I got on the horn to Dennis Litchak, a retired fire captain who lives below me, and asked him to go upstairs and check on my flat; we had exchanged keys sometime ago, as a general precaution between neighbors. He was gone the better part of ten minutes and I did a lot of fidgeting while I waited. But when he came on again he said, “Everything’s okay. You didn’t have any visitors.”
I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dennis.”
“What’s up, anyhow?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
I went over to the window and stood looking down at the misty lights along Taylor Street. The pulps were still in my mind. My flat was not nearly so easy to get into as this office, but it was a long way from being impregnable; sooner or later, somebody could get inside and destroy or even steal those magazines. That was a fact and I had damned well better pay attention to it. Have another lock put on the front door and the back door. And increase my personal property insurance right away, no matter how much it cost for the premiums. And then just hope to God I did not come home someday to find what I had found here.
A couple of minutes passed. Then two cars pulled up at the curb below-Eberhardt’s Dodge and an unmarked police sedan-and Eb and two other guys got out and entered the building. I returned to the desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it, where there were none of the drying worms of white glue. Pretty soon I heard the grinding of the elevator, then their steps in the hall, and the door opened and they came in.
Eberhardt took one long look at the office and said, “Jesus Christ.”
“I told you it was bad.”
“Looks like a psycho job,” one of the other guys said. He had a field-lab case in one hand. “Somebody doesn’t like you worth a damn.”
“Yeah.”
While the lab boys went to work, picking their way through the mess on the floor, I stepped into the hall with Eberhardt. He said then, “Hell of a thing to walk into. You okay, paisan? ”
“More or less.”
“Don’t make a grudge deal out of it, huh?”
“You know me better than that, Eb. Besides, if anybody finds out who did it, it’ll be you. Or Donleavy, maybe.”
“If there’s a connection.”
“The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”
“We’ll see.”
“Did your man find out anything new in Bodega?”
“Nothing positive,” he said. “The Carding kid left all of his belongings behind when he disappeared, but that may not mean much; none of what little stuff there is is worth anything. And if anybody up there knows where he is or why he left, they’re not talking. Friend of his, Steve Farmer, did say that he’d been kind of secretive for a few days. Maybe writing an article of some kind; that’s what Farmer thinks.”
I remembered Lainey Madden saying that Jerry had not come down to San Francisco last weekend for that same apparent reason. I said, “Farmer didn’t have any idea what this article might be about?”
“No. There wasn’t any sign of it among Jerry’s effects, either.”
“Well, I’m going up there tomorrow myself. Maybe I can nose up something. Okay with you?”
“Go ahead. But it’ll probably be a waste of time.”
“I know. One thing I can do, though, is ask Farmer about a girl named Bobbie Reid. He used to date her, and she was also a friend of Christine Webster’s. She committed suicide about a month ago, because of some sort of personal problem.”
Eberhardt cocked an eyebrow. “You find all that out today?”
“Yes. From Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax.”
“You can be a pretty good cop when you set your mind to it,” he said without irony. “What else do you know about this Reid girl?”
I filled him in on what few other details I had learned. “The suicide report ought to tell you her next-of-kin,” I said, “and maybe who some of her other friends were.”
“I’ll have Klein check it out.”
It was another fifteen minutes before one of the lab guys put his head out and said they were finished. Eberhardt and I went back inside. Most of the file papers and folders had been gathered up into loose stacks, and the rest of the wreckage had been stirred around in a methodical sort of way; the desk and chairs and file cabinets and a few other things had a fine dusting of fingerprint powder on them.
“We found two dominant sets of latents,” one of the lab boys said, “but one set is bound to be yours. Are your prints on file with the Department?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. We’ll just have to hope the other set is on file too-somewhere. And that they belong to whoever laid into this place.”
“How long will it take to run a check?”
“Not too long, local and state. If we have to go to the FBI,” he said wryly, “it could take days.”
Eberhardt said, “Call him at home later tonight or first thing in the morning, either way. I’ll give you the number.”
“Right.”
“Anything else?”
“Not much,” the other guy said. “Lock on the door wasn’t jimmied; probably picked with a credit card or something. Smudges on a couple of the papers that seem to be oxblood shoe polish. No help in that, though, unless it’s a rare brand that can be traced to certain dealers.” He shrugged. “And that’s it.”
The three of them left not long afterward. When they were gone I spent some time scraping the dried glue off the desktop, putting things back into the drawers. But my heart wasn’t in it. It would take me at least a day to sweep up the floors, scrub the walls and furniture, sort out the files, get somebody to cart away the slashed chair and somebody else to bring in a new one. Next week-when some of the pain and anger had dulled and I could face the task with a sense of detachment.
I got out of there at eight-thirty. And home a little before nine. I forced myself to eat a sandwich I did not want and thought about calling Laura Nichols; but I had nothing of substance to report and no desire to talk to her in any event. I did call Dennis Litchak again, to tell him I would be away tomorrow and to ask him to check on the flat for me from time to time. He said he would.
At a quarter of ten, just as I was about to head into the shower, the phone rang. It was one of the lab guys: they had run the second set of latent prints through the state and local computers. No card match, no ID. Whoever the prints belonged to had never been fingerprinted in the state of California.
Terrific.
So I took my shower and went to bed and eventually to sleep. And had a nightmare about coming home, opening the front door, and being inundated by toppling stacks of pulp magazines, all of which had been ripped to pieces. Voices kept screaming accusations at me, saying things like, “Look what you’ve done to us! You’re supposed to be the last of the lone-wolf private eyes; why didn’t you protect your own kind?” Then the voices became eyes, thousands of eyes that glared balefully at me while I fought to keep from drowning in a sea of shredded pulp paper.
It was absurd stuff, of course, with comic overtones. But it scared hell out of me just the same.
THIRTEEN
Until the early sixties Bodega Bay had been a quiet and old-fashioned commercial fishermen’s province. People from the bigger Sonoma County towns like Santa Rosa and Petaluma went there to buy fresh crabs and other seafood, or to use one of the nearby beaches, and families came up from San Francisco once in a while to take in the scenic beauty of the Sonoma coastline; otherwise the natives had the place pretty much to themselves.