Nightshades (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “That’s not true,” Coleclaw said. “We didn’t know you were still here. We thought you’d left the valley.”

  “Even if you didn’t know, you could’ve guessed. Come looking to make sure.”

  Silence.

  “Why?” I asked them. “I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, and Robideaux, but why the rest of you?”

  “Outsiders don’t care about us,” Ella Bloom said, “but we care about each other. We watch out for our own.”

  “More than neighbors, more than friends,” Penrose agreed. “Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I’m repulsive.”

  More silence. And as I studied them now, the skin along my back began to crawl. Robideaux had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands across his chest; one of the men I didn’t know had done the same thing. Coleclaw’s big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a vague gathering aura of violence—the kind of aura a lynch mob generates.

  Some of the fear I’d felt during the fire came back, diluting my anger. I had a sudden premonition that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists—out of control. If that happened I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they’d done, I would be a dead man.

  I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens, good people with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade—not criminals, not a mob. Telling myself they wouldn’t do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.

  Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn’t see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.

  I was still groping when the headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.

  The tension had been like a silent scream; I felt it end, felt it let go of me, and I said, “Somebody’s coming!” in a clogged-up voice and threw my right arm out and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And the tension in them seemed to break too; somebody said, “God!” They all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies—the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.

  The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Robideaux threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.

  It was Treacle. And a man I didn’t know, a big flat-faced man in a business suit. They came hurrying over to me, and Treacle said a little breathlessly, “What happened? What’s going on?”

  I shook my head at him. I was still having trouble finding words.

  “That fire,” he said. “You look as though you were in it . . .”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. It’s over now—this part of it.”

  “What’s over? For God’s sake, what happened?”

  I glanced back at the raging fire. Then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward Coleclaw’s mercantile, hunched black silhouettes outlined against the firelit sky.

  “Musket Creek just died,” I said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The flat-faced guy with Treacle was a Redding police officer named Ragsdate—the bodyguard Treacle had been demanding for the past two days. I felt better when I found that out. I did not think there was going to be any more trouble here tonight, but with Gary Coleclaw on the loose, and unpredictable, things were still a little dicey. Ragsdale was armed; that meant we didn’t have to get out of here immediately, that we could take the time to hunt up my car.

  I told them what had gone down. Treacle did some vocal fussing, but Ragsdale was a professional. He wanted to know if I needed to get to a doctor; I said I was okay, even though my face hurt and my shoulder was still stiff and sore, and explained about my car, and he said looking for it was fine by him. He wasn’t willing to go looking for Gary Coleclaw, though, because he had no jurisdiction out here. And that was fine by me; I had no desire to join in on that kind of manhunt. Besides, Gary was not going to get away. He simply had no place to go, not now and not ever.

  “Did he kill Frank too?” Treacle asked hopefully. “This crazy kid?”

  “He’s not crazy,” I said, “he’s retarded. He only did what he thought the other people here wanted.”

  “But he did kill Frank, didn’t he?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He must—must’ve done it!”

  “No. Two deaths, two separate murderers.”

  And that was the key to the whole complicated business. All of us had assumed that if both Randall and O’Daniel had been murdered, the same person must be responsible. It was only when you realized they were separate cases, with what had to be entirely different motives, that you began to see the shape of things emerging.

  Treacle said, “Then who—who blew up Frank’s boat?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  There was a hollow, thundering crash from behind us; we all swung around to look. The upper story of the hotel had collapsed in a mushrooming shower of sparks and flame and smoke. The other buildings in the creekside row were a single line of fire. It was like watching a piece of the past—years, events, individual lives—being consumed. All those ghosts . . . if you listened closely to the crackle and roar of the blaze, I thought, you could almost hear them screaming.

  I turned away first and went to Treacle’s Continental; he and Ragsdale followed. Except for lights here and there, the town had a deserted look and feel. The residents had all shut themselves away now, behind locked doors. A long night for each of them coming up—maybe the longest night of their lives.

  In the car, with Ragsdale behind the wheel and Treacle between us, I said, “What brought you out here anyway?” I nudged Treacle. “You’re the last person I expected to see.”

  “You can thank Miss Wade,” he said nervously. “It was—was her idea.”

  “Kerry sent you?”

  “Asked us to come,” Ragsdale said. He backed the Continental around on the road. “Any idea where the Coleclaw kid took your car?”

  “No, but it can’t be too far away. Up in the woods to the west, maybe.” He pointed the car that way, and I asked Treacle, “Why did Kerry ask you to come looking for me?”

  “She was worried because you didn’t come back when you said you would.”

  “Did she call you or what?”

  “No. Officer Ragsdale and I were at your motel. I wanted to talk to you again so we drove over there.”

  “Why didn’t she come out here with you?”

  “She was just leaving when we got to the motel,” Ragsdale said. “She told us she’d been about to drive to Musket Creek—her first priority, she said. But if we’d do it for her, she could go do some other important thing. Mr. Treacle said we would.”

  “What was this other important thing she had to do?”

  “She didn’t say. She seemed pretty excited about it, though.”

  Now what the hell did this mean? She’d been worried about me, but instead of joining in the hunt to see if I was still healthy, she’d gone running off on some mysterious errand. That sounded like Kerry—but it still didn’t make any sense. What could be so bloody important?

  We were in the woods now; the fire was just a stain on the underbelly of the clouds above
and behind us. The Continental’s headlights picked up nothing but trees and underbrush until we came to the place where Gary Coleclaw had waited for me yesterday with his gun and his warning. A trail cut off into the forest there, and something gleamed faintly back among the redwoods and pines—a reflection of the headlamps off chrome—and when we pulled onto the trail, there was my car.

  Ragsdale and I got out, and I went and looked at the car, looked inside. Gary hadn’t done anything to it. Except take the keys with him, but that was no problem: I had a spare set in a little magnetized case behind the front bumper. I fetched them, brought them back to where Ragsdale was standing in the Continental’s headlight glare.

  “Now you’ve got your car,” he said, “my advice is to report to the county authorities as soon as possible.”

  “I was planning on it,” I said. “You and Treacle should probably come along; you’re material witnesses to at least part of what happened here.”

  He nodded. “Weaverville or the Redding office?”

  “Better make it Redding. It’ll be easier to explain things to Lieutenant Telford. ”

  “Right. We’ll follow you in. ”

  He backed the Continental out onto the road, and I did the same with my car, and we made a two-car caravan back through town. Coleclaw’s house was dark; the old black Chrysler was nowhere in sight, nor was any other vehicle. The fire had started to die among the creekside row of buildings—they were blackened hulks now, barely recognizable for what they’d once been—but a spark or an ember had blown across the roadway and touched off the ghosts on that side, so that a whole new conflagration had started up. Nobody here cared about that, either. Except me, a little, but I had too many other things on my mind right now.

  Kerry. Where had she gone in such a hurry? And why? I couldn’t come up with an answer to either question. Except. . .

  “I’d make a pretty good detective if I set my mind to it,” she’d declared to me yesterday. And this afternoon she’d said, “You’re the detective; I’m just along for the ride. Not too bright, but reasonably attractive and a pretty good lay.” Full of sarcasm. But with things going on underneath, maybe—wheels turning, threshing out ideas with her own cockeyed brand of logic.

  Damn it, had she gone off to play detective?

  It was the kind of thing she’d do, to relieve her boredom. Show up the smart-guy private eye boyfriend, out-think him, get to the bottom of things before he does and then give him a nice fat raspberry. Yeah, that was just the way her mind worked.

  But that still didn’t tell me where she’d gone, what sort of theory she’d devised. What if she had out-thought me? What if she’d put something together that I’d missed, figured out who was responsible for O‘Daniel’s death, and gone gallivanting off to try to prove it? Damn her, didn’t she realize how dangerous that could be? She was an amateur; she could wind up as dead as O’Daniel . . .

  Easy, I thought, take it easy, you don’t know it happened that way. Or if it did, that she’s in any danger. She’s probably back by now, safe and sound, sitting there in the motel room worrying about you.

  But I felt uneasy, jittery, and the feeling got worse as the car jounced along the unpaved access road toward Highway 299. I kept brooding, imagining all sorts of things, alternately cursing her and fretting about her. By the time we neared Redding I was a bundle of nerves; and when we came into the city itself I was twitching and twanging and ready to jump all over anybody who looked at me cross-eyed.

  Without thinking about it, I put my blinker on and pulled over to the curb. I was out and hurrying back to the Continental before it came to a full stop. “You go on to the sheriffs department,” I said to Ragsdale. “I want to swing by the motel first.”

  “Why?”

  “My face is giving me hell; I’ve got some burn medicine there. And I want to check on my lady friend.”

  “We can tag along . . .”

  “Not necessary. It won’t take me long.”

  He hesitated. “You’re sure you’ll show up?”

  “I won’t be more than ten minutes behind you.”

  “All right, then. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  I got back into the car and swung out into the street again. It was after eleven; there was no traffic to speak of and most of the stoplights were on amber. Within five minutes I was turning in under the red neon sign above the entrance to the Sportsman’s Rest.

  The Datsun wasn’t there.

  And the room was empty.

  I moved around it, half frantic now. Where had she gone, where? There wasn’t anything in the room to give me the answer . . . or was there? The local telephone directory was lying on the bed, fanned open: she must have been looking up a number or an address. I peered at the pages. Qs. Nobody connected with this case whose name began with a Q. She’d probably tossed the book aside after she was done with it and it had fallen open again at random.

  I picked it up anyway, and when I did I noticed that one of the pages was dog-eared. Kerry did that sometimes with telephone directories; the one in her apartment had a score of dog-eared pages. I flipped to the turned-down page in this book. Ds, starting with DA and extending through DU.

  Decker? Tom Decker?

  He was listed on the page, all right—Tom Decker, Mountain Harbor, County. I hauled up the telephone receiver and dialed the number, and spoke to Decker’s wife, and she went and got him for me.

  “Sorry to be calling so late,” I said, “but it’s urgent. Did Kerry Wade call you earlier tonight?”

  “Yes, she did,” he said. “Around nine o’clock.”

  “What did she want?”

  “To ask me a couple of questions. First thing she wanted to know was whether or not Frank O’Daniel kept flares on board his boat. ”

  “Flares?”

  “I told her he did. Then she wanted to know about his wife.”

  “His wife. What about his wife?”

  “Well, she wanted me to describe her.”

  “What for?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “When did you meet Helen O’Daniel? She led me to believe she’s never even been to Mountain Harbor.”

  “Never been here? Hell, she used to come up just about every clear weekend with O’Daniel, until a month or so ago. Marie mentioned that the night of the explosion, remember?”

  I got it then—the one solid lead that Kerry must have figured out. I said tensely, “Describe the woman for me, Tom.”

  He did. And by the time I put the receiver down, the rest of it was coming together—other bits and pieces Kerry must have picked up on and added together. She’d out-thought me, all right. But maybe she’d out-thought herself as well.

  The woman Decker had described, the probable murderer of Frank O’Daniel, was the secretary, Shirley Irwin. And it had to be Shirley Irwin that Kerry had gone to see, alone, close to three hours ago.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Irwin was listed in the telephone directory—1478 Codding Street, Redding. If she hadn’t been I don’t know what I would have done. I ran across to the motel office and shocked the woman on duty with my appearance and by demanding to know the fastest way to get to Codding Street. She didn’t waste any time telling me; for all she knew, I was a demented person with dark and awful deeds on his mind. And maybe, right then, I was.

  Codding Street was on the west side of town, near Keswick Dam; I remembered seeing a sign for the dam on my way to and from the O’Daniel house. I charged out of the office and got into the car and went screeching away like Mario Andretti coming out of the pits at the Indy 500.

  I drove like him too—too damned fast, taking corners in controlled skids, taking risks. There was little traffic at this hour and I didn’t run afoul of any cops or any other wild drivers; those were the only reasons I reached Codding Street in one piece and without incident. As it was I got lost once, briefly, and used up most of the cuss words I knew before blundering back onto the right
track. By the time the right street sign appeared in my headlights I was wired so tight you could have twanged me like a guitar string.

  Typical residential street, quiet at this hour, lights still on in one or two of the houses. The houses themselves were smallish—bungalows, old frame jobs—with small yards separated by fences and shrubbery. I barreled along to the 1400 block; switched my headlights to high beam when I got there so I could check house numbers and the cars parked along the curb.

  Kerry’s rented Datsun was sitting smack in front of 1478.

  I swung over in front of it, trying not to make a lot of noise that would announce my arrival. I shut off the engine and cut the lights and shoved open the door, looking up at the house. Brown-shingled bungalow with an old-fashioned porch across the front; no lights showing along the near side, but a pale yellow glow behind a curtained window to the right of the front door.

  Without thinking much I cut across the lawn and went up slow onto the porch, over to the curtained window. But I couldn’t see inside: the curtains were of some thick material and drawn tightly together. I tried listening. That also got me nothing; there wasn’t a sound in there that I could make out.

  A bunch of things ran through my head: see if there’s a window open somewhere, maybe the back door, try to pinpoint where they are first. But I didn’t do any of them; I went back to the front door instead, and reached out and took hold of the knob. If it had been locked I would probably have busted the damned thing down with my shoulder or foot. But it wasn’t. The knob turned and I shoved the door open and bulled my way inside, through a narrow little foyer and into a combination living room and dining alcove.

  And then I stopped. And stood there huffing and puffing and gawping. I don’t know what I expected to find in here, but what I was looking at wasn’t it. It was not even close.

  Kerry was present and accounted for, but she wasn’t lying on the floor in a pool of blood, or tied and gagged in a chair, or even cowering in a corner. She was on her feet at the moment but she’d been sitting at a formica-topped dinette table, and what she’d been doing there was counting money. A whole lot of money. Most of the table was covered with nice crisp bills—twenties and fifties and hundreds in neat stacks.