Fever nd-33

by Bill Pronzini

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, it must have been about a year ago. Until then she was attractive and very friendly, we had some lovely chats about art. She’s an artist, you know. Watercolors and charcoal sketches. I’ve seen some of them, she’s quite talented.”

  When he got to the apartment he booted up his laptop and ran a quick check on Bryn Darby. Her address was 2511 Moraga Street, just a few blocks away. Age 33. Born Bryn Christine Cordell in Marin County. Married in 1995 to Robert Darby, an attorney with offices on West Portal. Divorce filed by her husband, March of this year. One child, a boy, Robert Jr., age 9. Primary custody granted to the father.

  That was as far as he let himself dig. What the hell was he doing, following a crazy compulsion like this? Invading a stranger’s privacy, gathering information on her, without any justification. Wrong-headed, unprofessional. Illegal, like the goverment and their covert spying. Like a damn stalker.

  Cracking up.

  Sometimes, lately, that was just how he felt-as if he were coming apart again, slowly, one little crack at a time, the way he had after Colleen died.

  I t was Wednesday afternoon before he got back to the Youngblood pro bono case. He preferred to move ahead quickly on his investigations, get them wrapped up ASAP, move on to the next. But other cases, higher-priority cases, kept interfering. One of those, the wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, had taken a couple of new turns that kept him hopping all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning. At least he was busy, a lot of his time accounted for. The busier you were, the less you had to interface with your private demons.

  Aaron Myers worked as an office manager for an outfit called Fresh To You Frozen Foods in South San Francisco. Runyon made the mistake of driving down there instead of calling ahead to make sure Myers was on the job today. He wasn’t. Out of the office, no reason given. Expected back tomorrow.

  He drove back into the city by way of Army Street and stopped at Myers’s apartment building in Noe Valley. More wasted time. Nobody answered the bell. He wrote “Call me, please” on the back of one of his business cards and dropped it through the mailbox slot that bore Myers’s name.

  It was two o’clock when he walked into Bayside Video on Chestnut Street. Youngblood’s friend and chess partner, Dre Janssen, was there but busy with a customer. Runyon browsed through the section marked CLASSICS while he waited. Casablanca, one of Colleen’s favorites. The Searchers, one of his in the days when he’d cared about movies as more than just noise producers and time passers. Young Frankenstein. Funny film; he remembered Colleen breaking up every time somebody said “Frau Blucher” and horses started whinnying off-camera. It wasn’t until after they’d seen it that he found out why the horses kept freaking, that Blucher is the German word for glue. Ron had told him-Ron Cain, his former partner, his friend, dead twelve years now in the high-speed chase that had bitched up Runyon’s leg and caused him to take an early retirement from the Seattle PD. Colleen, Ron, people he’d cared about-gone. Andrea, too, even though it had been a long time since he’d had any feelings for her. The only family he had left was Joshua, and his son alive was as irretrievably lost to him as all the rest were dead…

  The customer was leaving now. Runyon went over, introduced himself, and explained why he was there. Janssen’s response was a heavy sigh blown through both nostrils. He was tall, thin, freckles like dark spots of rust sprinkled across his cheeks and one of those patches of chin whiskers popular among young men these days. On his lean, ascetic face the whiskers looked like nothing so much as transplanted pubic hair.

  “So Brian’s in trouble,” he said.

  “His mother thinks so. So do I.”

  “Well, I’m not too surprised. But I don’t know that I can tell you much-I haven’t seen or talked to him in months.”

  “Mrs. Youngblood told me you and Brian play chess regularly.”

  “Used to. All in the past now.”

  “How come?”

  “That’s the way he wanted it.”

  “He tell you why?”

  “No. You know somebody most of your life, you think you know them pretty well, right? Then all of a sudden something happens to them and they weird out and you realize you didn’t know them at all.”

  “When did Brian start to weird out?”

  “More than a year ago.”

  “In what ways?”

  “Well, it started with him not going to church anymore. He used to be real devout-we belong to the same church.”

  “His mother didn’t say anything about that.”

  “She doesn’t know. He told her he was going to a different one, in my neighborhood, but he wasn’t. I asked him why and all he’d say was that he had his reasons.”

  “You think he lost his faith?”

  “Must have, somehow. Didn’t seem to want anything to do with religion anymore.”

  “What else happened with him?”

  “Well, he started buying things,” Janssen said, “expensive computer hardware he didn’t really need. High-quality stuff, all the latest advances. Last time I saw him he had four PCs, three laptops, five printers, three twenty-two-inch screens hooked together, modems, motherboards, CD burners, camcorders, all sorts of anti-spy software, you name it.”

  “How did he explain it to you?”

  “He didn’t even try. Just said he needed to keep upgrading his system and it wasn’t any of my business anyway.”

  “How else did he change?”

  “Distant, withdrawn,” Janssen said. “Started holing up in his flat. Wouldn’t answer e-mails or acknowledge chess problems I sent him. Wouldn’t return phone messages.”

  “Did you know he was in debt, not paying his bills?”

  “Yeah, I heard. I can tell you part of the reason: he lost two of his best consulting jobs.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “He wasn’t doing the work. Just didn’t seem to care anymore.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Four or five months ago.”

  “He tell you this?”

  “No. Another friend of his, Aaron Myers.”

  “Do you know Myers well?”

  “Not very. Met him through Brian, but we didn’t hit it off. I ran into him later on at a computer trade show at Moscone and we got to talking. He was worried about Brian, too. But neither of us knew what to do about it.”

  “Might’ve contacted his mother.”

  “Myers did that, or started to, but Brian found out and threw a fit, told him to mind his own business. I thought about doing it on my own, but… you know, I didn’t want to make things worse by sticking my nose in. I figured he’d talk to her on his own if things got bad enough. But he didn’t?”

  “No. She doesn’t know about his weird behavior or financial problems,” Runyon said. “All she knows is that somebody beat him up last week.”

  “Beat him up? Brian?” Janssen looked and sounded amazed. “Who?”

  “He told his mother he was mugged. He told me he was carjacked.”

  “And you don’t believe it’s either one.”

  “Can you think of another explanation?”

  “No. Brian’s totally nonviolent. If you’ve met him…”

  “Monday afternoon, at his flat. His girlfriend was there with him.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Brandy. You know her?”

  “No way. I never met anyone named Brandy.”

  Runyon described her and her foul mouth, summarized the scene at Youngblood’s flat.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Janssen said. “I can’t imagine Brian letting anybody talk that way about his mother. He didn’t stand up to this Brandy at all?”

  “Not for a second.”

  “Man. She sounds like a… whore.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Brian and a woman like that?” Head wag. “That’s just crazy.”

  “Not the type he’s attracted to?”

  “Lord, no.
His mother tell you he was engaged to Ginny Lawson?”

  “Yes.”

  “You talked to her yet? Ginny?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When you do you’ll see what I mean. She’s the total opposite of this Brandy- total. Real devout. Her hobby is singing gospel music.”

  “Why did she break off the engagement, do you know?”

  “Brian wouldn’t say. I figured it must have something to do with the weird way he was acting.”

  “So it wasn’t the breakup that led to his erratic behavior.”

  “No. The weird stuff started a few months before.”

  “And for no apparent reason that you could see.”

  “None. Just… out of the blue, seemed to me.”

  “Has Brian dated any other women since Ginny Lawson?”

  “Besides this Brandy? Not that I know of.”

  “Before Ginny?”

  “Well, Verna Washington. She was kind of funky.”

  “Funky how?”

  “Oh, the way she dressed, her tastes in music and food. She’s a chef for some restaurant in SoMa. They seemed like kind of an odd couple, but she wasn’t nasty or anything.”

  “How long were they together?”

  “Not long. Couple of months.”

  “What broke them up?”

  “Don’t know. You’d have to ask him. Or Verna.”

  “You have an address for her?”

  “She was living in the outer Sunset back then. Lake Street, I think. I don’t know the number.”

  Easy enough to find out. Runyon made a note. Then he asked, “Did you know Brian paid off most of his debts three months ago-ten thousand dollars’ worth?”

  Janssen showed surprise again. “No, I didn’t know. Where’d he get that kind of money?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question. Certificate of deposit or IRAs, possibly?”

  “No way. His family never had much and he’s never been big on future planning. He and Ginny argued about it once that I know about.”

  “Loan from a friend? Aaron Myers?”

  “Not Myers-he doesn’t have that kind of money. And if Brian has any other friends with that much cash to loan out, I don’t know who they could be. Maybe he got it from a bank or finance company.”

  “He didn’t.” It would have been on the credit report if he had. “How about new consulting work?”

  “That’s out, too. Even if he hustled two or three new jobs, it’d’ve taken him a lot longer than a month or two to raise that much cash.”

  Which left what? A couple of possibilities, one of them-

  “Brandy,” Janssen said abruptly, as if reading his mind. “Maybe she loaned it to him. It’d explain why he let her talk smack about his mother, wouldn’t it? Why he let her walk all over him?”

  “It might.”

  Janssen shook his head again. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “How does a guy like Brian, a good guy, all of a sudden get so screwed up?”

  Runyon said nothing. The woman in the scarf, Bryn Darby, flicked across his mind. Most of us can’t even explain to ourselves why we screw up or get screwed up in all the ways we do.

  H e was starting to forget what Colleen looked like.

  Always before he could close his eyes and she would appear bright and crystal sharp in his memory. Happy, sad, playful, serious, loving-all her moods, all her voices distinct down to the finest nuance, as if she were still alive and caught by time. She was still there for him now, but the images had begun to blur and fade at the edges. It happened all of a sudden, it seemed to him, like home movies shot with an old video cam that he’d watched one too many times. More and more, now, he found himself looking at his photos of her, the one in his wallet and the framed portrait he kept on the bedside table, to try to recapture the clarity. But it wasn’t working. Photos were static, without the movement, the words, the life force-the real Colleen-that had once dominated his memory.

  It happened again that night in the apartment. He was in the kitchen making tea, he thought of her, he closed his eyes, and her face came to him in soft focus, as if he was looking at her through a thin mist. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and stared at the framed photograph. Impulse drove him to the closet, where he kept the albums she’d put together before the cancer was diagnosed-snapshots taken at mountains, lakes, Seattle locations, Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, Vancouver, Victoria Island. He sat with one of them open on his lap and paged through it slowly, looking only at those of her alone or the two of them together with her the most prominent figure. He went all the way through the album before he closed his eyes and looked at the memory images again.

  Still the soft, misty focus. Blurred. Faded.

  It scared him. He felt as if he were losing her all over again. First Colleen herself, now his memories of her. One day he might close his eyes and not be able to see or remember her clearly at all. If that happened, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t want to think about what he might do.

  He put the album away, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. He was sitting there, staring at faceless people talking in a room, when his cell phone rang. The noise activated him again. Business-Bill or Tamara. An emergency, maybe, something to occupy his mind and his time, help him make it through another night.

  But it wasn’t Bill or Tamara. A half-muffled man’s voice said, “Jake Runyon?” He acknowledged it, and the voice said, “If you want to know who hurt Brian Youngblood and why, ask Nick Kinsella. Nick Kinsella, Blacklight Tavern.” That was all. The line went dead.

  Runyon switched off. No emergency, but at least now he had something else to think about. The muffling had been the result of a handkerchief or some other cloth draped over the mouthpiece, but it hadn’t done much of a job of disguising the voice. Enough of the thin, pale tone had come through to make it recognizable.

  Brian Youngblood.

  And why would Brian Youngblood want to tell him something anonymously that he could have volunteered straight out, over the phone or in person?

  13

  TAMARA

  She spent Wednesday night with her folks in Redwood City, part of it in a big argument with Pop. Nothing new in that; seemed like she’d spent most of her life facing off with him about one thing or another. She loved him, he loved her, but they were oil and water when they were together and always had been. That was why she’d been such a stone bitch rebel as a teenager, defying Pop and jerking his chain every chance she had. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll drove him crazy, the main reason she’d been such a wild child on all three fronts.

  What it boiled down to was, he resented her independence and she resented his need to control everybody and everything-her, Ma, Claudia, the Redwood City police department, the damn gophers and crab grass in his backyard. And when you threw in what Bill called the generation gap, you had a recipe for friction just about every time they saw each other. Big day if they agreed on anything. If she said the earth revolved around the sun, he’d find some way to argue the point and twist things around so she was wrong and he was right.

  She knew going in that he’d probably be against what she was of a mind to do, but she figured she might as well give it a shot. Thing was, and she’d only admitted this to herself a couple of years ago, she’d always craved the approval, at least some of it, that he gave kiss-ass Claudia in pretty much everything she did. Closest he’d come to spooning some out to her was telling her he thought she’d done “a good job” with the agency, but then he’d had to go and spoil it by lecturing her on the dangers of detective work and offering a lot of unwanted advice. He’d tossed a hissy fit when he found out about the day last Christmas-the day the whack job with the load of guns invaded the old agency offices and held her and Bill and Jake hostage for a few hours. Another fit in March, when she’d been kidnapped by that child-stealing son of a bitch in the East Bay. Actually tried to talk her into giving up the partnership after that episode-for her own safety, he said.
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  Well, the threat of danger was what she wanted to talk to him about now. Strictly business, very professional. Her taking control of the situation, right? That’s the way she looked at it. Plus it was an offer of some father-daughter bonding. He couldn’t object to that, could he? Naive, girl. Like hell he couldn’t.

  So she called up Ma and asked her if Pop would be home tonight, and she said he would, he was working the day shift this week. Ma was always glad to hear from her, always glad to invite her for dinner; they had a pretty good relationship now, at least. Stage set, everything cool.

  And everything stayed cool through one of Ma’s famous braised short-ribs meals. They all had a glass of wine-just one glass, all Pop allowed except on holidays and then, wow, you could actually have two glasses as long as you put plenty of space between the first and the second-and he seemed to be in a pretty good mood. He’d helped catch a serial rapist and he did a little justifiable bragging about it, which was rare because he usually didn’t like business rap at the dinner table. Afterward she said she’d had a little business matter to talk over with him, and they went into his den and sat down.

  He looked good, she thought. Buff, even, not a hint of flab anywhere. She felt a stab of jealousy. Must be nice not to ever have to worry about your weight. His hairline had receded about halfway back on his knobby head, the reason he wore his “lucky Fedora,” a shapeless gray hat with a moldy bird feather in it, everywhere except in the house; he’d probably be bald as an egg in another few years. That was something she’d never have to put up with, anyway.

  “Talk to me, sweetness,” he said.

  Sweetness. She didn’t much like that nickname; sometimes, when he pissed her off enough, she actively hated it. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “it’s about time I got myself firearms certified.”

  He’d been favoring her with his fatherly smile. Amazing how quick it could turn into his stern, disapproving fatherly scowl. He said, “What brought that on?” and his tone had dropped to one decibel above a growl.

  What had brought it on was the happenings last Christmas and March, and what had brought it to the point where she was ready to do something about it was Janice Krochek walking into the office unannounced and all beat up on Monday morning. Nothing really ominous in that, but what if the dude who’d done it had followed her in and started more trouble? What if something like the Christmas invasion or the kidnapping happened again? It could. Bad things happened in threes, right? She didn’t want to get into explanations with Pop, but avoiding them with Sergeant Dennis Corbin, Redwood City PD’s hotshot interrogator, was next to impossible. Should’ve remembered that, too.