Come Morning
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 1986
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mysterious Press
- ISBN: 978-0-89296-243-3
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Come Morning». Краткое содержание книги:
Runyan had been in a lot of interrogation rooms during his detention and arraignment and trial. They were all pretty much the same. Institutional pastel walls, wooden table with three or four straight-backed chairs with the varnish coming off them, a mirror which was, of course, one-way glass for those in the adjacent observation room. Built-in pickups going to a voice-activated tape recorder somewhere. Ashtrays on the table for those who smoked.
Runyan sat with his hands clasped in front of him, his elbows resting on the table edge. He had quit smoking his first week in Q, cold turkey, realizing that when you were inside, any addiction was a handle someone had on you. The overhead light brushed Waterhouse’s pale elongated shadow back and forth across the table as he strode around.
He stopped and thrust his face down to within a few inches of Runyan’s. “You drove back and shot him.”
“I was half a mile up a mountain,” said Runyan, not for just the first time. “With a witness.”
“The same witness you say is your alibi for the Tenconi hit.” He straightened up and sneered, “The same gun in both cases. And the maid puts you in Tenconi’s penthouse just—”
“Leaving. Four hours before he got his ticket punched.”
Waterhouse started pacing again, talking as if to himself.
“Eight years ago, Cardwell owes Tenconi a bundle. He’s also night guard in a building where you just happen to pull a two-million-plus jewel heist. He shoots you. He’s king for a day. They name margarines after him.”
Runyan was silent. Waterhouse kept pacing.
“Tenconi is shot to death a few days after you get out of Q. Cardwell is shot to death a few days after that. And now our shiny new police computer discovers that you and Cardwell were old Army buddies — something nobody ever bothered to find out at the time of your trial. Suggestive, ain’t it?”
Runyan said nothing. It was suggestive. If he’d been on their side of the table, he’d have been trying to make it fit into a pattern too.
Prince came in. He shut the door and leaned against the wall beside it with his arms folded. There was a sardonic look on his face. He gave a grunt of laughter.
“This Louise Graham must be the invisible woman.”
Runyan, shaken, strove to hide it. He yawned and shrugged and wished he still smoked cigarettes. “Try her motel,” he said. “She probably got tired of waiting in the car out there at—”
“Checked out,” said Prince. “No forwarding.”
Runyan felt all the animation leave his spirit. He felt the switches close, he felt the emotions drain away, he felt his face clench like a fist. When he turned toward them, he wore the mask he had brought out of San Quentin with him.
“Shame on me,” he said softly in his flat prison voice.
Chapter 29
Runyan crossed the echoing lobby of the Hall of justice from the elevator bank, pushed open the front door, and went out into the cool bright San Francisco day. On the steps he passed detainees’ relatives coming from the bail brokers’ offices across Bryant Street, chattering attorneys bright-voiced as magpies, plainclothes cops whose veiled arrogance made them unmistakable.
Waterhouse said behind him, “You got lucky, Runyan.”
He turned, face cold and set. They must have been waiting since getting the news that Moyers had backed Runyan’s statement concerning Cardwell’s murder.
“For the moment,” added Prince.
“Since the same gun was used, you’re clean on both hits.”
“For the moment,” said Prince.
“It’s bullshit, of course, but...” Waterhouse shrugged.
Runyan went down the steps without speaking. Louise had abandoned him again, obviously for good, which meant he was back to being an ex-con out on the street with a lot of people after him for one thing or another.
But he had one more job before resigning from the human race. Jamie was dead, and to his own amazement he couldn’t just let it go. Maybe what the Chinese said was right: When you saved someone’s life he was your responsibility forever. Delarty and/or Gatian, working singly or in tandem. Either way, he was going to take them down. He knew just how to do it.
At the East Bay Terminal, after making sure nobody was on his tail, he entered the same phone booth he had used after putting the bonds in the coin locker the night before.
When the phone rang Art was brooding out the window at the fine drizzle which was obliterating Portland’s measly skyline. Win, lose, or draw, the fucking auditors were gone, anyway.
Gladyce stuck her head in the door. She’d had it in his lap every night for a week; pretty soon, he wasn’t careful, she’d be going down on him under the desk. He’d taken to calling her Glad-Ass in their private moments.
“It’s your brother on line three, Art.”
He swung his swivel chair back to the desk, staring at her box and making kissing sounds with his lips as he punched line three. Gladyce giggled and pulled the door shut.
“Yeah, you in town, kid?” demanded Art into the phone.
Runyan’s voice answered, “San Francisco. I just called to thank you for the loan, Art, and to tell you I’ll be putting it into the mail to you this afternoon or tomorrow.”
“Hey, bring it with you,” said Art. Aggrieved, he added, “You aren’t going to crap out on me, are you?”
“I’m sorry, Art, I won’t be able to make it for a while. I’ll be cleaning up some loose ends around here, then...”
Runyan had stuffed two sticks of gum into his mouth and started chewing them while talking with Art. When he hung up, the hand he’d rested casually on the moulding at the top of the phone booth brought down the coin locker key he’d stashed there.
He divided the bonds into two even packets: one he tossed back in the locker, feeding in a coin and removing the key again; the other packet he split to cram into the inside pockets of his jacket like a chipmunk stuffing nuts into its facial pouches.
Then he got a shoeshine at the stand beside the door to the men’s room. As the black man daubed on polish and popped the cloth, head down and concentrating on the shoes, Runyan took the wad of gum from his mouth, wrapped the locker key in it, and stuck it against the inner edge of the front of the chair on which he was sitting.
It was the grassy interior of California here, hot and endless and unchanging, and Louise drove it half asleep. Far to the east was the blue smudge of the Sierra; to the west the low dark backs of the Coast Range. Here were just grass and moaning wind and hovering white-tailed kites, beautiful lean snowy birds that might have been gulls or terns except for that unmistakable predator’s head.
What else could she have done except leave? If Moyers had told Runyan about her, any relationship between them was gone anyway. Better leave him thinking she was still working out some imagined debt to a former lover; he already had assimilated that incomplete part of the story.
Why was she not on her way to Hawaii or Florida or Puerto Rico or even Atlantic City, any resort area where a woman with her sort of talents could always find an uneasy living? Why was she returning to the house of a man she had come to loathe?
To pick up her half-completed scraps of stories, no other reason. From the beginning, she now saw, her brief season with Runyan had been doomed to failure — but it had somehow ruined her taste for the good life on the edge. His struggle to break free from his past had made her want to break free from hers.
Together, they might have done it. Apart, both would fail. But she was going to keep going through the motions, because conventional wisdom held that sometimes appearance became reality.