Spider’s Cage (13 page)

Could Jodie be on the wrong side in this?

Boojum
, she'd called her granddad; a gentle, childhood sobriquet. Yet, undoubtedly, he was the man who'd discovered Sal, nurtured her. A man of affairs, such as Sweet Jesus O'Ryan, who liked to sit quietly in the desert, in a shack with no electricity, no running water, and read philosophy, while his empire flourished.

The whiskey he'd drunk earlier was wearing off. The tiny, dermal itch, which, when free, ran along the surface of his skin like a thin film of oxidation on a metal plate, lately erased by the alcohol, began again to tickle here and there, experimentally, at the corners of his temple and cheek. His thumbs crinkled the pieces of paper money. The rat's toenails clicked on the floorboards of the hallway.

He couldn't figure it. If she wanted him off the case, why had she called for help? Why the postcard? Until just a few minutes ago, all Jodie Ryan had to do was tell Windrow to stay out of her private life, and Windrow would happily have done so.

He tried to remember what case he'd been on the week before.

Ah, yes.

The swimming pool case.

A swimming pool had ruptured in Mill Valley.

Had the contractor who built it deliberately begun construction on uncompacted fill?

Lawyer Emmy Cohen had been retained by the homeowner.

She had put in a call to Windrow. It was still on his answering device.

He hadn't returned the call.

The rent was due.

He pulled his hands out of his armpits and looked at them in the dark.

One half to the landlord. It would be just what he needed to make up the difference between what he had in the bank and what he needed to make the rent. That left him a hundred and fifty dollars, mad money. A retainer. Forget Bruce.

The first thing to do would be to talk to Concepción. Bdeniowitz and Gleason had already done that, but they hadn't known about the telephone call, or its significance. Besides, they were stupid.

Another thing to do, contact Emmy Cohen, wish her good luck with the swimming pool, and get her to find a copy of Sweet Jesus O'Ryan's real will.

A third thing to do, maybe, was see if that red Ford would get him to Reward, California, and see what there was to see in O'Ryan's shack. Maybe talk to this Hardpan character about the old days.

Windrow frowned. A trip to the south end of the San Joaquin and back, with a little professional snooping at the far end, meant at least a day out of the city. He'd already lost a week to lethargy and the hospital. Would another day make any difference?

The freighter on the Bay emitted another long, low groan from its foghorn, a good thirty seconds worth. Its reverberations wafted investigatorily among the hard surfaces of the bricked canyons and paved gulches in downtown San Francisco, three, four, five; strong, long echoes.

Above him, the rat dropped some small item down the stairwell; it bounced off the first floor landing and hit the street door.

Windrow bit his lip. The time spent riding around in the desert would have to make a difference. The mere possibility of a second will had been enough to shake up Woodruff and Neil, perhaps enough for them to start killing people, if not each other. There must have been some other angle, something Windrow hadn't noticed… .

He nodded his head in the dark, and tapped his foot on the stair tread. He had a cerebral rhythm, could feel nodes of it. He had some kind of metabolic empathy with its amplitude or period. He tapped his foot to let it know he was listening, to help it reappear on time, like a timed silence in the middle of a song presaged a consensus downbeat, three, four, and… Woodruff and Neil had some other problem related to O'Ryan's will, and Windrow's innocent lie had inadvertently reinforced their suspicions. Of course their idea of a second will, the possibility of its existence, perhaps a clue to its location, would be more real to them than to Windrow: Windrow had merely extemporized its existence, just to get a foot in the door, to have a look around. But they didn't know that. They'd been startled to hear that a total stranger had any idea of it. Startled, and maybe a little bit scared; panicked, even. If this guy Windrow knew about it, there was only one person he might have heard it from: Jodie Ryan.

Windrow pursed his lips. His emotional attachment to Jodie had led him to want to help her, to take the initiative when he'd thought her in trouble, but his fondness for Jodie had distracted him from a new possibility, that his little white lie had put Jodie on the spot.

At least two people, Woodruff and Neil, would have
wanted to ask her a question: namely, what's this about another will,
honey
?

Pamela Neil was dead. That left Woodruff.

Windrow stood up. It looked like the trip to O'Ryan's shack was inevitable. But what about that damned phone call?

He'd have to talk to Concepción before he left.

He fingered the two halves of the hundred dollar bill, turned, and strode down the hall to his office.

And pay the rent, he muttered to himself, searching in his pockets for his keys. Need some paper clips and a bottle of scotch, too. He put the two halves of the torn bill in one hand and rummaged in his pockets. No keys. He switched the paper into the other hand and found the keys in his left hip pocket, right where Opium Jade had playfully put them, after she'd snatched them from the ignition of the Ford, and while she'd kissed him goodnight.

He smiled, grimly, as he turned the key in the lock of his office door, and turned the knob.

Then he hit his head on the pebbled glass. The door hadn't opened. But, assuming it would after he'd unlocked it, he had walked right into it.

He ducked, flattened himself against the wall next to the door, and listened, scarcely breathing. He could hear nothing. Not even the rat made a sound.

Then the ship's horn again, a long, low, single note, a pause, then a short blast, that echoed up and down the street outside. Poking around in the fog, looking for a way out, an inarticulate urge in a befuddled mind.

Windrow looked at the keys dangling from the lock, still swinging slightly. Thinking his office door locked, he'd turned the key in the cylinder a full circle. That should have
un
locked it. But it hadn't. Instead, he'd locked the
door, which meant that someone had unlocked it and left it that way.

He waited, listening. He heard nothing. He smelled nothing. He saw nothing.

Down the hall, the rat began its nocturnal chores again. After a while, a truck chattered down Folsom Street.

After a long time, he admitted to himself what he already knew. If someone had been waiting to talk to him, they would have said something by now. If someone had wanted to shoot him, he'd already made himself a splendid target.

Logic is very reassuring.

Carefully, he reached up to the dangling keys and operated the lock. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Nothing happened.

He sprang out of his crouch and dove through the door. Something soft met him, something soft and… inanimate.

He put out his hands to help himself up, and one of them found a leg or an arm. He whimpered and recoiled. Soft and warm, with cloth around it. But not soft enough, and not quite warm enough.

He caused light with the switch and looked.

He was shaking. Better to be shot at than to embrace a dead body.

Concepción Alvarez would never tell him anything.

P
ETREL GLEASON STOOD OVER THE LIFELESS FORM OF
Concepción Alvarez. He squinted down through the smoke of a cigarette whose drooping ash, though not extending quite so far, coped almost perfectly the curve his nose launched away from his face. He held his head to one side and maintained a recently wolfed hotdog in its place. His eyes were tired, multiple lines extended backwards from them toward each temple, discolored flesh encircled them, and the musculature that might pull his mouth into a smile didn't, but formed two deep downward clefts, one on each side of the descending corners of his mouth.

The smoke did not obscure his eyeful of death, no more than the sheet that covered her. The guts of flash bulbs fused to make a magnesium light that made the blue smoke bluer and the bright after-image of the sheet dance in his eyes. From a lower lip the camera spit out each stark image of an overlit, nameless room. A technician not as tired as Gleason, with a more clinical approach to sudden death, dusted white powder on the black telephone on Windrow's desk, revealing a solid mass of fingerprint whorls, and muttered Aha. Gleason shifted his eyes to the fingerprint man, held them there for a moment, then looked to the corpse.

He'd touched it earlier, when he'd first arrived, helping the coroner's assistant examine her. The neck was broken:
a job difficult to affect, but clean. She'd still been soft and warm, only her naturally dark color slowly leading the last changes, greying the rear guard of the body's sudden elision from life to death. He'd been reminded of a squirrel he'd found years before beneath a tree out of which it had fallen, still soft, still warm, the little machine winding down around the severed connection, its broken neck, its head dangling from the body like a sponge ball hanging by a rubber band off a wooden paddle.

Many cigarettes. Their butts lay crushed on the board floor around the front of Windrow's desk. The nicotine and the death brightened the effects of the light in the room. Light danced on the edges of everything except Windrow, who sat over a drink in a dark corner behind his desk, brooding silently.

In fact, Gleason wasn't sure if his perception of the light were attenuated by the horror of the scene, or the nicotine, or by the cocaine he'd filched from the ounce discovered at the scene of Pamela Neil's death. He hadn't been around long enough not to be surprised by this drug's particular superfluous qualities, but he had been around long enough to recognize in his nostrils the specific sting of methedrine. Mrs. Neil's cocaine had been heavily cut with speed. He'd not expected the powerful sting and the tears it brought to his eyes. He sniffled. Maybe it was dexedrine. You'd think a rich creampuff like her would have better connections. Anyway, being tired, he was grateful for the stimulus.

Windrow permitted a tic at one corner of his mouth to betray his amusement at the audible congestion in Gleason's nose, then forgot about it. The memory of colliding with the still warm body on the floor, where there should have been nothing but floor and maybe if only maybe a few bullets slapping overhead, eclipsed his indifferent opinion of
Gleason's mild indiscretions with the nose candy. Staying awake would always be a problem in Gleason's line of work, as it sometimes was in Windrow's, but thinking straight in the face of death presented a problem, too.

Windrow sat over his drink and stared at the corner of the sheet visible beyond the top of his desk. Periodically, one of the people from the crime laboratory passed between him and the body, muttering Latin undertones, but he took no notice of them. Twice he restrained himself from throwing his glass against the wall behind the door, a practice he'd found therapeutic in the past, when solutions or sense proved elusive, as now they seemed bent on proving themselves. He contented himself with imagining the amber rivulets of scotch following the wall down to the coving and the smashed bits of glass on the floor. There was some satisfaction to that.

Concepción Alvarez had been a pretty girl. Windrow knew that she was the sole surviving member of a large and politically active family from El Salvador, wiped out by way of a simpleminded solution to the differences between Right and Left. She'd been eighteen when it happened. Assured of a similar fate had she remained in her own country, she immigrated illegally to the United States with the idea of raising money to do the revolution some good.

After six months of poverty and culture shock, she'd gone to work for Pamela Neil at fifty dollars a week, plus room and board.

Jodie Ryan had a room in the basement of Pamela Neil's mansion. She used it when she was working in San Francisco. Concepción had a room just like it on the other side of the bathroom they shared. They became friends.

Jodie had described to Windrow how Concepción had covered the walls of her room with revolutionary posters, and surrounded her bed with books. For two years, while
she worked for Woodruff and Neil, she educated herself. She taught herself English. Gradually, she had made herself aware of Che Guevara and Castro, of Benito Juárez and Zapata, of Thomas Jefferson, of Allende, Patrice Lamumba, Ho Chi Minh, the American, French, Chinese and Russian Revolutions, and other political and historical figures and processes. She discovered Sartre, Marcuse, Marx and the U.S. Constitution.

You know, Jodie Ryan had said to Windrow one day, it's not all theory with her.

Windrow had nibbled her ear and said, No? It isn't?

She told him that Concepción had found a man in Daly City who would sell anybody all the semi-automatic carbines anybody wanted for a hundred dollars apiece. Cash.

Windrow had shrugged. You got a buyer, you got a seller, you got a market. Interesting, but an old story. “Then she told me,” Jodie had said, “that she knows Pamela Neil spends about four thousand a month on cocaine.”

“One of the risks you run being extravagant,” Windrow had pointed out, “is that there are always people out there somewhere who think they could spend your money a little more wisely than you do. Take the government, for example …”

“Right,” Jodie had said. “I told her as much, and she walked out. I thought she'd left, and didn't really know what to do. Then she came back with a book and showed it to me. It was a collection of remarks by all kinds of people, philosophers mainly, opened to a particular page. The line she showed me said in effect, that the trick to being a servant is to rule the master.”

“Was she referring to the situation in El Salvador, or did Concepción intend to become Pamela Neil's connection for cocaine?”