Bleeders

by Bill Pronzini

  “You see?” Byers said bitterly. “He knows everything.”

  Cohalan waggled his head. He’d gotten over his initial shock and he looked stricken; his hands had started that scoop-shovel trick at his sides. “You believed me. I know you did.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “I didn’t believe you. I’m a better actor than you, is all. Your story didn’t sound right from the first. Too elaborate, loaded with improbabilities. Seventy-five thousand is much too large a blackmail bite for any past crime short of murder, and you swore to me—your wife, too—you weren’t guilty of a major felony. Blackmailers seldom work in big bites anyway. They bleed their victims in small bites to keep them from throwing the hook. We just didn’t buy it, either of us.”

  “We? Jesus, you mean ... you and Carolyn....”

  “That’s right. You were never my client, Cohalan—it’s been your wife all along. Why do you think I never asked you for a retainer? Or suggested we mark the money just in case?”

  He muttered something and pawed his face.

  “She showed up at my office right after you did the first time,” I said. “If she hadn’t, I’d have gone to her myself. She’s been suspicious all along, and when you hit her with the big bite, she figured it for a scam right away. She thought you might be having an affair, that that’s where the money was going. Didn’t take me long to find out about Annette. You never had a clue you were being followed, did you? Once I knew about her, it was easy enough to put the rest of it together, including the business with the money drop tonight.” I showed him my teeth. “And here we are.”

  “Damn you,” he said, but there was no heat in the words. “You and that frigid bitch both.”

  He wasn’t referring to Annette Byers, but she took the opportunity to dig into him again. “Wise guy. I told you it was a bad idea to hire a goddamn private cop—”

  “Shut up, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t keep telling me to shut up.”

  “Shut up shut up shut up!”

  “You son of a—”

  “Don’t say it. I’ll slap you silly.”

  “You won’t slap anybody,” I said. “Not as long as I’m around.”

  He pawed his face again. “What’re you going to do?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do?”

  “You can’t turn us in. You don’t have any proof ... it’s your word against ours.”

  “Wrong again.” I showed him the voice-activated recorder I’d had hidden in my pocket the entire evening. High-tech, state-of-the-art equipment, courtesy of George Agonistes, fellow investigator and electronics genius. “Everything that was said in your office and in this room tonight is on tape. I’ve also got the cassette tape Annette played when she called your office number. Voice prints will prove you were talking to yourself on the phone, giving yourself instructions for the money drop. If your wife wants to press charges, you’re looking at jail time. Both of you.”

  “She won’t press charges. Not Carolyn.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

  “Jay,” Byers said, “don’t let him walk out of here with our money.” A frantic note had come into her voice. “Don’t let him.”

  Cohalan said to me, “I suppose you intend to take it straight back to her.”

  “No, he’s gonna try to keep it for himself. Stop him, for God’s sake. Stop him, Jay!”

  “Straight back to your wife, that’s right,” I said. “And if you’ve got any idea of trying to take it away from her, tonight or any time, get it out of your head. That money’s going where you’ll never lay hands on it again.”

  “No,” he said. Then, “I could take it away from you.”

  “You think so?”

  Byers: “Go ahead, do it!”

  Cohalan: “I’m as big as you ... younger, faster.”

  That’s one of the things that makes crank such a nasty drug. It not only speeds you up, it creates a false sense of power and invincibility. On meth, cowards like Cohalan start to think they’re tough guys after all.

  I repocketed the recorder. I could have showed him the .38, but I grinned at him instead—the kind of death’s-head grin I can work up at times like this. “Go ahead and try,” I said.

  “I need that money, damn you.”

  “Go ahead and try.”

  Sweat made Cohalan’s face shiny; his stare seemed to be losing focus, the way eyes do when they’re about to cross.

  Byers half-screamed, “Well, what’re you waiting for? Take it!”

  He ignored her. Weighing the odds, wondering if he really was man enough, wondering if he’d loaded his bloodstream with sufficient crank to make him man enough.

  “Make your move, Cohalan. Or else step away from the door. You’ve got five seconds.”

  He moved in three, as I took a step toward him. Sideways, clear of both me and the door. Not enough drug, too much yellow.

  “Bullshitter,” Byers spat at him, “pansy-ass!” And in the next second she charged me with her hands hooked into claws, one grabbing for the briefcase, the other slashing red-tipped nails at my face.

  Men should not hit women; that’s an edict I believe in and live by. But in this case I had no choice. I twisted just in time to avoid being raked and backhanded her across the side of the head. It stopped her, put her enough off balance so that I could follow up with a hard shove. Cohalan caught her on reflex, held her. She fought free of him, glared at me but thought better of another rush. She turned on him instead, called him a name. He called her something worse. She one-upped him and then some; she had a mouth like a sewer rat.

  I went out in the middle of it and closed the door against their vicious, whining voices. Bleeders, druggies, fools. Jesus.

  Outside, the fog had thickened to a near drizzle, slicking the pavement and turning the lines of parked cars along both curbs into two-dimensional onyx shapes. I walked quickly to California. Nobody had bothered my tired old wheels in the bus zone. I locked the briefcase in the trunk, got rolling, then used the car phone to call Carolyn Dain. It was Dain because like a lot of women these days, Kerry included, she’d preferred to keep her own name after marriage.

  She answered on the second ring, and as soon as I identified myself she said, “We were right, weren’t we.” Flat statement, not a question. “The whole thing was just a ... scam.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dain.”

  “Yes. So am I. Where is he now? Still with her?”

  “At her apartment. Both high on methamphetamine. Did you know he was a user?”

  “I knew,” she admitted. “It’s been going on for a long time, as long as ... the other women. I should have told you.”

  “Yes, you should have.” Not that it had taken me long to figure it out on my own. “I put a scare into them and I don’t think he’ll bother you tonight. But you’d be wise to spend the night someplace else.”

  “I’ve already made arrangements.”

  “Okay, good. Are you going to press charges?”

  “I.... don’t know yet.”

  “Well, if you don’t do it immediately, I’d advise you to stay away from your husband so he can’t influence you in any way. And also not to waste any time putting the money into a safe deposit box or a bank account in your name only.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “I have the cash with me, the full seventy-five thousand. I wouldn’t hold out any hope of getting the rest of your inheritance back.”

  “I don’t care about that right now.”

  “I can bring the money out to you. Or meet you wherever you’ll be staying....”

  “I mean I don’t care about any of the money right now,” she said. “Please don’t be offended, but I don’t want to see anyone tonight except the person I’m staying with. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I don’t like being responsible for it.”

  “You’re bonded. I trust you.”

  �
�Still, I’d prefer to—”

  “Don’t you have someplace safe to keep it? Just for tonight?”

  “I suppose so, but....”

  “Please. Just for tonight. I can’t ... I simply can’t cope with any more of this. Please.”

  “If you insist,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll keep it until tomorrow, but you’ll have to take possession as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Let me have the address and phone number of where—”

  “I’ll call you at your office,” she said, and the line went dead.

  Well, hell. Shaken up, the underpinnings of her life torn loose.... who could blame her for needing time and space, giving short shrift to the money? It was the root cause of all this. And she didn’t much care about financial matters anyway, except to provide the basics; she’d told me that the day I took her on as a client. Music was what she cared about. She taught music appreciation and the history of classical music at White Rock School, one of the city’s private high schools. Played the flute “passably well” and was gathering data for a “probably-never-to-be-written” biography of an Austrian musicographer named Ludwig Köchel, who had cataloged all of Mozart’s compositions in chronological order. What a woman with her taste and interests was doing married to a sorry-ass specimen like Jay Cohalan was anybody’s guess.

  I turned the car around and drove downtown to my office on O’Farrell. The neighborhood, on the westward fringe of the Tenderloin, is not the safest at eleven o’clock, despite some upscaling in recent years: a heavy influx of Vietnamese and Cambodian families and the reclamation of the nearby Sgt. John Macaulay Park, once a notorious drug gallery and open-air toilet, now a children-only playground. Still, crack dealers, homeless alcoholics, and recent parolees roamed the area at night, and it pays to be vigilant. Fortunately there was a parking space a couple of doors from my building. I made sure I had the immediate vicinity to myself before I unlocked the trunk and hauled the briefcase out.

  The building is a tomb at this hour. Nobody in either of the other two businesses that occupy it—Bay City Realtors on the ground floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor—stays on the premises past 5:30. There’d been a brace of break-ins a few years back, though in neither case had anything been stolen from my top-floor office, probably because that was in the days before I’d hired Tamara to computerize the operation, and there hadn’t been much there worth stealing. Pressure on the owner had led to better security measures, and we hadn’t had any trouble since.

  I rode the tiny, creaking elevator to the third floor, keyed myself in, put on a light, and went straight to the coat closet. That’s where the office safe is, bolted to the floor in one corner. It’s an old Mosler that anybody with a minimum of safecracking skills could have open in twenty minutes, but since I seldom keep anything of value inside, I’d never seen a need to pay for an upgrade. Carolyn Dain’s money ought to be secure enough overnight, given the fact that no one but me knew its whereabouts.

  The briefcase was too bulky to fit into the safe, so I unpacked the stacks of bills and stored them in neat rows. It was an odd feeling, handling that much cash—as if I were doing something that was not quite wholesome. Maybe it had to do with all the people I’d encountered in thirty-some years as a cop and private investigator, all the scheming and violence and suffering I’d seen in quests for stacks of bills like these. Filthy lucre. Blood money. Cold, hard cash. Throwaway terms that had deeper, much more bitter meanings for men and women like me.

  When I was done, I made sure the safe was locked, slid the empty case into the kneehole of my desk, locked up, and went home to a far better pair of human beings than I’d dealt with so far on this cold early-winter night.

  FOUR

  KERRY WAS STILL AWAKE, IN BED READING. “I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said when I came in.

  “Worried about me?”

  “Always. How did it go?”

  “Fine. I miscalculated on one point, but it worked out all right.” I’d kept her apprised of what was happening with the Dain case, the little sting I’d planned for tonight. “Most damn satisfying job I’ve had in a while.”

  “So you nailed Cohalan and his bimbo.”

  “Real good.”

  “Is your client going to press charges?”

  “She doesn’t know yet. She didn’t want to see me tonight, not even to take possession of her money. Too upset.”

  “You mean you still have all that cash?”

  “In the office safe until tomorrow.”

  She ran her fingers through her already touseled auburn hair. She’d had it cut short recently; the new style fit her pretty well, and she thought it made her look younger, but I hadn’t gotten used to it yet. I still preferred the old, longer style.

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t bring it home,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that much much money in the house.”

  “That’s why I put it in the safe.”

  “What was the one miscalculation?”

  I told her about that while I shed my coat and tie and shirt.

  “It wouldn’t have been your fault if Byers had hit somebody,” Kerry said.

  “Morally it would have. I didn’t need to play Cohalan’s game. I could’ve picked up the money myself after he made the drop, then gone to confront them.”

  “More effective the way you handled it.”

  “More dramatic anyway. Looking for a little drama and excitement to spice up my mundane life.”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “I meant my professional life.” I reached over and patted one of the curves outlined by the bedclothes. “I’ve got all the personal drama and excitement I can handle right here.”

  “Uh-huh. Sweet talk doesn’t feed the bulldog, mister.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t have a clue. I heard somebody say it in a meeting the other day ... you know how advertising people talk. I like the way it sounds, even if it doesn’t make much sense.”

  I struggled out of my shoes and socks, massaged one foot and then the other; my feet have a tendency to swell when I do a lot of sitting around. “Emily okay? I was going to look in on her, but I didn’t want to chance waking her up.”

  “I talked her into playing a couple of games of Scrabble before she went to sleep,” Kerry said. “She seemed to enjoy that. But she’s still so quiet and withdrawn ... it hurts me to see her like that.”

  “Me, too. I’ve been thinking that I need to make more time for her.”

  “So have I. The same thing.”

  “Well, I’ve got tomorrow afternoon free. I thought maybe I’d take her to the zoo or the aquarium after school, just the two of us.”

  “She’d love that. You know she idolizes you.”

  “I don’t want to be idolized. Too much responsibility.”

  “I idolize you.”

  “Sweet talk doesn’t feed the bulldog, lady.”

  She laughed. “How about the three of us doing something together on the weekend, both days? We could take Emily up to the Delta—I haven’t been to the Delta in years, and I don’t know that she’s ever been there. I’m supposed to attend a conference Saturday morning, but she’s more important. The agency won’t lose any business just because I’m not there to offer my usual brilliant suggestions.”

  “That’s a plan, then.”

  “And we don’t let anything prevent us from following through. Pact?”

  “Pact.”

  I pulled on my pajama bottoms and got into bed. Kerry had her book fanned open on her belly, a slender trade paperback with a picture of what looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus on the front cover. The title was Forever Lasting; there was a subtitle to go with it, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  “A book Paula loaned me.”

  “Paula Hanley?”

  “Do we know any other Paulas?”

  “Oh
, God,” I said. “Lady Crackpot.”

  “She is not a crackpot.”

  “No? That woman’s pot is so cracked you couldn’t fix it with a kilo of Crazy Glue.”

  She let me hear one of her little warning growls. “This book,” she said, “is actually very interesting. It’s all about—”

  “I don’t want to hear what it’s all about.”

  “That’s the trouble with you. You have a closed mind sometimes.”

  “Where Paula and her ideas are concerned, that’s right. Closed in self-defense.”

  “Forever Lasting is not only a fascinating history, it offers a whole new—”

  “I said I don’t want to hear it. Turn out the light.”

  “No. I’m going to read a while longer.”

  I slid my hand over onto her bare thigh.

  Pretty soon she said, “Well, maybe I won’t read any more tonight,” and turned out the light.

  Everybody has some sort of curse in his life, large or small. Mine is Kerry’s friend, Paula Hanley. Paula is one of San Francisco’s highest paid interior decorators. An article Kerry showed me in one of those Beautiful Homes magazines said she had “exquisite taste.” Maybe so, where her business was concerned, but she dresses like a Technicolor nightmare; whenever I see her I have an urge to put on very dark sunglasses. She bickered incessantly with her rabbity chiropractor husband, drank too much, prosletyzed too much on any subject of interest to her, and worst of all, she was a magnet for and a repository of Weird with a capital W. Fads and fancies were her specialty. She’d been into Esalen, primal scream therapy, channeling and past life regression, rolfing, tantric sex, acupuncture, and a great many others I’d mercifully forgotten about. Whatever this lastest folly, contained in that ominous little book titled Forever Lasting, I wanted nothing to do with in any way, shape, or form.

  So naturally Kerry had to tell me all about it over breakfast. I tried to stop her, but she has a blind spot where La Hanley is concerned; she seldom buys into Paula’s Weird, but she does listen to it and think about it and every now and then one of these wacko concepts strikes a responsive chord in her. I live in mild dread of those times—and it looked and sounded as though this was one of them. As she explained in chilling detail the screwball concept of Forever Lasting, her cheeks took on a faint flush, and her eyes got bright and just a bit dreamy. And I sat there with my appetite waning and all sorts of impure thoughts about Paula Hanley dancing in my head.