Bill Pronzini: Mourners

Rough weekend for Kayabalian, too. He didn’t look as poorly used as Logan or me, maybe because he was several years younger, but the signs were plain enough on his thin, walnut-brown face. And in the fact that his usually impeccable attire was on the rumpled side today, the knot in his paisley tie just a bit off-center. He yawned more than once on our way to the restaurant on Van Ness.

Once we were seated with our lunches in front of us I asked him when he’d last talked to Lynn Troxell. He said, “Just before eight o’clock, briefly. I called to see how she was bearing up.”

“And?”

“She sounded calm enough under the circumstances.”

“Casement still with her then?”

“Yes. He answered the phone.”

“Was he going to stay with her?”

“Until Lynn’s sister could get there from Marysville. Lynn asked her to come-she needs family at a time like this and they’re fairly close. Or Casement did the asking, I don’t know. He said he was going to notify Martin Hessen and anybody else that needed to be told. Better him than me, frankly.”

“The sister was coming right away?”

“As soon as she could. She may be there by now.”

We talked a little more while we finished our sandwiches. My ham and cheese was going to lie in my stomach all afternoon; I could feel it hardening up in there already as we got up from the table. On the way out of the restaurant Kayabalian allowed that he would probably go over and see Lynn Troxell in person later today. “I’m not relishing the visit,” he said. “A stranger’s grief is bad enough, but in a friend or loved one… well, you know what I mean.”

“All too well.”

“You won’t be seeing her again, will you?”

“Not right away, no.”

But eventually. Like it or not, sooner or later-I was pretty sure of that.

At the agency, we had Sassy Tamara to start the week. Hip, flip, and cynical. I liked that version a lot better than Gloomy or Grumpy. At least she was more or less responsive.

When I asked her about her weekend, she said, “I almost got laid by a dude wanted me to wear Marilyn Monroe’s hair.”

“Huh?”

“Carries it around in his briefcase in case he gets lucky.”

“… Is that some kind of joke?”

“Yeah,” she said. “On me.”

Young people nowadays. Sometimes they seem to speak a language that sounds like English but makes no more sense to people of my generation than Urdu or Sanskrit.

We talked some, comprehensibly, about Troxell’s suicide and Jake Runyon’s unofficial investigation into the rape-murder of Erin Dumont, his call this morning with the baseball hunch. Tamara hadn’t been able to track down a current address for Sean Ostrow yet, but she would. There was damn little information she couldn’t dig up sooner or later; it was a matter of professional pride with her, in spite of all that office-drudge nonsense she’d given me.

“Sounds like Jake is convinced Ostrow is the perp,” I said.

“Leaning heavy that way,” she agreed. “Once he knows where to find Ostrow, he’s gonna want to get in the man’s face. You think we should let him go ahead? Or tell him to back off?”

“He’s got good instincts. My inclination is to let him stay with it.”

“We’re off the hook now. Might put us right back on.”

“I know it.”

“But sometimes you have to keep pushing, right?”

“Sometimes your conscience won’t let you do anything else.”

“Just don’t push too hard.”

“That’s the tricky part,” I said. “Knowing how hard to push and when to stop before it becomes a shove.”

I went into my office and put in a call to the Troxell home. Answering machine. I identified myself, but if anybody was monitoring calls, they didn’t pick up. I left an “if there’s anything I can do” message and let it go at that for now.

For a time I tried to do some routine work, but my head wasn’t into it. Shortly before three o’clock I packed it in and went to tell Tamara that I was through for the day.

“Going home?” she asked.

“Not right away. Couple of things I need to do first.”

“Business?”

“Pushing,” I said.

JAKE RUNYON

Midafternoon traffic in Marin and Sonoma counties was heavy enough to cause slowdowns. The temperature was fifteen degrees warmer up there, summer-hot in the vicinity of Santa Rosa. The Ford’s air-conditioning was busted, so Runyon drove with the window down. Windless heat mixed with exhaust fumes crawled through the car, sweating him and making him aware of how tired he felt. Lack of sleep seldom bothered him; all he’d ever needed was four or five hours a night. He remembered one hot summer in Seattle, when he was working vice. A string of violent assaults on prostitutes had everybody on the squad pulling extra duty, and he’d gone sixty-seven hours straight without closing his eyes and been as alert and functional when they finally cornered the perp in an abandoned building as if he’d just gotten out of bed.

Stop and go, stop and go. He kept trying to shut himself down in order to make the drive easier, but he was having trouble doing it today. The missed sleep, maybe. Memories kept intruding unbidden, like feelers probing through his mind and then expanding into sharp images.

That same summer he’d gone the sixty-seven hours without sleep. A few weeks later, early August, the much-needed vacation. Colleen had talked him into driving up to the Cascades, going camping in the national forest. He was an urbanite, he didn’t know anything about wilderness camping, but he’d done it to please Colleen. And the experience hadn’t been bad at all. All those giant trees, all that empty virgin quiet-peaceful and stimulating at the same time. Both of them enjoying themselves, frisking around in the woods like a couple of kids, Colleen playful and horny that one warm afternoon in the little meadow where they stopped to make camp. So there they were, going at it in the grass under towering redwoods, her on top and making more noise than she usually did, and then all of a sudden she’d let out a shriek that had nothing to do with their lovemaking and froze, pointed, and yelled, “Jake, look!” And he’d twisted around and looked, and damn if a bear hadn’t been standing at the edge of the glade, watching them.

Small brown bear, but it looked big as hell from down on the ground. They’d shoved apart and he’d jumped for his. 357 Magnum, but he didn’t need it. The bear had already taken off running by the time he got it out of his pack. And there they stood, buck naked, him armed and loaded for bear, listening to a real bear crashing away through the woods. Then Colleen started to laugh. “We scared him more than he scared us,” she said. “I’ll bet that poor peeping bruin doesn’t stop running for hours.” Her words got him laughing and they couldn’t stop. They must’ve laughed for ten minutes, hanging on to each other and whooping it up like a couple of crazy people.

Their private joke for years afterward. All he had to do was wink and say “Peeping bruin,” and Colleen would break up. That fine, rich, bawdy laugh of hers… he’d loved that laugh, nothing made him feel better than hearing her laugh A horn blared behind him, snapped him out of it. Cars were moving up ahead and he was still sitting there dead stopped. Christ. He accelerated to rejoin the flow, rubbing off sweat with his free hand. Freeway noise poured in through the open window, but he could still hear Colleen’s laughter echoing inside his head. Echoing and then fading. And gone.

He paid attention to the highway, only the highway the rest of the way into Santa Rosa. It was just four o’clock when he rolled into the parking garage behind the downtown Macy’s.