So much for the news. And so much for breakfast. I finished the last of my coffee refill, left the paper to enlighten somebody else, and walked back to the hotel. It was eight-thirty and time to put in a call to the hospital to find out what the situation was with Alex Cappellani.
But I did not find out much, as it developed. The nurse who answered my call said that his condition was “satisfactory,” a term which can mean anything at all; that was all she would tell me because I was not a relative and because the injury to Alex was a police matter. When I asked her if he could have visitors, or at least take a call, she advised me firmly that the family had issued instructions that he was not to be disturbed.
I hesitated, thinking: Now what? I could leave a message and then hang around here for the day, on the chance that Alex was well enough to want to get in touch with me and to see me. But that would mean paying out another twenty dollars for the room, and it might also mean a wasted day. I decided the best thing to do was to go back to San Francisco and get a report ready for him of my findings on Jason Booker. So I gave my name to the nurse and requested that Alex be told when possible that I had called and that I could be reached either at my office or at my flat.
I got my things together then and checked out and headed home for the first time since Tuesday.
The Napa Valley is some seventy-five miles northeast of San Francisco, a good two-hour drive, and it was eleven o’clock by the time I came across the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather had been warm and clear in St. Helena, but in the city it was cold and foggy — one of those thick, wind-blown fogs that blanket the hills and drift like wisps of smoke through the streets. I drove straight downtown, left my car in the parking lot on the corner of Taylor and Eddy, and hurried over to the tired old Victorian building on the fringe of the Tenderloin where I have my office.
There was nobody in the dark lobby. One of the other tenants, a guy who ran a mail-order business, had gotten mugged in there six months ago — the Tenderloin has one of the highest crime rates in the city — and ever since then I make it a point to look around when I come in. I opened up my mailbox and pulled out three days’ accumulation of maiclass="underline" two letters and two pieces of junk advertisement. A sign on the elevator grill said that the elevator was out of order. Again. So I climbed the stairs to the third floor, and there weren’t any muggers up there either.
The office was just a single room, with a little alcove off of it that contained a sink and some storage shelves; if you needed the toilet, there was one down at the end of the hall with a broken seat and a paper dispenser that never had any paper in it. A low rail divider separated the room into two halves. My desk was behind it, in front of the windows facing Taylor Street, and there were a couple of client chairs over there, and a filing cabinet with a hotplate on top of it. On this side of the divider was an old leather couch and another chair and a table with some magazines that had never been read. Except for the poster I had had made during the summer and tacked up on one of the walls, it was pretty much the same arrangement and the same decor I had opened business with after leaving the San Francisco cops fourteen years ago.
The poster was a blow-up of the cover of a 1932 issue of Black Mask and depicted a guy holding a couple of guns and standing in front of a suit of armor; it also featured a story by one of my favorite pulp writers, Paul Cain. It looked a little gaudy up there, and was probably inappropriate for a business office; but what the hell, everybody has a hobby and pulp magazines — reading them and collecting them — are mine. I have been fascinated by the pulps ever since I was a kid, and it was that fascination that led me into police work, led me eventually to become a private investigator: I wanted to be a detective just like the ones I read about in the pulps. Up until this summer, when my outlook on so many things had begun to change, that fact had nagged at me — that I had built my whole life as an emulation of the fictional private eye, made myself into a kind of functional cliché. Now, it did not seem to matter. It was my life and I enjoyed what I was doing. What difference did it make how or why I had become what I was? And if I were to lose a client because I collected pulps and had a Black Mask cover on my office wall, then I was better off without that kind of client.
The steam radiator was clanking away and it was warm in there, but a little musty from being closed up for three days. I unlatched the window and raised the sash a few inches. Then I put fresh water into the coffeepot, the pot on the hotplate, and sat down at my desk to look at my mail.
A fifty-dollar check from a furniture store that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of their clients, and a letter from a guy who said he was the vice-president of the Northern California Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and wanted to know if I would be a speaker at one of their monthly meetings. I put the check into my wallet and the letter into my basket until I had time to answer it; the idea of speaking to a group of mystery writers appealed to me.
I called my answering service, and there were a couple of messages. The one that interested me most was from Leo Cappellani, who had called at nine-forty this morning and who wanted me to get in touch with him at the winery’s San Francisco office as soon as I came in.
I frowned a little as I put down the phone. How had Leo found out I was a private detective? From Alex, maybe? I lifted the receiver again, started to dial the number the answering service girl had given me.
And the office door opened and Leo Cappellani walked in.
I blinked at him, cradled the handset and got up on my feet. He glanced around the office, took in the Black Mask poster on the wall; but there was nothing in his face to show what he thought about any of it. He was wearing a conservative brown business suit today, and he looked crisp and successful and a little imposing, like a banker or a corporation lawyer. I noticed as he came up to the rail divider that his eyes were sharp and peremptory — as his mother’s were, but nothing at all like Alex’s mild expressive brown eyes.
“Good morning, Mr. Cappellani,” I said. “I just came in, just got your message. I was about to call you.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, I was on my way to an early lunch and I thought I’d stop by on the chance you’d returned.”
I invited him to have a chair, and he came in and took the one in front of my desk. I said then, “How is Alex?”
“Not seriously hurt. He has a scalp wound and a mild concussion.”
“Then he was able to talk to the police?”
“Yes. But he had nothing to tell them about the man who assaulted him. He was sitting at the desk with his back to the door, and the door was open. He heard a sound just before he was hit, but he didn’t get so much as a glimpse of the man.”
“He doesn’t have any idea who it could have been?”
“None.”
“Was anything taken from the office?”
“No. Nothing at all.” Leo crossed his legs and watched me with those sharp black eyes. “Now you can relieve my curiosity, if you don’t mind.”
“About what, Mr. Cappellani?”
“About why you didn’t tell any of us last night that you’re a private detective.”
“It didn’t seem to be relevant,” I said.
“That remains to be seen. Are you working for my brother?”
“Did he tell you I was?”