Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,32
over what so far was just a feeling. “But don’t let it go to your head. If there are prowlers working those apartments, keep the chain on your door the way I told you, and don’t let anybody in until you’ve finished the first two volumes of his biography. I’ll call you tomorrow, and I’ll be back early tomorrow night.”
They talked a few minutes more, and as soon as he’d hung up, he put in a call to Murdock. His answering service said Mr. Murdock wasn’t at his office or at home yet, but that he should report in shortly. Romstead gave her the number of the motel. “Ask him to call me as soon as he comes in.”
All he could do then was wait. And wonder about it. Too many things were wrong with the picture, Naturally, any prowler could get names off the mailboxes down below, but this guy wasn’t some punk who’d wandered in off the street with a strip of plastic or a credit card. He couldn’t have got in. Those were dead-bolt locks, and he’d turned the key when he left. Then there were the other touches, the coverall, the prop toolbag—both disposable down the nearest garbage chute—the calm assurance, the plausible patter, all of which bespoke a real professional—except that no professional in his right mind would waste his time prowling a single man’s apartment, even if you left him a key under the doormat. No furs, no jewelry—all the expensive baubles belonged to women. He’d get three or four suits that some fence might give him two dollars apiece for and the cleaning woman’s eight dollars if he could find it.
He could call Paulette Carmody, but he didn’t want to have the phone tied up if Murdock called.
He waited. He unpacked his bag and studied the maps some more. It was about twenty minutes before the phone rang. He grabbed it up. It was Murdock.
“I just got your call,” he said. “Anything new?”
“Yeah, some guy shook down my apartment this afternoon,” Romstead replied. “I can’t figure what he was after, but let’s take up your end of it first. You get any line on the girl?”
“Yes, we’ve had pretty good luck so far. I’ve just talked to Snyder again—he’s the man I put on her. He picked up her trail at Packer Electronics right off the bat. It’s a big outfit on upper Mission, handles everything in the electronics line: hi-fi components, radio and TV parts and tubes, transistors, ham equipment, and so on. She worked in the office there for about a year and a half, until last March. They let her go for tapping the till; apparently her habit was pretty expensive even then. Snyder got her last known address and checked that out. She’d been sharing an apartment with another girl named Sylvia Wolden out near the Marina, but she’d moved out of there in April. The Wolden girl didn’t know she was on junk but suspected she was shoplifting, from the things she’d bring home.
“She left no forwarding address, but Sylvia was able to give Snyder the name of an old boyfriend, Leo Cullen, who tends bar at a place on Van Ness. Cullen told Snyder he’d broken up with her along about Christmas, when she first got hooked on the stuff, and hadn’t seen her since but had heard she was shacked up with a guy named Marshall Tallant, who ran a one-man TV repair place in North Beach. Snyder went out there and found the place; but it was closed, and nobody in the neighborhood had seen Tallant in over a month. The girl had been living with him, though, and they’d both disappeared from the neighborhood about the same time.”
“Any idea how she was supporting her habit?” Romstead asked. “Tallant couldn’t have made much out of that shop.”
“No,” Murdock replied. “We haven’t got any line on that yet. If she was hustling, it apparently wasn’t in that neighborhood, though she might have been shoplifting downtown. And you’re right about the shop—Tallant couldn’t have paid for any forty- or fifty-dollar habit unless he had other sources of income. I gather he was plenty good, could fix anything electronic, but snotty and temperamental. He’d turn down jobs if they didn’t interest him, and some days he didn’t even open the place.
“There’s one possibility, though, and that brings me to my end of it. She could have had some kind of hustle going with your father. What, I don’t