Death in North Beach (36 page)

Other than the fact that he wasn't a regular, Lang, in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball cap, didn't stand out. The bartender, a heavy-set man hovering somewhere between a hard forty and a soft fifty, came up. Though Lang preferred something a little more complex, he ordered a Budweiser. He wanted to be one of the guys.

‘Hey, Marty, while you got your hand in the fridge, get me one too,' a guy at the pool table yelled out.

When the guy came back with his beer, Lang told him that he stopped by to pick up Scotty's package. The bartender gave him the ‘Who in the hell are you?' look.

‘You know our friend is dead, right?'

‘Heard that,' the bartender said.

‘He gave you a package. He give you instructions about the package?'

The bartender maintained an appraising attitude.

‘Maybe not,' Lang said. ‘He always puts things off. He probably hadn't got around to it.'

‘What's your interest?' the bartender asked.

‘Just doing a favor for a friend,' Lang said.

‘What's that?'

‘I'm supposed to deliver the package to someone. Scotty said that if anything ever happened to him, I should get the box from you.'

‘How do you know Scotty?' the bartender asked.

Lang took out his wallet, showed him his PI license.

‘Partners in crime,' Lang said.

‘He never talked about you.'

‘I never talked about him. Maybe I got the wrong guy. You Marty?'

The bartender nodded.

‘I think the least we can do is follow Scotty's wishes, don't you, Marty?'

‘I don't know,' the bartender said.

‘Scotty's dead. Look inside. There's no gold in there. The stuff's no good to anybody but the person I'm supposed to give it to.'

‘I don't . . .'

‘Man, it's Scotty's wish.'

Pepe followed her, but stayed a few feet back. Carly put down a bowl of water in the kitchen. This would take some getting used to – having another live being hanging around on a regular basis. And it was a far cry from having Sweet William fixing her a Martini after a hard day. But Pepe's reticence was sweet. It was as if he didn't want to intrude.

‘It's OK,' Carly told him. ‘We'll go running in the morning.'

There was a half moon. It was perfect. Lang had wrapped the plastic container in a trash bag and brought it out to the back, just beyond the little patio where he enjoyed a late-night drink. With just a touch of light he could see what he was doing and that the neighbors wouldn't. He used the old, rusty spade previous tenants had left behind to dig the hole.

What he was doing, he reminded himself, was concealing evidence. But after reading the manuscript he thought only unnecessary harm could be done by its existence. The sins Warfield exposed, if you could call them sins, were far more venial than mortal – with the exception of one. And with that one notation, the world didn't need its pound of flesh. But that one revelation caused Lang to bury the material rather than destroy it. The unnecessary death of Angel LeGard, who was in fact Hui Zhong Chang, could be linked in an unflattering way with Ralph Chiu. And it was her death that remained unsolved. When the time came, facts could be unearthed.

As he patted down the soft earth, Buddha became visible in the scant light. His eyes gave him away. He appeared to criss-cross the burial ground before slipping away again.

‘Was that your way of saying goodbye to Pandora?' Lang asked.