“He must have been preoccupied to ignore you,” I said as a sincere compliment.
“I tried to be nice,” she explained. “I make the bed ready and put on the short see-through nightie that shows me off, but he only looks once and waves me away. Sometime in the night the phone woke me up. He had already answered it. He said the call was for him, but all he did was write something down on the back page of my date book and hang up.” She gestured toward a stylish white writing desk trimmed with delicate gold pinstriping.
I put my glass down and walked toward the desk. “He made some telephone calls. How many?”
“Just two. Maybe more after I was asleep. One was long distance. He dialed a lot of numbers before he stopped.”
“Did you hear any of the conversations?”
“A little, but not enough to tell what was going on. The one call he talked like someone was going on a trip. He was getting information about travel schedules. I didn’t listen well.”
Sitting down at the writing desk, I thumbed through a spiral bound appointment book that lay next to an ornate French-style telephone. Patrick had a lock on Tuesdays at 9 P.M. Michael was booked every Friday evening at 7:30 for the next three months. I turned to the back of the book. The last page was missing. Tufts of paper clinging to the curved wire binding marked where it had been. There were indentations on the inside of the back cover where a ball-point pen had borne down on the impressionable surface.
I turned on the desk lamp and tilted the book to catch the light. Faint numerals were discernable. A telephone number. I shifted the book about, trying to see other dim grooves. Melissa stood close to my chair, looking over my shoulder. “I saw him write just the one time... in the book. Then he tore out the page. For a... how you say... stratygos... he acted very strange.”
The Greek word she used meant general. Hookers generally are given first names only and most customers prefer to keep it that way. “How do you know he was a general?”
“Yes. General. That’s the word. I read it, but don’t remember. It was written out. On his check.”
“You take checks?” The world’s oldest profession was certainly becoming modernized. I wondered if she accepted credit cards too?
“For him it was a favor. He paid me, like everyone, in dollars for nothing. I owed him something. He give me check for the hotel. Yesterday, when I go there to meet someone, I give check to cashier lady. Right at top of check is printed his name and address. Also his rank of general with some numbers to identify him. I remember because I see he lives in Virginia in a town with a Greek name... Alexandria.” She said it proudly.
The first three numbers scratched on the back cover of Melissa’s date book were 479. A schematic diagram in the front of the phone book showed that this exchange served communities in and around San Rafael-Novato. For some reason, it was important for Keith Martin to contact someone living there. With a bit of luck I’d find out who it was.
I dialed the 479 prefix, then added the 3715 that I could make out under the strong light from the desk lamp. The telephone was answered by a woman after the second ring.
I brought my voice up from well back in my throat. “Hello. Marianne? This is Mark, Jean’s husband, calling from San Diego. Has Jean arrived yet?” All the elements of security and appeal to human emotions were in the message. The safety of a long distance call... a married man looking for his missing wife. Her curiosity should be piqued.
A good sign would be hesitation from the other end. There was. Then, “I believe you have the wrong number.”
I had to be quick. “Isn’t this 479-3715?”
“Why, yes. But I’m not Marianne. San Diego? Are you sure you dialed the right area code?”
Another substantiating answer was needed. I had looked it up, just in case. “Four-one-five?” I said hopefully.
“That’s right for San Rafael.”
A hit.
I waited now, keeping my fingers crossed.
“Who were you calling?”
Strike out.
I was tempted to come straight out with the name Keith Martin, but that was too risky. If he was there, or the woman had a way of reaching him, he could slip away again. She’d cut me off if I made my probing too pointed. The conversation had about run its course. “Isn’t this Marianne Tyson at nine-sixty-five Grand Avenue?” I invented a likely San Rafael address, hoping she’d tell me hers. It was a long shot.
It missed.
“I’m sorry. You have the wrong party. Ask the operator to help you.” She didn’t give me time to reply. The replaced receiver sent a click over the line.
Melissa saw me out. Before leaving, I’d made a point of suggesting that she engage a lawyer to advise her on immigration laws. One slip, I reminded her, and she’d be on her way back to the tobacco fields of Kosani.
I think she was a little sorry to see me go. But she didn’t offer me a discount. I paid the full amount — top dollar for top talent — willingly.
It was money well spent.
Because of Melissa Stevens, I was one step closer to coming face-to-face with Keith Martin.
Six
The commuters that used the Golden Gate Bridge to reach their suburban homes in Marin County flowed out of the city like hordes of grunion responding to the spring spawning urge. I joined in. Like them, I knew precisely where I was going and who it was I was going to see.
Her name was Gloria Grimes. She was married. Her husband was Captain Willis Grimes, a member of the United States Air Force. They had no children. The address was 833 Ivywild Street.
This information was found in the reference department of the downtown San Francisco public library. Five shelves sagged under the weight of city directories from most California towns and all major U.S. municipalities. There is a supplement in the back of each directory. It contains a numerical listing of telephone numbers. The name of the subscriber — nothing else — is shown beside the phone number. That’s all I needed to find everything else I wanted from the front of the book.
Aside from as much advertising as can be sold, the front part of city directories contains the names of residents listed in alphabetical order. The street address follows. The given names of all persons living at that address comes next, along with their occupation shown in parentheses. The final bit of data is the telephone number. That was the cross-reference I needed to pinpoint Gloria Grimes. The most time-consuming part of the whole, simple procedure was driving to the library and finding a place to park.
At the end of each work day, Highway 101 became a hurtling traffic jam. The vehicles in the right-hand lane moved at the prescribed 55 miles-per-hour speed limit, and I rolled along with them. An unbroken file of speed limit violators streamed past in the left-hand lane. One of them was a cruising cop car, oblivious to the lawbreakers.
I exited at the 4th Street off ramp and reached the Grimes house in five minutes. It was small, square and flat-roofed, wearing a crumbling coat of sun-bleached pink stucco. The front lawn was littered. A feeble stream of water dribbled from a slowly rotating sprinkler. A mud puddle had formed around its base. From the look of things, Captain Grimes had little interest in property maintenance.
I perked up when I saw the green automobile parked in the driveway. It matched the description of the car rented by Keith Martin. Ahead of it was a white, hatchback Pinto tucked under a warped-roof carport. I slowed down, but didn’t stop. I couldn’t tell if anyone was in the house. No lights had been turned on inside although shadows were getting longer and darkening.
There was a service station on a corner two blocks from the Grimes house. It probably had been a good location until the freeway bypassed it. The operator was old enough to have been working at the station since the day the first storage tank was buried in the ground. Tasked him to put a quart of oil in the engine and fill up the gas tank. He grinned in acknowledgement, showing ill-fitting teeth. I went inside the station and got a bottle of soda from the vending machine.