The narrow interior stairway went straight up from the street. He climbed it to the tune of a rapid-fire typewriter. When his eyes were level with the floor, he glanced to his right and was staring at the high-heeled shoes and shapely calves of a woman behind a desk beside the stairs. Her thighs were hidden in the desk’s cubbyhole.
The office was made into an L by a supply storeroom at the head of the stairs. Windows with Venetian blinds ran the length of the long wall overlooking Franklin Street. More windows over Bush Street. There was a partitioned private office with windows on both streets and the door closed.
On the desk were two telephones, a typewriter, an intercom box, In and Out baskets stuffed with letters, papers, and file folders. The woman herself was in her mid-thirties, blond, tall and slender but well formed. Her shirt was white, man-tailored, with a gold stickpin holding it together at the throat. What he could see of her skirt was dark blue.
“You come to repossess the furniture?”
Dunc started. “I beg your pardon?”
Her narrow sharp-featured face had good cheekbones, a thin wide lipsticked mouth, and smart brown eyes under pale brows. “You were looking the place over pretty good. Or did you just come up to try and see my legs from the stairwell?” Dunc felt himself coloring up. He had been, without realizing it. “Don’t worry — better men than you have tried and failed.”
Dunc cleared his throat. “I... I’d like to see Mr. Cope.”
She pushed a button on a box on the top of her desk. There was no answer, but she seemed to expect none. Drinker Cope came out of the private office in his shirtsleeves. He looked solid and somehow very tough despite his benign pink features.
“My fucking sins catch up with me.” He turned to the woman. “Sherry, this is the one I was telling you about.”
“Your bastard son from Toledo,” she said without levity.
Dunc felt like someone who’d come into the film at the start of the second reel. “I... Down in L.A. at the Labor Day picnic you said—”
“I was drunk at the Labor Day picnic.”
“Your bastard son from Los Angeles?” asked Sherry.
“You said I’d make a good detective,” Dunc blurted out.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” said Sherry, and threw up her hands.
“I said you might develop into a good investigator. Might. With hard work and experience I ain’t gonna pay you to get.”
“You told me to look you up,” said Dunc stubbornly.
“You’ve looked me up,” said Drinker Cope. “G’bye.”
“Try me out for a week. If you don’t like my work, you don’t owe me anything.” Cope turned on his heel. Dunc said to his back, “And I can outshoot you any fucking day of the week.”
Sherry laughed out loud. Cope’s hard eyes were unreadable in that rubicund face. “One week, be here at eight tomorrow.”
The blonde stuck out her hand. “Sherry Taft. Charmed.”
“Pierce Duncan. Dunc.”
“The sign says investigations, commercial and domestic. We take any case that walks in the door,” said Drinker. “Good guy, bad guy, legal, borderline, we go all the way. That bother you?”
“No.”
Sherry said, “Where are you staying?”
“Nowhere yet. But I—”
“Ma Booger’s. We stash witnesses there sometimes.” She was writing on her memo pad. “Mrs. Adelaide Boger. Three blocks down Franklin and a half-block to the left, 1117 Geary just up from Tommy’s Joynt. Seven bucks a week.” She handed him the memo slip. “Welcome aboard.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The room was big, with twelve-foot ceilings and two eight-foot windows with frayed lace curtains and pull-down shades. Two single beds, made up, and a small round table with a floor lamp and a sagging easy chair under the window. An open closet was in the left wall, half taken up by a narrow chest of drawers.
“It’s got a nice little kitchen counter and its own sink and a two-burner gas hot plate,” said Mrs. Adelaide Boger. “But I’ll only charge you seven a week ’cause Sherry recommended you.”
He didn’t much care what the room looked like as long as it was clean. He wouldn’t be spending a lot of time there.
“There’s a shower and a bathroom at each end of the hall, very convenient.”
The chest-high kitchen counter had two tall straight-back stools beside it. Inside the cubbyhole beyond were a sink and a counter with the gas hot plate beside it. Cabinets overhead.
“This is great,” said Dunc, wreathing her face in smiles.
“You just stop by the office and sign the register when you’re unpacked,” she said.
He hung things in the closet, stuck his underwear and shirts in the chest of drawers, bounced on the bed a couple of times, put his notebooks on the round table, then went down to his landlady’s office at the head of the street stairs.
Adelaide Boger was in her late sixties, a fleshy German lady with a kindly face and concerned eyes behind thick glasses; her big nose, red from allergies, made Ma Booger a natural.
Confident Cope would hire him, Dunc paid a month’s rent up front. Ma Booger gave him a front door key and a room key on a ring with a tab that had 1117 Geary stamped into it. She also told him Tommy’s Joynt on the corner was a San Francisco tradition.
It was jammed. Along the left wall was the bar with a hundred different kinds of beer. At a hot-food counter on the right wall under the Geary Street windows, beefy chefs with tall white hats and long carving knives cut sandwiches to order — “carved before your eyes!” A house special was buffalo stew. Dunc had to have that; it tasted pretty much like stringy beef.
He was up at six and beat another guy to the shower. Foster’s all-night cafeteria, catty-corner across the Van Ness/Geary intersection from Tommy’s Joynt, had something called toasted English muffins: an order was two of them, hot and crispy and drenched in butter. Wonderful!
He opened the agency street door at 7:45 to the rapid-fire staccato of Sherry’s typewriter.
“You’re early. I like that. Coffee?”
“No thanks. I... don’t like it much.”
Today she wore a navy-blue dress and white trim at throat and wrists. Her desk was covered with case folders — one opened — and a yellow legal pad with scrawled notes on it, some underlined, others with exclamation points beside them.
“Skip-tracing,” she said. “When a subject — the person the case is about — takes off and doesn’t want to be found, he’s called a skip. He’s skipped out. We try to track him down, trace him — skip-trace. You’re a field agent. You talk to people, follow people, find people, window-peep, serve subpoenas, go undercover to stop employee theft, check government records — everything that can’t be done by phone from the office.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Only Drinker deals with the clients. The client doesn’t want to hear that Drinker’s working a slew of other cases at the same time, he doesn’t want to hear that some field agent is working his case instead of Drinker. Got it?”
“Got it,” said Dunc.
“Not yet, but you will, believe me. Drinker is going to assign you just one single case, because you’re new to the game. But it’s a tough nut we haven’t been able to crack. Subject, Chauncey Jones, who was a municipal bus driver in Dayton, Ohio. Walked out on his wife and kids three years ago, left ’em without a bean. Nine months ago he came into a sizable inheritance.”