Camouflage(4)
“I’ll run his retainer check down to the bank on my lunch break.”
“Low-priority case, right?”
“Right. Fit it in when you can.”
She gave me a patient little smile, my cue to go away and let her get back to work. I liked that, too. It was a much more pleasant cue than some of those her other personalities indulged in.
* * *
Jake Runyon rolled into the agency a little past four thirty, just as I was about to leave for the day. I had my overcoat and hat and muffler on; the weather lately had been fog ridden and blustery, the kind—even though it was only April—that had inspired Mark Twain to write that the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Runyon, on the other hand, was coatless in a rumpled suit and tie. He seemed impervious to weather conditions of any kind, maybe because he was a native of Seattle. The fact that he was twenty years younger than me might also have had something to do with it; I hadn’t been nearly so aware of weather extremes when I was his age.
He’d been out on a hunt for a witness to a near-fatal hit-and-run auto accident. The agency doesn’t usually handle personal injury cases, but the injured party involved in this one was a local politician whose attorney knew a criminal lawyer I’d done some work for in the past. So we’d taken it on as a favor. Quid pro quo is a necessity in any successful detective business.
“Find the witness yet?” I asked Runyon.
“Name and address, but he’s out of town for the weekend. Back on Monday—I’ll brace him then. Anything new for me?”
“Nope. One new client today, but it’s a minor trace job and Tamara and I are handling it.”
He ran a hand over his slablike face. Something on his mind; I could see it in his eyes. “You in a hurry to get home?”
“Not really. Why?”
“I can use your input on a problem.”
“Business?”
“Personal.”
That was a surprise. Runyon was usually reticent when it came to his personal life; he’d offer up snippets now and then if you asked him a direct question, but he seldom volunteered any information.
“Sure thing,” I said. “How about we go across the square? I can use a beer.”
“I’ll buy,” he said.
2
The agency’s offices are in an old, salmon-colored building on South Park, a chunk of Bohemian-era San Francisco—private residences, cafés, small businesses, a little park and playground—sandwiched among a lot of high-rise buildings between Second and Third, Brannan and Bryant. It was a prime business location, close to downtown and the Bay Bridge; we’d managed to get a long-term lease shortly after the dot-com industry collapse a few years ago, when office space all over the city was going begging. Lucky timing, because the industry had bounced back and now the area surrounding South Park was thick with high-tech companies paying rents five and six times higher than ours.
The South Park Café, on the opposite side of the square, was already starting to fill up with the Friday evening happy hour crowd when Runyon and I walked in. We managed to claim the last available table just ahead of a young couple who glared at us as if we’d robbed them of something valuable. Funny thing was, it was the same table we’d sat at a couple of weeks ago, at a quieter time of day, for the same reason we were here now—to talk over a personal matter. Only then it had been my personal matter, a nasty bit of business involving my adopted daughter, Emily, that still raised my blood pressure whenever I thought about it. I’d asked Jake to join me in doing something that was borderline illegal, and despite the professional risk he’d agreed without hesitation. I owed him any kind of favor in return.
Runyon had also noticed the coincidence. He said as we waited for service, “Nothing like the last time we were here. Except that it’s about a kid in trouble … maybe.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Not a hundred percent. I could use your input.”
“Glad to help if I can, you know that. Who’s the kid?”
“Bryn’s son, Bobby.”
Bryn was a woman he’d met not long ago, the first relationship he’d had since the death of his second wife, Colleen, in Seattle. Colleen had wasted away slowly from ovarian cancer, which left him devastated. He’d moved down here to be close to his estranged gay son from his first marriage, but they still hadn’t reconciled. Jake’s life had narrowed down to his work—he was a hell of a good investigator—and for the first year and a half he’d worked for the agency he’d been a tightly closed-off loner. Bryn Darby had brought him out of that hard depressive shell, started him living again for something more than his job. She was a commercial artist, divorced, with the one young son and a home in the Sunset District; that was all I knew about her, aside from one reference to a “physical problem” that he wouldn’t elaborate on.