I had only two of Harmon Crane's Johnny Axe novels-the first, Axe Marks the Spot, and Axe of Mercy. It had been a while since I'd read either one, and it seemed like a good idea to refamiliarize myself with his work when time permitted. I tucked the two books under my arm and went back into the nice, neat living room. And right out of it again. It was lonely in there, now that Kerry had murdered all my old friends, the dust mice.
Eberhardt wasn't in yet when I got to the office; he seldom shows up before nine-thirty and sometimes not until ten. I opened the window behind his desk to get rid of the stale smell of his pipe, after which I filled the coffeepot from the bottle of Alhambra water and put it on the hotplate. Morning ritual. I completed it by checking the answering machine and discovering-lo! — that there weren't any messages.
I sat down and rang up San Mateo County information and asked the operator if there was a listing for Russell Dancer. There wasn't. Damn. Now I would have to drive all the way down to Redwood City, on what might well be a wild goose chase. The way Dancer moved around, one hop and two skips ahead of his creditors and the IRS, he could be somewhere else in California by now. Like in an alcoholic ward, or maybe even in jail. With Dancer, anything was possible.
Well, I had one other lead to follow up first: Stephen Porter, Amanda Crane's friend. I dialed the number I'd copied out of the directory yesterday, and this time I got an answer. The right one, too, for a change. A scratchy male voice, punctuated by coughs and wheezes, informed me that yes, he was Adam Porter's brother and yes, he would be willing to talk to me, either before eleven or possibly after three, though he might be busy then, because he had classes between those two times, not to mention lunch, heh, heh (which was either a feeble chuckle or some sort of nasal gasp). I said I could come over right away and he said fine and gave me the address. After which he hacked again in my ear, loud enough to make me wince, and hung up.
The telephone rang almost immediately after I cradled the handset. Michael Kiskadon, bubbling over with eagerness and curiosity. How was my investigation going? Had I found out anything yet? Who had I talked to? Who was I going to talk to? I gave him a brief verbal report, assured him I would be in touch as soon as I had something definite to report, and told him I had an appointment to get him off the line. But I had a feeling I'd be hearing from him again before long. He was that kind of client, and clients like that can be a pain in the ass.
Eberhardt breezed in just as I was about to leave. He was all smiles this morning, chipper and cheerful and whistling a spritely tune. “Coffee,” he said, sniffing. “Man, can I use some of that.”
“Big night, huh?”
“Yeah, well,” he said, and smirked at me.
“You not only got laid last night,” I said, “you got laid this morning. Not more than an hour ago, in fact. You had to hurry getting dressed so you wouldn't be any later than you usually are.”
He gawped at me. “How the hell did you deduce all of that, Sherlock?”
“Your fly's still open,” I said.
North Beach used to be a quiet, predominately Italian neighborhood, the place you went when you wanted pasta, Chianti, a game of bocce, conversation about la dolce vita and il patria d'Italia, the company of mustachioed waiters in gondolier costumes singing arias from operas by Puccini and Verdi. Not anymore. There are still Italians in North Beach, and you can still get the pasta and Chianti and conversation, if not the bocce and the singing waiters; but their turf has been reduced to a mere pocket, and the vitality and Old World atmosphere are little more than memories.
The Chinese are partly responsible, having gobbled up North Beach real estate when Chinatown, to the west, began to burst its boundaries. Another culprit is the so-called beatnik or Bohemian element that took over upper Grant Avenue in the fifties, paving the way for the hippies and the introduction of drugs in the sixties, which in turn paved the way for the jolly current mix of motorcycle toughs, aging hippies, coke and hash dealers, and the pimps and small-time crooks who work the flesh palaces along lower Broadway. Those topless and bottomless “Silicone Alley” nightclubs, made famous by Carol Doda in the late sixties, also share responsibility: they had added a smutty leer to the gaiety of North Beach and turned the heart of it into a ghetto.
Parts of the neighborhood, particulary those up around Coit Tower, where the Cranes had once lived, are still desirable, and in the shrunken Italian pocket you can still get a sense of what it was like in the old days. But most of the flavor is gone. North Beach is tasteless now, and hard and vague and unpleasant-like a week-old mostaccioli made without spices or garlic. And that is another thing that is all but gone: twenty-five years ago you couldn't get within a thousand yards of North Beach without picking up the fine, rich fragrance of garlic. Nowadays, you're much more likely to smell fried egg roll and the sour stench of somebody's garbage.
Stephen Porter's studio was on Vallejo Street, half a block off upper Grant. It was an old building, the entrance to which was down a narrow alleyway plastered with No Parking signs. A hand-lettered card over the topmost of three bells read: 1A-Stephen Porter, Sculptor. And below that: Lessons Available.
I rang the bell and pretty soon the door lock buzzed. I went into a dark hallway with a set of stairs on the right and a cat sitting on the bottom step giving me the once-over. I said, “Hello, cat,” and it said, “Maurrr,” politely, and began to lick its shoulder. The hallway ran past the stairs, deeper into the building; at the far end of it, a door opened and a man poked his head out. “Down here,” he said.
I went down there. “Mr. Porter?”
“Yes, that's right. You're the gentleman who called? The detective?”
I said I was, and he bobbed his head, coughed, wheezed a little, and let me come in. He was about sixty, a little guy with not much hair and delicate, almost womanish hands. The hands were spotted with dried clay; so was the green smock he wore. There was even a spot of clay on the knot of his spiffy red bow tie.
The room he led me into was a single, cavernous enclosure, brightly lit by flourescent ceiling tubes, that looked as if it had been formed by knocking out some walls. Along one side was a raised platform piled high with finished sculptures, most of them fanciful animals and birds. At the rear was a curtained-off area, probably Porter's living quarters. The rest of the space was cluttered with clay-smeared tables, a trio of potter's wheels complete with foot treadles, drums full of pre-mixed clay, and some wooden scaffolding to hold newly formed figures while they dried. Spread out and bunched up on the floor were several pieces of canvas, all of them caked with dried spatters of clay. But they hadn't caught all of the droppings, not by any means: what I could see of the bare wood underneath was likewise splotched.
“There aren't any chairs out here, I'm afraid,” Porter said. “We can go in back, if you prefer…”
“This is fine. I won't take up much of your time.”
“Well,” he said, and then turned away abruptly and did some more coughing and hacking, followed by a series of squeaky wheezes. When he had his breath back he said, “Emphysema.” And immediately produced a package of Camels from the pocket of his smock and fired up.
I stared at him. “If you've got emphysema,” I said, “why not quit smoking?”
“Too late for that,” he said with a sort of philosophical resignation. “My lungs are already gone. I'll probably be dead in another year or two anyway.”
The words gave me a chill. A few years back, when I was a two-pack-a-day smoker myself, I had developed a lesion on one lung and spent too many sleepless nights worrying that maybe I'd be dead in another year or two. The lesion had turned out to be benign, but I still hadn't had a cigarette since. It was a pact I'd made with whatever forces controlled the universe; and so far they had kept their end of the bargain by allowing me to go on living without medical complications.