No answer. No sound.
I tried again, got more of the same, and dropped my free hand to the doorknob. It turned freely. The only way to tell if that meant something or nothing was to go in there, fast and low, with the gun extended. I held a breath, started to open the door.
“Hey, you over there.”
Woman’s voice, behind me. I snapped my head around, letting go of the knob, shoving the .38 down out of sight. She hadn’t seen the weapon; she was in the doorway of an apartment across and down the hall, 305, and she stayed there when I turned to face her.
I put on a smile that felt tight and strained. “Yes, ma’am?”
“He ain’t there,” she said. “That crazy cueball better not show his face around here again, he knows what’s good for him. You wouldn’t be a cop?”
“Not exactly.”
“What’s that mean, not exactly?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Relative of the cueball’s or what?”
“No. Business matter.”
“Business.” She snorted through her nose, a sound like a goose honking. “Monkey business, hah?”
I relaxed a little and moved over to where she stood. She was close to seventy, her round red face a mass of folds and seams like an apple that had been desiccated by the elements. Stringy gray-black hair lay in flat, sparse curls on a dandruff-flecked scalp. She wore a chenille bathrobe that looked as old as she was, and even at a distance of three feet I could tell that she had a fondness for sweet wine.
“He owes me something,” I said.
“Money?”
“Not anymore. When did you see him last?”
“Night I called the cops on him, that’s when.”
“What night was that?”
“Last Friday night. Hell, Saturday morning — three A.M.”
“Why? What happened?”
“What didn’t happen, you mean. Cussing, yelling, screaming, shooting, you name it. Woke up the whole damn building.”
“Shooting?”
“Fired a gun over there. Boom! I know a gunshot when I hear one.”
“Manganaris and a woman, is that right?”
“That’s what I told the cops. Him and his dolly, fighting, busting up the furniture, her screaming like a banshee. Then the gun went off, boom! and pretty quick she come running out like the devil himself was after her. I had my door cracked by then, and I saw her.”
“Was she carrying anything? A briefcase?”
“Had something in one hand, might’ve been a briefcase. All doubled over, clutching her middle. I didn’t see no blood, though. I don’t think she was shot.”
“What about him?”
“He come staggering out four minutes and eleven seconds after she did. I timed it on my clock.”
“Staggering, you said. Was he shot?”
“Didn’t see no blood on him, neither. But he was spitting cuss-words and holding his head. I hope she did shoot him. Serve that crazy cueball right for beating up women, wrecking a decent person’s sleep.”
“He been back here since?”
“Better not come back. I’ll call the cops again if he does, file another complaint against him.”
“You’re sure he hasn’t been here, even once?”
“Sure I’m sure.” Then she frowned, snorted, and breathed more cream sherry fumes at me. “What kind of question is that? You think I got nothing better to do than spy on my neighbors?”
“I didn’t mean it that way...”
“I’ll have you know I’m a respectable woman who minds her own business,” she said with haughty indignation and retreated into her apartment and slammed the door.
I walked soft to 302, eased the door open and myself inside, the .38 drawn in spite of what the woman had said. The apartment was two rooms of tasteless bargain-basement furniture, empty beer and wine bottles, the rotting remains of a couple of take-out meals. There’d been a fight in here, all right. Tables and chairs were askew, the shards of a ceramic lamp and cigarette butts from an upended ashtray littered the threadbare carpet, a cheap picture had been knocked off one wall and its glass splintered in the drop. There was a scorched hole in one of the sofa cushions that was large enough to have been made by a bullet; I dug around in the foam-rubber padding and found the slug, examined it briefly for traces of blood. Didn’t seem to be any. If Annette Byers had fired the gun, she’d evidently missed. Or possibly they’d struggled over it, and it had discharged that way. She must have smacked Manganaris with something — the gun, that busted lamp, one of the empty wine bottles — to put him down for those four minutes and eleven seconds.
There was nothing else for me in the living room, or in the pocket-size kitchenette, or in the equally tiny bathroom. In the bedroom, the sheets on the double bed were soiled and wadded together. The top of the single nightstand held an overflowing ashtray and a glass stained with red wine residue; the drawer under it was empty except for an opened package of condoms and a well-used crack pipe. The crack pipe said the police hadn’t bothered to search carefully; the fact that the door had been left unlocked confirmed their sloppy handling of the complaint.
The drawers in the bureau contained nothing that held my attention. Closet next. A few shirts and pants and a denim jacket on hangers, a pile of soiled clothing on the floor. Manganaris hadn’t spent much of his income, legal or illegal, on clothes or luxury items; most had probably gone for drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and food. The only other item in the closet was a battered old sailor’s duffel bag. It didn’t make him ex-navy or ex-merchant marine; you could buy duffels like that one in any army-navy store. At first I thought it was empty, but when I brushed my hand over an inside zipper compartment, something made a crinkly sound. I fished it out.
An old nine-by-twelve color photograph, wrinkled and torn along a couple of its edges. Posed group shot of a high school football team decked out in green-and-gold uniforms. A two-line boldface caption read:
Below that was a list of names, but the type was tiny and the light too poor in there for me to make them out. I took the photo into the bathroom, which had a stronger bulb, and used the little gadget magnifying glass on my keychain to scan the names. Second row, third from the left: Harold “Mean Joe” Manganaris. I squinted at the face that went with it. Yeah. He’d had all his hair then, but the bushy eyebrows and the snarling mouth were the same.
There was nothing on the front or back of the photo to tell me where East Central Valley High School was located. Tamara’s meat. I went back to the living room, to the phone I’d seen in there. It was still operational; I used it to call the agency. No problem, Tamara said, as long as East Central Valley was a California school. The State Board of Education would have a complete list. She’d know one way or another in a few minutes.
I folded the photograph, tucked it into my coat pocket, and let myself out. The mummified minder of her own business was peering out through her front door again. She said, “Hey, what you been doing in there? You ain’t got no right to be in there.”
“The door was unlocked.”
“Yeah? I thought those cops locked it when they were done poking around in there Friday night.”
“Evidently not.”
“You still ain’t got no right to be in there. That crazy cueball finds out, he won’t like it.”
“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like,” I said. “I told you, he owes me.”
“You didn’t steal nothing, did you?”
“No. There’s nothing worth stealing.”
“You sure about that? Nothing at all?”
“Why don’t you go over and have a look for yourself?”
She didn’t like that; she made a catlike spitting noise as I went past her and yelled at my back, “I ain’t that kind! I don’t trespass on other people’s property! Who you think you are anyway? I ought to call the cops on you!” She was still ranting as I went through the door to the stairwell.