Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (19 page)

Eberhardt had some people in his office when I got down to the Hall of Justice a half hour later, and I had to wait in the detectives' squad room until he finished his business with them. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and discussed the political situation with Inspector Branislaus, whom I knew slightly. After half an hour three men in business suits came out of Eberhardt's cubicle and marched out of the squad room in single-file cadence, like army recruits on a parade field.

I sat there for another five minutes, and then the intercom on Branislaus's desk sounded and Eberhardt's voice said it was all right for me to come in. He was cleaning out the bowl of his pipe with a penknife when I entered, and said, without looking up, “So what the hell do
you
want?”

“How about a kind word?”

“Did you see those three men 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. As a result, I haven't seen my wife 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've come for, the answer is no. Call me Sunday afternoon, and if I've made it home by then, we'll have a beer together.”

I said, “Okay, Eb. But it has to do with the murder last night of a Skid Row character named Chaucer.”

He frowned. “What do you know about that?”

“I can tell it to whichever homicide team is handling it, if you want.”

“You can tell it to me,” Eberhardt said. “Sit down.”

I took his hat off a chair and put it on a corner of his desk, then sat down and lighted another cigarette.

Eberhardt said, “You smoke too much, you know that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you remember a guy named Nello? A companion of Chaucer's? They were both on the Row when we were patrolmen.”

“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 the ashtray on his desk. “There might be a connection,” he said. “Why didn't Nello come down himself with this?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” He sighed softly, tiredly. “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.”

“Not exactly. There were some marks on him, but that wasn't the cause of death.”

“What was?”

“Brain hemorrhage,” Eberhardt said. “Caused by a sharp blow. The investigating officers found blood on the wall of one of the buildings in the alley, and the way it looks, his head was batted against the wall.”

“What about the time of death?”

“The medical examiner fixes it at between midnight and two
A.M.
”

“Was there anything in the alley?”

“You mean like fingerprints or shoe prints or missing buttons?”

“Like that.”

“No,” Eberhardt said. “And nobody saw or heard anything, of course; that area around the railroad yards is like a mausoleum after midnight.”

“You really don't have much, do you?”

He shook his head. “There is one other thing, though. Chaucer had thirty-eight dollars and some change in his pockets when he was found.”

“That's a lot of money for one of the Row people to be carrying around. They're usually broke.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It sort of substantiates Nello's story, wouldn't you say?”

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

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

“And killed him instead,” Eberhardt said. “Well, it could have happened like that.”

“Look, Eb, I'd like to poke into this thing myself if I've got your permission.”

“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.”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then who's going to pay your fee?”

“Maybe I'll do it gratis. I'm not doing anything else right now.”

“You doing charity work these days?”

“Come on, Eb, knock it off.”

“You feel sorry for Nello, is that it?”

“In a way, yes. You know what he thinks? He thinks the cops don't give a damn about finding Chaucer's killer. He's sold on that.”

“Why would he think that?”

“Chaucer was a nobody, just another wino. ‘Who cares,' Nello said, ‘if some wino is murdered?'”

“Yeah, well, that's a crock.”

“Sure, it's a crock,” I said. “But Nello believes it. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole Row believes it.”

Eberhardt got wearily to his feet. “I think I can spare a couple of minutes,” he said. “You want to come with me down to Traffic? We'll see what hit-and-run has on Old Jenny.”

“All right.”

We rode the elevator down to the Traffic Bureau on the main floor and went into the office of Inspector 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, then said at length, “Woman named Jenny Einers, sixty-three years old, hit-and-run at the intersection of Sixth and Howard Streets three weeks ago. That the one?”

“That's the one,” Eberhardt said.

“We've got very little on it,” Aldrich told him. “It happened at approximately twelve fifty
A.M.
, and there were no witnesses around.”

“There was one witness,” I said. “Two, actually.” I filled him in on what Nello had told me. When I was finished, he said, “Well, that's more than we were able to come up with.”

Eberhardt asked, “Any broken glass on the scene?”

“Several shards of it, yes. One of the headlights. Nothing identifiable, though.”

“What about paint scrapings?”

“Uh-huh. Forest green. General Motors color, 1966 to 1969.”

“Were you able to identify the make and model?”

“No,” Aldrich said. “It could have come off any one of several GM cars.”

“Was there any fender or grille dirt?”

Aldrich nodded. “We put it though chemical analysis, of course. Common ground dirt, a little sand, and some gravel chips. Nothing unusual that we could work with.”

“Anything else?”

“One thing. I don't know what it means, if anything.”

“Yes?”

“Sawdust,” Aldrich said. “We found several particles of it on the street near the point of impact.”

“What kind of wood?”

“White pine.”

Eberhardt's forehead wrinkled. “What do you make of it?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “I don't know.”

Aldrich said, “We sent out word to all the body shops in the Bay Area the morning after. That's standard procedure. There were a couple of late-model GMs with forest green paint jobs brought in for body work, but one was a rear-ender and the other had the right front door banged up. We checked the accident reports on both, and they were clear. There was nothing else.”

“Dead end,” Eberhardt said.

He thanked Aldrich for his time and we went out to the elevator bank. Eberhardt pushed the
Up
button, then said, “I just 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.”

“Sure,” he said. “But it doesn't hurt to remind you.”

The elevator doors slid open. Eberhardt got in and I crossed the lobby and went outside. Fog banks sat off to the west in great folding billows, like cotton candy. The wind was up, carrying the first trailing vapors over the city. I walked rapidly to my car.

I sat inside it for a time, with the windows rolled up and the heater on, wondering where I would go from there. Nello had said he had last seen Chaucer around three the previous afternoon, apparently just before he left the Row; and Eberhardt had said that the medical examiner had fixed the time of death at between midnight and two
A.M.
That left approximately nine to eleven hours of Chaucer's time unaccounted for. Assuming that Chaucer had had the money that had been found on him prior to his death, and knowing the type of individual he had been, it seemed logical that he would have circulated along the Row—even though Nello hadn't encountered him. If that were the case, then somebody there had to have seen him or spoken with him or possibly even spent some time with him.

I drove over to Seventh and began to canvass the Row. During the next two and a half hours, I walked streets littered with debris, windswept papers, and empty wine bottles, even though the city sanitation department works the area every morning. I talked to stoic bartenders with flat eyes in cheerless saloons; to dowdy waitresses with faces the color of yeast in cafes that sold hash and onions for thirty-five cents; to tired, aging hookers with names like Hey Hattie and Annie Orphan and Miss Lucinda; to liquor store clerks who counted each nickel and each dime with open contempt before serving their customers; to knots of men huddled together in doorways or on street corners, panhandling indifferent passersby and drinking from paper-wrapped bottles with only the neck showing—men called Monkey-face and Zingo and Yahoo and Bud-Bud and dozens of other names.

I learned nothing.

My feet had begun to ache, but I decided to try the area around South Park before giving up. I went into a place called Packy's. One of the men sitting at the bar was a study in varying shades of gray—iron-gray hair, washed gray eyes, red-veined gray skin, gray pinstripe suit, gray-white undershirt. He was Freddy the Dreamer, an old-timer on the Row. I went up to him and told him why I was there and asked my questions again for the hundredth time.

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.”

“What time, Freddy?”

“Around six,” he answered. “He was just getting off a bus up on Mission.”

“Which line?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Sure,” Freddy said. “We had us a party. Scotch whiskey, can you believe? Old Freddy with his very own jug of aged Scotch whiskey.”

“Chaucer paid for it?”

“He was carrying a roll like you never seen. We got a flop down by the Embarcadero and went to work on that Scotch.”

“Where did he get the roll, Freddy?”

“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 kind of secretive. ‘Robin Hood,' he says. ‘I got it from Robin Hood.'”

“Robin Hood?”

“That's it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.”

“Okay. What time did Chaucer leave this flop last night?”

“Who knows?” Freddy said dreamily. “With a jug of real Scotch whiskey, who knows?”

“Do you have any idea where he went when he left?”

“To see Robin Hood.”

“Is that what he said?”

“He was a kidder, you know?” Freddy said. “A great kidder.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I hope you find whoever done it to him. I sure hope you do. I can still taste that Scotch whiskey.”

I got out of there.
Robin Hood
, I thought as I walked to where I had left my car. It could have meant something—or nothing—the same way the sawdust Aldrich had mentioned could have meant something or nothing.

I decided to go back and talk to Eberhardt again, but when I got there, he was out on something. One of the cops in the squad room said that he was expected back around four thirty. The clock on the wall read just a little after three, and I didn't feel much like waiting there for him.

I drove to a restaurant and had something to eat; the food, through no fault of the management, was tasteless. I felt a little depressed, the way I used to feel when I was working the Row as a patrolman. My office seemed as good a place as any to go right then, so I paid my tab and went over there.

A single piece of mail had been shoved through the slot in the door, and I picked it up off the floor and put it on the desk. As usual, it was very cold in there. I turned on the valve on the steam radiator, then sat down and opened the letter.

It was a bill from a magazine readership club. In a weak moment sometime back, I had succumbed to the sales pitch of a doe-eyed college girl. I folded the bill and the envelope and put them into my wastebasket. Then I sat there and lighted a cigarette and looked at the wall and listened to the ringing knock of the radiator as it warmed up.

Robin Hood
, I thought.
Sawdust
.

I stood up after a time and picked up the coffeepot, still half full with my morning coffee. There was a thin sheen of oil on the surface, but I replaced it on the two-burner anyway to heat.

I returned to the desk, sat down, and looked at the top for a while. There was nothing much on it save for the telephone and a desk calendar and an empty wire basket. I lighted another cigarette.

Sawdust, Robin Hood. To hell with it
, I thought. Let Eberhardt handle it; maybe he could make a connection. I looked at my watch. It was twenty past four. When four-thirty came, I would call him and put it in his lap. I had done all I could for Nello.