Zigzag

by Bill Pronzini

  “I’m not a salesman. You’re Mr. Rodriguez?”

  “I asked you what you want.”

  “To talk to the manager. Is that you?”

  “No, my wife, but she’s at work.” He didn’t say why he wasn’t also at work, but then maybe he had a night job. And a tolerant employer, if so, since he reeked of beer. “No empty units, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “It’s not. What I’m looking for is some information on a couple who lived here over a year ago. The Voks—Antanas and Elza Vok.”

  “Them two.” Rodriguez scowled at me. He was a big guy, forty or so, with hairy arms and chest and a hanging beer gut that hid the belt buckle on his trousers. “They’re dead, killed in a car smash. Why you want to know about them?”

  “I’m trying to locate their next of kin.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “Can you help me, Mr. Rodriguez?”

  “No. I mind my own business, man. Besides, them other guys was pretty damn creepy.”

  “What other guys?”

  “The two come around here and took some of the Voks’ stuff away.”

  “When was this? How soon after the car smash?”

  “Morning after he died in the hospital.”

  Fast work, if Rodriguez’s memory was accurate. The kind that suggests urgency and purpose.

  “Can you describe the men?” I asked.

  “After a year? Come on, man.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d try to remember.”

  He didn’t have to try very hard; he remembered them, all right. Pretty soon he said, “One was like the Voks. You know, foreign.”

  “Lithuanian?”

  A fat shoulder lifted, dropped again.

  “What about the other one?”

  “White guy. Butt ugly, built like an ox. They wasn’t the painting brothers, that’s for sure.”

  “Painting brothers?”

  “Yeah. Sign on the door of the van they had.”

  “The Painting Brothers, that was the company name?”

  “No, no. The brothers’ name was the same as that guy used to be on late-night TV. The talk show guy.”

  “I don’t watch late-night TV.”

  “Leno, man. L-e-n-o. Leno Brothers Painting.”

  “Do you recall where the business was located?”

  “Nah. My memory ain’t that good.”

  “How old would you say the two men were?”

  “Not as old as the Voks. I didn’t look at them too close. Creepy, like I said.”

  “In what way?”

  “Just creepy,” Rodriguez said. “You know how you meet somebody, strangers, you get these vibes tell you you don’t want to have nothing to do with them? Like that.”

  “Were you the one who let them into the Voks’ apartment?”

  “Not me. My wife took ’em up.”

  “How did you and she know they were authorized to remove the Voks’ belongings?”

  “They had a paper.”

  “What kind of paper?”

  Another shrug. “Maria was okay with it. Didn’t think they was as creepy as I did … ain’t nothing much bothers her. Anyway, why should we care? Sooner they got the stuff out, sooner we could rent the unit again. The owner don’t like empty apartments.”

  “Did they take everything the Voks owned?”

  “Left the furniture,” Rodriguez said. “Clothes, too. Crappy stuff, all of it. We had to dump the clothes at Goodwill. But not the furniture—new renters didn’t have none of their own, and they didn’t care it was crappy.”

  “What exactly did the men haul away?”

  “Cartons full of stuff. Took ’em a couple of hours.”

  “Any idea what was in the cartons?”

  Shrug. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  “Were you or your wife ever in the apartment when the Voks lived in it?”

  “Hell, no. They didn’t want nobody in there. Kept to themselves, never had much to say.”

  “Did they have many visitors?”

  “Not that I seen. Never paid no attention.” Rodriguez belched beerily and squinted down his nose at me. “Hey, all these questions. How come you want to know so much about the Voks?”

  “I told you, I’m trying to track down their next of kin.”

  “Yeah, well, you come to the wrong place, man.” He belched again. “I got no more time to talk. Things to do inside.”

  Like open another beer. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Rodriguez. Buenas tardes.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and backed up and shut the door in my face.

  9

  I looked up Leno Brothers Painting on my trusty new iPhone. Just about every business has a website these days, and this outfit was no exception. They were located in Campbell, a small city adjacent to San Jose on the west. The two brothers were Floyd and Harvey and there were photographs of each on the site; the one named Harvey appeared to qualify as “butt ugly, built like an ox.” They evidently ran a cut-rate outfit with emphasis on speed rather than quality of work. “Nobody Beats Our Prices. Fastest Brushes in the West.”

  The address turned out to be in an industrial area not far off Highway 17. Narrow piece of property sandwiched between an outfit that sold solenoid valves and a plumbing supply company’s pipe yard. The building’s exterior was neither run-down nor prosperous looking—just a small, nondescript blue-collar business like thousands of others. A none too clean white van sat in the driveway alongside, facing the street.

  An overhead bell rang a couple of off-key notes when I entered. The interior, unoccupied at the moment, wasn’t much to look at, either. There was a linoleum-topped counter with some paint-sample books on it, a stack of gallon cans with a placard propped against them that had the words Sale—Big Savings written on it, and walls adorned with photographs of freshly painted houses by way of advertisement for the Leno brothers’ handiwork.

  Beyond the counter was an areaway that apparently led to a workroom and storage area at the rear. A man wearing a stained white smock and painters’ cap appeared there and walked up to the counter, wiping his hands on a large rag, not quite hurrying. The Leno named Floyd—smaller, leaner, and older than his brother, craggy faced, eyes the shiny color of black olives. His forehead, under a thatch of thinning, dust-colored hair, was oddly crosshatched with a pattern of lines that resembled nothing so much as a tic-tac-toe drawing.

  “Yes, sir? Help you?”

  “Mr. Leno?”

  “Floyd Leno, that’s right.”

  Under normal circumstances I would have showed him ID and come straight to the point of my visit, as I’d done with Lenihan and Rodriguez. But these were not normal circumstances. So I played a role instead.

  “I’m not here about a painting job or anything like that,” I said, making my voice hesitant and a little nervous, as if I were unsure of myself. “I … well, I understand you knew a man named Vok.”

  “Who?”

  “Vok. Antanas Vok.”

  You had to be paying close attention to see the change in his eyes, like shutters coming down over a pair of tiny windows. Otherwise his expression remained the same. “Name’s not familiar. Customer of ours?”

  “I don’t think so, no. I thought he must be … well, a good friend of you and your brother.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “On account of your brother and another friend cleaned out the Voks’ apartment after they were killed in that accident last year.”

  He looked at me steadily while he did some more hand-wiping; the rag smelled strongly of turpentine. “Who told you that?”

  “Tenant in the building where they used to live.”

  “He made a mistake,” Leno said. “I told you, I don’t know anybody named Vok.”

  “But maybe your brother does. Is he here?”

  “Out on a job. What’s your interest in this Vok anyway?”

  I cleared my throat before I said, “I met him where he used to work, not long before
he was killed. We had a talk one night.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “About this … group he belonged to.”

  “What kind of group?”

  “People who believe in doing things other people wouldn’t approve of. It sounded like something I’d like try, but I … I guess I wasn’t ready at the time. And then there was the accident and Vok hadn’t given me the names of anybody else in the group, so I tried to forget about it. But I couldn’t. Things haven’t been going too well for me lately, and now … well, I’m ready for a change, a new way of living the rest of my life.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”

  “You sure? I mean, I’m serious about wanting to get into this group. Real serious. I’ve got a little money saved, if that’s what it takes…”

  Apparently it wasn’t. “You’re not making any sense,” he said. There was a cold steel edge in his voice now. The black eyes no longer seemed shuttered; they were fixed on me in a glazed, unblinking stare, like that of a corpse. “And you’re wasting my time; I got work to do. Go peddle your bullshit someplace else.”

  “It’s not bullshit—”

  “It is to me. You know what’s good for you, mister, you won’t come around here anymore. My brother’s got even less patience than me, and a mean temper when he’s bugged for no reason.”

  “Are you … threatening me?”

  “Call it friendly advice,” Leno said. He threw the smelly rag down on the counter, gestured at the door. “On your way.”

  Bust. Maybe I hadn’t played the role well enough. Maybe Leno and his brother weren’t involved in a devil cult after all. Maybe, if they were, the cult wasn’t taking in new communicants. Or maybe in order to join you had to be sponsored by one of the members, to ensure complete secrecy.

  Too many maybes. Unless Tamara could turn up something useful on the Leno brothers, what they amounted to was a dead end.

  10

  I don’t like hospitals.

  My antipathy isn’t as strong as Jake Runyon’s—he spent long months watching his second wife die of ovarian cancer in a Seattle hospital—but it’s strong enough. I’ve been inside one or another too damn often, as patient and visitor both, the last time in Placerville on a two-day vigil after Kerry’s kidnap ordeal, praying for her to pull out of a semi-coma. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone you love hooked up to machines and IVs, dying or perilously close to it. No one who has gone through that can ever be comfortable in a hospital again, even on the kind of brief professional mission that took me to South Bay Memorial. I could feel myself tightening up, my pulse rate jump, as soon as I walked through the door into the main lobby. Health care facility. Right. The sooner I got this visit over with, the better my health care would be.

  I told the woman staffing the Information Desk that I wanted to speak with Nurse Ellen Bowers on a personal matter. She checked a list, made a call, and then directed me to the nurses’ station on the third floor. Two nurses up there, one of each sex; the woman wasn’t Ellen Bowers. Ms. Bowers was “on her rounds,” the male nurse told me, and expected back shortly.

  There were some chairs in a small waiting area, one of which I was invited to occupy. So I sat there and did what I could to block out the hospital sounds and smells by ruminating on the Rodriguez and Floyd Leno interviews.

  Harvey Leno and an unidentified Lithuanian, with a paper allegedly authorizing the removal of the Voks’ personal belongings. Why in such a hurry? There could be an innocent cultural explanation, if the Lithuanian was a friend or close relative. It also could have something to do with the nature of those belongings, if Lenihan had been closer to the truth than he realized in his made-up description of the apartment’s black arts–related contents. No way now that I could see, after the Leno blow-off, of finding out which.

  I’d been waiting there seven or eight minutes when Ellen Bowers returned to the station. I hadn’t let myself form any preconceived notions about what she’d be like, and it was just as well. There was nothing particularly memorable about her unless you were a man attracted to large-breasted women—Lenihan’s preference, no doubt. Late thirties, wheat-blond hair, a little on the plump side. Large gray eyes, the irises rimmed in black—her best feature. A pleasantly quizzical smile took on a sardonic edge when I introduced myself and told her how I’d gotten her name.

  “My good friend Joe,” she said, as if he were anything but. “What did he tell you about me?”

  “About you personally? Nothing.” I was not about to repeat Lenihan’s uncalled-for sexual comment. “Just that you were the source of an article he wrote for his blog about a year ago, concerning an accident victim named Antanas Vok.”

  “Oh … that. Is that why you’re here? I thought maybe Joe told you I…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I had a pretty good idea what she’d been about to say. If Lenihan bragged about her as an easy score to others as casually as he had to a stranger like me, he was an even bigger schmuck than I’d taken him for.

  “You were present when Vok delivered his vengeance threat, is that right?”

  “Yes, I was there, and I wish to God I hadn’t been. Is that why you’re here? That unholy business?”

  I said it was, and gave her a look at the license photostat.

  She blinked at it. “Why would a private investigator be interested, after all this time? My God, don’t tell me something’s happened to … the person who was threatened?”

  “No. Confidential matter, Ms. Bowers.”

  “You realize I can’t tell you the person’s name?”

  “That isn’t one of my questions. Do you mind talking about the incident?”

  Several seconds ticked away. She seemed about to decline, then changed her mind. “I suppose not,” she said. “But you’ll have to make it brief. I have duties.”

  “As brief as I can. What Joe Lenihan wrote on his blog is essentially what happened that day?”

  “Exactly what happened. I’m never likely to forget what that dreadful little man said and did before he died.”

  “The threat was just as Lenihan quoted it?”

  “Word for word,” Ms. Bowers said. “I have a very good memory. Too good in that case.”

  “Would you say Vok was in his right mind at the time?”

  “Right mind? I doubt that man was ever in his right mind.”

  “So you don’t think what he said had any sort of factual basis.”

  “Well, he believed every single word. Actually believed he’d made a pact with the devil. Oh, he was one of them, all right. You should have seen his face. His eyes … I swear they glowed like fire the whole time. Brrr. Gives me chills just thinking about it.”

  “You witnessed him passing the black host?”

  “That little black disc? Yes. Vok grabbed the man’s arm and pushed the thing into his hand.”

  “Where did he get it, do you know?”

  “It must’ve been in his shoe.”

  “Shoe?”

  “As weak and near death as he was that morning,” Ms. Bowers said, “he kept asking for his shoe, the right shoe. Doctor Adamson, the attending physician, said it couldn’t hurt to grant the request if the shoes hadn’t been disposed of in the ER cleanup. They hadn’t been, and I brought the right one up.”

  “Was it Doctor Adamson who telephoned … let’s call him the victim?”

  “Yes. The phone call was Vok’s first demand; he made it over and over until the doctor agreed. Dying patients’ final requests, no matter how strange, are honored whenever possible.”

  “What was the victim’s reaction to the black host?”

  “No reaction, he just stared at it. But his wife … she gasped and turned white as a sheet, I thought she was going to faint when Vok started babbling about Satan.”

  “Did either of them say anything to him?”

  “No.”

  “Or he say anything more to them?”

  “Not a word. The victim shoved the thing int
o his pocket, grabbed his wife’s arm, and hurried her out of there. Vok flatlined less than two minutes after they were gone.”

  “What about the other man in the room? What can you tell me about him?”

  “… I’m sorry?”

  “The other man, the one who evidently came to visit Vok.”

  “I don’t know who you mean,” Ms. Bowers said. “As far as I’m aware, the patient had no other visitors at all.”

  “There was no one else in the room at the time?”

  “Just the victim and his wife, Vok, and myself. Did Joe tell you there was?”

  “No.”

  “Well, whoever did was mistaken or misinformed.”

  No, I thought, the individual was making it up. And why would Peter Erskine tell me such a dead-bang lie?

  11

  The main ingredients in detective work are the gathering and interpretation of facts, plus a certain amount of legwork. But instinct also plays a role when you’ve been at it long enough, a kind of sixth sense that generally comes into play in one of two instances: when an investigation is proceeding well and nearing conclusion, or when the facts indicate you’ve unintentionally gone or deliberately been led astray. In the latter case, the intuitive feeling is sharp and grows sharper the more attention you pay to it.

  Something was wrong here. The kind of wrongness that smacks of manipulation and deceit.

  I sat ruminating in the hospital parking lot for the better part of ten minutes. The thinking produced a couple of notions, neither of which I liked worth a damn. Follow-up time. I programmed Erskine’s office address into the GPS and pointed the car north.

  The address was just off El Camino Real in downtown Menlo Park, a few miles from the Erskines’ Atherton home—an older, modernized building that housed three attorneys, an architectural firm, and an orthodontist in addition to Peter Erskine, Financial Advisor. His business name was displayed in fancy gilt script on the frosted glass door. I opened it and went on in.