Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

He’d told me the truth, the whole truth. I would have staked my reputation on it.

The man was not a murderer, not a criminal. Just the opposite, in fact — a victim of circumstance, and racial prejudice, and the kind of crippling fear that overrides all other human emotions.

He sat slumped now, as if the conversation had exhausted him. His dark face was beaded with sweat; that and the glow from the pale ceiling bulb gave it an oddly burnished quality, like a casting in bronze.

“We goin’ to the po-lice now?” he said.

I’d already made up my mind. Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts and to hell with rules and regulations and strict adherence to the letter of the law. There is more than one kind of justice in this world, even if it’s too little and too late.

“No,” I said. “No reason to, Mr. Brown.”

“... Brown?”

“Our client is Charles Anthony Brown. As far as we know, nobody by that name is wanted by the authorities.”

I handed him Tamara’s printout containing the personal and contact information for Robin Louise Franklin Davis. He looked at it, looked up at me with emotions playing over his face again — gratitude, renewed hope, something that might have been shame.

“Good-bye, Mr. Brown,” I said. “Good luck with Robin Louise.”

I went to the door. I had my hand on the knob when the trumpet notes sounded behind me, tentative at first, then clear and sharp and now familiar. When I turned back toward him, he lowered the instrument and said, “I ain’t played nor sung ‘Who You Been Grapplin’ With?’ in fifty years, ’cept inside my head. Lily’s song, wrote it special for her, but it’s mine now. Been mine ever since I left N’Orleans.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say.

In a low, age-cracked voice, he began to sing. The melody was the same, but the beat was slower, the lyrics slightly different and with different meaning than the ones Tamara had sung for me — a mournful elegy for a tragically broken life that stayed with me long after I left him.

Jake Runyon and I were the only customers in the all-night diner near the Cow Palace, sitting at the counter with mugs of coffee for me and tea for him, when the man and woman blew in out of the rain.

Blew in is the right phrase. They came fast through the door, leaning forward, prodded by the howling wind. Nasty night out there. One of the hard-rain, big-wind storms that hammer the California coast during an El Niño winter.

The man shook himself doglike, shedding rainwater off a shaved head and a threadbare topcoat, before the two of them slid into one of the sidewall booths. That was as much attention as I paid to them at first. He wasn’t the man we were waiting for.

“After eleven,” I said to Runyon. “Looks like Maxwell’s a no-show again tonight.”

“Weather like this, he’ll probably stay holed up.”

“And so we get to do it all over again tomorrow night.”

“You want to give it a few more minutes?”

“Might as well. At least until the rain lets up a little.”

Floyd Maxwell was a deadbeat dad, the worst kind. Spousal abuser who owed his ex more than thirty thousand dollars in unpaid child support for their two kids; hard to catch because he kept moving around in and out of the city, never staying in one place longer than a couple of months, and because he had the kind of job — small-business computer consultant — that allowed him to work from any location. Our agency had been hired by the ex’s father and we’d tracked Maxwell to this neighborhood, but we’d been unable to pinpoint an exact address; all we knew was that since he’d moved here he ate in the Twenty-Four Seven Diner most evenings after ten o’clock, when there were few customers. Bracing him was a two-man job because of his size and his history of violent behavior. Runyon was twenty years younger than me, and had a working knowledge of judo learned during his days as a Seattle cop.

This was our third night staked out here and so far all we had to show for it were sour stomachs from too much caffeine. I had mixed feelings about the job anyway. On the one hand I despise deadbeat dads and spousal abusers and nailing one is always a source of satisfaction. On the other hand it amounted to a bounty hunt, the two of us sitting here with handcuffs in our pockets waiting to make a citizens’ arrest of a fugitive, and I’ve never much cared for that kind of strong-arm work. Or the type of people who do it for a living.

The new couple were the only other customers right now. The counterman, a thin young guy with a long neck and not much chin, leaned over the counter and called out to them, “What can I get you folks?”

“Coffee,” the man said. He was about forty, well set up, pasty-faced and hard-eyed. Some kind of tattoo crawled up the side of his neck; another covered the back of one hand. He glanced at the woman. “You want anything to eat, Lila?”

“No.”

“Couple of hamburgers to go,” he said to the counterman. “One with everything, one with just the meat. Side of fries.”

“Anything to drink?”

“More coffee, biggest carton you got. Milk.”

“For the coffee?”

“In another carton. For drinking.”

The counterman said, “Coming up,” and turned to the grill.

The tattooed guy said to the woman, “You better have something. We got a long drive ahead of us.”

“I couldn’t eat, Kyle.” She was maybe thirty, a washed-out, purse-lipped blonde who might have been pretty once — the type of woman who perpetually makes the wrong choices with the wrong people and shows the effects. “I feel kind of sick.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t you stay in the car?”

“You know why. I couldn’t listen to it anymore.”

“Well, you better get used to it.”

“It breaks my heart. I still think—”

“I don’t care what you think. Just shut up.”

Lila subsided, slouching down in the booth so that her head rested against the low back. Runyon and I were both watching them now, without being obvious about it. Eye-corner studies with our heads held still.

Pretty soon the woman said, “Why’d we have to stop here, so close? Why couldn’t we keep going?”

“It’s a lousy night and I’m hungry, that’s why.”

“Hungry. After what just happened I don’t see how you—”

“Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?”

The counterman set a mug of steaming coffee on the counter. “You’ll have to come get it,” he said. “I got to watch the burgers.”

Neither of the pair made a move to leave the booth. Kyle leaned forward and snapped at her in a low voice, “Well? Don’t just sit there like a dummy. Get the coffee.”

Grimacing, she slid out and fetched the coffee for him. She didn’t sit down again. “I don’t feel so good,” she said.

“So go outside, get some air.”

“No. I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Yeah, well, don’t do it here, for Christ sake.”

She turned away from him, putting a hand up to cover her mouth, and half-ran into the areaway that led to the restrooms. A door slammed back there. Kyle loaded sugar into his coffee, made slurping sounds as he drank.

“Hurry up with the food,” he called to the counterman.

“Almost ready.”

It got quiet in there, except for the meat-sizzle on the grill, the French fries cooking in their basket of hot oil. Outside, the wind continued to beat at the front of the diner, but the rain seemed to have slacked off some.