No answer. He lay still, his eyes shut now, his breathing a little less raspy in repose. I thought he might have drifted off, hadn’t heard what I’d said. But he was awake and he’d heard. And he answered me as I turned away from the bed and parted the curtains.
“No tengo,” he said. “Goddamnit to hell.”
The rooming house where Dancer had lived the past two decades was an ancient, two-story Victorian on Stambaugh Street, off Broadway and fairly close to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Downscale neighborhood that looked about the same as it had on my last, long-ago visit. The block-long thrift store where Dancer had gathered his reading material was still there; so was Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern a half block to the west. Not much had changed, in fact, except that there were a couple of empty storefronts and more graffiti on the building walls. The Victorian had had a coat of paint slapped on it in the interim, but it hadn’t done much to dispel the seedy aspect; its turrets and gables were still in need of repair, its brick chimneys still unstable-looking. One of the two scraggly palm trees in the front yard had died and been cut down; the broken picket fence that had enclosed the yard had been replaced by an even uglier Cyclone job. How long before urban renewal caught up with this little patch of decay? A few years at the most. Its days were numbered in any case, and Dancer had been a perfect fit: old and blighted and dying a little more every day.
Even though I had Dancer’s keys, I thought I’d better check with the manager. One of the mailboxes on the creaky porch identified C. Holloway as having that dubious distinction. I rang C. Holloway’s bell. Ten years ago the manager had been a woman with a face like a gargoyle, but she was gone now; the new one was male, forty-five or so, with a milky cataract in one eye and the disposition of a scorpion. He wouldn’t let me come in when I told him who I was and why I was there; I had to bribe him with a brace of dollar bills and show him my ID. He didn’t ask how Dancer was, didn’t seem to care. Inside he pointed me toward the basement stairs and said before he left me, “Don’t touch none of the other lockers down there. I’ll call the cops on you if I find out you did.”
The basement was musty and cold and threaded with spider-webs. The storage lockers were arranged along one wall-narrow cages made out of wood and chicken wire. The padlocks on each door were a joke; you could have torn through that thin wire with your bare hands and a minimum of effort. Room numbers were stenciled on the doors. Number 6, Dancer’s room, had the fewest items of any of the occupied cages: a couple of cheap suitcases, half a dozen open cartons of mint but dust-covered paperback books, and a beat-up paste-board trunk.
The package with Cybil’s name on it was in the trunk, on top of a jumble of old clothing. Nine-by-twelve padded mailing bag, fairly thick and heavy, sealed with filament tape. I tucked it under my arm.
Before I locked up the cage again, I took a quick look through a couple of the boxes of books. Multiple copies of a variety of lurid titles- Raw Day in Hell, Mistress of Bleak House, Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon, Black Avenger #7: Slaughter Train. Author’s copies of some of Dancer’s pseudonymous novels. On impulse I picked out half a dozen at random, tucked them into my coat pocket. Why not? They represented little pieces of the man’s life, imagination, talent. Somebody ought to care about them, just a little.
Upstairs, there was no sign of C. Holloway in the lobby. So I climbed the rickety staircase to the second floor-impulse again-and used the other key on the ring to let myself into Dancer’s room. It seemed no different than it had a decade ago. Bed, nightstand, dresser, writing table. Empty half-gallon jug of cheap bourbon on the floor next to the bed. Scatter of battered thrift-store paperbacks.
No typewriter or other writing tool, not even a pencil.
No copies of any of the paperbacks boxed up in the basement, nor any other book that might have been written by him.
Dancer’s home for more than fifteen years, but it wasn’t a home at all. Living space. Existing space for a broken, friendless, bitter, lovelorn, alcoholic ex-writer. Lonely space. Wasted-life space. Dying space.
I got out of there, quick. Thank God for Kerry and Emily and the kind of work I had, because without them, given my own loner instincts, I could have ended up occupying a space not much different from Russ Dancer’s.
5
JAKE RUNYON
Gene Zalesky lived alone on Museum Way, a street high up in the Corona Heights area that dead-ended at the Fairbanks Randall Jr. Museum. The steep, rocky slopes of Corona Heights Park ran along one side of the street; along the other was a curving row of private homes and two-unit flats, all of which had wide-angle views of the Castro District, Bernal Heights, and pieces of the Bay in the distance. The views would add several hundred a month to rental prices, another six figures to a seller’s asking price.
Zalesky’s address was one of the private homes, a dark wood and stucco job set back a few steps from the sidewalk. An ornate security gate barred the entrance. It told Runyon going in that Zalesky’s job as a systems analyst, whatever that was, for a banking outfit paid well. The interior of the house confirmed it. Antiques of one kind and another crowded the living room; the carpet on the floor was an expensive-looking wine-red oriental, the threads in an elaborate tapestry on one wall had the glitter of real gold. Velvety curtains were drawn over the expensive view.
The man himself was in his late thirties, short, dark, and cynical. The cynicism showed in his eyes, the set of his mouth, his voice. It wasn’t the result of his beating; it had been a part of him for a long time, maybe ever since he’d found out that he was different from the so-called norm, an outsider and an object of lesser men’s hate and scorn. His left forearm was in a cast; fading bruises discolored the left side of his face, and there was a bandage over some kind of wound on the right cheekbone. He moved slowly, stiffly-testimony to other bruises, other wounds, beneath the silk robe and pajamas he wore.
“Sorry I’m not dressed,” he said when he let Runyon in. “Still hurts like hell when I try to put on my pants.”
“No apology necessary.”
“One of them kicked me in the ass. I’ve got a bruise on my left buttock the size of a cantaloupe.”
“Must be painful.”
“Only when I sit down. I’m going to stand, if you don’t mind, but you go ahead and have a seat.”
Runyon said he’d stand too. While he was declining the offer of a drink, a fluff ball white cat appeared from behind one of the antiques and came over to sniff at his shoes.
“That’s Snow White,” Zalesky said. There was pride in his voice, as if he were introducing a relative. “Pure- blood Angora. You like cats?”
“Yes.” Colleen had owned a cat when he met her. Pure black alley cat named Midnight. Lived with them for the first eight years they were married, and she’d cried for three days when it died.
The Angora decided it had had enough of him and his shoes and drifted away. Zalesky made clucking noises; it ignored him, too. “Independent little bastard,” he said affectionately. Then he said, “So you’re Joshua Fleming’s father. I don’t remember him mentioning you until his call a few minutes ago.”
“We’re estranged,” Runyon said.
“Oh. I see.”
“Not for the reason you might think. His mother and I were divorced when he was a baby. She blamed me. So does he.”
“With just cause?”
“I don’t think so, but he won’t listen to my side of it.”
“Young and stubborn. I was like that myself, once, for different reasons. I learned to be more tolerant of my folks as I got older. Maybe he will, too.”
“What I’m hoping.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? Investigating these bashings?”
“Partly. He contacted me, opened a closed door that I’d like to keep open.”
“What other reason?”
“He’s hurting, he needs my help. That’s one.”
“There’s another?”
“I’ve been in law enforcement most of my adult life,” Runyon said. “I don’t like to see innocent people hurt
