Demons

by Bill Pronzini

  I told him it wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t want to hear that. He smacked his thigh with a closed fist, several times, hard, as if he were inflicting corporal punishment on himself.

  “Listening to us?” Kay Runyon said. She was staring at me. “Everything we said and did in this house for the past two weeks?”

  “Not everything, no. Random eavesdropping, just enough to frustrate him. The only thing he found out was that you hired me.

  “A man like that, a violent criminal? How could he have the technical knowledge…?”

  “He once worked for the telephone company,” I said, “and he once worked for a microelectronics firm. And you don’t need to be an expert to make and install a listening device. You can buy the components at Radio Shack and learn how to put them together from a book you can special-order at Crown or B. Dalton.”

  “My God.”

  “The important thing is that if he did bug your house, he committed a felony that’ll put him right back in prison. Matt can identify him positively; press charges for illegal trespass and eavesdropping and they’ll stick. With his record, his background, your testimony and mine, it should be enough to get a conviction even if your husband remains silent.”

  “How soon can we have him arrested?”

  “Charges can be filed as soon as we have proof of the bugging.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Not long. A few hours.”

  “Those… things can be found that quickly? Gotten rid of?”

  “Yes. I know an exterminator; I’ll go see him now, try to get him here by three o’clock at the latest.”

  The hope in Kay Runyon’s eyes was thin and wary; too much painful disillusionment had made her emotionally gun-shy. She said, “Should I tell Vic?”

  “No. I’ll do that when I come back. While you’re waiting, don’t say anything about the bugs or Cahill; the transmitters could be anywhere. If you want to talk, stick to normal topics.”

  “Normal topics,” she said. “There’s nothing normal in our lives anymore. I wonder if there ever will be again.”

  Matt put his arm around her shoulders; she leaned against him. I left them there like that and went to meet George Agonistes, the electronic surveillance industry’s version of the Orkin man.

  CHAPTER 15

  AGONISTES WAS WAITING in his light-blue van when I got up to Crestmont. The van didn’t look like much from the outside, but behind its smoke-tinted windows was some of the most sophisticated electronics equipment available-everything from laser shotguns to spike mikes to microtransmitters no larger than a pea. All sorts of debuggers, too, that being his particular specialty, including a thing he’d shown me once called a nonlinear junction detector that looked like nothing so much as a vacuum cleaner and was used to uncover body bugs and wired briefcases, to find concealed listening devices by scanning radios, tape recorders, TV sets, and the like. None of it made a whole lot of sense to me from the technological standpoint, but then it didn’t have to. I had my end of the detecting business and Agonistes had his, and the twain had no interest in meeting except on rare occasions like this one.

  I parked behind his van, climbed out. This being Saturday, the neighborhood wasn’t as quiet or deserted as it was on weekdays: couple of kids on skateboards, a woman working in her front yard, a man washing his car. Homey activities; day-off pleasures. I envied the adults… now more than ever. Theirs was a world I could only observe from the outside, as if through a thick pane of glass. Men like me don’t have weekend lives. For us, every day is Monday, and too often a blue Monday at that…

  Bullshit, I thought.

  More of the self-indulgent loner crap. I could be one of those Mr. Averages if I wanted it badly enough. Anybody can change; you just need the proper incentive. Maybe if I’d tried harder to integrate myself into the mainstream of society, Kerry and I wouldn’t have come to the big crisis point we were at now.

  Agonistes seemed to be in no hurry to quit his van, so I went around to the passenger side and opened the door and slid in next to him. I hadn’t seen him in ten months, but he wouldn’t have changed much if it had been ten years. He still reminded me of a shrub that needed pruning. Thin, brown, gnarly body, topped by a wild tangle of bristly hair like an Afro that had gone to seed. But under that thatch was a mind as sensitive and finely tuned as one of the pieces of equipment he worked with.

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Few minutes,” he said. “Nice neighborhood. Never been up here before.”

  “Country living in an urban environment.”

  “What do you suppose one of these houses costs?”

  “More than you or I could ever afford.” Especially him. He made a good living, but he had a wife and four kids-and his electronics mistress cost him as much to support as his family.

  “Sad but true,” he said. “Neighborhood-watch program here, I’ll bet. See that woman up the street? She’s already noticed us sitting here. Not a good area to set up a lengthy street surveillance.”

  “Nope.”

  “Your wiseguy live around here?” he asked. “Wiseguy” was Agonistes’s generic term for anyone, male or female, professional or amateur, law officer or felon, who indulged in electronic surveillance.

  “No. In Daly City.”

  “Probably not simple room bugs then. They send out radio signals on a standard eighty-eight to one-oh-eight megahertz FM band, but they don’t have much range. Half a mile, max, with a relay transmitter.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He could’ve hidden a voice-actuated recorder somewhere within range, but that’s not too likely, not in a neighborhood like this.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Probably not carrier current bugs either. You know what they are?”

  “No.”

  “Wiseguys put them in the electrical system, inside a wall outlet,” Agonistes said. “Then when they want to tune in, they use a radio somewhere in private, like their own homes. You get hiss and crackle with bugs like that, sometimes too much, and they amplify room noise; I don’t like ‘em. You said your wiseguy worked for the phone company?”

  “Two years ago. I think that’s when he planted the bugs in the house across the street. But a simple phone tap doesn’t have any range either, right?”

  “Right. A standard phone tap also doesn’t have a long life.”

  “What does?”

  “Infinity transmitter.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A nasty little mother,” Agonistes said. “Works off a room’s telephone or electrical current. Endless supply of power-transmission to infinity, theoretically. See?”

  “I see.”

  “They’re small, about a quarter-inch in diameter, so you can stick them any damn place-telephones, under carpets and furniture, behind electrical outlet switch plates. You can even hard-wire them into walls and cover them with conductive paint, then over that with regular paint. Conductive paint carries electricity the same as copper wires.”

  “How do they work?”

  “Tone-activated. Wiseguy calls his target’s number and blows a whistle into the receiver as soon as he hears the ring. Whistle shorts out the ring and activates the I.T.”

  “And then he can listen in as long as he wants, on his own telephone?”

  “Right,” Agonistes said. “Or from any telephone from here to Zimbabwe. If anybody else calls the target while the wiseguy’s listening, the party gets a busy signal.”

  “And if the target happens to pick up his phone?”

  “Dead or hissing line.”

  “Bugs like that must not be too easy to track down.”

  “On the contrary. All you need is an R.F. detector. R.F.-radio frequency.”

  “Which you’ve got.”

  “Which I’ve got.”

  “Can you deactivate I.T.s without removing them?”

  “Sure. Is that what you want?”

  “For now.”

  “Why?”

  �
�It’s a tricky situation.” I explained it to him, in detail. When I was done, his thin lips had a sour, downward pull.

  “So what we’re talking about here,” he said, “is one of the same felonies the wiseguy pulled. Illegal trespass.”

  “Technically, yes. Morally, no. You have a problem with that?”

  “Not if it doesn’t put my ass in a sling. I got mouths to feed.”

  “It won’t,” I said. “If Nedra Merchant is alive and well, she’ll thank us for this and authorize you to pull the bugs. Pay you extra for it, too, probably.”

  “Suppose she’s not alive and well?”

  “Then it’s a moot point. Her only relative is an elderly aunt in Texas and the aunt’s not likely to complain about illegal trespass in a good cause even if she finds out about it. Which she won’t.”

  Agonistes sighed. “Let’s get it done.”

  He opened up the back of the van and removed a tool kit and his R.F. detector, an instrument about the size and outward appearance of a small black leather suitcase. The woman up the street glanced our way as we crossed to Nedra Merchant’s house, but she wasn’t curious enough or suspicious enough to come down and ask questions. We moved and acted casually, as if we belonged there.

  When we were through the gate, Agonistes said, “No talking once we’re inside. Nearest phone first. Kitchen? Living room?”

  “Kitchen and family room.”

  “Kitchen, then.”

  I keyed us in. On the drainboard in the kitchen, Agonistes opened the R.F. detector to reveal a radarlike screen, meters, a set of headphones. He did some fiddling with the equipment, put the headphones on, did some more fiddling. Then he picked up the detector and approached the wall phone, and as soon as he did that the screen and meter needles began to dance. I figured that he was also hearing some kind of tone through the earphones, one that coordinated with the visual register on the screen. The louder the tone, the closer the bug.

  There was one behind the plate for the phone jack; he found it in thirty seconds flat, showed it to me when he had the plate off. It looked innocent enough, about the size and shape of a square sugar cube. He did something to deactivate it, replaced the wall plate, and we moved on to the family room.

  He found an I.T. in there, too, inside the phone itself. And another in the wall thermostat in the downstairs hallway, halfway between Nedra Merchant’s bedroom and office; that bug evidently drew its power from the wires serving the thermostat. There were two bugs in the bedroom-Cahill making certain he heard everything that went on in there. One was hidden in the extension phone’s base unit. The other had been mounted inside the wall separating the bedroom from her private bath; it was behind the light switch, dangling from a wire down inside the studs.

  The last bug was in her office, again inside the telephone. Agonistes swept the storage room, the spare bedroom, the balconies, the garage, without finding any more. The whole operation took slightly more than an hour and a half.

  He closed up his equipment and we went out and I closed up the house. I asked him then, “Were all the bugs fully operational?”

  “Yep. Your wiseguy knew what he was doing. Not the best electronics, but a professional job of setting up. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s done some bug work for cash, here and there.”

  We went across the street to the van. The fact that the I.T.s still worked, I was thinking, explained how Cahill had found out Nedra was missing. Runyon was the type to walk around the house talking to himself; or to sit in front of his shrine and hold a conversation with Nedra’s photograph. Cahill was no mental giant, but he could put two and two together. The only problem was, he’d factored in Runyon spending so much time alone in Nedra’s house and come up with the wrong equation.

  I said, “Now we go to my client’s place. Don’t mention what we found here. As far as the Runyons are concerned, you’ve never even heard of Nedra Merchant.”

  “Why? The illegal trespass?”

  “Yeah. If there are bugs at the Runyon house, we’re all going down to the Hall of Justice to make a complaint against the wiseguy. You included, as the bug expert. I didn’t tell my client and her son about the bugs here, because they might let something slip to the authorities. Then we’d be compromised and maybe the case against the wiseguy would be too.”

  Agonistes rolled his eyes. “First an illegal trespass, then a trip to the cop house. You got any more surprises for me?”

  “No.”

  “Better not have. And I’d better not be hung up at the Hall all evening. I promised to take Jean to the movies.”

  “You won’t be.”

  “How about you?” Agonistes asked. He was inside the van by this time, putting his equipment away in specially built and cushioned compartments. “You and your lady got plans for tonight?”

  “No,” I said. “No plans.”

  “Don’t tell me you and Kerry sit home like old married folks on Saturday nights? Relationships get stale that way, you know-”

  “The hell with that, George,” I said too sharply.

  “… What’d I say?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “You are still with Kerry?”

  “Sure I am. Why do you ask that?”

  “No reason. I just wondered.”

  “Did I ask you if you’re still with Jean?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry if I touched a raw nerve-”

  “You didn’t touch any goddamn nerve. Hurry up in there, will you? The sooner we get this operation finished, the sooner we can both go home.”

  “Right,” Agonistes said. “Right.”

  But the look he gave me was wise and seasoned with pity.

  ***

  VICTOR RUNYON WAS UP AND around when we arrived at his house. Dressed in a pair of slacks and an old sweater. He didn’t seem quite as zombielike today, but he was not any more communicative. He came along docilely enough when I took his arm and prodded him outside with his wife and son to meet Agonistes. He wouldn’t look at anybody but me, though; and his gaze kept sliding off mine as if it were greased. When I told him about the bugs that were probably infesting his home he didn’t react, didn’t have anything to say. It was as if he’d lost the capacity for shock or anger. As if his obsessive love for Nedra Merchant had grown so enormous inside him it had destroyed the roots of all normal emotion.

  Agonistes went inside with Matt to start the sweep. I gestured to Kay Runyon to go along, too, because I wanted to talk to her husband alone.

  I said to Runyon, “If Agonistes finds listening devices inside-and he will-your wife is going to make a formal complaint against Eddie Cahill. Right away, this afternoon. Matt’s a witness; he’s going along too.”

  “Did you tell them to do that?”

  “I didn’t tell them to do anything. It’s their decision.”

  “And you all think I should go too.”

  “Felony assault is a bigger crime than illegal trespass and eavesdropping. You press charges for that and it’ll ensure Cahill is arrested, tried, convicted, and sent back to prison where he belongs.”

  Runyon stared out at the empty street. “You don’t need me.”

  “I don’t, no, but your family does.”

  “No,” he said. “They’d be better off without me.”

  “If that’s what you think, you’re a bigger damn fool than I thought. They need you, man. In the worst way.”

  Nothing from him.

  “All right,” I said, “look at it this way. I think Cahill bugged Nedra’s house too. Two years ago, before he went to prison the second time. His fixation for her is not only sick, it’s potentially deadly. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes. Potentially deadly.”

  “You still believe she’s alive and unharmed, wherever she is? That she’ll come home one day?”

  “I have to believe it,” he said.

  “Then help put Cahill away. For Nedra’s sake, if not for your family’s. You’ve got no good reason not to, Runyon.”
<
br />   Silence for almost a minute, while he stared again at the street. The expression on his battered face was fixed. I was not even sure he was thinking about what I’d said until he spoke again.

  “All right.”

  “You’ll come with us to the Hall of Justice? You’ll file assault charges against Cahill?”

  “I’ll file charges,” he said.

  ***

  AGONISTES FOUND FOUR INFINITY transmitters in the Runyon house-one in each of the three phones they had, including the phone in Kay Runyon’s studio, and another behind the light switch in the master bedroom. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind, he said, that they’d been planted recently. They were brand-new, shiny, dust-free.

  As soon as he was done, I got the Runyons into my car and drove downtown to the Hall of Justice. Agonistes followed in his van. Kay Runyon was in much better spirits; her husband’s decision had relieved her and resuscitated her dying optimism. Matt was solemn. At seventeen, life is either carefree or dead-bang serious, without much shading in between. Runyon sat next to me in the front seat, not speaking, body rigid, eyes straight ahead. If he was thinking about backing out at the last minute, I wasn’t going to let him do it.

  At the Hall, we ran into a little luck. An inspector I knew named Branislaus was on tap in General Works, so I didn’t have to go through a lot of preliminary explanations. I told Branny most of the story, with backup from Agonistes and Kay Runyon. He asked questions; we supplied answers. Runyon cooperated fully, in flat tones with plenty of candor even when the questions concerned Nedra Merchant and his relationship with her.

  The whole thing took about half an hour. Then there was paperwork, and more questions to complete it-another hour. When that was done Kay Runyon asked Branislaus, “Will you arrest Cahill right away, tonight?”

  “That depends on the Daly City police, and on how difficult Cahill is to pin down. I’ll request a pickup-and-hold on him immediately. Then it’s out of my hands.”