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“What did I do this time, leave food on my plate?”
Carlucci ran a restaurant in North Beach where I ate occasionally because his mother was on some kind of mission to fatten me up. Not unlike my own mother’s crusade. If I didn’t clean my plate it caused undue grief. If Tony’s mom was not happy, Tony was not happy.
And when Tony Carlucci was not happy with you, he was a nightmare.
“It’s no joke, Jake. Tony sounded very upset. Don’t ask me what about, he wouldn’t say—but he insisted he had to talk with you right away. He will call at your office at nine and expects you to be there. Be there, Jake.”
Great.
“I certainly will be, Joey.”
“Give me a call as soon as Tony’s done with you.”
Interesting choice of words I thought.
I promised Joey I would call immediately after Tony was done with me and then I painfully negotiated my way across the hall toward the shower.
THREE
Kenny Gerard was nothing if not punctual.
Kenny was never late for work or, for that matter, early.
His work was that of a doorman slash security guard in a high-rise apartment building at Mission and Third. Kenny worked the day shift, seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, five days a week. His work area was limited to the building lobby, the street-front just outside the building entrance, and occasionally the elevator bank if a tenant needed help with shopping packages. Radios, iPods, portable televisions, chats with friends and book reading were all prohibited while on duty. Fraternizing with the tenants was frowned upon—though there were a good number of young woman residents who Kenny would have loved to do some fraternizing with.
Gerard bounced into the lobby at exactly seven on that Thursday morning. The first thing he noticed was that Jim Bingham was absent from his post.
The large duty desk was an L-shaped affair, fronted by a tall counter which hid the desktop and all but the top of the head of a seated person. Kenny often used the cover of the counter to take in a few pages of a graphic novel or to struggle with the Examiner crossword puzzle.
The days were long and boring.
Kenny sometimes thought he might prefer the three to eleven shift, when there was more activity—tenants coming in from their jobs and going out on the town. Women were friendlier in the evenings than they were rushing away in the morning to their workplaces. But Gerard would rather have the day shift than the graveyard. Kenny pitied James Bingham. The poor bastard was stuck with nothing to do and not much to see from eleven at night until he was replaced at seven. And at seven, Bingham was usually standing right at the doorway itching to get away, waiting on Kenny Gerard like a member of a tag team race.
But not this morning.
And Kenny Gerard continued to wonder where Bingham was until he discovered James hidden behind the security desk.
Bingham didn’t look good.
First at the scene were two San Francisco patrol car officers who were closest when the call came in. Murdoch, a rookie, and Winger, a three-year veteran. The pair were affectionately known at the station as the tall skinny kid and whatshisname.
Kenny Gerard thought they appeared to be very young, and he was correct.
The two officers looked down at the body, which was stuffed under the desk between the counter and the chair. Only Winger had touched the body, and only long enough to check for pulse. James Bingham’s head sat at an angle to his torso that brought Linda Blair to Kenny Gerard’s mind, though he didn’t mention it.
“Do you think he slipped way underneath the desk and snapped his neck?” Murdoch asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Winger answered.
“Who do we call now—the forensic guys, the M.E., or homicide?”
“Call it in as a D.O.A., cause of death unknown,” said Winger. “Let them figure out who the hell to send.”
Darlene Roman did her laps around Buena Vista Park alone.
She missed having Tug McGraw running beside her.
Her best friend Rose and Rose’s husband were taking the kids up to Stinson Beach for a four-day weekend and the two little girls pleaded with ‘Aunt’ Darlene to let Tug go along.
