Bill Pronzini: Fever

Then she told me. She needed me to know. Not because I was Brian’s friend, because she needed my help. Brian couldn’t make me do what she wanted, but she could. Not then but later. I came over one day and there she was, all dressed up in those ugly woman’s clothes, talking the way she did, calling Brian’s mother names he never would have in a million years. She was jealous of Mrs. Youngblood too, she hated that poor woman. I don’t know why. She’d never tell me. She was crazy.

It made me sick. But I couldn’t get away from her. I tried to but I couldn’t. I was afraid of her from the first. She had this way about her, a kind of power you couldn’t resist. She could make you do things you never thought you were capable of. Not sex stuff, thank God, it wasn’t like that, I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d tried to, if she…

But what she did was worse, she made me steal money, embezzle money from the company I work for. She said she should have told me about Brandy sooner, made me steal the money sooner so Brian wouldn’t have had to go to a loan shark. Today she wanted me to steal MORE money. Another five thousand to pay off the rest of what Brian owed Nick Kinsella. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t. I refused and she hit me, she said she’d kill me if I didn’t do what she said.

She was out of control, a control freak out of control. If I didn’t stop her she’d keep hounding me and hitting me and threatening me. I knew someday when she got mad enough or crazy enough, she’d do just what she said she would, she’d kill me.

So I killed her first. In self-defense. There wasn’t anything else I could do. She deserved to die. I’m not sorry I destroyed the bitch.

But I’m sorry Brian is dead. He was my best friend and I killed him too. I can’t live with that and I won’t go to jail because of what I did to her. I’m a coward a miserable fucking coward I don’t care what

That was all. Ended in mid-run-on sentence on the second page.

Runyon backed away again. All of it was clear now. That first day he’d come here… Brian in Brandy’s persona, Myers pretending to be Brian at her insistence-find out what he wanted, why Rose Youngblood had hired a detective. Myers, weak, ineffectual, chafing under Brandy’s lash but unable to break loose, making the anonymous call out of desperation. And when that didn’t bring results quickly enough, when Brandy made her demand that he steal another five thousand from his company and threatened to kill him if he didn’t, Myers swinging that brass lamp in sudden blind fury.

He returned to the bedroom, stood looking down at what was left of Brian Youngblood. He could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Chronicle: BIZARRE TRANSVESTITE MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, the media would love this. Even in San Francisco, where bizarre happenings were part of the norm, it was just kinky enough to warrant a big play-the kind that provokes smarmy comments and sick jokes.

Brian doesn’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do. I’ll pray for him.

It’d tear his mother up. Her only child, all she’d had in a life barren other than her religion. His death, even the money troubles and the collusion in Myers’s embezzlement-with the help of her pastor, she’d learn to live with that. But the rest of it…

He kept staring at the body lying there in the ice-blue dress and the black net stockings. Lipstick, eyeshadow-you could scrub that off. The bloody dress and the stockings and woman’s underwear and wig could be disposed of easily enough. Not so all those clothes in the closet, bottles of makeup on the dresser-but he could’ve been living with a woman, it could look that way in the preliminary stages.

Only one person besides him knew the truth about Brian Youngblood now, and Ginny Lawson wasn’t talking to anyone about Brandy. Might come out later that Brian had been a cross-dresser, but by then it wouldn’t have any media appeal. It was what he was wearing when he died, and the dual-personality angle, and Myers’s suicide note that made it sleazy media fodder. One click of the delete button would erase the suicide note. With men’s clothing on the body instead of the dress and underwear, with some of the details left out or glossed over …

Tampering with evidence.

Thirteen years as a police officer, another seven as a private investigator, and this was the first time he’d ever for one second thought of crossing the line.

Did it make any real difference to the law if the details of a conclusive murder-suicide were altered slightly? No. Would it make a difference to a bereaved mother and her memories of her son? Definitely. Strong arguments in favor.

But not strong enough.

He wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t capable of doing it, for Rose Youngblood, for Aaron Myers’s sister and her two kids in Pacifica, for anyone. Not because he might get caught, but because it would destroy one of the last things he had left that mattered to him: his self-respect.

He opened his cell phone and tapped out 911.

On the way into the Oakland Hills I tried to find a possible fit for Rebecca Weaver in the Krochek disappearance. Hard to do without more facts and the answers to a bunch of questions. And there might not be a fit. An affair six months old was a pretty cold dish to go digging around in.

Unless Mitchell Krochek had started sleeping with her again, or had been sleeping with her the entire time he’d been bedding Deanne Goldman. From what I’d learned about him, he was the type of man capable of maintaining two concurrent affairs, particularly when one of the women lived right next door.

Krochek had told me he’d talked to his neighbors after the disappearance, but he hadn’t been specific about which ones. One of them must have been Weaver, given her proximity, and there was no reason for her not to have been candid with him if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. Ms. Goldman had no idea one way or the other; he hadn’t mentioned the woman’s name recently. How did Weaver and Janice Krochek get along? She didn’t know, she said, but if there’d been any problems Mitch would have told her, he told her everything about his private life. Sure he did. She also claimed not to know anything about Weaver other than what she’d confided to me about the brief affair.

I’d’ve preferred to talk to Krochek before I interviewed Rebecca Weaver, but when I called his cell all I got was voice mail, and his secretary at Five States Engineering told me he was on a job site and incommunicado for the day. So I’d just have to wing it with Ms. Weaver-assuming she was home and willing to talk to me.

When I drove into Fox Canyon Circle, the three houses grouped around the cul-de-sac had an external look of desertion. No people, no cars, not even a sprinkler working in one of the front gardens. The whole area had a two-dimensional look under a high, fragmented overcast; the pale sun seemed caught in the gray-white like something in a web, its light silvery and shadowless. Despite a strong wind and the absence of humidity, it was the kind of day that makes me think of earthquakes. The sky had looked a lot like this when the Loma Prieta quake created several hundred square miles of havoc from Santa Cruz north to Sonoma County in ’89.

I parked between the Krochek house and the one belonging to Rebecca Weaver. The wind bent and swayed limbs in the trees along the canyon rim, and you could hear it thrumming in the telephone wires. It was like a hand on my back as I walked up the front walk to the Weaver house.

When I pressed the doorbell, a few chords of some vaguely familiar song echoed inside. Cute. Like the song snatches that the cell phone companies used in place of a good old-fashioned ring.

Two minutes, and the door stayed shut.