Death Notes

often and wasn’t ever going to happen again. Never.
    There wasn’t time to get any more philosophical than that because the phone rang and I had to catch the call before the answering machine snatched it.
    ‘Hello? Miss Ventana?’
    The voice was a woman’s - throaty, rough-edged, vaguely familiar and a little breathless.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘This is Sharon, honey. Sharon Margolis. Match’s wife.’
    Considering what she’d been through, I was surprised she remembered me.
    ‘I lost your card but Lucius gave me your number,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘Lucius said he knew you.’ Her voice started to rise, not strident, but not calm, either. ‘He’s the bartender at the Riff, honey. He said—’
    ‘I know who Lucius is.’
    I’d burglar-proofed his mother’s house in East Oakland last year and he hadn’t let me pay for my own drinks at the Riff Club since.
    ‘What can I do for you?’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about it over the phone, honey. Can you come over?’
    Philly Post’s hot little words of warning flashed across my brain.
    ‘I don’t know. It depends. Do you mind telling me what this is about?’
    ‘You want me to come to your office? That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it, honey?’
    I looked around my one-room North Beach walkup (two rooms if you counted the bathroom): a single table, chair, sofa bed and kitchenette with a hot plate. If she wasn’t put off by the bar downstairs, this would be the ‘office’ Sharon Margolis would see.
    ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Does this have anything to do with the murder?’
    ‘Please, honey, let’s not talk about it over the phone. I don’t want to leave the house, but if you’re going to insist, I can—’
    ‘Your place is fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be over in an hour.’
     

5
     
    I skipped my run, showered, brewed a quick pot on the Mr Coffee and found a box of Cheerios I’d forgotten I owned. The milk in the fridge had gone sour, though, so I threw the whole mess out and ate an Italian pastry from Cafe Roma in the car on the way out to her place.
    I felt stagnant, but the sun was out and by the time I pulled up to the curb on Molimo Drive in Miraloma Park, I was actually halfway looking forward to talking to Match’s widow.
    The Margolis house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, set apart from the others on the block by a yard and a newly painted fence. The back of the lot abutted the foot of Mount Davidson, the hill with the big white cross on it where Clint Eastwood knifed the psycho punk in the leg in Dirty Harry. There was more history to the place than that, I was sure, but I wasn’t up on it.
    From the outside the place was nice. Two stories of eggshell-blue stucco with a terrazzo tile roof, a carved oak door and big, solid trees all over the yard. She had a lot of green and a lot of space for being in the city.
    The grass in front hadn’t been mowed in a while, but the growth along the edges of the path to the door was freshly trampled about a foot and a half on either side. The reporters had obviously come and gone.
    When Sharon opened the door she didn’t look like somebody who’d seen her husband die just two nights ago. Her thick, middle-aged body was packed into a loud, flower-patterned dress that strained at the seams. She’d dabbed her eyes with too much purple shadow and her cheeks with pink, draped a couple of colored ropes around her neck and dangled some big, clanging loops from her ears. None of it helped. In the bright light of day Sharon Margolis looked old and used.
    ‘Good morning,’ I said, and offered my condolences.
    She said, ‘Yeah, isn’t it awful?’ without much conviction, then waved me into the house, locked the door, and hurried me down the hall. The air inside smelled of burned toast and bad coffee.
    Sharon wasn’t bossy and bustling like the other night before Match was killed and she wasn’t in a dazed fog, either, like she’d been afterward. She acted like a woman with a mission. And I got the distinct impression she wanted me to be part of it.
    ‘Look at this,’ she said, leading me through inexpensively furnished rooms into a dining room. I couldn’t understand the barely contained excitement in her voice. ‘Just look at all this.’
    The big oak table was strewn with newspapers and telegrams.
    ‘They loved him.’
    She picked up yesterday’s paper and slapped the above-the-fold front-page heading: JAZZ GREAT SLAIN.
    ‘See those