“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“It hurts now but it’ll hurt a hell of a lot more if you don’t have it set pretty soon.”
“I can live with pain,” he said. “I’ve lived with pain a long time now.”
“Not the broken-nose kind. On your feet, Mr. Runyon.”
He didn’t give me any argument. He stood, slowly, took one last lingering look at the photo, and then shambled out of there. He didn’t think to snuff the candles; I had to do it for him.
When I joined him in the foyer he gave me a clear-eyed look for the first time. “I don’t know you,” he said.
“That’s right, you don’t.”
“What are you doing here? Why did you help me?”
I was not about to coddle or play games with him. I said, “I’m a private investigator. Your wife hired me to find out about Nedra.”
“...A detective? Kay?”
“Did you think she didn’t know?”
“Poor Kay,” he said.
“Yeah. Poor Kay.”
“I didn’t want to hurt her. I never wanted to hurt my family.”
Caught, trapped, backed up against their own deceit, people always say things like that. But the words are hollow; not lies so much as empty afterthoughts. “If you didn’t want to hurt your family, you should have stayed away from Nedra Merchant.”
“I couldn’t.”
They say that too. And the next:
“I love her. You don’t know how much I love her.”
“I don’t care how much you love her. Where is she?”
“Gone.”
“You said that before. Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Gone when, then? How long?”
“May. Early May.”
“Of her own volition?
Headshake.
“Alone or with somebody?”
Headshake.
“Or did something happen to her?”
Headshake.
“Why didn’t you notify the police? Or did you?”
Headshake. This time the movement was violent enough to bring a pained sound out of his throat, to start blood trickling again from one nostril. His nose was swelling: burst-tomato blob, turning purple at the edges. He was still holding the stained towel; he lifted it up over the whole of his face, as if he were trying to hide behind it.
“Come on,” I said, “we’ll talk in the car.”
I prodded him out onto the front deck, locked the door behind us. While I was doing that I removed the key from his case, slipped it into my pants pocket. Not for his sake, to keep him from refeeding his obsession; for mine, to allow me to get back in alone at some point. I was not done here, or with any of this business yet. There were too many questions that Victor Runyon probably couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Too damned much confusion for me to walk away from it clean.
Chapter 7
When we were in the car and rolling, I said, “Talk to me, Mr. Runyon. What happened to Nedra?”
No response. I looked over at him as we passed under a streetlamp. He had his head tilted back against the seat, his eyes shut, the bloody towel cradled against his chest as if it were a security blanket. His breathing had a raspy regularity and I thought at first that he’d passed out. But as we neared Clarendon he stirred, groaned faintly, put the towel up to his leaking nose.
I said, “I’m going to keep asking you this until you give me an answer. What happened to Nedra Merchant?”
A few more seconds of silence. Then, “She went away.”
“Went away where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean she disappeared?”
“Just... gone.”
“Here one day, gone the next?”
“No, she... I don’t know.”
“Tell me about the last time you saw her.”
“May ninth,” Runyon said. “Saturday, May ninth.”
“Where? Her house?”
“The house. Yes.”
“She say anything then about going away?”
“No.”
“How did she seem? Happy, sad, upset, afraid?”
“Angry,” he said.
“Angry. Why was she angry?”
“We fought. A bad fight.”
“Words, you mean? Or something physical?”
“Words. Just... ugly words.”
“About what?”
“Us. She wanted to...”
“What, Mr. Runyon?”
“End it. End it once and for all.”
“Your affair?”
“Our love,” he said.
“Why did she want to end it?”
“Too possessive, she said. Smothering her.”
Yeah, I thought.
“You asked her to marry you, is that it?”
“Yes. God, she knows how much I love her.”
“But she didn’t want to be tied down again.”
“One bad marriage... it didn’t have to be that way with us. I told her that. I love her too much; I worship her. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t listen.”
“What happened then?”
No reply. I thought he’d gone away again, retreated behind the wall of his obsession — but he hadn’t. When I asked him the question a second time his body jerked, as if with a sudden chill, and then he answered me in a thin, rusty voice, like hinges creaking in the dark.
“I left her alone. I went home.”
“When did you try to talk to her again?”
“The next day.”
“Called her? Went to see her?”
“Both. She... her machine was on. She wouldn’t answer the door.”
“But she was home that day, Sunday?”
“I don’t know,” Runyon said. “I’m not sure.”
“Then what?”
“I kept trying... a few days, three or four.”
“Calling her, trying to see her.”
“Yes. Finally I went to her house, used my key. Then I knew she was gone.”
“How did you know?”
“Felt it.”
“Was anything disturbed?”
“I don’t... disturbed?”
“Any signs of foul play?”
“No.”
“Her car was missing but her clothes and other possessions were still there, everything exactly as it should be?”
“Yes.”
“No message of any kind?”
“Message?”
“For you or someone else. Written or recorded.”
“No.”
“What did you think happened to her?”
“I thought she’d gone away for a while.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because of us, the fight we had. To think about us.”
“Was she in the habit of doing that?”
“What?”
“Going away suddenly, unannounced,” I said. “Disappearing for a few days, a week, longer.”
“Once. She did that once, right after we met.”
“How long was she gone that time?”
“A few days. She went to Tahoe.”
“By herself?”
“Yes. She said she did that when she wanted to think.”
“Always to Tahoe? Any special place up there?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Okay. So at first you thought she went away to think things over — your proposal, your relationship.”
“Yes,” Runyon said. “Give it enough time, she’ll change her mind. I know she will. She has to.”
“You still believe that? That she’s been holed up somewhere for nearly four months, trying to make up her mind?”
Silence. We were on Twin Peaks now, nearing upper Market; oncoming headlights sliced into the car, fragmented and threw splinters of light against his battered face. He had his head tilted back again but his eyes were open, blinking now and then against the glare.
“Is that what you believe now?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe that anymore.”
“What do you believe?”
“I don’t know what I believe. I do know she’s alive, she’s all right, she’s not really hurt.”