Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (5 page)

EBERHARDT WAS HOME when I got to his old two-story house in Noe Valley, just below Twin Peaks: working with the power tools in his garage workshop. He had always been good with his hands, always enjoyed making furniture and things. He’d let the hobby slide after Dana divorced him several years ago, and I was glad to see that he’d taken it up again. Another positive effect Bobbie Jean was having on his life, I thought.

She was there too—not in the garage, inside the house somewhere. Her car was parked out front. The garage door was up, so I walked straight in there from the street and waited for Eb to finish fashioning an ogee molding with his band saw. From the cut pieces spread out over his workbench, he appeared to be making a table of some kind.

As I watched him, it struck me again how leaned-down and gray he’d gotten. At least ten pounds thinner and a shade or two grayer than last December. The weight loss might have been the result of his relationship with Bobbie Jean, but I could not help feeling that it and the added gray were in fact the result of what had happened to me. Kerry had been thinner when I came back from Deer Run, though she had since put the lost poundage back on. Those three dead months had been an ordeal for them, too. Not knowing what had become of me, worrying, spending time and effort and money trying to find out. Eberhardt had worked day and night, Kerry told me, hounding SFPD’s Missing Persons Bureau, following small dead-end leads and exploring empty possibilities on his own and with the help of two other detectives he’d hired. Frustration, psychic drain ... and yet through it all he’d lent support to Kerry and somehow managed to deal with day-to-day agency business as well. When I’d tried to thank him, back in March, he’d turned gruff and growled something about paying back past favors. Sure he was. The first thing he’d said to me when I walked back into his life was, “Jesus, I never thought I’d see you again,” and he’d fought like hell to keep me from seeing the wetness in his eyes.

And what was his reward for caring so much? A flatter belly, loose jowls, and some more dead hair follicles. It wasn’t my fault, but there was a feeling of guilt in me just the same. Guilt and love and pain and gratitude. I had never felt closer to him and to Kerry than I did now. And I had never felt more alone.

It was a small relief when he finally shut off the saw; the whine and screech of the blade was like an abrasive on my nerve ends. He wiped his forehead with the back of one hand, getting sawdust on his gray forelock, and said cheerfully, “So what brings you by today,
paisan
?” He was in a good mood, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which meant that he had gotten laid last night. You can usually tell when he’s had his ashes hauled. Some men wear their hearts on their sleeves; Eberhardt wears his gonads there too.

“I need you to do something for me, Eb.”

“Don’t tell me you’re working? When are you gonna learn to take it easy on weekends?”

“Probably never.”

“Drop dead of a heart attack one of these days,” he said. “All right, which case?”

“You don’t know about it yet. A thing I took on last night—favor to one of the secretaries at Kerry’s agency.”

“You and your favors. Well?”

I told him about it. He was not particularly interested until I got to the part about Ekhern Manufacturing Company; then I had his full attention.

“What the hell?” he said. “The Mob?”

“I’m not kidding. If you’d seen those two, you’d be thinking the same thing.”

“Then for Christ’s sake why did you give them your card? You want trouble with people like that?”

“I didn’t have a choice. Besides, it’s not going to come to anything rough.”

“Depends on what’s going on. And whether or not you keep poking your snout in.”

“It’s my snout, Eb.”

“Ahh,” he said. “I suppose you want me to find out if there’s anything official on this Ekhern outfit?”

“I’d do it myself, but you’ve got more pull than I have—friends who’ll tell you what they won’t tell me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Another thing I need is the name of the inspector who investigated David Burnett’s suicide. I want to ask him a few questions.” I paused. “Maybe you can set up a meet.”

“Now I’m your social secretary.”

“Indulge me, Eb, all right?”

“Ahh,” he said again. Then he said, “Come on inside while I phone. Bobbie Jean’s making cornbread.”

I could smell the cornbread as soon as he opened the inside door. It made my mouth water; I had not eaten anything all day, unless you counted coffee and the half a glass of orange juice with Bruce Littlejohn. We went through the utility porch into the kitchen, where Bobbie Jean was bustling about and the cornbread smell was overpowering. There was a fresh, steaming pan of it on top of the stove.

Eberhardt said, “Look who’s here, hon,” and patted Bobbie Jean on the fanny for my benefit. She paid no attention to the pat, also for my benefit, and came over and kissed me on the cheek. Eberhardt went upstairs to make his call. I went and smelled the cornbread close up.

“Go ahead, take a piece,” Bobbie Jean said.

I took a piece. Nobody makes cornbread like a southerner; I don’t know why that should be true but it is. A northerner makes it, it’s just cornbread; a southerner uses exactly the same ingredients and it’s a culinary art form. I made myself eat slowly, to savor the taste and because one piece was all I was going to allow myself.

Bobbie Jean stood watching me, smiling. She was a couple of years shy of fifty, tallish and slender in a pair of blue chambray pants and a dark red sweat shirt. The first time I’d met her, the same December night I was abducted, she had worn her brown hair in a shag cut; since then she had had it permed, a style that better complimented her lean, angular features and made her look younger. Eberhardt had met her during the course of a routine skip-trace—she worked as a secretary to a San Rafael real estate agent—and in December they had been dating casually for several weeks. Now they were a “hot item,” as Eberhardt put it. Translation: They were sleeping together. I was glad for both of them. I liked Bobbie Jean much more than any of Eb’s recent string of lady friends; she had a wry, sometimes bawdy sense of humor and a frank way of speaking, and she could handle him even better than Dana could, back in the days when their marriage was a good one. Kerry liked her too. She and Bobbie Jean had become fast friends.

I finished the cornbread and said, “Good.” Eloquent praise is not one of my long suits. But Bobbie Jean didn’t seem to mind. She said, “Well, it’s my mother’s recipe, so I can’t take any real credit for it. But don’t tell Eb that. He thinks I’m in a class with Julia Child.”

“Better watch out or he’ll chain you to the stove.”

She sighed. “He keeps trying to do just that.”

“Oh?”

“He’s asked me to marry him four times now,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“No.”

“Probably because I keep saying no. But just between you and me and the stove ... I think I’m weakening.”

“I thought you were a card-carrying member of the I Hate Marriage Club.” Like Kerry, dammit, I thought.

“I am. Or was. He looks at me with puppy eyes and tells me how much he needs me ... oh hell, I don’t know. It gets harder and harder to turn him down.”

“He’ll keep right on asking, you know.”

“I know. Mr. Persistence.”

“He’s a good man, Bobbie Jean.”

“I know that too. I wish I’d met him thirty years ago, before either of the two jerks I said ‘I do’ to.”

She’d married the first jerk when she was eighteen, in her native South Carolina; he had taken her to Texas so he could fulfill his ambition of working on the Galveston docks, and she had divorced him a year later. (He’d been good-looking and a terrific bed partner, she had confided to Kerry, “but he had a brain the size of a lima bean. Did you ever try to hold a conversation with a lima bean?”) The second jerk was an electronics engineer who had transported her from Texas to Silicon Valley, where he had fathered her two daughters. She’d divorced
him
after twenty not-so-blissful years, when she discovered he was actively bisexual and had been for most of their married life. With a track record like that, it was little wonder that she was gun-shy where marriage was concerned.

Bobbie Jean said, “I’m not the first woman Eb’s proposed to since his divorce. You know that. I guess that’s the biggest thing holding me back. Is it me he wants, or any old body to take care of him and warm his bed?”

I asked her what she thought—an old trick to avoid answering a difficult question.

“I think he cares for me, but that he’s also tired of living alone. The trouble is, I think I feel the same way.”

We talked for another twenty minutes, though not any more about the marriage issue, before Eberhardt finally reappeared. He motioned me out into the garage.

“Well, you called it,” he said when we were alone. “Ekhern Manufacturing is a suspected Mob front, all right. Probably a low-level clearinghouse. I didn’t get that from anybody at the Hall, either. I was referred to the feds and I got it from the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force here. He wanted to know why I was interested so I told him.
He
wasn’t interested after that. But he didn’t mind talking a little.”

“If the Strike Force knows about Ekhern, why don’t they shut it down?”

“Why do you think? No legal cause. Besides, they’re after bigger fish.”

“Who runs Ekhern for the Mob?”

“Guy named Garza, Frank Garza. One of the new breed. He’s got an MBA, for Christ’s sake.”

“I believe it.”

“The suspected owner, though, is one Arthur Welker. Mob underboss, came out of Chicago about ten years ago. Garza worked for him back there.”

“This guy Welker doesn’t operate here, does he?”

“No. Northern Nevada. He lives at Tahoe.”

“Then he’s hooked into the gambling business?”

“Right. He owns pieces of two casino-hotels.”

“Which ones?”

“Coliseum Club in Reno, Nevornia in Stateline.”

“Uh-huh. The Coliseum Club was where David Burnett won his big jackpot.”

“Which means what?”

“Good question.”

“Hell,” Eberhardt said, “the Mob’s got its claws in more than a couple Nevada casinos. But the gambling is strictly legit, you know that. No way would Welker come down on a citizen for winning
any
amount of money. They love it up there when a big hit happens. Brings new suckers in in droves.”

“Sure. But there’s got to be a connection somewhere. You find out who Manny is?”

He shook his head. “Nobody by that name works for Ek-hem.”

“Maybe for Welker in Nevada, then.”

“Could be. His file’s thin here. He pretty much confines his operations to the other side of the state line.”

“Okay,” I said. “Who was in charge of the Burnett suicide?”

“Harry Craddock.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“He’s fairly new. Good man.”

“You talk to him?”

“No. He’s working the four-to-midnight this week. Go down to the Hall from here, you ought to be able to catch him when he comes on duty.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Just take it easy, huh?” he said.

“With Craddock?”

“You know what I mean. Word is that Welker’s rough goods.”

“I’ll walk soft. Thanks, Eb.”

I headed out to my car. But he wasn’t done with me yet; he tagged along and said as I opened the door, “So what did you and Bobbie Jean talk about while I was upstairs?”

“Why?”

“I’m just curious. Well?”

“You,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought so. She tell you I asked her to marry me?”

“Four times, she said. Mr. Persistence.”

“You don’t approve, huh?”

“Sure I approve. If you really love her.”

“What the hell kind of crack is that? Would I ask her if I didn’t love her?”

“You asked Wanda.”

That made him mad. His affair with Wanda Jaworski of Macy’s footwear department had been a disaster, mainly because he hadn’t been able to see past her gargantuan chest to a mind of the same lima bean proportions as Bobbie Jean’s first husband. “Always throwing Wanda in my face,” he said. “I made a mistake, all right? You never made a mistake?”

“Lots of them. But never one like Wanda.”

“Get out of here,” he said, glaring. “Go play games with the goddamn Mob.”

“Does this mean I don’t get to be best man if Bobbie Jean finally says yes?”

“You don’t even get an invitation,” he said, and put his back to me and stalked off in a huff.

I watched him into the garage, thinking: I hope you do love her, Eb. Because she’s right for you, because she loves you. And because in my own way, so do I.

INSPECTOR HARRY CRADDOCK was a heavyset black guy in his mid-thirties, very serious about his work, very intense. He smoked long, thin cigarillos with plastic mouthpieces and had trouble keeping his hands and body still, standing or sitting. Classic type A personality. If he didn’t fall victim to a coronary or a perforated ulcer, he would probably make captain before he was fifty and chief or deputy chief before mandatory retirement. You only had to spend five minutes with him to know that he was a first-rate cop.

When I first approached him he allowed as how he’d heard of me, being noncommittal as to what it was he’d heard, and said he could give me fifteen minutes. We went to his desk in the squad room. Things were relatively quiet here for a Saturday afternoon; we were able to converse in more or less normal tones.

I told him why I was interested in David Burnett’s death, keeping it brief. When I was done he said, “Well, if you think it was anything but suicide, you can forget it. Kid killed himself and no mistake.”

“In a motel, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Place called the Bay Vista, off the Bayshore north of Candlestick. Used to be a hot-sheet motel, but it changed hands a few years ago. Fairly respectable place now.”

“He checked in alone?”

“Right. About seven the night he died.”

“Night clerk remember him?”

“Said Burnett didn’t say much, acted withdrawn.”

“Who found the body?”

“Maid. Past noon the next day, when she went in to clean. Door was double-locked; she had to use both her keys. Both windows locked too.”

“What time did he die?”

“Coroner says sometime around midnight.”

“Is it possible he had a visitor between seven and midnight?”

“Anything’s possible,” Craddock said. “But nobody saw one, and there was nothing in the room to indicate one.”

“I understand he left a note.”

“Handwritten. Burnett’s handwriting.”

“What did it say, do you remember?”

“Two lines: ‘This way is better for everybody. Karen, Allyn, please forgive me.’ ”

“Cause of death was an overdose of sleeping pills?”

“Nembutal. Compounded by alcohol. We found an empty pint of bourbon anchoring the note. Dutch courage. When he got drunk enough he took the pills—almost a full bottle.”

“You know where he got them?”

“Off a small-time drug dealer named Niko,” Craddock said. “Burnett bought grass from him a few times.”

“What did Niko have to say?”

“Oh, we had a nice little talk.” Craddock grinned and I grinned back at him. “He sold Burnett the Nembutal two days before the kid checked into the Bay Vista.”

“Did Niko ever sell him any other drugs?”

“Just grass. He said it was the first time Burnett had ever asked for anything else.”

“What about Burnett’s motive?”

“For doing himself in?” Craddock shrugged. “Never know what goes on in people’s heads, but in this case it seems clear-cut enough.”

“Losing all his jackpot winnings and running up a big debt besides.”

“Right.”

“You find out which sports books he made his bets with?”

“Nobody seems to know. He was secretive about it.”

“You might have run checks,” I said mildly.

“That’s right, we could have. But why? Kid committed suicide, that’s definite. And there are dozens of sports books in Nevada. And I’ve got a caseload that would break a camel’s back.”

“I’m not blaming you,” I said. “It’s just that a hundred and fifty thousand bucks, give or take a few thousand, is a hell of a pile to wager on horses, boxing matches, and baseball games.”

“Been known to happen.”

“Sure. But Burnett had no history of heavy gambling.”

“So he caught the fever,” Craddock said. “Hitting a Megabucks jackpot for two hundred grand can do that to a man—make him want to parlay a small fortune into a big one.”

“The friend Burnett was with when he hit the jackpot, Jerry Polhemus—you talk to him?”

“Briefly. Why?”

“I spent a few minutes with him this morning. He didn’t seem to like it when I brought up Burnett’s name. Acted nervous, scared.”

“Of what?”

“My investigation, maybe. I had the feeling he was covering up something.”

“Such as?”

“No idea yet.”

“I didn’t get that kind of hit off him,” Craddock said. He lit another cigarillo, glanced at his watch; my fifteen minutes were almost up. “Your best friend kills himself, it makes you think about your own mortality. Could be he just doesn’t like the idea of you opening up old wounds, and you misread him.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You check him out?”

“No reason to. He was up at Lake Tahoe the night Burnett died.”

I told him about Ekhern Manufacturing, the Mob angle, the name Manny. He thought it over, but it didn’t impress him. “So Ekhern’s a clearinghouse,” he said. “The kid picked a Mob-owned sports book to make his bets with, and paid off his losses here. Either that, or he lied about Vegas and Reno and dropped his pile with an illegal book in the city, one with Mob ties.”

“I thought of that too. But why would they take his marker for thirty-five grand—a kid like him, with no way to raise the money?”

“Somebody screwed up, maybe.”

“Maybe. Here’s something else: I think he may have taken his jackpot payoff in cash.”

“You kidding?”

“No. He told his fiancée he authorized the Coliseum Club to send a payoff check directly to his bank. But there’s no record of a deposit to his checking or savings accounts. Or anything to indicate that he had a secret account somewhere.”

Craddock had grown fidgety. He looked at his watch again. “Why the hell would he take cash?”

“People do stupid things,” I said. “Or maybe he had a good reason, one that has nothing to do with gambling. Maybe he didn’t blow all his winnings on sports events after all.”

“What did he do with the money then?”

“How about a large drug buy?”

“Oh come on, man. There’s no evidence Burnett was into that kind of scene. I told you what Niko said about him.”

“Yeah.”

“What were you thinking? He didn’t kill himself, he was murdered in some kind of Mob drug burn? Well, you can forget it. He committed suicide—period. I’d stake my badge on that.”

I didn’t pursue it any further. He was right—it was an off-the-wall theory. Instead I said, “Okay, just one more question. Was Burnett ever in trouble with the law?”

“Picked up once for drunk driving three years ago. First offense, damn judge gave him a slap on the wrist.” Craddock scowled as he said that; he didn’t like judges who were lenient with drunk drivers, even first offenders. For that matter, neither did I. “That’s all. Considering what it’s like on the streets these days, he was just your average city kid—maybe a little above average.”

“Sure. Except that he won and lost a small fortune and then killed himself a few months before he was supposed to get married.”

“Compared to most of the stuff that crosses my desk,” Craddock said, “that’s so tame it doesn’t even make me raise an eyebrow.”

“I guess you’re right.”

But I was far from satisfied.

UNTIL RECENT YEARS, when some dealerships moved to the Auto Center out on 16th Street, Van Ness Avenue was the place San Franciscans went to buy a new or used car. A dozen or so lots and showrooms still line the busy avenue, from near the Opera House north toward Lombard Street. One of them was Benoit Chevrolet, where David Burnett had bought a brand-new Corvette three weeks ago. His sister had told me that when I called her from the lobby of the Hall of Justice.

It was a few minutes shy of five o‘clock when I walked into the Benoit showroom. At five on the nose I was sitting in a glass-walled cubicle with an assistant manager named Kamroff. He wasn’t the salesman who had first waited on Burnett, but he’d been in on the second round of dealings. And he was not averse to talking about it. Most car salesmen suffer from diarrhea of the mouth; Kamroff was no exception.

“Things like that don’t happen much,” he said. “Not here, they don’t. Young guy comes waltzing in off the street, plunks down fifty thousand bucks for a new ‘Vette, drives it for a week, puts a couple hundred miles on it, and then brings it back and says he wants a full refund.”

“Did he pay the fifty thousand in cash?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. Stacks of fifties and hundreds in a Giants tote bag. Can you believe it?”

“He say why he was paying cash?”

“Told Lloyd Adams he won the money in Reno, big slot-machine payoff. Well, why not? It’s none of our business where they get the money to buy a car.”

“So then he brought the Corvette back a week later.”

“That’s right,” Kamroff said. “Says something came up, big emergency, he’s got to have the fifty thousand back.”

“What sort of emergency, did he say?”

“No. But he was all worked up over it. Even more worked up when I explained the facts of life to him. We couldn’t have refunded the full purchase price if we’d wanted to. You can’t sell a car as new when it’s got mileage on it—that’s a state law. You have to market it as used, which means a price reduction even if it is brand-new and only has a couple hundred miles on it. I did what I could to oblige Mr. Burnett, got most of his outlay back to him; we try to please our customers, even the wacky ones. He didn’t like it, but that’s life. You take the good with the bad.”

“Did he ask for the refund in cash?”

“At first he did. We convinced him to take a cashier’s check.”

“Can you tell me whether he cashed it or signed it over to someone?”

“Cashed it.”

“For currency or another cashier’s check?”

“Currency. The bank manager mentioned it when I spoke to him the next day.”

So David Burnett had taken both his jackpot winnings and his refund in cash. Which meant what? Why would he want to risk carrying around all that green?

MY OFFICE was only a few blocks from Benoit Chevrolet, on O’Farrell Street, so I made that my next stop. For one thing, I needed to prepare an agency contract for Allyn Burnett to sign. And for another, I wanted to get hold of Joe DeFalco—
Chronicle
reporter, poker buddy, and expert on gambling and related matters. There were a couple more theories I wanted to explore, one reasonable and the other off-the-wall.

Eberhardt had closed up last night and for a change he had remembered to switch on the answering machine. No messages, though. I called DeFalco’s home number. His wife said he was out on some sort of assignment but that he was due home by six. I asked her to have him call when he showed up.

I used my old portable to fill out one of the standard contract forms. Then I took a look at Saturday’s mail, which consisted of two bills and a catalogue of “the latest in professional and security control devices” from some company in Kentucky. Eberhardt was always after me to upscale the agency, outfit ourselves with modern technological advancements that would, he claimed, make our job easier. So I opened the catalogue and paged through it.

Miniature cameras and “camera systems.” Mini-stethoscopes. A variety of bugs and bug monitors. A thing to detect whether or not somebody you were shaking hands with was wearing a covert listening device. Bulletproof briefcases and tote bags made of something called “ballistic polypropylene” that was guaranteed to have five times the strength of steel in stopping slugs fired at point-blank range. Some gunk you could spray on letters to turn the envelopes translucent, thus allowing you to read the contents without muss or fuss. But the gunk wasn’t the best little privacy-invader offered in the catalogue. No siree. That honor belonged to a glittering gem of advanced technology called the Night Penetrator.

What the Night Penetrator did was to electro-optically amplify starlight or other ambient light into phosphor green images that literally let you see in the dark. With this cameralike baby, you could read license plates in unlighted garages, peer into shadowy corners; and if you happened to have a voyeuristic bent, why, you could even look through your neighbor’s bedroom window when you suspected he might be humping his wife or girlfriend. It came with an optional hand-held image intensifier, and an infrared spot for greater clarity, and a tripod,
and
a pistol grip. The Night Penetrator cost a paltry four thousand dollars, and you could get all the accessories for another twelve hundred. And the best part about it was that it was government-approved and perfectly legal to own.

I threw the catalogue into the wastebasket. Alienation, fear, paranoia, distrust, deceit—that was what life was all about nowadays. Every man for himself and to hell with anybody else and
his
right to privacy. I couldn’t live that way, wouldn’t live that way. Caring too much could be a curse, but it was far better than caring too little. Far better, too, that the meek should inherit the earth than the paranoids and hard-core paramilitary “patriots” with hideout guns in their clothing and Night Penetrators tucked into the trunks of their cars....

The telephone bell put an end to my brooding. Joe DeFalco.