Bill Pronzini - Mourners

“That won’t happen,” Risa said.

“All right. Have you remembered anything else about this man Fatso, anything that might help identify him?”

“No. It was a long time ago, and it just didn’t seem important then. To Erin or to me.”

“Well, if you do…”

“Yes, I’ll let you know right away.”

He said he would be in touch and broke the connection.

But he wouldn’t have anything to tell her when she heard from him, she thought fatalistically. How could Erin’s murderer be a man she’d hardly known two years ago and who’d done nothing more menacing than show up at McRoyd’s a couple of times while she was there? It had to be a total stranger, some faceless psycho who’d picked her at random. He might be caught one day for some other crime, in two or five or ten or twenty years, and a DNA test would link him to Erin’s murder and he’d confess or not confess, and then it would be over. Or he might never be caught and then it would never be over.

Grabbing at straws. That was all Jake Runyon was doing. Like everybody else, herself included, just grabbing at straws.

Get her hopes up? God, no, that wouldn’t happen, not now and maybe never again.

The phone rang ten minutes later, while she was mixing a second vodka and lime juice. Mom and Dad calling from Green Bay. Two more sufferers to round out the day. She told them about Runyon and what he was doing, downplaying it, but it lifted their spirits much more than it had hers. They were unshaken believers; they’d kept the faith all along. So had she, for a while, but her belief wasn’t rock solid anymore. The more time that passed without some kind of resolution, the more it would crumble until there was nothing left.

They talked for twenty minutes, mostly about Erin even though she kept trying to steer the conversation to more mundane subjects. And the conversation left her feeling depressed. She put on a hip-hop CD, cheerful music that didn’t cheer her any. She thought she ought to eat something, and made herself a third drink instead. That had better be the last; she was feeling them already, and if she drank any more she’d have a hangover tomorrow, and she hated hangovers. She wished she had some pot. Then she could really get stoned without worrying about how she’d feel in the morning.

Good-bad day turning into another bad night.

She wondered, sipping vodka, how long it would be before she had a good day, a good night. Really good, the kind where everything you did or heard or saw gave you pleasure and you were so happy and content you smiled and laughed for no reason at all.

She wondered, sipping vodka, if she would ever have that kind of day and night again.

Troxell left his house alone shortly past seven Thursday evening. Destination: Wisconsin Street. Potrero Hill. I camped at the curb three doors uphill from the Lindens’ Stick Victorian and watched him leave his BMW empty-handed and head down the path alongside.

Then I sat in the cold, dark car and fretted about Kerry.

You live with someone long enough, you develop a finely calibrated sensor where the other person is concerned. It doesn’t take long for the bells and whistles to go off when something isn’t right. Little things, cumulative effect. The way she’d been acting lately, the brooding silences, the declining interest in intimacy. The unsatisfactory talk we’d had last night. The fact that she’d taken most of today off work without explanation at the office and without telling me; I’d found that out from her secretary. The fact that she hadn’t been home at six thirty tonight. She must have come home and then gone out again somewhere with Emily; nobody had answered my call to the condo and both their cell phones were out of service, which probably meant they were in a restaurant; we had strict rules about cells being turned off in public places. But why hadn’t she let me know they were going so I wouldn’t worry?

If the Dancer business was what was bothering her, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t simply brought it out into the open. If it was something else… what? Some sort of medical problem? She’d had her annual physical a couple of weeks ago, but I’d asked her about it and she’d said everything was as it should be. Why would she tell me that if it wasn’t?

Me? General dissatisfaction with our relationship, our life together? That notion scared hell out of me. We’d always been so good together, so completely in synch. Problems, sure, every marriage has some friction from time to time, but nothing serious, nothing that we hadn’t managed to work out with a minimum of difficulty. She might be pissed at me for keeping secrets about Dancer and Cybil, but I couldn’t conceive of her being angry enough to lose faith, start falling out of love Another man?

Well, it had happened… almost happened… once before. Paul Blessing, Blessing Furniture Showrooms, one of Bates and Carpenter’s clients. But that had been before we were married, and it hadn’t amounted to much. Strong physical attraction, a few dates, that was all. She hadn’t gone to bed with him. Said she hadn’t, and I’d believed her-I still believed her. No, it wasn’t another man. She wouldn’t cheat on me any more than I would cheat on her.

What, then?

Round and round…

I’d figured I was in for another of those long, dull, butt-cramping waits, while Troxell took his time doing whatever he did in his private hideaway, but it didn’t turn out that way. He spent less than an hour in there tonight. When he reappeared he had something tucked under one arm, not too bulky; I could make out a faint gleam of white when he opened the driver’s door on the BMW and the inside light came on. Plastic sack? Might be rental videos, viewed and ready for return, but I couldn’t be sure at the distance.

Down off Potrero Hill, south on 101, west on 280. But he wasn’t going home yet. He stayed on 280 until the Daly City interchange, swung off on John Daly Boulevard and from there onto Skyline north, past Fort Funston and Lake Merced. Heading for the beach? Right. He took the cutoff onto the Great Highway, then turned into the narrow beachfront parking area at the foot of Sloat Boulevard. I drove on past, circled the block onto Sloat, and crossed into the parking area from there.

The BMW was dark, slotted about halfway down. I pulled up between it and one other car parked there, close enough to the BMW for my headlights to wash over it and let me see that it was empty. I shut off the lights and got out and went to where I could see down beyond a shelf of broken shingle to the beach.

Broken clouds tonight, restless and shifting under the lash of a stiff, cold wind that had driven the temperature down into the low forties. The three-quarters moon was obscured at first, the beach like an expanse of black velvet except for the trim of faint luminiscence where the surf broke and creamed over the sand. I stayed put, braced and shivering, until the moon broke free and I had a clearer view. One man down there, moving in hunched walk toward the waterline. Troxell, who else? Anybody’s guess what quirk or impulse or demon sent him beach-walking at night, in frigid weather like this.

Back in the car, I sat on my hands until they warmed up and then called Jake Runyon’s cell phone number. “Troxell went up to Potrero Hill again, but he didn’t stay long. He’s back at the beach now, taking a moonlight stroll.”

“Going home from there, you think?”

“Probably.”

“Be a good time for me to use that key.”

“Yeah.”

“Worth the risk. My opinion.”

I hesitated, but not too long, before I said, “If you’re game, I suppose I am, too. You won’t take anything, disturb anything?”

“You know I won’t.”