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

house? Did it look lived in?”
    “Hard to tell. All the windows blinded so I couldn’t get a look inside. Nothing in the front or back yards but weeds.”
    “Talk to any of the neighbors?”
    “Not yet. Didn’t want to risk it yet.”
    “Probably wise. So you’re going back tonight?”
    “Yeah.” She hesitated, a frown working up little rows in the smooth skin of her face. “Funny thing,” she said then.
    “What is?”
    “Something that went down last night.”
    “What kind of something?”
    “What I saw, or thought I saw,” she said. “Keeps messing around in my head. I did some checking, but . . . I don’t know, it’s probably nothing. Just my bad imagination, you know what I’m saying?”
    “No,” I said. “What is it you saw?”
    “Well, while I was—”
    The phone rang just then and cut her off. The call was for me, and by the time I finished with it Tamara was involved in a call of her own. I meant to pick up the conversation again, find out what she’d seen that was bothering her, but the press ofother business kept getting in the way. Well, if it was anything important she’d come to me about it eventually.
    J ust before I left the office I called Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Redwood City. The last frayed thread of Russ Dancer’s wasted life had snapped at 1:57 that afternoon.

8
JAKE RUNYON
    The first victim of the gay bashings had been a printer and graphic artist named Larry Exeter. Time: a few minutes past midnight on April 4. Place: an alley off Eighteenth Street, not far from where he lived. He’d gone out for a walk around the neighborhood “to get some air.” Two men had accosted him on the street, dragged him into the alley, beat him senseless with fists and an “unidentified blunt instrument.” A resident in one of the flanking buildings had heard the commotion, looked out his window, yelled when he saw what was going on, and the perps ran. Neither Exeter nor the citizen had been able to supply detailed descriptions of the men or their vehicle. Exeter’s injuries were serious enough to require hospital treatment, but the beating had been interrupted before any major damage was done: three cracked ribs but no broken bones or internal damage.
    Runyon got all of this from the police report, through oneof the agency’s contacts at the SFPD. Joshua hadn’t been able to remember Exeter’s name, and Gene Zalesky had professed not to know him, either. Exeter’s Seventeenth Street address was given in the report, but no phone number; and there was no listing for him in the white pages. A check revealed that he shared an apartment with a David Mulford, who did have a listed number.
    Runyon had a window of free time around three o’clock. He tried Mulford’s number then, and the man who answered owned up, reluctantly, to being Larry Exeter. High, thin, timid voice and an attitude to match, he kept saying, “I just want to forget what happened, get on with my life.” Runyon danced with him, playing it low-key and mentioning his son several times, and eventually talked him into a face-to-face meeting. “But you can’t come here,” Exeter said. “David . . . my partner . . . he wouldn’t like it.”
    “Any time and place that’s convenient for you.”
    “Does it have to be today?”
    “If you can manage it. The sooner the better.”
    “Well . . . I should go out for groceries before David gets home. The Safeway on Market and Church, you know where that is?”
    “You want to talk while you’re shopping?”
    “No, no. Across the street, on the first block of Church, there’s a coffee shop . . . Starbucks. I could meet you for a few minutes around four-thirty.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    The second thing Runyon did was to finish up a preliminary background check on Gene Zalesky that he’d started the night before. Financial status and credit rating: solid. Employmentrecord: likewise, twelve years with Coastal Banking Systems. The only blot was an arrest fourteen years