Free Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) by Bill Pronzini

I hadn’t seen much of Emily tonight, either—shut inside
her
room, listening to music and doing her homework—and her good-night kiss had been perfunctory. Home after a long, hard day, cradled in the bosom of my loving family? No, sir. Ignored, misunderstood, and consigned to bed with
Murder in Hot Pants
and
Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon
for company.
    The first title was a medium raunchy porn thing thinly wrapped in a mystery-story plot. One cover blurb said it was “a brand-new, uncensored, unexpurgated bombshell by Bart Hardman”; a second blurb said, “He fought the scum of humanity to follow her on the road straight to hell!” Dancer hadn’t wasted any time getting down and dirty; the first sexual encounter between the narrator, a tough cop named McHugh, and a Hollywood starlet “whose epic body had starred with a cast of thousands” started in the middle of page 6. I quit reading at the top of page 7. Russ Dancer’s sexual fantasies held no interest for me, and after the time I’d spent with the wasted shell of him tonight, they seemed somehow repellent.
    The other book was a western, about a range war in Wyoming, loaded with stick-figure characters and enoughcarnage in the first fifty pages to fill half a dozen novels. Pure hackwork, the writing slapdash; but here and there as I skimmed through I saw little blips—a simile, a descriptive passage, a brief exchange of dialogue—of the raw-talent, pulp-era Russell Dancer, of the writer he might have been. It made me sad, as evidence of waste always does.
    I closed this one at page 50, put both books on the night-stand next to Dancer’s legacy. I’d brought the envelope in there with me just in case Kerry had any ideas of jumping the gun on her mother. Tomorrow I would take all the books I’d appropriated and put them in Kerry’s Goodwill bag. I’d had more than enough of the corrupt hack Dancer had become. If I ever had another urge to read him, I’d pick up an old issue of
Midnight Detective
and commune with Rex Hannigan for a little while. Probably not, though. Probably not.
    I lay there in the dark and felt sorry for him and sorry for myself and wished to Christ he’d picked on somebody else to carry out his dying wishes.
    I n the morning I had some outside work that kept me out of the office until around eleven. Tamara was busy on the phone when I walked in. Runyon was there, too, neatly dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, studying the screen on his laptop.
    “Morning, Jake. Busy?”
    “Not very. Heading out pretty soon. The Great Western fraud claim.”
    “Talk to you for a minute before you go?”
    “Sure.” He switched off the computer, closed the lid. “Here or in your office?”
    “Make it the office. More comfortable in there.”
    He followed me in and we got settled on either side of mydesk. He sat solid and stiff in the client’s chair, the way he always did in the office, as if he were uncomfortable sitting in the presence of someone else. Or as if he’d forgotten how to relax. He was a boulder of a man, compact, with a slablike, jut-jawed face that seldom smiled. When he’d first come in to interview for the field operative’s job, his clothes had hung loosely on him and he’d looked ill—the physical effects of six months of watching his second wife die a slow, painful death from ovarian cancer. Since then he’d gained weight, color; outwardly he seemed to have come to terms with his loss. But there was still a distance, an inward-turned reticence about him, that said differently. Inside he was still the same sad and bitter and angry man, maybe always would be. I liked him, Tamara liked him, and in his way it was probably recipocal; after what we’d gone through together just before Christmas, there was a professional bond among the three of us. But that was as far as it went. We weren’t friends, didn’t socialize, didn’t talk about anything except business. Any efforts to personalize our relationship were politely