Джо Горес - Cases

Her voice was small, frightened. “I... had the rabbit test and... it was positive.”

Dunc just sat there, unable to speak, move, think, breathe.

“Dunc?” An edge of terror in her voice. “Dunc? Are you there? Say something, honey, I...”

He’d rehearsed it in his mind often enough. Just do it. Quickly. Brutally. Five utterly horrible minutes and he was home free. But the dam burst, she was pouring it all out, low intense words, getting them out before they stuck in her throat.

“Dunc, I... we... have to get married real quick — so when our baby’s born it’ll just seem like it’s a month early. It would kill my mom to know I was pregnant before... out of wedlock. I’ve got three days of finals, then...”

Dunc plunged into his rehearsed speech, instead heard himself saying, “Penny, sweetie, we’ll... get married as soon as you can get out here. I... I’ll send you the money for a one-way ticket through Western Union. Okay? Just don’t cry, baby.”

She got out, “I’m crying ’cause I’m so happy, my darling!”

When they had hung up, he sat there with the phone in his hand, stunned. How had that happened? What had he done?

He straightened up slightly. What he’d had to do.

A great weight shifted from his shoulders — and another settled there. The one that said in a dry, biting voice that he’d never be a writer. His life as a free spirit had just begun, to be ended by a little wiggly sperm, swimming upstream.

Sean set out a glass of hot clam juice as Drinker Cope came through the door of the Old Clam House. Drinker lifted the four-ounce glass in salute, fired down the hot salty liquid. The very air was awash with the briny smell of fresh shellfish.

The walls were crowded with darkened oil paintings, the hardwood floor was worn, hard drinkers studded the bar. The jukebox was sobbing out Eddie Fisher’s “Oh My Papa.” A woman’s glossy jet-black hair just showing above the back of the farthest booth. The stirring in his groin told Drinker who she was.

April was wearing chocolate slacks and a fawn-colored ribbed fisherman’s sweater that would have come halfway down her thighs if she were standing up. She got right down to the reason for her call.

“Harry told me he’s going out on the Doubloon again in just two weeks. March tenth. He said they have a galleon called the Cinco Llagas pinpointed somewhere up the coast around Point Arena. It was supposed to be carrying gold and vases and jade.”

“D’you have anything on under that getup?”

Her grin was wicked. “For me to know and you to find out. But only if you do something about Harry.”

“Oh My Papa” ended. They stayed silent until Rosemary Clooney started inviting them over to her house.

“Neutralize him?” Drinker said then derisively.

“Neutralize him,” April agreed. She deepened her voice to a credible mimickry of Drinker’s. “ ‘I was a demolitions man, I blew a lot of Japs to hell and gone out of their little caves.’ ”

Drinker stood up abruptly, filled with lust.

“Come onna my house,” he said, thick-voiced.

Dunc met him at the head of the office stairs, so tense he was almost hostile. “Penny’s flying out, we’re getting married this weekend up in Reno.”

Drinker gave him a long slow smile, thinking, poor bastard, knocked her up and he’s doing the right thing. That’s why Dunc would never be dangerous to any man. Too much humanity in him. Pity they got tagged so soon — usually the guy at least got a few months of worry-free humping before the nickel dropped.

“Congratulations, kid. Me and Sherry, we’ll go up with you as best man and best woman, or whatever they call it. Okay? But meanwhile, I gotta make a phone call and I want you to go out and track down Harry Wham. Start at the yacht club. Call me here if you connect with him.”

An hour after leaving Drinker’s bed, April was sitting on her living room couch with her legs drawn up, head back as she blew Tarryton smoke luxuriously at the ceiling. Besner was in the pastel-green lounge chair across the room.

“Do you think we’re putting too much faith in Cope?”

“As much as a woman can put in any man. He wants me, bad.”

“He’s smart and he’s tricky and he’s mean,” warned Besner.

“That’s what we need, darling. I gave Cope a deadline of sorts — the next time Harry and Fong take a trip to Mexico, I told Cope they mustn’t come back.”

Besner blurted out, “Are you sleeping with him?”

“Ferris!” Her sparkling laughter contained only outraged delight. “He’s like a... a sausage! ” She was on her feet. “Come on, darling, let Mama show you how much she loves you.”

Harry Wham slid onto a stool at the Buena Vista Cafe. “An Irish coffee, John. Lots of Irish, lots of whipped cream.”

Reversed in the backbar mirror, the Hyde Street pier reached a finger out toward the bulbous tip of the Municipal Pier to form Aquatic Park. Side-lit gulls flew low against the far dark mass of Angel Island, pink-stranded by a dying sunset.

A big man in a dark overcoat slid onto the next stool. He had a beaming rubicund face and blue twinkling eyes. Gray-shot hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead.

He pointed at Harry’s Irish coffee.

“I’ll have what he’s having.” He rubbed his hands together as if cold, then jerked a thumb at two swimmers just climbing out onto the pier. “How can those guys from the Polar Bear Club go swimming around out there all year round?”

“A hardy bunch. An hour a day in that water, you’ll live forever,” said Harry.

“You think so? Fish fuck in that stuff.”

They got to talking, as men do, ended up moving over to one of the tables looking out over Bay Street. Eventually they drifted to the war. It turned out they both had served in the Pacific theater. In the Marines. Had even hopped those same islands while driving the Japs back toward their Imperial homeland, had sunk their Land of the Rising Sun in defeat.

Penny was due in on Friday night. The four of them would drive to Reno on Saturday in two cars; Drinker got carsick in the backseat on mountain roads. Meanwhile, he was a slave driver, in a foul mood, something on his mind for sure, which meant one surveillance job after another for Dunc.

When Dunc stopped off at the office on Wednesday to type up the latest batch of surveillance reports, Drinker spun a case assignment sheet across his desk.

“Go up to Point Arena chop-chop for a witness interview.” Dunc had a vague idea that Point Arena was somewhere up the north coast. “Seven months ago this guy maybe witnessed a hit-and-run that left our client in a wheelchair for life. I need his statement.” His tone got almost tentative. “Also, find out if the Doubloon’s been up there in the past month or so.”

“I thought all of Harry Wham’s trips were to Mexico.”

The snap was back in his voice. “You ain’t paid to think.”

By the map, Point Arena was about seventy-five miles north of the Golden Gate on narrow, winding coast-hugging Highway I. The hills above the sea were turning rainy-season green, a light steady rain was falling. Every vista retreated in lacy pastel washes like Japanese prints, every range of hills was a series of dolphin backs, ever more distant, breaking the surface of gray endless seas of fog. The ocean off to his left was obliterated by a drifting water-color wash of mist.

His reaction to Penny’s pregnancy had just been panic. Hemingway’d been married when he’d quit being a reporter to try and be a fiction writer in Paris, had just kept on writing, even when they had a kid. Dunc could do the same. It was just that a baby right now made everything so damned complicated...