Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

  Half a dozen raps on the door brought no response. He tried the knob—locked tight. The window beside the door was curtained, the folds crossing fully from top to bottom so that it was impossible to see inside.

  He didn’t like the idea of bracing Tucker Devries at work, in a public place, but hanging around here on an extended stakeout wasn’t an option. For all he knew, Devries was in Los Alegres planning more mischief.

  Two of the local camera shops were in the downtown area. Nobody in either had ever heard of Tucker Devries. The third on the list, Waymark Cameras, New and Used, occupied space in a strip mall back toward the freeway. That was the right one.

  The only person in the small, cluttered store was a fat man in a bulky turtleneck sweater who said he was the owner, Jim Waymark. He was all smiles until Runyon dropped Devries’s name. Then the smile turned upside down, thinned out into a wounded glower.

  “Yeah, I know him. He used to work for me.”

  “Fired or quit?”

  “Neither. Disappeared without any notice. I came in late one day, he was supposed to’ve opened up, but no, the place was still locked up tight. And not a word from him since.”

  “When was that?”

  “About three weeks ago,” Waymark said. “I was thinking about letting him go anyway. He knew cameras but he didn’t know how to deal with people. Get irritated, snap at customers for no reason. But I didn’t take him for a thief.”

  “He steal something from you?”

  “I think so, but I can’t be sure. I’ve been around to where he lives half a dozen times, but he’s never there. Left town, for all I know.”

  “Money?”

  “No, a digital camera. Kodak EasyShare. I don’t know why Tucker would’ve taken it, unless it’s because it has the look and feel of an old-fashioned single-lens reflex camera like his old Nikkormat; there are a lot more expensive digitals in the shop. But the Kodak’s gone and if I was a hundred percent sure he stole it, I’d’ve called the cops on him. Maybe I will anyway.”

  “Don’t bother,” Runyon said. “He’s in a lot more trouble than you can make for him.”

  The first mailbox in the bank at 2309 Crinella bore a label that read: Apt. 1—J. Morales, Mgr. Runyon found Number 1 and rang the bell. Ten seconds later he was facing a young Latina with a squalling baby slung over one meaty shoulder. Child voices and spicy cooking odors dribbled out from the clutter behind her.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for one of your tenants. Tucker Devries, apartment eleven.”

  “Oh, him,” she said. Another one with scorn in her voice. “The photographer.”

  “Seen him lately, say in the past week?”

  “No. His rent’s overdue.”

  Runyon flashed his license, handed her a business card; she looked at both with no expression, held the card between thumb and forefinger as if it were something dead and not very interesting.

  “It’s important that I find Devries,” he said. “Very important.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Hurt some people. Might be something in his unit that’ll help me find him.”

  Blank look while she rocked and patted the baby. It went right on squalling.

  “It’s worth twenty dollars to me to have a look,” he said.

  “Uh-uh. My husband, he wouldn’t like it.”

  “Thirty dollars.”

  The dark eyes showed interest for the first time. “How much?”

  “Forty. Best offer.”

  “Well, you know, I can’t leave my kids alone here.”

  “Forty dollars for a twenty-minute loan of your passkey.”

  “Yeah? How do I know you’ll bring it back?”

  “You saw my license and you have my card.”

  She wrestled with her greed for maybe thirty seconds, just about as long as it took the baby to stop crying and let loose a loud belch. Then she said, “Just a minute,” and retreated inside and shut the door. Two minutes and the door opened again. In place of the infant she held a key on a tarnished brass loop.

  “Forty dollars,” she said.

  He gave her two twenties and she relinquished the key.

  “You better bring it back,” she said. “And you better not steal anything or I’ll call the cops on you.”

  Runyon made his way to Number 11, let himself in. Faint musty odor; nobody there for several days. He found a light switch. Room about the size of one in a downscale motel. Clean, tidy. Cheap furniture, nondescript, the kind you find in those same downscale motel rooms. The only stamps of individuality were on the walls—hundreds of photographs in orderly rows from near the floor to as high as a six-foot-tall man could reach. Mostly five by seven, some eight by ten.

  He spent a couple of minutes scanning them. People, places, animals; fences, graffitied walls, junk cars. No rhyme or reason to any of them, except for two short rows on the back wall near the kitchenette. These were all eight-by-tens and displayed in the best location for viewing. And all depicted women—young, middle-aged, old—in various states of nudity, taken through bathroom and bedroom windows. Tucker Devries, the photographic Peeping Tom.

  Nothing else in the living room. In the kitchenette Runyon opened the refrigerator. Half-full quart of milk nearly a week past its sell-by date. Eggs, packaged cheese left open so the ends were curled up hard, cold cuts, part of a loaf of sliced bread that was stiff to the touch and smelled stale.

  The bathroom was outfitted as a dark room, the equipment neatly arranged on the cheap vanity sink, a red safe light in place of the bulb over the sink. He examined the bottles. Developing solution, fixer, stop bath. And one that didn’t have anything to do with processing pictures.

  Hydrochloric acid.

  Tucker Devries was the perp, all right.

  The only other room was a small bedroom. More cheap furniture in there. The nightstand, the bureau drawers, held nothing of interest. The closet was too small for more than a few items of clothing on hangers, a suitcase, a couple of cardboard cartons. No sign of the inherited trunk. Devries had either stored it or gotten rid of it.

  Runyon sifted through the contents of the two cartons. One held photographs, bundled together and fastened with rubber bands. Discards, probably, ones Devries didn’t deem worthy of display. The other contained his mother’s belongings, some or all of what he’d decided to keep.

  Letters. Wedding portrait of an attractive blond woman and a bushy-haired man, both in their late teens—Anthony and Jenny Noakes. Divorce papers. Baby pictures, and snapshots of a boy from toddler to about age seven. Locks of dark blond hair and other small keepsakes. A woman’s hat made out of some kind of soft animal fur. Odds and ends that meant nothing to Runyon.

  He thumbed through the letters. From Aunt Pauline and a friend in Ukiah named Darlene, mostly. A couple from men, short and suggestive of sexual relationships; none of the names was familiar. Nothing bearing Lloyd Henderson’s name, but two notes in a man’s hand and signed with the initial L. One: Can’t wait to see you again. I’ll be at the camp alone next weekend. See you then. Love. The other: Meet me tonight usual place. I want you so much! Both notes written on what looked like letterhead stationery with the heads cut off. No dates on either.

  Nothing there to indicate motive. Had Devries found something else in the trunk, more notes, maybe, that he’d kept with him or destroyed?

  The twenty minutes were almost up. Quick looks through drawers in the kitchenette and the end table in the living room, and among a neat stack of papers and photography magazines on the coffee table, produced zip. There wasn’t anything in the apartment to indicate where Devries might be holing up.

  Runyon locked up, walked down and returned the passkey to Mrs. Morales. “If you see Devries in the next day or two,” he said, “give me a call at either of the numbers on my card. It’s worth another twenty dollars to me.”

  “Sure, why not.”

  “And if he does show, don’t say anything about my being here looking for him
.”

  “You think I’m crazy?” She surprised him with a conspiratorial wink. “I ain’t even gonna tell my husband about the forty dollars.”

  In the car he sat for a time with his hands on the steering wheel, trying to figure his next move.

  Los Alegres. Sure, that much was clear. If Devries wasn’t here, hadn’t been here in a week or more, then that was where he was. But the problem was still the same one they’d faced all along.

  How to find him.

  19

  Istayed away from the agency on Thursday morning, with the intention of doing the same in the afternoon. After yesterday’s horror show I figured I was entitled. Write out my witnesss statement and drop it off at the Hall of Justice later on. Putter a little, read a little, catch up on cataloging my pulp collection. Quiet, relaxing day.

  Yeah, sure. I should’ve known better.

  I forgot about that insidious invention, the telephone. Silly me. If my brain had been functioning properly, I would have turned off the cell, unplugged the house phone, and drowned the answering machine in the bathtub.

  The damn things, cell and house phones both, kept up a steady clamor from nine o’clock on. Three calls from Tamara. Three calls from media people, starting with Joe DeFalco, my old muckraking Chronicle buddy. Barney Rivera. Gregory Pollexfen. Even a damn telemarketer.

  After the first two calls—Tamara, with a progress report from Jake Runyon on the Henderson investigation, and DeFalco—I wised up and cannily began to monitor the barrage of incoming calls. So I didn’t have to talk to two of the relentless media, or the telemarketer. Or Rivera, whose sadistic imp I could hear lurking inside his message: “Call me. We need to talk.” I knew what he wanted; Tamara had already told me he’d phoned the agency asking for a status report on the missing books and reminding her that the claim investigation was still open. I’d deal with him at my convenience, not his.

  The other calls I answered. Tamara’s second had to do with another agency matter. I picked up when I heard Pollexfen’s voice because he sounded upset and didn’t say in the message he started to leave why he was bothering me at home. Curiosity is sometimes one of my strong points, sometimes one of the weak.

  “The police haven’t found my first editions,” he said without any preamble. “They searched Jeremy’s records and the Coyne woman’s apartment and there’s no sign of them or what was done with them.”

  “So I’ve heard. That’s too bad.”

  “Too bad? Is that all you have to say?”

  “They’ll turn up eventually. Or some evidence of disposal will.”

  “The police don’t care about rare books. They won’t even let me into the library to clean up the mess. Blood spattered everywhere … more than a few volumes may be irreparably damaged.”

  Some cold bird, Pollexfen. His brother-in-law had died in that room, apparently by his wife’s hand, and his primary concern was possible damage to his books.

  “Why tell me, Mr. Pollexfen?”

  “Why? Why do you think? You’re the only investigator I have any faith in.”

  “It’s not my case any longer. The police—”

  “Hang the police. What happened to my first editions is still an unresolved insurance matter. I’ve already spoken to Mr. Rivera at Great Western and he agrees. The investigation, your investigation, is to continue as long as the eight books remain unaccounted for.”

  That little son of a bitch. He’d keep me on the hook as long as possible so he could laugh all the harder when I failed. Well, screw him and screw Gregory Pollexfen.

  “If it continues,” I said, “it’ll be by somebody else. As far as I’m concerned, I’m no longer employed as an independent contractor by Great Western Insurance.”

  “But you can’t quit,” he said angrily. “You have to keep investigating—”

  I said, “No, I don’t,” and hung up on him.

  The satisfaction was premature. I wasn’t done with the Pollexfen case, much as I wanted to be; Tamara’s third call convinced me of that.

  “I just heard from Paul DiSantis,” she said. “Wants to see you ASAP. Urgent.”

  “What about?”

  “Mrs. Pollexfen. He says she’s innocent. Says her defense team wants to hire us to prove it.”

  “Defense team?”

  “Him and the criminal lawyer he got for her. Arthur Sayers. Only the best for the rich folks, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think we should do it, and not just for the money. High profile, you know what I’m saying? Good for business.”

  Arguable, but I let it pass.

  “I told DiSantis I’d get back to him as soon as I talked to you. Wouldn’t do any harm to listen to what he has to say, right?”

  I tightened my grip around the receiver’s hard plastic neck and strangled it a little, just for fun. “My office,” I said. “One o’clock.”

  Angelina did not kill her brother,” DiSantis said. “She couldn’t have.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because she was unconscious for three hours before the shooting.”

  “Passed out drunk? Pretty flimsy defense.”

  He leaned forward in the client’s chair. He didn’t look quite as suave and self-possessed today. Angry, earnest, more than a little worried. He wasn’t just playing bed games with Angelina Pollexfen, I thought; he genuinely cared for her.

  “She wasn’t drunk,” he said, “she was drugged.”

  “Drugged? She reeked of gin.”

  “Two martinis, that’s all she had. You saw how much she drinks—two martinis wouldn’t give her a mild buzz, much less cause her to pass out. Drinking the last one in the library is all she remembers until she woke up in police custody.”

  “That doesn’t mean she was drugged.”

  “The tox screen we had done does. Clonazepam. It’s still in her system.”

  “What’s clonazepam?”

  “It’s prescribed for anxiety disorders, among other things. A large dose mixed with alcohol makes a person sick and disoriented. And it can result in short-term memory loss.”

  “You must have told the police about this. What did they say?”

  “That it doesn’t change anything. That she took it herself, willingly.”

  “Well?”

  “She wouldn’t and she didn’t.”

  “But she had a prescription for it?”

  “Yes. For Klonopin, a trade name for the stuff,” he said. “Her doctor gave it to her a while back, when she was having mild panic attacks at night. There’s a supply in her bathroom medicine cabinet. She swears she hasn’t taken any in weeks, and that she’d never voluntarily take it with alcohol.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “She did that once and it made her sick. Very sick. She had to have her stomach pumped. That’s not an experience anyone would want to repeat.”

  The time the EMTs had been called to the house, I thought. Matter of public record and a point in her favor.

  “What’s her claim?” I asked. “That her brother spiked her martinis?”

  “No. Her husband. He made the martinis, but he drank scotch himself.”

  “So she’s saying Pollexfen drugged both her and Cullrane?”

  “She’s not sure about Cullrane. We asked the police to have a tox screen done on him, but they said it wouldn’t make any difference if clonazepam is found in his system, she could’ve given it to him as well as to herself.”

  “Why would Pollexfen drug the two of them?”

  “Isn’t that obvious? To frame her for the murder.”

  “How could he do that, Mr. DiSantis? Cullrane was shot in a locked room, Mrs. Pollexfen was the only other occupant, and I was outside with Pollexfen and his secretary when the round was fired.”

  “I know that, I know it doesn’t seem possible. But I believe that Angelina is telling the truth. She didn’t kill her brother. And she had nothing to do with those books being stolen.”

  “She think her husband is respo
nsible for that, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why would he dream up such an elaborate scenario to frame Cullrane for theft and her for Cullrane’s murder? What does he stand to gain?”

  “He hated Cullrane and he hates her.”

  “There’d have to be more than that. And there’s still the fact that he couldn’t have fired the shot that killed Cullrane.”

  DiSantis spread his hands. “That’s why I’m here. If anybody can find out the truth and prove Angelina’s innocence, it’s you.”

  “I’m not a miracle worker.”

  “Mr. Rivera at Great Western Insurance thinks you are.”

  Rivera again. I said between my teeth, “I’ll want to talk to Mrs. Pollexfen before I make any commitments. Has she been formally charged?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still being held, then?”

  “Until tomorrow morning. Arthur has a court date at ten to try to arrange bail.”

  “Can you get me in to see her?”

  “Should be able to, yes. Now?”

  “Now,” I said. “I need to drop off my statement at the Hall of Justice anyway.”

  San Francisco operates eight city jails, which says something about the local crime rate. Two of them are located down the Peninsula in San Bruno, there’s a prison ward in San Francisco General Hospital, and a pair for the booking and release of prisoners and for “program-oriented rehabilitation” are in the newest jail complex on Seventh Street near the Hall of Justice. The other three are in the Hall itself, on the two top floors. One of those, on the sixth floor, houses the women’s section where Angelina Pollexfen was being held.

  Every time I enter the Hall of Justice these days, I can’t help remembering that the sprawling monolith has design flaws and is a potential death trap in a high-magnitude earthquake. I don’t read the newspapers as a rule, but Kerry does; there was an article a few years ago in the Chronicle about the building’s “vulnerability to calamity” that she’d called to my attention. The original structure was built in 1958 and has been expanded twice since, but none of the city administrators has seen fit to authorize the necessary retrofitting to meet current earthquake codes. There’s been plenty of talk about putting up a replacement building, yet in twenty years plans haven’t gotten much beyond the talking stage. The ever-increasing cost of tearing down the old and putting up the new back-burners it every time.