Huckleberry Fiend (4 page)

“Mcdonald,” said Blick, “I’m runnin’ out of patience.”

“Okay, okay. I got a message on my machine. It said, ‘This is Beverly Alexander. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of a friend.’ Something like that.”

“What friend?”

“The lady didn’t say.”

“Go on.”

“She gave me this address and asked me to meet her here this afternoon about a possible story for the
Chronicle
.”

“Yeah? What story?”

“She didn’t say.”

“She didn’t say? Mcdonald, you so poor you come to somebody’s house you don’t know on the off-chance of making fifty, a hundred bucks?” He looked totally disgusted. “How’s your book sellin’, huh? Finally got one published after all these years. Hollywood called yet?”

I stared at him with unadulterated hatred. This was my weak spot, this business of never knowing where Spot’s next can of Kitty Queen was coming from.

Blick made his voice even lower and nastier. “Even you ain’t hard-up enough to do a crazy thing like that.”

The whole thing was pissing me off— he was right, even I wasn’t. But he had me in the position of having to pretend I was even more embarrassingly poverty-stricken than I actually was. Meaning he got the best of me whether I told the truth or I lied. I lied, of course: “I was curious.”

“When did she call, dildo?”

“Yesterday. She was killed last night, right?”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“Howard, I’m really afraid I’m going to have to ask you to watch your language. Miss Nakamura—”

“Answer the fucking question!”

“You said so. A minute ago.”

“Oh, hell. Get your ass out of here, Mcdonald.”

I was history, as the young people say, almost before he’d finished speaking. And on my way to the chic Russian Hill digs of Booker Kessler, boy burglar. If I knew Booker, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be alone— in the event he was home at all— but I was too shaken up to care.

It was a good five minutes before he answered the door, and when he did, he was wearing only a pair of blue jeans, obviously just pulled on, which meant I could see and marvel at his skinny, freckled chest with its five or so scraggly hairs. His reddish head hair was mussed, and he looked approximately seventeen and a half. In fact, the little runt was at least twenty-six, and the scourge of San Francisco’s singles bars. Considering his thorough and phenomenal success with women, it was amazing the twerp hadn’t had a crimp put in his enthusiasm by some jealous husband or swain. In fact, the whole thing was amazing; I wished he’d answered the door naked so I could have seen whether he was hung like a Clydesdale, which would have explained things.

“Paul, I didn’t expect you.” He was trying his best to be welcoming. “Would you like to come in?” His tone said he’d prefer I turned into a frog.

“Afraid I have to, buddy. Beverly Alexander’s dead.”

He looked alarmed.

“Murdered.”

“Excuse me a minute.” He started to walk out of the room, and then apparently remembered something drummed into him by his mom in her pre-lesbian days. “Sit down, okay? Have a beer.”

The beer seemed a fine idea, if it was the only alcoholic beverage he was offering; a belt of something stronger would have been even more to the point. But who knew where it was, so I made for the fridge. It held eight or ten premium imported brands, along with equally impressive selections of mustards and ice cream toppings. On nearby counters there were canisters of teas, and others of coffees. The kitchenware was Le Creuset. The gadgets were the best and the latest. Booker’s kitchen was a microcosm of his whole house— the finest of everything, and lots of it.

I went back to the living room, where I could have spent hours looking at the famous art collection, or browsing the record library, which covered nearly a whole wall, with several shelves containing only compact discs. Need I mention that the audio equipment was state-of-the-art? The furniture was covered in leather, the surfaces were glass, the colors were black and white— the better, said the owner, to show off his art. Pretty opulent for a runty kid— a runty kid who was even now showing to the door the source of his interrupted afternoon delight, a tall and gorgeous drink of water in black leather skirt and three-colored hair. She and Booker proceeded to kiss for a good part of the afternoon. I was thinking of clearing my throat when I heard her whisper, “Tomorrow?”

“I’ll call you,” said Booker, and the door snicked shut.

“How do you do it?” I blurted.

He looked puzzled. “How do I—? Oh, women. Easy. I work at it.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Mcdonald, please. Begging your pardon, but I am a pro. Have I ever shown you my wardrobe? I know exactly what to wear to every joint on which night. I know what crowd is going to be where, and when they’re going to get tired of that and move on. I can smell a new joint before the ink’s dry on the lease, and I can tell you what kind of women it’s going to draw.”

“Don’t you ever meet women at— you know— art exhibits or anything?”

“What’s the point? If I brought someone nice here, she’d just think I was a dope dealer, like the rest of them do.”

“You mean you can never have a meaningful relationship?”

“I’m trying, Mcdonald, okay? Am I in analysis or not?” He spoke with such heat that I couldn’t help hearing the hurt underneath. I supposed being wealthy at twenty-six had its drawbacks, and I hoped I’d remember that next time I became envious of Booker and tempted to learn my way around a ’loid.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay. Tell me about Beverly. Is Isami okay?”

“No worse than you’d be if you’d spent the afternoon with Howard Blick. I don’t know if she’s a suspect or not. I don’t know anything— I just wanted to tell you she’s dead. It happened last night,” I added, watching him carefully.

He didn’t react at all. I hoped it had happened sometime between seven and ten, when Booker was with Sardis and me, but nothing in his expression told me he was thinking of that at all. “How’d she die?”

“Don’t know yet. Except that she was murdered.”

He was quiet a while. “I can’t get it out of my mind,” he said at last. “She must have been killed for the thing.”

“The manuscript?”

He nodded. “Maybe she was supposed to deliver it, and couldn’t, because I took it. Or maybe someone knew about it and tried to steal it. Only they couldn’t, once again because it wasn’t there. So they killed her, trying to make her talk.”

“Hey, you shouldn’t think like that.” But my heart wasn’t in it. It was the way I was thinking.

“Mcdonald, I’m responsible for that woman’s death.”

“You know that’s—”

“There’s no two ways about it; I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.”

“How do you know she was shot?”

I was getting goose bumps again, like I had when I’d first seen the manuscript. But Booker seemed unaware that, so far as I was concerned, he had just seriously incriminated himself. “Figure of speech,” he said, waving a hand so dismissive I came close to believing him. But there was still some nagging going on in the back of my mind.

“It’s too much of a coincidence,” he continued, “that she was killed the night after I burglarized her.”

I agreed with him, but held my tongue about it.

“We’ve got to get the murderer. It’s no longer enough just to return the manuscript.”

He sounded as if he were thinking aloud. I wondered if I could sneak out before he came out of his reverie.

“Paul, I don’t care how much it costs. Get him.”

“Get him?”

“Get her, if that’s the case.”

“Booker, this is big. Don’t you think you’d better go to a pro?”

“A private eye? Don’t be absurd; I have to have somebody I can tell the truth to. Besides, you used to work for a private eye and you used to be an investigative reporter. That’s good enough for me.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Actually, I was scared silly. “By the way, I feel funny about hanging on to the manuscript, now that we’re pretty sure it’s valuable. Have you got a wall safe or something?”

He waved dismissively again— premature wealth had made him imperious. “Put it in a safe-deposit box.”

The problem was, the banks were closed for the day. Very well; I knew what I’d do with it.

I pointed my Toyota eastward, looking forward to getting home and half-wishing I’d find Sardis in the kitchen, filling a chicken, perhaps, with her very fine sage stuffing. But I knew I wouldn’t. It was I, as a matter of fact, who’d balked at exchanging keys. If Sardis felt I was too immature to live with her, then I was going to make damned sure she wasn’t going to get the benefits of living with me. Maybe she’d be a little inconvenienced every now and then by not having my key, and maybe, I reasoned, that would make her think twice. (Though actually reason had little to do with it— it was pure pigheadedness and I knew it as well as Sardis did. But I’d been pigheaded all my life and I wasn’t going to stop now. No matter how much I inconvenienced myself.)

And to tell the truth, the inconvenience was just about all mine. Sardis’s apartment, furnished with her artist’s eye and her hedonist’s love of textures, was completely inviting and mine was more than a bit on the bare side. We each had the same number of rooms— living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom for sleeping, and second bedroom for office or studio. In my case, though, I wouldn’t be using either of the bedrooms until I could afford to furnish them. My burned-up furniture was insured, of course, but I’d put all the money into the house, which was a considerable step up from the old one.

So far I’d bought only five big things— my nice dining-room table, a VCR, a stereo, some unfinished bookshelves, and a painting. I’d lost a painting I loved in the fire, and I’d needed the small Mary Robertson river scene to console myself.

There was one other nice thing in the place— another painting, the one Sardis had given me as a housewarming gift.

I thought it was the best example of her work that I’d seen and I was proud to have it. It was a very powerful stylized depiction of a fire, an image that had several layers of meaning for both of us, beginning with the way I lost my house and the way Sardis had taken me in afterward and the things that had happened not only between us, but also around us in the ensuing weeks.

The few other things I had were other people’s discards— an old bed, which doubled as a sofa, a TV, chest of drawers, old plastic-covered, chrome-legged chairs that were monstrous with the oak table, and an unbelievably heavy, ugly coffee table. The thing consisted of glass on top of an elaborately and hideously machine-turned stand, so that you could look down and see every tasteless curlicue.

That was the dump to which I was depriving Sardis of free access— more or less an indoor junkyard. This was only my second day there, but it certainly didn’t feel like home. Still, it would get there— my bookshelves were already overflowing and now I had Booker’s candlesticks. With the money he was paying me, I might just be able to get some decent dining room chairs and a new coffee table.

When I pulled up, Spot was lying on the porch, a medium-sized ball of black fur, which unrolled and stretched at my approach. Well, it
was
home. Sardis or no Sardis, Spot was there.

The manuscript was lying on the egregious coffee table. Now that I was pretty sure it was real, that offended me on aesthetic grounds. And now that I believed Beverly had been killed for it, it terrified me as well. The purloined-letter approach was the only hope of hiding it— and God knows I had the manuscripts to pull it off. Five of my unpublished masterpieces had been in the hands of indifferent (and eventually rejecting) editors at the time of the fire. One was at a potential agent’s and a copy of my current one had been at a friend’s. So one thing I hadn’t lost was my life’s work. I had plenty of worthless manuscripts in which to bury Mr. Clemens’s. I took the first chapter of
Vandal in Bohemia
, plunked it on top of Huck Finn, labeled it like all my other ones, and thrust it near the bottom of the pile.

Next, I went up to fill Sardis in, hoping for a dinner invitation, which was not forthcoming. Instead, I started some tuna pasta and, waiting for the water to boil, put in a call to Debbie Hofer at the
Chronicle
: “Sweetbuns, it’s Paul.”

“Lovebomb! When are you going to leave your blonde and come home to Deb?” Debbie is near retirement age, quite fond of Sardis, and would give me no end of motherly lectures if I broke up with her.

“I’m downstairs with my suitcase.”

“Stop teasing old Deb. How’s the new place?”

“The place is great, Deb. I have this interesting little job that might even enable me to furnish it.” Because Debbie is like a favorite aunt— and completely in my confidence— I hadn’t the slightest hesitation about telling her the whole story, not even omitting Booker’s name; she knew him from my long-ago news story, so why pretend?

Her reaction was typical: “Honey, you’ve got to write it! Best yarn I’ve heard all year.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got one hell of a conflict, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, if it’s a simple choice between money and glory—”

“It’s not, actually. Booker’s a friend, remember?”

“Details.”

“And anyway, I’d choose the money. The only thing is, I need a little help.”

“I figured. You want me to call the cop shop.” And she rang off without waiting for an answer.

I was polishing off the last of the pasta when the phone rang. “Sweetums, it isn’t pretty. Somebody choked poor Beverly, and beat her head against the floor.”

“Oof. But at least she wasn’t shot.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Never mind. When did it happen?”

“Lateish. Between nine and eleven.”

Not so good for Booker.

“But more like nine, they think. Because someone tried to call her at nine-thirty and got a busy. It turned out the phone was off the hook, which was the way her roommate found it when she returned the next morning.”

Better for Booker— he’d been with us at nine.

“The police think your buddy did it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bev and Isami reported the burglary, of course. The cops think the burglar came back.”