“Month. Paid in advance.”
“One month?”
“Deaf? Month, in advance.”
“Paid how?”
“Cash. No credit cards.”
“What’s the monthly rate?”
“Two and a quarter.”
Two hundred twenty-five dollars, cash. Drinking cheap wine with Spook in an alley a few weeks ago; drinking good sour mash whiskey since he moved into this neighborhood. Paying for a room one month in advance. Wearing a recently bought rain slicker and a pair of new shoes. Where did a homeless alcoholic get the kind of money he was throwing around?
“Where does he hang out when he’s not here?”
“Who knows.”
“Calls for him? Visitors?”
“No.”
“I need to look at his room,” Runyon said.
“Guests only upstairs.”
“Ten minutes, no more.”
“Guests only upstairs.”
“Suppose I rent your passkey.”
“Rent?”
“Ten minutes, ten dollars.”
“Twenty.”
“Ten. And nobody finds out I was here, cops included.”
The corpse pose lasted until he opened his wallet, removed a ten and flattened it against the glass. Then the veined hand snaked out again and a scarlet nail tapped the partition tray.
“Passkey first,” he said, “then you get the money.”
“No.”
“Same-time exchange, then.”
“... Okay.”
So he went through the ritual with her, putting the money into the tray and holding onto it with two fingers while she did likewise with the passkey; taking hold of the key while she pinched the other end of the sawbuck, like a four-handed tug of war; both of them pulling and letting go simultaneously. She squinted at the bill, as though she thought it might be counterfeit, then made it vanish inside the front of her white shirt.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
“Don’t worry. Neither of us wants me around any longer than that.”
There was no elevator. Runyon climbed dust-carpeted stairs, found his way to a door at the rear with the number 9 painted on it. The passkey let him into a twelve-foot-square box that reeked of stale booze, stale food, stale tobacco, and human excretion. Blanket-wadded single bed, tiny nightstand, scratched-up bureau, one rickety chair. Scatter of empty liquor bottles, a tuna fish can full of cigarette butts, remnants of fast-food meals that had already attracted roaches — two of them scurried away when he switched on the naked ceiling bulb — and a filthy knapsack propped in one corner. Cold in there; the Commerce was the kind of place where the heat would be turned on for the legal minimum each day and not a minute longer.
Bare-bones survival living at two twenty-five a month. One step up from the streets; at least Spook’s doorway at Visuals, Inc. had been free. This was what Big Dog had aspired to, what he’d spent part of his windfall on — one month in a cold, foul-smelling roach box and subsistence on hard liquor and junk food. Drunk, drifter, bully, bum. And a probable felon besides. The kind of borderline human who gave homelessness a bad name.
Runyon went over and squatted by the knapsack. Its straps were loose; he sifted through the pockets. No firearm of any kind, but plenty of testimony to Big Dog’s character. In addition to a scant few articles of filthy clothing, he found a cracked roach pipe, a switchblade knife with a broken blade, and a tattered envelope that contained half a dozen pawed-over glossies depicting the nastier acts of child pornography. He stared to rip up the photos, changed his mind and stuffed them back into the envelope, put the envelope into his coat pocket.
He turned the knapsack around to get at the pouch on the other side. Only one thing in there: a dirty cloth sack homemade out of what had once been a small pillowcase. Its contents rattled when he lifted it out. He undid the crude drawstring, spread the cloth open.
String of colored beads. Tiny brass cat. Half a dozen new pennies. Top to a simulated gold fountain pen. Woman’s compact made of scratched silver plate. Shiny copper pipe fitting. Pair of fingernail clippers on a silver chain. And a single gold-filled hoop earring with a broken fastener.
Bright and pretty. Spook’s stash.
There were two other items in the bag. One was an old, torn, edgeworn Valentine’s Day card on the front of which was a tufted gold and red heart enclosing the words I LOVE YOU. Inside, below the usual sentimental message, was an inked signature that read Your Dottie. The other item was a piece of heavy, slick paper folded into a two-inch square. It had been opened and refolded so many times that the paper had begun to separate along the creases. He spread it out carefully on the filthy carpet.
Page of black-and-white, head-and-shoulders studio portraits from an old school yearbook. Mix of some forty teenage boys and girls, twenty on each side, their names printed below each photo. One of the portraits had a crude heart drawn around it, like the heart on the Valentine’s card, in smudged penciclass="underline" a dark-haired, attractive girl named Dorothy Lightfoot. Dorothy... Dot.
There was nothing on either side of the page to identify the school or year. No writing or other marks. And none of the boys was named Luke or Duke or anything similar. Or Snow.
Runyon refolded the page, tucked it into a different pocket. His watch said he’d been there a little more than eight minutes. He said aloud, “ ‘And when the big dog comes home, he’ll tell you what the little dog done.’ ” But Big Dog wouldn’t be coming home, most likely. And when he did turn up again, it’d be the SFPD he told his story to.
Runyon had had as much of this place as he could stand. He pulled the drawstring on the cloth, returned the sack to the pocket where he’d found it, stood the knapsack in its original place. The only reason he locked the door behind him when he left was to keep the other residents from stealing the knapsack.
Downstairs, the vampire woman was still doing nothing except sitting on her cranked-up chair and staring blankly into space. The dead eyes shifted to him as he approached her cage, watched him drop the passkey into the tray. Then, slowly and deliberately, she gave him the finger. Animal trick, like the baboon he’d once seen mooning a crowd of onlookers at the Seattle zoo. He ignored it, went out into the dirty streets and the clean rain.
13
I was out of the office most of Thursday. After Tamara and I wrapped up the report for McCone Investigations, I took it over to Pier 24-½ and hand-delivered it to Ted Smalley. Then I spent an hour and a half with a Maritime Plaza attorney who specialized in felony appeals cases and who was looking to hire a small agency on a retainer basis to do his investigative work. I thought the interview went pretty well, but with lawyers you can never be sure of anything. Early afternoon I played hooky again and finished my Christmas shopping at Union Square. Nokia cell phone for Emily, four-ounce bottle of expensive French perfume for Kerry, a couple of multicolored silk scarves for Tamara, and another overload of crowd-and-Christmas commercialism for me.
It was nearly five when I got back to O’Farrell Street, just missing Jake Runyon. He’d found and had some trouble with Big Dog, Tamara informed me; he’d also uncovered a lead on Spook’s background. She filled me in before she handed over the heavily creased page of photos.
“Runyon okay?” I asked.
“Lump on his head and a sore ear. Tough dude.”
“And a good investigator.”
“Man knows judo, you believe it?”
“Good for him. So you like him better now?”
“I always liked him. You the one didn’t want to hire him.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to like either of us much, earlier in the week.”
“Already said I was sorry. My bad, and I’m keeping it out the office from now on.”