until after he’s gone.”
“She has a right to know.”
“Right to know what?”
“That’s he’s dying. About this… legacy of his.”
“I don’t understand that. What gives her that right? And what difference does it make if she knows about it ahead of time?”
“I’d want to know,” Kerry said.
“Why?”
“Wouldn’t you? If it was somebody you’d known for fifty years?”
“Not if he specifically asked that I not be told until afterward. Why bother her with this now?”
“She has a right to know.”
“You keep saying that,” I said, and then made the mistake of trying to lighten things up. “How about a new career in media public relations? You’d be good at giving out the old ‘the public has a right to know’ line.”
Big scowl. “Oh, so now I’m spouting crap.”
“I didn’t say that…”
“This is different and you know it.”
“Why is it different?”
“Because it’s personal.”
“Personal to Cybil, not to you. Why’re you getting so worked up?”
“I’m not worked up. I’m just trying to make you understand how I feel.”
“Babe,” I said gently, “how you feel isn’t relevant.”
“That’s a lousy thing to say. I’ve had to deal with Russ Dancer off and on most of my life, dammit.”
“But you’re not involved in this last wish thing. He didn’t say anything about you, the envelope isn’t addressed to you.”
“You think Cybil won’t feel the same as I do? She will.” Kerry fingered the package again, as if it had some kind of magnetic lure for her. “She’ll be upset if we don’t call her tonight.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“That’s not the issue-”
“Don’t you suppose I know my own mother?”
“Sure, of course, and if she gets upset I’m sorry, but-”
“But you’re not going to call her.”
“We’re not going to call her,” I said.
“Just because you say so.”
“No, because Russ Dancer said so. He put me in a position of trust, and like it or not, I won’t violate it. Neither will you.”
“Mr. Macho.”
“Kerry, come on, be reasonable…”
She got up without looking at me or saying anything else and stomped off into the kitchen.
What just happened here? I thought.
We’d had one of our infrequent fights and I didn’t even know what the hell we’d been fighting about. Cut and dried issue, as far as I could see. Simple, basic. I tried to look at it from her point of view, still couldn’t find anything to get exercised over. How had I got to be the bad guy in this business?
At ten-thirty I took a couple of Dancer’s pseudonymous paperbacks to bed with me. Alone. Kerry was still shut up inside her home office. Working, she said-the only thing she’d said to me since the living room. Avoiding me was more like it. I hadn’t seen much of Emily tonight, either-shut inside her room, listening to music and doing her homework-and her good-night kiss had been perfunctory. Home after a long, hard day, cradled in the bosom of my loving family? No, sir. Ignored, misunderstood, and consigned to bed with Murder in Hot Pants and Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon for company.
The first title was a medium raunchy porn thing thinly wrapped in a mystery-story plot. One cover blurb said it was “a brand-new, uncensored, unexpurgated bombshell by Bart Hardman”; a second blurb said, “He fought the scum of humanity to follow her on the road straight to hell!” Dancer hadn’t wasted any time getting down and dirty; the first sexual encounter between the narrator, a tough cop named McHugh, and a Hollywood starlet “whose epic body had starred with a cast of thousands” started in the middle of page 6. I quit reading at the top of page 7. Russ Dancer’s sexual fantasies held no interest for me, and after the time I’d spent with the wasted shell of him tonight, they seemed somehow repellent.
The other book was a western, about a range war in Wyoming, loaded with stick-figure characters and enough carnage in the first fifty pages to fill half a dozen novels. Pure hackwork, the writing slapdash; but here and there as I skimmed through I saw little blips-a simile, a descriptive passage, a brief exchange of dialogue-of the raw-talent, pulp-era Russell Dancer, of the writer he might have been. It made me sad, as evidence of waste always does.
I closed this one at page 50, put both books on the night-stand next to Dancer’s legacy. I’d brought the envelope in there with me just in case Kerry had any ideas of jumping the gun on her mother. Tomorrow I would take all the books I’d appropriated and put them in Kerry’s Goodwill bag. I’d had more than enough of the corrupt hack Dancer had become. If I ever had another urge to read him, I’d pick up an old issue of Midnight Detective and commune with Rex Hannigan for a little while. Probably not, though. Probably not.
I lay there in the dark and felt sorry for him and sorry for myself and wished to Christ he’d picked on somebody else to carry out his dying wishes.
In the morning I had some outside work that kept me out of the office until around eleven. Tamara was busy on the phone when I walked in. Runyon was there, too, neatly dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, studying the screen on his laptop.
“Morning, Jake. Busy?”
“Not very. Heading out pretty soon. The Great Western fraud claim.”
“Talk to you for a minute before you go?”
“Sure.” He switched off the computer, closed the lid. “Here or in your office?”
“Make it the office. More comfortable in there.”
He followed me in and we got settled on either side of my desk. He sat solid and stiff in the client’s chair, the way he always did in the office, as if he were uncomfortable sitting in the presence of someone else. Or as if he’d forgotten how to relax. He was a boulder of a man, compact, with a slablike, jut-jawed face that seldom smiled. When he’d first come in to interview for the field operative’s job, his clothes had hung loosely on him and he’d looked ill-the physical effects of six months of watching his second wife die a slow, painful death from ovarian cancer. Since then he’d gained weight, color; outwardly he seemed to have come to terms with his loss. But there was still a distance, an inward-turned reticence about him, that said differently. Inside he was still the same sad and bitter and angry man, maybe always would be. I liked him, Tamara liked him, and in his way it was probably recipocal; after what we’d gone through together just before Christmas, there was a professional bond among the three of us. But that was as far as it went. We weren’t friends, didn’t socialize, didn’t talk about anything except business. Any efforts to personalize our relationship were politely rejected. Colleen Runyon hadn’t been just his wife, she’d been his best friend, his only real friend; now that she was gone, he had no one else and wanted no one else. It had been that kind of marriage. He was that kind of man. The only person who really mattered to him now was his son, his only living relative, the main reason he’d moved to San Francisco from Seattle-and his son hated him.
I said, easing into it, “How was L.A.?”
“Worth the trip. Beckmer’s down there, all right. Holed up with his ex-wife in Santa Ana.”
“Cozy. You serve the subpoena?”
“He didn’t want to take it. Tried to get tough.”
“And?”
Runyon shrugged. “He took it.”
“You give Fred Agajanian the good news yet?”
“Left a message with his secretary. He’s in court this morning.”
