Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) (9 page)

I finished off the prime rib and about a pint of chocolate-rum ice cream. Then I put my hand on hers across the table.

“Come on,” I said, partly because I knew it was expected of me, “let’s go to bed.”

“Sometimes, Joe,” Rachel said, “I think you’re just using me.” But the way she turned her hand to meet mine said this wasn’t yet a Federal offense.

“Could be,” I said, tugging her to her feet.

11

It was in the morning that I always wished I could bring myself to marry the Widow
Schute. We were sitting on the top deck, blinking in the soft-lemon sunshine, with Sausalito and the bay laid out for us to spit on if we felt like it. Miss Black Power was back dishing out the scrambled eggs, bacon, croissants, and fresh grapefruit juice. I could tell she didn’t like me because she always put my eggs off-center on the plate.

Rachel was sitting there in a hundred-and-fifty-dollar dressing gown, looking well-laid and altogether too content with life to bother settling the guerrilla warfare going on at the end of the table between Ramsey and Donald, the two older boys. And Joey, the baby, was busy mashing his scrambled eggs into his highchair tray. He’d not yet been born when his father, the late, rich Howard
Schute had driven his car off a seventy-five-foot cliff above Stinson Beach. I hadn’t known Howard Schute, but he couldn’t have been too bad if Rachel liked him.

My friend, the maid, brought me the
Chronicle
as if she were giving up one of her kidneys, and it didn’t take me long to find the report of Chub’s untimely end. Not that it carried screaming headlines. The story was all but buried on the back page next to a laxative ad and simply said that a Mr. Seymour F.—for what? I wondered—Kroll of New York City had been found in a North Beach apartment house dead of stab wounds. The police were pursuing their investigations. A one-day non-sensation. I wondered if there was somebody in New York who would care.

On the front page, the
Chronicle
was still pumping Tina’s death for what it was worth and quoting Johnny Maher’s noncommittal statements about the likelihood of the killer being caught, tried, and executed in time for Sunday brunch. There was a good deal of lip-licking over preparations for the memorial service at midday at St. Timothy’s, the hippest church in North Beach. It promised to be a four-star occasion. It was bound to be open-coffin, but would Tina be topless?

Breakfast can’t last forever, and I had a visit to pay across the way on Belvedere Island. If I turned slightly to the left, I could see Bel
vedere, but couldn’t pick out the house.

The boys kicked up such a fuss when I said I had to leave that Rachel didn’t have a chance really to get started. Not that she was much of a fuss maker. She could say things with her eyes and a slight lift of her upper lip that you couldn’t get across with forty-five minutes of shouting. I kissed her warmly but noncommittally, wrestled with the boys all the way down the three flights of outside steps, and waved like hell until my car was out of sight. There was a damned fine family for somebody who wanted a family.

It was a pleasant, sunny ride from Sausalito to Belvedere, right around the blunt blade of bay which splits that end of Marin County. When I passed through Mill Valley I gave a thought to Ralph Lehman up there on his little hill, trying to hold everything together for another nine months so that he could retire. He’d be lucky.

Belvedere’s not really an island, but it likes to think it is. Since most of the houses on Belvedere have their backs rudely turned to
the narrow road that spirals around it, the casual rubbernecker wouldn’t know how really luxurious the houses are.

About two thirds of the way up, I pulled off the road into a little carport in front of a three-car redwood garage. Even the garage had a good view over Tiburon toward the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. I was just putting a foot on the carefully graveled ground when a voice said, “What do you want here,
Goodey?”

I couldn’t see who it belonged to, but I knew the voice. It was Stoney
Karras, Sgt. Stoney Karras, late of the Docks Squad, now detached for rather special duty. I hate talking to people I can’t see, so I waited until he appeared from behind a thick, stunted cypress tree next to the garage. Karras didn’t look like much in a cheap Robert Hall special the color of grape pulp and ancient oxblood loafers, but I respected him as a hard man in a hard job.

“I want to see the man, Stoney.”

“What if he don’t want to see you?”

“Try him and see,” I suggested.

Stoney shrugged and went over me with his fat fingers like an amateur pianist. He didn’t find anything because my police special was still in the suitcase. Then he told me not to bother wandering around while he checked out my popularity rating with the squire. I could have told him the answer to that one, but I didn’t think Kolchik would refuse to see me. He was too interested in the job I was supposed to do to play it that cool.

“Okay, come on,” said Stoney when he reappeared from the house, but I could tell from his expression that he thought the mayor was making a mistake. Stoney would have had me thrown into the bay. That’s why Stoney wasn’t the mayor. Maybe he should have been.

Stoney herded me out onto a brick terrace at the front of the house, grunted something, and left me standing there. I was alone. A couple of leather-strapped sun loungers pointed out to sea, and a low, driftwood table held a big, kidney-shaped ceramic ashtray and a Mexican silver cigarette box. On the silver box was a small brass bell.

Somebody cleared his throat theatrically behind me. I turned around to see Mayor
Kolchik coming out of the dark recesses of the house.

Kolchik
was a short, dark man with a potato nose and the physical stature of a natural clown. But there was nothing clownish about his black, deep-set eyes. They told you that everything you assumed about him at first glance was a mistake, and you’d better know it. They meant business. His outfit was sporty—a three-quarter-sleeved mustard shirt, Balboa-blue slacks with a razor crease, and open-weave sandals. But his heart wasn’t in it. He could have really relaxed in a midnight-blue pinstripe with one-inch cuffs.             

Neither of us knew exactly how to start. We knew too much about each other to be strangers. He knew I’d shot his cousin, and I knew about Tina. We couldn’t start with a businesslike handshake.

“You’re Goodey,” he said.

I wanted to say, “You’re
Kolchik,” but chickened out and just nodded.

“You wanted to see me?” he said.

“Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Tina D’Oro,” I said, feeling a bit silly and exposed.

Kolchik
looked as though someone had given him a tough riddle, and he was working on it. Apparently he hadn’t expected such a call on this sunny Saturday morning. He peered at me as if I were a junior accountant who’d lost a decimal point. He frowned.

“Does my brother know you’re over here?”

“He told me to investigate Tina’s murder,” I said, “but he didn’t tell me how. I’m one of those self-starters you hear about.”

He didn’t like that. It came too close to wise-
guyism to suit him, and he frowned again. He was a good frowner.

“So I’m your number-one suspect, eh?” he said. That brought out a small, wrinkled smile, and I began to like him a little. But only a little.

“If you weren’t a possible suspect,” I said, “you wouldn’t have wanted to try to find out who killed Tina and eliminate you as a suspect. When Lehman told me just how it was, I volunteered to come back.”

“You wanted to help me,” he said.

“I wanted to help myself. The way Lehman told it, unless I came back willingly and tried to bail you out, you and The Brother were going to get nasty about me shooting your cousin.”

“If that’s what Lehman said, there must be some truth in it,”
Kolchik said. He smiled again. “So that’s what they call Bruno, eh? The Brother.”

“That’s what I call him. I’ve heard him called worse.”

“A lot of people have the wrong slant on Bruno,” he said. “He’s a bit rough, perhaps, but he’s got one great quality that makes up for everything. He’s loyal.”

“Loyal to what?”

“To me, Goodey. To me,” Kolchik said complacently. “What are you loyal to?”

Before I could answer, he moved over to the driftwood table and took up the small bell. He gave it a few brisk shakes, and almost im
mediately a short, ugly girl with a Little Nemo haircut came out onto the terrace with an expectant look on her face. She was wearing a mauve slack suit with a small apron which seemed to turn it into a uniform. She ignored me and turned her face to Kolchik as if he were the sun.

“Let’s have a drink,
Goodey,” he said. “I make some very good beer. Irina, will you please bring us a bottle of the homemade beer from the cellar?”

She moved back into the house with a slightly pigeon-toed walk, and
Kolchik gestured toward the deck chairs. “Let’s sit down and enjoy the sun,” he said. “It’s one of God’s great gifts. Now, you were about to tell me what you’re loyal to. Or maybe to whom.” The “to whom” came right out of Business English IA (night school division), but he got it out without falling flat on his face.

I didn’t have to think very hard. “To me,” I said.

I could see that he thought this was a bit crass. It offended his Polish-American sense of respect for family, nation, and institutions.

“Not to the police force?” he asked with raised eyebrows. He meant, “Not to me?”

“I’m not on the police force anymore,” I said. “You had me kicked off.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, shrugging as if he’d forgotten to pay the milk
man or some other small oversight. “But you’ll be back on the police force, won’t you, after you clear up this…other matter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But about this
other matter
—”

But he wasn’t listening. He was looking past me at the sliding door into the house, and I turned to follow his eyes. Coming onto the ter
race was a woman in a shiny, chromium-plated wheelchair which she was propelling with thin, muscular arms. On a tray over her lap was a pitcher of beer with a thick head of foam and two tall pilsner glasses. She maneuvered the wheelchair with the expertise of long practice.

Everything about the woman was gray, and she fought the somber shade by wearing a vividly flowered red dress and a shocking shade of carmine lipstick. Her tapered nails were drops of fresh blood. But behind this show of color, she was like a vampire’s victim, drained of all but the dregs of life and fighting every inch of the way. Behind her dull silver skin, veins like very minor roads on a map seemed to be fading out before my eyes.

Kolchik was up from the sun lounger and behind her chair with the agility of a man half his age. Reluctantly she stopped propelling the chair and allowed herself to be pushed.

“This is my wife,”
Kolchik said proudly, wheeling her between our two loungers. “Dear, this is Joe Goodey. He’s a detective looking into the murder of Tina D’Oro.”

I jumped up feeling faintly guilty. “I could come back at a more convenient time,” I said, “if—”

“No, Mr. Goodey,” she said, giving me a cold, dry hand, “there won’t be a more convenient time. This is fine.” She paused briefly. “Aren’t you the detective who shot Sanford’s cousin? What extremely bad luck!”

I didn’t know if she meant that I or old Stanislaus had had the bad luck, but I nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid I’m the one.”

“Have you been to see him at the hospital yet?”

"No,” I said. “Things have been a little hectic since then, and I haven’t had a chance. I don’t think I’d be very welcome anyway.”

“Of course you would,” she said sternly, looking up at my face with once-indigo eyes glazed with a gray sheen. “Cousin Stanislaus will be wondering what sort of man shot him.”

“I’ll try to get to see him soon,” I promised.

The mayor had poured out two perfect glasses of beer and was holding one out toward me. “Drink this,” he said, “and you’ll never drink commercial beer again. It’s a recipe my grandfather stole from the bishop of Cracow.”

It just tasted like beer to me, but I tried to look like a man drink
ing the best beer he’d ever experienced. I don’t think I succeeded, but Kolchik swallowed his disappointment and the rest of his glass of beer and immediately poured himself another. Not to be outdone, I chug-a-lugged the rest of mine and held out my glass. Hizzoner brightened considerably, and I could tell that we were well on the way to being best buddies.

But how do you raise such a delicate matter as the late Tina
D’Oro with even a best buddy with his crippled wife sitting there admiring his bobbing Adam’s apple as he drank beer?

“Mayor,” I said, “the matter I came to see you about is a rather delicate one. I think we’d better talk privately.”

“That won’t be necessary, Goodey,” he answered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and missing a bit of foam. “Mrs. Kolchik knew all about Tina. I have no secrets from her. So go right ahead.”

I still hesitated. I’m as modem and sophisticated as the next man, but I’m still young enough to think that there’s something unwhole
some about swinging geriatric cases. But then, maybe Kolchik didn’t see himself that way.

“That’s right, Officer,” said Mrs.
Kolchik, smiling up at me. “I knew about Tina. You see, it’s been many years since my health has been good enough to allow me to be a complete wife to Sanford.” She didn’t have to hit me over the head with a bread board. I knew what she was getting at. “And,” she went on, “Sanford is still a youthful and vigorous man. So we decided years ago that it would be best if he were free to seek the company of younger, stronger women. It was my idea. You see, Mr. Goodey, I am a European woman, really. I hope I am not embarrassing you.”