Fever nd-33

by Bill Pronzini

  I didn’t know Brian was like that, half man and half woman, until three months ago. He kept it a secret from everyone until Brandy began to take over. She’d been with him since he was fifteen, he said, making him wear women’s underwear, dress up in women’s clothes when he was by himself. Getting stronger and stronger every year until he was buying her expensive presents, clothes and jewelry and computers, spending more and more time with her, borrowing money from a loan shark so he could pay off his debts so he could buy her more presents. She didn’t want him to marry Ginny, she was jealous of Ginny, so she told Ginny all about Brian and her and what they did together in bed.

  Then she told me. She needed me to know. Not because I was Brian’s friend, because she needed my help. Brian couldn’t make me do what she wanted, but she could. Not then but later. I came over one day and there she was, all dressed up in those ugly woman’s clothes, talking the way she did, calling Brian’s mother names he never would have in a million years. She was jealous of Mrs. Youngblood too, she hated that poor woman. I don’t know why. She’d never tell me. She was crazy.

  It made me sick. But I couldn’t get away from her. I tried to but I couldn’t. I was afraid of her from the first. She had this way about her, a kind of power you couldn’t resist. She could make you do things you never thought you were capable of. Not sex stuff, thank God, it wasn’t like that, I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d tried to, if she…

  But what she did was worse, she made me steal money, embezzle money from the company I work for. She said she should have told me about Brandy sooner, made me steal the money sooner so Brian wouldn’t have had to go to a loan shark. Today she wanted me to steal MORE money. Another five thousand to pay off the rest of what Brian owed Nick Kinsella. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t. I refused and she hit me, she said she’d kill me if I didn’t do what she said.

  She was out of control, a control freak out of control. If I didn’t stop her she’d keep hounding me and hitting me and threatening me. I knew someday when she got mad enough or crazy enough, she’d do just what she said she would, she’d kill me.

  So I killed her first. In self-defense. There wasn’t anything else I could do. She deserved to die. I’m not sorry I destroyed the bitch.

  But I’m sorry Brian is dead. He was my best friend and I killed him too. I can’t live with that and I won’t go to jail because of what I did to her. I’m a coward a miserable fucking coward I don’t care what

  That was all. Ended in mid-run-on sentence on the second page.

  Runyon backed away again. All of it was clear now. That first day he’d come here… Brian in Brandy’s persona, Myers pretending to be Brian at her insistence-find out what he wanted, why Rose Youngblood had hired a detective. Myers, weak, ineffectual, chafing under Brandy’s lash but unable to break loose, making the anonymous call out of desperation. And when that didn’t bring results quickly enough, when Brandy made her demand that he steal another five thousand from his company and threatened to kill him if he didn’t, Myers swinging that brass lamp in sudden blind fury.

  He returned to the bedroom, stood looking down at what was left of Brian Youngblood. He could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Chronicle: BIZARRE TRANSVESTITE MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, the media would love this. Even in San Francisco, where bizarre happenings were part of the norm, it was just kinky enough to warrant a big play-the kind that provokes smarmy comments and sick jokes.

  Brian doesn’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do. I’ll pray for him.

  It’d tear his mother up. Her only child, all she’d had in a life barren other than her religion. His death, even the money troubles and the collusion in Myers’s embezzlement-with the help of her pastor, she’d learn to live with that. But the rest of it…

  He kept staring at the body lying there in the ice-blue dress and the black net stockings. Lipstick, eyeshadow-you could scrub that off. The bloody dress and the stockings and woman’s underwear and wig could be disposed of easily enough. Not so all those clothes in the closet, bottles of makeup on the dresser-but he could’ve been living with a woman, it could look that way in the preliminary stages.

  Only one person besides him knew the truth about Brian Youngblood now, and Ginny Lawson wasn’t talking to anyone about Brandy. Might come out later that Brian had been a cross-dresser, but by then it wouldn’t have any media appeal. It was what he was wearing when he died, and the dual-personality angle, and Myers’s suicide note that made it sleazy media fodder. One click of the delete button would erase the suicide note. With men’s clothing on the body instead of the dress and underwear, with some of the details left out or glossed over …

  Tampering with evidence.

  Thirteen years as a police officer, another seven as a private investigator, and this was the first time he’d ever for one second thought of crossing the line.

  Did it make any real difference to the law if the details of a conclusive murder-suicide were altered slightly? No. Would it make a difference to a bereaved mother and her memories of her son? Definitely. Strong arguments in favor.

  But not strong enough.

  He wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t capable of doing it, for Rose Youngblood, for Aaron Myers’s sister and her two kids in Pacifica, for anyone. Not because he might get caught, but because it would destroy one of the last things he had left that mattered to him: his self-respect.

  He opened his cell phone and tapped out 911.

  24

  On the way into the Oakland Hills I tried to find a possible fit for Rebecca Weaver in the Krochek disappearance. Hard to do without more facts and the answers to a bunch of questions. And there might not be a fit. An affair six months old was a pretty cold dish to go digging around in.

  Unless Mitchell Krochek had started sleeping with her again, or had been sleeping with her the entire time he’d been bedding Deanne Goldman. From what I’d learned about him, he was the type of man capable of maintaining two concurrent affairs, particularly when one of the women lived right next door.

  Krochek had told me he’d talked to his neighbors after the disappearance, but he hadn’t been specific about which ones. One of them must have been Weaver, given her proximity, and there was no reason for her not to have been candid with him if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. Ms. Goldman had no idea one way or the other; he hadn’t mentioned the woman’s name recently. How did Weaver and Janice Krochek get along? She didn’t know, she said, but if there’d been any problems Mitch would have told her, he told her everything about his private life. Sure he did. She also claimed not to know anything about Weaver other than what she’d confided to me about the brief affair.

  I’d’ve preferred to talk to Krochek before I interviewed Rebecca Weaver, but when I called his cell all I got was voice mail, and his secretary at Five States Engineering told me he was on a job site and incommunicado for the day. So I’d just have to wing it with Ms. Weaver-assuming she was home and willing to talk to me.

  When I drove into Fox Canyon Circle, the three houses grouped around the cul-de-sac had an external look of desertion. No people, no cars, not even a sprinkler working in one of the front gardens. The whole area had a two-dimensional look under a high, fragmented overcast; the pale sun seemed caught in the gray-white like something in a web, its light silvery and shadowless. Despite a strong wind and the absence of humidity, it was the kind of day that makes me think of earthquakes. The sky had looked a lot like this when the Loma Prieta quake created several hundred square miles of havoc from Santa Cruz north to Sonoma County in ’89.

  I parked between the Krochek house and the one belonging to Rebecca Weaver. The wind bent and swayed limbs in the trees along the canyon rim, and you could hear it thrumming in the telephone wires. It was like a hand on my back as I walked up the front walk to the Weaver house.

  When I pressed the doorbell, a few chords of some vaguely familiar song echoed inside. Cute. Like the song snatches that the cell phone companies used in pla
ce of a good old-fashioned ring.

  Two minutes, and the door stayed shut.

  I let the bell play its tune again. Same result.

  Well, hell.

  There was a flagstone path that wound through the fronting cactus garden. I went along there onto the Krocheks’ property, following the route Rebecca Weaver had taken the day I’d met her. The front gate was closed but not locked. I went across the inner patio and pushed the bell there. Normal chimes, and as expected, no response.

  It took me about fifteen seconds to decide to exercise a certain tacit right accorded me as Mitchell Krochek’s representative. The Krocheks’ spare key was still under the decorative urn at the front wall; I dug it out and used it on the door.

  The coolness inside was faintly musty, the way houses get when they haven’t been aired out in a while. All the drapes were closed tight, making it too dim to find my way around without turning on some lights. The telephone and answering machine were in an arched alcove off the formal living room. The blinking light on the machine indicated that there were two messages. The first was from one of the friends Krochek had contacted about his wife, asking if everything was okay; the second was a familiar male voice saying curtly, “Carl Lassiter, Mrs. Krochek. Call me.” That one had come in at 2:45 yesterday afternoon, before my meeting with him.

  I went into the kitchen. The dried blood smears were still there on the tile; Krochek had followed my advice on that score, at least. He hadn’t touched anything else in there, either; the dirty dishes still jammed the sink, giving off the sour odor of decay.

  Nothing had changed in the rest of the house, as far as I could tell. The empty Scotch bottle and overflowing ashtray and strewn clothing still cluttered the spare bedroom. The bed in there was unmade, the sheet pulled loose at the bottom corners-testimony to a couple of long, sleepless nights for Krochek before he moved in with Deanne Goldman.

  Back to the kitchen and into the laundry room. A quick look around there told me nothing. I turned the deadbolt on the outside door and stepped into the backyard.

  The narrow half-moon gouge in the lawn caught my eye again. I got down on one knee to look at it this time. Half-inch or so deep, which meant that it had been made by something heavy; the grass that hadn’t been ground down into the dirt was brown and dead.

  Wheelbarrow?

  Could be. The width of the furrow was the right size for a barrow tire. And a wheelbarrow was a convenient way to move a body from one point to another. To a car, say, backed into the garage or up close to the garage door.

  There was no sign of a wheelbarrow out here, but I thought I remembered seeing one among the other garden implements when I’d looked into the garage last time. I headed over that way. What stopped me before I’d taken a dozen steps was a smell carried on a gust of the cold wind. Rank, noxious-

  Rotting meat.

  The hair on my neck stood up like quills. When the wind gusted again, bringing me another whiff, I followed the odor to a fenced-in section between the garage and the gate that led out front. Another gate opened into a narrow enclosure where the garbage cans were kept. Garbage smell, that was all. Except that it was too strong here, too distinct.

  I eased the lid up on one of the cans. The stench that poured out was bad enough to make me recoil, start me breathing through my mouth. The can was stuffed with paper-wrapped packages and freezer bags, all of them showing bloodstains. At first glance I thought: God Almighty, he killed her and cut her up. But when I took a closer look, swallowing bile, I saw that it wasn’t human remains the packages and bags contained, but steaks, chops, roasts, hamburger.

  The second can was filled with more of the same. Plus brand-name bags of fruit, vegetables, fried potatoes; TV dinners and other kinds of quick meals. The sort of items you buy in the freezer sections of supermarkets.

  Discarded and long-thawed frozen goods, all of it.

  As if somebody had emptied out a freezer.

  I slammed the lid down, backed out of the enclosure, and opened the side door to the garage. Dark, empty, the only odors those of oil and dust. I found a light switch and two rows of hanging fluorescents came on. The wheelbarrow sat against the near side wall, next to a propping of shovels, rakes, and brooms. Its metal interior was scored and dirt-streaked, but there were other, darker stains on the sides. I scratched a fingernail through one of them, held a fleck up for a closer look. Dried blood, all right.

  At the far end was a loft supported by beams and heavy chains. Most of the storage space looked to be empty. Below it, at the back wall, a plywood partition had been erected to create a small separate room. The sound of my steps on the concrete floor seemed loud and hollow as I walked back there, stepped through the doorless opening in the partition.

  Storage boxes piled on one side, and on the other, set between the plywood and the back wall, a big floor-model freezer.

  I knew what I was going to find even before I opened it. I took a couple of deep breaths before I lifted the lid. Through the icy vapor that wafted up I had a clear look at the dead woman inside.

  She had been wedged in there at an awkward angle, knees drawn up, one arm twisted under her and the other down against her abdomen. Her eyes were open, staring; the coating of frost gave them and the death rictus of her mouth an even more repellent look. She wore jeans and a white blouse, the blouse splotched across the chest and stomach with frozen blood. The frost and the blood made it impossible for me to tell what had caused the wound or wounds that had killed her.

  All of that was bad enough. But the biggest shock was her identity.

  It wasn’t Janice Krochek I was looking at.

  It was Rebecca Weaver.

  25

  I lowered the freezer lid, quit the garage, and went back through the house and out the way I’d come in. Following a cold, prickly little hunch now. Nothing lost if it didn’t pan out; another few minutes wouldn’t make any difference to the law or Mitchell Krochek or the dead woman in the freezer.

  I crossed the strip of lawn that separated the Krochek property from Rebecca Weaver’s. All three of the homes here had the same general layout. The gate in the narrow fenced area next to the garage, where her garbage cans were kept, was unlocked. So was the second gate that gave access to her backyard. And so was the side door into the garage. I opened that one and looked inside. The car in there was a Pontiac Firebird, low-slung and sporty and either new or close to it.

  All right. I went through the yard to the back door: also unlocked. Easy, so far. But if the rest of my hunch proved out, it would stop being easy pretty damn quick.

  I eased the door open partway, leaned in to listen. Faint sounds somewhere inside, unidentifiable from here. I stepped through onto a utility porch similar to the Krocheks’, then across the kitchen. The sounds were louder now-a familiar and discordant series of electronic beeps, clangs, and bongs. They stopped abruptly as I passed through the kitchen; I stopped, too. The new silence was heavy and unbroken.

  The dining room, formal living room, and family room were empty. I made my way down a hallway that bisected the full width of the house, walking soft. Four doors opened off of it; the last one on the west side was open. I edged forward until I had a clear look inside.

  It was like looking into some sort of surreal three-dimensional exhibit. Motionless shapes, shadows, one halo of stationary light, and one bright rectangle of shifting colored images in an otherwise darkened room. And all of it wrapped in a hush that put a strain on my eardrums, tweaked at nerve ends.

  Spare bedroom turned into an in-home office-desk, chairs, couch, bookshelves, computer workstation. Blinds drawn, the only illumination coming from a halogen desk lamp and the computer screen. She sat hunched forward in front of the screen, her back to me and her body stiff with tension; the only part of her that moved, now and then, were the fingers of her right hand as they manipulated the mouse. The back of her neck and the ends of her hair were wet with sweat. A half-smoked Newport burned in a full ashtray on her left; ash
littered the desk around it and the air was thick with smoke. An empty glass, a bottle of Scotch, a woman’s wallet, and a scatter of credit cards were on her right. I didn’t need to see the silent monitor to know what was going on.

  I went in there, still walking soft and at an angle until I was parallel with the desk and within the range of her vision. She didn’t notice me; she was in a kind of trancelike zone, as if the images on the monitor had hypnotized her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Krochek,” I said.

  I had to say the words again before they registered. Her head jerked sideways, but even when the brown eyes focused on me, there was no other physical reaction except a tightening of the muscles around her mouth. “Oh, it’s you,” she said with no discernible emotion. As if it was perfectly natural for me to be there. As if I were no more than a small, annoying interruption, like a buzzing fly.

  The look of her was chilling. Hair wildly tangled, no makeup, skin sallow and moist, eyes bagged and feverish with excitement. Clothes wrinkled and soiled. Soiled body, too; the room stank of sweat and unwashed flesh mixed with the stale odors of booze and tobacco smoke. If she’d slept at all in the past three-plus days, it had been for no more than a few minutes at a time. If she’d eaten, it hadn’t been enough to dirty more than the two plates and two cups that sat on the low table in front of the couch. Existing the whole time on Scotch and cigarettes and adrenaline.

  Her eyes flicked away, drawn magnetically back to the screen. She stared at it for a few seconds, moved the mouse, moved it again. “Shit,” she said then, still without any inflection. “Another loser. I should’ve kept on playing the twenty-line slots, let this damn site cool off a while longer.”

  She was playing seven-card stud now, I saw when I moved a little closer. She clicked on the ante for a new hand, or “posted the blind” as it’s called, looked at her hole cards-king of diamonds, ten of clubs-and made a bet: $50. Reckless and foolish, without a pair in the hole.