Death in North Beach (26 page)

Carly admitted they didn't.

‘I'd like to do the exhibition,' Nadia said.

‘What?' Carly said. The word was accompanied by a look of near incomprehension.

‘What an incredible draw,' Nadia said. ‘Murderer's Row.'

‘Isn't that a little lurid?'

‘Oh, yes,' Nadia said, sitting forward again, excited. ‘Exactly. Those photographs would go for ten times, maybe more, what they would have fetched. Poor Mr Wiley. We need to find out about your Mr Wiley's estate.'

It was a flicker, a quick hop and a skip across Carly's mind. But did someone want to improve the value of Wiley's work? It seemed the longest of long shots. There were others involved. And whoever carried all this out was taking a gigantic risk. To somehow collect at the end would put that person right at the top of the suspect list.

‘I'm serious,' Nadia said.

‘I don't doubt it.'

‘The greatest San Francisco photography exhibition ever. I mean it's lurid, yes. And naked . . . that adds a lot. Involved in murders. Maybe the murderer is right here,' she said, tapping the computer screen. That's what you think, right? We could tour the show.'

‘Calm down, calm down,' Carly said. ‘And slow down.'

Carly saw the greed, understood that's how it always worked. Nadia was quick to pick up on the opportunity. Had Wiley made the same decision? Was Wiley documenting history or was he making a buck on the foolish decisions of these folks in their trusting youth? Carly thought how we all feed on others – herself included, she supposed – and how people are still feeding and feeding on the legend that was North Beach.

Lang found a very different Marlene Berensen than he had seen before. Gone was the haughty, threatening and elegant creature. Instead, the woman at the door was frazzled, dowdy and disoriented. Hair mussed, she wore a misshapen, gauzy gown much too apparent beneath a wrinkled robe.

She saw him, recognized him through a blinking, unfocused stare and moved out of the way in a clumsy attempt at a sweeping welcome. He entered, passing by her brewery breath.

‘Would you like a drink?' she asked, shutting the door behind her. There were cigarettes and cigarette butts on the coffee table. ‘Or . . .' she continued, ‘more appropriately, a cup of coffee?'

‘I'm fine, thanks.'

She smiled an odd smile. ‘He's gone,' she said.

‘Who is gone, Marlene?'

‘Oh, “Marlene”, is it?' She sat down with less grace than she expected and seemed to surprise herself.

‘Who's gone?'

‘Everybody,' she said, shaking her head.

‘Mickey,' Lang said a little louder than usual and looking directly into Marlene's unfocused eyes. ‘You know Mickey, right?'

‘Right.' She looked confused. ‘He's gone.'

‘Where did he go?' Lang asked.

‘Whitney's gone,' she said. ‘Everybody's gone.'

He and Marlene might be sharing the same room, Lang thought, but they were in slightly different realities. Hers was, no doubt, slower, thicker.

There were those who thought that the words of a drunk were unreliable. Others thought the uninhibited mind spoke the truth. Lang fell in the middle. The only real truth, he thought, was that they were likely to say things they wouldn't say if they were sober – true or not.

‘May I use your bathroom?' Lang said, standing up.

‘Be my guest,' she said, getting up and staggering toward a bottle of gin on the table by the door, probably where she set it when she went to answer his knock.

‘Nice place,' Lang said, yelling back over his shoulder.

‘Used to be,' she said.

For Lang the place exuded a faded elegance that made its formal beauty less cold, more hospitable. He glanced in the bedrooms. One room was spotless. The other was tossed by careless living. The bedclothes were barely on the bed. Clothing was scattered. The ashtray by the bed was full of ashes and butts. There was an empty cigarette package crumpled on the floor.

It was a red package. He examined it. Non-menthol. If he was correct Marlene smoked menthol. Even if someone wasn't particular about what brand they smoked, only few jumped from menthol to non-menthol or the other way around. Someone else had stayed there. How recently, he didn't know. There were no men's clothes in the closet, however, and no other clues that he could see in his quick inventory.

He could hear her coming and stepped quickly into the hall and pretended to admire a print hanging there.

‘Sorry, got sidetracked,' he said when she came upon him.

He went into the bathroom and shut the door. He checked the shelves behind the mirror. There was a Darvon generic, a tube of K-Y and . . . a bottle of Viagra prescribed to Mickey Warfield. Lang couldn't repress a smile. Not because he looked down on those using a little helper, and not just because it belonged to the macho Mickey, but because it proved Mickey was here and what he was probably doing here from time to time. Other tubes and bottles might be embarrassing but shed little light on Marlene, other than that she was human with nagging little physical annoyances.

Lang looked around the bathroom, saw nothing else that was of interest. He flushed the toilet, washed his hands and emerged into the hallway and then into what dim light the closed blinds allowed into the living room. He found her on the sofa. She was out cold. He hoped she was just unconscious. He checked her pulse. These days, it seemed, it was important to check. She was alive, though her behavior suggested she might not want to be.

No more questions for now, he thought, but he checked what appeared to be a combination den, office, library, media room. It was comfortable, but had none of the design coherence of the rest of the house. This is where she could kick back. Then again, it looked a little masculine in its disdain for style.

The kitchen yielded nothing. The garage wasn't very telling either. Her blue Volvo was parked there. He looked inside. Nothing. He checked the exterior. He was no CSI, but he was pretty sure there was sand in the grooves of the tires. Not all that conclusive because much of the city was built on dunes and it was a very sandy place.

Her timely unconsciousness allowed him to check all the drawers and closets. No sign of Mickey or any other male. He left, locking the door from the inside. He felt sad about Marlene not being the tough, smart person he thought her to be. She had to put on a costume and manufacture an attitude. Nothing was what it appeared to be. This was not a sudden loss of innocence on his part. Early on in his professional life he had received a forced indoctrination about books and covers and how that applied to the human species. And certainly Thanh, the shape-shifting creature that he was, proved it nearly every day.

All in all, stopping by was a good investment of his time. In addition to the fact that Mickey Warfield was driving a car registered to her, the bottle of sexual performance pills in Marlene's medicine cabinet with Mickey's name on them pretty much sealed the case, perhaps not for a court of law, but for him. He wondered if that made Marlene Mickey's stepmistress. As far as Lang was concerned, Warfield the Younger was the prime suspect. It was often difficult, Lang thought, for the sons of celebrities to find their own light.

But what was the specific catalyst to the killing? Why now? Did he just find out he wasn't in Daddy's will? Was there a fight over Marlene? Hard to believe, now that Lang saw the sadly vulnerable personality and what she looked like before she went on the public stage.

He knew that Carly was keen on the murderer being connected to a missing photograph. There was a certain logic to her thinking. But there were other explanations. Time had passed between the evening she saw the photographs and the night of Wiley's murder. Maybe one photograph hadn't been framed properly or Wiley changed his mind about including it, and it was possible Carly didn't get the count right the first time.

‘Lunch?' Lang asked when Carly came into the office.

‘Is that all you ever think about?'

‘More and more,' Lang said. ‘It seems safer than some other human indulgences.'

She smiled. After a night sleeping with the client, she couldn't really fault him for sleeping with a witness. She'd like to. And he wasn't aware of her indiscretion, if one could call it that. But she liked to play fair.

‘We need to talk,' Lang continued.

‘And what is this thing that we're doing now?'

‘C'mon, Carly.'

‘Can we go back to Osteria?'

‘The place with the handsome Italian waiter?'

‘That would be the one,' she said. ‘And the delicious food.'

‘And, incidentally, the delicious food.' Lang smiled.

‘What are we going to talk about?'

‘Love.'

‘I'm not going,' she said.

‘Death,' he said.

‘That's better.'

The restaurant Lang used as a bribe had a line of folks waiting for a table.

‘That's the problem with good food and handsome waiters,' Lang said to Carly as they stood on the sidewalk outside. He scanned the street. There was no shortage of good restaurants in North Beach.

‘How about a slice of pizza and a glass of wine?' Carly asked.

‘That's always good.'

Golden Boy Pizza was a small place on Green between Columbus and Grant. Inside the customers either sat at the counter facing the kitchen or they sat at a counter facing a wall. Two of the walls and the ceiling were corrugated steel, providing a kind of Quonset hut environment. The pie was thick and good, the wine good and inexpensive.

‘When I was young, I used to come here at night after drinking maybe a little more than I should,' Carly said, getting comfortable on her stool.

Service was quick. Pizza came from a large tray in the front and wine was poured.

‘So what are we talking about?' Carly asked.

‘All right,' Lang said, gathering his thoughts. ‘As I understand it, you're thinking that the murderer is someone who was determined to remove a photograph. If we find the photograph, we find the killer.' She nodded. ‘I'm pretty convinced that Mickey Warfield did it, but we know the night Wiley was killed, Mickey was incarcerated in San Mateo.'

‘You're not making a great case for yourself, Noah.'

‘I'm not, I know.' He took a sip of wine. ‘This morning I stopped in for a surprise visit at the lovely Marina home of Marlene Berensen. This was after I learned that her Jaguar, the one Mickey was driving, was found driverless in the parking lot at Ocean Beach. Marlene was drunk on her feet and crying that Mickey was gone.'

‘And your point is?'

Lang waited until he finished his bite of pizza and took a sip of wine.

‘Mickey has to be involved. And this leads me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it isn't one person trying to hide one secret. Maybe the secret is bigger or there is more than one.'

Carly nodded. ‘It's possible, I'm sure. It does seem like Mickey Warfield is involved but someone killed Frank Wiley and I am sure there is a photograph missing.'

It was Lang's turn to agree.

‘So where are we?' Lang asked.

‘In the dark, I think.'

‘It's always darkest before the dawn.'

‘You're just full of quotes.'

‘And trite expressions,' Lang said.

‘You spend the weekend reading Bartlett's?'

‘How's William?' Lang smiled, knowing he had just stopped the attack.

Damn, she thought, as she felt herself blush.

‘What makes you think I know how he is?'

‘I wasn't sure, but now I know. You have what gamblers call a “tell”.'

‘What kind of tell?'

‘I can't tell you. If I told you what your tell was it would no longer be a tell.'

‘So?'

‘I like you having one.'

‘Well, maybe you have it wrong.' She gave him a Cheshire Cat smile. Behind the smile she was cursing herself. She didn't want him going anywhere near the truth. If he did, then she lost whatever leverage she had knowing he had slept with the recently dead Angel.

‘We are getting paid for this, aren't we?' Lang asked as they walked to the car.

‘We are,' she said.

‘In money?'

She gave him the look. It was more threatening than Inspector Stern's threatening look. Perhaps, just perhaps, he told himself, he'd gone too far.

Twenty-Six

Lang climbed out of Carly's Mini Cooper on lower Polk Street. She wished him well as she pulled away. Lang went up the narrow stairway and toward Scotty Markham's office.

Markham sat at his desk amidst the clutter of Chinese takeout cartons and newspapers. It was as if Lang never left. Markham looked up, said nothing.

‘I seem to have lost Mickey Warfield,' Lang said.

‘You lost him, you find him.' Markham didn't bother putting down the newspaper.

‘You know about Angel?' Lang asked.

‘The Chinese chick, right?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Yeah.'

‘You know, your hands aren't real clean where Angel was concerned. We know you went there after visiting our little office.'

‘Hey,' he said dryly, ‘I wasn't with her when she croaked.'

‘Mickey tell you that?'

‘Mickey schmickey. What do you want from me?'

‘Some help maybe. You know where or how I might find him?'

‘Why should I help you?'

‘Professional courtesy,' Lang said, knowing how Markham would take it. ‘Listen, Scotty, wasn't I a nice guy when you and your pal showed up threatening me and my friends? Did I punch you out? Did I call the police?'