Dunc shook his head. She slammed the door in his face. He heard the dead bolt being shot home. The nearest liquor store was a narrow storefront on Bayview.
He asked the colored clerk bluntly, “Did Chauncey Jones get his booze here?”
“Who’s askin’?”
“Mr. Green.”
Dunc’s dollar disappeared with dazzling speed.
“Jes ’fore he quit comin’ in here, he bought him a jug of Wild Turkey. That stuff costs, man. Said the ponies was gonna make him well. Had him a lady ovah in the East Bay. Near to Golden Gate Fields.” He squinted his eyes. “Amanda. Brought her in here once, she shook my hand.”
“You don’t remember her last name, do you?”
“No, I... Wait a sec! Amanda... Harris. That was it! Amanda Harris. I ’member ’cause I got me a Uncle Harris.”
Dunc wasn’t even sure what — or where — the East Bay was. He drove back to the office. Since it was his first day, he felt he ought to write a report. Sherry said, “Even your shoes sound tired. Did you hit the wall?”
“I’ve got a lead, I just don’t know what to do with it.”
Dunc told her about his day. She said, “Nice. Meaty. You go type your report, I’ll see what I can do about Miss Harris.”
The report forms were white, green, pink, and yellow snap-out sheets interlarded with thin carbons. White to the client, green into the file, yellow for memos to other field operatives or skip-tracers, pink to be stapled face-out to the back of the operative’s assignment sheet.
Standing beside Sherry’s desk, Drinker read the original of Dunc’s report. He dropped it with a grunt, went into his office, and closed the door.
“Does that mean he likes it or he doesn’t like it?”
“Drinker’s grunts enlighten no man. Or woman.” She handed him some scribbled notes. “Amanda Harris was a junior at UC-Berkeley, dropped out last year. She has — or had — an apartment in the Berkeley flats and works — or worked — as an admission ticket taker at Golden Gate Race Track in Richmond.”
“How did you get all that?” demanded Dunc, amazed.
“Cross-directories, a few lies on the phone. Tomorrow cross the Bay on the Oakland car ferry. It’s really fun.”
At eight the next morning Dunc drove Grey Ghost into the wooden belly of the beast by the Ferry Building at the foot of Market. He could see Alcatraz and beyond it the green mound of Angel Island, nearer at hand wooded Yerba Buena and the flat man-made pancake of the navy’s Treasure Island.
Bright sun, no fog, crisp air, the gulls whirling and crying as they looked for handouts behind the boat, occasionally dipping to grab something out of the white, churning wake. Passing under the Bay Bridge, he looked up, saw a passenger train on the lower deck going west toward the City. The noise of the bridge traffic was like muted thunder beyond the horizon.
When he figured out how to get to Berkeley from the Oakland Ferry Terminal, he sought out Amanda Harris’s address on Prince Street off Shattuck. She was long gone — of course — but he knocked on the apartment door anyway, and a stocky, bright-eyed girl answered. She had been one of Amanda’s roommates.
“She’d be graduating this year if she hadn’t met him.” She twirled a dark curl around a forefinger, twisted it. “He was... She just... fell for him. Like that. I couldn’t stand him.”
“She got the job at the racetrack after she met Jones?”
“Yes. He talked her into it.”
She didn’t know if Amanda was still working there. Dunc used his map, drove up the sweeping blacktop road to the parking lot behind the grandstands, tried to find someone who would tell him more than terminated “for cause.” He was in luck; a former coworker was delighted to have lunch bought for her.
Amanda had been fired for dipping into the till, and soon after had moved down the Peninsula. Near Tanforan Race Track.
The last solid information he got on Jones himself was from an exercise boy — the boy was older than Dunc — walking a horse at Tanforan. Jones had been working for a horse owner named Al Eisner as a trainer, had been fired for an undisclosed cause.
“I think he was trying to dope one of the old man’s horses. Mr. Eisner just gave him the boot. Myself, I’d of liked to of put the boot into the bastard’s face.”
Dunc abandoned Jones, for the rest of the week crisscrossed the City in his search for Amanda Harris. He learned how to set up a “swing” for the day’s investigations in geographical sequence. From Sherry he learned how to work the phone for information, how to lie and dissimulate and make promises he couldn’t keep. In those brief days he drove two thousand miles without ever leaving the Bay Area. He loved every minute of it.
On that Friday evening he knocked at the door of an apartment in a brown wood four-unit building on Worden, a half-block alley below Telegraph Hill. The fog was in, swathing the City in a clean wet gray blanket.
Amanda Harris was a slight brown-haired girl with the first genuinely green eyes he had ever seen. She still dressed like a college coed, sweater and plaid skirt and penny loafers, and was calm, sad, resigned to something Dunc had come to already suspect.
“He was no good, I knew that from the very start.” She had served tea, their cups were cooling on the coffee table. “But somehow, whatever he asked me to do...”
He’d wanted her to steal from the admission office at Golden Gate Fields. She had. Heel wanted her to do the same thing at Tanforan. She had. She said he had been ruined by a big killing at the track he’d made while still a Muni driver.
“He became obsessed with it, and then he got in with some men who doped horses, and then he tried to steal from them...”
The next day, a Saturday, Dunc drove down to Colma to finally find Chauncey Jones. Even with Amanda’s directions, it took him the better part of two hours.
On Monday morning he trotted up the steps to Drinker Cope’s office with his bulging case file on Chauncey Jones. Sherry was at her desk, Drinker by the coffeemaker.
“So, Dunc, how goes the great Chauncey Jones trackdown?”
It had been ten days since Drinker had handed him the file. He had been to fifty-seven addresses, had talked with 122 people. He hadn’t filed a report since the first one.
“Over the weekend I stood over his grave and told him what a rotten son of a bitch he was. The bastard’s dead — as both of you very well knew when you sent me out after him.”
Sherry sat up straight behind her desk. “You what?”
“I crossed your tracks a dozen times, Drinker. It was a hit-and-run, but the gamblers he crossed killed him. Tell me straight — is Amanda Harris in any danger?”
Drinker Cope was still for a moment, then shook his head.
“Was there ever a wife back in Dayton?”
“No. Different client, different assignment, but it seemed a nice file to dummy up for you to cut your teeth on.”
“You know what pisses me off the most?” asked Dunc. “I never even saw the guy. It feels unfinished somehow.”
“They often do,” said Sherry.
Drinker straightened up, set down his coffee cup.
“Just ten fucking days,” he said. “Okay, three hundred a month, retroactive to the day you started. You can charge your gas and oil at Emil’s 76 station around the corner on Pine and Franklin. Keep receipts of your expenses. And kid, go out and get drunk tonight — you earned it. A hell of a job.”
He picked up his coffee, retreated to his private office.
Sherry said, “Since you don’t like coffee, Dunc, I bought a box of tea for you.”