Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (8 page)

Hunched around on the seat now, I leaned over the back to look through the rear window and pushed the accelerator all the way down. The high white glare of my headlights, the crimson wash from my backup lights, bleached the darkness enough so that I could see the road behind me. It was pretty straight, and I had a white-fisted grip on the wheel. I kept my eyes on the road, not looking to see where the VW was; the metallic taste of fear was sharp in my mouth. I wasn't armed — I had not carried a gun since I'd been on the cops years ago — and these characters had at least one and probably two weapons. I had nowhere to go if I lost control of the car or they managed to get me off the road.

The intersection with Hillside Boulevard came up quickly, less than a hundred yards away now. Sweat half-blinded me, but when I dropped below the screen of trees I could see there were headlights approaching from the direction of South San Francisco — two sets of them. Relief dulled the edge of my fear. The nearest set of lights was maybe five hundred yards off: enough time, just enough time.

There was a sudden, glancing impact: the VW had rammed me, but not hard enough to do the job for them. I managed to keep the rear end straight as the intersection rushed up, held off using the brakes as long as I could; then I touched them lightly and laid my other hand on the horn ring and swung the wheel hard to the right. The tires screamed as I slid sideways, rocking, out onto Hillside Boulevard.

Another horn blared; there was more shrieking of rubber. The first of the oncoming cars swerved to the left, nosing off the road, to avoid a collision with me; the second braked hard and skidded around to the side of the first one — and in the next second a red light began revolving on its roof, sweeping the darkness with an eerie pulsing glow. It was a county police cruiser, a traffic unit that patrols Hillside for speeders at night.

I turned my head to see where the VW was, saw it right in front of me. They had swung out in the same direction I had, but the red light on the cruiser had made them quit worrying about me. The little car rocked as the transmission was thrown into a forward gear; rubber howled again. They had been half turned around on the road, as I had been, and they tried to come out of it too fast, with too much power. The rear end fishtailed and they started to slide one way, then the other. And then the VW spun around twice in the middle of the road, like a toy car in the hands of a playful kid; tilted and went over, rolling; finally settled on its top in the culvert between the road and the cemetery fence.

The county patrol car slid around mine and cut diagonally in front, blocking me off. One of the two cops who came out of it ran to where the VW lay in the culvert like a huge beetle on its back, wheels spinning lazily in the light-spattered darkness; the other cop came over to me with his service revolver drawn. He looked in through the open window. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.

I told him — as much as he needed to know right away. It took him a couple of minutes to believe me, but when I showed him the photostat of my investigator's license and told him what he would find in the wreckage, he was convinced. He left me to use his car radio, because the other cop was still at the wrecked VW and yelling for an ambulance and a tow truck; Paige and his partner were wedged inside, and he couldn't tell if they were dead or alive.

I was pretty shaky for a while, but by the time the ambulance and the tow truck arrived I was all right. A couple of guys went to work on the VW with blowtorches. When they got Paige and the other one out, they were still alive but cut up and unconscious; Paige had a broken leg, too. The ambulance took them away to the nearest emergency hospital.

The county officers escorted me to the police station in South San Francisco, where I made a formal statement. None of the cops was too pleased that I had given chase after the robbery, instead of notifying the law like a good citizen was supposed to
do, but they didn't make an issue of it. They let me go on home after a couple of hours.

I had bad dreams that night. But they could not have been any worse than the dreams Judith Paige would be having . . . .

I
n the morning I learned, through my friend Eberhardt at the Hall of Justice, that Paige was an ex-con — four years at San Quentin for armed robbery — who'd figured that his job as a real estate salesman wasn't paying off and wasn't likely to. Two months ago, he'd reestablished contact with another armed robber he'd met in prison, and they had worked out the liquor store heists. The other guy's name was Stryker.

The rest was about as I'd figured it. Stryker, alert and strung out after the holdup, had spotted me coming out of the lot after them. They'd figured me for a heroic-citizen type, and at first they'd thought of trying to outrun me; but the VW didn't have all that much power, they had no idea how good a driver I was and they didn't want to risk alerting a cop by exceeding the speed limits. So they'd hit on Cynthia Street — and although they refused to admit it to the police, they would have killed me if they'd succeeded in forcing me off the road.

As for why Stryker had been on foot that night — and why they'd used Paige's VW, with its distinctive WALLY P license plate, instead of Stryker's car — the reason was so simple and ironic that it made me laugh sardonically when I heard it. Stryker lived down the Peninsula, near South San Francisco, and he was married, and his wife had insisted on using their car to attend an audition: she was a singer, and there was a job she badly wanted in the city. So he'd given in, notified Paige and then had her drop him off at the shopping center on her way into San Francisco.

Crooks, I thought. Christ!

There was irony, too, in the fact that Paige had apparently been faithful to Judith all along. He had married her because he loved her, or had some kind of feeling for her. If she hadn't suspected him of playing around, and come to me, he and Stryker might have carried on their string of liquor store heists for quite a while before they screwed up and got themselves caught.

The police had been the ones to break the news to Judith Paige last night; better them than me. But I knew I had to see her again anyway: it was one of those things you have to do. So I drove out to the Parkside district late that afternoon and spent twenty minutes with her — twenty long minutes that were not easy for either of us.

She told me she was going to file for divorce and then go home to Idaho, which struck me as the wisest decision she could have made. She would meet another guy there someday, and she'd get remarried, and maybe then she would be happy. I hoped so.

I would never see her again in any case, but the future would still bring another Judith Paige. There is always another Judith Paige for somebody in my business. One of these days she would walk into my office, and I would hear the old story again — the old, sad, sordid story.

Only that next time it would probably be true.

W
hen the Iberian Airlines jet came in sight of the Balearic island of Majorca, ninety miles off the southern coast of Spain, I took my nose out of the pulp I'd been trying bleary-eyed to read and put it over next to the window glass. Far below, the island sat basking in the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean like a huge amulet reflecting the early-morning October sun. I could see a jagged, pine-covered mountain range running along the western peninsula; deep green valleys and terraced hills and sheer cliffs falling away to small inlets and strips of white beach; an almost symmetrical patchwork of green and brown fields running through the interior.

I yawned and stretched and rubbed at my gritty eyes. It had been a long trip, close to twenty-four hours all told — San Francisco to London, London to Madrid, Madrid to Majorca's capital city of Palma — and I had never been able to sleep much on airplanes. But now that it was almost at an end, I began to perk up a little. It wasn't every day that I got to go someplace halfway around the world.

The buildings of Palma came into view as we banked low over the water and began our landing approach: old-fashioned,
dun-colored architecture, both Moorish and Spanish, interlaced with modern, steel-and-glass office and apartment buildings and dozens of high-rise luxury hotels ringing the wide sweep of the harbor. Pretty soon the dusty tan of the Son San Juan Airport appeared ahead of us. I watched the runway rush up to meet us, felt the jar as the wheels touched down.

Well, I thought, here you are, guy. Sin Island, the playland of Europe, home of the Jet Set and the Idle Rich. Wine, women and a year-round mean temperature of sixty-five degrees. Are the stories they tell true? Is it really all that easy to get laid here?

As we rolled to a stop near the terminal, I wondered if my bank account was sturdy enough to stand three or four days at one of those luxury hotels I'd seen from the air. If everything went well in Palma Nova, the job that had brought me here would be finished in a few hours and I would be on my own; and the return-trip ticket in my coat pocket was paid for and good anytime. A couple of days of lying in the sun, of finding out whether or not a middle-aged, bearish guy with a beer belly could attract some female companionship, was not too much of a vacation to give myself. After all, the chances were I'd never have another opportunity like this one.

I was still a little disbelieving of my good fortune. Thirty-six hours ago I had been sitting in my office in San Francisco, staring out the window at a threatening sky and wondering where the Indian summer we'd been promised was, when an attorney named Bathsgate called; he wanted to know if I had a valid passport, and if so, would I be available for a job which entailed an immediate trip to Europe. I told him I had a passport — I had applied for it a few years ago for an abortive trip to Central America and used it once to go to West Germany on a job — and said I was available, all right, depending on what it was I was supposed to do in Europe. He gave me an address up on Russian Hill and told me I would be expected within the hour.

The address turned out to be one of those imposing, turn-of-the-century mansions clinging majestically to the fog-shrouded hill; in clear weather it would command an impressive view of the Bay. A butler who must have been seventy and who had skin like fine old parchment let me in, conducted me up a marble staircase and into a darkened bedroom.

The man lying propped up in the bed was about the same age as the butler, with haggard gray features and sunken cheeks and eyes that had known a lot of pain. A wheelchair, faintly grim in its emptiness, sat beside the bed. The butler announced me, and when he was gone the man in the bed said, "I am Millard Frost."

It surprised me a little. Millard Frost was a multimillionaire and a dominant figure in West Coast shipping for more than forty years, founder of Frost Lines, Inc. He had once been strong, forceful, outspoken, but this sick old man was just a shadow of that dynamic individual. As I took the chair he indicated near the foot of his bed, I remembered that he had been stricken with some kind of spinal disease about two years before, leaving him bedridden.

He had, he said, what he hoped to be a simple reason for wanting the services of a private detective; you could hear in his voice the echoes of the strength and force of will he'd once had. I sat with my hat on my knees and listened attentively. Frost went on to say that I had been chosen by Bathsgate, his attorney, on the basis of my record of integrity and discretion, and because I was fully bonded. Men who operated major corporations, who were in the public eye, could ill afford the wrong kind of publicity and would not tolerate dishonesty. Did I understand?

I said I did.

From the night table at his elbow, he took a small sheet of flimsy paper that he identified as an overseas cable. He had received it from his son, Dale, an hour before I was summoned. He handed it to me with thin, gnarled fingers and told me to read it.

It said:

DAD NEED TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS CASH URGENT. NO TIME TO WAIT FOR BANK TRANSFER CAN SOMEBODY BRING SOONEST PLANE. WILL EXPLAIN LATER. DALE.

Frost began talking again as soon as I lifted my eyes from the cable. He explained that Dale was twenty-two and had graduated that June from one of the Ivy League colleges back East; but before accepting an executive position with Frost Lines, Inc., he had wanted to spend a year traveling around Europe — a sort of youthful last fling before settling down to the sobriety of the business world.

Dale had entered Spain toward the end of July, after a period in France and England. Majorca was an attractive lure, and he'd fallen in love with the island; he had written to his father that he would be staying on there for an indefinite period, that he had rented a villa in Palma Nova, one of the sun-and-fun areas on the southern coast. Since then he had corresponded faithfully, once a week, if only a line or two; the last letter had arrived three days ago. It had given no indication that the youth was in any financial difficulties. His regular monthly allotment, which I assumed to be substantial enough although Frost did not mention the sum, had seemed to be taking care of his needs more than adequately.

One part of my job was to deliver the ten thousand dollars Dale had asked for; even without explanation, the fact that his only son needed the money was enough for Millard Frost. But Frost did want to know what was behind the sudden request, and that was the second part of my job: to find out, directly or indirectly, and to let him know immediately by telephone. For these two things, Frost would buy my round-trip plane tickets, incur any necessary expenses and pay me five hundred dollars besides.