Deadly Nightshade Read online

  Anyway, I talked to the cops. What did they want with you?”

  “I saw it,” Jake said. “Sort of. I heard him coming in and went to look out the bedroom window…”

  “Ever the peeping Tom,” Moira said. She picked up an empty glass from the pass-through counter, held it up to the light to examine it and gave it a quick wipe with her sleeve before half filling it from the Chivas bottle.

  “I was looking out the window when she…”

  “She?” She downed the Scotch in one long draught.

  “One of his hookers. I thought they were getting ready for some action. She kissed him and then he said,

  ‘hey, you’re not a real woman,’ and, bang, she shot him.”

  “‘You’re not a real woman?’” She laughed aloud. “You’re telling me Mister Footlong picked up a drag queen? You must have heard it wrong.”

  Jake smiled with her. “No, I swear it, that’s what he said. Well, what he started to say, anyway, but she shot him before he finished, boom. Then she takes off down the stairs.”

  “So you must have gotten a good look at her,” Moira said, giving him an appraising once over, as if she had just discovered something interesting about him. She set the glass aside. “I take it nobody you knew?

  Like, one of his regulars, or something?”

  Acheson looked away from her, glanced at Gaylord. “Never saw her before. I’m going down to the station in a little while and work with the sketch artist.”

  “Good for you.” She paused thoughtfully. “I wonder why anyone would want to shoot the poor bastard. I mean, hell, he was Mister Saturday Night around this place, wasn’t he?”

  “Well, he’d found out her secret. The drag queen thing.”

  “He’d have found that out soon enough anyway, wouldn’t he? I mean, if he was fucking her, he’d almost certainly have noticed a dick standing in his way. Not that I’d know exactly, but I should think.”

  Jake grunted. After a moment, he said, “So, what brings you by, Moira. Not to talk about our neighborhood murder, surely.”

  “I need some money,” she said.

  He looked a little embarrassed. “Actually, I’m kind of short…”

  She glanced meaningfully at the Chivas bottle on the table and at Gaylord. He lifted the bottle to pour a generous drink into his glass and sipped from it, smiling across the rim at her.

  “I’ll get my checkbook,” Jake said with a sigh.

  She left two thousand dollars richer, blowing kisses as she closed the door after herself. Jake, two thousand poorer, blew no kisses.

  “She could get a job, couldn’t she?” Gaylord said when she was gone. “Why should you have to support her?”

  Jake laughed bitterly. “What kind of job do you think would suit Moira?”

  “They use pigs to find truffles in the woods, don’t they? I’ll be she’d be killer at that.”

  § § § § §

  Jeremy Clark lived directly across the way from Acheson, the other side of the atrium. He was even more sure of the woman he had seen dashing across the atrium than Jake Acheson had been.

  “I told the guys in uniform. Drag queen, absolutely,” he said. “I can always tell. Most of them can’t resist the eyelashes like feather dusters. The only real women you see wearing them are strippers and the occasional hooker.” He paused and screwed up his face. “Actually, now that I think of it, most of the hookers these days are drag queens, aren’t they? Plus enough eye liner to paint a boat. Mick Jagger lips, or Goldie after one of those injections, looked like they could suck the coconuts off the tree. The way no real woman makes up.”

  “So, you stopped in your tracks and she ran right past you.” Tom said. “A drag queen. Aren’t we supposed to say transgender?” He looked at Stanley, who shrugged.

  Tom looked at his notes. “You said she was little. Five two, five three, right? You didn’t try to stop her?”

  “Hey, she had a gun. And I didn’t know right off the bat that she’d killed Hartman. All I saw was a drag queen running, with a gun in her hand. Mostly, I was too surprised to do anything till she was gone.”

  “Which way did she go?” Stanley asked.

  He thought for a moment. “You know, now that you ask that, it’s kind of funny. She didn’t run out the front gate. That’s where I came in, and that was closest, you’d think that’s where she’d head, wouldn’t you, get out quick, but she didn’t. There’s another gate at the side of the building.” He pointed in the direction of 17th Street. “She ran out that way. But that’s, what, sixty, eighty feet further away.”

  “You saw her go?”

  “No, not exactly. But the floor in that hallway is tile and she was wearing high heels, they made a lot of racket on the tile. I could hear her, and then the gate over there kind of sticks, it bangs when it shuts. I heard that.”

  “Maybe that’s where she parked. Did you hear a car?”

  “No. But I wasn’t listening for one, either. That’s about when Jake upstairs came out of his apartment. He said something, I don’t remember what, exactly, and then he said, ‘Holy shit,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said,

  ‘She killed him.’ So I came over to the stairs, and there was Hartman…”

  “Did you know him?” Tom asked. “This Hartman guy, I mean.”

  “Not to talk to. A couple of times I peeked out my bedroom window and watched him getting blow jobs from his dates. He was pretty impressive. The chicks got real excited when they got a load of what he had on him.”

  “Did this guy have any friends in the building?” Stanley asked, “or just a lot of non-paying audience?”

  “Hey,” Clark said in a defensive voice, “he was the one putting on the shows. If he didn’t want people watching, he could always have waited till he got inside his apartment.”

  “Don’t get excited,” Stanley said, making a placating gesture. “Hell, I’m just sorry I missed the performances. Sounds like they were pretty hot.” He ignored Tom’s disgusted scowl.

  “They were,” Clark said begrudgingly. He glanced at Tom. “Really,” he said. “I mean, I’m not queer, but, hell, this guy was something to see. And the way the chicks got all turned on… well… To tell you the truth, I took things in hand a time or two while the show was going on. You know what I mean?” He pumped his hand up and down in front of his crotch and gave Tom another defensive glance. Tom avoided it.

  “So,” Stanley said, “did he have any friends in the building?”

  Clark had to think about that. “Try 310, next door to Hartman,” he said. “Andrews is his name. Terry Andrews. Jerry Andrews. Something like that. I think they used to sometimes grab a beer together.”

  They set Jeremy up with the artist, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Barry Andrews was a little man with a shiny head and a white goatee. The thick lenses in his glasses made his large eyes look even more owlish.

  “Gordy Hartman?” he said when they went to interview him. “I don’t know if he had any really close friends. His ex wife, maybe. They remained friendly, seemed like. He’s got a kid, a son, grown up now, he’s back on the East Coast, I think. So’s the wife, as I recall. Or maybe she’s in the east bay, I don’t remember.

  Hartman was pretty much a loner, though.”

  “We’re told the two of you sometimes hung out together,” Tom said.

  Andrews looked surprised. “Not really, not what you’d call hanging out together. I’ve got this big screen television, HDTV. Sometimes he’d come over to watch some baseball. I think for him it was like looking at a mirror.” He looked at Stanley. “The baseball bat, you know what I mean?”

  Tom sighed. “That seems to be the one thing everybody knew about this guy,” he said. “What a way to be remembered.”

  “There’s worse things,” Stanley said. He looked meaningfully at Tom’s lap. Tom shifted his legs, thinking he’d have to switch to jockeys if he was going to be working with queers. Boxers showed too much.

  Sometimes it got a woman’s eye, but he didn’t like that it encouraged the boys. Andrews seemed to find the remark funny, until Tom scowled at him.

  They were leaving when Andrews said, “We did go out for a beer one night, though, me and Hartman. It was kind of funny, actually. I mean, he had never suggested anything like that, we weren’t even that friendly, really, and then this one night, it was a Saturday, he said why didn’t we go out and tip a few, and I had nothing on, I’m not much of a social butterfly myself, so I said sure, why not.”

  “Where’d you go?” Stanley asked.

  “Well, that’s the funny thing. He said he’d found this bar, he thought it was kind of a riot. That’s how he described it. ‘A real riot,’ he said, and I should have a look. In retrospect, I think he was, sort of, like scoping me out, how I’d react to it, you know what I mean?”

  “React to what?” Tom asked.

  Andrews got a sheepish look on his face. “It was a drag bar.”

  Stanley’s eyebrows went up. “A drag bar?”

  “Totally. I mean, there was a stage, and a show going on—but, really, the whole thing was about drag. The waitresses, the bartenders, just about everybody. They were mostly all chicks with dicks. You know, guys in dresses.”

  “And how did you react to this?” Stanley asked.

  Andrews managed a pallid smile. “I didn’t like it, to tell you the truth. It’s okay, I guess, if that’s your bag, but, well, it doesn’t do anything for me. I like real women, you know what I mean?” This time it was Tom he looked to for support.

  “Exactly,” Tom said.

  “I mean, hell, I guess if it came right down to it, I could probably make it with a guy. I mean. I like women, but probably, the right time—if I was super horny, say, and there was nothing else available. You know, a blow job is a blow job. You close your eyes, how could you tell the difference? You can fantasize whatever you want. But, the funny thing is, if something like that happened, I’d want it to be a guy, not one dressed up like a chick. I don’t think I could do it with someone in drag. I mean, knowing it was really a guy under the dress and the makeup and all. I’d want to look and I wouldn’t want to, either. I think it would mess up my fantasies. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” Tom said, and Stanley said, at the very same moment, “Absolutely.” Andrews looked from one to the other.

  “You guys are a funny pair,” he said. “Kind of like Abbot and Costello play detective.”

  “We’re rehearsing for the school play,” Stanley said. “So, what happened? At your drag bar?”

  Andrews shrugged. “Nothing, really. I think we were both kind of embarrassed by the whole situation. He could see I wasn’t comfortable, and I guess he was sorry he had taken me there. We had a drink. Just one, even though we had to pay for two. Cover charge, you know. He paid. It was his idea to go there, so I figured that was only right. And we left and came home. Or, I came home, anyway. He was driving. He dropped me off, said he had someplace to go. I kind of figured he was going back to the same place but it wasn’t any of my business, the way I saw it. Live and let live, I always say.”

  He looked from one to the other again, seemed to be waiting for one of them to say something. When neither of them did, he added, “That was the only time we ever went out together, though. He never asked again. To be honest, I was kind of glad. Now that I think of it, he never stopped over again, either.”

  “This club you went to,” Stanley said. “What was it called, do you remember?”

  “Oh, sure,” Andrews said. “Carla’s Web. It’s down in the Mission.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said.

  “The odd thing is, like, I’ve been wondering, who’d want to kill Hartman? He was kind of a funny guy, but he seemed pretty harmless to me. Who would want him dead?”

  “Good question,” Stanley said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “I mean, half the building was in on the fun.” Andrews gave them a lewd kind of grin. “Well, it was something to watch. Beat Leno, most nights. He could have sold tickets, made some bucks.”

  § § § § §

  “Two real witnesses,” Stanley said when they were in the corridor. “You don’t often get that kind of break, do you? And both of them got a good look at the perp.”

  “Cops don’t say ‘perp,’ Stanley, that’s on TV. And their stories don’t exactly mesh. Acheson said he saw her running across the atrium with the gun, Clark says she was already running down the side hall when Acheson came out of his apartment.”

  “Probably nothing. People get sequences mixed up, don’t they? That kind of detail. That was the whole point of Rashoman.”

  “So, what do you think?” Tom asked.

  “Rashoman? It’s a classic, you mean you never…?”

  “About our case. You know, the homicide. What do you think, as a homicide detective?” He gave the last two words a sarcastic inflection.

  Stanley seemed not to notice the sarcasm. He was flattered to be asked his professional opinion, as a homicide detective. “I think we should get a damned good sketch,” he said cautiously, not sure what was expected of him.

  “I mean, about the murder.”

  “I think the building’s lost its chief source of entertainment.”

  “Yeah. What a bunch of sickos, huh? Everybody hanging around their windows to watch this guy get his tool lubed.”

  “What? You’ve never watched?”

  “Me? No way. Oh, well, sure, a porn movie every now and then.”

  “Guys and girls?”

  Tom shot him a look. “Totally,” he said.

  “Well, this Hartman sounds like he put on a pretty good show. Sorry I missed it, to tell the truth. I’ll bet Saturday nights won’t be the same around the old hacienda.”

  “Uh, Stanley, not to keep harping on it, but, about the murder…”

  “Oh, sure, the murder. Well, we just started. I don’t have it solved yet, exactly. Do you?”

  “What about Miss Nancy?” Tom said.

  “Nancy Drew? You dig her, too? I started reading her when I was twelve. The Secret in the Old Clock. That’s still my personal—”

  “Miss Boom Boom,” Tom interrupted him. “She’s a drag queen—”

  “Transgender.”

  “Why is it transgender if I say it, and drag queen if they say it?”

  “You’re a police officer. You’re supposed to be politically correct.”

  Tom snorted. “So, as I was saying, she’s a drag queen, and a drag queen killed this guy. That’s a big coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Her boyfriend alibis her,” Stanley said. He liked the way that sounded when he said it, like real cop-speak.

  He thought he was handling this very professionally. His future as a homicide detective was looking more secure all the time. “She was with Acheson, according to both of them.”

  “Might not mean anything. Think about it. The boyfriend likes to ogle the guy next door. Miss Trés Gaye gets jealous. Or, maybe old Jake did more than just watch from time to time. Maybe he was going over occasionally to borrow a cup of sugar, you know what I mean.”

  “Hmm. Or maybe it was the other way around,” Stanley said. “Maybe it was Gaye Dawn who was paying neighborly visits. She strikes me as the sleazy sort. Did you see the way she looked you over? And her husband right there in the room.”

  “So, why would she shoot Hartman, then?”

  Stanley shrugged. “I didn’t say she did. Doesn’t seem likely, really. Think about it. This Jeremy guy heard the killer run out the other end of the building…”

  “She could have circled around, come back in another way. That apartment building, what’s it called?”

  “Casa Sanchez. Because it’s on Sanchez Street,” he added—unnecessarily, he thought.

  “Well, it’s a maze. You could get lost in the place without a map. Plus, there’s a bunch of entrances.

  There’s one at the other end of the building, too, on Dorland Street, I noticed that when we drove past.

  Probably one through the garage, too, maybe a tunnel up to one of those queer bars in the Castro for all we know. That could have been just to throw us off, the perp running all the way down to the side entrance like that. So we’d think he didn’t live in the building.”

  Stanley thought a moment. “Maybe,” he said, unconvinced. “I’d be happy to pin it on her, but to be honest, Gaye Dawn doesn’t seem like the gun type to me.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “Acheson, though. There was something funny about him.”

  “You picked up on it too? He was lying about something. Or there was something he wasn’t telling us.”

  “Exactly. If there’s one thing I know, it’s when a man is trying to hide something from me. My ex—”

  “Maybe something about the boyfriend. They’re an odd pair, aren’t they?”

  “They have one thing in common,” Stanley said. Tom raised an eyebrow. “They’re both in love with Gaye Dawn.”

  Tom snorted. He was silent, thoughtful for a moment. “What do you suppose an apartment costs in a place like that?”

  “That apartment? Three grand a month, probably. Maybe more.”

  “Pretty rich for a bartender. And it was furnished pretty grand.”

  “Oh, please, lots of money, no taste. You didn’t think that was a real Aubusson, did you?”

  “No, ‘course I didn’t,” Tom said too quickly. “Still, like you say, lots of money. Do they make that kind of tips?”

  “She works.” Stanley screwed up his face. “Only, you can just bet she’s a selfish little bitch. I can’t see her spending her money on anyone but herself.”

  “I think you’re right about that.” Tom thought for another minute. “This last guy, Andrews, he had a good question. Who’d want to kill this guy Hartman?”

  “That’s always the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? Figure out the motive, according to Agatha Christie, and more often than not you’ve got the case solved. All we have to do is figure out the motive, right?”

  Tom gave him a suspicious look. “Stanley, you’ve never actually worked a homicide investigation, right?”