Instruments... band members... Maryjane...
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Damn, somebody snoring so loud it was putting him to sleep.
Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzzzz...
Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.
Squeerq. Somewhere, stealthily, a window went up.
Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.
Rustle-rustle-rustle. Through the window a dark shape climbed, pushing aside the translucent drapes, silent except for the stealthy whisper of cloth. It was all in black, like a ninja in a Hong Kong karate flick. But in one hand it bore a vicious-looking pickax-like mattock such as are always used by the peones to take out swaggering government troops when the railroad train has just been blown up in movies about the Mexican revolution.
Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.
The intruder froze at the sound, an utterly motionless shadow in the midst of other motionless shadows. Then he started up the grand sweeping main staircase to the second floor, feet silent on the marble treads, pausing only to take a cautious look through the archway into the living room.
Slumped down in their chairs on either side of their card table were Giselle and Ken Warren, eyes closed and heads tipped over to one side. Their empty coffee cups lay on the thick rose-colored rug below their flaccid fingers.
From the CD player came the soft jazz of Birds “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” from the wonderfully evocative noir album by Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, Always Say Goodbye.
From Ken Warren’s mouth came the sounds that momentarily had frozen the intruder in midmovement.
Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.
Still wide awake well after midnight, Inga was lying in her cozy canopy bed in her cozy bedroom. Her eyes gleamed in the dim light coming through the filmy curtains over her windows. She could hear the measured ticking of the cabinet clock in the corner of the room, the only item she had not chosen herself: everything else was frills and lace and ruffles in her favorite colors of pink and purple.
Out in the hall, a floorboard creaked. Inga’s eyes moved but she lay rigidly on her back, her breathing so shallow her breasts barely rose and fell under her plain pink cotton nightgown with embroidered red roses at neck and cuffs.
Again. And then the slight stealthy rattle of a doorknob, the muted squeak of ill-oiled hinges.
With a surprisingly quick, lithe movement for one so outwardly placid, Inga was out of bed and padding on bare silent feet across the oval rag rug to the connecting door to Paul’s room. She turned the knob without sound, drifted the door open.
In the center of the room a crouched dark figure was advancing on Paul’s bed, head forward, a heavy pickax-looking thing in his hands. He began to raise it above shoulder level.
Inga threw up her hands and screamed a real scream.
Downstairs in the living room, Giselle and Ken fell out of their chairs. Shaking their heads groggily, but at least awake, they struggled to their feet and lurched toward the stairway, another scream helping bring them out of their haze.
Upstairs, the attacker swung the mattock down with terrible force at Paul’s head just as the young computer wizard sat up wide-eyed under the covers. The handle of the mattock hit the bed frame above Paul’s head, and the head of it flew off to smash into the wall beside the bed. Its sharp, narrow-pointed end went through the plaster and into the eighty-year-old lath behind, where it hung like a surreal piece of op art. The handle spronged back with enough force to whip out of the attacker’s hands and spin across the room to gouge the cedar chest in the far corner.
Paul was yelling and thrashing around, trying to escape, trying to find his glasses so he could see to escape, Inga was screaming, Giselle and Ken were coming through the door.
The assailant took three running steps, hurled himself feetfirst through a window to take glass and frame and lace curtains with him. He landed on his butt with a bump, bounced and rolled down to the edge of the porch roof’s sloping shingles.
Ken and Giselle, trying to get through the doorway together to get at him, got stuck. He hung by his hands off the drain spout, let go just as they got free. Ken rushed to the window. The shadowy figure was running across the oval of grass inside the turnaround. Giselle’s little .32 with the shrouded hammer was in her purse downstairs beside her chair. Ken was a lousy shot anyway. He turned back into the room.
Giselle had turned on the bedside light. Paul was sitting up with his glasses hanging down across his chin from one ear. For once, Sam Spade he wasn’t.
“God God God!” he keened in falsetto.
But he was unhurt. Giselle whirled to grab the still-shrieking Inga by the upper arms and shake her just as Bernardine appeared in the doorway in a long flannel robe and slippers.
She began in her haughty voice, “I demand to know—”
“Who was it?” Giselle snapped at Inga. “Did you see—”
“Frank!” Tears streamed down her face. “Frank Nugent!”
Then she tore free to hurl herself into Paul’s puny arms, sobbing as if her heart would break.
During drinking hours, Ace in the Hole furnished hot food to any patrons from the bar next door, closed now after hours, who might need to soak up some alcohol before ordering another round, and coffee to those who had to wend their way home to apartment, rooming house, residential hotel, street corner, or gutter for a little shut-eye.
Now, at 3:00 A.M., there were only four patrons in the place: Ballard, still on his stool at the end of the counter, a couple at one of the three tables with old-fashioned oilcloth covers along the wall, and a lone woman sitting at the furthest table around the el. In the back wall beside Ballard’s end of the counter was a plain wooden door with NO ADMITTANCE — THIS MEANS YOU stenciled on it.
The coffee, amazingly enough, was excellent, and he’d drunk five cups. He’d also eaten a cheeseburger with everything on it, an order of fries and one of onion rings, and had slurped two of the chocolate malts the dog-eared and grease-darkened menu had surprised him by featuring.
The short-order cook brought him a second cheeseburger and second orders of both fries and onion rings. What the hell, it had been twelve long hours since his lunch with Amalia Poletti.
As the cook got back behind his counter, the riverboat gambler from Mood Indigo came in, said something to the man made him laugh the way Mood Indigo’s black bartender had laughed, then strolled the length of the diner to go around the end of the counter past Ballard and into the NO ADMITTANCE door.
Larry wondered why he was sitting here, munching away, surreptitiously surveying the other patrons for a woman who might possibly fit the strange remarks of the bartender at Mood Indigo. Because he had had nowhere else to be: Kearny would be wallowing in his bed by now, leaving him with the too-short couch with the broken spine he’d paid thirty bucks for at the Salvation Army.
And he was worried about Bart. Maybe the bald bartender had been giving him some oblique message from Bart — even if he could not for the life of him see what it might be.
At least he knew why the two cops were looking for the Heslip look-alike in the composite drawing. He’d knocked Georgi Petlaroc on his butt in a gay bar on Polk Street a couple of hours before Petlaroc’s death. And then had said Petlaroc would look funny with his face blown off.
Bart Heslip in a gay bar?
Not likely. But Bart in San Francisco was unlikely, too. Bart calling him for a meet at Mood Indigo, and then not showing, was even more unlikely — and troubling. Yet the picture was him. The police artist had caught his brashness, the taut stance from his days in the ring that gave him a physical arrogance.