And that’s why you took your maiden name again, I thought. I said nothing, waiting for her to go on.
‘I didn’t feel anything for him then, when I found out he was dead,’ she said. ‘He was… just nothing to me any more. I didn’t even go to his funeral.’
I asked quietly, ‘How long ago did this happen, Cheryl?’
‘Two years now. Two years last October sixth.’
‘And you’ve been living alone since then?’
‘Except when Doug comes home for the holidays, or on one of his vacation leaves,’ she said. ‘We’re very close, Doug and I. He’s all I have left.’
She continued to stare into the fire, and I let her have a few moments with the privacy of her thoughts. The confessions each of us had made as to why we were the lonely people we were had established a bond and a foundation for our relationship, and I knew that when we spoke again, it would be much easier, more natural, between us. That was the way it was. She turned from the fire, and a moment later we were asking questions of each other and there were no hesitations with any of the answers.
Cheryl told me she was a waitress-cashier at Saxon’s Coffee Shop on 19th Avenue-she made the statement almost defensively, as if I might attach some kind of stigma to her position, the old nonsense about waitresses being dim-witted pushovers-and that Tuesdays were her days off, which was why she had been free today and tonight. She told me she had been born and raised in Truckee, in the High Sierras, but that she and Doug had been orphaned in their teens and had both come to San Francisco shortly after the death of their parents. She had gone to college for a year, liberal arts because that was what all the other girls who had no idea what they wanted out of life had studied, but she had not had the money to continue with her education. For a time she had been a secretary in the Traffic Bureau at Southern Pacific, and then she had been a cocktail waitress, and then she had met this Tom and gotten married, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’
I filled her in on my own background, my youth in the Noe Valley District, on the fringe of San Francisco’s tough Mission; my military and war service in Texas and Hawaii and the South Pacific; my desire to become a cop and my enrollment in the Police Academy; the fifteen years I had spent on the San Francisco police, and the afternoon I had gone out on a homicide squeal and found a guy who had hacked his wife and two kids to pieces with an ax and decided that I had had it with direct police work; the acceptance of my application to the State Board of Licenses for a private investigator’s certificate; the lean years since; a little more about Erika, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’
We smiled at each other across the table, and there was more to say, more to ask. But we had talked enough for one night; part of any relationship is the anticipation of more knowledge, of stronger ties. She sensed it, too, and she said, ‘I’d better be going now. It’s almost eleven, and I have to be to work at eight in the morning.’
I nodded. ‘When can I see you again, Cheryl?’
‘You can call, if you like.’
‘I have to go out of town for a day or two,’ I said. ‘I’ll call as soon as I get back, and we’ll have dinner together, and dancing or a show afterward-whatever you like to do.’
‘All right.’
I helped her on with her coat, and we went through the long narrow section of the lounge and outside. A thick blanket of fog had come in off the ocean, and it was cold and damp on the sidewalk. I walked her to her car, at the end of the block, and it was there that we said good night.
For the first time, but not for the last.
CHAPTER SIX
Fog drifted like tattered gossamer through the darkened streets of Pacific Heights. I had to leave my car a couple of blocks from my flat again, and trailing vapors of mist touched my face in a gray, feathery caress as I hurried along the wet sidewalk. They made me feel vaguely chill and apprehensive; it had been a night like this one, a fog like this one, that I had had my belly sliced open during the kidnapping business the previous autumn. The cut, which had required twenty-seven stitches, had scarred thin and white, and even though I had nightmares about it sometimes, I had for the most part been able to bury the terror of that night in my subconscious; but heavy fog, the feel and smell of it, always seemed to release the memory from the mental grave I had dug for it…
I reached the foyer of my building and worked the latch-key and stepped into warmth and silence and the dying odors of a corned-beef supper. The anxiety went away as I climbed the stairs, and immediately I felt a return of the high spirits with which I had driven home from the Golden Door. This seemed to be my day for shifting moods, all right. Maudlin in the morning, buoyant at night. I reached the landing at the top of the stairs, and in the semi-darkness there, aimed my key at the lock on my door. Oh, what a difference a day makes-Sinatra hit the nail right on the head. Or was it Tony Bennett who sang that one? Or was it Ella-
And that was when I heard the sounds inside my apartment.
The landing was very quiet, and the scrape of my key at the lock was indistinct, like a rat chittering somewhere in a wall. But the other sounds were graphic, unmistakable-the creak of a loose floorboard, the rustle of clothing, the jangle of coins. There was somebody in there, somebody in my living room, and I turned the key reflexively without thinking about what I was letting myself in for and shoved the door wide.
The knob cracked against a surface of the highboy set against the side wall, and I was two steps into heavy darkness, now thickly silent darkness. I got my hand up, fumbling along the wall to the right of the door for the light switch, and very suddenly a blinding, shimmering white hole appeared in the black fabric of the room, less than ten feet in front of me. Flashlight, I thought, large-cell flashlight-and I threw my left arm up and across my face to shield my eyes, still trying to locate the wall switch with my right hand.
Something came out of the brilliant, diffused aureole of the flash beam, something dark and bulky, and I stumbled awkwardly to the right to get out of the way and collided with the drop-leaf table there, upsetting it. I went down onto my hands and knees, painfully, burning my palms on the worn nap of the carpet; above and behind me the something shattered hollowly against the rose wallpaper. Porcelain shards rained on the backs of my legs like thin, cold hailstones, and I thought: the shit, he threw the reading lamp at me, the goddam shit.
The flash beam went out, abruptly, and the room once more diminished into a deep-black; the guy, whoever, was running through the flat now, banging into things in the darkness. I got my feet under me and lurched upright, turning back to the wall. I found the switch finally, and pale light from the glass ceiling bowl flooded the room. My eyes ached from the glare of the flash; it took a moment to focus them so I could see well enough to navigate the cluttered expanse to the doorway on the opposite side, and I could hear him out on the utility porch, trying to get the side door open.
I kicked a footstool out of the way, viciously, and staggered into the kitchen and then out to the porch. The back door was standing wide open. Footsteps pounded down the flight of steep wooden stairs which jutted outward like a prominent rib cage from the old Victorian lady’s side wall. I swung through the door onto the pocket-sized platform which serves as a landing for my flat, and a dark man-shape wrapped in a trenchcoat and gloves and some kind of long-billed cap was down at the foot of the stairs; fog and deep shadow helped to camouflage his features, the size and shape of him.