Bill Pronzini - Fever

“With me, with that neighbor of his. He was vulnerable, he’s still vulnerable…”

“Wait a second,” I said. “He had an affair with one of his neighbors?”

“Before he met me. It didn’t last very long. She wanted it to, but it was just… physical for Mitch. Not like it is with us.”

“Which neighbor? Did he tell you her name?”

“The woman who lives next door to him. It was right after her divorce.”

“Rebecca Weaver?”

“Yes,” she said. “Rebecca Weaver.”

JAKE RUNYON

Aaron Myers’s car was a ten-year-old Buick LeSabre. He got that info from Tamara on the way back to the city. When he reached Noe Valley, he drove around within a three-block radius of Myers’s apartment building. If he found the LeSabre, and Myers still wasn’t answering his bell, he’d figure some way to get inside the building and then the apartment.

He didn’t find it.

And nobody answered the bell.

Maybe good, maybe not. Depended on where Myers had gone. Runyon drove up to Duncan Street-and the LeSabre was parked around the corner from Youngblood’s flat, facing downhill at a bad angle. There was a narrow space behind it; he squeezed the Ford in there and went to have a look. All the doors were locked, the interior empty. Under the windshield wipers was a parking ticket, issued at 9:40 that morning. A sign just down the way said that Friday was street-cleaning day and there was no parking on this side between four a.m. and noon. The Buick had been here since early morning or sometime the night before.

He didn’t like that at all.

He hurried uphill and around the corner. He expected to have some trouble getting into Youngblood’s building, but he caught a break. One of the residents had bought a new refrigerator; a delivery truck was double-parked in front, and two burly guys were hauling the old one out through the propped-open front doors. Runyon waited for them to pass by, stepped through as if he belonged there, and hurried up the stairs.

A one-minute lean on the bell bought him nothing but muted noise from inside. When he tried the knob, it turned under his hand and the door edged inward. The muscles in his gut and across his shoulders pulled tight. Cop’s instincts, telling him something was wrong here-bad wrong. He stepped inside, shut the door softly behind him.

The place smelled of death.

The odor was so faint and indistinct that most people wouldn’t have noticed. He’d been in too many places where people had died; the smell was sometimes strong, sometimes not, but always there and always the same.

He went down the hallway into the living room. And that was where he found Aaron Myers, slumped down in a chair in front of one of the computers, his head lolling sideways, his eyes squeezed shut.

Runyon touched knuckles against one cheek, felt the neck artery. Cold skin, no pulse. Dead a long time; rigor had already come and gone. Last night sometime. There were no marks on the body, nothing except a thin foamy drool that had leaked from one corner of the mouth and dried there. Overdose of some kind-hard drugs or prescription pills.

The computer in front of the corpse was turned on. Sleep mode, looked like. He wiggled the mouse with the back of his hand, and the screen lit up. Writing, more than a page single-spaced. Suicide note-he read enough of it to tell that. The rest could wait.

He backed away, his lips flattened in against his teeth, and turned to look around the room. No signs of disturbance anywhere in here. The way the flat was laid out, there’d be a bedroom at the front and another at the rear beyond the kitchen. The one in front, adjacent to the living room, would be the larger of the two. He checked in there first.

Drapes drawn, a lamp burning on a nightstand. And another dead man, sprawled backward across the bed.

No need to check this one’s pulse. One side of his head had been caved in by a heavy blunt object-the brass lamp, a twin to the one on the nightstand, that lay streaked with dried gore on the carpet.

When you’d been on enough homicide scenes, you learned not to let the blood and torn flesh and staring eyes and cold waxy faces bother you too much. This was just another in a long string. Standard murder-suicide, the kind that happened almost daily in a city the size of San Francisco.

Except that it wasn’t. Not this one.

The dead man on the bed was wearing black net stockings and a blue silk dress. The dress had twisted open in front, exposing a pair of foam-rubber falsies; hiked up far enough on the thighs to reveal lacy, black silk panties. Close-cropped black hair showed where the hennaed wig had come undone. The face under the pancake makeup and crimson lipstick was lean, ascetic, the chin slightly beard-stubbled.

Brian Youngblood.

And Brandy.

One body, but for months now it had contained two personas-the quiet hacker and the foulmouthed bimbo. Half him and half her, even now in death. There was a walk-in closet across the room; from where Runyon stood he could see racks of women’s clothing inside, four or five times as many garments as there were of men’s wear. Brandy had been the dominant personality for some time.

There was no surprise in any of this. He’d begun to catch on as soon as he heard the voice-mail message on Shari Lucas’s cell phone-the same voice that had said, “If you want to know who hurt Brian Youngblood and why, ask Nick Kinsella” in the anonymous phone call. Which meant Aaron Myers had pretended to be Brian Youngblood at Monday’s interview. And Brandy, the mystery woman that nobody seemed to know? A couple of other sound bytes from his memory file had helped give him the answer. Ginny Lawson saying: “He’s mentally ill… Sick, sick, sick.” Verna Washington laughing slyly as she said, “What you see ain’t always all there is… Underneath, you know?”

He should have figured it sooner, much sooner. Plenty of clues, hints. The weird behavioral changes, Dre Janssen’s comments. The normal way Myers walked on that first visit, while Brandy grimaced with pain when she moved in her chair-that alone should have tipped him to the switch. Youngblood was the one who’d suffered the recent beating by Kinsella’s enforcer, Youngblood who’d still been stiff and sore.

If he hadn’t been so focused on himself and Bryn Darby, he could’ve prevented this, saved two lives-

No.

None of this was his fault. You can’t hold yourself responsible for the actions of others-that was a hard and fast truth you learned when you first went into police work. If you didn’t learn it, you either quit and got into some other line of work or you stayed on and made a lousy cop.

Runyon turned away, went back out to where the other body slumped in the chair. Without touching anything, except the computer keyboard with the back of one knuckle, he read the rambling suicide note Aaron Myers had typed there.

I killed Brian. Only he wasn’t Brian anymore, she’d taken over. Brandy. She kept hurting me. People been hurting me all my life but nobody as badly as her. She was a control freak, a monster. She made my life a living hell. I couldn’t take it anymore. She deserved to die.

I didn’t know Brian was like that, half man and half woman, until three months ago. He kept it a secret from everyone until Brandy began to take over. She’d been with him since he was fifteen, he said, making him wear women’s underwear, dress up in women’s clothes when he was by himself. Getting stronger and stronger every year until he was buying her expensive presents, clothes and jewelry and computers, spending more and more time with her, borrowing money from a loan shark so he could pay off his debts so he could buy her more presents. She didn’t want him to marry Ginny, she was jealous of Ginny, so she told Ginny all about Brian and her and what they did together in bed.