Bill Pronzini - Savages

“Four years ago,” she said, “I was a different person than I am now. Four years ago my sister was still alive.”

Awkward moment. I managed not to squirm. She was practiced at getting her way, and this whole conversation had been carefully manipulated with alternating prods of pathos, praise, and subtle demand. Even so, I couldn’t blame her. Her hatred of her brother-in-law may have been misguided, but both her grief and her conviction were genuine.

Saying no to someone in distress has never been easy for me. I tried to say it now, and what came out instead was a hedge: “I can’t conduct the sort of investigation you’re asking for on the basis of intuition alone. I’ve already done a deep background check on the man without turning up anything. If he’s as cunning as you say, there won’t be anything to find in the past four years, either. And if he is guilty of murder, he’ll have covered himself twice as thoroughly. Without some concrete facts as a starting point, I just don’t think I could-”

“What sort of facts?”

“Unusual recent occurrences in his life or hers. Anything out of the norm that might support the assumption of violence. Letters, messages, unexplained bills, that sort of thing.”

“A diary?”

“Or a diary, yes.”

She smiled faintly, a constrictive upward movement at the corners of her mouth, and picked up the white gift box and held it out to me.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

I took it from her. Inside were a dozen or so computer discs, each of which bore a set of dates, and several business-size envelopes and small manila envelopes stuffed with papers. I looked into a few of them: insurance policies, itemized credit card bills, utility and property tax bills, check registers and canceled checks, miscellaneous items that couldn’t be identified at a glance.

“Nancy’s,” she said. “All of it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From her study at her home. The day after she died, before he came back from Chicago.”

“You have a key to the house?”

“No. He wouldn’t allow it. I went to see Philomena and convinced her to let me have hers.”

“Does Mathias know you took all this?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about it at the funeral. Hardly spoke a word to me.”

“What’s on the computer discs?”

“Nancy kept a daybook. Faithfully, every day, since she was a child. Usually just a few lines about her day, impressions, and so on.”

“Up to the time of her death?”

“To the very night, in fact.”

“So you’ve read everything on the discs?”

“More than once. The rest, too, of course.”

“And?”

“Hints, little things that I’m at a loss to explain-out of the norm, as you put it. You’ll be able to tell what they are, I think.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“I’d rather you discover them for yourself.” The faint nonsmile again. “Without my biased input.”

I said, “I didn’t know your sister or anything about her private life.”

“You’ll know enough by the time you’ve examined everything in that box.”

Probably more than I’d ever want to know, I thought.

“Just study it all with an open mind,” Celeste Ogden said, “that’s all I ask. When you’re done, I think you’ll understand why I don’t believe Nancy’s death was an accident.”

“Maybe so. But I still may not want to undertake this sort of investigation-”

“Of course you will,” she said in her imperious way. She got to her feet. “Excuse me a moment,” and away she went, leaving me alone with my doubts and the box full of a dead woman’s private leavings.

I pushed the contents around again with the tips of two fingers. But my mind wasn’t on Nancy Mathias. It was Kerry I was thinking about when Celeste Ogden came back into the room. This time what she had in her hand was a check.

“One thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s sufficient for the time being, I trust.”

I had the feeling, holding the check, that she hadn’t just made it out; that it had been written long before I got there. A woman used to getting her own way, all right. A woman you couldn’t say no to in a situation like this, no matter how hard you tried.

JAKE RUNYON

It started out as just another routine assignment.

Some operatives would consider it dull routine-deliver a subpoena to a reluctant witness in a robbery-assault case-but it was the kind he liked because it entailed a road trip. He felt better when he was on the move. Didn’t matter where he went or why. Driving, moving, energized him, gave him a measure of peace that he seldom found when he was caught between four walls.

The road trip in this case would be manageable in one long day if the timing were right, but he had other agency business to take care of that Friday and he couldn’t get out of the city until early afternoon. The subpoena could have waited until Monday for delivery, but he never felt right about putting off a job when he had the opportunity to do it immediately-the more so when there was a static weekend to be gotten through. As it was, he’d stay over in a motel somewhere around Gray’s Landing. The four-hour run back to San Francisco would use up most of Saturday morning and he could stretch the day out with a detour or two.

This Saturday was the first in weeks he hadn’t been able to fill up with work. Busy summer, lots of overtime-also just the way he liked it. What he didn’t like was the reason behind the heavy workload. He didn’t know Bill or his wife very well, Kerry hardly at all, but the news of her breast cancer had slammed him a little because of Colleen. Ugly damn coincidence. He knew what they were going through, both of them. Breast tumor, surgery, radiation-that was bad, but at least it was the curable kind of cancer with a high survival rate. Ovarian cancer, the kind Colleen had had, was a death sentence. Six months of pain and fading hopes and not-so-quiet desperation before she was finally, mercifully gone. But it would never be over for him. He would continue to live with the suffering, hers and his both, every day and every night until he drew his last breath. He hoped to God, if there was a God, that Bill wouldn’t have to do the same.

During those terrible months of watching Colleen die, Runyon had developed the ability to shut himself down inside without losing awareness-a kind of catlike patience that kept external forces beyond his control from touching him, kept the pain and the memories more or less at bay. He did that now, as he crept across the Bay Bridge. Friday traffic was already at a crawl, and pretty much stayed that way up Highway 80 and across the Carquinez Bridge. More than an hour before it cleared enough for him to run at the speed limit; it could have been ten hours and it wouldn’t have affected him any differently.

He drove at a steady sixty-five up 80 to the 505 connector and then due north on Highway 5. Fifteen degrees hotter by the time he passed Willows, even though it was well after five o’clock by then. Late September heat, dry and dusty, shimmering on the asphalt and across the flat brown farm country that stretched all the way to Red Bluff.

Gray’s Landing was some twelve miles south of Red Bluff. Agricultural area: olives, almonds, walnuts, peaches. Cattle and sheep ranching. That was all he knew about it. When he’d first moved down from Seattle two years ago, he’d spent a lot of time familiarizing himself with San Francisco and the other Bay Area cities, traveling some of the main arteries and back roads that threaded the rural areas of northern California. The theory being that the better a man knew the area he was working in, the better he could do his job. He’d been to Red Bluff and Redding and some of the other towns in Tehama and Glenn and Butte counties, but he’d missed Gray’s Landing. You couldn’t cover every bit of ground within a couple of thousand square miles. Eventually, maybe, but not in only two years.