Come Morning

Chapter 9

Louise was wearing a tam and a Burberry; it was only when the cab went by that her face, framed in that gleaming dark hair, registered with Moyers. He muttered a startled curse and U-turned after the cab up the Embarcadero. Very cool, very clever, going to check into some other hotel, figuring he wouldn’t follow her, leaving Runyan to slip out with her car and join her later. Leaving David Moyers in the dust. And she had almost gotten away with it. Would have, if he hadn’t been such an old hand at keeping ahead of the opposition.

When this was all over and Moyers had recovered the diamonds, whoever the hell had hired her wouldn’t be too happy. She might need someone to take care of her. That might even have been her real purpose in sneaking out to his car last night — laying the groundwork for a new liaison in case she missed with Runyan. Naturally, she would think of Moyers as her next move.

Louise didn’t think about Moyers until the cab was up on the skyway heading for the airport. Huddled bleakly in the back seat, staring out at the serrated teeth of the financial district as the early morning light struck their glass caps and steel inlays, she suddenly thought, My God, that creep from the insurance company is going to be following me. She almost turned to look out the rear window, but controlled the urge.

He’d figure she was on her way to check into a new hotel in the belief he wouldn’t follow her — so of course he would. When she ditched him, he was going to take it personally and really go after her: So, what did he know, and what could he find out?

He knew her name and the license number of her U-drive. From that he could get to the car rental company, and would have ways of getting into their files — probably just punch her up on the insurance company’s computer.

That would give him her Nevada driver’s license number, her credit card number, and her Vegas residence address. She caught her own reflection in the driver’s rear-view mirror. They had threatened to throw acid in her face. Everything dead-ended in Vegas, everything was billed to that address where she hadn’t lived for over a year...

So, point him at Vegas.

Runyan parked on North Point, around the block from where Moyers would be staked out, and went in a side entrance of the hotel. He didn’t have the diamonds, but he couldn’t let Moyers know he had gone looking; he would have to think up ways to stall the rough-voiced man who had threatened him on the phone. If they had been there, it all would have been so simple. Now...

Now, nobody was going to believe they had been lost in the building of a new subdivision. He could hardly believe it himself. Moyers might be just mean enough and sore enough to get the parole board after him. Violating an ex-con’s parole was the easiest thing in the world; any minor infraction was enough to send him back inside.

Walking down the corridor from the elevator, he knew he was going to have to come up with something. Before he had gone inside, it would have been easy; he always had half-a-dozen possible burglaries lined up. But now he was on parole; he almost needed permission to go to the bathroom. No jobs cased and probably no guts to do one anyway.

The only illumination was from around the edges of the drapes. The bathroom was open, its door open. The bed was as they had left it from their love-making.

“Louise?”

Down in the coffee shop. He was halfway back out of the room when he froze. The typewriter and manila folders were no longer on the table.

He hit the lights; the room sprang into bold relief. No cosmetics on the vanity. The closet area was stripped. Suitcase and overnighter gone. He yanked out the empty dresser drawers, dropping each on the floor as irrational panic became rational certainty.

She was gone. Cleared out. No note, nothing. Just gone.

He sat down on the bed as if his legs could not support his weight. There had to be an explanation.

She’d left the car with him... With the bill unpaid.

She’d gotten a call, long-distance, her father back in Rochester was sick, sinking fast, there’d been no time for a note to Runyan...

There was always time for a note — if you wanted to write one. He stood up wearily. She’d been after the diamonds all along. But if so, why clear out before he recovered the stones? Before there was any chance for her to get them for herself?

What if she’d come to con him out of the diamonds, then had started to feel something for him, as he had for her, and couldn’t go through with it? That would explain just disappearing, it would explain the lack of a note or a goodbye...

Didn’t she know that he didn’t care what she’d started out to do? That yesterday was the first day of their lives? That today was all that counted?

The room yielded nothing to help him find her. But stuffed in the wastebasket were two manila folders. One was the CONVICT BOOK folder, including the sheet with his title BAD TIME slashed across it; the other was ASSAULT ON THE CITADEL. He took them with him; in some way, they confirmed his feeling. She had come to scam him, and when self-revulsion set in had discarded the files as too painful to keep.

Somehow he’d find her.

As Moyers pulled up, Louise was walking into the terminal beside the porter carrying her bags. He stopped behind the taxi that had brought her, walked up to the driver’s open window and gave the man a swift glimpse of a silver badge he carried for times like this. A replica of the SFPD badge in size and shape, it had long since ceased being even marginally legal to carry.

“Daltinski, Airport Security,” he said in a bored voice. His rubber face had become set in the cop mold, his eyes had turned bleak. “That fare you just dropped. Which airline?”

“PSA. She said she was catching a flight to Vegas.”

Moyers didn’t thank him; cops didn’t. He got back in his car and followed the arrows for a return to short-term parking. He couldn’t risk leaving his car in front of the terminal — they were very quick to ticket and tow violators here, and he had to get back to the hotel as soon as he knew for sure where she was going. Her catching a plane just didn’t fit into any scenario he could devise, and her getting this far away from Runyan just couldn’t be made to make sense. Unless...

Unless she was just a goddam writer after all. She gets her interview, gets a good fuck from the ex-con — something to tell the monthly writing club about over drinks — and off she goes. But then why leave her car behind?

Easy. She has her Runyan interview on tape, he casually offers to turn her car in for her...

But Moyers couldn’t be sure. And if they had run a game on him, and he was out of touch with Runyan, then he damn sure better not get out of touch with the woman.

Toeing her bags forward in the PSA line, Louise kept a wary eye out for Moyers — if he got here too quick she’d have to think of something else. But her luck held. She collected the ticket she had ordered from the hotel, and checked her bags.

“I also need a ticket to Las Vegas on your flight through Burbank,” she said to the clerk. “For a Louise Graham. She doesn’t have any luggage.”

“That flight leaves in eleven minutes,” said the mustachioed, uniformed agent as he made out the one-way ticket.

Moyers trotted along the moving beltway, up the two flights of escalators to the main terminal lobby, and shoved his way through the throngs to the PSA flight board behind the ticket counters. The Las Vegas flight was marked DEPARTED. He got the PSA reservations number from a pay phone.

“PSA, Ms. Laurence, may I help you?”

“Yes, my wife is taking your ten a.m. flight to Las Vegas from S.F. International, it just left and I wanted to make sure she caught it. She was cutting it awfully fine. Graham, first initial L.”

“Thank you, sir.” There was a pause as she tapped into the computer. She came back on. “She was ticketed and had a reservation made just before departure time, Mr. Graham. There hasn’t been time for the passenger manifest to be turned in by the personnel on the check-in gate, but the records we do have would indicate she made the flight.”

He thanked her and hung up, then used his phone calling card to contact a Las Vegas detective he had used in the past.

“Louise Graham, twenty-nine, blue-green on brown, five-eight in heels, hundred-and-fifteen pounds, wearing a Burberry and a light blue tam. She’s arriving on the next flight from SFO through Burbank. Everything you can get on her in a hurry.”

“She expecting us?”

Moyers thought for a second. “No. But I’d rather you got made than lose her. I’ll call for a preliminary report in...” he checked his watch. “Three hours.”

“You got it.”

Moyers personalized his tone. “Wife and kids?”

“Fat and sassy — in that order.”

“They usually are,” said Moyers.

As soon as he left the terminal, Louise emerged from the labyrinth of book shelves in the lobby tobacco shop from which she had been watching him. With a touch of irony, she bought Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying to read during the 45-minute wait for the plane’s scheduled departure.