Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (3 page)

A man’s life has little enough dignity. If he is any kind of man, he owes it to himself to preserve what little there is.

JERRY POLHEMUS lived on Ninth Avenue in the inner Sunset, a few blocks from Golden Gate Park. His building had three units, one per floor, which meant that they were good-sized flats rather than apartments. He occupied the second floor, with at least two Asian families crowded together above him—there were a bunch of different Vietnamese or Laotian names on that mailbox in the vestibule—and a Hungarian couple below. One of the city’s typically heterogenous neighborhood residences.

I pushed the button under Polhemus’s mailbox—four times. Nobody home. Almost eleven of a Saturday morning, and the weather was a little better today; the sun seemed to be threatening to shine through the gray, though if it did make an appearance, it probably wouldn’t stay around long. No weekend slugabed, Polhemus. Places to go and things to do.

I turned out of the vestibule, onto the sidewalk. And a voice high above me said in broken English, as if God were just learning the language, “You look for Jerry?”

I stopped and turned and tilted my head upward. A middle-aged Vietnamese or Laotian woman was leaning out of a third-floor window. In one hand was a dust mop that she was shaking vigorously; the wind caught the dust from it and swirled it around her head in a gray nimbus.

“Yes, I am.”

“I hear bell,” she said. “Very loud.”

“Do you know where I might find him?”

“Work. Saturday morning, work.”

“Where?”

“Carpet-clean place. You know?”

“Yes, ma’am. Which one?”

“Irving Street, not far. Over Nineteen Avenue.”

“Can you tell me the name?”

She quit shaking the dust mop and shook her head instead, just as vigorously. “Irving Street, over Nineteen Avenue.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay,” she said, and pulled her head back in and slammed the window shut for no particular reason that I could figure. Maybe she just liked to slam windows.

I drove downhill to Irving, found a place to park, hunted up a public telephone booth, and looked in the Yellow Pages under “Carpets & Rugs—Cleaning and Repairing.” There was only one place on Irving: Basic Carpet Cleaners, “Put Your Rugs and Carpets in Caring Hands,” Saturdays 9:00-1:00. And the street number located it a couple of blocks west of 19th Avenue.

When I walked into Basic Carpet Cleaners fifteen minutes later, a scowling fat guy in a suit and tie confronted me across a wide, bare counter. Prominent on the wall behind him was a sign that lied shamelessly, SERVICE WITH A SMILE.

“Yes?” he said.

“Does Jerry Polhemus work here?”

“He does. Are you here about a carpet or rug?”

“No. It’s a personal matter.”

That deepened his scowl. “Jerry has work to do.”

“I won’t take up much of his time.”

“Is it important?”

“The person I represent thinks so.”

“Represent? What do you mean, represent?”

The edginess Bruce Littlejohn had instilled in me was gone now, dissipated by routine activity. But there was enough of a residue left to lower my tolerance level to the point of perversity. So I smiled at the fat guy. Didn’t say anything, just smiled. It made him nervous; he was the sort who would always become nervous when people smiled at him for no reason, because he would think they had ulterior and probably nefarious motives.

At length he said, “Jerry’s in the warehouse. You’ll have to use the alley entrance.”

There was a closed door in the wall behind him that I would have bet led directly into the warehouse. I smiled at him some more, for ten seconds or so, until he began to twitch; then I said, “Thanks. I’ll be sure to mention you in my report,” and turned for the door.

Behind me he said, “Report? What report?” And I went out, paused on the sidewalk, and smiled at him one last time through the glass.

I walked around to the alley and down it to Basic’s backside. The warehouse doors were open, the opening filled with a van that had the company name and slogan painted on it. Inside the warehouse, two young guys in coveralls were working at a big steam-cleaning machine. The thing made plenty of noise, so there was no point in my trying to make myself heard above it. I squeezed inside past the van, maneuvered around stacked, tagged, and various-sized rolls of floor covering, and stopped near where the two guys were working.

They both frowned at me. One of them shut off the machine and the other said, “Help you?” but not as if the prospect pleased him. This was one hell of a cheerful place of business. You could find more good humor in an undertaking parlor.

“I’m looking for Jerry Polhemus.”

“That’s me. What do you want?”

“We talk in private?”

“Why? What about?”

“David Burnett.”

The name rocked him a little—much more than it should have. That surprised
me.
So did the sudden nervous tic on his jaw, the flicker of something in his eyes that might have been fear. He was quick to get his defenses up, though. And quick to tell the co-worker that he’d be right back, then to lead me out into the alley.

The first thing he said there was, “You a cop?”

“Now why would you think that?”

“You look like one.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said.

“... No shit?”

“You want to see my license?”

Headshake. “Who you working for?”

“David Burnett’s sister.”

“Allyn? Why’d she hire a detective?”

“She wants to know what drove her brother to suicide.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Polhemus said. “Christ, I told her that at the funeral.”

I let him stew a little while I looked him over. Mid-twenties. Short, stocky without being fat. Good-looking in a weak, characterless way. Brown hair and a bushy brown mustache that seemed longer on one side than the other and gave his face a slightly lopsided appearance. His eyes were bright, nervous, like a bird’s eyes. Scared about something, I thought, and trying like hell to hide the fact.

I said, “He ever mention suicide to you? Give you any indication he was thinking about taking his own life?”

“Hell no. Why should he?”

“So you were surprised when you heard the news?”

“Sure I was. Wouldn’t you be surprised if your best friend offed himself?”

That much was truth, I thought. Or half-truth, because he was also holding something back. You get so you can feel it when people lie or half lie to you.

“Burnett strike you as troubled the week before his death?”

“No. But I didn’t see much of him that week.”

“He told his sister he lost all the money he won in Reno, and more besides. Gambled it away with the sports books. That what he told you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“What did you think?”

“Think?”

“Didn’t you find it odd?”

Now his fear was beginning to show through the camouflage he’d thrown up. He seemed to realize it, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coveralls as if he were afraid they might start to shake and really give him away. He wet his lips before he said, “What you mean, odd?”

“His sister says he never gambled for high stakes. So why all of a sudden would he lay down big bets with the sports books?”

“Greed, why else.”

“Got a taste of big money and wanted more.”

“Yeah. Dave was a greedy bastard.”

“Bastard? I thought he was your best friend.”

“Sure he was. So?”

“Then why call him a greedy bastard?”

“Because he was. You don’t have any pals who’re greedy?”

“A couple. But I wouldn’t refer to them as bastards if they’d killed themselves last week.”

No answer. He was literally biting his tongue.

I said, “You and Dave have some kind of falling out?”

“No. What makes you think that?”

“Over money, maybe? The money he won up in Reno?”

“I told you, no.”

“You were with him when he hit the Megabucks jackpot.”

“So what?”

“One of the big casinos, was it?”

“Yeah. One of the big casinos.”

“Which one?”

“Coliseum Club. What difference does that make?”

“Lot of fanfare in places like the Coliseum Club when there’s a big jackpot payoff,” I said. “Plenty of glory for the winner. The guy he happens to be with, though, gets zip.”

“That’s for fuckin’ sure.”

“But Dave was your buddy. He probably gave you a cut of his winnings—a small slice of the pie, at least a few crumbs. That how it was, Jerry?”

“None of your business.”

“Or maybe he didn’t give you anything at all. Maybe that’s why you called him a greedy bastard.”

“I said it’s none of your goddamn business!” His voice had taken on a shrill edge.

“And then he blew the whole wad,” I said. “And ran up a debt besides. He borrowed money from his sister to help pay it off. He hit you up for a loan too?”

“No.”

“Would you have given him money if he had?”

“I don’t have any to loan out.”

“Uh-huh. So what do you think? You think he killed himself because he was in deep and couldn’t raise enough to pay off the sports books? Or did he have some other reason?”

“I told you, I don’t know!”

“Seems out of character for a happy-go-lucky guy to knock himself off just because he loses money gambling, gets himself in debt. You’d think his philosophy would be easy come, easy go. Unless money meant a lot to him?”

“Everybody likes bucks.”

“Some more than others. How about you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“What would you do if you got your hands on two hundred thousand bucks? How would you spend it?”

I had worked him into a pretty good state: fear, confusion, anger. He couldn’t seem to keep his feet still; shuffled them around like a kid with a full bladder. But you can push somebody just so far. Then he either pushes back or breaks and runs.

Polhemus was the kind that broke and ran. “That’s enough bullshit questions,” he said. “You’re not a cop, you’re nobody, I don’t have to talk to you.”

“Why not, unless you’ve got something to hide?”

“Leave me the hell alone,” he said. “You hear? You bother me again and I’ll call the cops on
you.”

There was no force or conviction behind the threat; it was nothing more than a lame exit line. He swung away from me and hustled himself back inside the warehouse.

Lies and half-truths, I thought as I walked around to where I had parked the car. Polhemus’s responses had been loaded with one or the other. But why? And why was he so frightened? It was possible that he had somehow managed to get hold of a portion of David Burnett’s jackpot winnings, and was covering up the fact—but then why would Burnett have lied to his sister about the sports books, sold back the car and presents he’d bought, borrowed a thousand dollars from her? I couldn’t see where a theft by Polhemus would explain Burnett’s suicide, either.

Puzzling.

Maybe it wasn’t such a simple, clear-cut tragedy after all.

RUSSIAN HILL is one of the city’s oldest residential neighborhoods; and if you believe research studies, like the one some outfit did in the early seventies, it is also the choicest urban area in the country. Steep hills, odd little cul-de-sacs, sweeping bay views, easy access to downtown, the Financial District, and North Beach—and extortionate rents and condo purchase prices that nowadays keep out the riffraff. You can still find a few struggling writers, would-be artists studying at the Art Institute, aging hippies still living in their sixties dreamworld, but the high rents have forced them to share quarters in clusters and will eventually force them out altogether. Mostly, now, the Hill’s residents are Old Money and white-collar New Money, those young go-getters who would toss a glass of vintage Napa Valley chardonnay in your face if you called them Yuppies. The wealthy types might know—and tell you if they do—that in the 1890s the Hill was a mecca for the influential San Francisco literary crowd: Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, George Sterling. But they probably don’t know—and wouldn’t tell you if they did—that it was the site of the city’s first public hanging, back in the Gold Rush days. Or that their home or garden may have been built atop the graves of some murdered Russian sailors; according to legend, that was how the Hill got its name.

The apartment David Burnett had shared with Karen Salter was on Russian Hill, not far from the old renovated firehouse on Green Street. But it was not in one of the fancy dowager buildings or shiny new high rises; it was in a structure that had probably been built between 1906 and 1910, since most of the original buildings on the Hill were destroyed in the big quake, and been denied a face-lift ever since. It was also situated above a dry cleaners, and surrounded by enough taller structures so that its windows would offer no particularly desirable view; and judging from the size of the building, the apartment itself wouldn’t be very large. All of these things would help keep the rent down to an affordable level. If Karen Salter had that rara avis, a fair-minded landlord, she might actually be one of the few Hill residents who was getting a bargain.

Street parking on Russian Hill is always difficult; on Saturdays it is virtually impossible to find a legal space. So, because the world is a perverse place and sometimes the perversity works in your favor, I found a slot fifty feet uphill of the dry cleaners. Some idiot behind me didn’t want to let me park. He kept blowing the horn in his Porsche while I jockeyed into the space, and when the traffic going the other way thinned he roared around me and shouted out his window, “Stupid schmuck!” There had been a time, not so long ago, when I let people like him—the real stupid schmucks—prod me into an angry response. No more. I have a higher boiling point now. Much higher.

The entrance to Karen Salter’s apartment was a recessed doorway between the dry cleaners and the building next door. The mailbox still had both their names on it—K. Salter, D. Burnett—which told me something about K. Salter. I rang the bell. And was about to ring it again when a female voice said through the squawk box, “Yes? Who is it?”

I identified myself and told her why I was there, mentioning Allyn Burnett’s name. The voice said, “Oh, yes, just a second,” and I waited for ten before the lock-release buzzer sounded.

Inside was a flight of stairs, at the top of which was a door. The door opened when I was halfway up and a young woman looked out, but it was dark in the stairwell and I couldn’t see her clearly until I got up to where she was. Twenty-six or -seven, attractive in a pug-nosed, gamin sort of way. Dark hair cut short and rumpled now, as if she hadn’t bothered to comb it this morning. Nor had she applied makeup of any kind, not even to cover the dark half-circles that formed cups for her eyes. Her small, round body was encased in blue jeans and an old Cal sweatshirt, both of which were splotched with paint and varnish stains. She also wore one rubber glove—the other was in the gloved hand, along with a drippy paintbrush. Waves of smell came off her and the brush: paint stripper, one of the stronger varieties.

She let me have a brief impersonal smile and her ungloved hand. “Allyn called this morning. She said she’d hired a detective and that you might stop by to see me.”

“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time.”

“No, no. I’m refinishing a table. You don’t mind if I keep working while we talk? The gunk I’m using dries fast and if it gets hard I’ll have to start all over again. I’ve got the window open back there, so the smell isn’t too bad.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

She led me through a narrow, cluttered living room whose walls were dominated by an odd combination of art deco and sports posters, into a small room that had been outfitted as an office: desk with a home computer and printer on it, filing cabinet, bookcase containing computer books and tapes. But there were frivolous male touches here too: a basketball on top of the bookcase, a jockstrap that had been turned into a hanger for a potted fern.

A plastic dropcloth covered most of the carpet, and in the middle of it was a small, twenties-vintage smoking table glistening with a thick application of the paint stripper. Strip-Ease, it was called; there was a gallon can next to the table, along with a little pan of the stuff. The window sash was up, as she’d said, letting in cold puffs of wind, but the smell of the paint stripper was strong in the room anyway. What it reminded me of was a mixture of alcohol and nail polish remover. Spend enough time sniffing it, and it would make you light-headed-maybe even a little spacey.

Karen invited me to sit down in the desk chair, the only chair in the room, but I said, “Thanks, I’ll stand,” and went over next to the window.

Down on her knees, she began slathering Strip-Ease on the table legs. “Do you really think you can find out what made David kill himself?” she asked. Emotion underlay the words, even though she spoke matter-of-factly. She had her grief in check, it seemed, but not enough time had passed yet for it to begin to fade. Or for her to eliminate the reminders of him from her living space. Or for her to begin sleeping well again. The refinishing work was a kind of therapy, I thought—a productive way to keep herself busy on an empty Saturday.

I said, “Well, I’m going to try.”

“It means a lot to Allyn, I guess.”

“Doesn’t it to you?”

“Knowing won’t bring him back,” she said. A trace of bitterness had come into her voice. People who take their own lives don’t realize what it does to their loved ones; how much hurt and anger and resentment it engenders. Karen Salter was
angry
at David Burnett for leaving her the way he had, and she had every right to be. Suicide is the ultimate form of desertion.

“No, it won’t,” I said. “But it’s better than not knowing. It might help you cope with it.”

“I am coping with it. I’ll be all right. I’m a strong person, even if David wasn’t.”

“Why do you think he did it?”

“The money, of course. That damned money.”

“Winning so much and then losing it all, you mean.”

“If he hadn’t won it in the first place,” she said, “he’d still be alive.”

“Was it like him to gamble so heavily?”

“No.” She paused. “But it wasn’t like him to kill himself, either.” Her anger was closer to the surface now. I could hear it in her voice and see it in the hard, determined way she kept dipping the brush in the pan of paint stripper and slapping the stuff on the table legs, so that it splattered over the plastic cloth.

“He must have been pretty excited about the jackpot,” I said.

“At first he was. He was bubbling over when he got back and told me about it.”

“He didn’t call to tell you, from Reno?”

“No.”

“Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Not really. He said he was too shaken up after it happened. I would have been, too, I guess, if I liked to gamble.”

I wouldn’t, I thought. If I won two hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn’t be too excited to call Kerry. I’d call her first thing. Especially if we were planning to be married in a few months.

But then, I wasn’t in my mid-twenties. Sometimes I wonder if I was ever that young.

I asked, “Did David tell you he was making large bets with the sports books?”

“Not until after he’d already done it.”

“How upset was he?”

“As upset as David ever got. He didn’t show negative feelings. Or positive ones very often. He kept everything locked up inside. He was a very private person.”

“So you had no inkling he was thinking about suicide?”

“My God, no.” The bitterness was sharp in her voice again. She savaged the tabletop for a few seconds, as if the scraping tool were a weapon and the table a victim. David, symbolically, I thought. “At least he didn’t do it here. At least he had that much feeling for me. If I’d come home and found him ... God, I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Where did he do it?”

She looked up. “Don’t you know?”

“No. Allyn didn’t tell me.”

“In a motel,” she said, and slashed at the tabletop again. “He rented a room in a cheap motel. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?”

I let a few seconds pass before I said, “I talked to Jerry Polhemus a while ago. About his relationship with David and David’s death. He wasn’t very cooperative. In fact, he seemed nervous, afraid of something.”

“Afraid? Why would Jerry be afraid?”

“That’s the question.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Have you seen him or spoken to him since the funeral?”

“No.”

“How did he act that day?”

“Cold, not very sympathetic, but that’s Jerry for you.”

“How well do you know him?”

Wryly, “Not as well as he’d like.”

“Oh?”

“He tried to hit on me once,” she said, “after I started going out with David. I should have told David, I guess, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if he called me one of these days and tried to hit on me again.”

“You don’t like him much, do you.”

“No. If he does call ... well, that doesn’t matter. I’ll handle him.”

“You have any other reasons for disliking him?”

“Lots of them. He’s immature, for one. I went with David and him to a Giants game once. Jerry drank too much beer and started yelling things like ‘Dodgers give blowjobs’ at the top of his voice. A man with little kids told him to shut up and he threatened to punch the man out.”

Blowjobs, I thought. When I was young, most girls didn’t know what blowjobs were, much less use the term in polite conversation. Or was I just being naive? I wondered again if I had ever really been twenty-five.

“I don’t trust him, either,” Karen said. “He’s a sneak.”

“How do you mean?”

“He just is. Trying to hit on me behind David’s back. I don’t think he cares about anybody but himself.”

“How did he and David get along?”

“Oh, as far as David was concerned, Jerry couldn’t do anything wrong. They were always going to baseball and football games or off to Tahoe and Reno—you know, the way guys do.”

I nodded. “How did he feel about David’s big jackpot?”

“I don’t know. David didn’t say. But I’ll bet he was jealous. Anyway, David must have felt sorry for him because he gave Jerry ten thousand dollars out of his winnings.”

“Did he now. Jerry didn’t mention that to me.”

“Well, David said it was the least he could do for a friend who’d been with him at the time. He was always so generous ...” She let the sentence trail off, and her mouth set tight again. She picked up the scraping tool again and worked on the tabletop, where the Strip-Ease had loosened the old varnish.

“Would you have any idea what Jerry did with the ten thousand dollars?”

“No. But if he hasn’t spent it yet, it’ll all be gone before the end of the year. That’s the way Jerry is.”

“David didn’t try to get it back from him, did he? To pay off his gambling debt?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did. I know he borrowed money from Allyn and tried to borrow from others he knew. He asked me to try to get him a loan at the bank where I work but he just didn’t have any collateral.”

“How large a loan did he want?”

“Thirty-five thousand dollars.”

“He lost that much in addition to his jackpot winnings?”

“I suppose he must have. He could be such a fool.”

I watched her work for a time. The smell of the paint stripper was giving me a headache. I sat on my haunches, finally, so the cold wind from the window could wash over the back of my neck. Then I asked, “Are all of his belongings still here?”

“What?” She had turned inside herself, to commune with her grief and anger. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“David’s belongings,” I said. “Are they all still here?”

“Oh. Yes. I haven’t had a chance to ... Allyn said she’d come over and help me box them up, but ... I really should do it pretty soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Have you gone through them?”

“You mean to see if there was anything that might help explain his suicide?”

“Yes.”

“I looked,” she said. “Allyn asked me to, and the police. But I didn’t find anything.”

“Do you mind if I look?”