Demons

by Bill Pronzini

  “In the van or on foot?”

  “On foot. They brought cars into the area pretty fast, but he still managed to slip through.”

  “Armed?”

  “We don’t know. Officers got a warrant and searched the house and there weren’t any weapons or spare rounds. But that doesn’t have to mean anything. What they did find was electronics equipment-the surveillance kind, including some of the same bugs Agonistes found in the Runyon house. The old phone company ID too.”

  “Hard evidence.”

  “Right. He’ll go up for sure once we nail him.”

  “He might try to contact his sister,” I said. “Ask her to hide him out or help him leave the city.”

  “I already talked to the brother-in-law,” Branislaus said. “He doesn’t like Cahill; he’ll turn him in if he has the chance.”

  “Runyon’s wife know about this yet?”

  “Yeah. She called here ten minutes ago. I figured she had a right to know.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “She seemed numb. All she can think about is her husband.”

  “Can you spare somebody to keep an eye on her and her son until Cahill’s picked up?”

  “I wish I could. But we’re shorthanded. Hell, when aren’t we?”

  “I’ll do it, then. Keep me posted, Branny.”

  “Will do.”

  I had drip-dried, talking to him. I threw the bath towel into the hamper and got dressed and went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Breakfast? I felt that I ought to eat something, but there was nothing in the fridge that appealed to me. I didn’t want to hang around here anyway. Too much time alone with myself the past eighteen hours; this was a day I needed to spend among people, even if they were all relative strangers.

  ***

  ZIM’S ON VAN NESS WAS where I went to eat. The food made no impression on me; I forgot what it was even as I was shoveling it down. The place was crowded, though, and when I came out afterward there was a congestion of cars in the area: morning mass at St. Mary’s, on Cathedral Hill nearby, had just let out. The good clear sound of church bells filled the warm Sunday morning. The people and the bells made me feel better than I had in a while.

  I walked down O’Farrell to my office. One thing to take care of there before I drove to Ashbury Heights to see how Kay Runyon was holding up. As I walked, I had a mental image of the nave of St. Mary’s-the old church that had been destroyed by fire in 1962. Only once had I been inside the huge new cathedral that had opened in 1971, and that had been to see what it was like, not to attend services. More than thirty years since I’d been to mass at St. Mary’s or any other church, even though Cathedral Hill was only a few blocks from my flat. Long, long time. My ma had been a devout Catholic, had tried to raise me the same way; I’d gone along with her wishes to please her, but after she died, religion had no longer meant much to me. Such a good woman, so devout, and all she’d got for her virtue and her faith had been pain and suffering. God’s fault or not? For a long time I’d thought it was; now I wasn’t so sure. Might do me some good to give Him another chance… go to services again… take some of the old teachings to heart.

  Might, yes, if I could learn to believe again. But could I, after so many years? Religion is no comfort at all without faith, and I was no longer even sure I had faith in myself, let alone in a higher power.

  Something to think about. One more thing to think about…

  My building was deserted, as usual on Sundays. When I let myself into the office I stood for a few seconds, listening. The only sounds were from outside the building; inside, there was dead silence. No creaks, no groans, no ghostly complaints. Only at night, and no mistake. Just another of life’s little mysteries.

  The message light on my answering machine wasn’t blinking. So Annette Olroyd had yet to respond to the request I’d left with her mother. Still out of town? Or it could be she’d got back too late last night to call and hadn’t had a chance yet this morning. I looked up her number, tapped it out.

  Six rings, and a female voice said, “Hello?” Not the mother’s; this one was younger, and tiny like a munchkin’s, and diffident.

  “Ms. Olroyd? Annette Olroyd?”

  Brief pause before she said guardedly, “Yes?”

  I identified myself. “I spoke to your mother yesterday, about the postcards you received from Nedra Merchant. Did she tell you about our conversation?”

  Ongoing silence. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. The line was still open, though; faint circuit noises tickled my ear.

  “Ms. Olroyd?”

  “My mother,” she said, “is too trusting.”

  “… I’m sorry?”

  “With strangers. In person and on the phone.”

  “If you think she betrayed a confidence-”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “No. She was candid and helpful, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know you,” the woman said.

  “I’m a licensed private investigator-”

  “I know that. I looked up the name in the phone book. But I don’t know you. How can I be certain you’re who you say you are?”

  Paranoid, I thought. With or without good reason, like a lot of people these days. “I can prove it to you easily enough,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, “if you’ll just-”

  “I’m not going to give you my address,” she said. “At least my mother didn’t go that far.”

  “Would you like to come to my office?”

  Pause. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “And you won’t tell me about the postcards on the phone.”

  “No. Why do you want to find Nedra? You didn’t tell my mother your reasons.”

  “I think she might be in serious trouble. You know that she dropped out of sight suddenly-”

  “She explained that on her first card.”

  “In detail?”

  “… No. Not in detail. But she wrote the cards, they’re in her handwriting. She’s perfectly fine.”

  “Is she, Ms. Olroyd? A person’s handwriting can be duplicated, you know.”

  Silence.

  “Or she might have written the cards under duress. Has that possibility occurred to you?”

  More silence. Thinking it over, I hoped.

  “If you care at all about Nedra Merchant,” I said, “please help me. We could meet in a public place, if you’d rather not come to my office. Anyplace you like-you name it.”

  “… I can’t this morning,” she said. Weakening; it was in her voice. “I have things to do, I don’t know how long they’ll take. I was just about to leave when you called.”

  “This afternoon, then. Whatever time is convenient for you.”

  “Well, after two o’clock…”

  “Two-thirty? Three?”

  “Three,” she said.

  “Where would you feel comfortable meeting?”

  “There’s a…” she began, and then stopped and then made a throat-clearing sound. “Do you know Mountain Lake Park?”

  “Off Lake Street, edge of the Presidio?”

  “Yes. We could meet there.”

  “Fine. Where in the park?”

  “The Eleventh Avenue entrance… there’s a big rock in the grass, halfway between the entrance and the lake. It has a plaque on it, to a Spanish explorer.”

  “Rock with a plaque, right. You want to tell me what you look like? Or would you rather I described myself?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “Late sixties, dark, heavy set, graying hair. Wearing a brown sport jacket, beige slacks, a blue shirt without a tie. All right?”

  “Yes… all right.”

  “You do still have the postcards?”

  “I still have them.”

  “If you’d bring them along, let me take a look at them, it would be a big help. Will you do that?”

  “… I suppose so.”

  “Three o’clock, Ms. Olroyd. Please don’t disappoint me. For Nedra’s sake.”
>
  “Three o’clock,” she said in her tiny munchkin’s voice, and hung up without saying good-bye.

  I was sweating a little as I cradled the receiver. Talking to people like Annette Olroyd is hard work.

  The phone bell jangled as I was getting out of my chair. Kerry, I thought. Immediate reaction these days, like one of Pavlov’s drooling dogs. And the same letdown when I heard somebody else’s voice. Kay Runyon was the only woman interested in talking to me lately, it seemed.

  “I called your home number,” she said, “and I called your car phone.” She sounded apprehensive but not quite as frantic as she had yesterday evening. “I didn’t think you’d be in your office on Sunday.”

  “It’s just another day to me. Everything okay?”

  “Yes. But I’d like to see you. Can you come here?”

  “I’d already planned on it. You haven’t had any word on your husband?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just… I need to see you. Will you come right away?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “Please hurry,” she said, and rang off.

  More hard work coming up.

  ***

  THERE WAS PLENTY OF Sunday activity in Ashbury Heights, including a family of badminton players swatting a shuttlecock back and forth over a net strung across their tiny front lawn. Drapes and windows were open all along the winding street, to let in the sun and the warm, breezeless air-but not at the Runyon house. Huddled away in there already, I thought: mourners before the fact.

  I parked in front, went up and rang the bell. The door opened in two seconds flat, as if Matt had been lurking behind it with his hand on the knob. He was strung tight this morning, so tight he was almost quivering. There was something in his face, too, that I couldn’t read because he put his back to me almost immediately, without speaking, and walked away into the Dreamsicle living room.

  He stopped half a dozen paces into the room; I stopped in the doorway, with a sudden shriveling sensation in my belly and groin. Now I knew what had been in the boy’s face, why he was drawn so tight.

  Kay Runyon wasn’t alone in there. Eddie Cahill stood behind the orange-and-white couch she was sitting on, the muzzle of a Saturday night special pressed against her right temple.

  CHAPTER 18

  CAHILL SAID, “COME ON in here, slick. Nice and slow.”

  I moved ahead, halfway to the couch before I stopped again. You could feel the strain in there, the hard scraping edge of tension, but it wasn’t as acute as it might have been. Cahill was keyed up, sweating, but he seemed to have the furnace of violence in him under control. Kay Runyon was calm; there was no panic in her eyes, only a dull fright. She had been through so much recently, her sensibilities bludgeoned and bruised to the point of numbness. I felt bad for her, and bad for Matt, and angry as hell at the half-wit with the gun.

  I asked her, “You okay, Mrs. Runyon?”

  “Yes.” Low voice, as stunned as her eyes.

  “He didn’t hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “More than an hour… just before he made me call you. He forced his way in-”

  “Shut up,” Cahill said. His gaze, when he shifted it to me, showed more heat. “Don’t talk to her, goddamn it. You talk to me.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “That’s what you think. You carrying heat?”

  “No.”

  “Show me.”

  I opened my jacket, fanned it up and out, and did a slow turn. “Satisfied?”

  “Go stand next to the kid.”

  I went over beside Matt. His hands were fisted at his sides, locked down rigid; when I glanced at him I could see his neck cords bulging, the pulse throbbing in the hollow of his throat, the faint forward straining of his body. Like a pit bull at the end of a leash, I thought. Release him and he’d try to tear Cahill apart.

  I said to Cahill, “What’s this all about?”

  “You know what it’s about. You fuckers sicced the cops on me, you and Runyon. Richie told me that.”

  “Richie?”

  “My fuggin’ brother-in-law. He turned my own sister against me. A few bucks and a set of wheels, that’s all I wanted; but no, Richie drags out his piece”-he waggled the Saturday night special-“and sticks it in my face. Would of shot me, too, if I hadn’t taken it away from him. Fixed his wagon for him, the bastard.”

  “What’d you do to him?”

  “Busted his head,” Cahill said. “Gave Marj a jolt too. That’s what she gets for marrying Richie. A spic-what’s she want to marry a fuggin’ spic for anyway?”

  His smooth red face turned brooding and petulant; you could see his emotions running naked there. He’d backed himself into a corner, not for the first time in his miserable life, but he didn’t see it that way. It was always somebody else’s fault-in this case, the Runyons’, mine, his sister’s, his brother-in-law’s. Angry, persecuted, trapped, and not very bright, with no place to run and no place to hide, taking out his frustrations on the people he blamed for his trouble.

  But that still didn’t explain why he’d come here. This was a bigger risk than anything else he might have done…

  Runyon, I thought, that’s why. He’s after Runyon.

  And Nedra. Even now, on the run, he can’t let go of his fixation for her.

  “Here’s the way it stacks up,” he said. “You give me what I want and I walk out of here and nobody gets hurt.”

  “I can’t give you what you want. None of us can.”

  “No? I’m talking about Runyon.”

  “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “I told him we don’t know where Vic is,” Kay Runyon said. “I told him and Matt told him, but he won’t believe us.”

  “It’s the truth, Cahill. They don’t know and I don’t know either.”

  “You got to have some idea.”

  “No. If I had, don’t you think I’d have been out working on it instead of sitting around my office this morning?”

  He shook his head stubbornly; he had one thought in there and by God nothing and nobody was going to drive it out. “You people put me on the run-okay, that’s over and done with. But I ain’t going anywhere until I find out what he did to Nedra.”

  I asked Kay Runyon, “Did you show him the note your husband left you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That note don’t mean shit,” Cahill said.

  “It means he’s not coming back. It means he may already have done away with himself. What good is it going to do you to hang around here waiting?”

  “I ain’t gonna hang around here long. Neither are you. You don’t know where Runyon is, all right, then you go find him and bring him here.”

  “Jesus Christ, how am I going to do that? I just told you, he may already be dead-”

  “He’s not dead. I don’t buy that.”

  “I’ve been hunting him ever since he left last night. So have the police. Nobody has any idea where he is. How the hell can I find him if I don’t know where to look?”

  “I don’t care how you do it, just do it.”

  It was like trying to talk to a wall. I felt bitterly helpless. I couldn’t walk out of here and leave the woman and her son at Cahill’s mercy, not unless I was prepared to go straight to the police and put their lives in further jeopardy by turning this into a SWAT-team fiasco; and I couldn’t stay here because there was no way to negotiate with a monomaniacal simpleton, and no way I could see to disarm him by myself.

  One more try: “It’s Nedra you really want, Cahill, we both know that.”

  “I want to know what he did to her. She better be alive.”

  “I think she is. I’ve got an appointment with somebody later this afternoon, a friend of Nedra’s who might know where to find her.”

  “Who? What friend?”

  “I won’t tell you that. But I’ll take you with me when I see her-just the two of us. That’s my condition: Le
ave Mrs. Runyon and her son here and I’ll take you to the friend.”

  “Bullshit,” Cahill said.

  “What’s bullshit?”

  “There’s no friend.”

  “There’s a friend. I swear it.”

  “Then go get her and bring her here.”

  “I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Find out what the friend knows, come back and tell me.”

  “And then what?”

  “I go find Nedra myself.”

  And if she’s dead and you still believe Runyon did it, I thought, and Runyon still hasn’t been found, you come back here and throw down on these poor people again. No way. You don’t get Annette Olroyd and you don’t get whatever those postcards of hers reveal.

  Cahill said impatiently, “How about it, slick?”

  It’s got to be the cops, I thought. Walk out, call Branislaus, tell him the way it’s shaped up in here. He’ll take over, do what has to be done.

  And if this airhead shoots Kay or Matt before the negotiators can talk him out? I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.

  But there’s no other way…

  One other way: Leave, drive off, park somewhere out of sight, take the gun from the car and come back and try to get in quietly through the backyard and kitchen door, try to surprise him and pop him before he has a chance to use his weapon.

  Sure, sure, big clumsy guy like me, make noise when I breathe-I couldn’t sneak up on a brass band. Bigger chance of the Runyons getting hurt that way than with trained hostage negotiators handling it. I’m no hero, for Christ’s sake, especially not with other people’s lives at stake.

  “Come on, slick,” Cahill said, “make up your fuggin’ mind.” Angry now, letting the doors to the furnace blow open. He moved a pace to his right, took the Saturday night special away from Kay Runyon’s head so he could jam it in my direction for emphasis. His eyes had fire in them now-the meltdown glare, bright and crackling and all for me.

  And that was good because he didn’t see Matt move. He didn’t but I did-a slow, sideways shifting that brought the boy up next to a spindly table with an orange pottery vase on it. There were maybe fifteen feet separating him and Cahill.