Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) Page 4

  Come on, Tamara. You want to do the nasty so bad, you know you can find somebody to do it with without even trying. Half a fox now that the love handles were slimmed down. Sleek and sassy. Must be a few hundred guys in the city that wouldn’t mind getting into her pants for a night or two, no strings. Pick a night, pick a club, pick a dick.

  More stupid thoughts.

  She sighed. She was off the bridge now, moving toward the interchange and 880 south, but she could still hear that damn shushing hum.

  Horace. Horace, Horace, Horace . . .

  The house George DeBrissac’s cousin owned in San Leandro was on Willard Street, 1122 Willard. She’d looked it up on the Netscape MapQuest site before leaving the office: Willard was in the wide trough between the 880 and 580 freeways, closest to 880 off San Pablo Avenue. Simple directions, should be pretty easy to find.

  It was. Blue-collar residential neighborhood, not much different from dozens of others in the East Bay—that was apparent even on a dark night in an area without many streetlights. Old houses, mostly frame, a few stucco, on pretty good-sized lots. Probably an ethnic mix of whites, blacks, maybe a few Latinos and Asians.

  Finding 1122 was a little harder. No numbers on the street signs, no reflector curbside numbers for the headlights to pick up, the houses set far enough back from the street so it wasn’t easy to read the numbers on them. Tamara drove slow, with the driver’s window down, until she passed a house with the porch light on: 906. Which way did the numbers run, up or down? Down—the next block was 800. She made a U-turn, came back to the 1100 block, finally pinpointed the right one.

  Boxy frame house, hedges hiding most of the front porch, low-maintenance yard behind a Cyclone fence interwoven with some kind of scraggly vine. Dark, no light showing anywhere. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody inside. The front windows looked like they had heavy coverings, and there might be lights at the back that she couldn’t see from here.

  She kept on going, circled the block, eased back up Willard in the same direction as before. Fifty yards or so across from 1122, a gnarly curbside tree laid out a big puddle of shadow. She parked in the puddle, darkened the car. Unobstructed diagonal view of 1122 from there, if she needed to maintain a surveillance.

  Now that she was here, out on a field job, she began to feel a little stoked. Working on the computer was satisfying, she was an expert hacker, but it got boring sometimes. Fieldwork wasn’t, not yet anyway. She’d worked with Bill long enough to know that night jobs could be occasionally dangerous, and dull and more boring than office work when long stakeouts were involved, but she wasn’t worried about any of that. Probably lose its fascination for her before long, but right now it was all still new and pretty cool.

  She remembered what the boss man had taught her. Stay alert in unfamiliar territory, use your senses. Right. Street was deserted, nobody on the sidewalks or in any of the nearby yards. She got out, locked the door. Lights in some of the houses, salsa music playing somewhere, distant traffic sounds. Cross the street, not too fast and not too slow. Don’t go into a strange yard until you make sure there aren’t any dogs or BEWARE OF DOG signs. 1122 was a canine-free zone as far as she could tell. Don’t try to get past locked gates unless it’s absolutely necessary. Gate in the Cyclone fence wasn’t locked. She opened it, walked up the path and up the steps to the door.

  Nothing to hear from inside. There was a doorbell; she pushed it and it made a noise that sounded more like a long fart than a bell. She waited a minute or so, then released the fart again. Still silent inside.

  Alongside the house on the left was a gravel driveway. She quit the porch, went over there. Make sure you’re alone and unobserved before you go prowling around strange property. Yeah, she thought, and that goes double for a black woman even in a mixed neighborhood after dark. Alone and unobserved as far as she could tell; the house next door on that side was as dark as this one. She moved along the driveway to a garage that was just about big enough for one car. A rear yard opened up alongside the garage, but there wasn’t anything in it except a half-dead tree and some ground cover that was more weeds than lawn. The garage didn’t have any windows that she could see. The lift-up door was probably locked, and even if it wasn’t, she’d be asking for trouble to even try looking inside. Never take unnecessary risks. Right. No point in it anyway. If the deadbeat was hiding out here, he was somewhere else right now.

  Tamara strolled back down the driveway, not too fast and not too slow. Two options now. One was to go ring a couple of doorbells, find out if any of the neighbors had seen DeBrissac. Only problem with that was, if he was living here, wasn’t any way of knowing what his relationship was with the neighbors. He might’ve given them some song-and-dance, asked them to cover for him or report to him if anybody came poking around. That happened, he’d fly again and be twice as hard to find. So . . .

  She crossed the street, crawled back into Horace’s Toyota. Surveillance time. Prospect of that killed off the last of her little high; this was the part that could get boring. But she wouldn’t stay all that long, an hour, maybe two. If nobody showed at 1122, she could always come back again tomorrow night.

  She wiggled her butt into a comfortable position on the seat and settled down to wait.

  4

  Russ Dancer, dying. Cirrhosis and emphysema. Refused to quit drinking or smoking, refused hospitalization or treatment beyond painkillers and an oxygen bottle that he carried around with him. He’d finally collapsed five days ago in the hallway of his rooming house. Bitched and moaned about going to the hospital, wanted to die in his room, but he was too sick and too weak and the croakers wouldn’t let him stay there alone. All of this courtesy of Buck Trail. And all of it typical Russ Dancer.

  I felt bad about it, in a detached sort of way. The detachment—a reflection on me and on the sad, bitter life of Russell Dancer—made me feel bad, too. So did my having assumed he was already dead, that he must have drunk and smoked himself into his grave years ago. So did the fact that he still considered me enough of a friend, even though I’d made no effort to get in touch with him in more than a decade, to ask for me on his deathbed.

  I confessed this to Kerry when I called her with the news. She said, “You have no reason to feel guilty. He really didn’t want you in his life, you know that. Particularly after you and I got together. Too much of a reminder of Cybil.”

  “I know it. Still. . .”

  “Why do you suppose he wants to see you?”

  “No clue. But I have to find out.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “And I wish I didn’t.”

  “Do you want me to call Cybil? She’ll want to know.”

  “Not yet. Better wait until after I see him.”

  I took 101 south to Redwood City. The 280 freeway would have been faster, even with the rush-hour clog getting across to the west side, but on this errand of mercy—if that was what it was—I was willing to put up with the commuter-crawl delay. Or so I thought when I started out. The trouble was, Dancer rode with me all the way down.

  He was a writer, a damn good one back in the postwar forties when pulp magazines were still a viable form of popular entertainment. Creator of private eye Rex Hannigan, whose hard-boiled exploits had run in Midnight Detective until the magazine’s demise in the early fifties, then been chronicled in a series of softcover mystery novels during that decade’s paperback boom. The Hannigan stories, particularly those in the pulps, had had energy, flair, innovative plotting—the work of a raw talent that might have been developed through care and diligence into a voice to be reckoned with in the crime-fiction field. But Dancer had wasted his gift. Taken the easy road into fast-money hackwork to support a hard-living, hard-boozing lifestyle. As of ten years ago, he’d published upward of two hundred novels—mysteries, Gothics, bodice-ripper historicals, movie tie-ins, traditional westerns, adult westerns, softcore porn, hardcore porn, just about anything somebody would pay him to write.

  Our paths had first c
rossed down the coast in Cypress Bay, where he’d been living at the time, on a case involving one of his paperback mysteries. The second time was at a pulp magazine convention in San Francisco where I’d met Kerry; he’d been one of the guests—along with Kerry’s mother and father, Cybil and Ivan Wade, who’d also been pulp writers—and had managed to get himself arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. He liked me because I got him off the hook: they don’t let you have booze or a typewriter in jail. The third and last time I’d seen him had been a brief encounter in Redwood City, when I’d looked him up to gather information about the murder of yet another former pulpster, Harmon Crane. All in all, we’d spent an aggregate of less than twenty-four hours in each other’s company. And yet whenever I thought of him he was a vivid presence in my memory.

  I knew him and I didn’t know him; he was both an open book and a conundrum. Rowdy, sharp-tongued, bitter, self-mocking, with a penchant for trouble and bad decisions: he could make people dislike, even hate him without half trying. A little of him went a long way. Yet there was something about him, an innate vulnerability, that built a certain amount of pity in me. In a sense he was a tragic figure; he had no luck and had suffered a good deal of adversity, both personal and professional, that wasn’t his fault. He was not easy to deal with because it had never been easy for him to deal with himself. He knew he’d compromised his talent, and hated the fiction whore he’d become, and that was one of two reasons he kept dragging himself down into the depths. The other reason—and the other reason I pitied him—was his fifty-year letch for Kerry’s mother.

  I remembered how he’d looked that last day in Redwood City, on a stool in a sleazy neighborhood bar called Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern. Sagging jowls, heavy lines and wrinkles on his face and neck, tracery of ruptured blood vessels in his cheeks, rum-blossom nose. Dissipated, rheumy, too thin for his big frame as if the flesh were hanging on his bones like a scarecrow’s tattered clothing. I’d had the thought then that he wasn’t long for this world; maybe that was why I’d assumed he must be dead by now.

  I remembered some of what he’d said to me that day, too. He’d just lost an assignment to write a series of adult westerns—screwed it up himself somehow, probably, though he blamed the editor. I’d asked him if he was still writing and he’d said, “Sure, always at the mill. Got a few proposals with my agent, a few irons in the fire. And I’m working up an idea for a big paperback suspense thing that might have a shot.” Face-saving lies. I had stopped by his furnished room before going to Mama Luz’s, had a quick look inside, and there’d been no sign of his typewriter. He must have hocked it to supplement his Social Security, buy more booze and cigarettes.

  Russ Dancer, hunched on a bar stool. A little drunk, a little maudlin, a whole lot lonely, wanting me to stay and have a drink with him, begging for a few more minutes of companionship and compassion. And I’d walked out on him and never gone back. Why hadn’t I bothered to look him up again, try to find out how he was doing? Inertia, lack of any real motivation . . . lousy excuses. He considered me his friend, and for a friendless man like him, that meant something. It should’ve meant a little something to me in return.

  Ten long years. And he’d been down there all that time, living on Social Security and dying by centimeters. And now he was finally about to get what he’d been after for Christ knew how long, that kept eluding him because of an iron constitution and a perverse nature and a hair shirt as thick as they come.

  I felt lousy by the time I got to Redwood City. I felt, dammit, right or wrong, as though I’d betrayed a trust.

  Kaiser Permanente Hospital.

  Bed in a ward, surrounded by a curtain on an oblong frame.

  Dancer, hooked up to machines.

  Not the Dancer I’d known, not even that last time at Mama Luz’s. A shadow, a husk, a stick figure topped by a death’s head coated with gray fuzz and age spots. Lying there motionless, eyes shut, his breathing aided by oxygen tubes but still coming in wheezes and gasps. My mouth dried out, looking down at him. I had to work some spit through it before I could speak.

  “Hello, Russ.”

  He’d known I was there; a nurse had gone in first to tell him he had a visitor. The shrunken head turned slowly, the eyes flicked open and focused on me. A grimace that tried to be a smile moved the corners of his mouth. Words came in little bursts fragmented by wheezes, so low that I had to lean close to hear him.

  “No tengo . . . for good this time . . . eh, paisano? Goddamnit. . . to hell.”

  It took a few seconds for that to signify. The old Spanish cowboy lament he’d been fond of quoting at one time as a metaphor for his life and career. “No tengo tabaco, no tengo papel, no tengo dinero—goddamnit to hell.”

  There was a white metal chair at the foot of the bed. I pulled it up alongside, sat down. Better that than standing and looming over him. This was awkward and painful enough as it was.

  All I could think of to say was, “I’m sorry.”

  “What for? We all . . . gotta go . . . sometime.”

  Some more easily than others. I nodded.

  “You don’t mean it . . . anyway. Nobody . . . gives a shit . . . when a hack writer croaks.”

  “I do, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Pity,” he said. “Pity visit . . . no different than . . . pity fuck.”

  Even on his deathbed, the Dancer tongue was as crude and acrid as ever.

  “Your friend Trail cares,” I said.

  “Buck? Hah, that’s a . . . that’s a laugh.”

  “Why would he call me if he didn’t care?”

  “Paid him, that’s why. Twenty . . . twenty bucks. Bet he’s . . . over at Mama Luz’s . . . drinking it up right now.”

  “One of the doctors or nurses would’ve done it for free.”

  “Wouldn’t trust . . . any of those bastards. Nurses . . . can’t even empty bedpan . . .” A cough shook him, made him wheeze harder. “Besides, what do I . . . care about money . . . now . . .” More coughs, a staccato series of them that led to a gasping struggle for breath.

  “Russ? Should I call the nurse?”

  “. . . No. Be okay . . . not time yet . . .”

  The struggle went on for another fifteen or twenty seconds. That could be me, I thought. If I hadn’t quit smoking when I did, if I hadn’t started taking better care of myself. The thought put little ripples of cold on my neck.

  “Why did you ask to see me, Russ?” I said when the wheezing and gasping finally eased. “Just to say good-bye?”

  “Hell, no. No damn good . . . at good-byes. Want you . . . do something for me.”

  “All right. If I can.”

  “You can. Has to do with . . . Sweeteyes.”

  “Cybil? You want me to bring her to see you?”

  “Christ! That’s the . . . last thing . . . her see me like this.”

  “Give her a message, then?”

  “Sweeteyes,” Dancer said again. His pet name for her. “Bet she’s . . . still as . . . beautiful as ever.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Health good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still . . . sharp mentally, still . . . writing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell her . . . read her novel. Damn good. She . . . can still write rings . . . around most of us. Makes . . . everything I churned out . . . look like the shit it is.”

  “I’ll tell her. Anything else?”

  Faint smile. “Remember D-Day.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “What was that, Russ?”

  “Remember D-Day.”

  “Just those words?”

  “And . . . one more message. Tell her . . . amazing grace.”

  “You mean like the hymn?”

  “Just tell her. Remember D-Day . . . amazing grace.”

  “All right.”

  “Rest of what I . . . have to say to her . . . in the package.”

  “Package?”

  “Other thing I want you . . . do for me
. Give Sweeteyes . . . package.”

  “Where is it? Here?”

  “No. Storage locker, trunk . . . my building. Keys . . . keys in drawer there . . . next to bed. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Big envelope, her name . . . on the front. Don’t open . . . for Sweeteyes only.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t give it . . . to her until after . . . you hear I’m gone.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Good. Knew I could . . . trust you. Only one . . . I can trust . . .”

  The curtains slid open behind me, the sudden ratcheting of hooks on the frame making me jerk a little. A starchy nurse poked her head inside. “You’ll have to leave now,” she said to me. “It’s time for the patient’s medicine.”

  “Fucking cow,” Dancer said when she was gone. “Time for . . . patient’s medicine. You like that? Not . . . Mr. Dancer, not even . . . old bastard, just patient.” He made a laughing sound. “Dead meat, pretty soon.”

  I’d had enough even before the nurse appeared. I stood up.

  “Take keys,” he said.

  I opened the nightstand drawer. Two keys on a ring; I put them in my pocket.

  “No . . . good-byes. Hate good-byes.”

  “So do I.” But I couldn’t just leave it at that. I felt even worse now; I had to put some of the guilt into words—for my sake, if not for his. “I really am sorry, Russ. I should’ve gotten in touch, I should’ve been a better friend.”

  No answer. He lay still, his eyes shut now, his breathing a little less raspy in repose. I thought he might have drifted off, hadn’t heard what I’d said. But he was awake and he’d heard. And he answered me as I turned away from the bed and parted the curtains.

  “No tengo,” he said. “Goddamnit to hell.”

  The rooming house where Dancer had lived the past two decades was an ancient, two-story Victorian on Stambaugh Street, off Broadway and fairly close to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Downscale neighborhood that looked about the same as it had on my last, long-ago visit. The block-long thrift store where Dancer had gathered his reading material was still there; so was Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern a half block to the west. Not much had changed, in fact, except that there were a couple of empty storefronts and more graffiti on the building walls. The Victorian had had a coat of paint slapped on it in the interim, but it hadn’t done much to dispel the seedy aspect; its turrets and gables were still in need of repair, its brick chimneys still unstable-looking. One of the two scraggly palm trees in the front yard had died and been cut down; the broken picket fence that had enclosed the yard had been replaced by an even uglier Cyclone job. How long before urban renewal caught up with this little patch of decay? A few years at the most. Its days were numbered in any case, and Dancer had been a perfect fit: old and blighted and dying a little more every day.