The uneasiness took me away from the door, around the corner, and down to the driveway. A car came uphill through the fog, and I turned to watch it whisper past; it slowed at the top of the hill, but then it continued along Larkin and its taillights were swallowed by the mist. I went into the driveway, stopped beside the station wagon and glanced inside. It was empty. When I put my hand on the hood the metal turned out to be cold: it had been some time since the car was last driven.
I stepped off into the shrubbery and went up to the lighted window. Past thin curtains I could see that the room there was a study, with a desk and some leather chairs and a leather sofa and wall shelves holding books and military-type curios. Like the car, it was empty — but draped over the sofa was a man’s shearling coat, and on the desk was a man’s tweed hat.
Turning, I moved back to the driveway, walked along it to the closed garage door. No handle on its surface, which meant that it was probably remote-controlled. To the left, I saw then, away from the house, was a narrow concrete walk that led between a wooden property fence and the side wall of the garage. I went over there, onto the walk. It ended three-quarters of the way back at a raised wooden platform on which were two metal garbage cans; but halfway along was a side door set into the garage wall.
The door was unlatched: a tiny strip of light shone between its edge and the jamb.
I came to a standstill, and there was a clenching sensation in my stomach. Something wrong here, all right — the same kind of something, maybe, that had been wrong at the winery. I listened again, tensely. Silence, except for the wind rustling the shrubbery.
Get it over with, I thought. And went up to the door, hesitated again, and then put my palm flat against the panel and shoved it wide.
Worse than last night, much worse.
Because the first thing I saw was the dead man lying on his side on the concrete floor.
I said “Jesus” under my breath, went in there a couple of paces. He was sprawled out in front of an open door into the house, with one arm extended beyond his head. In that hand was a .32 caliber blued-steel automatic. But he had not been shot; the side of his head had been brutally caved in.
Jason Booker.
To one side of him was what looked to be a homemade black jack — a man’s sock filled with something like sand or buckshot — and it was matted with blood and hair: the murder weapon. Spatters and ribbons of blood stained Booker’s face, the back of his sports shirt, the floor around him. It had congealed, but still glistened wetly; he could not have been dead much more than half an hour.
Alex, I thought. Alex?
I started to take another step toward the body, stopped abruptly when I realized there was still more blood, a small puddle of it, down near my right shoe. Booker’s too? But the puddle was a good twenty feet from where he lay. I stared at the gun in his hand, and sniffed the air, and thought I could smell the faint lingering odor of cordite. Had Booker managed to shoot his assailant? before he died, or before a final death blow was struck?
There were plenty of signs of a struggle. Firewood had been knocked from a stack along the wall to the left of the open house door, tools had been dislodged and scattered from a workbench to the right of the door. Half a dozen coins were strewn among the dislodged tools: two nickels, two dimes, a quarter and a penny. There were also a matchbook and a nearly empty package of Camels — and a piece of paper that looked as if it had been part of a 5x7 notepad, center-folded and resting tented on the fold.
I could make out typeprint on the paper, and I detoured around the puddle of drying blood and went over to it and sat on my haunches. Without touching the paper, I leaned down to look at the words. They were in elite type, and they spelled out the address of this house. That was all, except for a single word in capital letters at the bottom, like a signature, that meant nothing to me at all.
The word was Twospot.
I straightened up, frowning. You could put together some of what had happened here, but there were other things that did not seem to add up. If Alex had murdered Booker, what was the sense in the piece of notepaper? He would have had no conceivable reason for carrying around the address of his own family’s house. It could belong to Booker, but the same thing applied: he would not have needed an oddly signed paper to tell him where the house was situated.
But if Alex was not the murderer, then why had Booker been killed? And by whom? And why hadn’t Alex kept his rendezvous with me?
You’re wasting time, I told myself. Get the police out here, leave the speculating to them. I went to the open house door, entered a small storage pantry, passed through it into a central hallway. The house was deeply hushed, contained an almost palpable aura of emptiness. Light from the study I had seen from outside spilled into the hall, creating pockets of heavy shadow; I located a wall switch, flicked it with the back of my hand to keep from smearing any fingerprints that might be on it, and turned into the study.
A telephone sat on one corner of the desk. I took out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my hand. Then I lifted the receiver and dialed the number of the Hall of Justice.
When the switchboard operator came on I asked him if Lieutenant Eberhardt was on duty; Eberhardt was a close friend of mine, had been ever since we had gone through the Police Academy together after World War II. But he said no, Eb was gone for the day — did I want to talk to anyone else? I knew several other detectives, one of whom was a Homicide Lieutenant and a casual acquaintance I had played poker with on a number of occasions. I asked if he was on night watch, and the operator said he was and transferred the call.
An unfamiliar voice said, “Homicide, Canelli speaking. Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let me talk to Frank Hastings.”
Part Two
The Police Lieutenant
7
I watched Canelli bring my cruiser down the spiral parking ramp. The car bounced to a jerky stop at the broad yellow line at the bottom of the ramp — then stalled. Through the windshield, I could see Canelli’s lips moving as he restarted the car. To myself, I smiled. As long as I’d known him, Canelli had been on the losing side of a long, grueling battle with machines. Anything mechanical defeated him. A typewriter ribbon or a cassette cartridge left him helplessly muttering. Cheerfully, he volunteered to get coffee from the machine — but often returned to the squadroom apologetically carrying cocoa, or tea, or soup. Yet, before he’d wandered into police work, he’d been a skilled electrician. Electricity, he said, made sense.
Finally the car stopped at the curb in front of me, and the door swung open.
“I think this car needs a tune-up, Lieutenant,” he said earnestly.
Not replying, I closed the door, fastened my seat belt and motioned for him to get under way. “Go to Van Ness,” I said, “and turn right.”
“Yessir.”
Concentrating on his driving, Canelli maneuvered the car out of the garage and onto Sixth Street. The night was cold and damp; the fog was so thick the pavement glistened. On Folsom Street, the garish glow of neon signs was softened to misty pastels. As Canelli switched on the windshield wipers he asked, “Where’re we going?”
“Chestnut and Larkin. The corner.”
“Hey, that’s a pretty fancy part of town. One time when I was an electrician, I worked in a house on that block that had an observatory on top of it. Honest to God.”
“An observatory?”
“Right. No fooling. It had a telescope that I bet was ten feet long, at least. I was working on the servo system, that operated the overhead doors. They were half clamshells, I remember, just like the big observatories. It was unbelievable. Except that the servos shorted out when it rained.”