Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "Slattery didn't happen to go down to the basement himself, did he?"

  "Never said anything about it if he did."

  I don't know what I expected Wesley Thane to be like—the Raymond Massey or John Carradine type, maybe, something along those shabbily aristocratic and vaguely sinister lines—but the man who opened the door to Room 315 looked about as much like an actor as I do. He was a smallish guy in his late sixties, he was bald, and he had a nondescript face except for mean little eyes under thick black brows that had no doubt contributed to his career as a B-movie villain. He looked somewhat familiar, but even though I like old movies and watch them whenever I can, I couldn't have named a single film he had appeared in.

  He said, "Yes? What is it?" in a gravelly, staccato voice. That was familiar, too, but again I couldn't place it in any particular context.

  I identified myself and asked if I could talk to him about Nick Damiano. "That cretin," he said, and for a moment I thought he was going to shut the door in my face. But then he said, "Oh, all right, come in. If I don't talk to you, you'll probably think I had something to do with the poor fool's murder."

  He turned and moved off into the room, leaving me to shut the door. The room was larger than Dan Cady's and jammed with stage and screen memorabilia: framed photographs, playbills, film posters, blown-up black-and-white stills; and a variety of salvaged props, among them the plumed helmet off a suit of armor and a Napoleonic uniform displayed on a dressmaker's dummy.

  Thane stopped near a lumpy-looking couch and did a theatrical about-face. The scowl he wore had a practiced look, and it occurred to me that under it he might be enjoying himself. "Well?" he said.

  I said, "You didn't like Nick Damiano, did you, Mr. Thane," making it a statement instead of a question.

  "No, I didn't like him. And no, I didn't kill him, if that's your next question."

  "Why didn't you like him?"

  "He was a cretin. A gibbering moron. All that nonsense about skeletons—he ought to have been locked up long ago."

  "You have any idea who did kill him?"

  "No. The police seem to think it was a drug addict."

  "That's one theory," I said. "Iry Feinberg has another: he thinks the killer is a resident of this hotel."

  "I know what Iry Feinberg thinks. He's a damned meddler who doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut."

  "You don't agree with him then?"

  "I don't care one way or another."

  Thane sat down and crossed his legs and adopted a sufferer's pose; now he was playing the martyr. I grinned at him, because it was something he wasn't expecting, and went to look at some of the stuff on the walls. One of the black-and-white stills depicted Thane in Western garb, with a smoking six-gun in his hand. The largest of the photographs was of Clark Gable, with an ink inscription that read, "For my good friend, Wes."

  Behind me Thane said impatiently, "I'm waiting."

  I let him wait a while longer. Then I moved back near the couch and grinned at him again and said, "Did you see Nick Damiano the night he was murdered?"

  "I did not."

  "Talk to him at all that day?"

  "No."

  "When was the last time you had trouble with him?"

  "Trouble? What do you mean, trouble?"

  "Iry Feinberg told me you hit Nick once, when he tried to brush off your coat."

  "My God," Thane said, "that was years ago. And it was only a slap. I had no problems with him after that. He avoided me and I ignored him; we spoke only when necessary." He paused, and his eyes got bright with something that might have been malice. "If you're looking for someone who had trouble with Damiano recently, talk to Charley Slattery."

  "What kind of trouble did Slattery have with Nick?"

  "Ask him. It's none of my business."

  "Why did you bring it up then?"

  He didn't say anything. His eyes were still bright.

  "All right, I'll ask Slattery," I said. "Tell me, what did you think when you heard about Nick? Were you pleased?"

  "Of course not. I was shocked. I've played many violent roles in my career, but violence in real life always shocks me."

  "The shock must have worn off pretty fast. You told me a couple of minutes ago you don't care who killed him."

  "Why should I, as long as no one else is harmed?"

  "So why did you kick in the twenty dollars?"

  "What?"

  "Feinberg's fund to hire me. Why did you contribute?"

  "If I hadn't it would have made me look suspicious to the others. I have to live with these people; I don't need that sort of stigma."

  He gave me a smug look. "And if you repeat that to anyone, I'll deny it."

  "Must be tough on you," I said.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Having to live in a place like this, with a bunch of broken-down old nobodies who don't have your intelligence or compassion or great professional skill."

  That got to him; he winced, and for a moment the actor's mask slipped and I had a glimpse of the real Wesley Thane—a defeated old man with faded dreams of glory, a never-was with a small and mediocre talent, clinging to the tattered fringes of a business that couldn't care less. Then he got the mask in place again and said with genuine anger, "Get out of here. I don't have to take abuse from a cheap gumshoe."

  "You're dating yourself, Mr. Thane; nobody uses the word 'gumshoe' any more. It's forties B-movie dialogue."

  He bounced up off the couch, pinch-faced and glaring. "Get out, I said. Get out!"

  I got out. And I was on my way to the elevator when I realized why Thane hadn't liked Nick Damiano. It was because Nick had taken attention away from him—upstaged him. Thane was an actor, but there wasn't any act he could put on more compelling than the real-life performance of Nick and his skeletons.

  Monahan's Gym was one of those tough, men-only places that catered to ex-pugs and old timers in the fight game, the kind of place you used to see a lot of in the forties and fifties but that have become an anachronism in this day of chic health clubs, fancy spas, and dwindling interest in the art of prizefighting. It smelled of sweat and steam and old leather, and it resonated with the grunts of weightlifters, the smack and thud of gloves against leather bags, the profane talk of men at liberty from a more or less polite society.

  I found Charley Slattery in the locker room, working there as an attendant. He was a short, beefy guy, probably a light-heavyweight in his boxing days, gone to fat around the middle in his old age; white-haired, with a face as seamed and time-eroded as a chunk of desert sandstone. One of his eyes had a glassy look; his nose and mouth were lumpy with scar tissue. A game fighter in his day, I thought, but not a very good one. A guy who had never quite learned how to cover up against the big punches, the hammerblows that put you down and out.

  "Sure, I been expectin' you." he said when I told him who I was. "Iry Feinberg, he said you'd be around. You findin' out anything the cops dint?"

  "It's too soon to tell, Mr. Slattery."

  "Charley," he said, "I hate that Mr. Slattery crap."

  "All right, Charley."

  "Well, I wish I could tell you somethin would help you, but I can't think of nothin. I dint even see Nick for two-three days before he was murdered."

  "Any idea who might have killed him?"

  "Well, some punk off the street, I guess. Guy Nick was arguin' with that night—George Weaver, he told you about that, dint he? What he heard?"

  "Yes. He also said he met you upstairs just afterward."

  Slattery nodded. "I was headin' down the lobby for a Coke, they got a machine down there, and George, he come out of the elevator with his cane and this little radio unner his arm. He looked kind of funny and I ast him what's the matter and that's when he told me about the argument."

  "What did you do then?"

  "What'd I do? Went down to get my Coke."

  "You didn't go to the basement?"

  "Nah, damn it. George, he said it was just a argument Nick wa
s havin' with somebody. I never figured it was nothin, you know, violent. If I had—Yeah, Eddie? You need somethin?"

  A muscular black man in his mid-thirties, naked except for a pair of silver-blue boxing trunks, had come up. He said, "Towel and some soap, Chancy. No soap in the showers again."

  "Goddamn. I catch the guy keeps swipin' it," Slattery said, "I'll kick his ass." He went and got a clean towel and a bar of soap, and the black man moved off with them to a back row of lockers. Slattery watched him go; then he said to me, "That's Eddie Jordan. Pretty fair welterweight once, but he never trained right, never had the right manager. He could of been good, that boy, if—" He broke off, frowning. "I shouldn't ought to call him that, I guess. 'Boy.' Blacks, they don't like to be called that nowadays."

  "No," I said, "they don't."

  "But I don't mean nothin by it. I mean, we always called em 'boy,' it was just somethin' we called em. 'Nigger,' too, same thing. It wasn't nothin personal, you know?"

  I knew, all right, but it was not something I wanted to or ever could explain to Charley Slattery. Race relations, the whole question of race, was too complex an issue. In his simple world, "nigger" and "boy" were just words, meaningless words without a couple of centuries of hatred and malice behind them, and it really wasn't anything personal.

  "Let's get back to Nick," I said. "You liked him, didn't you, Charley?"

  "Sure I did. He was goofy, him and his skeletons, but he worked hard and he never bothered nobody."

  "I had a talk with Wesley Thane a while ago. He told me you had some trouble with Nick not long ago."

  Slattery's eroded face arranged itself into a scowl. "That damn actor, he don't know what he's talkin about. Why don't he mind his own damn business? I never had no trouble with Nick."

  "Not even a little? A disagreement of some kind, maybe?"

  He hesitated. Then he shrugged and said, "Well, yeah, I guess we had that. A kind of disagreement."

  "When was this?'

  "I dunno. Couple of weeks ago."

  "What was it about?"

  "Garbage," Slattery said.

  "Garbage?"

  "Nick, he dint like nobody touchin' the cans in the basement. But hell, I was down there one night and the cans unner the chutes was full, so I switched 'em for empties. Well, Nick come around and yelled at me, and I wasn't feelin' too good so I yelled back at him. Next thing, I got sore and kicked over one of the cans and spilled out some garbage. Dan Cady, he heard the noise clear up in the lobby and come down and that son of a bitch Wes Thane was with him. Dan, he got Nick and me calmed down. That's all there was to it."

  "How were things between you and Nick after that?"

  "Okay. He forgot it and so did I. It dint mean nothin'. It was just one of them things."

  "Did Nick have problems with any other people in the hotel?" I asked.

  "Nah. I don't think so."

  "What about Wes Thane? He admitted he and Nick didn't get along very well."

  "I never heard about them havin' no fight or anythin' like that."

  "How about trouble Nick might have had with somebody outside the Medford?"

  "Nah," Slattery said. "Nick, he got along with everybody, you know? Everybody liked Nick, even if he was goofy."

  Yeah, I thought, everybody liked Nick, even if he was goofy. Then why is he dead? Why?

  I went back to the Medford and talked with three more residents, none of whom could offer any new information or any possible answers to that question of motive. It was almost five when I gave it up for the day and went next door to the office.

  Eberhardt was there, but I didn't see him at first because he was on his hands and knees behind his desk. He poked his head up as I came inside and shut the door.

  "Fine thing," I said, "you down on your knees like that. What if I'd been a prospective client?"

  "So? I wouldn't let somebody like you hire me."

  "What're you doing down there anyway?"

  "I was cleaning my pipe and I dropped the damn bit." He disappeared again for a few seconds, muttered, "Here it is," reappeared, and hoisted himself to his feet.

  There were pipe ashes all over the front of his tie and his white shirt; he'd even managed to get a smear of ash across his jowly chin. He was something of a slob, Eberhardt was, which gave us one of several common bonds: I was something of a slob myself. We had been friends for more than thirty years, and we'd been through some hard times together—some very hard times in the recent past. I hadn't been sure at first that taking him in as a partner after his retirement was a good idea, for a variety of reasons; but it had worked out so far. Much better than I'd expected, in fact.

  He sat down and began brushing pipe dottle off his desk; he must have dropped a bowlful on it as well as on himself. He said as I hung up my coat, "How goes the Nick Damiano investigation?"

  "Not too good. Did you manage to get a copy of the police report?"

  "On your desk. But I don't think it'll tell you much."

  The report was in an unmarked manila envelope; I read it standing up. Eberhardt was right that it didn't enlighten me much. Nick Damiano had been struck on the head at least three times by a heavy blunt instrument and had died of a brain hemorrhage, probably within seconds of the first blow. The wounds were "consistent with" a length of three-quarter-inch steel pipe, but the weapon hadn't been positively identified because no trace of it had been found. As for Nick's background, nothing had been found there either. No items of personal history among his effects, no hint of relatives or even of his city of origin. They'd run a check on his fingerprints through the FBI computer, with negative results: he had never been arrested on a felony charge, never been in military service or applied for a civil service job, never been fingerprinted at all.

  When I put the report down Eberhardt said, "Anything?"

  "Doesn't look like it." I sat in my chair and looked out the window for a time, at heavy rainclouds massing above the Federal Building down the hill. "There's just nothing to go on in this thing, Eb—no real leads or suspects, no apparent motive."

  "So maybe it's random. A street-killing, drug-related, like the report speculates."

  "Maybe."

  "You don't think so?"

  "Our client doesn't think so."

  "You want to talk over the details?"

  "Sure. But let's do it over a couple of beers and some food."

  "I thought you were on a diet."

  "I am. Whenever Kerry's around. But she's working late tonight—new ad campaign she's writing. A couple of beers won't hurt me. And we'll have something non-fattening to eat."

  "Sure we will," Eberhardt said.

  We went to an Italian place out on Clement at 25th Avenue and had four beers apiece and plates of fettuccine Alfredo and half a loaf of garlic bread. But the talking we did got us nowhere. If one of the residents of the Medford had killed Nick Damiano, what was the damn motive? A broken-down old actor's petulant jealousy? A mindless dispute over garbage cans? Just what was the argument all about that George Weaver had overheard?

  Eberhardt and I split up early and I drove home to my flat on Pacific Heights. The place had a lonely feel; after spending most of the day in and around the Medford, I needed some laughter and bonhomie to cheer me up—I needed Kerry. I thought about calling her at Bates and Carpenter, her ad agency, but she didn't like to be disturbed while she was working. And she'd said she expected to be there most of the evening.

  I settled instead for cuddling up to my collection of pulp magazines—browsing here and there, finding something to read. On nights like this the pulps weren't much of a substitute for human companionship in general and Kerry in particular, but at least they kept my mind occupied. I found a 1943 issue of Dime Detective that looked interesting, took it into the bathtub, and lingered there reading until I got drowsy. Then I went to bed, went right to sleep for a change—

  —and woke up at 3:00 A.M. by the luminous dial of the nightstand clock, because the clouds had finally opened up a
nd unleashed a wailing torrent of wind-blown rain; the sound of it on the roof and on the rainspouts outside the window was loud enough to wake up a deaf man. I lay there half groggy, listening to the storm and thinking about how the weather had gone all screwy lately and maybe it was time somebody started making plans for another ark.

  And then all of a sudden I was thinking about something else, and I wasn't groggy anymore. I sat up in bed, wide awake. And inside of five minutes, without much effort now that I had been primed, I knew what it was the police had overlooked and I was reasonably sure I knew who had murdered Nick Damiano.

  But I still didn't know why; I didn't even have an inkling of why. That was what kept me awake until dawn—that, and the unceasing racket of the storm.

  The Medlord's front door was still on its night security lock when I got there at a quarter to eight. Dan Cady let me in. I asked him a couple of questions about Nick's janitorial habits, and the answers he gave me pretty much confirmed my suspicions. To make absolutely sure, I went down to the basement and spent ten minutes poking around in its hot and noisy gloom.

  Now the hard part, the part I never liked. I took the elevator to the third floor and knocked on the door to Room 304. He was there; not more than five seconds passed before he called out, "Door's not locked." I opened it and stepped inside.

  He was sitting in a faded armchair near the window, staring out at the rain and the wet streets below. He turned his head briefly to look at me, then turned it back again to the window. The stubby little pipe was between his teeth and the overheated air smelled of his tobacco, a kind of dry, sweet scent, like withered roses.

  "More questions?" he said.

  "Not exactly, Mr. Weaver. You mind if I sit down?"

  "Bed's all there is."

  I sat on the bottom edge of the bed, a few feet away from him. The room was small, neat—not much furniture, not much of anything; old patterned wallpaper and a threadbare carpet, both of which had a patina of gray. Maybe it was my mood and the rain-dull day outside, but the entire room seemed gray, full of that aura of age and hopelessness.

  "Hot in here," I said. "Furnace is going full blast down in the basement."

  "I don't mind it hot."