Bill Pronzini
Demons
For my new in-laws:
Kathryn, Lois, and Henry Muller
and
Yes, there is a devil,
Of that there is no doubt.
But is he trying to get in us,
Or is he trying to get out?
Chapter 1
I said, “I don’t like divorce work, Joe. You know that. The only time I’ll do it is when I need money. And right now I don’t need money.”
“Kay doesn’t want a divorce,” DeFalco said.
“Same kind of dirty job.”
“You won’t have to take photos or make tapes or anything like that. Find out who the woman is, that’s essentially it.”
“Essentially?”
“Well, there is a minor complication.”
“There are always complications, and they’re usually not so minor. What’s this one?”
“I’d better let her tell you.”
“Uh-huh. So I find out the woman’s identity — then what? Kay confronts her?”
“She’s not violent, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I sighed. “Talk it over woman-to-woman, appeal to the dolly’s sense of decency and fair play. Right?”
“Something like that.”
“And what if the girlfriend won’t give him up?”
“Kay’s at the end of her rope. If she can’t put an end to the affair herself, she’ll walk.”
“Yeah.”
“No, she will. You don’t know her; I do.”
I thought: Nobody knows anybody, not really. We don’t even know ourselves. But I didn’t say it.
DeFalco sat slouched in the client’s chair across my desk, watching me with his shrewd reporter’s eyes. He doesn’t look like a newspaperman; nor, for that matter, does he look Italian. He looks like Pat O’Brien playing Father Jerry in Angels with Dirty Faces. People tell him things they wouldn’t tell anybody else. Friends also turn to him for favors in a time of need. And when that happens, Joe being lazy and something of a buck-passer, his first inclination is to dump the whole thing, favor included, into the lap of another friend. In this case, me.
“Well?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, she’s a nice lady. No bull. I’ve known her since we were radicals together at Berkeley.”
“You were never a radical.”
“In spirit I was,” he said. “Be a mensch, will you? She’s hurting, bad, and she needs help and there’s nothing much I can do for her. It’s your kind of work.”
“Sure it is.”
“You picked the profession, pal. Nobody forced you to become a private eye.”
I sighed again. If this were a comic strip — and my life felt like one sometimes — one of those word balloons would come out of my ear in the next panel and the word printed in it would be sucker! I said, “All right. I’ll talk to her. No promises beyond that.”
He gave me his wise Pat O’Brien smile along with Kay Runyon’s address and telephone number. I wasn’t kidding him, the smile said. It also said I wasn’t kidding myself and we both knew it, didn’t we? Right on both counts, the smug bastard.
At the door he paused and took a look around the half-empty loft, the way he had when he’d first come in. Don’t say it, Joe, I thought; you got this far without saying anything, just let it go. But he didn’t let it go, not my old pal, Mr. Sensitive. He said, “This place is too big for a one-man operation. You ought to take in another partner. Or get yourself a smaller layout.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Any plans along those lines?”
“No,” I said.
“Think about it,” he said. Then he said, “You hear from Eberhardt since he moved out?”
This time, teeth clenched, I shook my head.
“Me neither. I guess he’s cut off a lot of his old friends.”
No comment.
“I hear he’s not doing too well. That what you hear?”
No comment, damn it.
“Well, he made his own bed,” DeFalco said. “Still, I’d hate to see him go down the tubes. You’d take him back, wouldn’t you? If he can’t hack it on his own and comes begging?”
Enough. “Get out of here,” I said. “Go rake some muck at city hall.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, huh? Eberhardt?”
“Good-bye, Joe.”
“Sure, I know how you feel. I’m on your side. Call me after you talk to Kay.”
“Good-bye, Joe.”
He went. And a little while later, so did I.
Kay Runyon and her allegedly philandering husband lived in Ashbury Heights, a little pocket of affluence on the hill above the Haight-Ashbury. Old money up there — nervous money in the late sixties, when the Haight had been the center of the Flower Power, free love, let’s-all-get-stoned counterculture. The citizens of the Heights had survived the hippies with their property values intact, and were now in the process of surviving the drug-infested, homeless-dominated new Haight scene. Still nervous about the shape of things below, no doubt, but reasonably confident in the long view. If you live high enough on the hill, any hill, and you’re wary and well insulated, you can survive anything the rabble does down in the bottoms. That’s the theory, anyway, that the great visionaries in Washington had been tacitly propounding for a dozen years. The gospel according to St. Ronald and St. George.
The Runyon house was a tall, narrow Mediterranean: stucco-faced, painted a creamy silver-gray, with cathedral-style windows of leaded glass and black wrought-iron balconies and trim. A double tier of brick steps led up onto a side porch from the street — fifteen steps in each tier. High, high on the hill. I wondered what Victor Runyon did for a living, to afford this kind of home. Or, not to be sexist, what Kay Runyon did. DeFalco hadn’t told me which of them controlled the family purse strings, or where the money in the purse came from.
The front door opened before I was halfway up the second tier and Kay Runyon came out to greet me. I’d called her before leaving the office — a thirty-second conversation to determine that she was home and available for a conference right away. She had sounded tense on the phone and she looked tense in person: woman on the edge, and trying so hard not to show it that her balance was all the more precarious. She was about forty, too thin in baggy slacks and a white velour pullover, as if she might be anorectic; hair a sandy blond, worn shoulder-length in one of those fluffy, in-curving styles; large gray eyes that would have been striking except for the smudges under them and the pain in their depths. Twenty years ago she’d have had suitors of all shapes, sizes, and ages beating down her door. Now, what should have been an equally potent mature beauty was blurred, marred by the effects of strain and emotional upheaval.
She subjected me to an intense five-second scrutiny of her own, and the impression she got seemed to reassure her. She shook my hand, said, “Thank you for coming, I really do appreciate it,” and ushered me into a big, angular living room. Everything in there was either orange or white or a combination of the two colors, including some oddly fuzzy impressionistic paintings on the wall and such accoutrements as vases, coasters, a table lighter, and ashtrays. There was plenty of light — from a chandelier and two table lamps, as well as from the sunny August day outside — and the effect should have been warm and cheery. Not for me, though. All that orange and white made me cold because it reminded me of a Dreamsicle, one of my generation’s kid treats: orange-flavored ice on the outside, vanilla ice cream on the inside. My old man loved Dreamsicles — just a big overgrown kid himself — and was always trying to get me to eat them, couldn’t understand why I kept refusing. Once, when I turned one down, he knocked me flat and stood over me shaking it, splattering me with cold melting orange and white, telling me what an ungrateful little shit I was. Some guy, my old man. Every boy’s ideal pop.