Bohemian Heart Page 7

The Farragut clan, from William I on down, had built a formidable reputation for leaving no discernible trail throughout a hundred years of plundering the city. I envisioned old man Farragut III sitting at the dinner table, teaching young William IV how to run a proper slush fund the way most fathers instruct their sons in the art of hitting a curveball.

  I asked Arnie about the girl who had been Farragut's S&M sweetie, but nothing that Arnie had found in Farragut's records immediately indicated who she was or where to find her. Naturally.

  Nothing in the evidence files indicated that she had ever been found. That got my curiosity working overtime. Why hadn't the SFPD or Sherenian's army of P.I.s ever found her?

  Finally, Arnie produced three phone numbers, the three Farragut had called most frequently, particularly in the days preceding his death. One was the number of his bosom buddy, Calvin Sherenian, one was the number of his political hack, Supervisor Helen Smidge.

  The last was an unlisted number in Hillsborough that Farragut called every night between the hours of seven and eight. Through a friend of mine at the phone company, Arnie had learned that the nightly calls made by the murdered William IV, were to Eileen Farragut, his mother.

  This last piece of information was just one more in the string of surprising facts about the Farragut family, one I didn't remember from my previous pursuit of Willy IV. It made me wonder if Bluebeard wrote regularly to his mom.

  I thanked Arnie, and after he left, I rose, yawned a jawbreaker, and went upstairs to exchange my courtroom apparel for a spare leather jacket and a Walther. Then I clunked back down the stairs, opened the garage, and fired up the Norton.

  I slowed to watch the sun dropping behind the Golden Gate, fiery red, the shadow of the bridge moving over the Marina like a sundial on fast forward. It always amazes me to watch the colors of the city change as the sun sets, gold fading to pale metallic green, then deepening to a light iridescent purple as the last ray climbs Telegraph Hill and mingles with the first evening lights.

  It had been twenty-four hours since I received Colleen's invitation to the opera and I was pushing forty hours without sleep. My head hurt, my eyes burned, and I had Eileen Farragut to deal with, if she'd see me.

  I knew that keeping my arrangement with Colleen a secret was going to be tough; Eileen would be the first test.

  Los Angeles may be famed for its traffic jams, but they do in eight or ten lanes what much of the San Francisco Peninsula is still doing in four. Bumper to bumper, the ulcer brigade returned to the suburbs, with me on the Norton burning a hole between the lanes, pissing off ten or twelve thousand people in the process.

  My mind was all over the place. I thought of Colleen and the horror that awaited her. I thought of how the bastards had killed Kennedy and were still getting away with it, of how my grandfather had once tried to bust Farragut's grandfather and had gotten the same treatment I had. I thought that God was a bent quarter in a midnight phone booth.

  I needed a night's sleep. I needed a job where no one went to jail or lost their life if I couldn't perform a miracle. I needed a long vacation with Colleen and two suitcases full of her favorite lingerie in a bungalow in the Caribbean, eating right and fucking like humans.

  What I really needed was a break in the case. I wanted Eileen Farragut to tell me something she hadn't told anyone else, something that would lead me to her son's killer.

  I exited the freeway, passing a sign that read WELCOME TO HILLSBOROUGH, which I doubted I was. One of the wealthiest suburbs in the country, it was also the home of the Hearst family of publishing and Patty fame. I pushed the Norton down streets so perfect, so clean, I suspected little gardeners hid in the bushes with pointed sticks, ready to attack any candy wrapper invading from some disrespectful ghetto to the north.

  Arriving at the home of the late William Farragut III, I headed up the long drive. The house was another one of those Tudor-style monstrosities, and I was certain they'd be delighted to see an uninvited, leather-jacketed P.I. with long hair and a motorcycle.

  I scuffed my way up the stone steps to the front door and pressed a button, which set off musical door chimes. A tiny peephole with a metal grate over it opened and a single female oriental eye appeared.

  "Francis Fagen, private investigator," I said, and held my ID up so the Cyclops could see it. I always saved "Francis" for the better neighborhoods, figuring the choirboy handle might offset the fashionably avant-garde Bowery appearance. I lowered the ID and told the eye I wanted to see Mrs. Farragut about the murder of her son. I held the ID up again. The eye didn't blink. I wished I'd had a spitball and a plastic straw. Finally the eye closed the peephole and left me hanging, reciting nonsense phrases, lyrics from bad songs like "Play That Funky Music White Boy" and wondering why private detectives never called first.

  I'd waited long enough to earn a college degree when I heard latches being unbolted and the large wooden door swung open. The Oriental eye belonged to a short stout woman in her mid fifties. I thanked her in Cantonese as I entered. She was unimpressed. My Mandarin was equally unimpressive. I found out later she was Korean.

  I followed the maid down a series of hallways like the ones in Colleen's house. Most were decorated in medieval decor: sawed-up bridge timbers chairs and tables, with flayed saddles for seats and backs. It proved again that taste and money rarely had intercourse.

  The maid deposited me in a huge library where eightyish Eileen Farragut sat in a red chair wearing a green dress and black shoes, and didn't seem to mind. She was slight, silver-haired, and wrinkled as a catcher's mitt left out in the rain. She had fingers bony enough to pick a padlock, forearms that could slice cheese.

  She looked me over from bottom to top without the slightest hint of approval. What struck me most were her eyes. Clear blue and years younger than their owner, they seemed to be crying out help me, I'm being held prisoner in the body of an old woman.

  "So you're the man who struck fear in the heart of my son," she said.

  "That's twice I've heard that," I answered, "I must admit that it surprises me. I thought your son was only capable of one emotion." Open Mouth, Insert Foot, Fagen.

  But she smiled, looked me over top to bottom this time. "Greed is not an emotion, it's an institution with the males of the Farragut lineage." She said it with humor and life filling her eyes. "I remember you from your newspaper photographs, Mr. Fagen. You've gone to hell a bit, haven't you?" I didn't have much of an answer to that one. "I say, I've known a few private detectives in my life and you're the damnedest one I've seen yet. What is your business, Mr. Fagen?"

  "I'm investigating the Colleen Farragut case. I think there's at least a chance she might be innocent. I was hoping you might help me. If she is innocent, that means the person who killed your son is still out there." It's deduction like that last bit that's going to get me in the P.I. Hall of Fame.

  Eileen waved me to a chair. "I've answered a lot of questions already, but if you think it will help you I'll gladly answer more. Then you'll answer one or two of mine."

  I nodded. I liked her already.

  "Why did your son marry Colleen?" I began. She seemed a little surprised; I was sure no one had asked her that yet.

  "Besides the obvious?" she asked. I nodded. Without blinking she said, "You know how most women are, here in the hedonist half of the twentieth century; they show up for a first date in a garter belt and a pair of kneepads. Not Colleen, she made him wait, she refused to be impressed by his power or his money. He pursued her, not vice versa. After that, well, I hear she has incomparable oral dexterity."

  I tried not to bust out laughing. "That's a noble trait, Mrs. Farragut, one I admire tremendously in a woman, but it's not a reason to marry."

  "With William it was." She was serious. This was some family. Son finishes a hard day plundering the city, calls mom faithfully and lets her know what a good blow job the missus gives. Sigmund Freud should have had them on his greatest hits.

  "Look, Mr. Fagen, I think you're trying to fin
d hidden motives: did Colleen have anything on William, did she blackmail him or manipulate him into marrying her? The answer is no. My son was rich and handsome and very charming, although he had the Farragut curse, a soul blacker than a bottomless pit. He could have had a lot of women, damn near any woman he wanted, but he chose her. He was obsessed with her."

  "I've oversimplified to make a point, Mr. Fagen, but Colleen was, in William's opinion, the most erotic and exciting woman he'd ever met. She didn't pursue him, he pursued her."

  She was smart, smarter than I was. "So what happened?"

  "To them? As I mentioned, my son had the family disease. His father, his grandfather—you know the Farragut history, I'm sure. They all had the attention span of an autistic child, especially when it came to human relations, he grew tired of her. Once he had her, he wanted what they all wanted: more. Something new and different. Something he couldn't have. Matter of fact, that particular curse is not limited to the Farraguts, at least where women are concerned. Most men are afflicted by it."

  "In fact, Mr. Fagen, judging by your shoddy good looks, your lack of a wedding band, and your inflated sense of bohemian self-worth, you probably suffer from some of those very same afflictions."

  Again I had to fight not to laugh out loud. She owned me.

  "William called you every night, and I'm gathering that he kept very few secrets from you. Did he have any real enemies, people who were threatening revenge, who might have been capable of killing him?"

  She looked at me, waiting for an explanation. I smiled and kept going.

  "Right now, everyone is talking burglary, burglary. It could be someone went there to harm either William or Colleen, then tried to cover it up by dumping out drawers and stealing the two silver plates to make it look like a burglary."

  "Yes, Ghiberti's plates. Among my son's most prized possessions." She hesitated, looked up, seemed to choose her words carefully. "My son had a lot of enemies, Mr. Fagen. He'd received a number of death threats over the years from radical groups in San Francisco and Berkeley. Crackpots like the people who kidnapped Patricia Hearst, Marxist groups. But the police don't seem to think any of them had anything to do with it, or they would have crowed about it in the media."

  The police were right; any radical group or self-righteous whacko would have pumped it up for publicity value. I could safely move that theory to the bottom of the list.

  "William's business opponents were a strange lot, Mr. Fagen, but most of them were his friends. People he'd bested in deals, people he'd defeated along the way. I despised my son's business tactics, the way I despised his father's and his grandfather'sbut William never cheated a partner. The people he'd beaten always hoped he'd include them in his next venture. No threats, no blackmail, nothing. And believe me, he would have told me. His father died when he was only twenty, and I became his most trusted confidante. Myself and his lawyer, Calvin Sherenian, who became a surrogate father to him, were the two people closest to him."

  I looked her in the eye, wanting to believe her. If what she said was true, one of my theories was probably wrong: that Farragut and not his possessions had been the target. That would bring me back to a bungled burglary. Or Colleen.

  "Do you think Colleen killed him?" I asked.

  She smiled. The great blue eyes floated over my face, softening. "No, I do not."

  I was surprised and tried not to show it.

  "I adore my daughter-in-law, Mr. Fagen," she said. "I thought she was the best thing that ever happened to Will. She used his money to try to help people. She wasn't one of those weekend liberals, she didn't help people to get her name in the society pages. She had heart, and she got her hands dirty. I can't imagine her doing something so stupid, even if she did want him dead."

  She looked at me without speaking for a few moments, then added, "Look, Mr. Fagen. I hate being wrong almost as much as I hate being old. Colleen didn't have to kill anyone. Men swoon when she passes. She's smart enough and ambitious enough to get anything she wants without a man's help. I think the killer is elsewhere."

  "Now answer one for me, Mr. Fagen. Why are you on this case? It can't possibly be for revenge in this ancient feud between the Fagens and the Farraguts. William is already dead. I know she has very little money left; she certainly can't be paying you very much. But every time I offer to help, she refuses."

  I hadn't told her Colleen hired me, I merely said I was investigating the case. Lying about it now seemed futile.

  "She gave me a retainer, and I'll get a very large bonus if I find the killer." I left out the part about the diaries. "She also asked that I keep my activities as quiet as possible, that I work strictly for her."

  "If that is her wish, your secret is certainly safe with me. I wish you Godspeed, Mr. Fagen. Don't fail her."

  I rose, thanked her, and headed for the door, wondering if I'd see her again, feeling grateful that my job sometimes brought me into the company of a woman like Eileen Farragut.

  "Mr. Fagen," she called after me. I turned, glad to spend a few more seconds in her company. "If you need anything—if you need expense money, or reward money, or money for bribes—you'll call me. Without hesitation." It wasn't a question, but a kindly order. I nodded, thanked her again, caught the blue eyes smiling, and went out.

  When I reached the motorcycle I looked back at the house. I was pleased and surprised by my reception, comforted by Eileen Farragut's conviction that Colleen was innocent, and troubled by the fact that I was a day closer to reckoning and still didn't know a damn thing more than when I'd started.

  Chapter 8

  The words in the evidence files started dancing and doing weird gyroscopic impersonations of the 49er's cheerleaders when I decided I'd had enough. Dropping them on the table with the sinking feeling that nothing in them was going to help me anyway, I stood in front of the picture window and stretched, staring out at the dark waters of the Bay. I thought I saw the two bridge towers bowing toward each other like a pair of fencers. I was too tired to work and too wired to sleep.

  I thought about Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, our two greatest writers of detective fiction, in that order, about how everything that happened in their stories, almost everyone the sleuth interviewed, virtually every place he went produced a clue or a piece of the puzzle, and how unlike real life that was. For every piece of hard evidence you uncover you have to interview a few dozen bad liars and sift through a boxcar of useless information. I sensed I was going to break my own frustration record before I was through with the Farragut case.

  The buzzer rang. It wasn't Arnie, Martha or Henry Borowski, who all had keys. I cocked my Walther and put it in my back pocket, keeping my finger on the trigger, and went downstairs to answer the door.

  As I approached I saw a tall, Grim Reaper-like figure, face shrouded deep in the shadow of a hood. I didn't know the Reaper rang doorbells. I tensed a little, not having expected any hooded company, until I saw the long hand with the fuchsia-colored nails reach up and zip the hooded coat open. Colleen smiled at me through the etched-glass window. That woke me up instantly.

  "Are you alone?" she asked as I opened the door. I nodded and let her in. She signaled to Consuela, parked across the street, that it was okay to go. Consuela nodded, then drove off.

  "I'm sorry to barge in on you, but I just came from Calvin's office and I wanted to talk." She took the coat off, revealing the demure, business woman's attire she had worn to the trial that day. When she smiled the room seemed a little lighter.

  "Have you eaten?" she asked.

  "No, actually I'd forgotten all about it." It was just past ten. I went to a drawer and retrieved a menu from Fior D'Italia on Washington Square.

  "My cousin Giuseppe is a maitre d' at Fior, he'll have something sent over to us."

  She selected the eggplant parmesan, I chose fettuccine vongole rosso. While I called and gave the order to Giuseppe, Colleen wandered about my office looking at my library of family photographs, many of which dated bac
k to the Gold Rush. There were portraits of eleven of us in police uniform, including my great grandfather, Byron "Bunky" Fagen, my grandfather Arthur, my father, Francis Paul, and me, Francis James. Mine was taken on the day I graduated from the academy. Colleen grinned at the baby-faced rookie with the white-sidewall haircut and the smug determination, a twenty-one-year-old ready to right the world.

  It was an impressive collection, and she looked at it with the intense, admiring eye of someone who loves both the city and good photography. Among the lot were some classics taken between 1850 and the Great Earthquake, showing the masts of schooners bobbing in the Bay at Yerba Buena, the city little more than a booming but beautiful cow town.

  The centerpiece of the collection was some prints of the 1906 earthquake and the resulting fires and destruction taken by the tragedy's greatest chronicler, Arnold Genthe, who had befriended my great-grandfather. She examined them intently as I opened a bottle of Cabernet from the Cohn Winery in Sonoma. "Is that your house being built?" she asked.

  "Yes. Those burly guys with the handlebar moustaches and denim aprons are my great-grandfather and his brothers. The teenager at the far right in the big picture is my grandfather. They were all cops, every one of them. That was 1887."

  What was most impressive about the photos was the absence of landmarks in the backgrounds.

  First, a shot from the top of Telegraph Hill, across the street. It showed North Beach and Cow Hollow without the Marina District, a grassy marsh that might have given birth to Swamp Thing. In the foreground was a muddy street with a wooden sidewalk and the Lombard Street cable car easing down, a line that no longer exists.

  Most striking was Fort Point and the Golden Gate without the bridge.

  In several other shots, Coit Tower is conspicuously absent from the grassy knoll atop Telegraph Hill, and there is no Bay Bridge looming above and behind the Embarcadero.

  "This house was built for the princely sum of seventeen hundred fifty dollars. I still have the receipts from the lumberyards and glass shops."