Mourners: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (2 page)

He went down close to the waterline, where the sand was wet and the surf creamed up in long fans, and walked back and forth for close to an hour—a couple of hundred yards in one direction and then a couple of hundred yards back in the other. The wind billowed the tails of his overcoat up around his head, so that from where I was he looked like a giant seabird about to take flight. When he finally decided to quit he stood for another five minutes or so, watching the waves lift and slam down or just staring out to sea—I couldn’t tell which.

He must’ve been half frozen when he came back up to the parking area. But he didn’t get into his BMW to warm up; instead he waited for a traffic break and then crossed the highway and went into the Beach Chalet. Crap. That meant I had to brave the ocean wind after all. For all I knew he was meeting someone over there. Someone alive, for a change.

The Beach Chalet has been a San Francisco landmark of one kind or another since the midtwenties. It started out as a fancy seaside bar and restaurant, made even more elegant during the Depression by a WPA artist who decorated its tiled ground floor with cityscape murals. During and after World War II it had fallen on hard times. The local VFW managed it for a while, using it as their meeting place, and when they bowed out the place deteriorated into a hard-core bikers’ hangout, then into an abandoned and vandalized eyesore. In the early nineties the city finally decided it was worth saving; the Parks and Recreation Department gave it a facelift and restored the murals and established a visitors’ center in the lobby, and the upstairs was rented to an outfit that opened a new-style bar and
restaurant attractive to both locals and tourists. Full circle in three-quarters of a century.

By the time I got upstairs, Troxell was on a stool at the far end of the bar with a drink and a twenty-dollar bill in front of him. Straight bourbon or Scotch, a double, no ice. It was nearly two thirty now, and most of the lunch crowd was gone; only a handful of the window tables were occupied, and Troxell had the bar to himself. He sat bowed forward, with his chin down and his eyes on the whiskey. But he didn’t drink any of it, just stared into the glass while the bartender brought him his change and served me an Amstel Light draft. At the end of ten minutes he still hadn’t touched the liquor, or moved any part of his head or body more than an inch or two.

The bartender noticed; bartenders notice everything when they’re not busy. He tried to catch my eye, but I pretended to be interested in my beer and in the decorations over the back bar. He shrugged and washed beer steins.

Troxell sat there like a piece of sculpture for another couple of minutes. Then, all at once, as if he were coming out of some kind of self-induced trance, his shoulders jerked and his head snapped up. He focused on the glass, picked it up, threw the whiskey down his throat in one convulsive swallow, and climbed off the stool and started past me with his eyes straight front.

The bartender called, “Hey, mister, you forgot your change.”

It didn’t slow him or turn his head. “Keep it.”

“There’s seventeen bucks there—”

“Keep it,” Troxell said again and kept right on going.

The bartender blinked his surprise. He wasn’t the only one.

Three more stops for Troxell.

The first was a video store on Taraval. He was in there for close to twenty minutes, and when he came out he was carrying a plastic sack. Judging from its evident weight and bulges, he’d either bought or rented half a dozen VHS tapes. Rather than put the bag on one of the seats, he locked it in the trunk.

The second stop was a combination liquor store and newsstand a little farther up Taraval. His only purchases there appeared to be an armload of newspapers; these went into the trunk with the videotapes. There must’ve been at least half a dozen. All from the Bay Area? To hunt for more victims of violent crimes, more funeral announcements?

Stop number three, the longest, was a florist shop on West Portal. He spent nearly thirty minutes inside, and when he came out he was empty-handed. Deliberating over a purchase, I thought; found what he wanted and ordered it. Flowers for another funeral? For all I knew at this point, he’d sent wreaths or bouquets to the services yesterday and today—one more facet of his mourner pattern.

From West Portal he drove straight up into St. Francis Wood. The Wood, on the lower western slope of Mount Davidson, is one of the city’s best neighborhoods; large old homes on large lots that you couldn’t buy for less than a million each—maybe a million-five in the current overin-flated real estate market—and at that price you’d have to
settle for one of the less desirable properties. Troxell’s house was probably in the two-million-dollar bracket. His annual salary at Hessen & Collier, one of the city’s more prominent financial management firms, ran upward of three hundred thousand a year and he’d owned his prime chunk of San Francisco for more than two decades—a Spanish Mission–style place, all stucco and dark wood and terra-cotta tile, shaded by pine and yucca trees, flanked by tall hedges. The Good Life, with all its attendent perks. Unless possibly, for some private reason, you were starting to come apart at the seams.

Another silver BMW was parked in the wide driveway; he slid his in alongside. The twin belonged to his wife, Lynn Scott Troxell. I pulled up across the street and down a ways, just long enough to watch him get out and lock his car and enter the house. He didn’t take the videotapes or the newspapers with him.

I wondered if that meant he was going out again tonight. And where he would go if he did. Twice a week was his current average for noctural absences from home. And very few funerals are held at night.

I also wondered what my client, or rather the agency’s client, once removed, would make of her husband’s bizarre behavior of the past two days. One thing for sure: it wasn’t going to make Lynn Troxell any happier than if he’d spent them in the company of another woman.

The central ingredient in detective work is the same as in just about any other business, large or small: the gathering and processing of information. In the old days, before computers and the Internet, you got your information through legwork and personal interaction with people—paying, asking, manipulating, compromising, and often enough, currying favor. Even nowadays there’s still a lot of necessary quid pro quo. Ask a favor of somebody, and sooner or later he’s liable to request payback. And when that happens, like it or not, you’re obligated to say yes.

So I said yes to Charles Kayabalian, a reputable attorney and collector of Oriental rugs who had over the years provided answers to legal questions and thrown a handful of investigative jobs my way. In all that time he’d only called in one favor. I owed him a lot more than this small number two.

Lynn Scott Troxell was a personal friend of Kayabalian’s. She had been in the same graduating class at UCLA with his daughter, and while at the university she’d married her
high school sweetheart. The marriage hadn’t worked out, and not long after her divorce, which Kayabalian had handled for her, she’d met and married James Troxell. That was as much background information as Kayabalian had been willing to impart; he wanted her to lay out the rest for me, along with her reasons for wanting to hire a private investigator.

“It’s a domestic matter,” he said, “and I know you don’t care for that kind of work. But it’s not your typical domestic case. At least, I don’t think it is and neither does Lynn.”

I met the woman in Kayabalian’s Embarcadero Center offices later that day, with him present mostly in the role of observer. She was in her midthirties, dark-haired, slender, very attractive in a quiet and remote sort of way. The first thing you noticed about her was her hands; they were thin and very long-fingered, the bones and veins prominent, the nails cut short and unpolished, and there was grace and strength in the way she moved them—like the hands of a concert pianist. The second thing you noticed was that there was a sadness in her, deep-rooted and as remote as her beauty; you had to look deep into chocolate-brown eyes to see it. Not a recent sadness, not the result of whatever domestic problems she was having, but one long ingrained—the kind of melancholy you’d find in a supplicant who’d lost faith, say, or an idealist who had been irreparably disillusioned. Something had hurt her once, long ago. Her busted first marriage, possibly. Or maybe the cause was nonspecific; maybe it was just life, the long long chain of experiences and day-to-day living, that had done it to her.

Her first words to me were, “I’m afraid there’s something wrong with my husband.”

“How do you mean, Mrs. Troxell?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know exactly. He’s not the same man he was a few months ago, even a few weeks ago.”

“In what way is he different?”

“Erratic, strange . . . not like Jim at all.” The long-fingered hands moved together in her lap, lacing and interlacing. “He’s a private person, introspective, but we have always been able to communicate. Now I can’t seem to reach him. It’s as if he’s . . . going away.”

“You think he may be planning to leave you?”

“Yes, but not as if he wants to. As if . . . I can’t explain it. It’s a terrible feeling I have, almost a premonition.”

“Can you pinpoint when this change in him began?”

“I first began to notice it, little things, four or five months ago.”

“So it wasn’t sudden.”

“Yes and no. I know that’s an ambiguous answer, but . . . The specific behavioral changes were more or less gradual, but I think something happened about two months ago that had a profound effect on him. Emotionally, psychologically. That’s when he really began to change.”

“Can you connect it with any specific event?”

“No. All I can tell you is that it seems to have had nothing to do with me or our friends or his work. Something outside our . . . his . . . normal sphere.”

“These behavioral changes—what are they exactly?”

“Moodiness, hours alone in his den, avoidance of social activities. And recently, one or two evenings a week away from home. He won’t say where he goes, just stonewalls the subject. The one time I asked if I could go with him, he said he didn’t want company.”

“How late does he stay out?”

“Four to five hours, usually. From six thirty or seven on. Once last week, until after two
A.M
. He . . . well . . .”

She fell silent, her gaze moving against mine. Neither my face nor my eyes showed her anything. One of the many things detective work teaches you is how to maintain a poker face. Besides, I wasn’t thinking anything yet. No preconceived notions and no quick judgments—that’s something else the business teaches you.

I asked, “What else, Mrs. Troxell?”

“Now he’s taking days off work—unexplained absences. One or two days a week.”

“The same days?”

“No. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to it.”

“You said unexplained absences.”

“He won’t give me or anyone at Hessen and Collier a reason. He just calls in with some excuse.”

“Does he stay home, hole up on those days?”

“No,” she said. “He leaves at his usual time every morning, whether he goes to the office or not, and stays out most of the day.”

“How did you find out he wasn’t going to his office?”

“Mr. Hessen, Martin Hessen, called me last week. He’d spoken to Jim about it, but Jim stonewalled him, too.”

“Is he letting his work slide?”

“Not to a crisis point, not yet. But of course Martin and the other partners are concerned.”

“Have you spoken to your husband’s friends?”

“He only has one close friend, Drew Casement—they’ve known each other since high school. But he hasn’t confided in Drew. Or anyone else that I contacted.”

“So you have no idea where he goes, what he does during his day and evening absences?”

“Not a clue. I thought of following him myself, but I wouldn’t be any good at that sort of thing. That’s why I need your services. I have to find out before . . . I have to find out.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, there’s the obvious explanation for his actions and the behavioral changes—”

“It isn’t another woman,” she said flatly.

“I’m sure you don’t want to consider the possibility, but—”

“It is not another woman.”

“I have to say this. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a woman.”

“No.” Sharply this time. “Whatever is causing this, it isn’t love or sex.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’d
know
if it was. A woman knows. Besides . . .”

“Yes?”

Her hands moved again, joining, unjoining. “My husband has been very attentive to me recently. You understand? Very passionate.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but you’re wrong. The passion has nothing to do with guilt or subterfuge or even release of tension. It’s more than simple physical desire. It’s a deep-seated need . . . in some way I don’t understand he needs me more than he ever has. The closeness, the intimacy. As if he’s trying desperately to hang on.”

“To you emotionally?”

“Just trying to hang on,” she said.

Just trying to hang on. Euphemism for a man struggling against a mental breakdown. Based on what Lynn Troxell had told me and the two days’ surveillance I’d put in so far, that was the most likely explanation for her husband’s abnormal behavior. Stress-related, maybe, with the trigger being some disturbing event or experience; or the gradual degenerative result of a genetic flaw or any number of other possible psychological and/or physical factors. Breakdowns happen all the time to all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons, and manifested in all kinds of ways. More and more every year, it seems; Tamara and Runyon and I had run up against an extreme case ourselves just last Christmas.

Hell, with all the pressures and insanities in the modern world, it’s a wonder a lot more individuals don’t slide off the edge—great streams of them like lemmings off a crumbling cliff.

It was after four thirty when I got to the new suite of offices in a venerable three-story building overlooking South Park. Jake Runyon was in, sitting at his desk and studying something on the screen of his laptop. Behind him, the seldom-shut door to Tamara’s office was closed.