slammed on the brakes and the edge of the sidecar took me hard and low on the rib cage. I climbed out swearing, said ‘Wait’ ill-naturedly and hobbled off to where the sliding doors were closing behind Milton-Smith’s narrow shoulders and sticking-out bum.
Inside it was dark enough to screen Casablanca. When my eyes got used to the gloom I saw Milt waiting by the elevators with a flock of secretaries carrying files and folders. He was impatient, shifting from foot to foot, and nervous, scratching at his thinly covered skull. We all piled into the elevator and I lined up behind Milt as he touched button six.
At six he got out, turned left and walked down a short corridor. I hung back and watched him go into an office marked Palmer F. Wong-Realty amp; Investments. I hung around for fifteen minutes and no one went in or out of the office. Milt was in conference.
Back on the street, I filled Swan in.
‘What does it mean?’ he said.
‘Don’t know. He loses money to Chinese gambling, and here he is ensconced with a Chinese money man after getting a phone call from a guy he hired to harass you. It has to hang together somehow.’
‘We could shake it out of him,’ Swan said.
Just then Milton-Smith came out of the building. Swan ducked his head and fiddled with his goggles but I took a good long look. The man with Milt was about six foot four and couldn’t have weighed less than two hundred pounds. He had a shaven skull and only one ear; the other side of his head was just smooth, waxed, yellow skin. He took long bouncy strides as if he liked to feel the sidewalk under his feet. I wondered what else he could do with his feet.
Swan had shot them a quick look. ‘Guess not,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Well, the answer’s there, in that building.’
I sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. You better go home. I’ll call you in the morning.’
I was cold and tired by the time I had a fix on the security arrangements for what I was privately calling the Wong building. The place basically emptied at 5 o’clock with a few over-achievers hanging around till six or a little past. A security patrol van came by at seven; an armed man looked for lights, used a telephone in the lobby and then locked up. The van came back at nine; a guard checked the front door, a side service door and the small underground parking lot.
I walked a couple of blocks to get warm, called a cab and went back to the city. I had a late dinner near the hotel and crawled into bed not looking forward to the next day, and wondering why I didn’t just chuck it and fly back to Sydney. I knew why-I liked Swan, I’d taken his money and I wanted to know what was going on.
‘I thought you were going to do it last night,’ Swan said when I called him.
‘That shows how much you know about the detective business. It’s tonight. Milt in today?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How’s he looking?’
‘Nervous.’
‘You see that big Chinese with the one ear?’
‘No.’
‘That’s right, you wouldn’t. I’ll call you again tonight.’
I spent the early afternoon buying a few things. At 4 o’clock I was back at the Wong building in Berkeley. By 4.40 I was lying across the beams inside the acoustic tiles, maybe two metres above the toilets, in the men’s room on the sixth floor. I’d used the toilet before I’d climbed up into the space which was about half the size of a telephone booth. Among my effects I had a flask of whisky and a strong flashlight. I’d wound my watch.
The time passed slowly and it was hard not to sneeze. I climbed down at 6.45 and snuck a look down the corridors. There was a light near the elevator, otherwise the whole floor was dark. At 7 o’clock, phones started ringing; one rang on every floor and then there was silence. Working by the flashlight, it took me ten minutes to get in Mr Wong’s secretary’s room and another five to get into the inner sanctum. In the strong beam I picked out individual objects-a big, tidy desk, a wet bar, chairs, two filing cabinets.
Filing cabinets are a pushover and some systematiser had made it easy for me. The first cabinet contained a folder labelled SWAN. I took it over to the desk, sat down and went through it. The song it sang was clear if not sweet. Daniel Swan had filed a number of preservation requests on San Francisco buildings with the Heritage Committee and the City Hall when he began working as a tour guide. From his hastily written letter to the City, with the building designations filled in by hand, it seemed that this was a routine procedure. The applications had been put on open review by the City, which effectively blocked applications to demolish or substantially alter the said buildings. A proposal by Fenner A. Wong for a re-development of the Baltimore Building site had been refused, with Swan’s preservation request cited as the grounds.
I looked in vain for Milt under ‘M’ but I found him under ‘S’. He owed Kwong-Ping Wong of Washington Street slightly more than fifteen thousand dollars, and had taken out an unsecured loan with Palmer F. Wong for just that amount.
I used the Nashua copier in the outer office to make several copies of all documents, put the files back and locked up after me. At the bottom of the fire stairs was a door with a padlock on it which led out to the car park. I was ready for padlocks and this one didn’t give me any trouble.
A light showed into O’Farrell Street from the shop. I rattled the door and Swan opened it with the hand that wasn’t holding money.
‘How’s the take?’
‘Lousy.’
We went back to the register, stepping over the boxes and weaving between the untidy tables.
‘Your troubles are over,’ I said. ‘Or maybe they’re just starting.’ I laid out the documents on the counter. Swan got two beers from his loft and took a long swig before reading. I remembered my flask and had a shot and a chaser. He started to smile on the third page and it had spread, broad and winning across his narrow, dark features by the time he’d finished.
‘Shit,’ he said and drained his can, ‘I’d forgotten those preservation requests.’
‘Very enlightening. Why the grin?’
He picked up one of the photocopy sheets and rustled it. ‘It’s the wrong building.’
‘What is?’
‘This one, the Baltimore. A magazine writer nominated it as the Fat Man’s hotel and I went along with him when I was just starting out. I put in a request on it, but I know better now. It doesn’t fit. I haven’t taken the tour past there in a year. Didn’t you notice, Hardy? Couldn’t have been paying attention. I can lift that request tomorrow.’
‘What about the building?’
‘An eyesore. Wong can call Milt off. Say, he must be the one stole my bird. Hardy… can you…?’
I had another shot and put the whisky away. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘might as well. Where’s the phone book? Here’s what we do.’
Milt lived in South San Francisco and my third cab of the day made a sizable hole in Swan’s tour money. If everything worked out, I planned to hit him for the expenses. I could give him the burglar’s tools for a keepsake. It was a bland, anonymous street and a bland anonymous apartment block, the kind of place you go to once and forget forever. I unshipped the. 38 and stuck it up the Chinese’s wide, flaring nose when he opened the door.
‘Back up,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to where the phone is. It’s going to ring soon.’
He looked at me carefully and seemed to decide it would be worthwhile letting me live a few minutes longer. I followed him down a hallway to a small living room where Milt was sitting at a table with a pack of tarot cards laid out in front of him. He looked up at me with his struggling thought processes showing on his gnomish face.
‘In the shop,’ I said. ‘ Canticle for Leibowitz, and in Kwong-Ping’s on Washington, and in the elevator to Mr Wong’s office.’
Bewilderment followed puzzlement and I felt sorry for him. The Chinese loomed against a book-shelf filled with Sci-Fi paperbacks and if I hadn’t known he was inscrutable I’d have thought he was impatient. The phone
