Nightcrawlers nd-30

by Bill Pronzini

  Dog, Tamara thought. Sure. Sick dog, picked it up late at the vet’s. No big deal.

  A light went on in the front room over there, punching a couple of saffron squares in the darkness. Both windows had shades pulled all the way down. She sat up, fidgeting, replaying in her mind what she’d just seen.

  Hadn’t kicked like a dog. Or any other kind of animal.

  Kicked like… what? A kid?

  Come on, Tamara. Why would he have a kid all wrapped up like that? Punishment of some kind? Bad boy, bad girl, wrap your sorry little ass in a blanket?

  Lord. A kid could smother, all trussed up in the back of an SUV like a piece of baggage. Lot of bastard parents in this world, abuse their kids in all sorts of ways…

  No. It hadn’t been a kid.

  Had it?

  Too much imagination, girl. Got to be some simple explanation, nothing weird at all except inside your own head.

  Still.

  The way the guy had thrown looks around after he shut the SUV’s hatch, sort of furtive, like he was worried somebody might see him. She hadn’t imagined that. Or the way he’d half run for the house, humped over, as if he were trying to shield the bundle with his body.

  Just didn’t seem natural, none of it.

  Well, okay, then. What’re you gonna do about it?

  She sat chewing her lower lip. Call the cops? Oh, yeah, right. Go over to the house, ring the bell, ask the man if everything was cool? He’d say it was even if it wasn’t. And it’d piss him off either way, maybe get her in the kind of trouble she wasn’t equipped to handle.

  Forget about it then. None of her business. Her business was George DeBrissac and 1122 across the street. Plus her full-up bladder. If she didn’t get to a bathroom pretty quick…

  She reached for the ignition key, then pulled her hand back and lifted it instead to click off the dome light. Then she was out of the car, creaking a little from all the sitting, drawing her thighs together against the pressure in her bladder. Always walk in a strange neighborhood as if you belong there, don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. Right. Up onto the sidewalk, amble slow past the house. Glance at it, don’t stare at it. Lights still on in the front room, shades still drawn tight. Just enough shine from the one nearest the door so that she could make out brass numbers on the brick wall between them. 1109. Pretty sure that was it.

  On her way past the driveway, she risked a longer look at the SUV. Big, black-Chevy Suburban? The front license plate was shadowed. 1MO Something 6 Something Something.

  Tamara kept on going, forcing herself not to hurry. At the far corner she paused for a few seconds, then turned and came back at the same measured pace. Nothing had changed at the house. She squinted harder when she reached the driveway, still couldn’t quite make out the license number. Caution told her to give it up, go straight to the Toyota; curiosity sent her a quick half-dozen steps up the drive, bent low, until she could read the plate clearly.

  1MQD689.

  She retreated to the sidewalk, her heart hammering. Got away with it. Nobody came out of the house, nobody chased her, nothing happened. A minute later she had the Toyota’s engine rumbling and she was on her way.

  Took her five minutes to find a service station on San Pablo Avenue. Good thing it didn’t take six or more; as it was, she just made the rest room in time.

  7

  Kerry said, “Remember D-Day? Amazing grace?”

  “That’s what he said. Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  D-Day. June 6, 1944, the day the Allied forces invaded Europe, the beginning of the end of World War II. “Cybil and Dancer were both living in New York in the summer of ‘forty-four, weren’t they? And the Pulpeteers were active then.”

  “So?”

  “Just thinking it could have something to do with the group.” The Pulpeteers had been a loose-knit writers’ club of a dozen or so Manhattan-based professionals, Cybil and Ivan and Dancer among them, and a moderately wild bunch according to what Kerry had told me once-club-hopping, all-night parties, crazy practical jokes. “One of their pranks or escapades, maybe.”

  “That he’d want her to remember after fifty years? I don’t think so.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Amazing grace,” Kerry said. “Well, he couldn’t have meant the hymn, that’s for sure. Not Russ Dancer.”

  “I asked him about that and he said no.”

  “This package,” she said. It was on the table between our chairs, where I’d put it when I arrived home a few minutes ago. She’d already fingered it twice; I watched her make it three times. “Paper, a lot of it. It feels like a manuscript.”

  “You said that before.”

  “Why would he give her a manuscript?”

  “Oh, hell,” I said, “all we’re doing is asking each other rhetorical questions. Cybil will give us the answers if she wants us to know.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want us to know?”

  “I’m not saying she wouldn’t. But whatever’s in the envelope is obviously private, at least from Dancer’s point of view. For her eyes only.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of opening it, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I know that.”

  Kerry kept staring at the envelope. “One of us should call her.”

  “What, you mean tonight?”

  “Right now. It’s only a little after nine. She’ll still be up.”

  “Why should we?”

  “To let her know about Dancer and the envelope.”

  “I told you, he doesn’t want her to know he’s dying. Doesn’t want her to see him all wasted.”

  “She won’t want to go down there.”

  “Probably not, but-”

  “She can’t stand him, you know that. All the crap he used to give her, coming on to her all the time… he could be a real bastard.”

  “No argument there.”

  “I can’t stand him myself. I never could.”

  “Kerry, he’s dying.”

  “That doesn’t change how you’ve felt about somebody all your life.”

  “Granted. But it’s also no reason not to respect his dying wishes. He doesn’t want Cybil to open the package until after he’s gone.”

  “She has a right to know.”

  “Right to know what?”

  “That’s he’s dying. About this… legacy of his.”

  “I don’t understand that. What gives her that right? And what difference does it make if she knows about it ahead of time?”

  “I’d want to know,” Kerry said.

  “Why?”

  “Wouldn’t you? If it was somebody you’d known for fifty years?”

  “Not if he specifically asked that I not be told until afterward. Why bother her with this now?”

  “She has a right to know.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said, and then made the mistake of trying to lighten things up. “How about a new career in media public relations? You’d be good at giving out the old ‘the public has a right to know’ line.”

  Big scowl. “Oh, so now I’m spouting crap.”

  “I didn’t say that…”

  “This is different and you know it.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “Because it’s personal.”

  “Personal to Cybil, not to you. Why’re you getting so worked up?”

  “I’m not worked up. I’m just trying to make you understand how I feel.”

  “Babe,” I said gently, “how you feel isn’t relevant.”

  “That’s a lousy thing to say. I’ve had to deal with Russ Dancer off and on most of my life, dammit.”

  “But you’re not involved in this last wish thing. He didn’t say anything about you, the envelope isn’t addressed to you.”

  “You think Cybil won’t feel the same as I do? She will.” Kerry fingered the package again, as if it had some kind of magnetic lure for her. “She’ll be upset if we don’t call her tonight.”

  I didn’t
say anything.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “That’s not the issue-”

  “Don’t you suppose I know my own mother?”

  “Sure, of course, and if she gets upset I’m sorry, but-”

  “But you’re not going to call her.”

  “We’re not going to call her,” I said.

  “Just because you say so.”

  “No, because Russ Dancer said so. He put me in a position of trust, and like it or not, I won’t violate it. Neither will you.”

  “Mr. Macho.”

  “Kerry, come on, be reasonable…”

  She got up without looking at me or saying anything else and stomped off into the kitchen.

  What just happened here? I thought.

  We’d had one of our infrequent fights and I didn’t even know what the hell we’d been fighting about. Cut and dried issue, as far as I could see. Simple, basic. I tried to look at it from her point of view, still couldn’t find anything to get exercised over. How had I got to be the bad guy in this business?

  At ten-thirty I took a couple of Dancer’s pseudonymous paperbacks to bed with me. Alone. Kerry was still shut up inside her home office. Working, she said-the only thing she’d said to me since the living room. Avoiding me was more like it. I hadn’t seen much of Emily tonight, either-shut inside her room, listening to music and doing her homework-and her good-night kiss had been perfunctory. Home after a long, hard day, cradled in the bosom of my loving family? No, sir. Ignored, misunderstood, and consigned to bed with Murder in Hot Pants and Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon for company.

  The first title was a medium raunchy porn thing thinly wrapped in a mystery-story plot. One cover blurb said it was “a brand-new, uncensored, unexpurgated bombshell by Bart Hardman”; a second blurb said, “He fought the scum of humanity to follow her on the road straight to hell!” Dancer hadn’t wasted any time getting down and dirty; the first sexual encounter between the narrator, a tough cop named McHugh, and a Hollywood starlet “whose epic body had starred with a cast of thousands” started in the middle of page 6. I quit reading at the top of page 7. Russ Dancer’s sexual fantasies held no interest for me, and after the time I’d spent with the wasted shell of him tonight, they seemed somehow repellent.

  The other book was a western, about a range war in Wyoming, loaded with stick-figure characters and enough carnage in the first fifty pages to fill half a dozen novels. Pure hackwork, the writing slapdash; but here and there as I skimmed through I saw little blips-a simile, a descriptive passage, a brief exchange of dialogue-of the raw-talent, pulp-era Russell Dancer, of the writer he might have been. It made me sad, as evidence of waste always does.

  I closed this one at page 50, put both books on the night-stand next to Dancer’s legacy. I’d brought the envelope in there with me just in case Kerry had any ideas of jumping the gun on her mother. Tomorrow I would take all the books I’d appropriated and put them in Kerry’s Goodwill bag. I’d had more than enough of the corrupt hack Dancer had become. If I ever had another urge to read him, I’d pick up an old issue of Midnight Detective and commune with Rex Hannigan for a little while. Probably not, though. Probably not.

  I lay there in the dark and felt sorry for him and sorry for myself and wished to Christ he’d picked on somebody else to carry out his dying wishes.

  In the morning I had some outside work that kept me out of the office until around eleven. Tamara was busy on the phone when I walked in. Runyon was there, too, neatly dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, studying the screen on his laptop.

  “Morning, Jake. Busy?”

  “Not very. Heading out pretty soon. The Great Western fraud claim.”

  “Talk to you for a minute before you go?”

  “Sure.” He switched off the computer, closed the lid. “Here or in your office?”

  “Make it the office. More comfortable in there.”

  He followed me in and we got settled on either side of my desk. He sat solid and stiff in the client’s chair, the way he always did in the office, as if he were uncomfortable sitting in the presence of someone else. Or as if he’d forgotten how to relax. He was a boulder of a man, compact, with a slablike, jut-jawed face that seldom smiled. When he’d first come in to interview for the field operative’s job, his clothes had hung loosely on him and he’d looked ill-the physical effects of six months of watching his second wife die a slow, painful death from ovarian cancer. Since then he’d gained weight, color; outwardly he seemed to have come to terms with his loss. But there was still a distance, an inward-turned reticence about him, that said differently. Inside he was still the same sad and bitter and angry man, maybe always would be. I liked him, Tamara liked him, and in his way it was probably recipocal; after what we’d gone through together just before Christmas, there was a professional bond among the three of us. But that was as far as it went. We weren’t friends, didn’t socialize, didn’t talk about anything except business. Any efforts to personalize our relationship were politely rejected. Colleen Runyon hadn’t been just his wife, she’d been his best friend, his only real friend; now that she was gone, he had no one else and wanted no one else. It had been that kind of marriage. He was that kind of man. The only person who really mattered to him now was his son, his only living relative, the main reason he’d moved to San Francisco from Seattle-and his son hated him.

  I said, easing into it, “How was L.A.?”

  “Worth the trip. Beckmer’s down there, all right. Holed up with his ex-wife in Santa Ana.”

  “Cozy. You serve the subpoena?”

  “He didn’t want to take it. Tried to get tough.”

  “And?”

  Runyon shrugged. “He took it.”

  “You give Fred Agajanian the good news yet?”

  “Left a message with his secretary. He’s in court this morning.”

  I said Fred would be pleased. Then I said, “I took a call for you yesterday afternoon. Didn’t sound like business. He wouldn’t leave his name, but… I had the impression it might’ve been your son.”

  Nothing changed in Runyon’s expression. “Might’ve been. Message from him on my machine when I got home last night.”

  “He sounded upset about something. Everything okay with him?”

  “No. His roommate’s in the hospital. Three gay bashings in the Castro district over the past couple of weeks-he’s the latest victim.”

  “Christ. Hurt bad?”

  “Still critical.”

  “Police have any leads on who did it?”

  “Other than sketchy descriptions of the two perps, no.”

  “Figures. This damn city. SFPD’s in a shambles, the politicians keep tearing each other up over who’s responsible instead of working together to fix the problems, and meanwhile even violent-crime cases get short shrift.”

  “Hate crimes against gays among the shortest,” Runyon said. “I looked up last year’s stats a while ago. Nearly five hundred reported cases, only a handful resolved.”

  “So much for San Francisco’s reputation as a liberal mecca for homosexuals. What was it like in Seattle?”

  “Pretty much the same. Cases like this, it takes a media howl for there to be much of an official effort.”

  “And the only way that happens is if there’re more beatings and maybe one of the victims dies.”

  He nodded. “It won’t get to that point if I can help it.”

  “An investigation of your own?”

  “Joshua asked me to see what I can do. I’d go ahead even if he hadn’t.”

  “So would I, in your shoes.”

  “Already started,” Runyon said. “On my own time. I talked to the second victim last night.”

  “Anything?”

  “Maybe. Too early to tell for sure.”

  “Well, the job doesn’t have to be strictly on your own time,” I said. “Agency facilities are yours if you need them. That includes Tamara and me. If there’s anything we can do, just ask.”

 
; “No payoff in it.”

  “So? You think this agency’s never done any pro bono work before? Or taken on any personal cases? If it was my kid who was hurting, or somebody in Tamara’s family, wouldn’t you offer to help out if you could?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Okay. That’s all the payoff we need.”

  “Sorry if I sounded cynical.”

  “Hell,” I said, “it’s not easy to be anything else these days.”

  I didn’t have much opportunity to talk to Tamara during the day. Lunch with Pat Dixon, an assistant D.A. who’d become a friend after a revenge bomber case that involved the kidnapping of his son. Both of us busy in the office with our respective caseloads, client calls, and a drop-in visit from another client who wanted to talk over a report. It wasn’t until three-thirty that we found time to say more than a few words to each other.

  “How’d the deadbeat dad thing go last night?” I asked. “DeBrissac living in the cousin’s San Leandro house?”

  “If he is,” Tamara said, “he was out later than I was. Three hours’ surveillance was all the down time I could take.”

  “Told you stakeouts were a pain in the butt. How about the house? Did it look lived in?”

  “Hard to tell. All the windows blinded so I couldn’t get a look inside. Nothing in the front or back yards but weeds.”

  “Talk to any of the neighbors?”

  “Not yet. Didn’t want to risk it yet.”

  “Probably wise. So you’re going back tonight?”

  “Yeah.” She hesitated, a frown working up little rows in the smooth skin of her face. “Funny thing,” she said then.

  “What is?”

  “Something that went down last night.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “What I saw, or thought I saw,” she said. “Keeps messing around in my head. I did some checking, but… I don’t know, it’s probably nothing. Just my bad imagination, you know what I’m saying?”

  “No,” I said. “What is it you saw?”