Bill Pronzini: Vixen

The kid hadn’t waited.

Drawn back to the flame again.

Runyon braked in front of the closed office gates. Before he got out he unlocked the glove compartment, removed the.357 Magnum from its chamois wrapping, holstered it, and clipped the holster to his belt.

A chill bay wind played with scraps of litter, swirling them along the uneven pavement, forming little heaps against the bottom of the fence; a fast-food bag slapped his leg as he stepped up to the gates. The two halves were drawn together, but not locked: a big Yale used to padlock them hung by its staple from one of the links. He pushed through, his steps echoing hollowly on the uneven pavement.

Somebody had torn the WE’RE ECO-FRIENDLY! poster off the office door; one corner of it was all that was left, the loose piece flapping in the wind. The doorknob turned freely under Runyon’s hand. He pushed the door inward, looked into the outer office without entering. Lighted, but empty.

He called Chaleen’s name. No answer.

Once more, shouting it this time. Still no answer.

He went in then, leaving the door standing open behind him, one hand on the Magnum. The two inner doors were closed. The one on the far left would lead to a bathroom or storage room. He cracked the one in the middle. The large room beyond was also lighted. He called out again, heard nothing but the faint after-echo of his own voice, then widened the crack so he had a clear look inside.

Chaleen’s private office, large enough to take up most of the back half of the building. Desk, chairs, wet bar, couch, a shaded lamp on the desk supplying the light.

And Frank Chaleen sitting in a sideways sprawl on the couch, head flung back, eyes shut, one arm dangling.

At first Runyon thought he was dead. But there was no blood or other signs of violence on Chaleen or the cushions under him, and as Runyon moved closer he could hear the faint rasp of the man’s breathing. Passed out drunk was the way it looked; you could detect the odor of liquor on his breath, and on a table next to the couch was a nearly empty glass of what smelled like expensive scotch.

But the way it looked wasn’t the way it was.

Runyon used a thumb to raise one closed eyelid. Drugged; the size of the pupil confirmed it. Beckett, on the phone: Cory put something in his drink when they were together before. Together here? No, she wouldn’t have run that risk. Probably arranged to meet Chaleen in a bar or restaurant not too far away, spiked his drink with something slow-acting like benzodiazepine, then sent him here on some pretext with a promise to meet him later. The drink he’d poured for himself from his wet bar would have helped deepen the drug’s effect when it finally took hold.

And once he was unconscious, Beckett was supposed to come in and finish the job. Shoot Chaleen point-blank in the head, make it look like suicide. Another reprise of Cory’s cold, evil MO: leave the dirty work, the wet work, to the men in her life, and her brother was the only one left. Except that she’d overestimated her power to manipulate Kenneth into an act he was incapable of committing. But he must have come close because he’d been in here with the gun and something else Cory had given him, the sheet of bond paper that now lay crumpled on the floor in front of the couch.

Runyon picked up the paper, smoothed it out. Chaleen Manufacturing letterhead stationery with six lines of computer typing on it and Chaleen’s scrawled signature at the bottom. But he hadn’t typed it and he hadn’t been the one to sign it.

I can’t go on living. Business on the edge of bankruptcy, my whole life in shambles. I killed Andrew Vorhees. We had a fight and I hit him with a paperweight and put the body in his car and made it look like a carjacking. The police are suspicious, they’ll find out, I can’t face prison. This is the best way for everybody.

The hell it was. Best for Cory. Only Cory.

Runyon shoved the phony suicide note into his pocket, then made a quick search under and around the couch and of the rest of the office. There was no sign of Cory’s small-caliber automatic; Beckett had taken it with him.

At the door Runyon cast one more look at Chaleen. Limbs starting to twitch a little now; pretty soon he’d wake up sick and bewildered. But not half as sick as he’d be when he took the fall for killing Vorhees.

Runyon was in the Ford and on his way down Basin Street before he rang Bill’s home number. Caught him in, gave him a terse report — what Beckett had told him, what he’d found in Chaleen’s office, what he was afraid might happen or have already happened.

Bill said, “The kid may not have gone back to the apartment. If he’s enough afraid of his sister...”

“Plenty afraid, but he won’t be able to stay away from her. He’s like a whipped dog with nowhere else to go.”

“She wouldn’t hurt him. It’s not her style.”

“Not normally, but she’s bound to be furious when he tells her he didn’t go through with it. I’m on my way there now.”

“Intervention? Cory could make a lot of trouble if he refuses to give her up.”

“I know it, but I don’t see any other choice now — I’ve got to try for his sake. I’ll take full responsibility—”

“No, you won’t,” Bill said. “I’ll meet you there and we’ll see this through together.”

I had a shorter distance to travel, so I got to the Nob Hill address ahead of Runyon. The blue Dodge van wasn’t anywhere in the immediate vicinity, but that didn’t mean anything. The neighborhood has a smattering of small parking garages where residents pay outlandish monthly fees to lodge their vehicles. I left my car in the nearest one, the hell with the expense.

While I waited I paced the sidewalk in front, looking up at the lighted windows of the Beckett apartment. No telling for sure if both of them were in there; the curtains were closed. I wondered if Runyon and I were going to have trouble getting in, first to the building and then to the apartment. We couldn’t go barreling through doors like a couple of commandos; admittance, at least to the building, had to be by permission.

If we did get into the apartment and Beckett was all right, I was not looking forward to the face-off with Cory. We had plenty of circumstantial ammunition against her, but none of it, including the fake suicide note, was much good from a legal standpoint unless we could convince the kid to open up to the authorities. If he sided with his sister, let her control him and the situation, we’d have no choice but to back off again.

I’d been there ten minutes when Runyon came hurrying up the block. We conferred in the foyer while he leaned on the bell. I expected it to be a while before we got a response, if we got one, and that the first thing we’d hear then was a voice on the intercom. But it was only a few seconds before the door buzzer went off, while the intercom stayed silent.

Neither Jake nor I said anything on the way inside. I could feel a sharpening tension. Nothing either of the Becketts did was completely predictable, it seemed.

The door to their apartment stood ajar. That ratchetted the tension up another notch. The sudden constricted feeling in my gut was one I’d had before, a sixth-sense warning sign: something wrong here . From the look on Runyon’s face, he felt it, too. He was armed as a precaution; he’d mentioned it in the foyer. I saw him put a hand on the holstered Magnum under his coat and keep it there as we moved ahead to the door.

We went in slow and cautious, Jake announcing us on the way. Almost immediately Kenneth Beckett answered in a flat, toneless voice, “In here, Mr. Runyon.”

So he was all right. One hurdle cleared.

Beckett was in the gaudily decorated living room, sitting stone-rigid on a chair in front of one of the gold-flecked mirrors, fingers splayed like hooks over his knees. Alone in there, his sister nowhere in sight. His unblinking gaze shifted from Runyon to me and then fastened on Jake. If Beckett saw me at all, he didn’t care who I was or why I was there. The look of his eyes — dark, opaque, like burned-out bulbs — confirmed my gut feeling of wrongness. So did a pair of long, fresh scratches below his left cheekbone, the blood from them still oozing a little.