Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (4 page)

The young guy gave me a slanted look. "Cop?" he asked, but his voice was still cheerful.

I showed him the photostat of my investigator's license. He shrugged, then studied the photograph. "Yeah," he said finally, "I did see this fellow a couple of nights ago. Nice old duck. We talked a little about the Forty-niners."

I stopped feeling cold and I stopped feeling frustrated. I said, "About what time did he come in?"

"Let's see. Eleven-thirty or so, I think."

Fifteen minutes before Colly had been shot in an alley three and a half blocks away. "Do you remember what he bought?"

"Bourbon — a pint. Medium price."

"Kesslers"

"Yeah, I think it was."

"Okay, good. What's your name?"

"My name? Hey, wait a minute, I don't want to get involved in anything . . ."

"Don't worry, it's not what you're thinking."

It took a little more convincing, but he gave me his name finally and I wrote it down in my notebook. And thanked him and hurried out of there.

I
had something more than an idea now.

Eberhardt said, "I ought to knock you flat on your ass."

He had just come out of his bedroom, eyes foggy with sleep, hair standing straight up, wearing a wine-colored bathrobe. Dana stood beside him looking fretful.

"I'm sorry I woke you up, Eb," I said. "But I didn't think you'd be in bed this early. It's only six o'clock."

He said something I didn't hear, but that Dana heard. She cracked him on the arm to show her disapproval, then turned and left us alone.

Eberhardt went over and sat on the couch and glared at me. "I've had about six hours' sleep in the past forty-eight," he said. "I got called out last night after you left, I didn't get home until three A.M., I was up at seven, I worked all goddamn day and knocked off early so I could get some sleep, and what happens? I'm in bed ten minutes and you show up."

"Eb, it's important."

"What is?"

"Colly Babcock."

"Ah, Christ, you don't give up, do you?"

"Sometimes I do, but not this time. Not now." I told him what I had learned from the guy at Tay's Liquors.

"So Babcock bought a bottle there," Eberhardt said. "So what?"

"If he was planning to burglarize a liquor store, do you think
he'd have bothered to buy a bottle fifteen minutes before?"

"Hell, the job might have been spur-of-the-moment."

"Colly didn't work that way. When he was pulling them, they were all carefully planned well in advance. Always."

"He was getting old," Eberhardt said. "People change."

"You didn't know Colly. Besides, there are a few other
things."

"Such as?"

"The burglaries themselves. They were all done the same way — back door jimmied, marks on the jamb and lock made with a hand bar or something." I paused. "They didn't find any tool like that on Colly. Or inside the store either."

"Maybe he got rid of it."

"When did he have time? They caught him coming out the door,"

Eberhardt scowled. I had his interest now. "Go ahead," he said.

"The pattern of the burglaries, like I was saying, is doors jimmied, drawers rifled, papers and things strewn about. No
fingerprints, but it smacks of amateurism. Or somebody trying to make it look like amateurism."

"And Babcock was a professional."

"He could have done the book," I said. "He used lock picks and glass cutters to get into a place, never anything like a hand bar. He didn't ransack; he always knew exactly what he was after. He never deviated from that, Eb. Not once."

Eberhardt got to his feet and paced around for a time. Then he stopped in front of me and said, "So what do you think, then?"

"You figure it."

"Yeah," he said slowly, "I can figure it, all right. But I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

"And Colly?' I said. "You think he liked it?"

Eberhardt turned abruptly, went to the telephone. He spoke to someone at the Hall of Justice, then someone else. When he hung up, he was already shrugging out of his bathrobe.

He gave me a grim look. "I hope you're wrong, you know that."

"I hope I'm not," I said.

I
was sitting in my flat, reading one of the pulps from my collection of several thousand issues, when the telephone rang just before eleven o'clock. It was Eberhardt, and the first thing he said was, "You weren't wrong."

I didn't say anything, waiting.

"Avinisi and Carstairs," he said bitterly. "Each of them on the force a little more than two years. The old story: bills, long hours, not enough pay — and greed. They cooked up the idea one night while they were cruising Glen Park, and it worked just fine until two nights ago. Who'd figure the cops for it?"

"You have any trouble with them?"

"No. I wish they'd given me some so I could have slapped them with a resisting-arrest charge, too."

"How did it happen with Colly?"

"It was the other way around," he said. "Babcock was cutting through the alley when he saw them coming out the rear
door. He turned to run and they panicked and Avinisi shot him in the back. When they went to check, Carstairs found a note from Babcock's parole officer in one of his pockets, identifying him as an ex-con. That's when they decided to frame him."

"Look, Eb, I —"

"Forget it," he said. "I know what you're going to say."

"You can't help it if a couple of cops turn out that way . . .

"I said forget it, all right?" And the line went dead.

I listened to the empty buzzing for a couple of seconds. It's a lousy world, I thought. But sometimes, at least, there is justice.

Then I called Lucille Babcock and told her why her husband had died.

T
hey had a nice funeral for Colly.

The services were held in a small nondenominational church on Monterey Boulevard. There were a lot of flowers, carnations mostly; Lucille said they had been Colly's favorites. Quite a few people came. Tommy Belknap was there, and Sam Biehler and old man Harlin and the rest of them from D. E. O'Mira. Eberhardt, too, which might have seemed surprising unless you knew him. I also saw faces I didn't recognize; the whole thing had gotten a big play in the media.

Afterward, there was the funeral procession to the cemetery in Colma, where we listened to the minister's final words and watched them put Colly into the ground. When it was done I offered to drive Lucille home, but she said no, there were some arrangements she wanted to make with the caretaker for upkeep of the plot; one of her neighbors would stay with her and see to it she got home all right. Then she held my hand and kissed me on the cheek and told me again how grateful she was.

I went to where my car was parked. Eberhardt was waiting; he had ridden down with me.

"I don't like funerals," he said.

"No," I said.

We got into the car. "So what are you planning to do when we get back to the city?" Eberhardt asked.

"I hadn't thought about it."

"Come over to my place. Dana's gone off to visit her sister,
and I've got a refrigerator full of beer."

"All right."

"Maybe we'll get drunk," he said.

I nodded. "Maybe we will at that."

H
is name was Nello.

Whether this was his given name, or his surname or a sobriquet he had picked up sometime during the span of his fifty-odd years — I never found out. I doubt if even Nello himself knew any longer. He was what sociologists call "an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity or himself." And what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as "a Skid Row wino."

He came into my office just before ten o'clock on one of San Francisco's bitter-cold autumn mornings. He had been a lawyer once, in a small town up near the Oregon border, and there were still signs of intelligence, of manners and education, in his gaunt face. I had first encountered him more than twenty years ago, when a police lieutenant named Eberhardt and I had been patrolmen working south of the Slot. I didn't know — and had never asked — what private hell had led him from small-town respectability to the oblivion of the city's Skid Row.

He stood just inside the door, his small hands nervously rolling and unrolling the brim of a shapeless brown fedora. His thin, almost emaciated body was encased in a pair of once
brown slacks and a tweed jacket that had worn through at both elbows, and his faded blue eyes had that tangible filminess that comes from too many nights with too many bottles of cheap wine. But he was sober this morning — cold and painfully sober.

I said, "It's been a long time, Nello."

"A long time," he agreed in a vague way.

"Some coffee?"

"No. No, thanks."

I finished pouring myself a cup from the pot I keep on an old two-burner on top of my filing cabinet. "What can I do for you?"

He cleared his throat, his lips moving as if he were tasting something by memory. But then he seemed to change his mind. He took a step backward, hall-turned toward the door. "Maybe I shouldn't have come," he said to the floor. "Maybe I'd better go."

"Wait, now. What is it, Nello?"

"Chaucer," he said. "It's Chaucer."

I recognized the name. Chaucer was another habitué of the Row, like Nello an educated man who had lost part of himself sometime, somewhere, somehow; he had once taught English Literature at a high school in Kansas or Nebraska, and that was where his nickname had come from. He and Nello had been companions on the Row for a long time.

I said, "What about him?"

"He's dead," Nello said dully. "I just heard about it a little while ago. The cops found him early this morning in an alley off Hubbell Street, near the railroad yards. He was beaten to death."

"Christ. Do they know who did it?"

Nello shook his head. "But I think I might know the reason he was killed."

"Have you gone to the police?"

I didn't need to ask why not. Noninvolvement with the law was one of the codes by which the Row people lived—even when one of their own died by violence. But I said, "If you have some information that might help find Chaucer's killer, you'd better take it to them."

"What good would it do? The cops don't care about a man like Chaucer — a wino, a bum, a nobody. Why should they bother when one of us is murdered?"

"Some cops feel that way, sure. But not all of them."

"Enough," Nello said. "Too many."

"Then why did you come to me? I was a cop once, remember; in a way I'm still a cop. If you don't think the police will care, what made you think I would?"

"I don't know," he said. "You were always decent to me, and you're not on the force anymore. I thought . . . Look, maybe I just better go."

"It's up to you."

He hesitated. There was a struggle going on inside him between an almost forgotten sense of duty and the adopted attitudes of the Row. This time, duty — given strength by his friendship with Chaucer — won out; he moved forward in a ponderous way and sat in one of the clients' chairs. He put the hat on his knee, looked at the veined backs of his hands.

"I can't pay you anything, you know," he said.

"Never mind that. About the only thing I can do is take whatever you tell me to the police and see that it gets into the proper hands."

He took a breath, coughed and wiped at his mouth with the palm of one hand. When he began talking, his voice was low, almost monotonous. "Three weeks ago, Chaucer and I were sharing a bottle in a doorway on Fifth down near Folsom. It was after midnight, not much traffic on the streets. Old Jenny — you know her?"

I shook my head.

"One of us. A bag lady," Nello said. "She was standing on the corner across the street, waiting for the light to change, and when it did she stepped down and started to cross. She was right out in the middle when the car hit her. It came racing up Fifth, right through a red light; knocked her thirty feet into the wall of
a building. Wasn't time for Chaucer or me to yell a warning. Wasn't time for anything. The car slowed after it hit her, but then it speeded up again and made a fast turn left on Howard. There wasn't anything we could do for Old Jenny, not the way she'd been thrown into that building, so we beat it out of there before the cops came."

Again, the code of noninvolvement. Nello rubbed a hand over his face, as if the length of his explanation had left him momentarily drained. I waited without speaking, and pretty soon he went on.

"Last weekend, Chaucer was panhandling up by the Hilton and saw the hit-and-run car parked on O'Farrell Street. It had been repaired, had a fresh paint job. He told me about it later."