“Take a few shallow breaths before you start to hyperventilate.”
“Listen, don’t tell me what—”
The telephone on his desk went off.
The sudden clamor jerked him half around, as if with an electric shock. In the quiet that followed, the first thing I could hear was the irregular rasp of his breathing. He looked back at me as the bell sounded again. I was on my feet, too, by then.
“Go ahead, answer it,” I told him. “Keep your head.”
He went into his office, picked up just after the third ring. I timed the lifting of the secretary’s phone to coincide, so there would not be a second click on the open line.
“Yes,” he said, “Cohalan.”
“You know who this is.” The voice was harsh, muffled, indistinctively male. “You got the money?”
“I told you I’d have it. This is the last, you promised me...”
“Seventy-five thousand, and you never hear from me again.”
“Where this time?”
“Golden Gate Park. Kennedy Drive, by the buffalo pen. Put it in the trash barrel beside the bench there.”
Cohalan was watching me through the open doorway. I shook my head at him. He said into the phone, “Can’t we make it someplace else? What if there’re people around?”
“Just do what you’re told. Nine P.M. sharp.”
“Nine? That’s two hours...”
“Be there. With the cash.”
The line went dead.
I cradled the secretary’s phone. Cohalan was still standing alongside his desk, hanging onto his receiver, when I moved into the cubicle.
“Put it down, Mr. Cohalan.”
“What? Oh... yes.” The receiver slid from his fingers, made a clattering noise in the cradle. “Christ,” he said then.
“You all right?”
His head bobbed up and down a couple of times. He ran a hand over his face, yanked hard on his lower lip, and then swung away to where the big cowhide briefcase lay. The cash was packed in there; he’d shown it to me when I first arrived. He picked up the case, set it down again. Rubbed and yanked at his face another time.
“Maybe I shouldn’t risk the money,” he said.
He wasn’t talking to me so I made no answer.
“I could leave it right here where it’ll be safe. Stick a phone book or something in the case for weight.” He sank into his chair; popped up again like a jack-in-the-box. “No, what’s the matter with me; that won’t work. I’m not thinking straight. He might open the case in the park. No telling what he’d do if the money’s not there. And he’s got to have it when the police come. Right? In his possession?”
“Yes.”
“All right. But for God’s sake don’t let him get away with it.”
“He won’t get away with it.”
Another jerky nod. “When’re you leaving?”
“Right now,” I said. “You stay put until at least eight-thirty. It won’t take you more than twenty minutes to get out to the park.”
“I don’t know if I can get through another hour of waiting around here.”
“Keep telling yourself it’ll be over soon. Get yourself calmed down. The state you’re in now, you shouldn’t be behind the wheel.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Come straight back here after you make the drop. You’ll hear from me as soon as I have anything to report.”
“Just don’t make me wait too long,” Cohalan said. And then, again and to himself, “I’ll be okay.”
Cohalan’s office building was on Kearney, not far from where Kerry works at the Bates and Carpenter ad agency on lower Geary. She was on my mind, as she often is, as I drove down to Geary and turned west toward the park. Emily, too — sweet, troubled little Emily. My thoughts prompted me to lift the car phone and call the condo. The sitter answered; Kerry wasn’t home yet. Like me, she puts in a lot of overtime night work. A wonder we manage to spend as much time together as we do... as much time with Emily as we do, jointly and separately. Which was part of the problem, of course. A bigger part than we’d anticipated and one that was not easily solved.
I tried her private number at B and C and got her voice mail. In transit, probably, the same as I was: Two among the many sets of headlights crossing the dark city just now. Urban night riders, that was us. Except that she was going home, and I was on my way to nail a shakedown artist for a paying client.
That started me thinking about the kind of work I do. One of the downsides of urban night riding is that it gives vent to introspection and, sometimes, dark self-analysis. Skip traces, insurance claims investigations, employee background checks — they’re the meat of my business. There used to be some challenge to jobs like that, some creative maneuvering required, but nowadays it’s little more than routine legwork (mine) and a lot of computer time (Tamara Corbin, my techno-whiz assistant). I don’t get to use my head as much as I once did. My problem, in Tamara’s Generation X opinion, was that I was a “retro private eye,” pining away for the old days and old ways. True enough; I never have adapted well to change. The detective racket just isn’t as stimulating or satisfying after thirty-plus years and with a new set of rules.
Every now and then, though, a case comes along that stirs the juices — one with some spark and sizzle and a much higher satisfaction level than the run-of-the-mill stuff. I live for cases like that; they’re what keep me from packing it in, taking an early retirement at age sixty. They usually involve a felony of some sort and sometimes a whisper if not a shout of danger, and they allow me to use my full complement of functioning brain cells. This Cohalan case, for instance. This one I liked, because bleeders — the blackmailers and extortionists and small-time grifters and other sociopathic opportunists who prey on the weak and gullible — are near the top of my list of worthless parasites, and I enjoy hell out of taking one down.
Yeah, this case I liked a whole lot.
2
Golden Gate Park has plenty of daytime attractions — museums, tiny lakes, rolling lawns and playing fields, windmills, an arboretum — but on a foggy November night it’s a mostly empty place to pass through on your way to somewhere else.
It does have its night denizens, of course, like any large park in any large city: homeless squatters, not all of whom are harmless, and predators on the prowl through its sprawling acres of shadows and nightshapes. On a night like this it also has an atmosphere of lonely isolation, the shifting fog hiding city lights and turning streetlamps and passing headlights into surreal blurs.
The buffalo enclosure is at the westward end, less than a mile from the ocean — the least-traveled section of the park after about eight P.M. There were no cars in the vicinity, moving or parked, when I came down Kennedy Drive. My lights picked out the fence on the north side, the rolling pastureland beyond; the trash barrel and bench were about halfway along, at the edge of the bicycle path that parallels the road.
I drove past there, looking for a place to park and wait. I didn’t want to sit on Kennedy Drive; a lone car close to the drop point would be too conspicuous. I had to do this right. If anything did not seem kosher, the whole thing might fail to go down the way it was supposed to.
The ideal spot came up fifty yards or so from the trash barrel, opposite the buffaloes’ feeding corral — a narrow road that led to Anglers Lodge where the city maintains casting pools for fly fishermen to practice on. Nobody was likely to go up there at night, and trees and shrubbery bordered one side, the shadows in close to them thickly clotted. Kennedy Drive was still empty in both directions, so I cut in past the Anglers Lodge sign and drove up the road until I found a place where I could turn around. Then I shut off my lights, made the U-turn, and coasted back down into the heavy shadows. From there I could see the drop point clearly enough, even with the low-riding fog. I shut off the engine, slumped down on the seat with my back against the door.