Bill Pronzini: Scattershot

I was running out of possibilities, and I wasn’t sure what to try next. I could not get my head into figuring angles, at least not now. Later tonight, or tomorrow morning when I checked Brister’s file again.

Time passed. People moved up and down the sidewalks, most of them young and on their way to the saloons along the Union strip; this was a popular area, one of the city’s current “in” places. The weather had turned almost cold, with scattered clouds, but there was no sign of fog above Twin Peaks or over near the Golden Gate. Which was something of a relief. Tail jobs are tricky enough as it is, especially at night, without the added problem of poor visibility.

Lewis Hornback showed up at 5:04. Which was also a relief; I had been illegally parked long enough not to want to push my luck any further. I recognized him right away. He came walking across Laguna behind me, wearing a light-colored suit, no tie, a gold chain glistening between the open collar wings of his shirt. He looked exactly like his photograph, and he wasn’t smiling now, either. He came up onto the sidewalk, drifted past me, and entered the parking garage.

Two minutes later the Dodge Monaco appeared, turned left on Union; I could see Hornback clearly through the windshield when he passed me. He made a right on Laguna and headed up the hill. I gave him a half-block lead before I pulled out into a U-turn and swung up after him.

Where he went was straight out Broadway to North Beach, to a little Italian restaurant not far from Washington Square. I parked a block from where he did, illegally again in another bus zone because there were no other street vacancies, and followed him inside the restaurant. Meeting the girl friend for dinner, maybe, I thought-but that wasn’t the way it turned out. After two drinks at the bar, while I nursed a beer, he took a table alone. I sat at an angle across the room from him, treated myself to polio al’ diavolo, and watched him pack away a three-course meal and a half-liter of house wine. Nobody came to talk to him except the waiter; he was just a man having a quiet dinner by himself.

He polished off a brandy and three cigarettes for dessert, lingering the way you do after a heavy meal; when he finally left the restaurant it was almost eight o’clock and twilight was settling down on the city. From there he walked over to Upper Grant, where he gawked at the young counterculture types who frequent the area, did a little window-shopping, stopped in at a newsstand and a drugstore. I stayed on the opposite side of the street, fifty yards or so behind him-about as close to a subject as you want to get on foot. But the walking tail got me nothing except exercise: Hornback was still alone when he led me back to where he had left his Dodge.

When I got to my own car there was a parking ticket fluttering under one of the windshield wipers. Terrific. But it was going to wind up being Mrs. Hornback’s problem, not mine. As far as I was concerned, things like parking tickets were legitimate expense account items.

Hornback’s next stop was a small branch library at the foot of Russian Hill, where he dropped off a couple of books. Then he headed south on Van Ness, west on Market out of the downtown area, and up the winding expanse of Upper Market to Twin Peaks. There was a little shopping area up there, a short distance beyond where Market becomes Portola Drive; he pulled into the lot in front. And went into a neighborhood tavern called Dewey’s Place.

I parked down near the end of the lot. Maybe he was meeting the girl friend here or maybe he had just gone into the tavern for a drink; he seemed to like his liquor pretty well. I put on the gray cloth cap I keep in the glove compartment, shrugged out of my coat and turned it inside out-it was one of those reversible models-and put it on again that way. Just in case Hornback had happened, casually, to notice me at the restaurant earlier. Then I stepped out into a cold wind blowing up from the ocean, crossed to Dewey’s Place.

Inside, there were maybe a dozen customers, most of them at the bar. Hornback was down at the far end with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other-but the stools on both sides of him were empty. And none of the three women in there looked to be unescorted.

So maybe I’d been right and there wasn’t a girl friend. It was almost ten o’clock; if a married man has a lady on the side, you’d expect him to get together with her by this time of night. But so far, Hornback had done nothing unusual or incriminating. Hell, he hadn’t even done anything interesting.

I sat at the near end of the bar and sipped a draft beer, watching Hornback in the mirror. He finished his drink, lit a fresh cigarette, and gestured to the bartender for a refill. I thought he looked a little tense, but in the dim lighting I couldn’t be sure. He was not waiting for anybody, though, you could tell that: no glances at his watch or at the door. Just killing time, aimlessly? It could be; for all I knew, this was how he spent each of his evenings away from the Russian Hill apartment- eating alone, driving alone, drinking alone. And his reason might be the simplest and most inno cent of all: he left the office at five and stayed out until midnight because he didn’t want to go home to Mrs. Hornback.

When he’d downed his second drink he stood and reached for his wallet. I had already laid a dollar bill on the bar; I slid off my stool and left ahead of him, so that I was already in my car when he came out.

Now where? I thought as he fired up the Dodge. Another bar somewhere? A late movie? Home early?

None of those. He surprised me by swinging back to the east on Portola and then getting into the left-turn lane for Twin Peaks Boulevard. The area up there was residential, at least on the lower part of the hillside; the road itself wound upward at steep angles, made a figure-eight loop through the empty wooded expanse of Twin Peaks Park, and curled down on the opposite side of the hill.

Hornback stayed on Twin Peaks Boulevard, climbing toward the park. Which meant that he was probably not going to make a house call in the area; he had bypassed the only intersecting streets on this side, and there were easier ways to get to the residential sections below the park to the north. I wondered if he was just marking more time, if it was his custom to take a long, solitary drive for himself round and about the city before finally heading home.

Since there was almost no traffic I dropped back several hundred feet to keep my headlights out of his rearview mirror on the turns. The view from up there was spectacular; on a night like this you could see for miles on a 360-degree curve-the ocean, the full sweep of the bay, both bridges, the intricate pattern of lights that was San Francisco and its surrounding communities. Inside the park, we passed a couple of cars pulled off on lookouts that dotted the area: people, maybe lovers, taking in the sights.

Hornback went through half the figure eight from east to west, driving without hurry. Once I saw the brief faint flare of a match as he lit another cigarette. When he came out on the far edge of the park he surprised me again: instead of continuing down the hill he slowed and turned to the right, onto a short, hooked spur road where there was another of the lookouts.

I tapped my brakes as I neared the turn, trying to decide what to do. The spur was a dead end; I could follow him around it or I could pull off the road and wait for him to come out again. The latter seemed to be the better choice, and I cut my headlights and started to glide off onto a turnaround. But then, over on the spur, Hornback swung past a row of cypress that lined the near edge of the lookout. The Dodge’s brake lights flashed through the screen of trees; then his headlights also winked out.