Demons Read online

  For the “Nameless Detective,” investigations involving matters of the heart are to be avoided. But when an old poker buddy asks him to help frazzled and distraught Kay Runyon, whose husband, Victor, is having a clandestine affair with a mystery woman named Nedra, Nameless relents. After all, it seems like a simple matter: Find out just who Nedra is so Kay can confront her in a last-ditch effort to save her marriage.

  But Nameless soon discovers that there is much more at stake than a simple affair. Nedra is a modern-day Circe who attracts men who become obsessed with her, in some cases dangerously so. Victor Runyon is the latest in a long line; others whose paths Nameless crosses include a violent ex-convict, Nedra’s jealous ex-husband, and a powerful San Francisco politician.

  Victor’s obsession with Nedra takes a bizarre twist when she suddenly vanishes without a trace. Did she disappear willingly or was she the victim of one of her lovers’ private demons? Nameless must find out before it’s too late to save Victor and Kay from tragic ends. And he do so while trying to cope with a very personal and private demon of his own.

  Demons is a powerful tale of psychological suspense that builds inexorably to a chilling and shocking climax.

  Bill Pronzini

  Demons

  DEDICATION

  For my new in-laws:

  Kathryn, Lois, and Henry Muller

  and

  Carol and Karl Brandt

  EPIGRAPH

  Yes, there is a devil,

  Of that there is no doubt.

  But is he trying to get in us,

  Or is he trying to get out?

  —Old Rhyme

  CHAPTER 1

  I SAID, “I DON’T LIKE divorce work, Joe. You know that. The only time I’ll do it is when I need money. And right now I don’t need money.”

  “Kay doesn’t want a divorce,” DeFalco said.

  “Same kind of dirty job.”

  “You won’t have to take photos or make tapes or anything like that. Find out who the woman is, that’s essentially it.”

  “Essentially?”

  “Well, there is a minor complication.”

  “There are always complications, and they’re usually not so minor. What’s this one?”

  “I’d better let her tell you.”

  “Uh-huh. So I find out the woman’s identity-then what? Kay confronts her?”

  “She’s not violent, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  I sighed. “Talk it over woman-to-woman, appeal to the dolly’s sense of decency and fair play. Right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And what if the girlfriend won’t give him up?”

  “Kay’s at the end of her rope. If she can’t put an end to the affair herself, she’ll walk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, she will. You don’t know her; I do.”

  I thought: Nobody knows anybody, not really. We don’t even know ourselves. But I didn’t say it.

  DeFalco sat slouched in the client’s chair across my desk, watching me with his shrewd reporter’s eyes. He doesn’t look like a newspaperman; nor, for that matter, does he look Italian. He looks like Pat O’Brien playing Father Jerry in Angels with Dirty Faces. People tell him things they wouldn’t tell anybody else. Friends also turn to him for favors in a time of need. And when that happens, Joe being lazy and something of a buck-passer, his first inclination is to dump the whole thing, favor included, into the lap of another friend. In this case, me.

  “Well?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Come on, she’s a nice lady. No bull. I’ve known her since we were radicals together at Berkeley.”

  “You were never a radical.”

  “In spirit I was,” he said. “Be a mensch, will you? She’s hurting, bad, and she needs help and there’s nothing much I can do for her. It’s your kind of work.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “You picked the profession, pal. Nobody forced you to become a private eye.”

  I sighed again. If this were a comic strip-and my life felt like one sometimes-one of those word balloons would come out of my ear in the next panel and the word printed in it would be sucker! I said, “All right. I’ll talk to her. No promises beyond that.”

  He gave me his wise Pat O’Brien smile along with Kay Runyon’s address and telephone number. I wasn’t kidding him, the smile said. It also said I wasn’t kidding myself and we both knew it, didn’t we? Right on both counts, the smug bastard.

  At the door he paused and took a look around the half-empty loft, the way he had when he’d first come in. Don’t say it, Joe, I thought; you got this far without saying anything, just let it go. But he didn’t let it go, not my old pal, Mr. Sensitive. He said, “This place is too big for a one-man operation. You ought to take in another partner. Or get yourself a smaller layout.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “Any plans along those lines?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Think about it,” he said. Then he said, “You hear from Eberhardt since he moved out?”

  This time, teeth clenched, I shook my head.

  “Me neither. I guess he’s cut off a lot of his old friends.”

  No comment.

  “I hear he’s not doing too well. That what you hear?”

  No comment, damn it.

  “Well, he made his own bed,” DeFalco said. “Still, I’d hate to see him go down the tubes. You’d take him back, wouldn’t you? If he can’t hack it on his own and comes begging?”

  Enough. “Get out of here,” I said. “Go rake some muck at city hall.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it, huh? Eberhardt?”

  “Good-bye, Joe.”

  “Sure, I know how you feel. I’m on your side. Call me after you talk to Kay.”

  “Good-bye, Joe.”

  He went. And a little while later, so did I.

  ***

  KAY RUNYON AND HER ALLEGEDLY philandering husband lived in Ashbury Heights, a little pocket of affluence on the hill above the Haight-Ashbury. Old money up there-nervous money in the late sixties, when the Haight had been the center of the Flower Power, free love, let’s-all-get-stoned counterculture. The citizens of the Heights had survived the hippies with their property values intact, and were now in the process of surviving the drug-infested, homeless-dominated new Haight scene. Still nervous about the shape of things below, no doubt, but reasonably confident in the long view. If you live high enough on the hill, any hill, and you’re wary and well insulated, you can survive anything the rabble does down in the bottoms. That’s the theory, anyway, that the great visionaries in Washington had been tacitly propounding for a dozen years. The gospel according to St. Ronald and St. George.

  The Runyon house was a tall, narrow Mediterranean: stucco-faced, painted a creamy silver-gray, with cathedral-style windows of leaded glass and black wrought-iron balconies and trim. A double tier of brick steps led up onto a side porch from the street-fifteen steps in each tier. High, high on the hill. I wondered what Victor Runyon did for a living, to afford this kind of home. Or, not to be sexist, what Kay Runyon did. DeFalco hadn’t told me which of them controlled the family purse strings, or where the money in the purse came from.

  The front door opened before I was halfway up the second tier and Kay Runyon came out to greet me. I’d called her before leaving the office-a thirty-second conversation to determine that she was home and available for a conference right away. She had sounded tense on the phone and she looked tense in person: woman on the edge, and trying so hard not to show it that her balance was all the more precarious. She was about forty, too thin in baggy slacks and a white velour pullover, as if she might be anorectic; hair a sandy blond, worn shoulder-length in one of those fluffy, in-curving styles; large gray eyes th
at would have been striking except for the smudges under them and the pain in their depths. Twenty years ago she’d have had suitors of all shapes, sizes, and ages beating down her door. Now, what should have been an equally potent mature beauty was blurred, marred by the effects of strain and emotional upheaval.

  She subjected me to an intense five-second scrutiny of her own, and the impression she got seemed to reassure her. She shook my hand, said, “Thank you for coming, I really do appreciate it,” and ushered me into a big, angular living room. Everything in there was either orange or white or a combination of the two colors, including some oddly fuzzy impressionistic paintings on the wall and such accoutrements as vases, coasters, a table lighter, and ashtrays. There was plenty of light-from a chandelier and two table lamps, as well as from the sunny August day outside-and the effect should have been warm and cheery. Not for me, though. All that orange and white made me cold because it reminded me of a Dreamsicle, one of my generation’s kid treats: orange-flavored ice on the outside, vanilla ice cream on the inside. My old man loved Dreamsicles-just a big overgrown kid himself-and was always trying to get me to eat them, couldn’t understand why I kept refusing. Once, when I turned one down, he knocked me flat and stood over me shaking it, splattering me with cold melting orange and white, telling me what an ungrateful little shit I was. Some guy, my old man. Every boy’s ideal pop.

  Kay Runyon and I sat on white chairs with orange cushions. She lit a cigarette, began to smoke it in quick little drags. It was very quiet in the house, so quiet you could hear the faint hiss of the tobacco igniting each time she inhaled.

  Pretty soon she said, “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Wherever it’s easiest for you.”

  “Well… Joe told you my problem. Joe DeFalco.”

  “Yes.”

  “That my husband is having an affair.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s… no, it’s not just an affair. I could deal with it if that’s all it was.”

  “Have you had to before? Deal with that kind of thing?”

  “You mean is Vic a habitual cheat? No. As far as I know he was faithful to me for nearly nineteen years. That’s one of the things that makes all this so crazy, so…” She shook her head, jabbed out the remains of her weed in an orange clamshell ashtray, and immediately lit another.

  “You think he’s in love with this woman, then?”

  “No,” Kay Runyon said. “I think he’s obsessed with her.”

  “Obsessed?”

  “I know that sounds melodramatic, but it’s the literal truth. He’s not just sleeping with her, he’s not just infatuated with her… he’s pathologically obsessed with her.”

  “If you could be more specific…”

  “He isn’t the same man since it started. Not at all the same man. He doesn’t act or interact the same-I’m sure he doesn’t think the same. It’s as if he’s with her even when he’s here with me, as if nothing else-me, our son, our lives together, his job, none of it-is vital to him anymore.”

  “How long has he been this way?”

  “The relationship started eight or nine months ago, sometime before Christmas. At least that’s when I first suspected he was seeing someone. The obsession… four months or so. But I suppose it had been building all along.”

  The length of time surprised me a little. “And he hasn’t asked you for a divorce?”

  “No. I kept expecting it, dreading it… but no. I suppose it’s because she’s married, too, and doesn’t want to or can’t get out.”

  That was one explanation. I could think of a couple of others, both fear-related, but I didn’t share them with her. I asked, “Have you confronted him about the affair?”

  “I tried. It was… bizarre.”

  “How so?”

  “He wouldn’t admit or deny it,” she said. “Wouldn’t talk about it at all. He just… retreated. Into himself, like a turtle pulling its head into its shell. My God, it was like trying to talk to a stranger, a retarded person. There was just no connection.” She shivered, jabbed out her second cigarette, hugged herself. The lower parts of her arms, bare beneath the half-rolled pullover sleeves, were riddled with goose bumps. “No connection,” she said again.

  “The affair started sometime before Christmas, you said. Do you have any idea where or how?”

  “No. She’s someone he met through his work, I think. He’s not a social animal. I mean he doesn’t sit in bars by himself, doesn’t have the kind of male friends who go prowling in packs. Doesn’t have many friends at all, in fact. Until eight months ago he was a family man and a workaholic.”

  “What kind of work does he do?”

  “He’s an architect. Private homes, mainly. He’s quite well known, quite successful.” There was pride in her voice; even after all the pain he’d caused her, she was still proud of him. “Not just in the city or Bay Area-all over the state.”

  “A workaholic, you said. Would you describe him as driven?”

  “Yes. He’s that kind of man. Not such a long step from work obsession to woman obsession, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Something like that. Does he do much traveling?”

  “Some. Quite a lot in the past several months-to be with her, I’m sure.”

  “Away for long periods of time?”

  “Three or four days at the most. But I don’t think he met her while he was away. I think he met her right here in the city. I think she lives here or in a town close by.”

  “What makes you believe that?”

  “Well, in the first place he was home most of November-just one overnight consultancy trip to L.A.-and all of December. In the second place… lately, when he’s not out of town, he goes to see her two or three nights a week.”

  “Spends the entire night with her?”

  “No. At least he hasn’t gone that far yet. He comes home, but not until late-midnight or after. Goes straight to her from his office, or meets her somewhere, or whatever.” Another headshake. “I don’t want to know that part of it. What they do when they’re alone… the damn details.”

  “He doesn’t call you on those nights, make excuses?”

  “No. If he’s not here by six-thirty, then I know it’s one of his nights with…” Emotion drowned the rest of the sentence. I watched her struggle against it, try to hide it by lighting yet another coffin nail.

  In one of the other rooms a telephone rang.

  Kay Runyon’s head jerked a little; she said, “My God,” and got abruptly to her feet. But she didn’t go anywhere, just stood there rigidly listening to the phone ring three more times. Then she said, “Excuse me, please,” without looking at me, and went out of there at a half run, trailing cigarette smoke.

  The chair cushion was hard on my backside; I squirmed on it, fighting off the urge to get up and walk around. If I did that I would probably keep right on walking out the door, out of the troubled lives of Kay and Victor Runyon. This wasn’t my kind of case-I hated this kind of case. DeFalco and his goddamn favors.

  From the other room the sound of her voice came faintly. Too faintly for me to make out the words, but the harsh overtones of anger came through. The conversation didn’t last long; she was back in not much more than a minute. It hadn’t been a good call for her. Her face was paler and she seemed shaky now. When she sat down again her knees seemed to bend too quickly, so that she half collapsed into the chair.

  “Nedra,” she said, as if she were uttering an obscenity.

  “… I’m sorry?”

  “That’s her name, the bitch.”

  “Whose name?”

  “Vic’s obsession, the woman he’s fucking.”

  “You mean she just telephoned you-?”

  “No, no. That was him again, the man who keeps calling.”

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mrs. Runyon, you’re not making sense to me. Let’s back up a little here. You told Joe DeFalco you had no idea who the woman i
s, you led me to believe the same thing, and now you say her name is Nedra.”

  “That’s all I know about her, her first name.”

  “Who told you that? Your husband?”

  “No. The man who keeps calling.”

  “Why does he keep calling?”

  “To harass Vic, but he’s driving me crazy too.”

  “Harass him how?”

  “He wants Vic to stay away from her. Nedra. My God, it’s the same thing I want. I’ve tried to tell him that but he won’t talk to me, he won’t listen to me.”

  DeFalco’s “minor complication.” I asked, “How long has this been going on? These anonymous calls?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “How often? Every day?”

  “Almost. Sometimes once or twice a day.”

  “If he won’t talk to you, how did you hear the name Nedra?”

  “It was the first time he called… the first time I know about. Vic was home, here in the house, and I was in my studio out back, and he and I happened to pick up at the same time. Vic said hello before I could, and this man’s voice said, ‘Stay away from Nedra, you son of a bitch, if you know what’s good for you.’ “

  “A voice you’d never heard before?”

  “Never.”

  “What did your husband say?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t have time. The man called him another name, much worse, and hung up.”

  “Did you ask Vic who he is?”

  “Of course. He withdrew again.”

  “But you think he knows the man’s identity?”

  “Oh, he knows. He must know. I’m terrified that…”

  “What? The caller will make good on his threat?”

  “Yes. This is a crazy world, full of crazy people. He has to be unstable, to make all those calls. Who knows what he might do?”

  She was right, but I didn’t voice my agreement. I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s one of the reasons I have to know who Nedra is,” Kay Runyon said. “You see? Who she is and who the man is. Then I can talk to her-to him, too, if necessary-face-to-face.