Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (6 page)

“Whatever you say.”

“Good. Knew I could . . . trust you. Only one . . . I can trust . . .”

The curtains slid open behind me, the sudden ratcheting of hooks on the frame making me jerk a little. A starchy nurse poked her head inside. “You’ll have to leave now,” she said to me. “It’s time for the patient’s medicine.”

“Fucking cow,” Dancer said when she was gone. “Time for . . . patient’s medicine. You like that? Not . . . Mr. Dancer, not even . . . old bastard, just patient.” He made a laughing sound. “Dead meat, pretty soon.”

I’d had enough even before the nurse appeared. I stood up.

“Take keys,” he said.

I opened the nightstand drawer. Two keys on a ring; I put them in my pocket.

“No . . . good-byes. Hate good-byes.”

“So do I.” But I couldn’t just leave it at that. I felt even worse now; I had to put some of the guilt into words—for my sake, if not for his. “I really am sorry, Russ. I should’ve gotten in touch, I should’ve been a better friend.”

No answer. He lay still, his eyes shut now, his breathing a little less raspy in repose. I thought he might have drifted off, hadn’t heard what I’d said. But he was awake and he’d heard.
And he answered me as I turned away from the bed and parted the curtains.

“No tengo,”
he said. “Goddamnit to hell.”

T
he rooming house where Dancer had lived the past two decades was an ancient, two-story Victorian on Stambaugh Street, off Broadway and fairly close to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Downscale neighborhood that looked about the same as it had on my last, long-ago visit. The block-long thrift store where Dancer had gathered his reading material was still there; so was Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern a half block to the west. Not much had changed, in fact, except that there were a couple of empty storefronts and more graffiti on the building walls. The Victorian had had a coat of paint slapped on it in the interim, but it hadn’t done much to dispel the seedy aspect; its turrets and gables were still in need of repair, its brick chimneys still unstable-looking. One of the two scraggly palm trees in the front yard had died and been cut down; the broken picket fence that had enclosed the yard had been replaced by an even uglier Cyclone job. How long before urban renewal caught up with this little patch of decay? A few years at the most. Its days were numbered in any case, and Dancer had been a perfect fit: old and blighted and dying a little more every day.

Even though I had Dancer’s keys, I thought I’d better check with the manager. One of the mailboxes on the creaky porch identified C. Holloway as having that dubious distinction. I rang C. Holloway’s bell. Ten years ago the manager had been a woman with a face like a gargoyle, but she was gone now; the new one was male, forty-five or so, with a milky cataract in one eye and the disposition of a scorpion. He wouldn’t let me
come in when I told him who I was and why I was there; I had to bribe him with a brace of dollar bills and show him my ID. He didn’t ask how Dancer was, didn’t seem to care. Inside he pointed me toward the basement stairs and said before he left me, “Don’t touch none of the other lockers down there. I’ll call the cops on you if I find out you did.”

The basement was musty and cold and threaded with spider-webs. The storage lockers were arranged along one wall—narrow cages made out of wood and chicken wire. The padlocks on each door were a joke; you could have torn through that thin wire with your bare hands and a minimum of effort. Room numbers were stenciled on the doors. Number 6, Dancer’s room, had the fewest items of any of the occupied cages: a couple of cheap suitcases, half a dozen open cartons of mint but dust-covered paperback books, and a beat-up paste-board trunk.

The package with Cybil’s name on it was in the trunk, on top of a jumble of old clothing. Nine-by-twelve padded mailing bag, fairly thick and heavy, sealed with filament tape. I tucked it under my arm.

Before I locked up the cage again, I took a quick look through a couple of the boxes of books. Multiple copies of a variety of lurid titles—
Raw Day in Hell, Mistress of Bleak House, Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon, Black Avenger #7: Slaughter Train
. Author’s copies of some of Dancer’s pseudonymous novels. On impulse I picked out half a dozen at random, tucked them into my coat pocket. Why not? They represented little pieces of the man’s life, imagination, talent. Somebody ought to care about them, just a little.

Upstairs, there was no sign of C. Holloway in the lobby. So I climbed the rickety staircase to the second floor—impulse
again—and used the other key on the ring to let myself into Dancer’s room. It seemed no different than it had a decade ago. Bed, nightstand, dresser, writing table. Empty half-gallon jug of cheap bourbon on the floor next to the bed. Scatter of battered thrift-store paperbacks.

No typewriter or other writing tool, not even a pencil.

No copies of any of the paperbacks boxed up in the basement, nor any other book that might have been written by him.

Dancer’s home for more than fifteen years, but it wasn’t a home at all. Living space. Existing space for a broken, friendless, bitter, lovelorn, alcoholic ex-writer. Lonely space. Wasted-life space. Dying space.

I got out of there, quick. Thank God for Kerry and Emily and the kind of work I had, because without them, given my own loner instincts, I could have ended up occupying a space not much different from Russ Dancer’s.

Gene Zalesky lived alone on Museum Way, a street high up in the Corona Heights area that dead-ended at the Fairbanks Randall Jr. Museum. The steep, rocky slopes of Corona Heights Park ran along one side of the street; along the other was a curving row of private homes and two-unit flats, all of which had wide-angle views of the Castro District, Bernal Heights, and pieces of the Bay in the distance. The views would add several hundred a month to rental prices, another six figures to a seller’s asking price.

Zalesky’s address was one of the private homes, a dark wood and stucco job set back a few steps from the sidewalk. An ornate security gate barred the entrance. It told Runyon going in that Zalesky’s job as a systems analyst, whatever that was, for a banking outfit paid well. The interior of the house confirmed it. Antiques of one kind and another crowded the living room; the carpet on the floor was an expensive-looking
wine-red oriental, the threads in an elaborate tapestry on one wall had the glitter of real gold. Velvety curtains were drawn over the expensive view.

The man himself was in his late thirties, short, dark, and cynical. The cynicism showed in his eyes, the set of his mouth, his voice. It wasn’t the result of his beating; it had been a part of him for a long time, maybe ever since he’d found out that he was different from the so-called norm, an outsider and an object of lesser men’s hate and scorn. His left forearm was in a cast; fading bruises discolored the left side of his face, and there was a bandage over some kind of wound on the right cheekbone. He moved slowly, stiffly—testimony to other bruises, other wounds, beneath the silk robe and pajamas he wore.

“Sorry I’m not dressed,” he said when he let Runyon in. “Still hurts like hell when I try to put on my pants.”

“No apology necessary.”

“One of them kicked me in the ass. I’ve got a bruise on my left buttock the size of a cantaloupe.”

“Must be painful.”

“Only when I sit down. I’m going to stand, if you don’t mind, but you go ahead and have a seat.”

Runyon said he’d stand too. While he was declining the offer of a drink, a fluff ball white cat appeared from behind one of the antiques and came over to sniff at his shoes.

“That’s Snow White,” Zalesky said. There was pride in his voice, as if he were introducing a relative. “Pure-blood Angora. You like cats?”

“Yes.” Colleen had owned a cat when he met her. Pure black alley cat named Midnight. Lived with them for the first eight
years they were married, and she’d cried for three days when it died.

The Angora decided it had had enough of him and his shoes and drifted away. Zalesky made clucking noises; it ignored him, too. “Independent little bastard,” he said affectionately. Then he said, “So you’re Joshua Fleming’s father. I don’t remember him mentioning you until his call a few minutes ago.”

“We’re estranged,” Runyon said.

“Oh. I see.”

“Not for the reason you might think. His mother and I were divorced when he was a baby. She blamed me. So does he.”

“With just cause?”

“I don’t think so, but he won’t listen to my side of it.”

“Young and stubborn. I was like that myself, once, for different reasons. I learned to be more tolerant of my folks as I got older. Maybe he will, too.”

“What I’m hoping.”

“Is that why you’re doing this? Investigating these bashings?”

“Partly. He contacted me, opened a closed door that I’d like to keep open.”

“What other reason?”

“He’s hurting, he needs my help. That’s one.”

“There’s another?”

“I’ve been in law enforcement most of my adult life,” Runyon said. “I don’t like to see innocent people hurt and I damn well hate the ones who do the hurting. This pair that beat you up, put Joshua’s roommate in critical condition . . . if they’re not stopped, they’re liable to kill somebody. I don’t want that to happen.”

Zalesky said, “Commendable,” and seemed to mean it. “I wish more cops felt that way.”

“So do I.”

“I’ll do anything I can to help, of course, but you already know that. What is it you’d like to know?”

“To begin with, where were you attacked?”

“Just up the street from here, on the park side. I’d just come home from visiting a friend, just parked my car and gotten out.”

“What time?”

“After one
A.M.
Close to one-thirty.”

“They followed you?”

“No. They were parked a couple of spaces away, across from my house.”

“As if they were waiting for you?”

“It seemed that way.”

“But they were strangers?”

“Oh, yes,” Zalesky said. “Definitely. I suppose they spotted me somewhere, some other time, and followed me then. One of those random things. It’s quiet up here late at night, I must’ve seemed like a good target. I don’t know. With men like that . . . who the hell knows?”

“They were in a pickup truck?”

“Yes. Black or dark blue, I’m not sure which.”

“Could you identify the make and model?”

“I don’t know anything about cars, much less pickups.”

“Did it seem new or old?”

“More old than new.”

“Anything distinctive about it that you can remember?”

“Distinctive . . .” Zalesky’s brow furrowed, smoothed again. “Well, there was a Confederate flag in the back window. I noticed that when they came out at me.”

“A real flag or some kind of decal?”

“I think it was real. My God, you don’t suppose they could be Klan members? In San Francisco, of all places in this country?”

“Anything’s possible,” Runyon said. “So they came out and then what? Just attacked you, or did they say anything first?”

“Oh, they had a lot to say. The usual run of gay insults. One of them called me sweet thing . . . Christ. The other one said something ridiculous about teaching me not to mess with boys and then they started hitting me.”

“They use weapons of any kind?”

“One of them had a pipe or club made out of metal. Aluminum, I think.” Zalesky shuddered. “I can still hear the sound it made when he hit me with it.”

“Little League baseball bat?”

“I suppose it could’ve been. The other one hit me with his fists, kept kicking me when I was on the sidewalk. They were both laughing. The whole time . . . laughing, as if they were really having a fun time.”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“Not much. It was dark and I couldn’t see their faces clearly. One of them wore a jacket with a hood and the other a cap.”

“What kind of cap?”

“I’m not sure . . . it might’ve been a baseball cap.”

“Was he the one with the aluminum club?”

“. . . Yes, I think so.”

“How old were they?”

“Early twenties, maybe twenty-five.”

“Big?”

“The one in the jacket was. Over six feet and . . . what’s the word I want? Not fat, but . . . burly, chunky. Pale skin, at least it seemed pale in the dark. He may have red hair.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Freckles,” Zalesky said. “On his forehead and cheeks.”

“You’re sure they were freckles, not blemishes?”

“Freckles, yes. And I remember a lock of hair hanging out from under his cap. Light-colored, but not blond . . . it didn’t look blond to me.”

Runyon said, “Good. That helps. What about the other one?”

“Tallish, slender. Average-looking. That’s all I remember about him.”

The white cat reappeared and began to wind itself around Zalesky’s legs, purring, making little burbling noises in its throat. Zalesky said, “What’s the matter, baby? You need a little love?” He bent, slowly and with evident pain, and scooped the cat up with his good hand and hugged it against his chest. The purring got louder. And louder still when Zalesky buried his face in the animal’s thick fur.

Private moment; Runyon looked away. The cat wasn’t the only one who needed a little love right now.

He was looking at the wall tapestry, trying to make out what the scene depicted on it was all about, when Zalesky put an abrupt end to the private moment. “I keep having the feeling I’ve seen him someplace before.”

“Who?”

“The tall, slender one.”

“Before that night? Where?”

“That’s just it, I can’t quite recall.”

“Someplace around here, this neighborhood?”

“No.”

“Near where you work?”

“The Transamerica Pyramid . . . no, not there.”

“Try it this way,” Runyon said. “Day or night?”

“I’m not . . . Night. It might’ve been at night.”

“Where do you go nights? Public places, I mean.”

“That’s not an easy question to answer. I go out frequently. Concerts, plays, the cinema. Dinner with friends. The Castro scene, too, of course—bars, clubs. I’m not really into cruising, but now and then . . . well, never mind, you’re not interested in that.”