The Private Detectives of San Francisco
Chapter 1/Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots
A Strange Cup of Sugar from Oakland
The Labrador Retriever of Dead People
Smiley’s Genuine Louisiana Barbecue
Good News, Bad News
January 2, 1942 had some good news and some bad news.
First, the good news: I found out that I was 4F and wasn’t going off to World War II to be a soldier boy. I didn’t feel unpatriotic at all because I had fought my World War II five years before in Spain and had a couple of bullet holes in my ass to prove it.
I’ll never figure out why I got shot in the ass. Anyway, it made a lousy war story. People don’t look up to you as a hero when you tell them you were shot in the ass. They don’t take you seriously but that wasn’t my problem any more at all. The war that was starting for the rest of America was over for me.
Now for the bad news: I didn’t have any bullets for my gun. I had just gotten a case that I needed my gun for but I was fresh out of bullets. The client that I was going to meet later on in the day for the first time wanted me to show up with a gun and I knew that an empty gun was not what they had in mind.
What was I going to do?
I didn’t have a cent to my name and my credit in San Francisco wasn’t worth two bits. I had to give up my office in September, though it only cost eight bucks a month, and now I was just working out of the pay telephone in the front hall of the cheap apartment building I was living in on Nob Hill where I was two months behind in my rent. I couldn’t even come up with thirty bucks a month.
My landlady was a bigger threat to me than the Japanese. Everybody was waiting for the Japanese to show up in San Francisco and start taking cable cars up and down the hills, but believe me I would have taken on a division of them to get my landlady off my back.
“Where in the hell is my rent, you deadbeat!” she’d yell at me from the top of the stairs where her apartment was. She was always wearing a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.
“The country’s at war and you don’t even pay your Goddamn rent!”
She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.
“Tomorrow,” I’d lie to her.
“Tomorrow your ass!” she’d yell back.
She was about sixty and had been married five times and widowed five times: the lucky sons-of-bitches. That’s how she’d come to own the apartment building. One of them left it to her. God had done him a favor when He stalled his car one rainy night on some railroad tracks just outside of Merced. He had been a travelling salesman: brushes. After the train hit his car they couldn’t tell the difference between him and his brushes. I think they buried him with some of his brushes in the coffin, believing they were part of him.
In those ancient long-ago days when I paid my rent, she was very friendly to me and used to invite me into her apartment for coffee and doughnuts. She loved to talk about her dead husbands, especially one of them who’d been a plumber. She liked to talk about how good he was at fixing hot water heaters. Her other four husbands were always out of focus when she talked about them. It was as if the marriages had taken place in murky aquariums. Even her husband who’d been hit by the train didn’t merit much comment