Bill Pronzini: Scattershot

“You haven’t said yes, either.”

“I just need more time, that’s all.”

“How much more time?”

“I don’t know. It’s a big decision. …”

“Sure. Your decision, not your father’s.”

“Now look, you, ” she said. Her tone was light, but the lightness seemed a little forced. “Nobody makes my decisions except me. And nobody exerts any influence over me. I’m a big girl; I don’t pay much attention to parental advice anymore. “

“Meaning he was after you again to push me under a bus. “

“Oh God, ” she said. “He doesn’t hate you; he’s just leery of the business you’re in. “

“Yeah. Leery. “

A shout went up from some of the bocce players: one of them had whacked an opponent’s ball with an underhand air shot. I glanced over at them. When I looked back at Kerry she was staring straight ahead and her face had a cloudy, introspective cast. The set of her mouth showed a leaning toward anger.

I knew I was pushing it too much, but I could not seem to help myself. I loved her, and I wanted her so damn badly it was becoming an obsession. The first time I had asked her to marry me, we’d been sitting on the balcony of her Diamond Heights apartment; it had been just after the end of the pulp convention case and I had known her four days. She’d been surprised, flattered-and reticent. She liked me, she said, and maybe she loved me too, but she wanted to be absolutely sure; she had been through one bad marriage, to a schmuck L. A. lawyer named Ray Dunston, and she just wasn’t sure if she wanted to try it again. Okay, I said, so we’ll live together first, what about that?

Maybe, she said. Give me some time to think it over.

So I gave her some time; I didn’t mention marriage or a living arrangement for the next couple of weeks. We went out together, we slept together, we spent good quiet evenings at her apartment and at my Pacific Heights flat. And I thought she was weakening, from things she said, little hints she dropped, and I got ready to bring up the subject again. But then her father called, and she made the mistake of telling him about my proposal, and that was when Ivan the Terrible started his longdistance telephone campaign. With the result that when I did restate my proposal, Kerry put me off. And had been putting me off ever since.

Ivan Wade didn’t like me worth a damn. He thought I was too old for Kerry; he thought I was a fat, scruffy private detective and had told me so to my face during the pulp convention. He was a stuffy, overprotective, humorless old fart, Ivan was. He had seen his daughter through one messy relationship; he did not want to see her through another, which was what he was convinced would happen if she hooked up with me. He was after her all the time about the perils and insecurities of my job, about the difference in our ages, about Christ knew what else that she wasn’t telling me. And he was beginning to wear thin on me. If he didn’t cut it out pretty soon I was inclined to fly down to Los Angeles and confront him about it. Kerry wouldn’t like that, but it seemed to be my only course of action. As it was, I had tried to reason with him through her, which had proved futile. I had even called Kerry’s mother, Cybil, who pretty much approved of me-maybe because I had uncovered and then reburied some skeletons in her closet during the double-homicide thing, or maybe just because she liked me-but that had not done any good, either. Cybil was a forceful personality, but when it came to Ivan the Terrible she seemed more often than not to come off second best.

Kerry had her hands folded on one knee; I put my hand on her laced fingers. “Hey, ” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come on so strong. “

“No, it’s all right, ” she said. But she didn’t smile.

“It’s just that I love you. “

“I know. “

“So make your decision soon, huh?”

“Yes. Soon. “

I looked at her for a time. “Crazy, ” I said.

“What’s crazy?”

“Me. I feel like a kid when I’m around you. “

“You are a kid sometimes. Big, tough private eye. Hah. “

“Hah, “I agreed.

‘ She reached over and straightened the damp collar of my jogging-suit top, and this time I got a smile. “Big, sloppy, persistent kid, ” she said. “All right, kid, let’s go jogging. “

“Uh-uh. I’ve had enough of that. “

“No, you haven’t. You need the exercise. “

“There are other forms of exercise. “

“Like what?”

I told her like what.

She said, “It’s not even noon yet. “

“So?”

“So didn’t you have enough Friday night?”

“Sure. But this is Sunday. “

“We can do that later, you sex fiend. Right now I want to go jogging, and then I want to go to your flat and take a shower, and then I want to have some lunch. “

“Jogging first?”

“Jogging first. Come on. “

Jogging is for jerks, I thought. But I let her prod me up and lead me out of the bocce courts and down toward the beach. Then, by God, I let her start me running and puffing and dripping sweat again, while the fishermen and a bunch of tourists and the black musicians gawked at the sight.

The ordeal lasted an hour. I didn’t have a heart attack, but I was hurting plenty as I drove, with Kerry following in her car, down Van Ness and up to my flat. She got into the shower first, which gave me time to guzzle two cans of Schlitz; I’ll start my diet tomorrow, I thought, the hell with it. Then I took my shower and let the hot water work out some of the muscle knots. Then we had lunch. Then we went to bed.

And for the first time between us, it wasn’t all that good.

Kerry knew it too; we didn’t say much to each other afterward. I asked her to have dinner out somewhere, stay the night, but she said no, she wanted to do some more work on her agency presentation. She left at five-thirty, and when she was gone the flat felt empty and I felt empty. I spent the evening reading one of her mother’s Samuel Leatherman private eye novellas in a 1946 issue of Dime Detective -one of the sixty-five hundred pulp magazines I collect and keep on bookshelves in the living room. That wasn’t very good, either. At eleven I went to bed and lay there listening to the silence and to the mutterings inside my head.

I’m going to lose her, I thought.

Jogging, diets, proposals, love-none of that would make any difference. Ivan the Terrible was going to get his way. Damn it, I was going to lose her.

Blue Monday.

I was in a funk when I got down to my new offices at nine-twenty- a pale blue funk, two shades lighter than dark blue depression. The place did nothing to buoy up my spirits. It was on Drumm Street, within pitching distance of the Hyatt Regency and the moribund Embarcadero Freeway, and I had been occupying it just about as long as I had known Kerry. The building was newly renovated and the elevators did not clank as they went up and down, — the anteroom and the private inner office had chrome chairs with corduroy cushions and Venetian blinds on the windows; the walls were pastel-colored, the carpet was beige, the telephone was yellow, and the fact that I was blue made it a Technicolor nightmare.

No character, that was the problem with it. My old office, on the fringe of the Tenderloin, where I’d spent twenty years of my life, had been dripping with character: scarred walls, battered furniture, sagging rail dividers, a gloomy alcove with a sink in it that had been old in the days of Sam Spade. That, by God, had been a private eye’s office. This was the office of a salesman or a lawyer or a minor business executive: pleasant, unobtrusive, and sterile. It wasn’t mine. Not even the blowup poster of a Black Mask cover I had hung on one wall made it mine.