Death-Wish Green by Frances Crane

Author:Frances Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

In the car again I said, “The name of one of those little streets was Harwood Place.”

“Just a minute,” Pat said, checking the time. He drove along Grant Avenue toward Bay Street. “I suppose you’ll dream now that Mrs. Harwood took the name Harwood because she was born on Harwood Place. You could be very wrong. My guess is that she came from quite another part of the city.”

“No sense in guessing. Look, The Purple Onion isn’t open Sundays just now, Pat. Maguire said he heard what Celeste said about death-wish green there.”

Pat said wryly, “Maguire probably meant The Hungry I. The interesting thing is that he heard the remark at all. There’s a telephone. I won’t be a minute.”

He took five and came back. We drove on.

I said, “People’s Russian mothers for years have been White Russians born in Paris. Why not one born in San Francisco? We have plenty of Russians here. San Francisco has everything. Maguire might as well have acquired that high-class New York-Paris-White Russian accent right in this city.”

“Maguire does everything correctly, according to himself. He has himself born in an elegant section of New York. He goes to Yale. He practices genuine Japanese Zen. He’s an aesthete. Elegant tea, fine clothes, fine furnishings, both in the Oriental style and the most costly Western. It must gall him to be a bad painter and to have to live off selling pictures like his. And they can’t bring enough money for the double life he lives. Where does he get it?”

“He may push dope in the picture frames. Who did you call?”

“Bradish. I’m afraid he’ll visit disc jockey Robert Daphne’s pad before we get the chance. I’ve got other things to do. I told him about Maguire’s shack in Corte Madera. He knew about it already. Sam knows everything. I called Liz. Sergeant Tracy answered. She’s put both Liz and Tom Fenimore to bed. With adequate sleeping pills, she said. That will disappoint our Sam if he plans on Tom’s running out. Our good Sergeant Tracy is seeing that he doesn’t. I’d like to stop by Ira Spinner’s a minute and then we’ll go to the Harwoods.”

“By appointment?”

“Certainly not.” He saw fog ahead. “I might have made better time via the Broadway tunnel. Fog has moved in over the Marina. Would you like to go home now?”

“I’d love to go home if you will. Even in these coats it’s going to be cold with the top down, when we get into fog.”

There was a red blinker again at Hyde Street. We waited as usual for the cable car which went on down clanging. You might run through a red light on Columbus Avenue or some other street, but you must feel and behave tenderly toward cable cars. We had the green lights at Van Ness and turned north again after a few blocks, toward Pacific Heights. The Spinner home Was near the Alta Plaza. I thought of Celeste when I gazed down at the nest of lights in the Fillmore-Geary district where she had been born.

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