It was a funny thing really about Weiss and women. All that chivalry and romance in his heart and there was no one for him in the world. No one but his prostitutes—and Julie Wyant, who wasn’t much more than a daydream.
There were plenty of reasons for his being alone. He was a big, ugly man, for one thing. About fifty. About six foot four. Heavyset with a copper’s paunch. He had unruly salt-and-pepper hair. Thick features that sagged like a basset hound’s. A bulbous nose. Brown eyes set in the vertical parentheses of bushy eyebrows above and wrinkly bags below. The eyes themselves were deep, weary, sympathetic, full of understanding, but they could be disconcerting, too, sometimes. Everyone lies in this life; we all try to make ourselves look good, hide our smallness, our cravings, our selfishness behind some grand philosophy or some show of charity, some swagger, some sweetness. Well, when Weiss hit you with those lamps of his, it sometimes felt as if they were shining right through all that, right through the pretty disguise to the clammy humanity underneath. So he was ugly and he could peer into people’s souls. In the relationship game, that was two strikes against him right there.
Then—strike three—there was that baffling idealization of women. Baffling because, as I say, he’d been a cop; he’d seen all kinds of females, girls who’d sell their babies to sex fiends for a pipeful of crack, spoiled brats who’d gun down their sugar daddies so they could get it on with the tennis pro in the backseat of the Mercedes; all kinds. Still, he insisted on the natural tenderness of the sex. Hovered over women whenever he could, courtly and protective. So, of course, women reacted almost universally by either treating him like a sexless father figure or shrugging him off as a tiresome pain in the ass or occasionally both.
He’d had a wife once—so I heard, anyway—a venomous marriage. But nowadays, there were only the whores. Outcall girls who visited him in his apartment every so often. A procuress named Casey supplied them to his specifications—and sometimes dropped by herself for a freebee, though whether this was out of affection or simply a bonus for a good customer, he could never be sure.
It was a hell of an arrangement for someone like him, someone who probably wanted nothing more than a wife waiting in the doorway, a couple of kids causing havoc in the backyard. But it made sense, too, in a strange kind of way. It was the flip side of this idealization business. Because when it came right down to it, Weiss never really fell for a woman he knew at close range. It was only the ones at a distance he went for, the ones who couldn’t disappoint him, the ones he couldn’t have.
Which brings us to Julie Wyant.
That evening, when Weiss stepped out of his office building to head for home, a bad feeling came over him. A feeling that he was being watched, being followed. He’d been having that feeling a lot lately. And it was all because of Julie Wyant. Because of Julie Wyant and the man called Ben Fry.
Fry was a killer. Julie was a whore. Fry was in love with Julie, obsessed with her. Julie had disappeared about six months ago, desperate to get away from him. Fry was willing to move heaven and earth, do whatever it took, to track her down.
As of right now, Weiss was the only man alive who could help him do that, the only man who had any clue at all as to where Julie Wyant was.
Now Weiss, in his days on the force and still afterward, was considered one of the best locate men in the business. He could find people, find anyone, sometimes track down in a day, in an hour, with a single phone call, missing persons whom the police had been seeking for weeks, months, years. It had to do with a quirk of his personality, an almost uncanny insight he had into the hearts and minds of human beings he barely knew, whom he might never even have met. He could imagine them somehow, picture to himself what they were like, and then suddenly he’d be thinking with them, feeling with them, getting inside their heads. Given a single lead, he could follow their trains of logic and figure out exactly where they had gone.
He had gotten his lead one night when Julie phoned him. It was the only time he had ever spoken with her.
You can’t come to me, she had said. Do you understand? Do you? You would only bring him with you. You see? He’ll be watching you now all the time, every second. And if you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first.
Weiss had back-traced the call to a pay phone in a town called Paradise, up near the Sierra Nevadas—that was his lead. But because of what she said, he never followed up on it. He left Julie alone.
Still, her image haunted him. It was easy enough to see why. He could have invented her face in a fantasy. Clean and clear and gazey. With fine, tumbling strawberry blonde hair like a miser’s dream of gold. Lots of her clients went slobbery over her. Those middle-aged guys especially, with their unsung songs. For Weiss, all it took was a photograph he had of her, and a ten-second video clip he kept on his computer. He watched that video a lot when no one was looking. He knew it was idiotic of him. But he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
He couldn’t forget she was out there somewhere, running, hunted. And he couldn’t forget what she’d said on the phone. If you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first. The idea climbed up the walls of his mind like ivy. The more he thought about Julie, the more he could feel the man called Ben Fry watching him. The stronger the urge to find her, to protect her, to rescue her, the stronger his fear that he would bring the killer in his wake.
That evening, when he stepped out of the concrete tower that housed the agency, Weiss paused in the shadows of its entranceway and scanned the street, Market Street. It was late, nearing seven, but a summer’s day, still light. The banks were closed and the shops were closing, but the pavement was still loud with footsteps, the air still grumbled with car engines, and the wires overhead still snapped and sizzled as the electric streetcars went rattling by underneath. The last of the rush hour pedestrians flowed homeward, pooling at the bus stops, eddying at the corner traffic lights. Weiss stood in the entranceway a long moment, his features in darkness, his eyes bright as he studied the passersby.
He’d seen mug shots of Fry—we’d all seen them in those weeks after the North Wilderness Assault. But he had no idea if it would be Fry himself who would come after him or if he would send some minion or come in disguise or if he would come at all. He had no idea what he was looking for, in other words.
A bent, wizened old black woman hobbled along the sidewalk as he watched; then a young black woman came striding up, plump and shapely. There were two youthful Asian men in suits and ties, walking together; a youthful white man and a youthful black man standing in hail-fellow conversation; a middle-aged white man with a frown and a briefcase, marching as to war. Any one of them could’ve been the one who was watching him. All of them. None of them. He just didn’t know.
“For fuck’s sake,” Weiss murmured aloud finally. He was a tough old bird. He wasn’t used to feeling helpless like this. It gave him a panicky sensation in his throat, as if he were strangling on his own paranoia. The whole business was starting to get to him.
With a shudder, he moved resolutely out of the shadows, into the balmy evening and the failing light. He headed for home.