“I know it. Still…”
“Why do you suppose he wants to see you?”
“No clue. But I have to find out.”
“Of course you do.”
“And I wish I didn’t.”
“Do you want me to call Cybil? She’ll want to know.”
“Not yet. Better wait until after I see him.”
I took 101 south to Redwood City. The 280 freeway would have been faster, even with the rush-hour clog getting across to the west side, but on this errand of mercy-if that was what it was-I was willing to put up with the commuter-crawl delay. Or so I thought when I started out. The trouble was, Dancer rode with me all the way down.
He was a writer, a damn good one back in the postwar forties when pulp magazines were still a viable form of popular entertainment. Creator of private eye Rex Hannigan, whose hard-boiled exploits had run in Midnight Detective until the magazine’s demise in the early fifties, then been chronicled in a series of softcover mystery novels during that decade’s paperback boom. The Hannigan stories, particularly those in the pulps, had had energy, flair, innovative plotting-the work of a raw talent that might have been developed through care and diligence into a voice to be reckoned with in the crime-fiction field. But Dancer had wasted his gift. Taken the easy road into fast-money hackwork to support a hard-living, hard-boozing lifestyle. As of ten years ago, he’d published upward of two hundred novels-mysteries, Gothics, bodice-ripper historicals, movie tie-ins, traditional westerns, adult westerns, softcore porn, hardcore porn, just about anything somebody would pay him to write.
Our paths had first crossed down the coast in Cypress Bay, where he’d been living at the time, on a case involving one of his paperback mysteries. The second time was at a pulp magazine convention in San Francisco where I’d met Kerry; he’d been one of the guests-along with Kerry’s mother and father, Cybil and Ivan Wade, who’d also been pulp writers-and had managed to get himself arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. He liked me because I got him off the hook: they don’t let you have booze or a typewriter in jail. The third and last time I’d seen him had been a brief encounter in Redwood City, when I’d looked him up to gather information about the murder of yet another former pulpster, Harmon Crane. All in all, we’d spent an aggregate of less than twenty-four hours in each other’s company. And yet whenever I thought of him he was a vivid presence in my memory.
I knew him and I didn’t know him; he was both an open book and a conundrum. Rowdy, sharp-tongued, bitter, self-mocking, with a penchant for trouble and bad decisions: he could make people dislike, even hate him without half trying. A little of him went a long way. Yet there was something about him, an innate vulnerability, that built a certain amount of pity in me. In a sense he was a tragic figure; he had no luck and had suffered a good deal of adversity, both personal and professional, that wasn’t his fault. He was not easy to deal with because it had never been easy for him to deal with himself. He knew he’d compromised his talent, and hated the fiction whore he’d become, and that was one of two reasons he kept dragging himself down into the depths. The other reason-and the other reason I pitied him-was his fifty-year letch for Kerry’s mother.
I remembered how he’d looked that last day in Redwood City, on a stool in a sleazy neighborhood bar called Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern. Sagging jowls, heavy lines and wrinkles on his face and neck, tracery of ruptured blood vessels in his cheeks, rum-blossom nose. Dissipated, rheumy, too thin for his big frame as if the flesh were hanging on his bones like a scarecrow’s tattered clothing. I’d had the thought then that he wasn’t long for this world; maybe that was why I’d assumed he must be dead by now.
I remembered some of what he’d said to me that day, too. He’d just lost an assignment to write a series of adult westerns-screwed it up himself somehow, probably, though he blamed the editor. I’d asked him if he was still writing and he’d said, “Sure, always at the mill. Got a few proposals with my agent, a few irons in the fire. And I’m working up an idea for a big paperback suspense thing that might have a shot.” Face-saving lies. I had stopped by his furnished room before going to Mama Luz’s, had a quick look inside, and there’d been no sign of his typewriter. He must have hocked it to supplement his Social Security, buy more booze and cigarettes.
Russ Dancer, hunched on a bar stool. A little drunk, a little maudlin, a whole lot lonely, wanting me to stay and have a drink with him, begging for a few more minutes of companionship and compassion. And I’d walked out on him and never gone back. Why hadn’t I bothered to look him up again, try to find out how he was doing? Inertia, lack of any real motivation… lousy excuses. He considered me his friend, and for a friendless man like him, that meant something. It should’ve meant a little something to me in return.
Ten long years. And he’d been down there all that time, living on Social Security and dying by centimeters. And now he was finally about to get what he’d been after for Christ knew how long, that kept eluding him because of an iron constitution and a perverse nature and a hair shirt as thick as they come.
I felt lousy by the time I got to Redwood City. I felt, dammit, right or wrong, as though I’d betrayed a trust.
Kaiser Permanente Hospital.
Bed in a ward, surrounded by a curtain on an oblong frame.
Dancer, hooked up to machines.
Not the Dancer I’d known, not even that last time at Mama Luz’s. A shadow, a husk, a stick figure topped by a death’s head coated with gray fuzz and age spots. Lying there motionless, eyes shut, his breathing aided by oxygen tubes but still coming in wheezes and gasps. My mouth dried out, looking down at him. I had to work some spit through it before I could speak.
“Hello, Russ.”
He’d known I was there; a nurse had gone in first to tell him he had a visitor. The shrunken head turned slowly, the eyes flicked open and focused on me. A grimace that tried to be a smile moved the corners of his mouth. Words came in little bursts fragmented by wheezes, so low that I had to lean close to hear him.
“No tengo… for good this time… eh, paisano? Goddamnit.. to hell.”
It took a few seconds for that to signify. The old Spanish cowboy lament he’d been fond of quoting at one time as a metaphor for his life and career. “No tengo tabaco, no tengo papel, no tengo dinero — goddamnit to hell.”
There was a white metal chair at the foot of the bed. I pulled it up alongside, sat down. Better that than standing and looming over him. This was awkward and painful enough as it was.
All I could think of to say was, “I’m sorry.”
“What for? We all… gotta go… sometime.”
Some more easily than others. I nodded.
“You don’t mean it… anyway. Nobody… gives a shit… when a hack writer croaks.”
“I do, or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Pity,” he said. “Pity visit… no different than… pity fuck.”
Even on his deathbed, the Dancer tongue was as crude and acrid as ever.
“Your friend Trail cares,” I said.
“Buck? Hah, that’s a… that’s a laugh.”
“Why would he call me if he didn’t care?”
“Paid him, that’s why. Twenty… twenty bucks. Bet he’s… over at Mama Luz’s… drinking it up right now.”
“One of the doctors or nurses would’ve done it for free.”
“Wouldn’t trust… any of those bastards. Nurses… can’t even empty bedpan…” A cough shook him, made him wheeze harder. “Besides, what do I… care about money… now…” More coughs, a staccato series of them that led to a gasping struggle for breath.
“Russ? Should I call the nurse?”
“… No. Be okay… not time yet…”
The struggle went on for another fifteen or twenty seconds. That could be me, I thought. If I hadn’t quit smoking when I did, if I hadn’t started taking better care of myself. The thought put little ripples of cold on my neck.