Spook

by Bill Pronzini

  I packed up six cartons and hauled them out to the car. Two at a time, just to prove that I could do it without working up much of a sweat.

  Mid-afternoon did not mean three o’clock, after all, not in the Department of Human Services. Evelyn Sukimoto wasn’t there when I walked in at five minutes before three. She wasn’t there at three-fifteen, or at three-thirty. At twenty to four I caught the smarmy young guy giving me a satisfied little grin, as if he enjoyed watching me sit and wait. He’d make a perfect spin doctor, all right. Help cover backsides, help screw the citizens who didn’t contribute campaign funds and couldn’t be bought. Up the machine! Politics for politicians! Don’t legislate, obfuscate and manipulate!

  People came in, people went out. Staff, mostly, a good ethnic mix of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Caucasians. The younger ones wore determined, upbeat expressions, moved with a certain brisk purpose; the older ones seemed tired and stoic, their movements almost lethargic. No surprise there. Urban social work is a young person’s game. The players under thirty believe they can make a difference, and work hard at the job. The veterans have had too many daily encounters with grinding poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, spousal abuse, street abuse, plus all the myriad forms of political b.s., to retain an outward show of optimism. Some had turned bitter, cynical. Even the ones who remained idealists at heart had a defeated, worn-out demeanor, like structurally sound buildings with weathered, graffiti-scarred facades.

  Evelyn Sukimoto was one of the young, determined variety. She showed up finally at two minutes past four, fast-stepping as if she couldn’t wait to get to her desk. She was about twenty-five, slender, nice features; silky, glistening black hair hung almost to her waist. Frozen Face glanced up at her as she approached his desk, then quickly avoided eye contact by peering again at his computer screen. Right in character: He wasn’t going to tell her she had a visitor. But I was already on my feet, and I got to her before she could pass through to the inner sanctum.

  “Ms. Sukimoto?”

  She didn’t know me and I didn’t look homeless, but she offered up a nice little smile anyway. “Yes?”

  I said I’d been waiting to talk to her and could she give me ten minutes or so of her time? “It’s about the homeless man who was murdered last week. Spook.”

  She lost the smile. “Are you with the police?”

  “Private investigator.” I proved it to her with my license photostat, told her what we’d been retained to do.

  “Well... all right, come with me.”

  We went through the door, then through a maze of cubicles to one with her name on a little plate next to its doorless entrance. Desk, desk chair, straight-backed chair, and not much else. We both sat down.

  “I don’t know how I can help you,” she said. “Spook wasn’t one of my clients; I hardly knew him. Why did you come to me?”

  I relayed what Jake Runyon had told Tamara. The smile came back, sliced wry this time, when she heard Pete Snyder’s name.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Pete the Stud.”

  “Stud?”

  “He trunks so, anyway. Hits on me every time he sees me.”

  “Sounds like you don’t much like him.”

  “What’s to like? He’s married, for one thing. Even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “Too pushy?”

  “Too white. I don’t date white guys.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “I was married to one for ten months. That’s why.”

  Or to that.

  “Not that I’m bitter or anything,” Ms. Sukimoto lied. “It’s just that... well, he was such a shit. My ex, I mean. And you know the old expression. Once burned, twice shy.”

  I made a polite noise this time. Intended it to be polite, at least. It came out sounding like a dyspeptic grunt.

  “Anyway, like I said, I hardly knew that poor man. Murdered... my God, of all people. I still have trouble believing it. But I don’t know a thing about him or why he was killed.”

  “You told Snyder you’d had an inquiry about Spook. A caller who wanted to know where to find him.”

  “Well, I didn’t have an inquiry. I mean, the man on the phone didn’t t ask for me, specifically.”

  “Who did he ask for?”

  “Spook’s caseworker. Janet Coolibra.”

  “By name?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The call was referred to Janet’s number. She had to go out for a few minutes and she was expecting another call, so she asked me to pick up for her. That’s how I happened to talk to the man.”

  “Did he identify himself?”

  “No. All he said was that he was trying to locate a homeless man named Spook.”

  “You ask him why?”

  “He said Spook might be somebody he knew once. And if so, maybe he could help him get off the streets.”

  “And you told him about Visuals, Inc.?”

  “I didn’t know about Visuals, Inc. then. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have given out the information to a stranger over the phone.”

  “Did you give him Janet’s name?”

  “Yes. He said he’d contact her.”

  “Did he, do you know?”

  “He didn’t. She never heard from him.”

  “How did he sound to you? Young, old?”

  “Not young.”

  “How old, would you say?”

  “Well... not ancient, but... you know, an older man.”

  That statement was accompanied by a sidewise flick of her gaze, as if she were thinking, You know, somebody your age. Youth is a wonderful thing — if you happen to be looking at the world through young eyes.

  I asked, “How would you characterize his tone?”

  “Characterize?”

  “Casual, determined, angry?”

  “I don’t know, sort of... cold and flat, I guess. The only time it changed, got a little angry, was after I put him on hold. Oh, and there was something funny about his voice.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Well, kind of slurred. But not as if he was drunk.”

  “Speech impediment?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You said you put him on hold. Why?”

  “Janet’s other call came through — call forwarding.”

  “At what point in the conversation?”

  “We hadn’t been talking long,” Ms. Sukimoto said, “less than a minute. I think I’d just said I couldn’t help him, I wasn’t Spook’s caseworker, and he was saying couldn’t I just give him some idea of where he could find Spook.”

  “How long’d you keep him on hold?”

  “Oh, a couple of minutes. I had to take a message for Janet.”

  “And he didn’t like being kept waiting.”

  “No. I didn’t mean to but I guess I cut him off kind of abruptly to answer the other call. He said something about that, told me not to do it again — don’t put him on hold again because he was calling long distance.”

  “Those were his words, long distance?”

  Wrinkles appeared in Ms. Sukimoto’s brow. “Actually, that wasn’t what he said. He said he was calling from... some county. What was it? Oh, right. Mono County. ‘I’m calling from Mono County.’ ”

  “Is that all? No specific location?”

  “That’s all.”

  Mono County was in the eastern part of the state, in the high desert along the Nevada line. Large in terms of square miles, but with a relatively small population. There were no towns of any size, and only one or two with more than five thousand inhabitants.

  Not much of a lead without additional information. “Older but not ancient” and the speech impediment indicated he might not be the same mole-cheeked man who’d been asking Spook’s whereabouts among the homeless along lower Potrero. Which meant what, if that were the case? Two men looking for Spook for different reasons, or for the same reason independently? Or was there some sort of connection between the t
wo?

  11

  Jake Runyon

  It took him three and a half days to track down Big Dog.

  He might’ve cut that time in half if he’d been able to devote all his working hours to the task. But Tamara Corbin had given him a handful of interview assignments on another case that took up all of Wednesday afternoon and half of Thursday. Routine work — white collar offices in the city, an upper middle-class home in Palo Alto. He preferred the streets, bleakness and all. His meat, his comfort zone.

  He found out a couple of things on the Spook investigation before he found Big Dog. One was what Pete Snyder had told him, the only new information he’d gotten out of anybody at Visuals, Inc. The other came from one of the homeless who’d known Spook, the one called Pinkeye. Why he had that street name Runyon never did find out. Both his eyes were brown, milky with cataracts, the whites more or less clear, and there wasn’t anything else pink about him. Big, loose-jointed black man, face mostly hidden behind a grizzled, gray prophet’s beard. And eager enough to talk once he had two dollars of Runyon’s money tucked away in a saggy pants pocket. He knew Big Dog, too, well enough to steer clear of him. (“Bad dude, cut your throat for a dime and drink your blood afterward.”) Couldn’t help with Big Dog’s whereabouts; his information had to do with Spook.

  “I wonder what happened to his stuff,” he said.

  “What stuff?”

  “His stuff, man. Everybody out here’s got stuff.”

  “Police didn’t find anything on him.”

  “Sure they didn’t. Don’t keep your stuff on you, not if you want to keep it.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Got to have a hidey hole,” Pinkeye said. “Everybody got a hidey hole somewhere. You got one yourself, I bet.”

  “You know where Spook’s was?”

  “No idea, man. You tell anybody where you got your stuff hid, ain’t gonna be yours for long.”

  “What kind of stuff did Spook have?”

  “Bright and pretty, that’s what he collected. Sidewalks, gutter, garbage cans, Dumpsters... scoured ’em all. All kinds of bright and pretty.”

  “Such as? Give me an example.”

  “One time,” Pinkeye said, “I seen him pick up a gold earring. Yeah. One big old gold earring, right off the sidewalk. Not real gold, just a bright and pretty, but the way he grinned and hopped around you’d’ve thought it was. I asked him what was he gonna do with it. ‘Give it to Dot,’ he says.”

  “Dot. His ghost woman?”

  “Yeah. One of old Spook’s head people. ‘She likes pretty things,’ he says. ‘Gonna give it to her, she’ll look real pretty, maybe she’ll forgive me.’ ”

  “Forgive him for what?”

  “Wouldn’t say. Talked to his head people but wouldn’t talk about ’em.”

  “So you figure he kept the earring with the rest of his stuff.”

  “What else, man? Dot wasn’t no real woman. Can’t give no bright and pretty to somebody only lives inside your head.”

  Runyon had gone back to Visuals, Inc. and talked to the client and to Meg Lawton. Both were surprised to hear that Spook had had a hidey hole, collected shiny objects; he’d never said anything on either subject. Franklin Square had been next. No help from Delia or any of the other homeless who hung out there. No help from anybody else he talked to.

  After he finished up the last of the interviews on Wednesday afternoon, he drove to the Potrero neighborhood and picked up where he’d left off, widening the radius of his search. Lower Potrero from Duboce to Twentieth on the north; all the way past Highway 280 to Third and the area called Dogpatch on the south; back north and then west toward Army. Street people, liquor store clerks, employees and inhabitants of greasy spoons and bars, plus a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen he hadn’t tried before. And finally, midday on Friday, all the legwork paid off.

  Liquor store with heavily barred windows, near Mission on Twenty-fifth; a thin man of Middle Eastern descent behind a counter protected by a wall of bullet-proof glass. “Him, that one,” the man said when Runyon described Big Dog. “He better not come in here anymore. I don’t want his money, I told him I don’t want to see his face again.”

  “When was that? The last time you saw him?”

  “Only one time. The night before last. He comes in drunk, staggering, he wants to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I tell him I don’t have any Jack Daniel’s, he starts yelling. Dirty words, dirty names. Calls me an obscenity Muslim, an Arab terrorist. I am not a Muslim, I am not an Arab, I am not a terrorist. I tell him I am Jordanian, but he keeps right on calling me names. I tell him to get out or I call the police. He keeps on yelling obscenities. So I pick up the phone, I call the police, and then he leaves before they come.”

  “Any idea where he came from or where he went?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to know.”

  “He wanted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, you said?”

  “Jack Daniel’s. In this neighborhood.”

  “So he must’ve had money to pay for it.”

  “Yes, he had money. He waved his money, twenty dollars he waved while he called me an obscenity Arab Muslim terrorist.”

  Runyon found two other liquor stores in the teeming, mostly Latino neighborhood. Big Dog had been in both, had bought a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in one three days ago, the only bottle of Jack they’d had in stock; the second store hadn’t had any and he’d verbally abused the clerk there too. That placed him in the general vicinity. Another hour of canvassing, and Runyon located a panhandler on Twenty-third and Shotwell who admitted, in exchange for the usual cash dole, that he’d seen Big Dog in the neighborhood recently.

  “He’s a mean son of a bitch, drunk or sober. Knocked down an old guy got in his way the other night, just knocked him down and kicked him like he was a cat. Why’d he hafta move in on this neighborhood, for Chrissake?”

  “How long’s he been here?”

  “Week or so. Too freakin’ long.”

  “Ever see him before that?”

  “No. What you want with him?”

  Runyon said, “You know where he hangs?”

  “I think he’s got a room at the Commerce.”

  “Commerce? Doesn’t sound like a shelter.”

  “Nah. Roach hotel. One of them residence joints.”

  “Address?”

  “Right up on the next block. But he probly ain’t there now.”

  “No?”

  “I see him goin’ into Fat Tony’s a while ago.”

  “Fat Tony’s is what, a bar?”

  “Pool joint. Tobacco and pool. Twenty-fourth, near Mission.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Right before I come down here and I ain’t been here long.”

  Fat Tony’s turned out to be a storefront with a dirt-streaked plate glass window that you couldn’t see through clearly until you stood up close. Long, gloomy, droplit interior, counter and cases and shelves of tobacco along one wall, the rest of the space taken up with pool and snooker tables in decent repair. Only one of the tables was in use, by two Latino men. The only other occupant was a huge blob of a man on a ladderback stool.

  On the wall behind the fat man was what looked like a blow-up of a cartoonish Christmas card. Santa Claus on a snowy rooftop, his sleigh and reindeer parked to one side, the animals lying down in their traces, the words SEASON’S GREETINGS FROM SANTA in scraggly letters in the snow. It seemed out of place in these surroundings until Runyon got close enough to see the details. St. Nick was standing in partial profile, a stream of urine coming from his unbuttoned trousers, writing his holiday message in dirty yellow. Right. Not out of place at all.

  The fat man said, “Ain’t that a pisser?”

  “What?”

  “Cartoon.” Rumbling sounds rolled out of the massive chest. “A real pisser, ain’t it?”

  “Hilarious,” Runyon said. “I’m looking for Big Dog.”

  “Who?”

  Runyon described him. The
fat man’s jolly little smile turned upside down. “Yeah, he was here. Half hour ago, maybe.”

  “First time, or he been in before?”

  “Couple times before.”

  “Buy tobacco? Shoot pool?”

  “Neither. Don’t buy nothing, ain’t a player. Asshole drunk. Pig-dirty bum.”

  “Then why does he come in?”

  “Lookin’ for one of my regulars. Pablo.”

  “Pablo who?”

  “Just Pablo. Another asshole. Fuckin’ butcher, what I hear.”

  “Butcher?”

  “Raw meat salesman. You dig what I mean?”

  Runyon nodded. what kind of raw meat?”

  “What kind you think?”

  “Child porn?”

  “What I hear. Little kiddies. I hate that shit, man.”

  “Makes two of us. Big Dog one of Pablo’s customers?”

  Shrug. “One and one adds up to two, don’t it?”

  “Where can I find Pablo?”

  “Works in a tacqueria on Mission. Grease cook.”

  “That where you sent Big Dog today?”

  “What I told him, same as you.”

  Runyon pried loose the name and general location of the tacqueria. Then he said, “If you hate what this butcher peddles, why do you let him hang out in here?”

  “Why?” Fat Tony seemed surprised at the question. “I got to make a living, too, don’t I?”

  The tacqueria was a hole-in-the-wall, overheated by the big cookstove and ovens behind the serving counter, the air clogged with the smells of chile peppers and fried lard. Two of the eight tables had customers. At one an old man was finishing a burrito in careful little bites. And against the rear wall, a big man sat hunched vulturelike over a table strewn with plates, beer bottles, and spilled food. He had a ratty red and green wool cap on his head, wore what might have been a recently purchased secondhand rain slicker with the collar pulled up and new, thick-soled black shoes. The slicker already had foodstains on it, some dried, some fresh. He clenched a dripping taco in one hand, was using two fingers of the other hand to scoop up beans and shovel them into his mouth.