Just a job, another job — sure. Do your work, earn some money to pay the bills. But the work ought to matter, right? Or at least you ought to be able to convince yourself that it matters while you’re doing it, even if you suspect in your more cynical moments that it doesn’t mean much in the long run and that maybe not a hell of a lot of human endeavor does. I had never been somebody who could just go through the motions. And that was what this felt like — going through the motions, for no real purpose, to no real resolution.
Well, then? Nobody to blame but myself. Mr. Bleeding Heart. Seduced by a sob story in a Dreamsicle room by a woman who paints pictures with dryer lint. It made me feel like the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. Mr. Bleeding Heart? Mr. Butthead.
I called TRW and requested a credit check on Glen Rigsby or Grigsby, picking the two most likely spellings. While I was at it I asked for credit checks on Lawrence April and Walter Merchant as well. Then I called the AMA and the San Francisco Bay Area Psychological Association, and requested information on a psychiatrist/psychologist/therapist named Duncan practicing in San Francisco five years ago. Might as well give Kay Runyon full value for the fifty-five dollars an hour she was paying me.
I had paperwork to do, and preliminaries on a department-store skip trace that could be done telephonically, but I didn’t feel like knuckling down to any of it. Grumpy and out of sorts today. It wasn’t just the Runyon case either. It was spending too damn much time inside my own head lately. Work all day, sit around my flat at night. Some boring company Mr. Butthead was.
I needed to get laid.
No, that was more cynicism. I needed Kerry — not just her body, her. Her smile, her wit, her fussiness, her insight, her caring, her friendship. Kerry Wade, soulmate. Sounded trite and a little silly, when you put it that way, but it was true. I was a loner, without many friends; had been one most of my life. And since Eberhardt had walked out, I seemed to want even less to do with the few friends I had left. Afraid to get too close to them, afraid to trust them too much, for fear of being hurt again: Eberhardt’s goddamn legacy. So now even more than ever I’d put all my faith and social eggs in Kerry’s basket, and damn it, I missed her—
The telephone rang.
And it was Kerry.
I grinned when I heard her voice. Psychic connection, by God. Didn’t this prove that we were soulmates?
“I got home too late to call you last night,” she said. “Yesterday was total crap. Today’s not much better so far.”
“You sound pretty tired.” Preoccupied too.
“Frazzled is the word. I would have called this morning if I’d had two minutes to myself.”
“I figured you were busy.”
“Three different accounts, all wanting instant results,” she said. “Bridger’s the worst. Bridger is driving me up a wall.”
“Who he?”
“Granny’s Bakeries. He’s Granny. He’s also a jerk. If he calls one more time—” She broke off; I heard her take a ragged breath. “You don’t want to hear all this, not during business hours. You must be busy too.”
“Not at the moment.”
“You okay? I mean, getting enough sleep?”
“I’d sleep better if I had company.”
Nothing from her.
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” I said. “And I do want to hear about it.”
“Hear about what?”
“All your troubles with Granny Bridger and the rest. How about tonight?”
“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a pro-choice meeting after I get done here.”
“Tomorrow night, then.”
“Not tomorrow either.”
“The weekend? You’re not going to work all weekend again?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I may have to.”
“Kerry, baby, I miss you. I haven’t seen you in more than a week—”
“I know that—”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too. But I don’t know if—” She broke off again, this time because a woman’s voice in the background called her name, said that Paul somebody was waiting to see her.
There was a muffled rattle of conversation; then Kerry said to me, sounding even more frazzled and preoccupied, “I’ve got to go. Another emergency.”
“Try to free up Saturday or Sunday night, okay?”
“I’ll call you,” she said, and rang off.
Chapter 5
It must have been a slow day at TRW: one of the reps called back after only forty-five minutes with the information I’d requested. The credit reports on Lawrence April and Walter Merchant told me nothing much; both had excellent ratings and a long history of paying their various bills on time. The one piece of potentially useful news concerned a man named Glenford Grigsby, who lived in Oakland and who was currently employed by an outfit called Health House in Emeryville.
Grigsby’s credit rating wasn’t so hot. Neither was his past employment record. He’d worked for nine different health and athletic clubs over the past fifteen years, as a masseur, a gym attendant, and an “exercise therapist,” whatever that was. One of the clubs he’d worked for, five years ago, was a SoMa establishment called The New You that had been located on Hawthorne Street within easy walking distance of Nedra Merchant’s former office. I hadn’t visited The New You yesterday because it wasn’t there anymore; it had gone out of business in 1989.
After the TRW rep and I were done with each other, I got Health House’s number from directory assistance and called it and asked the man who answered if Glenford Grigsby was working today. Affirmative. It was a quarter to three by my watch; the Bay Bridge wouldn’t be too crowded yet with homeward-bound commuters. If I hustled I could still get over to Emeryville, talk to Grigsby, and get back into the city before the big rush got under way.
Health house was a sprawling, newish complex on the bay side of Highway 80, with easy access to the freeway. Designed for busy office workers, guests of nearby hotels, and residents of the condo high-rises in the area. It had just about anything you could want in the way of healthful pursuits, from indoor tennis courts and swimming pool on down to aerobics classes. Grigsby, according to a woman at the front desk, was something of a jack-of-all-trades, working wherever he was needed within the complex. She consulted a chart and said that right now he was providing competition for one of the members on the handball courts. I told her I had important business with him, and she decided I looked respectable enough to be given a pass into the bowels of the place.
The handball courts were on the ground floor, rear. There were three of them but only one was in use. One of the players was middle-aged, wiry, and intense; he attacked the ball as if it were an enemy he was trying to hurt. The other player was in his thirties, blond, muscled, the Adonis type — Grigsby, from Walter Merchant’s description. He played with a fluid grace, hard enough to work up a good sweat, but I got the impression he was holding back, letting the older man have the advantage. Good employee, deferring to a member... or maybe he just didn’t give a damn about winning a contest in which there was nothing for him but a workout.
I was there ten minutes before the match ended, in a volley so furious the ball caroming off the walls and ceiling was a blur. The older guy won, but he was so drained from the effort he had to lean against the wall to shake hands. Both men used towels and had swigs from plastic water bottles; then they said some things to each other, and the blonde laughed and clapped the wiry one on the back. The older man came out first and walked away stiffly toward the men’s locker room. The Adonis gathered up ball and gloves and towels and water bottles before he quit the court.