Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (3 page)

I hoped so. The quicker we wrapped this up, the better. Split-fee cases can be unprofitable as hell for the subcontractor if they drag on for any length of time. I’ve never liked them, but they’re unavoidable sometimes in a back-scratching business
like ours. Paul Ballard had done a favor for me once, so I couldn’t say no when he called on us. Quid pro quo.

I said to Tamara, “You want me to go over to San Leandro, check out the house?”

“Have to be after hours. If DeBrissac’s living there, he’s liable to be working during the day.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “You work too hard as it is. Supposed to be semiretired, putting in almost as many hours as I am.”

“I still don’t mind. Unless you want to wait a day and send Jake over tomorrow night. He won’t mind, either.”

“Nope. I’ll do it myself.”

“Now who’s the workaholic.”

“Yeah, well. Besides, I kinda like fieldwork. No reason you and Runyon should have all the fun.”

T
he voice on the phone was male, young, and hesitant. Its tone held something else that I couldn’t quite identify—some kind of emotional upset. “Runyon . . . Jake Runyon, please.”

“He’s not in. May I take a message?”

“When will he be back?”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “He’s out of town, not due back until after close of business.”

“So he’ll be home tonight?”

“Probably. Is this a business or personal call?”

Dead air.

“Let me have your name and number, and I’ll—”

He said, “No, I’ll call him at home,” and the line hummed in my ear.

Tamara had just come out of the bathroom and was standing
there watching me. As I lowered the receiver, she asked, “What was that about?”

“Call for Jake.”

“From?”

“Wouldn’t give his name. But I think it might’ve been his son.”

“His son? I thought Jason, Joshua, whatever his name is—”

“Joshua.”

“—didn’t want anything to do with him. No contact since before Christmas.”

“That’s right.”

“Second thoughts about a reconciliation, maybe?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Didn’t sound like that at all.”

I
had one more nonbusiness call that day, just before five o’clock. This one was personal for me—a little surprising, a little disturbing.

The caller said his name was Buck Trail. And he was elderly and not entirely sober, judging from his cracked and thickened baritone. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Pal asked me to call for him because he can’t.”

“What pal is that?”

“Russ Dancer.”

It took a couple of seconds for the name to register. My God, Russell Dancer. A name out of the past, a man I hadn’t seen in six or seven years or thought about more than a couple of times in passing since.

“He wants to see you,” Trail said.

“Is that right? He still living in Redwood City?”

“Not for much longer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“What does he want to see me about?”

“Didn’t tell me that. Just asked me to call you up, give you the message. I was you, I’d come on down right away. Tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

“He’s dying,” Trail said. “Croakers at Kaiser Hospital give him another day, two at the outside.”

His flight from L.A. landed at SFO at 5:05, which put him smack into the middle of rush-hour traffic heading into the city. Not that the stop-and-crawl bothered him. There was a time when it had, in Seattle during the evening rush when he was on his way home to Colleen. Now he had no one waiting, no reason for hurry. Rattling around his San Francisco apartment or creeping along the 280 freeway—one place was the same as another. Her death had taught him patience, if nothing else. Or maybe patience was nothing but a prettied-up name for apathy.

Work was the only thing that mattered to him anymore, the only relief for the disinterest he felt during his nonworking hours. Colleen was gone, his son hated him and refused to have anything to do with him, what else was there? But you couldn’t do your job twenty-four/seven; you had to have sleep, food, and like it or not there was a certain amount of downtime that
you had to put up with every day. Weekends were the worst. Even weekends in L.A. Saturday he’d been able to put in a full day on the missing witness case; L.A. was a damn big place and he’d spent hours on the freeways and side streets getting from one place to another, all the way from the San Fernando Valley to Riverside. Sunday, though, had been bad. Motel room, movies and a baseball game on TV, coffee shop, and more driving, the aimless kind, to kill the rest of the time. Full workday again today, at least. And now he was home and looking at five more busy workdays before he had to face another Sunday.

Home. Just a word now, like a word in a foreign language you didn’t understand.

Into the city, finally, crawling past the state university campus and on up Nineteenth Avenue. When he neared Taraval he thought about turning off—coffee shops and Asian restaurants along there—but he kept on going instead. Hungry, but not hungry enough to bother stopping. Later he’d go out to eat. A bath first, soak out some of the driving and airplane kinks, the weekend fatigue.

His apartment was in a nondescript building on Ortega, not far off Nineteenth. Four rooms that might’ve been rooms in a hotel or boardinghouse or the motel in L.A.; the only thing that personalized it, made it a place worth returning to, was the framed photograph of Colleen that he kept on the bedside nightstand. An eagerness to see the photo came on him as he keyed open the door, a shadow of the eagerness he’d felt when she was alive and he was coming home to her. He had another photo of her in his wallet, but it wasn’t as clear and sharp a likeness as the one in the bedside frame.

The message light on the answering machine was blinking. He registered that—Tamara or Bill, probably, work-related—and
kept on going into the bedroom. He picked up Colleen’s photo, stood looking at it for a long time. God, she’d been beautiful. Red hair, those impish Irish green eyes, that beacon-like smile. He put the frame down. If he looked at her image too long, the pain would start again and then he’d be in for a long, bad night.

He shed his overcoat, started into the kitchen to put on water for tea—Colleen’s drink, his drink now—then changed his mind and went back into the living room. Might as well find out what the office wanted first.

But it wasn’t the office. The voice on the machine said, “This is Joshua. I’ll probably regret this, but I need to talk to somebody . . . Call me.” That was all except for his new number, the unlisted-to-avoid-his-father number.

Runyon was beyond surprise at anything, business or personal, but sometimes things happened that came close. The hostage situation just before Christmas. And now this call out of the blue. No communication between Joshua and him since their one disastrous meeting in December, the boy so poisoned by Andrea’s bitter, alcohol-fueled hatred for Runyon and her imagined abandonment of them that the father-son gap seemed impossible to bridge . . . so why the sudden change of heart?
I’ll probably regret this, but I need to talk to somebody
. If it was a change of heart.

Still, hope stirred in him. The kid had called. That was something; maybe it was a beginning. He played the message back, noting the day and time of the call: today,
2:27
P.M
. Less than four hours ago. He wrote the unlisted number in his notebook, then picked up the receiver and tapped it out.

Joshua answered immediately, as if he’d been sitting next to the phone, waiting for it to ring. “Yes? Hello?”

“Hello, son.”

Breathing sounds.

“Joshua?”

“I’m here.”

Different tone of voice than on the message. The cold, distant one again.

“I’m glad you called,” Runyon said.

“Don’t be. It was a mistake.”

“Why a mistake?”

“I can’t talk to you. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“No. There’s nothing you can do.”

“What did you want me to do?”

“Nothing. Just forget it.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No.”

“Something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I said forget it. It’s not important.”

“No? Must’ve cost you a lot, that call.”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“Then talk to me.”

“What’s the use? Straight society doesn’t give a shit about people like us.”

“Wrong. Some of us do.”

Breathing.

“Talk to me, son.”

Joshua said, “I’m not your son,” and broke the connection.

Runyon lowered the receiver. He stood for half a minute or so, listening to the quiet in the apartment, making a decision. All right. He went back into the bedroom for his coat and car keys.

T
he old house was on Hartford just off Twentieth—a steep street of one- and two-story Stick Victorians and small, plain apartment buildings. The flat Joshua shared with his roommate was in one of the two-story Sticks, on the ground level.

Runyon had been there once before. A drive-by, just to see what kind of place his son had picked to live in. He’d gotten the address by checking the reverse city directory. The roommate’s name was Kenneth Hitchcock, age twenty-eight—six years older than Joshua; born in Visalia in the Central Valley, graduated from Fresno State with a degree in business administration, worked as a teller in a downtown branch of B of A, had never been in trouble of any kind either as a juvenile or an adult. Curiosity had prompted the background check, nothing more. Runyon could have gotten their unlisted phone number, too, easily enough, but he hadn’t bothered. It wouldn’t have done any good to keep calling, invading Joshua’s privacy; would’ve just increased the rift between them. All he cared about, once his attempts to create an understanding had been unequivocally rejected, was that his son be safe, healthy, solvent, and reasonably content.

But now there was this new contact, initiated by Joshua. A reaching out for some reason that wasn’t clear yet. It had opened the door, and Runyon wasn’t about to stand by and let it slam shut again without some push. Andrea’s alcoholic-fueled hate and vindictiveness had prevented him from being a part of Joshua’s life for the first twenty years, but he could be there for him now. And would be, whatever it took.

He hunted up a parking place, walked back to the building through a chilly night wind that had the smell of fog in it. There was a gate, and a short path that led from the street, to a
narrow front stoop. He rang the bell. Before long, footsteps. A peephole was set into the door; Joshua must have looked out through it because the door came open fast. Tight-set face, eyes that snapped with anger, words that were flung more than spoken. “What’re you doing here?”

“We didn’t finish our conversation.”

“Yes we did. I told you, I changed my mind. I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“You did this afternoon.”

“How did you know where I live? We’re not listed in the phone book. Oh, right . . . snooping’s what you do for a living.”

Runyon let that slide. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Don’t tell me different. It’s in your face as well as your voice.”

Joshua was a handsome kid, Andrea’s kid in that respect, too—her blond hair, her smoky blue eyes, her narrow mouth and delicate features—but he wasn’t so good-looking right now. Drawn, pale, puffy, as if he hadn’t slept much recently. Misery as well as anger showed in the blue eyes, some kind of visceral hurt.

“Why should you care?”

“That’s a stupid question and you know it.”

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Same category,” Runyon said. “I have left you alone. If you’d wanted me to go on leaving you alone, you wouldn’t have called.”

Joshua met his gaze briefly, looked away.

“We’re going to talk, son. Be easier on both of us if we do it inside.”

He moved ahead on the last word, crowding the kid a little. No more resistance; Joshua gave ground, turned aside to let him past.

Runyon automatically catalogued details as he advanced. Foyer and a short hallway with three closed doors leading off it. The hall opened into a big living room, uncurtained windows in the south wall that framed a broken view of an overgrown yard and the backsides of neighboring houses. Neat, clean, tastefully furnished in greens and browns and dusky reds. Paintings on the walls that had an amateurish look but weren’t badly done—expressionist style, all blobs and whorls of dark color on a white background, all the work of the same artist. Grouped on a folded dropcloth in front of one window were an easel, a chair, a big Tensor lamp, and a small table covered with brushes and jars of paint in symmetrical rows.

“You the painter?” he asked.

“No. Kenneth.”

“He’s pretty good.”

“Yes, he is. I wouldn’t have thought you’d like expressionist art.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know. Is Kenneth here? I’d like to meet him.”

“No, he’s not here.” A muscle spasmed in Joshua’s cheek. “He’s in the hospital.”

“Yes? I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Three days now and his condition is still critical.”