“He wouldn’t have to give her anything if she were dead.”
“He doesn’t want her dead. He’s not like that.”
“Solve all his financial problems. And he’d be free to marry you.”
“We don’t have to be married to be together,” she said. “I’m not a conventional person. The kind of relationship we have right now, based on love and trust… it’s enough for me.”
No, it wasn’t; I could see it in her eyes. I said, “He told me he was with you Tuesday night from seven until after eleven. True?”
“Yes. At my apartment.”
“He never left, even for a few minutes?”
“Not for one second.”
“Did you see him on Wednesday?”
“No. You told him to stay home all day, and he did.”
“I spoke to his first wife this morning,” I said. “He tell you about her?”
“Yes. She’s a bitch.”
“Do you know her?”
“I’m glad I don’t. I’ll bet she had all sorts of nasty things to say about Mitch.”
“Not really.”
She rotated the iced tea glass again. “Why did you talk to her anyway? What could she possibly know about Janice’s disappearance?”
“Nothing. As I told you, I’m trying to get a complete picture.”
“By asking all these questions about Mitch?”
“Among other things. You think he’d object?”
“… No, I guess not. He… has faith in you. He told me that.”
“I hope I can repay it,” I said.
“I hope so, too. You… well, you just don’t know how bad it is for him right now. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but… he cried in my arms last night. Like a hurt child.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I felt so awful for him,” she said. “He’s such a warm, caring, loving man.”
And she was a naive young woman riding for a big fall. But it wasn’t up to me to burst her rose-colored bubble; she would have fought me if I’d tried.
A waitress came by. I asked for the same as Deanne Goldman was drinking. The waitress asked if we wanted to order lunch and I said not yet and she went away. Ms. Goldman sat making more wet circles with her glass.
“It’s not his fault, you know,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“The affairs he’s had. She told you about the one that broke them up, didn’t she? His first wife?”
“She mentioned it.”
“She drove him to it. Nagging at him all the time, denying him… you know, in bed. He wouldn’t have been unfaithful to her if she’d been a proper wife.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“It’s the truth,” she said. Sharply, but with a defensive undertone. She had her own doubts, I realized then, even if she wasn’t admitting them. If she were lucky, she’d burst the rose-colored bubble herself before Krochek had a chance to hurt her too badly. “He wouldn’t have been unfaithful to Janice, either, if it weren’t for her gambling sickness.”
“With you, you mean?”
“With me, with that neighbor of his. He was vulnerable, he’s still vulnerable…”
“Wait a second,” I said. “He had an affair with one of his neighbors?”
“Before he met me. It didn’t last very long. She wanted it to, but it was just… physical for Mitch. Not like it is with us.”
“Which neighbor? Did he tell you her name?”
“The woman who lives next door to him. It was right after her divorce.”
“Rebecca Weaver?”
“Yes,” she said. “Rebecca Weaver.”
23
JAKE RUNYON
Aaron Myers’s car was a ten-year-old Buick LeSabre. He got that info from Tamara on the way back to the city. When he reached Noe Valley, he drove around within a three-block radius of Myers’s apartment building. If he found the LeSabre, and Myers still wasn’t answering his bell, he’d figure some way to get inside the building and then the apartment.
He didn’t find it.
And nobody answered the bell.
Maybe good, maybe not. Depended on where Myers had gone. Runyon drove up to Duncan Street-and the LeSabre was parked around the corner from Youngblood’s flat, facing downhill at a bad angle. There was a narrow space behind it; he squeezed the Ford in there and went to have a look. All the doors were locked, the interior empty. Under the windshield wipers was a parking ticket, issued at 9:40 that morning. A sign just down the way said that Friday was street-cleaning day and there was no parking on this side between four a.m. and noon. The Buick had been here since early morning or sometime the night before.
He didn’t like that at all.
He hurried uphill and around the corner. He expected to have some trouble getting into Youngblood’s building, but he caught a break. One of the residents had bought a new refrigerator; a delivery truck was double-parked in front, and two burly guys were hauling the old one out through the propped-open front doors. Runyon waited for them to pass by, stepped through as if he belonged there, and hurried up the stairs.
A one-minute lean on the bell bought him nothing but muted noise from inside. When he tried the knob, it turned under his hand and the door edged inward. The muscles in his gut and across his shoulders pulled tight. Cop’s instincts, telling him something was wrong here-bad wrong. He stepped inside, shut the door softly behind him.
The place smelled of death.
The odor was so faint and indistinct that most people wouldn’t have noticed. He’d been in too many places where people had died; the smell was sometimes strong, sometimes not, but always there and always the same.
He went down the hallway into the living room. And that was where he found Aaron Myers, slumped down in a chair in front of one of the computers, his head lolling sideways, his eyes squeezed shut.
Runyon touched knuckles against one cheek, felt the neck artery. Cold skin, no pulse. Dead a long time; rigor had already come and gone. Last night sometime. There were no marks on the body, nothing except a thin foamy drool that had leaked from one corner of the mouth and dried there. Overdose of some kind-hard drugs or prescription pills.
The computer in front of the corpse was turned on. Sleep mode, looked like. He wiggled the mouse with the back of his hand, and the screen lit up. Writing, more than a page single-spaced. Suicide note-he read enough of it to tell that. The rest could wait.
He backed away, his lips flattened in against his teeth, and turned to look around the room. No signs of disturbance anywhere in here. The way the flat was laid out, there’d be a bedroom at the front and another at the rear beyond the kitchen. The one in front, adjacent to the living room, would be the larger of the two. He checked in there first.
Drapes drawn, a lamp burning on a nightstand. And another dead man, sprawled backward across the bed.
