Marcia Muller - Games to Keep the Dark Away

I got up, took three aspirin, and stepped into the shower. It helped some. When I was dressed, I picked up the phone and called Snelling. As before, his phone rang eight, nine, ten times with no answer.

What now? I asked myself. Go back to the city? But what if Snelling-when I finally reached him-wanted me to follow up here? I’d only have to turn around and drive south again. I decided to get some breakfast and then go see Don Del Boccio, as I’d planned to before I’d found Jane’s body.

The disc jockey was listed in the phone book. He lived in the old section of town, near the harbor. The houses there were great clapboard castles built by the families who had gotten rich during the city’s heyday as a fishing port. Now they were broken up into apartments or converted in to rooming houses.

I rang Del Boccio’s bell and received an immediate answering buzz. Inside was an entryway with scuffed parquet floors and a central staircase. Since none of the doors off the entry opened, I went to the stairs and looked up. A man with a lean, tanned face stared down at me, a mass of black hair falling onto his forehead. When he saw me, his mouth, beneath a shaggy moustache, curved into a wide grin.

“A pretty lady to see me! You’ve made my morning.”

His smile was infectious, and I grinned back. “By saying that, you’ve made mine.”

“You are here to see me?”

“If you’re Don Del Boccio.”

“I sure am. Is this a social call?”

“I wish it were.” I told him my name and that I worked for All Souls in San Francisco.

He looked surprised but motioned for me to come up. I climbed to the third floor landing where he stood in an open doorway. He was about six feet tall, a little on the stocky side, and wore faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. When I reached the top of the stairs, he gave me a quick appraising look, his hazel eyes moving appreciatively but not offensively over my body. Then he turned and said, “Come on in.”

We entered a large, sun-filled room. The far wall was all kitchen, separated from the rest of the space by a bar with stools. An alcove to the right was all bed. The rest of the long room contained a baby grand piano, a set of drums, a stereo, hundreds of records, stacks of books, and a huge blue rug. Large pillows were strewn on its thick pile, but otherwise there was no furniture

I stood looking around. In spite of the lack of furniture, it was one of the homiest places I’d ever seen. If only I could find something half this nice in San Francisco! “This is a wonderful apartment,” I said.

“Thanks. Have a seat. I hope you don’t mind the floor.” He dropped onto one of the pillows. “I just moved in last month, and I’m delighted with the place. I’ve always dreamed of an apartment where I could gather all the essentials of my life into one room. I can leap from my bed to my piano to my kitchen to my stereo to my drums…back and forth, any which way. All with the least possible effort. I like to make the most of my leisure time.”

Don Del Boccio was as much of a motor-mouth in person as on the radio-although far more charming. “I know what you mean about leisure time; when you get it, it’s precious. And I guess you keep unusual hours, what with your radio show.”

He clapped a hand to his forehead in an extravagant gesture of dismay. “Jesus, don’t tell me you’ve heard that!”

“Well, I tuned in for a few minutes yesterday afternoon.”

“A few minutes is long enough. It’s a terrible show. I hate rock and stupid commercials and teenage callers. I do the whole show wearing ear plugs.”

“What?!”

“Except for the part when I have to talk on the phone and take requests. But as soon as that’s over, in go the old plugs.”

I laughed, shaking my head. Perhaps that accounted for Del Boccio’s noisy style. If he couldn’t really hear himself…”Good Lord, if you hate it so much, why do you do it at all?”

“Groceries. Rent. You see, I trained as a concert pianist.” He rippled his fingers, playing a scale in the air. “Unfortunately, I’m not very good. And actually the job is fun. Nutty, but enjoyable in an odd way.”

I’d once had a boyfriend who was a pianist-but he’d ended up a third-rate rock musician. The job market for serious pianists was about as good as it was for sociology graduates. “Where did you go to school?”

“New York. Rochester, specifically. The Eastman School of Music. I never finished, though; it was so goddamn cold back there that my fingers froze and I couldn’t play. So I came back to sunny California and the low-brow life of a deejay.”

‘But you keep up with your music.” I motioned at the piano.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s my first love.” He paused, studying my face. “But what about you? You said you’re a private investigator. What can I help you with?”

I sobered instantly, realizing he probably hadn’t heard about Jane Anthony’s murder. “I came down here on a missing person’s case. An old friend of yours-Jane Anthony.”

His mouth twitched beneath the shaggy moustache. “Huh. Janie?” Then his eyes moved from my face to a point beyond my right shoulder. “Funny, I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”

“You’re not close anymore, then?”

“No. We’re not exactly what you’d call friends either.”

“Why not?’

He shook his head. “Sorry. My business.”

“It may not be.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Your relationship with Jane may be police business. She’s dead.”

His eyes jerked back to mine. “Dead?”

“She was murdered last night, stabbed to death, at the old pier in Salmon Bay.”

He flinched. “That can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, it is.”

“Jesus.” His face was pained and he looked down at the blue rug. Finally he said, “Who did it?”

“They don’t know.”

“God. Janie.”

“Do you want to talk about her now?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. We went together for a couple of years. She was a bright woman, knew about music and art. Had a lot of interests-photography, science fiction. She liked to sail. She was a strong woman. Knew what she wanted in life.”

I waited and when he didn’t go on, I said, “What was that?”

He raised his eyes to mine. They were moist and sad. “Well, it wasn’t me. If it had been, she’d be here with me right now.”

“It sounds like you cared a lot for her.”

“I guess I loved her.”

We sat in silence for a minute, and then I reached for my purse and started to get up. Del Boccio put out a hand. “No, don’t go.”

“I thought you’d want to be alone.”

“No. I’d rather not be. How about if I give you breakfast?”

I’d only had coffee and toast before and, as with Allen Keller’s fried egg sandwich, I couldn’t resist. Besides, Don Del Boccio might tell me something that would broaden my picture of Jane, give me a clue as to why someone would want to kill her. “All right,” I said, “but nothing that’s too much trouble.”

He jumped up, obviously eager for activity. “You’re looking at one of the world’s great cooks, lady. Nothing’s too much trouble for Del Boccio.”

He went to the kitchen and began rumbling around, carrying on a monologue about his favorite restaurants, both here and in San Francisco. I wondered if he were the sort who felt a need to be on stage all the time, or if this was just his way of diverting himself from Jane’s death. Talking nonstop didn’t hamper his ability to cook, however; in less than ten minutes he had produced a feast and spread it on a large tray between us on the blue rug. I looked with growing hunger at the scrambled eggs, bacon, bagels, cream cheese, and dry white wine.