Bill Pronzini - Schemers

“You won’t.”

“It’s just so hard,” she said. “So hard.”

“Don’t let him feel you’re rejecting him and he won’t reject you. I think I’m right about that. Loving close is always better than loving at a distance.”

I t was after nine by the time they got back to the city. The coffee shop at Taraval and Nineteenth Avenue stayed open until midnight; they had dinner there, in a rear booth. A stranger sitting across from them couldn’t keep his fat eyes off Bryn. The third time he glanced over, Runyon caught his gaze and held it, impaled him until the man shifted both his gaze and his body and kept his attention on his plate, where it belonged. Damn people, anyway.

He took Bryn home afterward, walked her to the door. Before she unlocked it and went in, she said, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Putting up with me. Being honest. I’m such a screwedup mess.”

“Not any more than me and a whole lot of others.”

“I almost cancelled tonight. So depressed after I saw the doctor.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“So am I.”

“Better now?”

“Better,” she said. “What you said, about Bobby, about loving close… it makes sense.”

“When can we get together again?”

“Not tomorrow. My mother’s night to call.”

Her mother lived in Denver, she’d told him, and was the only other person she could talk to about personal issues. But only for short periods; the mother tended to become weepy and critical.

“Wednesday, then?”

“Yes, Wednesday. Good night, Jake.”

“Good night.”

It was a short drive from Moraga Street to his apartment building on Ortega. On the way he turned his cell phone back on. He’d taken to switching it off when he was with Bryn; urgent calls were a rarity in the evening and their time together had become too important to let routine business intrude.

One voice-mail message, from Cliff Henderson in Los Alegres: “I looked through the trunk in Damon’s garage like you asked. The only thing missing I’m sure about is one of the photo albums. Mostly old pictures taken on hunting and fishing trips-Damon and me, my father, some of his hunting buddies. No damn idea why that crazy bugger would steal it.”

Too late to call Henderson back now. He’d talk to him about the missing album in the morning, in person.

Coming in late to the apartment, facing the emptiness, wasn’t so bad on the nights he was with Bryn. He turned on the TV for noise, booted up his laptop to check his e-mail. All he ever got were occasional business messages and spam, but he always checked it before he went to bed. One e-mail from Tamara tonight, sent after five o’clock, with some more background information on the Henderson brothers, their father, and their remarried mother. Didn’t seem to be much there, but you never knew what might prove to be important until you got deeper into an investigation.

In the bedroom later, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the framed portrait of Colleen on the nightstand. Another nightly ritual, but that, too, was different than it had been before. She would’ve liked Bryn, approved of him seeing her. Encouraged it, even. Just one of the things he’d loved about Colleen: she’d always wanted what was best for him.

SCHEMER

He sat on the edge of the motel tub, burning the last of the Henderson snapshots.

The cracked, leather-bound album lay spread open on his lap. The door was closed, the rattling fan switched on to clear away the smoke and keep it from setting off the smoke alarm. There were only a handful of snaps left in the album. He’d burned the rest over the past several days, a few each day.

He removed one of the last from its plastic sleeve, looked at it for a time. Lousy, like all of them. Poor composition, bad use of light and background. Cheap camera, probably. Amateur shit. He turned it over to read what was written on the back-“Hayden and George, Aug 1998”-and then spun the wheel of his lighter and touched the flame to one corner. It burned slow at first, then fast. When the heat began to sear his fingers, he dropped the charred remains into the toilet with the others.

Unexpected find, this album. He hadn’t been looking for anything like it, anything at all the afternoon he’d slipped into Damon Henderson’s garage. Bold move, going in there in broad daylight. Proof that he could breach their lives any time and any place he wanted to, that he owned them now whether they knew it yet or not. No real risk involved. Getting into the garage had been ridiculously easy. Wear a khaki shirt, carry a flashlight and a clipboard, wear a badge that looks authentic, act like you belong in the neighborhood, and people take you for a meter reader or a workman and pay no real attention to you.

Sifting through all those boxes and then finding the trunk with the albums in it-that had been almost as much of a rush as Sunday night’s visit. Bad few seconds when Henderson came blundering in, spoiling the planned acid bath for his CPA records and his car, but the rest of it had turned out real well. Hitting him with the tire iron, straddling him, whispering to him, hitting him again and hearing him scream… oh, yeah! He’d had to fight himself not to use the tire iron a third time, split Henderson’s skull wide open, but it wasn’t the right place or the right time. Henderson wouldn’t have suffered enough. And there hadn’t been enough time to tell him why he was suffering. That would come later.

He looked at and burned two more photos, taking his time. The last one was in color, a posed shot, poorly centered and badly filtered so that the background was muzzy and the images not sharp. But they were clear enough for identification, even without what was written on the back: “Cliff, Damon, and Dad, Oct 2000.” He lifted the snapshot close to his mouth and spat on each of the images before he set it on fire. Held it longer than any of the others, watching it burn, savoring the blackened destruction of the images until the flame reached his fingers and made him let go. Some of the ashes missed the toilet bowl. He scraped them into his hand, brushed them in.

Then he stood, unzipped his fly, urinated onto the ashes.

Spat one last time on the yellow-black mess and flushed it away.

At the sink he washed his hands. They still felt unclean when he was done, so he washed them again. Better. He used the towel, making sure his palms and wrists were completely dry. Then he switched off the fan and went out into the main room.

Typical cheap motel room, designed for anonymity. The perfect hideout. He smiled at the thought of “hideout” and sat down on the lumpy bed.

The spiral-bound notebook was in his briefcase, along with the five-by-seven color portrait and the digital snapshots he’d taken at the cemetery. He unlocked the case, took them out, lay back with his head propped against the headboard. He looked at the portrait first, looked at it for a long time. Familiar face, but clouded by time-a kid’s memory. But he’d gotten to know it well from the portrait, as well as he ever would. Each time he looked at it he felt a great tenderness well up inside. She’d been so pretty. Not the plastic, Hollywood kind of prettiness-genuine, the girl-next-door kind. High cheekbones, small nose, small cleft in the well-shaped chin. And not just attractive outside, but good inside. You could see the goodness shining in those soft brown eyes.

After a time he put the portrait down and again read the last few notebook pages, shaping each sentence with his lips, lingering over the important passages. Sad, bitter, painful. Full of love and sorrow and desperation. Full of pleading-a tacit plea to him, now, because there was nobody else.

Testimony.