Fever

12

JAKE RUNYON

The scarf woman’s name was Bryn Darby.

He found that out Tuesday night, on his second canvass of the Taraval neighborhood, from a garrulous woman who ran an arts and crafts store near the Parkside branch library. “Oh, yes,” she said, “Mrs. Darby. Her first name is Bryn, B-r-y-n, isn’t that an odd name? Poor woman. So much tragedy in her life.”

“What sort of tragedy?”

“Well, her deformity. And her husband leaving her. She didn’t tell me that, but it’s what I heard.”

“What sort of deformity?”

“Well, I don’t know. Something to do with the right side of her face. I’ve never seen it and she won’t talk about it, not that I blame her a bit even if she has become a bit standoffish since it happened.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, it must have been about a year ago. Until then she was attractive and very friendly, we had some lovely chats about art. She’s an artist, you know. Watercolors and charcoal sketches. I’ve seen some of them, she’s quite talented.”

When he got to the apartment he booted up his laptop and ran a quick check on Bryn Darby. Her address was 2511 Moraga Street, just a few blocks away. Age 33. Born Bryn Christine Cordell in Marin County. Married in 1995 to Robert Darby, an attorney with offices on West Portal. Divorce filed by her husband, March of this year. One child, a boy, Robert Jr., age 9. Primary custody granted to the father.

That was as far as he let himself dig. What the hell was he doing, following a crazy compulsion like this? Invading a stranger’s privacy, gathering information on her, without any justification. Wrong-headed, unprofessional. Illegal, like the goverment and their covert spying. Like a damn stalker.

Cracking up.

Sometimes, lately, that was just how he felt-as if he were coming apart again, slowly, one little crack at a time, the way he had after Colleen died.

I t was Wednesday afternoon before he got back to the Youngblood pro bono case. He preferred to move ahead quickly on his investigations, get them wrapped up ASAP, move on to the next. But other cases, higher-priority cases, kept interfering. One of those, the wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, had taken a couple of new turns that kept him hopping all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning. At least he was busy, a lot of his time accounted for. The busier you were, the less you had to interface with your private demons.

Aaron Myers worked as an office manager for an outfit called Fresh To You Frozen Foods in South San Francisco. Runyon made the mistake of driving down there instead of calling ahead to make sure Myers was on the job today. He wasn’t. Out of the office, no reason given. Expected back tomorrow.

He drove back into the city by way of Army Street and stopped at Myers’s apartment building in Noe Valley. More wasted time. Nobody answered the bell. He wrote “Call me, please” on the back of one of his business cards and dropped it through the mailbox slot that bore Myers’s name.

It was two o’clock when he walked into Bayside Video on Chestnut Street. Youngblood’s friend and chess partner, Dre Janssen, was there but busy with a customer. Runyon browsed through the section marked CLASSICS while he waited. Casablanca, one of Colleen’s favorites. The Searchers, one of his in the days when he’d cared about movies as more than just noise producers and time passers. Young Frankenstein. Funny film; he remembered Colleen breaking up every time somebody said “Frau Blucher” and horses started whinnying off-camera. It wasn’t until after they’d seen it that he found out why the horses kept freaking, that Blucher is the German word for glue. Ron had told him-Ron Cain, his former partner, his friend, dead twelve years now in the high-speed chase that had bitched up Runyon’s leg and caused him to take an early retirement from the Seattle PD. Colleen, Ron, people he’d cared about-gone. Andrea, too, even though it had been a long time since he’d had any feelings for her. The only family he had left was Joshua, and his son alive was as irretrievably lost to him as all the rest were dead…

The customer was leaving now. Runyon went over, introduced himself, and explained why he was there. Janssen’s response was a heavy sigh blown through both nostrils. He was tall, thin, freckles like dark spots of rust sprinkled across his cheeks and one of those patches of chin whiskers popular among young men these days. On his lean, ascetic face the whiskers looked like nothing so much as transplanted pubic hair.

“So Brian’s in trouble,” he said.

“His mother thinks so. So do I.”

“Well, I’m not too surprised. But I don’t know that I can tell you much-I haven’t seen or talked to him in months.”

“Mrs. Youngblood told me you and Brian play chess regularly.”

“Used to. All in the past now.”

“How come?”

“That’s the way he wanted it.”

“He tell you why?”

“No. You know somebody most of your life, you think you know them pretty well, right? Then all of a sudden something happens to them and they weird out and you realize you didn’t know them at all.”

“When did Brian start to weird out?”

“More than a year ago.”

“In what ways?”

“Well, it started with him not going to church anymore. He used to be real devout-we belong to the same church.”

“His mother didn’t say anything about that.”

“She doesn’t know. He told her he was going to a different one, in my neighborhood, but he wasn’t. I asked him why and all he’d say was that he had his reasons.”

“You think he lost his faith?”

“Must have, somehow. Didn’t seem to want anything to do with religion anymore.”

“What else happened with him?”

“Well, he started buying things,” Janssen said, “expensive computer hardware he didn’t really need. High-quality stuff, all the latest advances. Last time I saw him he had four PCs, three laptops, five printers, three twenty-two-inch screens hooked together, modems, motherboards, CD burners, camcorders, all sorts of anti-spy software, you name it.”

“How did he explain it to you?”

“He didn’t even try. Just said he needed to keep upgrading his system and it wasn’t any of my business anyway.”

“How else did he change?”

“Distant, withdrawn,” Janssen said. “Started holing up in his flat. Wouldn’t answer e-mails or acknowledge chess problems I sent him. Wouldn’t return phone messages.”

“Did you know he was in debt, not paying his bills?”

“Yeah, I heard. I can tell you part of the reason: he lost two of his best consulting jobs.”

“How did that happen?”

“He wasn’t doing the work. Just didn’t seem to care anymore.”

“When did this happen?”

“Four or five months ago.”

“He tell you this?”

“No. Another friend of his, Aaron Myers.”

“Do you know Myers well?”

“Not very. Met him through Brian, but we didn’t hit it off. I ran into him later on at a computer trade show at Moscone and we got to talking. He was worried about Brian, too. But neither of us knew what to do about it.”

“Might’ve contacted his mother.”

“Myers did that, or started to, but Brian found out and threw a fit, told him to mind his own business. I thought about doing it on my own, but… you know, I didn’t want to make things worse by sticking my nose in. I figured he’d talk to her on his own if things got bad enough. But he didn’t?”

“No. She doesn’t know about his weird behavior or financial problems,” Runyon said. “All she knows is that somebody beat him up last week.”

“Beat him up? Brian?” Janssen looked and sounded amazed. “Who?”

“He told his mother he was mugged. He told me he was carjacked.”

“And you don’t believe it’s either one.”

“Can you think of another explanation?”

“No. Brian’s totally nonviolent. If you’ve met him…”

“Monday afternoon, at his flat. His girlfriend was there with him.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Brandy. You know her?”

“No way. I never met anyone named Brandy.”

Runyon described her and her foul mouth, summarized the scene at Youngblood’s flat.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Janssen said. “I can’t imagine Brian letting anybody talk that way about his mother. He didn’t stand up to this Brandy at all?”

“Not for a second.”

“Man. She sounds like a… whore.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Brian and a woman like that?” Head wag. “That’s just crazy.”

“Not the type he’s attracted to?”

“Lord, no. His mother tell you he was engaged to Ginny Lawson?”

“Yes.”

“You talked to her yet? Ginny?”

“Not yet.”

“When you do you’ll see what I mean. She’s the total opposite of this Brandy- total. Real devout. Her hobby is singing gospel music.”

“Why did she break off the engagement, do you know?”

“Brian wouldn’t say. I figured it must have something to do with the weird way he was acting.”

“So it wasn’t the breakup that led to his erratic behavior.”

“No. The weird stuff started a few months before.”

“And for no apparent reason that you could see.”

“None. Just… out of the blue, seemed to me.”

“Has Brian dated any other women since Ginny Lawson?”

“Besides this Brandy? Not that I know of.”

“Before Ginny?”

“Well, Verna Washington. She was kind of funky.”

“Funky how?”

“Oh, the way she dressed, her tastes in music and food. She’s a chef for some restaurant in SoMa. They seemed like kind of an odd couple, but she wasn’t nasty or anything.”

“How long were they together?”

“Not long. Couple of months.”

“What broke them up?”

“Don’t know. You’d have to ask him. Or Verna.”

“You have an address for her?”

“She was living in the outer Sunset back then. Lake Street, I think. I don’t know the number.”

Easy enough to find out. Runyon made a note. Then he asked, “Did you know Brian paid off most of his debts three months ago-ten thousand dollars’ worth?”

Janssen showed surprise again. “No, I didn’t know. Where’d he get that kind of money?”

“I was about to ask you the same question. Certificate of deposit or IRAs, possibly?”

“No way. His family never had much and he’s never been big on future planning. He and Ginny argued about it once that I know about.”

“Loan from a friend? Aaron Myers?”

“Not Myers-he doesn’t have that kind of money. And if Brian has any other friends with that much cash to loan out, I don’t know who they could be. Maybe he got it from a bank or finance company.”

“He didn’t.” It would have been on the credit report if he had. “How about new consulting work?”

“That’s out, too. Even if he hustled two or three new jobs, it’d’ve taken him a lot longer than a month or two to raise that much cash.”

Which left what? A couple of possibilities, one of them-

“Brandy,” Janssen said abruptly, as if reading his mind. “Maybe she loaned it to him. It’d explain why he let her talk smack about his mother, wouldn’t it? Why he let her walk all over him?”

“It might.”

Janssen shook his head again. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “How does a guy like Brian, a good guy, all of a sudden get so screwed up?”

Runyon said nothing. The woman in the scarf, Bryn Darby, flicked across his mind. Most of us can’t even explain to ourselves why we screw up or get screwed up in all the ways we do.

H e was starting to forget what Colleen looked like.

Always before he could close his eyes and she would appear bright and crystal sharp in his memory. Happy, sad, playful, serious, loving-all her moods, all her voices distinct down to the finest nuance, as if she were still alive and caught by time. She was still there for him now, but the images had begun to blur and fade at the edges. It happened all of a sudden, it seemed to him, like home movies shot with an old video cam that he’d watched one too many times. More and more, now, he found himself looking at his photos of her, the one in his wallet and the framed portrait he kept on the bedside table, to try to recapture the clarity. But it wasn’t working. Photos were static, without the movement, the words, the life force-the real Colleen-that had once dominated his memory.

It happened again that night in the apartment. He was in the kitchen making tea, he thought of her, he closed his eyes, and her face came to him in soft focus, as if he was looking at her through a thin mist. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and stared at the framed photograph. Impulse drove him to the closet, where he kept the albums she’d put together before the cancer was diagnosed-snapshots taken at mountains, lakes, Seattle locations, Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, Vancouver, Victoria Island. He sat with one of them open on his lap and paged through it slowly, looking only at those of her alone or the two of them together with her the most prominent figure. He went all the way through the album before he closed his eyes and looked at the memory images again.

Still the soft, misty focus. Blurred. Faded.

It scared him. He felt as if he were losing her all over again. First Colleen herself, now his memories of her. One day he might close his eyes and not be able to see or remember her clearly at all. If that happened, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t want to think about what he might do.

He put the album away, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. He was sitting there, staring at faceless people talking in a room, when his cell phone rang. The noise activated him again. Business-Bill or Tamara. An emergency, maybe, something to occupy his mind and his time, help him make it through another night.

But it wasn’t Bill or Tamara. A half-muffled man’s voice said, “Jake Runyon?” He acknowledged it, and the voice said, “If you want to know who hurt Brian Youngblood and why, ask Nick Kinsella. Nick Kinsella, Blacklight Tavern.” That was all. The line went dead.

Runyon switched off. No emergency, but at least now he had something else to think about. The muffling had been the result of a handkerchief or some other cloth draped over the mouthpiece, but it hadn’t done much of a job of disguising the voice. Enough of the thin, pale tone had come through to make it recognizable.

Brian Youngblood.

And why would Brian Youngblood want to tell him something anonymously that he could have volunteered straight out, over the phone or in person?