Hennessey was waiting for me on 17th Street. Under his arm he had a single folder, which contained Stanley Ballard’s will and a copy of the appraisal. He had made no attempt to read the will—Walter Dreyfuss had given him a verbal summary—but he had looked the book appraisal over.
“What’s it say?”
“Book club fiction, almost without exception. Worthless.”
“W’ho did the appraisal?”
“That dame up in Evergreen. Rita McKinley.”
I grunted.
“So where does this leave us?” Hennessey said.
“Right back where we started. It was something small, and Bobby had to buy the whole damn library to get it; something so tiny you could carry it in your pocket, but so potent it makes the hair stand up on my neck just thinking about it.”
“How’re we gonna find it?”
“I’m gonna dig. I’m gonna comb through every piece of paper in this state if I have to.”
I dropped Hennessey at Ruby’s store, where he had parked his car, and I started back to my apartment for what I thought would be another long night’s work.
Then something happened that changed my life for all time.
15
I was full of nervous energy: I wanted something to break that would engage me fully and keep me going through the night. I had two possibilities, either of which ought to do it. I took the Ballard files up to my place, but when I started to work I decided to run down the U-Haul lead.
There are almost fifty places in Denver that rent U-Hauls. A lot of gas stations are subagents and rent them out of their back yards. I sat at the phone with a Yellow Pages and began to work. I did it the same way we had found the church, beginning at Bobby’s place and working in a widening circle between there and Madison Street. This is what police work is all about: your trigger finger always gets more action on the telephone than in any gunplay. I hummed “Body and Soul” between calls, trying to get a hint of the way Coleman Hawkins used to play it. “Dah-dah de dah-dah dumm.” It didn’t work. Nothing worked. I gave them Bobby’s name on the insane chance that someone somewhere might’ve had soup for brains and rented a $25,000 truck to a guy with no driver’s license. You never can tell. Lacking a file on Westfall, they would have to look through all their receipts for the night of June 10. I waited through interminable delays. Most of the little places had no extra help—the guy who rented the U-Hauls was the guy who pumped your gas. Customers came and went while I dangled on the phone. One place took almost thirty minutes, and it turned out that they hadn’t rented any trucks on the night in question.
The truck outlets themselves were, if anything, slower than the corner gas stations. Those places are all on computer now. This is supposed to make finding information faster and easier, but in real life it doesn’t turn out that way. Have you noticed how much longer you have to wait in bank lines, and at Target and Sears stores, since the computer came in? I hate computers, though I know that without them police work would be like toiling in a medieval zoo. After three hours of being told that the computer was down, that there were no such rentals, that they’d have to check and call me back, I was ready to adjourn to my favorite beanery. I couldn’t raise Carol, but when I’m that hungry I don’t mind eating alone.
Before I could get out of there, the phone rang.
It was Barbara Crowell. Her voice was quaking, terrified.
“Janeway! My God, I can’t believe you finally got off that phone!”
“Hello, Barbara,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Can you come over here?”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s… him.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I know he’s out there.”
“Out where?”
“Somewhere outside. I saw him.”
“When did you see him?”
She breathed at me for fifteen seconds. Then she said, “I think I’m losing my mind. 1 see him everywhere. I don’t know what to do. Everywhere I look I see his face. Then I look again and he’s gone. Then he’s there again. I hear a sudden noise and I freak out. I’m afraid of the dark. The telephone rings and I jump out of my skin. I answer it and there’s no one there. I know it’s him. All of a sudden I’m afraid of the goddamn dark. I’ve never been afraid of anything and now I see shadows everywhere.”
“All right, calm down. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”
I parked a block away from her place and walked over. I came up carefully, keeping in shadow. For a long time I stood across the street and watched her apartment, and nothing happened. Her light was a steady beacon at the top. I walked down the street and around the corner and came up from the back. There was no one around: I could see quite clearly. I skirted the house and went in through the front, and I stood in the dark hall and watched the street. It was quiet: people were settling in for the night.
I climbed the three flights to the top and knocked on her door.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
She clawed at the locks and ripped the door open.
“Jesus, what took you so long?”
“I wanted to walk around and look the place over.”
“Did you see him?”
“Barbara, there’s nobody there.”
She closed her eyes and collapsed against me. I held her with one arm and closed the door with the other. Eventually I got her to the sofa and sat her down. Then I went through it all again, the same routine we’d done before: the coffee, the calming words, the lecture. She looked like a little girl, ready to explode in tears. I couldn’t help being angry and sorry for her at the same time.
“Jackie doesn’t need to torture you, honey,” I said. “You do a good enough job on yourself.”
“I know I saw him this morning. That’s what set me off.”
“Where did you see him?”
“I was on my way to work. I had stopped at a red light and he pulled up beside me. I could sense him there looking at me.”
“What do you mean you could sense him? What does that mean?”
“I couldn’t look at him.”
“It might’ve been the man in the moon sitting there for all we know.”
“It was him. I saw his car. There couldn’t be another car like that, so don’t tell me I’m imagining it. When the light turned green he pulled out ahead of me and turned the corner. I couldn’t be mistaken about that car.”
I left her alone for a while. I turned down the lights and went to the window and looked down in the empty street.
“While you’re scaring yourself to death, Jackie’s probably home watching TV,” I said. Or breaking in a new dog, I thought.
“He’s not home,” she said. “He’s out there somewhere.”
I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
“Call him up if you think he’s home,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Go ahead, call him and see. You’re not afraid of him; call him and see if he’s home. If he is, I won’t bother you anymore.”
“All right.”
I didn’t need to look up the number: I had known it for more than a year. I dialed it and waited. No one answered.
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Looks like Jackie’s hiding out there in the bushes, just waiting for you to show your face.”
She shivered and the goose bumps started.
“I guess you can go hide in the bedroom,” I said. “Tremble in the dark for the rest of your life.”
She cried at that. She cried a good deal. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t know how to push her off the dime. What was worse, I wasn’t sure anymore what Jackie was ca-pable of, or what I wanted Barbara Crowell to do about him.
“God, I hate having you hate me,” she said at one point.
“If I hated you I wouldn’t be here. I told you before, this isn’t my line of work. I should be well fed and home by now, settling in for a long night’s work.”