Bill Pronzini: Spook

“I believe it,” I said.

“Up to my ass in work even this time of year.” He blew his breath out, scowled at the cigarette, set it down on the blotter. “Trying to quit,” he said. “Bad time to do it, probably, holidays and my workload combined, but I can’t take the wheezing and morning cough anymore.”

“I know how it is. I used to be a heavy smoker myself.”

“You have a hard time quitting?”

“Not really. Cancer scare.”

The tic jumped under his eye. “Scares me, too. That, and emphysema. My old man died of emphysema. How’d you do it? Quit, I mean.”

“Just gave it up. Cold turkey.”

“I can’t do that,” Taradash said ruefully. “I tried, a dozen times at least. Patches, inhalers, that gum that releases a chemical makes you sick when you smoke... all the damn tricks and none of ’em worked. I’m trying something new this time.”

No wonder he was nervous. “New product?”

“No. I’ll show you.” He produced a penknife from a desk drawer, used the blade to slice the paper lengthwise on the weed in front of him. Then he lopped off the filter, cut the paper and tobacco into little wedges until he had a shredded mess in front of him. He seemed to enjoy doing it; his expression was one of almost unholy glee when he was done. He swept the mess into an ashtray, emptied the tray into his wastebasket. “I do that every time the craving gets too strong — twenty or thirty times a day. Wastes money, but what the hell, I waste it when I’m smoking the goddamn things, right? So far it seems to be doing the job.”

“How long now?”

“Five days and counting.” He grinned suddenly; it transformed his features, made him look boyish. “Each time I pretend I’m slice-and-dicing one of the tobacco company execs or their frigging lawyers. Very satisfying.”

I said I guessed it must be. “About your reason for wanting to hire my agency, Mr. Taradash...”

“Spook, right.” He shifted through papers, found a clipping and slid it over my way. “The newspaper article I mentioned on the phone, that’ll give you some of the background.”

The clipping was headed DEATH AND ANONYMITY ON THE STREETS. I smiled a little, wryly, when I saw the byline: Joseph DeFalco. My old pal Joe, one of the last of the old-school yellow journalism hacks. Typically, this story of his was a mixture of straight news reportage, sob feature, and soapbox rhetoric, loaded with bathos and flamboyant metaphor DeFalco’s “personal style” which in fact was loosely patterned on those of Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin.

Distilled, the facts amounted to these: On Tuesday morning a homeless man in his mid-thirties, known only by the name Spook, had been found shot to death by an employee of Visuals, Inc. in one of their back-alley doorways. He carried no identification, no one seemed to know his real name, and a check of his fingerprints had turned up no match in any state or federal database. Officially he was a John Doe, the latest of more than a hundred and forty John and Jane Does to pass through the medical examiner’s office this year.

There was no apparent motive for the shooting. Everyone seemed to agree that he’d been a harmless street person, mentally ill like many of the city’s homeless — known as Spook because he had ghosts living inside his head with whom he held regular conversations — but gentle, friendly, nonaggressive. Steve Taradash and his dozen employees had befriended Spook, given him small amounts of money, food, nonalcoholic drinks. One of the employees, a woman named Meg Lawton, described him as “a really sweet man who’d bring us presents sometimes, flowers and little things of no value. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. I just don’t understand why anyone would want to kill him.”

When I returned the clipping, Taradash said, “You see that part about how many John and Jane Does died in the city this year? How their ashes get scattered if they’re not identified?”

“I saw it.”

“That’s the part really gets me, can’t get it out of my head. A man dies and nobody knows his name, who he was, if he was always unbalanced or something made him that way. Scatter his ashes off the Golden Gate and that’s it, like he never existed at all. You understand what I mean?”

“All too well,” I said.

“Just another crazy street guy. Who cares, right? Well, I do. My people do. We knew him, liked him... ah, Christ. I’d really like to know who he was. Contact his people, if he had any. If he didn’t... maybe arrange for his burial myself.” Taradash dragged another cigarette out of the pack, stared at it the way he had at the other one. The tic was working again. “That sound off-the-wall to you?”

“Not at all. It sounds decent, humanitarian.”

“Yeah, well, I can afford to be humanitarian. I’ve made mine and poor bastards like Spook... well, you know how it is. The haves and the have nots.” He went to work with his penknife again. “Besides,” he said, “it’s the season, almost Christmas. I always feel sentimental, this time of year.”

“Too bad more people don’t share your feelings.”

“Yeah.” The knife point bit deep into his blotter, scoring it. “How long will they keep the body on ice before it’s cremated? Thirty days, isn’t it?”

“Usually, in a homicide case.”

“Two weeks till Christmas. You think you could find out who Spook was, something about him, in two weeks?”

“Depends on what kind of leads we can turn up. We’ve had identity cases that were wrapped up in a few hours, others that couldn’t be cleared in two months.”

“How much do you charge?”

I gave him the daily rate and the weekly rate, and added the usual “plus expenses.” The numbers didn’t faze him; he kept right on dismembering the weed.

“So would you be willing to take it on?” he said. “Two weeks, max?”

“Just an identity search? You’re not asking for an investigation into the murder?”

“Would that be an extra charge?”

“No. But it might not be do-able. The SFPD doesn’t like private investigators mixing into homicide cases. Even if I could get clearance, the odds are I wouldn’t be able to find out anything more than they have.”

“They can’t be making much of an effort. I mean, Spook was just another street crazy to them. And they have a lousy track record with violent crimes anyway. That series in the Chronicle a while back... the SFPD doesn’t exactly inspire confidence these days.”

I’d seen those articles, courtesy of Kerry and Tamara. They were the result of a seven-month newspaper investigation into the SFPD and contained some eye-opening statistics: just 28 % of serious felonies committed here between 1996 and 2000 solved, the lowest percentage of any large city in the country; only half of all homicide cases cleared; close to 70 percent of robberies and serious assaults not actively investigated by an inspector. The department claimed it was emphasizing crime suppression over crime solution, and I was aware of extenuating circumstances not covered in the paper’s expose and that efforts had been made since to improve performance, but the statistics were disturbing nonetheless. As Taradash had said, they didn’t exactly inspire confidence, even in an ex-cop and pro-police citizen like me.

I said, “You have a point, Mr. Taradash. But the police still have resources I can’t match.”

“So I guess we’ll never know who did the shooting.”

“If no clear-cut motive emerges, probably not. I take it you have no idea who might have done it, or why?”

“Not a clue. A guy like Spook...” He shrugged and wagged his head.

“Did he own anything of value?”

“God, no. His clothes were filthy, little better than rags. He never had any money except for what we gave him and what little he could panhandle.”