F Is for Fugitive

guys afterward and bad-mouth her."
    "For what you'd done," I supplied.
    "Right. I still can't think about her without feeling kind of sick. What's strange is I can still remember things she did." He paused for a moment, eyebrows going up. He shook his head once, blowing out a puff of air. "She was really outrageous... insatiable's the word... but what drove her wasn't sex. It was... I don't know, self-loathing or a need to dominate. We were at her mercy because we wanted her so much. I guess our revenge was never really giving her what she wanted, which was old-fashioned respect."
    "And what was hers?"
    "Revenge? I don't know. Creating that heat. Reminding us that she was the only source, that we could never have enough of her or anything even halfway like her for life. She needed approval, some guy to be nice. All we ever did was snicker about her behind her back, which she must have known."
    "Did she get hung up on you?"
    "I suppose. Not for long, I don't think."
    "It would help if you could tell me who else might have been involved with her."
    He shook his head. "I can't. You're not going to get me to blow the whistle on anybody else. I still hang out with some of those guys."
    "How about if I read you some names off a list?"
    "I can't do that. Honestly. I don't mind owning up to my own part in it, but I can't implicate anybody else. It's an odd bond and something we don't talk about, but I'll tell you this – her name gets mentioned, we don't say a word, but we're all thinking the same damn thing."
    "What about guys who weren't friends of yours?"
    "Meaning what?"
    "At the time of the murder, she was apparently having an affair and got herself knocked up."
    "Don't know."
    "Make a guess. There must have been rumors."
    "Not that I heard."
    "Can you ask around? Somebody must know."
    "Hey, I'd like to help, but I've probably already said more than I should."
    "What about some of the girls in your class? Someone must have been clued in back then."
    He cleared his throat again. "Well. Barb might know. I could ask her, I guess."
    "Barbara who?"
    "My wife. We were in the same class."
    I glanced at the photograph on his desk, recognizing her belatedly. "The prom queen?"
    "How'd you know about that?"
    "I saw some pictures of her in the yearbook. Would you ask her if she could help?"
    "I doubt if she knows anything, but I could mention it."
    "That'd be great. Have her give me a call. If she doesn't know anything about it, she might suggest someone who would."
    "I wouldn't want anything said about..."
    "I understand," I said.
    I gave him my card with a little note on the back, with my telephone number at the Ocean Street. I left his office feeling faintly optimistic and more than a little disturbed. There was something about the idea of grown men haunted by the sexuality of a seventeen-year-old girl that seemed riveting – both pitiable and perverse. Somehow the glimpse he'd given me of the past made me feel like a voyeur.

Chapter 11
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    At two o'clock I slipped up the outside stairs at the motel and changed into my running clothes. I hadn't had lunch, but I was feeling supercharged, too wired to eat. After the hysteria at the courthouse, I'd spent hours in close contact with other human beings and my energy level had risen to an agitated state. I pulled on my sweats and my running shoes and headed out again, room key tied to my laces. The afternoon was slightly chilly, with a haze in the air. The sea blended into the sky at the horizon with no line of demarcation visible between. Southern California seasons are sometimes too subtle to discern, which I'm told is disconcerting to people who've grown up in the Midwest and the East. What's true, though, is that every day is a season in itself. The sea is changeable. The air is transformed. The landscape registers delicate alterations in color so that gradually the saturated green of winter bleaches out to the straw shades of summer grass, so quick to burn. Trees explode with color, fiery reds and flaming golds that could rival autumn anywhere, and the charred branches that remain afterward are as bare and black as winter trees in the East, slow to recover, slow to bud again.
    I jogged along the walkway that bordered the beach. There was a sprinkling of tourists. Two kids about eight were dodging the waves, their shrieks as raucous as the birds that wheeled overhead. The tide was almost out and a wide, glistening band divided the bubbling surf from the dry sand. A