living room, barefoot but dressed under a loose-fitting terrycloth robe, her face pale and her eyes starry and unblinking. Composed, with no outward signs of the earlier turmoil. The Valium, maybe. But more likely it was hopeless resignation, the ashes of panic in this kind of situation.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Troxell.”
She sagged a little against the doorjamb. Otherwise, no reaction.
Casement went to her, put his arm around her as if to hold her up. She didn’t seem to notice he was there. He said to me, “How did you find him?”
“Does that matter?”
“No, no, I just…” He shook his head.
Mrs. Troxell said in that same flat, empty voice, “How?”
“That doesn’t matter, either, right now.”
“Please. I want to know.”
“He shot himself.”
“He… shot… That can’t be right…”
“There’s no doubt.”
“Why would he do that? He didn’t own a gun. He wouldn’t have a gun in the house.”
“He was sick,” Casement said, “he wanted to die. Get it over with quick. A pistol… that’s as quick as it gets.”
“Where would he get a gun?”
“Bought it somewhere, a gun shop…”
She shook her head, a meaningless, loose-necked movement.
“Lynn, maybe you should lie down again.”
“No,” she said. “I want to see him.”
“Christ, you don’t want to do that, not now-”
“I want to see him.” She asked me, “He’s not still at the beach? You didn’t just leave him there?”
“No, of course not. I called the police as soon as I found him.”
“You should have called us, too,” Casement said.
I ignored that. So did Mrs. Troxell.
She said, “And they… took him away?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The city morgue.”
“Where’s that?”
“Basement of the Hall of Justice.”
“They’ll let me see him?”
“Yes. You’ll need to make an official identification.”
Casement said, “Does she have to be the one? Can’t I do it, or somebody else?”
“Next of kin. But it doesn’t have to be now. Morning’s soon enough.”
“Now,” she said, “right now.”
He said, “Lynn, please-”
“No. Will you take me? If not, he will. Or I’ll drive myself.”
“I’ll take you, if you’re sure it’s what you want-”
“What I want is for my husband to still be alive.” She did that habitual twining thing with her long-fingered hands. She was so pale now she might have been exsanguinated; the skin across her cheeks was almost transparent, so that you could see the veins, the crawling muscles beneath the skin. “I’ll get dressed and we’ll go. It won’t take me long.”
“You are dressed-”
“I can’t go like this. For God’s sake, Drew.”
She twisted away from him, walked stiffly out of sight. He stared after her for a few seconds before he faced me again. Anguish showed in his dark eyes; he spread his hands in a helpless gesture.
“She’ll be all right,” he said. To himself mostly, as if he were trying to convince himself that it was true. “It’ll take time, that’s all. Time.”
I stayed silent.
All he could find to say to me was, “Thanks for what you did,” in a distracted voice.
“For nothing,” I said.
I found my own way out.
Four thirty, a hint of dawn in the dark restless sky, when I got home. I let myself in as quietly as I could. Kerry had left a couple of lights on for me; I went down the hall, eased open the bedroom door. The night-light in the bathroom let me see that she was asleep. But she’d always been a fairly light sleeper and I knew that if I went in there and got undressed and got into bed, she would wake up and ask questions that I didn’t feel like answering right now. More importantly, she needed sleep and she wouldn’t get any more if I woke her up. Neither of us would.
I stood watching her for a time. She’d kicked off the blanket and sheet and lay sprawled out on her back, breathing in soft little snores, her auburn hair fluffed out around her head and one arm flung over on my side of the bed. She looked very young in that pose and that light, like Emily does sleeping. Young and innocent and vulnerable.
I love you so damn much, I thought. You have to tell me what’s wrong, babe, let me do something, anything to help fix it. If I ever lost you…
But I wasn’t going to let myself go there. Not after what I’d been dealing with. I eased the door shut again and shut off the hall light and catfooted into the living room. It was early-morning cold in there, and I hadn’t been able to get warm since that first long walk on the beach; I turned the heat up past seventy. Then I took off my shoes and lay down on the couch with my coat on and Kerry’s afghan pulled up to my chin. I thought maybe I could sleep a little, or at least lapse into a doze, but I was wide awake and I stayed that way as daylight began to creep in around the drawn drapes.
I kept seeing James Troxell’s dead face, stark and bloody in the beam of my flashlight. And the film of windblown sand over his staring eyes. And the shiny new. 22 in his stiffened fingers.
Suicide. Such a waste, such a stupid senseless needless waste.
And after a while it was another dead face I was seeing, another stupid senseless needless waste I was thinking about. Eberhardt’s. Eberhardt, and the way he’d died.
23
JAKE RUNYON
The call came in on his cell phone shortly before eleven. He was in the field on new agency business, a routine investigation on behalf of the plaintiff in a wrongful death lawsuit. But the timing was good; he’d just parked his Ford on Stanyan Street and was walking down toward Haight where the subject of his first interview owned a music store, so he was able to take the call on the move.
He recognized the woman’s voice even before she identified herself. “I hope I’m not calling at a bad time,” she said. Tentative and apologetic, the way she would approach most things in her life. “This is Arlene Burke. Sean Ostrow’s sister?”
“Yes, Mrs. Burke.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call Saturday night or yesterday. I wanted to, but… well, my husband”-stress on the word husband, as if it were a bad taste in her mouth-“he didn’t want me to have anything more to do with you. He threw a fit about it. He said you threatened him. Did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I didn’t think so. I suppose it was the other way around.”
“He was abusive, yes.”
