“What time is the delivery?”
“Sometime after two.”
“Well, that ought to work out okay. My stuff’s coming out of storage and over to the office around that time. I should be able to get there by then.”
“Good,” he said. “Looking forward to it, paisan.”
That makes one of us, I thought.
I dialed Kerry’s number, to find out if she’d read the newspaper thing too, but there was no answer. She’d already left for Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where she worked.
So I took the directory out of the nightstand drawer, looked up the number of the registrar’s office at City College and then punched it out. The woman who answered said that Nelson Mixer was still out sick. I found Mixer’s home number, and when I called it a man’s voice came on after five rings. He sounded a little miffed, as if I had interrupted him at something. Sleeping, maybe, or taking medicine; his voice was hoarse. I asked him if he was Nelson Mixer and he said he was and I said, “I wonder if you’d be interested in purchasing some aluminum siding at a premium price-” and he hung up on me. I grinned as I cradled the receiver. Now I knew where to find him this morning.
I drank my coffee in the kitchen, trying not to listen to the empty noises my stomach was making. Then I spent ten minutes doing the exercises the muscle therapist had given me to strengthen the damaged motor nerve in my left arm and shoulder. The same gunman who had put Eberhardt in a coma for seventeen days back in August had pumped a bullet into me, too. I had had a lot of stiffness in the arm for a while, and I still had some off and on, particularly after any kind of physical activity. But it wasn’t so bad any more, as a result of time and the muscle therapy. Most days I had no pain or stiffness at all and I was reminded of the trouble only when I tried, without thinking, to use the arm for something. I still had a three-or four-percent impairment, according to the therapist. The goal was one percent, which was as close to normal as the old wing was going to get.
My watch said it was just nine-thirty when I shrugged into my overcoat and put on my hat and left the flat. I hoped Nelson Mixer had something useful to tell me. As things stood, with Ken Yamasaki unavailable to me for the time being, the only other name on my list was Edgar Ogada. And I wanted very much to find out the identify of Haruko Gage’s secret admirer. Not because it was any big deal; it wasn’t. Just because I wanted my last solo investigation, my last little fling, to be a successful one.
Nelson Mixer’s residence turned out to be a small house on 46th Avenue, just off Balboa and not far from either Sutro Heights Park or the ocean. It was one of the stucco rowhouses that a builder named Dolger had strung out over the avenues in the 1930s-the kind Malvina Reynolds had referred to as “ticky-tacky houses” in her sixties protest song, “Little Boxes.” Each one attached to its neighbors, like links in a giant chain, with a little patch of ground in front and a garage under the living room windows. When the garage was open it would look like a gaping mouth under a couple of bulging rectangular eyes.
Two things set Mixer’s house off from those of his neighbors. One was the fact that it was painted a bilious urine-yellow color uncompli-mented by bright green trim. The other was the Christmas tree prominently displayed in one of the front windows: pink-flocked, decorated with silver tinsel and sparkly blue ornaments. If there had been a city ordinance against visual pollution-and there ought to have been-they could have slapped Mixer with a hell of a fine.
The curb in front was empty; I put my car there and stepped out into the same kind of light, steady drizzle we had had last night. December in San Francisco usually brings decent weather, but not this year. It had been raining off and on for three weeks now and I was pretty sick of it. I was starting to feel like an overwatered houseplant: much more of this and I would start to rot.
I ran up the yellow stucco staircase to one of those burglar-proof wrought iron gates that protected the front stoop. It kept me standing out in the rain while I pushed the doorbell and waited for somebody to respond. I waited a good minute before that happened; then the door clicked open and eased inward and a face peered at me around the edge. It was a white face, sort of vulpine, topped with a wild shock of red hair that clashed painfully with the yellow walls and green trim. It peered at me being rained on outside the gate, blinked a couple of times, and poked out a little farther from behind the door on a long scrawny neck.
“Yes?” the face said warily. “What do you want?”
“Are you Nelson Mixer?”
“I am. Who are you?”
I told him who I was and what I did for a living. His eyes got wide and popped a little, as if I’d told him I was Benito Mussolini come back from the dead; the white skin turned even whiter. He yanked the door open all the way, more a reflex action than anything else, and I was looking at the rest of him. There wasn’t much to see, really. He was about five-six and weighed in at a strapping one-twenty, all of which was encased in a royal blue bathrobe with gold-leaf dragons emblazoned on it. He could have been thirty-five or he could have been forty-five. He could also have been slightly screwball, if the way he was gawping at me was any indication.
“Private detective?” he said. “My God! What do you want? Who sent you?”
“Nobody sent me, Mr. Mixer. I-”
“Clara’s father? Is he the one?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know anyone named-”
“Well, you tell him I never touched her. You hear me? It’s all a pack of lies. All I did was tutor her.”
“Pardon me?”
“Tutor, tutor. You know what tutor means, don’t you?”
“Of course I know what-”
“There was never anything between Clara and me. No physical contact of any kind. I don’t even find her attractive; I’ve never liked women with big behinds. Tell him that, the old fool.”
“Look, Mr. Mixer…”
“Nellie!” a woman’s voice called from somewhere inside the house. “Nellie, what are you doing out there?”
“Oh my God,” Mixer said. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me again. Sudden guilt had spread like jam over his vulpine features.
“ Nell ie?”
He half-turned. “Stop that yelling!” he yelled. “I’ll be there in a minute, Darlene.”
“It’s pretty wet out here,” I said when his attention returned to me. “How about buzzing me in so we can talk?”
“Hah,” he said. “I don’t care if you drown out there.”
“You’re all heart. Who’s Darlene?”
“What?”
“Your friend inside. Darlene.”
“She’s not my friend,” he said quickly. “She’s one of my students.”
“I called up City College a while ago,” I said. “They told me you were too sick to teach today.”
“Too sick to leave the house. Yes, that’s right. I was just, ah, tutoring Darlene.”
“In your bathrobe?”
He looked down at himself as if he’d forgotten he was wearing the robe. Little red splotches appeared on his cheeks; they matched the color of his hair. “I, ah… that is, I… coffee, I spilled coffee on myself while we were…” He quit sputtering all of a sudden, drew himself up, bared his teeth in a foxy snarl, and said, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. Go away. Go tell Clara’s father I’ll sue him if he doesn’t stop harassing me.”
“I’m not working for Clara’s father,” I said, getting it out fast because he had started to shut the door. “I don’t know anybody named Clara. I’m here about Haruko Cage.”
The door stayed open about halfway. “Who?”
“Haruko Gage. She’s been-”
“Who the hell is Haruko Gage?”
“You don’t remember her, is that it?”
“Nellie!”
“No,” Mixer said, “I don’t remember her. Who is she?”
“A former student of yours. You asked her to move in with you about three years ago.”
“I did what?”
“Or don’t you remember that either?”