Blood Type Page 15

  “Gimmeabreak, fer Chrissakes,” a voice pleaded from somewhere overhead. “Whatta ya, a frigging Mormon?”

  I backed onto the sidewalk to where I could look up and see Tony Milano, shirtless in the open window, holding back a drape and looking down on me with the calculated cockiness of the young Stallone.

  I said my name and reminded him of where we’d met.

  “The detective,” Tony mumbled. “Whatsa problem, you need a date?”

  “I’d just like to talk to you some more about Tom.”

  “If you’re takin’ up a collection to cover the frigging coffin, yer wastin’ yer time ’cause I gave at the office.”

  “It won’t cost you anything but time to talk to me, Tony. Guaranteed.”

  “Time’s something I don’t got a lot of, now I’m on nights. What I got I save for the ladies.”

  “Five minutes,” I said. “We’ll talk while you get dressed, and I’ll be finished by the time you’re ready.”

  Tony leaned out the bay window and looked up and down the block. “Hey. This is San Francisco. I don’t get naked in front of nothing but a mirror or a broad, and the broad goes first to make sure that’s what the fuck she is.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll stay down here. We can entertain the neighbors.”

  The prospect didn’t please him. “Ah, what the hell. I been thinkin’ about Tommy a lot lately. Me and him, we ran the best EMU on the street. The fucking new guy don’t have the brains God gave linguini.”

  A buzzer buzzed. I pushed through the door and climbed to the second floor and entered a room that was straight out of the Godfather movies. It was decorated in brocaded Old World fabrics and featured squat and heavily stuffed furnishings, a litter of religious icons, and somehow, through the selection and arrangement of drapes and blinds and lamp shades, a scrim of ocher light that seemed to shine straight from Napoli as well. Tony must have lived with Mom.

  Towel tucked around his waist, toothbrush jaunty in his mouth, feet elegant in red-lined leather slippers, neck adorned in matching ropes of gold, Tony Milano opened the door and waved me inside in time to the Harry Connick ballad playing in the background. When I started to speak, he cut me off with a shake of his head and disappeared into a back bedroom, only to appear a moment later wearing skintight black slacks and white silk socks and a third gold chain, this one cinched as tight as a cleric’s collar around his muscled neck. His pecs and delts bespoke of pumping iron, his hair of continual evaluation and regular lubrication, his teeth of Mendelian perfection. As he shoved his arms into a silver shirt and pulled it around his torso, his routine was so reminiscent of Saturday Night Fever I expected the beat to turn to disco and Tony to enlighten me on the glories of his love life at the pitch of a Bee Gee falsetto.

  Luckily it didn’t get that far. Tony went to a drawer, got out a bristly shoe brush, and bent to polish his already burnished boots. When the shine was imperceptibly improved, he looked up. “So. You trying to make like Sammy the Spade or what?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You think I got something you need?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  He shrugged. “What’s to know? Tommy goes to the ’Loin and gets hammered by a frigging blood bag, doesn’t get help till the vitals are flat and he’s history. Happens all the time. That’s why they got a morgue.”

  “Did Tom take drugs, Tony?”

  “Tommy? Are you kiddin’? Tommy said a Hail Mary if he had a beer.”

  “Do you know how he died?”

  Tony shrugged. “I heard a mugging.”

  “Someone shot him up.”

  “With what?”

  “Epinephrine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You carry that stuff in your rig?”

  Tony nodded. “For the allergies. Have to get authority from base to inject it, but yeah, we got it. How the hell did the blood bag get hold of it?”

  “Some people don’t think that’s the way it went down. The police, for example, think Tom loaded one up and killed himself.”

  Tony swore. “That would figure, right?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “More stool time at Winchell’s for the fuzz if it’s Suzy in the side. But that don’t make it true.” Tony looked out the window. “I got to go.”

  “Do you have any reason to think Tom was murdered, Tony?”

  “You mean like someone took him out?”

  I nodded. “Like that.”

  He curled a pulpy lip. “Why the fuck would they do that? I mean, Tommy was as straight as my dick in the morning—he never crossed no one. The worst I ever seen him do was cop some AZT from a D.O.A., then give it out later on to some slime who needed it. A fuckin’ Robin Hood, he was.”

  “What about the Healthways thing?”

  “The time with the newspaper? Yeah, some of the medics got jammed up by that one. Jimmy Dickerson down the block—Jimmy Pickle, we call him—he had a mean on for a couple weeks after, but I don’t think he traced it back to Tommy. Anyways, Jimmy’s making twice the bread he was driving an EMU, so I can’t see him in Tommy’s face over the Healthways thing.”

  “What’s Jimmy doing now?”

  “Pilots a limo for some heavyweight. Like I said, a real pillow.”

  “Is the heavyweight named Sands?”

  “Who knows? Me and Jimmy, we had a falling-out.” Tony admired the image in the mirror, then consulted the watch on his wrist. “Hey. I got a lady waiting at the Greco. And this one won’t wait long.”

  “I guess your job gets in the way of your social life sometimes,” I said, to keep it going while I made sure I had everything I’d come for.

  Tony’s black eyes shone as brightly as his boots. “You don’t got a clue, do you, Pops? The ladies get wet just hearing about the shit I’m into. They think it means I care, right?—hauling blood bags off the street. What I don’t tell them is, the job is mint ’cause I don’t fucking give a shit.”

  “Did Tom feel the same way?”

  “Tommy? He was better than a frigging priest, man; always trying to console the creeps. Not just to figure out what went down, either—Tommy not only had to know what, he had to know why. Then he’d start with how they could fix it up—do this, don’t do that; go see this person or that office; take this test or that test—half the time he didn’t wait till he’d finished the CPR before he started with the advice. Like somebody’s fucking mother, he was.” Tony laughed to himself. “As if the blood bags would actually do anything even if there was a way out of the sewer.” Tony shook his head. “People get used to the smell of it, man; there’s no use trying to change them. Me, I say load ’em up and haul ’em off, then hose down the unit and go after the next one before they clog the system like a two-week turd in a flophouse toilet.”

  “But not Tommy.”

  Tony shook his head. “The dude got involved, you know? Some frigging domestic thing, woman cuts her husband a new asshole with a blade the size of a ruler, Tommy goes back on his own time to see how she’s getting along without the bastard. Half the time she’s at the hospital—right?—begging the asshole to forgive her even though she can hardly talk ’cause of the teeth he wrecked.” Tony muttered an oath that seemed directed in part at his departed partner. “You can’t let it bend you like that, you know? I mean, you got to stay smooth or you’ll end up down the drain with the rest of ’em.”

  Tony glanced disdainfully in the general direction of the Tenderloin, as though it was the repository of everything he despised. In the meantime, his philosophy lingered long enough for me to compare it to my own and find too many points of congruence.

  “Was there any particular place or person Tom seemed interested in lately?” I asked quickly, as Tony rearranged his chains.

  He shrugged. “Not that I remember. Only his little brother,” he added after a moment.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Nicky? The Nick was a foamer, man.”

  “Foamer?”
>
  “Foaming at the mouth. Running without a leash. A certified crazoid.” Tony laughed dryly. “The last few months, whenever we’d roll through the ’Loin, Tommy would go hunt for the fucker, to see how the poor bastard was doing. And you know what little brother would do when he saw him coming?”

  “What?”

  “Run the other way. Brotherly fucking love, man; it’s beautiful.” Tony laughed derisively. “Tommy kept wondering what was wrong with the guy. Hell, I knew what was wrong with him; he was a fucking loony toon.”

  “Where was Nicky living, do you know?”

  He shrugged. “I never went up there, man. Not after the first time we ran into the guy. Tommy, he seemed glad to see him, but me, I see right away I don’t want to be on the same planet with the dude.”

  “You must know approximately where he lived if Tom went there frequently,” I persisted.

  “Somewhere in the ’Loin, that’s all I know. I think he had a room somewhere on Ellis, maybe, him and some girl.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Who knows? But she must have been crazy, too, right? Have to be a crazoid to fuck one.”

  “Did Tom ever say anything to you about his brother being sick?”

  “He was sick, all right. Schizo to the max.”

  “I mean physically.”

  “Hey. Everyone in the ’Loin is sick. I take Listerine five times a day to kill the shit I breathe down there.” Tony hitched up his pants. “That’s all I got to say about Mister Nicky Crandall. Ever.”

  He walked to the door and waited for me to join him. I took my time getting there. “You ever drive an ambulance for Healthways, Tony?” I asked along the way.

  By the time I had my hand on the knob, Tony Milano was rigid at my side. “I got nothing to say about that shit—I got out and I’m staying out. You get your cock and mine both in a grinder you start sticking it into Healthways, man. You don’t want someone hauling you off to General with the rest of the blood bags, you’ll leave Healthways the fuck alone.”

  NINETEEN

  Her apartment was on the way back to my place, the hour was late enough not to wake her the way I had awakened Tony Milano, and when I tried to call her, I got a busy signal. Interpreting the circumstances as an engraved invitation to come calling, I walked the three blocks to the Crandall residence and rang the bell.

  Clarissa was in a pink housecoat, hair in a yellow towel, feet bare and blue-veined, face flushed with the heat of her shower and her race to the door. There was an open, anticipatory look on her face when she opened it, but it closed like a fist when she saw me. “You said you’d call first,” she protested.

  “You said you’d edit your answering machine.”

  She winced. “I forgot. I hope his mother didn’t …” Her lip twitched twice. “But then she wouldn’t, would she?”

  Which had us on the wrong foot already. Her cavalier hostility toward anything to do with Tom still angered me, implying as it did a jaundiced view of her husband’s life and what it represented and an irreverent dismissal of his death. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember a time Clarissa Crandall hadn’t given me a bad impression, whether through the hearsay of her husband’s anguished chronicles or the direct testimony of her own hard-edged aplomb.

  “You seem to be bearing up marvelously, Widow Crandall,” I said with more sarcasm than I’d planned. “Maybe you should give workshops in grief management. Advise the folks at the local hospice how to cope.”

  She started to lash back, then sighed, then softened. “I deserved that. Almost. It’s just that it’s been … difficult lately. This thing has knocked me for a loop.”

  “By ‘thing’ you mean your husband’s death.”

  “That. The reasons for it. Mostly my reaction to it.”

  “You sound surprised that you feel bad.”

  “I’m surprised I feel anything at all.” She gathered the housecoat about her. “I know you think I’m to blame for what Tom and I were going through, but you really can’t appreciate what I’ve had to … what he made me think about myself.” Her stuttered plea for understanding drifted into silence, as though it was too flawed to bear fruit.

  “I’ve done enough domestic work to know that no one has a monopoly on fault between a husband and wife, Mrs. Crandall. No matter how it starts, at some point it’s tit for tat.”

  “More like a heart for a heart.” She looked for a smile and found only a miniature. “So maybe you can cut me some slack. Just a little?”

  “Just so I don’t have to do the same for Mr. Sands.”

  The smile hardened at the edges. “Mr. Sands cuts his own swath, Mr. Tanner. He doesn’t need help from either of us.”

  “You sound a tad disillusioned, Mrs. Crandall.”

  “I don’t know what I am anymore. Except exhausted.” She tugged her collar away from her neck and shook her head as if the jolt would make her more perceptive. “So what are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I thought it might be a good time for me to look through Tom’s things.”

  “Remind me again why you think you have to.”

  “I’m still looking for a line on his brother. I’m hoping something in Tom’s effects will tell me where he is.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “I’m not sure, except so far all roads seem to lead to Nicky. Do you—”

  She turned to look at the clock in the foyer, then quickly cut me off. “They’re redoing the promo materials at the hotel. I have to make sure they get my part right—if I’m not there when they go to the printer, they’ll misspell my name and use a ten-year-old glossy of Lainie Kazan. How long do you think you’ll be?”

  I shrugged. “Twenty minutes?”

  “I can give you fifteen.”

  Like all celebrities, she spent much of her life negotiating over her time. I decided to take what she gave me and come back later if I had to.

  Clarissa stepped away from the doorway and let me into the apartment. The foyer was small and dark and nondescript except for a massive mink coat that hung like a thick black flag from an antique rack in a corner, a flag for the forces of evil. The living room was a refreshing change, bright and airy, framed by a baby grand on one side and a pair of massive speakers and two attendant tape decks on the other. Some of it commercially printed, much of it in hand notation, sheet music was so prevalent throughout that the room seemed tiled in black and white.

  The curtains were flowered and frilly, the furnishings thin and insubstantial, the books on the shelves exclusively about music and musicians, including a set of the original Grove; the photos propped on every surface formed a visual autobiography of the star. The atmosphere was so attuned to Clarissa and her talent that I wondered if Tom had ever been allowed to enter it. And how he could survive if that was the only atmosphere available.

  Clarissa endured my inventory from the center of the room, arms crossed, fingers worrying the sash at her waist. “Tom’s office is in there.” She pointed toward a doorway at the rear of the apartment. “It was his bedroom, too, actually. Since we kept such different hours, we …” She abandoned the explanation couples always seem obliged to give when you learn they don’t sleep in the same bed.

  “I assume that’s where you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for,” she went on. “I’ve been going through his things, getting ready to … dispose of them. You look like you and Tom were about the same size. If you see any items you like, feel free to—”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but thanks. Dead men’s clothing gives me hives. Besides, I outweighed him by forty pounds.”

  She cocked her head. “Really? You don’t look it.”

  That she might have paid me a compliment discombobulated her momentarily. “His books, then,” she managed when she was back in form. “I’m just going to haul them to the library sale or the dump, so you’d be doing me a favor to take some.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe one or two.”

  “There are
some empty boxes in there, I think. Load up. All you want. Really.”

  I thanked her and headed for the door. “I’ll be in the back bedroom if you need me,” she said, patting her towel, uncinching the sash. “But I truly do have to leave in a short while.”

  “Have you thrown anything of Tom’s away?” I asked. “Or put it somewhere else?”

  She stopped fussing and looked at me. “Nothing that would interest you. Just silly things. Sexy things, mostly, back from when we used to do … stunts.” She rubbed her face with a hand that was stiff with the work of grief. “God. It seems like a century since we were happy. I thought the romance would never end, until I realized it already had.”

  I glanced at the photos on the piano and specifically at a snapshot of her late husband that was featured in a silver frame. Tom was posed beside his ambulance, smiling with calm and contentment, as sunny as I’d ever seen him. “That’s not the way he saw it,” I said.

  “He didn’t see it at all. That was the problem.”

  With a grimace more painful than I intended to provoke, Clarissa turned on her naked heel and was gone. Freed from being a dead man’s advocate, I went to the room she had indicated, flipped on the light, and began to look around.

  It was a cell, of course—spartan, dark, and dreary, just the way Tom would have liked it. Small cot; smaller desk and typist’s chair; reading light; typewriter; radio and chest of drawers. One wall was a window onto a light well, another a cardboard wardrobe containing Tom’s normal rumpled raiment and two crisply pressed work uniforms. Rising up the remaining wall, five shelves of bricks-and-boards were crammed with the only indulgences the room enjoyed.

  Except for a variety of texts on emergency medicine and some handbooks from a night course in hypnotism Tom had evidently taken at some point, the books were primarily history and political philosophy: Kant and Hegel; Rousseau and Locke; even Bundy and Boorstin and Kissinger. There were turgid-looking tomes on Greek city-states and Renaissance craft guilds and more sexy volumes detailing such cultural icons as the Dreyfus Affair and the Scopes trial. The few novels in evidence—Gore Vidal’s historicals, Charles McCarry’s internationals, Ward Just’s politicals—were piled behind the closet door as though Tom regarded them as contraband.