“Have you checked the state mental institutions? She was quite unbalanced and should have been confined.”
Garreth wrinkled his forehead. “Then why did you drop the charges?”
Claudia shrugged. “As a favor for a friend, Don Lukert, the manager of the Red Onion. He was afraid the owners might be upset by the implication prostitutes worked the club, though of course we did, and openly…so I agreed to drop the charges if he’d fire her and use his influence to see that she couldn’t find another job in North Beach. He did and I did.”
Vindictive bitch, Garreth thought. Aloud he said, “This manager. Is his name Donald Lukert?”
“No, Eldon.”
“Do you know where he is today?” Mr. Lukert might have known something about his singer.
Claudia shook her head. “I could afford to get out of the game after Armistice and dropped my old acquaintances.” She smiled. “I was a war profiteer…all those young soldiers and sailors with pay burning a hole in their pockets, hungry for female companionship and sex as an affirmation of life, even if they had to pay for it. And I saved every penny I could, eventually investing in construction when one of my last johns talked about how all those returning soldiers were going to create a housing boom.”
Her eyes focused past him. “You know the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett swears she’ll never be hungry again? That was me in 1933! My family almost starved during the Depression. I started turning tricks at thirteen to help us eat…skinny as a rail, dressed in rags, giving head jobs and stand-ups in alleys, as often for a loaf of bread or can of beans as cash.” She grimaced at the memory
Thirteen! Garreth shuddered inwardly at the thought of being that desperate.
“Until I used some money from one trick to go to Gone with the Wind. It changed my life! The scene where Scarlett turned curtains into a dress to go visit Rhett Butler was my light on the road to Damascus. If you’re going to sell yourself, it told me, do it with style and don’t sell yourself cheap.” She glanced around complacently, caught him checking out the room, too, and laughed. “As you see, I haven’t.”
The story showed him what drove her social climbing, and brought admiration for her survivor and opportunist skills. Lane’s youth spanned the same era. Had it turned her into a killer?
That jerked him back to his reason for talking to Claudia. “So you lost track of Lukert?”
She nodded. “I did go by the Red Onion a few years later but it had changed name and ownership. Don wasn’t there. If he’s still in the city, he’s probably in a nursing home now. He was in his late forties back then.”
“Did Mr. Lukert ever talk to you about Miss Babra?”
“Oh, a couple of times perhaps. We had some laughs over how grotesque she was.”
A determined survivor, but still a bitch, Garreth reflected.
“She tried to claim she was a Balkan princess. She carried the blood of ancient nobility in her veins, is how she put it. She gave Don some fantastic story about having escaped from eastern Europe ahead of Hitler’s storm troopers. But she wasn’t European. That Bela Lugosi accent she used came and went all the time, and a client of mine heard her speaking what she claimed was her native language and said it was nothing but a hodgepodge of German and Russian.”
Garreth made a note of that. German matched Lane’s choice of names, but where did the Russian fit in? Possibly hers had been a mixed German and Russian community? Insular enough to keep speaking their own languages in addition to English.
After asking questions for another ten minutes without learning anything more useful, he closed the notebook and stood. “I think that’s all I need. Thank you for your time.”
She escorted him to the door, speaking in a voice pitched to carry. “I’m so glad to hear Kate’s doing well. I really must give her a call. Thank you so much for her number.”
Garreth sighed in relief as the door closed behind him. She never came close to asking for his ID. Keep smiling, Lady Luck.
6
Anything Records had on Eldon Lukert had long since gone into deep storage, and he found no telephone listing for an Eldon Lukert in the greater San Francisco area. Garreth went through all the office’s phone books, including Oakland, Marin County and as far south as Palo Alto and still came up empty. Claudia might be correct in her opinion he was in a nursing home. That was something impossible to check at this hour, so he spent the rest of the night writing up reports. Alone and with no interruptions he finished them shortly before dawn.
He crashed onto his pallet at home as daylight mashed him.
Until the piercing beep of his alarm clock dragged him back to consciousness after noon. Being a creature of the night in a mostly daylight world sucked. Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved, he forced a smile.
That, at least, he enjoyed. They still had Harry plugged into a battery of machines and a web of tubes plugged into him, but his eyes looked less sunken and his voice had improved from a croak to a breathy rasp. Lien looked more like her old self, too.
“And how are you,” she wanted to know.
He smiled at her. “Feeling righteous. I finished all my reports.”
“So you’re leaving for your folks’ soon?”
He shook his head. “I have a couple of things to see to here first.” At the flash of concern in her eyes he said, “Housekeeping. Shopping.” He plucked at the jeans beginning to hang on him like a homeboy’s. “A few new clothes.”
Necessary at some point, true…sooner if his boots quit fitting. Today he shopped for Eldon Lukert.
Letting his fingers do the walking…sitting in his apartment with the phone book. He started with the A’s in the nursing home section of the yellow pages and worked his way through the listings. one phone call at a time. If necessary, he was prepared to call every home in the Bay Area.
He thought he might have to. He struck out on every San Francisco facility down to the W’s. Then he thought Lady Luck smiled again. Not only could he feel sunset coming, the woman answering at the Windsong Adult Care Home said, “Eldon Lukert? No, we don’t have a patient by that name now but it sounds familiar. Just a minute.” She went off the line.
Garreth crossed his fingers.
She came back several minutes later. “We did have an Eldon Lukert until last month.”
“That’s the gentleman I need. Can you tell me where he went?”
She paused. “I’m sorry. He didn’t leave in the sense you mean. He died.”
Garreth hung up and slumped back in his chair. Crap. Dead ends came no deader than that. Now what? Trying to track other former associates needed their names, which meant attempting to look at the Bieber file. Even if he managed that and got the names…and found some of them — he lucked out with Claudia — would they know anything more personal than Claudia had. The closest they had to personal information on her were her belongings.
The apartment had to be the key. Somewhere among those pieces of her, collected and kept over the years, there must be a clue to where she came from, and from that, some indication where she might go to hide. If only he could find it.
Driving to the apartment, he approached the door with caution. He had been invited in once. Would it still hold good, as the legend said? Or would the fiery pain bar him again?
At the door, his body still felt cool and comfortable. He leaned against the door. Still no fire seared him.
That hurt as much as ever.
He leaned against the wall inside, breathing deeply until the pain faded. How dark the hall had looked that first time he walked down it behind Lane Barber. No more. For once he felt appreciated his vampire vision; he could move around the apartment and study it all he needed without lights to arouse the curiosity and suspicion of neighbors.
He stepped into the living room…and jerked to a halt in shock.
