INSPECTOR LOU CRANDALL stood silently beside an open window in a back room of the former Greek restaurant at 1733 Haight Street. The window looked out on an alley that was, right now, bathed in the whirling red of an SFPD prowl car roof light. The features on Crandall’s pale round face were obscured by the smoke from his howitzer cigar.
Nash stepped further into the room. He’d found three more prowl cars and two unmarked SFPD vehicles parked out front when he arrived. Belcher told Nash to see Crandall, inside the charity kitchen.
Belcher didn’t say much else.
Nash stepped over to where the corpse lay. The bare hands of the deceased male Caucasian were tied behind the victim’s back with electrical cord. The dead man’s torso had fallen forward, but it was clear that he had been on his knees, possibly with his head bowed, when he was killed. What remained of the man’s neck was a bloody mass of torn tissue and exposed vertebral bone.
The man’s head had left a dark red trail on the floor after being kicked aside, presumably by the murderer. The head now rested under a wooden chair next to a metal cabinet that held large boxes of powdered milk, instant rice, Malt-O-Meal. The severed head faced outward from the shadows under the chair, stealthily watching the room from a hiding place. Except that the eyes in the head had no spark of life in them.
Nash had grudgingly left the warm embrace of Tina Gone to show up here. He’d helped her find the clothing she’d vacated, promised to call her as soon as he could. He told Tina only that he was needed at a crime scene, he didn’t mention where. She’d left the apartment with him and climbed into her sports car. Nash watched her drive off. He wasn’t happy about it.
Pre-coitus interruptus was never agreeable.
It was Crandall who broke the silence. “What do you think, Nash?”
Nash didn’t have to think too hard. “It looks like an execution.”
Nash listened to Crandall clear his throat. The sound had a loose wet edge. Crandall removed a black leather billfold from his jacket pocket, tossed it to Nash.
The victim’s wallet. It contained two hundred dollars, mostly in tens and twenties. The victim hadn’t been killed for his money, but Nash hadn’t been in much doubt on that point. A common stickup isn’t normally concluded with the forcible removal of the victim’s head.
There was also a driver’s license, issued by the state of Louisiana to William Donald Slocum. Oddly, the washed-out photograph of Slocum looked very much like the dead face under the wooden chair across the room. As everyone knew, photographs taken at the Department of Motor Vehicles never looked true to life. It had never occurred to Nash that they might look true to death.
Slocum had resided on the quaintly named Tickle Street in Shreveport. Thirty-eight years old. The wallet also contained Diner’s Club and Texaco credit cards, and the business card of a men’s clothing shop at Market and Stockton, near Union Square.
Nash tossed the wallet back to Crandall.
“He had a pistol in a real pretty calf’s leather holster, strapped under his arm,” Crandall said. He rolled the cigar around in his mouth, looking for a new spot to chew on. “The pistol is gone but the holster is still there, take my word. There’s a throwing knife strapped to his ankle. I’m guessing Slocum wasn’t a regular here.”
Nash watched Crandall stare at the corpse for a while longer, then decided that Crandall could do his staring alone. Nash walked out to the long dining room full of wooden picnic tables. The heavy front door of the former restaurant was propped open.
Belcher stood just outside, right where Nash had left him when Nash arrived.
“Crandall looks like he’s seeing ghosts,” Nash said.
Belcher shrugged. “A guy without his noggin—it takes a little time to reconcile that with the big wide world.”
Nash lit a gasper and smoked. A small crowd of locals had gathered across the street. Two bare-chested long-haired men squatted on the sidewalk, pounding out voodoo rhythms on bongo drums. The various police vehicles were parked helter-skelter in front of the restaurant, a disentangled traffic accident. Clouds congealed in the night sky. The stars disappeared.
Belcher removed his crumpled hat, smoothed his hair back. “A citizen heard a commotion and called it in. A prowl unit found what you just saw. The window was already open. No description of an assailant. No witnesses. Whatever the murder weapon is, it’s big and sharp and has a lot of blood attached to it.”
“The victim’s pistol was taken.”
“Yes, there is that angle.” Belcher nodded sagely. “Looks like a problem for the police. Let’s call them, so I can go back to bed.”
“How did you wind up here?”
“Crandall called me. He wanted me to drop by and tell him what I thought. When I realized where the body was, I gave you a jingle. Since you know some of these jokers.”
“I know bubkis about the dead man.”
“It’s a live one I’m thinking of.”
Belcher paused, scratched his ear. Eyed the two bongo-playing men across the street. Nash wondered how many city ordinances could be broken by voodoo drums in the wee hours.
A man wearing a fisherman’s cap with his black suit climbed out of one of the unmarked black Fords, where he’d been writing notes in a notebook. A Homicide Detail inspector, Buddy Arbogast. Nash didn’t know him well but Belcher had worked with him in the past. Arbogast and Crandall had both been at the Hall of Justice when the call came in from the first patrol unit at the scene. They drove out to Haight Street together.
“Nothing much to go on,” Arbogast said when he came over. Arbogast was a thin man with thick eyebrows, a chin sharpened to a point. The wrinkled black suit made him look like a shady undertaker, assuming there are other kinds.
Arbogast went on. “A fellow who lives across the alley from this joint reported hearing screams. He didn’t see anything. I’ve got patrolmen beating the bushes. The blade work on the victim’s neck isn’t ragged, so the murder weapon was probably some type of sword. Nothing a person can drag behind him on the street without being noticed.” Arbogast glanced at the bongo players. “Even on this street. The Crime Lab boys are on the way, and I’ve got an address for the fellow who runs this dump. He lives on Hayes, a few blocks from here. I sent a patrol unit to fetch him.”
“Nash here knows him,” Belcher said.
“I know who he is,” Nash said.
“Nash is banging his sister,” Belcher said.
“That’s not a true statement,” Nash said.
Arbogast, bemused, scratched his jaw and studied Nash’s face like he’d never seen one before. Nash gave Arbogast the skinny on the occurrences of the previous night, first at Tina Gone’s pad, then at Timothy Gone’s Hayes Street residence.
Belcher had already told Arbogast some of it.
Nash was still talking when a prowl car pulled up behind the collection of other SFPD vehicles.
A patrolman jumped out of the car. Approached. He reported to Arbogast that he’d visited the residential address for Gone. The patrolman found no one at home, the house dark, no evidence of hasty egress.
“Nada,” the patrolman said, in summation.
“Call his sister,” Arbogast said to Nash when the patrolman had returned to his car. “Maybe she’s got a line on his whereabouts.”
“Not in the middle of the night.”
“We don’t work banker’s hours, Nash.”
“I’ll talk to her in the morning.”
Arbogast nodded grimly to himself, as though he’d just learned an important truth. Nash considered the subject closed. He had no desire to question Tina Gone right now. Her brother’s whereabouts could wait. He wasn’t a suspect, at the moment.
Belcher studied his Timex wristwatch, announced that it was just past two o’clock, by the by. Arbogast disappeared into the building. When he returned he looked even more perturbed. “Ross, get Lou out of here. He’s got a bee up his ass and it doesn’t have much to do with my crime scene. Take him home, buy him a drink, whatever it takes. The Crime Lab will have enough to do without dealing with Lou the Sphinx.”
There was a long silence. Belcher looked like he wanted to tell Arbogast all the reasons why Crandall was Belcher’s good friend and Arbogast was just Arbogast, but he held his tongue.
—————
CRANDALL AND Belcher drove out of Haight-Ashbury in Belcher’s Pontiac Bonneville, heading toward Van Ness. Nash followed in the Plymouth. Belcher drove down to Hemlock, followed it a block and a half, then pulled the Bonneville onto a smooth patch of blacktop between two narrow buildings and parked. Nash parked behind Belcher’s car and got out, still wondering where they were headed.
Nash followed the two full inspectors to a wooden door half-hidden by shadows and trash cans. A diamond-shaped window in the door was covered from the inside by a dark blue cloth.
Belcher knocked, then knocked again.
A hand pushed the cloth in the window aside. A face peered out.
The door opened.
The three inspectors stepped inside. A short man with sad eyes closed the door quickly, checked to make sure the bar towel was back in place over the window.
Nash realized where they were.
They had come through the back door of the Golden Bubble. A fast and loose cocktail lounge that fronted on Post Street.
Like any decent watering hole, the Bubble had no front windows, and right now the front door was locked tight. It was past the legal cutoff time for selling alcohol, but the Bubble still had numerous paying customers, and it was two bits a throw for beer on tap.
Nash had been to the Bubble for lunch with Belcher once or twice, but Belcher had never mentioned that the Bubble’s owner, Chuck Roscoe, ran an after-hours hootch parlor.
The three inspectors took seats at a table in back. “Roscoe calls it a private club to keep PD and the Liquor Control Board off his back,” Belcher said to Nash. “Since most of PD drinks here, I’d guess he doesn’t have much to worry about.”
Belcher, Crandall, and Nash finished one round of bourbon and sodas and were starting on the second round when Lou Crandall finally emerged from his thoughts.
“You know what I saw, don’t you?” Crandall said to Belcher.
“I know what it might’ve looked like, Lou.”
“Looked like? Hell.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions.”
“It was a punch in the gut.”
Nash had no idea what the other two were discussing.
Clearly they’d discussed it before.
The liquor slowly untied Crandall’s tongue. Then Crandall told Nash a tale that Belcher was already familiar with, although he too seemed to be hearing some of the details for the first time.
“I was a gunner’s mate,” Crandall said. “The USS Houston, a cruiser, ninety-two hundred tons. I went aboard at Darwin in Australia. Valentine’s Day, ’Forty-two. Two weeks later we duked it out with the Japs in the Sunda Strait, off Sumatra. The Japs kept coming at us—dive bombers and Zeros, one right after the other. We fired shells so fast the barrels on the twenty-eight millimeter ack-ack guns started to melt.
“There was an explosion, amidships. The fire spread and the ship started to list badly. I grabbed a life preserver and went over the side, like everyone else who still could.
“We were in the water four days. We clung to pieces of wreckage, whatever would float. At first the screaming from the burn casualties kept up nonstop. Then it petered out. Some of the men died from injuries and some of them died from sharks.
“Some just gave up and drowned.
“I tied myself to two other men and we hung on to debris, kept our heads above water. We thought that three of us together, we’d be easier to spot by a rescue plane. But no one came looking for us. There was just water, all the way to the horizon, every direction.
“After four days a ship appeared. It was a little tub, an island steamer. When it got closer I saw two ack-ack guns, one fore, one aft. I saw the Rising Sun flag on the stern and knew we were cooked. The Japs had a reputation for shooting survivors in the water, just for the sport.
“But the Japs didn’t shoot us. Maybe they were low on ammo. The three of us looked mostly dead anyway. The Japs pulled us out of the drink and gave us a ladle of fresh water to wet our throats. Then they threw us in the tub’s hold and closed the hatch.
“We sat in darkness for days.
“When the Japs opened the hatch again they kicked and punched us off the boat and onto dry land. They didn’t tell us where we were but it turned out to be Java. They took us to a POW camp in the center of the island. The prisoners there looked even worse than we three did. It was a camp full of skeletons that walked and talked.
“The prisoners were British, with some Australians and a couple of Dutch. There was only one other American in the camp, a Navy flier who was shot down. His name was Weber. He died a month later from a combination of beri-beri and tropical ulcers and no hope. Mostly it was the beri-beri. It caused fluid to build up in his lungs, until finally he drowned in it.
“Just before he passed over, Weber gave me a letter to deliver to his folks. He’d carefully written the name and address on the dirty envelope. I still remember it—Mr. and Mrs. Clarence T. Weber, One-twenty-seven Corral Street, Butte, Montana. Weber made me promise to get the letter to them. After Weber died I opened the envelope because I wanted to read the letter and learn something about this man who had just died, a long way from home. When I unfolded the sheets of paper I found they were blank.”
Crandall’s eyes were fixed on the ashtray in front of him. Nash watched Crandall’s hand as the older man absently pushed the cigarette butts around in the ashtray with a wooden match stick until the smoked butts were neatly lined up, a row of orderly graves.
“We lived on a handful of rice and a ladle of thin vegetable broth a day,” Crandall said. “We were always hungry. I ate tree bark. I’d have eaten a shoe if I’d had a shoe. The British officers were at the top of the pecking order. They gave us jobs to do. A Limey major told me my job was fire detail.
“Fire detail was stacking up lengths of bamboo, then stacking the prisoners who had died that day onto the wood. Then we set fire to the bamboo, cremated the bodies. It was the only sanitary way.
“What I remember most is the way the legs and arms began to jump around as the bodies burned. Sometimes the contraction of the muscles would cause a corpse to sit right up in the fire with licks of flame shooting out of their empty eye sockets and their mouths. Like they wanted to have a quiet word with you, from Hell.
“The only news we got came from a radio an Australian put together. Just bits of whatever he could get his hands on, and a whole bunch of nothing. When the weather was right he could pick up the BBC from New Delhi, even KGEI from San Francisco. Incredible.
“A radio was forbidden, of course. We kept the radio parts hidden, but the Jap guards got wind of it, they always did. They lined us up in formation in the yard. We stood out there in the sun all day while they ranted and raved at us to give up the man with the radio. Men keeled over, unconscious.
“Nobody squealed.
“So the Japs rearranged those of us still on our feet into eleven rows. They chalked one of the Japanese ideograms for the numbers two through twelve on each of our foreheads. No particular order. Then the Japs huddled together, rolled a pair of dice they had.
“The first roll came up nine.
“They rolled the dice again and it came up five. Two Jap guards walked to the eighth row of prisoners—there wasn’t a row numbered ‘one’, you see—and they grabbed the first one in the row who had a five chalked on his forehead. They double-timed him up to the front of the formation, tied his hands together. Made him kneel, head down, in front of the Jap commander, dressed up, with his ceremonial sword. The commander grunted and growled. He wrestled his sword out of its scabbard. Waved it around with his short little Jap arms. Then he took aim. He brought the sword down and sliced off Number Five’s head with one good whack.
“The severed head went into a wicker basket. There were three more heads in the basket before the Australian who’d put the radio together stepped forward and told the Japs where the parts were hidden.
“His head became the fifth one in the basket.”
A puzzled expression crossed Crandall’s face, as though he couldn’t quite give credence to the memories he recounted. Nash finished his second bourbon and soda. The ice at the bottom of the highball glass rattled, a collection of broken teeth.
Crandall said, “That night when we burned the five bodies, there were no last words from flaming skulls. The five loose heads had been impaled on the posts of the camp fence. It didn’t matter. We already had all the messages we needed from Hell.”
In the long silence that followed Nash realized that the Golden Bubble had emptied out. Across the room sad-eyed Chuck Roscoe wiped the pitted wooden surface of the bar.
“One last one, Lou?” Belcher’s voice was hoarse from drinking and smoking and not talking.
“Sure, Ross.” Crandall’s eyes remained fixed on the ashes in the ashtray.
Belcher stepped up to the bar, came back with a last round of drinks. Nash watched Crandall drain off half of his bourbon first thing, reach for a fresh cigarette. The pack was empty. Belcher shook one up from his own pack. Crandall took the gasper and lit it and added the spent wooden match to the butts and burnt matches in the ashtray in front of him.
“What I don’t understand,” Crandall said. Nash watched the older man struggle with his thoughts. “When the Japs took over half the Pacific, they said they wanted to give the conquered people better lives. The Japs called their territory the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. And now this fellow on Haight, he calls his soup kitchen the same kind of thing.
“Maybe it’s only a joke. But then we find a headless corpse there, on its knees. Just like the Japs used to do.”
Crandall turned to Nash like he wanted to ask a question, but instead he merely shook his head.
“You’re right, Lou,” Belcher said. He spoke quietly, not wanting to disturb the shadows. “It’s a kooky thing.”