Spook

8

Monday was one of those dark, dreary December days — cold, light rain, low-hanging clouds. My mood was pretty upbeat in spite of the weather, but not Tamara’s; she blew in like a raincloud, wet and sullen. Uncommunicative, too. She growled unintelligibly at my “Good morning,” grumbled likewise at my offer of a cup of coffee, threw her coat at the rack — it slid off the hook to puddle on the floor, where she left it — and stomped to her desk. On went her computer; she sat there glowering at it.

“Okay,” I said, “what’d you do with her?”

Mutter that sounded like “Who?”

“New Tamara, the pleasant one. I could swear I’m looking at Old Tamara, the gloomy, irascible brat.”

Another mutter, this one with a four-letter word in it.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Definitely Old Tamara. I never did like her much.”

Silence.

I made a couple more futile efforts to jolly her out of her mood. Then I went and refilled my cup at the hotplate as an excuse to take a closer look at her. Puffy cheeks, baggage under her eyes, the whites shot through with red veins. Not New Tamara, not Old Tamara — an alarmingly different Tamara.

“You want to talk about it?” I said, serious now.

“No.”

“Something happen over the weekend? Looks like you haven’t had much sleep.”

“I’m okay,” she lied. “Don’t worry your head about me.”

“Come on, Ms. Corbin. I’m a detective, I can deduce the difference between okay and not okay.”

Mutter.

“I didn’t get that.”

“Said I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Who?”

Silence.

“Tamara, who is it you don’t want to talk about?”

She made eye contact for the first time. Her expression was more than just haggard; it was etched with pain, the mental kind. “It’s all over,” she said. “Finished, kaput.”

“What is? You don’t mean you and Horace?”

“Man wants me to marry him.”

“He what?”

“Marry his sorry ass. I moved out on Saturday.”

“I don’t get that. Moved out?”

“Staying with Claudia till I can find someplace else,” she said, and pulled a face. “Vonda doesn’t have a spare room, Lucille’s mother’s living with her now, wasn’t anybody else.”

I stared at her. Claudia was her older sister, Vonda and Lucille were two of her girlfriends. That much made sense, but the rest of it... “You moved out on Horace because he asked you to marry him?”

“No way I’m going to Philadelphia with him.”

“... Where did Philadelphia come from?”

“His big dream. Seat with a symphony orchestra.”

“In Philadelphia? Good for him, but—”

“Audition last Friday, now he’s got his big chance.”

“So it’s definite?”

“Definite enough. Has to practice with the orchestra first, but they wouldn’t be paying his way if he wasn’t gonna get the gig. Besides, he’s a fine cellist. Gonna get better, too, maybe in Yo-Yo Ma’s class someday, wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Well, then, you can’t blame him for—”

“I don’t blame him. Go to Philly, play his cello, have his dream, have a nice life.”

“Are you saying he gave you some kind of ultimatum? Marry him and move back east, or it’s all over between you?”

“No. But he expected it, you know what I’m saying?”

Jake Runyon walked in just then and put an end to this confusing exchange. Tamara glowered at him and began to pound her computer keyboard. He glanced at me, nodded when I made a go-easy gesture behind Tamara’s back. Horace situation on hold.

I asked Runyon how things had gone on Saturday afternoon. He said, “Turned up a few things, nothing definite,” and gave me a terse rundown.

“Those genital scars might be an angle if we can get a general fix on where Spook came from,” I said. “Can’t be many near-castration cases on record.”

Tamara had been listening. She muttered, “Be one in San Francisco if that man don’t keep his distance.”

When a woman is in a mood like hers, all primed and loaded and ready to go off, the smartest thing a man can do is to ignore her. Runyon knew it, too. He said to me, “Pretty severe wounds, self-inflicted or not. Professionally treated, from the look of the scars. Bound to be hospital records somewhere.”

“You think there might be a connection to those ghosts of his?”

“Could be. The guy with the mole I can’t figure yet.”

“Odds are he’s the shooter.”

“Or a scout for the shooter. Linked somehow, anyway.”

“Probably.”

“Question is, why track down and blow away a disturbed homeless man? Homeless and harmless, by all accounts.”

“Motive might be tied up in who Spook was, his background.”

“Maybe. You have anything else for me today?”

“I don’t think so. Tamara?”

“Nothing pressing except the job for McCone Investigations.”

“Almost finished with that. My baby, anyway.”

Runyon said, “Then I’d like to work the streets again, try to get leads on the guy with the mole and this Big Dog character.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Just remember to check in,” Tamara said, “you find something or not.”

“I won’t forget.”

I said, “One thing before you go, Jake. You own a firearm?”

“Three-five-seven Magnum.”

“You’ll need to get it registered in California. Bonding company requirement.”

“Already taken care of. Soon as I had a permanent address.”

“Premises?”

“And carry, both.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You must’ve pulled a string somewhere to get a carry permit without bonafide employment.”

“A couple of strings,” Runyon said. “All in who you know.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

When he was gone, I said to Tamara, “About you and Horace—”

That was far as I got. She swung around on me, scowling and sparking. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore. That’s all I been doing since Friday night, talking to or about that man.”

“I’m sorry, I know it must be hard for you.”

“Just don’t be telling me we can work something out. He keeps saying it, Claudia keeps saying it, I don’t want to hear it out anybody else’s mouth.”

“Okay. No questions, no comments, no advice. Peace and quiet in the workplace.”

That bought me one of her slitty-eyed looks. “You sure you a man, all nice and reasonable like that?”

“Last time I looked.”

“Hah. Now that’s typical, comes down to that every time.”

“What does?”

“How a man thinks. Ask him if he’s sure he’s a man, right away he says ‘Last time I looked.’ Dude that used to draw ‘Bloom County,’ he had it right on.”

“ ‘Bloom County’?”

“One strip, this feminist tells Opus and Bill the Cat to take another look at the one thing gives meaning to their meaningless lives, and what do they do?”

I had no idea who Opus or Bill the Cat were. “I don’t know, what?”

“Drag open their shorts and stare at their dicks. Never catch a woman saying ‘Last time I looked’ and opening her panty hose and staring at her—”

“Never mind! Let’s just drop the subject, shall we?”

“Men,” she muttered, and went back to abusing her keyboard.

I had two cases working. The least important was an employee investigation for one of the city’s small engineering firms; the employee was in a position of some trust, and the head of the firm had cause to suspect that the trust had been violated — that the employee might be passing bid specs to a rival company. The priority case was the subcontract for McCone Investigations.

Sharon McCone was an old friend, and in small ways something of a protégé. Her agency down on the bayfront had prospered in recent years, to the point where she now had a staff of six and a caseload that many times larger than the one Tamara and I carried. By dint of several high-profile cases, she’d developed a reputation for results that now and then brought her plum jobs. The most recent was a politically and media sensitive investigation of the city’s building-inspection department. It had started out as a relatively simple probe into whether or not a senior official, one Joseph Patterson, was taking kickbacks in exchange for speeding up the permit process, but it had blossomed into a revelation of corruption in other arms of city government. The group that had hired her, headed by the deputy in order to satisfy them McCone and her overworked staff needed help with certain aspects of the investigation. Occasionally in such situations she subcontracted work to other operatives like Tamara and me.

Our part of the inquiry had been fairly extensive, if routine, and some of the information I’d dug up had turned out to be vital — McCone’s word when I passed it on to her. The entire case was close to the finish now. A few more chunks of hard evidence, and she’d turn over enough ammunition to the deputy mayor and the D.A. to prosecute Patterson and two of his cronies and to remove a few others from their entrenchment in the city pork barrel.

But the last chunk from us would have to wait a while longer. The two calls I made produced zero results, both sources being unavailable until later in the day. There wasn’t much else I could do until I talked to them.

Dead silence in the office now. Tamara was sitting zombielike, staring off into space. Hurting and angry and full of gloom; I could almost see the dark cloud hanging above her head, like the character in Li’l Abner. As sorry as I felt for her, her bleak mood was having an effect on me. I decided I needed an airing. Work on the engineering employee job could wait until later, and it was getting on toward lunch time and I was hungry. Imminent semiretirement had done wonders for my appetite. If I didn’t watch out, it would eventually do greater wonders for my waistline.

I told Tamara where I was going, that I’d be back around one. Her response was a grunt. Who says it’s so great to be young? I thought, and beat it out of there before youth took another bite out of my Monday.