Kiely chuckled as he switched on the light- “They’d give a lot to know what they want is right here.” Dunc turned back to set the night chain when Kiely used a sudden breathless voice.
“I was playing poker with a fellow m K.C. named Moran—”
He drew in a sharp breath. Dunc tried to turn. Was gone.
Obscenely gay flowers were painted around the cheap tin waste-basket, and the brown carpet tickled Dunc’s nose. A middle-aged man regarded him thoughtfully from a broken-down easy chair across the narrow room. He looked slightly familiar.
“What the hell?” said Dunc.
Kiely? Yeah. A]ax Kiely. Memory trickled back. Former poetry teacher, high-stakes poker play. Always quoting.
“What the hell?” Dunc asked him again, thickly.
He got to his hands and knees, got himself erect. His pockets had been turned out. He bent to gather up his money and wallet, straightened quickly. Jesus! Pain had shot through his head. Bent again with exaggerated care for his belongings. His k shoe skittered something metallic across the rug to rattle against the baseboard. A knife. He picked it up to peer at it as if he needed reading glasses.
Switchblade. Smell of cigar smoke in the room. Emmy. Ki shirt wore a new red necktie. The end of it lengthened to drip twice in his lap. In Dunc’s memory a car slid to the curb in the next block. Christ! He’d fingered Kiely, after all. And Kiely’d been halfway afraid of it.
The room had been torn apart. Kiely’s meager belongings scattered about, his pockets turned out as Dunc’s had been.
Outside, a lightly touched siren growled. Precinct station a couple of blocks away. Anonymous phone call...
Hide the knife. Blood on it. Blood on his jacket, smeared on. His head throbbed, he was still woozy. He closed the knife, dropped it into his jacket pocket, thought, I can’t hide Kiely.
Heavy shoes were pounding up the stairs. He wrapped his jacket around his arm, slammed it against the window. The glass burst outward, taking the shade with it. Fresh air stung his sluggish brain awake. An equally heavy fist made the door quake.
“Police! Open up in there!”
Dunc cannonballed into darkness. His heels crunched a pail and flipped it over, landing him in a shower of garbage. He dodged through a junk-littered yard to the back fence, made the top on first try. A flashlight beam probed the yard and voices shouted from Kiely’s window. Dunc went over without pause.
At the foot of a shallow muddy embankment he trotted along railroad tracks to Twenty-fifth Street, turned uphill, away from Third, climbing toward the Potrero Terrace housing projects where he had interviewed a witness just last week.
Closed-up little grocery store. Pay phone. He leaned against the side of the booth with his eyes shut, ringing Drinker Cope’s home phone, belatedly standing on one foot to check on the safe-deposit box key. Yes. Still in his shoe. Drinker answered on the third ring, voice thick with sleep.
“It’s Dunc. I’m in real trouble.”
Voice bright and clear now. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“Two guys killed a third guy tonight in a Third Street flop. I was there. The law is looking, but not for me specifically.”
“The bad guys looking for you?”
“They got my keys, so they’ll know where I’m staying.”
“Where are you now?”
“Potrero Terrace.”
“Walk down to the foot of Connecticut, have a Yellow pick you up by that big green warehouse on the southeast corner...”
Dunc’s shoes echoed hollowly on the concrete ramp down to the all-night auto park in the basement of the Bellingham Hotel on Sixth and Mission. A husky Negro about his own age was dozing on a cot in the bright cramped office. The name of the garage was stitched in neat red script across his blue coveralls.
Dunc said, “Nat?”
The Negro’s brown eyes opened, focused, sharpened.
“You’re Dunc? Little cool to be running around outside without a jacket.” He jerked open a desk drawer, took out a bottle. Dunc shook his head, instantly regretted it.
“Wow! You got any aspirin?”
He washed four of them down with a paper cup of water. Nat dropped a key onto Dunc’s open palm.
“Geary and Octavia, third house from the corner, yellow with lots of gingerbread. Front room on the first floor. Ground floor’s the garage. I got a shackrat’ll put me up for a couple days. Don’t let the landlady see you — she’s death on whites bein’ in her house.” He reached an army field jacket down off a hook in the wall. “Be sunup when I leave, I won’t need this.”
Dunc laid his rolled-up jacket down on the desk to shrug into the field jacket. When the warmth it fostered hit him, he shivered. Nat had picked up the jacket.
“You look all used up, man. I’ll get rid of this for you after I call a cab.”
Chapter Thirty-two
At noon Dunc sat on the edge of the bed looking out between lace curtains at a slanting street drenched in golden light. No town was lovelier than San Francisco when the sun was shining. A little colored girl was skipping down the sidewalk in a bright red cloth coat, her hair sticking straight out from the sides of her head in two tight black braids. Behind her came three Negro boys and one Chinese boy, all dressed in gaudy windbreakers and brown corduroy trousers. Two of them carried schoolbooks.
Down at the corner by the bus stop, Drinker Cope was just getting out of his powder-blue ’51 Plymouth. Five minutes later he was sitting in Nat’s easy chair gulping black, steaming coffee fresh from the hot plate. Dunc told Drinker everything, starting with the movies and ending with Kiely’s key in his hand.
“You’re good at finding trouble, ain’t you, kid? Gimme.” Dunc tossed him the key, he stuck it in his watch pocket. He chuckled. “But you’re lucky at winning things, too, ain’t you?”
“You call a dead man in my lap lucky?”
“I call a key to eighty grand in your hand lucky.”
He started to prowl the room, deceptively soft-seeming but moving like a much smaller, quicker man. He dropped back into the easy chair, shook his head, gave an exasperated chuckle.
“Jesus, you’re green, kid. Any way I look at it, I gotta think you’re trouble. You get mixed up with a guy gets dead, then you give your jacket with the blood on the sleeve and the murder weapon in the pocket to Nat because he says he’ll get rid of it.”
“I figured he was one of your field agents. What was wrong with that?”
“It was the fucking murder weapon, for God’s sake. With your fingerprints m the victim’s blood all over it.”
“Nat said he’d—”
“Fuck what Nat said. Never put yourself in another man’s hands that way. You can trust Nat, don’t get me wrong, he gave them to me and I got rid of ’em for you. But if you’re gonna work for me, you can’t be stupid.”
“I’m sorry” said Dunc.
“Don’t be sorry. Be smart. What was this Kiely to you, you go warn him? You didn’t know about the eighty grand vet.”
Emmy with his gleaming knife evoking Raffetto, coming at him after murdering Artis, that’s why he’d done it. But he hadn’t told Drinker anything about Las Vegas, wasn’t about to.
“It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do.” Drinker shook his head again in disbelief. “I assume they followed you to Kiely’s place.”
“Yeah,” said Dunc bitterly. “It was their Lincoln I noticed pulling in down the street just after I got there.”
Instead of the justifiable scorn he expected, he saw interest light up Drinker’s round red face. “And then?”