Fever

16

JAKE RUNYON

Sausalito was a little hillside and waterfront town filled with million-dollar homes on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Former fishing village, artists’ colony, San Francisco bedroom community, real estate agent’s wet dream, and expensive tourist trap. That was as much as Runyon knew about it-as much as he wanted to know. Scenic places had no appeal to him anymore. Picturesque or nondescript or squalid, they were just places. The only things about Sausalito that registered on him were the swarming number of picture-taking, gabbling tourists that flocked the downtown streets and the difficulty in finding a legal parking space. He didn’t have to worry about either one this trip.

The Wells Fargo branch where Ginny Lawson worked was on Bridgeway, on the north end of town away from the tourist clutter, and he could use the customer parking lot. Turned out she was a bank officer, occupying one of half a dozen desks on a carpeted area opposite the tellers’ cages. The nameplate on the desk said VIRGINIA F. LAWSON. Nobody was in the customer chair in front it.

She glanced up from her computer screen when he sat down. Prim little professional smile. Devout and conservative, Dre Janssen had called her, and she looked it: gray skirt and jacket, white blouse, minimum amount of makeup, no cornrows or any other kind of distinctive African American hairdo. Her eyes had a remote quality, as if they were looking at you through a self-imposed filter.

“May I help you?”

“I hope so.” He laid his card in front of her. “I’m not here on bank business. Private professional matter.”

“Yes?” She glanced at the card, frowned, and said the word again with a flatter inflection. “Yes?”

“It’s about Brian Youngblood.”

She froze. Like running water suddenly turning to ice. In a strained voice she said, “I have nothing to say to anyone about Brian Youngblood.”

“He’s in trouble, Ms. Lawson. Maybe serious trouble.”

No response. Silence built up between them, thick and heavy. It occurred to him that she intended to keep on sitting there like that, frozen and silent, until he gave it up and went away. He waited as motionlessly as she sat, holding eye contact, letting her know he wasn’t leaving until she talked to him.

The silence lasted for maybe two minutes. Then, “I’m not surprised.”

“That Brian is in trouble?”

“He’s sick. He has been for a long time.”

“Sick in what way?”

“Mentally. He’s mentally ill.”

“That covers a lot of territory. It might help if you’d be more specific.”

Tight little headshake.

“Is that the reason you wouldn’t marry him? Because you think he’s mentally ill?”

“I won’t discuss my private life.”

“If you know something that might explain-”

“I said I won’t discuss it.”

“I understand it must be painful for you-”

“Don’t you listen? No means no.”

“Brandy,” he said.

She jerked as if he’d touched her with an electrode. The tight little headshake again, then the frozen silence.

“You know her, Ms. Lawson. Tell me about her.”

Nothing.

“She’s part of Brian’s troubles, isn’t she? Maybe the root cause.”

Nothing.

“Is she the reason you ended your relationship with him?”

Still nothing. But the ice was beginning to crack. She sat just as rigidly, but muscles had begun to twitch in her face-an effect like fissures forming and spreading on a glacial moraine.

“Ms. Lawson?”

She started to laugh. A low, bitter, humorless sound that caused a couple of nearby heads to turn. The facial muscles kept twitching, as if they were acting as a pump for the dribbling laughter.

“Brandy,” she said. “Oh God, Brandy.”

“Ms. Lawson?”

“Sick,” she said, “sick, sick,” and went right on laughing.

It was as if she were alone somewhere, all alone in a place he couldn’t get to and wouldn’t want to be if he could. He got up and went away from her and the empty sounds of her anguish.

B ack to the city. He took the Lincoln Boulevard exit just beyond the bridge toll plaza, wound down through the Presidio past Baker Beach and Sea Cliff and over to Lake Street. Brian Youngblood’s former girlfriend Verna Washington had recently moved from the Haight to an apartment on Lake, but stopping there was a wasted effort: she wasn’t home. Already at Bon Chance, the downtown French restaurant where she worked as pastry chef? He called the restaurant number. She wasn’t there, either.

Getting on toward noon. His schedule was open until two o’clock, and he wasn’t hungry. Bill had the Nick Kinsella lead covered, and Tamara had been in touch with Rose Youngblood to report on progress, or the lack of it, so far. Which left him with Aaron Myers.

He called Fresh To You Frozen Foods. Myers was out of the office again today. Home ill with the flu, the woman who answered told him; might not be back at his desk again until next week. Did he want to be connected to Mr. Myers’s voice mail? No, he didn’t.

Runyon drove down Lake, took Divisidero south to Castro, and went along there into Noe Valley. He leaned on Aaron Myers’s doorbell for two minutes without getting a response. Too sick to answer, maybe. Or maybe his illness was an excuse to take a few days off work for reasons of his own.

Another talk with Brian Youngblood? Might as well give it a shot. If the man was alone, without Brandy to intimidate him, he might be induced to give out with some straight answers.

He drove up to Duncan Street. Another waste of time. No answer to another couple of minutes of bell-ringing. It went like that sometimes; people not home, unavailable, information hard to come by and sketchy when you did manage to pry some loose.

Now what?

He should have gone downtown to make sure he was on time for his two o’clock appointment. But he didn’t. Without making a conscious decision, he drove up and over Twin Peaks and west to Nineteenth Avenue. When he got to Moraga, he turned off and circled down to Bryn Darby’s address.

Small, single-family home, brown-shingled, not much larger than a cottage tucked between a larger house and a two-story apartment building. Strip of browning lawn and some kind of flowering shrub in front. Security gate across the front porch. Drawn venetian blinds over the facing windows. No sign of the chocolate-covered Scion anywhere on the block.

At the corner he made a U-turn, drove slowly until he neared her house, then braked and pulled over to the curb opposite. And sat there looking across at the house. Not thinking about anything, just sitting and looking for three or four minutes with the engine running. Then he switched it off, opened the door, and started to get out. But that was as far as he got. Duty rather than propriety stopped him: he was going to be late for his two o’clock appointment as it was and he hated being late. He slid back under the wheel, fired up the engine again. Before he drove away he shut himself down all the way, so he was not thinking at all.