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  ( Nameless Detective - 29 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

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  It's a Lousy World

  Colly Babcock was shot to death on the night of September 9, in an alley between Twenty-ninth and Valley streets in the Glen Park District of San Francisco. Two police officers, cruising, spotted him coming out the rear door of Budget Liquors there, carrying a metal box. Colly ran when he saw them. The officers gave chase, calling out for him to halt, but he just kept running; one of the cops fired a warning shot, and when Colly didn't heed it the officer pulled up and fired again. He was aiming low, trying for the legs, but in the half-light of the alley it was a blind shot. The bullet hit Colly in the small of the back and killed him instantly.

  I read about it the following morning over coffee and undercooked eggs in a cafeteria on Taylor Street, a block and a half from my office. The story was on an inside page, concise and dispassionate; they teach that kind of objective writing in the journalism classes. Just the cold facts. A man dies, but he's nothing more than a statistic, a name in black type, a faceless nonentity to be considered and then forgotten along with your breakfast coffee.

  Unless you knew him.

  Unless he was your friend.

  Very carefully I folded the newspaper and put it into my coat pocket. Then I stood from the table, went out to the street. The wind was up, blowing in off the Bay; rubble swirled and eddied in the Tenderloin gutters. The air smelled of salt and dark rain and human pollution.

  I walked into the face of the wind, toward my office.

  "How's the job, Colly?"

  "Oh, fine, just fine."

  "No problems?"

  "No, none at all."

  "Stick with it, Colly."

  "Sure. I'm a new man."

  "Straight all the way?"

  "Straight all the way."

  Inside the lobby of my building, I found an out-of-order sign taped to the closed elevator doors. Yeah, that figured. I went around to the stairs, up to the second floor and along the hallway to my office.

  The door was unlocked, standing open a few inches. I tensed when I saw it like that, and reached out with the tips of my fingers and pushed it all the way open. But there was no trouble.

  The woman sitting in the chair in front of my desk had never been trouble for anyone.

  Colly Babcock's widow.

  I moved inside, shut the door and crossed toward her.

  "Hello, Lucille."

  Her hands were clasped tightly in the lap of a plain black dress. She said, "The man down the hall, the CPA — he let me in. He said you wouldn't mind."

  "I don't mind."

  "You heard, I guess? About Colly?"

  "Yes," I said. "What can I say, Lucille?"

  "You were his friend. You helped him."

  "Maybe I didn't help him enough."

  "He didn't do it," Lucille said. "He didn't steal that money. He didn't do all those robberies like they're saying."

  "Lucille…"

  "Colly and I were married thirty-one years," she said. "Don't you think I would have known?"

  I did not say anything.

  "I always knew," she said.

  I sat down, looking at her. She was a big woman, handsome — a strong woman. There was strength in the line of her mouth, and in her eyes, round and gray, tinged with red now from the crying. She had stuck by Colly through two prison terms and twenty-odd years of running, and hiding, and looking over her shoulder. Yes, I thought, she would always have known.

  But I said, "The papers said Colly was coming out the back door of the liquor store carrying a metal box. The police found a hundred and six dollars in the box, and the door jimmied open."

  "I know what the papers said, and I know what the police are saying. But they're wrong. Wrong."

  "He was there, Lucille."

  "I know that," she said. "Colly liked to walk in the evenings. A long walk and then a drink when he came home; it helped him to relax. That was how he came to be there."

  I shifted position on my chair, not speaking.

  Lucille said, "Colly was always nervous when he was doing burglaries. That was one of the ways I could tell. He'd get irritable, and he couldn't sleep."

  "He wasn't like that lately?"

  "You saw him a few weeks ago," she said. "Did he look that way to you?"

  "No," I said, "he didn't."

  "We were happy," Lucille said. "No more running. And no more waiting. We were truly happy."

  My mouth felt dry. "What about his job?"

  "They gave Colly a raise last week. A fifteen-dollar raise. We went to dinner to celebrate, down on the Wharf."

  "You were getting along all right on what he made?" I said. "Nothing came up?"

  "Nothing. We even had a little bank account started." She bit her lower lip. "We were going to Hawaii next year, or the year after. Colly always wanted to go to Hawaii."

  I looked at my hands. They seemed big and awkward resting on the desk top; I took them away and put them in my lap. "These Glen Park robberies started a month and a half ago," I said. "The police estimate the total amount taken at close to five thousand dollars. You could get to Hawaii pretty well on that kind of money."

  "Colly didn't do those robberies," she said.

  What could I say? God knew, and Lucille knew, that Colly had never been a saint; but this time she was convinced he'd been innocent. Nothing, it seemed, was going to change that in her eyes.

  I got a cigarette from my pocket and made a thing of lighting it. The smoke added more dryness to my mouth. Without looking at her, I said, "What do you want me to do, Lucille?"

  "I want you to prove Colly didn't do what they're saying he did."

  "I'd like nothing better, you know that. But how can I do it? The evidence — "

  "Damn the evidence!" Her wide mouth trembled with the sudden emotion. "Colly was innocent, I tell you! I won't have him buried with this last mark against his name. I won't have it."

  "Lucille, listen to me…"

  "I won't listen," she said. "Colly was your friend. You stood up for him with the parole board. You helped him find his job. You talked to him, gave him guidance. He was a different man, a new man, and you helped make him that way. Will you sit here and tell me you believe he threw it all away for five thousand dollars?"

  I didn't say anything; I still could not meet her eyes. I stared down at the burning cigarette in my fingers, watching the smoke rise, curling, a gray spiral in the cold air of the office.

  "Or don't you care whether he was innocent or not?" she said.

  "I care, Lucille."

  "Then help me. Find out the truth."

  "All right," I said. Her anger and grief, and her absolute certainty that Colly had been innocent, had finally got through to me; I could not have turned her down now if there had been ten times the evidence there was. "All right, Lucille, I'll see what I can do."

  It was drizzling when I got to the Hall of Justice. Some of the chill had gone out of the air, but the wind was stronger now. The clouds overhead looked black and swollen, ready to burst.

  I parked my car on Bryant Street, went past the sycamores on the narrow front lawn, up the concrete steps and inside. The plainclothes detective division, General Works, was on the fourth floor; I took the elevator. Eberhardt had been promoted to lieutenant not too long ago and had his own private office now, but I caught myself glancing over toward his old desk. Force of habit; it had been a while since I'd visited him at the Hall.

  He was in and willing to see me. When I entered his office he was shuffling through some reports and scowling. He was my age, pushing fifty, and he seemed to have been fashioned of an odd contrast of sharp angles and smoo
th, blunt planes: square forehead, sharp nose and chin, thick and blocky upper body, long legs and angular hands. Today he was wearing a brown suit that hadn't been pressed in a month; his tie was crooked; there was a collar button missing from his shirt. And he had a fat, purplish bruise over his left eye.

  "All right," he said, "make it quick."

  "What happened to your eye?"

  "I bumped into a doorknob."

  "Sure you did."

  "Yeah," he said. "You come here to pass the time of day, or was there something?"

  "I'd like a favor, Eb."

  "Sure. And I'd like three weeks' vacation."

  "I want to look at an Officer's Felony Report."

  "Are you nuts? Get the hell out of here."

  The words didn't mean anything. He was always gruff and grumbly while he was working; and we'd been friends for more years than either of us cared to remember, ever since we went through the Police Academy together after World War II and then joined the force here in the city.

  I said, "There was a shooting last night. Two squad-car cops killed a man running away from the scene of a burglary in Glen Park."

  "So?"

  "The victim was a friend of mine."

  He gave me a look. "Since when do you have burglars for friends?"

  "His name was Colly Babcock," I said. "He did two stretches in San Quentin, both for burglary; I helped send him up the first time. I also helped get him out on parole the second time and into a decent job."

  "Uh-huh. I remember the name. I also heard about the shooting last night. Too bad this pal of yours turned bad again, but then a lot of them do — as if you didn't know."

  I was silent.

  "I get it," Eberhardt said. "You don't think so. That's why you're here."

  "Colly's wife doesn't think so. I guess maybe I don't either."

  "I can't let you look at any reports. And even if I could, it's not my department. Robbery'll be handling it. Internal Affairs, too."

  "You could pull some strings."

  "I could," he said, "but I won't. I'm up ‘to my ass in work. I just don't have the time."

  I got to my feet. "Well, thanks anyway, Eb." I went to the door, put my hand on the knob, but before I turned it he made a noise behind me. I turned.

  "If things go all right," he said, scowling at me, "I'll be off duty in a couple of hours. If I happen to get down by Robbery on the way out, maybe I'll stop in. Maybe."

  "I'd appreciate it if you would."

  "Give me a call later on. At home."

  "Thanks, Eb."

  "Yeah," he said. "So what are you standing there for? Get the hell out of here and let me work."

  I found Tommy Belknap in a bar called Luigi's, out in the Mission District.

  He was drinking whiskey at the long bar, leaning his head on his arms and staring at the wall. Two men in work clothes were drinking beer and eating sandwiches from lunch pails at the other end, and in the middle an old lady in a black shawl sipped red wine from a glass held with arthritic fingers. I sat on a stool next to Tommy and said hello.

  He turned his head slowly, his eyes moving upward. His face was an anemic white, and his bald head shone with beaded perspiration. He had trouble focusing his eyes; he swiped at them with the back of one veined hand. He was pretty drunk. And I was pretty sure I knew why.

  "Hey," he said when he recognized me, "have a drink, will you?"

  "Not just now."

  He got his glass to his lips with shaky fingers, managed to drink without spilling any of the whiskey. "Colly's dead," he said.

  "Yeah. I know."

  "They killed him last night," Tommy said. "They shot him in the back."

  "Take it easy, Tommy."

  "He was my friend."

  "He was my friend, too."

  "Colly was a nice guy. Lousy goddamn cops had no right to shoot him like that."

  "He was robbing a liquor store," I said.

  "Hell he was!" Tommy said. He swiveled on the stool and pushed a finger at my chest. "Colly was straight, you hear that? Just like me. Ever since we both got out of Q."

  "You sure about that, Tommy?"

  "Damn right I am."

  "Then who did do those burglaries in Glen Park?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Come on, you get around. You know people, you hear things. There must be something on the earie."

  "Nothing," he said. "Don't know."

  "Kids?" I said. "Street punks?"

  "Don't know."

  "But it wasn't Colly? You'd know if it was Colly?"

  "Colly was straight," Tommy said. "And now he's dead."

  He put his head down on his arms again. The bartender came over; he was a fat man with a reddish handlebar mustache.

  "You can't sleep in here, Tommy," he said. "You ain't even supposed to be in here while you're on parole."

  "Colly's dead," Tommy said, and there were tears in his eyes.

  "Let him alone," I said to the bartender.

  "I can't have him sleeping in here."

  I took out my wallet and put a five-dollar bill on the bar.

  "Give him another drink," I said, "and then let him sleep it off in the back room. The rest of the money is for you."

  The bartender looked at me, looked at the fin, looked at Tommy. "All right," he said. "What the hell."

  I went out into the rain.

  D. E. O'Mira and Company, Wholesale Plumbing Supplies, was a big two-storied building that took up three-quarters of a block on Berry Street, out near China Basin. I parked in front and went inside. In the center of a good-sized office was a switchboard walled in glass, with a card taped to the front that said Information. A dark-haired girl wearing a set of headphones was sitting inside, and when I asked her if Mr. Templeton was in she said he was at a meeting uptown and wouldn't be back all day. Mr. Templeton was the office manager, the man I had spoken to about giving Colly Babcock a job when he was paroled from San Quentin.

  Colly had worked in the warehouse, and his immediate supervisor was a man I had never met named Harlin. I went through a set of swing doors opposite the main entrance, down a narrow, dark passage screened on both sides. On my left when I emerged into the warehouse was a long service counter; behind it were display shelves, and behind them long rows of bins that stretched the length and width of the building. Straight ahead, through an open doorway, I could see the loading dock and a yard cluttered with soil pipe and other supplies. On my right was a windowed office with two desks, neither occupied; an old man in a pair of baggy brown slacks, a brown vest and a battered slouch hat stood before a side counter under the windows.

  The old man didn't look up when I came into the office. A foul-smelling cigar danced in his thin mouth as he shuffled papers. I cleared my throat and said, "Excuse me."

  He looked at me then, grudgingly. "What is it?"

  "Are you Mr. Harlin?"

  "That's right."

  I told him who I was and what I did. I was about to ask him about Colly when a couple of guys came into the office and one of them plunked himself down at the nearest desk. I said to Harlin, "Could we talk someplace private?"

  "Why? What're you here about'?"

  "Colly Babcock," I said.

  He made a grunting sound, scribbled on one of his papers with a pencil stub and then led me out onto the dock. We walked along there, past a warehouseman loading crated cast-iron sinks from a pallet into a pickup truck, and up to the wide, doubled-door entrance to an adjoining warehouse.

  The old man stopped and turned to me. "We can talk here."

  "Fine. You were Colly's supervisor, is that right?"

  "I was."

  "Tell me how you felt about him."

  "You won't hear anything bad, if that's what you're looking for."

  "That's not what I'm looking for."

  He considered that for a moment, then shrugged and said, "Colly was a good worker. Did what you told him, no fuss. Quiet sort, kept to himself mostly."

  "You
knew about his prison record?"

  "I knew. All of us here did. Nothing was ever said to Colly about it, though. I saw to that."

  "Did he seem happy with the job?"

  "Happy enough," Harlin said. "Never complained, if that's what you mean."

  "No friction with any of the other men?"

  "No. He got along fine with everybody."

  A horn sounded from inside the adjoining warehouse and a yellow forklift carrying a pallet of lavatories came out. We stepped out of the way as the thing clanked and belched past.

  I asked Harlin, "When you heard about what happened to Colly last night — what was your reaction?"

  "Didn't believe it," he answered. "Still don't. None of us do."

  I nodded. "Did Colly have any particular friend here? Somebody he ate lunch with regularly — like that?"

  "Kept to himself for the most part, like I said. But he stopped with Sam Biehler for a beer a time or two after work; Sam mentioned it."

  "I'd like to talk to Biehler, if it's all right."

  "Is with me," the old man said. He paused, chewing on his cigar. "Listen, there any chance Colly didn't do what the papers say he did?"

  "There might be. That's what I'm trying to find out."

  "Anything I can do," he said, "you let me know."

  "I'll do that."

  We went back inside and I spoke to Sam Biehler, a tall, slender guy with a mane of silver hair that gave him, despite his work clothes, a rather distinguished appearance.

  "I don't mind telling you," he said, "I don't believe a damned word of it. I'd have had to be there to see it with my own eyes before I'd believe it, and maybe not even then."

  "I understand you and Colly stopped for a beer occasionally?"

  "Once a week maybe, after work. Not in a bar; Colly couldn't go to a bar because of his parole. At my place. Then afterward I'd give him a ride home."

  "What did you talk about?"

  "The job, mostly," Biehler said. "What the company could do to improve things out here in the warehouse. I guess you know the way fellows talk."

  "Uh-huh. Anything else?"

  "About Colly's past, that what you're getting at?"

  "Yes."

  "Just once," Biehler said. "Colly told me a few things. But I never pressed him on it. I don't like to pry."