Come Morning

Chapter 8

Moyers was parked in the first space next to the fire hydrant on Beach just off Mason. The garage entrance was across the street, the exit was centered in his rear-view mirror, and by turning his head he could see down the cobbled alley to the hotel entrance. If they tried to leave, he’d have them nailed.

Slouched behind the wheel of the Datsun, he wondered if they were up in her room right now, doing it again. Almost eidetic images of the woman, nude, in various abandoned positions upon the bed, flashed through his mind: In each of them, Moyers, bare-assed and shlong at the ready, was about to perform upon her whatever sexual act her particular position seemed to encourage.

He forced his mind away, to himself before the parole board, saying the things that had gotten Runyan out of San Quentin. Brilliant.

“I believe he knows where those diamonds are, and I believe he will try to recover them shortly after his release. In doing so, he will violate the terms of his parole. He will be returned to San Quentin, Homelife General will make recovery, and the interests and aims of society will have been served...”

Louise Graham opened the off-side door, slid in beside him, and slammed it. She wore a clinging soft grey wool dress which, without displaying anything, suggested everything.

“You have any coffee?” she asked. “It’s freezing out and I left my coat up in the room.”

Moyers forced himself to look away from her body while he considered the problems her presence suggested. He shot a quick look at the entrance and his rear-view mirror, then reached down for the Thermos, a deliberately sleepy look on his face.

“I hope you left Runyan up in the room too.”

She eyed the coffee greedily. “Dead to the world.”

He gave a coarse laugh as he unscrewed the top of the Thermos. “Fucked himself to sleep, huh? After all these years without any.”

“Oh goody,” she said tonelessly. “It knows how to talk dirty. I was so afraid it wouldn’t.” She held out the plastic cup from the Thermos and he poured steaming coffee into it.

Okay, nothing cheap about her. Brains and sensitivities to match her looks. Which made her more dangerous. Why had she come here? Probably to try and pump him about Runyan. Or about himself; he could be a factor in the equation she hadn’t expected. She could be as curious about his role as he was about hers. He switched tacks.

“Runyan tells me that you’re a writer.”

She nodded. “Louise Graham.” She slurped coffee and made a face. “Vile but hot.”

“Moose-shit pie — but good!”

She surprised him with a husky laugh that affected him like her languid fingernails running up his spine.

“Don’t try so hard to shock me. I started out doing newspaper obits; you ever listen to the jokes undertakers tell between cadavers?”

She started to take another drink of her coffee, bumped her elbow on the door handle, and cascaded hot coffee into her lap.

“Ouch!” she yelled. “Damn!”

Moyers snatched out his handkerchief and sopped at the spill, his fingers almost greedy in their movements. Before she pushed his hand away, he had felt the firm twin curves of her inner thighs coming together, had brushed the mound of her pudendum even through the wet wool of her skirt.

“Thanks,” she said coldly. “I can manage.”

Moyers belatedly looked down the alleyway to the hotel entrance, checked the garage exit in the rear-view mirror. Nothing moving either place. With her coffee spill, Louise had given Runyan just enough time to whip the Lynx out of the garage exit and around the corner, out of sight. Her ruined skirt apparently forgotten, she plucked a box of Winchell’s doughnuts from the dashboard.

“Any of these left? I’m starving to death.”

Moyers doubted that, having observed them in the hotel dining room, but he wasn’t going to argue. He had to get as much as he could from her about Runyan’s plans without letting her know what he was doing. It wouldn’t be too tough: She was bright enough, but he was a professional.

“So,” he said, “you must have come out here for more than my doughnuts.”

“Don’t bet on it,” she said, biting into a sugar glaze. “Newspeople are the world’s original freeloaders.”

Runyan stopped just beyond the wide concrete apron and, by the light of the streetlamp 30 yards down the alley, looked across the car at the street loading door.

In his mind, a gun went off.

The door was shoved violently open and Runyan, eight years younger, head back and arched as he yelled distantly, fell out through it. Clinging grimly to his attaché case, he struggled to his feet and reeled toward the car, leaving an irregular blood spoor across the concrete.

Stony-faced, Runyan watched himself come shambling up the tunnels of memory and through the closed door of the Lynx, a man made of smoke. He could feel the hairs on his arms rise, as if that younger, crippled, more innocent and wilder self were trying to reintegrate with this stunted prison parolee.

Moyers watched Louise take the final bite of her third doughnut and wash it down with hot coffee. He had a vivid desire to lick away the tiny wetness of powdered sugar at the corner of her mouth.

“I get the feeling,” said Louise as she poked around in the box for another doughnut, “that you don’t believe a damned thing I’ve said. So just pretend I’m a writer working on a book. Just pretend I wrote to Runyan in San Quentin and that he wouldn’t even come to the visitors’ room to meet me...” She looked up. “You like the ones with hagelschlact on them?”

“Hagel-what?”

“Those little chocolate bits.”

“Oh. No. Go ahead.”

Dammit, she couldn’t be a writer. Any woman who made you want to come just by eating a doughnut had to live by sex. But she couldn’t just be a prostitute, either. She was too much herself, she lacked that sophisticated fantasy persona men paid the top-drawer callgirls to possess. So whoever had sent her was a genius. Just-released cons were always after anything hot and hollow with hair around it; but here Runyan had been given the Mona Lisa to cope with.

“In fact,” she said, “just pretend I’m a journalist after a story and tell me all about Runyan — who he is, what he did, why he did it, why you’re after him. Okay?”

Tomorrow he’d have to run her car plate; meanwhile, she was dangerous because she made him just ache to tell her things.

“Okay,” he said. “Eight years ago, Runyan hit a wholesale diamond merchant for two-point-one-three-million in topquality uncut stones. He got shot by one of the guards but got away, then crapped out from loss of blood and went off the freeway north of San Rafael three hours later. They got him, but no diamonds.”

“If they didn’t have the diamonds, how did they prove—”

“Diamond merchant’s attaché case in the car. Guard’s bullet in Runyan. His blood type on the floor. Positive I.D. by the guard who shot him. From Runyan they got nothing. He stood mute at his trial.”

“Where is San Rafael?”

“Marin County. North across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Crossing the bridge, the younger Runyan squinted into the fog at the lights of oncoming traffic. An auto horn trailed angry sound past him, he jerked the wheel over: yellow rubber lane markers flew in every direction as he plowed through them before getting back into his own lane. The bridge’s foghorn gave a disconsolate bellow from its nest beneath the roadbed.

In Louise’s Lynx, Runyan tried to reconnect with that younger, brasher, colder self again, tried to recapture the rage and pain; but they were emotions in another man’s dream. Even the diamonds were an abstraction, something to deal away to Moyers for the reward which then would buy off last night’s caller. His life had started today. Louise was reality.

Louise brushed powdered sugar off the clinging fabric in her lap. Moyers could almost feel his own fingers there, beneath the skirt, caressing up her inner thigh, slipping under the elastic legband of her panties to...

He said, “I’ve never bought the image of Runyan the papers played up at the time — romantic cat-burglar type, in it as much for the kicks as for the money...”

“Why not?”

“This job screams for someone inside, and someone else to dispose of the gems afterward. Someone he was going to meet when he went off the road.”

“Then he would have had the diamonds with him.”

Moyers shook his head. “If he shows up with the stones, already half-dead, they just finish him off and split one less way. But if he shows up half-dead without the stones—”

“Of course,” said Louise. “They have to keep him alive to tell them where he hid them. But he never made the meeting, and so they never...” Abruptly, surprisingly, she shuddered. “So they’d be waiting when he got out. No contact, no threats, no nothing. Just... waiting.”

“That’s why he’ll have to come to me eventually,” said Moyers complacently. “I’m the only game in town.”

She opened her door. “If your reconstruction is right.”

“It’s right.”

She went back across the street, her heels ringing loudly on the pavement. He watched the movement of her backside with carnal lust.

The headlights swept across the ancient, oddly tilted tombstones of the old cemetery. In Runyan’s mind, the Bel-Air nosed to a stop, lights and motor still on. His younger self opened the door and fell out on the ground. After a long time, that earlier Runyan dragged himself erect, his hands leaving wet red smears on the door, window, door handle.

Beside the hotel’s lobby entrance was a small intimate bar called The Lubbers. Tucked inconspicuously away above it was a dark, cozy private drinking room with only two tables and a view of the street entrance through dark-tinted windows. A bulky bearded man in a red and black Pendleton, calling himself Leo Cronin, finished his drink so Louise would have time to get back to her room. Then he went down to the pay phones in the lobby.

Louise lay on the unmade bed with her forearm over her eyes. She had thought taking on Moyers would be fun; instead, it had brought back all the old despised memories. Smoke, and booze, and uncounted rows of coke. Lights that were never turned off, slots that never stopped clanging, the dealers’ smooth tones, the muted click of chips, the babble of the suckers as they poured their case money down the toilet of house odds.

Moyers, in his own narrow little company-man way, was one of them, his cesspool thoughts as easily read as the top line on an eye chart:

Men, all men. Except Runyan. She sat up abruptly. God, she wanted him back here with her. In her, coming in her, what was she going to do? When he came back, she would tell him. All of it. Every...

The phone rang. She snatched it quickly off the hooks, but the heavy familiar voice was not Runyan’s.

“Goddammit, where you been? I been ringing for—”

“Out. Busy.” Her voice was shriller, brassier, catalyzed into reaction by him. “Don’t push, damn you. That was the arrangement. I come in, make contact...”

“Well, what about it? He fall for you?”

“How should I—”

“You know, don’t try to shit me. You can smell them in rut. That’s what you’re good at.”

Dear God, did she have to tell him? Unwillingly, she said, “He’s hooked. Hard.” As if she were being ill, vomiting everything out, she added, “He’s out in my car right now.” Then she plunged despairingly into the gyre of betrayal she had to enter one way or another. “I think he went to get the diamonds.”

Climbing in the first predawn light, Runyan could see the little twisted tree on the crest. Bigger twisted tree, now. That night he’d used the tire iron as a sort of crutch, but still had fallen twice before he reached the tree with his sack of diamonds. Half hanging against the trunk, he’d vomited blood, then had gone down the far slope to the massive, oddly shaped boulder on which he’d practiced rock climbing and rappelling techniques. Fell on his knees beside it, started to dig with his tire iron...

Runyan, carrying Louise’s tire iron, could almost hear the clink of metal against stone. In 20 minutes he’d have the diamonds, he’d take them back and tell Louise all about everything...

“Let me tell you,” said the bearded Cronin into the phone in the lobby, “I want you out of there tonight.”

Louise reeled as if struck in the face. Before she had a chance to tell Runyan... what? What could she tell Runyan?

“Are you still in Vegas?” she asked in a dull voice.

“Where the fuck else would I be?” snapped the man in the lobby. “But I have a man in San Francisco to take over.”

“Whatever you want.”

“I want you out of there.” He hung up.

She paced the room, stopped and looked at her face in the mirror. Acid in the face. That’s what they had threatened. And he’d wanted her, desperately, and even weak blustery men sometimes found courage in desire. So he’d stood up to them. Or maybe bought them off. Either way, she owed him.

So, betray him, betray Runyan — she was really only betraying herself anyway. She whirled to stare at the loverumpled bed behind her.

“Damn you, Runyan!” she cried. “You were supposed to be a creep!”

She fell across the bed and burst out crying.

Runyan leaned against the twisted tree and burst out laughing. Bitter laughter, edged with despair. As if in mimicry came one of the intricate broken calls of a mockingbird. A jay raucously challenged it, and a California quail whistled liquidly from a far slope. Dawn was almost here.

Runyan looked down the slope once more at the half-built unit of a not-yet-occupied subdivision. The site was still early-morning deserted, and the boulder was gone, blasted to rubble by a subdivider’s plans. Gone with it were Runyan’s hopes. The diamonds no longer existed.