San Francisco serves as the accidental point of exposure in Nico Peterson’s disappearance: Clare Cavendish sees him there, turning a concealed escape into a mystery that others begin pursuing. The city also figures in Peterson’s account of a proposed sale of the heroin he had kept for himself, linking it to the criminal scheme behind his flight.

The Proposed Heroin Sale

Peterson recalls knowing a man in San Francisco who offered, in exchange for a cut, to take the drugs and sell them to the mob without asking questions. In Marlowe’s reconstruction, Peterson planned to keep the suitcase while this contact found a buyer powerful enough to deter Lou Hendricks from interfering. Peterson could then leave for somewhere safe with more money than he had imagined. The plan did not work out, but the account places San Francisco within the attempted diversion of Hendricks’s shipment.

The Sighting That Set Events in Motion

Clare’s sighting of Nico on a San Francisco street made his disappearance visible to someone who knew him. Marlowe observes that without that encounter, neither Hendricks nor Mendy Menendez nor anyone else would have known that Nico had vanished. Hendricks regrets that Clare saw him and wishes the discovery had never happened; Marlowe counters that Clare did not tell Mendy directly, suggesting instead that she told Richard Cavendish, who passed the information on. The sighting thus turns an otherwise hidden disappearance into a chain of communication and a search, with consequences for the people drawn into it.