Demons

by Bill Pronzini

  I made good time until I neared Santa Rosa. Then I ran into an accident jam, and by the time I got past the blocked lane on the south side of town, I’d lost most of the twenty minutes or so I’d gained early on. Sometimes when you roll the dice you come up with snake eyes.

  It was six forty-five when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and after seven when I reached Forest Hill. They were there, all right; his car was parked in front of the red-shingled garage. I stopped across the street. The only firearm I own, a lightweight .38 Smith & Wesson Bodyguard, I keep clipped under the dash; I popped it free, put it into the pocket of my jacket, then donned the jacket as I got out.

  The gate in front of the house was shut. I still had Runyon’s key but I did not want to go in the front way if I could help it. I detoured to the side stairway, descended slowly to the landing midway down the hillside. The storeroom door was recessed under an overhang there.

  The key worked that lock as well as the ones on the gate and the front entrance. I eased the door open, myself inside; shut it behind me. Stood listening until my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I could see the way across to the interior door. There were no sounds to hear.

  I picked my way through the storeroom, peered into the downstairs hall. More empty silence. Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, they were being quiet about it. I entered the hall, moving quickly now that I had carpet underfoot, and poked my head around the doorway into the master bedroom. They weren’t in there, which was a small relief. It would have been bad, walking in on them having sex; I don’t know what I would have done. Consensual abuse is still abuse, the more so in Nedra Merchant’s case.

  I padded down to her office and the spare bedroom; they were also empty. Back to the stairs… and above, not far away, I heard somebody cough. It didn’t sound right-liquidy, strangulated, the cough of a person in pain.

  I went up fast to the middle landing, where the upper half of the stairs turned back in the opposite direction. A decorative wrought-iron banister ran partway around the staircase and through the pickets I could see into the entrance hall. What was up there made me stop, put a fresh clutch of tension across my shoulders. It also knocked me mentally off-balance, because it was not at all what I’d expected to find here.

  He was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall facing me, his feet splayed out in front of him. Blood, a lot of it, had dyed the front of his pale-blue shirt a glistening crimson. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing… until his chest heaved and another cough, then a ragged series of coughs, racked his body. The floor around him was littered with objects: two large plastic bags that evidently had been dropped, spilling their contents. Cosmetics, perfumes, two small gift-wrapped packages, a bottle of champagne, several food items. On its side half in and half out of the bathroom doorway, as if it had been dropped or kicked there, was a suitcase-Nedra’s suitcase, the one that I’d seen in the bedroom at the Thornapple house.

  I climbed up the rest of the way, cautiously, with my gaze swiveling between the formal living room on my right and the kitchen straight ahead. Nothing and nobody to see in either place. I went into the kitchen, then the family room; looked out onto the deck; checked the attached garage and the bathroom. Nedra wasn’t here. Nobody was here except Baby.

  I knelt beside him. The wound in his chest was down low, under the right breast. Maybe life-threatening, maybe not; he’d lost a half pint of blood and it depended on the angle of penetration and where the bullet had lodged. Shot with a small-caliber handgun-probably a .22. There was no sign of the weapon among the litter on the floor.

  It must have been Nedra, I thought… But then where was she and where was the gun? I could see her shooting him, if she’d somehow thrown off her psychological dependency and acted in a rush of hatred. But I couldn’t see her doing it and then charging out of the house on foot with the weapon in her hand. He’d turned her into a burrow animal, and animals don’t run wild in the daylight when they’re hurt. They hide in the dark and lick their wounds.

  Whoever did it, I thought, it’s partly my fault. If I’d called the SFPD from Nice, this wouldn’t have happened. Then I thought: No, damn it, you don’t know that’s so. Explanations, priorities… the cops might not have gotten here any faster than you did. Some of the fault is Nedra’s and most of it is Baby’s; none of it is yours.

  He coughed again, then started to shiver. I hurried downstairs and got a blanket out of the master bedroom and brought it up and put it around him. It didn’t stop the shivering. I leaned down and said against his ear, “Who did this to you?” His eyes stayed shut and he didn’t answer. He was conscious-wheezing with his mouth open, licking at cracked lips with a liverish tongue-but his awareness was a small, shriveled thing huddled somewhere in the dark within.

  Seeing him like this, I felt nothing for him except the thin, detached pity I would have felt for any gunshot victim. No rage, no compassion, no sense of sorrow. Every man has demons and he’d let his destroy him, nearly destroy several innocent people; I had no patience with a man like that, no room inside me for understanding and forgiveness. I reserved my feelings for the fighters, the bogey-bashers and demon-slayers, the selfless ones who might hurt themselves but could never be driven to harm others.

  The front door was locked; I opened it and took a quick look at the latch. No scratches, no marks of any kind. Then I went back into the family room. Something in there had caught my eye on the first pass: a glass on the coffee table where Runyon’s flower shrine had sat. It was a tall glass, half full of a dark liquid that was probably bourbon and three melting ice cubes.

  Right.

  From the phone in there I called 911, told the dispatcher who answered that I had a gunshot emergency and needed an ambulance right away at 770 Crestmont. She asked my name, and I hesitated and then disconnected without giving it to her. It wasn’t the smartest move, to walk away from the scene of a shooting, especially if one of the neighbors happened to see me doing it. But I couldn’t bear the thought of hanging around here, waiting, going through another endless Q. & A. session. I had a pretty good idea now of where Nedra was and who had shot Baby. And I could do something about it if I got out of here immediately.

  He was still sitting as I’d left him, still wheezing, still licking his dry lips. I went past him, opened the door again. There were no sirens yet, but it wouldn’t be long before an ambulance and a police cruiser or two came shrieking up the hill. Gunshot emergency response in the city is usually fast… in upper middle-class white neighborhoods like this one anyway.

  Leaving the door open, I crossed the deck and cracked the gate. The street was empty and there were no pedestrians. To make things as easy as possible for the cops and the paramedics, I left the gate ajar too.

  It was the last thing I could or would do for Victor Runyon.

  ***

  DOWNHILL ON IRVING I STOPPED at a service station that had a public telephone booth with a still-usable directory. The address I wanted was listed, a number on Paraiso Place. I had to look up Paraiso on my city map: a short street in the Parkside District, between Sloat Boulevard and Stern Grove. Fairly close to where I was now; ten or fifteen minutes, depending on traffic.

  As I drove out Nineteenth, my head was full of Victor Runyon. What had happened between him and Nedra, beginning in early May, was not hard to figure now. He had been coming apart slowly for some time: years of overwork and stress, the added stress of his affair with Nedra. She had been the catalyst, and the final catalytic act was her ending their relationship. That was what turned her from the controller into the controlled; from the predator into the victim.

  Angry words, threats, at her home on Saturday, May 9th; an ugly scene. That day, or the next, Nedra had driven up to Lake County-to get away from Runyon, or maybe just to be alone for a while. When he found her gone he figured out where she went and drove to Nice himself. Another confrontation, even more volatile, and the last threads of his sanity had unravele
d. He’d locked her in the root cellar. Not with any intention of keeping her there, not at first; just a wild and angry attempt to force her into changing her mind. But she had spirit and she’d made the mistake of resisting him, taunting or threatening him. A day or two or three, and by then it was too late: he was committed. He’d hold her prisoner until she saw things his way, agreed to marry him. An impossible fantasy, but in his battered mind it was his only hope.

  It wouldn’t have been difficult for Runyon, an architect, to turn that cellar into a livable cell, no more than a couple of days’ work with her locked in the downstairs toilet where she could yell her head off without being heard. He’d have had the .22 with him by then, to keep her obedient. Early May was when he’d taken the gun from his garage, not last Saturday. I’d have bet money on it.

  Before too long, Nedra would have stopped openly fighting him, pretended to give in, said or done anything to free herself. But she’d have waited too long: he didn’t believe her. Hate and malice had gotten mixed up with his desperate love; he’d wanted to punish her as well as bend her to his will. Three and a half months… he’d punished her, all right. Broken her at last. He must have realized that when he went up there again on Saturday, and it was a good thing for her that he had. Otherwise she’d be dead now. They both would be.

  Runyon had reached the point of killing himself; the goodbye letter to his wife proved that. But suicide wasn’t the only thing on his mind when he walked out of his house Saturday evening. If Nedra had continued to resist him in any way, or if he’d still felt there was no hope for the two of them, he’d have shot her before turning the .22 on himself. I’d have bet money on that too.

  Instead he’d found a totally dependent Nedra, all his at last. “Baby,” she’d said, and he’d taken her out of her prison, and cleaned her up, and made love to her, and yesterday or this morning he’d packed her bag and promised to take her home. Today he’d locked her up again-“just for a little while,” he’d have said to her-while he ran around Lakeport buying her cosmetics, presents, food, and champagne to celebrate their homecoming. Even finding me there with her hadn’t changed his plans. All he cared about was the two of them, being together, going home.

  It all seemed so clear-cut… and yet I hadn’t tumbled to any of it, hadn’t had a glimmer of suspicion, until I saw Nedra crouching inside her prison. No one had suspected-except, for God’s sake, Eddie Cahill. Had Runyon let something slip in one of his monologues at the Crestmont house that Cahill had overheard? Or was his belief in Runyon’s guilt based on reasoning as wrongheaded and monomaniacal as Runyon’s? Didn’t matter much, either way. The point was, that damned shrine had acted like a screen to obscure the truth from me; so had the things Runyon had told me on the way to S.F. General, the things he’d done to preserve Nedra’s home and finances. They were all part of a madness much deeper and more complex than a layman like me could have diagnosed. His lies were not so much calculated falsehoods as self-denials of the terrible act he’d committed. The shrine, the paying of her bills, the preservation of her mail and her phone messages, were not just expressions of blind, sick faith; they were devotional preparations for her homecoming, the beginning of their life together.

  Still, even with all the complexity and obfuscations, I might have guessed at least some of the truth. There were things that pointed to it, like lights in a heavy fog. Kay Runyon had told me her husband traveled a lot as part of his profession, that he’d increased his travel time considerably over the past several months. If I’d checked into that I’d have discovered that few if any of his recent trips were business-related. When he’d left the city it had been to go to Lake County, to attend to Nedra. Then there were the postcards. As far as I knew, only two people had received cards-Dr. Muncon and Annette Olroyd, the only two who had expressed serious concern in messages left on her answering machine. Runyon had monitored those tapes; he’d told me so himself. The only other person who had listened to them was me.

  And finally there were things he’d said on the ride to the hospital, revealing little phrases. Give it enough time, she’ll change her mind. I know she will. She has to. And: I do know she’s alive, she’s all right, she’s not really hurt. And: [I’m her] lover and best friend. Now especially she needs no one but me. And: She’ll come back, safe and sound. She has to, for both our sakes. You understand? She’ll come back with me. That last was the most telling of all. With me, he’d said, not to me. I just hadn’t paid attention to the word choice at the time.

  ***

  THE HOUSE ON PARAISO PLACE WAS small and Spanish-style: white stucco, red tile roof, wrought-iron trim. In front was a pocket-size lawn and a couple of cypress that had been sculpted to resemble bonsai trees. In the driveway alongside sat a new beige Cadillac Eldorado. Maybe that was a good sign and maybe it wasn’t. I would have liked it better if Walter Merchant weren’t home, if he’d taken Nedra straight to a hospital.

  I parked behind the Caddy, went up and laid into the bell. When I finally let up I thought I heard steps inside, but the door didn’t open. I leaned on the bell some more, kept it up for a full minute. The door stayed shut.

  “The hell with this,” I said aloud. Then, in a much louder voice, I called out my name and: “I know you’re in there, Merchant. Open up, damn it, and talk to me.”

  Nothing at first. But as I was about to sing out again, he said from close behind the door, “Go away. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “Don’t play games with me. I just came from Nedra’s house. I called the paramedics but not the police, not yet. You’ve got ten seconds before I do. And you won’t like what I tell them.”

  He used all ten seconds to make up his mind. A chain rattled, the door swung inward. Walter Merchant didn’t look like a confident, dignified, take-charge lawyer tonight. He was pale, slump-shouldered, his hair mussed, his clothing rumpled and untucked. There was a hunted look in his eyes. And across the front of his pin-striped shirt, smears of dried blood.

  He said dully, “How did you know to come here?”

  “Lucky guess.” But it hadn’t been. He’d told me in his office that he hadn’t given Nedra any reason to change the locks on her house after the divorce; that being the case, and given his feelings for her, it was reasonable to assume he’d kept a key, just in case. And he’d been hanging around there on Saturday night, with his torch for her burning hot. And who else but Merchant would have made himself a drink in there tonight, made himself at home in the place that used to be his home?

  I pushed past him, into a living room furnished expensively but without much style or taste. There was nobody in it except Merchant and another collection of tropical fish in a tank that matched the one in his office.

  “Where’s Nedra?”

  “In the bedroom. I put her to bed.”

  “Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”

  “I was going to, but… I wasn’t thinking clearly, I didn’t have any idea what had happened to her. I still don’t, except that she’s been through some kind of hell…”

  “The worst kind.”

  “What did he do to her, for God’s sake?”

  “Locked her in a root cellar in a house she owns in Lake County. That’s where she’s been the whole three and a half months.”

  “Jesus!”

  “How did you get her here?” I asked him. “She wouldn’t have come willingly, not the shape she’s in.”

  “She was… wild. She didn’t even seem to know me at first. I couldn’t control her, she tried to claw me… I had to hit her and then carry her to the car.” A tremor ran through him at the memory. “I never hit her while we were married. Never, not once.”

  “She still unconscious?”

  “She woke up when we got here. She knew me then-didn’t try to fight me anymore. She was… God, it was like she was a zombie. I had some sleeping pills, I got her into bed and made her take one…”

  “Show me where she is.”

  He led me into a sha
dowed bedroom at the rear. Nedra was asleep on her back, with a comforter tucked up under her chin. Her gaunt, bloodless face didn’t look quite so ravaged in repose. I went over and listened to her breathing. It sounded normal enough.

  “That bruise on her chin,” Merchant said miserably. “That’s where I hit her.”

  I had nothing to say to that. I took hold of his arm, prodded him out of there and back into the living room.

  “What happened with Runyon?” I asked then.

  “Runyon. Is that his name?”

  “You never saw him before?”

  “No, he was a stranger to me. Is he dead?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s badly hurt? He might die?”

  “He might, but I doubt it.”

  “That’s too bad. I wish I’d killed the son of a bitch.”

  “No you don’t. You’re a lawyer, Merchant; you know better than that.”

  He drew a deep, shaky breath, started to speak, changed his mind, and sank bonelessly onto the arm of a leather couch. Pretty soon he said, “I was in the house when they walked in. I don’t know why I went there again tonight. The same perverse impulse that made me drive by on Saturday, I guess. I’d been thinking about her all day, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.”

  “What happened when they came in?”

  “As soon as I saw her-the way she looked-I went a little crazy. He had his arm around her and I tried to pull her away. She screamed, tried to jump on me, and he pulled his damn gun and waved it in my face… I don’t know, I tried to take it away from him and he… it went off. The muzzle must have been right up against his body.”