Downstairs again, I tried not to look at the bloodstained carpet. No good; it drew my eyes magnetically. They could have cleaned it up, I thought. Or Dana could have come and done that — aired the place out, made it decent for Eb when he came home. It didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t been here. She wanted no part of this house anymore, no part of Eberhardt’s life; she was back in Palo Alto, waiting in her law professor’s bed to find out if Eb lived or died.
I hope she’s still suffering a little, I thought. I hope she has long nights and bad dreams.
I made a promise to myself that I would come back in a few days and call a cleaning service and have them pick up the carpet. Maybe nobody else cared about those stains, but I did. At least I could see to it that they were erased from the carpet, even if I could never erase them from my memory, or Eberhardt from his.
On the way back to Pacific Heights I made two stops. The first was at a liquor store on 24th Street, where I bought a copy of the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle. There was nothing on the front page about Eb or the police investigation. Other news, national and local, had kicked it onto one of the inside pages, or maybe too much time had passed and they had quit writing about it altogether; I didn’t bother to look. Instead I turned to the financial section and checked for a stock listing on Mid-Pacific Electronics.
No listing. Which meant what? Either the company was too small or too insolvent to warrant one, I thought, or else they had not gone public with their stock. In any case, it would take some checking to find out how much a share of Mid-Pacific was worth, and just what kind of outfit it was.
My second stop was at a service station on Market, to get a tankful of gas and to have a look at the directory in their public telephone booth. There was a local listing for Mid-Pacific Electronics, it turned out: an address on Pine Street in the Financial District. I thought about dialing the number, but I didn’t do it. Even if anyone was around on Sunday, which was unlikely, I wanted more information before I started asking questions of the company personnel.
All the parking places near my building were taken; I had to leave the car three blocks away and walk uphill. By the time I let myself into my flat, I was winded and coated with an oily sweat. I shrugged out of my overcoat — and the telephone bell went off.
It was Kerry. “My God,” she said, “where have you been?”
“Why?”
“I tried to call you a little while ago and there was no answer. You didn’t go out, did you?”
“No. I was sleeping.”
“Didn’t you hear the phone?”
“I turned the bell down on it.”
Pause. Then she said, “You sound... odd.”
“I just woke up. I’m a little groggy.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“How’s your arm?”
“Still stiff. No pain, though.”
“That’s good. Did you eat something?”
“I fried a couple of eggs,” I said.
Another pause. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “How about if I bake a lasagna and bring it over? We could have a quiet dinner together—”
“No. Not today.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t be very good company. Maybe tomorrow night.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Just not in the mood for visitors.”
“Well... I’ll be here if you need me.”
“I know you will.”
“I’ll call you in the morning, if I don’t hear from you sooner.”
“No, let me call you.”
“Why? You’re not planning to go out somewhere tomorrow...”
“I’ll call you,” I said and put the receiver down.
My stomach was growling; I hadn’t eaten the eggs I’d fried earlier; I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I dumped the cold eggs out of the pan, fried some more, and washed them down with gulps of milk. Then I went back to bed. There was nothing I could do until tomorrow; Mid-Pacific Electronics would have to wait until then.
So would Mau Yee, the son of a bitch, whoever and whatever he was.
Six
At nine-thirty Monday morning I was sitting in a cubicle at the Hall of Justice with an inspector named Richard Loo. I did not know him, but he knew who I was; there wasn’t a cop in the city who didn’t know who I was these days. When I went up to General Works and told the desk man I wanted to see somebody on the Gang Task Force, I had to wait less than five minutes before Loo came out. Two minutes after that we were in the cubicle for a private talk.
The Gang Task Force had been formed in 1977, when a pair of Chinese youth gangs — the foreign-born Wah Ching and the American-born Chung Ching Yee or “Joe Boys,” named after its leader — had gone on a rampage against each other over territorial rights to gambling and extortion rackets. There had been open warfare on the streets, several shootings and killings in and out of Chinatown, and it had culminated when three Joe Boys armed with automatic weapons walked into a popular Washington Street restaurant one Sunday night and opened fire on a group of Wah Ching; five people had been killed and eleven others injured. The Golden Dragon Massacre, as the media called it after the name of the restaurant, had made headlines all over the country and led to the mayor posting a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the gunmen. The Gang Task Force, comprised of white and Oriental cops, had tracked down the perpetrators and put an end to the warfare. In order to keep it from flaring up again, and to maintain a close watch on underworld activities in the Chinese community, they remained an active arm of the Department.
Loo had been with the task force since its inception, he told me. He was in his late thirties, polite, quiet, studious-looking in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a neat business suit. He shook my good hand with an air of respectful solemnity, murmured sympathetic words about Eberhardt and what had happened to me; I got the impression that he was apologizing, not for himself but for the Chinese population in general, and that in his own way he was just as angry as I was. On the way to the cubicle he wondered solicitously if I ought to be up and around so soon. I told him I was a fast healer, lied about how I felt, and he let it go at that.
Now, sitting across a table from me, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t have much to tell you. All the doors seem to be closed in Chinatown. The shooting of a police officer... well, no one wants to get involved.”
I was there to ask him about Mau Yee, but I did not want to make him suspicious by doing it straight out. There would be a way to work in the question later on. I said, “What about the case Eberhardt was working on? The death of a woman in one of the projects?”
“Doesn’t seem to be anything there. The woman, Polly Soon, fell from a walkway at the Ping Yuen project on Pacific — fifth-floor walkway, right outside her apartment. She was a common hooker, worked the bars along Grant and in North Beach.”
“Could she have been murdered?”
“The coroner didn’t find anything to make us think so,” Loo said. “Neither did the lieutenant. I talked to the same people he did, including an informer named Kam Fong; none of Polly Soon’s neighbors saw it happen, no one claims to know anything about it. She didn’t work with a pimp; strictly free lance. Half a dozen arrests for soliciting, but that’s all — no underworld ties of any kind. I think her death was probably an accident.”
“This informer — Kam Fong, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Had Eberhardt used him before?”