Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

  Runyon had met Robert Jr. once, on one of Bryn’s weekends with him last month. Nice kid, nine years old; smart, shy, liked computers and video games and football. No question that he loved his mother, but he seemed a little uneasy around her. Wouldn’t look at her directly, as if the covered half of her face frightened him or made him nervous.

  Runyon said, “You’ll have more time with him as he gets older.”

  “Will I? You didn’t have any time with your son.”

  “Different situation. My first wife was a vindictive alcoholic—I think I told you that. She poisoned Joshua against me. After twenty years, there’s no antidote. Don’t let your ex do that to Bobby.”

  “He hasn’t. I don’t think he will. Robert can be a prick, but he cares about Bobby. And doesn’t care enough about me to hurt me any more than he already has.”

  “What about the new woman he’s with?”

  “I’ve never met her and I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Know much about her?”

  “No, except that she sells real estate. She’s been good to Bobby—he likes her.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you talked to Bobby about the paralysis?”

  “Mother to son? Yes, as much as you can to a nine-year-old about a thing like that.”

  “Let him see your face, without the scarf?”

  Nothing for a few seconds. Then, “No.”

  “Might help him understand better.”

  “It would be cruel to subject him to that. He’s just a child.”

  “Afraid of his reaction?”

  “I don’t … What do you mean?”

  “That he won’t be able to deal with it. Pull away from you.”

  “You’ve seen my face,” she said. “Half a Halloween mask.”

  Runyon had seen it only once, the first time their lives intersected, when he’d chased away a couple of smart-ass kids after one of them yanked off her scarf in a Safeway parking lot. Dim light, but it hadn’t seemed so bad to him. He said, “Eye of the beholder. It didn’t scare me away.”

  “You’re an adult.”

  “And you’re Bobby’s mother. He needs you.”

  “And he can have me,” she said bitterly, “two weekends every month.”

  “I only saw you together once, but you were tentative around him.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Tentative?”

  “No hugs, no kisses. You didn’t even touch him.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. That’s not true.”

  “It’s true, Bryn. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “You’re a fine one to dispense parental advice. How many times did you hug your son when he was growing up?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. You do.”

  “That’s enough! I don’t like being told how to deal with my son!”

  He’d pushed it too hard, made her angry. A fine one to dispense parental advice.

  “All right,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.”

  “I was out of line. I won’t do it again.”

  “Better not if you want to keep this friendship.”

  Quiet again until they were approaching Devil’s Slide on the way back. But she’d been thinking about his perceptions, weighing them; she broke the silence by saying, “Jake? About what you said earlier …”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Just being honest—I know. You were right, I don’t touch Bobby. I’m afraid to touch him, afraid he’ll draw away from me. He’s all I have left. I couldn’t stand to lose him, too.”

  “You won’t.”

  “It’s just so hard,” she said. “So hard.”

  “Don’t let him feel you’re rejecting him and he won’t reject you. I think I’m right about that. Loving close is always better than loving at a distance.”

  It was after nine by the time they got back to the city. The coffee shop at Taraval and Nineteenth Avenue stayed open until midnight; they had dinner there, in a rear booth. A stranger sitting across from them couldn’t keep his fat eyes off Bryn. The third time he glanced over, Runyon caught his gaze and held it, impaled him until the man shifted both his gaze and his body and kept his attention on his plate, where it belonged. Damn people, anyway.

  He took Bryn home afterward, walked her to the door. Before she unlocked it and went in, she said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Putting up with me. Being honest. I’m such a screwedup mess.”

  “Not any more than me and a whole lot of others.”

  “I almost cancelled tonight. So depressed after I saw the doctor.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “So am I.”

  “Better now?”

  “Better,” she said. “What you said, about Bobby, about loving close … it makes sense.”

  “When can we get together again?”

  “Not tomorrow. My mother’s night to call.”

  Her mother lived in Denver, she’d told him, and was the only other person she could talk to about personal issues. But only for short periods; the mother tended to become weepy and critical.

  “Wednesday, then?”

  “Yes, Wednesday. Good night, Jake.”

  “Good night.”

  It was a short drive from Moraga Street to his apartment building on Ortega. On the way he turned his cell phone back on. He’d taken to switching it off when he was with Bryn; urgent calls were a rarity in the evening and their time together had become too important to let routine business intrude.

  One voice-mail message, from Cliff Henderson in Los Alegres: “I looked through the trunk in Damon’s garage like you asked. The only thing missing I’m sure about is one of the photo albums. Mostly old pictures taken on hunting and fishing trips—Damon and me, my father, some of his hunting buddies. No damn idea why that crazy bugger would steal it.”

  Too late to call Henderson back now. He’d talk to him about the missing album in the morning, in person.

  Coming in late to the apartment, facing the emptiness, wasn’t so bad on the nights he was with Bryn. He turned on the TV for noise, booted up his laptop to check his e-mail. All he ever got were occasional business messages and spam, but he always checked it before he went to bed. One e-mail from Tamara tonight, sent after five o’clock, with some more background information on the Henderson brothers, their father, and their remarried mother. Didn’t seem to be much there, but you never knew what might prove to be important until you got deeper into an investigation.

  In the bedroom later, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the framed portrait of Colleen on the nightstand. Another nightly ritual, but that, too, was different than it had been before. She would’ve liked Bryn, approved of him seeing her. Encouraged it, even. Just one of the things he’d loved about Colleen: she’d always wanted what was best for him.

  8

  SCHEMER

  He sat on the edge of the motel tub, burning the last of the Henderson snapshots.

  The cracked, leather-bound album lay spread open on his lap. The door was closed, the rattling fan switched on to clear away the smoke and keep it from setting off the smoke alarm. There were only a handful of snaps left in the album. He’d burned the rest over the past several days, a few each day.

  He removed one of the last from its plastic sleeve, looked at it for a time. Lousy, like all of them. Poor composition, bad use of light and background. Cheap camera, probably. Amateur shit. He turned it over to read what was written on the back—“Hayden and George, Aug 1998”—and then spun the wheel of his lighter and touched the flame to one corner. It burned slow at first, then fast. When the heat began to sear his fingers, he dropped the charred remains into the toilet with the others.

  Unexpected find, this album. He hadn’t been looking for anything like it, anything at all the afternoon he’d slipped into Damon Henderson’s garage. Bold move, going in there in broad day
light. Proof that he could breach their lives any time and any place he wanted to, that he owned them now whether they knew it yet or not. No real risk involved. Getting into the garage had been ridiculously easy. Wear a khaki shirt, carry a flashlight and a clipboard, wear a badge that looks authentic, act like you belong in the neighborhood, and people take you for a meter reader or a workman and pay no real attention to you.

  Sifting through all those boxes and then finding the trunk with the albums in it—that had been almost as much of a rush as Sunday night’s visit. Bad few seconds when Henderson came blundering in, spoiling the planned acid bath for his CPA records and his car, but the rest of it had turned out real well. Hitting him with the tire iron, straddling him, whispering to him, hitting him again and hearing him scream … oh, yeah! He’d had to fight himself not to use the tire iron a third time, split Henderson’s skull wide open, but it wasn’t the right place or the right time. Henderson wouldn’t have suffered enough. And there hadn’t been enough time to tell him why he was suffering. That would come later.

  He looked at and burned two more photos, taking his time. The last one was in color, a posed shot, poorly centered and badly filtered so that the background was muzzy and the images not sharp. But they were clear enough for identification, even without what was written on the back: “Cliff, Damon, and Dad, Oct 2000.” He lifted the snapshot close to his mouth and spat on each of the images before he set it on fire. Held it longer than any of the others, watching it burn, savoring the blackened destruction of the images until the flame reached his fingers and made him let go. Some of the ashes missed the toilet bowl. He scraped them into his hand, brushed them in.

  Then he stood, unzipped his fly, urinated onto the ashes.

  Spat one last time on the yellow-black mess and flushed it away.

  At the sink he washed his hands. They still felt unclean when he was done, so he washed them again. Better. He used the towel, making sure his palms and wrists were completely dry. Then he switched off the fan and went out into the main room.

  Typical cheap motel room, designed for anonymity. The perfect hideout. He smiled at the thought of “hideout” and sat down on the lumpy bed.

  The spiral-bound notebook was in his briefcase, along with the five-by-seven color portrait and the digital snapshots he’d taken at the cemetery. He unlocked the case, took them out, lay back with his head propped against the headboard. He looked at the portrait first, looked at it for a long time. Familiar face, but clouded by time—a kid’s memory. But he’d gotten to know it well from the portrait, as well as he ever would. Each time he looked at it he felt a great tenderness well up inside. She’d been so pretty. Not the plastic, Hollywood kind of prettiness—genuine, the girl-next-door kind. High cheekbones, small nose, small cleft in the well-shaped chin. And not just attractive outside, but good inside. You could see the goodness shining in those soft brown eyes.

  After a time he put the portrait down and again read the last few notebook pages, shaping each sentence with his lips, lingering over the important passages. Sad, bitter, painful. Full of love and sorrow and desperation. Full of pleading—a tacit plea to him, now, because there was nobody else.

  Testimony.

  Damning testimony.

  Wet filled his eyes. He used a clean edge of the pillowcase to dry them, then returned the notebook and the portrait to his briefcase. The rage was in him again, strong and driving. It made the blood beat loud in his temples.

  Another face popped out of his memory—thin, wrinkled, not pretty at all. “Damn you,” he said aloud, “why didn’t you read what she wrote? Didn’t you suspect, didn’t you care? And why didn’t you give me the notebook while that son of a bitch was still alive? He’d have been the one to suffer then. I’d have made him suffer!”

  He lay still for a time until his pulse rate slowed and the rage started to fade. No use blaming her. She’d only done what she believed was right for him. But she shouldn’t have waited, shouldn’t have let him find out the way he had, so long afterward, when it was too late.

  He picked up the cemetery photos, shuffled through them. Not too bad. Decent composition considering the darkness and the digital camera. The urn, the ashes, the monument … all clearly defined. The vapors from the acid made a neat wavy pattern on the one of the headstone. Mementos he could enjoy for years to come.

  The anger was gone now, but his eyes had begun to sting. The pillowcase hadn’t been properly laundered after all. His face, his hands … itchy, dirty. He hurried into the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and stood under a scalding hot shower to make himself clean again.

  9

  JAKE RUNYON

  The Henderson Construction Company was building three new homes in a hillside cul-de-sac on Los Alegres’ southwestern edge. Two homes framed out and in different stages of completion, the third staked and ready for the concrete foundation to be poured. All three sites were fenced—new Cyclone fencing, from the look of it, probably put up after the vandalism. The gates were open now, half a dozen pickups parked inside, a forklift unloading board lumber from a flatbed truck on one site, a dozen or so workmen making the usual amount of noise.

  Runyon left his Ford outside on the street and hunted up Cliff Henderson at the the home nearest completion. They went over by a large, portable tool-storage shed to talk. Even before Henderson pointed it out, Runyon had noticed the acid damage done to the unit’s metal siding.

  “Bastard couldn’t get inside the shed,” Henderson said. “Didn’t have enough time to burn the locks off, so he just splashed acid on the sides. If he had gotten in … thousands of dollars’ worth of tools down the toilet.”

  “No attempt at a second pass?”

  “If he was thinking about it, the fencing, police patrols, a private security patrol I hired changed his mind. I can’t afford to take any more losses on these sites.”

  “How’s your brother?”

  “Better. Might let him go home today, tomorrow for sure.”

  “You have a chance to talk to him about the missing photo album?”

  “On the phone last night. He can’t figure it either. Why the guy would risk poking around in Damon’s garage during the day, why he took the album. Just gets crazier and crazier.”

  “Mostly photos of the two of you and your father, you said.”

  “Yeah. On the fishing and hunting trips we used to take.”

  “Any particular place?”

  “Same place every time. Hunting camp in Mendocino County, east of Fort Bragg. Dad built it back in the fifties.”

  “Still own the property?”

  “Sure. Damon and I don’t get up there as much as we used to, but two of Dad’s old hunting buddies still go now and then. They don’t hunt anymore, they’re both in their seventies, but they fish and play cribbage … you know, just to get away for a few days.”

  “Hayden Brock one of them?”

  “That’s right. And Dr. George … George Thanopolous.”

  Runyon asked, “Anything unusual happen on any of the trips?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything at all. Anything that might have been in those snapshots.”

  “Not on the trips Damon and me were on. We caught fish, shot a buck if we were lucky, played cards, drank beer, told stories, goofed around. Guy stuff, that’s all.”

  “How about on the ones your father took with his buddies?”

  “Not that I know about.” Henderson frowned. “What’re you getting at? This stalking crap couldn’t have any connection to my dad or the camp.”

  “Then why was the album stolen?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. But Dad … he was salt of the earth. Ask anybody, they’ll tell you. He’s been gone five years. And the last time he was up at the camp was three or four years before that, before he got sick. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  Runyon spent the rest of the morning making the rounds of friends, neighbors, and business acquaintances of the Henderson brothers. None of t
hem had anything to tell him. The Hendersons were great guys, good family men, regular churchgoers. Honest as the day is long. No harm in either of them. Incredible that anybody could hate them enough to do what had been done to them.

  By the time he finished, he was convinced that the motive for the harrassment and assault lay elsewhere. Something to do with the father?

  Wrong tree or not, it was worth some more barking.

  Hayden Brock leaned back in the swivel chair in his law office, hooked his thumbs under the straps of his old-fashioned galluses, and gave Runyon an unreadable lawyer stare. His eyes were a cold blue under bushy white eyebrows. White hair, fine as rabbit fur, and a thick white mustache gave him a stern and frosty look.

  “If you’re looking for dirt on Lloyd Henderson,” he said flatly, “you won’t find it here.”

  Runyon said, “The only thing I’m looking for is answers to why his sons are being stalked.”

  “Terrible thing, that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Lloyd.”

  “Everybody keeps telling me that.”

  “But you don’t seem to listen.”

  “When you can’t find an answer in one place, you look in another. Right now I’m looking at Lloyd Henderson.”

  “Just because the first act of vandalism was the desecration of his grave?”

  “That’s one reason. Another is the stolen photo album. Can you offer any explanation for that?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know of anything unusual that happened on the family’s hunting and fishing trips to Mendocino County?”

  “I do not.”

  “On any of the trips that didn’t include the two sons?”

  “No. Weekend getaways, that’s all they were.”

  “Men only? No women allowed?”

  The white mustache bristled. “What kind of question is that?”

  “A simple one.”

  “Our wives didn’t share our passion for the outdoors.”

  Lawyerspeak. Factual but evasive. Runyon said, “So there were no women in the photos that were stolen.”