Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (5 page)

I said, "How did he know it was the same car?"

"He got the license number when the driver slowed after hitting Old Jenny. Even with two bottles of port in him, he had an eye like a camera."

"Did he tell you what the number was?"

"No," Nello said. "He didn't tell me he found out the owner's name from the registration last weekend either, but that's what I think he did. I saw him yesterday afternoon, early; he looked excited. Said he had to take care of some business, that if it worked out the way he hoped he'd look me up later and we'd go celebrate. I never saw him again."

"Uh-huh. So you figure he went to see the owner of the hit-and-run car and tried to shake him down. And got himself killed instead."

He nodded.

"Chaucer didn't mention the make and model of the car?"

"No."

"Or where the owner lived?"

"No."

"Did he say anything that might lead to either the car or the owner?"

"No," Nello said. "I told you everything he told me."

I got my cigarettes out and lit one. Nello's bloodshot eyes were hungry as he watched me. I thought: What the hell, he made the effort to come here, didn't he? and tossed him the half-f package. He swiped at it, dropped it, picked it up and put it into the pocket of his coat. His eyes thanked me, even if he couldn't make his mouth say the words.

"All right," I said, "I'll see what I can do. As soon as anything turns up, I'll let you know."

He nodded again, listlessly this time, and got to his feet. It was plain to see, as he shuffled out, that he didn't believe anything would turn up at all.

E
berhardt
was in conference with some people when I got down to the Hall of Justice, so I sat in the squad room and smoked a couple of cigarettes out of a new pack and discussed the political situation with an inspector named Branislaus, whom I knew slightly. After half an hour three men in business suits, two of them carrying briefcases, came out of Eberhardt's office. They marched out of the squad room in single-file cadence, like Army recruits on a parade field.

Branislaus announced me over the intercom, but it was another five minutes before Eberhardt decided to let me see him. He was cleaning out the bowl of his pipe with a penknife when I went in, not being particularly careful about it; bits of dottle were scattered across the paper-littered surface of his desk. He said without looking up, "So what the hell do you want?"

"How about a kind word?"

"You see those three guys who just left?"

"I saw them, sure."

"They're with the state attorney general's office," Eberhardt said, "and they've been giving me a hard time for a week on a certain matter. I haven't seen Dana in two days, and I haven't eaten since eleven o'clock yesterday morning. On top of all that, I think I've got an abscessed tooth. So whatever it is you came for, the answer is no."

I said, "Okay, Eb. But it has to do with a homicide last night."

He frowned. "Which homicide?"

"A guy from Skid Row called Chaucer."

"What do you know about that?"

"I can tell it to whichever team of inspectors is handling the investigation -"

"You can tell it to me," he said. "Sit down."

I sat down. And got my cigarettes out and lit one.

Eberhardt said, "You smoke too damned much, you know that?"

"Sure," I said. "You remember a guy named Nello? Friend of Chaucer's on the Row?"

"I remember him."

"He came to see me this morning," I said, and outlined for him what Nello had told me.

Eberhardt put the cold pipe between his teeth, took it out again, scowled at it and set it in his ashtray. "There might be a connection, all right. Why didn't Nello come down himself with this?"

"You know the answer to that, Eb."

"Yeah, I guess I do." He sighed. "Well, I was reading the preliminary report a little while ago, before those state clowns came in. I recognized Chaucer's name. There's not much in it."

"Nello said he was beaten to death."

"That's right. Lab boys found blood on the wall of one of the buildings in the alley; way it looks, his head was batted against the wall until it cracked. There were other marks on him, too — facial and body bruises."

"What was the approximate time of death?"

"Coroner figures it at between midnight and two A.M."

"Was there anything in the alley?"

"In the way of evidence, you mean? No. And nobody saw or heard anything; that area round the Southern Pacific yards is like a mausoleum after midnight."

"Did Chaucer have anything in his pockets?"

"A pint of scotch and thirty-eight dollars, plus some change."

"That's a lot of money, and pretty fancy liquor, for a wino to be carrying around."

"Uh-huh."

"Gives credence to Nello's theory, wouldn't you say?"

"Maybe. But if this hit-and-run guy killed Chaucer, why would he give him the money first?"

"Could be that Chaucer asked for a hell of a lot more than what he had in his pockets," I said. "The guy could have given him that as a down payment, then arranged to meet him last night with the rest."

"And gave him a different kind of payoff instead," Eberhardt said. "Well, it could have happened like that."

"Look, Eb, I'd like to poke into this thing myself if you don't mind."

"I was wondering when you'd get around to that. What's your big interest in Chaucer's death?"

"I told you, Nello came to see me this morning."

"But not to hire you. I don't believe that."

"No," I admitted.

"Then who's going to pay your fee?"

"Maybe I'll do the job gratis. I'm not working on anything else right now."

"You feel sorry for Nello, is that it?"

"Some, yes. You know what he thinks? He thinks the cops don't give a damn about finding Chaucer's killer. Chaucer was a nobody, just another bum. Who cares, Nello said, if some wino gets knocked off."

Eberhardt sighed again and got wearily to his feet. "I think I can spare a couple of minutes," he said. "Come on, we'll go down to Traffic. See what Hit-and-Run has on Old Jenny."

We rode the elevator down to the Traffic Bureau on the main floor and went in to see an inspector named Aldrich, who was in charge of the Hit-and-Run Detail. He was a big, red-haired guy with a lot of freckles on his face and hands. Eberhardt told him what we wanted, and Aldrich dug around in one of his file cabinets and came up with a thin cardboard folder. He spread it open on his desk, squinted at the contents; I had the impression that he needed glasses but was too stubborn or too proud to admit it.

He said at length, "Woman named Jenny Einers, sixty-three years old, hit-and-run at Fifth and Folsom streets three weeks ago. That the one?"

"That's the one," Eberhardt said.

"We've got damned little on it," Aldrich told him. "Happened at approximately twelve-thirty A.M., and there were no witnesses."

"Yes there were," I said. "Two, in fact."

"Oh?"

I filled him in on what Nello had told me. Then I asked, "Was there any broken glass at the scene?"

"Yes. From one of the headlights, probably. No way to identify the make and model from it, though."

"What about paint scrapings?"

"Uh-huh. Forest green. General Motors color, 1966 to 1969. Same thing applies. It could have come off any one of several GM cars."

"Was there any fender or grille dirt?"

Aldrich nodded. "The lab put it through chemical analysis, of course. Common ground dirt, a little sand, some gravel chips, a few other things. But nothing unusual that we could work with."

Eberhardt asked, "You find anything else?"

"Just some sawdust," Aldrich said.

"Sawdust?"

"Several particles on the street near the point of impact. White pine, spruce, redwood. You make anything conclusive out of that? We couldn't."

Both Eberhardt and I shook our heads.

"We sent out word to all the body shops in the Bay area right away," Aldrich said. "That's the standard procedure. There were a couple of late-model GM's with forest-green paint jobs brought in for bodywork, but one was involved in a routine fender-bender and the other had the left front door banged up. We checked the accident reports on both; they were clear. Nothing else came up." He spread his hands and shrugged. "Dead end."

We thanked Aldrich for his time and went out to the elevators. When Eberhardt pushed the up button he said, "I
can't take any more time on this right now, so you can poke around if you want. But make sure you call me if you turn up anything."

"You know I will."

"Yeah," he said. "But it doesn't hurt to remind you."

The elevator doors slid open, and I watched him get inside and press four on the panel. Then I crossed the lobby, went out to Bryant Street. Fog banks were massing to the west in puffy swirls, like carnival cotton candy. The wind was up, carrying the first streamers of mist over the city. I buttoned my coat and hurried to where I had parked my car.

For a time I sat inside with the engine running and the heater on, wondering what to do next. Nello had said he'd last seen
Chaucer early yesterday afternoon, apparently just before
Chaucer left the Row; and Eberhardt had told me that the coroner had fixed the time of death at between midnight and
two A.M. That left close to twelve hours of Chaucer's time
unaccounted for. Assuming he'd had the money found on him for some time prior to his murder, and knowing the type of person he'd been, it seemed logical that he would have circulated on the Row even though Nello hadn't come across him. If that was the case, then one of the other habitués had to have seen him, maybe even spent some time with him.

I drove over to Mission Street and put my car in the lot near Seventh and Mission, opposite the main post office. Then I walked to Sixth and began to canvass the Row from Market to Folsom north-south, from Sixth to Third west-east.

During the next three hours, I walked streets littered with debris and windswept papers and hundreds of empty wine and liquor bottles, even though the city sanitation department works the area every morning. I talked to stoic, hard-eyed bartenders in cheerless saloons; to dowdy waitresses with faces the color of yeast in greasy spoons that sold hash and onions for a dollar; to tired, aging hookers with names like Hey Hattie and Annie Orphan and Black Manah; to liquor store clerks who
counted each nickel and each dime with open contempt before serving their customers; to knots of men white and black huddled together in doorways, on street corners, in the small "Wino Park" on Sixth just south of Mission that had, amazingly enough, been sanctioned by the city in an effort to keep the Row people from clogging the sidewalks — men called Monkeyface and Yahoo and Big Stick, who spent their days panhandling indifferent passersby and drinking from paperbag-wrapped bottles with only the necks showing.

I learned nothing.

By the time I got to Third and Folsom, I was cold and tired and my feet had started to hurt. But I wasn't ready to give it up yet; I kept thinking about Nello and the hopeless way he had shuffled out of my office. So I wandered down past Harrison toward where South Park used to be and went into a place called Packy's.

One of the men sitting at the bar was a study in various shades of gray — dirty iron-gray hair, washed-out gray eyes, red-veined gray skin, a soiled gray pinstripe suit that had not been new when Eisenhower was President. His name was Freddy the Dreamer and he was an old-timer on the Row, like Nello and Chaucer. I went up to him, told him why I was there and asked my questions again for the hundredth time.

And he said in the dreamy voice that had given him his nickname, "Sure, I seen Chaucer yesterday. Hell of a thing, what happened to him. Hell of a thing."

"What time, Freddy?"

"Around six. He just come off a bus up at the Greyhound depot."

"Which bus?"

He shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Think, Freddy. Was it a Muni bus? Or a Greyhound?"

"Daly City," Freddy said. "Yeah. He said he come from Daly City."

Daly City was a small community tacked onto San Francisco to the southwest. I said, "Did he tell you what he was doing there?"

"Nah." Freddy grinned reminiscently. "We had us a party," he said. "Scotch whisky, can you believe? Old Freddy with his very own jug of scotch whisky."

"Chaucer paid for it?"

"He was carrying a nice little roll. He bought that scotch and we went to my flop on Natoma."

"Where did he get the roll?"

"Chaucer was a kidder, you know? Him with his fancy education, a great kidder. I asked him where he picked it up, who did he mug, and he just laughed. 'Robin Hood,' he says. 'I got it from Robin Hood."

"Robin Hood?"

"That's what he said."