“Two or three weeks, maybe a little longer.”
“Do you know the person he was arguing with?”
“Well… uh… I’m not sure…”
“Not sure?”
“I’ve seen him around, but I don’t know his name.”
Lying, Runyon thought. Why?
“Seen him around where?”
“In the Castro. Here and there.”
“Describe him.”
“In his twenties, blond, an angelic face…” Zalesky seemed nervous now, ill at ease. “I’m not very good at describing people.”
“This argument. What was it about?”
“I… don’t know, I was just passing by.”
Another lie. Falsehoods and deception weren’t natural to him; his eyes slid sideways, a little flick of guilt, when he wasn’t telling the truth.
“So it wasn’t a violent argument.”
“No. The guy was in his face, the blond’s face, but not touching him.”
“Doing all the talking?”
“Yes.”
“Was anyone with you at the time?”
“With me? Oh… no, I was alone.”
One more lie.
“That’s all I can tell you,” Zalesky said. “I’m not feeling very well… I’m still in a lot of pain and I took some Vicodin before you came and it’s making me woozy. If you don’t mind…”
“Sure, I understand. Just one more question. The argument was outside one of the clubs, you said. Which one?”
Hesitation. Another lie coming up? No. Zalesky held eye contact when he finally answered.
“The Dark Spot,” he said.
6
TAMARA
Nine-thirty, and still nobody home at 1122 Willard.
She was terminally bored already. She had her headset on, Norah Jones’s Grammy-winner, “Come Away With Me,” cranked up in the Walkman; the good pop-jazz kept her awake but it didn’t do much for the boredom. The enforced sitting in the small, cramped car was what was messing with her head. Messing with her rear end, too. Bill had told her stakeouts could be a pain in the ass, and now she was finding out that he’d hadn’t been kidding. And she’d only been here, what, not more than a couple of hours? He’d done surveillance work that lasted four, six, as many as eight hours. Whoo. Any job like that came up in the future, she’d be quick to hand it over to Jake Runyon.
She sighed and stared at the empty street and wondered if she ought to pack it in. Natural aversion to giving up on a job, even for one night, but much more of this and she’d be listening to complaints from her ass all day tomorrow. Besides which, she had to pee. Not too bad yet, but before long it’d be a crisis. Pepsi and 7UP didn’t have a thing on SlimFast when it came to fast trips through your plumbing. One can equaled one trip to the can.
Another fifteen minutes, max. Then she was outta here.
Thinking about SlimFast made her wonder if maybe there was a Slim•Fast snack bar hiding in the bottom of her purse. Not that she was hungry, but nibbling one of those bars would make the fifteen minutes go by a lot faster. Small bites, let the chocolate melt on her tongue before she swallowed… that was the way to do it. Her mouth began to water. She pulled her purse over, rummaged around inside.
Damn! Ate the last one at noon, forgot to put another one in there.
So now she was not only bored, but she had chocolate on her mind. Tasted chocolate, craved chocolate. How could those SlimFast people make snack bars that were loaded with chocolate and tasted like Snickers bars but were still good for you and helped you lose weight?
Come Away with Me had cycled through and was replaying. By feel she worked the buttons on the Walkman, ejected the CD, found another one in the case that she thought was Springsteen, and fired that one up. Oh, great, she’d grabbed the wrong one. Classical instead of rock. Beethoven, with Yo-Yo Ma on the cello.
Chocolate out, Horace back in.
No. She wasn’t going to think about Horace any more tonight. Hell with Horace. Vonda was better, Vonda and her new white, Jewish boy toy. In love with him? Sure, she was. She’d been in love with every guy she went to bed with, it was her sexual MO. Couldn’t do the nasty for the sake of doing the nasty, just because it felt good-no, there had to be all this emotional attachment.
Well, girl? You’re not much different, check out you and Horace Horace again.
Vonda. Vonda, dammit. The black-white thing. Yeah, that’d be a big problem, if by some miracle she actually was in love with this Ben Sherman guy. And him being Jewish made the problem twice as big. Her family was borderline racist, brother Alton not so borderline; they’d make her life miserable if they found out, a living hell if she moved in with him or went all the way and married him. Stupid. Not so much Vonda, you couldn’t help who you fell in love with, it was all a matter of chemistry and hormones. Her family, the us-versus-them bullshit. She’d felt that way herself once, all the militant hardass stuff, but not anymore. Everybody had to live with everybody else, what difference did it make what color you were? Or what religion? Or who you slept with or lived with or married? If people would just Car coming.
There’d been cars before, a bunch of them. This one probably wouldn’t belong to George DeBrissac either, but the lights were coming toward her, high and slow, and she scooted down until her butt was half off the seat. The glare filled the car, only this time they didn’t slide on past. Car slowed and then stopped on the street close in front of the Ford.
Oh, man, she thought, cops. Somebody saw me sitting out here, called 911, and now I’m gonna get hassled.
But it wasn’t cops, cop cars didn’t have high-riding headlights. In the next second she heard gears grinding and then the lights began to retreat and swing out away from her. Backing up. Backing into one of the driveways on this side, close to where she was parked.
Tamara blew out her breath, eased up on the seat until she could squint over the dashboard. Van. No, SUV, one of those big mothers with tinted windows so you couldn’t see inside, gliding up the drive of the brick-faced house directly in front of her. She sighed again. Somebody coming home, people on this block had been coming home the whole time she’d been here.
She’d probably have quit paying attention, except the SUV was right in her line of sight. So she watched it stop within a few feet of a closed garage set just back from the house. Lights went off. Driver didn’t get out right away, must’ve been a minute or so before the door opened. It was dark over there, but the distance wasn’t much more than twenty-five yards. Big dude. Black man? She had the impression he might be, but she couldn’t be sure. Wore dark clothes, some kind of cap pulled down low on his forehead.
A cramp was forming in her left buttock. Terrific. She wiggled, trying to ease it. No good. She needed to sit up, but she didn’t want to do that while the dude was hanging over there, maybe call his attention to her. She wiggled some more, willing him to hurry up, go inside, let her sit up-let her get out of here. Now she really had to pee.
He hurried, but not straight into the house. Went around to the back of the SUV instead and hauled up the hatch. Light didn’t go on inside. But in he went, on hands and knees, out of sight for a few seconds. Then he backed out again to where she could see him, and when he straightened up he had something cradled against his chest with one arm. Something a couple of feet long wrapped in what looked like a blanket.
