Spook

by Bill Pronzini

  “Make it five. Anything in the stash that wasn’t with the rest of the stuff in the knapsack?”

  “Might be the answer to number three, if there was. Something that named or pointed to the shooter. What’s Runyon’s take on all this?”

  “He’s not guessing.”

  I looked over the sheet of photographs, studied the one of the girl named Dorothy Lightfoot encased in the penciled heart. “High school yearbook. Graduating class, you think?”

  “Hard to tell. Nothing to ID the school or location.”

  “Could be Mono County, if there’s any connection to the phone call to Human Services.”

  “I can find out. Be easier if we knew the time frame.”

  “Hairstyles ought to give some idea.”

  “White kids, all of ’em,” Tamara said. “I never did pay much attention to white kids’ do’s. Before my time, anyway. Got to be pretty old, mat page.

  “Twenty years, at least. Maybe twenty-five or thirty.”

  “Doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “No, but I think I can get it narrowed down.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “Kerry. Advertising people get paid to notice hairstyles, clothes, things like that, past as well as present.” I folded and pocketed the sheet. “Either you or Runyon contact SFPD with all this?”

  “He did,” she said. “Stopped to see Jack Logan on his way back here. Only thing he held out was the page of photos... same as you’d’ve done.”

  “In my younger days, anyhow.”

  “One other thing he gave the lieutenant, also same as you would’ve — that envelope of kiddie porn. No more raw meat for Pablo. He’s gonna be spoiled meat pretty soon.”

  Right. The two types of felons cops hate more than any other are child molesters and kiddie-porn vendors. They’d put Pablo out of commission fast. Big Dog, too, but only if finding him proved easy. Otherwise, even with the new reforms in the department, they’d let the case slide again in favor of higher priority squeals.

  I said as much to Tamara. She said, “Runyon’s take, too. Big Dog’s still loose by this time tomorrow, he wants to go back out on the streets and see if maybe he can help put a leash on him.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Okay with me, but I’d check with you.”

  “Iffy.”

  “Runyon said he’d do the job on his own time.”

  “The hell he did.”

  “Man’s a workaholic. Sound familiar?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Only difference is, you got a life and he doesn’t. Nobody to go home to and a grown son who hates his guts, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sounds like compassion.”

  “Well, I been thinking about the man. About a lot of things. I got bad, but I also got people who care — family, friends. Folks like Runyon, they got all the bad and none of the good. I figure the least we can do is give him anything reasonable he asks for.”

  “Be his friends as well as his employers.”

  “Yeah, well, why not?”

  I felt paternal as hell toward her in that moment. Tamara Corbin — from hostile streetwise college kid to mature businesswoman in less than five years. I’d had a small hand in it and it made me feel proud, the way her real father must feel about her.

  On impulse I went over and put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Hey, why’d you do that?”

  I grinned and said, “Why not?”

  “Nineteen seventy-seven,” Kerry said.

  “Come on. The exact year?”

  “Want to make a little bet?”

  “You only looked at the photos for about two minutes.”

  “I don’t need any more time. I could give you a four- or five-year window — late seventies to early eighties — but ’seventy-seven seems right. The photos were probably taken in the late fall of ’seventy-six, a few months before the yearbook was released.”

  “Now you’re really guessing.”

  “Want to make a bet?” she asked again.

  “No way I’d ever bet against that smug look of yours.”

  “I don’t have a smug look.”

  “Go look in the mirror. All right, tell me why you’re so sure. Dazzle me with your deductive powers.”

  “I should’ve been a detective, huh? Stolen some of your thunder?”

  “God forbid. Come on, give.”

  “I worked on my high school yearbook,” she said. “Photos are usually taken in the fall of the year before the book comes out. Three or four months’ lead time, to allow for layout, proofreading, printing. Capito?”

  “Capito. But that doesn’t explain how you can pinpoint an exact year.”

  “ ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ for one thing.”

  “Who?”

  “Number one rated TV show in the late seventies. Three beautiful women private eyes who worked for a mysterious boss named Charlie.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You’re kidding. Famous jiggle show.”

  “What’s a jiggle show?”

  “Now I know you’ve heard that term before.”

  “If I have, I didn’t internalize it.”

  “They didn’t wear bras, bounced when they moved. Jiggle show.”

  “Oh. Sexy stuff.”

  “You sure you never watched the show?”

  “You know I don’t watch episodic TV.”

  One of her analytical looks. “Sometimes I could swear you’re putting me on. You can’t be that far out of the mainstream, can you?”

  “Why can’t I? The only things on the tube that interest me are sports and old movies. And I like my sex up close and personal, not bouncing and jiggling on a screen.”

  “That much I know isn’t a put on.”

  “So what about this ‘Charlie’s Angels’ show?”

  “Well, one of the actresses was Farrah Fawcett. Blonde, wore her hair in a long, distinctive style. Waves, feathers... never mind.” Kerry poked the grubby page under my nose and tapped one of the photos. “This style. It was all the rage back then. Three of the girls here have the Farrah look.”

  “Okay, I get it now. That explains the window but not the specific year.”

  “ ‘Charlie’s Angels’ first aired in the fall of ’seventy-six,” she said patiently, although the patience seemed to be wearing a little thin. “A lot of girls adopted the Farrah look right away — more then than later, when the novelty began to wear off.”

  “That’s not conclusive evidence.”

  “Not conclusive, no, but—”

  “So admit it, you’re just guessing.”

  “I am not guessing!”

  “Then give me conclusive proof the year is nineteen seventy-seven.”

  “The pin,” she said.

  “What pin?”

  “One of the girls is wearing a pin. Didn’t you notice it?”

  “No. Which girl?”

  The page came at me again; she almost banged me on the nose with it. A finger came around and jabbed a photo near the bottom. “This girl. This pin.”

  I squinted. Pin, all right, on a chubby girl’s black sweater. Up close, now that I was focused on it, it looked vaguely familiar.

  “Looks vaguely familiar,” I said.

  Kerry said, not quite in one of her exasperated growls, “Nineteen seventy-six. What does that mean to you?”

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Don’t start that again.”

  “Don’t start what again?”

  “The year nineteen seventy-six,” she said in one of her exasperated growls, “what happened that year, why is it historically important, what did it represent?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Bicentennial.”

  “The light dawns. That’s right, it was the Bicentennial. And a lot of people, especially in small towns, young people all over the country, celebrated by wearing Bicentennial pins. The girl in this photo is wearing a Bicentennial pin. After nineteen sev
enty-six, when the Bicentennial ended, hardly anybody wore the pins because there was no longer any reason to. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “Q.E.D.”

  “Huh?”

  “Gahh,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  She folded the sheet carefully, tucked it into my shirt pocket, glared at me, said, “You can be a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?” and walked out of the room.

  I sat down in my chair and tried to figure out what I’d done to set her off like that. Nothing, I decided. Chalk it up to the fact that women are emotional creatures. Emotional and volatile and unpredictable and often unreadable, not anything like men.

  Give Tamara enough of a starting point, she can find out just about anything in what she calls cyberspace. Fast, a lot faster than by dint of the creaky old methods I’d relied on for so many years. First thing Friday morning she took the three slim leads we had — Mono County, the page from what Kerry insisted was a 1977 high school yearbook, and the only Dorothy on the two-sided page of photos — and by early afternoon she had made connections and pulled up facts that answered some questions and opened up a potential can of worms.

  The page of photos was from the High Desert Municipal High School yearbook in Aspen Creek, a town of 2,500 residents not far from Mono Lake in Mono County. And Kerry had been right, by God, about the date being 1977. Dorothy Lightfoot had graduated that year, with honors.

  Tamara checked public records on file in Bridgeport, the Mono County seat. No birth certificate for Dorothy Lightfoot, but a marriage license had been issued to her and a man named Anthony Colton in the spring of 1979. If the union had produced any offspring, the birth had taken place elsewhere.

  There was another certificate on file in Mono, one that was a little surprising. On August 19, 1985, Dorothy Lightfoot Colton had died in Aspen Creek. The death certificate did not list the cause.

  “Twenty-five years, six months,” Tamara said. “Dag, that’s my age, almost exactly. Twenty-five’s too young to die.”

  “Any age is too young to die,” I said.

  “I guess. But twenty-five...”

  “Accident, maybe.”

  “Let’s see if there’s an obit anywhere online.”

  There wasn’t. Aspen Creek was too small to have a newspaper, and none of the other Mono sheets had the staff, time, or money to put their back issue files on the Internet.

  I said, “Find out if Anthony Colton still lives in Aspen Creek or anywhere else in the county.”

  He didn’t. Nor did anybody else named Colton.

  “Try the Lightfoot name.”

  While she was doing that, Runyon came in. We’d had him out doing legwork on the engineering employee case. He gave me a quick report on his findings, then I filled him in on what Tamara had learned so far.

  He asked, “Big Dog picked up yet?”

  “I checked in with Logan a little while ago. Still at large.”

  “So it’s okay if I see what I can do?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Pretty soon Tamara said, “Two hits on Lightfoot, neither one in Aspen Creek. Robert in Bridgeport, George in Lee Vining.” She’d been using Big Hugs for that search, a website that had been created to help trace adoptive parents and then expanded into other search areas. Through a subscription to that site, you can find out, among other things, the addresses of ninety percent of the U.S. population.

  Runyon said, “How about checking the Snow name?”

  “Good idea.”

  Very good idea, as it turned out. It produced a second surprise.

  One Vernon Snow, age 64, had died in Aspen Creek on August 19, 1985 — the same day as Dorothy Lightfoot Colton.

  “Dot and Mr. Snow,” Tamara said. “We got us a connection, for sure.”

  “What we need now is the cause of both deaths,” I said. “One of the papers up there must have something on file — obits, a news story if the deaths were related or anything other than natural.”

  “After three Friday afternoon. Not much chance of getting anybody to check files for us in a hurry.”

  “With the weekend, it might take days.” Small-town newspaper offices were generally closed on weekends, and always seemed to be understaffed and too busy to respond quickly to out-of-town requests. The same was true of small-town, rural county libraries; their hours were shorter, their staffs even smaller.

  Tamara ran a “death sweep” on Anthony Colton. That’s another of Big Hugs’ online search services: you can find out the date and place of death of ninety percent of American citizens deceased during the past fifty years or more, using the individual’s birth date and place of birth as a starting point. Anthony Colton of Mono County, CA, wasn’t one of them, however. Either he was still alive or among the ten percent whose deaths, for one reason or another, had gone unrecorded.

  Running a criminal background check on the four names would’ve been easy enough if Tamara’s friend Felicia had been on duty in SFPD’s communications department. But she wasn’t. Civilians, in which class private detectives fall, can’t access National Crime Information Center computer files, and without specific details Tamara couldn’t pull up the information on her own without doing some illegal hacking. The check would have to wait until Monday morning, when Felicia was due back on the job.

  Runyon said, “I could drive up to Mono County, see what I can find out over the weekend.”

  Tamara and I both gave him a look. “Mono’s way up along the Nevada line,” I said. “Six or seven hundred miles, round trip. Three or four days altogether.”

  “I wouldn’t mind, if you don’t need me on Monday.”

  I considered it. “Well... it might save us some time, at that. Always easier to dig out details in person. But the client might not want to authorize the extra expense.”

  “I could call him,” Tamara said.

  “What’s the schedule look like first of next week?”

  “Christmas week. Not much happening.

  “All right. Call Steve Taradash, see what he says.”

  Taradash said okay. So we said the same to Runyon. If the workaholic wanted to feed his habit with a twelve-hundred mile roundtrip drive, might as well let him do it. God knew I’d done enough of that kind of feeding myself over the long haul.

  14

  Tamara

  She trudged up the stairs to Claudia’s flat, keyed open the door — and there was Horace, big as life, bigger, all duded up in a sport coat and tie, sitting on the damn sofa with her sister.

  Tamara stopped short. Been a long day and she was tired, she was cold and damp from a two-block walk in the rain, and she was hungry. All she wanted was something to eat, a long hot bath, and a book that’d put her to sleep in less than ten pages. Instead, just as she was starting to drag herself out of the glooms, get her head together, she had this to deal with.

  She said to Claudia, “Sister Judas.”

  “Now don’t fly off the handle—”

  “How many times did I ask you, beg you, don’t let no sweet-talkin’ longhair musicians come round here?”

  “Don’t blame Claudia,” Horace said. He was on his big feet now. “I talked her into it. We’re both hurting, Tamara, we have to get this situation resolved.”

  She ignored him. Damn room looked like a stage set for a dumb-ass holiday play. Lights turned down low, gas fire going, Claudia’s tree all lit up and twinkling blue and green in the bay window, Christmas CD humming and jingling in the background. He’d talked her into it. Sure, right. Looked like they’d planned it together. Sister Judas and the Cello King, co-conspirators.

  “Where’re the caterers?” she said. “Call ’em in. I can sure use a glass of bubbly.”

  “Caterers?” Claudia said. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Never mind.”

  Horace said, “Tamara, baby...”

  “Who’s that barking? Some stray? Better let him out before he pees all o
ver your Persian carpet.”

  “Please don’t be a smartass about this. Can’t you just sit down and talk things over with Horace like a responsible adult?”

  “Horace who?”

  Claudia sighed. Ever since they were kids she’d done a lot of sighing, usually over something Tamara said or did that she didn’t approve of. She was four years older, ten pounds heavier, one shade darker, and as far as Tamara was concerned, two shades uglier. She was also a born-again vegan, wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t grown organically and washed eleven times in purified water, didn’t have enough sense of humor to stuff an olive, got her jollies reading obscure law precedents, refused to own a TV, and had a boyfriend who wasn’t only another lawyer but an oreo with a tighter ass than hers. And she thought her little sis had problems.

  “I’m outta here,” Tamara said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to stay put and have this out with Horace.”

  “Don’t know anybody named Horace.”

  Another sigh. “I’m the one who’s leaving. I have a date with Brian — I told you that this morning. We’re going to The Nutcracker.”

  “You ask me, Brian ought to have his nuts cracked.”

  “... What kind of thing is that to say?”

  “I don’t know what you see in that man. He must do something pretty terrific in bed, all I can figure.”

  “Tamara...”

  “What’s his idea of foreplay? Reading you one of his briefs?”

  “That’s enough!”

  She looked somewhere between Claudia and Horace and said as if she were doing stand-up in front of a hostile audience, “What do you call two lawyers screwing? Anybody know?”

  Breathless suspense while they waited for the punch line.

  “Joint practice.”

  Thud.

  She let go a sigh of her own, one that outdid Claudia’s, threw her coat and purse onto one of the chairs, and stalked into the kitchen.

  Unopened quart of milk she’d bought was in the fridge. She poured a tall glass full up, gulped it in three swallows. They were talking in the living room; she could hear the low mutter of voices but none of the words. Just as well. Who cared what they were saying? She wasn’t hungry any more, but she found a cold chicken leg and stripped it to the bone in ten seconds flat. Drank more milk. Rummaged up a hunk of cheese and took it to the kitchen window, the one that overlooked Fell Street and the long strip of park. Panhandle looked deserted, lonesome, headlights on the cars passing and the house and street lights opposite on Oak all blurry and cold. Damn rain.