6

According to R and I, Claudia Darling had been born Claudia Bologna. Her yellow sheet listed eight arrests for prostitution in the years between 1940 and 1945. After that her only offenses were those of many good citizens: speeding citations. One had been issued in 1948, one in 1952 by which time her name had become Mrs. William Drum with a Twin Peaks address—and a final one in 1955.

He copied down the information and studied it as he rode up to Homicide.

Serruto's office sat empty, but otherwise the squad room looked like it looked any other day. Garreth felt almost like a civilian in his sweater, jeans, and ski jacket. He walked quickly to his desk, only nodding greetings to the detectives there. He felt better after he began the reports. They were easy . . . just typed from his notes and memory, no real involvement required, no emotion. His fingers danced across the keys with almost selfvolition, translating the thoughts in his head to words on paper. The rhythm soothed, draining away tension and anxiety, even when the report dealt with a dead-end lead or Wink's screwed-up capture. He typed steadily most of the afternoon, oblivious to the other activity in the room, only occasionally pausing to greet someone or let another thought creep in.

While proofreading, though, his mind slipped back to his conversation with his ex-wife. He fumed just thinking of it. Let Dennis have Brian? No way! Yet he recognized that Judith had a valid argument. Maybe that was what he found so infuriating. He had to admit that he had not been much of a father . . . and what kind could he ever be now? Come on, son; let's go out for a bite. You have a hamburger and I'll take the waitress.

He tapped the reports into a neat stack and carried them into Serruto's office. That was enough for today. Now, to Miss Claudia Bologna Darling Drum. He closed the door of the office and sat down behind the desk with the phone book.

Three William Drums lived in San Francisco, none in the Twin Peaks area. Dialing the number of William C. Drum, he found a Mrs. Drum at the other end, but a young woman and not a Claudia. She had never heard of Claudia Drum.

No one answered William R. Drum's phone.

He dialed William R. Drum, Jr. A child answered. Hearing the high-pitched voice, Garreth grimaced. This did not sound promising. "May I speak to Mrs. Drum, please?"

"Who?"

Garreth tried another tack. "Is your mommie there?"

"Mommie?"

Garreth felt like an idiot, talking baby talk to make himself understood. But to his great relief, a woman's voice came on the line a few moments later.

"This is Inspector Mikaelian of the San Francisco police," he explained. "I'm attempting to locate a Mrs. Claudia Drum."

"I'm afraid I don't know anyone by that name."

"She's an older woman. Your mother-in-law isn't named Claudia?"

"No, Marianna. Wait a minute." Her voice became muffled as she called to someone with her, "Bill, what's your mother's name?"

Several voices murmured, unintelligible to Garreth, then the voice of an older man came on. "This is William Drum, Sr. You're looking for a woman named Claudia? I may know her. Can you describe her for me?"

"She's short, blue-eyed, brunette. Her maiden name was Bologna and in 1955 she lived in the Twin Peaks area."

"And you say you're with the police?"

Garreth gave Drum his phone number and invited him to call back. Drum did, then explained that Claudia Drum was his first wife. "We divorced in 1956."

"Do you know where she is now and what name she's using?"

Drum hesitated. "I'm curious, Inspector, what you want with her. If all you know is that name, this must concern something very old."

"We're looking for information on a woman who assaulted her in 1941."

A long silence greeted that remark. Garreth pictured Drum staring nonplused at the receiver, wondering why the police cared about a forty-year-old assault. Finally, with a shrug and a dry note in his voice, Drum said, "Her name is Mrs. James Emerson Thouvenelle and she lives on the wall." He gave a Presidio Heights address and phone number.

Garreth wrote them down, impressed. Claudia had done well for herself, rising from hooker to the mansions overlooking the Presidio. He wondered if Drum's dry tone indicated that he knew he had been a mere stepping-stone to that mansion. Garreth made sure he thanked William R. Stepping-stone Drum warmly before hanging up and dialing the Thouvenelle number.

How would his request to see her be received? As a rude reminder of her past?

When he mentioned Mala Babra, however, the rich voice on the other end of the line laughed. "That crazy singer? Are things so slow for you boys that you're digging into the basement files? Yes, I'll talk to you."

Garreth saw one problem: identification. It was all very well to tell her over the phone that he was from the police. She could call back and verify that. What did he do when she asked to see identification at her house?

His eyes dropped to the drawer where Serruta had put his badge case. His hand reached out for the drawer pull, then jerked back. You were going to keep clean, remember?

"Will this evening be convenient for you?" He would bluff his way in somehow.

"If you come before seven."

Garreth parked at the curb at a quarter till the hour. The heavy front door bore an ornate lion's head knocker in the middle. He reached out for it, but the door swung open even before he touched the knocker. A plump pouter pigeon of a woman looking the epitome of grandmother and matron studied him from the level of his shoulders.

"You're the young man who called? Mikaelian?" she asked.

"Yes. You're—"

"Claudia Thouvenelle. Well." She looked him over, relieved about something. "Please come in. Do you have a first name?"

"Garreth." He followed her to a set of double doors down the hallway.

She pulled one of the doors open and leaned into the library behind. "James," she said to the man sitting in a leather chair, "this is Garreth Mikaelian, the son of my old girlfriend Katherine Kane. You remember me telling you about her, don't you? Gary and I will be across the hall chatting if you need me."

She led an astonished Garreth across the hall to a living room and settled herself on a sofa. She met his eyes with her own, unnaturally blue—contact lenses?—and cool as ice. "I see no need to reveal the long-dead past to my husband, though understand that I'm not ashamed of it. I even find the idea of talking about those days after all these years a bit nostalgic. What do you want to know about that madwoman?"

"Everything you can tell me: who she was, where she came from, who her friends were."

She blinked, in disappointment, Garreth would have sworn. "I don't know anything except that she nearly disfigured me. She was crazy. It wasn't my fault if the naval officer preferred me to her. Who wouldn't prefer a woman-sized woman to that great gallumphing elephant?"

Garreth silently compared the matron with her blue-gray hair and sagging jowls to the slim, taut-bodied redhead who had her choice of men to bed and bleed. He could imagine that a woman so tall in those days might find the pickings a bit lean. Lane had the last laugh on her generation now, though.

"May I ask what your interest in her is after all these years?"

"We're trying to locate her. We think she has information we need on a current investigation."

"Have you checked the state mental institutions? She was quite unbalanced and should have been confined."

Garreth wrinkled his forehead. "Then why did you drop the charges?"

"As a favor for a friend, Don Lukert, the manager of the Red Onion. He was afraid that the owners might be upset by the bad publicity, so I agreed to drop the charges if he'd fire her and use his influence to see that she couldn't find another job in North Beach. He did and I did."

Vindictive bitch, Garreth thought. Aloud he said, "This manager. Is his name Donald Lukert?"

"No. Eldon."

"Do you know where he is today?" Mr. Lukert might have known something about his singer.

The woman shook her head. "I made enough during the war so that with some wise investments, I retired after Armistice and dropped out of my old circles. I went by the Red Onion a few years later but it had burned and another club had been built in its place. Don wasn't there. If he's still in the city, he's probably in a nursing home. He was in his late forties back then."

"Did Mr. Lukert ever talk to you about Miss Babra?"

"Oh, a couple of times, perhaps. We had some laughs over how ridiculous and grotesque she was."

Garreth decided he did not care much for Claudia Bologna Darling Drum Thouvenelle.

"She tried to make him think she was a Balkan princess. She carried the blood of ancient nobility in her veins, is how she put it. She gave him some fantastic story about having escaped from eastern Europe just ahead of Hitler's storm troopers. But she wasn't European. That Bela Lugosi accent she used disappeared the moment she started shrieking at me and before that, a client of mine I met at the club heard her speaking what she claimed was her language and he said it was nothing but a preposterous hodgepodge of German and Russian."

Garreth blinked. German matched Lane's choice of names, but where did the Russian fit in? Possible German and Russian community? he wrote. They would have to be groups insular enough to be speaking their own languages in addition to English.

After asking questions for another ten minutes without learning anything more that seemed useful, he closed the notebook and stood. "I think that's all I need. Thank you for your time."

She escorted him to the door, speaking in a voice pitched to carry. "I'm so glad to hear about Kate. I'd lost track of her and thought I'd never hear of her again. Give your mother a big hug for me, will you?"

Garreth sighed in relief as the door closed behind him. What luck. She had never come close to asking for his ID. Lucky cop. Thank you, Lady Luck. Keep smiling, Lady.