Garreth saw one problem: identification. It was all very well saying on the phone he was from the police. What did he do when she asked to see ID at her house? Well, he could put in the fix if necessary. “Will this evening be convenient?”
“This evening? You’ve made me curious about what’s so urgent. How old are you?”
His turn to stare baffled at the phone. “Twenty-seven.”
“That’ll work. Come on out.”
That baffled him even more. What would work?
The heavy front door at her address bore an ornate lion’s head knocker in the middle. Before he touched it, the door swung open. A pouter pigeon of a woman looking the epitome of grandmother and matron eyed him, then nodded. “Yes, you’ll do. You even look a little travel worn.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You are the detective who called, aren’t you? Mikaelian?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re Claudia Thouvenelle?”
“Yes. Please come in, and follow my lead. What’s your first name?”
“Garreth.” He followed her to a set of double pocket doors down the hallway.
She slid open one and leaned into the library behind it. “James,” she said to the man sitting in a leather chair, “This is Garreth Kane, the son of my old girlfriend Katherine. You remember me telling you about her, don’t you? Gary’s on a five-hour layover to Tokyo and Kathy asked him to come by while he was here. We’ll be across the hall chatting if you need me.”
That explained her remarks.
The man nodded, and she led Garreth across the hall to a living room, where she settled on a sofa. She met his eyes with her own, unnaturally blue — contact lenses? — and cool as ice. “I see no need to reveal the long-dead past to my husband, though understand I’m not ashamed of it. I even find the idea of talking about those days after all these years a bit nostalgic. What do you want to know about that madwoman?”
“Everything you can tell me: who she was, where she came from, who her friends were.”
She blinked, in disappointment, Garreth would have sworn. “I don’t know anything except that she nearly disfigured me. She was crazy. It wasn’t my fault if the naval officer preferred me to her. Who wouldn’t prefer a woman-sized woman to that great galumphing elephant?”
Garreth silently compared the matron with her blue hair and crepe-skinned neck to the redhead still looking twenty, who had her choice of men to bed and bleed. Yes, a woman her height in those days might meet some ridicule but Lane had the last laugh on her generation now.
“May I ask what your interest in her is after all these years?”
“We think she has information we need on a current investigation.”
“Have you checked the state mental institutions? She was quite unbalanced and should have been confined.”
Garreth wrinkled his forehead. “Then why did you drop the charges?”
Claudia shrugged. “As a favor for a friend, Don Lukert, the manager of the Red Onion. He was afraid the owners might be upset by the implication prostitutes worked the club, though of course we did, and openly…so I agreed to drop the charges if he’d fire her and use his influence to see that she couldn’t find another job in North Beach. He did and I did.”
Vindictive bitch, Garreth thought. Aloud he said, “This manager. Is his name Donald Lukert?”
“No, Eldon.”
“Do you know where he is today?” Mr. Lukert might have known something about his singer.
Claudia shook her head. “I could afford to get out of the game after Armistice and dropped my old acquaintances.” She smiled. “I was a war profiteer…all those young soldiers and sailors with pay burning a hole in their pockets, hungry for female companionship and sex as an affirmation of life, even if they had to pay for it. And I saved every penny I could, eventually investing in construction when one of my last johns talked about how all those returning soldiers were going to create a housing boom.”
Her eyes focused past him. “You know the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett swears she’ll never be hungry again? That was me in 1933! My family almost starved during the Depression. I started turning tricks at thirteen to help us eat…skinny as a rail, dressed in rags, giving head jobs and stand-ups in alleys, as often for a loaf of bread or can of beans as cash.” She grimaced at the memory
Thirteen! Garreth shuddered inwardly at the thought of being that desperate.
“Until I used some money from one trick to go to Gone with the Wind. It changed my life! The scene where Scarlett turned curtains into a dress to go visit Rhett Butler was my light on the road to Damascus. If you’re going to sell yourself, it told me, do it with style and don’t sell yourself cheap.” She glanced around complacently, caught him checking out the room, too, and laughed. “As you see, I haven’t.”
The story showed him what drove her social climbing, and brought admiration for her survivor and opportunist skills. Lane’s youth spanned the same era. Had it turned her into a killer?
That jerked him back to his reason for talking to Claudia. “So you lost track of Lukert?”
She nodded. “I did go by the Red Onion a few years later but it had changed name and ownership. Don wasn’t there. If he’s still in the city, he’s probably in a nursing home now. He was in his late forties back then.”
“Did Mr. Lukert ever talk to you about Miss Babra?”
“Oh, a couple of times perhaps. We had some laughs over how grotesque she was.”
A determined survivor, but still a bitch, Garreth reflected.
“She tried to claim she was a Balkan princess. She carried the blood of ancient nobility in her veins, is how she put it. She gave Don some fantastic story about having escaped from eastern Europe ahead of Hitler’s storm troopers. But she wasn’t European. That Bela Lugosi accent she used came and went all the time, and a client of mine heard her speaking what she claimed was her native language and said it was nothing but a hodgepodge of German and Russian.”
Garreth made a note of that. German matched Lane’s choice of names, but where did the Russian fit in? Possibly hers had been a mixed German and Russian community? Insular enough to keep speaking their own languages in addition to English.
After asking questions for another ten minutes without learning anything more useful, he closed the notebook and stood. “I think that’s all I need. Thank you for your time.”
She escorted him to the door, speaking in a voice pitched to carry. “I’m so glad to hear Kate’s doing well. I really must give her a call. Thank you so much for her number.”
Garreth sighed in relief as the door closed behind him. She never came close to asking for his ID. Keep smiling, Lady Luck.
6
Anything Records had on Eldon Lukert had long since gone into deep storage, and he found no telephone listing for an Eldon Lukert in the greater San Francisco area. Garreth went through all the office’s phone books, including Oakland, Marin County and as far south as Palo Alto and still came up empty. Claudia might be correct in her opinion he was in a nursing home. That was something impossible to check at this hour, so he spent the rest of the night writing up reports. Alone and with no interruptions he finished them shortly before dawn.
He crashed onto his pallet at home as daylight mashed him.
Until the piercing beep of his alarm clock dragged him back to consciousness after noon. Being a creature of the night in a mostly daylight world sucked. Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved, he forced a smile. It’s showtime, folks. Time to play human. And he went off to visit Harry.
That, at least, he enjoyed. They still had Harry plugged into a battery of machines and a web of tubes plugged into him, but his eyes looked less sunken and his voice had improved from a croak to a breathy rasp. Lien looked more like her old self, too.