Bleeders, page 15
part #27 of Nameless Detective Series
I slapped his face half a dozen times, back and forth, not being gentle about it. All that got me was a low groan. Another set of six slaps, and his eyes popped open; but there was no focus in them, and they closed again before I finished smacking him. The hell with this, I thought. I don’t like mishandling the helpless, even a kid who probably deserved it.
So I yanked the covers all the way off his naked body, hauled him off the bed and onto his feet. It roused him enough to mutter something that sounded like “What’s going on?” but not enough to enable him to walk under his own power. I had to drag him out of there and across the hall into the bathroom. There was a shower stall; I pushed him in there, propped him against a mildewed tile wall, and turned on the cold water.
That brought him out of it. He squealed when the spray hit him; gasped, moaned, made other sounds of protest. But he took it standing up and without trying to get away. I figured he’d had enough when his eyes stayed open and shivers wracked him. I turned off the water, tossed him one of the soiled towels draped over a clothes hamper.
From the hallway I watched him dry off in jerky movements, wrap the towel around his middle. He stood for a few seconds, staring groggily at nothing. Then he gulped three glasses of water, dribbling some of it down his skinny chest, and wobbled past me into the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, put his face in his hands.
I leaned against a bureau, waiting. His head came up finally. The watery blue eyes had focus now; he saw me standing there and gave me a long, bleary look. He didn’t seem angry or scared—just bewildered in a fuzzy-headed way, and maybe a little resigned. As if it were an expected part of his lot to be hauled out of bed and thrown in the shower by somebody he’d never seen before. The mild-mannered, submissive variety of addict and ex-con. Yet another variety of bleeder. The predatory cons in prison must have had a field day with him.
“Who’re you?” he asked. The Texas drawl had a mush-mouthed sound, as though his tongue was swollen.
“A man with questions. A man you don’t want to lie to or mess with.”
“Cop?”
“Close enough. Your PO’s a good friend of mine.”
“Mr. Duryea? Oh, shit.” Some scare had come into his voice. “He know I’m here?”
“Not yet. Cooperate and he won’t find out from me.”
“Gonna find out anyways, sure as hell. Goddamn that Kay. I wished I never met her.”
“Who’s Kay?”
“Kirsten. I was clean till I met her. Clean and straight, I swear it. I’d’ve known all the shit she was into, I never would’ve come near her. Speed, man, that stuff messes with your head. I feel like I done crashed and burned.”
“She didn’t knock you down and force you to take it, did she?”
“Well, she had it, she offered it, she’s got good connections....” He grimaced, groaned a little. “Ah, hell, it ain’t her fault. It’s mine. I know better, I just cain’t hep myself sometimes. Man don’t use his head, he might’s well have two assholes.”
Amen to that.
Bright looked around the bedroom, frowning. “She ain’t here, is she?”
“Just the two of us.”
“What time’s it?”
“After eleven.”
“Eleven? Goddamn her, she knows I cain’t wake up like she does after a jag. I told her get me up so’s I can go to work. No later’n eight A.M. and don’t forget ’cause I cain’t take no more time off.”
“Maybe she tried to get you up. Look at the trouble I had three hours later.”
“Yessir, I’m sorry about that. But listen here, I got to call in. I lose that job of mine, Mr. Duryea’s gonna violate my ass for sure.”
There was no point in telling him he’d already lost his job. “Answer my questions first. A few more minutes won’t make any difference.”
“Reckon you got that right.”
“Dingo,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Dingo. You know the name.”
“Nossir, I ... whoa. You mean that Aussie sumbitch?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, man, I wished I never set eyes on that boy. I doan want nothing more to do with him.”
“What’s his real name?”
“I doan know.”
“He never told you, you never heard it?”
“Nossir. Dingo’s all I know.”
“Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same man. Forty or so, big, bald, bushy eyebrows, onion breath.”
“Cain’t say about his breath. Rest of it’s right.”
“He speak with an Australian accent?”
“Not so’s you notice. Been in this country awhile, I reckon.”
Or born here. “All right. Where’d you meet him?”
“Frisco. ’Bout two years back.”
“Before you were busted for dealing meth.”
“Yessir. All his idea and his fault, that deal. Him and that woman of his.”
“Annette Byers?”
“I doan recall her name.”
“Tall, leggy, streaky blond hair, early twenties.”
“Big tits? Yeah, that’s her. Sumbitch Dingo set us up with a undercover narc and her and me got busted. Not him. He got off clean, that boy.”
“Why didn’t you take him down with you?”
“I sure wanted to, but she said we dasn’t, he’d kill us if we did. He would’ve, too. Sumbitch’s meaner’n a sore-dick dog.”
“You have any contact with him since you were paroled?”
“Nossir. No way. I ever see him again, I run the other way.”
“How about with the woman?”
“Her neither.”
“How’d you get involved with the two of them?”
“Met her one night at this here club in Belmont.”
“The Alamo?”
“Right, the Alamo.”
“She hang out there or what?”
“Not her, me. She come in one night with some friends.”
“Dingo one of them?”
“No. Wasn’t ’til later that I met up with him.”
“Where was that?”
“Party at some old boy’s house.”
“What old boy?”
“Slick named ... Duke. Yeah, Duke.”
“Duke what?”
“I doan remember. Honest.”
“Where was the house?”
“Frisco somewheres.”
“What street?”
“I doan remember.”
“What part of the city?”
“I doan know Frisco, man.”
“Who else was at this party? Jay Cohalan?”
“Who?”
“Jay Cohalan. Another friend of Annette Byers.”
“Never heard the name.”
I described Cohalan. Bright said, shaking his head, “Nosir, uh-uh.” It sounded like the truth, which made me wrong about him being Cohalan’s supplier. It had to have been Dingo, then, through Byers. She was the Alamo connection, not Bright. Cohalan had either met her there as Bright had or she’d taken him there after they were together.
I said, “So Dingo was at this Duke’s party. Who invited you? Byers?”
“Yessir. Made it seem like we was gonna ball, her and me, but once we got there she was all over him like a blowfly on a turd. Sweet little piece like her, and him with a face that’d pucker a hog’s ass. He must have some whang on him, on’y thing I can figure.”
“How’d they hook you into the meth deal?”
“Well, he had some crystal on him and I done bought me some. I was flush at the time, I ain’t sayin’ how come. Dingo, he says he needed more cash for a big buy he was setting up. I wished I didn’t listen to him, but he was pretty slick. Snot-on-a-doorknob slick, that boy. A thousand buy-in gets me a fast five thou on the street. Uh-uh. All that thousand got me was a year in jail.”
“Anybody else in on the deal with you three?”
“Nossir. Just us.”
“Where was Dingo living then, do you know?”
“With her, I reckon. Couple times we met, it was at her place.”
“He have a job? The legit kind, I mean.”
“A job ...” Bright frowned, winced, held his head. “Seems one of ’em said something once ’bout him working part-time for some moving company.”
“Which moving company?”
“Doan remember if they said which one.”
“But it was in the city?”
“Frisco, yeah, I think it was.”
“What else can you tell me about Dingo? Where he came from, other people he knew?”
“Nothing. If I ever knew something else, I done forgot it.” He blinked at me again. “That sumbitch in trouble? That how come you asking all these questions?”
“He’s in trouble, all right. You don’t want to know any more than that.”
“Reckon I don’t,” Bright said. “Can I make my call now? I’m scared as hell I’m gonna lose my job.”
“Where’ll you be if I need to talk to you again?”
“Huh? Right here, that’s where.”
“Not moving out on Kirsten?”
“I cain’t. I give up my own place on account of her and her goddamn speed. I ain’t got nowheres else to go.” He turned his hands palms upward, a gesture at once rueful and resigned. “No damn place to go except straight back to jail.”
SEVENTEEN
SO NOW I HAD MOST OF IT.
Dingo: Second-generation Australian, or else in this country long enough to have lost most of his accent. Possibly a part-time worker for a San Francisco moving company as of two years ago. Crankhead and small-time crank dealer. Shacked up or at least sleeping with Annette Byers before she took up with Jay Cohalan, and evidently still tight with her during the affair. Big, hard, mean, violent, and not very bright—a deadly combination.
Scenario: Cohalan meets Byers, probably at the Alamo. He’s already worked out the scam to get his hands on his wife’s inheritance in small bites, and makes the mistake of confiding this to Byers. She in turn tells Dingo and the two of them cook up a scheme to doublecross Cohalan and steal Carolyn Dain’s money for themselves. She works on Cohalan to go for the big bite, all the remaining inheritance money in one payoff, no doubt using sex as the lure. He gives in, they set it up. And that’s when I come into it, the monkey wrench that fouls up the works.
It was Dingo, not Cohalan, that she was waiting for at her apartment Thursday night. Cohalan wasn’t supposed to show at all, at least not until it was too late and Dingo and Byers had made off with the cash; that was why she was surprised to see him. And when Dingo finally arrives and finds Cohalan there and the money gone with me, he’s furious. Cohalan is the first target of his rage, right away or after he’s driven out to Daly City and found Carolyn Dain gone. By this time the money’s an obsession fueled by frenzy and drugs. One option is to go after me, but for all he knows I’ve already turned over the seventy-five thousand. He decides to wait for Carolyn Dain to come home. Meanwhile, sometime that night, they load a beaten-up Cohalan into his car and take him out by Candlestick, one of them driving the Camry and the other following. Exit Cohalan.
When Carolyn Dain returns to her house on Friday, Dingo is waiting for her. She tells him I still have the cash, he forces her to make those calls to my office. Then he kills her and waits for me to make the delivery. He’s worked up a pretty good hate for me by then, for all the trouble I’ve caused him, so I’m scheduled to die, too. After the misfire, the fight, the money grab, he’d still want me dead but not badly enough to risk stalking me. The money’s all he really cares about. So he and Byers go on the run, or to ground somewhere, or buy a load of crank to sell, or do any number of other things with the cash.
The scenario played out. That was the way it had gone down, or close to it.
All right. There was one more thing I needed to know, and one thing left for me to do. Yeah, just two little things.
Find out Dingo’s real name.
And then find him and Byers.
Tamara was on the phone when I came into the office. So I went and got the San Francisco Yellow Pages and spread them open on my desk. Movers and Full Service Storage. Christ, there were twenty-six pages of listings-full-page ads, half-page ads, spot ads, box ads, and single lines of names and addresses. A couple of hundred companies large and small, from AA Worldwide Moving to Zandor Transportation, Inc. It would take Tamara and me the rest of today and part of tomorrow to canvass all the numbers, and at that we’d get answering machines, nonresponses, and a bunch of uncooperative individuals....
Something tickled the back of my mind, but it got lost when I heard the phone go down on Tamara’s desk. I glanced over there. “Anything?”
“Might be,” she said. “That was Grant Johnson I was talking to.”
“Who?”
“Father of Byers’ kid. I finally tracked him down. He’s a plumber, lives up in Woodland now.”
“And?”
“Married, three kids—two of ‘em with the present wife. Third’s the boy he had with Byers. So I called him up at work, said I was a reporter for the Chronicle and had he seen Byers recently and did he have any idea where she might be.”
“Took a chance doing that. What’d he say?”
“Got real upset. Knew she was wanted by the law, but what’d that have to do with him? Said he hadn’t seen the bitch in years, didn’t want nothing to do with her, don’t call him again or he’d sic his lawyer on me and the paper both. Sounded scared to me.”
“You think he might’ve been lying?”
“Hiding something, maybe. Hard to be sure over the phone, you know what I’m saying?”
“Worth talking to in person?”
“Might be, but Woodland’s a long way from here.”
“Only a couple of hours. What else did you pick up on him?”
“Not much. Your model citizens, him and his wife both. Melanie’s her name. No criminal records, one speeding ticket for him five years ago. Belong to the Methodist Church, the PTA, Greenpeace.”
“If he’s that clean,” I mused aloud, “what was he doing with a screwed-up crankhead like Byers?”
“Maybe she wasn’t into drugs when he knew her. And you know what they say about a hard-on.”
“Yes, and I don’t want to hear you say it. What’s Johnson’s home address in Woodland?”
She consulted her computer screen. “Seven-ninety Rio Oso. Work address: RiteClean Plumbing and Heating, twenty-six hundred Benson Avenue. Also Woodland.”
I wrote down the addresses. While I was doing that, the phone rang again. Tamara answered, listened, indicated with her hand that the call was for her.
The Yellow Pages were still spread open on my desk blotter. As I pocketed my notebook, one of the large ads caught and held my eye—and the tickling sensation returned. The ad itself had nothing to do with it. Something else....
Got it. Quickly I flipped pages. There were only three listings under the letter V: Valley Relocation and Storage, Vector Transportation, and Viselli Van and Storage. I smacked my fist down on the page.
Dingo 4.15 V.V.S.
V.V.S.—Viselli Van and Storage.
It was a medium-size place, three stories and truck yard that covered half a block at the foot of Potrero Hill. Dot-com firms had gobbled up some real estate in the area, but the pocket here was still blue-collar industrial by day, a meeting ground for hookers and their johns at night. Business at Viselli Van and Storage must be pretty good; they had an office staff of half a dozen. The one I talked to was a Mrs. Lupinski, a pinch-faced woman in her fifties with gray hair so stiff-looking it might have been lacquered and gold-framed eyeglasses dangling from a silver chain.
“I’m looking for a man who might be employed here,” I told her. “An Australian who goes by the nickname Dingo.”
The name was like a squirt of lemon juice: her mouth puckered with instant distaste. “What do you want with him?”
“He does work here then?”
“He did until last week, and I don’t mind telling you I’m glad he’s gone.”
“When last week?”
“Thursday.”
“Quit or fired?”
“Fired, and rightly so. He started a fight with one of our customers. A fistfight, no less, without any provocation. Are you with the police?”
“Not exactly. Why do you ask?”
“Drugs,” she said, lowering her voice. The pucker grew even more pronounced. “He’s a drug addict. Did you know that?”
“Yes, ma’am.” On drugs, probably, and already out of control when he started the fistfight. It hadn’t been much of a step from that to crossing the line into cold-blooded murder. “What’s his real name?”
“His name?”
“I know him only as Dingo.”
“Manganaris,” she said as if it were a dirty word. “Harold Manganaris. Harold is a perfectly good name, but he hated it. He insisted everyone call him by that silly Dingo.”
All right. Harold Manganaris. All right.
“Would you spell the last name, please.”
She spelled it. “He has a foul mouth, too,” she said. “You should have heard some of the things he said to me, to other women here. He should’ve been fired long ago. Long ago.”
“Would it be possible for me to see his personnel file?”
“Oh, no, that isn’t allowed.”
“Well, could you at least give me his home address? And the names and addresses of any relatives? Please, Mrs. Lupinski. It’s very important.”
She glanced around as though she were afraid someone might be eavesdropping. Then she said conspiratorially, “Just a minute,” and went away to her desk for a little time. When she came back she half-whispered a street and apartment number on Duboce.
“Relatives, next of kin?”
“None. He provided only the barest facts. He shouldn’t have been hired in the first place, if you ask me.”
“Did he have any friends here? Anyone he worked with regularly?”
“No. He’s not the kind of man who makes friends. Everyone here disliked him, no one wanted to work closely with him. Even Mr. Viselli disliked him. I can’t understand why he wasn’t fired long ago.”
