“No. But she was a spacey chick.”
“How do you mean?”
“Emotional, hyped up all the time.”
“Drugs?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think she was into that. A little pot, maybe, but that’d be all. She was just… I don’t know, intense, freaky. Like she couldn’t get her head together. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
The wind blowing across the floor of the stadium was bitter cold; I could feel my ears and cheeks burning. And I had run out of questions. So I said, “Okay, Dave, thanks. I won’t keep you any longer.”
He nodded solemnly. “I wish there was more I could do to help,” he said. “I keep thinking something’s happened to Jerry too. If he’s all right, why hasn’t he shown up all week? Or why hasn’t somebody found him?”
“Somebody will, son. Sooner or later.”
He nodded again and gave me his hand: his grip was as gentle as his voice. Then he put his helmet on and trotted onto the field, and I turned back toward the stands.
On the way there I noticed that the team’s place-kicker had begun practicing field goals at the north end. He was a soccer-style kicker and pretty good, judging from the forty-yarder he put squarely between the uprights. The second kick I watched him try, from forty-five yards out, hit the crossbar, caromed straight up, hit the crossbar a second time, and fell through: good.
For some reason, my mind being what it is, that made me think of a country-and-western song that had been popular several years ago, a religious novelty item with the more or less unforgettable title of “Drop-Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life.” Uh-huh. Well, some of us got drop-kicked through, all right. But some of us missed wide right or wide left, or just by inches, and some of us-like Christine Webster-got blocked at the line of scrimmage.
And then there were the ones like me. We made it through, but not without hitting the damned crossbar a few times on the way…
From the college I drove downtown and stopped at the main library in Civic Center where I spent half an hour looking through month-old issues of the Chronicle and Examiner. I found nothing at all about Bobbie Reid-no news story, no obituary, not even a funeral notice. Which meant that her death, like so many deaths in a city as large as San Francisco, had not been deemed important enough or unusual enough to warrant coverage; and that her body, like Christine Webster’s, had been claimed by out-of-town relatives and her funeral held elsewhere.
There would have to be a police report on file, though, because the Homicide Detail is required by law to investigate all suicides. Eberhardt could look it up and use it to begin digging into Bobbie’s background.
As for me, it seemed that a drive up to Bodega Bay was the next order of business. I had no leads to pursue here, no leads at all except for the tenuous link to Steve Farmer’s involvement with Bobbie Reid; maybe I could find out something by talking to Farmer or by nosing around among the people in Bodega who knew Jerry Carding. On the way out of the library, I decided I would head up the coast first thing in the morning.
It was almost five o’clock by then. I had not been to my office all day and I had been out of touch since before eleven; it was possible that there was a message or two on my answering machine. Better check it out, I thought, and then call Eberhardt from there before he knocks off for the day.
Taylor Street was only a few blocks from the library, but it took me ten minutes to get there because of the rush-hour traffic. I coaxed the car into a narrow parking space near my building, went inside and looked through the slot in the mailbox. Nothing. The elevator was being cranky again: it made grinding noises and shuddered a lot on the way up. But it determined not to break down and strand me between floors, as it had once for twenty minutes a couple of years ago. I got out of it in a hurry, making a mental note to use the stairs until the landlord got the thing fixed again, and moved down the hall to the office door.
And pulled up short when I got to it.
The door was cracked open about six inches.
The skin along my back prickled; I could feel my stomach muscles begin to wire up. I had locked the door last night-I was always careful about locking it when I left the office because of the kind of neighborhood this was. The building had no janitor, and the only other person with a key would be the landlord; but he was not in the habit of paying uninvited calls on his tenants.
It was quiet in the hall except for the muffled, desultory clacking of a typewriter from one of the offices at the far end. But when I edged closer to the door I could hear another sound-a low pulsing beep, the kind a phone makes when it’s been off the hook for more than thirty seconds. The slit between the door and jamb let me see nothing but darkness and the faint smeary glow from the lights in the building across the street.
I stayed where I was for another ten seconds, listening to the beep from the phone. Then I put the heel of my hand against the panel, held a breath, and gave the door a hard shove and went in across the threshold by one step, reaching out for the light switch on the inside wall.
There was nobody in the room or in the little alcove off of it; I could see that and sense the emptiness as soon as the overhead lights blazed. But what I did see made me recoil, stunned me with an impact that was almost physical.
The office had literally been torn apart.
TWELVE
Wanton, senseless destruction. All the drawers in the filing cabinets standing open and their contents strewn across the floor. The magazines from the table in the visitor’s area ripped apart. The Black Mask poster pulled off the wall and shredded out of its frame. Everything swept off the desk, everything emptied out of the desk drawers. The typewriter still on its stand but the ribbon unwound from the spools like twenty feet of jumbled black intestine. The dregs from the coffee pot splashed on one wall; granules from the jar of instant coffee hurled around over the scattered papers. Jagged slash marks in the padded seat and back of my chair. Worms of white glue squeezed out over part of the desk and part of the client’s chair. A long deep gouge in the desk top, made with a knife or maybe my letter opener. And in the alcove, all the supplies scraped off the shelves, my spare change of clothes cut into strips, and a can of cleanser sprinkled over the tangle on the floor.
I started to shake, looking at all of that. A savage, impotent rage welled up inside me; I had that ugly feeling you get when something like this happens, this kind of personal violation: a combination of pain and hatred and confusion that makes you want to smash something yourself.
The more I looked at the carnage in there, the wilder I felt. In self-defense I caught hold of the door, backed into the corridor, and shut out the sight of it. It was two or three minutes before the shaking stopped and the black haze cleared out of my head. Before I could trust myself to go talk to anybody.
The office across the hall was vacant and had been for weeks; I went back past the elevator, toward the clacking of the typewriter. A guy named Faber who ran a mail-order business had the office adjacent to mine, but there were no lights on inside and the door was locked. The fourth office, where the typewriter sounds were coming from, belonged to a CPA named Hadley. I opened the door and went in there.
Hadley was sitting at one of two desks across the room, hunt-and-pecking on a small portable. He looked up as I entered and gave me one of his smarmy grins. He was a thin bald-headed guy in his forties, with a fox-face and a wise-ass sense of humor.
“Well, if it isn’t the dago private eye,” he said. “How’s the snooping business these days?”
“Knock it off, Hadley. I’m in no mood for bullshit.”
He took a closer look at my face, and the grin wiped away in a hurry. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? You look-” He stopped there, but he did not have to say it; we both knew how I looked.