Spook

1

He was the fourth applicant Tamara and I interviewed for the field operative’s job. On paper he had all the necessary qualifications and experience, but he didn’t make a very good first impression. Not much charisma, for one thing. And he had personal problems.

His name was Runyon, Jake Runyon. Native of Washington state, grew up in Spokane where his father had risen to the rank of police sergeant, lived most of his adult life in the Seattle area. Fourteen years with the Seattle PD, the first seven as a uniformed officer, the last seven working plainclothes on the robbery and then homicide details. Voluntary retirement with a partial disability pension five years ago, reason not set down in his resume. Since then, until six weeks ago, he’d worked as an operative for Caldwell & Associates, a solidly respectable Seattle investigative agency.

Plentiful professional credentials, but pretty sketchy on the personal side. Except for vital statistics — age 42, height 6’1, weight 190 — Runyon hadn’t supplied much information. Moved to San Francisco five weeks ago, in early November; current residence was an apartment on Ortega Street. Evidently he lived alone, since the only family reference he’d included was a terse “no dependents.” Shortly after establishing residence, he’d applied for a California investigator’s license and had been issued a temporary on the basis of his Washington state license. And that was all.

He showed up on time for his eleven A.M. appointment. Well-dressed in a suit and tie, freshly shaven except for a scimitar mustache, curly brown hair clipped short. He took an inclusive look around the office when he came in, without appearing to do so, the way a good investigator will in new surroundings. He had a crisp handshake and he made and held eye contact whenever he spoke to either Tamara or me. All of that was on the plus side.

On the negative side he looked as though he might have been or might still be ill. He had a large, compact frame and a slablike face, hammerhead-jawed and blunt-angled, like a chunk of quarried stone; but his clothes hung loosely on him, as if he’d recently lost some weight, and the stone slab had an unhealthy grayish cast and seemed to have developed fine cracks and crumbly edges that had nothing to do with age. There was a distance, an inward-turned reticence about him, too, that made him hard to read. For me it was more like confronting a closed fire door than interviewing a man.

He declined a cup of coffee, sat solid and stiff on one of the clients’ chairs — a waiting posture that didn’t change much throughout the interview. Lot of pressure built up behind that fire door, I thought. If he’s not careful, one of these days he’ll blow out an artery.

Tamara and I had worked up separate sheets of questions for each applicant. We’d also decided not to compare notes until all the applicants had been interviewed, so as to narrow down the field individually before we did it jointly. That way, we wouldn’t be inclined to try to influence each other during the process.

I got the ball rolling with Jake Runyon by asking, “The partial pension — what kind of disability do you have?”

“Far as I’m concerned,” he said, “I don’t nave any.”

“Then why the pension?”

“The department’s idea, not mine. All it is is a slight limp, left leg. You notice it when I came in?”

I said, “No,” and Tamara shook her head.

“Hardly anyone does, most days. Now and then, when the weather’s bad, I get twinges. You might be able to tell then, but you’d have to be paying close attention.”

“These twinges—”

“They don’t keep me off the job. Or from moving as fast as I always have. I can still run hard if I have to.”

“Broken leg what caused the limp?”

“Tibia fractured in three places. Two surgeries to get it fixed right.”

“How’d it happen?”

“High-speed chase in pursuit of a fugitive homicide suspect,” Runyon said. “A truck hit us and he got away. I came out of it lucky. My partner was driving. He came out of it dead.”

“Rough.”

“A shame and a waste. But it happens.”

“If the leg doesn’t cause you problems, why’d you take voluntary retirement?”

“They tried to chain me to a desk after I got out of the hospital the second time. No way. I’m a doer, not a sitter.”

Tamara frowned at that, but she made no comment.

I asked, “Any other physical problems?”

“No.”

“You look like you might’ve lost some weight—”

“I’m fine.” Through compressed lips.

“Have you had a recent physical exam?”

“Six months ago. My health’s good. I’ll get you confirmation if you want it.”

I let it go. “You went straight from the Seattle PD to Caldwell & Associates, is that right?”

“Right. Interviewed with them before I left the department, to make sure I had a job waiting. You know Caldwell?”

“We’ve had some minor dealings. Good outfit. You like working for them?”

“Well enough.”

“Field work the entire five years?”

“Mostly. Outside interviews, surveillance, bodyguard and security jobs, chasing bail jumpers — you name it.”

“Well, we’re a much smaller agency, as you can see. Not much surveillance or security work. Mainly we handle skip-traces, insurance claims investigations, background checks. And the occasional offbeat case that nobody else wants.”

“An familiar territory,” Runyon said. “If anything comes up that I haven’t dealt with before, it won’t take me long to learn the ropes. I’m a quick study.”

I made a couple of notes on his résumé. “Back to Caldwell. Any problems or hassles while you were with them?”

“If you mean black marks on my record, no. Lee Caldwell wouldn’t’ve given me the letter of recommendation if there were.”

“I’m just wondering why you left them,” I said.

“I wasn’t fired or let go. I resigned.”

“For what reason?”

Silence. He just sat there, looking halfway between Tamara and me. His eyes, more black than brown, were shadowed.

“Mr. Runyon?”

“My wife died,” he said.

Stone-faced and flat-voiced. I might’ve taken it for a cold response if it weren’t for what I saw in those shadowed eyes. For just a second, as he spoke the words, the door opened and I had a glimpse of what lay inside. Grief, suffering... emotion so raw and corrosive it was no wonder he had it under such tight guard.

Awkward moment. Tamara and I passed meaningless words of sympathy, the way you do. And she added, “Was it sudden?”

“Yes and no. Cancer. Three months alter the diagnosis, she was gone.” Pause, and then he said, “Twenty years. You think that’s a long time, but it’s not. It’s the blink of an eye.”

Yeah, I thought.

Tamara asked him, “That the reason you quit Caldwell, left Seattle?”

“I couldn’t stand it up there afterward.”

“Why’d you pick San Francisco?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Friends, relatives in this area?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Not unless it has something to do with your work.”

“It doesn’t,” Runyon said. Then he said, in a slow, dragging way as if the words scraped on the membranes of his throat, “My son lives here.”

“Son? You say on your resume that you have no dependents.”

“He’s not a dependent, he’s a grown man with a job of his own.” Runyon glanced at his hands, looked stonily at me. “Twenty years,” he said again. “Blink of an eye.”

“So you moved down here to be near him?”

“More or less.”

“Have you applied with any other agencies since you’ve been in the city? Other jobs of any kind?”

“No. You’re the first.”

“Getting acclimated, spending time with your son?”

“Getting acclimated. I haven’t seen him yet.”

“Oh? How come?”

He shook his head, sharply. “Like I said, it’s personal. I’d rather not talk about it, you don’t mind.”

I said, “Suit yourself,” but I sensed that at some level he did want to talk about it. The something hidden away behind that door was the lonely man’s conflicted hunger for privacy on the one hand, human contact and understanding on the other.

Tamara took over the questioning. “You computer literate, Mr. Runyon?”

“I can operate one of the things.”

“Mac or pc?”

“Mac.”

“Personal habits. You smoke?”

“No.”

“Drink?”

“Not much. Never on the job.”

“Recreational drugs?”

“No. I’ve seen too much of what crack and blow can do.”

“Pot?”

“No.”

“How do you feel about weed? Same category as hard drugs?”

“No. You want my honest opinion, marijuana should be decriminalized.”

“Why?”

“Same reason I think prostitution and all forms of gambling should be legalized,” Runyon said. “Trying to legislate morality is a waste of time, money, and manpower.”

“Uh-huh. Vice is here to stay.”

“Isn’t it?”

She said, “You know I’m a new partner in this agency, right?”

“So I gathered from the newspaper ad.”

“You mind taking orders from a woman?”

“I don’t have any problem with it.”

“Black woman just about young enough to be your daughter?”

“No problem with that either. I’ve worked with women, black and white, young and old. And my partner, the man who was killed in the chase, was black.”

“He was driving, you said?”

“The crash wasn’t his fault, if that’s what you’re getting at. I don’t hold grudges against dead men, Ms. Corbin. Or live ones, for that matter, black or white.”

“So you get along with everybody.”

“If they make a reasonable effort to get along with me. I don’t toady to anyone, and I’ve been known to question authority — male or female — if I think the situation warrants it. Might as well get that said up front. Otherwise, I’m easy enough. And a good investigator. I work hard, I don’t object to overtime or scut work, I don’t make unreasonable requests, and I don’t pad the expense account.”

That pretty much ended the interview. Runyon shook hands with each of us again, I told him we’d be in touch one way or the other, and away he went. He hadn’t cracked even the ghost of a smile the entire time.

“Mr. Personality,” Tamara said.

“Man with problems. But he seemed forthright enough.”

“Uh-huh. Working with that dude would be a laugh a minute.”

“Like working with me, you mean?”

“You can be pretty funny, specially when you’re not half trying.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Funny as Drew Carey, sometimes.”

Whoever Drew Carey was.

We had a total of nine applicants, and as a matter of course we ran a background check on each one. The check on Jake Runyon filled in some of the gaps in his personal record. He had problems, all right. A long, sad history of them.

He’d been married twice, the first time at age nineteen to a woman named Andrea Fleming. The following year she’d borne him a son, Joshua. Fourteen months after that, he’d left her for his second wife, Colleen McPhail — a bitter separation and divorce that culminated in Andrea getting full custody of the child and moving to San Francisco, where she’d taken back her maiden name and legally changed the child’s surname to Fleming. Evidently her bitterness hadn’t been tempered by time; one of Runyon’s friends on the Seattle PD told me she’d poisoned Joshua against his father and the boy had grown up hating him, refusing to have anything to do with him. Andrea Fleming had never remarried; had nursed her bitterness with alcohol and died two years ago of liver failure. Runyon’s second marriage, meanwhile, had apparently been rock-solid; he worshipped Colleen, the cop friend said. No children from that union, just the two of them together for two decades. And now Colleen Runyon was gone, too, of ovarian cancer, and Jake Runyon was alone except for his estranged son whom he still hadn’t seen after five weeks in the city.

Tamara said, “Moved down here looking to patch things up, probably, and he’s not getting anywhere.”

“Can’t be easy finding an antidote to a lifetime of poison.”

“Yeah. But the man did it to himself. Left his wife and baby for another woman. I’d be full of poison, too, if a man treated me that way.”

“For twenty years? I don’t think so. You’re not the type who lives in the past, uses booze to nurse an obsessive hatred.”

“Might be if I loved somebody enough in the first place.”

“As much as Runyon seems to have loved his second wife, you mean?”

“Sure, take his side. Men always stick up for each other.”

“I’m not taking anybody’s side,” I said. “We don’t know enough about any of these people to make judgments. All I’m saying is that there are no easy explanations for what people feel or do. Life can be a complicated mess sometimes.”

“Ain’t it the truth. What Runyon said about twenty years being the blink of an eye — you agree with it?”

“Absolutely. Life itself isn’t much more than three or four.”

By the end of the week I had the field narrowed down to two. Jake Runyon was one; the second was Deron Stewart, another ex-cop with similar credentials. Stewart was local, had worked eight years for the San Francisco office of a big national agency. The economic crunch brought about by the sudden collapse of the dot-com industry had cost him his job, but he’d been given an unqualified recommendation and he owned a solid if undistinguished record.

Tamara and I sat down late Friday afternoon to make our final decision. I said, “Two names on my list. There’s not much difference in background or experience, so as I see it the choice comes down to personalities.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How many names on your list?”

“Just one.”

“Really? Who?”

“You first.”

“Okay. Close call, but my vote goes to Deron Stewart.”

She gave me a bent smile. “How come you be picking him?”

“He has a nice, easy way of dealing with people,” I said. “Quick, too. And he’s upbeat.”

“Those the only reasons?”

“Only ones I can think of at the moment.”

“Fact that he’s African American didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Well...”

“You figure I’d be more comfortable working with a brother, maybe?”

“Come on, Tamara, don’t bring race into this.”

“Me? You the one playing that card, boss man. We been working together four years now, the last two full-time, and you don’t know me any better’n that? You think I’m still the hard-ass college kid I was back when?”

She’d been a hard-ass, all right — the type of young urban black who distrusts and dislikes whitey, sees racism lurking in every act and spoken word, and adopts a hostile attitude. The first day she’d walked into this office, to interview for the part-time job of computerizing my old-fashioned operation, she’d worn outlandish clothing, brandished her attitude like a sword, and all but accused me of having ulterior sexual motives toward her. We’d clashed, hard. But there’d been a connection nonetheless, one which allowed us to get past all the crap and give each other a second chance. And she had matured into a person with perspective, tolerance, compassion, a far more adult fashion sense, and a remarkable flair, passion, and professionalism for the detective business. Four years ago it would’ve been inconceivable to me that I’d one day offer her a full partnership — as inconceivable as making a firm decision to semi-retire at the age of sixty-one.

I said, “Anything but.”

“Then don’t be patronizing me,” she said. There was an edge to her voice, but no real heat. She was making a point, not starting an argument.

“I’m not patronizing you. I was only—”

“You really think Deron Stewart’s the best man?”

“Well... don’t you?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He’s a hound, that’s why not.”

“Hound?”

“Pussy hound. Didn’t you see the way he looked at me, how long he held onto my hand after we interviewed him? Sniff, sniff, sniff, with his big old tongue hanging out.”

“Was he that obvious?”

“Was to me. Man’s sly, but not so sly a smart woman can’t see what he is. He’d be hitting on me inside a week. Be hitting on any other woman he figured might be available, too, black or white, every chance he had.”

“You mean while on the job?”

“On the job, off the job, in his sleep. Trust me, he’s a hound. I can’t work with a hound no matter what color he is.”

I like to think I’m a good judge of character, that I can pick up on obvious flaws on a first meeting. Not where Deron Stewart was concerned, evidently. Because he was a black man? Because I’d wanted to believe Tamara would be happier, more comfortable with someone of the same race — patronizing her, as she’d claimed, with reverse racism? Or just because I was getting old and missing signals, more ready for the pasture than I wanted to admit?

She said, “What’s the other name on your list?”

“Jake Runyon.”

“Right. Only name on mine.”

“I thought you didn’t much care for Runyon’s past or personality.”

“Didn’t much care for you either in the beginning,” Tamara said. “Man’s a pro, that’s the main thing. I can work with him.”

“So are you a pro,” I said. “Someday you’ll be a better one than I ever was.”

“Not better, but just as good.” No false modesty in Ms. Corbin.

“So it’s Runyon then?”

“Best man for the job. Only one in the bunch worth your time and mine.”

I made the call to tell Jake Runyon that he was hired. All he said was, “Good. When do I start?”