Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

“I told you, I’m trying to track down their next of kin.”

“Yeah, well, you come to the wrong place, man.” He belched again. “I got no more time to talk. Things to do inside.”

Like open another beer. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Rodriguez. Buenas tardes. ”

“Yeah,” he said, and backed up and shut the door in my face.

I looked up Leno Brothers Painting on my trusty new iPhone. Just about every business has a website these days, and this outfit was no exception. They were located in Campbell, a small city adjacent to San Jose on the west. The two brothers were Floyd and Harvey and there were photographs of each on the site; the one named Harvey appeared to qualify as “butt ugly, built like an ox.” They evidently ran a cut-rate outfit with emphasis on speed rather than quality of work. “Nobody Beats Our Prices. Fastest Brushes in the West.”

The address turned out to be in an industrial area not far off Highway 17. Narrow piece of property sandwiched between an outfit that sold solenoid valves and a plumbing supply company’s pipe yard. The building’s exterior was neither run-down nor prosperous looking — just a small, nondescript blue-collar business like thousands of others. A none too clean white van sat in the driveway alongside, facing the street.

An overhead bell rang a couple of off-key notes when I entered. The interior, unoccupied at the moment, wasn’t much to look at, either. There was a linoleum-topped counter with some paint-sample books on it, a stack of gallon cans with a placard propped against them that had the words Sale — Big Savings written on it, and walls adorned with photographs of freshly painted houses by way of advertisement for the Leno brothers’ handiwork.

Beyond the counter was an areaway that apparently led to a workroom and storage area at the rear. A man wearing a stained white smock and painters’ cap appeared there and walked up to the counter, wiping his hands on a large rag, not quite hurrying. The Leno named Floyd — smaller, leaner, and older than his brother, craggy faced, eyes the shiny color of black olives. His forehead, under a thatch of thinning, dust-colored hair, was oddly crosshatched with a pattern of lines that resembled nothing so much as a tic-tac-toe drawing.

“Yes, sir? Help you?”

“Mr. Leno?”

“Floyd Leno, that’s right.”

Under normal circumstances I would have showed him ID and come straight to the point of my visit, as I’d done with Lenihan and Rodriguez. But these were not normal circumstances. So I played a role instead.

“I’m not here about a painting job or anything like that,” I said, making my voice hesitant and a little nervous, as if I were unsure of myself. “I... well, I understand you knew a man named Vok.”

“Who?”

“Vok. Antanas Vok.”

You had to be paying close attention to see the change in his eyes, like shutters coming down over a pair of tiny windows. Otherwise his expression remained the same. “Name’s not familiar. Customer of ours?”

“I don’t think so, no. I thought he must be... well, a good friend of you and your brother.”

“Why would you think that?”

“On account of your brother and another friend cleaned out the Voks’ apartment after they were killed in that accident last year.”

He looked at me steadily while he did some more hand-wiping; the rag smelled strongly of turpentine. “Who told you that?”

“Tenant in the building where they used to live.”

“He made a mistake,” Leno said. “I told you, I don’t know anybody named Vok.”

“But maybe your brother does. Is he here?”

“Out on a job. What’s your interest in this Vok anyway?”

I cleared my throat before I said, “I met him where he used to work, not long before he was killed. We had a talk one night.”

“Talk about what?”

“About this... group he belonged to.”

“What kind of group?”

“People who believe in doing things other people wouldn’t approve of. It sounded like something I’d like try, but I... I guess I wasn’t ready at the time. And then there was the accident and Vok hadn’t given me the names of anybody else in the group, so I tried to forget about it. But I couldn’t. Things haven’t been going too well for me lately, and now... well, I’m ready for a change, a new way of living the rest of my life.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”

“You sure? I mean, I’m serious about wanting to get into this group. Real serious. I’ve got a little money saved, if that’s what it takes...”

Apparently it wasn’t. “You’re not making any sense,” he said. There was a cold steel edge in his voice now. The black eyes no longer seemed shuttered; they were fixed on me in a glazed, unblinking stare, like that of a corpse. “And you’re wasting my time; I got work to do. Go peddle your bullshit someplace else.”

“It’s not bullshit—”

“It is to me. You know what’s good for you, mister, you won’t come around here anymore. My brother’s got even less patience than me, and a mean temper when he’s bugged for no reason.”

“Are you... threatening me?”

“Call it friendly advice,” Leno said. He threw the smelly rag down on the counter, gestured at the door. “On your way.”

Bust. Maybe I hadn’t played the role well enough. Maybe Leno and his brother weren’t involved in a devil cult after all. Maybe, if they were, the cult wasn’t taking in new communicants. Or maybe in order to join you had to be sponsored by one of the members, to ensure complete secrecy.

Too many maybes. Unless Tamara could turn up something useful on the Leno brothers, what they amounted to was a dead end.

I don’t like hospitals.

My antipathy isn’t as strong as Jake Runyon’s — he spent long months watching his second wife die of ovarian cancer in a Seattle hospital — but it’s strong enough. I’ve been inside one or another too damn often, as patient and visitor both, the last time in Placerville on a two-day vigil after Kerry’s kidnap ordeal, praying for her to pull out of a semi-coma. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone you love hooked up to machines and IVs, dying or perilously close to it. No one who has gone through that can ever be comfortable in a hospital again, even on the kind of brief professional mission that took me to South Bay Memorial. I could feel myself tightening up, my pulse rate jump, as soon as I walked through the door into the main lobby. Health care facility. Right. The sooner I got this visit over with, the better my health care would be.

I told the woman staffing the Information Desk that I wanted to speak with Nurse Ellen Bowers on a personal matter. She checked a list, made a call, and then directed me to the nurses’ station on the third floor. Two nurses up there, one of each sex; the woman wasn’t Ellen Bowers. Ms. Bowers was “on her rounds,” the male nurse told me, and expected back shortly.

There were some chairs in a small waiting area, one of which I was invited to occupy. So I sat there and did what I could to block out the hospital sounds and smells by ruminating on the Rodriguez and Floyd Leno interviews.

Harvey Leno and an unidentified Lithuanian, with a paper allegedly authorizing the removal of the Voks’ personal belongings. Why in such a hurry? There could be an innocent cultural explanation, if the Lithuanian was a friend or close relative. It also could have something to do with the nature of those belongings, if Lenihan had been closer to the truth than he realized in his made-up description of the apartment’s black arts — related contents. No way now that I could see, after the Leno blow-off, of finding out which.