Aaron Conners - Tex Murphy 02 (9 page)

I shrugged. “Beats me. Came in the mail with no name or return address.”

Chelsee was looking at it intently. “Maybe it’s a license plate number. Or a VIN.”

Louie shook his head. “Too many…what d’ya call ‘em…characters…for a license plate.

And there ain’t enough for a VIN.” He squinted at the card. “Lemme see …eight, nine, ten. There’s ten characters. If ya don’t count the plus sign and change them letters to numbers, could be a phone number…you know, with an area code. What would it be?

2…9…5…2,2,6,1,1,8,4. Lemme grab a white pages.”

Louie hurried off to the kitchen. Chelsee set the card in front of me and leaned an elbow on the counter, resting her chin in the palm of her hand. I swiveled slightly and looked straight at her. She smiled and motioned with her eyes toward the index card. “Kind of like a riddle, huh? I like riddles.”

“I’m sure you do.”

I turned my head and picked up my glass of beer. When I looked back at Chelsee, she had a feigned expression of shock on her face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Consider it a special riddle, from me to you.”

Louie backed through the kitchen doors with an open phone book in his hands.

“I don’t see a 295 area code listed here.” He ran his finger to the bottom of the page.

“No, nothin’.” He closed the book and set it under the bar, a hint of dejection on his broad face. “Maybe it’s some kind of international code.”

“Don’t worry about it, Louie. It was a nice idea, but I don’t think it’s anything as simple as a phone number. I’ll give my personal psychic a call and see if she can sense something useful.”

Chelsee smiled and stood up with her drink. “Well, I’ll leave you two handsome guys to your manly conversation. I’ve got to get back to my book.”

I turned around on the bar stool and leaned back. “Let me guess. Damp Passion. The torid story of a stunningly beautiful model turned neurosurgeon, who must choose between the sincere but dull billionaire who loves her, and the impossibly handsome and innocent fugitive accused of murder, with whom she has tasted the ripe fruit of forbidden love.”

Chelsee raised an eyebrow.

“Actually, I’m reading The Collected works of O. Henry. You know, like the candy bar.”

She spun around, her hair bouncing attractively, and I couldn’t help but stare as she returned to her booth. She gave me a brief glare before blocking her face with the book.

I turned back toward Louie, who was shaking his head.

“You sure got a magical way with women, Murph.”

A vid-phone beeped in the kitchen. Louie excused himself and went to answer it. I picked up the blue card and looked it over again. BXK+A261184. A serial number?

Maybe I had to sleep on it. I stifled a yawn as I slipped the card back into the pocket of my overcoat, and decided that I should probably hit the hay early. As I collected my smokes and lighter, Louie stuck his head through the swinging doors.

“Hey, Murph. Call for ya.”

I’d never gotten a call at the diner before. Intrigued, I walked around the bar and into the kitchen. Mac Malden’s puffy face filled the vid-phone screen. It looked like he was calling from an outside pay vid-phone. “I tried your office first.”

“I’m not there.”

Mac rolled his eyes. “No kidding. Look, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for a week now. Actually, a lot of people have. I’ve been calling your office since I got your message. I figured I’d check the Brew & Stew and see if I could catch you before the boys on stakeout do.”

So my hunch had been right. “How’d I get so popular all of a sudden?”

Mac ran a hand nervously over his mustache. “Look, I’m going out on a limb here. I’m telling you this ‘cause I think they’re going after the wrong guy, and if you get a head start, you might be able to do something to cover your ass. Just remember - I didn’t make this call. If the commissioner finds out I’m warning you off, he’ll have me walking the Mission District beat with a rubber gun.”

“Well, since you’re not making this call, how about if I don’t ask you what it was I did.”

The fat cop glanced over his shoulder as someone passed by, then looked back into the camera. “You know Roy O’Brien, right? The Colonel?”

That came out of the blue. “Sure. We go way back. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Good friends?”

“Used to be. We haven’t had much to do with each other for quite awhile, though.”

Mac squinted through his already squinted eyes. “Why’s that?”

“We had a bit of a falling out about fifteen years ago.”

“A woman?”

I laughed. “Yeah, right. It was during a case. I was learning the ropes and thought I knew everything. The Colonel broke a few incidental laws and I blew the whistle on him. The ethics board suspended his license for six months. Surprisingly enough, he canned me.”

Mac snorted. “You got off easy.”

“Well…live and learn. I’ve always done everything the hard way.”

Mac nodded. “So you haven’t talked to the Colonel since he gave you your walking papers.”

The fat cop wasn’t very crafty. I knew this was leading somewhere and decided to come clean. “Actually, I did talk to him a couple weeks ago…at my office. Showed up out of nowhere. I think we buried the hatchet. So to speak.”

Mac nodded slowly, creating a modestly uncomfortable silence. I was starting to get a funny feeling. “Is there something you want to tell me, Mac?”

The cop stuck a Merit under his mustache. “The Colonel disappeared about a week ago…around the same time you did.”

“So what? Maybe he’s on vacation. I heard that one time he stopped off at a

convenience store, talked the counter girl into quitting her job, and showed up two weeks later with a slight limp and a Roadrunner tattoo.”

Mac blew out a long stream of smoke. “Not this time. We got a call from some lady whose dog showed up with a finger in its mouth. A human finger. It’d been cut off at the third knuckle and the print was still good, so we ran it. Turns out the finger belongs to the Colonel. We’ve been looking ever since, but we haven’t found the rest of him.”

“Nice.”

Mac nodded like a man who’d seen too many corpses to care anymore. “The

commissioner and his special unit searched his office personally and found your name, along with not much else. According to Drysdale, that makes you murder suspect number one.”

So, by all appearances, the Colonel was dead. Assimilating that fact was surreal, like the time I’d caught Sylvia with the upholsterer. What I needed was a bottle of bourbon and time to think, two luxuries I didn’t have. I could probably avoid the cops for awhile longer, but they’d find me eventually. And when they did, I’d be a glob of chewing gum on the sole of the commissioner’s five-hundred-dollar Italian loafers. Sure, the hospital in Brownsville could verify that I’d been there three days earlier, but Mac had said that the Colonel disappeared before then. My alibi was a bout as airtight as cheese-cloth.

If Mac’s information was current, I wasn’t just the prime suspect, I was the only suspect.

And Commissioner Drysdale enjoyed an abnormally high conviction rate. He was the kind of cop who craved closure, even if he had to settle for busting the wrong guy.

Unless I could prove that I’d hadn’t used a cigar cutter on the Colonel, odds were good that I’d find myself learning a new trade and making sixty-seven cents a day at Pelican Bay.

I thanked Louie for dinner and made a hasty exit. There was nothing I could do to prove my innocence, short of finding another, more realistic lead for the cops. And the only places I could think of that would turn up such a thing were either the Colonel’s house or office. I wasn’t sure where the Colonel had been living, but I knew where his office was. I fired up the speeder and lifted off.

As I flew over the brightly lit city, I remembered the dream I’d had just before waking up in Brownsville hospital. I was certain now that it had been a replay of an actual conversation. Despite my severe drunkenness at the time, on some subconscious level my brain had recorded everything. I found myself wondering about the reason for the Colonel’s unexpected visit. Why had he made the trip to my office after so many years, only to leave without giving a reason for stopping by? It just didn’t make any sense. The Colonel never did anything without some set purpose. He was like a grandmaster chess player, always thinking three or four moves ahead. I, myself, had always preferred checkers, though I also enjoyed dominoes and Parcheesi.

Images came to mind of the early days, when the Colonel had taken me under his wing.

Despite the big breakup, I’d always considered my mentor a father figure, albeit a verbally abusive, overbearing, foster-parent-from-Hell type. The Colonel wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, but he was a top-notch detective. His agency was one of the largest and best-known in this part of the country. The clientele was a veritable Who’s Who of business, politics and Hollywood. Over the years, he’d earned a lot of respect, but he’d also made more than his share of enemies. I’d lasted only two years at his agency, but I could think of a dozen people who hated his guts and had subjectively good reasons for seeing them spilled all over his office’s hundred-dollars-a-square-foot carpet.

Even in my straw-grasping state of mind, I wondered if I was kidding myself.

Realistically, what were the chances of me finding something in the Colonel’s office that Drysdale’s special unit had overlooked? His men were professionals in the truest sense of the word, and the commissioner had been hell-bent. But it had happened on occasion in the past. Maybe I was no better than a gambler who’d gotten lucky on the ponies a couple of times, bloated with overconfidence and confusing luck with talent.

The Colonel’s office was in Sausalito, in a nice, quiet suburb of the city, where the commercial section trailed off into the residential area. As I descended toward the office, I saw lights on inside the reception area and a police speeder parked at the curb. This was an unforeseen complication. Under more favorable circumstances, the cops might have let me poke around the place, but I was a wanted man. A diversionary tactic was called for.

I set the speeder down two blocks away from the Colonel’s office and around the corner from a mom-and-pop convenience store called the Market Basket. Seeing the store had inspired a plan. It was unethical and callous, not to mention illegal, but it was a proven winner. I walked to the store and looked it over. A metal grate covered the store’s façade, and a Rockwell Alarm System sticker was pasted onto the front window.

Excellent.

I walked around the building to a small alley and searched until I found a goodsized chunk of asphalt. Returning to the front of the market, I glanced around to make sure no one was in sight, then reared back and heaved the asphalt. It flew between two metal bars in the grate and shattered the front window. An alarm blared as I sprinted back to my speeder. Alarms were like dog whistles for cops. I figured it would get the attention of the patrolmen down the street.

Back in the speeder, I lifted off and sped around the block until I was on the other side of the Colonel’s office, with a clear view of the front entrance. The cops were quick.

They were already half way down the block, guns drawn and strings of saliva trailing behind them. I set the speeder down as close as I could without being obvious, then bolted for the door to the Colonel’s office.

I stepped in gingerly and glanced around. Apparently, there had been only two cops, both of whom had fallen for my little ruse. I was in the reception/waiting area, which is where the policemen appeared to have set up shop, judging by the deck of cards, piles of Styrofoam, and mountains of fast food wrappers on the receptionist’s desk.

I couldn’t be sure of how much time I’d have to search the office, but I knew I had to hurry. I hustled down a hallway, turned left, and entered the Colonel’s private office. I turned on the lights and saw that everything had been turned upside down, with drawers emptied and papers spilled all over the floor. An expensive chess set was scattered around. There was no way to tell if this had been done before or after the cops’

investigation.

A cigarette butt on the floor caught my eye. I remembered that the Colonel had said he’d quit smoking. Maybe a careless cop had dropped it, but I hoped not. I picked up the filterless stub and saw the strange symbol on the wrapper. It was the same as the one on the butts I’d found in the mansion. This was beyond coincidence. But what would the person who set me up be doing in the Colonel’s office? And how was he or she involved in the Colonel’s disappearance?

I began searching the office, eyes peeled and ears straining to hear when the cops returned. I had no idea what I was searching for. After ten minutes or so, I be-came convinced that the police had taken everything of interest and tagged it for evidence.

The papers on the floor turned out to be mostly empty forms and junk mail, and the Colonel’s desk was practically empty. It did contain a paperback, titled Perry Mason and the Case of the Sleeping Wife. Naturally, I was a big fan of Erle Stanley Gardner, and I hated to see a perfectly good pulp novel go to waste. I picked up the book and stuck it in the pocket of my overcoat. Under the book was a stack of blue index cards, held together with a rubber band. They were just like the one I’d found with my mail that morning, except these were blank. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided I’d have to consider the implications later.

There was a coat closet eight or nine feet to the right of the desk. I figured the cops would’ve gone through it, but I checked it out anyway. There were two coats, a shirt, and an umbrella inside. I’d just about decided I was wasting my time, and was expecting the cops to return at any moment. I took one more look around the room and was about to leave when I noticed something odd.

A thermostat control box was affixed to the wall by the door, but it suddenly dawned on me that there were two of them in the office. I examined the one by the door closely and decided that it was actually what it appeared to be. The second box was on the same wall as the coat closet but, unlike the first, had a casing of smoke-tinted plastic. I looked it over, then carefully pulled the casing off the wall. Staring back at me was what appeared to be a camera lens.