“I don’t beat up on people,” I said a little sharply.
Her gray-green eyes were amused. “No? How about me last night?”
“That was a different matter altogether.”
“God, you’re sensitive, aren’t you?”
“A little, I guess. People always seem to have the wrong idea about the kind of work I do. I don’t strong-arm people and I don’t ‘get things’ on people. I operate strictly within the law.”
“I stand corrected,” she said. Her gaze had turned speculative, as it had a couple of times up at the winery; but she did not seem to be put off. “Okay?”
I smiled at her. “Okay.”
Our sandwiches and drinks arrived, and we went to work on them. I said between mouthfuls, “If Alex hates Jason Booker, how does Leo feel about him?”
“Booker? The same, I gather. But Leo says Rosa has no intention of marrying anybody and she’s too tough and too sharp to let Booker talk her into anything she doesn’t want to do. Alex is the only one who’s worried.”
“What’s your opinion of Booker?”
“He’s a turd,” she said.
“That bad?”
“At least. He tried to get me into bed with him not too long ago, at the winery; big macho come-on, as if there wasn’t a woman in the world who could wait to screw him. I laughed in his face.” The lopsided grin again. “He’s never bothered me since.”
“Nice guy, all right,” I said.
“Yeah. You don’t suppose he could be the one who clobbered Alex — and you — with that wine bottle?”
“It’s possible, I guess.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Shelly said. “He’s the type that’s capable of doing anything to get what he wants.” She paused. “If it was Booker, you know, he might try to go after Alex a second time.”
“He might, yeah.”
“So are you planning to stay on the scene?”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Keep on working for Alex. Give him protection.”
“We don’t know that he needs protection. The man who hit him could still have been a sneak thief.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I can’t answer it,” I said. “I haven’t talked to Alex.”
“Make you a bet that when you do, he’ll want you around. He needs people to lean on, particularly in a crisis. He’s not at all like his mother, or like Leo. Why do you think he’d hire a private eye in the first place, instead of working things out himself?”
“If he hired me.”
“Sure, right.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “this whole business will probably be over before much longer. The Napa sheriff’s people should see to that.”
“But will they?” She laughed ironically. “I doubt it. They haven’t found out a damned thing so far.”
“You really are down on cops, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am.”
“Then how come the lunch with me?”
She gave me a long look over her stein of Black-and-Tan. “Two reasons,” she said. “One is that I’m curious as hell about you and Alex and what happened last night. As if you hadn’t already figured that out.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s the other reason?”
“Chemistry,” she said.
That gave me pause. “Pardon?”
“Oh come on, big man, don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant, all right. I had been too tired and too battered to attach much significance to it at the time, but I remembered now the way she had looked at me inside the winery sales room, and later, just before I was ready to leave: the sort of looks a woman gives you when she’s interested in what she sees.
So maybe I was interested too. She was a damned good-looking woman, and I do not know very many good-looking women who find me interesting — not at my age, and not with my shaggy looks and my overhanging belly. No great passion on either side, but you don’t need great passion to begin a relationship.
Shelly said, “Mutual, right?”
“Mutual.”
“Good. Now we can go on from there.”
We went on from there. I told her a little about myself, and she reciprocated. She was from Florida, she said, and she had been married to a county sheriff whose idea of fun was to get drunk twice a week and rape her — not make love to her, forcibly rape her. She divorced him finally, knocked around Miami and Fort Lauderdale for a while, came to California a few months ago to visit a friend, decided to stay on, and got the job with the Cappellani Winery through another acquaintance who knew Leo. What she did there was handle marketing matters. She thought San Francisco was a good place to live, “except that there are too goddamn many fags here,” but she would probably go back to Florida eventually because of the climate there.
It was a relaxed and casual conversation, without much intimacy — just two people getting to know each other a little better. When she said at three o’clock that she had to get back to the office I was sorry to have it end. I liked her, despite her narrow opinions on some matters; she was frank and open, and she did not seem to play games.
We left the Boar’s Head together, and out on the street Shelly said, “Call me tonight or tomorrow night, big man. I’m in the book. On Beach Street in Marina.”
“Count on it,” I said.
We touched hands. Standing close to her that way, I found myself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with her. Typical male: get to know a woman and right away you think about getting laid.
The only thing was, there was a look in Shelly’s eyes which might have meant she was wondering the same about me.
6
It was three forty-five by the time I got back to my office. I checked in with my answering service — no calls — and then finished the report on Jason Booker and wrote a letter accepting the Mystery Writers’ invitation to speak at one of their meetings. At five o’clock I closed up for the day, stopped at a store on Van Ness to buy some groceries, and eventually drove up to my fogbound flat on Pacific Heights.
The telephone started ringing as soon as I keyed open the door.
I had an armful of the groceries and a handful of my overnight bag and my house mail; I kicked the door shut, put the groceries down on the highboy along the inside wall, the bag and the mail down beside them, and clicked on the light switch so I could see my way through the bachelor’s clutter of newspapers and magazines and clothing on the living room floor. I keep the phone in the bedroom and I hustled in there past the laminated wood bookshelves that contain my pulp collection, caught up the receiver on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Good — you’re in,” a man’s voice said. “Alex Cappellani.”
I sat down on the rumpled bed. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Cappellani?”
“Lousy. But not as bad as I’d feel if you hadn’t showed up at the winery last night.”
“When will you be able to leave the hospital?”
“I’ve already left it. Earlier this afternoon.”
“But I heard you had a concussion—”
“Mild concussion. They wanted to keep me in there for observation, but I wasn’t having any of that. I don’t like hospitals.”
I could appreciate that; but I did not say anything.
“Look,” Alex said, “what is it you found out yesterday about Jason Booker?”
“You want me to give you the full report now?”
“Just the meat, that’s enough.”
“Okay,” I said, and told him about Booker’s marriage to Martha Towne, about the fifteen thousand dollars of her money that he had appropriated for private investments of his own.
“I knew it,” Alex said grimly. He paused for a moment. “All right. Can you meet me in twenty minutes?”