My next call was to TRW, to request a credit check on Rodriguez. Then I punched up the number of the AMA, to see if they’d come up with anything for me. They hadn’t; no licensed psychiatrist named Duncan had practiced in San Francisco or anywhere in the Bay Area within the past ten years. The S.F. Bay Area Psychological Association had drawn the same blank where practicing psychologists and psychotherapists were concerned. Either the man Nedra Merchant had been seeing was unlicensed — some kind of head quack — or Lawrence April had in fact misremembered the name.
I put the Runyon-Merchant matter on temporary hold so that I could take care of the preliminaries on the department-store skip trace and then get some billing done. No bills sent, no checks received: and my cash flow was a little sluggish at the moment. I was working on the billing when the telephone went off.
Kay Runyon. Sounding tired and tense; she didn’t have to tell me she’d had a sleepless night. She said, “He just called again.”
“Who did?”
“The same man, the man who attacked Vic.”
“You answered the phone?”
“Yes.”
“He have anything to say to you this time?”
“God. I wish he hadn’t. He asked for Vic and I recognized his voice and I... I lost it for a few seconds. I called him some names, I told him he wasn’t going to get away with what he did last night. He just laughed.”
“And said what?”
“He thinks Vic did something to Nedra... hurt her or drove her away, I don’t know. I tried to tell him he was wrong. He kept saying somebody had better tell him where she was and she had better be all right. Or else. If I didn’t know, then I’d better find out from Vic or have you find out for me.”
“Me? He mentioned me?”
“Yes.”
“By name or by profession?”
“Both. Didn’t you tell him last night who you are?”
“No. Only that I was a friend of your husband’s.”
“But how...?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out. Did he say anything else?”
“No. Then he hung up.”
“How did he sound? His emotional state.”
“Angry. Very angry.”
“In control or not?”
“Yes, but... not underneath.”
“Unstable?”
“Psychotic,” she said.
Overreaction. Or was it? His frenzied assault on Runyon... what was that kind of outpouring of rage if not a psychotic episode? If I hadn’t been there to pull him off, he might have beaten Runyon to death.
But I was not about to admit that to her. I said, “Don’t let your imagination get the best of you. We’ll have a better idea of his mental state after I talk to him, do some checking into his background.”
“Do you know yet who he is?”
“I know who owns the car he was driving, yes. He may or may not be the registered owner; I’ll have that information pretty soon.”
“You’ll call as soon as you know for sure?”
“As soon as I have anything definite,” I said, and changed the subject. “Your husband been up yet?”
“No. They gave him some pills at the hospital, for the pain and to make him sleep. I made sure he took them when we got home.”
“You won’t have to worry about him going out today. He’ll hurt too much when he wakes up to do anything but lie in bed. I know; I’ve had my nose broken.”
“He’ll stay here,” Kay Runyon said grimly, “if I have to drug him and tie him to the bed.”
“Have you contacted a psychiatrist yet?”
“I called six of them this morning. The earliest I could get an appointment with anyone is next Tuesday. Tuesday, for God’s sake.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What does that tell you about the number of disturbed people in this city?” she said. “About the society we live in? We’re a nation of crazy people... we really are, you know.”
The conversation left me feeling bleak. And puzzled. It was possible that the balding guy had gotten my car license at the same time I’d gotten his last night. But how could he have known which car was mine? It was unlikely he’d noticed me drive up and stop; he had been too focused on Victor Runyon. And there’d been several other cars parked in the vicinity. And even if he had picked off my number, how could he have traced it so quickly? He wasn’t a cop or another P.I., not the way he’d acted. I’d have sensed it right away if he were. You get so you can tell when you’re dealing with one of your own kind.
The only other thing I could think of was that he’d recognized me, put the name to the face. My photograph has been in the newspapers and on TV, and not always for the right reasons. Not recently, though — and the photos available to the media hadn’t been good likenesses.
So? How the hell had he found out who I was and what I did for a living?
The outer mission is my old neighborhood. I was born and raised there, in a big rambling house just off Alemany Boulevard near the Daly City line. Lower middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood in those days, heavily ethnic European — Italians, Poles, Slavs, some Irish. Pretty good place to grow up in: the city was different back then, nurturing, the streets a far cry from the drug-and gang-riddled war zones they’ve evolved into today. Family and ethnic ties were rock-solid. We watched out for our own, policed our own — lived by codes and traditions that were centuries old — and kids like me, first-generation American-born, were better and stronger for it.
Not that my childhood was some kind of urban idyll. It wasn’t. Loner then, loner now, shaped by circumstances as well as by genetic makeup. I played team sports, had a circle of casual friends; but I was close to only one, a tall gangly kid named Gino, and to none after he and his parents moved away when I was twelve. (Funny, I could no longer remember Gino’s last name.) I was never a leader, never one of the popular ones; shy, clumsy, overweight kids seldom are. A tagalong, a fringer in every group and activity. So I preferred my own company, spending long afternoons in the walnut tree in the backyard, reading books and pulp magazines, living in a black-and-white fantasy world of heroes and villains, imagining myself as one of the good guys helping to right wrongs. More than anything else those childhood fantasy trips were why I went into police work, why I eventually turned to private investigation.
My home life hadn’t been any bed of roses either. Nina, my sister and only sibling, died of rheumatic fever when she was five and I was eight. And my old man was a drunk, a verbal and sometimes physical abuser, a dockworker who couldn’t hold a job and who got mixed up with a waterfront gang that was stealing goods out of the pier sheds and selling them on the black market. He drank himself to death at the age of fifty. I was seventeen then, six months shy of high school graduation. I didn’t wait; I joined the army and went off to fight in the South Pacific, in another of humanity’s mad wars. No one, not even Kerry, knows that I never finished high school; that I got into the MPs with the help of a friend in clerical who doctored my records, and into the police academy after I left the service on the strength of my MP training and record.
My old man’s legacy might have left deeper, uglier scars if it hadn’t been for Ma. She was a good woman, as good as anyone God ever made; a big, sad, loving woman from Genoa, who’d traded the old world for a new one she didn’t like nearly as much, and who’d made the best of a life she didn’t deserve. My old man killed her, too, with his drinking and his abuse, five years after he killed himself. She’d been a fine cook, like most Italian women of her generation, and the more he drank, the more she ate of her rich Genovese cooking for solace and escape. After he died she kept right on gorging herself for the same reasons, and because she was all alone in that rambling house. It was a heart attack that ended her life, induced by obesity and clogged arteries. She stood five-two and on the day she died she weighed two hundred and forty-seven pounds.