Bill Pronzini: Vixen

“Pretty much confirms what Cory Beckett told me about him.”

“Yeah. But I’ll bet she didn’t tell you anything about her background.” Tamara waggled an eyebrow. “Juicy stuff.”

“What, you checking up on our clients now?”

“After that fiasco with Verity Daniels, you bet I am.”

The Daniels tangle was a sore subject with me, too. It had landed Jake Runyon in jail on a bogus attempted rape charge, almost gotten the agency sued for malfeasance, and its finish was the source of my promise to Kerry to keep myself out of harm’s way.

“Besides,” Tamara went on, “her background and her brother’s are pretty closely linked. Kenny may be a nerd, but she’s anything but. Some real interesting facts here.”

“Such as?”

“For one, she’s not a model. Not now, not ever.”

“No? Then what does she do for a living?”

“Marries rich dudes. Two of ’em so far.”

Well, that wasn’t much of a surprise. “Married now? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”

“Nope. First husband divorced her after eight months. She got enough of a settlement to set her up real sweet for a while. Number two, rich dude named Lassiter, lasted a little over a year. No divorce there, though.”

“No?”

“Guy offed himself.”

“For what reason?”

“Financial setbacks, according to the note he left,” Tamara said. “But there’s more to it than that. Two grown sons from a previous marriage claimed Cory was responsible for Lassiter’s suicide.”

“On what grounds?”

“Several. Two substantiated affairs during the year of marriage. Quote, bizarre sexual practices detrimental to his mental health, unquote.”

“Bizarre in what way?”

“Not a matter of public record. Could be anything from orgies to goats to whips and chains.”

“Goats?”

Tamara chuckled. One of her less-than-endearing traits is an off-the-wall sense of humor that she sometimes uses to shock my old-fashioned sensibilities. “Sons also claimed she mishandled finances, and coerced their father into making a new will that cut them out of the estate and left everything to her. They sued and had enough legal chops to get a favorable ruling. They got the big slice, she got a little one. Case brought her some negative publicity — probably one of the reasons she moved up here.”

“So she’s a promiscuous gold digger. What does that have to do with her missing brother?”

“Nothing, maybe. Except that both her exes owned yachts berthed at local marinas, the first one in Marina del Rey, the second in Newport Beach — the same places Kenny worked.”

I chewed on that for a bit. “So maybe it was the husbands who got him his jobs there.”

“Uh-uh. He was working at both marinas before she hooked up with either guy.”

“Well? Maybe she likes boats, too, hangs around where her brother works, and that’s how she met the future husbands.”

“Or Kenny set up the meetings for her.”

“What’re you suggesting? The two of them working a scam to find her eligible marriage partners?”

“Could be. He trolls around, finds a likely prospect, baits the hook, and she does the rest.”

“Immoral, if so, but not illegal.”

“No, but if that’s the game, neither one of ’em’s as innocent as she pretended to you.”

“Clients have lied to us before,” I said. “We don’t have to like them or believe them as long as the lies have no bearing on the job we’re hired to do. You know that. Besides, Abe Melikian’s footing half the bill, and we know he’s all right.”

Tamara said cynically, “Good thing for him he’s not a rich yachtsman,” and retreated into her office.

Since the Beckett case was essentially mine, I was back at the agency again the next morning for the follow-through. Tamara had compiled a list of all the yacht harbors and marinas in the greater Bay Area — quite a few, large and small, within a seventy-five-mile radius — and she and I called the ones large enough to have full-time staff members who could check their records for recent hires. No Kenneth Beckett or anyone answering his description at any of them. Finding him wasn’t going to be that easy. If he was working at all, it could be for a private party rather than as an employee of a marina, boatyard, or boat owner. Or at a marina or boatyard outside the seventy-five-mile radius. And in any event, he might well be using a name other than his own. It would take legwork, possibly a lot of it, to track him down.

In the old days I handled most of the field jobs myself, until it got to be too much effort for even a fairly robust man in his sixties. Now and then I make an exception and climb back into the field harness, but hunting for Kenneth Beckett wouldn’t be one of those times. Likely the search would require piling up a considerable number of highway miles, showing Beckett’s photograph and asking the same questions over and over again — pretty dull and time-consuming work.

Not for Jake Runyon, though. He thrived on that kind of assignment. Liked being out on the road, moving from place to place. Worked best when he could set his own schedule, his own pace. And there was enough gap time in his caseload to allow him to take on the Beckett hunt.

Good man, Jake, a former Seattle cop and former investigator for one of the larger private agencies in the Pacific Northwest. Big, slab-faced, hammer-jawed. Smart, tough, loyal, and honest as they come. He’d moved to San Francisco after the cancer death of his second wife, to try to reestablish a bond with an estranged gay son from his first marriage, the only family he had left. The restoration attempt hadn’t worked out; he and Joshua were still estranged and would likely remain so.

Runyon had been something of a reticent loner, still grieving for his dead wife, the first year or so he was with us. He’d come out of his shell somewhat after his hookup with Bryn Darby, but now that the relationship might be ending, he’d begun to drift back into his loner mode. A hard man to get close to in any case. My connection with him was mainly professional; we didn’t socialize, probably never would. But we got along well, and more importantly, we had each other’s backs. I’d trust him in any crisis and with my life — had done both, in fact, on more than one occasion.

Tamara and I were just finishing up when Runyon stopped in to deliver some material he’d dug up on a consumer fraud case. We briefed him on the Beckett investigation, and after he’d looked over the casefile he asked, “Priority job?”

“Medium to start,” I said. “Beckett’s trial is three weeks off, but it might take a while to find him.”

“Okay. I’ll get moving on it right away.”

It looked like a fairly routine case to him, too, at first. He’d handled dozens like it over the years — skip-traces, bail jumpers, missing persons — and with less information than he had to go on here. Assuming the sister was right about Kenneth Beckett’s habit patterns, the odds were pretty good that he could be found before the trial date. Beckett didn’t seem to be either mature or bright, which made him a poor candidate for grounding himself without leaving a trackable trail. The one potentially tricky part, once he was located, was convincing him to come back to the city to stand trial.

There were more than two hundred marinas and boatyards on Tamara’s list. But Runyon figured he could eliminate the ones in close proximity to the city — Oakland, Alameda, Sausalito, Pacifica, the near end of the Peninsula. Even a half-smart, short-tether runaway who didn’t like to travel would choose a hiding place at some distance from his home turf. The remaining possibilities within a seventy-five-mile radius could be covered by one man in the allotted time frame, though if Runyon couldn’t get a line on the subject in a week or so, Tamara had said she’d assign Alex Chavez or part-timer Deron Stewart to help out.