Quarry : a nameless detective mystery Read online

  "No, he doesn't," I said.

  "Besides," Ms. Crowley said, "it's been six months since they broke up. I don't see how Todd Bellin could have anything to do with Grady's trouble now."

  I had a thought about that, but I did not put it into words. It was possible Bellin was an unstable personality and had spent those six months nursing a grudge. Left Grady alone, or mostly alone, until the grudge festered to the point where he'd lost control and started hassling her—made threats, maybe embarked on a little campaign of terror. The love-turned-to-hate syndrome. That kind of thing happened too often in these days of open aggression, casual violence, and people living too close to the edge.

  You stupid shit! You hurt me again and I'll kill you!

  Yet Arlo Haas had said that Grady was "busted up inside and in shock," but no longer afraid; resigned, as if "she don't care anymore." You can go into shock when your life is threatened, but then it wears off and fear takes firmer root. With Grady it seemed to be the other way around. What could a rejected suitor do to you that would cause that kind of reaction? What could anybody do to you?

  All right, enough of that. I was getting ahead of myself, playing worst-case scenario, and that was not good detective work. The fact was, I had too few facts to indulge in any worthwhile speculating. Different things hurt different people in different ways, and some of them have no more substance than phantoms at high noon. With any luck that was all we were dealing with here—phantoms at high noon.

  Chapter 3

  It was almost six by the time I got back to San Francisco, thanks to commuter-traffic snarls on both ends of San Jose. And it was just shy of six-thirty when I finished inching my way across town to O'Farrell Street. The old building near Van Ness that houses the agency offices was locked up tight. Eberhardt never stays after four-thirty, except in cases of dire emergency, and these days he was too immersed in his wedding mania to do much work anyway; and the other two businesses that occupy the premises—Bay City Realtors, on the first floor, and the Slim-Taper Shirt Company, "The Slim-Taper Look Is the Right Look," on the second floor—both shut down operations promptly at five-thirty. I unlocked the street door, rode the casket-sized elevator up to the top floor, and let myself into the converted loft that was my home away from home.

  Two messages on the answering machine, neither important. On my desk, a note from Eberhardt in his near-illegible scrawl that I deciphered as: Don't forget to pick up your tux. Hinkle will have ready 8 A.M. tomorrow.

  I sighed. These past couple of weeks Eb had become a royal pain in the ass. A man who was about to be married for the second time at the age of fifty-eight was entitled to a certain amount of prenuptial frenzy, but he had far exceeded his allotment. What had started out as a simple affair—civil ceremony with Kerry and me as witnesses, a few friends to his house for a wedding buffet afterward—he had manipulated into an elaborate church wedding with a guest list of more than sixty and a catered reception that required the renting of a hall. And a five-day honeymoon in La Jolla had since become a ten-day honeymoon on Waikiki. This was all his doing; Bobbie Jean Addison, his somewhat shy and beleaguered bride-to-be, had been caught up in and swamped by the tide of his lunacy.

  This business of tuxedos was his latest aberration. It wouldn't do, he'd decided a few days ago, for the two of them to get married in ordinary clothing. Oh no, Bobbie Jean and Kerry had to wear gowns and he and I had to wear soup-and-fish. Bobbie Jean argued with him. I argued with him even more vehemently. The last time I'd worn a rented tuxedo, on a job over in Ross that I did not like to remember, I'd split the crotch out of the damn pants climbing through a window—an episode that had cost me my thirty-buck deposit and a priceless amount of humiliation. The thought of donning a monkey suit again made me itch. But Eberhardt wouldn't listen to reason. It was gowns and tuxedos and that, by God, was that.

  Five days to go, I told myself. Just five more days, and the two of them will be on their blissful way to Hawaii and things will get back to normal around here.

  But five days is a long time. An eternity when you're dealing with a crazy man. What else he might think up between now and Saturday afternoon was the stuff of bad dreams and Abbott and Costello movies.

  At the Haas farm I'd had Arlo Haas sign a standard agency contract and give me a check to cover two days' work; I filed the contract and put the check in the lockbox in my desk, for deposit later. Then I threw Eberhardt's note in the wastebasket and closed the office again and went home to spend a quiet evening by myself. Or so I thought until I got there.

  * * * * *

  I heard the music as I came down the hall to the door of my flat. Jazz, the soft moody kind; Miles Davis. Ah, I thought. I keyed open the door. All the lights were on and the jazz was coming from one of my albums playing on the stereo. And Kerry was sitting on the couch, barefoot, her legs tucked under her, snugly wrapped in a tatty bathrobe of mine—the blue chenille one I used to wear when I was forty pounds heavier than I am now.

  Her hair was down, combed out long over shoulders, the lampglow giving it deep-burgundy highlights. She was not beautiful in any classic sense; some men, the kind who equate beauty with paint and plastic and clonelike perfection—one of the Stepford wives, for instance—might even have called her plain. But to me she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known. Just looking at her made me ache inside. It wasn't all physical either. I had an emotional attachment to Kerry Wade that was sometimes a little unnerving in its intensity. Without her I could not have survived the first few months after I came home from my mountain ordeal. Without her I'm not sure I could go on very long even now.

  "Well, it's about time," she said as I shut the door.

  "Hiya, toots."

  "Toots," she said and rolled her eyes. At her elbow, I saw then, was a glass of wine. On her lap was a pulp magazine from my collection, one of the later issues of Black Mask, the cover of which depicted a half-naked Hollywood starlet in a fur-trimmed cape who was attempting to brain a gun-toting mug with an Oscar statuette. Just another day in La-La Land. "You sound like the detective in the story I've been reading."

  "All private eyes have to sound like pulp detectives once in a while. It's in our union contracts."

  "Hah," she said. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming home tonight. Where were you?"

  "In the Salinas Valley on a case."

  "New case?"

  "Yup. I'll tell you about it later." I shrugged out of my overcoat, threw it over the back of a chair, moved around to where I could see her better. "I'd have managed to get here a lot sooner if I'd known you'd be waiting. Why didn't you tell me you could get away tonight?"

  "I didn't know until this afternoon. A couple of people from Children of Grieving Parents went to see Cybil, and she actually let them talk her into attending an open house at a Marin seniors' complex. They won't have her back until at least ten."

  "Now that is good news. On both counts."

  "I thought you'd be pleased. Have you eaten?"

  "No."

  "Good. I made dinner for us."

  "Such domesticity. What are we having?"

  "You'll see . . . later." She stretched lazily, like a cat. The hem of the robe fell away and revealed most of one slim, bare leg. "Aren't you going to kiss me?" she said.

  I went over and leaned down and gave her a short one. That wasn't good enough for her. She caught hold of my ears, both of them, and yanked my head down and bruised my mouth a little, wetly. When she finally let go she licked her own mouth, again like a cat, and favored me with a sloe-eyed look.

  "Wanna get laid, big boy?"

  "Gee," I said, "I don't know. I'm hungry and kind of tired. . . ."

  "What I am is horny. It's been eight days."

  "You keep track, huh?"

  "Damn right. Well?"

  "Suppose I'm not in the mood?"

  "You Italians are always in the mood."

  "You think so? Maybe you don't know me as well as you think you do."

 
"Want to bet?" she said.

  Smiling, she stood up, taking her time about it. She loosened the belt at her waist and shrugged out of the robe, taking her time about that too. Then she struck a pose, with one hand on a provocatively arched hip.

  I said, staring, "You're naked."

  "Such powers of observation! Such ratiocination! Shall we?"

  "We shall."

  And we did.

  * * * * *

  Dinner, when we got around to it, was a Spinach salad and chicken parmigiana. While we ate we talked some more about Kerry's seventy-five-year-old mother, Cybil Wade—a too-frequent topic of conversation these past several months. But it wasn't half as bleak a subject now as it had been.

  Cybil had been Kerry's roommate since December, a few weeks after Kerry's father, Ivan, died suddenly of a heart attack. All her life Cybil had been strong and self-sufficient, but Ivan's death had had a crippling effect on her. It left her unable to cope with her loss or with the prospect of living out her remaining time alone; she had a horror of being shut away in a nursing home, of dying in such a place. So she'd put her L. A. house up for sale, talked Kerry into letting her move in, and virtually retreated from both society and reality.

  Her depression and smothering dependency had been hard enough on Kerry; two factors made it even worse. One was that Cybil had turned against me, an irrational reaction to the active dislike Ivan and I had felt for each other. For more than four months now it had been impossible for me to visit Kerry at home, and difficult for us to spend much time together. The other factor was that Kerry's building in Diamond Heights was in the process of going condo. Kerry wasn't sure at first that she could afford the asking price; she was afraid she'd have to find a new place to rent and then move not only herself but Cybil as well.

  Things finally began to ease a bit when Kerry joined Children of Grieving Parents, a support group that helped her deal with her mother's problems and was now helping Cybil do the same. They'd eased even more when she'd been able to arrange a bank loan that would allow her to buy her apartment. Cybil's progress had been slow, but the fact that she was letting herself be trotted off" to a seniors complex open-house was encouraging. That type of complex—private condos with available recreational facilities and a clinic staff"ed by medical personnel and counselors—was everyone's ultimate goal for her.

  "If the place makes a favorable impression on Cybil," Kerry said, "she'll want to tell me all about it when she gets home tonight. Keep your fingers crossed."

  "Yup."

  "I'll give you a full report in the morning, either way." She sighed. "I love that woman dearly but Lord I hope she makes up her mind soon. I'm just too selfish to go on sharing my life with her at such close quarters."

  "You're not selfish," I said, "you're emotionally taxed."

  "Selfish, too, my love. We all are to one degree or another, particularly those of us who won't see forty again. It's not such a bad trait, you know. There's a big qualitative difference between being selfish and being self-centered."

  "I know. Eberhardt taught me that."

  "You think he's self-centered?"

  "Don't you? Now?"

  "Oh," she said, "the wedding."

  "What else? All this fancy stuff" is for his sake, not Bobbie Jean's. Just a big ego trip."

  "Poor Bobbie Jean," Kerry said. "She's at her wits' end."

  "You talk to her today?"

  "Last night. She called about the white-gown nonsense."

  "What white-gown nonsense?"

  "Didn't Eb tell you?"

  "No. I haven't seen him since Saturday."

  "Well, now he wants Bobbie Jean to wear white."

  "Why, for God's sake?"

  "He's got some silly idea that brides should always wear white. Even when they're fifty-one, have been married twice before, and have two grown daughters."

  "Is she going along with it?"

  "No, she put her foot down this time. She already has her wedding dress and she's not about to pay for another. She's had all the plan-changing she can stand."

  "Me, too, with his damn tuxedos," I said. "One more crazy idea and I swear I'll strangle him with his own cummerbund."

  It was nearing nine-thirty by the time we finished eating, and Kerry said she'd better scoot. I told her I'd take care of the dishes—but I didn't do them right away. Instead, I followed her into the bedroom and sat on the bed to watch her dress. There is almost as much erotic pleasure in watching a woman you love put her clothes on as there is in watching her take her clothes off.

  She was zipping up her skirt when she made a sudden giggling sound, as if she'd just been tickled or goosed. "I heard a good joke today," she said.

  "Dirty joke?"

  "Mildly bawdy. Want to hear it?"

  "Boy," I said. "Steamy sex, a home-cooked meal, and now a racy joke. What more could a man want of an evening?"

  She wrinkled her nose at me. "I know you're not big on jokes, but this one is funny. One of our clients"—she was a senior copywriter at the Bates and Carpenter ad agency— "told it at lunch."

  "Some client. Did he also leer suggestively and pat your fanny?"

  "Her name is Rebecca Kiefer and she's the chief honcho at KSUN radio."

  "Oh," I said.

  "You want to hear the joke or don't you?"

  "I want to hear it."

  "All right. After a long hard day at the office, this attractive career woman—a person not unlike myself—decides to stop in at a small cocktail lounge for a drink to relax her before going home. Unfortunately, the lounge happens to be occupied by one of those handsome macho types who think they're God's gift and no woman could possibly refuse their charms. He sits down at her table, uninvited, introduces himself as Doug, and proceeds to tell her what a truly wonderful lover he is—how a night of passion with him is an experience to be treasured for years afterward. He's so sure of himself that he segues into the subject of sexual positions without missing a beat. Not only has he tried every one in the Kama Sutra, he says, he's invented a couple of new ones himself.

  "Before he can tell her just what they are, the career woman gives him an innocent smile and says, 'That's all very well and good, Doug, but I couldn't do anything really kinky with a man I hardly know. I'm the old-fashioned type. The only way for a woman like me and a man like you is the jungle missionary position.'

  " 'The jungle missionary position?' he says. 'Is that the same as the standard missionary position?'

  " 'Oh no,' she says. 'Here's how it works. I go home and take a long luxuriant bath in warm water scented with different exotic oils. Then I dry off and anoint my body with powder and perfume. Then I put primitive music on the CD player, the kind that's full of drums and animal grunts and pagan cries. Then I get into bed—naked, of course—and arrange myself comfortably on my back. And while I'm doing all of that . . .' She pauses, drawing out the moment.

  "By this time Doug's tongue is hanging out. He says, 'Yeah? While you're doing all of that, what do I do?'

  "And she says, 'You join a religious sect, fly to Africa, get lost in the jungle, and are never heard from again.' "

  * * * * *

  I was still chuckling when Kerry left ten minutes later.

  Chapter 4

  The University of San Francisco is the city's oldest institution of higher learning, having been founded by a Jesuit priest in 1855. Its first campus was completely destroyed by fire in the 1906 quake; the present campus was built a few years later atop the hill at Fulton and Parker, above the east-em edge of Golden Gate Park. For most of its existence the university was strictly the dominion of Catholic males; women weren't allowed in until the early sixties. Once U.S.F. turned coeducational, though, it made the transition intelligently and with dispatch. Now it graduates as many women as men, and has a very good School of Nursing to go with its School of Law and its above-average colleges of Liberal Arts, Science, and Business Administration.

  Its main campus sprawls over twenty-odd acres; a few bl
ocks away, atop a much smaller hill, is its newer Lone Mountain campus. The neighborhood that surrounds the two is residential—older middle-class homes and small apartment buildings that serve chiefly as off-campus housing for students. Temescal Terrace runs between the main campus and the university's soccer field, one of several block-long streets that fill the gap. There was only one apartment building among the private homes standing shoulder to shoulder along its length: three floors, three units, and like its neighbors, Spanish in style—beige stucco with blue trim and a blue tile roof. It was set back from the sidewalk just far enough to permit a couple of yucca trees to maintain a root-hold.

  All of the available street parking was taken when I came cruising along at nine on Tuesday morning, so I had to leave my car around the comer on Turk. The day was bright, clear, cold—a good day to be out and about in the city. Unless you were on your way to invade someone's home, someone who valued her privacy above all else. Yes, it was part of the job I'd been hired to do; yes, I had her father's permission and a key to go with it; yes, it was with the best of intentions. But the justifications didn't make me feel any less like a sneak.

  Her apartment was the bottommost of the three, the one with its fronting windows tightly draped against prying eyes. The first mailbox in the narrow vestibule bore her name and was jammed full, as I could see by the view slot. No post-office hold on her mail indicated that her leaving town had been sudden and unplanned, which in turn suggested flight rather than a simple urge to get away for a while.

  The key Arlo Haas had given me opened the building door as well. Inside was a bare tile-floored lobby and a staircase and a heavy blue door with the numeral 1 on it. The building was without audible sound; so was Grady's apartment when I laid my ear against the door. I rang the bell anyway. Haas had said she lived alone, but I did not want to take the chance of walking in on anybody. I thumbed the button twice more before I was ready to use the key.