Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (4 page)

“What’s the matter with him?”

Hesitation. Then, in an angry, anguished rush: “He has a fractured arm, four cracked ribs, a broken cheekbone, and a punctured lung, that’s what’s the matter with him. Among other injuries. His face . . . God, his poor face . . .”

“What happened?”

“He was beaten up. They used some kind of club.”

“They?”

“Fucking homophobes. Gay-bashers.”

“So that’s it. Known to him?”

“I don’t think so. He’s been under heavy sedation . . . confused when he’s awake. He can’t seem to remember much, just that there were two of them.”

“When and where?”

“Last Friday night. Saturday morning. He was on his way home from work, he moonlights as a bartender three nights a week at The Dark Spot on Castro. They must’ve been cruising for another target, it was late and he was alone . . .”

“Another target?”

“He wasn’t their first victim, the bastards.”

“How many others?”

“Two in the past two weeks. I know the second man.”

“Yes?”

“Gene Zalesky. He . . . used to be a friend of Kenneth’s.”

“How badly was he hurt?”

“Not as badly as Kenneth. He’s home now.”

“Was he able to provide descriptions of the attackers?”

“Young, early to mid twenties . . . the same pair.”

“Driving what kind of vehicle?”

“An old pickup truck, black or dark blue.” Joshua went to one of the chairs, slumped down on it. Runyon stayed where he was. “I
told
Kenneth to be careful, ask somebody to give him a ride home, take a cab if he had to. But he wasn’t afraid, he didn’t believe it would happen to him . . . Goddamn them!
Goddamn them?”

“Easy, son.”

“Don’t tell me that. That’s what they kept saying.”

“Who?”

“The cops. Bullshit, that’s all. They didn’t care. Just another fag beating. File a report and forget about it.”

Runyon said, “It doesn’t work that way,” but they were just words. It did work that way, much of the time. And not just in crimes against gays or other hate crimes—in nearly all low-profile street felonies. Too many crimes, too many criminals, too little time and manpower. Too many excuses and too much apathy.

Joshua said bitterly, “I thought you didn’t lie. Isn’t that what you told me in December?”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry. What good is sorry?” Shuddery breath. The blue eyes were moist now; shifting emotions, pain the most intense. “He could die. Kenneth could
die.”

“His condition that critical?”

“Internal bleeding. The doctors had trouble stopping it. It could start again at any time . . .”

It seemed for a few seconds that Joshua might break down. Runyon felt an impulse to sit beside him, give him a shoulder to lean on. Didn’t do it because he knew the gesture would be rejected. What his son wanted from him had nothing to do with fatherly solace.

Joshua made a visible effort to pull himself together. At length he said, “I hate this,” in a shaky voice. “Kenneth is the strong one. I’m no damn good in a crisis.”

Runyon said, “I am.”

“I just . . . I don’t know what to do.”

“You’ve already done all you can. Calling me was the right thing.”

For the first time Joshua looked at him squarely. “Could you find them, stop them before they kill somebody?”

“Maybe. No guarantees.”

“Would
you? If I hired you, paid you . . .”

“No.”

“But you just said—”

“I’ll do what I can, but not for pay.”

Silent stare.

“You’re my son,” Runyon said. “That’s all the reason I need.”

Vonda said, “Well, I met this guy.”

“Uh-huh.” So what else is new? Tamara thought.

“A couple of weeks ago at a club in SoMa. We danced and had some drinks and he asked me for my phone number and I gave it to him. I was a little ripped or I probably wouldn’t have.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He kept calling me up and I gave in and I’ve been out with him a couple of times. A really nice guy, and gorgeous . . . I mean a real hunk. His name is Ben, Ben Sherman; he played football when he was at UC Berkeley. He has a good job, he works for a brokerage company in the financial district.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Saturday night we went out again, dinner and dancing, and afterward . . . well, he invited me to his place on Tel Hill, he’s got a great apartment up there, terrific view and everything . . .”

“Let me guess. You ended up in bed.”

“I wasn’t going to, it just happened. I mean, you know me, I don’t usually sleep with a guy until I get to know him first.”

Oh, yeah, right. She’d been friends with Vonda since they were sophomores at Redwood City High. Shared some wild times, their gangsta period when they’d chased with some rough homies, smoked weed, done all kinds of stuff that came close to crossing the line. Vonda looked a little like a young Robin Givens, slim and sleek but with a J-Lo booty; guys had been all over her since her boobs started to show. She’d lost her cherry when she was fifteen, must’ve slept with fifty different guys before and after she cleaned up her act.

“How was it?” The usual girl-talk question.

“Oh, great. Wow. The best ever. I mean, Ben really knows how to treat a woman in bed. But it wasn’t just sex.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No lie. There’s a difference, you know there is. Sex is one thing, making love’s another. I thought I’d made love a time or two, but with Ben . . . Lord, I think I’m in love with that man.”

“Uh-huh.” She’d heard that one before, too.

“Seriously, Tam. And it’s mutual. He came right out and said he loves me.”

Tamara covered a sigh with a sip from her glass. Mineral water. And a white wine spritzer for Vonda. Tamara Corbin and Vonda McGee, the two badass young ‘ho’s all cornrowed and grunge-dressed and party-ready. If those high school homies could see the two of them now, nine years later, one a partner in a private investigation agency, the other an up-and-coming sales rep at the S.F. Design Center, wearing conservative business outfits and sipping mineral water and white wine
spritzers in a crowd of mostly white establishment types in the South Park Café. Whoo! Sometimes she could hardly believe it herself, all the big jumps and sharp-angle turns in her life . . .

“And I wish neither of us was,” Vonda said.

“Was what?”

“In love. Ben Sherman, my God, of all the guys in the world.”

“Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s white,” Vonda said.

Tamara stopped being bored. “Uh-oh.”

“That’s not all. He’s more than just white.”

“How can he be more than just white?”

“He’s Jewish, too,” Vonda said.

“. . . Damn, girl!”

“I know, I know. That’s why I wanted to get together tonight, I had to talk to somebody about this and you’re the only one I can tell. I’ve never been with a white guy before, you know that, it’s never been my thing. And you know how my people feel about the interracial thing. Alton’ll go ballistic when he finds out.”

“He doesn’t have to find out.” Alton was her brother, a head case who’d never outgrown his hatred of Whitey. “If you don’t see this Ben Sherman again.”

“I don’t think I can do that, just blow him off. I really do love him, Tam.”

“Great sex isn’t love. You’ve only known the guy two weeks.”

“It’s not just physical and it doesn’t matter how long I’ve known him. You’ve been there, you understand what I’m saying. Same feelings you had for Horace right from the first.”

Horace. Let’s not get started on Horace.

“What am I gonna do?” Vonda said.

“Got to be your decision, nobody else’s. Yours and Ben’s. What’s he say about it?”

“He says it doesn’t matter how other people feel, it only matters how we feel about each other.”

“Yeah, well, he’s right. But not a hundred percent right.”

“I know it.”

“Still got to do what your heart and your gut tell you to.”

“What would
you
do? I mean, suppose Horace was white.
And
Jewish.”

Horace again. “Well, he’s not.”

“Come on, Tam. Suppose he was. What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Tamara said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

E
astbound traffic on the Bay Bridge was still moderately heavy, even though it was nearly seven o’clock when Tamara drove up the ramp and joined the stream. The westbound upper deck and the bridge railings and girders created a tunnel effect that magnified car and tire sounds into a steady shushing hum. After a while it seemed almost like a whispering voice.

Saying Horace, Horace, Horace.

Get a grip, she thought. She would have turned on the radio and slipped in a CD, but there was something wrong with the volume control—you couldn’t turn it up past a low hum not much different from the one outside. Damn thing had worked fine before he left. Figured. His car. Ten-year-old Ford hatchback that he’d left with her because he hadn’t wanted to chance driving it all the way to Philadelphia in the middle of winter. Maybe it missed him too. Yeah, or it was just a sign of things going wrong, screwing up.

Vonda wasn’t the only one with a screwed-up love life. All God’s chillun got troubles and love troubles were high on the list. You could empathize with other people’s, but you couldn’t get too caught up in them when you had your own to deal with. Couldn’t give somebody else advice when you couldn’t advise yourself.

Three and a half months now since Horace had left for Philly. Got his gig with the philharmonic back there, second seat cello, doing fine. Living with one of the other black men on the orchestra, a violinist named Cedric. Settled in. Just as she was settled in: agency partnership, new offices, expanding caseload and all the details and decisions that were part of the package. She wasn’t going anywhere for a long time, if ever. And neither was Horace.

They talked on the phone once a week, exchanged e-mails, said all the right things about how much they missed each other and loved each other, made tentative plans to get together here or back east. But they still hadn’t done it. Something got in the way every time. And the phone calls were getting shorter because they didn’t seem to have as much to say to each other, couldn’t relate long distance to all the changes that made up their new, separate lives.

She’d known it would be this way. Three-thousand-mile relationships might work for a while, but without personal contact, days and nights together to pump some fresh blood into the relationship, it’s bound to start withering. Sooner or later it would wither past the point of saving. Just dry up and croak, like a plant without water.

It was already happening to her. She felt it, fought it, couldn’t stop it. All the lonely nights in the Outer Richmond flat they’d shared . . . she’d got so she hated going there after
work. Stayed later and later at the office, started taking on after-hours field jobs like this deadbeat dad case tonight. Better that than staring at the walls or the boob tube and throwing pizza and junk food down her neck, which she’d done for about a week after Horace left. After that she’d gone the other way, started to lose her appetite. That was the main reason she’d dropped twelve pounds, not any real desire to shed the flab; she just wasn’t interested in food anymore. Or much of anything else except work.

Now that’s a lie, she thought as she pulled out to pass a slow-moving truck. She was still interested in sex, oh Lord yes. On her mind more and more lately. Tonight, thanks to Vonda. Three and a half months is a long time to go without it when you’re used to getting it regularly. So damn horny sometimes she felt like she was ready to explode. Vonda might’ve gotten in over her head with a white, Jewish dude, but at least Vonda was getting
laid
.

Maybe Vonda would loan out Ben Sherman for a night. Or maybe he had a friend who wanted to change his luck. She’d never slept with a white guy herself—or a Jewish guy, for that matter. Might change
her
luck.

Stupid thoughts.

Come on, Tamara. You want to do the nasty so bad, you know you can find somebody to do it with without even trying. Half a fox now that the love handles were slimmed down. Sleek and sassy. Must be a few hundred guys in the city that wouldn’t mind getting into her pants for a night or two, no strings. Pick a night, pick a club, pick a dick.

More stupid thoughts.

She sighed. She was off the bridge now, moving toward the
interchange and 880 south, but she could still hear that damn shushing hum.

Horace. Horace, Horace, Horace . . .

T
he house George DeBrissac’s cousin owned in San Leandro was on Willard Street, 1122 Willard. She’d looked it up on the Netscape MapQuest site before leaving the office: Willard was in the wide trough between the 880 and 580 freeways, closest to 880 off San Pablo Avenue. Simple directions, should be pretty easy to find.

It was. Blue-collar residential neighborhood, not much different from dozens of others in the East Bay—that was apparent even on a dark night in an area without many streetlights. Old houses, mostly frame, a few stucco, on pretty good-sized lots. Probably an ethnic mix of whites, blacks, maybe a few Latinos and Asians.

Finding 1122 was a little harder. No numbers on the street signs, no reflector curbside numbers for the headlights to pick up, the houses set far enough back from the street so it wasn’t easy to read the numbers on them. Tamara drove slow, with the driver’s window down, until she passed a house with the porch light on: 906. Which way did the numbers run, up or down? Down—the next block was 800. She made a U-turn, came back to the 1100 block, finally pinpointed the right one.

Boxy frame house, hedges hiding most of the front porch, low-maintenance yard behind a Cyclone fence interwoven with some kind of scraggly vine. Dark, no light showing anywhere. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody inside. The front windows looked like they had heavy coverings, and there might be lights at the back that she couldn’t see from here.

She kept on going, circled the block, eased back up Willard in the same direction as before. Fifty yards or so across from 1122, a gnarly curbside tree laid out a big puddle of shadow. She parked in the puddle, darkened the car. Unobstructed diagonal view of 1122 from there, if she needed to maintain a surveillance.