“Is it possible she went away with another man?”
“No,” he said.
“Wasn’t seeing anybody but you in May? Couldn’t have broken off your affair because she’d met somebody new?”
“I told you why she wanted to leave me.”
“Tell me about the man who attacked you tonight,” I said.
Runyon coughed, spat thickly into the towel. His breathing had become more clogged from the swelling and the blood; it had a scratchy, wheezing cadence, like a man in the last stages of TB.
“Mr. Runyon? The man who attacked you — who is he?”
“...I don’t know his name.”
“He knows yours.”
“Don’t know how he found out.”
“Tonight isn’t the first time you saw him face-to-face?”
“No. Twice before.”
“Where? Nedra’s house?”
“Both times. Just... showed up there.”
“How long ago, the first time?”
“Three weeks.”
Right, I thought. And after you left that night, he followed you home. Easy enough then for him to find out your name and telephone number.
“What did he say to you, that first time?”
“He wanted me to leave Nedra alone.”
“Did he know she was missing?”
“No. He does now. He thinks I did something to her.”
“You tell him she’d disappeared?”
“No. He found out.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long did it take him to find out?”
“Not long. A few days.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Veiled threats. Not like tonight.”
“On the phone as well as in person?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you his relationship with Nedra?”
“No. He... talks about her as if he owns her.”
“A former lover?”
“Man like that? No. Nedra would never give herself to a man like that.”
“Like what? A violent man?”
“Crude, uneducated. Ugly.”
“She ever mention someone like him in her past?”
“No.”
“Someone who’d bothered her, made trouble for her?”
“No.”
“Would she have confided in you about that sort of thing?”
“Of course she would. We have no secrets.”
Sixteenth Street coming up. That was the more direct route to S.F. General, over on Potrero, but I didn’t take it; this time of night, it would be jammed around Mission Street with low-riders and the coffeehouse-and-disco crowds. I kept on going to Duboce and turned there.
I asked Runyon, “What have you done to try to find her?”
“Done?”
“You must have done something. Talked to friends, relatives—”
“She has no relatives. She’s an orphan.”
“Friends, then.”
“No. Nedra is a private person.”
“Everybody has at least one friend.”
“Me,” Runyon said. He was still wheezing, the words coming out with difficulty. “Lover and best friend. Now especially she needs no one but me.”
Christ.
“People she works with, clients — you talk to any of them?”
“A few.”
“None had any idea what happened to her?”
“Where she was, no. I didn’t say she’d disappeared.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I... couldn’t. Too personal, too painful.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said she’d gone away for a while and I’d lost contact with her. I said she’d be back eventually. But they wouldn’t listen, they were all so angry.”
“Because of work she owed them?”
“Yes. No loyalty to her, no compassion.”
“I don’t suppose you contacted the police, the missing persons bureau?”
“No, I... I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Have to be a relative to file a missing persons report. They couldn’t find her anyway. If I couldn’t reach her — the man who loves her, knows her best — how can strangers?”
Bullshit. You don’t have to be a relative to file a missing persons report; all that’s required is a personal or professional relationship with the individual and a willingness to detail it to the authorities. Maybe Runyon didn’t know that, but he could have found out easily enough. He loved Nedra, he wanted to marry her, he was pathologically entangled with her... but still he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to uncover his ass and go public with his affair. And then he’d waffled too long and it was too late to do much of anything: he was hamstrung and any fresh leads to Nedra’s whereabouts had gone stale, were probably lost for good by now. Weak and ineffectual personality, operating under a dangerous overload of indecision and worry and stress — that was Victor Runyon. Man caught and strangling slowly on the cord of his obsession.
“Just what exactly did you do, Mr. Runyon?”
“What?”
“To try to find Nedra.”
“Everything I could think of. Went through her papers, her mail, her bills. Listened to her phone messages. Kept checking her favorite places... restaurants, shops, the aquarium, the De Young.”
“That’s all?”
“What else could I do?”
“You paid her past-due bills, didn’t you?”
“Bills? Yes, I paid them.”
“When they shut off the electricity at the house.”
“Yes. I should have paid them sooner.”
I didn’t have to ask him why he’d done it. It was the same reason he’d built the shrine: an expression of sick, blind faith.
“She’ll come back,” he said thickly, “safe and sound. She has to, for both our sakes. You understand? She’ll come back with me.”
Like one of the disciples waiting for Christ to rise from the dead.
Kay Runyon had already arrived when I walked her husband into the emergency room at S.F. General. And she hadn’t come alone; the other member of the family, Matt, was there too. When she saw Runyon’s bruised and swollen face she bit her lip, hard; otherwise she showed no reaction. Neither did her son. Matt stood stone-faced, tense, his young-old eyes as bleak as the linoleum floor and the drab beige walls. Neither of them made a fuss or got in my way while I deposited Runyon on one of the benches.
I went to talk to an admissions nurse, tell her the nature of Runyon’s injury. My footsteps echoed hollowly in the big room. Slack time, as early as it was and on a weeknight: only two other people in the waiting area, and both of those on silent vigils. No major-accident or gang-shooting victims so far tonight; no crack or heroin overdoses, no stabbings or bludgeonings or other serious trauma injuries. Even so. there was a charged atmosphere of expectancy among the staff: it was only a matter of time. I’d been here once on a particularly eventful Saturday night, and it had been like a combat-zone field hospital — the hurt and the dying lined out on benches and gurneys, hurrying paramedics and frazzled nurses and doctors in blood-spattered smocks. War is hell, and so is life in some parts of the city. In those parts, on certain nights, it amounts to the same thing.
When I got back to Runyon, his wife and son were sitting one on either side of him. Mrs. Runyon was saying something to him, but she might have been talking to herself for all the reaction she was getting. He didn’t seem to know she was there. Kay Runyon, yesterday afternoon: He just... retreated. Into himself, like a turtle pulling its head into its shell. Yeah. He could bear his soul to me in all its raw, pathetic torment because I was a stranger and the contact was impersonal, without emotional baggage, like confiding to a priest in a confessional. Where his family was concerned it was just the opposite: too much emotional baggage, with the biggest chunk of it being guilt.