Bill Pronzini: Mourners

So now what? I thought.

Another damn funeral?

No. Not again today, thank God.

Troxell drove back to Daly City, around Lake Merced, and up onto the Great Highway. Opposite the Beach Chalet at the northern end of Ocean Beach, he swung across into one of the diagonal parking spaces that faces the sea. I followed suit a short distance away. For a time he sat in the car, doing nothing that I could see; then he got out and walked down onto the beach. Not me, not on a blustery day like this. The wind was strong enough to blow up swirls and funnels of sand, and the waves were high and you could hear the pound of surf even with the windows shut. From inside the car I could see a long ways in both directions. The beach was deserted except for Troxell and one other person, jogging with a dog far up toward Cliff House.

He went down close to the waterline, where the sand was wet and the surf creamed up in long fans, and walked back and forth for close to an hour-a couple of hundred yards in one direction and then a couple of hundred yards back in the other. The wind billowed the tails of his overcoat up around his head, so that from where I was he looked like a giant seabird about to take flight. When he finally decided to quit he stood for another five minutes or so, watching the waves lift and slam down or just staring out to sea-I couldn’t tell which.

He must’ve been half frozen when he came back up to the parking area. But he didn’t get into his BMW to warm up; instead he waited for a traffic break and then crossed the highway and went into the Beach Chalet. Crap. That meant I had to brave the ocean wind after all. For all I knew he was meeting someone over there. Someone alive, for a change.

The Beach Chalet has been a San Francisco landmark of one kind or another since the midtwenties. It started out as a fancy seaside bar and restaurant, made even more elegant during the Depression by a WPA artist who decorated its tiled ground floor with cityscape murals. During and after World War II it had fallen on hard times. The local VFW managed it for a while, using it as their meeting place, and when they bowed out the place deteriorated into a hard-core bikers’ hangout, then into an abandoned and vandalized eyesore. In the early nineties the city finally decided it was worth saving; the Parks and Recreation Department gave it a facelift and restored the murals and established a visitors’ center in the lobby, and the upstairs was rented to an outfit that opened a new-style bar and restaurant attractive to both locals and tourists. Full circle in three-quarters of a century.

By the time I got upstairs, Troxell was on a stool at the far end of the bar with a drink and a twenty-dollar bill in front of him. Straight bourbon or Scotch, a double, no ice. It was nearly two thirty now, and most of the lunch crowd was gone; only a handful of the window tables were occupied, and Troxell had the bar to himself. He sat bowed forward, with his chin down and his eyes on the whiskey. But he didn’t drink any of it, just stared into the glass while the bartender brought him his change and served me an Amstel Light draft. At the end of ten minutes he still hadn’t touched the liquor, or moved any part of his head or body more than an inch or two.

The bartender noticed; bartenders notice everything when they’re not busy. He tried to catch my eye, but I pretended to be interested in my beer and in the decorations over the back bar. He shrugged and washed beer steins.

Troxell sat there like a piece of sculpture for another couple of minutes. Then, all at once, as if he were coming out of some kind of self-induced trance, his shoulders jerked and his head snapped up. He focused on the glass, picked it up, threw the whiskey down his throat in one convulsive swallow, and climbed off the stool and started past me with his eyes straight front.

The bartender called, “Hey, mister, you forgot your change.”

It didn’t slow him or turn his head. “Keep it.”

“There’s seventeen bucks there-”

“Keep it,” Troxell said again and kept right on going.

The bartender blinked his surprise. He wasn’t the only one.

Three more stops for Troxell.

The first was a video store on Taraval. He was in there for close to twenty minutes, and when he came out he was carrying a plastic sack. Judging from its evident weight and bulges, he’d either bought or rented half a dozen VHS tapes. Rather than put the bag on one of the seats, he locked it in the trunk.

The second stop was a combination liquor store and newsstand a little farther up Taraval. His only purchases there appeared to be an armload of newspapers; these went into the trunk with the videotapes. There must’ve been at least half a dozen. All from the Bay Area? To hunt for more victims of violent crimes, more funeral announcements?

Stop number three, the longest, was a florist shop on West Portal. He spent nearly thirty minutes inside, and when he came out he was empty-handed. Deliberating over a purchase, I thought; found what he wanted and ordered it. Flowers for another funeral? For all I knew at this point, he’d sent wreaths or bouquets to the services yesterday and today-one more facet of his mourner pattern.

From West Portal he drove straight up into St. Francis Wood. The Wood, on the lower western slope of Mount Davidson, is one of the city’s best neighborhoods; large old homes on large lots that you couldn’t buy for less than a million each-maybe a million-five in the current overin-flated real estate market-and at that price you’d have to settle for one of the less desirable properties. Troxell’s house was probably in the two-million-dollar bracket. His annual salary at Hessen amp; Collier, one of the city’s more prominent financial management firms, ran upward of three hundred thousand a year and he’d owned his prime chunk of San Francisco for more than two decades-a Spanish Mission-style place, all stucco and dark wood and terra-cotta tile, shaded by pine and yucca trees, flanked by tall hedges. The Good Life, with all its attendent perks. Unless possibly, for some private reason, you were starting to come apart at the seams.

Another silver BMW was parked in the wide driveway; he slid his in alongside. The twin belonged to his wife, Lynn Scott Troxell. I pulled up across the street and down a ways, just long enough to watch him get out and lock his car and enter the house. He didn’t take the videotapes or the newspapers with him.

I wondered if that meant he was going out again tonight. And where he would go if he did. Twice a week was his current average for noctural absences from home. And very few funerals are held at night.

I also wondered what my client, or rather the agency’s client, once removed, would make of her husband’s bizarre behavior of the past two days. One thing for sure: it wasn’t going to make Lynn Troxell any happier than if he’d spent them in the company of another woman.

The central ingredient in detective work is the same as in just about any other business, large or small: the gathering and processing of information. In the old days, before computers and the Internet, you got your information through legwork and personal interaction with people-paying, asking, manipulating, compromising, and often enough, currying favor. Even nowadays there’s still a lot of necessary quid pro quo. Ask a favor of somebody, and sooner or later he’s liable to request payback. And when that happens, like it or not, you’re obligated to say yes.

So I said yes to Charles Kayabalian, a reputable attorney and collector of Oriental rugs who had over the years provided answers to legal questions and thrown a handful of investigative jobs my way. In all that time he’d only called in one favor. I owed him a lot more than this small number two.