Dead Man (10 page)

Beyond Karl’s was an alley. He glanced down that way, then stopped, utterly still. Foot traffic flowed around his solid immobility.
Yes. It was what he’d do. He started ambling down the alley, stopped again. Him, but not Zimmer. Zimmer, alone, just about
here would be thinking,
still time to turn them over to Maxton
and get his 100-K and live happily ever after.

As he was passing the back door of a cafe a short-order cook came out to dump some garbage in one of the pails. It went in
with an ugly wet plopping sound. Dain stopped again, abruptly.

Zimmer would have given Maxton the bonds, but he hadn’t. So if he’d come down this alley, something stronger than his fear
of Maxton had driven him on.

Or drawn him on.

Belatedly, he made a note on the Hispanic cook as a wino careened past him up the alley. No note for him. Winos saw a lot,
but their sense of time and reality was elastic, and in hopes of a bottle of muscatel they would tell you not what they’d
seen, but what they thought you wanted them to have seen.

He emerged from the far end of the alley, looked around casually. Here is where he would have parked if he’d been waiting
to pick up Zimmer and the bonds.

A black teenager had just finished washing and squeegeeing the front display windows of a men’s clothing store. Dain made
a note and strolled on, noting a florist truck, five secretaries exiting a building for a coffee break, an old woman staring
down through lace curtains from a third-floor apartment window.

He quit for the day at the end of the block. Ten minutes max was as long as Zimmer would have been in the vicinity: after
that he would have walked away, caught a bus, a taxi, driven off himself in a car, or been picked up by someone else.

For the rest of the week, Dain left the front of the bank each morning at 9:23 to canvass in a different direction until he
was satisfied that he had covered all reasonable possibilities.

Records could tell him all about who Zimmer had been up until the day he stole the bonds. Records could tell him Zimmer had
accessed the Lorimer safe-deposit box at 9:03
A.M.
and had left at 9:22
A.M.
There the records stopped.

But Zimmer had kept going. So Dain did, too. He now had his raw data: now he could begin to work it. This was like a chess
game. The same almost infinite number of choices; the same implacable logic. And it absorbed him to be working someone else’s
backtrail, so he wasn’t thinking about

Marie going back and up, mouth strained wide, eyes wild

Yes, only Dain could work the backtrail. In person. Which was his salvation. Using the computer made him unbearably sad; as
for chess, even looking at a board, even now five years later, made vomit rise in his throat.

On the coffee table in Mill Valley was the unfinished game he and Marie had been playing before they had left for Point Reyes
five years before. He hadn’t been able to put it away.

“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right. Maybe you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game
…”

And he, pretentious asshole that he was, had said,
“You know that all investigations are just a game, sweetie
—
move, countermove, just like chess.”

And she had died. And Albie had died.

Sometime, maybe, someone else would die. Oh God, please let him find someone else he could make die…

Next morning, Dain caught the Cicero bus three stops short of the First Chicago Bank of Commerce, stood right behind the driver
talking to him under the sign that said DO NOT TALK WITH DRIVER WHEN THE BUS IS MOVING. Nothing. A bill changed hands and
Dain got off at the stop beside the bank.

Meg Crowley, in uniform and with her citation pad sticking out of a back pocket, turned from the counter with a coffee and
turnover to cannon into a man just emerging from the rest room. Hot coffee cascaded down the front of his shirt.

“No milk or sugar next time,” said Dain with a wry grin.

Meg already had set her turnover and empty coffee cup on the corner of a table and was ineffectually dabbing with paper napkins,
trying to blot up the stain; he was a hunk. They sat beside a window that needed washing. He told her
about the missing heir he was
that
close to finding, son of a woman dying in Bangor, Maine. He described Zimmer, with attache case…

“I remember him!” exclaimed Meg suddenly, her face lighting up. She laughed. “I’ve got a Mick temper on me, and he jaywalked
right in front of me as if I didn’t exist…”

The postman looked like a ferret but was worthless. He had no fixed schedule for picking up the mail from the drop-box on
the corner, couldn’t remember his pickup on that particular day, and only saw letters, not people on his route. A dead man
walking.

The next morning, twenty bucks bought Dain three blocks’ worth of conversation with the doughnut truck driver who delivered
to Karl’s Koffee Kup Kafe just short of the midblock alley. He had seen nothing, or if he had, didn’t remember it.

Chuck Gilette was a sandy-haired kid who delivered coffee and Danish from Karl’s to offices around the neighborhood. He wanted
to go to college but his grades weren’t all that good so his salary and the tips he made went into the old college fund.

For Chuck, also, the missing heir and his dying mum.

“Sure I remember him, Mr. Dain. He sort of darted into the alley just as I came out of Karl’s, so I had to make a move…”
He sprang backward in demonstration, like a batter getting brushed back by a close pitch. “The cap flew offa one of the cups,
hot coffee all over my hand.” He grinned sheepishly. “I started to cuss him out, but he didn’t even know I was there.”

A $50 contribution to Chuck’s go-to-college fund.

Pablo Martinez, sneaking a cigarette behind the greasy spoon, got uneasy when Dain showed him a $20 bill.

“Four day’ ago you come down the alley,” Pablo accused.

“I’m not
la migra,”
said Dain quickly. He described Zimmer, his clothes, face, the attache case in his hand. “I want to know if he walked past
you last week and where he went…”

The man Pablo had bought his green card from had assured him it was so close to genuine it would pass any immigration scrutiny,
but Pablo was not convinced. As a short-order cook illegally in the country, he had learned to be a pessimist.

“I doan see nothin’, man.”

Dain gave him the twenty anyway. Pablo’s reaction had confirmed he’d seen Zimmer passing by.

The black teenager who washed down the haberdashery windows each morning was on break, so Dain went through the motions with
his other possibles even though reasonably sure someone had been waiting for Zimmer in a car at the end of the alley.

The five secretaries who went for coffee at 9:30 each morning were like the three monkeys: hear no, see no, speak no.

The old woman who hung out of her third-floor window had seen nothing she could remember on the day in question.

The florist truck driver, intercepted on his route, said he only remembered cars that he was able to look down into from his
truck’s height advantage and see women’s legs.

“Saw a broad driving a 280Z stark friggin’ naked, once.” He was gesturing, excited. “Saw another broad giving a handjob to
a guy in a Caddy Seville once, he was stopped for a red light on South State Street, middle of the friggin’ day…”

Colorful, but about as useful as the wino in the alley.

When he got back to the haberdashery, Dain found Zeke White stacking sweaters in a row of bins across the back of
the store. The place smelled of wool and leather and shoe polish. Zeke had bright eyes with almost bluish whites, a high-bridged
nose more Hamitic than Bantu, and hands too big for the rest of him, hands like those of 49er wide receiver Jerry Rice. He
wore his hair buzzed, with his initials shaved into one side. His jeans were baggy, his hightops red with the laces undone.

“I saw you doing the windows four mornings ago.”

“Zmah job, man,” said Zeke with great economy of speech.

Dain described Zimmer. Zeke kept folding sweaters. “I’m trying to find out if he came down the alley one day last week when
you were washing the windows.”

“Didn’t see the dude, man.”

Dain took a flier. “Maybe getting into a car?”

Suddenly Zeke started to laugh, a big deep man’s laugh though he was still just a teenager.

“Blonde in a red Porsche,” he said. “Parked in the alley. Car was a beater, real muddy, she took a lot better care of herself
than she did of that car. I’m doin’ the store windows, all of a sudden she come outten there like she be drivin’ the Batmobile.
Was a cat with her but I couldn’t see him ‘cause he was on the other side of the car, y’dig?”

“Sure,” said Dain.

“Dude put his hands on her down where I couldn’t see, an’ she slam on the brakes so hard he hit his head on the dash.” He
gave his booming laugh again. “Man, she tell him, You put yo hands on me again I don’t want you to, you gonna need a plastic
dick t’piss.”

The woman? Really blonde, platinum like, man, with a really pretty face messed up with too much eyeliner an’ mascara, real
red lipstick, didn’t really need it all, sure, it made her sexy, but also made her sorta… cheap like. Which she wasn’t.

“She winked at me, man, when she said ‘bout him pissin’. She call him sweet thing, but she doan really mean it.”

Another $50 for Zeke. He was worth it.

* * *

So… a blonde in a beat-up old Porsche almost certainly had been waiting in the alley to pick Zimmer up after the theft of
Adelle Lorimer’s bonds. Like the Wizard of Oz with the cowardly lion, she’d given Zimmer his courage.

Jeri Pearson? Platinum didn’t fit her hair color, exotic didn’t fit her face. But she might know the exotic blonde—probably
her successor with Jimmy Zimmer, maybe the one-night stand at his apartment before the bluenose had gone to the cops.

Meanwhile, it was Friday. Dain flew back to San Francisco for the weekend. He was missing Shenzie and the summer fog, and
he had to analyze all of the data he had gathered.

Wearing only an old pair of blue cotton workout briefs, Dain was using a coiled spring exerciser with all five stainless-
steel coiled springs in place. Through the open loft windows came cold wet foggy night air, the wash of small oily waves against
the pilings beneath the pier, at intervals the far sad cry of the Alcatraz foghorn.

For the twentieth time without pause, Dain brought his arms down from straight overhead with agonizing slowness against the
tension of the opening springs. When the arms were straight out from his shoulders at either side, the fully extended springs
were stretched across the back of his shoulders and neck.

Dain gasped out, “What… do you think… cat?”

Shenzie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him, said
meowr
and batted Dain’s hand lightly with one paw.

Dain’s arms started slowly back up. His face was contorted with effort, his torso flushed with blood. The pale pock scars
on his shoulder, chest and neck were very visible. As the spring contracted above his head, his lats sprang out on the sides
of his body in a tremendous V-shape spread.

When the springs were finally closed, he let out a gasping breath that carried “Twenty” with it.

He lay down on the floor parallel to the bed, his head to
ward the head of it, his feet pointed toward an artist’s portable easel with a 19-inch by 24-inch sketching pad open on it.
The hand-lettering in Sharpie permanent marker on it said:

LAW SCHOOL

former profs

former students

APARTMENT

landlady

tenants

OFFICE

exec secretary

receptionist

other secretaries

BANK

teller

meter maid

postman

doughnut truck

delivery boy

short-order cook

window washer

secretaries

old woman

flower truck

Dain, still panting, began to do twisting crunches, hands locked behind his head, shoulders off the floor, bicycling with
his legs, twisting to touch each elbow to each opposite raised knee. He did fifty on each side without stopping, letting his
eyes sweep across the drawing pad open on the easel with each rep.

When he was finished he bounced to his feet, went to the board, with the Sharpie drew a line through every item under each
of the headings, save one. Sweat formed a wet circle around his bare feet as he stood there on the plank floor.

“Cat, we have to find out who the peroxide blonde is.”

Shenzie yawned prodigiously, but had nothing to say. He
began giving himself a professional wash job on the edge of the bed. Dain tapped the unlined item on the drawing pad—
exec secretary
under OFFICE.

“Only one easy shot left, Shenz.”

He phoned an airline, made a reservation for Chicago, then got down to do clap-hand push-ups, giving a sharp shove as he came
up off the floor at each rep so he could clap his hands twice before his body started down again. Despite his grunts and the
sweat rolling off him, they looked effortless. The only other sounds were the waves breaking against the pilings fifty feet
below, and the occasional muffled bellow of foghorns.

Shenzie padded the length of the bed to the bedside table, curled himself around the telephone as if Dain’s call had made
it warm, and went to sleep.

Chicago, like San Francisco, is a town where umbrellas routinely get turned inside out when it rains. Monday evening was blustery
and Dain was relying on a rain slicker and rain hat as he entered the Sign of the Trader, just inside the West Jackson Boulevard
entrance to the Board of Trade Building. He went through the heavy wood and glass door, the noise hitting him like a subdued
echo from the trading pits that had closed several hours before. He tossed his rain-wet slicker over one of the coatracks
lining the coatroom.