Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

anything to you?”
    She looked at it for several seconds before she said, “No, I don’t think so.”
    “You don’t know anyone named Manny?”
    “No.”
    “Did David ever mention anyone by that name?”
    “Not that I remember.”
    “What about the address? Ring any bells?”
    “De Haro Street ... no. That’s industrial, isn’t it?”
    “Some of it is. Not all. Where did David work?”
    “Halpern Sporting Goods, downtown. On Grant.”
    “All right,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help? Names of David’s other friends, someone he might have confided in?”
    “Jerry was the only person he was close to, except for Allyn and me. He knew a lot of people but ...” She was silent for a few beats; then she said, “It was a small funeral,” which was not a non sequitur at all.
    I asked her about his co-workers, favorite hangouts, but she had nothing more to tell me. She was working on the table again when I left—dull strokes with the scraper. Looking inward as she had been earlier, holding his memory against her pain.

Chapter 5
    POTRERO HILL, on the eastern rim of the city, used to be a low-income, blue-collar neighborhood. To a large degree it’s still blue collar, but the Yuppies have changed the face of it in the past couple of decades. They’ve moved in in droves, bought up and restored hundreds of the old Victorians and two-flat houses that cling to the hill’s steep sides; and where the Yups go, so go the entrepreneurs who cater to them. Nowadays, the venerable Victorian ladies with their new coats of paint stand cheek by jowl with real estate offices, travel agencies, fashionable boutiques, trendy nightclubs and wine bars, and nouvelle cuisine restaurants.
    The gentrification of Potrero Hill is the main reason the face of the flatlands that fan out below is also changing. Once that area was heavily industrial. Southern Pacific tracks crisscross it; not far away is what’s left of San Francisco’s port business at Central Basin, Islais Creek, and India Basin. The area is still the home of small manufacturing companies, drayage warehouses, industrial supply houses, the Greyhound and Sam Trans bus yards, and Anchor Brewing Company, the city’s last brewer of quality beer. But mixed in among them are dozens of outfits, some entrenched in fancy new or renovated buildings, that cater to San Francisco’s burgeoning interior-design trade: designer showrooms, antique furniture cooperatives, import/export companies, graphic arts studios, and the Butterfield & Butterfield auction warehouse. There are also numerous upscale lunchrooms and taverns, and clusters of private housing that are slowly being taken over by less affluent urban professionals who can’t afford the prices that have grown as steep as the streets on Potrero Hill above.
    I expected 2789 De Haro to be one of the private houses, but I was wrong. It was a weathered warehouse-type structure set behind a chainlink fence that had some kind of climbing plant growing thickly over it, so that from the street you couldn’t see much of the building or the grounds. A metal sign wired to one half of a pair of closed gates read:
    EKHERN MFG. CO.
    Industrial Solenoid Valves
    I parked and walked back to the gates. There was none of the climbing plant on them; through the links I could see a deserted blacktopped area, a loading dock, and two closed metal roller doors into the building. Nobody was around. Closed Saturdays, maybe. But there was no padlock at the joining of the gate halves, and when I pulled up on the bar that held them together, one half swung open.
    I walked in, shutting the gate behind me. No sounds came from the warehouse or anywhere else on the grounds; my shoes made little flat, hollow sounds as I crossed to a set of cement stairs that gave access to the loading dock. I climbed those, followed an extension of the dock around to the east side of the building.
    A car was nosed up in front of what looked to be