“Yeah, I heard. I can tell you part of the reason: he lost two of his best consulting jobs.”
“How did that happen?”
“He wasn’t doing the work. Just didn’t seem to care anymore.”
“When did this happen?”
“Four or five months ago.”
“He tell you this?”
“No. Another friend of his, Aaron Myers.”
“Do you know Myers well?”
“Not very. Met him through Brian, but we didn’t hit it off. I ran into him later on at a computer trade show at Moscone and we got to talking. He was worried about Brian, too. But neither of us knew what to do about it.”
“Might’ve contacted his mother.”
“Myers did that, or started to, but Brian found out and threw a fit, told him to mind his own business. I thought about doing it on my own, but… you know, I didn’t want to make things worse by sticking my nose in. I figured he’d talk to her on his own if things got bad enough. But he didn’t?”
“No. She doesn’t know about his weird behavior or financial problems,” Runyon said. “All she knows is that somebody beat him up last week.”
“Beat him up? Brian?” Janssen looked and sounded amazed. “Who?”
“He told his mother he was mugged. He told me he was carjacked.”
“And you don’t believe it’s either one.”
“Can you think of another explanation?”
“No. Brian’s totally nonviolent. If you’ve met him…”
“Monday afternoon, at his flat. His girlfriend was there with him.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Brandy. You know her?”
“No way. I never met anyone named Brandy.”
Runyon described her and her foul mouth, summarized the scene at Youngblood’s flat.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Janssen said. “I can’t imagine Brian letting anybody talk that way about his mother. He didn’t stand up to this Brandy at all?”
“Not for a second.”
“Man. She sounds like a… whore.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Brian and a woman like that?” Head wag. “That’s just crazy.”
“Not the type he’s attracted to?”
“Lord, no. His mother tell you he was engaged to Ginny Lawson?”
“Yes.”
“You talked to her yet? Ginny?”
“Not yet.”
“When you do you’ll see what I mean. She’s the total opposite of this Brandy- total. Real devout. Her hobby is singing gospel music.”
“Why did she break off the engagement, do you know?”
“Brian wouldn’t say. I figured it must have something to do with the weird way he was acting.”
“So it wasn’t the breakup that led to his erratic behavior.”
“No. The weird stuff started a few months before.”
“And for no apparent reason that you could see.”
“None. Just… out of the blue, seemed to me.”
“Has Brian dated any other women since Ginny Lawson?”
“Besides this Brandy? Not that I know of.”
“Before Ginny?”
“Well, Verna Washington. She was kind of funky.”
“Funky how?”
“Oh, the way she dressed, her tastes in music and food. She’s a chef for some restaurant in SoMa. They seemed like kind of an odd couple, but she wasn’t nasty or anything.”
“How long were they together?”
“Not long. Couple of months.”
“What broke them up?”
“Don’t know. You’d have to ask him. Or Verna.”
“You have an address for her?”
“She was living in the outer Sunset back then. Lake Street, I think. I don’t know the number.”
Easy enough to find out. Runyon made a note. Then he asked, “Did you know Brian paid off most of his debts three months ago-ten thousand dollars’ worth?”
Janssen showed surprise again. “No, I didn’t know. Where’d he get that kind of money?”
“I was about to ask you the same question. Certificate of deposit or IRAs, possibly?”
“No way. His family never had much and he’s never been big on future planning. He and Ginny argued about it once that I know about.”
“Loan from a friend? Aaron Myers?”
“Not Myers-he doesn’t have that kind of money. And if Brian has any other friends with that much cash to loan out, I don’t know who they could be. Maybe he got it from a bank or finance company.”
“He didn’t.” It would have been on the credit report if he had. “How about new consulting work?”
“That’s out, too. Even if he hustled two or three new jobs, it’d’ve taken him a lot longer than a month or two to raise that much cash.”
Which left what? A couple of possibilities, one of them-
“Brandy,” Janssen said abruptly, as if reading his mind. “Maybe she loaned it to him. It’d explain why he let her talk smack about his mother, wouldn’t it? Why he let her walk all over him?”
“It might.”
Janssen shook his head again. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “How does a guy like Brian, a good guy, all of a sudden get so screwed up?”
Runyon said nothing. The woman in the scarf, Bryn Darby, flicked across his mind. Most of us can’t even explain to ourselves why we screw up or get screwed up in all the ways we do.
H e was starting to forget what Colleen looked like.
Always before he could close his eyes and she would appear bright and crystal sharp in his memory. Happy, sad, playful, serious, loving-all her moods, all her voices distinct down to the finest nuance, as if she were still alive and caught by time. She was still there for him now, but the images had begun to blur and fade at the edges. It happened all of a sudden, it seemed to him, like home movies shot with an old video cam that he’d watched one too many times. More and more, now, he found himself looking at his photos of her, the one in his wallet and the framed portrait he kept on the bedside table, to try to recapture the clarity. But it wasn’t working. Photos were static, without the movement, the words, the life force-the real Colleen-that had once dominated his memory.
It happened again that night in the apartment. He was in the kitchen making tea, he thought of her, he closed his eyes, and her face came to him in soft focus, as if he was looking at her through a thin mist. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and stared at the framed photograph. Impulse drove him to the closet, where he kept the albums she’d put together before the cancer was diagnosed-snapshots taken at mountains, lakes, Seattle locations, Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, Vancouver, Victoria Island. He sat with one of them open on his lap and paged through it slowly, looking only at those of her alone or the two of them together with her the most prominent figure. He went all the way through the album before he closed his eyes and looked at the memory images again.
Still the soft, misty focus. Blurred. Faded.
It scared him. He felt as if he were losing her all over again. First Colleen herself, now his memories of her. One day he might close his eyes and not be able to see or remember her clearly at all. If that happened, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t want to think about what he might do.
He put the album away, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. He was sitting there, staring at
