Toll Call Page 3

  But if they were shared, what? Dating. And we who had communicated with an easy rapport over eight years of professional partnership would immediately become tongue-tied. After dating—sex. Not that I didn’t want it. Not that I hadn’t dreamed of it. Just that sex places a relationship under a moral microscope, and when viewed through such a lens such matters can loom grotesque and unappealing. And after sex …? Decisions. Commitments. Responsibilities. Change.

  Easy to shy away from.

  By the time the garage door opened and Peggy and her Subaru emerged, I was as tired and confused as Peggy seemed to be. Still, I managed to remember why I was on Fillmore Street instead of Jackson Square in time to start my car and tag along as she drove off.

  She turned left on Lombard, took a right on Van Ness and headed downtown, then surprised me by passing up the left on Broadway and continuing on Van Ness until she reached the Civic Center. When she joined the line of cars that was descending to the underground garage, I suspected she was on a municipal errand of some sort, mundane and unrevealing. I almost broke off my pursuit and headed for the office, but when serendipity presented me with a parking place in front of the city library I hurried to occupy it, then waited for Peggy to emerge from her subterranean shelter.

  It took eight minutes. She came out of the pedestrian entrance at a trot, dressed in a tweed skirt and camel jacket, her purse slung over her shoulder and clutched to her side as though it was full of secrets.

  She turned up Larkin Street immediately, presumably heading for the Federal Building. A thousand things, benign and private, could have prompted the journey, and that realization made me lag behind. Luckily, as it turned out, because Peggy looked back several times, as though she suspected someone was in her wake.

  When she didn’t turn toward the Federal Building, but crossed Turk and continued up Larkin, I quickened my pace. This time my luck ran out, because in the time it took me to look both ways before I crossed the street, Peggy managed to disappear.

  I trotted to the last place I’d seen her, but encountered only strangers’ faces, most of them Asian. I looked up and down the block, at the Hotel Yogi and the Phnom Penh Café and the other nondescript businesses and apartments far removed from the Manhattanized downtown, and gradually realized that the building at my back was one I’d visited many times over the past ten years, and hoped to visit many more.

  I peered through the barred glass door. Peggy wasn’t in the vestibule, but the elevator indicator was on the rise. When it stopped at the second floor I knew where Peggy had gone. What I didn’t know was why.

  I retreated to the Federal Building and sat next to the defunct fountain in position to see Peggy when she returned to reclaim her car. While I waited, I considered what her visit to the second floor of the Larkin Street building might mean, and decided that at the very least it meant I’d been right to worry through the night about what was haunting her.

  Thirty minutes later, Peggy retraced her steps, hurrying past the Federal Building without looking my way, her expression intent, determined, wary. I waited until she was out of sight, then walked back up Larkin to the building she had vacated. I didn’t wait for the elevator, but took the stairs two at a time, the way I always did, and came to a stop when I was face to face with the door to apartment 10, the one with the door knocker fashioned from a silver spur.

  I knocked twice. “Did you forget your—”

  My presence cleaved her question. She froze for a moment, mouth agape, then cackled twice and grinned her Class A grin, the one that came with a healthy dash of sass. “Marsh Tanner. What the … How the hell are you, sugar bear?”

  “Hello, Ruthie. Long time, no see.”

  “A coon’s age and then some, you mangy coyote.”

  “So how are you, Ruthie?”

  “Well, I still got my teeth and my hair, and my plumbing works if I give it some lubricant from time to time, so I guess I can’t complain. Not that you’re interested, you illegitimate son of a snake. I don’t suppose you care to tell me why you haven’t been by to see me since poor Ralphie had his stroke.”

  Ralphie was Ruthie’s parakeet. The night he died, Ruthie had called me almost as deep in tears as she’d been the day they told her Harry, her husband, had been murdered in a valley town named Oxtail and I’d spent several hours comforting her as best I could, until she was in shape to comfort me.

  Harry Spring had been a friend and mentor, a former sheriff’s deputy who became the best private investigator in the city and who had told me what I needed to know to get me through my first year in the trade. After that I’d begun to figure most things out for myself, but it had hit me hard when Harry died, and a little harder after I found out who had killed him. But that had all washed out years ago. Ruthie had taken over Harry’s business, specializing in domestic wrangles of one kind or another, the kind of wrangles I tried to avoid by referring such stuff Ruthie’s way as often as I could. But Ruthie took on other causes as well, and I wondered if one of them might be whatever it was that was plaguing Peggy.

  Ruthie was a friend, and I owed her for nurturing me through a lot of lonely nights in ways both bawdy and maternal, so I always felt guilty when I saw her and was reminded of how long it had been since I’d given her a call. And in a few minutes I was going to feel even more unworthy, because I was going to try to persuade her to do something she wouldn’t want to do.

  “Well. I’m waiting for your excuse,” Ruthie declared, hands on denim hips, feet in pointed boots, her deep-dish smile displayed above a fringed shirt held together with snaps instead of buttons and dripping fringe from the wrists and pockets.

  “I’ve been sick,” I said. “Old Hawaiian disease.”

  Ruthie barked a laugh. “Lackanookie, my wrinkled ass. I told you anytime you want your ashes hauled I can fix you up with the sweetest thing you’ve ever laid your tongue on, and she won’t charge you the yard-and-a-half she gets from her regular admirers, either.”

  “I don’t know, Ruthie. Store-bought sex is more risky than Russian roulette in this town.”

  Ruthie’s smile slipped away as though it had been stolen. “AIDS. Yeah. Friend of mine just died of it. I’d rather be chewed on by a shark than go that way, I really would. Some say it’s the wrath of God.” Ruthie closed her eyes. “Well, if the good Lord cooked this one up then He’s a flaming sadist. I used to smuggle him in some heroin at the end. To ease the pain a little. The boys at the jail always got a little spare sitting around, stuff that don’t quite make it to the evidence locker.”

  Ruthie spit out a mordant laugh, then opened her eyes. She had been a deputy, too, once upon a time, and she still had scads of friends on the force who would swim to Alcatraz if she asked them to, and I believed every word she said about the heroin. Ruthie had been a nurse in Korea before she joined the sheriff, and she’d decided at some point that there was no reason in the world not to make dying as easy as possible for those with a one-way ticket. Ruthie Spring was as moral an individual as I knew, an actor upon belief rather than merely a sloganeer, but her code was all her own.

  “Cassie’s clean, Marsh,” she was saying. “She’s clean and she’s careful and she sees a doctor once a month. Want me to give her a buzz?”

  I shook my head. “Some other time, Ruthie. But how about you? You getting your fur stroked enough these days?”

  Ruthie’s eyes softened and her voice followed suit. “That’s a long story, sugar bear. Why don’t you come in and let me bore you with it?”

  She led me into the apartment. The front room was still converted to an office, the way it had been when Harry was alive, the desk and file cabinets and bookshelves cluttered with memorabilia from Ruthie’s rather outsized life, with Harry and before and after as well. A quick glance told me the place was much the same except for the empty cage that had housed the dearly departed Ralph and an 8 x 10 glossy in a silver frame that pictured Ruthie arm-in-arm with the lady mayor, smack in the middle of Haight Street.

 
Across from me, Ruthie stood tapping the toe of her boot, waiting for my attention to return. “How about a drink? Cut the dust a little.”

  “Not before noon, Ruthie.”

  “It’s noon in Dallas, sugar bear.”

  I shook my head.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I learned what a prostate is.”

  Ruthie chuckled. “Hell, Marsh, it’s never too early for a snort. The other morning I was out of milk so I tried Hamm’s on my corn flakes. Not half bad, till I screwed up and added sugar. How about coffee?”

  “Sure, if it’s ready.”

  “Why, them little crystals are just chomping at the bit to hop out of the jar and into your cup, doll. And I got one of them little dealies that boils water quicker than you can take a piss.”

  I kept myself from shuddering.

  “Be back in two shakes of your pecker.”

  Ruthie went off to the kitchen and I leaned back in my chair and enjoyed being nestled in Ruthie’s ample bosom once again, amid the memories and the mementoes and the tangible ether of energy and accomplishment that permeated the place. I always felt good around Ruthie, because Ruthie herself was good and was salty enough to tolerate nothing less than a peer in her ambit.

  “So what’s this about your love life?” I called out to her. “Sounds like you’ve got something torrid going.”

  “I got me a boyfriend, if you can believe it,” she yelled back. “Put my brand on the critter about six weeks ago.”

  “So tell me about him.”

  Ruthie waited till the coffee was ready before she answered. After she returned to the front room and handed me my cup she took a seat across from mine. “Well, the first thing you got to know is, he’s pint-sized. Everything about him’s tiny but his wallet and his dick. They say money can’t buy happiness, Marsh, but I’m here to tell you that money and a big twanger can damned sure get a woman within roping distance of it.”

  As usual, Ruthie’s words were as rough as a cob, but her eyes stayed as soft as her heart. She patted the friz in her brassy blond head, took a gulp of coffee, and crossed her legs, giving me a good look at a boot made from the fresh-plucked flesh of an ostrich.

  Ruthie hadn’t been in Texas for years—she said it was because she didn’t like the way the oil people had pushed the cattle people aside and had taken over everything from politics to football—but she was stamped to her soul with that heritage and she’d decided long ago not to fight it but to let it rip. I’d seen a few of San Francisco’s pseudosophisticates look down their noses at her over the years, after one or another of her earthy outbursts, but no one who knew her well looked anywhere but up. “It’s the real thing, huh?” I said.

  “It’s real enough to tingle my titties Marsh, and that’s as real as it gets for a woman who’s left menopause about twelve miles down the road.”

  “I’m happy for you, Ruthie.”

  “Hell, I’m happy for me too. And old Caldwell—Caldwell Rakes, he’s my fella—he’s just as tickled as a rat in a dumpster. Can’t get enough of me, he says. What I don’t tell him is he gets all of me I can bear to give.”

  Ruthie’s eyes flicked to the wall, where a framed photograph of Harry—smiling, strutting, displaying a huge coho he’d landed out of a river up in Oregon—hung where she could see it anytime she wanted or needed to. Caldwell Rakes might have a lot of her, but there was still a nugget deep inside that would remain forever Harry’s.

  “You’re out and about at an odd hour, aren’t you, Marsh?” Ruthie’s hearty friendliness had evaporated, leaving a steel-eyed stare in its stead. “Been down in federal court?”

  “I’m here on business, Ruthie.”

  “Yeah? Whose business?”

  “Yours. And mine.”

  “That so?” Ruthie recrossed her legs and tugged on a wisp of hair that dangled beside an ear that sported an earring shaped like a horseshoe. “You referring something my way?”

  I shook my head. “It’s about one of your clients.”

  “Who?”

  “Peggy.”

  Ruthie pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.

  “Peggy Nettleton. My secretary. She just left here. I think she hired you. I want to know why.”

  Ruthie looked as though I’d answered a question instead of asked one. “You follow her here, Marsh?”

  I nodded.

  “She thought someone was. I imagine it’ll ease her mind when I tell her it was you. If I tell her.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.”

  “I imagine you would.”

  Ruthie stood up, took her cup and mine into the kitchen, and came back with refills. After I thanked her she returned to the kitchen again. This time she came back empty-handed. “Thought I had some biscuits but I don’t,” she said. She was stalling for time and I knew why.

  Ruthie sat down in the chair again and looked back at the picture of her husband and his fish. “I learned most of what I know from Harry, Marsh. About business; about more important things than business.”

  “Me too.”

  “When he met me I was a hotheaded ex–barrel racer who’d seen more than anyone should have in Korea and had become semialcoholic and semipromiscuous as a result. He settled me down and straightened me out and he did it without raising his voice or his fist either one. I did what he wanted because he was the first real man I’d ever run across, the first who had thought enough about life to decide what was important and what wasn’t, to use his brain more often than his dong. When he died I spent a long time wishing I’d died too; wishing I’d been the one down there in that ditch with a bullet through my brain, instead of him. I went back to my old ways there for a while, Marsh. I don’t know if you knew that.”

  I shook my head.

  Ruthie looked away from the picture and at me. “I tried to keep it from you because I love you, Marsh Tanner. You’re the son Harry and I never had. Oh, I know you don’t want to hear that sentimental swill, but it’s true all the same and you damned well know it. Hell, when Harry was alive I spent more time asking him about you than about anything else in life, including his frigging fishing trips. God, I hate the taste of fish. And the poor dumb bastard never knew it.”

  I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. Ruthie swiped at eyes that had somehow become soggy, then grinned. “Sorry if I embarrassed you, sugar bear, but hell. You embarrass too damned easy. Always have. Well, shit.” She wiped her eyes again. “I’m leaking worse than a suckling sow. What I’m trying to say is, Marsh, I’d tell you almost anything in the world you want to know. My age. My bra size. How much estrogen I gobble of a morning. But you know that with that goddamned Harry hanging on the wall over there, looking at me with that shit-eating grin of his, well you know I can’t tell you one single thing about why your little Peggy came by to see me this morning.”

  “But this is different,” I protested. “She’s my secretary. Hell, she may be my best friend. I—”

  “You know what I got to do, Marsh; now don’t pretend you don’t. You know that I got to keep my mouth as zippered as a prelate’s pecker or else those years with Harry don’t mean owl manure and I got to turn in my license and spend the rest of my days letting Caldwell slobber all over my body at the noon hour in between the times I go out and spend money on things I don’t need just to take up the slack till something comes along and kills me.”

  “Is she in danger? Just tell me that.”

  Ruthie just sat there, purposely bereft of any emotion beyond a vague, undifferentiated sorrow, her fingernails pressing tiny, curving cuts in the dead flesh of her high brown boots.

  FIVE

  I drifted through the deposition in the Grantland case without doing me or my client any harm. Grantland’s lawyer was a corporate type, not a litigator, and his idea of subtlety was the occasional insertion of a double negative into his questions. My client’s counsel objected to the form of the inquiry so frequently I began to think the deposition was going to stretch
into two days even though no one in the room wanted it to. But the corporate type finally wrapped it up at three thirty without getting to the most important point, which was that a portion of the information I’d acquired in my investigation had been obtained through the use of electronic eavesdropping equipment in a manner at least arguably proscribed by Sections 631 and 632 of the California Penal Code. Which meant that the evidence wasn’t admissible in any judicial proceeding, and that I was subject to a $2,500 fine and imprisonment for up to a year in the county jail if they could prove the violation. I’d been prepared to take the Fifth Amendment if the issue came up, but I was saved by an attorney’s incompetence, and not for the first time. Now I had to hope that my client’s lawyer could get the case settled so I wouldn’t have to go through the whole thing again at trial.

  When I got back to the office Peggy was there, and we exchanged a few careful comments about the telephone call of the night before. But she clearly didn’t want to go into it, and was embarrassed by whatever it was she thought I’d concluded about her situation. Neither of us mentioned Ruthie Spring, so I assumed Ruthie had honored my request not to mention my intrusion of the morning. We dropped the subject, whatever the subject was, skipped through the day with as little contact with each other as possible, and went our separate ways as soon as the clock struck five.

  My way took me out to dinner with a woman I’d dated on and off for the past six months, a widow whose husband had left her wealthy, childless, and determined to the point of frenzy to squeeze more out of life than a prim and proper marriage had heretofore provided. She had a passion for nightlife that offered a dab of danger along with the rest of the bill of fare. One night we’d collected a set of hostile stares at a series of black nightclubs in the Fillmore District, and this evening we provoked much the same reaction at a series of gay hangouts along Folsom Street.

  When we got back to her place on Pacific Avenue, she invited me up for a nightcap. Normally that meant that before the evening had ended she would drag me through yet another testing ground of sorts, trying to make me a prototype when I was only a Model T. Janice was convinced that every man knew more than she did about sex, and could teach her volumes on the subject. Unfortunately, I’d long since run through my tiny bag of tricks. When I declined her invitation she pouted and protested, but I left anyway, after removing her hand from inside my shirt.