“With you, you mean?”
“With me, with that neighbor of his. He was vulnerable, he’s still vulnerable …”
“Wait a second,” I said. “He had an affair with one of his neighbors?”
“Before he met me. It didn’t last very long. She wanted it to, but it was just… physical for Mitch. Not like it is with us.”
“Which neighbor? Did he tell you her name?”
“The woman who lives next door to him. It was right after her divorce.”
“Rebecca Weaver?”
“Yes,” she said. “Rebecca Weaver.”
23
JAKE RUNYON
Aaron Myers’s car was a ten-year-old Buick LeSabre. He got that info from Tamara on the way back to the city. When he reached Noe Valley, he drove around within a three-block radius of Myers’s apartment building. If he found the LeSabre, and Myers still wasn’t answering his bell, he’d figure some way to get inside the building and then the apartment.
He didn’t find it.
And nobody answered the bell.
Maybe good, maybe not. Depended on where Myers had gone. Runyon drove up to Duncan Street—and the LeSabre was parked around the corner from Youngblood’s flat, facing downhill at a bad angle. There was a narrow space behind it; he squeezed the Ford in there and went to have a look. All the doors were locked, the interior empty. Under the windshield wipers was a parking ticket, issued at 9:40 that morning. A sign just down the way said that Friday was street-cleaning day and there was no parking on this side between four a.m. and noon. The Buick had been here since early morning or sometime the night before.
He didn’t like that at all.
He hurried uphill and around the corner. He expected to have some trouble getting into Youngblood’s building, but he caught a break. One of the residents had bought a new refrigerator; a delivery truck was double-parked in front, and two burly guys were hauling the old one out through the propped-open front doors. Runyon waited for them to pass by, stepped through as if he belonged there, and hurried up the stairs.
A one-minute lean on the bell bought him nothing but muted noise from inside. When he tried the knob, it turned under his hand and the door edged inward. The muscles in his gut and across his shoulders pulled tight. Cop’s instincts, telling him something was wrong here—bad wrong. He stepped inside, shut the door softly behind him.
The place smelled of death.
The odor was so faint and indistinct that most people wouldn’t have noticed. He’d been in too many places where people had died; the smell was sometimes strong, sometimes not, but always there and always the same.
He went down the hallway into the living room. And that was where he found Aaron Myers, slumped down in a chair in front of one of the computers, his head lolling sideways, his eyes squeezed shut.
Runyon touched knuckles against one cheek, felt the neck artery. Cold skin, no pulse. Dead a long time; rigor had already come and gone. Last night sometime. There were no marks on the body, nothing except a thin foamy drool that had leaked from one corner of the mouth and dried there. Overdose of some kind—hard drugs or prescription pills.
The computer in front of the corpse was turned on. Sleep mode, looked like. He wiggled the mouse with the back of his hand, and the screen lit up. Writing, more than a page single-spaced. Suicide note—he read enough of it to tell that. The rest could wait.
He backed away, his lips flattened in against his teeth, and turned to look around the room. No signs of disturbance anywhere in here. The way the flat was laid out, there’d be a bedroom at the front and another at the rear beyond the kitchen. The one in front, adjacent to the living room, would be the larger of the two. He checked in there first.
Drapes drawn, a lamp burning on a nightstand. And another dead man, sprawled backward across the bed.
No need to check this one’s pulse. One side of his head had been caved in by a heavy blunt object—the brass lamp, a twin to the one on the nightstand, that lay streaked with dried gore on the carpet.
When you’d been on enough homicide scenes, you learned not to let the blood and torn flesh and staring eyes and cold waxy faces bother you too much. This was just another in a long string. Standard murder-suicide, the kind that happened almost daily in a city the size of San Francisco.
Except that it wasn’t. Not this one.
The dead man on the bed was wearing black net stockings and a blue silk dress. The dress had twisted open in front, exposing a pair of foam-rubber falsies; hiked up far enough on the thighs to reveal lacy, black silk panties. Close-cropped black hair showed where the hennaed wig had come undone. The face under the pancake makeup and crimson lipstick was lean, ascetic, the chin slightly beard-stubbled.