“Twenty minutes? Aren’t you calling from the winery?”
“No. I just got into the city, I’m in a service station down on Lombard.”
Well, Christ, I thought. Leo Cappellani had said Alex was headstrong and sometimes exhibited a lack of good judgment; driving seventy-five miles with a concussion and a bad scalp wound was a prime example of both.
I said, “Why do you want me to meet you?”
“Because I’m going to have a showdown with Booker and I want somebody there. I don’t trust him and I don’t trust myself.”
I frowned. And Shelly had said he always needed somebody to lean on in a crisis: here he was wanting to lean on me, all right. “Why don’t you trust him, Mr. Cappellani?”
“For all I know he’s the son of a bitch who hit me last night, that’s why. Maybe he found out somehow that I’d hired you to check into his background.”
“That’s not much of a reason for attempted murder.”
“Not for you and me, maybe. But how do we know how a bastard like Booker thinks? He stands to gain access to a lot of money if he’s able to convince Rosa to marry him. The kind of guy you proved him to be, if he realized how much of a threat I am he might have figured his only chance was to get rid of me.”
You’re going off half cocked, I thought. But I said, “You wouldn’t be planning to accuse him, would you?”
“That depends. Probably not; I don’t have any proof. But I damned well do want the satisfaction of telling him to his face what I know about him and what I think of him.”
“That might not be a good idea,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be better if you talked to your mother first—?”
“I’ll talk to my mother later,” he said stubbornly. “Listen, you probably saved my life last night and I’m damned grateful — but I’m not after advice from you. All I want is for you to back me up when I see Booker.”
I hesitated. Did I want to get mixed up in an emotional and potentially volatile scene between Alex and Jason Booker? The answer was no. But then again, if I refused and he saw Booker alone, there was no telling what might happen. Hell, Booker could be the one who had taken that wine bottle to Alex in the winery office…
He said, misinterpreting my silence, “I’ll pay you for your time, don’t worry about that.”
“I wasn’t worrying about it,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“Okay — sorry. Will you meet me?”
“Yeah, I’ll meet you. Where’s Booker?”
“At our town house, up on Russian Hill. He told my mother he had something to do down here and she gave him permission to spend the night at the house.”
“Anybody else there? Servants?”
“No.”
“What’s the address?”
“Chestnut and Larkin.” He gave me the number.
“I’ll see you out front, then. We’ll go in together.”
“Right. Twenty minutes?”
“As soon as I can get there.”
We rang off, and I sighed a little and went into the bathroom and took four aspirin for my lingering headache. Then I got the groceries and carried them into the kitchen, talked myself out of taking time to have a beer and look through my house mail, and left the flat.
When I got to my car a block away — parking on Pacific Heights is always a hassle — I found that in the half-hour since I had left it somebody had slammed into the rear end. There was a piece gone out of the left taillight and a big dent in the trunk lid. I scowled at the damage, went finally around to the front. And saw with amazement that there was a note on the windshield, under the wiper blade. I took it out and looked at it, and the amazement went away. Uh-huh, I thought.
What the note said was, “Whoops, sorry about that.”
The house on the corner of Chestnut and Larkin was a big white neo-colonial set a little way back from the sidewalks behind shrubbery and a five-foot brick-and-wrought-iron fence. There was a driveway on the downhill Larkin side, leading to an attached garage, and in the driveway was the dusty station wagon that Jason Booker had been driving last night. Through a shifting curtain of fog, I could see blurred light beneath the closed garage door and in one of the side windows; the rest of the house appeared dark.
I found a parking spot near the driveway. On a clear day you would have some view from up there: the broad sweep of the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Angel islands, the Marin hills, part of the East Bay. Which was the main reason why Russian Hill was one of San Francisco’s moneyed neighborhoods; panoramic views do not come cheap. But tonight, about all you could make out down below were the vague misty lights that marked Fisherman’s Wharf and Aquatic Park and the Presidio.
There were other cars parked in the area, but all of them were dark and nobody got out of any of them to approach me. So I stepped out myself after a moment, into the icy wind and the wet brackish-smelling fog, and walked up to Chestnut and down the sidewalk in front of the Cappellani house. More cars parked there, and all of them deserted too.
Where was Alex? It had been a good thirty minutes since he called me, and he had said he was in a service station on Lombard Street; it should not have taken him much more than ten minutes — fifteen, maximum — to get from there to Russian Hill. Unless he had stopped somewhere on the way, for some reason.
I came back to the corner and stood next to a lamppost there, hunching my shoulders against the wind. A pair of headlights appeared behind me, but they drifted on past, went down to where Larkin hooks into Francisco, and disappeared. Out on the Bay, a foghorn echoed in its mournful way; and over on Hyde, a cable car bell clanged tinnily. Otherwise the night held a kind of eerie stillness, the way it does in one of San Francisco’s heavy blanketing fogs.
Five minutes went by without another car showing up, without any sign of life on the streets. Then there were two sets of fuzzy headlights on Chestnut and another set on Larkin, each of which vanished again without slowing as they passed me. I was getting damned cold, standing there, and not a little irritated. Where the hell was he?
It occurred to me then that maybe he was already here. I did not know what kind of car he was driving; it could be any one of those parked nearby. And in spite of our agreement he could have gone into the house without waiting for me to show up. But was he that impulsive, that foolish? It would have defeated the whole purpose of getting me up here.
I gave it another two minutes. Nothing, no other car. All right, damn it, I thought — and I went over to the front gate, through it and up the front walk to the house’s pillared entranceway. There was a doorbell button set into a recessed niche beside the door, and I pushed that and heard the distant peal of chimes inside. But I did not hear anything else in there: no one came to open the door.
I began to feel uneasy, as I had up at the winery cellar — an intimation that something was wrong. Booker was supposed to be here, should be here; that was unmistakably his station wagon over in the driveway, and there were those lights showing in the garage and in the side window. But if he was here, why hadn’t he answered the door chimes? And where was Alex, if not inside the house?
Maybe the two of them went off in Alex’s car, I thought. Only that did not make much sense. There didn’t seem to be any reason for either of them to have wanted to do that; and Alex couldn’t have gotten here more than fifteen minutes before me, which was little enough time for him or Booker to decide to go for a ride.
I pressed the doorbell button again, listened to more chimes echo and then fade into unbroken silence. On impulse I reached down and tried the doorknob. Locked.