“Yeah, I heard.”
“You going to do anything about it?”
“What do you want me to do?”
Ashley laughed. “Nothing. Come on, let’s go eat. I’m starving. Bye, Detective. Bye, Sandy. Try not to cry too much tonight-your complexion’s not so good as it is.”
The two of them went off, the girl trailing more laughter.
Sandra said, “Kelso’s daughter. But I guess you figured that out.”
He nodded. “And the mayor’s son.”
“Yeah. She’s a bitch and he’s a wimp. He lets her lead him around by his dick.”
“She doesn’t like Jerry much.”
“Not anymore. She doesn’t like anybody much except herself.”
“Okay. Now tell me what you want me to do about Jerry, straight out.” He put a hand on the doorknob. “Otherwise I’m leaving.”
“No, don’t. Please.”
He waited.
“… Suppose I do know where he is,” she said.
“I’m listening.”
“Would you talk to him? If the right person… you know, somebody he could trust… I think that’s all it would take.”
“Why me? What about his father?”
“Jerry won’t talk to him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s afraid to. Afraid his dad won’t believe him.”
“Does he know you came to see me?”
“No, it was my idea.”
“What makes you think he’ll talk to me, a stranger?”
“Maybe he won’t. I don’t know. I’m just desperate, that’s all.” She drew a shaky breath. “He has to talk to somebody before it’s too late. He doesn’t have any reason to be afraid of you. And he knows you got hurt by whoever’s trying to make him look guilty.”
“Does he have any idea who framed him or why?”
“No. I don’t, either.”
“You know that if I do talk to him and he won’t go in voluntarily, I’m legally bound to give him up. I’d lose my license if I didn’t.”
“I know,” she said in a small voice. “But it’d be a lot better that way than Kelso tracking him down.” Her pale blue eyes appealed to him. “Will you, if I can get him to talk to you?”
In other circumstances Runyon might have turned her down. The assault and the concussion gave him a vested interest, but the quickest way for a private detective to lose his license was to get involved in a major felony investigation without permission. It just wasn’t his business. But something else was his business-the job he’d come to Gray’s Landing to do. He took a fierce pride in his work; if there was one thing he hated, it was to leave a job, any job, unfinished.
“All right,” he said, “but it has to be in person, not on the phone.” And if and when he did talk to Jerry Belsize, like it or not, he’d serve him with the subpoena at the same time.
8
TAMARA
So here she was. All set for another wild and crazy hiphop Saturday night.
Livin’ large, partyin’ half the night and doing the nasty the other half. Down and dirty ‘cause she was under thirty. Young and sweet and full of heat. Yeah, baby. You go, girl.
Except she wasn’t going anywhere. Only hip-hop she’d be doing was sitting around on one hip or the other while she sucked down diet soda and then hopping up to go to the bathroom. Only nasty she’d be doing was in her fantasies, and she didn’t even have enough of them right now to say hello to Mr. V. Only party she’d be going to was the pity party she was throwing for herself. Young and sweet and full of defeat.
She sighed. Didn’t have to stay home on Saturday night. Could’ve called up Vonda or one of the other girlfriends and gone out roaming.. except that Vonda and Lucille and Joleen all had steady men or other plans. Could’ve gone out by herself to one of the Mission or SoMa clubs, done the singles crawl, found some other lonely soul to spend the night with… except that she’d tried it before and the only guys she’d met were weird, like that stockbroker dude, Clement Rawls, with his blond wig hang-up.
Six thirty already. No place to go, and the only exercise she was getting was slap-talking herself for being a lump. She didn’t feel like reading or vegging out in front of the tube or even listening to music. The only thing she did feel like was heading out to the nearest Golden Arches and stuffing herself on McGrease. Not that she would. Damn, no. Worked too hard to lose weight to start moving back into Fat City just because she was lonely and depressed and horny and about sixteen other things.
In spite of herself she wondered what Horace was doing tonight. Playing a gig with the Philadelphia Philharmonic… no, symphonies were dark during the summer. Out with Mary from Rochester, doing the town. Or home alone doing each other. Or maybe planning their big October wedding, making out the guest list. Tamara could just imagine him with his face all scrunched up the way it got when it was puzzling on something, saying, “What do you think, Mary, should we send my ex Tamara an invitation or not?”
Well, damn him and her, too. Second-chair cello, second violinist-a couple of second-rate musicians who deserved each other and their second-rate lives in the City of Brotherly Love. She was well rid of that man. Sure she was. She knew it; everybody said so. So why did he keep popping up inside her head like a big black smiley jack-in-the-box?
Clue in, Tamara. You know why he keeps popping up. Takes time to get over somebody you thought was the love of your life. A lot more time than three months.
She hopped off the couch and went to pee again. World’s smallest bladder. When she came out, she detoured into the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Bottle of sauvignon blanc, nice and cold. No. Only make her more depressed, and she’d feel worse in the morning. She looked at the cans of Diet Coke, made a face, and shut the door. Well? Gonna do what now?
Uh-huh.
Work.
Only thing she was likely to get her head into tonight. Most nights, for that matter. If it wasn’t for the heavy agency caseload and the fact that she could do a lot of the Net searches and billing from home, somebody’d have to come in and scrape her off the wall.
Not that she minded the overtime. Thing was, she loved detective work, even the routine stuff. Never imagined she would, when she first went to work for Bill, after seeing Pop so tired from all the overtime he put in at the Redwood City PD and him drumming it into her and Claudia’s heads that one cop in the family was enough. Big career in the computer industry, that was what Tamara had mapped out for herself. But the detective business got into your blood after a while. Fascinating, for the most part. Stimulating-sometimes too stimulating. Partner in a growing concern, her own boss, and she made good money and eventually she’d make a lot more as the agency continued to expand.
Of course it had its downsides, same as police work. All the hours you had to put in, the sometimes boring routine, the kinds of people and situations you had to deal with…
Blink. New thought: The business not only sucks you in; it controls your life. Look at Bill, all those years running a one-man agency, a real workaholic loner before he met Kerry. Look at Jake, always on the move, still working 24-7 whenever he could, still a loner with his wife gone and his son not wanting anything to do with him. Look at her. Before she got into the game, she’d had a love life and a social life and she’d played hard and didn’t worry about much and didn’t have any hang-ups she couldn’t deal with. Now here she was, no love life, no social life, a solitary working fool herself. Maybe there was something about the business that screwed up normal lives. Or maybe it was just that people like Bill and Jake and her were the ones who were attracted to it. Maybe she hadn’t known herself as well as she’d thought; maybe underneath all the teenage grunge and cockiness and uptight racial bullshit there’d been a born workaholic loner inside her tubby body waiting to pop out.
Well, anyway, it was something to think about. Or not think about.
Okay. Work.
She went into the small second bedroom that Horace had used to practice cello compositions before the lowbrow neighbors complained. The apartment was his before she moved in and it was still jammed with his memory and his scent. Damn hand-me-down, like his Toyota Camry. She’d keep the car a while longer, but no way was she going to renew the apartment lease come the end of October. She could afford a better neighborhood than the avenues fog belt, a bigger apartment, and besides, living well was the best revenge. Wasn’t too early to start the hunt for a new place, see what was available in other parts of the city. Might as well start tomorrow. She didn’t have anything better to do on another boring Sunday.