Death Notes

silence, then Blackie said, ‘So what’d the fucker ask you?’
    ‘You mean Post?’
    He struck a match, cupped his hand over it, then held the flame to the tip of his cigarette. The tobacco caught and smoke billowed out into the warm night air of the waterfront.
    ‘He tell you to stay out of it?’
    ‘He’s just doing his job, Blackie. It’s not personal.’
    I opened the Buick’s door and tossed my jacket and bag inside.
    ‘He’s an asshole, doll, and you know it. Listen to the old teach here.’
    Blackie piled into the driver’s side while I kicked the empty liquor bottles, discarded fast food cartons, and crushed empty cigarette wrappers under the car seat to make a space to set my feet. The clock on the dash said nine a.m. It was five hours fast, as usual.
    Blackie jangled his keys into the ignition. ‘Joey’s playing after hours at the Dock,’ he said. ‘Want to check him out?’
    ‘Sure, why not?’
    It would beat going home and brooding about the soulless look in Match’s dying eyes.
    Blackie pressed on the gas and guided the car onto China Basin Street. The mostly empty warehouses and just-barely-getting-by factories along China Basin yielded to cheesy cafes and hardware stores in the next few blocks, then nicer cafes and shops farther on, and finally to office buildings, the ballpark, and dozens of skyscrapers packed together, blocking out the night sky.
    Driving down this stretch was like a trip through time, a panorama of the short, ten-year history of downtown and South of Market - the ‘Manhattanization’ and ‘dot-comization’ of my beloved San Francisco. It was progress, but just the same it made me sad.
    ‘Did the asshole have any leads?’ Blackie said.
    ‘Uh-uh. All he’s got is that knife and it didn’t look like anything special. You could buy one like that anywhere.’
    ‘Prints?’
    ‘They’re going to check but the handle didn’t look like it would hold a decent set, not even that precious square millimeter they need for the computer to work it. But who knows, maybe they’ll find something.’
    ‘How about yourself, doll? You got any ideas?’
    ‘I like the wife but Post says she was in plain view up on the bandstand. Did you see her there when Match went down?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He seemed reluctant to agree with anything Post said. A bump in the road jiggled the two-inch ash off the end of Blackie’s cigarette. I imagined the carpet of trash on the floor exploding into flames but nothing happened. Blackie rolled his window down and tossed the butt out, then swerved around a comer.
    ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Match musta crawled through fifty people to get from where he was to where he dropped. Could’ve been anybody along the way. What about the list the cops made?’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘That’s a start.’
    Blackie’s eyes sparkled in the glare of oncoming headlights.
    Back when Blackie was showing me the ropes we used to w ork a lot of cases just for kicks. It was sort of his hobby, trying to beat out the cops.
    ‘Think you can get a copy?’
    ‘From who? Aldo Stivick won’t do it. He’s in love with that judge’s clerk now so I’ve lost my leverage with him. Post’s all I’ve got and we both know he won’t give me a thing. He warned me to keep out of it and this time I think I’ll listen. There’s no money in it, Blackie, and Hakim’s nagging me about the rent. I’ve got to land something that pays.’
    ‘I hear anything, I’ll pass it on.’
    Blackie pulled out another cigarette, careened through two stop signs, then braked for a red light.
    ‘He say anything?’
    His voice was oddly casual.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Margolis. Word out on the floor was he slipped you a couple of hints before he croaked.’
    ‘Post had the same idea. Who told you that?’
    ‘About fifteen different people.’
    The light changed and Blackie smashed his foot on the gas. We flew up the Bay Bridge on ramp and sped toward Oakland. A horn blared. Blackie swerved to miss a diesel truck, then accelerated as he glanced across at me.
    ‘Better keep your eyes open, doll. Whoever took him out heard the same rumor I did.’
     

4
     
    I was awake before the phone rang. I’d spent most of Sunday recovering from Saturday night - B-complex and Bloody
    Marys - and fighting the urge to look into Match’s murder. Now it was Monday and I should have been out running instead of moping in bed thinking about jazz and Match and how the kind of music he made didn’t happen too