Bill Pronzini - Bleeders

I went out in the middle of it and closed the door against their vicious, whining voices. Bleeders, druggies, fools. Jesus.

Outside, the fog had thickened to a near drizzle, slicking the pavement and turning the lines of parked cars along both curbs into two-dimensional onyx shapes. I walked quickly to California. Nobody had bothered my tired old wheels in the bus zone. I locked the briefcase in the trunk, got rolling, then used the car phone to call Carolyn Dain. It was Dain because like a lot of women these days, Kerry included, she’d preferred to keep her own name after marriage.

She answered on the second ring, and as soon as I identified myself she said, “We were right, weren’t we.” Flat statement, not a question. “The whole thing was just a... scam.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dain.”

“Yes. So am I. Where is he now? Still with her?”

“At her apartment. Both high on methamphetamine. Did you know he was a user?”

“I knew,” she admitted. “It’s been going on for a long time, as long as... the other women. I should have told you.”

“Yes, you should have.” Not that it had taken me long to figure it out on my own. “I put a scare into them and I don’t think he’ll bother you tonight. But you’d be wise to spend the night someplace else.”

“I’ve already made arrangements.”

“Okay, good. Are you going to press charges?”

“I... don’t know yet.”

“Well, if you don’t do it immediately, I’d advise you to stay away from your husband so he can’t influence you in any way. And also not to waste any time putting the money into a safe deposit box or a bank account in your name only.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I have the cash with me, the full seventy-five thousand. I wouldn’t hold out any hope of getting the rest of your inheritance back.”

“I don’t care about that right now.”

“I can bring the money out to you. Or meet you wherever you’ll be staying...”

“I mean I don’t care about any of the money right now,” she said. “Please don’t be offended, but I don’t want to see anyone tonight except the person I’m staying with. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

“Yes, ma’am, but seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I don’t like being responsible for it.”

“You’re bonded. I trust you.”

“Still, I’d prefer to—”

“Don’t you have someplace safe to keep it? Just for tonight?”

“I suppose so, but...”

“Please. Just for tonight. I can’t... I simply can’t cope with any more of this. Please.”

“If you insist,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll keep it until tomorrow, but you’ll have to take possession as soon as possible.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Let me have the address and phone number of where—”

“I’ll call you at your office,” she said, and the line went dead.

Well, hell. Shaken up, the underpinnings of her life torn loose... who could blame her for needing time and space, giving short shrift to the money? It was the root cause of all this. And she didn’t much care about financial matters anyway, except to provide the basics; she’d told me that the day I took her on as a client. Music was what she cared about. She taught music appreciation and the history of classical music at White Rock School, one of the city’s private high schools. Played the flute “passably well” and was gathering data for a “probably-never-to-be-written” biography of an Austrian musicographer named Ludwig Köchel, who had cataloged all of Mozart’s compositions in chronological order. What a woman with her taste and interests was doing married to a sorry-ass specimen like Jay Cohalan was anybody’s guess.

I turned the car around and drove downtown to my office on O’Farrell. The neighborhood, on the westward fringe of the Tenderloin, is not the safest at eleven o’clock, despite some upscaling in recent years: a heavy influx of Vietnamese and Cambodian families and the reclamation of the nearby Sgt. John Macaulay Park, once a notorious drug gallery and open-air toilet, now a children-only playground. Still, crack dealers, homeless alcoholics, and recent parolees roamed the area at night, and it pays to be vigilant. Fortunately there was a parking space a couple of doors from my building. I made sure I had the immediate vicinity to myself before I unlocked the trunk and hauled the briefcase out.

The building is a tomb at this hour. Nobody in either of the other two businesses that occupy it — Bay City Realtors on the ground floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor — stays on the premises past 5:30. There’d been a brace of break-ins a few years back, though in neither case had anything been stolen from my top-floor office, probably because that was in the days before I’d hired Tamara to computerize the operation, and there hadn’t been much there worth stealing. Pressure on the owner had led to better security measures, and we hadn’t had any trouble since.

I rode the tiny, creaking elevator to the third floor, keyed myself in, put on a light, and went straight to the coat closet. That’s where the office safe is, bolted to the floor in one corner. It’s an old Mosler that anybody with a minimum of safecracking skills could have open in twenty minutes, but since I seldom keep anything of value inside, I’d never seen a need to pay for an upgrade. Carolyn Dain’s money ought to be secure enough overnight, given the fact that no one but me knew its whereabouts.

The briefcase was too bulky to fit into the safe, so I unpacked the stacks of bills and stored them in neat rows. It was an odd feeling, handling that much cash — as if I were doing something that was not quite wholesome. Maybe it had to do with all the people I’d encountered in thirty-some years as a cop and private investigator, all the scheming and violence and suffering I’d seen in quests for stacks of bills like these. Filthy lucre. Blood money. Cold, hard cash. Throwaway terms that had deeper, much more bitter meanings for men and women like me.

When I was done, I made sure the safe was locked, slid the empty case into the kneehole of my desk, locked up, and went home to a far better pair of human beings than I’d dealt with so far on this cold early-winter night.

Kerry was still awake, in bed reading. “I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said when I came in.

“Worried about me?”

“Always. How did it go?”

“Fine. I miscalculated on one point, but it worked out all right.” I’d kept her apprised of what was happening with the Dain case, the little sting I’d planned for tonight. “Most damn satisfying job I’ve had in a while.”

“So you nailed Cohalan and his bimbo.”

“Real good.”

“Is your client going to press charges?”

“She doesn’t know yet. She didn’t want to see me tonight, not even to take possession of her money. Too upset.”

“You mean you still have all that cash?”

“In the office safe until tomorrow.”

She ran her fingers through her already touseled auburn hair. She’d had it cut short recently; the new style fit her pretty well, and she thought it made her look younger, but I hadn’t gotten used to it yet. I still preferred the old, longer style.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t bring it home,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that much much money in the house.”

“That’s why I put it in the safe.”

“What was the one miscalculation?”

I told her about that while I shed my coat and tie and shirt.

“It wouldn’t have been your fault if Byers had hit somebody,” Kerry said.

“Morally it would have. I didn’t need to play Cohalan’s game. I could’ve picked up the money myself after he made the drop, then gone to confront them.”