“Annette Byers?”
“I doan recall her name.”
“Tall, leggy, streaky blond hair, early twenties.”
“Big tits? Yeah, that’s her. Sumbitch Dingo set us up with a undercover narc and her and me got busted. Not him. He got off clean, that boy.”
“Why didn’t you take him down with you?”
“I sure wanted to, but she said we dasn’t, he’d kill us if we did. He would’ve, too. Sumbitch’s meaner’n a sore-dick dog.”
“You have any contact with him since you were paroled?”
“Nossir. No way. I ever see him again, I run the other way.”
“How about with the woman?”
“Her neither.”
“How’d you get involved with the two of them?”
“Met her one night at this here club in Belmont.”
“The Alamo?”
“Right, the Alamo.”
“She hang out there or what?”
“Not her, me. She come in one night with some friends.”
“Dingo one of them?”
“No. Wasn’t ’til later that I met up with him.”
“Where was that?”
“Party at some old boy’s house.”
“What old boy?”
“Slick named... Duke. Yeah, Duke.”
“Duke what?”
“I doan remember. Honest.”
“Where was the house?”
“Frisco somewheres.”
“What street?”
“I doan remember.”
“What part of the city?”
“I doan know Frisco, man.”
“Who else was at this party? Jay Cohalan?”
“Who?”
“Jay Cohalan. Another friend of Annette Byers.”
“Never heard the name.”
I described Cohalan. Bright said, shaking his head, “Nosir, uh-uh.” It sounded like the truth, which made me wrong about him being Cohalan’s supplier. It had to have been Dingo, then, through Byers. She was the Alamo connection, not Bright. Cohalan had either met her there as Bright had or she’d taken him there after they were together.
I said, “So Dingo was at this Duke’s party. Who invited you? Byers?”
“Yessir. Made it seem like we was gonna ball, her and me, but once we got there she was all over him like a blowfly on a turd. Sweet little piece like her, and him with a face that’d pucker a hog’s ass. He must have some whang on him, on’y thing I can figure.”
“How’d they hook you into the meth deal?”
“Well, he had some crystal on him and I done bought me some. I was flush at the time, I ain’t sayin’ how come. Dingo, he says he needed more cash for a big buy he was setting up. I wished I didn’t listen to him, but he was pretty slick. Snot-on-a-doorknob slick, that boy. A thousand buy-in gets me a fast five thou on the street. Uh-uh. All that thousand got me was a year in jail.”
“Anybody else in on the deal with you three?”
“Nossir. Just us.”
“Where was Dingo living then, do you know?”
“With her, I reckon. Couple times we met, it was at her place.”
“He have a job? The legit kind, I mean.”
“A job...” Bright frowned, winced, held his head. “Seems one of ’em said something once ’bout him working part-time for some moving company.”
“Which moving company?”
“Doan remember if they said which one.”
“But it was in the city?”
“Frisco, yeah, I think it was.”
“What else can you tell me about Dingo? Where he came from, other people he knew?”
“Nothing. If I ever knew something else, I done forgot it.” He blinked at me again. “That sumbitch in trouble? That how come you asking all these questions?”
“He’s in trouble, all right. You don’t want to know any more than that.”
“Reckon I don’t,” Bright said. “Can I make my call now? I’m scared as hell I’m gonna lose my job.”
“Where’ll you be if I need to talk to you again?”
“Huh? Right here, that’s where.”
“Not moving out on Kirsten?”
“I cain’t. I give up my own place on account of her and her goddamn speed. I ain’t got nowheres else to go.” He turned his hands palms upward, a gesture at once rueful and resigned. “No damn place to go except straight back to jail.”
17
So now I had most of it.
Dingo: Second-generation Australian, or else in this country long enough to have lost most of his accent. Possibly a part-time worker for a San Francisco moving company as of two years ago. Crankhead and small-time crank dealer. Shacked up or at least sleeping with Annette Byers before she took up with Jay Cohalan, and evidently still tight with her during the affair. Big, hard, mean, violent, and not very bright — a deadly combination.
Scenario: Cohalan meets Byers, probably at the Alamo. He’s already worked out the scam to get his hands on his wife’s inheritance in small bites, and makes the mistake of confiding this to Byers. She in turn tells Dingo and the two of them cook up a scheme to doublecross Cohalan and steal Carolyn Dain’s money for themselves. She works on Cohalan to go for the big bite, all the remaining inheritance money in one payoff, no doubt using sex as the lure. He gives in, they set it up. And that’s when I come into it, the monkey wrench that fouls up the works.
It was Dingo, not Cohalan, that she was waiting for at her apartment Thursday night. Cohalan wasn’t supposed to show at all, at least not until it was too late and Dingo and Byers had made off with the cash; that was why she was surprised to see him. And when Dingo finally arrives and finds Cohalan there and the money gone with me, he’s furious. Cohalan is the first target of his rage, right away or after he’s driven out to Daly City and found Carolyn Dain gone. By this time the money’s an obsession fueled by frenzy and drugs. One option is to go after me, but for all he knows I’ve already turned over the seventy-five thousand. He decides to wait for Carolyn Dain to come home. Meanwhile, sometime that night, they load a beaten-up Cohalan into his car and take him out by Candlestick, one of them driving the Camry and the other following. Exit Cohalan.
When Carolyn Dain returns to her house on Friday, Dingo is waiting for her. She tells him I still have the cash, he forces her to make those calls to my office. Then he kills her and waits for me to make the delivery. He’s worked up a pretty good hate for me by then, for all the trouble I’ve caused him, so I’m scheduled to die, too. After the misfire, the fight, the money grab, he’d still want me dead but not badly enough to risk stalking me. The money’s all he really cares about. So he and Byers go on the run, or to ground somewhere, or buy a load of crank to sell, or do any number of other things with the cash.
The scenario played out. That was the way it had gone down, or close to it.
All right. There was one more thing I needed to know, and one thing left for me to do. Yeah, just two little things.
Find out Dingo’s real name.
And then find him and Byers.
Tamara was on the phone when I came into the office. So I went and got the San Francisco Yellow Pages and spread them open on my desk. Movers and Full Service Storage. Christ, there were twenty-six pages of listings-full-page ads, half-page ads, spot ads, box ads, and single lines of names and addresses. A couple of hundred companies large and small, from AA Worldwide Moving to Zandor Transportation, Inc. It would take Tamara and me the rest of today and part of tomorrow to canvass all the numbers, and at that we’d get answering machines, nonresponses, and a bunch of uncooperative individuals...
Something tickled the back of my mind, but it got lost when I heard the phone go down on Tamara’s desk. I glanced over there. “Anything?”
“Might be,” she said. “That was Grant Johnson I was talking to.”
“Who?”
“Father of Byers’ kid. I finally tracked him down. He’s a plumber, lives up in Woodland now.”