But she didn’t show up. Not by ten-thirty, not by eleven.
Runyon came in again from the outer office. “I’ve got a meeting with Fred Agajanian at eleven-thirty. Shouldn’t last long. Tamara still hasn’t shown up by then, I could drive to her place, make sure everything’s all right there.”
“Good idea.” I gave him the address. “If she shows or checks in meanwhile, I’ll call your cell. If you don’t hear from me, go ahead out there.”
Too much on my mind. And too quiet in the office with Runyon gone and Tamara absent. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on my work; my mind kept skipping around helter-skelter.
Dancer, Cybil. Remember D-Day. Amazing grace. That bulky envelope. Kerry’s odd behavior. Cybil’s reticence. Secrets. But what kind?
Dancer had made any number of passes at her and once tried to talk her into divorcing Ivan the Terrible and marrying him, back around 1950; but she’d had very little to do with him after the war, and no contact at all since the pulp convention fiasco. Kerry had disliked him for his crude ways and his open hunger for her mother. Old Ivan had actively hated him for those reasons and because he’d considered Dancer a worthless hack. During the war, while Ivan was an army liaison officer stationed in Washington, loneliness and the Pulpeteers’ freewheeling lifestyle had led Cybil into an affair with Frank Colodny, editor of Midnight Detective. Bad choice: Colodny had been a blackmailer and a thief, among other things-sins that many years later had gotten him murdered. But neither Dancer nor Cybil had had anything to do with his death at the pulp convention, even though Dancer had been arrested for it. And when pressed, she’d been candid about the affair. She’d also told me she had had plenty of other offers and turned them all down; she loved Ivan and she wasn’t promiscuous. And I believed her.
No buried secrets in any of that, as far as I could see.
But there had to be something pretty disturbing either in her past relationship with Dancer or that Dancer knew about to upset her this way. Something that Kerry also either knew about or suspected. The contents of the envelope felt like a manuscript, book length or close to it. A novel or nonfiction work he’d written for or about Cybil, and wanted her to have as a love offering-or maybe hate offering-from the grave? Dancer had had his sentimental side, and he could also be mean-spirited and cruel; he was perfectly capable of concocting one type or the other. But I couldn’t imagine anything fact or fiction that would rattle her after so many years. Or what D-Day had to do with it. Or what amazing grace might signify.
I kept telling myself to quit picking at it and forget about it, it was none of my business anyway. Fat chance. It was my business. Cybil and Kerry were family and Dancer had put me in the middle of it and it was having a none too pleasing effect on my marriage. Besides which, I don’t like secrets and I chafe at puzzles I can’t solve.
One way or another, I was going to dig out some idea of what this was all about.
Noon came and went.
No Tamara.
The more time that passed without word, the more edgy and restless it made me. Every time the phone rang I jumped at it. Routine business, until Jake Runyon’s voice came over the wire at a quarter to one.
“She’s not at her apartment,” he said. “I talked to a couple of the neighbors. Nobody’s seen her in the past twenty-four hours.”
“What about her car… her boyfriend’s car? Red Toyota…”
“I remember. No sign of it in the neighborhood.”
“I don’t like this. I’m starting to get bad vibes here, Jake.”
“I hear you. Want me to take a run over to San Leandro, check out that surveillance address?”
“I’ll do it. You’ve got other business.”
“Nothing that won’t keep.”
“What about the gay bashings? How’s that going?”
“Making progress.”
“Line on the perps?”
“No IDs yet, but it turns out they’re not picking at random-the victims were sexually involved with a seventeen-year-old kid named Troy.”
“All three victims?”
“All three.”
Including his son’s partner. But I didn’t say it and neither did he. All I said was, “Hell of a hard row to hoe sometimes, being a father. Particularly for men like us.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You have more work you can do on the investigation-now, I mean?”
“It can wait until I’m on my own time.”
“The hell with that,” I said. “Go ahead and get on it. I’ll let you know if there’s any news about Tamara.”
The trip to the East Bay was a waste of nearly two hours.
The San Leandro neighborhood Tamara had been staking out was lower middle class and early-afternoon quiet. There was no sign of Horace’s red Toyota on the 1100 block of Willard Street, or anywhere else on Willard or within a four-block radius. I parked in front of number 1122, the house where deadbeat George DeBrissac might or might not be hiding out, and went and rang the bell and got no answer.
Start ringing other doorbells? Bad time for it. Most of the residents were away at work or out shopping; Tamara had been here after dark, so anybody who might’ve seen her might not be home until after dark. Better to wait until tonight, if it came down to that.
So I drove back to the city and South Park. It was just three o’clock when I got off the elevator in front of the new offices.
Still no Tamara, still no word from her.
Time, past time, to start making some calls. I decided on a compromise where her family was concerned. If there was a serious problem and her family knew about it, I was pretty sure somebody would have let me know by now. And I didn’t want to sound an alarm to them yet. Her father was a Redwood City cop, overprotective and none too keen about her choice of profession, even less so after that close call last Christmas; they had a prickly relationship, and he and I had never been more than civil to each other. He’d be in my face from the get-go. And if it turned out the absence had a simple explanation, I’d have Tamara’s disapproval to deal with as well.
So I made my first call to her sister Claudia, a lawyer with the public defender’s office. Tamara was out somewhere, I said, and I was trying to locate her. Had Claudia heard from her today? No, Claudia hadn’t. Like her sister, she was a sharp young woman; there must have been something in my voice that she picked up on, because she asked immediately if anything was wrong. I gave her an evasive answer and got off the phone by pretending I had another call.
We had an office Rolodex file of names and addresses that included some personal contacts, among them Tamara’s closest friends. Lucille Cranston hadn’t spoken to her in several days. I couldn’t get hold of Deanne Cotter. The third call, to Vonda McGee at the Design Center, produced some results.
“Well, yeah,” Vonda said, “I talked to her last night.”
“In person or on the phone?”
“Phone.”
“She call you or you call her?”
“I did, on her cell.”
“What time?”
“I think… around eight or so.”
“Where was she? San Leandro?”
“Didn’t say. We only talked for a couple of minutes. She kind of blew me off.”
“Is that right? Why?”
“Said she couldn’t talk, she was on a job. She sounded a little weird. Off the hook.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Like she was messed about something.”
Young people and their slang. “Upset? Scared?”
“Not scared. Just sort of heavy-duty stoked.”
“Does that mean excited?”
