PETREL GLEASON STOOD OVER THE LIFELESS FORM OF Concepción Alvarez. He squinted down through the smoke of a cigarette whose drooping ash, though not extending quite so far, coped almost perfectly the curve his nose launched away from his face. He held his head to one side and maintained a recently wolfed hotdog in its place. His eyes were tired, multiple lines extended backwards from them toward each temple, discolored flesh encircled them, and the musculature that might pull his mouth into a smile didn’t, but formed two deep downward clefts, one on each side of the descending corners of his mouth.
The smoke did not obscure his eyeful of death, no more than the sheet that covered her. The guts of flash bulbs fused to make a magnesium light that made the blue smoke bluer and the bright after-image of the sheet dance in his eyes. From a lower lip the camera spit out each stark image of an overlit, nameless room. A technician not as tired as Gleason, with a more clinical approach to sudden death, dusted white powder on the black telephone on Windrow’s desk, revealing a solid mass of fingerprint whorls, and muttered Aha. Gleason shifted his eyes to the fingerprint man, held them there for a moment, then looked to the corpse.
He’d touched it earlier, when he’d first arrived, helping the coroner’s assistant examine her. The neck was broken: a job difficult to affect, but clean. She’d still been soft and warm, only her naturally dark color slowly leading the last changes, greying the rear guard of the body’s sudden elision from life to death. He’d been reminded of a squirrel he’d found years before beneath a tree out of which it had fallen, still soft, still warm, the little machine winding down around the severed connection, its broken neck, its head dangling from the body like a sponge ball hanging by a rubber band off a wooden paddle.
Many cigarettes. Their butts lay crushed on the board floor around the front of Windrow’s desk. The nicotine and the death brightened the effects of the light in the room. Light danced on the edges of everything except Windrow, who sat over a drink in a dark corner behind his desk, brooding silently.
In fact, Gleason wasn’t sure if his perception of the light were attenuated by the horror of the scene, or the nicotine, or by the cocaine he’d filched from the ounce discovered at the scene of Pamela Neil’s death. He hadn’t been around long enough not to be surprised by this drug’s particular superfluous qualities, but he had been around long enough to recognize in his nostrils the specific sting of methedrine. Mrs. Neil’s cocaine had been heavily cut with speed. He’d not expected the powerful sting and the tears it brought to his eyes. He sniffled. Maybe it was dexedrine. You’d think a rich creampuff like her would have better connections. Anyway, being tired, he was grateful for the stimulus.
Windrow permitted a tic at one corner of his mouth to betray his amusement at the audible congestion in Gleason’s nose, then forgot about it. The memory of colliding with the still warm body on the floor, where there should have been nothing but floor and maybe if only maybe a few bullets slapping overhead, eclipsed his indifferent opinion of Gleason’s mild indiscretions with the nose candy. Staying awake would always be a problem in Gleason’s line of work, as it sometimes was in Windrow’s, but thinking straight in the face of death presented a problem, too.
Windrow sat over his drink and stared at the corner of the sheet visible beyond the top of his desk. Periodically, one of the people from the crime laboratory passed between him and the body, muttering Latin undertones, but he took no notice of them. Twice he restrained himself from throwing his glass against the wall behind the door, a practice he’d found therapeutic in the past, when solutions or sense proved elusive, as now they seemed bent on proving themselves. He contented himself with imagining the amber rivulets of scotch following the wall down to the coving and the smashed bits of glass on the floor. There was some satisfaction to that.
Concepción Alvarez had been a pretty girl. Windrow knew that she was the sole surviving member of a large and politically active family from El Salvador, wiped out by way of a simpleminded solution to the differences between Right and Left. She’d been eighteen when it happened. Assured of a similar fate had she remained in her own country, she immigrated illegally to the United States with the idea of raising money to do the revolution some good.
After six months of poverty and culture shock, she’d gone to work for Pamela Neil at fifty dollars a week, plus room and board.
Jodie Ryan had a room in the basement of Pamela Neil’s mansion. She used it when she was working in San Francisco. Concepción had a room just like it on the other side of the bathroom they shared. They became friends.
Jodie had described to Windrow how Concepción had covered the walls of her room with revolutionary posters, and surrounded her bed with books. For two years, while she worked for Woodruff and Neil, she educated herself. She taught herself English. Gradually, she had made herself aware of Che Guevara and Castro, of Benito Juárez and Zapata, of Thomas Jefferson, of Allende, Patrice Lamumba, Ho Chi Minh, the American, French, Chinese and Russian Revolutions, and other political and historical figures and processes. She discovered Sartre, Marcuse, Marx and the U.S. Constitution.
You know, Jodie Ryan had said to Windrow one day, it’s not all theory with her.
Windrow had nibbled her ear and said, No? It isn’t?
She told him that Concepción had found a man in Daly City who would sell anybody all the semi-automatic carbines anybody wanted for a hundred dollars apiece. Cash.
Windrow had shrugged. You got a buyer, you got a seller, you got a market. Interesting, but an old story. “Then she told me,” Jodie had said, “that she knows Pamela Neil spends about four thousand a month on cocaine.”
“One of the risks you run being extravagant,” Windrow had pointed out, “is that there are always people out there somewhere who think they could spend your money a little more wisely than you do. Take the government, for example …”
“Right,” Jodie had said. “I told her as much, and she walked out. I thought she’d left, and didn’t really know what to do. Then she came back with a book and showed it to me. It was a collection of remarks by all kinds of people, philosophers mainly, opened to a particular page. The line she showed me said in effect, that the trick to being a servant is to rule the master.”
“Was she referring to the situation in El Salvador, or did Concepción intend to become Pamela Neil’s connection for cocaine?”
Jodie Ryan’s shrugs were distracting. She shrugged a couple of times extra. “I don’t know,” she’d said after a while. “I offered an alternative, told her to skim a gram or two when the pile was big and it wouldn’t be missed, and trade it for armaments. I even suggested we could stash the carbines in the attic until we could figure out how to ship them to El Salvador.” She shrugged again. “I was feeling seditious.”
“Well?”
“She said she wasn’t too sure about becoming a gunrunner and a coke dealer all in one day; she’d have to think it over. That was the last I heard about it… .”
Windrow hooked a drawer open with his foot and propped the other foot on it. His body creaked like an old oven door. On his desk in front of him lay the paperwork for two divorce cases and a breach of internal security in a burglar alarm company, and the two halves of the C-note. The edges of the former were beginning to curl and sunlight had yellowed the top sheets.
“Hey Gleason,” he said, looking over the rim of his glass. “What’s the quality of the Neil woman’s stuff?”
Gleason coughed on his cigarette smoke, emitting a cloud between them. “How the hell would I know,” he blustered.
Windrow put his glass on his desk and picked up a pencil. He tapped a rhythm on the glass with its tip. Gleason scratched his stubble.
Windrow raised his eyebrows and looked past Gleason at the door. “El Bad Ass’ll be here any minute, Steve,” he said. He shifted his eyes to his pencil, as he rolled it between his fingertips. Windrow was the only man Gleason knew who called him Steve. Even Gleason’s wife had called him Petrel, right up until the day she left him.
Gleason looked halfway over his shoulder, at the lab boys, then back at Windrow. “Been cut heavily,” Gleason said. “Some kind of speed, dex probably. Not sure.” He waved his cigarette hand. “Lab report’s kind of vague.”
There was a lot of noise in the hallway. The two or three reporters gathered there shouted questions; the police technicians looked busy. The uniformed officer outside Windrow’s office let Max Bdeniowitz in, and restrained a couple of other people. A camera appeared over the heads of the knot of people at the door, its flash went off, the door closed against the moil. Bdeniowitz looked exactly like a man who thought he’d gotten away with going home and turning in early, then found out he hadn’t.
“Hi chief,” Gleason said cheerfully.
Bdeniowitz ignored him and addressed a coroner’s assistant. “What happened?” he growled.
The coroner’s assistant was a neat, young scientist with thin hair and gold rimmed spectacles, and his name was Michael. He frowned and picked a corner of his trim moustache. “Hard to tell exactly…” he began.
Bdeniowitz scowled. “You want me to tell you?
“…but it looks like atlanto-occiputal subluxation, subsequent to hemorrhage and swelling within the spinal cord, resulting loss of primitive functions leading to death.” Michael spoke primly and continued to curry his moustache, while looking at the corpse.
“Broken neck,” Bdeniowitz muttered. “She fall?”
“Nope.”
“Pushed?”
“Nope.”
“Well?”
“Some kind of hold, executed by a strong, inexpert person. I’m guessing. They struggled.”
“Man or woman?”
The coroner’s assistant shook his head.
“Anything else?”
The man showed a tentative expression and waggled the fingers of one hand, palm down. “Could have been right-handed,” he said.
“Great. A strong right-handed inexperienced person. Gleason.”
Gleason consulted his small spiral-bound notebook. “Got the call 9:10, arrived 9:20. She was there, Windrow was there.” He pointed at Windrow behind the desk. “Says he came in at 9:05 or so and found her where she lies. No weapons on the premises, except for Marty’s .38,” he pointed at the pistol on top of the file cabinet. “unfired. Says he wasn’t carrying it. He pulled it out of a file drawer when I asked after it.” He replaced the notebook in his pocket. “No signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. Windrow says the place wasn’t searched.”
Bdeniowitz looked at Windrow, his face sour. “Nothing missing?”
Windrow shook his head.
“Why you?”
Windrow shook his head.
Bdeniowitz’ eyes flared and the knots at his jaw hinges puffed up. “Look, apple, I know you know who this is, at least.”
Windrow nodded. Gleason spoke up.
“Say it’s,” he consulted his notebook, “Concepción Alvarez. Pamela Neil’s maid.”
Bdeniowitz inhaled slowly and exhaled a long, loud sigh. “Pamela Neil,” he said, nodding to himself. “Apple…”
“Nice little farm in a warm climate with goats and a woman don’t speak English?” Windrow suggested helpfully.
“If you don’t give us any help on this apple, I’ll see if I can arrange it. Was she dead when you got here?”
“What she want?”
“She didn’t say.”
“She leave anything? A message, a phone number? Ever talk to her before?”
Windrow shook his head.
“C’mon, dammit. Why you?”
“I’m as in the dark as you are, Max. All I can figure is she must have known something about Pamela Neil’s death and she figured to tell me about it. But there’s another angle.”
Bdeniowitz tried to look interested.
“She might have known something about Jodie Ryan’s whereabouts.”
“So?”
“She knew we were friends.”
“So what about Jodie Ryan’s whereabouts?”
“I’m working on it.”
“What you got.”
“Nothing. A sore back.” Windrow poured himself two fingers of scotch. Bdeniowitz raised his eyebrows, then narrowed his eyes. “Scrape your knuckles getting that jug off the shelf?”
Windrow didn’t look at the knuckles of his right hand. He’d split the skin over two of them on Harry Lobe’s face. The abrasions reopened when he’d rolled through the office door. He stood the bottle in the open desk drawer.
“I had to tap a guy out earlier today,” he said indifferently.
Gleason showed Bdeniowitz his notes. Bdeniowitz skimmed them and scowled.
“Big day for you, apple. You get out the hospital from being almost killed, pick up a hooker, go a couple rounds with somebody on the way to the bar, where you get toasted, drop off the hooker, then trip over a stiff in your front door. Did I get it all?” He indicated the form under the sheet, without waiting for an answer. “Suppose you get a little more specific.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Windrow said gloomily.
“Let me be the one gets depressed about it doesn’t matter.”
Windrow shrugged. “Guy named Lobe tried to shoot his way out of talking to me. I had to sit him down.”
Before the words were out of his mouth, Windrow realized he’d spilled beans he hadn’t even known he was holding, because Gleason and Bdeniowitz exchanged meaningful glances, a rare occurrence.
Bdeniowitz cocked his head and eyes to one side, licked his lips, then looked at Windrow again.
“You did what?” he said carefully.
“I, uh, had to hit him,” Windrow held up the knuckles, then raised a forefinger. “Once.”
Bdeniowitz examined a fingernail. “This guy Lobe, apple. That wouldn’t be Harry “Greased” Lobe? Pimp, loan shark, snowman, 15 percenter? Billed himself a theatrical agent? Same guy you sat down, this afternoon?”
A small, pointed light bulb, the 1.5 volt kind you see a lot of around Christmas time in the windows of discrete antique stores, with the curly tip, unfrosted, lit up above Windrow’s head. “Lobe is a cocaine dealer?”
Bdeniowitz put his hands on his hips, pushing back his coattails as he did so, revealing the snub-nose revolver clipped to his belt. “I asked you first, apple. Answer the question.”
“Yeah,” said Windrow impatiently, “Yeah. Same guy. Harry Lobe, Lobe Theatricals. Has a cell down on lower Turk, third floor in the back, over the love-toy dealer. He’s a coke dealer?”
“What an act,” Gleason grumbled.
“About what time of day were you employing your sitdown technique on the Greased Lobe, apple?”
Windrow thought about it. “Maybe three o’clock this afternoon?” He looked at his wristwatch. “Matter of fact, it was three oh five.” He tapped the crystal with a fingernail. “My watch must have stopped when I hit him.”
Bdeniowitz waited. Gleason licked his fingertips and went through the pages of his notebook.
“Well?” Bdeniowitz said impatiently.
Gleason stopped on a page and ran a finger down the lines. “Two fifty-five,” he read. He looked at Windrow. “Your watch was fast, you hope.”
“Could be, but…”
“Or he’s lying,” Bdeniowitz observed.
“Maybe it didn’t stop right away. Maybe—.” Windrow looked back and forth at the two of them. After what must have seemed a long time to them—it did to him—, he made the connection.
“So Lobe’s dead too,” Windrow said.
The two detectives stared at him.