Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

An ex-con named Kyle Franklin, not long out of San Quentin after serving six years for armed robbery, decides he wants sole custody of his seven-year-old son. He drags his new girlfriend to San Francisco, where his former wife is raising the boy as a single mom, and beats and threatens the ex-wife and kidnaps the child. Rather than leave the city quick, he decides he needs some sustenance for the long drive to Lila’s sister’s place in L.A. and stops at the first diner he sees, less than a quarter mile from the ex-wife’s apartment building — a diner where two case-hardened private detectives happen to be staked out.

We overhear part of his conversation with Lila and it sounds wrong to us. We notice the blood on his coat sleeve, the scraped knuckles, his prison pallor, the Odin’s Cross — a prison tattoo and racist symbol — on his hand, and the fact that he’s carrying a concealed weapon. So we follow him outside and brace him, he pulls the gun, and while we’re struggling our deadbeat dad chooses that moment to show up. The smart thing for Maxwell to have done was to drive off, avoid trouble; instead he lets his curiosity and arrogance get the best of him, and comes over to watch, and then picks up Franklin’s gun and hands it to me nice as you please. And so we foil a kidnapping and collar not one but two violent, abusive fathers in the space of about three minutes.

What are the odds? Astronomical. You could live three or four lifetimes and nothing like it would ever happen again.

It’s a little like hitting the megabucks state lottery. That night, Runyon and I were the ones holding the winning ticket.

The weirdest damn case I’ve ever been involved in began, innocuously enough, with a phone call.

I was alone in the agency office when it came in late that May morning, the day being one of the two per week I spend at my desk now that I’m semiretired. Tamara had gone down to the South Park Cafe to get us some take-out lunch, and Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez were both out on field assignments. So the decision to follow up or not follow up was mine to make, and the subsequent investigation mine if and when it came to that.

The caller gave his name as Peter Erskine, his profession as stockbroker and financial advisor, and said that he was calling from his home in Atherton. The location got my attention right away; Atherton is an uber-affluent community on the Peninsula some thirty miles south of San Francisco. His problem, he said, was personal and “very strange and disturbing.” When you’ve been a detective as long as I have, you get so you can read voice nuances over a phone wire. He didn’t sound particularly upset, but there was a detectable undercurrent of tension in his businesslike approach — the way a man speaks when he’s keeping himself under tight control.

“How do you mean strange, Mr. Erskine?”

“It’s... complicated, and it takes considerable explaining better done in person. Could you possibly come to my home this afternoon?”

I said, “Our policy with prospective new clients is an initial consultation here in our offices, to determine if our services meet your needs. You understand, I’m sure.”

“Yes, of course, but this matter also concerns my wife. She’ll want to meet and speak with you as well, but her health is poor and she doesn’t travel well. If you could see your way clear to driving down, I’ll pay you two hundred and fifty dollars for your time, plus travel expenses, whether you agree to help us or not. In cash if you’d like.”

Well, we’d been offered more than that up front, but not very often and not in recent memory. Besides which, the “very strange and disturbing” appellation to his problem was tantalizing, I was not particularly busy, just working a routine employee background check for a large industrial company, and the weather was too unseasonably nice for this time of year to be cooped up inside if you could justify a field trip. Two hundred and fifty bucks plus expenses was plenty enough justification.

I said, “What time would be convenient for you?”

“As soon as you can make it.”

“Two o’clock?” I was thinking about my lunch. No breakfast to speak of this morning, and my stomach was grumbling.

“Two o’clock, yes, that’s fine. Thank you.”

“Address? Phone number in case I should need it?”

He provided them, along with general directions that weren’t necessary. The GPS Kerry had talked me into installing in my car — rightly so, I had to admit, despite my general dislike of electronic gadgets — would take me to his home by the shortest possible route.

Tamara came back and into my office as I was ending the conversation with Peter Erskine. Tamara Corbin, my partner and just about young enough to be my granddaughter. Whip-smart and as organized and creative as they come — literally the guiding hand and beating heart of the agency. When I’d first hired her for her computer expertise several years back, I’d been running a modest one-man operation; once she learned the ropes and took on more and more responsibility, she’d worked tirelessly to expand the business to the point where now we employed two full-time field operatives and another on a part-time basis and were dragging down five times the annual profits I’d made on my own. One of these days, long after I was gone, she’d undoubtedly head up the largest investigative agency in the city.

She set one of two Styrofoam sandwich containers on my desk. Its contents had the warm, spicy aroma of hot pastrami. “New client?” she asked, nodding at the phone.

“Prospective. Peter Erskine, stockbroker and financial advisor, Atherton.”

One of her eyebrows went up at that, climbed another fraction when I told her about Erskine’s cash offer. “Man’s serious, whatever his problem. Could be interesting.”

“Could be,” I agreed.

Interesting? What a hell of an understatement that turned out to be.

Atherton is one of those expensive, wooded, hillside communities that prides itself on its scenic attractions and considerable amount of open space. The homes in the upper sections below Highway 280 are mostly situated on large parcels shaded by heritage trees and surrounded by lawns and carefully tended gardens. There are quite a few that qualify as estates, tucked away on acres of real estate behind stone walls, ornate fences, high hedges. You could buy yourself one of those for ten million on up to thirty million or more if you were one of the upwardly mobile, mega-rich folk who’d made their pile down in Silicon Valley. Even the less opulent properties would cost you seven figures on the open market.

The property that evidently belonged to Peter Erskine and his wife was modest in comparison to some of its neighbors, probably worth a paltry three or four mil. It had a whitish stone fence and a gated entrance drive, the gates mounted on ornate pillars and open now. I drove on through.

Half an acre of barbered lawn and flowering shrubs separated the house from the road. Two stories of angular modern architecture, faced in the same kind of whitish stone as the fence and decorated at the corners with red fire brick, the house wasn’t half as large as most in the vicinity — no more than a dozen rooms, not counting baths. Over on its right side I had a glimpse of a redbrick terrace and, at a distance at the edge of a copse of evergreens, a large hexagonal outbuilding that I would call a gazebo and the Erskines probably labeled a summerhouse. There’d be a swimming pool, too, somewhere around back.

The driveway ended in a white-pebbled parking area that would accommodate half a dozen cars. Mine was probably the oldest and cheapest passenger vehicle that had ever been left there. I made my way to the porch and rang the bell. Rolling melody of chimes, footsteps, a pause while I was scrutinized through a peephole magnifier, then a male voice saying my name interrogatively even though it was five minutes of two and I was expected. Erskine being careful nonetheless, for reasons I was about to learn, before he admitted a stranger.