Free Mourners: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) by Bill Pronzini Page B

not you?”
    “Well, he knows. He’s a good detective, he must have figured it out somehow. And then he confronted you and you told him the whole story. Is that the way it was?”
    “Why don’t you ask him?”
    “I have. He just keeps stonewalling. Did you swear him to secrecy? He’d never break a promise to you.”
    “I didn’t swear him to secrecy.”
    “All right, then, it was a joint decision. The two of you trying to protect me. Well, it’s misguided. I don’t need protecting, I need to know the truth. I’ve had all I can stand of secrets and lies.”
    Cybil drained her glass before she said, “I’ve never lied to you, Kerry.”
    “Not openly, maybe. Lies of omission are still lies.”
    “Only if they stem from certain knowledge.”
    “I don’t understand that.”
    “You want to know the truth. But the fact is, I can’t tell you because I don’t know myself. Not beyond any doubt.”
    “Another evasion.”
    “No, it isn’t. Kerry . . .”
    “You and Russ Dancer, dammit. You had an affair with him, didn’t you.”
    “I did not. You know how I felt about the man.”
    “Later, yes. Not how you felt about him during the war.”
    “I tolerated him then. I hated him afterward.”
    “After D-day.”
    “After the war ended, yes.”
    “Ivan was in Washington on D-day. Did you and Dancer celebrate together? Is that when you slept with him?”
    “I would never have voluntarily slept with that man.”
    “You had other affairs. With that pulp editor, Frank Colodny, for one.”
    Cybil winced. “Mistakes, foolish youthful mistakes. But never with Dancer. Never.”
    “Then why were you so upset by that envelope he left you when he died? What was in the letter he wrote you, what was in his unpublished manuscript? What’s the real significance of D-day?”
    “It’s not what you think.”
    “Isn’t it? Cybil, I can count to nine—I was born nine months after D-day. Was Ivan really my father? Or was it Russ Dancer?”
    Out, now. All the way out into the open and lying there between them like the scab off an open wound. Cybil squeezed her eyes shut for three or four seconds. An expression of pain mixed with bitterness changed the shape of her face.
    “No!” she said in a fierce whisper.
    “But he could be, couldn’t he? That’s what you’ve been hiding, you and Bill, these past three months.”
    “Ivan was your father. Ivan.”
    “You want it to be Ivan, but you’re not one hundred percent positive.”
    “Ivan, Ivan, Ivan!”
    “But it
could
have been Dancer. I can see it in your face.” She caught Cybil’s hand, held it tight in both of hers.“Why won’t you admit it? Don’t you understand, I have to know! Today, now, right now!”
    Her voice sounded strained, desperate, too-loud in her own ears. Cybil’s stare was not the only one directed at her; all the eyes made her shrink inside herself, her skin feel loose and prickly.
    Cybil’s mouth moved; Kerry could barely hear the words. “Why? Why the sudden urgency?”
    Lies of omission, secrets—she was as guilty of them as Cybil and Bill. Put an end to hers here and now. She’d known she might have to; it couldn’t be concealed much longer anyway. Come clean as she was making Cybil come clean.
    “Medical reasons,” she said.
    “I don’t . . . what do you mean?”
    “If there’s any chance that Dancer was my father, it means my medical history might be different. Different inherited genes, good and bad. I have a doctor’s appointment later this afternoon—that’s why I have to know now.”
    “. . . Doctor’s appointment?”
    “With a surgeon. For a biopsy.”
    “Oh my God!”

10
    Stonestown, off Nineteenth Avenue near San Francisco State University and Lake Merced, was the city’s first big shopping mall, built in the sixties to serve west side and Daly City residents. In its early years it had been open-air, with shops off a central courtyard and side ells that were like arctic tundras whenever the wind and fog came