Bleeders

by Bill Pronzini

  He said, “Do something?” in a voice like rocks being shaken in a can. Hit in the throat hard enough once, I thought, to damage his windpipe and vocal chords.

  “Zeke Mayjack around?”

  “Who wants him?”

  I told him who. The name didn’t impress him, either.

  “I don’t know you,” he said. “Zeke know you?”

  “No. I’m a friend of a friend.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nick Kinsella.”

  Nothing changed in his face, but he said, “Zeke ain’t here.”

  “Expect him any time soon?”

  Shrug. “He comes and goes.”

  “Best time to catch him is when?”

  “He comes and goes, like I told you.”

  “Any idea where he might be now?”

  “No.”

  And if he knew where Zeke Mayjack lived, he wouldn’t tell me. I asked, “How about Jackie Spoons? He around?”

  “Who?”

  “Jackie Spoons.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Yeah, I thought, just like you never hard of Marciano or Ali. But there was nothing to be gained in pushing it. Kinsella’s name was good enough for an introduction to Mayjack, but I’d have to go through Mayjack to get to Jackie Spoons. That told me something about Jackie’s standing at the Veterans’: hands-off unless you were known to the staff and cleared for an audience. Money, fear? That combination, and also the closed-circle attitude you found in old clubs like this one. Whatever else Jackie Spoons was, he was also one of their gym rats.

  Nothing else for me here right now. I could hang around and wait for Mayjack, but it could turn into a long wait, and I was not up to it. It was already six o’clock, and I was tired of the urban jungle, tired of walking the edges. Enough for today.

  I thought about going to my flat in Pacific Heights, as I had told Kerry I might do. The flat, which I had occupied on a rent-controlled lease for more than three decades, had been a good place to live when I was single, a good place to hole up in sad, bad times then and since. Most of my pulp magazine collection was there, and a lot of my other long-time possessions. Since I’d gotten settled into marriage, though, it had begun to feel less and less like home, and I did not go there nearly as often. Maybe the time had come to give it up, move the pulps to the condo and the rest of my stuff into storage. I hadn’t been able to take that step yet, but I had the sense that I would be ready to before much longer. I felt it again now because I did not really want to go to the flat tonight, did not really want to be alone there or anywhere.

  Home was the condo, home was Kerry and Emily. I went home.

  TWELVE

  EMILY HUGGED ME FIERCELY WHEN I WALKED IN, but afterward she withdrew again into her self-protective shell. She was very quiet during dinner, ate almost nothing, refused desert, and went straight to her room.

  Kerry had been demonstrative enough at the table, trying to draw Emily out, but she grew quiet when we were alone. There was something she wanted to say to me, only she was not quite ready to say it. Just as well. I could guess what it was and I was not quite ready to hear it.

  We cleaned up and then sat in the living room and made desultory conversation. Not about where I’d been or what I’d been doing all day; she didn’t ask and I didn’t volunteer any information. That was something else I was not yet ready to discuss. The main topic was Cybil. Kerry and her mother had had a long phone talk about what had happened, and Cybil had offered to take Emily for a few days until things “calmed down.” Kerry thought it might be a good idea; I didn’t. Cybil was eighty and lived in a seniors’ complex, but that wasn’t the main reason I objected. The kid had been displaced enough in the past year. It wouldn’t do her or us any good if she were uprooted in the midst of a new crisis. She had to learn to deal with life’s calamities large and small, not to run or hide from them, and sheltering her was not the way for the lesson to be taught.

  So we hashed it out, and Kerry finally agreed with me. But then she said, “I think you’d better talk to her about last night. I tried, but I can’t get through to her. It has to come from you.”

  “Now, tonight?”

  “Right now. She knows we almost lost you. She was there; she saw the way you looked ... she’s not dealing with it very well.”

  None of us are, I thought. And you were there, too, babe. I said, “Maybe I’d better. Get it out into the open.”

  “It would be best.”

  For us, too. But I didn’t say it.

  I went and knocked on Emily’s door and put my head inside. She was in bed, propped up against the pillows, Shameless curled and purring beside her, one of her dozen or so stuffed animals—a grinning Garfield—clutched against her chest. All the lights were on: overheads and bedside lamp in there, ceiling and vanity lights in the adjoining bathroom.

  “Okay if I come in?”

  “Yes.”

  I shut the door and sat at the foot of her bed. “Kind of bright in here, kiddo. Too much light for sleeping.”

  “I can’t sleep. I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bad dreams.”

  “What kind of bad dreams?”

  “Ugly ... the ugly kind. I don’t want to talk about them.”

  “You might feel better if you did.”

  “No.” She grimaced, put her hand on Shameless as if for warmth and comfort. He licked her finger, purred louder. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said.

  “Wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean with me, the person I am.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, honey. Why would you think that?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Everybody keeps dying,” she said. “Everybody I care about. Dad, Mom ... everybody.”

  I could feel her pain; it was my pain, too. I said, “I’m still here. I didn’t die last night.”

  “You almost did. When I came in that house and saw you ... all the blood ... I thought you were going to. That’s the first thing I thought.” A shudder went through her. “I’m still afraid you’re going to.”

  Dead man walking.

  Click. Click.

  I kept it out of my face, or tried to. She was looking at me the way a kid can sometimes, penetratingly and with a depth of intuition and understanding no adult can match. She knows, I thought. She’s known all along.

  What I said to her now was more important than anything I’d ever said to her. No simplistic, homespun philosophy of the sort I’d dished out at the zoo on Friday; something with heft and meaning and impact. I framed it in my head, found a way to begin, and plunged in.

  “You must think you’re pretty special, Emily.”

  “I’m not special—”

  “Powerful, too. A special, powerful little girl.”

  “I don’t think that. I’m not.”

  “As special and powerful as God. A kind of god yourself.”

  The words shocked her, as I’d intended them to. She sat upright, her face all rounded O’s—eyes, mouth, flared nostrils. “That’s not true!”

  “No? Then how can you believe you cause people to die? God’s the only being who can do that, not that I believe He does. So if you can do it you must have godlike powers yourself. Right?”

  “No! It’s not like that. It’s ... they die because of me, something in me....”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Unless you believe you’re evil instead of godlike. Is that how you see yourself? An evil person?”

  “I’m not that, either.... I’m not.”

  “Of course you’re not. You’re neither godlike nor evil. You’re a ten-year-old girl named Emily Hunter who’s had a lot of bad things happen to her and to people she loves—things that aren’t her fault. Not hers, not God’s, not anybody’s. You didn’t make them happen. You didn’t have anything to do with them happening.”

  “Then why did they happen
?”

  “Some people would say it’s God’s will. I don’t buy that. I think God’s an observer, not an active participant; I think He pretty much stays out of human business. I think bad things happen because there are bad people in the world and sometimes good people get in the way. There’s no reason or purpose to it—it’s random, accidental. You understand?”

  “Yes, but ... then what’s the use of praying?”

  “It makes you feel better, doesn’t it? Closer to God?”

  “ ... I suppose so.”

  “It helps you, that’s the point. Divine miracles are few and far between, Emily. The only miracles most of us get are the ones we bring to ourselves.”

  “By being good people, leading good lives?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But people we care about still die.” She hugged Garfield closer. “I can’t help it, I’m still afraid.”

  “You’re not alone. So am I.”

  “Of dying?”

  “No. Everybody dies sooner or later. Dying’s pretty easy when you get right down to it. Living’s the hard part.”

  “What are you scared of, then?”

  “Of what will happen to you if I die before you grow up. Not so much where you’d go or what you’d do, but how you’d be inside. That you’d always be afraid. That you might never have a life because you’re too concerned with death. That scares me more than anything. More than you’re scared right now.”

  She gave me a long, searching look. And then, all at once, she began to cry. Fat tears and low, hard-wrung sobs, as if an emotional dam had burst deep within her. And that was good, as painful as it was to watch, because it was the first time her grief and pain had come pouring out in front of me or Kerry or anyone else.

  I ached to hold her, comfort her—but not yet, not until the purge was finished. I just sat there, feeling bad-good for her and mostly bad for myself.

  When I came out I told Kerry about it, and she agreed that the breakdown was a positive sign. She went in to see Emily herself, to offer comfort and to reinforce what I’d said. And when she came out—

  “She’s better now. I think she’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

  “She let you turn off the lights?”

  “All except the nightlight in the bathroom.”

  Another good sign. If Emily was able to deal with one kind of darkness now, in time she’d probably learn to deal with the other kind.

  A little later Kerry and I went to bed. We lay quietly, holding hands. I wanted to talk to her as freely as I’d talked to Emily, but with Kerry it would mean reliving the near-death experience, and my emotional dam on that subject was still tightly closed. I sensed that she was ready to speak her piece, though, and I was right.

  Pretty soon she said, “There’s something I need to say. I don’t want to preach at you, or try to tell you what to do, but you have to understand how I feel.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m not so different from Emily,” she said. “Last night ... it scared me, too. We came so close to losing you.”

  “Close only counts in horseshoes.”

  “Dammit, this isn’t funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

  “You could be dead right now.”

  “I know that better than you do.”

  “Yes, all right. I didn’t mean ... I don’t know what I meant. I suppose I’m being selfish, but I can’t help being afraid for myself and for Emily, as well as for you.”

  “That’s not selfish, just human.”

  “We can’t go through something like this again,” she said. “None of us can, you most of all.”

  “Quit beating around the bush. Just say it.”

  “All right. I think it’s time you ... cut back. Stop putting yourself in situations where you can get hurt or killed.”

  “Retire, you mean. Get out of the detective business.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s what you meant.”

  “No, it isn’t, not exactly. Cut back, take a less active role in the agency. Give Tamara more responsibility, hire somebody else to do the fieldwork.”

  “Somebody younger.”

  “Age isn’t the issue here.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “ ... Okay, maybe it is, partly. You’re sixty years old—”

  “You think sixty’s old?”

  “No, sixty is not old. Not in the normal course of things. But when it comes to dangerous situations, physical abuse ... you can’t keep on doing the things you did twenty or thirty years ago, taking the kind of beating you took last night. You know you can’t.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know you can’t,” she said again.

  Lay still, you old fuck. Hey, Pops, you want some more marks on that ugly face of yours? Hey, you old fuck.

  “And now you’re out there again,” Kerry said, “prowling around on the mean streets or whatever you call them, doing God knows what that might get you hurt again or killed this time. Don’t tell me that’s not what you were doing today. I know better. I know you.”

  I let that pass as well.

  “You have to stop this before it’s too late.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “If you know me so well, you know the answer to that.”

  “The hunter, always the hunter. Hemingway bullshit. Macho bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit. Not for me. And I’m not hunting the way you mean.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m after justice, not revenge.”

  “Fine, but you’re still out there, still vulnerable.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said.

  “Famous last words. Can’t you understand I need you, Emily needs you—alive, safe?”

  “I understand a lot better than you think.”

  “But still you won’t quit.”

  “Not until my client’s murderer is identified and caught.”

  “And when he is, if he is, what then?”

  Give up my flat, give up my job ... give up my life. Or was it giving up? Or just adapting, changing, accepting more important responsibilities, moving on to a different phase of my life?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right. Will you at least think about it?”

  “Yes. All right, yes, I’ll think about it.”

  Sunday morning, a few minutes past nine, the phone rang. I answered it, thinking that it might be Tamara with new information. No. The call was for me, but the voice on the other end belonged to Lieutenant John Fuentes, Daly City PD.

  “Glad I caught you in,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound glad about anything. “You free this morning?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Appreciate it if you’d meet me at the Hall of Justice. Say in about an hour.”

  “You mean here in the city?”

  “We don’t have a Hall of Justice in Daly City.” Testy now. Nobody likes working Sunday mornings. “Coroner’s office, one hour.”

  “Coroner’s office?”

  “We’re going to look at a body found in an abandoned car earlier this morning, see if you can identify it. Victim of homicide, evidently.”

  “Why me?”

  “One good reason,” Fuentes said. “The abandoned car belongs to Jay Cohalan.”

  THIRTEEN

  THE DEAD MAN IN THE REFRIGERATED MORGUE locker had been badly used before he was murdered. Facial bruises, nose broken, upper lip split in two places. Beaten and then, at some point, shot in the back of the head. The body lay face up so the entrance wound wasn’t visible, but the ragged hole below the right eye was plainly an exit wound.

  The two cops stood watching me from the other side of the sliding table. A study in contrasts, those two. Lieutenant John Fuentes was a little guy, stringy, in his early fifties, slow-moving and deliberate, wearing a perpetual half-smile that hid a suspicious mi
nd and an abrasive personality. The mole on his cheek was the size of a garbanzo bean; I wondered irrelevently if there was much risk of it becoming cancerous. Inspector Harry Craddock, SFPD Homicide, was a broad-beamed black man pushing forty, eight inches taller than Fuentes, fidgety standing or sitting, serious-meined and dedicated to the point of obsession—your classic Type A. I’d had dealings with Craddock before and we’d always gotten along. Fuentes was another matter. It was obvious he’d taken a dislike to me, for whatever reason; every time he aimed a question or comment my way, the words seemed underscored with accusation and grated on me like sandpaper.

  He said when I lifted my head, “Well?”

  “Jay Cohalan.”

  “Uh-huh. What we figured.”

  “No ID on him?”

  “Would I have called you if there was?”

  “Why did you call me? Must be somebody else who could have ID’ed the body.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Craddock said, “Let’s continue this upstairs.” He chafed his hands together, blew into them. “It’s too goddamn cold down here.”

  He gestured to the coroner’s attendant, who slid what was left of Cohalan back into the locker, and the three of us went out to the elevators. Craddock’s office was in the main Hall of Justice building, second floor. On the way there we passed an alcove of vending machines; he stopped, saying, “I can use a cup of coffee.” Fuentes didn’t want anything. Neither did I.

  “Christ, I hate going to the morgue.” Craddock again, when we were settled around his desk. Both his big hands were wrapped tight around the foam cup of hot coffee. “Chill down there goes right to your bones.”

  “Didn’t seem cold to me,” Fuentes said.

  Craddock tipped him a look. “Maybe your blood’s thicker than mine.”

  “Maybe it is. You know how hot-blooded us Latinos are.” Craddock didn’t bite on that, and the false half-smile swung my way. “So you don’t know anything about what happened to Cohalan?”