Come Morning

Chapter 4

As she drove down Waldo Grade toward the tunnel on US 101, Louise wondered how you got through to a clod like Runyan: He was handsome enough, with air from the open window ruffling his shiny black prison-chopped hair, and his eyes a piercing blue under dark even brows. But he was reacting to her as to a rock lying alongside the highway. None of her research on him ranging back to childhood had prepared her for this zombie. Could seven years in prison have turned him into a homosexual?

Well, how about vulnerability? Expose her throat, like a she-wolf showing submission to the pack’s dominant male?

“Um... in my letter, I mentioned I was a journalist researching a book? I was working for a newspaper in Minneapolis, but I felt the need for an in-depth study of the ex-convict reentering society after a long hiatus...” No reaction. Didn’t know the big words? “What I mean is, what happens when you hit the street after being away for a long time?”

No answer. Beyond Waldo Tunnel, San Francisco sprang up like an enchanted city in a pop-up book of her childhood. They swept down and out onto the Golden Gate past the stunning rocky Marin headlands flanking the span.

“What I’m concerned with here are the difficulties the emerging mainline prisoner encounters in adjusting to this... um... new and bewildering complex of inputs...”

Nothing. Maybe he had a dead battery or something. Her voice had an edge, she couldn’t help it.

“Instead of complex of inputs, how does everything coming at you at once grab you?”

Runyan finally looked over at her, making his eyes go dull. “They put saltpeter in our soup to keep our sex drive low,” he said. “It makes you all mushy in the head.” In the same tone, he added, “I have to report to my parole officer, if you could drop me at a bus stop on Van Ness...”

“I’ll drive you,” she said quickly.

Dammit, girl, keep the asperity out of your voice. Asperity is not what this man needs right now. Maybe she should have worn a Playboy bunny outfit instead of doing her skun rat impression. Maybe she should just ask him what he was thinking. Maybe she should just tell him what she was thinking.

I think you’re a lout and a boor and a wise-ass and probably a fag, and I want you to tell me all about yourself.

Sure.

The San Francisco Parole Office was supposed to have been relocated to a nondescript two-story stucco office building between a parking lot and an old Queen Anne Victorian on South Van Ness. But the doorway was half-blocked by a pile of sand wearing a highway warning flasher with ROADWORK — DRIVE CAREFULLY stencilled on it. The signs on the ground floor government-funded mental health clinic and counselling service for the elderly were in Spanish only.

Runyan was checking his release papers, obviously confused.

“Could it be on the second floor?” Louise asked almost timidly; she didn’t want to come on all assertive, in case he was macho man after all.

“Sure, you’re right, that’s it. Thanks.” He opened the door and started to get out, gym bag in hand.

“You don’t lose me that easily,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

He shrugged and tossed the gym bag back in the car, as if it didn’t matter much. Short brown people with broad Peruvian faces and excitable Latin discourse crowded the street. A pair of lovers passed, hand-in-hand, heads together, giggling; to Louise it was a rough-looking neighborhood, but to them it was safe territory.

Runyan pulled open the door on the curb side and began, “Look, Miss Graham, I can make it on my own from—”

“Ms. And I’m trying to interview you, remember?”

He shrugged again and got in. She drove in on South Van Ness to the broad arterial slash of Market Street; beyond rose pompous, self-important grey government buildings. As they passed the glittering Marion Davies Concert Hall, Runyan craned around in his seat, then settled back shaking his head.

“You don’t like it?” she asked quickly.

“I love it,” he said, hitting love with a hammer. “If you could turn right at Golden Gate...”

They went by the hulking stone Federal Building and Federal Courthouse, a grey monstrosity taking up an entire block behind a plaza that looked too sterile even to attract pigeons.

“Is this where your trial was held?”

“This is federal, I was state,” said Runyan tonelessly.

How adroitly you elicit his views on things, Louise thought. First Davies Hall, then this. Maybe you ought to try to sell him magazine subscriptions. But it wasn’t just her; there was some tension in him that was beyond the moment. Something having nothing to do with her, or having to do with her in a way she didn’t yet understand.

The neighborhood had changed again. They were in the Tenderloin, low life in a high crime area. Even the women looked like muggers. At the corner of Larkin the light held them as two mounted policemen clopped by, one with a huge pink carnation stuck through the mane of his sleek, wise-looking horse.

“When do you start asking me about the diamonds?” Runyan demanded abruptly.

“I don’t know anything about any diamonds — other than you allegedly took a bunch of them.” She strove to keep shrewishness out of her voice. “I still would have been in college when you did that, anyway.”

The red light had stopped them in front of the old, genteelly seedy YMCA, with its chipping paint and earnest sign, MEN AND WOMEN — ROOMS — FITNESS CENTER.

“We don’t talk about the diamonds, we don’t talk,” said Runyan.

Louise made an elaborately courteous gesture. “Then by all means, let us talk about the diamonds.”

The light was changing; Runyan opened his door and stepped out with his gym bag.

“I don’t talk about the diamonds,” he said.

He walked around the corner and was gone. Louise whipped off her dark glasses to glare after him, then belatedly shot the Lynx around the corner too as the cars behind her started to honk. Runyan was half-a-block ahead, walking rapidly. On the corner two bearded men in their early thirties were kissing, hands on one another’s hips.

The anger abruptly left her face. Seeing them, she knew that Runyan hadn’t gone that route in prison. Which meant he was accessible to a woman in ways that Louise knew all about.

The blue sign at 531 Leavenworth still read WESTWARD HO-TEL in white letters with broken bits of neon tube dangling from them. He had roomed there once, years before, it was the logical place to list as his address with the parole authority.

Plastered beside the brown double doors at the head of the terrazzo steps were various stern warnings on pastel sheets of stiff art paper: NO SITTING ON STEPS (blue); PLEASE KEEP DOORWAY CLEAN (pink); NO VISITORS (yellow); and NO TRESPASSING (red and black). Posted off to one side was one of much heavier caliber, a dated DEMOLITION ORDER APPEAL HEARING.

He paid the pallid rat-faced clerk a week in advance on a room that was second floor back, at the far end of the cross hall next to the fire escape window. It was what you could expect in the Tenderloin for $50 a week: shabby chest of drawers, a sink in the corner with a thin napless towel on the rack, no soap or washcloth, a small hand mirror tacked above the sink partially to mask the brown water stains of an old overflow from the sink upstairs. The single bed had a human-shaped depression in the middle of it.

On the other hand, with the brown roller shade up, sunlight came through the frayed imitation lace curtains to give it a certain spurious golden charm. And it was a room, not a cell; no electrically controlled bar would slide across the door at night to keep him in.

Runyan tossed his gym bag on the dresser and stripped off his shirt. He started to run cold water into the sink to wash away the stink of Q, a need more psychological than physical.

Would she show up again? He’d detected real beauty behind those dark glasses and severe hair, but he couldn’t afford the luxury of believing that she was just a writer after material.

As the sink filled, he thought, On the other hand, who would she belong to? Moyers didn’t need a plant, he knew Runyan probably would turn the diamonds back to him, eventually, for the recovery fee. Unless he had become more rather than less of a man during the past seven years, Cardwell wouldn’t have the guts. There weren’t any other players — unless, and this was his real fear, Jamie’d had partners in the betrayal...

But anybody smart enough to preserve his safety through eight long years of silence was too smart to put himself into the hands of a hired woman. So maybe she was what she said she was.

As he came up whooshing from the cold water, the mirror showed him Louise just coming through the door. He said immediately, without turning, “The insurance company is waiting for me to be a good little doggie and dig up their bone for them.” Blinking, he groped for the towel. “They figure I have the diamonds stashed somewhere.”

She had shut the door and was turning in a complete circle, taking in the room.

“It’s you,” she said.

Using the towel was like drying off with a cardboard shirt backing. She was pulling down the window shade, making the room a dim cavern where anything might happen. She tossed her sunglasses on the dresser and started shaking out her hair: Her eyes were the most beautiful Runyan had ever seen, wide-set emerald chips glowing with an inner light. He felt an involuntary thickening in the groin, a tightness in the chest, a growing wildness in his mind.

“At that college, didn’t they teach you about leaving the door open when you’re alone in a room with a man?”

“We had coed dorms.”

She pulled out her blouse and started unbuttoning it. Oh Jesus, eight years. He almost ran to open the door, but she stepped right into him, so her face was only inches from his. Through the gauzy bra her already hardening nipples were like tiny hot coals against his naked chest. His arms came up to encircle her. Her hips were shifting against him, bringing him completely erect.

“This... is as far as we can take it and still quit easy,” he said in a harsh voice.

“I didn’t come here to quit,” she said.

Her tongue, tasting very faintly of cinnamon, was hot between his lips. Her buttocks were taut beneath his clutching hands as he lifted her toward the bed with a cresting, almost frenzied urgency.