Mourners: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (12 page)

Long, strange, good-bad day. She was relieved when her shift ended and she could leave the club and escape home. The emptiness, all the reminders of Erin, made the apartment claustrophobic sometimes, but tonight it was preferable to facing all those other hurt and damaged lives.

Her building was only a dozen blocks from Get Fit; she’d been fortunate to find a job with such an easy commute. She seldom drove to work, usually either walked or took the 38 Geary bus depending on the weather and how tired she was. Tonight, despite an early blowing fog, she walked. Lost inside herself and paying only minimal attention to her surroundings, yet without really thinking about
Erin or anything else: bolstering herself against the night ahead with exercise and the few minutes of freedom.

The apartment was more good-bad: a sanctuary, but a cold, empty one. She really ought to move to a new place. Or at least clean out Erin’s room, keep a few mementos and send the rest of her things to Mom and Dad or give them to Goodwill. People kept advising her to do one or the other, and she knew they were right, but she just couldn’t face either chore. No use kidding herself—it probably would be a long time before she could.

She poured herself a vodka and lime juice, and took it with her into the bathroom. The drink and a hot shower helped a little. Dressed again, she looked up Sally and Kevin Johnson’s phone number in her computer address book and then called it, thinking that if Sally knew anything about Fatso that she didn’t, it would be easier for her to get the information. But all she got was their machine. She decided against leaving a message, tapped out Runyon’s cell phone number instead.

He had an odd sort of voice, gruff and gentle at the same time, but without much inflection. This morning, the whole time he’d talked to her at the cemetery, he’d worn a sort of neutral expression, what Jerry called a poker face, so you couldn’t be sure of what he was thinking behind those pained eyes. She wondered again, talking to him now, what kind of man he was. Honest and caring, she was pretty sure of that much. And if he had the usual male ideas he kept them under control—she’d believed him when he told her he didn’t expect anything in return for his help. But aside from that, who was he deep inside?
Her interest was both personal, because of Erin, and impersonal. Or maybe detached was a better word. Acts of kindness were few and far between these days. A man like Jake Runyon almost made her believe again that most people were good and God was good and the world wasn’t always a rotten, ugly place. Almost.

When she told him she’d tried to call Sally, he said, “You think she might not talk to me?”

“No, I don’t see why she wouldn’t. I just wanted to save you some time and effort.”

“Thanks, but there’s no need. I know what questions to ask.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Thing is,” he said, “this isn’t much of a lead yet. I don’t want you to get your hopes up prematurely.”

“That won’t happen,” Risa said.

“All right. Have you remembered anything else about this man Fatso, anything that might help identify him?”

“No. It was a long time ago, and it just didn’t seem important then. To Erin or to me.”

“Well, if you do . . .”

“Yes, I’ll let you know right away.”

He said he would be in touch and broke the connection.

But he wouldn’t have anything to tell her when she heard from him, she thought fatalistically. How could Erin’s murderer be a man she’d hardly known two years ago and who’d done nothing more menacing than show up at McRoyd’s a couple of times while she was there? It had to be a total stranger, some faceless psycho who’d picked her at random. He might be caught one day for some other crime, in two or five or ten or twenty years,
and a DNA test would link him to Erin’s murder and he’d confess or not confess, and then it would be over. Or he might never be caught and then it would never be over.

Grabbing at straws. That was all Jake Runyon was doing. Like everybody else, herself included, just grabbing at straws.

Get her hopes up? God, no, that wouldn’t happen, not now and maybe never again.

The phone rang ten minutes later, while she was mixing a second vodka and lime juice. Mom and Dad calling from Green Bay. Two more sufferers to round out the day. She told them about Runyon and what he was doing, downplaying it, but it lifted their spirits much more than it had hers. They were unshaken believers; they’d kept the faith all along. So had she, for a while, but her belief wasn’t rock solid anymore. The more time that passed without some kind of resolution, the more it would crumble until there was nothing left.

They talked for twenty minutes, mostly about Erin even though she kept trying to steer the conversation to more mundane subjects. And the conversation left her feeling depressed. She put on a hip-hop CD, cheerful music that didn’t cheer her any. She thought she ought to eat something, and made herself a third drink instead. That had better be the last; she was feeling them already, and if she drank any more she’d have a hangover tomorrow, and she hated hangovers. She wished she had some pot. Then she could really get stoned without worrying about how she’d feel in the morning.

Good-bad day turning into another bad night.

She wondered, sipping vodka, how long it would be before
she had a good day, a good night. Really
good
, the kind where everything you did or heard or saw gave you pleasure and you were so happy and content you smiled and laughed for no reason at all.

She wondered, sipping vodka, if she would ever have that kind of day and night again.

Troxell left his house alone shortly past seven Thursday evening. Destination: Wisconsin Street. Potrero Hill. I camped at the curb three doors uphill from the Lindens’ Stick Victorian and watched him leave his BMW empty-handed and head down the path alongside.

Then I sat in the cold, dark car and fretted about Kerry.

You live with someone long enough, you develop a finely calibrated sensor where the other person is concerned. It doesn’t take long for the bells and whistles to go off when something isn’t right. Little things, cumulative effect. The way she’d been acting lately, the brooding silences, the declining interest in intimacy. The unsatisfactory talk we’d had last night. The fact that she’d taken most of today off work without explanation at the office and without telling me; I’d found that out from her secretary. The fact that she hadn’t been home at six thirty tonight. She must have come home and then gone out again somewhere with Emily; nobody had answered my call to the condo and both their cell phones were out of service, which
probably meant they were in a restaurant; we had strict rules about cells being turned off in public places. But why hadn’t she let me know they were going so I wouldn’t worry?

If the Dancer business was what was bothering her, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t simply brought it out into the open. If it was something else . . . what? Some sort of medical problem? She’d had her annual physical a couple of weeks ago, but I’d asked her about it and she’d said everything was as it should be. Why would she tell me that if it wasn’t?

Me? General dissatisfaction with our relationship, our life together? That notion scared hell out of me. We’d always been so good together, so completely in synch. Problems, sure, every marriage has some friction from time to time, but nothing serious, nothing that we hadn’t managed to work out with a minimum of difficulty. She might be pissed at me for keeping secrets about Dancer and Cybil, but I couldn’t conceive of her being angry enough to lose faith, start falling out of love—

Another man?

Well, it had happened . . . almost happened . . . once before. Paul Blessing, Blessing Furniture Showrooms, one of Bates and Carpenter’s clients. But that had been before we were married, and it hadn’t amounted to much. Strong physical attraction, a few dates, that was all. She hadn’t gone to bed with him. Said she hadn’t, and I’d believed her—I still believed her. No, it wasn’t another man. She wouldn’t cheat on me any more than I would cheat on her.

What
, then?

Round and round . . .

I’d figured I was in for another of those long, dull, butt-cramping waits, while Troxell took his time doing whatever he did in his private hideaway, but it didn’t turn out that way. He spent less than an hour in there tonight. When he reappeared he had something tucked under one arm, not too bulky; I could make out a faint gleam of white when he opened the driver’s door on the BMW and the inside light came on. Plastic sack? Might be rental videos, viewed and ready for return, but I couldn’t be sure at the distance.

Down off Potrero Hill, south on 101, west on 280. But he wasn’t going home yet. He stayed on 280 until the Daly City interchange, swung off on John Daly Boulevard and from there onto Skyline north, past Fort Funston and Lake Merced. Heading for the beach? Right. He took the cutoff onto the Great Highway, then turned into the narrow beachfront parking area at the foot of Sloat Boulevard. I drove on past, circled the block onto Sloat, and crossed into the parking area from there.

The BMW was dark, slotted about halfway down. I pulled up between it and one other car parked there, close enough to the BMW for my headlights to wash over it and let me see that it was empty. I shut off the lights and got out and went to where I could see down beyond a shelf of broken shingle to the beach.

Broken clouds tonight, restless and shifting under the lash of a stiff, cold wind that had driven the temperature down into the low forties. The three-quarters moon was obscured at first, the beach like an expanse of black velvet except for the trim of faint luminiscence where the surf broke and creamed over the sand. I stayed put, braced and
shivering, until the moon broke free and I had a clearer view. One man down there, moving in hunched walk toward the waterline. Troxell, who else? Anybody’s guess what quirk or impulse or demon sent him beach-walking at night, in frigid weather like this.

Back in the car, I sat on my hands until they warmed up and then called Jake Runyon’s cell phone number. “Troxell went up to Potrero Hill again, but he didn’t stay long. He’s back at the beach now, taking a moonlight stroll.”

“Going home from there, you think?”

“Probably.”

“Be a good time for me to use that key.”

“Yeah.”

“Worth the risk. My opinion.”

I hesitated, but not too long, before I said, “If you’re game, I suppose I am, too. You won’t take anything, disturb anything?”

“You know I won’t.”

“Sure. Worry mode tonight.”

“Go ahead then?”

“Go. Let me know when you’re finished.”

I sat fidgeting, paying too much attention to the time, thinking that I ought to call home again and telling myself to quit worrying for no good reason. Eight thirty wasn’t late; if Kerry and Emily weren’t home by ten or eleven, that was the time to start fingering the panic button.

Less than half an hour dribbled away before Troxell trudged back to his car. Too cold on the beach tonight even for him. Go home now, brother, I thought, when he headed out of the lot.

And that was what he did.

They were at the condo when I got there, both of them. Relief didn’t hang around long; as soon as I knew they were safe, it gave way to a simmer of other emotions, one of them being low-grade anger. I had a headache, I was hungry, I wanted a beer and some aspirin and some food and some explanations. I got all of that, more or less, but none of it made me feel any better.

Kerry was sitting in her recliner in the living room, in the dark, alone except for Shameless curled up in her lap, the drapes open over the picture window and the lights of the city shining hard and bright in the distance. Emily was in her room with the door shut; I could see the light under the door. I called out to Kerry, got a lackluster response, and detoured into the kitchen. No dinner waiting, hot or cold. So I washed down three aspirin with a long draught from a bottle of Sierra Nevada, ate a cold chicken leg and a couple of carrots out of the refrigerator. Elegant dining in the bosom of home. Then, bottle in hand, I went into the living room to have a little fireside chat with my mate.

As far as I could tell she hadn’t shifted position. When I switched on one of the table lamps I saw that she was sitting half-slouched, a sloppy posture she almost never adopts, and that she had a glass of white wine in one hand. She glanced up, favored me with a skeletal smile, and refocused her attention on the city lights below.

I said, “So?”

“So what?”

“You haven’t been home long. Where were you tonight?”

“Emily and I went out to dinner.”

“Uh-huh. How come I didn’t get invited?”

“It wasn’t planned. I didn’t get home until after six and I didn’t feel like cooking.”

“I have a cell phone now. You gave it me last Christmas, remember?”

“You said you’d be working tonight. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“I was a lot more bothered not hearing from you.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I should have called.”

“Yes, you should have. How was work today?”

“Work?”

“You know, the daily grind at the city’s leading ad agency.”