Джо Горес - Cases

He was up at six and beat another guy to the shower. Foster’s all-night cafeteria, catty-corner across the Van Ness/Geary intersection from Tommy’s Joynt, had something called toasted English muffins: an order was two of them, hot and crispy and drenched in butter. Wonderful!

He opened the agency street door at 7:45 to the rapid-fire staccato of Sherry’s typewriter.

“You’re early. I like that. Coffee?”

“No thanks. I... don’t like it much.”

Today she wore a navy-blue dress and white trim at throat and wrists. Her desk was covered with case folders — one opened — and a yellow legal pad with scrawled notes on it, some underlined, others with exclamation points beside them.

“Skip-tracing,” she said. “When a subject — the person the case is about — takes off and doesn’t want to be found, he’s called a skip. He’s skipped out. We try to track him down, trace him — skip-trace. You’re a field agent. You talk to people, follow people, find people, window-peep, serve subpoenas, go undercover to stop employee theft, check government records — everything that can’t be done by phone from the office.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Only Drinker deals with the clients. The client doesn’t want to hear that Drinker’s working a slew of other cases at the same time, he doesn’t want to hear that some field agent is working his case instead of Drinker. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Dunc.

“Not yet, but you will, believe me. Drinker is going to assign you just one single case, because you’re new to the game. But it’s a tough nut we haven’t been able to crack. Subject, Chauncey Jones, who was a municipal bus driver in Dayton, Ohio. Walked out on his wife and kids three years ago, left ’em without a bean. Nine months ago he came into a sizable inheritance.”

She flipped open a case folder. Inside was a single printed form with scanty typed information on it.

“Only he doesn’t know he’s got an inheritance, and they can’t collect without him. He was traced as far as San Francisco from their end. We found he was driving a bus again, and developed a residence address. He’s gone from both places. Drinker expects written reports every seventy-two hours.”

She handed him the case file, took him to a desk in the back of the office, near the mimeograph machine. There was a swivel chair, phone and phone book, letterhead and work sheets, multiple report forms, and a typewriter.

“Familiarize yourself with it, then go knock on doors.”

The form had in re with the subject’s name typed in, CHAUNCEY JONES. Last known address: 1144 Eddy St., Apt. 4. There were two further lines for Previous addresses: one had Toledo, Ohio, typed in, the other was blank.

Last known employment was Municipal Railroad, San Francisco. Personal references was blank. Relatives had only Mrs. Jones, Dayton, Ohio. No given name, no address. He guessed Drinker thought he didn’t need to know them, at least not now.

Enough time in the office; he was dying to get out into the City. He headed for the door with his file, stopped at Sherry’s desk. “What do I tell this guy when I find him?”

“ ‘When’? I like that. When you find him, say you’re employed by an attorney in Dayton with an inheritance for him.”

“Check.” Dunc clattered down the stairs to the Grey Ghost.

Drinker Cope came out of the private office where he had been silently waiting and listening. He stopped at Sherry’s desk, stood behind her massaging her neck with small delicate fingers. “So, what do you think?”

“I like him.”

“That’s the hell of it, so do I.”

“What if he finds our Mr. Jones and talks with him?”

“That would put Sam Spade to shame. And in his own city, yet.” Drinker gave a snort of laughter. He went back into his own office and this time left the door open.

Eddy was three streets below Geary, but 1144 was three blocks farther out than Dunc’s 1117 Geary, between Octavia and Laguna, across the street from a small green city park called Jefferson Square. It was in a row of converted gingerbread Victorians, with no tenant’s name in the slot for apartment 4. But when Dunc pushed the bell he was buzzed in.

A young Negro woman answered the door with cool eyes and a wary manner. Dunc asked for Chauncey Jones.

“Ain’t no Chauncey around here, ain’t been no Chauncey, ain’t gonna be no Chauncey. We moved in three months ago.”

Dunc thanked her, went back out into the sunshine and paused. Landlady. She might have a forwarding address. He rang the MGR bell. She was short and hunched, with streaky blond hair and nicotine-stained fingers and bags under her eyes.

“Son of a bitch moved out on me three months ago.”

“Did he leave you any forwarding address?”

She glared at him. “Bastard left owing two months’ rent, you think I got a forwarding? G’wan, get outta here!”

Gone three months. He sat in his car and watched kids playing in the park while he tried to figure out what to do next. The kids were mostly colored. Chauncey Jones was white. A mixed neighborhood. Okay, San Francisco Municipal Railroad. He should have looked up the address while he was still in the office — or brought the phone book with him.

The corner grocery store would have a phone book.

The Up To Date Market was narrow and cluttered and smelled of onions and garlic. A husky guy in a white apron was stocking the shelves down its single narrow aisle.

Dunc asked him, “You have a phone book I can use?” He did. Muni Railroad, 949 Presidio Avenue, phone Fillmore 6-5656. On an impulse he asked, “Do you know a man named Chauncey Jones? He lived up the block, drives a bus for the Municipal Railroad, maybe bought his groceries here?”

The clerk was frowning. He had a wide open Irish face, pale hair. Then he gave a chuckle.

“Yeah, Chauncey — the streetcar driver. More like he bought his booze here, not groceries. He drank, he didn’t cook.”

Dunc could get no leads to girlfriends or associates, so he thanked him and left. He had brought no notepad, either; he had to write down everything he had learned on the back of the case assignment sheet. He looked up Presidio Street on the map.

It intersected — indeed, dead-ended at — Geary Street.

The yard of the hulking brick Muni Railroad building was half filled with idle streetcars and buses. Inside the door marked OFFICE a hard-bitten man in his fifties strolled up to the counter where Dunc waited. He had a gray cardigan sweater and steel-wool hair and a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth. He squinted at Dunc through the smoke.

“I’m trying to reach one of your drivers, Chauncey Jones.”

“All employee records are private.”

Dunc found himself back on the street. He wandered around the cavernous yard until he found a high window labeled DISPATCH OFFICE. A thickset balding dispatcher in a lumberjack shirt slid open the window to look down at Dunc in the yard below.

“I’m looking for one of your drivers — Chauncey Jones.”

“Sec.” His head disappeared for a moment. “Don’t show him on the dispatch sheet. You sure he’s working outta this barn?”

“All I had was Muni Railroad.”

“They can tell you at the office.”

“Guy in there told me to go to hell.”

“That asshole,” he muttered under his breath. “Sec.” He left, came back. “The Potrero Barn out at 2500 Mariposa.”

Mariposa ran west from the Bay to end at Harrison, but it didn’t go all the way through. It took Dunc thirty minutes to find his way to the Muni’s Potrero Barn off Hampshire. Jones had quit six months before. The dispatcher’s records didn’t show why.