Summer twilight was cooling the grey pavement furnace of the University section. Russ tugged off his wrinkled necktie, stuffed it into his hip pocket. With the determined stride of someone in a hurry to get someplace, he plodded down the cracked sidewalk. Sweat quickly sheened his blue-black stubbled jaw, beaded his forehead and eyebrows. Damp hair clung to his neck and ears. Dimly he regretted that the crewcut of his college days was no longer fashionable.
Despite his unswerving stride, he had no destination in mind. The ramshackle front of the Yardarm suddenly loomed before him, made him aware of his surroundings. Mandarin paused a moment by the doorway. Subconsciously he’d been thinking how good a cold beer would taste, and his feet had carried him over the familiar route. With a grimace, he turned away. Too many memories haunted the Yardarm.
He walked on. He was on the strip now. Student bars, bookshops, drugstores, clothing shops and other student-oriented businesses. Garish head shops and boutiques poured out echoes of incense and rock music. Gayle Corrington owned a boutique along here, he recalled — he dully wondered which one.
Summer students and others of the University crowd passed along the sidewalks, lounged in doorways. Occasionally someone recognized him and called a greeting. Russ returned a dumb nod, not wavering in his mechanical stride. He didn’t see their faces.
Then someone had hold of his arm.
“Russ! Russ, for God’s sake! Hold up!”
Scowling, he spun around. The smooth-skinned hand anchored to his elbow belonged to Royce Blaine. Mandarin made his face polite as he recognized him. Dr Blaine had been on the medicine house staff during Mandarin’s psychiatric residency Their acquaintance had not died out completely since those days.
“Hello, Royce.”
The internist’s solemn eyes searched his face. “Sorry to bother you at a time like now, Russ,” he apologized. “Just wanted to tell you we were sad to hear about your friend Stryker, Know how good a friend of yours he was.”
Mandarin mumbled something appropriate.
“Funeral arrangements made yet, or are they still looking?”
“Haven’t found him yet.”
His face must have slipped its polite mask. Blame winced. “Yeah? Well, just wanted to let you know we were all sorry. He was working on a new one, wasn’t he?”
“Right. Another book on the occult.”
“Always thought it was tragic when an author left his last book unfinished. Was it as good as his others?”
“I hadn’t seen any of it. I believe all he had were notes and a few chapter roughs.”
“Really a damn shame. Say, Russ — Tina says for me to ask you how about dropping out our way for dinner some night. We don’t see much of you these days — not since you and Alicia used to come out for fish fries.”
“I’ll take you up on that some night,” Russ temporized.
“This week maybe?” Blaine persisted. “How about Friday?”
“Sure. That’d be fine.”
“Friday, then. 6:30, say. Time for a happy hour.”
Mandarin nodded and smiled thinly. Blaine squeezed his shoulder, gave him a sympathetic face, and scurried off down the sidewalk. Mandarin resumed his walk.
The hot afternoon sun was in decline, throwing long shadows past the mismatched storefronts and deteriorating houses. Russ was dimly aware that his feet were carrying him along the familiar path to Stryker’s office. Did he want to walk past there? Probably not — but he felt too apathetic to redirect his course.
The sun was behind the old drugstore whose second floor housed a number of small businesses, and the dirty windows of Stryker’s office lay in shadow. Behind their uncurtained panes, a light was burning.
Mandarin frowned uncertainly. Curtiss never left his lights on. He had an obsession about wasting electricity.
Leaning heavily on the weathered railing, Russ climbed the outside stairway that gave access to the second floor. Above, a dusty hallway led down the center of the building. Several doorways opened off either side. A tailor, a leathershop, several student-owned businesses — which might or might not reopen with the fall term. Only Frank the Tailor was open for the summer, and he took Mondays off.
Dust and silence and the stale smell of disused rooms. Stryker’s office was one of the two which fronted the street. It was silent as the rest of the hallway of locked doors, but light leaked through the not-quite-closed doorway.
Mandarin started to knock, then noticed the scars on the door jamb where the lock had been forced. His descending fist shoved the door open.
Curtiss’s chair was empty. No one sat behind the scarred desk with its battered typewriter.
Russ glanced around the barren room with its cracked plaster and book-laden, mismatched furniture. Anger drove a curse to his lips.
Stryker’s office had always been in total disorder; now it looked like it had been stirred with a stick. Whoever had ransacked the office had done a thorough job.
Through the Yardarm jukebox Johnny Cash was singing “Ring of Fire” for maybe the tenth time that evening. Some of those patrons who had hung around since nightfall were beginning to notice.
Ed Saunders hauled his hairy arms out of the sleeves of his ill-fitting suitcoat, slung the damp garment over the vacant chair beside him. He leaned over the beer-smeared table, truculently intent, like a linebacker in a defensive huddle.
“It still looks completely routine to me, Russ,” he concluded. Mandarin poked a finger through the pile of cold, greasy pizza crusts, singing an almost inaudible chorus of “down, down, down, in a burnin’ ring of far…” A belch broke off his monotone, and he mechanically fumbled through the litter of green Rolling Rock bottles for one that had a swallow left. Blackie the bartender was off tonight, and his stand-in had no conception of how to heat a frozen pizza. Mandarin’s throat still tasted sour, and he felt certain a bad case of heartburn was building up.
The bottles all seemed empty. He waved for two more, still not replying to Saunder’s assertion. A wavy-haired girl, braless in a tanktop, carried the beers over to them — glanced suspiciously at Saunders while she made change. Mandarin slid the coins across the rough boards and eyed the jukebox speculatively.
The city detective sighed. “Look, Russ — why don’t you let Johnny Cash catch his breath, what do you say?”
Russ grinned crookedly and turned to his beer. “But it wasn’t routine,” he pronounced, tipping back the bottle. His eyes were suddenly clear.
Saunders made an exasperated gesture. “You know, Russ, we got God knows how many break-ins a week in this neighborhood. I talked to the investigating officer before I came down. He handled it OK.”
“Handled it like a routine break-in — which it wasn’t,” Mandarin doggedly pointed out.
The lieutenant pursed his lips and reached for the other beer — his second against Mandarin’s tenth. Maybe, he mused, it was pointless to trot down here in response to Mandarin’s insistent phone call. But he liked the psychiatrist, understood the hell of his mood. Both of them had known Curtiss Stryker as a friend.
He began again. “By our records, two of the other shops on that floor have been broken into since spring. It goes on all the time around here — I don’t have to tell you about this neighborhood. You got a black slum just a few blocks away, winos and bums squatting in all these empty houses here that ought to be torn down. Then there’s all these other old dumps, rented out full of hippies and junkies and God knows what. Hell, Russ — you know how bad it is. That clinic of yours — we have to just about keep a patrol car parked in front all night to keep the junkies from busting in — and then the men have to watch sharp or they’ll lose their hubcaps just sitting there.”