Death Notes

Margolis wrote you a bad check?’
    He was fighting to keep from snickering.
    ‘It’s the cost of having your own business,’ I said, then felt stupid for getting defensive and trying, however obliquely, to put him down for being a bureaucrat.
    Post seemed impervious. I told him when he asked about the rest of my evening that I’d checked up on Sharon, left her sleeping on the couch and came home to find the mess and the Richard Nixon-masked guy down the block. I told him how I’d tried to catch up to him but lost him somewhere in the heart of North Beach.
    When I’d finished, he scanned the room. The fingerprint technician was packing up her kit.
    ‘What else?’ he asked me.
    I went over to the counter that serves as my kitchen. The intruder had knocked over my bottle of Scotch but he hadn’t broken it. I waited until the tech left, then raised the bottle and offered Post a drink.
    He raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘This guy must have scared the shit out of you if you’re offering me a drink.’
    ‘I just want to know what you’ve got, Post. I want to know if you’ve run across anybody you think could be behind this. And if you have, I want to know who.’
    I poured two stiff ones and pushed a glass toward him. He was still standing in the middle of the mess that was my apartment.
    ‘Well?’ I prompted.
    He scowled. ‘So you can go off on your own little hunt? Not on your life, Ventana. This break-in must have done something to your memory. Since you forgot, I’ll tell you again: I don’t share my police work with citizens. And I especially don’t share it with you.'
    ‘Malone,’ I said. ‘I can see him doing this. But the guy I saw was too quick to be him.’
    Post was listening. I was starting to feel like Scheherazade. ‘Or Tobinio,’ I continued. ‘He’s too much of a big guy to junk the place himself—’
    ‘Or catch a rat,’ Post added sarcastically.
    ‘Or Sharon.’
    ‘I thought that’s where you were - at her house.’
    ‘Yes. But she could have somebody to do her dirty work.’ Post was shaking his head. ‘Sharon Margolis likes money, Ventana, not power, not fear.’
    Post was right. The message tonight was intimidation. And despite all her shortcomings, Sharon didn’t seem like somebody who’d be behind something as creepy as dead rats and messages scrawled in blood.
    ‘Does this match anything on any of the Riff Club’s Saturday night guests’ rap sheet?’
    Post shrugged. He still hadn’t touched the Scotch.
    ‘You got anybody you need to visit out of town, Ventana? If I were you, I’d take a trip.’
    ‘No, you wouldn’t.’
    I gestured at the mess around us. ‘Somebody’s left me a message. I’m going to answer it.’
     

46
     
    I spent the rest of the night fixing my door and cleaning my apartment. The dead rat was the hardest part, but having to cut it down and stuff it into a garbage bag just made me angrier about the whole thing.
    By the time the sun came up, the place was semi back to
    normal. With sunlight streaming through my windows and the place smelling of disinfectant and soap, I dropped onto the couch and fell asleep.
     

47
     
    T he episode must have worn me out more than I realized because I slept the rest of the day. It was nearly six in the evening when I woke up. Twelve hours.
    I checked my answering machine, thinking how odd it was that nobody’d called, but I must have slept through the phone ringing. The machine said four calls had come in.
    On playback, the first message was Mitch, asking about his car. The next one was the office I’d done the subpoena and witness interview for on Thursday, calling to thank me for the reports and to tell me that they’d put a check in the mail for me. The last two were from Mitch, again, each call sounding more disturbed than the last.
    I showered in my clean-as-a-whistle bathroom, found some fresh clothes in the closet, then picked up a couple of gyros at the Mediterranean place off Columbus, and drove Mitch’s car out to Marin.
    Afterward, I decided to hit the Riff Club. It seemed as good a place as any to consider my options.
    As it turned out, it was Lucius’s night off so I had to buy my own. Not surprising, given the luck I’d had lately.
    Even the jazz was bad. The trio on the stand was painstakingly eking out a precisely discordant species of sound that made my temples ache and set my nerves on edge. Each scraping note lingered longer than it really needed to and the whole effect, sort