Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  He ran. Around the track again and then again. The more he ran, the more tired he got, the more his thoughts became disjointed, the more they were swept up into the chuck, chuck rhythm of his sneakers and the rhythm of his breath. He thought of the feel of the gun in his hand. Chuck, chuck. He remembered the smell of her. His harsh breath rasped. He thought how Weiss had said, “You never would’ve shot him.” He thought: Good old Weiss. Chuck, chuck. He ran.

  The sky darkened. The clouds tumbled over him, low. His thoughts became rhythmic fragments. What was she? Nothing. Flesh. Chuck, chuck. Lips, tits, cunt. Like any woman. Chuck. For him: a faster pulse, a stiff dick. (His mind went in time to his harsh, hoarse breaths, to his sneakers in the dirt.) And everything else was a trick of words. Words for the pulse, for the stiff dick. Chuck, chuck. Words like “yearning,” like “passion.” Chuck, chuck. Words to change sensation into desire, to change desire into emotion. Words to change breath. Just breath. Chuck, chuck. Just words. Just breath. Chuck, chuck.

  The sound of his sneakers suddenly changed. Their soles slapped hard against the track. He came to a stop under one of the empty, silent bleachers. He bent over, his hands on his knees. He panted, waiting to catch his breath.

  After a few minutes, he stood upright. He inhaled deeply through his nose. He could smell damp leaves and the coming rain. A cool smell, a lush smell. Nothing else. There was no faint scent of Honey anymore. No scent of her anywhere. She was gone. She was out of his system. He was sure of it.

  He had draped a towel on the railing by the stands. He yanked it off now, hung it round his neck, wiped his face with the tail of it. He looked up over the dirt and the grass and the bleachers. The brown of the dirt and the green of the grass and the silver of the bleachers were all muted in the dull light. He felt the emptiness of the track. He felt the wind through his short hair. He nodded to himself. Yes. She was gone.

  He walked home slowly. Tired. Wiping his face with the towel around his neck. He thought he would call Weiss when he got home. See if there were any new assignments for him. If nothing else, he could do some background checks for the lawyers upstairs. Weiss always had something going. When he really thought about it, Weiss was a decent guy. Probably the only real friend he’d ever had.

  He walked along the edge of the university, idly running his gaze over the campus buildings: stately, stone, like redroofed temples on the rolling grass and the winding paths. Beyond them, above them, the low, boiling clouds swallowed the backdrop of hills. The upper campus seemed to fade into the whiteness. The campanile rose against it as if the clock beneath its spire were the last signpost before a vast and ghostly nothing, the boiling clouds.

  Bishop turned away. He went down Telegraph. He walked faster past the clothing shops and food shops and book shops. Vendors were hawking jewelry and crafts from stands on the sidewalk, and beggars were asking for spare change with upturned caps. Students wandered among them. Bishop wove his way through the crowd. He had no feeling for the street or the people. He would live here for a while and then move and live somewhere else. He didn’t care. He never stayed anywhere long.

  He reached his corner and turned. He reached his building, came into the alcove.

  And there she was. Honey. She was standing right there. Leaning her shoulder against the alcove wall, tilting her head against it. Waiting, sullen. As if Bishop were late for an appointment they’d made.

  She was wearing a suede parka and a pink sweater over a frilly white blouse. Brand-new jeans. Rich-girl clothes: She was her father’s daughter again. Her hair was up, but silken blonde strands of it fell free as if she’d just woken from a nap or the wind had blown them. Her face looked scrubbed and fresh and beautiful, but her tousled hair looked wild and rebellious.

  She stood off the wall when she saw Bishop. She broke into a bright smile. He stepped up into the alcove and came to her. She fingered his sweaty T-shirt and bit her lip and cast a mischievous glance at him. He caught the scent of her.

  She was not gone. She was not out of his system. He had been wrong at the track. Now he knew better. She was not gone at all.

  Forty-Three

  So that’s how Bishop was doing. Weiss, meanwhile, had left the office of Mr. Munarolo and was now approaching a dilapidated house near the freeway in Potrero Hill. The house was built in the “San Francisco stick” style: a rectangular clapboard box with a rectangular bay window jutting out of it. It was the last known address of Harold Spatz, the pimply-faced worker who had quit Munarolo’s warehouse without a word.

  The front door was off to one side, up a rickety flight of steps. Weiss climbed the stairs heavily, knocked heavily on the door’s peeling gray paint.

  The landlady’s name was Mrs. Cobham. Black, heavyset, around Weiss’s age, maybe fifty. She pulled the door open and saw him there and her broad face turned to granite. Weiss knew that look. She thought he was a cop.

  “My name’s Scott Weiss,” he said. He offered her his card. “I’m a private investigator.”

  Her eyes went to the card, then back to him. She let the card hang there in his hand. “Yeah?”

  He slipped the card back into his jacket pocket. “I’d like to talk to you about Harold Spatz,” he said.

  That changed things, Weiss could tell. The woman’s big shoulders shifted a little. She considered him more thoroughly, her glance going head to toe. Then she nodded. “I wondered when someone would turn up.”

  She pulled the door back farther. Weiss stepped in.

  He followed her down a bare hallway. They passed the living room. A TV was on in there. Weiss heard a man’s voice, insanely elated. Laughter, applause. He got a glimpse of an unmade cot, piles of clothes, an ironing board, a picture of Jesus above a melted candle. It seemed as if the whole life of the house took place in that one room.

  But Mrs. Cobham kept walking, on down the hall, on into the kitchen at the end. While she unlocked a door under the red plastic wall clock, Weiss took a look at the crayon drawings stuck to the refrigerator. One quick glance and he knew the landlady had two grandchildren, a nine-year-old boy named Howard and an eight-year-old girl named Rhea. He understood somehow that Mrs. Cobham was working hard to keep these kids out of trouble. That was why she didn’t want to see any cops on her front step.

  Mrs. Cobham got the door open. It led to a descending flight of narrow wooden steps. She went down first with Weiss right behind her.

  He had to duck under the low ceiling as she led him across a small cellar. At the far end, there was a room, a narrow area sectioned off from the boiler with drywall.

  “I rented this to Harold for about three months,” she said as they stepped across the threshold. “April, May, June, part of July.”

  There was just space enough here for a single bed, a dresser, and a desk. The only window was a thin strip of dirt-encrusted glass half hidden by a steampipe. The only real light came from a naked bulb in a ceiling fixture.

  Weiss looked the room over. He could feel Mrs. Cobham looking him over at the same time. He could tell she was still wary, the way she stood back from him, her arms crossed under her breasts.

  She was a short woman—not much higher than Weiss’s elbow—but she was thick and sturdy. Wherever she planted herself, it seemed she would never budge. She was wearing a man’s flannel shirt and black slacks, an outfit that made her look even more blocky and formidable. And she had fierce, pugnacious features, though Weiss thought he spotted something vulnerable around the mouth. You could still get her to smile sometimes, he told himself. Or someone could.

  “What happened to him after July?” he asked her.

  A mangy half-breed mutt slunk in. Sniffed at Weiss’s pants leg. Lay down at his feet, muzzle on paws. The dog’s good opinion seemed to carry some weight with Mrs. Cobham. She lowered her crossed arms. Cocked her head at Weiss as if to say Come here and look at this.

  She stepped to a dresser. Pulled a drawer open. Waved a hand at the briefs and T-shirts crumpled up in there. Weiss leaned
over, jutting his jaw, as he peered down at them.

  “Harold told me he was gonna be gone for a while,” Mrs. Cobham said. “He didn’t say how long. You can see he packed some things, but he left a lot, too.” She tugged randomly at a pair of underpants, a T-shirt, a sock. “I got a security deposit. He’s paid up to the end of this month. So I don’t know. Looks like he was planning to come back. Maybe he still is. I just don’t know.”

  Weiss noticed she averted her gaze as she said this. He understood: Her “I don’t know” was pretty much of a technicality. That is, technically, she didn’t know, but she knew, all right. Spatz was gone for good.

  “I been having a bad feeling about it,” she admitted to him after a moment.

  “Ever call the police?”

  She looked away again. Brushed the question off with a flip of her hand. “I can’t be having the police in here every time someone runs off without telling me. I’m his landlady, not his mother.”

  Weiss understood this, too. She hadn’t wanted to get involved with the cops, but now she wished she had. She felt bad about letting it go this long.

  He asked her, “What about Spatz’s family? He have anybody? Any friends?”

  “Not one, not that he ever told me about, anyway. I always got the feeling he was just a lonesome child. Like a runaway or something, from a bad place somewhere. There was just something about him. The way he liked to hang around with my grandkids all the time. With me, too. Just watching TV, or playing games or drawing pictures for us or whatever. Like he wanted to have a family because he never really did.”

  The beginning of a smile played at one corner of Weiss’s mouth. That was good, he thought. The woman was good. She was smart. She could read people. Just like he could.

  “Did he say anything else before he left?” he asked her. “Anything at all about where he was going?”

  She frowned. Shook her head. Pressed her lips together, keeping mum.

  Weiss let the smile come now, let it bunch the saggy flesh under one deep eye. “C’mon,” he said. “What d’you figure?”

  That was all it took, all the encouragement she needed. “Well, a few weeks before he went away, he started acting strange,” she told him eagerly.

  “Strange like?”

  “Just funny, that’s all. Keeping down here to himself all the time. Drawing his pictures, doing whatever else he did. And he was happy all the time, too. Singing, whistling. Playing air guitar.”

  Weiss got it. “You think he had a girl, you mean.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Skinny little white boy like that starts playing air guitar, honey, you know somebody’s wrapping him up somewhere.” She was warming to Weiss now: She sensed, as he sensed, the similarity between them.

  “You sure it was a girl?” he asked her.

  “Oh yes. He wasn’t no gay boy. I’d clean up in here sometimes, I’d see his magazines. He wasn’t no gay boy.”

  The detective’s heavy features seemed to grow even heavier, to sag even farther as he thought it over. He was getting a feeling for the kid, this Harold Spatz. He was working through the probabilities just as Mrs. Cobham must’ve been doing these last six weeks.

  “So what do you think? He ran off with her?” he said. “You think that’s why he told you he’d be gone for a while?”

  She dropped her chin decisively. “That’s exactly what I think. I mean, I think that was his plan anyway. You look. He packed just enough clothes for some kind of getaway, maybe in Reno or somewhere. And look at this.”

  She went into the drawer. Pushed the laundry aside. Came out with a drawing pad. She handed it to Weiss and stood next to him as he lifted the cover.

  There were pencil sketches on the pages inside, nine or ten of them. Not bad, either. The kid had a good eye for detail, a steady hand. You could tell what everything was, anyway.

  The pictures were all more or less the same. The beach through trees. Looking down from a height through branches at the surf against the rising rocks, the ocean into the endless west, the clouds, the gulls, the sun. Postcard California.

  There was a caption on one of them: “The Beach from Lost Trail.”

  “That was his special place he liked to go,” said Mrs. Cobham. She stuck one thick finger right up against the penciled woods. “You know, he’d go out there and he’d sit and he’d draw his pictures. He was always talking about it. And one night after dinner, just before he went away, we talked together, and he went on and on about what a romantic spot it was and didn’t I think it was romantic and all like that. And look. Look there.”

  She lifted the pages of the pad to show Weiss the last picture. She pointed to it. Weiss squinted past her fingertip.

  There were two figures lightly penciled in amid the foliage. A man and a woman. Very faint, as if Spatz had hardly dared to draw them fully.

  “You think he was planning to take her up there,” he said. “Show her his special place.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What?” He gave her a shrewd glance. “You think he was planning to ask her to marry him?”

  “Yes, I do. That’s just what I think. Take her to his special place and pop the question. That’s just what I think he was planning.”

  Weiss nodded slowly, getting the feel of it. Drawing the image from Mrs. Cobham’s mind into his.

  “So maybe that’s it,” he said after a while. “Maybe it all worked out for him just like that. He went out there, popped the question, she said yes. They ran off together into the sunset. Happy ever after. Maybe that’s why he never came back.”

  Now Mrs. Cobham nodded also. She frowned down at the picture on the pad in Weiss’s hand. The two sensitives stood shoulder to shoulder in the narrow space, nodding and frowning and studying the last sketch made by Harold Spatz.

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Cobham. “Maybe that’s just what happened.”

  Weiss glanced over at her, read her eyes.

  Nah, he thought. She didn’t believe it either.

  Forty-Four

  Bishop, now, was on the bed, watching Honey. And it was strange, he thought. He still wanted her. Even after he’d had her, he wanted her still. It was not the usual way with him. With most women, when he was done he was done. But he lay on the bed and watched her and he was ready to begin with her again.

  She had pulled on a T-shirt of his. It billowed around her. It ended just at the top of her thighs. She was at the door.

  “You want coffee?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would be good.”

  She went into the living room, then into the kitchenette. She moved back and forth, coming in and out of sight in the bedroom doorway. Bishop lay on his side, on one arm, and watched.

  He had had her quickly, ferociously, just as they came in. Then, right away, he had had her again. When the second time ended, he felt that there was nothing left of him. But as it turned out, there was. As it turned out, there was this desire, this low fury of desire, which the sex did nothing for. He wanted to take her and take her in every way he could think of, but he knew if he did, he still wouldn’t have what he wanted.

  She came back to the doorway, leaned in the doorway, his box of cigarettes in her hands. He could hear the coffeemaker working behind her, a guttural whisper.

  She lit a cigarette, waved out the match. Her eyes went over Bishop’s body, bare to the sheet at his waist.

  “Man,” she said. “You are hot, Cowboy.” She gestured with the cigarette box. “Want one?”

  Bishop rolled onto his back, put up his hands. She tossed the box. He caught it.

  She put one arm around her middle. She propped her cigarette arm up on it. Her eyes moved over him as he lit a cigarette of his own.

  “I was away from you too long,” she said.

  “It was only a few days,” he said around the reed.

  “Yeah, well, that was too long.”

  “I heard your father had you under guard or something.”

  “Just
about. Daddy thinks Cobra’s coming to get me. He says, as far as he’s concerned, till they find Cobra’s body, Cobra is definitely still alive.”

  “He’s not,” said Bishop. “I shot him in the face.”

  She shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Daddy says, that’s all. Maybe he just wanted an excuse to surround me with all his goons, keep me safe at home.”

  Bishop let smoke fill his mouth, curled his tongue around it. He looked her over, toying with the cigarette box in his hands. In the other room, the coffeemaker beeped. It was done.

  “So how come he let you out?” he asked her.

  “Who—Daddy? Are you kidding me? He didn’t. I escaped.”

  Bishop laughed. Looked her over. His urge to have her flared like flame.

  “I did!” she said. “I asked one of the guards to get me a glass of milk? Then I stole my sister’s bike and rode it down the hill. A girlfriend picked me up and drove me into the city. It’s true! What’s so funny?”

  “I was just wondering if your father would hire me to find you again.”

  She whiffled at him over her shoulder as she went to pour the coffee.

  Bishop drank his mug of coffee sitting up in bed with pillows behind him. Honey sat in a wooden chair, the only bedroom chair, by the window. Outside, behind her, there was half a billboard and a rooftop and the gray sky. Workmen had come that morning in the early hours and changed the picture on the billboard. They changed it every month. The smiling bank lady was gone. In her place was a sports car and the words EXPERIENCE FREEDOM.

  Honey sat in the chair with her back very straight and her legs crossed at the knee. It was a prim, ladylike posture, except for the fact that Bishop’s T-shirt rode up above her waist and exposed her. Sipping her coffee, she saw Bishop quietly considering her nakedness. She watched him over the rim of her mug. Then she lowered the mug slowly. She tugged the T-shirt down to cover herself.