Demons

by Bill Pronzini

  The one eye I could see was glazed and rolling at first, like a blue marble under a film of plastic; then it regained focus, and some of the straining wildness went out of him. He said in a choked voice, “Goddamn you, let me go.”

  “Not until you cool down.”

  “I’ll break your fuggin’ head.”

  “You think so? Maybe I’ll break yours instead.”

  The one eye glared at me for three or four seconds. Then the heat in it died, all at once like a light going off, and he went limp under me. “All right,” he said with his mouth against the deck. “All right. All right.”

  I held on to him awhile longer, to make sure he had his wits back and wasn’t going to give me any more trouble. He did and he wasn’t; he stayed limp when I finally eased my grip. I shoved off him, up onto my feet, and backpedaled a couple of paces. Victor Runyon was still sprawled on his back, still moaning; his face was lacerated in half a dozen places, his nose bent toward his right cheekbone. Spiderwebs of blood covered the lower half of his face, the fronts of his blue shirt and blue sport jacket.

  “Proud of yourself?” I asked the balding guy.

  “He had it coming.” The words were muffled; on one knee now, he was sucking the bruised and torn knuckles of his right hand.

  “You might have killed him.”

  “Might of had that coming too.”

  “Is that right? Why? Who are you?”

  “Who the hell are you, slick?”

  “A friend of Runyon’s.”

  “Yeah? Or Nedra’s, huh? Another of hers.”

  “Her what? Boyfriends? Is that what you are?”

  “Asshole,” he said.

  Neither of us had anything for the other; we were just wasting breath. I watched him get slowly to his feet. He was one of those people whose age is difficult to gauge: he might have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. He had a blocky, ridged face, but with skin that was red as a radish and baby-smooth except for pale, downy brows-as if some curious chemistry had produced an infant that resembled a fully grown adult male.

  What was left of his hair was tobacco-colored and as thin and wispy as a dust mouse.

  He said, “Hell with it. For now,” and swung away abruptly through the gate.

  I went after him. There was nobody else out there, nobody visible at any of the neighboring houses. It seemed as though the three of us had made a lot of noise, but it always does when you’re in the midst of something violent. The wind was an effective muffler, too, this high on a hillside. Even if any of the neighbors had been alerted, I thought, they probably wouldn’t do anything about it. Hear no evil, see no evil.

  The balding man was halfway across the street. I called, “Maybe I ought to notify the cops,” to see what his reaction would be.

  Not much. “Go ahead,” he said without slowing or turning.

  “Aggravated assault. That’s a felony.”

  No response.

  “So is making threatening telephone calls.”

  Another bust. He was at the van now; he yanked open the door, hauled himself inside. The engine revved, the gears ground, and he came away from the curb in a fast, tight U-turn, the van’s front bumper scraping the front bumper of my car. There was not enough room for him to complete the turn in the street; he bounced his wheels up onto the sidewalk, forcing me to jump back out of the way. With one hand he got the van straightened, with the other he gave me the finger. Five seconds later he was gone around the uphill turn.

  Hell with it. For now.

  Yeah. For now. But I’d see him again-soon.

  I have good vision, and there was still plenty of daylight on the street: I’d gotten the van’s license number before he’d made me jump.

  I wrote the number down in my notebook: insurance against forgetting it or misremembering or transposing any of the letters or numerals. When I came back through the gate I saw that Victor Runyon had raised himself into a sitting position; but his eyes had a painglaze on them and it was obvious that he still wasn’t tracking very well. I moved past him to the front door, tried the latch. Locked. I pushed the bell, kept my finger on it for about ten seconds. No answer. If Nedra Merchant was in there, she wasn’t dealing with any of this little drama.

  Runyon was trying to get to his feet. I helped him, with one arm around his waist for support. “Let me have your key, Mr. Runyon.”

  “Key?” he said.

  “To the house. So we can go inside.”

  It didn’t seem to register. So I patted his jacket pockets, found his keycase and fished it out; he didn’t seem to know what I was doing. I walked him to the door, tried two keys before I located one that unlocked it, and took him inside.

  Hallway. Closed door to the garage on the left, staircase to the lower floor on the right; beyond the staircase, a smallish formal living room opened at the front, dappled now with sunlight. At the rear on that side, a dining room. Kitchen straight ahead. Another room-probably a family room-was closed off from the hall and from the kitchen by sliding panel doors.

  Silence.

  A faint musty odor, as if the place had been closed up a long time. Or not cleaned in a long time.

  I took Runyon into the sunlit kitchen. Fine ocean view from here, and a wide balcony across the entire rear width of the house so that you could sit outside on nice days to enjoy it. I got Runyon into one of the two chairs at a dinette table. Found a dishtowel under the sink and ran water over it and then used it to sponge some of the blood off his face. He winced and mewled a little when I touched his broken nose. Otherwise he just sat there, neither helping nor hindering me.

  Cut on his upper lip, cut on one cheek, neither one deep or long enough to require stitches. Some bruises and abrasions. The only real damage was to his nose, the source of most of the blood. He’d be all right. Physically, at least.

  I opened the refrigerator, looking for ice. There was nothing in it. Nothing in the freezer compartment, nothing in the regular compartment-as bare as if it had just been delivered by Sears.

  What the hell?

  I rinsed out the bloody towel in cold water, took it to Runyon. He looked up at me blankly, like a child. “For your nose,” I said, and he nodded and held the towel against his face.

  There was an uneasy feeling inside me now. I went into the hallway, opened the door to the garage. Empty. I shut the door, started for the stairs, changed my mind and walked over and opened the sliding door to the closed-off room adjacent to the kitchen.

  It was like entering a church. Or a funeral parlor.

  Two layers of drapes were closed against the lowering sun; the room-family room, as I’d guessed-was full of dark-light and shadows, the shadows given a grotesque, shimmery animation by the unstable glow from a pair of burning candles. So Runyon hadn’t just arrived when the balding guy showed up and braced him; he’d been here awhile, in this room. The candles were on a heavy marble-topped coffee table, flanking something oddly shaped that I couldn’t identify from the doorway. Something that contained a lot of flowers: the damp, sweet smell of them was cloying in the airless space.

  Carefully, with the little hairs prickling on my neck, I crossed the darkened room. Two candles, tall and black, in sculpted silver holders. The odd-shaped arrangement between them was a kind of bower: red and yellow roses, carnations, three or four other varieties-the bouquets Runyon had bought last night, all of them recently sprayed with water to keep them fresh. And in the midst of the flowers, an eight-by-ten photograph of a woman in an expensive silver frame. I leaned down to it. Dark, slender woman in some kind of Asian outfit, although she herself didn’t appear to be Asian; waist-length dark hair, sultry smile. Across the front, in a bold hand, was written: To darling Vic. My love, Nedra.

  A shrine.

  That was the only word for what I was looking at here-a queer, homemade shrine.

  I took myself out of there, stumbling once on the carpet in my haste. Runyon hadn’t moved from the dinette table; his eyes were closed, the wet towel tig
ht against his nose and turning crimson again. I gripped his shoulder, shook him gently. Shook him again, harder, until his eyes snapped open and lifted to meet mine. They were focused now; he was more or less aware of externals.

  “Where’s Nedra?” I asked him.

  His head wagged brokenly.

  “Vic, where’s Nedra Merchant?”

  “… Gone,” he said.

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Gone,” he said again. His features seemed to crumple like old paper, and he laid his head on his arms and began to weep.

  ***

  I MADE A QUICK, SUPERFICIAL search of the rest of the house. Downstairs was a master bedroom, a spare bedroom, an office, two baths, a small storage area-and nothing out of the ordinary in any of them. Nedra Merchant’s bedroom had its own private black-tiled bath and was done in an exotic Oriental style-or what an Occidental might perceive to be an exotic Oriental style. Black teak furniture, ornamental masks and jade statuettes, gold drapes and carpeting and counterpane on the big, round bed. And mirrors, lots of ornate-framed mirrors strategically placed so that Nedra and her bed partners could watch themselves at play.

  Man-eater, maybe. Sybarite, probably.

  Gone, definitely.

  And yet, most if not all of her clothes were still here. The walk-in closet was jammed with casual and evening wear; her dresser drawers were loaded with lingerie; her jewelry case was full of earrings and bracelets and the like, accent on jade items that had to be reasonably expensive; and I’d noticed a matching set of Gucci luggage out in the storage room. All her cosmetics and perfumes appeared to be here, too. neatly arranged on the vanity table in the bath.

  Some sort of extended vacation or business trip?

  Planned disappearance, for personal reasons or financial gain?

  Foul play?

  Whatever it was, and however long she’d been gone, Victor Runyon had continued coming here two and three times a week ever since. Why? In the hope that she’d come back? To try to find a clue to her whereabouts? Or to keep renewing his sick little shrine with fresh flowers and fresh candles-an ongoing vigil, votive offerings to God or the gods asking her safe return, a continual private wake? Jesus. The man was not simply obsessed with Nedra Adams Merchant; he was coming apart at the seams, walking the edge of nightmare.

  On the table next to Nedra Merchant’s bed was a black-and-gold telephone. I picked up the receiver, heard a dial tone, then tapped out Runyon’s home number from my notebook. Two rings, and Kay Runyon’s voice said a guarded hello.

  I identified myself. “We need to talk, Mrs. Runyon.”

  “You’ve found out who Nedra is?”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. A whole lot more.”

  “… Do you want to come here? Vic’s… away again tonight.”

  “I know. I’m with him now. There’s been some trouble.”

  Faint intake of breath. “Trouble?”

  “He’s been hurt. Not too badly, but he needs medical attention. I’m going to take him to the emergency room at S.F. General. Will you meet me there in half an hour?”

  “My God, what happened?”

  “He was attacked. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Half an hour at S.F. General.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, I’ll be there.”

  I went back upstairs, into the kitchen. Runyon wasn’t there. Family room, I thought-and that was where he was, sitting now on a long sofa in front of his shrine, staring fixedly at Nedra Merchant’s photograph. The dancing candlelight made his bruised and bloodied face look ghastly, as if he’d been made up for some sort of horror show.

  I said, “Time to go, Mr. Runyon.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “The hospital. Get that broken nose taken care of.”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  “It hurts now but it’ll hurt a hell of a lot more if you don’t have it set pretty soon.”

  “I can live with pain,” he said. “I’ve lived with pain a long time now.”

  “Not the broken-nose kind. On your feet, Mr. Runyon.”

  He didn’t give me any argument. He stood, slowly, took one last lingering look at the photo, and then shambled out of there. He didn’t think to snuff the candles; I had to do it for him.

  When I joined him in the foyer he gave me a clear-eyed look for the first time. “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “That’s right, you don’t.”

  “What are you doing here? Why did you help me?”

  I was not about to coddle or play games with him. I said, “I’m a private investigator. Your wife hired me to find out about Nedra.”

  “… A detective? Kay?”

  “Did you think she didn’t know?”

  “Poor Kay,” he said.

  “Yeah. Poor Kay.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt her. I never wanted to hurt my family.”

  Caught, trapped, backed up against their own deceit, people always say things like that. But the words are hollow; not lies so much as empty afterthoughts. “If you didn’t want to hurt your family, you should have stayed away from Nedra Merchant.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  They say that too. And the next:

  “I love her. You don’t know how much I love her.”

  “I don’t care how much you love her. Where is she?”

  “Gone.”

  “You said that before. Gone where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Gone when, then? How long?”

  “May. Early May.”

  “Of her own volition?

  Headshake.

  “Alone or with somebody?”

  Headshake.

  “Or did something happen to her?”

  Headshake.

  “Why didn’t you notify the police? Or did you?”

  Headshake. This time the movement was violent enough to bring a pained sound out of his throat, to start blood trickling again from one nostril. His nose was swelling: burst-tomato blob, turning purple at the edges. He was still holding the stained towel; he lifted it up over the whole of his face, as if he were trying to hide behind it.

  “Come on,” I said, “we’ll talk in the car.”

  I prodded him out onto the front deck, locked the door behind us. While I was doing that I removed the key from his case, slipped it into my pants pocket. Not for his sake, to keep him from refeeding his obsession; for mine, to allow me to get back in alone at some point. I was not done here, or with any of this business yet. There were too many questions that Victor Runyon probably couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Too damned much confusion for me to walk away from it clean.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN WE WERE IN THE CAR and rolling, I said, “Talk to me, Mr. Runyon. What happened to Nedra?”

  No response. I looked over at him as we passed under a streetlamp. He had his head tilted back against the seat, his eyes shut, the bloody towel cradled against his chest as if it were a security blanket. His breathing had a raspy regularity and I thought at first that he’d passed out. But as we neared Clarendon he stirred, groaned faintly, put the towel up to his leaking nose.

  I said, “I’m going to keep asking you this until you give me an answer. What happened to Nedra Merchant?”

  A few more seconds of silence. Then, “She went away.”

  “Went away where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean she disappeared?”

  “Just… gone.”

  “Here one day, gone the next?”

  “No, she… I don’t know.”

  “Tell me about the last time you saw her.”

  “May ninth,” Runyon said. “Saturday, May ninth.”

  “Where? Her house?”

  “The house. Yes.”

  “She say anything then about going away?”

  “No.”

  “How did she seem? Happy, sad, upset, afraid?”

  “Angry,” he said.

  “Angry. Why was she
angry?”

  “We fought. A bad fight.”

  “Words, you mean? Or something physical?”

  “Words. Just… ugly words.”

  “About what?”

  “Us. She wanted to…”

  “What, Mr. Runyon?”

  “End it. End it once and for all.”

  “Your affair?”

  “Our love,” he said.

  “Why did she want to end it?”

  “Too possessive, she said. Smothering her.”

  Yeah, I thought.

  “You asked her to marry you, is that it?”

  “Yes. God, she knows how much I love her.”

  “But she didn’t want to be tied down again.”

  “One bad marriage… it didn’t have to be that way with us. I told her that. I love her too much; I worship her. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t listen.”

  “What happened then?”

  No reply. I thought he’d gone away again, retreated behind the wall of his obsession-but he hadn’t. When I asked him the question a second time his body jerked, as if with a sudden chill, and then he answered me in a thin, rusty voice, like hinges creaking in the dark.

  “I left her alone. I went home.”

  “When did you try to talk to her again?”

  “The next day.”

  “Called her? Went to see her?”

  “Both. She… her machine was on. She wouldn’t answer the door.”

  “But she was home that day, Sunday?”

  “I don’t know,” Runyon said. “I’m not sure.”

  “Then what?”

  “I kept trying… a few days, three or four.”

  “Calling her, trying to see her.”

  “Yes. Finally I went to her house, used my key. Then I knew she was gone.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Felt it.”

  “Was anything disturbed?”

  “I don’t… disturbed?”

  “Any signs of foul play?”

  “No.”

  “Her car was missing but her clothes and other possessions were still there, everything exactly as it should be?”