymore. American citizen.”
“What nationality?”
“Greek. Sure, I remember that now.” Quarles took a sip of his port. “Came over here when he was a kid, made his money in the restaurant business. What the devil was his name? Papa something. No, it sounded like ‘papa.’” Another sip, another frown that suddenly morphed into a smile. “Pappas. That’s it, Pappas.”
“First name?”
“Wasn’t Greek. American. Wait, now… same as that actor, tall fella, played in a bunch of Westerns.”
“John Wayne?”
“No sir, no, not the Duke. Famous, though, won an Oscar for that film about the lawyer and his family down south. Had ‘bird’ in the title…”
“ To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck.”
“That’s it. Real fine actor. How could I forget his name?”
“Gregory, then-Gregory Pappas. You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. Yep, pretty sure.”
I left Quarles smiling wistfully over what remained of his port and drove up 20th Street past the McManus house. Nobody around, the driveway empty, the Room for Rent sign still absent from the front fence. No sign of Alex Chavez’s Dodge, either. Been here and gone-I wondered how he’d made out.
Selma Hightower wasn’t home. At least, nobody answered the bell. I tried to recall which of the other neighbors had been cooperative on my first canvass, picked the likeliest of them, and was hoofing it around the corner on Minnesota Street when my cell phone went off.
Tamara. With news from Alex Chavez about McManus and Carson.
“If Alex can stay with them long enough, we’ll have some idea of where they’re going,” she said when she’d relayed the gist of it. “Wherever it is, it’s north out of the city.”
“If he’s right, they’re heading for the bridge.”
“Must be on it by now. He’d’ve called back if they’d turned off. Bet you they’re running.”
“Maybe. What do you think spooked them into it?”
“Us, our investigation.”
“Virden’s disappearance? If they’re responsible, they went through a lot of trouble to cover it up and as far as they know they got away with it. Why cut and and run now?”
“They can’t be sure we’re not close to nailing their asses.”
“Would that be enough reason for you to suddenly throw up everything and take off? Because somebody might be getting close? Running is an admission of guilt, you know that.”
“What about the ID theft?”
“Minor crime compared to homicide or manslaughter. And hard to prove without a complaint being filed. Virden didn’t call the law on them and neither did we. No, that’s not it.”
“Something to do with the property or the house? Like maybe a dead body that’s starting to stink and they don’t know what to do with it?”
“Jesus. You have a gruesome turn of mind sometimes.”
“Well, that couldn’t be what happened to Rose O’Day,” Tamara said. “Over three years ago that she went missing. I wish we had the names of the more recent roomers.”
“I’ve got one name,” I said, and relayed what I’d been told about Gregory Pappas. “It may or may not be the
