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“Warm in what way?”

“That seems to have slipped my mind.”

“You’re a liar, nothing ever does. You said something about an inside job.”

“Did I?” He half-sat on the edge of his desk and kicked a pointed toe at me sadistically. “I wouldn’t want to throw you into conflict.”

“Give.” I said.

“You asked for it. Take a second look at those letters, the one from Wycherly and the others. You read ’em for content. Now read ’em for physical characteristics, comparatively.”

I compared the three documents, Wycherly’s letter to Mackey was evenly and neatly typed, with business-school spacing and paragraphing. The letters from “A Friend of the Family” were sloppily done, by amateurish fingers. But all three looked as if they had been typed on the same typewriter.

“Similar typewriter characteristics,” I said. “Same type, same degree of wear, same idiosyncrasies. The ‘e’ is out of alignment, for example. I’d like to see what a typewriter expert has to say about them.”

“I did, Lew. Wycherly’s original letter to me and the poison-pen letters were done on the same machine – a prewar Royal.”

“Whose?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when the slob yanked me. Clearly it’s a machine he has access to. I asked his permission to inspect all his typewriters, in his home and in his office. He wouldn’t let me. No doubt he had his reasons.”

“You think he wrote those letters himself?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out. His letter to me could have been typed by a secretary – it’s a professional piece of work – and the letters to the family by Wycherly himself. Note that they were addressed to ‘The Wycherly Family,’ instead of any particular member of it. He could have been trying to stir up trouble in his own family, force his wife into an open confession. I’ve seen crazier things done, for crazier reasons.”

“You take those accusations seriously?”

“I don’t know. Catherine Wycherly is a fairly hot dish for a woman her age. And whoever was trying to stir up the animals succeeded. She did divorce him.”

I looked the letters over again. “You don’t seem to take them seriously as threatening letters. I do. That combination of paranoia and righteousness bothers me. I’ve seen it in homicidal maniacs.”

“So have I. Also in ministers of the gospel,” Willie added sardonically.

“In either case, it doesn’t go with what I know about Wycherly.”

“I agree. But he could have been pretending to be a crackpot. I think whoever wrote them was putting it on. They’re pretty exaggerated.”

“Wycherly isn’t that smart.”

“Maybe not.” Willie looked at his watch. “I don’t want to rush you, Lew.”

I got up to go. “Let me take this letter and these copies?”

“You’re welcome to them. I have no use for them. You’re welcome to the whole damn Wycherly caboodle.”

I walked uphill back to Union Square, kicking at pigeons. And got my break, if you could call it that.

Chapter 15

A short wide man in a horsehide windbreaker and a peaked cap was standing with the dispatcher on the sidewalk outside the hotel. He came toward me smiling. His scar made an extra fold along his jaw.

“You the man that wantsa talk to me?”

“If you’re Garibaldi.”

“That’s what they call me since grade school. Giuseppe Garibaldi, he’s my personal hero.” He laughed, and made an exultant gesture which wrote his personality large on the air. “My real name is Gallorini. Nick Gallorini.”

“Mine’s Lew Archer.”

“Glad to meet you, Lew,” he said expansively, and took off his driving glove to shake my hand. He was big-nosed, flap-eared, hammered-down; his dark eyes were wild and gentle like the eyes of certain animals and birds. “You got a problem?”

“Missing girl.”

“Too bad. You want to sit in the cab and tell me about it?”

His cab was the last in line. We sat in the back of it and lit cigarettes.

“Your daughter, maybe?” he said. “Or a friend?”

“Daughter of a friend. You drove her and her father to the docks about two months ago. He was sailing on the President Jackson. She went aboard the Jackson with him, asked you to wait.” I got out Phoebe’s picture and showed it to him.

“I remember her.” There was gloom in his voice.

“Good for you. What happened after that?”

“Nothing happened, not that day. I wait like she said, must have been nearly an hour. She finally comes off the ship with one of the officers and this lady with her. Turns out to be her mother, she called her mother.”

“How were the two of them getting along?”

“All right.” He nodded judicially. “They had a little argument on the way back, but it didn’t amount to nothing. The girl had a car stashed someplace, and the mother wanted her to drive her down the Peninsula to her home. I caught that, because I live down that way myself – got a nice three-bedroom in Sharpe Park – bought it when North Beach went to the dogs, the wife says move, we moved.” He smiled triumphantly, and pointed a downward thumb at a passing cable car.

“What did the girl say?”

“She said she couldn’t drive her mother home, she had a date with a man. The mother wanted to know what man. The girl wouldn’t tell her. That was what the fuss was about.”

“The mother made a fuss?”

“Yeah, she was under the weather, like. She said her loved ones were cutting her out. The girl said that wasn’t true. She said she loved her. She was a nice girl to hear her talk – lotta good feeling in her.” The gloom in his voice was deepening, and staining his susceptible eyes. “I got a daughter of my own almost as old as her, thatsa why we had to move out of North Beach.”

I prompted him: “Where did you drive them?”

“Dropped the girl right here at the St. Francis. The mother I took down to the SP station.”

“Did the girl go into the hotel?”

“I guess so. I didn’t notice.”

“Did she say anything at all about the man she had the date with?”

He considered the question. “No. She clammed up about him. That was what the mother didn’t like. She didn’t calm down until the girl promised to drive down and see her later.”

“Did she say when?”

“I think she said that same evening,” Gallorini looked at me sideways through smoke. “Listen, I got a good memory but I’m no electronic brain. Why don’t you take it up with her old lady?”

“She isn’t talking.”

“She won’t help find her own daughter? Holy Mother. I knew there was trouble there, that more was going on than they were saying. That’s one reason I remember the conversation.”

“What are the other reasons you remember?”

Gallorini was silent for a time. He butted his cigarette and dropped the butt into the breast pocket of his wind-breaker. Suddenly he gripped my knee:

“Listen, are you a cop?”

“I have been. I’m in private work now.”

“You picking her up as a runaway or what?”

“I hope that’s all that’s happened to her. Her father hired me to find her dead or alive. She hasn’t been seen since the day he sailed.”

“Thatsa where you’re wrong about that.” An emotion I didn’t understand added faint feminine endings to some of his words. “I saw the little girl myself, week or ten days later. More like ten days, it was.”

I sat up straight. “Where?”

“On the road at night – I was filling in nights that week. I had this fare to the airport, eleven o’clock plane, and I was deadheading back. I saw her standing there on the Broadway overpass. It was raining, coming down cats and dogs, and she was standing there in the rain beside the parapet. My headlights caught her face, and I sort of reckanized her, or I probably would of gone right on. Also I got a funny idea that maybe she was getting ready to jump down onto Bayshore.”