“You see anybody at my office today?”
“No. Why?”
“Hear anything down there?”
“Like what?”
“Like noise. Like a lot of damn noise.”
“I didn’t hear any noise. What-”
“You been here all day?”
“No. I was out from eleven until about two.”
“What about Faber across the hall? He come in today?”
“I don’t think so; he usually doesn’t on Fridays. Listen, what the hell happened?”
“Somebody busted up my office, that’s what happened.”
“Busted it up? You mean vandalized it?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Hadley began to look worried, but not for my sake. “You know who did it?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. You sure you didn’t see anybody or hear anything while you were around?”
“Positive. Busted up your office, huh?” He looked around his own office, as if he were visualizing the same kind of thing happening here. “This building isn’t safe any more,” he said. “Raise the goddamn rent and it isn’t even safe. Maybe we’d better think about moving out.”
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe we’d better.”
I left him and went back along the hall to my door. When I opened it and bent to look at the lock I did not see any fresh scratches or signs of forced entry. But it wasn’t much of a lock; a kid could have picked it with a bubblegum card. I got a tight hold on myself, stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
The destruction was not any easier to look at, but I could face it now without feeling as though I would come unglued. I stood still for a time and asked myself why. For God’s sake, why?
Tenderloin junkie looking for money to buy a fix? Maybe. One of the tenants on the second floor had had his office broken into a few months ago and his petty-cash box looted, and there had been a couple of other break-ins over the years. But never my office, never a detective’s; no money here, even a junkie knew that. Besides, what pawnable items there were, like the typewriter and the answering machine, had not been carried away.
Kids, vandals? More likely. Except that there were none of the vandal’s trademarks: words spray-painted on the walls, puddles of urine or piles of feces. Except that pure vandalism was one of the few crimes that did not happen much in the Tenderloin, and especially not to one office in a building that was locked up at night and full of people during the day.
Somebody looking for something in my files? But I had no information that anyone could want, or at least none I could imagine anyone wanting; just a lot of case-report carbons, most of which were old and nearly all of which were mundane. That sort of thief, looking for something he couldn’t find, might take out his frustration on the office itself-only this was not an act of frustration. It had taken time, a lot of time, to do all this damage. And that made it an act of frenzy, done by somebody with-a sick mind. And whoever had been threatening Christine Webster, who had maybe killed her, had a sick mind; the anonymous letter Lainey Madden had shown me confirmed that. The same person? Possible-and yet it didn’t seem to make much sense. Why come after me? My involvement was minimal enough and I knew even less and posed a far smaller threat than the police. And what would destroying my office accomplish in any case?
Still. The time was right: somebody vandalizes the office while I’m in the middle of two linked murder cases. It could be one of the people I had met and talked to in the past few days. Or it could be somebody I had yet to meet and talk to; my name had been all over the papers. Jerry Carding? Steve Farmer?
Somebody.
Why?
The beeping from the disabled phone penetrated and sent me wading through the debris on the floor, around to the far side of the desk. The phone was lying there in two pieces, the receiver hooked over one of the chair legs. I picked it up and put it back together and set it down on the slashed chair seat. The answering machine was upside-down under the window; I picked that up too and laid it on top of the typewriter.
I dialed the Hall of Justice and asked for Eberhardt. Got him half a minute later. “It’s me again,” I said.
“Now what? I was just on my way home.”
I told him what now. There was a silence. Then he said, “Christ, can’t you stay out of trouble for one day?” but he no longer sounded annoyed or irascible.
“Lecture me some other time, will you? This isn’t my fault.”
“Bad, huh?”
“It couldn’t be much worse.”
“You think it’s connected with the Webster and Carding cases?”
“I don’t know what to think. Maybe.”
“All right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Bring a couple of lab boys with you. There might be prints.”
“Twenty minutes.”
I hung up and fiddled with the switches on the answering machine. It seemed to be working okay-and there was a message on it, from Donleavy. His voice said I should call him at his office in Redwood City and then proceeded to give the number.
The message told me something else, too: my office had been vandalized sometime today, during business hours. If it had happened last night Donleavy would not have been able to reach me because of the disabled phone.
I dialed his number right away; it was better to be doing something constructive than brooding at what was left of this place. And it turned out that he was also still in.
“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I had a couple of my men make another search of the Carding garage and the grounds around it; they found the second bullet.”
“Good. Where?”
“Outside the garage window, in a bush.”
“So that’s what happened to it. Sure, the window was part way open, now that I think about it; I should have remembered that before. You going to withdraw the charges against Talbot now?”
“Not yet. Chances are he fired the bullet through the open window, considering where it was found and a Ballistics report confirming that it came from the murder weapon; but there’s no way of proving he did. Carding could have fired it himself, sometime prior to his death.”
“But you do believe Talbot is innocent?”
Donleavy made a sighing sound. “What I believe doesn’t seem to hold much water around here. The DA’s still planning to prosecute.”
“Has Talbot’s condition changed any?”
“Status quo. He’s been under sedation most of the day. That’s a preliminary treatment in cases of suicidal depression, the doctors tell me.”
“No other developments, I guess?”
“Nope. How about with you? I talked to Laura Nichols this afternoon at the hospital; she said she’d hired you to do some investigating of your own.”
“Yeah. I was going to call you about that tonight. You mind?”
“Your buddy Eberhardt doesn’t mind. Why should I?”
I told him about Bobbie Reid and her connection with Christine Webster and Jerry Carding. “Might be something in that, at least where the Webster case is concerned; I’ll pass it along to Eberhardt. I don’t see how it could tie in with the Carding homicide, though.”
“Neither do I,” Donleavy said. “Anything else?”
“My office was vandalized today. Torn apart. I’m standing here in the wreckage right now, waiting for Eberhardt.”
“Rough. Any idea who did it?”
“No. But I’m not so sure it’s coincidence.”
“How come?”
“Nothing stolen, for one thing. What time did you leave your message on my machine?”
“About eleven. Why?”
“Whoever did it knocked the phone off the hook,” I said. “So it had to have happened sometime between your call and when I got here a little after five. Which pretty much lets out street kids; they don’t vandalize business offices in broad daylight.”
“So you think it ties in with the two homicide cases?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
After we rang off I looked around at the destruction again, in spite of myself. My gaze settled on the shredded Black Mask poster. It was no special loss; I could get another one made from the magazine cover. But it made me think of my collection of pulps. The damage here would amount to no more than a few hundred dollars-but what if the same kind of thing happened at my flat? Those six thousand pulps had to be worth more than thirty thousand dollars at the current market prices; most were irreplacable, at least where I was concerned, and I had damned little personal property insurance. The thought of them being demolished started me shaking all over again.