The gate into the rear yard was latched but not locked. I went through it and across a section of weedy grass, skirted some bushes, and came to a flight of stairs that led up to where the lighted window was. Under the stairs was a door; the way the house had been built, it would give into a basement. It was sure to be locked tight but I tried it anyway. Yeah. I moved over and climbed the stairs, warily but not trying to be sneaky about it.
At the top was a little platform porch railed on the two sides. The door into the house was as tight-locked as the one into the basement. On the jamb was a doorbell, something you find occasionally on the backsides of older houses. I thought it over for a few seconds and then pushed the bell. Inside, the thing made a low, flat, buzzing sound. I stood with my ear against the door, listening for footsteps. All I heard was silence.
After half a minute I leaned out over the railing for a look through the lighted window. Kitchen, all right. I could see about half of it, including the sink and drainboard, the refrigerator, part of a stove, part of a Formica-topped table and two chairs. Everything was immaculate, gleamingly so, like a fifties-style remodeler’s showroom. That surprised me a little; Pendarves hadn’t impressed me as an orderly man. Just the opposite, in fact-he was pretty careless about his appearance. But then, maybe he had somebody come in and clean for him, and what I was seeing was the result of a recent tidying.
I straightened, put my hand on the doorknob, took it away again. No real point in my trying to get inside the house. Pendarves wasn’t here; and if there was anything to find on the premises, it was the cops’ job to find it.
Descending the stairs, I hurried across the yard and through the gate and alongside the garage. Except for the fog-smeared streetlights and nearby house lights, there was nothing to see; I was still alone on the property. I crossed the empty expanse of Rivera to where my car was parked. Got in and stripped off my gloves and sat for half a minute to let my breathing even out again; my lungs still weren’t working right.
I was lifting the receiver on the mobile phone when the night went red behind me.
The redness brightened swiftly, making the fog look as though it were drizzling blood. I sat unmoving, watching in the rearview mirror as a black-and-white prowl car came into sight, heading west on Rivera. It was moving at a pretty good clip, its dome light slashing at the wet dark, until it passed through the intersection; then the driver braked abruptly and swerved over to the curb in front of Pendarves’s garage.
A brace of patrolmen piled out. Both carried flashlights, switched them on at the same time; the beams burned bright tunnels through the red-splashed drifts of fog. They stopped together at the garage door, as if they were surprised to find it half open and the car engine shut off inside. They seemed to hold a hurried conference, after which they drew their sidearms in unison. One of them eased the door up a little farther and ducked under it; the other went into a shooter’s crouch and swept the interior with his light. After a few seconds the crouching one straightened again, turned away and moved along the near-side wall, out of my range of vision.
I put the phone receiver back in its cradle, thinking: Somebody beat me to it. One of the neighbors, who spotted me poking around? But then why were the cops surprised at what they found over there? Sure, the call could have been made before I opened the door, but that had been at least twenty minutes ago. Prowler calls in this neighborhood, with the Taraval precinct station only a little over a mile away, were routinely answered in half that time.
As I watched, the garage door went up all the way. Then the patrolman inside turned his flash on Thomas Lujack’s corpse, held it there until his partner came in through the access door and joined him. Both of them still had their weapons drawn. If they’d caught me on the premises, as they would have if they’d arrived five minutes sooner, they’d have hassled me pretty good.
The way it was now, I wouldn’t get much more than the fish-eye. All I had to do was go on over there, nice and slow, and then tell them the exact truth. I could give them enough bare facts to save time and trouble when the homicide inspectors arrived. Besides, it was the law-abiding and the smart thing to do.
I didn’t do it.
Up until a year ago, I would have-without hesitation. But I was neither the man nor the detective I had been a year ago. There was a wrongness about the whole scenario over there; I had felt it as soon as I realized who the dead man was, and the arrival of the prowl car had shoved it up close to the surface. Thomas Lujack’s death hadn’t ended my involvement with him, or with Nick Pendarves; I felt that, too, just as strongly. It seemed imperative to keep my name out of the official report, to not blow my cover at the Hideaway.
I waited until one of the patrolmen radioed in and the two of them together drifted into the shadows toward the house. Then I started the car and went away from there, running dark like a thief in the night.
* * * *
Bad night all around.
I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into a doze. My lungs ached and my head felt clogged with too many random thoughts, like a pressure building up. After a while the unease came, crimping at the edges of my mind. Then the claustrophobia, as if the darkness was contracting around me-outside pressure added to the pressure within. Even when I turned on the light the sensation of being squeezed and suffocated did not lessen any. Anxiety attack, the first in three months.
The clock said one thirty when I got up. I paced from room to room but it did no good; the trapped, fearful feeling seemed to worsen. There was nothing for it then but to get out and away. I dressed quickly and left the building and put my car around me again and began to drive with the window rolled down and the wind blowing icy mist against my face.
I drove here and there, going nowhere. Wet shiny streets, mostly deserted, reflecting splinters of light that stabbed into my eyes and made them burn again. Over in the Tenderloin, the night people were out alone or in little shadowy groups- pimps, whores, pushers, muggers; drunks and addicts and flesh-hungry johns. The predators and their prey, even more voracious in bad weather because it made tempers short and patience thin. On Marina Boulevard, the empty Green looked like a barren graveyard, the tall bobbing masts of the boats in the yacht harbor like skeletons performing a danse macabre. Along the fringes of the Presidio it was as if I were passing through a tropical rain forest-trees and bushes dripping, dripping, making me think of acid rain eating away unseen at leaves and roots so that one day there would be nothing left but blighted gray vegetable matter … seen one dead tree, you’ve seen them all. At Cliff House and Ocean Beach, wind-driven surf boiled foaming over the rocks and raged at the shore, and there was no peace in that, either-there can never be peace in the presence of raw violence. At 47th and Rivera, where raw violence had taken place earlier, there was the illusion of peace because the police were gone and the dead man was gone and the house was dark … but the illusion was worse than the violence itself; an illusion is a lie and a lie is always worse than the truth….
I drove some more, another half hour or so-here and there, going nowhere. At last I could feel the fatigue taking over, and with it came the beginnings of ease both physical and mental. The night felt less ominous, less tragic; it was merely lonely, the way even good nights are. I knew I could go home then, that when I got there the flat would no longer be a tightening snare. And I was right.
I slept immediately and dreamlessly, for a little more than four hours. When I awoke at 8:00 a.m., to face the dull gray of another day, I was all right again.
* * * *