Spook

12 Jake Runyon

The Commerce was two stories of colorless wood and dirty windows piled atop a row of storefronts. The entrance was a single door set into a shallow alcove, the words COMMERCE HOTEL — ROOMS BY WEEK, MONTH painted on its glass panel. Alongside the latch was a button and a card that said you had to ring for admittance after 9 P.M.

Runyon walked by slowly without turning in. Across the street and down a short way was a bakery and coffee shop with a long front window; he went over there, bought a cup of tea, took it to one of the stools at a counter that ran along below the rain-spotted window. From there he had a reasonably unobstructed view of the hotel entrance.

He had come straight back here, so Big Dog hadn’t had time to get to the Commerce ahead of him. He might not come back at all, as scared as he was. Runyon gave it half an hour, nursing his tea; nobody went into the Commerce, nobody came out. He left the bakery’s warmth and crossed the street again.

A bell jangled when he opened the glass-paneled door of the hotel, jangled again as he shut it behind him. Postage-stamp lobby with nothing in it — no chairs or tables, no adornments of any kind. The front desk, if you could call it that, was an even smaller cubicle enclosed by a wood-and-glass partition. This was a neighborhood of cages within cages. One of hundreds in a nationwide network of urban zoos: some animals locked in, others allowed to roam free, and a tossup as to which group had the most dangerous predators.

Framed behind the glass of this cage was a woman perched on an office chair, the kind that you could crank to adjust the height. This one was up as high as it would go, so that her breasts seemed to be resting on the inside counter. She was something to look at in there, like an exotic and faintly repulsive creature on display. Indeterminate age, anywhere from thirty to fifty. Ropy black hair pulled back so tightly from her face that the skin looked stretched to the splitting point among temples and forehead. Tall, thin body, dead-white skin, blank eyes, too much lipstick and rouge. Bloodless, lifeless — a victim in a vampire movie. Junkie, probably. Smack or crystal meth. The long-sleeved shirt would be to cover the needle tracks on her arms.

“Yeah?” she said. Her mouth barely moved. The empty eyes didn’t move at all.

“What room is Big Dog in?”

“Who?”

Runyon described him, including the rain slicker and new shoes.

“Big Dog, hell,” she said. “Big prick. Not in.”

“I’ll wait for him.”

“No waiting here.”

“What’s his room number?”

“Guests only upstairs.”

“What name is he registered under?”

Blank stare.

“How long has he been staying here?”

Blank stare.

It was like trying to communicate with an animated corpse. Stoned? Those empty eyes said it was likely. He weighed options. Money was the obvious pry bar, but if he put a bill of any denomination into the tray in the glass partition, she was liable to make it disappear without giving him anything in return. Silent intimidation or threats wouldn’t get the job done, either. Her cage, her advantage.

“He’s in trouble, lady. Big trouble.”

Blank stare.

“A prick, you said. So why protect him?”

Blank stare.

“Be smart and protect yourself. You don’t want his kind of trouble to rub off on you.”

“Cop?”

“You could say that.”

“Badge.”

Waste of time showing her his temporary California license, but he did it anyway. Colleen had given him a leather holder for his Washington state license one birthday; he flipped it open, held it up near the glass.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Go away.”

Runyon said, “Murder.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Murder.”

“More bullshit.”

“Big Dog’s involved in a street killing. Cops are as interested in talking to him as I am. I’ll go call them, report that you’re shielding him, might be mixed up in the homicide yourself.”

Blank stare.

“If they don’t arrest you for that, there’s always a drug charge. Withdrawal in a jail cell’s no picnic, lady, if you don’t already know it. Sometimes they don’t pay any attention to your screams.”

He walked away on the last sentence — five steps to the door. He had his hand on the latch when she said, “Wait.”

Back to the cage. She hadn’t moved; her eyes and her expression were as blank as before. But her body language said he’d touched the right nerve.

“Well?”

“Nine,” she said. “Second floor.”

“What name?”

A blue-veined hand snaked out, flipped open a register. “Joe Smith.”

“Sure. How long’s he been here?”

“Few days.”

“Renting by the week?”

“Month. Paid in advance.”

“One month?”

“Deaf? Month, in advance.”

“Paid how?”

“Cash. No credit cards.”

“What’s the monthly rate?”

“Two and a quarter.”

Two hundred twenty-five dollars, cash. Drinking cheap wine with Spook in an alley a few weeks ago; drinking good sour mash whiskey since he moved into this neighborhood. Paying for a room one month in advance. Wearing a recently bought rain slicker and a pair of new shoes. Where did a homeless alcoholic get the kind of money he was throwing around?

“Where does he hang out when he’s not here?”

“Who knows.”

“Calls for him? Visitors?”

“No.”

“I need to look at his room,” Runyon said.

“Guests only upstairs.”

“Ten minutes, no more.”

“Guests only upstairs.”

“Suppose I rent your passkey.”

“Rent?”

“Ten minutes, ten dollars.”

“Twenty.”

“Ten. And nobody finds out I was here, cops included.”

The corpse pose lasted until he opened his wallet, removed a ten and flattened it against the glass. Then the veined hand snaked out again and a scarlet nail tapped the partition tray.

“Passkey first,” he said, “then you get the money.”

“No.”

“Same-time exchange, then.”

“... Okay.”

So he went through the ritual with her, putting the money into the tray and holding onto it with two fingers while she did likewise with the passkey; taking hold of the key while she pinched the other end of the sawbuck, like a four-handed tug of war; both of them pulling and letting go simultaneously. She squinted at the bill, as though she thought it might be counterfeit, then made it vanish inside the front of her white shirt.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

“Don’t worry. Neither of us wants me around any longer than that.”

There was no elevator. Runyon climbed dust-carpeted stairs, found his way to a door at the rear with the number 9 painted on it. The passkey let him into a twelve-foot-square box that reeked of stale booze, stale food, stale tobacco, and human excretion. Blanket-wadded single bed, tiny nightstand, scratched-up bureau, one rickety chair. Scatter of empty liquor bottles, a tuna fish can full of cigarette butts, remnants of fast-food meals that had already attracted roaches — two of them scurried away when he switched on the naked ceiling bulb — and a filthy knapsack propped in one corner. Cold in there; the Commerce was the kind of place where the heat would be turned on for the legal minimum each day and not a minute longer.

Bare-bones survival living at two twenty-five a month. One step up from the streets; at least Spook’s doorway at Visuals, Inc. had been free. This was what Big Dog had aspired to, what he’d spent part of his windfall on — one month in a cold, foul-smelling roach box and subsistence on hard liquor and junk food. Drunk, drifter, bully, bum. And a probable felon besides. The kind of borderline human who gave homelessness a bad name.

Runyon went over and squatted by the knapsack. Its straps were loose; he sifted through the pockets. No firearm of any kind, but plenty of testimony to Big Dog’s character. In addition to a scant few articles of filthy clothing, he found a cracked roach pipe, a switchblade knife with a broken blade, and a tattered envelope that contained half a dozen pawed-over glossies depicting the nastier acts of child pornography. He stared to rip up the photos, changed his mind and stuffed them back into the envelope, put the envelope into his coat pocket.

He turned the knapsack around to get at the pouch on the other side. Only one thing in there: a dirty cloth sack homemade out of what had once been a small pillowcase. Its contents rattled when he lifted it out. He undid the crude drawstring, spread the cloth open.

String of colored beads. Tiny brass cat. Half a dozen new pennies. Top to a simulated gold fountain pen. Woman’s compact made of scratched silver plate. Shiny copper pipe fitting. Pair of fingernail clippers on a silver chain. And a single gold-filled hoop earring with a broken fastener.

Bright and pretty. Spook’s stash.

There were two other items in the bag. One was an old, torn, edgeworn Valentine’s Day card on the front of which was a tufted gold and red heart enclosing the words I LOVE YOU. Inside, below the usual sentimental message, was an inked signature that read Your Dottie. The other item was a piece of heavy, slick paper folded into a two-inch square. It had been opened and refolded so many times that the paper had begun to separate along the creases. He spread it out carefully on the filthy carpet.

Page of black-and-white, head-and-shoulders studio portraits from an old school yearbook. Mix of some forty teenage boys and girls, twenty on each side, their names printed below each photo. One of the portraits had a crude heart drawn around it, like the heart on the Valentine’s card, in smudged pencil: a dark-haired, attractive girl named Dorothy Lightfoot. Dorothy... Dot.

There was nothing on either side of the page to identify the school or year. No writing or other marks. And none of the boys was named Luke or Duke or anything similar. Or Snow.

Runyon refolded the page, tucked it into a different pocket. His watch said he’d been there a little more than eight minutes. He said aloud, “ ‘And when the big dog comes home, he’ll tell you what the little dog done.’ ” But Big Dog wouldn’t be coming home, most likely. And when he did turn up again, it’d be the SFPD he told his story to.

Runyon had had as much of this place as he could stand. He pulled the drawstring on the cloth, returned the sack to the pocket where he’d found it, stood the knapsack in its original place. The only reason he locked the door behind him when he left was to keep the other residents from stealing the knapsack.

Downstairs, the vampire woman was still doing nothing except sitting on her cranked-up chair and staring blankly into space. The dead eyes shifted to him as he approached her cage, watched him drop the passkey into the tray. Then, slowly and deliberately, she gave him the finger. Animal trick, like the baboon he’d once seen mooning a crowd of onlookers at the Seattle zoo. He ignored it, went out into the dirty streets and the clean rain.