Schemers nd-34

by Bill Pronzini

  3

  JAKE RUNYON

  He’d been to Los Alegres before, once on business, once on one of his periodic drives to familiarize himself with his new home territory, so he had no trouble finding his way around. It was a valley town, spread out between low foothills; former agricultural center founded in the 1850s, now a combination bedroom community, site for upscale business enterprises, and haven for writers, artists, and professional people attracted by the historic downtown, big old west-side homes, the saltwater estuary that terminated in its midst. Population around fifty thousand, most of that number in sprawling developments on the east side.

  The police station was on North Main, housed in a gray cinderblock building that looked more like a converted mortuary than a cop house and sided by a fenced-in yard where the patrol cars and other vehicles were kept. Runyon ID’d himself to the woman sergeant at the front desk and outlined the reason he was there. That and one of his business cards got him in to see Lieutenant Adam St. John.

  St. John was in his fifties, lean and fox-faced, with tired eyes and a slow way of moving as if he were trying to conserve energy. He seemed to need to make it clear at the outset that bringing in a private investigative service on the Henderson case wasn’t his idea.

  “I told them that if we can’t do anything, it’s damn unlikely anybody else can. But they insisted. Your agency’s got a good rep, so I handed out your name.” He shrugged. “It’s their money.”

  “Pretty desperate, from what they told us.”

  “Can’t blame them for that. If I had some whack job after me, I guess I’d be desperate, too.”

  “Any new developments?”

  “Not yet. We’ve done everything we can, and then some. It’s not like we’re trying to slough off on this.” Now he was on the defensive.

  “Nobody thinks that,” Runyon said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s frustrating for us, too. I mean, there’s just nothing to go on. Nothing in the family’s background, at least nothing we can find or they’re willing to talk about. We ran both brothers through the NCIS and even made an FBI inquiry. Zip.”

  “The father, too?”

  “Lloyd Henderson? Why should we run his name?”

  “His grave was vandalized.”

  “Vicious act aimed at the two sons,” St. John said. “Hell, the man’s been dead for years.”

  Runyon consulted his file notes. “Died in 2004.”

  “Right. Natural causes, in case you’re wondering.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “Dentist. Retired. Lived here all his life, served on the city council, belonged to the Rotary, Kiwanis, all the civic organizations. You won’t find a more respected member of the community.”

  “Take your word for it,” Runyon said. “The brother who was attacked in his garage. Damon, is it?”

  “Damon, right.”

  “Anything he could tell you about the perp?”

  “No. He had a flashlight, but he got hit from behind. All he saw was a shadow.”

  “Size estimate?”

  “Big, from the weight when he was straddled.”

  “And all the perp said to him was ‘Not yet, it’s not time yet’?”

  “That’s all.”

  “He’s sure about the words?”

  “Positive.”

  “What about the voice? Anything distinctive?”

  “No. Just a whisper. And he was hurting bad by then.”

  “What about olfactory impressions?”

  “Olfactory… smells? You mean did the guy smell?”

  “Body odor, cigarettes, booze, cologne or aftershave.”

  “… Henderson didn’t say anything about that.”

  And St. John hadn’t thought to ask. Runyon let it go. “How did the perp get inside the garage?”

  “Jimmied the lock on the side door. Didn’t make much noise, but Henderson was awake-using the toilet. That’s how come he heard.”

  “Perp wore gloves, I suppose. No prints.”

  “None that didn’t belong to the family members.”

  “Other evidence of any kind?”

  “Not that we could find.” St. John was defensive again. “We don’t have a big city forensics department here. We did the best we could.”

  “Sure you did,” Runyon said. “What about Damon’s family? They see or hear anything?”

  “His wife woke up and ran out when she heard him screaming. But the perp was gone by then.”

  “Neighbors?”

  “Woman lives down the block thought she heard a car racing off but she didn’t see it. Otherwise… no.”

  “Damon still in the hospital?”

  “As of this morning. He’ll probably be there a couple more days. The perp busted up his collarbone pretty badly with that tire iron.”

  Runyon said, “That’s about it for now, then. Thanks for your help, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay. Just make sure you let me know if you find out anything.” The look in St. John’s eyes said he’d be damn surprised if Runyon did.

  L os Alegres Valley Cemetery was in a semirural area a couple of miles northeast of the Henderson residence. One look at the somewhat secluded location, the low encircling fence, and it was easy to see how the perp had gotten in and out without being seen. The main gates were open and when Runyon drove through he could see a couple of low buildings off on the right-office, maintenance facility. But he didn’t need to go there to find out where the Henderson family plot was located. Two men working with a big forklift drew him to the other end of the grounds, and when he reached them he saw that they were putting a new black-granite monument into one of the larger sites-the Henderson plot, it turned out. Much of the earth in the large, square patch of ground had been dug up and resodded as well.

  There were half a dozen gravestones in addition to the new monument with Lloyd Henderson’s name on it. The others, judging from the names and dates, appeared to be the parents and grandparents of Lloyd Henderson, and two sisters who had precedeased him.

  The older of the workmen, heavyset and gray-bearded, was supervising the job. Runyon approached him, flashed his license, explained what he was doing there. The man, Joe Sobolewsky, was head groundskeeper and willing to talk.

  “I was the one found the mess in the morning,” he said. He had a malleable face; it twisted up into an expression of disgust. “Never seen anything like it in all the years I been here. Close my eyes, I can still smell the stink of that acid.”

  “Extensive damage?”

  “Real extensive. Enough acid on the marker to wipe out all the words, eat a hole in the granite big enough to put the top of your head in.”

  “Not simple vandalism, then.”

  “Oh, hell, no. We get that kind of thing out here once in a great while, but nothing like this.”

  “Hate crime,” Runyon said.

  “That’s it, mister. That’s it in a nutshell. Hate crime.” Sobolewsky paused to dig a knuckle into one ear. “One funny thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Water tap over there on your right. When I came out that morning, the ground under it was soaking wet. And it wasn’t from leakage-the tap was shut off tight.”

  “As if somebody turned it on for some reason during the night.”

  “Right. Had to be the guy who desecrated the grave. But I can’t figure why, unless all that devil’s work made him thirsty.”

  “Or he spilled a drop or two of acid on himself or his clothing.”

  “Yeah, that could be it, too.”

  Runyon asked, “Do you know the Hendersons?”

  “Not personally. By reputation. Good people.”

  “So you don’t know of anyone who’d have this much of a grudge against one or more of the family?”

  “I sure don’t. Cops asked me that, too. Beats the hell out of me.”

  “Whoever did it had to have come here at least once and probably two or three times,” Runyon said. “Pinpoint the locatio
n, figure out how to find his way in the dark.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “You see anybody in this vicinity before it happened? At any time?”

  “No, nobody,” Sobolewsky said. “Frank, neither, he’s my assistant there on the forklift. But I work all over these grounds-maintenance, landscaping, grave-digging. People come and go, put down flowers, pay their respects. Me and Frank, we’re both too busy to pay much attention unless somebody does something, you know, out of the ordinary.”

  “And nobody did.”

  “If somebody had, we’d’ve sure told the cops when they asked.”

  A s much as he hated hospitals, after all the time he’d spent in Seattle General watching Colleen waste away to a morphined husk, Runyon seemed to find himself in one too damned often since he’d moved down here. Once in Red Bluff as a patient, the mild concussion on the firebug business last September. As a visitor when his son’s boyfriend had been mugged and badly beaten in the city, twice more in Red Bluff, and now again in Los Alegres.

  They were all the same. Same sounds, same smells, same palpable aura of sickness and death. Took a special kind of person to be a doctor or a nurse or any other kind of hospital worker, people with systems immune to the stifling atmosphere-total opposites of a man like him, who needed to be outdoors and moving. Walls, particularly hospital walls, had a way of closing in on him after a while. As soon as he walked through the main entrance of Los Alegres Valley Hospital, he felt his stomach contract and his gorge rise, and the images of Colleen shriveled in that white bed in that white room came flooding back with an impact that was almost physical. Not as intense a reaction now as it had been, but bad enough.

  A woman on the reception desk told him where to find Damon Henderson. He rode an elevator up to the second floor, followed directions to the south wing. It was an old building with three or four wings, a couple of them probably add-ons, surrounded by medical offices, shopping centers, older east-side tracts. Everything was clean, reasonably well maintained, but faintly shabby, and the equipment struck him as borderline obsolete. The hospital stink seemed stronger up here; tightening his nasal passages and breathing through his mouth didn’t block it out. There was muscle tension all through him by the time he got to the semiprivate room where Damon Henderson lay and a woman sat in a chair at his bedside, holding his hand.

  The man-early to mid-thirties, slight, balding like his brother-was in rough shape. Facial bruises and contusions, right arm and shoulder in a cast. Doped to relieve his pain, apparently, but alert enough to talk. The thin-faced, scared-looking woman was his wife, Samantha. They were expecting him; Cliff had called her from San Francisco, she said, then stopped in at the hospital after he got back to tell Damon.

  Runyon asked the same questions he’d asked Lieutenant St. John, got pretty much the same answers. All except one. When he asked Damon Henderson if he’d had any aural or olfactory impressions of his attacker, the man said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Yes. Soap.”

  “How do you mean exactly? His body, his clothing?”

  “Everything about him. One of his hands, on my neck… gloved, but the soap smell was still strong.”

  “As if he’d scrubbed up recently.”

  “Yes. His hair… shampoo. And his clothes… freshly washed. Heavy, sweetish smell.”

  “Dryer sheets?” his wife said.

  “That’s it. All the odors were so strong it was almost… I don’t know, I was in so much pain…”

  What kind of man washes himself, shampoos his hair, and puts on clean clothes to break into a garage in the middle of the night? Somebody with OCD, maybe. Compulsive hand washer, cleanliness freak. That might explain the wet ground under the cemetery water tap, too.

  Runyon said as much and then asked, “Do you know anyone who fits that description? Obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness?”

  “I can’t… no, I don’t think so.”

  “Mrs. Henderson?”

  “No. No one.”

  “Just a few more questions. Did you have an impression of the man’s age?”

  “… Well, youngish, I think. From the sound of his voice.”

  “Twenties? Thirties?”

  “I’m not sure-twenties, I guess.”

  “Anything distinctive about the voice?”

  “Not that I can remember. The pain… it was right after he clubbed me.”

  “Any idea of what he was doing in your garage?”

  Henderson was tiring. His eyelids drooped, and when he tried to shift position, hurt twisted his mouth out of shape. “Sabotage my car again, I suppose.”

  “He’d already done that once?”

  “In my office parking lot, one night when I was working late. Threw acid on the tires, all four of them.”

  “Was there any damage to anything in the garage?”

  “No. He didn’t have time… I was out there pretty fast after I heard him break in.”

  “Where did he come from when he hit you?”

  “Where? I’m not… My left, over by my workbench.”

  “Keep anything flammable in that area? Paint thinner, gasoline?”

  “No flammable liquids, but there’s a lot of cardboard and paper-I store my old business files in the garage.”

  “Near the workbench.”

  “No, along the wall on the other side.”

  “My God,” Mrs. Henderson said, “are you suggesting he might’ve been planning to set fire to our garage?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. Just asking questions. Would you mind if I had a look around the garage? The rest of your property?”

  “The police have already been over everything…”

  “I’d like to see it for myself.”

  “Go ahead,” Henderson said. “Anything you need.”

  “I’ll be home in an hour or so,” his wife said. “Unless you’d like to go there now…”

  “No hurry. Later this afternoon is fine.”

  She drew a heavy breath. “Mr. Runyon, we have a twelve-year-old son. Cliff and Tracy have two young daughters. You have to find this man, find out who he is and why he’s doing this to us, stop him before he…” The rest of it seemed to stick in her throat.

  Runyon didn’t believe in offering false assurances. But these were desperate people. He said, “I’ll do everything I can,” and left them with that thin little thread of hope.

  P erp possibly in his twenties, possibly with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not much to go on, without some idea of why he’d targeted the Hendersons. A man with a real or imagined hate-on for both of the brothers, or for the Henderson family. The father had been dead for five years, so it didn’t figure to be him.

  Still, the first act of aggression had been to burn Lloyd Henderson’s ashes and the words off his monument with acid. Vicious and personal act. Everything else he’d done, with the exception of the assault on Damon Henderson, and that hadn’t been planned, was mild by comparison.

  Something to do with the father after all?

  4

  JAKE RUNYON

  Cliff and Tracy Henderson lived on Walnut Street. Runyon looked up the location on the Los Alegres map he’d bought, found it on the west side not far from the town center. The address turned out to be an old, two-story house with a columned side porch shaded by a tulip tree. The yard on the other side was fenced. The reason for the fencing was apparent as soon as he started up the front walk: a big brown and black dog, some kind of rottweiler mix, came charging out of the back barking and growling. Good for the Hendersons. A loud and aggressive animal was the best kind of home protection they could have.

  The dog kept up the racket as Runyon stood on the front porch thumbing the bell. No response. But as he came back down the steps, a dark gray SUV rolled upstreet and turned into the driveway. Tracy Henderson was at the wheel. He stood waiting as she and her passengers, two young girls, piled out.

  “Oh, Mr. Runyon,” she said. “Are you looking for Cliff? He’s at a job sit
e…”

  “I’d like to talk to you, if you can spare a few minutes.”

  “Of course.” The two girls came up, one on either side of her. She said, “My daughters, Shana and Rachel. I just picked them up at school.”

  The thirteen-year-old, Shana, gave him her hand in a solemn, grown-up way. The younger one, Rachel, said “Hello” shyly and stayed where she was, close to her mother. They knew who he was; their solemn expressions conveyed that. Good for the Hendersons on that score, too. You couldn’t protect kids their age by trying to shield them from what was going on.

  The dog was still barking. Mrs. Henderson yelled, “Thor! Quiet!” but the command didn’t have much effect. “He’s a good watchdog but once he gets started… Come inside, Mr. Runyon, we’ll talk in the living room. Just let me get the girls settled in their rooms.” She’d been calm enough in the agency offices this morning, but now she looked and acted frazzled. Worry and tension taking their toll.

  She deposited him in a living room that ran most of the house’s width across the front. Heavy dark furniture and rose-patterned wallpaper gave it the look of rooms you saw in movies made in the forties. Its focal points created a culture clash: shelves crammed with books along one wall, a television set displayed in front of one draped window. The TV won the clash hands down: ultra-modern fifty-two-inch flat-screen job on a long, high table, like a shrine to a false god. Runyon, waiting, stayed on his feet even though she’d invited him to sit down.

  She was back in not much more than three minutes. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee, a soda?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “I’m going to have a small scotch. You don’t mind? I don’t usually drink this early, but…”

  “I understand.”

  She poured the scotch neat, sipped it, made a face, sipped again as she lowered herself into one of a matching pair of overstuffed armchairs. The couch suited him; by turning sideways to face her, he had his back to the monster TV.

  She said, “Are you here because you have something to tell us? Or is it more questions?”