"Then you can't believe, down deep, that what happened yesterday will damage your friendship. I know him well enough to know that he cares about you as much as you care about him."
"You and I are both right, then. I'll be an optimist if you will. Deal?"
"Deal," she said.
We talked a little longer, and when she left we hugged each other and I kissed her on the cheek. It had been a good few minutes for both of us. She'd come for reassurance, and given me some of the same in return. And maybe that's all any of us need to help us through the difficult times. A little reassurance. A little compassion and understanding. A little love.
* * * * *
At four-thirty I closed the office and made my third trip of the day to China Basin. The net result of which was another dose of frustration.
There was still no sign of Savarese's Plymouth Voyager van. I would have gone inside anyway, but it was just five o'clock and the warehouse crew was leaving for the day. I buttonholed the middle-aged philosopher I'd spoken to on Tuesday. No, he said, he hadn't seen the boss today. Didn't have no idea where he was or what he'd been doing instead of working. I described Blackwell for him and he allowed as how he might have seen somebody looked like that with the boss once; but he didn't know who the guy was or what his business might be.
"One thing he ain't," the philosopher said, "is a customer wants to buy the party crap we got in there. You can count on that, man, same as you can count on the freakin' government gouging us for more freakin' taxes."
Yeah. Freakin' right you could.
Chapter 16
As usual in the city, the Friday night rush-hour traffic was a bitch. It took me forty minutes to get from China Basin to Noe Valley, and I used back streets all the way. Bobbie Jean's visit had made me as determined to talk things out with Eberhardt as I was to track down Savarese and Blackwell; somebody had to start the machinery of apology that would lead to reconciliation, and it might as well be me.
But not tonight: Eb's car was gone and the house was dark. I would have taken a look inside, just the same, except that his spare key was no longer under the lava rock. I was not surprised.
I drove down to Twenty-fourth Street and poked my snout into the Shamrock Bar. He wasn't there either. Nor had he been in today; the bartender knew him. Some other watering hole in the neighborhood, maybe, but I had neither the time nor the patience to go bar-hopping. Eberhardt would just have to wait until tomorrow.
Gellert Drive was another washout. Savarese's driveway was empty and so was his garage; I looked through a side window to make sure. Nobody answered the door, not even Gloria, the self-styled bimbo.
The whole day now—no Savarese. Why? Where the hell was he?
I cut through the park and out Twenty-fifth Avenue to Clement. It was six-forty by then and I was hungry and there was a Thai-Chinese restaurant that did some fine things with a seafood mixture served in potato baskets. Rather than eating there I ordered takeout, two portions. Kerry might have to eat with Cybil first before she could get away; then again, she might not. Either way, the second order would not go to waste.
By the time I reached Pacific Heights, the food smell was making me drool on myself. But because it was Friday night and seven-thirty, there was no street parking on my block; I had to drive around for ten minutes before I found somebody pulling out of a space on Buchanan. The driving around tried what was left of my patience, and not just because I was hungry. One of the parked cars I passed was Kerry's.
I made short work of the three-block walk to my building. A crescendo of woodwinds and crashing cymbals greeted me—Dennis Litchak, the retired fire captain who lived downstairs, was a classical music buff"—and the percussion followed me upstairs. Give me jazz any day: I've got short hair to go with my blue collar. I was thinking about that, and about Kerry, and about seafood in potato baskets, as I keyed open my door.
No lights. Just rooms full of clotted dark.
The wrongness of it was an immediate impact on my mind, as jarring as a physical blow. One second I was standing there looking in at the darkness; the next I was out of the doorway, up against the hallway wall beside it, muscles and nerves pinching tight all through my body.
Nothing happened.
Silence inside, so complete it was like a pressure against my eardrums. I stayed where I was, unmoving, for long dragging seconds. Still nothing—no sounds, not even the ghost of a noise. But the aura of wrongness remained; I could almost smell it, like a faint whiff of ozone before or after a storm.
Caution might have kept me where I was a while longer, except that my mind was full of Kerry now. I shoved off the wall, went in fast and low, going after the light switch with one up-sweeping hand. The ceiling globe and couchside lamp destroyed the dark but not the tension, not even when I saw that the living room was empty.
The room looked the same as always . . . no, not quite. One of the chairs was out of position, drawers in the secretary desk had been yanked open. I straightened, breathing hard, and took half a dozen strides, and then stopped again when I could see past the end of the couch, over in front of the fireplace.
Kerry's purse was lying on the hearth. On its side. Open.
A blood-surge of fear and rage drove me forward again, into the bedroom. She wasn't in there. Bathroom. No. Kitchen. No. Back porch. No, but the locks were off the door. I threw it open, stepped out onto the landing at the top of the alley stairs. Nothing to see below. I ran down into the alley anyway. Nobody there, just shadows and garbage smells and somebody's prowling cat.
Gone? On her own, got away from him? Or did he . . . ?
I pounded back upstairs, half-crazy now with fear, and tore through the flat again. And this time, almost immediately, I found her. Where I hadn't thought to look in those first frantic minutes.
In the bedroom closet. Lying crumpled on the floor of the bedroom closet.
I made some kind of noise as I went to my knees beside her and saw the blood on her face; made another kind of noise when I found that she was breathing and her pulse was strong, steady. I lifted her, gently, gently, and got her out of that narrow space and carried her to the bed. She moaned; one of her hands lifted, fell back across her chest. But she didn't open her eyes. In the light from the bedside lamp I had a better look at her face. Inch-long cut on her right cheekbone, not too deep; bruise and weal on her left temple. He'd hit her with his hands or some kind of weapon, beat her the same way he'd beaten Todd Bellin, and then stuffed her in the goddamn closet.
I'll kill him, I thought. I'll tear his heart out.
I bulled into the bathroom, fumbled the cold water faucet on full stream. My hands were shaking; I dropped the washcloth on the floor before I got it into the basin. Thoughts stumbled against one another in my head: My fault. After Bellin, after last night at the office . . . why didn't I figure he might come here next? Why did I let her come here tonight, alone? My fault she's hurt. Why wasn't I more careful?
I squeezed water out of the cloth, took it into the bedroom. Kerry was still lying there with her eyes shut, twitching a little now, rolling her head. I knelt beside her, held her still with my left hand, sponged blood off the cut. She moaned again—and her eyes popped open, blind in that first instant, shiny with terror. She felt my hands on her, fought against them wildly, crying out. I kept saying, "Kerry, it's me, it's all right, it's me," until the words got through to her and her eyes focused on my face. Then, all at once, she went limp. I held her, whispering her name. For a time she clung to me, then pushed me away. Reluctantly I let her go, drew back on my knees so I could look into her face.
"I thought you were him," she said thickly.
"No, no."
"Did you . . . ?"
"No, he was gone before I got here. Don't talk for a minute."
I cleansed away the rest of the blood from her cheek. She winced at the pressure on the cut, and I winced with her; it was as if I could feel the pain myself.
She said, "God, I must be a mess."
/> "Not too bad. How do you feel?"
"Shaky. And my head hurts."
"Anywhere else? He hit you in the body?"
"No. Just . . . no."
"All right. Lie still for a while."
"Yes, doctor."
Weak joke, but the shadows of terror were still in her eyes. Inside me, the rage kept seething. I tried to show her a poker face, but I was afraid she could see some of what lay black and ugly behind it, that it would frighten her even more. Turn your head . . . but I could not make myself stop looking at her.
"Don't you want to know what happened?"
"When you're ready."
She pushed herself higher on the bed, reaching up for one of the pillows. I helped get it behind her head. When she was motionless again she said, "Get me some aspirin, okay? Then I'll tell you."
I went and got the aspirin and a glass of water. Before I came back out I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. The poker face was on tighter than I'd thought; you couldn't see any of the violence roiling inside like floodwaters against a dam.
"Ready?" I asked her when she'd swallowed the aspirin.
"Ready."
"Take your time. Go slow."
"I got here about six forty-five," she said. "Cybil wasn't hungry so I thought I'd come early, see if you were here and if you wanted to go somewhere for dinner. I didn't notice anybody on the street . . . I don't know where he was hiding. In one of the parked cars, or in the alley—"
"Wait a minute. He grabbed you outside?"
"In the vestibule, while I was unlocking the downstairs door."
"Crept up and caught you from behind?"
"Yes. He knew me, knew my first name . . . I don't know how."
I did: the photo of her on my office desk. She had signed it, on the front in ink: "With All My Love, Kerry." He hadn't been after her tonight; he had no way of knowing she was coming to see me. He'd been after me. But he'd recognized her when she came along the sidewalk, and she was an easier way into the flat than I would have been.
"What did he say to you?"
" 'Don't scream'. . . . He wouldn't hurt me as long as I was quiet. He had a gun, he poked me in the back with it." A little shiver went through her; goose bumps came up on her arms. "At first I thought . . . you know, rape. It's the first thing a woman thinks of in that situation."
"Then?"
"He told me to finish unlocking the door, go inside and climb the stairs. He seemed to know where your flat was."
"What else did he say?"
"Keep my eyes front. Don't try to turn my head and look at him or he'd make me sorry."
"You obeyed him?"
"You bet. He . . . I knew he meant it."
"What happened after you let him in here?"
"He told me to turn on the lights, keep looking straight ahead. Then he made me stop; I guess he was looking around. Then he took my purse . . . I don't know what he did with it. . . ."
"It's in the front room."
"Well, he didn't look inside it then. He told me to walk in here. I thought . . . I still had rape on my mind. But that wasn't what he was after. He let go of me and said to turn around slowly. That was when . . . the first time he hit me. I yelled, or started to—I think I yelled—and that's all I remember." She winced again, touched the bruise on her temple. "He must have hit me more than once, damn him."
"You see him at all, even a glimpse?"
"No. Just . . . he was a shape, that's all."
"All right," I said.
"You know who he is, though, don't you? What he was after?"
"Yeah. I know who he is and what he was after."
"The Grady Haas case?"
"Yes." I'd been kneeling beside the bed; now I got to my feet. "Rest, babe. I want to look around some more."
I turned before she could say anything else, walked out quick into the living room. There was a squeezed-up sensation in my chest; I was having trouble breathing. In the kitchen I ran cold water into the sink and doused my head. It helped a little. I made myself take air in slow, shallow inhalations and that helped too.
Living room again. Kerry's purse. He'd rifled it but it didn't look as though he'd taken anything. Why should he? He wasn't a sneak thief any more than he was a rapist. He'd been through the desk . . . every drawer and cubbyhole in the place, probably. But it hadn't done him a lick of good. I still carried the notebook with Arlo Haas's name and address, and there was nothing else here—
Answering machine, I thought.
Into the bedroom. The message light was oif; but if it had been on and he'd listened in, he might have rewound the tape again afterward. Kerry lay quiet, watching me, as I pushed the play button and stood listening. Harvey, the bell captain at the Broadmoor Hotel, saying that he had some things to tell me . . . old message, from last night. None since then; none from Arlo Haas. Nothing for Blackwell on the answering machine either.
Then why hadn't he waited for me to come home? He'd come here after me, to pump me, and yet he'd left after or at some point during his search. Why, if he hadn't found a lead to Grady's whereabouts?
I didn't see how he could have. And yet I couldn't see any other reason for him to have quit the flat—and in something of a hurry, too, through the back door. I didn't like it. It added even more urgency to the hatred inside me.
I said to Kerry, "How do you feel? Well enough to be up and around?"
"I think so."
"I've got to go out and I don't want to leave you here alone. I'll drive you home—"
"No," she said. "I can drive myself."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"I don't think it's a good idea for you to go after him, either, but you're going to and I won't try to stop you. Do what you have to do. Let me do what I have to do."
"If you're sure . . ."
"I'm sure. Go on, go. Don't wait for me. I want to wash my face, make myself look presentable, so I don't give Cybil a coronary when I get home. I'll be all right; he's not going to come back here tonight,"
"Kerry . . ."
"I know," she said. "I love you too. Just take care of yourself, okay? And don't do anything . . . crazy because of what happened to me. Promise me that."
"I promise," I said, and I wasn't sure if I was lying or not.
I kissed her, touched her cheek, went away from her.
The front door, I saw as I started for it, was shut. I must have closed it at some point, but I couldn't remember doing that. I opened it, and lying on the carpet in the hallway were the Thai-Chinese take-out dinners, one of the cartons split and leaking seafood sauce. I also had no memory of dropping the cartons.
The smell of the food, once so appetizing, now made my gorge rise. I bent and picked up the containers and carried them into the kitchen and dumped them in the garbage. I don't know why I took the time to do that, unless it was because at some level I did not want Kerry to have to deal with any more of my messes.
Chapter 17
The Savarese house was still dark, apparently still empty. I went up to the door anyway, rang the bell, shook the thing by the knob and kicked it a couple of times, foolishly. Nothing. The idea was in my head to break and enter, search the place, but that was foolish, too, and I didn't give in to it.
When I came back toward my car I noticed that the garage door was raised at the neighboring house on the north and that there was a light on inside. I detoured over that way, walked up the drive. The garage was packed floor-to-ceiling with cartons, furniture, gardening equipment, hundreds of other items; you couldn't have fit a go-cart inside there, let alone an automobile. At first I didn't see anybody among the maze of stuff", but I could hear random noises. I moved closer, calling out, and pretty soon a little guy about seventy poked his head around a stack of boxes and gave me a squinty look.
"I'm looking for Vernon Savarese," I said. "You happen to have seen him tonight?"
"Nope."
"So you wouldn't have any idea where I can find him?"
; "Nope."
"How about his lady friend, Gloria?"
"Lady friend," the old guy said and laughed. "If she's a lady, I'm the Duke of Windsor."
"I really need to talk to Savarese," I said. "Any help you can give me . . ."
"Sorry, bub. I don't know where they are and I don't much care. I just hope it's far away and they don't come back too soon."
"Why is that?"
"Lousy neighbors, that's why," he said. "Fight all the time, day and night. And the language . . . you never heard such foul language. Her especially. Woman's got a mouth that would shame the devil himself."
"What do they fight about?"
"Money, mostly. You're not a friend of theirs, eh?"
"No."
"Bill collector?"
"You might say that. I'm trying to collect a debt."
"Don't surprise me," he said. "Deadbeats, that's what those two are. I happen to know they're two months behind in their rent and the landlord's threatened to evict 'em. Be the best thing for the neighborhood if that happens."
"You know any of their friends? Anybody I can contact who might know where Savarese is?"
"Nope. I mind my own business, even if they don't mind theirs."
I nodded to him, turned back down the drive.
"Good luck, mister. I sure hope you collect that debt."
"I will," I said. "Sooner or later, one way or another."
* * * * *
I didn't expect to find Savarese at his China Basin warehouse, but I drove down there anyway because I had nowhere else to look for him. And a light was on inside the building, a wedge of it coming through a man-sized gap between the entrance doors. And parked in front of the fence, sitting there all by itself, was a light-colored van—a Plymouth Voyager.
In my mind again I saw Kerry lying crumpled in the bedroom closet, the blood on her face, the bruise on her temple. I could feel heat rising, the sudden pound of blood in my ears; the palms of my hands were moist. I had to force myself not to whip the car in behind the van, go rushing into the warehouse. Instead I drove on past, down toward Mission Rock, checking the few other cars parked in the area. Ratty clunkers, most of them, temporary homes for the homeless. I turned around, came back past Savarese Importing in the opposite direction. No dark brown Buick anywhere in the vicinity.
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