Sure I was.
It was after six when I keyed open my front door; the day was pretty well shot. I had called Shelly Jackson last night and again this morning, with the intention of inviting her out for dinner tonight, but she hadn’t been home on either occasion; I had planned to try her again after I got home from the meeting with Alex. Only the events on Greenwich Street had robbed me of all enthusiasm for a Saturday night out on the town, and now I did not feel like doing much of anything except vegetating — curling up on my comfortable old couch with a beer and a stack of pulp magazines.
So I got a can of Schlitz out of the refrigerator and half a dozen issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective off the shelves, and did that. I read one of the 1931 Back Masks straight through from cover to cover — great stuff by Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy, Frederick Nebel, and old Cap Shaw himself. Then I had a sandwich and another beer, and came back and sampled stories from the other issues. Two reporters called on the phone, but I put them off with “no comment”; nobody came to see me. By midnight my eyes were a little strained but I was feeling considerably better than I had earlier. You can lose yourself in the melodrama and the machine-gun prose of the pulps, and sometimes when you come back to reality again you find you’ve left things that were bothering you with the ops and dicks and newshawks in those brittle pages. They’re not just fictional crime-solvers for me; they’re birds of my feather, and watching them shoulder the burden of their work helps to ease the burden of mine.
I went into the bathroom and changed the bandage on Shelly’s teethmarks; the wound was healing all right now. Then I got into bed and drifted off immediately. A long time later I dreamed I was a pulp detective who joined forces with Jerry Frost and Jo Gar and Captain Steve McBride to clean up a gang of Prohibition rum-runners. It was a good dream and I was enjoying it — except that the damned phone kept ringing while we were trying to interrogate the boss rum-runner. McBride answered it, but it kept on ringing anyway. Race Williams came in out of nowhere and blew it to pieces with one of his .44s, and it kept on ringing, and the dream got confused and mixed up with reality, and I woke up.
There was daylight in the room: morning, early Sunday morning. Seven A.M., for Christ’s sake, by the clock on my nightstand. Beside the clock, the phone kept on jangling. I scraped mucus out of my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose until I was awake enough to be coherent, and finally caught up the receiver and said hello.
A woman’s voice made a question out of my name. When I said yes, it was, she said, “This is Rosa Cappellani. I apologize if I’ve gotten you out of bed but it couldn’t be helped.”
God, I thought, now what? I threw the covers off and swung up into a sitting position with my feet on the cold hardwood floor. Outside the bedroom window tracers of broken fog chased each other across the roofs of the neighboring buildings. Which told me that in another couple of hours the fog would have blown inland and burned off and the day would be clear and windy.
I said, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Cappellani?”
“I’d like to see you this morning, as soon as possible.”
“About what?”
“I’d rather not discuss it on the telephone.”
“If it has to do with Alex and what happened yesterday, I can’t tell you anything more than you already know by now.”
“I don’t want you to tell my anything,” she said. “I want you to do something for me — something for which you’ll be well paid.”
The imperiousness was there in her voice, but it was muted somehow; I thought she sounded tired and worried. I ran my tongue over the sleep film on my teeth, thinking about it.
“Well?” she said.
Well. “Where are you?”
“At the winery.”
Another hundred-and-fifty-mile drive, round trip. But I was curious, and if she was willing to pay for my time I was willing to drive up to the Napa Valley again. I said, “Okay, Mrs. Cappellani. I should be able to get there by ten.”
“Fine,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “I’ll expect you then.”
She rang off before I could say anything else; I had wanted to ask her about Alex, if he was still in police custody or if the family lawyers had gotten him released. I sat there and looked at the silent handset for a couple of seconds, realized what a stupid thing that was to be doing, and put it down on its hook. Telephones. Every time one had rung the past few days, I seemed to get myself more deeply involved in the trials and tribulations of the Cappellani family.
Maybe Race Williams had the right idea, I thought. And got up and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.
In the glare of the morning sun the winery buildings had a dusty, ancient look that made them and the surrounding vineyards seem even more turn-of-the-century Italy or France. A few sunhatted grape pickers were spots of color here and there in the curving rows of vines, working with lug boxes; a group of men was doing something with one of the gondolas on the north side of the main cellar. Only the trucks and cars parked or moving in the area spoiled the illusion of things past and far away.
I drove down to where the gated lane branched off the road and led up to the old stone manorhouse. The gate was open; I passed through and pulled my car onto a cleared section beneath several of the shading oaks. There were two other cars parked there — a new silver Lincoln Continental and a Porsche a couple of years old.
A warm, vine-scented breeze fanned over me when I stepped out; you could not smell the fermenting wine at this distance from the cellars. I went up a stone pathway, past an old-fashioned basket wine press set on a kind of stone pedestal, with rose bushes and a dozen or so smaller, unfamiliar plants growing around it in a circle. There was nothing else in the way of decoration or garden, nothing at all except for the heavy old oaks.
I climbed two steps onto a sort of narrow, galleried porch, found a bell-push beside the black-painted door, and pushed it. The walls must have been a foot thick; I did not hear any bells or chimes ring inside, but the door opened after ten seconds and an elderly Chicano woman looked out at me with grave black eyes.
I told her who I was, and she nodded wordlessly and widened the door so I could come inside. The interior was cool and smelled faintly musty, like the inside of an old cedar chest. But there was not anything gloomy about the place, at least not in the foyer or the rooms off it that I could see into. Unshaded windows let in plenty of morning sunlight, and although the walls and ceilings were paneled in heavy dark wood and the floors were of stone, a number of cheerful-looking paintings — Napa Valley landscapes, mostly — and Indian-style rugs and upholstered furniture in whites and blues added a good deal of color.
The Chicano woman led me down a hallway, pointed to a closed door, and went away toward the rear of the house. I wondered pointlessly if she was a mute. Then I shrugged the thought away and knocked on the door, calling out my name.
Rosa Cappellani’s voice told me to come in. When I opened the door and stepped through, I found myself in a den or office filled with books and file cabinets and old furniture and a lot of military-type decoration: sabers cross-mounted on one wall, a glass case jammed with handguns and bayonets, old cavalry and World War II photographs. An American flag in a floor stand flanked one side of a battered oak desk that appeared as if it had been wounded in action on a number of different occasions. It was a man’s office, obviously, not unlike the one in the San Francisco town house; Mrs. Cappellani had no doubt inherited it from her late husband.