At that I could count myself lucky. Jackie Spoons didn’t consider me a threat; if he had he’d have sent a hardcase or two to deliver the message, with fists and weapons to back it up. Or brought it to me in person. The fact that he’d given the job to a punchdrunk old man was a show of contempt for me and my troubles.
Well, I could live with that — for now. The puzzler was why he’d thrown me Dingo. What was the connection between the two of them, the reason for Jackie Spoons’ dislike of the Aussie? And the main question: Was Dingo the bald man? I didn’t remember any sort of accent, but Baldy had spoken only a few words, and I’d been under enormous tension; and an Australian might have been in this country long enough to have Americanized his speech. Dingo could be the bald man, all right. Or a link to him. Or nothing more than just another bottom-feeding pawn.
In the car I tried calling Tamara; the line hummed and buzzed emptily. I accessed the office answering machine and listened to three different voices, none of them hers or Nick Kinsella’s. No calls, no messages: no news.
Working Sunday for me but not for most other people. Joe DeFalco wasn’t home, either.
I couldn’t think of anybody else to call, anyplace to go, anybody to see. Tomorrow, yes, but tomorrow was a long way off. I drove around for a while, aimlessly; all it did was give me too much down time to spin my thoughts and listen to the clicks. So I went home to Kerry and Emily and took them to the Palace of Fine Arts and then the aquarium and then to North Beach for an Italian dinner. Keeping them close, surrounding our little unit with strangers — getting through the rest of the day.
But none of it was much good. Nothing was going to be much good until I found Baldy. Only then would I be able to start living again.
14
Ben Duryea had one of the more thankless jobs in law enforcement. For nearly a quarter of a century he’d been a parole agent for the California Department of Corrections. Parole agents are what they’re called now, to distinguish them from the county-hired probation officers, but oldtimers in or close to the system still refer to the breed as either parole officers or POs.
The thing about POs is that they work like dogs. Each has a caseload that is supposed to run around one hundred, but because of prison overcrowding and little enough funding to increase a too-low workforce of some eighteen hundred agents, most carried between a hundred-and-fifty and two hundred cases. Their job was to provide general supervision of criminal offenders and to help them adjust to life in the community after their release, which in fact meant arranging jobs, housing, medical care, counseling, education, social activities; traveling widely to interview clients, family members, acquaintances, employers; conducting searches, surveillance, and drug testing when necessary; and making arrests of parole violators, agents being required by law to carry firearms. For all of which duties they were paid between forty thousand and fifty thousand dollars annually, before taxes. The attrition rate was pretty high; only dedication, inertia, and decent civil service benefits kept it from being much higher.
I caught Duryea in his office at the Ferry Building early Monday morning — just barely. He was getting ready to leave on a three-day trip to the Salinas-Monterey area, where half a dozen of his clients were currently located. POs spend a lot of time away from their desks and on the road. I was fortunate to connect with him at all without an appointment.
“I can give you ten minutes,” he said. “What do you need?”
“A line on one of your people. He may have information connected to a case I’m working.”
“Something I should know about?”
“I can’t be sure until I talk to him.”
“You’ll let me know if there is?”
“Right away.”
“What’s his name?”
“Charlie Bright. Charles Andrew Bright.”
“Bright, Bright. I don’t... wait a minute.” He leaned over to flick on his computer, then tapped the keyboard and squinted at the screen through black-rimmed glasses. He looked tired, the kind of weariness that makes an intaglio of a man’s face. I had a dim memory of Duryea as a young PO with a fresh degree in criminology from Cal State Fullerton, lean and earnest and full of zeal. Now he was twenty pounds heavier, yet he still seemed almost gaunt; the lines in his forehead and cheeks were deep-cut, and his once prominent widow’s peak had thinned and receded at least three inches. It takes a toll, all right. His kind of work — and mine.
“Oh, yeah, Charles Andrew Bright.” Duryea took off his glasses briefly to rub his eyes. “There was a time,” he said ruefully, “when I prided myself on instant recall — all my clients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, personal data. Now I can barely remember to take a leak when I get up in the morning.”
“I hear you.”
“Bright’s low-priority, though. You know his history?”
“Some of it.”
“No problems since he was released. Regular reports. What do you want to know?”
“For starters, what he looks like. I’ve never seen him.”
“Skinny kid. Red hair, blue eyes, freckles.”
Scratch Charlie Bright. “What’s his current address?”
“Let’s see... rooming house in Oakland.”
“Employed where?”
“Warehouseman and driver for Eastside Meat Packers in Emeryville.”
He gave me both addresses, and I wrote them down. “How about relatives in the area?” I asked then.
“No relatives in California. One aunt in Texas, but she’s in a nursing home.”
“Other contacts?”
“Not as far as I know. He keeps pretty much to himself these days, or so he claims.”
I asked, “Any of these names in his files?” and ticked off Dingo, Jay Cohalan, and Jackie Spoons. Negative on each. If there was a connection between Bright and any of them, it was buried.
“Anything else?” Duryea said.
“Well, I can use a copy of Bright’s photo.”
“That’s against the rules.”
“I know it. But technically so is giving out verbal information to somebody not in the system. Just a small extension of the favor, Ben.”
He made a blowing sound. The young Ben Duryea might have refused me; the tired, middle-aged Ben Duryea said, “I suppose if I had my printer on and I happened to hit the right buttons and you happened to be standing over here while my back was turned...”
He tapped a couple of keys and the printer began to hum and whir. It didn’t take long for a photo printout to appear. Duryea was on his feet, shrugging into his jacket, when I plucked Charlie Bright’s likeness out of the tray, glanced at it briefly, and folded it into my pocket.
“Time for me to hit the road,” he said. He straightened his tie, yawned, rotated his head the way you do when your neck is stiff, and then grimaced. “Christ, some days. I’m getting too old for this job.”
“Some jobs are like that.”
“Don’t tell me you never think about packing it in, spending more time with your family instead of with the bottom feeders. Hell, your face looks like you got into it with one or two of that type recently.”
He’d been too busy to read the papers or listen to TV news, which allowed me to ignore the second statement and respond only to the first. “Sometimes,” I said.
“I think about it a lot. But I probably won’t do it. Die on the job instead of in the saddle at home in bed... of a massive coronary if not some jerkoff’s Saturday night special. My problem is, I never learned how to relax. Maybe guys like us can learn, though. You think?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we can.”