Джо Горес - Cases

At midnight Drinker Cope got out of Sherry’s bed, careful not to wake her. She made a little mewing sound and snuggled deeper into the covers. Drinker went to the window, nude, smoked a cigarette looking out over the semisleeping city.

Thinking of April, he had gone off like a skyrocket. April obsessed him, even though he saw through her to some grand design of her own. He didn’t even have to learn what it was, she would put it in motion soon enough.

“Drinker?” In the dim light Sherry was up on one elbow, watching him. “You’re thinking about Wham-Bam, aren’t you?”

“Oh, for Chrissake! I’m thinking about her husband.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hand on the swell of her hip. “How to get our hands on some of the guy’s money...”

“We don’t need it, Drinker. Dunc’s working out great—”

“Go back to sleep, Sherry.”

He kept his hand on her hip until her breathing evened, then went back to the window. Damn right, Dunc was working out great. He felt bad about screwing the kid out of his share of the loot from Kiely’s safe-deposit box back there in Kansas City, but the K.C. cop had been greedy. Besides, Drinker had given the kid a job, paid him good wages.

His mind returned to April. He was going to possess her, get his pound of flesh, and go after her husband. Meanwhile...

He woke Sherry, used her again, savagely, punishing her because she wasn’t the woman who obsessed him. Then he slept.

Since it was New Year’s Eve, Drinker got to the Customs House at 555 Battery early to catch Gar Cheevers behind his desk. Gar was career civil service, dry and precise and incorruptible, horn-rim glasses set low on his nose, his desk half covered with framed photos of his wife, his dog, his five kids in various stages of growth at their modest summer cabin up on the Russian River.

Incorruptible, sure, but there was corruption and there was corruption. Drinker had pulled one of Gar’s daughters out of that same river one summer before she could drown, so the man owed him. Drinker took it out in information.

“What’s new in the antismuggling trade, Gar?”

“Just the usual, Drinker — drugs and people.”

“Much of it done by boat these days?”

“ Boat? Wetbacks wouldn’t be worth the trouble, and the border’s so leaky you can just walk the drugs across. We get ’em at the checkpoints if they’re amateurs or get nervous, but—”

“Private yachts don’t have to go through checkpoints.”

“We leave them to the Coast Guard,” he said with a chuckle.

“Anything else coming across besides wetbacks and dope?”

Gar mentioned gold. Drinker wished him a Happy New Year, went to the huge gray stone main library across the plaza from City Hall to spend three hours in the reference room, then to Western Union to send a long night letter to a man in Ensenada.

Dunc and Penny spent that morning in bed with the faint perfume of the roses lying over them like a new snowfall, talking, talking, voracious for each other’s lives.

For Dunc, deer hunting in northern Minnesota with his dad, one year he had gotten two bucks with two shots. Football. Fishing. Duck hunting at the shack on the Mississippi.

Penny’s dad had been killed in an industrial accident three months before she was born; her mom used his union insurance to open a coffee shop in a downtown Dubuque hotel and, working fourteen-hour days, had eventually sent Penny to college.

“We’re from the same kind of people, middle-class, Midwest, hardworking, Dunc. We’ll have to meet each other’s mom soon.”

“Soon — but not now.”

Oh no, not now. Now the sudden sharp stab of passion...

In the afternoon they bought fried chicken and climbed down the bluffs on Land’s End for a picnic on a minuscule beach of bright sand. Back at the motel to change for a New Year’s Eve celebration, they made love in the shower, and ended up seeing in 1954 without leaving their bed.

New Year’s Day, Dunc showed her his sorry little room and introduced her to Ma Booger, then up to the office to show her that, like a proud parent showing off his kids.

“What about your writing, Dunc?”

“I’m getting lots of material for the notebooks...”

“And not writing it down in them.”

“I’m keeping copies of my reports for the right time...”

On Saturday they went into the great glass Victorian conservatory in Golden Gate Park, and found themselves alone in the high-domed main room that was like a small, intense, steaming jungle; they played Tarzan and Jane in the dripping tropical foliage. Then went back to the Richelieu to play it for real.

Their last dinner together was at Alfred’s Steakhouse up beside the Broadway Tunnel, huge rare T-bones with garlic toast and baked potatoes and green salads and beer, since Dunc didn’t know anything about wine.

And so to bed. But not, for a long time, to sleep.

It was a blustery day at San Francisco International Airport, with isolated rain squalls running across the blacktop runways. Winter had returned to San Francisco.

They kissed a last time. “Keep up the notebook!” Penny whispered, then with a squeeze she was gone.

On the drive back from the airport, memories came crowding in on Dunc, surprisingly few of them sexual. He had showed her his city. Before too many months he knew she would return.

And then? Then... they would just be together. That was all they needed. He would write and try to sell his stories, she would work. They’d eaten at the Fleur de Lis in Sutter Street, where she had talked with the French chef about cooking. He’d never had an apprentice, but peut-être...

Meanwhile, going through the now-driving rain on the Bayshore, he felt the first stirrings of renewed excitement about the Wham case. Look out, Harry, he thought, here I come.

Since it was paid for, he slept a last night in their room at the Richelieu. He could still smell Penny’s scent on the sheets, her perfume and soap in the bathroom. The roses still bloomed bravely by the window, their fragrance a benison. He took them back to Ma Booger’s and kept them until they were dried and withered.

It was not until two weeks later that Drinker Cope brought him back into the Harry Wham chess game. While Dunc interviewed potential witnesses for an upcoming trial, and tailed an errant wife three times to her meetings with her lover at a Geneva Street motel, Drinker was working Harry Wham hard, including an international wireless and a long detailed letter to Hong Kong.

Dunc was glad that operatives who specialized in divorce work burst in to flash-photo the cheaters naked in bed, not he. What if someone had come smashing in like that on him and Penny at the Richelieu?

Then Drinker finally put him back on Wham. “My man in Ensenada says Harry and the Chink are coming in from Mexico tomorrow on his yacht. Talk to that old sailor pal of yours — I want you to eyeball Wham coming in, then I want you to stick to Harry like glue.”

“I haven’t done much tailing — what if he spots me?”

“Just make sure he doesn’t”

“Jesus, thanks, Drinker — great advice.”

Dunc, in navy watch cap and heavy blue wool pea jacket, secretly afraid of getting seasick, stood on deck as the Marie sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and kept his eyes on the horizon as Mac had suggested. His queasiness soon passed. He used Drinker’s binoculars to pick out the place beneath the bluffs where he and Penny had picnicked. It would be green and full of wildflowers by Easter. Their long letters had crossed in the mail, and they had talked on the phone twice.

“Them’re damn good glasses, them coated lenses don’t reflect the light.” Mac grinned slyly. “You’ll be able to watch Mr. Harry Wham whamming in the nude.”