Betrayers

13

I was two minutes from home, coming down off Diamond Heights on my way to the agency, when my cell phone went off. Never fails. Seems like the thing is always silent until I’m in the car and driving and then it rings incessantly. Early start today. It was only eight fifteen.

I could have let the call go onto voice mail, but I’m compulsive about answering the phone-a habit I picked up in the lean days when I first opened the agency and couldn’t afford to miss a potential client. I pulled over and stopped before I answered, something else I’m compulsive about. People who drive with a cell clapped against their ear and too-little attention to the road are one of my pet peeves. You don’t see quite as many doing it now that the new state law banning handheld cellular phones while operating a motor vehicle finally has kicked in, but there’re still too many to suit me. The fines aren’t nearly stiff enough to be an effective deterrent, and the ones who risk getting caught seem to take a sneaky self-satisfaction in flaunting a law they consider an unnecessary infringement on their personal rights. If I were a patrol cop, I’d spend a couple of days a week pulling them over and writing them up just to hear them whine.

The caller was Helen Alvarez. Excited and a little breathless. “It happened again last night,” she said.

“What did?”

“He broke into Margaret’s house again. Patterson or whoever he is. Walked right into her bedroom at three a.m., bold as brass.”

“He didn’t harm her?”

“No. Just scared the wits out of her.”

“She all right now?”

“Better than most women her age would be.”

“Did she get a good look at him?”

“No. Wouldn’t have even if all the lights had been on.”

“Why not?”

“He was wearing a sheet.”

“He was… what?”

“A sheet,” Helen Alvarez said grimly, “wearing a white sheet and making noises like a ghost.”

When I got to the Abbott house I found a reception committee of three on the front porch: Helen Alvarez, Leonard Crenshaw, and Everett Belasco, talking animatedly among themselves. Crenshaw was saying as I came up the walk, “… Should have called the police instead. They’re the ones ought to be investigating this.”

“What can they do?” his sister said. “There aren’t any signs of breaking and entering this time, either. Nothing damaged, nothing stolen. Just Margaret’s word that a man in a sheet was there in the first place. They’d probably say she imagined the whole thing.”

“Well, maybe she did,” Belasco said. “I mean, all that nonsense about her dead husband coming back to haunt her…”

“Ev, she didn’t say it was a ghost she saw. She said it was a man in a sheet pretending to be a ghost. There’s a big difference.”

“She still could’ve imagined it. Or dreamed it.”

Mrs. Alvarez appealed to me. “It happened; I’m sure it did. She may be a bit fanciful, but she doesn’t see things that aren’t there.”

“Is she up to talking about it?”

“I told her you were coming. She’s waiting.”

“Guess you don’t need me,” Belasco said. He bumped against Crenshaw as he turned, winced, and rubbed at a bandage across the back of his right hand.

Crenshaw asked, “What’d you do to your hand, Ev?”

“Goddamn knife slipped while I was slicing bacon this morning. Hurts like the devil.”

“If it’s a deep cut,” Mrs. Alvarez said, “you better have a doctor look at it.”

“No, it’s not deep. Just painful.” A gust of icy wind swept over the porch. Belasco shivered and said, “Damn, it’s cold out here. Come on, Leonard, I’ve got a pot of fresh coffee made.”

“No thanks,” Crenshaw said, “I got work to do.” He gave me a brief disapproving look and said pointedly to his sister, “Just remember, Helen-chickens always come home to roost.”

“Yes, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

“Bah,” he said.

“Silly old fool,” she said.

Mrs. Alvarez and I went into the house. Margaret Abbott was perched on her Boston rocker, a shawl over her lap and Spike, the orange tabby, curled up asleep on the shawl. She looked tired; the rouge she’d applied to her cheeks was like bloody splotches on too-white parchment. Still, she seemed in good spirits. And she showed no reluctance to discuss her latest ordeal.

“It’s really rather amusing,” she said, “now that I look back on it. A grown man wearing a sheet and moaning and groaning like Casper with a tummy ache.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

“Oh yes. Definitely a man.”

“You didn’t recognize his voice?”

“Well, he didn’t speak. Just moaned and groaned.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“I believe I asked what he thought he was doing in my bedroom. Yes, and I said that he’d better not have harmed Spike. It was Spike crying that woke me, you see.”

“Not the intruder coming into your bedroom?”

“No. Spike yowling as if he’d been hurt. He must have heard the man come into the house and gone to investigate and the man stepped on him or kicked him. Poor Spike. You’ve been through so much, haven’t you, dear?”

Spike opened one eye and yawned.

I said, “Then what happened, Mrs. Abbott? After you woke up.”

“Well, I saw a flickery sort of light in the hallway. At first I couldn’t imagine what it was.”

“Flashlight,” Mrs. Alvarez said.

“Yes. It came closer, into the doorway, then switched off and the man walked right up to the foot of my bed and began moaning and groaning and jumping around.” She smiled wanly. “Really, it was rather funny.”

“How long did he keep up his act?”

“Not long. Just until I spoke sternly to him.”

“Then he ran out?”

“Still moaning and groaning, yes. I suppose he wanted me to think he was the spirit of my late husband. As if I wouldn’t know a living man from a dead one. Or Carl, in or out of a sheet.”

Charley Doyle, I was thinking. A stupid ghost stunt was just the sort a pea-brain like him would come up with. He’d deny it, of course. And probably claim he’d spent all of last night with darlin’ Melanie, not that that was a stand-up alibi; she would lie for him just as readily as she drank and slept with him. But I’d have a talk with him just the same. Maybe, if I handled him right, I could rattle his cage enough to make him incriminate himself.

I called Dependable Glass Service. Doyle was out on a job, due back this time before noon and not scheduled to go out again until after the lunch hour. Okay. It was a little after ten now. That gave me time to swing by the agency.

Tamara was busy when I got there, simultaneously talking on the phone and thumping on her computer keyboard. I waited until she finished with the call before I went into her office.

“Got something for you to do when you have time,” I said.

She said, “Doesn’t everybody,” but she didn’t sound grouchy today. Tired and a little distracted but in a reasonably good mood.

“Run a check for me. Whitney Middle School’s enrollment. See if you can find out who belongs to the initials Z.U. ”

“What case is that for?”

“No case. Personal.”

She made a note of what I’d asked for. Then, “Whitney Middle School? Isn’t that the one Emily goes to?”

“Yes.”

“Something to do with her?”

“I’d rather not discuss it right now. Any more than you want to discuss what’s been bothering you lately.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “How important?”

“Pretty important. But you don’t have to drop everything else to do it. Sometime today.”

“No problem. If I come up with a name for Z.U., you want a full package on whoever it is?”

“As much as you can get. Address, parentage, school record, ever in trouble of any kind.”

She nodded and went back to tapping on the keyboard. The printer on her workstation thumped and began to ratchet a printout.

Dismissed.

Charley Doyle was not happy to see me. He was sitting in his pickup in Dependable’s side yard, eating a sandwich that had both mayonnaise and mustard in it; I knew that because of the yellow-white smear on one side of his mouth. He scowled at me through the open driver’s window.

“You again,” he said.

“Me again.”

“Now what you want? I told you last time-”

“There was another incident at your aunt’s last night.”

“Incident? What the hell you mean, incident?”

“Another home invasion. Intruder at three a.m. dressed up in a sheet and making noises like a ghost.”

“… You kidding me?”

“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”

“She okay? Auntie?”

“Fine. She scared him off.”

“Scared him? How?”

“She’s a tough old lady. She doesn’t really believe in ghosts.” Doyle grunted, looked at his sandwich, took another bite out of it; the bite and the way he chewed indicated he was angry, whether at me, his aunt, or the home invasion I couldn’t tell.

“Where were you last night, Mr. Doyle?”

“Me? Christ, you think I’m the guy? Bust into my aunt’s place dressed up in a fuckin’ sheet?”

“I asked you a question, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, it wasn’t me. I was with my woman all night, at her place.”

“Melanie.”

“Yeah, Melanie. All night. Ask her, you don’t believe me.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“Goddamn snoop,” he said. “Coming around where I work, accusing me. If you wasn’t an old man, I’d push your face in.”

“Welcome to try anyway. Assault is a bigger crime than malicious mischief.”

“Fuck your mischief,” he said cleverly. He dumped the rest of his sandwich into a paper sack on the seat beside him. “Now I lost my appetite.”

“That’s too bad. I’ll bet your aunt lost hers, too.”

Doyle opened the truck’s door and climbed out. I backed up a step to give him room-just the one step, so he wouldn’t get the idea I was retreating from him. But he had no intention of following up on his threat to push my face in. He stood flat-footed, glaring at me out of his little piggish eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “I told you before, I didn’t have nothing to do with what’s been going on at her place, that ghost crap and the rest.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You did mention ghosts the other day, didn’t you.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Her dead-husband’s friggin’ ghost,’ I think you said. How’d you know?”

“Huh?”

“That your aunt had a fanciful notion about Carl visiting her from the Other Side.”

“… What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“The notion only came to her three days ago. You said you hadn’t seen or talked to her for some time before that. So how’d you know about it?”

“I, uh…” Doyle’s blocky face had developed a burgundy flush. “Wasn’t just two days ago she started in about ghosts. She said it to me the last time I seen her.”

“Did she? I’ll ask her about that.”

“You don’t ask her nothing. Stay away from her.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing, you hear? I don’t have to talk to you no more at all.”

“Not to me, maybe. How about the police?”

The piggish eyes narrowed. He made a fist and waved it in my direction, not too close. I knew what was coming next. When guys like him are stuck for answers or caught out on something or other, they quit what passes for thinking and go straight to belligerent anger.

“I had enough of your bullshit,” he said. “You leave me alone from now on, man. Don’t come around bugging me no more. You do and I’ll bust you up good, old bastard or not.”

I showed him my wolf’s smile, to see if it would have any effect on him. The madder they get, the more likely they are to let something slip. Not Doyle, though. He fixed me with a black look and then stalked past me, not quite touching me on the way, and disappeared inside Dependable Glass’s warehouse.

I went and sat in my car, with my hands resting on the wheel. And then I just sat, staring, while things happened inside my head-plunk, plunk, plunk, like pinballs dropping into holes and slots.

Well, hell, I thought.

Getting old, all right. And real slow on the uptake.