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  “I think someone has.”

  “Really? What did they conclude?”

  “That it’s pretty much the same as the relationship between partridge and quail.”

  “But they’re essentially the same thing.”

  “Exactly.”

  While Sands was digesting my fabrication, I looked around yet again, this time focusing on the gilt-framed figure on display above the fireplace, her naked flesh swelling to the illusion of three dimensions in the golden beam of a track light. My first impression was that the painting could pass for a Reubens. My second, as I examined it more closely, was that the model could pass for my client.

  “A little wine, women, and song for the troops, huh?” I said, averting my eyes in a spasm of embarrassment.

  “You could put it that way, I suppose.”

  “And Clarissa Crandall provides the song.”

  Sands gave me a peek at his legendary ferocity. “Only when she feels like it—I would never compel her to perform, for me or anyone.”

  “How gallant.”

  Sands’ jaw clenched until bubbles formed beneath his ear. “Be as smart as people say you are, Tanner; stay on my good side.” He started to embellish the suggestion but was interrupted by a waiter who appeared in the doorway with my drink on a silver tray. At a sign from Sands, he delivered it, awaited my approval, then disappeared.

  I looked at my host. “You’re not joining me?”

  “I quit drinking nine months ago.”

  “Nine months. Let’s see. Was that the day they sentenced Milken to jail or the day they let Boesky out?”

  Sands swore derisively. “Like most people unschooled in the intricacies of the financial markets and blind to the capital deficit that plagues the nation, you fail to appreciate Michael’s genius.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt he’s a genius. But I also don’t doubt he’s a crook.”

  Sands turned the color of the expensively packaged smut on the wall at his back. “The rules he breached, if any, are outmoded, even catastrophic, drags on the workings of the free market.”

  “The market hasn’t been free since the invention of money. What you guys mean when you sing its virtues is that you’re free to fleece the poor folk, which is what you’ve been doing in spades for the past ten years.”

  Sands was livid, but like all successful men he had learned to make anger an asset. “I’d love to enlighten you about corporate finance sometime, Mr. Tanner,” he retreated expansively, “but we’re not going to solve the nation’s fiscal crisis tonight, are we?”

  “Not unless we can regraduate the income tax.”

  He raised a brow. “I’m surprised you’re such a reactionary.”

  “And I’m surprised you aren’t ashamed of yourself.”

  Sands’ face flushed once again. “God save us from tiny minds. How do you think this country would have fared if there hadn’t been men like me around at pivotal periods like this? Men who took chances, pushed the limits, redefined the rules?”

  “I don’t know how we’d have fared,” I admitted. “And neither do you.”

  “I—” Sands forced himself to stop, then looked at his watch. “You flatter yourself if you think I have time for this. I’ve got a Cabinet secretary on hold, for Christ sakes.” He readjusted his necktie. “Why are you making Clarissa’s life so difficult?”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was.”

  “You admit following her last evening, I presume.”

  “I admit wanting to hear her sing.”

  “You followed her here after the second show. We have you on our security tape, so don’t try to deny it.”

  I shrugged. “It was late; I was concerned about her welfare. I wanted to make sure she got home all right.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I smiled. “Probably.”

  Sands tried to look sincere and succeeded in looking sheepish. “You misinterpret our relationship. My primary interest in Clarissa is her talent, which has been tragically underexposed.”

  “I agree with you about the talent. The part about the relationship is bullshit. To coin a phrase.”

  “Much as her husband liked to think so, we don’t spend our time making whoopie; we spend it charting appropriate paths for her career. Next month, for example, Clarissa makes her debut in Las Vegas. She’s opening for David Copperfield on the strip.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t make her disappear along with the dromedary.”

  Sands actually pouted. “I’m in a position to do great things for Clarissa. Why are you averse to that?”

  The question seemed genuine. “I’m all for Mrs. Crandall becoming a star. But I’m wondering whether the things you’ve done for her include removing certain irritants from her life. Irritants like her husband, for example.”

  The burden of answering my question seemed to tire him. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” he asked softly.

  “I have to work at it.”

  “I’m told you’re pressuring the police to treat the event as a homicide.”

  “Only if it’s appropriate.”

  “I can assure you that it isn’t.”

  “It’s going to take more than that, I’m afraid.”

  “Why? What makes you think there was anything sinister about it?”

  I met his look with what I hoped was equal insouciance. “A number of things. Including the fact that I’m in this room.”

  Sands closed his eyes for a moment, then went to the fire and warmed his hands even though the chilliest thing in the place was his regard for me. “I can cause you a lot of grief in this town,” he muttered with what sounded like regret, looking up at the nude woman who seemed about to jump off the mantel and onto his shoulders in some sort of oriental calisthenic.

  “I’m sure you can,” I said.

  “You would be wise to steer clear of me and my affairs and to cease your harassment of Ms. Crandall. If you do not, my people would like nothing better than to pressure you out of existence.”

  I smiled. “Professionally speaking, of course.”

  His stare was reminiscent of Hussein’s. “Of course.”

  “I can’t abandon a client, Mr. Sands. It’s just not done.”

  “I was under the impression you didn’t have a client.”

  “That was then; this is now.”

  Sands considered the possibilities. It took him quite a while—I imagine he had a million of them. “Is it Clarissa?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What possible interest would anyone but Clarissa have in what happened to her husband?”

  “You’d know better than I would, I imagine.”

  “Unless it’s Sandstone you’re after, and Clarissa is just a ruse.”

  “That’s a possibility, all right. I’m a tricky guy.”

  “On the other hand, I’ve never known the SEC or the U.S. attorney to use outside investigators.”

  “Neither have I, now that you mention it.”

  “So it’s got to be Deirdre.” His look could have melted my fillings.

  “Who’s that?” I said, and left the room and the scotch and the portrait of my naked client in the umbra of his mighty scowl. As I climbed in the limo, I worked at remembering that Sands and Chadwick were titans of finance, not henchmen of the Godfather. Then I reminded myself that from a lot of perspectives, including my own at times, there wasn’t that much difference.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Although the city fathers and mothers have begun calling it San Francisco’s new Barbary Coast, in reality the Tenderloin is just what Tony Milano said it was—San Francisco’s sink trap, the place where the flotsam and jetsam of humanity congregate before being flushed into the sewer of the prison system or the whirlpool of drug rehab or the permanent leaching pond of a pauper’s grave in Colma. It’s an area wrenched with mental illness, ravaged by alcohol and drugs, riddled with poverty, awash in homelessness, pervaded with despair. Much of it panders not to the best of us but to the worst, in th
e form of grimy bars, slimy sex shops, pathetic strip joints, by-the-hour hotels, and the hustlers and whores and con artists such forms of commerce spawn. The Tenderloin is a walk on the wild side, a descent into the maelstrom, a long day’s journey into night—I avoid it if I can. When I can’t, I carry a gun.

  Despite its reputation for degeneracy, the area boasts one conspicuous attraction. Its scabrous history and its degenerate present make the Tenderloin the only place in the heart of the city where property has remained relatively cheap. This fact hasn’t escaped the notice of the most heedless and ambitious groups in the modern world—Asian immigrants and real estate developers. As a result of the most enduring achievement of our venture in Vietnam, legions of the former now swarm like a hyperactive virus among the lethargy and lassitude of the indigenous organisms, nesting in run-down hotels, eking out a living from small restaurants and grocery outlets as well as less legal means of commerce, somehow managing to survive and even thrive in an environment that would petrify the rest of us. Simultaneously, the more adventuresome realtors in town have begun to snap up the failing hotels and blighted commercial buildings that ring the Tenderloin’s sclerotic heart, refurbishing them in the conviction that people won’t mind stepping over lunatics and winos and weaving their way through prostitutes and panhandlers if at the end of the gauntlet they are presented with a hotel room that costs less than a hundred bucks a night or an apartment that rents for less than six-fifty. And of course they’re right.

  As part of a story on what they called the “New Tendo,” a local newspaper recently conducted a survey of the area. Two years ago, there were sixty-three taverns in the Tenderloin; now there are only forty-five of them. The number of sex shops has likewise dwindled—from twenty-one to fifteen. The city fathers and mothers can legitimately regard this as progress, I suppose, but as I pushed my way through the door of Scanlon’s at just after one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, no one in the place seemed proud to be patronizing one of the surviving forty-five, or of anything else for that matter.

  There were four men and two women sitting at the bar, a man tending to business behind it, and several hulks of indeterminate gender and geometry hunched over the tables in the rear. The light was suitable for a stag film, the smell for a meth lab, the sound for an autopsy—the ambience was apparently designed to make delirium tremens a tonic.

  I took the stool closest to the door and waited for the bartender to notice me. After he had, I waited for him to decide that I’d waited long enough to let me know who called the shots—in joints like Scanlon’s, the customer is always wrong.

  He finally ambled my way, looking at anything but me, a greasy towel around his waist, the sleeves of a sub-white shirt rolled above his biceps, which were bulbous and elaborately tattooed, a combination that formerly suggested military service but now suggests a prison term.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he muttered in a tone that indicated my pleasure was the lowest priority in his life.

  “Beer. Draft if you’ve got it.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Heineken, then.”

  He smiled. The rims of his teeth were as dark as the booze in the bottles behind him. “Strike two.”

  “Henry’s.”

  He lifted a thumb. His fingernails were dyed to match his bicuspids. “You’re out, pal. Try somewhere north of Geary.” He started to turn away.

  “Bud. In the bottle.”

  He kept walking, elaborately nonchalant, as if business were so good he could afford to ignore me. But it was all an act—halfway down the bar he bent over and yanked open a cooler door, grabbed a bottle off a shelf, snapped off the cap on an opener screwed to the edge of the bar, and slid it my way with a shove that was carefully offhand and surprisingly unskilled. The bottle came to a stop halfway between us, which meant I had to get off my stool and fetch it, which may have been what he had in mind.

  When I was back on my stool, I pulled two pieces of paper from my pocket, my movements as languid as a cellist’s, and laid them side by side on the bar. One was real, the other phony. The former was a fifty-dollar bill; the latter was something called a Notice of Heirship. It had been invented and dictated by me an hour earlier, then typed inelegantly by my temporary secretary. I’d stapled it to the stiff blue backing that could make a laundry list look official, and folded it the way they fold wills before they slip them into pocket envelopes for storage in the vault. Given the gloom of the bar, I was hoping that from a distance the document looked potent enough to close the place down or have half the patrons jailed.

  After his curiosity got the best of him, the bartender slid my way a second time, on duckboards that quacked when he stepped on them. To justify his presence, he asked if I wanted another Bud, but his eyes were jumping from the fifty to the bogus notice and back the way kids jump on and off a skateboard.

  I shook my head at the inquiry about the beer.

  He shrugged. I stayed silent. He wanted to reestablish his omnipotence by retreating down the bar once more, but the lure of my bait wouldn’t let him.

  “New in town?” he asked, plucking a glass off the back of the bar and rubbing it with a towel that looked like he’d used it to wax his car.

  I sipped my beer and shook my head.

  “Thought maybe you were a tourist.”

  I smiled. “I didn’t know this place was on the Grayline.”

  “If they take a wrong turn out of the Hilton or the Pare Fifty-Five, this is the first place they come to that looks like they can ask directions without seeing naked women humping cocker spaniels. We get about five a day like that.” He laughed at an image that seemed to give him comfort. “They keep thinking no one would build a high-class hotel so close to a cesspool like this, so they’re sure they’ll eventually get out of it, but all they get is deeper in shit. By the time they’re scared enough to look in here, they’re pissed at everyone from their travel agent to the governor.” He gave the glass another swipe. “People from Kansas can’t believe human beings can live like this. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself.” He glanced at the notice one more time. “So what kind of business you in? Lawyer?”

  “Investigator.”

  “Who with? D.A.?”

  “Whoever pays the freight.”

  “So what’s that mean, exactly, an investigator?”

  “It means I look for things. Things or people.”

  “Which is it this time?”

  “People.”

  His eyes flicked toward his customers, none of whom seemed to feel more imperiled than they’d been when I arrived. “Which one?” the barman asked.

  As though this was just another day in just another job that was dense with the mundane, I put a fingertip on the Notice of Heirship and angled it so I could read it. “Nicholas Crandall.”

  “Crandall.” He nodded. “That must be Nicky.”

  “Must be.”

  “What’s he done this time?”

  “What did he do the last time?”

  The bartender gestured toward the back of the tavern. “Tossed a beer mug through the TV screen. Got tossed out on his ass about ten seconds later.”

  “What’d he have against the TV?”

  “Claimed one of the Simpsons was insulting him. Guy at the bar said the only thing the Simpsons insult is the intelligence of the people watching. Nicky said when you couldn’t see him, Bart was trying to get Jan to take off her clothes.”

  “Who’s Jan?”

  “Nicky’s squeeze. So anyway, Nicky tosses the mug and I toss Nicky. You want to do some investigating, investigate how a whacko like that stays out of the nuthouse.”

  I didn’t have to investigate, I already knew the answer—tight budgets and low taxes and a world that spends more to hurt people than help them means we don’t have nuthouses anymore.

  I was about to start plumbing the bartender’s knowledge of Nicky Crandall when the door at my back opened to the accompaniment of a blinding flash of daylight. As my eyes were
protecting themselves from the onslaught, somebody called out, “Ice Man been in this morning? Huh, Gary? I need to find him, bad. He dissed me, man—didn’t show for his appointment.”

  The bartender squinted, then swore, then pointed. “Out, you slimy son of a bitch. I told you—no more of that shit my place. Take your hustle somewhere else, you fucking ghoul.”

  I turned to look, thinking it might be Nicky Crandall who was being ousted, but it was only a youngish street kid, one of hundreds afoot in the Tenderloin these days, forced to sell their booty or their bodies to feed their habits even if their only habit is to eat and sleep.

  I assumed it was no one I knew or cared about, but as my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw it was the kid I’d seen in the parking lot the day before, arguing with my new friend Chadwick. The more I looked at the kid, the more impossible it seemed that he and Chadwick inhabited the same universe, but despite his anarchistic and hyperactive aspect, the connection stayed pat.

  “Fucking Dracula,” the bartender muttered as I was wondering whether to readjust my priorities and start questioning the kid. Before I could decide which course would be more productive, the door swung closed behind him and, with a collective sigh of thanksgiving, the bar received the darkness as its due.

  When I looked at him again, the bartender was brandishing a ball bat in his hand, sawed off just below the trademark, transforming it into a tape-wrapped cudgel. Which explained the speed of the kid’s departure.

  “Dracula?” I asked.

  “Ah, the guy keeps coming around trying to scrounge up people to give blood to this place up the street.”

  “The plasma center.”

  The barman shook his head. “Dracula hustles for the something something blood bank, the joint up on Golden Gate. I mean, people got to have blood, sure, but blood’s the only thing some guys around here got to sell that anyone wants to buy. I don’t like Dracula promoting freebies for the fucking blood bank when the plasma center pays twelve bucks a pint. It don’t seem right, you know?” Amazingly, given the place and time, the bartender had to suppress a shudder.