Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels) (7 page)

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something. We had the drug talk with her, didn’t we? Both of us?”

“Yeah, we had the drug talk.”

“She swore she’d never have anything to do with drugs.”

“She probably meant it at the time. But thirteen’s a bad
age, you know that. And peer pressure can be more persuasive than parental pressure.”

“But my God . . . pot’s bad enough, but cocaine . . .” Kerry sank heavily into her chair. “Maybe she hasn’t tried it yet. Maybe somebody gave it to her and she’s just thinking about it.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t know what to think. I’m as hammered by this as you are.”

“It’s after five. She should be home by now.”

“Where’d she go after school?”

“The library to study with a couple of her friends. So she said.”

“Don’t start doubting her, babe.”

“Aren’t you doubting her? After this?”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

“So am I. Oh, God, I hate this—I fucking
hate
it!”

Kerry almost never used the
f
word. And hearing it from her didn’t have any effect on me; I felt like using it myself. Neither of us had been this upset since the early stages of her breast cancer.

To calm both of us down, I went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of wine and opened the beer I’d been wanting for myself. The alcohol did its job, but there was no enjoyment in the after-work drink now. The beer seemed bitter, left a lingering sour aftertaste.

“When she gets home,” Kerry said, “let me do the talking. You just back me up.”

“Always,” I said.

Emily came in fifteen minutes later. All breezy and bouncy as usual—until she saw Kerry and me in the living room, standing
like a couple of stone statues. She stopped, her smile sliding away, and blinked her brown eyes and said, “What’s the matter?”

Kerry told her, flat voiced, to take her coat off and then come back in and sit down.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Just do what I asked.”

Emily looked at her, looked at me, bit a corner of her lip, and sidled off to hang up her coat. When she came back, Kerry and I were both sitting down again in our side-by-side chairs. Emily went around and perched on the couch with her knees together and her hands in her lap, her gaze on a neutral point between us.

She looked very young sitting there and at the same time almost grown-up: lipstick, eye shadow, a sweater too tight and a skirt too short for my liking. A real beauty in the making, the only worthwhile gift she’d gotten from her screwed-up birth parents. Those big brown eyes, creamy skin, delicate bone structure, long silky hair, a trim body that was already filling out noticeably. Heartbreaker someday. Males would swarm around her—probably had started to already, though she didn’t talk much about boys. Or have any boyfriends yet, as far as Kerry and I knew.

They grow up so damn fast these days, I thought. Everybody says so—it’s not just my perception. They’re kids—Emily had been ten when she first came into our lives—and then all of a sudden they’re virtual adults with adult attitudes, needs, vices. No transition period, or so it seemed. No time for an extended childhood and a slow easing into the grown-up world, as there had been with my generation. We hadn’t been adults, hadn’t considered ourselves adults, until seventeen or eighteen; nowadays kids stopped being kids as early as twelve. Or thirteen.

Nobody said anything for a minute or so. We all just sat there. Up to me to get this started because I had the tin box in my pocket. I took it out and set it on the coffee table between us, unopened.

Emily looked at it, closed her eyes, opened them again. “You’ve been in my room,” she said. Not accusing, not sullen or angry—emotions she seldom expressed. She sounded hurt.

Kerry said, “I went to get my thesaurus. The box was right there on your desk.”

“That’s supposed to be my private space.”

“I just told you—I wasn’t snooping. How long have you been using drugs?”

“I
don’t
use drugs. Never.”

“Are you going to tell us you don’t know what’s in there?”

“I didn’t, not at first.”

“But now you do.”

“It’s cocaine, isn’t it.” Statement, not a question.

“And you’ve been thinking about trying it.”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to us, Emily. The evidence is right there in front of you.”

“I’m not lying. I don’t lie, Mom; you know that.”

“Then where did this box come from?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.”

“It doesn’t belong to you. Who gave it to you?”

“Nobody gave it to me.”

“Then how did you get it?”

“I . . . found it.”

“Found it where?”

“I can’t tell you. I promised.”

“Promised who, if you found it?”

Silence.

“Did some boy give it to you? A boy at school?”

Silence.

“Emily, answer me. Did a boy give you this box? Do you have a boyfriend you haven’t told us about?”

“No.”

“So it wasn’t a boy. One of your girlfriends?”

Headshake.

“Carla? Jeanne?”

Headshake.

“Kirstin?”

“Nobody. I found it.”

Kerry glanced at me; the frustration in her face mirrored what must have been showing in mine.

My turn. I said, “Emily, you remember the talk we had about drugs?”

“I remember.”

“You said you understood how dangerous they are, how much damage they can do. You swore you’d never use them.”

“I do understand. I’ve never used drugs, not any kind, and I never will.”

“Then explain the box.”

“I already did, Dad. I found it.”

“Where?”

“I can’t tell you that. I promised.”

“You keep saying that. Why would you make such a promise?”

Silence.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Reason wasn’t
working, and reason was the best way to deal with Emily on any subject. Threats, even if I believed in that kind of parental approach, wouldn’t work, either. You couldn’t force a girl like her into submission and confession. Punishment, constant badgering, would only cause her to withdraw.

It was already starting to happen; I could see it in the way she was sitting, eyes remote, face pale, shoulders hunched. Same hurt look, same unwillingness or inability to communicate, same form of self-defense, as when she’d first come to live with us—a fragile kid, badly damaged by the violent deaths of her parents and the lonely existence their sins had forced her to lead. Lost and hiding in a place deep inside herself that no one could reach. The fact that she’d been a near witness to an incident not long afterward, in which I’d been ambushed and nearly killed, had made her situation even worse: she’d had so much loss in her young life, she couldn’t bear the thought of any more.

It had taken months of patience to bring her out of herself, to earn her complete trust. We had it now. Trust, loyalty, unconditional love. She was happy, much more outgoing and better socialized, with a bright future ahead of her. But she was still young and fragile; not enough time had passed for her wounds to fully heal. If we pushed her too hard, punished her too severely, we could drive her right back into that inner twilight world. We could lose her again.

And yet a thing like this, drugs, misplaced loyalty . . . we couldn’t just ignore it or tiptoe around it. I glanced again at Kerry. Her expression said she was thinking along the same lines.

She said, “Emily, I know you understand why we’re upset, why we’re asking all these questions. Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For bringing drugs into this house.”

“Yes. I swear I’ll never do it again.”

“Well, that’s a start.”

“Are you going to search my room again when I’m not home?”

“Not if you don’t give us any cause to.”

“I won’t. Is it all right if I have the box?”

“. . . What?”

“Not what’s in it. Just the box.”

“Why? Does it have some special meaning to you?”

“No. May I have it?”

“To do what with?”

“Give it back.”

“To who?”

“The person it belongs to.”

“So you know who lost the box.”

“I . . . Yes.”

“And you told this person you found it.”

“Yes. But not that I opened it.”

“Are you going to say that we did? That we know about the cocaine?”

“No, but I won’t lie if I’m asked. May I have it?”

“No,” I said, “you may not.”

Emily started to say something, changed her mind. There was misery in her expression now, as if her emotions had begun to give her physical pain. Half a minute ticked away, during which time Shameless the cat wandered in and hopped up next to her. She clutched at him, pulled him close—something warm and furry to hang on to. Then, in a small voice, “May I be excused now?”

I melted a little. It wouldn’t do any of us any good to keep her sitting there, keep hammering at her to no avail and watching her suffer. “All right, go ahead, but we’re going to talk again later. I want you to think about telling the whole story when we do, think very hard.”

“I won’t break my promise, Dad. I can’t do that.”

Up and out of the room she went, carrying Shameless, her steps slow and not quite steady. I had the feeling that as soon as she was inside her room with the door shut she would start to cry. Soundlessly.

Kerry said, “Oh, Lord. You think she really did find that box?”

“She said she did and she doesn’t lie.”

“Then who is she protecting? Some boy?”

“I hope not.”

“She’s only thirteen. What if she’s gotten herself involved with somebody older? What if she’s already started having sex—”

“Hey. Don’t go there.”

“Don’t tell me the thought hasn’t crossed your mind.”

“. . . All right. But you be the one to ask her if it comes to that.”

“I will.”

“She won’t admit to anything if it means breaking her promise.”

“Oh, Lord. That damn teenage code: don’t break promises; don’t snitch.” Kerry leaned across the table between our chairs, touched my hand. Her fingers were cold again. “What’re we going to do?”

“I don’t know. We can’t force her to talk to us; we can’t threaten her—you saw the way she looked.”

“Calling up her friends’ parents or talking to her teachers isn’t the answer, either. All that’d do is open up a huge can of worms, with no guarantee of results.”

“And turn her against us, drive her back inside herself.”

“Well, we can’t just pretend this didn’t happen,” Kerry said. “We have to get to the bottom of it. We have to do
something.
”

Something. Sure. But what?

Since his relocation from Seattle to S.F. he’d spent a lot of time exploring and learning things about the city’s neighborhoods, particularly the ones that presented potential dangers when you had to venture into them after dark. Dolores Park, the hub of the upper Mission District residential area, was one of these.

The park, two blocks long, one block wide, had steeply rolling lawns, acres of shade trees, winding paths, tennis courts, soccer field, kids’ playground, dog-play area. People came from all over the city on weekends to take advantage of its attractions. In the late eighties and early nineties well-off Yuppies, lured by scenic views of the Mission and downtown and an easy commute, had bought up and renovated many of the old Victorians that rimmed the park.

Nice neighborhood . . . until the drug dealers moved in.

Pot sellers at first, targeting the students at nearby Mission High School, then another, rougher element dealing heroin, coke, meth. As many as forty dealers had been doing business in Dolores Park day and night in those days, Bill had told him.
And where you had hard drugs, you also had high stakes and violence; Runyon had seen it happen in Seattle when he’d been on the job there. One year there’d been eight shootings and two homicides in and around Dolores Park. Plus the fire-bombing of the home of a young couple who had tried to form an activist group to fight the dealers. Plus muggings, burglaries, intimidation of residents.

The SFPD and the city’s park police had finally cracked down, cleaned the dealers out of the park and out of the Mission Playground down on 19
^th
Street as well. Things had been quiet and stable again for a while. Then new problems started up. First it was homeless people camping in the park at night, panhandling aggressively by day. Then, recently, large groups began showing up on weekends and holidays, sanctioned and unsanctioned by the city: peace rallies, loud music festivals, freewheeling private parties that spawned public drunkenness, rowdy behavior, seminude sunbathing, loads of strewn trash, and damaged facilities and park property. The residents were up in arms again, for all the good it was doing. Most of them reportedly stayed out of the park on weekends and especially at night. Even with the hard-core dealers and homeless people gone, Latino gangbangers from the Mission and other lowlives still prowled it and muggings were not uncommon.

Few people were out on the lawns and paths when Runyon parked across the street on 19
^th
. Too cold today, with the sea wind bringing in late-afternoon fog that hid the cityscape views behind tattered folds of gray. The Queen Anne Victorian that belonged to Arletta and Coy Madison was two doors down, its blue-on-blue paint job bright and fresh looking. Runyon went up the stoop, rang the bell. ID’d himself to the woman’s voice that came through a speaker box.

There was a long pause before she said, “All right, I’ll come down.” She didn’t sound too happy about it.

Pretty soon the door opened on a heavy chain and a narrow eye peered out at him through the aperture. He held his license up so the eye could read it. One blink was the only reaction.

She said, “What are you, a bounty hunter?”

“No. My agency operates on a straight fee basis.”

“Same thing, if you’re working for Troy’s bondsman.”

“It’d be easier if we could talk inside, Mrs. Madison.”

“I can’t tell you anything. Have you spoken to my husband?”