Louise kept her eyes straight ahead. “I missed you.”
“But back there in Minneapolis you’d left a hot story on a back burner and you were afraid it would boil over, so—”
“Dinner? My treat?” she said abruptly. “I have to talk with you. Seriously.”
“Okay. I used to know a good place over in Tiburon.” He stopped by the Golden Gate Theatre as the light fired a burst of pedestrians across in front of them. He had forgotten the excitement of downtown crowds at night. He looked over at Louise. She was much more exciting. He said, “Anybody going to lose any sleep over you if we’re late home?”
The green beauty of her eyes was almost painful, like an unexpected blow to a nerve center. She shook her head and smiled. “You?”
The light changed. Runyan made the left into Taylor, edging around because now the pedestrians were flowing that way. He chuckled.
“Well... maybe a guy named Tenconi...”
Tenconi had Runyan backed up against the wall with one hand around the back of Runyan’s head, the other buried in Runyan’s throat. He grasped the Adam’s apple; he was going to rip it out and make the freaker eat it. Runyan was making a harsh buzzing noise.
The door buzzer, long and insistent, finally brought Tenconi awake. He couldn’t remember his dream, except that Runyan had been in it and that it had been pretty damn good. He checked the luminous face of his watch. Nine-thirty, a little past. He must have fallen asleep on the freaking couch.
The doorbell sounded again.
Tenconi gingerly swung his legs around and sat up. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. The burning in his groin had subsided, though his balls were still tender to the touch. He fumbled around, switched on the table lamp and squinted against the illumination. The bell rang again.
“Yeah, coming!” he yelled.
Freaking maid, why didn’t she use her key? He padded to the door on stockinged feet and put his head close to the panel.
“Yeah? Who?”
There was no response. Tenconi grunted and slapped aside the fancy wrought iron peephole cover and stooped slightly to put his eye to the little glassed orifice. The silenced .38 pressed against the outside of the peephole said PHHHT! and Tenconi spun away from the peephole with only one eye. He was dead before his knees started to buckle.
Chapter 18
The Dock Restaurant overlooked the Tiburon marina; from their window table they could watch the yachts rock at their moorings as the red and green jetty lights drew slow colored circles in the air. Angel Island, a dark unlit mass to the left, helped frame the city twinkling across the bay.
Louise set down her wine glass and leaned forward slightly. Her eyes glowed in the light of their candle.
“Now, young lady,” she said in mock-judicial severity, “if you would just tell the court in your own words about your abrupt disappearance and equally abrupt reappearance from—”
“Las Vegas,” said Runyan.
“Oh,” she said, much of her gaiety slipping away. “The auto rental form?”
“And a few phone calls. Vegas... Minneapolis... Rochester...” To her dismayed look, he nodded, “They aren’t going to bail you out of whatever trouble you’ve gotten yourself into this time, but please send money.”
“It wasn’t always that way,” she said, a little bitterly.
“How about stealing apples off the Mayo brothers’ estate?”
“Oh, that was true. But the book...” She waggled a palm-down hand. She finished the wine in her glass; her tone changed abruptly. “You know, when I was in high school and junior college I really did want to be a writer. I wrote all the time—”
“The stories in your hotel room,” said Runyan. “Window dressing from a long time ago?”
Louise nodded. “In a way. But it’s funny, now I’ve started writing again. As if wanting grew out of pretending.”
“Sort of like you and me, isn’t it?”
He kept being able to do that: catch her unawares, surprise her with an insight he shouldn’t have been capable of having. Why couldn’t it just be as simple as that?
“Exactly like you and me,” she said, hating the lie in the remark even as she made it. Runyan nodded again.
“Only your folks hadn’t heard from you in a year, and you weren’t listed in Minneapolis, and none of the Las Vegas data was any good any more. So...”
She held out her glass, glad of the respite, fighting the oddest compulsion to break out crying. But at the same time realizing that he was different from when she had walked away a few days ago. Subtly in command now, more sure of himself, more aggressive. Was it her coming back to him, showing her vulnerability, or was it something that had happened while she had been gone?
Runyan finished the bottle into both their glasses. “So,” he said, “where are we — really?”
“We’re in Tiburon, California, and I’m giving you the short happy life of Francis Macomber.”
“Hemingway,” said Runyan. To the surprise in her eyes, he added, “Prison library. Most of the guys wouldn’t crack a book unless it hit ’em first, but I read a lot. For a few hours you could live someone else’s life.”
“We’ll make this Frances Macomber — a.k.a. Louise Graham. I had two years at Rochester JC, was going to major in journalism at UofM, but I also had been dancing since I was five. That’s what I meant about my folks not always being that way. Until I was a teen-ager, they doted on me. Then I started going out with boys and then started staying out, and...”
“For me it was getting drunk, getting into fights, having my buddies or the cops bring me home at three in the morning...”
“Anyway, I was a pretty good dancer... ballet, tap, jazz — they called it ‘modern’ then — and acrobatic.”
She drank some wine. There was a far-off look in her eyes, and for the first time Runyan started to believe what she was telling him. She was really telling it to herself.
“Everybody kept saying I had what it takes to be a professional dancer. And for me being a professional meant glamor, easy money...”
“So you caught a bus to Vegas.”
“You’ve heard this story before.”
The waitress came around to ask them if they wanted coffee. They both did. She poured and withdrew.
“I was going to burn ’em up, knock ’em out...” Louise made an exaggerated sweeping motion with her hand. “ZOOM! Right to the top.” She added cream and sugar to her coffee. “Instead, ZOOM! Right into a casting director’s bed. Because Vegas is full of women who were told in their home towns that they had what it took. And who wanted the glamor and easy money just as much as I did...” Her voice rose slightly; her hands had closed into white-knuckled fists. “So I got into a show — but all it ever seemed to be was ostrich feathers and mesh stockings and bare boobs...”
He asked in an easy voice, “And a little favor for the management now and then?”
Louise gave a rueful little laugh. “You have heard this story before!” The animation died in her face. “All of a sudden I was at that line between amateur night and...”
“The first robbery I did was on a dare,” said Runyan. “A guy bet me fifty bucks I was afraid to climb up the side of an apartment building and steal somebody’s stamp collection. I got my fifty bucks and he made ten thousand fencing the stamps. So I turned professional. I went over the line.”
“I wasn’t sure where the line was, but I knew I was over it. Since I couldn’t stomach the thought of being a hooker, I started doing different kinds of favors, for a lot heavier people. Muling some grams here, once a kilo there... Flying to L.A. once a month to deposit skim money in a bank that wasn’t connected...”