The Season of Sharing affair wouldn’t be that bad. It too was an annual charity benefit, but on a much smaller scale, put on by McCone Investigations and the other businesses at Pier 24-½. I’d been to a couple of them — Sharon is one of the last persons I would ever willingly offend — and I had survived. I’d survive this one, too, if I approached it in the right spirit.
And the right spirit started with not worrying about it days in advance. What I needed right now was a way to pass the time until mid-afternoon. The only one with any appeal had nothing to do with business. Well, so what? Might as well start getting rid of the workaholic mindset a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.
I drove up to Pacific Heights, lucked into a parking space a block from the building that houses my flat. My soon-to-be-former flat. The decision to semiretire had come with a corollary: get rid of unnecessary possessions and consolidate my life. I’d had the rent-controlled flat almost as long as I’d been a freelance investigator, and for a time after Kerry and I were married I’d split my time between it and her Diamond Heights condo — an unconventional arrangement that had worked pretty well, giving both of us the space and privacy we needed after years of living alone. But gradually I’d found myself spending more and more time at the condo; it was home now, and had been even before Emily came into our lives. Over the past year I’d slept a total of two nights at the flat, both for business-related reasons. The place no longer felt the same to me. It was as if, walking in, I was entering a series of rooms that were only distantly familiar, like a house or apartment where you lived many years ago; as if I’d already moved out. A little more than two weeks, and it would cease to be mine. New year, new lease for somebody else. I wondered if I’d miss it any after I turned over the keys. Maybe a little, but not much.
There were only a few things left here that I wanted to keep. One piece of furniture, an antique secretary desk. Some personal stuff. And the bulk of my collection of 6,000 pulp magazines. There was room at the condo for all of these, though we’d need to do some rearranging and buy several new bookcases.
Cartons of pulps that I’d already packed were piled in the living room; only about two thousand were left on shelves. Several more cartons containing my long run of Black Mask and other valuable titles I’d already transported to the condo. I took off my coat and set to work filling the few remaining empty boxes, making another mental note to round up additional empties before my next visit. Maybe this time, with four or five such notes stored, I would remember to do it.
Pulp-paper magazines, with their gaudy covers and brittle, untrimmed edges and melodramatic stories of a vanished era, were a pleasure to handle. Even tucked into protective Mylar bags, their faintly musty odor permeated a room in a heady sort of way. I’d started collecting them in my late teens, and at one time I’d been an active, even aggressive buyer, poring over sales catalogs and haunting used bookshops and flea markets in my spare time. But then I’d met Kerry, and there’d been other changes good and bad, capped by Emily’s arrival, and my interest in pulps had declined to the point where I seldom even looked at them anymore.
Now, though, with more free time in the offing, my enthusiasm had rekindled. I’d started unbagging and reading stories at random, here and at the condo. I’d dug out my old want list of missing issues of Black Mask, Dime Detective, and half a dozen other titles and given it to Ted Smalley’s significant other, Neal Osborn, who was an antiquarian bookseller with worldwide contacts. Once I had the entire collection moved and reshelved, I would catalog it and then begin upgrading the tattier issues. The prospect was energizing. Who said work was the be-all and end-all of a man’s existence? Who said retirement was just a period of limbo between living and dying? Me, once, but not anymore.
I packed up six cartons and hauled them out to the car. Two at a time, just to prove that I could do it without working up much of a sweat.
Mid-afternoon did not mean three o’clock, after all, not in the Department of Human Services. Evelyn Sukimoto wasn’t there when I walked in at five minutes before three. She wasn’t there at three-fifteen, or at three-thirty. At twenty to four I caught the smarmy young guy giving me a satisfied little grin, as if he enjoyed watching me sit and wait. He’d make a perfect spin doctor, all right. Help cover backsides, help screw the citizens who didn’t contribute campaign funds and couldn’t be bought. Up the machine! Politics for politicians! Don’t legislate, obfuscate and manipulate!
People came in, people went out. Staff, mostly, a good ethnic mix of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Caucasians. The younger ones wore determined, upbeat expressions, moved with a certain brisk purpose; the older ones seemed tired and stoic, their movements almost lethargic. No surprise there. Urban social work is a young person’s game. The players under thirty believe they can make a difference, and work hard at the job. The veterans have had too many daily encounters with grinding poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, spousal abuse, street abuse, plus all the myriad forms of political b.s., to retain an outward show of optimism. Some had turned bitter, cynical. Even the ones who remained idealists at heart had a defeated, worn-out demeanor, like structurally sound buildings with weathered, graffiti-scarred facades.
Evelyn Sukimoto was one of the young, determined variety. She showed up finally at two minutes past four, fast-stepping as if she couldn’t wait to get to her desk. She was about twenty-five, slender, nice features; silky, glistening black hair hung almost to her waist. Frozen Face glanced up at her as she approached his desk, then quickly avoided eye contact by peering again at his computer screen. Right in character: He wasn’t going to tell her she had a visitor. But I was already on my feet, and I got to her before she could pass through to the inner sanctum.
“Ms. Sukimoto?”
She didn’t know me and I didn’t look homeless, but she offered up a nice little smile anyway. “Yes?”
I said I’d been waiting to talk to her and could she give me ten minutes or so of her time? “It’s about the homeless man who was murdered last week. Spook.”
She lost the smile. “Are you with the police?”
“Private investigator.” I proved it to her with my license photostat, told her what we’d been retained to do.
“Well... all right, come with me.”
We went through the door, then through a maze of cubicles to one with her name on a little plate next to its doorless entrance. Desk, desk chair, straight-backed chair, and not much else. We both sat down.
“I don’t know how I can help you,” she said. “Spook wasn’t one of my clients; I hardly knew him. Why did you come to me?”
I relayed what Jake Runyon had told Tamara. The smile came back, sliced wry this time, when she heard Pete Snyder’s name.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Pete the Stud.”
“Stud?”
“He trunks so, anyway. Hits on me every time he sees me.”
“Sounds like you don’t much like him.”
“What’s to like? He’s married, for one thing. Even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Too pushy?”
“Too white. I don’t date white guys.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“I was married to one for ten months. That’s why.”
Or to that.
“Not that I’m bitter or anything,” Ms. Sukimoto lied. “It’s just that... well, he was such a shit. My ex, I mean. And you know the old expression. Once burned, twice shy.”
I made a polite noise this time. Intended it to be polite, at least. It came out sounding like a dyspeptic grunt.