Authors: Lee Killough
Harry regarded him with concern. “Are you sure you’re all right? Maybe you ought to go home and take it easy the rest of the day.”
“
I’m fine. We have work to do.” He started to take off his coat and winced as the motion stretched bruised muscles.
Harry hustled him toward the door. “Go home. I’ll tell Serruto what happened.”
“
I’m fine,” Garreth said.
“
No one who refuses time off can possibly be fine. Go home.”
Eyeing Harry’s frown, Garreth sighed. “Yes, papa-san.”
He left Chiarelli’s pages of his notebook with Harry and headed for his car. After slipping the key into the ignition, though, he sat without starting the engine. As much as he hurt, he hated the thought of going home. He ought to give up the apartment with all of its sweet and painful memories and find another. Perhaps one of those places around Telegraph Hill that Mrs. Armour owned.
The thought of them told him what he really wanted to do. He wanted to see Lane Barber again, to talk to her by daylight and find answers for the increasing number of questions she raised about herself. Then he started the engine.
8
She did not come to the door until Garreth had rung the bell five times. He realized she must be sleeping and would find his visit inconsiderate and inconvenient, but he remained where he stood, leaning on the bell. She finally opened the door, wrapped in a robe, squinting against the light, and he discovered that even by daylight, she looked nothing like a woman in her thirties. If anything, she seemed younger than ever, a sleepy child with the print of a sheet wrinkle across one pale, scrubbed cheek.
She scowled down at him. “You’re that mick detective. What — ” Then, as though her mind woke belatedly, her face smoothed. He watched her annoyance disappear behind a facade of politeness. “How may I help you, Inspector?”
Why did she bother to swallow justifiable irritation? Did police make her that nervous? Perhaps it was to observe this very reaction, to see what she might tolerate to avoid hassles, that he had persisted on the bell.
“
I’m sorry to wake you,” he lied. “I have a couple of important questions to ask.”
She squinted at him from under the sunshade of her hand, then stepped back. “Come in.”
Moving with the heaviness of someone fighting a body reluctant to wake up, she led the way to the living room. Dark drapes left the room in artificial night. She switched on one lamp and waved him into its pool of light. She herself, however, sat in a chair beyond it, in shadow. A deliberate maneuver on her part?
“
This couldn’t wait until I got to the club?” Irritation leaked through the careful modulation of her voice.
“
I’ll be off duty by that time. I try not to work nights if I can help it; the police budget can’t stand too much overtime.”
“
I see. Well, then, ask away, Inspector.”
With her face only a pale blur, Garreth found himself listening closely to her voice, to read her through it...and discovered with surprise that she did not sound like he felt she should. Inexplicably, the voice discorded with the rest of her.
“
Can you remember what you and Mossman talked about Tuesday night?”
She paused before answering. “Not really. We flirted and made small talk. I’m afraid I paid little attention to most of it even while we were talking. Surely it isn’t important.”
“
We’re hoping that something he said can give us a clue to where he went after leaving the Barbary Now. Did he happen to mention any friends in the city?”
“
He was far too busy arguing why we should become friends.”
Suddenly Garreth realized why her voice seemed at odds with the rest of her. She did not talk like someone in her twenties. Where was the slang everyone else used? Just listening to her, she sounded more like his mother. What was that she had called him at the door? A mick. Who called Irishmen micks these days?
Garreth looked around, trying to learn more about her from the apartment, but could see little beyond the circle of lamplight. The illumination reached only to a Danish-style couch which matched his chair and a small desk with a letter lying on it.
He said, “Did he tell you he was married?”
“
He wore a wedding ring.”
“
Of course.” Garreth stood up and moved toward the door. “Well, it was a slim chance he’d say anything useful, I suppose. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” On the way, he detoured by the desk to read the address on the letter. Knowing someone she wrote to might be useful.
“
It’s a price I pay for my unusual working hours.” She stood and crossed to the lamp. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”
Garreth had just time enough to read the ornately written address before the light went out, leaving the room in darkness.
On the steps outside, after her door closed behind him, he reread the address in memory. The letter had to be incoming; it had this address. However, it had been addressed not to Lane Barber, but to Madelaine Bieber. The similarity of the two names struck him. Lane Barber could well be a stage name, “prettied up” from Madelaine Bieber.
He eyed the garage under the house as he came down the steps to the sidewalk. Did she drive or did she not?
He tried the door. Locked. However, by shining a flashlight from his car through the windows, he made out the shape of a car inside and illuminated the license plate. He wrote down the number.
Motion above him brought his attention up in time to see the drape fall back into place in the window over the garage. Lane, of course, watching him, but...out of curiosity or fear? Maybe the license number would provide an answer to that.
Back at the Hall, he ran Madelaine Bieber’s name through Records and asked for a registration check on the license number.
“
The car is registered to an Alexandra Pfeifer,” the clerk told him. The address was Lane’s.
“
Give me a license check on that name.”
The picture from DMV in Sacramento looked exactly like Lane Barber. Miss Pfeifer was described as five ten, 130 pounds, red hair, green eyes, born July 10, 1956. Which would make her twenty-seven.
Then Records came back with a make on Madelaine Bieber. “One prior, an arrest for assault and battery. No conviction. The charges were dropped. Nothing since. She’s probably mellowed with age.”
Garreth raised a brow. “Mellowed with age?”
“
Yeah,” the Records clerk said. “The arrest was in 1942.”
Garreth had the case file pulled for him. Madelaine Bieber, he read, had been singing in a club in North Beach called the Red Onion. A fight started with a female patron over a man, and when the woman nearly had her ear bitten off, she preferred charges against the singer. Miss Bieber, aka Mala Babra, was described as five ten, 130 pounds, red hair, green eyes, claiming a birth date of July 10, 1916. The mug shot looked exactly like Lane Barber in a forties hairstyle.
Garreth stared at the file. If Lane were born in 1916, she was now sixty-seven years old. No amount of facelifting would ever make her look twenty-one. This Bieber must be a relative, perhaps Lane’s mother, which would explain the likeness and similar choice in professions. But why was Lane receiving her mother’s mail? Perhaps the mother was a patient in a nursing home and the mail went to her daughter. It was something to check out. Another question remained: Why have a false driver’s license and a car registered to that false license name?
Mystique? Lane generated nothing but, it seemed. The lady definitely deserved further attention.
9
At eight o’clock, when Lane came out through the curtains for her first song, Garreth sat at a table talking to a barmaid while he ordered a drink. “How long has she been singing here?”
The barmaid, whose name tag read Samantha, shrugged. “She was here already when I came last year.”
“
What do you think of her?”
Samantha sighed. “I wish I had her way with men. They fall all over themselves for her.”
Lane worked her way through the club as she sang. On one turn, she saw Garreth. For a moment, her step faltered and a musical note wavered, then she smiled at him and moved on.
After the last song of the set, she came over to his table. “We meet again. I thought you weren’t going to work overtime tonight.”
He smiled. “I’m not. I’m here for pleasure. I’d also like to apologize again for disturbing you this afternoon.”
She smiled back. “That isn’t necessary; I realize you were only doing your job.”
“
Then may I buy you a drink?”
“
Later, perhaps. Right now I’ve already promised to join some other gentlemen.”
Samantha, passing the table, said, “Don’t waste your time; you’re not her type.”
Garreth watched Lane sit down with three men in flashy evening jackets. “What is her type?”
“
Older guys in their thirties and forties. Guys with bread to throw around. And her man of the evening is always a tourist, an out-of-towner. She only likes one-night stands.”
Garreth recorded it all in his head. He asked casually, “Man of the evening? She lets herself be picked up often?”
“
Almost every night, only she does the picking up. The suckers just think they picked her up.”
“
Really?”
Be an audience. Keep her going, Garreth, my man
.
“
Really. She chooses one, see, and tells him to leave but that she’ll meet him later. She never goes out the door with one of them.”
“
Then how do you know that’s what happens?” He kept his voice teasing.
“
Because...” Samantha lowered her voice. “...I’ve overheard her giving them instructions. She tells the guy that the boss is her boyfriend, see, and that he’s very jealous, but then she tells the sucker he’s turned her on so much, she’s just got to see him. He leaves thinking he’s really a superstud. Every night she tells a different guy the same thing.”
“
Always a different guy? No one ever repeats?”
Samantha shook her head. “Sometimes they try. She’s polite, but she never goes with them again.” She sighed. “She must do something they really dig. I wonder if I should try the tigress bit, too.”
“
Tigress bit?”
You’re doing great, honey; don’t stop
.
“
Yeah. If they come back for another try, the guys she’s gone with always have this huge hickey on their necks. I’ve never — ”
The whole world screamed to a halt for Garreth. He felt electricity lift the hair all over his body.
“
Hickey?” he asked breathlessly. “About this size and located here?” He demonstrated with a circle of thumb and finger.
The barmaid nodded.
She’s dirty
! But for a moment Garreth could not be sure whether he felt satisfaction or disappointment at proof of her involvement. Perhaps both. Wanted or unwanted, this gave him a legitimate excuse to ask all the questions of her he liked.
He gave Samantha a five-dollar bill. “For you, honey. Thanks.”
He made his way to the table where Lane sat. Nodding to the three men with her, he said, “Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but I need to speak with the lady for a minute.”
Lane smiled. “I said, later, perhaps.”
“
It can’t wait.”
One of the men frowned. “The lady said later. Bug off.”
Ignoring him, Garreth leaned down to Lane’s ear. “I can use my badge and make it official.”
She glanced up sharply at him. Her eyes flared red in the candlelight again.
Why did her eyes reflect when most people’s did not?
Lane stood, smiling at the men, cool and gracious. “He’s right; it can’t wait. I won’t be a minute.” As they walked away from the table, though, the tone of her voice became chiding. “So you’re on duty after all. You lied, Inspector.”
“
So did you. You said you didn’t see Mossman after he left the club on Tuesday, but we found him with a bruise on his neck just like the ones the girls here tell me you put on all your men.”
She glanced around. “May we talk outside?”
They left the club. Outside, the street stretched away from them in both directions, glittering with the lights of signs and car headlights, smelling of exhaust fumes and the warmth of massed humanity. Like accents and grace notes, whiffs of perfume and male cologne reached them, too. Voices and cars blended into a vibrant roar. My city, Garreth thought.
Lane breathed deeply. “I do so love the vitality of this place.”
Garreth nodded agreement. “Now, about Mossman...”
“
Yes, I saw him.” She strolled down the street with him following. “What else could I do? He would have waked all the neighbors, pounding on my door that way. He got the address from the phone book.”
“
So you invited him in?”
She nodded. “Then...well, he
was
a charming man so...we ended up in bed. He left about three, alive, I swear. But he insisted on walking, even though I warned him not to and offered to call a cab.”