“I’ll do that,” I lied. If I did, judging from that grin, I would regret it. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. “So what’s on the agenda for today? Any new business?”
“Nothing so far,” Tamara said. “But I turned up a possible lead on the deadbeat dad case.”
“Which case is that? Oh, the split-fee from the Ballard Agency?”
“Yup. Turns out George DeBrissac has a cousin who lives in Antioch and owns a second house in San Leandro. Rental property. Five months since the last tenants left, but it was taken off the market three months ago and there’s no record of it being rented at that time or since.”
“How long since DeBrissac skipped Portland?”
“Just about three months.”
“Could be coincidence.”
“Hah,” she said.
Right. In our business, the old “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck” axiom usually applies. This was particularly true in deadbeat dad cases. They tend to be the easiest skips we’re called on to find, since the individuals are generally middle-class types with little or no criminal history and some traceable source of steady income. George DeBrissac was a well-paid freelance accountant with Bay Area ties; it stood to reason that when he ran out on his ex-wife and two kids in Portland, he would head straight for northern California. The Ballard Detective Agency up there, hired by the ex-wife, had figured the same thing; so they’d called us and farmed out the hard part of the job for half the fee, one of those cooperative deals that become necessary when the client isn’t wealthy enough and the fee isn’t large enough for the primary agency to send one of its own operatives out of state. The case was Tamara’s, for the most part. She hadn’t had any luck yet in finding out where DeBrissac was working, if he was working, but now maybe it didn’t matter. The relative’s house in San Leandro looked like a strong lead-just the sort of place a not-too-imaginative skip would pick to hole up.
I hoped so. The quicker we wrapped this up, the better. Split-fee cases can be unprofitable as hell for the subcontractor if they drag on for any length of time. I’ve never liked them, but they’re unavoidable sometimes in a back-scratching business like ours. Paul Ballard had done a favor for me once, so I couldn’t say no when he called on us. Quid pro quo.
I said to Tamara, “You want me to go over to San Leandro, check out the house?”
“Have to be after hours. If DeBrissac’s living there, he’s liable to be working during the day.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “You work too hard as it is. Supposed to be semiretired, putting in almost as many hours as I am.”
“I still don’t mind. Unless you want to wait a day and send Jake over tomorrow night. He won’t mind, either.”
“Nope. I’ll do it myself.”
“Now who’s the workaholic.”
“Yeah, well. Besides, I kinda like fieldwork. No reason you and Runyon should have all the fun.”
The voice on the phone was male, young, and hesitant. Its tone held something else that I couldn’t quite identify-some kind of emotional upset. “Runyon… Jake Runyon, please.”
“He’s not in. May I take a message?”
“When will he be back?”
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “He’s out of town, not due back until after close of business.”
“So he’ll be home tonight?”
“Probably. Is this a business or personal call?”
Dead air.
“Let me have your name and number, and I’ll-”
He said, “No, I’ll call him at home,” and the line hummed in my ear.
Tamara had just come out of the bathroom and was standing there watching me. As I lowered the receiver, she asked, “What was that about?”
“Call for Jake.”
“From?”
“Wouldn’t give his name. But I think it might’ve been his son.”
“His son? I thought Jason, Joshua, whatever his name is-”
“Joshua.”
“-didn’t want anything to do with him. No contact since before Christmas.”
“That’s right.”
“Second thoughts about a reconciliation, maybe?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Didn’t sound like that at all.”
I had one more nonbusiness call that day, just before five o’clock. This one was personal for me-a little surprising, a little disturbing.
The caller said his name was Buck Trail. And he was elderly and not entirely sober, judging from his cracked and thickened baritone. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Pal asked me to call for him because he can’t.”
“What pal is that?”
“Russ Dancer.”
It took a couple of seconds for the name to register. My God, Russell Dancer. A name out of the past, a man I hadn’t seen in six or seven years or thought about more than a couple of times in passing since.
“He wants to see you,” Trail said.
“Is that right? He still living in Redwood City?”
“Not for much longer.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“What does he want to see me about?”
“Didn’t tell me that. Just asked me to call you up, give you the message. I was you, I’d come on down right away. Tonight.”
“Why tonight?”
“He’s dying,” Trail said. “Croakers at Kaiser Hospital give him another day, two at the outside.”
2
JAKE RUNYON
His flight from L.A. landed at SFO at 5:05, which put him smack into the middle of rush-hour traffic heading into the city. Not that the stop-and-crawl bothered him. There was a time when it had, in Seattle during the evening rush when he was on his way home to Colleen. Now he had no one waiting, no reason for hurry. Rattling around his San Francisco apartment or creeping along the 280 freeway-one place was the same as another. Her death had taught him patience, if nothing else. Or maybe patience was nothing but a prettied-up name for apathy.
Work was the only thing that mattered to him anymore, the only relief for the disinterest he felt during his nonworking hours. Colleen was gone, his son hated him and refused to have anything to do with him, what else was there? But you couldn’t do your job twenty-four/seven; you had to have sleep, food, and like it or not there was a certain amount of downtime that you had to put up with every day. Weekends were the worst. Even weekends in L.A. Saturday he’d been able to put in a full day on the missing witness case; L.A. was a damn big place and he’d spent hours on the freeways and side streets getting from one place to another, all the way from the San Fernando Valley to Riverside. Sunday, though, had been bad. Motel room, movies and a baseball game on TV, coffee shop, and more driving, the aimless kind, to kill the rest of the time. Full workday again today, at least. And now he was home and looking at five more busy workdays before he had to face another Sunday.
Home. Just a word now, like a word in a foreign language you didn’t understand.
Into the city, finally, crawling past the state university campus and on up Nineteenth Avenue. When he neared Taraval he thought about turning off-coffee shops and Asian restaurants along there-but he kept on going instead. Hungry, but not hungry enough to bother stopping. Later he’d go out to eat. A bath first, soak out some of
