“I probably can’t add anything to what you already know,” she answered. “You’re apparently pretty well informed about what happened.”
“You work for the Cappellanis, I gather.”
“Yes. I’m in their marketing division.”
“You know Logan Docksetter, then.”
“Of course.”
“What d’you think of him?”
“As a man, or a sales manager?”
“As a man.”
“I don’t think he’s much of a man.” She let a deliberate moment pass before she added, “You can take that any way you like — and you’d probably be right.”
“How long have you worked for the Cappellanis?”
“Just a few months.”
“What’d you do before that?”
Again she shrugged. The slow movement of her shoulders suggested a self-confident sensuality. I found myself thinking that she would be a bold, exciting lover.
“I was in marketing. I’m pretty good at it, as a matter of fact.”
“Did you work here in San Francisco?”
“No,” she answered shortly. “In Florida. My—” For the first time, she hesitated. Then: “My marriage broke up. So I came west.” As she said it, she challenged me with her eyes, putting the subject of her broken marriage off-limits.
“I wouldn’t think there’d be much wine marketed in Florida. They don’t grow grapes, do they?”
The comment seemed to amuse her. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I was in nuts, as they say. Pecans. But marketing is marketing, Lieutenant.” Her eyes still held mine, coolly waiting.
“You’re an intelligent woman, Miss Jackson. I’d like you to tell me how the Cappellanis strike you — as a family, I mean.”
She looked at me for a moment, obviously deciding how much to say — how far she could trust me. Finally she said, “Alex is a lightweight and Leo is a light-heavy. The mother, Rosa, is the only one who knows who she is and what she’s doing. But she apparently can’t do without a man, so that’s a weakness, I guess. Anyhow, Booker could get her giggling like a schoolgirl, sometimes.”
“You didn’t like Booker.”
She shook her head.
“How about Paul Rosten?”
“I don’t know him very well. He never talks. At least, not to me.”
I was trying to decide whether to ask if she thought Rosa and Rosten had been lovers when, suddenly, the paging device at my belt buzzed. It was Halliday again, asking me to phone him. I crossed the office, punched an outside line and dialed Communications. In spite of himself, Halliday was exicted as he said:
“Inspector Canelli just called to say that he thinks he has Mal Howard pinned down at 1976 Scott Street. He wants instructions.”
“What does he mean by ‘pinned down’?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes. Tell him not to take any action until I get there. He’s to keep the place buttoned up, nothing more. Clear?”
“Yessir.”
11
I drove past the Scott Street address twice before I spotted Canelli. He was across the street from the house, crouched down behind a laurel hedge. Whenever I saw Canelli concealing himself behind a tree or bush, I thought of an amiable hippo bulging out on all sides of a small hummock.
I surreptitiously nodded to him, drove around the corner and parked out of sight. Moments later, he slipped into my car.
“What’s the situation?” I asked.
“Well,” Canelli said, “what happened is that they been backtracking on Howard all day, the way I get it — going from one old address to another. You know. So anyhow, at one of the addresses, Marsten ran across this guy he’d busted a couple of months ago, when he was in Vice. So Marsten thought, what the hell, he’d give the guy a toss, for old time’s sake. So he finds the guy carrying some cocaine — which makes the guy think about making a deal, of course. And, besides, the guy had a beef with Howard, about some dirty movies, and was pretty pissed off, the way I get it. So anyhow, the guy cops. We’ve been here for about an hour and a half, showing Howard’s picture around. And it sure seems like he’s in there, all right. I mean, people saw him go in, but nobody saw him come out.”
“Have you got the back covered?”
“Sure, Lieutenant.” Canelli’s soft brown eyes reproached me for asking the question.
“How many men have you got?”
“Six, including me. I figured I should pull the whole detail in.”
I nodded agreement. From where I sat, I could see the building. It had once been a large, elegant two-story Victorian town house, built on a double lot. One side of the house was attached to its neighbor. An alleyway five feet wide ran along the other side of the house. The alleyway was secured by an iron gate. The gate was more than six feet high. The house itself was in fair repair — not completely restored, but not beyond hope, either. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect to find a hoodlum. Like the house, the neighborhood had been down as far as it would go, and was starting up on the other side. Most of the homes in the area had been built before 1900: spacious, ornate Victorian buildings, elaborately constructed for some of the city’s best families. In recent years, a city-sponsored Victorian restoration program had started the process of reclamation, reversing the slide toward decay. Private enterprise was finishing the job.
“Does he live by himself?” As I asked the question I studied Mal Howard’s picture: a thin, drawn face, sparse sandy hair, small eyes set deep over unusually high cheekbones, a flattened streetfighter’s nose and a tight, sullen mouth. Howard would be easy to identify.
“No,” Canelli answered. “It turns out that Howard’s gay — at least, if you want to believe the guy with the cocaine, he’s gay. And apparently there’s three or four of them living together, there. They’re all gay. The gays like those old Victorians, you know. They fix them up, and everything. You know — artistically.”
“Are Howard’s friends hoods, too?”
Canelli nodded. “According to the guy with the cocaine, they’re all hoods. And pretty heavy types, too, Marsten says.”
“How many of them are in there now?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant. I didn’t want to ask around the neighborhood too much, in case some wise guy should call them up, and warn them. That happened to me a few months ago. Remember?”
I remembered. The shootout had sounded like a war.
“How are your men dispersed?”
“Did you see that blue van with the white letters parked across the street from the house? It says General Alarms on the side.”
“No.”
“Well, it’s there. A friend of mine has a burglar alarm business. His name’s Pat Harvey, and he’s one of those eccentric geniuses, I guess you’d say. When I was an electrician, I used to work with him. So I borrowed the van from Pat. I put three of our guys in the van with a walkie-talkie and two shotguns. Then I sent Marsten and a guy from General Works to cover the back of the house. I forget the G. W. guy’s name. But they got a walkie-talkie.” As he spoke, Canelli withdrew his own walkie-talkie, and offered it to me. “You want to check out the positions?”
“You do it. Designate the van position one. Marsten is position two.”
He spoke briefly to Marsten and the men in the van, then left the walkie-talkie on the seat between us, switched on. Neither of the positions reported any movement, either inside or outside the house.
By the book, I should order the surveillance continued until Mal Howard was identified either entering the house or leaving it.
But, during the ten-minute drive from the Cappellani offices, I’d received a report of another homicide: a housewife in Noe Valley had followed her husband to another woman’s house, and killed them both in the woman’s bedroom. The housewife’s father had once served on the city’s board of supervisors, and the woman in bed was the daughter of a four-star general. Already, the reporters were hot on the scent. Friedman was handling the case until I could take over, but he was still muttering about Castro. And, on a Saturday afternoon, half our detectives were unavailable to us, except in an emergency.