Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) (6 page)

8

It was getting well on toward evening as I reached Broadway and turned toward the hub of North Beach. At that hour the whores and other starlets were having breakfast; the pimps, who’d been up and hustling for at least three hours, were having lunch; and the honest citizens, who’d just closed their shops, were having dinner. Ranked in doorways in side streets, the Tokay Brigade was augmenting its liquid diet with more liquid.

At The Jungle, a retired hubcap thief in an oversized doorman’s coat was shooing black kids away from the display pictures out front. Tina’s name was still on the marquee in eighteen-inch letters with the word “TONIGHT!” There was a lot of sentiment on North Beach. A lot of heart.

“Business as usual, eh?” I asked the doorman.

“Huh?” he said, aiming a last sharp-toed kick at one of the dodg
ing kids.

“Is Fat P
hil around?”

The doorman, a man of few words, jerked a dirty thumb toward the interior of The Jungle and went back to examining his life for the exact moment he’d gone wrong.

I started to push open the door but then paused.

“Too bad about Tina,” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

“If you can perfect that routine,” I told him, “you’ll be up on the stage inside instead of bruising your insteps out here.” I went in and closed the double door behind me before he could get off his famous rejoinder. He could wear out that act if he didn’t watch it.

The inside of The Jungle looked like a bad interior for
Tarzan Goes on the Bottle
. But then I suppose darkness and seven or eight watered drinks would lend a certain amount of verisimilitude to the tired plastic foliage and stuffed animals. Up over the bar was the tiny jungle clearing where Tina had done most of her shaking. But she’d swung on her last vine.

In front of the bar, taking up two stools and part of a third was Fat Phil Franks, front man for The Jungle and Tina’s former man
ager. It had made big headlines in San Francisco late last year when Tina and Phil had split the managerial blanket. It doesn’t take much to make headlines in San Francisco. But she’d stayed on at The Jungle. Phil had lost his fifteen percent, and now he’d lost his headliner.

I walked up to the back of his neck—a flabby tree trunk with a five-dollar haircut—and said: “It’s kind of you, Phil, to keep Tina’s name up in lights. She’d have been all choked up at that kind of sen
timent.”

Instead of waiting for him to turn around—that could have taken all evening at the rate he moved his three hundred and seventy-five pounds—I moved up to the bar to his right where he could swivel his neck at me without doing any serious damage to his system. I allowed him three or four bar stools for overflow and took a seat.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “Yeah, I thought it was the least I could do for poor Tina. I’m leaving her up there until after the funeral—as a mark of respect.”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“You going?”

“If I can,” he said sadly. “But you know how hard it is for me to get around. I’d really like to. I wasn’t even able to go up to her place when they found her.” With his weight and overworked heart, Phil hadn’t been above the ground floor of any building since he’d topped three hundred pounds. “But I’m sending a blanket of three thousand gardenias to the funeral. From me and The Jungle.”

“Touching,” I said. “But tell me something. How can you leave Tina’s name on the marquee and not give the suckers any Tina? Don’t they get irate when they’re getting some second stringer in
stead?”

Fat Phil parted his face in a smile that would have been terrifying on a man half his size. “Movies,” he said. “The best of Tina
D’Oro in sixteen-millimeter living color. Wide screen.”

“You’re a genius, Phil,” I said. “How long do you think you can get away with that?”

“Long enough,” he said, taking a long slurp of something vile and sickly from a tall glass, “for me to get my replacement for Tina ready to go on stage. God forbid I should speak ill of the dead, Joe,” he said, “but this girl is going to make Tina look like a cub scout.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “You’re going to be the fattest millionaire in the world. But I didn’t come here to watch you turn Tina’s death into your next fortune. I’m trying to locate someone called Irma
Springler. A friend of Tina’s. Do you know where I can find her?”

“You working on this case?” he asked, his dark-chocolate eyes growing wise. “I would have thought that after zapping
Kolchik’s cousin you’d be low man on the sewers squad.”

“You’ll think a lot of things before you’re done, Phil,” I said. I leaned over toward him and got confidential. “Don’t tell a soul, but
I’m up for promotion. The mayor never did like his cousin. He thanked me personally for perforating the old geezer. If I’d been just a little better shot, I’d be a captain right this minute.”

“Sure,” Phil said. “Right after I win the Kentucky Derby. On foot. What were we talking about?”

“Irma Springler.”

“I’ve seen her around,” Phil said. “What do you want to talk to her about?”

“Things, Phil,” I said. “Just things. I’m enjoying this chat an awful lot, but unless you can be just a bit more helpful, I’m going to have to go outside and talk with a lamppost. Do you know one that might know where Irma Springler lives?”

“Well,” he said, “she lives over on Union—the 400 block—but I don’t think she’s home now.”

“Let me take the risk. I can handle it. But the 400 block of Union is quite long, Phil. Do you think you could narrow it down a little?”

“It’s either 416 or 461,” he said. “But you’re wasting your time going over there.”

“I can afford it,” I said. “Don’t get up. I’ll see myself out.” I left him working hard over that tall glass. Just before I opened the door, I stopped and leaned toward his massive back. “By the way, Phil,” I said, “you don’t have any idea who killed Tina, do you?”

If he an
swered, I didn’t hear it.

Phil was right. Number 461 turned out to be a Victorian shambles with a slight lean toward Russian Hill, and a postbox name plate said “I.
Springler, 4B.” He was right on another count. After I puffed up four steep flights and leaned on the bell of 4B, nobody answered. I clouted the door a couple of times in case I. Springler was a little deaf. But all that got me was a sour look from her neighbor in 4C, a stringy old lady with the long lower lip and sparse beard of a nanny goat, who leaned out of her door and gave me a high, hard one out of her good eye.

“You looking for someone?” she quavered.

“Just Irma Springler,” I said. “Have you seen her today?” “No.”

“Have you seen her this week?”

“No.”

I was going to try for this month, but I knew the answer I’d get and I wasn’t ready to go to a year.

“Thanks very much,” I said. “If you do see Miss Springler, would you…” The door shut with an emphatic crunch.

It was easier going down, and by the time I got downstairs it was dark. It was a nice night for walking home. Broadway was kicking into life as I passed through. Club-door barkers were trying out their lines of lapel-grabbing innuendo, and dudes from Cotati, Burlin
game, and El Cerrito sidled down the street, avoiding the doormen’s blandishments and looking for that mythical club where the drinks weren’t watered and they were taking it all off right there in front of your face.

Back on my block, all was peaceful. The door to
Lum Kee’s shop was shut, locked, barred, and probably booby-trapped.

A glance up at my apartment’s lighted windows told me that somebody was home to welcome me. It had been quite a while since there’d been a light on for me, and the idea was cheering. I flipped on the stairway lamp and started climbing.

I usually climb stairs looking at my feet, but something up ahead on the second landing caught my eye. It was Chub, my old buddy, sitting on the top step, fat hands piled in his lap, like an Occidental Buddha. His round eyes were peacefully closed, and I thought Chub had dozed off waiting for me until I saw the thin line of blood running from the left side of his mouth down over those well-fed chops onto the front of his mohair suit.

That is, it had been a stream of blood, but as I got closer I could see that it had dried to a ribbon of rusty red. “Chub,” I said, the way people will talk to a dead man, and I touched his unbloodied shoulder. His plump little body rocked, and I had to stop him from tumbling forward. He’d been precariously balanced in death, and I’d upset that balance. Moving a hand to his back, I started to lay him down on the landing. My hand found a sticky patch of blood be
tween his shoulder blades and came away gory, but I got him laid down. His knees were still slightly bent, and in the harsh light of the landing I half expected Chub to throw a hand up to shield his eyes.

When I opened the door of my apartment, Fong was sitting on the long, green couch going over some printed forms. The door to my bedroom—my former bedroom—was closed, so I assumed that Mickey was in there playing Florence Nightingale to the girl junkie.

“Hello, Joe,” Fong said. “Fsui-tang woke up a while ago and is resting comfortably. I really do think she was just worn out.”

“I hope she’s well enough for company,” I said, washing my hands at the kitchen sink, “because we’re going to have some soon. There’s a dead man lying on the next landing down, and I’ve got to call the police.”

“A dead man?” Fong said right on cue. “But who? Are you sure he’s dead?” He was up off the couch, prepared to do something Christian.

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ve seen one before. Do you remember that little man who was here yesterday when you came up to see the apartment?”

“Yes. You called him—”

“Chub, but his name was Seymour Kroll. Somebody stuck some
thing very much like a knife in Mr. Kroll’s back not too long ago. And from the blood on the stairs, I’d say it happened right outside the door of this apartment. I don’t suppose you heard anything?”

“No. And I’ve been here since you left. I—”

“Save it for homicide,” I said, reaching over to pick up the telephone. “You’d better warn your delinquents in the next room that the police are coming. They may not want to stay.”

I was right. No sooner had I told a very alert and cheerful ser
geant about Chub’s accident than the door to the bedroom opened and Mickey came out carrying the girl. He was only a little devil, but she looked as though she weighed about as much as a box of Wheaties. Fong followed them, still trying to talk Mickey into staying. He wasn’t having much luck.

“Thanks, Gabe,” said Mickey, “but we’re not going to be here when the cops come. I’ll get in touch in a few days. We’ll be all right.” The girl wasn’t saying anything. She was conscious, and eyes the color of a moonless night took in the small room. She lay back in Mickey’s arms like a failed channel swimmer.

It occurred to me that I still had the file on Tina D’Oro and that it wouldn’t be a great idea for the police to find me with it. I got an idea.

“Can your boy here be trusted?” I asked Fong.

“Sure,” said Fong. “I think so.”

“Okay.” I pulled out a pen and wrote my name and an address on the envelope the records came in and sealed it. I put a couple of postage stamps in the comer and put the envelope and a five-dollar bill on top of
Fsui-tang.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Drop this in the first postbox you come to.”

“Okay,” said Mickey. “We’re off.”

Then they were gone, and I could hear Mickey’s heavy shoes clunk down the thin-carpeted stairs. He slowed right about where Chub’s body would have been, but then picked up speed again. From my front window I saw them leave the building and disappear between two fences across the narrow street.

Their short shadow had hardly disappeared when a prowl car swung in off Jackson and climbed the curb in front of the building. Two uniformed cops sprang out of the car and clanked across the sidewalk into the building. We’d be seeing more of those boys. “What shall we do?” asked Fong.

“Wait. It won’t take them long to get up here.”

“No, I mean about Mickey and Fsui-tang,” he said. “Shall we tell the police they were here but left? Won’t they be angry?”

“Very likely,” I said. “But it’s usually the best policy to tell the police the truth. Unless you have a good reason not to. Do you know where those two kids have gone?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t very well tell the police, can you?” I asked. “So I think we’d better tell it the way it happened. Okay?”

Before he could answer, somebody hit the door with what sounded like a baked ham, and I gestured for Fong to answer the door. When he did, the doorway was full of blue serge, and a cop started to ask if Fong was the guy who reported a dead body. Then he looked over Fong’s shoulder and saw me.

“
Goodey!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?” It was Gerry Anderson, a thick-skulled Swede I’d soldiered with a long time ago in the Parks Division. He hadn’t been too happy when I got into plainclothes.

“I live here,” I said. “And I reported finding the body. This is the Reverend Gabriel Fong. He shares this place with me.”