Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (4 page)

“No, go ahead. There isn’t much. David didn’t have much, really.”

“Will you show me where to start?”

“The bottom two drawers in the desk there were his,” she said.

I poked around in the two drawers. Souvenir-type junk, mostly: football and baseball programs and pennants, drink tokens from three different gambling casinos, a big yellow-and-red button that proclaimed the 49ers world champions of Super Bowl XVI. There was a folder full of bank statements and canceled checks; I shuffled through the checks, but none of them told me anything. The balances listed on the most recent statements, dated last month, were $39.54 in his checking account and $168.23 in his savings account. I hunted around for a checkbook or savings passbook. No checkbook or passbook.

I asked Karen if she had them. She said, “No, Allyn does. There wasn’t much in either one—not even enough left to help pay for his funeral.”

“Did he put all of his winnings into those two accounts?”

“He didn’t put any of it into them.”

“Any particular reason why not?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Did he open a new account?”

“If he did, I didn’t find a record of it.”

“That’s a little strange, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “He might have thrown the new passbook away when he drew the money out to gamble with.”

She may not have thought it was strange, but I did. Why would he open a new account if he intended to place large bets with the Vegas and Reno sports books? Even if he hadn’t decided beforehand to do some high rolling, why bother with a new account? Why not just funnel the jackpot winnings through his existing accounts?

I asked, “Did he show you the check he got from the Coliseum Club?”

“No. I asked to see it but he said he’d authorized the casino to send it straight to his bank.”

“But he couldn’t have,” I said. “There’d be a record if he’d had it sent to one of his old accounts, and you can’t open a new account long-distance over the weekend.”

She was frowning now. “No, of course you can’t. I should have thought of that before. But why would he lie to me?”

I said, “To cover the fact that he took his winnings in cash, maybe.”

“Cash? But that’s not—”

“Not very smart, no.”

“I can’t imagine why he’d do such a thing.”

“Neither can I,” I said. “On big casino payoffs, the IRS demands its cut right off the top—so there’s no tax advantage to taking cash. Was David irresponsible where money was concerned? I mean in the sense of wanting a lot of cash around.”

“No, never. He didn’t seem to care that much about money.”

“Did he have a safe-deposit box?”

“Not that I ever knew about. I didn’t find any record of one.”

“If he did take the money in cash, where might he have kept it?”

“Not here. I’m sure of that.”

“Anywhere else you can think of?”

“No. No.”

“Would he have entrusted Jerry Polhemus with it?”

“God, no. David wasn’t that foolish. He knew how Jerry was about money.”

I said, “I’d like to look through the rest of his things. Where would they be?”

“In the bedroom. I’ll show you.”

Without taking off her gloves, she led me into the bedroom. This was entirely her domain, everything feminine but without frills, done in whites and yellows. If David Burnett had put his stamp on it, left any little pieces of himself behind, she had removed them from sight.

“The nightstand by the window was his,” she said. “And the bottom two drawers in the dresser. The rest of his stuff is in the closet.” She started out.

“Don’t you want to stay while I look?”

“No, it’s all right. I want to get the table stripped so I can sand it down.”

That wasn’t it at all. She did not want to be present while I went through more of his things; she just wasn’t ready yet to deal with his leavings, even in the role of spectator. She wouldn’t be, I thought, until her anger had spent itself and she was ready to get on with her life.

I went to the nightstand first. Nothing in there but a paperback sports biography and a Prince Albert tin containing half a dozen joints. Allyn Burnett had told me that her brother wasn’t on drugs. So maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she and her brother didn’t feel that smoking a little grass now and then constituted drug use; a lot of people don’t. Or maybe these joints belonged to Karen Salter and she smoked dope and David never had.

I moved over to the dresser. On its top, next to Karen’s jewelry box, was a silver photograph-size frame that had been turned facedown. I picked it up. Head-and-shoulders color photo of a smiling young man with shaggy blond hair and bright blue eyes, signed on the bottom in a bold but childish hand:
To Kittyhawk, Love and Kisses
,
David.
Kittyhawk. Some sort of pet name. I put the photograph back as I had found it, facedown, and bent to the bottom two drawers.

Shirts, sweaters, underwear, socks—all neatly folded. Her doing, I thought; he wouldn’t have been that neat. Nothing hidden under or between or inside any of the items.

The closet was big, not quite a walk-in. His things were bunched on the left: half a dozen pairs of trousers, two sports jackets, a flowered vest, some pullovers and sports-type jerseys, a 49ers jacket and a Giants windbreaker. I went through pockets, found nothing of any interest until I got to the windbreaker. A thin piece of paper was tucked into one of the slash pockets. I fished it out—ordinary memo paper torn off a pad—and read what was on it.

Manny. 2789 De Haro St.

The handwriting was the same as on the photograph. I held on to the paper while I rummaged through the rest of his clothing, looked at the man’s shoes and sneakers on the closet floor, poked among the things piled on the single shelf above. Nothing. I shut the closet door and went back into the room where Karen Salter was.

She was kneeling before the smoking table with her head bowed, in a posture that was almost one of prayer—as if the table had become an altar. Her eyes were shut, I saw as I moved over to the window. Again I felt like an intruder, not just on her living space but on her grief: they were both places I had no right to be. We were strangers; and grief, like lovemaking, is too personal to be shared properly with someone you hardly know.

When I cleared my throat she jerked upright and blinked at me. “Oh,” she said, “I—”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

Her eyes were moist; she brushed at them with her forearm. “What did you find?”

“Nothing except this.” I handed her the piece of paper. “Mean anything to you?”

She looked at it for several seconds before she said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know anyone named Manny?”

“No.”

“Did David ever mention anyone by that name?”

“Not that I remember.”

“What about the address? Ring any bells?”

“De Haro Street ... no. That’s industrial, isn’t it?”

“Some of it is. Not all. Where did David work?”

“Halpern Sporting Goods, downtown. On Grant.”

“All right,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help? Names of David’s other friends, someone he might have confided in?”

“Jerry was the only person he was close to, except for Allyn and me. He knew a lot of people but ...” She was silent for a few beats; then she said, “It was a small funeral,” which was not a non sequitur at all.

I asked her about his co-workers, favorite hangouts, but she had nothing more to tell me. She was working on the table again when I left—dull strokes with the scraper. Looking inward as she had been earlier, holding his memory against her pain.

POTRERO HILL, on the eastern rim of the city, used to be a low-income, blue-collar neighborhood. To a large degree it’s still blue collar, but the Yuppies have changed the face of it in the past couple of decades. They’ve moved in in droves, bought up and restored hundreds of the old Victorians and two-flat houses that cling to the hill’s steep sides; and where the Yups go, so go the entrepreneurs who cater to them. Nowadays, the venerable Victorian ladies with their new coats of paint stand cheek by jowl with real estate offices, travel agencies, fashionable boutiques, trendy nightclubs and wine bars, and nouvelle cuisine restaurants.

The gentrification of Potrero Hill is the main reason the face of the flatlands that fan out below is also changing. Once that area was heavily industrial. Southern Pacific tracks crisscross it; not far away is what’s left of San Francisco’s port business at Central Basin, Islais Creek, and India Basin. The area is still the home of small manufacturing companies, drayage warehouses, industrial supply houses, the Greyhound and Sam Trans bus yards, and Anchor Brewing Company, the city’s last brewer of quality beer. But mixed in among them are dozens of outfits, some entrenched in fancy new or renovated buildings, that cater to San Francisco’s burgeoning interior-design trade: designer showrooms, antique furniture cooperatives, import/export companies, graphic arts studios, and the Butterfield & Butterfield auction warehouse. There are also numerous upscale lunchrooms and taverns, and clusters of private housing that are slowly being taken over by less affluent urban professionals who can’t afford the prices that have grown as steep as the streets on Potrero Hill above.

I expected 2789 De Haro to be one of the private houses, but I was wrong. It was a weathered warehouse-type structure set behind a chainlink fence that had some kind of climbing plant growing thickly over it, so that from the street you couldn’t see much of the building or the grounds. A metal sign wired to one half of a pair of closed gates read:

EKHERN MFG. CO.

Industrial Solenoid Valves

I parked and walked back to the gates. There was none of the climbing plant on them; through the links I could see a deserted blacktopped area, a loading dock, and two closed metal roller doors into the building. Nobody was around. Closed Saturdays, maybe. But there was no padlock at the joining of the gate halves, and when I pulled up on the bar that held them together, one half swung open.

I walked in, shutting the gate behind me. No sounds came from the warehouse or anywhere else on the grounds; my shoes made little flat, hollow sounds as I crossed to a set of cement stairs that gave access to the loading dock. I climbed those, followed an extension of the dock around to the east side of the building.

A car was nosed up in front of what looked to be an office at the far end. Cadillac—dark gray and shiny new, with nobody inside. I went on down to the office. One door, with a sign on it similar to the one on the gate; one long window with venetian blinds pulled down on the inside. I tried the door. Locked. I leaned over to see if I could get a squint past the blinds, but they were drawn tight.

I was thinking about knocking on the door when a voice behind me said, “Looking for something, soldier?”

It startled me, brought me half around in a crouch. Since Deer Run, I have been overly sensitive to sudden noises, unexpected movements. The man standing ten feet away on the dock walked soft for a big guy; he hadn’t made a sound coming along. He was a couple of inches over six feet, wide at the shoulders and hips, with brown hair cut long and in puffy wings so that he seemed not to have any ears. Wearing a chocolate-brown business suit and a plaid shirt open at the throat.

He stood still, hands down at his sides, watching me out of eyes that did not blink. Pale eyes, without expression. His whole face was expressionless, almost a blank, like one of the half-formed pod creatures in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One good look at him was enough to make me edgy again, to put a coldness on the back of my neck. Hardcase. Not one of the swaggering macho types that frequent bars on the weekends, looking for ways to prove their manhood. The genuine article.

“Man asked you a question, soldier.”

Another voice, behind me again. This time I was not startled. I turned and backed up two steps, doing it slow, until my back was against the building wall and I could see the other man. Shorter, leaner, with blond hair that grew light on top and streaky dark at the temples; dressed in a tan suit and a blue sport shirt. Same blank expression. Same mold. He was a soft walker, too: if he had come out of the office door, I would have heard it click open.

The blond one said, “Well, soldier?”

“I’m looking for Manny.”

“Manny who?”

“I don’t know his last name.”

“Nobody here named Manny,” the dark one said.

“I thought there might be.”

“What made you think that?”

“Somebody I know had his name and this address.”

“Who would that be?”

“David Burnett.”

The blond one said, “We don’t know anybody named David Burnett. Or anybody named Manny. You must have the wrong address.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybes about it.”

“We’re closed today,” the dark one said. “Closed weekends. Couldn’t you tell that from out front?”

“The gate was open—”

“No, the gate was closed. It just wasn’t locked.”

“Then you should lock it if you don’t want anybody to walk in.”

“That’s right,” the blond one said, “we should lock it. Usually we do. Today we forgot. We won’t forget again.”

“What’s your name, soldier?” the dark one asked.

I told him.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

“That so?” the blond one said, but not as if he cared. “What would a private investigator want to come here for?”

“I told you, I’m looking for Manny.”

“What for?”

“I want to ask him a few questions.”

“What about?”

“His relationship with David Burnett.”

“Why?”

“Burnett killed himself last week. His sister wants to know the reason.”

“That’s too bad,” the dark one said. “We’d help you out if we could but we can’t. You must have got the wrong address.”

The blond one said, “Tell you what, though. You give us your business card and we’ll keep it on file, just in case we hear anything about somebody named Manny. You got a card, don’t your?”

I took my wallet out, slow, and removed one of my business cards. The blond guy made no move to come and get it; neither did the dark one. There was anger in me now, like a low, pulsing heat, but it would be foolish to act on it, or even to let any of it show. They were tougher than I could ever be and twenty-five years younger to boot; and I was technically trespassing on private property. I pushed away from the wall and walked to where the blond one stood and gave him the card.

He looked it over, nodded once, put it away in his shirt pocket. Then he said, “Sorry we couldn’t help you, soldier. You have a nice day for yourself. And don’t forget to close the gate on your way out. We wouldn’t want anybody else to come wandering in by accident before we get it locked.”

Without saying anything, I went past him and down the steps and across the blacktop. I looked back once, halfway to the gate. The dark one was walking along the dock, so that he could watch me all the way out. The blond one had disappeared.

In the car, I sat for a while to let the anger and tension ease out of me. Then I started the engine and drove over to 16th and out Potrero to Army—on my way to Noe Valley.

I kept thinking: Hired muscle, but not the garden variety. The Mob variety.

San Francisco has never been a hotbed of organized-crime activity; there is none of the Family networking you find in East Coast cities. Mob operations in California are so poorly organized, in fact, thanks to internal disagreements back in the sixties, that they have a reputation as “the Mickey Mouse Mafia.” Still, the city had produced people like Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, a Mob underboss linked to illegal gambling, extortion, and pornographic film distribution. And over the years there have been instances of organized-crime ties to prostitution and union corruption. So it wouldn’t be all that unusual to find a Mob front operation here.

But how would David Burnett have got himself mixed up with those people? Sure, there was the money he’d purportedly lost with the Reno and Vegas sports books, the debt he’d run up. The Mob
does
have a strong power base in Nevada; he might have picked one of their booking outfits. Or, for that matter, he might have hooked into an illegal gambling setup right here in San Francisco. But the problem with either possibility was, I couldn’t see the Mob taking a thirty-five thousand dollar marker from a kid who had no collateral and a job in a sporting goods store—not even after he’d blown more than a hundred grand in cash. They’d have known who and what he was; anybody who makes big-money bets with them and then wants to lay down more gets himself checked out thoroughly.

The Mob and David Burnett ... it just didn’t add up. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe Ekhern Mfg. Co. was just what it seemed to be—a solenoid valve company—and maybe those two back there were something other than what they seemed to be. Maybe I was building sand castles here, the kind populated by armed enforcers and guys who put severed horse’s heads in other guys’ beds.

Maybe.

One way or another, I was going to find out.