I didn't say anything.
“You see?” Porter said. “It could have been murder, couldn't it?”
SEVEN
When I left North Beach I drove over to the foot of Clay Street and got onto the freeway interchange, heading south for Redwood City. As I drove I mulled over what Porter had told me. Not suicide-murder. Well, it was a possibility, as he'd said; and it would make an intriguing mystery out of Crane's death. But the police had determined that there was no way for a locked-room gimmick to have been worked, and I had a healthy respect for the SFPD Homicide Detail; I knew a lot of the men who'd been on it over the years, from my own days on the cops and from my friendship with Eberhardt, who had worked that detail for a decade and a half as inspector and then lieutenant. No, if they'd felt Crane's death was suicide, then it must have been suicide. And never mind why he decided to lock the office door before he put his. 22 Browning against his temple and pulled the trigger. He'd been drunk at the time, depressed and overwrought; a man in that condition is liable to commit any sort of irrational act.
Sure, I thought, sure. But all the same I wanted a look at the police report-if it still existed and if Eberhardt could find it. Even the best of cops makes mistakes now and then, just like the rest of us.
It was a little past noon when I reached the Redwood City exit off 101. For the San Mateo county seat, it's a quiet little town sprawled out on both sides of El Camino Real and the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Not nearly as affluent as Atherton and Palo Alto to the south, or Burlingame and Hillsborough to the north. Just a town like a lot of other towns, with a fair amount of low-income housing along tree-shaded streets. A few writers had lived there over the years, some of whom had written for the pulps. I wondered if any of those were still alive and if Russ Dancer knew them. And if he did, if he had anything in common with them after all these years.
I pulled into a Chevron station near Broadway, the main downtown arterial. And pumped my own gas while a fat, indolent teenager looked on, waiting to take my money. Self-service at gas stations is one of my pet peeves. High prices, and you do all the work yourself. What the hell did attendants like this one do to earn their salary? Not much, that was for damned sure. Instead of walking over to where he was, I got back into the car so that he had to move his fat in order to get paid. Small satisfaction, but you take your satisfactions where you can these days.
I took another one by sitting there at the pump for an extra couple of minutes while I dug a Redwood City street map out of the bag of maps in the glove compartment and looked up Stambough Street, Dancer's last known address. Only it wasn't Stambough, it was Stambaugh: I had mistaken an a for an o in the scrawled return address on Dancer's Christmas card envelope. Stambaugh Street was only a few blocks from where I was, not far off Broadway-more or less downtown and more or less close to the SP tracks.
But I didn't go there directly after I left the nonservice station. I stopped instead on Broadway and went into the first cafe I saw to eat lunch. I was hungry, and Dancer isn't somebody you want to deal with on an empty stomach.
I took my copies of Axe Marks the Spot and Axe of Mercy with me, and skimmed through them while I ate. Neither one had an Italian villain in it. I couldn't recall which of the others did have; it had been too long since I'd read them. I would have to go see Kiskadon later on and check through his copies.
With a cheese omelette and a glass of iced tea under my belt, I drove to Stambaugh Street. The number I wanted turned out to be a somewhat seedy rooming house near a block-long thrift store: a sprawling, two-story Victorian with turrets and gables and brick chimneys, all badly in need of paint and general repair. Two sickly palm trees grew in a front yard enclosed by a picket fence with a fourth of the pickets broken or missing altogether. Nice place. Every time I crossed paths with Dancer, he seemed to have tumbled a little further downhill.
I parked in front and went through the gate and up onto the creaky front porch. There was only one entrance and no marked mailboxes to identify who lived there. Just a doorbell button and a small card above it that said ROOM FOR RENT-SEE MANAGER. I tried the door, found it locked, and pushed the bell. Pretty soon somebody buzzed me into a dark hallway that smelled of Lysol and, curiously, popcorn. The somebody-a woman-was leaning out of a doorway beyond a flight of stairs, giving me a squint-eyed look.
I went over to her. The door was marked MANAGER and the woman was about fifty, gray-haired, wearing sequin-rimmed glasses. She had a face like something in an old, discolored wallpaper pattern-the gargoyle kind.
“Something I can do for you?” Brillo-pad voice, like Lauren Bacall with a sore throat.
“I'm looking for a man named Russell Dancer.”
Her mouth got all quirky with what I took to be disgust. “Him,” she said. “You wouldn't be a cop, would you?”
“I wouldn't. Why?”
“You look like a cop. Dancer's been in jail before.”
“In Redwood City, you mean?”
“Sure. He been in jail somewhere else too?”
He had, but I wasn't about to tell her that. “What was he arrested for?”
“Drunk and disorderly, what else? You a bill collector?”
“No.”
“Process server?”
“No. He does still live here?”
“Yeah, he lives here. But he won't much longer if he don't start payin his rent on time. He's just like my ex-a deadbeat and a bum. This was my house, I'd throw him out on the fuckin street.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Right out on the fuckin street,” she said.
“What's his room number?”
“Six. Upstairs.”
“He in now?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? If he ain't you can probly find him at Mama Luz's, over on Main. That's where he does his drinkin when he don't do it here.”
“Thanks.”
“Don't mention it. You a friend of his?”
“Religious advisor.”
“What?”
“His religious advisor. I'm teaching him how to love his neighbor. Maybe you'd like a few lessons too.”
“Fuckin wise guy,” she said, and shut the door in my face.
I went upstairs, found the door with the numeral 6 on it, and whacked it a couple of times with the heel of my hand. Nobody answered. On impulse I tried the knob: Dancer had forgotten to lock it, or just hadn't bothered. I poked my head inside. Just a room, not much in the way of furnishings; clothing strewn around, an empty half-gallon jug of Lucky Stores generic bourbon, a scatter of secondhand paperbacks that had probably come out of the thrift store nearby. I didn't see any sign of a typewriter or a manuscript or anything else that a professional writer ought to have lying around.
I shut the door and went back downstairs and out into the warm sunshine. It was a nice day down here, cloudless, with not much wind; the Peninsula is usually ten to twenty degrees warmer than San Francisco and this day was no exception. I left my car where it was and hoofed it along Stambaugh to Main Street. Mama Luz's wasn't hard to find. It was half a block to the west, and its full name, spelled out on a garish neon sign, was Mama Luz's Pink Flamingo Tavern. Some moniker for a sleazy neighborhood bar. I crossed the street, shook my head at the scrawny pink flamingo painted on the front wall, and went through an honest-to-God set of batwing doors.
The interior wasn't any better than the exterior. The usual bar arrangement, some warping wooden booths, a snooker table with a drop light over it, and a mangled jukebox that looked as if it had been mugged: broken glass top, caved-in side, and a big hole punched or kicked in its midsection. I would not have liked to meet the guy who had done all that damage, even if he'd been justified.