Garreth would have gone for Chiarelli’s throat, but he could only lean against the wall and concentrate on breathing.
“Sorry, man; it has to look real.”
No worry about that, Garreth reflected bitterly.
“See you around, man.” Chiarelli slipped out the door.
Garreth continued to lean against the wall for several more minutes, then made his way slowly back to the site of the bust.
Seeing him coming, Harry exclaimed, “Garreth!” and rushed to catch his arm. “What happened? Are you all right?”
Garreth leaned against a handy car, holding his stomach. “Bastard ambushed me. I thought I was never going to make it up off that damned floor.”
“So you let him get away, hot dog?” Woodhue said.
Several prisoners snickered. Garreth glared at them. “Next time I won’t bother chasing him. I’ll hobble the son of a bitch with a piece of lead.”
Harry helped him to a car. “Nice acting,” he whispered.
Remembering Chiarelli’s smirk, Garreth said, “Who the hell is acting?”
He sat silent all the way back downtown. Not until they had left the Narcotics officers and returned to Homicide did he give the notebook to Harry. “We’d better run these names, then find out who owns or lives in these houses.”
Harry regarded him with concern. “Are you sure you’re all right? Maybe you ought to go home and take it easy the rest of the day.”
“I’m fine. We have work to do.” He started to take off his coat and winced as the motion stretched bruised muscles.
Harry hustled him toward the door. “Go home. I’ll tell Serruto what happened.”
“I’m fine,” Garreth said.
“No one who refuses time off can possibly be fine. Go home.”
Eyeing Harry’s frown, Garreth sighed. “Yes, papa-san.”
He left Chiarelli’s pages of his notebook with Harry and headed for his car. After slipping the key into the ignition, though, he sat without starting the engine. As much as he hurt, he hated the thought of going home. He ought to give up the apartment with all of its sweet and painful memories and find another. Perhaps one of those places around Telegraph Hill that Mrs. Armour owned.
The thought of them told him what he really wanted to do. He wanted to see Lane Barber again, to talk to her by daylight and find answers for the increasing number of questions she raised about herself. Then he started the engine.
8
She did not come to the door until Garreth had rung the bell five times. He realized she must be sleeping and would find his visit inconsiderate and inconvenient, but he remained where he stood, leaning on the bell. She finally opened the door, wrapped in a robe, squinting against the light, and he discovered that even by daylight, she looked nothing like a woman in her thirties. If anything, she seemed younger than ever, a sleepy child with the print of a sheet wrinkle across one pale, scrubbed cheek.
She scowled down at him. “You’re that mick detective. What — ” Then, as though her mind woke belatedly, her face smoothed. He watched her annoyance disappear behind a facade of politeness. “How may I help you, Inspector?”
Why did she bother to swallow justifiable irritation? Did police make her that nervous? Perhaps it was to observe this very reaction, to see what she might tolerate to avoid hassles, that he had persisted on the bell.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he lied. “I have a couple of important questions to ask.”
She squinted at him from under the sunshade of her hand, then stepped back. “Come in.”
Moving with the heaviness of someone fighting a body reluctant to wake up, she led the way to the living room. Dark drapes left the room in artificial night. She switched on one lamp and waved him into its pool of light. She herself, however, sat in a chair beyond it, in shadow. A deliberate maneuver on her part?
“This couldn’t wait until I got to the club?” Irritation leaked through the careful modulation of her voice.
“I’ll be off duty by that time. I try not to work nights if I can help it; the police budget can’t stand too much overtime.”
“I see. Well, then, ask away, Inspector.”
With her face only a pale blur, Garreth found himself listening closely to her voice, to read her through it…and discovered with surprise that she did not sound like he felt she should. Inexplicably, the voice discorded with the rest of her.
“Can you remember what you and Mossman talked about Tuesday night?”
She paused before answering. “Not really. We flirted and made small talk. I’m afraid I paid little attention to most of it even while we were talking. Surely it isn’t important.”
“We’re hoping that something he said can give us a clue to where he went after leaving the Barbary Now. Did he happen to mention any friends in the city?”
“He was far too busy arguing why we should become friends.”
Suddenly Garreth realized why her voice seemed at odds with the rest of her. She did not talk like someone in her twenties. Where was the slang everyone else used? Just listening to her, she sounded more like his mother. What was that she had called him at the door? A mick. Who called Irishmen micks these days?
Garreth looked around, trying to learn more about her from the apartment, but could see little beyond the circle of lamplight. The illumination reached only to a Danish-style couch which matched his chair and a small desk with a letter lying on it.
He said, “Did he tell you he was married?”
“He wore a wedding ring.”
“Of course.” Garreth stood up and moved toward the door. “Well, it was a slim chance he’d say anything useful, I suppose. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” On the way, he detoured by the desk to read the address on the letter. Knowing someone she wrote to might be useful.
“It’s a price I pay for my unusual working hours.” She stood and crossed to the lamp. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”
Garreth had just time enough to read the ornately written address before the light went out, leaving the room in darkness.
On the steps outside, after her door closed behind him, he reread the address in memory. The letter had to be incoming; it had this address. However, it had been addressed not to Lane Barber, but to Madelaine Bieber. The similarity of the two names struck him. Lane Barber could well be a stage name, “prettied up” from Madelaine Bieber.
He eyed the garage under the house as he came down the steps to the sidewalk. Did she drive or did she not?
He tried the door. Locked. However, by shining a flashlight from his car through the windows, he made out the shape of a car inside and illuminated the license plate. He wrote down the number.
Motion above him brought his attention up in time to see the drape fall back into place in the window over the garage. Lane, of course, watching him, but…out of curiosity or fear? Maybe the license number would provide an answer to that.
Back at the Hall, he ran Madelaine Bieber’s name through Records and asked for a registration check on the license number.
“The car is registered to an Alexandra Pfeifer,” the clerk told him. The address was Lane’s.
“Give me a license check on that name.”
The picture from DMV in Sacramento looked exactly like Lane Barber. Miss Pfeifer was described as five ten, 130 pounds, red hair, green eyes, born July 10, 1956. Which would make her twenty-seven.
Then Records came back with a make on Madelaine Bieber. “One prior, an arrest for assault and battery. No conviction. The charges were dropped. Nothing since. She’s probably mellowed with age.”
Garreth raised a brow. “Mellowed with age?”
“Yeah,” the Records clerk said. “The arrest was in 1942.”
Garreth had the case file pulled for him. Madelaine Bieber, he read, had been singing in a club in North Beach called the Red Onion. A fight started with a female patron over a man, and when the woman nearly had her ear bitten off, she preferred charges against the singer. Miss Bieber, aka Mala Babra, was described as five ten, 130 pounds, red hair, green eyes, claiming a birth date of July 10, 1916. The mug shot looked exactly like Lane Barber in a forties hairstyle.