Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery)

by Bill Pronzini

  She tried to stand up too fast. A cramp in her right calf kept her down until she twisted around and got her foot jammed up straight against the wall. The pain eased and she was able to lift up and catch hold of the clothes rod, haul herself upright. Sweat streamed on her skin; every part of her felt soggy, like she’d taken a sauna in her clothes.

  He was in the room now. Lauren was awake, too, said something in a voice too low for Tamara to catch. He yelled at the child to shut up, go back to sleep, and the force of the words started her crying again.

  Then he was at the closet door, rattling on the lock out there. Breathing hard, almost snorting like a bull in heat. He had trouble getting the lock open, swore at it, finally yanked it loose. Tamara pressed back against the wall as he tore the door open.

  Oh, shit!

  One look at him looming there against the light, all fire-eyed and smoke-dark, and the sweat on her turned to icy jelly.

  14

  Tamara didn’t show up for work on Wednesday morning.

  The offices were locked when I got there a little before nine-thirty. My first thought was that she’d been there and had to go out for some reason, but if that had been the case she would’ve left a message on my desk and there was no message. None on the answering machine, either. In the five years we’d worked together, she had only missed a total of four days without advance notice—a three-day bout with the flu and an impacted tooth that had needed immediate attention. On both those occasions she’d notified me right away.

  Illness or emergency, I thought, sudden and serious enough to prevent her from calling in. Either way it was cause for concern. I rang up her apartment in the Outer Sunset, counted off a dozen rings before I disconnected. Then I tried her cellphone number. Out of service.

  Worrisome, but nothing to get alarmed about yet. For all I knew she was on her way in right now and the delay would turn out to be minor after all.

  I did a little work, and some time passed, and when she still didn’t show up I stood again and went into her office. The paper file on George DeBrissac was on her desk. I read through it, and there was nothing there that rang any alarm bells. Simple, straightforward case of nonpayment of child support; by all indications DeBrissac seemed to be your average white-collar deadbeat dad. While I was poking around among the other files and papers on her desk—nothing unusual in them, either—I heard the outer door open. But it wasn’t Tamara. Jake Runyon. I motioned to him to join me in my office.

  “What’s up?” he said. “Where’s Tamara?”

  “Good question. No sign of her this morning, and no message.”

  He digested that before he said, “Not like her.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “You try her cell phone?”

  “Out of service. And no answer at her apartment.”

  “Could be a combination of car trouble and a discharged cell.”

  “Could be. But I keep thinking about that deadbeat dad surveillance she’s been on the past couple of nights.”

  “One over in the East Bay?”

  “San Leandro.”

  “Pretty standard case, isn’t it?”

  “Looks to be,” I said. “Subject has no criminal record and no apparent history of violence. If he had, I’d’ve talked her into letting you handle it. But there’s something else. Yesterday she started to tell me about something that happened Monday night, something she saw or thought she saw that bothered her enough to do some checking. That was as far as she got before the phone rang and we never did get back to it. She mention any of this to you?”

  “No. Connected to the surveillance?”

  “She didn’t say one way or the other. Could’ve happened while she was staked out in San Leandro, or before or afterward someplace else. There’s nothing on her desk that might help explain it.”

  “Might be something on her computer,” Runyon said.

  “Could you get in there and find it?”

  “Well, I could try. But she has a security code, doesn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “If so, I won’t be able to get in without the password. I’m no expert.”

  “Better not, then. She doesn’t like anybody messing with her computer. Hell, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here anyway. It’s only a little after ten—two hours late doesn’t make her a missing person.”

  “Sure. She’ll probably show up any minute.”

  But she didn’t show up. Not by ten-thirty, not by eleven.

  Runyon came in again from the outer office. “I’ve got a meeting with Fred Agajanian at eleven-thirty. Shouldn’t last long. Tamara still hasn’t shown up by then, I could drive to her place, make sure everything’s all right there.”

  “Good idea.” I gave him the address. “If she shows or checks in meanwhile, I’ll call your cell. If you don’t hear from me, go ahead out there.”

  Too much on my mind. And too quiet in the office with Runyon gone and Tamara absent. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on my work; my mind kept skipping around helter-skelter.

  Dancer, Cybil. Remember D-Day. Amazing grace. That bulky envelope. Kerry’s odd behavior. Cybil’s reticence. Secrets. But what kind?

  Dancer had made any number of passes at her and once tried to talk her into divorcing Ivan the Terrible and marrying him, back around 1950; but she’d had very little to do with him after the war, and no contact at all since the pulp convention fiasco. Kerry had disliked him for his crude ways and his open hunger for her mother. Old Ivan had actively hated him for those reasons and because he’d considered Dancer a worthless hack. During the war, while Ivan was an army liaison officer stationed in Washington, loneliness and the Pulpeteers’ freewheeling lifestyle had led Cybil into an affair with Frank Colodny, editor of Midnight Detective. Bad choice: Colodny had been a blackmailer and a thief, among other things—sins that many years later had gotten him murdered. But neither Dancer nor Cybil had had anything to do with his death at the pulp convention, even though Dancer had been arrested for it. And when pressed, she’d been candid about the affair. She’d also told me she had had plenty of other offers and turned them all down; she loved Ivan and she wasn’t promiscuous. And I believed her.

  No buried secrets in any of that, as far as I could see.

  But there had to be something pretty disturbing either in her past relationship with Dancer or that Dancer knew about to upset her this way. Something that Kerry also either knew about or suspected. The contents of the envelope felt like a manuscript, book length or close to it. A novel or nonfiction work he’d written for or about Cybil, and wanted her to have as a love offering—or maybe hate offering—from the grave? Dancer had had his sentimental side, and he could also be mean-spirited and cruel; he was perfectly capable of concocting one type or the other. But I couldn’t imagine anything fact or fiction that would rattle her after so many years. Or what D-Day had to do with it. Or what amazing grace might signify.

  I kept telling myself to quit picking at it and forget about it, it was none of my business anyway. Fat chance. It was my business. Cybil and Kerry were family and Dancer had put me in the middle of it and it was having a none too pleasing effect on my marriage. Besides which, I don’t like secrets and I chafe at puzzles I can’t solve.

  One way or another, I was going to dig out some idea of what this was all about.

  Noon came and went.

  No Tamara.

  The more time that passed without word, the more edgy and restless it made me. Every time the phone rang I jumped at it. Routine business, until Jake Runyon’s voice came over the wire at a quarter to one.

  “She’s not at her apartment,” he said. “I talked to a couple of the neighbors. Nobody’s seen her in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “What about her car . . . her boyfriend’s car? Red Toyota . . .”

  “I remember. No sign of it in the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t like this. I’m starting to get bad vibes here, Jake.”

&nbs
p; “I hear you. Want me to take a run over to San Leandro, check out that surveillance address?”

  “I’ll do it. You’ve got other business.”

  “Nothing that won’t keep.”

  “What about the gay bashings? How’s that going?”

  “Making progress.”

  “Line on the perps?”

  “No IDs yet, but it turns out they’re not picking at random—the victims were sexually involved with a seventeen-year-old kid named Troy.”

  “All three victims?”

  “All three.”

  Including his son’s partner. But I didn’t say it and neither did he. All I said was, “Hell of a hard row to hoe sometimes, being a father. Particularly for men like us.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You have more work you can do on the investigation—now, I mean?”

  “It can wait until I’m on my own time.”

  “The hell with that,” I said. “Go ahead and get on it. I’ll let you know if there’s any news about Tamara.”

  The trip to the East Bay was a waste of nearly two hours.

  The San Leandro neighborhood Tamara had been staking out was lower middle class and early-afternoon quiet. There was no sign of Horace’s red Toyota on the 1100 block of Willard Street, or anywhere else on Willard or within a four-block radius. I parked in front of number 1122, the house where deadbeat George DeBrissac might or might not be hiding out, and went and rang the bell and got no answer.

  Start ringing other doorbells? Bad time for it. Most of the residents were away at work or out shopping; Tamara had been here after dark, so anybody who might’ve seen her might not be home until after dark. Better to wait until tonight, if it came down to that.

  So I drove back to the city and South Park. It was just three o’clock when I got off the elevator in front of the new offices.

  Still no Tamara, still no word from her.

  Time, past time, to start making some calls. I decided on a compromise where her family was concerned. If there was a serious problem and her family knew about it, I was pretty sure somebody would have let me know by now. And I didn’t want to sound an alarm to them yet. Her father was a Redwood City cop, overprotective and none too keen about her choice of profession, even less so after that close call last Christmas; they had a prickly relationship, and he and I had never been more than civil to each other. He’d be in my face from the get-go. And if it turned out the absence had a simple explanation, I’d have Tamara’s disapproval to deal with as well.

  So I made my first call to her sister Claudia, a lawyer with the public defender’s office. Tamara was out somewhere, I said, and I was trying to locate her. Had Claudia heard from her today? No, Claudia hadn’t. Like her sister, she was a sharp young woman; there must have been something in my voice that she picked up on, because she asked immediately if anything was wrong. I gave her an evasive answer and got off the phone by pretending I had another call.

  We had an office Rolodex file of names and addresses that included some personal contacts, among them Tamara’s closest friends. Lucille Cranston hadn’t spoken to her in several days. I couldn’t get hold of Deanne Cotter. The third call, to Vonda McGee at the Design Center, produced some results.

  “Well, yeah,” Vonda said, “I talked to her last night.”

  “In person or on the phone?”

  “Phone.”

  “She call you or you call her?”

  “I did, on her cell.”

  “What time?”

  “I think . . . around eight or so.”

  “Where was she? San Leandro?”

  “Didn’t say. We only talked for a couple of minutes. She kind of blew me off.”

  “Is that right? Why?”

  “Said she couldn’t talk, she was on a job. She sounded a little weird. Off the hook.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Like she was messed about something.”

  Young people and their slang. “Upset? Scared?”

  “Not scared. Just sort of heavy-duty stoked.”

  “Does that mean excited?”

  “Yeah. Not all there, you know? Off the hook.”

  “Distracted. Tensed up.”

  “Right.”

  “What was bothering her, she give you any idea?”

  “No. Well, she said something about dealing with a half-and-half, same as I am.”

  “Half-and-half?”

  “Half black, half white,” Vonda said. “See, I’m dating this guy, a white guy who’s also Jewish, and he’s getting serious, he wants to meet my people and they’re not too cool about the mixed-race thing. So I called Tam to—”

  “Did she give you a name, say anything at all about this half-and-half?”

  “Just that she was dealing with him.”

  “Him. A man.”

  “I guess so. That’s the impression I got.”

  “Somebody she met and was attracted to?”

  “No, not like that. Horace is her man, only man she wants.”

  “Some guy who hit on her, kept bugging her?”

  “Uh-uh. Didn’t sound like that either. She’d’ve said if it was a sex thing.”

  “What do you think she meant by ‘dealing with him’?”

  “No idea,” Vonda said.

  “Did it sound like an immediate thing—a situation she had to deal with then and there, wherever she was?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s all she said. Well, except that race doesn’t always have to be an issue. Be nice if that was true. Then she said she’d call me later, we’d talk then, and cut me off.”

  “But she didn’t call you back.”

  “Uh-uh. Not last night, not today. Funny—when Tamara says she’s gonna do something, she always does it. You know?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How come you asking me all these questions anyway? I mean, why don’t you just ask Tam?”

  “She’s been out of the office all day. I’m trying to find her.”

  “. . . Nothing wrong, is there? I mean—”

  I said, “I hope not, Vonda. Thanks for your help,” and rang off.

  I went and got the DeBrissac file again. As I remembered, he was down in there as a “male Caucasian.” To make sure, I put in a call to the Ballard Agency in Portland. They verified it: George DeBrissac was Caucasian, his ex-wife was Caucasian, and that made it pretty likely the cousin who owned the San Leandro house was Caucasian.

  So was this half-and-half part of the “something that went down” on Monday night that’d bothered her enough to do some checking? What had she meant by “dealing with him”?

  And the big question: Did he have anything to do with her sudden disappearance?

  15

  JAKE RUNYON

  Paul Venner, Troy’s lover who worked in the Castro leather shop, wouldn’t talk to him. Venner was in his twenties, had orange spiked hair and a tattoo of a scorpion under his right ear and a muscled body encased in black leather pants and an orange T-shirt with the words QUEER POWER emblazoned on the front; he wore his hostility toward both heterosexuals and cops like another motto on the sleeve. He stonewalled every question Runyon put to him by saying aggressively, “No comment. Buy something or get out, you don’t belong here” or “Hey, you’d look good in cowhide and chains” or “How about a fur-lined jock strap, they’re on sale this week.” Runyon didn’t bite on any of it. Nothing ever showed on his face unless he wanted it to, and he showed Venner nothing but a flat stare the entire five minutes he was in there. When he said, “You’d better watch yourself, kid, or you’ll end up in the hospital like the other three victims,” and got another smart-ass comment in return, he walked out. The Paul Venners of the world, the hard-line haters, the self-involved screw-everybody-else jerks gay or straight, deserved whatever they got.

  Another visit to Jerry Butterfield’s house—a refurbished post-1906 earthquake cottage with an add-on garage—also bought him nothing. Still nobody home. On the back of one of h
is agency business cards he wrote his cell-phone number and a brief call-me-it’s-important message, and wedged the card into the doorjamb above the lock. If he didn’t hear from Butterfield by seven or eight tonight, he’d follow up again himself.

  Next stop: Hattie Street.

  Keith Morgan was fifty or so, heavyset, sad-eyed. Lines and wrinkles calipered a small mouth, scored his cheeks and neck; even his head beneath a sparse combing of brown hair showed faint furrows. His first-floor studio apartment in the big, blue Victorian was dominated by framed photographs of a thin bearded man alone and in candid shots with Morgan, and prints and lithographs of dogs of one kind and another. A live dog, old and shaggy, of indeterminate breed, followed its master everywhere and never left him alone; it showed no interest in Runyon. Cataracts made its eyes look like blobs of milky glass.

  Morgan had no problem with Runyon being straight or a detective. He listened to a brief explanation for the visit, nodded, showed him into the apartment, turned off a TV tuned to a noisy talk show, offered him something to drink, and then sat in a creaky recliner with the blind animal at his feet. The room smelled of dog and some kind of food with a lot of curry powder in it.

  “Troy,” he said. “Well, I guess I’m not surprised he’s the cause of trouble.”

  “Why is that, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Wild young fool. The kind with no sense. Won’t listen to anybody, think nothing bad will ever happen to them and they’ll live forever.”

  “Promiscuous, I’ve been told.”

  “Lord, yes. He had a parade of lovers in and out.” Wry mouth. “He even propositioned me right after he moved in’offered to trade sex for his rent. I refused, of course. I would have even if I owned the building.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m HIV positive,” Morgan said.

  “I see. Recent diagnosis?”

  “No, I was diagnosed more than ten years ago. Amazing the disease hasn’t killed me by now. My partner wasn’t so lucky. He died nine years ago. Probably infected by me, though that’s not certain.”

  Runyon said, “I’m sorry,” and meant it.