Chelsee Bando was chatting with a stocky, middle-aged gent at her newsstand. Even from three stories up, I could almost smell her perfume, and primal urges stirred within me, like a den of bears around Easter. It had been a long time since I’d performed the forbidden dance of love, but that wasn’t the only reason Chelsee made my toes curl. Of course, looking at her was like holding an AA meeting at a bar. I’d sworn off women — they were worse than alcohol. Maybe they wouldn’t kill your liver, but they’d done one hell of a job on most of my other organs.
I sipped the java and looked around the rest of the street. Things were pretty dead, as usual. The only unusual thing I saw was a police speeder parked toward the end of the block. It was unmarked, but it might as well have had C-O-P-S painted on the hood in canary yellow. There was only one guy inside, slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed and mouth open.
The man talking to Chelsee left the newsstand and walked toward the cop speeder, holding two Styrofoam cups and a bulging bag. What were the cops doing on a stakeout in our sleepy little neighborhood? I’d been accused of taking too many things personally, and this was no exception. I moved away from the window and returned to my desk.
Over a second cup of joe, I wondered what the chances were of me being the target. I tried to think what I could possibly have done to piss of the SFPD. Except for the job in Mexico City, the most interesting thing I’d done since sobering up was experimenting with a tartar control gel. Everything before that was a bit blurry, but I couldn’t remember doing anything illegal. Despite being reasonably sure I wasn’t in trouble, I decided to keep a low profile.
My first priority was to find out who’d set me up. I’d never enjoyed being played for a sap, and I was about to get a hospital bill that I had no intention of paying. Besides, there were no messages on my vid-phone, no cases lined up, and I was determined not to fall back into a life of sloth and slobbering.
A good place to start would be the Century 22 real estate agency. I’d jotted down the number from the For Sale sign at the countess’s “bungalow.” I punched in the number on my vid-phone. After three rings, a handsome black woman with large, shiny eyes and a perfect, easy smile answered.
We chattered for several minutes about 2429 Filmore. Kaitlyn Abbot, the real estate agent, told me that the house had been owned by an older woman named Mrs.
Greenburg, but that she’d passed away some time ago. Mrs. Greenburg’s two children, both of whom lived out of state, had decided to sell the house. Mrs. Abbot went on to say that the place had been unoccupied for at least six months.
After I disconnected, I mulled over the fact that the mansion had supposedly been vacant for months. Countess Renier, if that was her real name, had certainly shown a bold streak by staging her ruse in the empty house. I had to admire the audacity.
Unfortunately, that didn’t take the sting out of being used like a Kleenex. If I’d been a realist, I might have filed the whole episode under Learning Experiences, but I’d never been accused of being a realist. Besides, I had nothing else to do. The question was, where to begin? The mansion was all I had to work with. Maybe the imposter countess had left something traceable behind. I decided to make a return trip.
A light acid rain was falling as I left the office and hurried to my speeder, carefully sidestepping the street’s minefield of oily pools. I was sporting my good Dexter wing tips and always tried to keep them safe from inclement weather and low pH puddles.
Inside the speeder, I lifted off and headed toward Pacific Heights.
I parked several houses away from 2429 and made my way to the back of the mansion without being seen. I entered the “bungalow” and spent the next hour going through the sitting room, looking for anything that might give me a lead. The high point of my search was finding a full ashtray. The cigarettes were marked with a symbol I’d never seen before.
I poured some of the cigarette butts into an envelope I found in my overcoat pocket, then left the residence and stealthily made my way back to the speeder. Maybe a tobacconist could identify the brand of cigarettes. It wasn’t the greatest lead in the world, but it might be just slightly better than nothing.
I lifted off and flew several blocks, until I reached a convenience store with pay phones out front. Jumping out of the idling speeder, I jogged through the misty downpour. At the pay phone, I inserted a dollar bill, and the directory menu appeared on-screen. I accessed the listing for tobacconist shops and decided to start at the Cigar Bar, since it had the catchiest name, as well as being the closest to my present location.
I was about to return to the warmth of my speeder when a thought struck me. I knew that tracking someone down by way of their preferred brand of cigarette is desperate at best, but I didn’t have anything else to go on. What I really needed was a crack team of investigators to go through the phony countess’s sitting room. With a staff of fully trained professionals, experienced in fingerprinting, collecting DNA samples, and analyzing microscopic fibers, maybe something would turn up. And I had connections in the San Francisco Police Department.
Unfortunately, I’d seen them at work often enough to decide they were mostly a bunch of knuckleheads. Their ringleader, Lieutenant Mac Malden, was an old acquaintance. I pulled out another dollar bill, fed it into the machine, and entered the number for the downtown precinct. Inferior help was better than no help at all. I also made a mental note to ask Mac if he knew anything about the unmarked speeder on Chandler Avenue.
Malden wasn’t in his office, so I left a brief message on his voice mail, asking him to call me at my office at his earliest convenience. I disconnected and returned to my speeder, then flew through a heavy downpour to the Cigar Bar. It turned out to be a rustic hole in the wall down by the Wharf. When I stepped inside, the smell of fresh tobacco reached out and embraced me like an old lover. The interior of the shop was long and slender and brown, appropriately enough. Sets of display cases faced each other down the length of the store. The hardwood floor was marinated in the blended aromas of cherry, vanilla and Cuban leaf.
I walked down the left side of the shop, inspecting the wares. Case after case was filled with handsome wooden boxes teeming with Cubans, Hemingways, and Ashtons. The shelves above were full of cigar cutters, vintage lighters, cigarette cases, and other smoking accouterments. I turned toward the right wall and its selection of hundreds of pipes. There was also a substantial magazine section containing every periodical published for the patrons of the disappearing art of smoking. It was heavenly. If I’d had the money, I could’ve spent the entire day here, smoking myself into a stupor.
Behind the long counter (and a cloud of smoke), a small, bony man with a bad toupee was ladling rough-cut tobacco from a large glass jar into a small plastic bag. He looked up at me, and his leathery face crinkled into a crooked grin around a neatly hand-rolled cigarette. “Afternoon.”
I pulled the pack of Luckies from my overcoat pocket and walked to the counter. The man stopped ladling and extended a lighter. I leaned over until the tip of my cigarette touched the flame, then straightened up, releasing a long stream of smoke. The leathery man looked me over approvingly.
“Baby Luckies. Don’t see many people smoking’ those these days. Not really enough.
Looks fine on you, though. Compliments the get-up nicely. You know, I gotta fedora like that. Pricey. Not really the style, but like I say, quality never goes out of fashion.
Am I right? You bet I am.”
He glanced over the counter. “Wing tips, too. Nice touch. There ya go again… quality.