Shirley Irwin was there too. But she wasn’t doing anything except lying sprawled on a wine-colored couch with her skirt up around her thighs and a big bruise over her left eye. She was out cold.
For the second time that night I felt the sudden release of tension; this time it left me relieved and surprised and very tired. I wanted to grab Kerry and hug her and then shake her until her teeth rattled. Instead I kept on gawping at her, and she kept on gawping right back.
Finally she said, “What are you doing here?” but at the same time I was saying, “What the hell’s been going on?” I started to say something else, and so did she, and I said, “Shit,” and she said, “Your face, your clothes . . . what happened to you?”
“Ragged-Ass Gulch burned up tonight. I almost burned up with it.”
“But how. . . ?”
“Gary Coleclaw,” I said. “He torched the old hotel with me in it, just like he torched Munroe Randall’s house.”
“My God! But what’re you doing here? How did you know where to find me?”
“Finding people is one of the things I get paid for.” My voice was starting to rise; I yanked it down again. “What did you do to Irwin?”
“She killed Frank O’Daniel,” Kerry said. “And I know how she did it, too.”
“You what?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, but there’s only one reasonable way she could have done it that fits the facts. That ringing you heard must have been an alarm clock going off—one of those old-fashioned portable ones with a wind-up key. And that pop and whoosh just before the explosion . . . it had to have been a flare igniting.”
“Flare?”
“A marine flare,” she said. “Standard equipment on all boats; Ray and I used to have some on ours, and Tom Decker told me O’Daniel definitely kept some on board his. Pop the cap on one end and when the flare ignites it makes a kind of sizzling whoosh. It also shoots out more than enough sparks and heat to exceed the flash point of gasoline.”
Exceed the flash point of gasoline, I thought. I said, “Then the flare had to have been down in the bilges.”
“Probably. Anchored down there, with a piece of heavy string—fishing leader, maybe—attached to the cap. The other end of the string would’ve been attached to the key on the back of the clock, and the clock would’ve also been anchored down. O’Daniel had to have been nearby too, either knocked out or drugged. Anyhow, after the alarm goes off on those old clocks, the bell keeps ringing until the key winds down; you know that. In this case, the key also wound up the string leading to the flare, pulled it taut, and finally jerked the cap to set the flare off. Then—boom.”
“Boom,” I said. But it sounded plausible; it even sounded probable. Damn her, it sounded right.
“If you hadn’t been there at just that time,” she said, “no one would’ve heard the alarm; no one would have had any good reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident.”
“There’s still no way to prove it wasn’t. All the evidence went up with O’Daniel and the boat.”
“Well, there’s a lot of other evidence against Miss Irwin. More than enough to convict her, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe. Now suppose you tell me what you did to her.”
“Well, she attacked me and I had to hit her.”
“You had to hit her. With what?”
“Fireplace poker. That’s what she tried to hit me with.” Very calm, very matter-of-fact. We might have been talking about a bad little girl that momma had to spank. “It only happened about ten minutes ago,” she said. “I’ve already called the police. I thought that’s who you were when I heard you on the porch.”
“Why the bloody hell did you come here by yourself? Why didn’t you wait for me? Or call the police from the motel?”
“Oh, don’t get excited.” Then a pause, a worried frown. “Maybe you’d better sit down. You look awful.”
“I feel awful,” I said, “and part of the reason is you. Answer me—why did you come here?”
“Because I figured out Shirley Irwin had to be O’Daniel’s killer, and I thought there might be some evidence here to prove it. Either that, or I could talk to her and maybe get her to admit something incriminating—you know, manipulate the conversation that way.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She wasn’t home when I got here. I prowled around looking for a way into the house, but all the doors and windows were locked—”
“Christ, you mean you broke in?”
“No, I didn’t break in. I didn’t want to do anything like that. I waited in the car for her to come home, and it wasn’t until eleven that she did. I said there were some things I had to talk over with her about O’Daniel’s death, so she invited me in. Well, she did make a slip while we were talking, but she realized it right away. Then she realized I knew the truth. That’s when she attacked me with the poker.”
“She could have killed you,” I said between my teeth.
“But she didn’t,” Kerry said. “Gary Coleclaw could have killed you but he didn’t. Survival is what counts.”
I was silent for about ten seconds; then I said, “Where did you find the money?”
“In her bedroom. It was in a briefcase—that briefcase there on the table—sitting on her bedroom dresser. Just sitting there in plain sight. The briefcase has Frank O’Daniel’s name inside it.”
I didn’t say anything at all this time.
“She was the prowler at the O‘Daniel house last night,” Kerry said. “She knew O’Daniel had been embezzling money from Northern Development; I think she was supposed to get a share of it, probably an equal share, but he’d been holding out on her. That’s one of the reasons she killed him—for the money.”
“Oh it is?”
“Sure. You don’t seem surprised about the embezzlement,” she said, as if she were disappointed.
“I’m not surprised. I figured that out just like you did.”
“When?”
“Never mind when,” I said. But it had been back in the motel room, after I’d talked to Tom Decker. And on the way over here. Given all the other facts, it was the one clear-cut explanation for O’Daniel’s recent behavior—the decisions to divorce his wife, to sell out his interest in Northern Development and move away; the failure to confide in his attorney about the latter plan. He hadn’t been worried any more about letting his wife have her half of their community property because he’d accumulated a fat private nest egg. It wouldn’t have been hard for him; he was the company accountant, and he had Shirley Irwin to help him juggle invoices and phony up correspondence. He’d probably started tapping the till when the firm’s downhill slide began, which had accelerated the skid and put them in their present financial hole.
Kerry said, “Miss Irwin’s second reason for killing him has to be an emotional one. They’d been having this affair for months; she used to go up to Mountain Harbor with him, posing as his wife—”
“Yeah, I know. I talked to Decker a while ago myself.”
“But things had cooled down between them; we know that because O’Daniel’d been going up to the lake alone the past month or so. The way I see it . . . ”
The way she saw it was the way I saw it: The break with Irwin had complicated matters for O’Daniel, but he’d figured a way out—or thought he had. He must have stalled her while he made his plans to take off with the whole boodle. After all, what could she do once he was gone? Going to the police would have meant a jail term for her too.
But he’d underestimated her. She had tumbled to what he was up to, arranged to murder him, and then gone and hunted up the money last night. Maybe he’d intimated that it was in his house; maybe he’d also let slip at some point where he kept his valuables at home. In any case she hadn’t had much trouble finding the stash.
Kerry paused for breath. Then she said, “Don’t you want to know what made me suspect Irwin in the first place?”
“All right, what?”
“That anonymous note she wrote to O’
Daniel, to begin with. That was stupid of her. She had what should’ve been a perfect plan for murdering him so it looked like an accident; all the note accomplished was to make everybody even more suspicious of foul play. I guess she knew there’d be some suspicion anyway and was trying to divert it to the Musket Creek residents, but it was still a stupid thing to do.”
“All murderers are stupid,” I said. “How did the note make you suspect Irwin?”
“It doesn’t point directly to her, of course. But I knew the minute I saw it that it’d been written by a woman.”
“Yeah? How did you know that?”
“The way it was worded. ‘If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you.’ A man would never write something like ‘wish your mother never had you’; he’d write ‘wish you were never born’ or something. It just isn’t a phrase men use.”
That one had escaped me completely. I sighed and said, “Okay, I see your point. What else?”
“Well, whoever murdered O‘Daniel had to be pretty knowledgeable about boats, right? Otherwise, the explosion couldn’t have been rigged to look like an accident. So who knew about boats besides O’Daniel? Miss Irwin. Remember when we were all standing outside the sheriff’s office yesterday? She said the radio told her the explosion was caused by fuel leaking into the bilges and some kind of spark setting it off. But then she said, ‘Poor Frank must have forgotten to use the blowers.’ The radio wouldn’t have said that. And only somebody who knew boats would know about blowers to get rid of gasoline fumes.
“Then I remembered what you’d told me about Mrs. O‘Daniel not liking boats or water, intimating she’d never even been to Mountain Harbor. And then I remembered you’d also told me O’Daniel used to bring ‘his wife’ up there all the time, according to the Deckers. So I called Tom Decker and asked him to describe O‘Daniel’s ‘wife’ and he—”
“—described Shirley Irwin,” I finished for her. “Yeah. After which you sent Treacle and his bodyguard off to Musket Creek to check on me and came gallivanting over here and almost got yourself knocked off.”
“So did you,” she said. “Almost get yourself knocked off, I mean.”
“That’s part of my job. I’m a detective.”
“Are you mad because I didn’t come out to Musket Creek myself? Well, I would have if Treacle and that policeman hadn’t shown up when they did. But I thought if you needed help, they’d be able to provide it better than I could. Did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Help you. ”
“Yeah, they helped me. Maybe they saved my life. Ah Christ, maybe you saved my life by sending them.”
She smiled wanly. “You came here to save my life, didn’t you. You thought I was in danger and you came charging over here like a white knight.”
“White knight,” I said. “Bah.”
Another smile, tender this time. “Why don’t you sit down? You look pretty wobbly.”
“No,” I said.
“All right, be stubborn. Tell me what happened in Musket Creek, then.”
“No,” I said, and I went over and eased myself onto a chair near the couch. I was pretty wobbly, damn it, and I didn’t want to fall on my face.
Kerry followed, all solicitous now, and peered at me up close and made clucking noises. “You sit still,” she said. “I’ll see if there’s anything around here for your wounds.” She hurried out of the room.
I sat there. Irwin was still out cold, showing no signs of reviving. I wished I was out cold too; consciousness was not too pleasant at the moment—my face hurt and so did my head where Gary Coleclaw had whacked me with the board—and she looked kind of peaceful lying there.
Cars began arriving out front. Doors slammed and people clumped up onto the porch. Somebody started banging on the door, and somebody called out, “This is the police!”
I stayed where I was. On one wall, a clock commenced to make bonging noises to accompany the racket outside. I looked over at it. Midnight.
Yep, I thought as Kerry came hurrying back into the room, I was right this morning. I sure was right.
Today had been a real humdinger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kerry and I spent two more days and nights in Redding before we were allowed to go on our not-so-merry way. And a few more things of minor significance happened while we were there.
Gary Coleclaw hadn’t been taken into custody on Monday night—or rather, Tuesday morning—because he’d left Musket Creek by the time Telford and his deputies got out there; his father and mother had left too. But the three of them didn’t get far. The Coleclaws were sad people who had never got far their entire lives, and never would. A Highway Patrol officer spotted them in a diner in Lake County late Tuesday afternoon and arrested them without incident.
I felt sorry for Gary. He was also a victim; guilty of homicide, yes, but not much more guilty than his father or any of the others in Musket Creek who had preached sermons of hatred and violence. It wasn’t going to go too badly for him, though: a second-degree murder charge and eventual institutionalization in a state hospital.
I felt a little sorry for the rest of Musket Creek, too—people like Penrose and Ella Bloom in particular. Treacle had decided he wanted no more part of a Musket Creek Disneyland, no more part of land development of any kind; he was folding Northern Development, putting the corporation’s holdings up for sale, and “getting the hell out of Northern California.” So the residents of Musket Creek had won their fight—except that it was a hollow victory, tainted, and for some, like the Coleclaws, it was no victory at all. Musket Creek really had died on Monday night. And its spirit had burned up along with the shades of Ragged-Ass Gulch. Some of the people would move away now; the ones that didn’t would isolate themselves even more than they had in the past, live out their unhappy lives in solitude. No, nobody had won the big fight. In one way or another, everyone concerned was a loser.
And because that was the case, I didn’t say much to the authorities about my fear of mob violence that night. Even if I was sure my perception of the situation had been right—and I wasn’t, not by any means—it was over now, it was something that had happened, something else that might have happened, it just didn’t matter any longer. I did not hate any of those people; I only felt sorry for them.
The one person I didn’t feel sorry for, aside from Kerry, was Shirley Irwin. She hadn’t confessed—she wasn’t saying anything on advice of her public defender—but she was guilty, all right. Her murderous attack on Kerry, the money Kerry had found in O‘Daniel’s briefcase, Tom Decker’s sworn statement linking her with O’Daniel and establishing her familiarity with his houseboat—these all proved it, at least to my satisfaction. So did a careful audit of the company books, which revealed her complicity in the embezzlement. So did the anonymous threatening note, because the authorities had matched the paper it was written on to a pad found in Irwin’s house. So did the fact that she could not satisfactorily account for her whereabouts for several hours prior to the explosion, even though she’d arranged an alibi for the exact time the boat blew up. And so did a fingerprint of Irwin’s that had been lifted off the back door of the O’Daniel house, a fingerprint that had to have been put there, because of its location, by the person who’d broken in on Sunday night.
Once Kerry and I were allowed to leave, we went straight back to San Francisco. No vacation. We’d both had our fill of Trinity County for a while, and I wasn’t in any physical shape to lie around in the sun, or sit around in it fishing. Plus I had lost my enthusiasm for boats.
Things were a little strained between us for a few days, on my part anyhow; I nursed my annoyance at her longer than I should have because of my wounded pride. For her part, she was chipper as hell. No more brooding about her whack of an ex-husband—or at least none that got taken out on me. She went around smiling a lot, looking pleased with herself. Very pleased with herself.
“You know,” she said to me once, “maybe I�
�ll do some more detective work one of these days. Now that I’m no longer a virgin, so to speak.”
“Not much chance of that. ”
“Why not? You’ve got to admit I’m not bad at it.”
“You got lucky, that’s all. ”
“Hah,” she said. “Lucky. Well, maybe I’ll get ‘lucky’ again on another case.”
“What other case?”
“One of yours. In the future.”
Like hell she will.
So it was over and everything was back to normal, more or less. Kerry was happy. Barney Rivera and his bosses at Great Western Insurance were happy, or happier than they would have been if they’d had to fork over $400,000 instead of $200,000 to Martin Treacle. Eberhardt was happy; he’d found his missing rich-girl up in the Napa Valley and talked her into coming home. I was happy too, I suppose. I had Great Western’s check, and Kerry, and most of my hide intact; my wounds were healing and I wouldn’t have any scars.
But there was one thing that kept itching at my mind at odd moments, troubling my sleep. Had I been right about the aura of mob violence in Musket Creek that night? Or had it been my imagination, a product of the darkness and the fire and the brush I’d had with death? Would they have assaulted me, maybe killed me, if Treacle and Ragsdale hadn’t shown up when they did?
Those were questions that would trouble my sleep for a long time, because there was no way now I would ever know the answers.
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Nightshades (Nameless Detective) Page 17