Demons

by Bill Pronzini

  Kay Runyon. Sounding tired and tense; she didn’t have to tell me she’d had a sleepless night. She said, “He just called again.”

  “Who did?”

  “The same man, the man who attacked Vic.”

  “You answered the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “He have anything to say to you this time?”

  “God. I wish he hadn’t. He asked for Vic and I recognized his voice and I-I lost it for a few seconds. I called him some names, I told him he wasn’t going to get away with what he did last night. He just laughed.”

  “And said what?”

  “He thinks Vic did something to Nedra… hurt her or drove her away, I don’t know. I tried to tell him he was wrong. He kept saying somebody had better tell him where she was and she had better be all right. Or else. If I didn’t know, then I’d better find out from Vic or have you find out for me.”

  “Me? He mentioned me?”

  “Yes.”

  “By name or by profession?”

  “Both. Didn’t you tell him last night who you are?”

  “No. Only that I was a friend of your husband’s.”

  “But how…?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find out. Did he say anything else?”

  “No. Then he hung up.”

  “How did he sound? His emotional state.”

  “Angry. Very angry.”

  “In control or not?”

  “Yes, but… not underneath.”

  “Unstable?”

  “Psychotic,” she said.

  Overreaction. Or was it? His frenzied assault on Runyon… what was that kind of outpouring of rage if not a psychotic episode? If I hadn’t been there to pull him off, he might have beaten Runyon to death.

  But I was not about to admit that to her. I said, “Don’t let your imagination get the best of you. We’ll have a better idea of his mental state after I talk to him, do some checking into his background.”

  “Do you know yet who he is?”

  “I know who owns the car he was driving, yes. He may or may not be the registered owner; I’ll have that information pretty soon.”

  “You’ll call as soon as you know for sure?”

  “As soon as I have anything definite,” I said, and changed the subject. “Your husband been up yet?”

  “No. They gave him some pills at the hospital, for the pain and to make him sleep. I made sure he took them when we got home.”

  “You won’t have to worry about him going out today. He’ll hurt too much when he wakes up to do anything but lie in bed. I know; I’ve had my nose broken.”

  “He’ll stay here,” Kay Runyon said grimly, “if I have to drug him and tie him to the bed.”

  “Have you contacted a psychiatrist yet?”

  “I called six of them this morning. The earliest I could get an appointment with anyone is next Tuesday. Tuesday, for God’s sake.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What does that tell you about the number of disturbed people in this city?” she said. “About the society we live in? We’re a nation of crazy people… we really are, you know.”

  The conversation left me feeling bleak. And puzzled. It was possible that the balding guy had gotten my car license at the same time I’d gotten his last night. But how could he have known which car was mine? It was unlikely he’d noticed me drive up and stop; he had been too focused on Victor Runyon. And there’d been several other cars parked in the vicinity. And even if he had picked off my number, how could he have traced it so quickly? He wasn’t a cop or another P.I., not the way he’d acted. I’d have sensed it right away if he were. You get so you can tell when you’re dealing with one of your own kind.

  The only other thing I could think of was that he’d recognized me, put the name to the face. My photograph has been in the newspapers and on TV, and not always for the right reasons. Not recently, though-and the photos available to the media hadn’t been good likenesses.

  So? How the hell had he found out who I was and what I did for a living?

  ***

  THE OUTER MISSION IS MY OLD neighborhood. I was born and raised there, in a big rambling house just off Alemany Boulevard near the Daly City line. Lower middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood in those days, heavily ethnic European-Italians, Poles, Slavs, some Irish. Pretty good place to grow up in: the city was different back then, nurturing, the streets a far cry from the drug-and gang-riddled war zones they’ve evolved into today. Family and ethnic ties were rock-solid. We watched out for our own, policed our own-lived by codes and traditions that were centuries old-and kids like me, first-generation American-born, were better and stronger for it.

  Not that my childhood was some kind of urban idyll. It wasn’t. Loner then, loner now, shaped by circumstances as well as by genetic makeup. I played team sports, had a circle of casual friends; but I was close to only one, a tall gangly kid named Gino, and to none after he and his parents moved away when I was twelve. (Funny, I could no longer remember Gino’s last name.) I was never a leader, never one of the popular ones; shy, clumsy, overweight kids seldom are. A tagalong, a fringer in every group and activity. So I preferred my own company, spending long afternoons in the walnut tree in the backyard, reading books and pulp magazines, living in a black-and-white fantasy world of heroes and villains, imagining myself as one of the good guys helping to right wrongs. More than anything else those childhood fantasy trips were why I went into police work, why I eventually turned to private investigation.

  My home life hadn’t been any bed of roses either. Nina, my sister and only sibling, died of rheumatic fever when she was five and I was eight. And my old man was a drunk, a verbal and sometimes physical abuser, a dockworker who couldn’t hold a job and who got mixed up with a waterfront gang that was stealing goods out of the pier sheds and selling them on the black market. He drank himself to death at the age of fifty. I was seventeen then, six months shy of high school graduation. I didn’t wait; I joined the army and went off to fight in the South Pacific, in another of humanity’s mad wars. No one, not even Kerry, knows that I never finished high school; that I got into the MPs with the help of a friend in clerical who doctored my records, and into the police academy after I left the service on the strength of my MP training and record.

  My old man’s legacy might have left deeper, uglier scars if it hadn’t been for Ma. She was a good woman, as good as anyone God ever made; a big, sad, loving woman from Genoa, who’d traded the old world for a new one she didn’t like nearly as much, and who’d made the best of a life she didn’t deserve. My old man killed her, too, with his drinking and his abuse, five years after he killed himself. She’d been a fine cook, like most Italian women of her generation, and the more he drank, the more she ate of her rich Genovese cooking for solace and escape. After he died she kept right on gorging herself for the same reasons, and because she was all alone in that rambling house. It was a heart attack that ended her life, induced by obesity and clogged arteries. She stood five-two and on the day she died she weighed two hundred and forty-seven pounds.

  She taught me a lot of things, my ma. Love, empathy, patience, perseverance, self-sufficiency. Forgiveness, too, except where my old man was concerned. On her deathbed she’d begged me to forgive him his sins and excesses, and I’d said I would try; and I had tried, for her sake. But I couldn’t do it. He’d lived and died a son of a bitch and he’d left me with nothing except contempt for his memory. I was Ma’s son, not his-and thank Christ for that. I would not have been any good to anyone, least of all myself, if I’d grown into his kind of human being.

  The house was gone now, long gone. I’d sold it after Ma died-too many mixed memories for me to want to live there-and the new owner had fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette one night in 1964 and burned himself and the house to cinders. What few homes of the same style and twenties vintage that still stood in the neighborhood today were tumbledown and graffiti-scarred, their porches enclosed by security gates, their
windows barred, their once well-kept yards weed-choked or paved over with cracked concrete. The ethnic mix was much different too: Latinos, blacks, Asians. I barely recognized the neighborhood these days. Whenever business brought me out here I was a stranger in a strange land. Even so, the memories good and bad always seemed to come flooding back…

  Richard Rodriguez’s address was a half block off Mission on Lowell. Two-story private house, newly painted and in better shape than its immediate neighbors, the lower floor converted into business premises. Over the business entrance was a sign that said RICHARD’S TV & APPLIANCE SALES & SERVICE. Parked in the driveway was the older Ford van, this one painted midnight blue, with the same words on its sides that were on the sign. I didn’t see the white van anywhere in the vicinity.

  I parked and went inside under a jangling bell. One long, weakly lighted, low-ceilinged room, two thirds of which was packed with new and repaired television sets, VCRs, and the like; the other third, behind a short counter, was a work area. The man back there turned my way as I entered, letting me see a broad, dark face split by a cheerful smile. He wasn’t the balding guy. He was in his mid-forties, Latino, with a full head of hair and a thick brush mustache.

  “Morning,” he said. He laid down the soldering gun he’d been using and came forward to the counter. “Nice day out there, huh?”

  “Nice day,” I agreed. “I’m looking for Richard Rodriguez.”

  “You found him. What can I do for you?”

  “Do you own a white Ford Econoline van, Mr. Rodriguez?”

  “That’s right. Well, it’s my wife’s, but we put it in my name. Why?”

  “Can you tell me who was driving it last night?”

  “Why you asking?”

  “Do you know a short, balding man with a reddish baby face?”

  What was left of Rodriguez’s smile upended itself into a disgusted scowl. “Ah, Christ,” he said. “What’s he done this time?”

  “Who?”

  “My wife’s no-good brother. If he did something to the van, wrecked it or something-”

  “What’s your brother-in-law’s name?”

  “Cahill. Eddie Cahill. Listen, what’s going on? Who are you?”

  I showed him the Photostat of my license. His mouth worked itself into a sour-lemon pucker that conveyed even greater disgust. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew he couldn’t stay out of trouble.”

  “Cahill’s been in trouble before?”

  “Most of his miserable life. I told Marj; I said, you watch, inside of six months he’ll be back in prison. He’s got wires loose in his head, that cholo. But no, she don’t want to believe it. Not about her baby brother.”

  “When was he in prison?”

  “The last time? He got out about a month ago.”

  “Convicted of what?”

  “Felony assault. He beat the hell out of some guy, damned near killed him. For no reason. Argument in a bar over baseball, can you believe it? Baseball.”

  “When was that?”

  “Couple of years ago. They gave him eighteen months.”

  “Which prison?”

  “Lompoc.”

  “And you say he was in jail before that too?”

  “Four years, in the early eighties.”

  “What was the rap that time?”

  “Grand theft. He worked for a microelectronics outfit in San Jose. Him and another guy were stealing them blind.”

  “What’s he been doing since he got out of Lompoc?”

  “Doing?”

  “Does he have a job?”

  “Supposed to be working for me,” Rodriguez said. “My wife talked me into it. Give him a chance to start over, she says. He knows electronics, doesn’t he? she says. So he works two days and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “He’s had your wife’s van since he got out?”

  “Most of the time, yeah.”

  “Where’s he living?”

  “Daly City. Marj got him a cheap house rental.”

  “Mind giving me the address?”

  “Castle Street, off Hillside. I don’t know the number but it’s in a bunch of row houses, they all look alike, take up half the block. Third one from the corner, across from an empty lot.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “What about the van?” he asked. “He didn’t have an accident, did he? Or hit somebody with it? My insurance don’t cover other drivers…”

  “No, no accident and no hit-and-run.”

  “What’d he do then? Why you looking for him?”

  “He’s been bothering some people I work for. Harassing them. First with telephone calls, then last night he attacked the man, broke his nose.”

  “Felony assault again,” Rodriguez said. “Right back into prison, huh? I told Marj. I told her.”

  “Do you know a woman named Nedra Merchant? A graphics designer who lives in Forest Hill?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Your brother-in-law ever been in trouble over a woman?”

  “Not that I know of. Is that why he broke some guy’s nose? Over a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think he cared about women that much,” Rodriguez said. “I never saw him with one. Not him. Baseball, booze, electronics-that’s all he ever talks about.”

  “He’s never been married?”

  “Never told Marj if he was. What’re you gonna do when you find him? Arrest him?”

  “I don’t make arrests, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “Have him arrested then? Send him back to prison?”

  “That’s not up to me.”

  “What’s the guy with the busted nose gonna do? Isn’t he gonna sign a complaint?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not if your brother-in-law promises to leave him and his family alone from now on.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that. Eddie’s got wires loose, like I said. And he’s stupid-stubborn. He gets an idea in his head, you couldn’t pull it out with a pair of pliers. You want my opinion?”

  I shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “Have his ass thrown back in prison,” Rodriguez said, “any way you can manage it. That’s where he belongs. That cholo‘s no damn good. Just no damn good.”

  ***

  THE ROW HOUSE ON Castle Street in Daly City was easy enough to locate. It was in a run-down, working-class neighborhood that seemed to be mostly the domain of Latin and other ethnic families.

  But the trip out there was a waste of time. The white van wasn’t there and neither was Eddie Cahill. And none of his neighbors knew where he was, when he’d be back, or anything about him.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE UNEASINESS STARTED AS SOON as I let myself into Nedra Merchant’s house. Not because I expected any trouble; there was no sign of Cahill or the white van anywhere along Crestmont. And not because technically I was committing a felony trespass. The uneasy feeling was purely psychological.

  I was an invader.

  Entering a stranger’s house without permission, no matter what the reason, always made me feel that way. Yes, it was the type of job I had; yes, I invaded the lives of strangers in some way nearly every day of my working life. But there is a difference between abstract intrusion and actual physical invasion, between telephonic and paper-trail snooping and laying hands like a burglar on personal and private belongings. In my mind there is, anyway. Even last night, with Victor Runyon on the premises, I hadn’t felt right about prowling through the chambers of Nedra Merchant’s home.

  But you do what you have to do, like it or not. And if there were any cold-trail leads left to her whereabouts, this was the most likely place for them to be. The fact that Runyon had gone through her effects himself didn’t mean much. He knew her, but he didn’t know what to look for in a missing persons case. And his perception and judgment were clouded by his emotions.

  I put the dead-bolt back on, pocketed Runyon’s key. The family room drew me first. The sweet-decay scent of the flowers was stronger today; combined with the mustiness and the
absence of light, it gave the room the dour aura of a mausoleum. I parted the drapes halfway, found sliding glass doors that gave access to the balcony outside, and opened one of those to let in some fresh air. Incoming sunlight slanted across Runyon’s shrine, threw it into ugly and pathetic relief. It was the kind of creation that needed darkness and candle glow to give it symbolism and meaning. With the sun on it, there was no illusion: flowers wilted, candle wax pooled on the table like thick globs of dried black blood, even the silver frame exposed as tarnished goods. It was a dead thing, a dead monument to a dead love.

  On impulse I gathered up all the flowers and what was left of the candles and took them out into the garage and dumped them into an empty garbage can. Then I went back into the room and carried Nedra Merchant’s photograph to the window so that I could study it in the bright sunlight.

  It was easy enough to see why men were attracted to her, why certain men could lose their heads over her. It wasn’t that she was beautiful; her nose was too large, her mouth too wide, her chin a little too sharp for classic beauty. But there was a dark, sultry allure about her, enhanced by the long black hair and eyes that had an Oriental cast-one of the reasons she affected Asian dress and bedroom trappings, probably. The eyes seemed to radiate a smoky heat. Siren’s eyes; witch’s eyes. Not my type, Nedra Merchant, but I could feel the pull of those eyes even looking at them in a photograph. In person they would be magnetic.

  I pried the cardboard backing off the frame, transferred the photo to my coat pocket. I might need it at some point; and if Victor Runyon did come back here soon, as it was probable he would-force his way in if he had to-he’d be better off if her likeness wasn’t around to reinforce his mania. Then I prowled the room, opening drawers and cabinets, looking under sofa and chair cushions, flipping through magazines and books. None of that netted me anything. The kitchen, dining room, and formal living room held no clues either.