Spook

by Bill Pronzini

  Thoughts while he walked, between brief conversations with the inhabitants of Franklin Square. Another indication of life stirring in him again. He hadn’t done much thinking the past four months. Mostly just shut his mind down while he went through the zombie motions of daily existence. The way he felt now, with his mind working again, didn’t mean rebirth; he wasn’t going to wake up whole again some morning. Forming a close bond with Josh wasn’t going to happen, either; no illusions about that. But it he could just reach an understanding with his son, then that combined with work should make getting through the days easier, a little more tolerable.

  The square was mostly grass and shade trees, a small playground, a fenced-off soccer field in the middle — downscale neighborhood park like any city park that had been taken over by the homeless. Piles of personal belongings were scattered on the grass and footpaths, on a couple of picnic benches; a dozen or so men and women, one of the women young, with a baby slung in a harness over her shoulders, were huddled among the belongings and along the soccer field fence, alone and in pairs and small groups. None of them was a big, dark man in a red and green wool cap. And none would talk to him, once he admitted that he wasn’t a cop, unless he offered money first. He doled out spare change and dollar bills, got noninformation in return. Big Dog? Never heard of him. Delia, Mac, Pinkeye? Never heard of them. Spook? Eyes averted, mouths clamped shut. “We don’t want nothing to do with murder, man,” one of the men said.

  Wasted effort until he approached an old woman sitting alone, cross-legged, on a blanket at the far end of the fence. Next to her was an ancient backpack: in her hands was a container of what smelled like Chinese takeout. She was eating with a plastic spoon, smearing the food into her mouth. Thin, dried out, so wrinkled her blotched face seemed almost mummified, age anywhere from mid-sixties to late-seventies. Bundled up in a worn, patched coat and tattered wool scarf, strands of wispy gray hair showing at the edge of a once-white headpiece like the ones women wore back in the forties. Snood? Something like that.

  She fixed him with bright parrotlike eyes when he approached her. He flashed a dollar bill and her eyes got even brighter. “What you want for that, laddie?” She made a cackling noise, showed him a greasy gap-toothed grin. “Delia ain’t no woman of easy virtue, you know.”

  He told her what he wanted. The grin stayed put; so did the brightness in her eyes.

  “Big Dog, yeah, I stay clear of that critter,” Delia said. “Junkyard dog, that’s what he is. Mean. Bite your hand or chew up your leg, you get too close to him when he’s had too much wine.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Ain’t afraid of dogs, laddie? Mean junkyard dogs?”

  “No,” Runyon said. “Where can I find him?”

  “You another cop?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Like Kojak, huh? No, Kojak was a cop. What you want with that Big Dog?”

  “He knew Spook. You know Spook?”

  “Sure I knew him. He’s dead. Killed.”

  “Who killed him? Big Dog?”

  She cackled again. “Rip your throat out, that junkyard dog, not shoot you with a gun.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “Shot Spook? How’d I know? I wasn’t there.” Delia tapped her temple with a bony forefinger. “Crazy in the head, but he never bothered nobody. Might be it was that fella in the raincoat.”

  “What fella in the raincoat?”

  “Come around here asking about Spook. Looked like a flasher in that raincoat. That’s what I thought when he come up, I thought he was gonna flash me. Old fart did that one time, he had a pecker like a pencil.” Cackle. “I swear, skinny little thing, just like a pencil. I didn’t let him do no writing on me.”

  “When was this.”

  “When was what? When the flasher showed off his little pencil pecker?”

  “When the man in the raincoat asked about Spook.”

  “Sometime. I don’t keep track. Few days, a week, who knows?”

  “What’d he ask you, exactly?”

  “Where he could find a homeless man called Spook.”

  “He say why he was looking?”

  “Nope. Didn’t say nothing, just wanted to know where he hung out.”

  “You tell him where?”

  “Nope. Didn’t like his looks, didn’t like his eyes.”

  “What was the matter with them?”

  “Kind of funny, that’s all. All hot and funny, like Big Dog’s eyes when he’s full up on wine.”

  “You know if anybody told him where Spook hung out?”

  “Don’t have no idea. You mean over at that movie place? I like that place. They give you free eats sometimes, fat woman brings ’em out. Not much, not as good as Chinese, that’s my favorite, but better’n no eats at all.”

  “What’d he look like, the man in the raincoat?”

  “ ’Bout your age. Big. Bet he didn’t have a pencil pecker.”

  “Big how? Tall, fat, heavyset?”

  “Who could tell in a raincoat? Just big, that’s all.”

  “Description?”

  “I just told you, didn’t I? ’Bout your age and big.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Brown hair. No, black. No, brown. Drizzly that day, that’s right, and his hair was wet. Wet and brown and not too much of it. Kinda thin, scalp showing through.”

  “Beard, mustache?”

  “Clean as a whistle, ’cept he had a thing next to his nose.”

  “A thing?”

  “Mole or whatever. Big one.”

  “Which side, left or right?”

  “Uh... left. Left side.”

  “What else was he wearing?”

  “Couldn’t tell. Raincoat was all buttoned up.

  “You’re sure it was a raincoat, not an overcoat?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Overcoats are bulkier, made of heavy cloth, like mine. Raincoats are lightweight — polyester cotton, microfiber.”

  “Pretty smart, aren’t you?” she said and cackled. “Wasn’t no overcoat. Raincoat. Brown raincoat.”

  “Old or new? Expensive or inexpensive?”

  “Old. Old and wet. Who knows how much it cost? I don’t.” She held out her hand, palm up. “You sure do ask a lot of questions. Ought to be worth more’n just that one dollar, my answers, eh?”

  Runyon gave her two singles, watched her make them disappear inside her own threadbare coat. “You tell any of this to the police, Delia?”

  “Any of what?”

  “About the man in the brown raincoat.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “They never paid me, that’s why not. All cops ever give me is a hard time.”

  “One more question,” Runyon said. “You happen to see what kind of car he was driving? The man in the raincoat.”

  “Nope. I don’t know nothing about cars, don’t pay no attention to cars unless I’m crossing the street. This is a dangerous city, you know? They drive their cars like crazy people in this city. Run red lights, don’t watch where they’re going, one of ’em almost got me in a crosswalk not long ago. Big hurry in their damn fancy cars.” Delia tapped her temple again. “Crazy people,” she said.

  Jack Logan was the only one of the two contact names on duty at the Hall of Justice. He was in his late fifties, salt-and-pepper hair, pepper-and-salt mustache. Quiet, on the reserved side, a little stiff at first. But when Runyon told him who he was working for and sketched out his Seattle background, it produced a warming trend, made Logan almost garrulous.

  “Heard a rumor that old Bill was going to retire,” he said. “Been meaning to give him a call, but you know how it is — too much work, never enough time. How’s he doing? His health, I mean.”

  “Seems fine.”

  “Hope so. You can’t help wondering when somebody our age decides to pack it in, if maybe they’re doing it for health reasons. I always figured an old warhorse like him w
ould stay in harness as long as mind and body permitted.”

  “Semi-retirement, from what I understand,” Runyon said. “Cutting back on his hours, giving up most of the field work.”

  “Well, that makes more sense. Tired of the grind, I guess. I can sympathize with that.” Logan scratched his head, then shook it. “Time catches up with all of us. Seems to happen all at once, too. One day you’re in your prime, the next you’re staring geezerhood in the eye and your whole outlook’s different, you’re not the same man you used to be. In more ways than one.”

  Runyon said nothing.

  “Well, the hell with it. You don’t want to listen to that kind of talk and neither do I. So you’re Bill’s new hire. You’ll like working with him. He doesn’t always do things by the book, has a tendency to get mixed up in heavy stuff now and then, but he’s a good man.”

  “How about his partner?”

  “Partner? Can’t mean Eberhardt. He’s dead.”

  “Tamara Corbin.”

  “He made her a partner? Kid like her? She can’t be more than twenty-five.”

  “Pretty smart for her age, seems like.”

  “So I hear,” Logan said. “I’ve only met her a couple of times. Cop’s daughter, and she’s been with Bill four or five years now. Makes sense, if he’s cutting back. Times change, all right. People, too.”

  Again Runyon said nothing.

  “So. This Spook business is your first case, you said?”

  “That’s right. Not a homicide investigation — strictly ID and background search on the victim.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got.” Logan switched on his computer, punched up the case file. “Bupkus,” he said then. “Fingerprint and DNA checks negative, dental check negative, no ID of any kind on the body. Unclaimed John Doe so far.”

  “Personal items?”

  “Not unless you count a pencil stub, two cigarette butts, and a penny.”

  “Any leads to the perp or to motive?”

  “Zero. Forensics didn’t find anything at the crime scene or on the vic’s clothing. No eyewitnesses, no ear witnesses, nobody on the street knows anything or will admit it if they do. Random assault or personal grudge — most of the homeless homicides come down to one or the other.”

  “Nothing in the report about a big man with a mole on the left side of his nose, asking questions about Spook a few days before the shooting?”

  Logan raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Where’d you get that?”

  “An old lady named Delia, in Franklin Square.” Runyon summarized the rest of what she’d told him.

  “You must be good, to pick that up in a couple of hours.”

  “Lucky. Right person, right questions.”

  “Still. Investigating officers should’ve come up with it....” Logan checked the computer screen. “Oh, yeah, Gunderson.” His expression said that Inspector Gunderson was somebody he neither liked nor respected. “Not on duty now, but if you want to talk to him...”

  “Not much point, is there?”

  “Not much,” Logan admitted. “I’ll pass on the info, for whatever good it’ll do. But my guess is this case will wind up in the inactive file — unless you turn up something else in the course of your investigation.”

  “If I do, it comes straight to you.”

  “That’s what I like to hear from the private sector.”

  Runyon said, “Be all right if I look at the body?”

  “No problem. But it won’t do you much good as far as ID goes.”

  “No?”

  “Shot in the back of the head execution style, forty-one caliber weapon, hollow point slug. You know what that means.”

  “I’d still like a look.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll call down to the morgue, tell them you’re on the way.”

  A .41 caliber hollow point does a hellish amount or damage when fired at point-blank range. The upper half of the corpse’s face, including both eyes, was gone. The lower half wasn’t much better. Bruised and torn flesh from the bullet, decaying teeth, cold-cracked lips, skin lesions, popped blood vessels from alcohol consumption. Age: hard to tell, probably mid-forties, maybe older. Body type: an inch or two under six feet, skinny to the point of emaciation. Identifying characteristics: strawberry birthmark on the upper right arm; thin scar a couple of inches long on the underside of a narrow, pointed chin; long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple; knobs on two right finger knuckles that indicated the hand had once been broken.

  The most interesting thing was three other scars, old ones, in a place you wouldn’t expect to find them — the genital area. The largest measured more than three inches, a curving, jagged line across the abdomen and down alongside the shriveled scrotum. The other two were on the penis itself, one across the top, one on the left side, that had deformed its shape. As if he’d been slashed down there with some kind of sharp instrument.

  The morgue attendant, standing to one side of the sliding refrigerator drawer, saw where Runyon was looking under the lifted sheet. He said, “Looks like somebody tried to castrate him once.”

  “Or he tried to do it himself.”

  “Jesus, why would a guy want to cut off his own dick?”

  “This one had mental problems.”

  “His mental problems didn’t shoot his face off,” the attendant said. “You through here?”

  “I’m through.”

  The attendant sheeted the body again, slid the drawer shut. “Poor bugger,” he said. “Some life he must’ve had. At least now he don’t have to eat any more of the sandwich.”

  “What sandwich is that?”

  “Shit sandwich. Friend of mine says that’s what life is for most people — a shit sandwich, and every day we take another bite.”

  “A philosopher, your friend.”

  “Yeah. You agree with him?”

  “He won’t get any argument from me.”

  7

  Jake Runyon

  He spent the rest of the afternoon cruising the area within a ten-block radius of Visuals, Inc. No sign of Big Dog in Franklin Square or on the streets or in the soup kitchen or homeless shelter or among the handful of wary occupants of a cluttered, junk-infested encampment under the freeway interchange. A few of the street people he talked to owned up to knowing who Big Dog was, but none could or would say where he hung out. Most refused to say anything, even when money was offered. Even the soup kitchen and shelter volunteers were reluctant to speak freely. Fear seemed to be the motivating factor, not of Runyon or what he represented, but of Big Dog and of becoming involved in a homicide.

  Runyon didn’t blame them. The thick shit sandwich out here was hard enough to swallow without adding dead meat and hair from a junkyard dog to the loaf. At dusk he called it quits for the day. The wind had sharpened, turned gusty, and the smell of rain was in the air. Raw night ahead. Most of the homeless were already forted up; the soup kitchen had long lines and the shelter had been nearly full at four o’clock. Trouble, not answers, was what you invited by prowling unfamiliar territory on a cold, wet winter night.

  No food since a skimpy breakfast and he was hungry. He’d gone days without eating after Colleen died, but once he was away from Seattle his appetite had gradually returned. Two meals a day now, and starting to put back some of the weight he’d lost. He stopped at a Chinese restaurant on his way across Twin peaks, packed in a three-course meal. Egg rolls, mooshu pork, crispy Peking chicken — Colleen’s favorites. They’d eaten Chinese two or three times a week before she got sick, usually in the same little hole-in-the-wall off Pioneer Square. He’d continued the ritual after he moved down here, in honor of her and what they’d shared. Another way of keeping her memory close.

  His apartment was on Ortega, a few blocks off 19th Avenue, on the city’s west side. Four rooms, furnished, on the third floor of an old, anonymous stucco building. When the real estate agent first showed him the place, he’d automatically cataloged each room and its contents down to the last detail. Now that he’d lived there
for more than a month, he’d’ve been hard-pressed when away to say what color the living room walls were or whether or not there was a carpet in the bedroom. Familiarity made the details nonessential. That was the way his mind worked in professional circumstances: Particulars noted, retained for as long as necessary, then filed for future reference or erased completely from his memory banks, depending on their relative importance to the business at hand.

  Cold night, cold apartment. He turned on the heat, went into the kitchen to brew himself a cup of tea. Colleen’s drink, now his. The fifth of Wild Turkey was stored in the same cupboard with the package of darjeeling, still almost half full. Emergency rations. Colleen’s phrase: “We ought to keep emergency rations on hand, just in case we suddenly have something to celebrate.” Or something to mourn. They’d gotten into the emergency rations just twice, the first time when he was promoted from patrolman to detective, the second when one of her sculptures sold for $300 at a crafts fair. He’d gotten into the whiskey just once on his own, the night she died. Booze was a crutch. He didn’t need a crutch, unless you counted work as one. The things he needed he could never have — a time machine and a cure for ovarian cancer. But he’d brought the bottle along anyway. Not because he might need it again; because it was something else they’d shared.

  He took his tea into the living room, flipped on the TV. Five minutes of the seven o’clock news was all he could take. He shut the set off, sat there in the silence for a time, and then without thinking about it he got up and went to the phone. No need to look up the number. He’d dialed it often enough in the past few weeks.

  And listened often enough to the same silly recorded message. “Hello. This is the disembodied voice of Joshua Fleming. Leave your name and number and my real self will return your call as soon as it materializes.”