Nightshades (Nameless Detective) Read Free

wasn’t too bad.”
    “So everybody keeps telling me,” Barney said. He patted his ample midriff. “But I can’t seem to do it myself. I like food too much. Carne asada —that’s my main weakness. Did I ever take you to my cousin Carlos’s place in the Mission? No? You never tasted carne asada the way he makes it. A gallon of sour cream, and those sweet onions he uses . . . ah Jesus.”
    “I think I better pass.”
    “Willpower,” he said. “I wish I had it.” He gave me another examining look. “Yeah, you look great. Except—”
    “Except what?”
    He snickered. “Just what is that thing on your upper lip?”
    I reached up and touched it; I couldn’t seem to break myself of the habit of doing that every time somebody called attention to it. “It’s a mustache,” I said. “What did you think it was?”
    “It looks like a hooker’s false eyelash stuck on there.”
    “Ha ha. Very funny.”
    “Kind of scraggly, isn’t it? Or did you just start growing it?”
    “I’ve had it for a month,” I said defensively. “It looks all right to me. What’s wrong with it?”
    “Nothing a razor won’t fix. How come you grew a mustache at your age?”
    “What am I, a candidate for the old folks’ home?” I could feel myself getting a little miffed. Which was stupid, because Barney was only having some fun with me; but I had taken a lot of ribbing about the mustache in the past month, principally from Eberhardt and Kerry, and I’d had enough. If it hadn’t been for all the ribbing, in fact, I might have shaved the thing off by now. As matters stood, each new crack only made me more determined to keep it. “So I grew a mustache,” I said. “So what’s the big deal?”
    “Why?” he said.
    “Why what?”
    “Why did you grow it? To impress your lady?”
    “No.”
    “You figured it’d make you look younger?”
    “No.”
    “Because of all the weight you lost?”
    “No! I grew it because I felt like it.”
    “Okay, okay. Kind of touchy on the subject, aren’t you.”
    “No, damn it, I’m not touchy on the goddamn subject!”
    Barney grinned. “I still think it looks like a hooker’s false eyelash,” he said.
    I suggested a fun thing he could do with himself, caught up my briefcase, told him I’d be in touch, and went out stroking the damn mustache like it was a pet caterpillar. By the time I realized what I was doing, I was halfway across the anteroom. And Barney, the little bastard, was having himself a noisy chuckle behind his closed office door.

CHAPTER TWO
    The office I shared with Eberhardt was a small, converted third-floor loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, a hop and a skip from Van Ness Avenue’s automobile row. The building was owned by an unconverted slum landlord named Crawford, who looked like a Tammany Hall politician and had the soul and heart of a pirate; he was charging us eight hundred dollars a month for the place, an outrageous price but one that was not far out of line with what other office space was going for in the city these days. San Francisco was full of pirates, it seemed. Pretty soon they would drive everybody else out to the suburbs and then they could start raping and pillaging each other, as the old Caribbean buccaneers used to do in places like Tortuga. It was a thought to keep you warm when the rent came due, anyway.
    The door was locked when I got there. When I let myself in the first thing I saw was the light fixture hanging from the ceiling. It looked like nothing so much as an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass. testicles. It was the ugliest light fixture I had ever seen and I hated it and I kept threatening to tear it down one of these days, landlord or no landlord. But I never seemed to get around to doing it. Maybe there was something psychological in that; maybe subconsciously I needed to keep it around in order to have something to take out my nonviolent aggressions on. Or maybe, somewhere down at the bottom of my