“It was the first time he called... the first time I know about. Vic was home, here in the house, and I was in my studio out back, and he and I happened to pick up at the same time. Vic said hello before I could, and this man’s voice said, ‘Stay away from Nedra, you son of a bitch, if you know what’s good for you.’ ”
“A voice you’d never heard before?”
“Never.”
“What did your husband say?”
“Nothing. He didn’t have time. The man called him another name, much worse, and hung up.”
“Did you ask Vic who he is?”
“Of course. He withdrew again.”
“But you think he knows the man’s identity?”
“Oh, he knows. He must know. I’m terrified that...”
“What? The caller will make good on his threat?”
“Yes. This is a crazy world, full of crazy people. He has to be unstable, to make all those calls. Who knows what he might do?”
She was right, but I didn’t voice my agreement. I didn’t say anything.
“That’s one of the reasons I have to know who Nedra is,” Kay Runyon said. “You see? Who she is and who the man is. Then I can talk to her — to him, too, if necessary — face-to-face.
Not just for my sake, for Vic’s and for our son’s. You do understand?”
“I understand that what’s brewing here is pretty volatile, Mrs. Runyon—”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“—and that you could make it worse by becoming personally involved with Nedra and this champion of hers.”
“Are you saying it’s better I don’t know who they are? That I just let things go along as they have?”
“No. I’m advising caution, that’s all.”
“I intend to be cautious. Very. But I have to know. I’m going to know, one way or another. If you won’t help me—”
She broke off because there were running footsteps on the stairs outside, then heavy on the porch. A key rattled; the front door opened and then banged shut. A young male voice called, “Mom? You here?”
“In the living room, Matt.”
A teenage version of Kay Runyon appeared in the doorway. He was sixteen or seventeen, his blond hair worn in a tight bristle cut, his clothing a pair of rumpled cords and one of those blue-and-white long-sleeved sweatshirts baseball players wear. He looked like a ballplayer: lean, rangy, long-armed, and strong. In one hand he carried a plastic sack tied off at the top and full of something that couldn’t be very heavy.
“I got the lint,” he said. “You want it in... oh.”
He’d spotted me, and it worked an immediate transformation on him. He froze in place, his body tensing.
Kay Runyon said, “It’s all right, Matt. This man’s here to help us.” She made introductions, and her son — Matthew, she said formally — unbent enough to come over and shake my hand, quick and hard. But the tenseness remained in him, and he had nothing to say to me. He turned back to his mother, jiggling the sack.
“You want me to put this stuff in the studio?”
“Yes. Go ahead, we’re almost finished here.”
He nodded and went out without looking at me again.
I said, “Lint?”
“Dryer lint. There are two Laundromats in the area that save it for me. Matt collects it when they have a sackful.”
“What do you use it for?”
“Didn’t Joe tell you? I’m an artist — I do representational and impressionistic paintings, using dryer lint as a central ingredient.”
“Uh, I see.”
Ghost of a smile. “It’s an established modern technique,” she said. “That’s one of my better efforts on the wall behind you.”
I looked. Furry geometrical designs arranged on a snowy white field, none of them quite touching one another, each in a slightly different shade of orange. “It’s very good,” I said. I had no idea if it was good or not; what I know about art you could hide in a spoonful of dryer lint.
“Thank you.”
One of those little awkward silences then, the kind that develop between strangers in unrelaxed circumstances. Thick quiet had reclaimed the house. I still wanted to get up and walk out, but I didn’t do it.
“He knows, of course,” Kay Runyon said abruptly.
“Matt?”
“Yes. What’s going on with his father, the phone calls, all of it. We don’t have secrets in this house. Didn’t used to have secrets, anyway.”
Another small silence. She looked at me steadily, waiting, as tense now as her son had been.
It’s all right, Matt. This man’s here to help us.
Well, somebody had to, right? And what difference did it make to me, really, who paid my fees and what kind of work I did as long as it was worthwhile. I got out my notebook.
Twenty minutes later, out in the car, I didn’t feel quite so nobly philosophical. I thought: Obsessive affair, harassing phone calls, not-so-veiled threats, people in pain living on the edge — a situation simmering with all sorts of explosive possibilities. Plus a Dreamsicle living room and paintings made with dryer lint. I must be crazy to get mixed up in a thing like this.
Right.
Just another day in the asylum...
Chapter 2
At five-fifteen that evening I was legally parked at a meter on Second Street, between Brannan and Townsend. It had taken me twenty-five minutes of cruising around, and a little fast maneuvering to ace out an irate woman in a Cadillac who also wanted the space — and at that I considered myself fortunate. I’d been prepared to do a lot of hovering and/or park illegally to maintain surveillance on the parking garage just down the block. The garage was where Victor Runyon kept his car — a maroon ’91 BMW, his wife had told me — while he was in his office around the corner on Brannan.
This was an area of the city that had changed radically over the past couple of decades. Once its streets and narrow alleys and old brick and stone and wood buildings had been home to light industry, to ship’s chandleries and marine supply outfits that catered to San Francisco’s now-moribund shipping trade. In those days it had been known as South of the Slot, “slot” being old-timer’s parlance for Market Street. As the port declined, so did the district. In the sixties and early seventies, some of the industrial outfits had closed down or moved out, and the area had degenerated into an adjunct to Skid Row: flophouses, cheap bars, empty buildings and warehouses, heavy drug use in and around South Park. Then the city fathers, in a rare exercise of good judgment, had stepped in and started an aggressive urban renewal program; and farsighted developers, who had correctly predicted the real estate boom of the mid-seventies, had bought up property and begun tearing down some of the worst of the derelicts and putting up new buildings, and refurbishing the “quaint” old brick warehouses into gentrified office and showroom space. Clothiers and people involved in the interior design trade moved in; so did architects and artists and food and entertainment entrepreneurs. Now what you had was a burgeoning San Francisco version of New York’s SoHo, replete with a similar trendy name: SoMa, short for South of Market. By day it was a diverse “mixed-use” jumble of printing outfits, auto repair shops, social service agencies, pawnshops, transient hotels and senior citizens’ residences peacefully coexisting with art galleries, factory-outlet clothing and jewelry stores, gourmet food and wine shops, and a variety of white-collar offices. By night it was a racy Bohemian blend of restaurants, comedy clubs, and gay leather bars and straight dancing clubs along Folsom Street’s so-called Miracle Mile.
I’m not a big advocate of change, but in this case I approved of the South of Market metamorphosis. I could remember the good old days when the area had had a crusty seaman’s flavor, but I could also remember the bad old days when it had been the domain of crumbling buildings and crumbling humanity. Mindless change — the tearing down of the functional old in favor of the glittery, too-often impermanent new — is one thing; reclamation and self-preservation by surgery is another. South of the Slot was dead. Long live SoMa.