The blonde made a sharp right turn, proceeding south, and beat the light into a left turn. I swore a little, coming up, and thought about running the red; but the cross traffic was heavy, and it would only have been inviting an accident. I reached the corner and peered down the slope of the street, and the blonde had gotten caught behind a beer truck at the light a couple of blocks down. I let breath spray between my teeth and took my hands off the wheel and worked some of the stiffness out of them, waiting for the green.
When it came, I closed the gap to a block again. The blonde brought the Corvair over into the left-hand lane as we neared the southbound Central Freeway approach. I got into the same lane and made the same light that she did, and I was six cars behind her climbing the banked and curving entrance ramp onto the freeway.
The midday traffic was heavy, and the Hanlon girl could not make any time at all on Central. She got around a couple of slow cars and a truck as we reached the Skyway and swung south onto Bayshore, opening the Corvair up, cutting across traffic with blind disregard until she had gotten into the outside lane. I edged over into the third of the four lanes and stayed there, moving out right or left when I encountered a car at a lesser speed than I was forced to drive.
The blonde remained in the outside lane until we neared the off-ramp at Army Street, and then she veered over, two lanes diagonally, narrowly missing a Volkswagen microbus. She made it into the exit lane. I went over there, too, and there was one car between us as we came down into the interchange on Army.
She turned right, onto Potrero Avenue, made three lights and missed a fourth. I was two blocks behind her. We passed San Francisco General Hospital, and when we reached Mariposa she swung right and went three blocks and made another right on De Haro. We were heading up onto Potrero Hill.
It was an industrial and low-rent housing area, with steep inclines and a lot of dead-end streets. I knew it well enough; I had had a girl friend who lived on Missouri Street at one time, and I had grown up in the Noe Valley District, not far away. I dropped back another block, giving her plenty of room; there was not much traffic now, and the risk of her spotting me was greater than it had been before.
At 23rd Street she took the Corvair left, crossed
Carolina Street and began climbing Wisconsin. I made the turn after her, just in time to see the green louvered rear deck of the Corvair swinging left onto Alaska Street.
I could feel the muscles in my arms and legs relax, and I worked saliva into my mouth. Alaska was a dead-end street, a single protracted block in length; Wisconsin was its only release street. I took the Valiant to the corner and stopped on the near side of it, in front of a small neighborhood grocery store. I looked up the steep incline to the leveled-off turning circle at its upper end. Lorraine Hanlon had pulled the Corvair to the curb off on the right of it, in front of an old shambling white house set well back behind a gray-white picket fence grown over with dry-looking rose bushes. A green tar-papered roof and the upper half of the facing wall of the house were all that was visible from where I was.
As I watched, the blonde got out of the Corvair and slammed the door and walked through a gate in the picket fence. She did not look anywhere except straight in front of her. A moment later she disappeared from my view.
I sat there for a short time, debating, and then I got out of the Valiant and began to walk up the hill. I did it slowly, because there was a tense pulsing in my lower belly. The wind blew strong and bitter cold up here; you could hear it moaning funereally in the now-leaden sky. From the southwest and Daly City, streamers of fog clutched at San Francisco like the tendrils of some obscene parasitic vine.
There were three houses on each side of the street going up, separated from one another by small brown yards and sagging fences of one kind or another. Shades and blinds and drapes were drawn against the hoary cheerlessness of the afternoon, and there was no sign of life anywhere. The only sound was the wind, and the empty, hollow slap of my shoes on the cracked sidewalk.
I reached the circle and paused there to drag breath into my lungs. There was a rasping ache in my chest now, from the climb. I had not thought about my lungs in two days, because I had had too many other things on my mind and I had gotten a good start on kicking the cigarette habit and there had been no recurrence of the coughing or wheezing. I thought about them now, briefly, and then I stopped thinking about them altogether. The skin beneath the bandage on my forehead began to itch; I wiped away cold sweat with the back of my hand and looked over at the white house.
It, and a smaller dwelling sided with brown wooden shingles, were angled like a pair of ears on the faceless head of the turning circle. A low wall constructed of weathered planks bisected the property and extended back as far as I could see. A glassed-in front porch covered the entire front of the house, and there was a set of steps inside a wooden block frame leading up to a screened-over front door. Split-bamboo blinds were lowered over the glass facing the street. Azalea and hydrangea shrubs, which would bloom wild in pink and white and lavender in the spring, filled the small yard between the picket fence and the house. Nothing moved anywhere on the grounds.
I got some of my breath back and went without hurrying to where the Corvair was pulled carelessly to the curb. I knelt down by the left rear tire and unscrewed the air valve, and then went around to the right rear tire and did the same thing. I straightened up again and looked at the house. Stillness.
I stepped away from the car, and I could hear the sibilance of escaping air from the tires. I walked directly to the brown-shingled cottage and went a little way down a weed-choked driveway paralleling the plank dividing wall, until I reached a point where I could see the rear grounds of the white house. Another plank wall extended the width of the property some forty feet in back of the dwelling, and then the terrain fell away sharply into a steep, rocky slope. It appeared to be unscalable.
I began to feel a little better about things. I pivoted and started back along the driveway, and a door opened and a fat woman in her late forties came out onto a podium-sized side porch. She had bright, curly orange hair that looked like carrot peelings pasted to her scalp. She wore a faded housedress and shedding blue mules.
I went over to the porch, and she came down a couple of steps and looked at me curiously, but without hostility. “Something you wanted?” she asked.
“Police business,” I said.
“Yeah? What’s going on?”
“Do you know who owns the house next door?”
She shrugged. “Some realty company.”
“Can you tell me who’s renting it, then?”
“Man and his wife and their kid.”
“What name?”
“Who knows?”
I pointed over at the green Corvair. “Was that the wife who just drove up a couple of minutes ago?”
“Didn’t see her, but that’s her car. She’s got a couple of flat tires, looks like.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “What about the husband?”
“What about him?”
“Can you describe him?”
“I only seen him once, from a distance,” the woman said. “He looked like a million guys look, that’s all.”
“When was that one time you saw him?”
“Three days ago, I think it was.”
“Tell me about the kid,” I said. “A little boy?”
“Yeah.”
“How old?”
“Nine or ten, maybe.”