Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

  The Hall withstood the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 with only minor damage, though the power failed and prevented officers from opening an electronic door to the secured area where weapons are stored. In a stronger shake centered in or close to the city, the walls would probably crack and even if the building managed not to topple, or the section of the freeway approach to the Bay Bridge in whose shadow it sits didn’t collapse into it, it would likely trap people inside and be rendered unusable—a crisis within a crisis. All of which makes me feel just a little vulnerable in its confines, despite the fact that native San Franciscans learn early on not to be intimidated by the threat of earthquakes.

  The jails in the Hall are gloomy, noisy places presided over by grim-visaged sheriff’s deputies of both sexes. DiSantis got us an audience with Angelina Pollexfen with no trouble, after which we went through the usual security checks and paperwork before being admitted to the visitors’ room. A matron brought Pollexfen out and she and I sat down on our respective sides of the glass wall and picked up the communicating handsets. DiSantis stood behind me and, to his credit, kept his own counsel.

  Different woman, Mrs. Pollexfen, than the one I’d had the adversarial lunch with on Tuesday. Orange jumpsuit in place of the expensive clothes, hair uncombed, pale face free of makeup, eyes sick and dull. The smart-ass cool had been replaced by a kind of wheedling deference.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said. “Paul said you would, but after the other day … I’m sorry about the way I acted. I shouldn’t have had all those martinis.”

  I waved that away. “Tell me what happened yesterday.”

  “I didn’t kill Jeremy,” she said fervently. “I swear to God I didn’t.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened. The last thing I remember is having drinks with with Jeremy and that bastard I’m married to. I started to feel woozy, I think I said something about it, and then … nothing until I woke up with police all over the place.”

  “Where did you have the drinks?”

  “The library. I thought that was a little strange because Greg doesn’t usually let anybody in there with him, especially Jeremy and me.”

  “His idea, this little gathering?”

  “Yes. He insisted we be there at twelve thirty—he said he wanted to talk to us.”

  “About?”

  “Those damn missing books. But he didn’t really have much to say, just the same old baseless accusations.”

  “Against your brother?”

  “Yes. And that I must have known and was keeping quiet about it to protect Jeremy.”

  “Were you?”

  “No. I swear I don’t know what happened to those books. Neither did Jeremy. He called Greg a conniving old fool and told him he’d better watch out or he’d regret it.”

  “Regret it how?”

  Her gaze shifted to DiSantis, but she must not have gotten anything from him in return; she said to my right ear, “He didn’t say how.”

  I said, “Look, Mrs. Pollexfen, if you want my help you’re going to have to confide in me and in your attorneys. Everything you know, nothing held back. Understood?”

  “Yes.” Low, almost a whisper.

  “The three of you hated one another, and yet your husband kept right on letting you and your brother live under his roof. I understand his reasons in your case, but not in your brother’s. Did Jeremy have something on him, some kind of hold?”

  No response for a time. Her lips were cracked and dry; she bit a piece of skin from the lower, scraped it off her tongue with a fingernail. Then, “He knew some things about Greg, yes.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Business dealings. I told you Greg was a manipulator. Well, his manipulations got him into a bind once and he did something illegal to get out of it. I don’t know what it was exactly, just that it involved a small aviation company.”

  “And your brother found out about it, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did this happen—the illegal act?”

  “Five or six years ago.”

  “So your brother blackmailed him—”

  “It wasn’t blackmail. Not exactly.”

  “Call it manipulation, then. Manipulating the manipulator. That’s how Jeremy got him to invest one hundred thousand dollars in the San Jose music show.”

  She nodded. “And when Jeremy lost the money, Greg hated him all the more. That’s why Greg killed him and made it look like I did it—to get both of us out of his life at the same time.”

  “This secret. Can you give me any details?”

  “Jeremy wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “He never mentioned the name of the aviation company?”

  “No. Wait, yes, I heard him talking to Greg once. Green something Aeronautics. Jeremy knew one of the executives who worked there, that’s how he found out what Greg did.”

  “Local company? Bay Area?”

  “I think so.”

  Tamara ought to be able to find out. I said, “Let’s get back to yesterday afternoon. Your husband made the drinks for the three of you?”

  “Martinis for Jeremy and me, scotch for himself.”

  “You said you felt woozy before you passed out. Your brother have the same reaction?”

  “I’m not sure. I think he said his martini tasted funny, but … I’m just not sure.”

  “Where were you, the last you remember?”

  “Where? Oh. Sitting on the couch.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Beside me.”

  “Your husband?”

  “In his desk chair.”

  “This was about one o’clock?”

  “About that. Greg kept looking at his watch, saying he had to leave soon for some book auction.”

  “The three of you were the only ones in the house?”

  “Housekeeper’s day off and Brenda had already gone to the auction.”

  “The shotgun? Still above the fireplace, or did your husband take it down for any reason?”

  “No. It was where it always was.”

  “Did he go near it, touch it?”

  “No.”

  Three hours. Pollexfen could have put enough of the Klonopin into their drinks to keep them unconscious for that long. Shut them inside the library, go off to Pacific Rim Gallery, come back in time to keep his appointment with me. But how could he have timed the shooting so perfectly, with the three of us right there when the shotgun went off? Some way linked to how he’d rigged the crime in the first place? Maybe, if he’d rigged the crime in the first place. But how in hell could you blow off the back of a man’s head when you were on the other side of a double-bolted door?

  Angelina Pollexfen intuited what I was thinking. “I don’t know how he did it,” she said. “All I know is that I didn’t. My own brother … my God, we didn’t get along but I would never have threatened him with a loaded shotgun like they’re saying. I couldn’t kill anybody, not for any reason.”

  I believed her. Her voice, her body language, the haunted desperation on her face and in her eyes … they all said she was telling the truth.

  Pollexfen, then.

  I think maybe I’d known all along it had to be Pollexfen.

  20

  DiSantis and I parted company in the elevator and I went on into General Works and the Homicide Division on the fourth floor. Linda Yin was away from her desk in the inspectors’ bullpen, but Sam Davis sat working at his. I gave him my signed witness statement, then asked if he had a few minutes to spare.

  “Not really,” he said, but he gestured me into a vacant chair anyway. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Couple of things. Gregory Pollexfen’s missing books turn up yet?”

  “No. We figure they were sold off right away. By the vic or Mrs. Pollexfen or the two of them together.”

  “But you haven’t found any record—large bank deposits, large amounts of cash, that kind of thing.”

  “N
ot so far.”

  “Well, if you can’t get some kind of trace, Great Western Insurance is stuck with paying off Pollexfen’s claim. So their claims adjuster wants me to keep on with my investigation.”

  “We don’t have any problem with that.”

  “How about with me doing a little sniffing on the homicide? As long as I don’t get in your way?”

  “Better check with my partner on that. Why the interest?”

  “I just had a talk with Mrs. Pollexfen, at her and her attorney’s request. I think she’s telling a straight story.”

  One of Davis’s bushy eyebrows tilted upward. “Nine out of ten claim they’re innocent.”

  “She could be the tenth who isn’t lying.”

  “All the evidence says otherwise.”

  “Evidence can sometimes be misleading. We both know that.”

  “Sometimes. Not this time. Not according to forensics, ballistics, and pathology. We—”

  His phone rang. Davis picked up, listened, pulled a grimace. “It won’t do you any good to keep calling, Mr. Pollexfen. I told you, my partner told you, you’ll have access when—What’s that?” He listened some more. “Look, just be patient, all right? Tomorrow, probably, that’s the best answer I can give you.”

  When he hung up, I said, “Pollexfen seems anxious to get into his library.”

  “Second time he’s called, demanding his keys so he can clean up in there. If he wasn’t a relentless pain in the ass, he might’ve got them back today.”

  Keys, plural. Pollexfen’s and the duplicate found on Cullrane’s body. Standard police procedure to hold on to them, to ensure that the room remained sealed in case another examination of the crime scene was necessary.

  I said, “Can I ask you some questions about the evidence?”

  Long study before he said, “My partner and I asked around about you. You’ve got a good rep for cooperation with the department.”

  “I was on the job myself before I went out on my own.”

  “So we heard. Go ahead, ask your questions.”

  “Nitrate tests indicate Mrs. Pollexfen fired the shotgun?”

  “No. They came up negative.”

  “But positive on Jeremy Cullrane?”

  “That’s right. It could’ve been suicide—that’s what her lawyers’ll claim—but we don’t see it that way.”

  “How’d it happen, then? She was threatening him with the weapon, he grabbed it and yanked it out of her hands, and the barrel jabbed into his mouth as it went off?”

  Davis nodded. “Hair triggers on that shotgun, the pull lightened down to less than four pounds’ pressure. Wouldn’t have taken much of a yank with her finger on the foretrigger to fire the round when he jerked it up into his face as he was falling backward.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Hers on the grip, stock, and barrel. Three of ’em, nice and clear.”

  “None on the trigger?”

  “Smudges.”

  “Cullrane’s prints on the weapon?”

  “None that were clear enough to identify.”

  “How about burn marks on his hands?”

  “No,” Davis said, “but that doesn’t prove anything. He didn’t have to’ve grabbed the hot barrel. Could’ve caught the grip close to the chamber area.”

  “What about this drug, clonazepam, she had in her system? Did it show up in Cullrane’s, too?”

  “Yes, but so what? She could’ve spiked his drink and hers both.”

  “Or Pollexfen could’ve done it. He made the drinks.”

  “She says he did. Says he arranged the whole thing to get rid of her brother and frame her. You buy into that?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Hell, man, you were out in the hallway with Pollexfen and the secretary when Cullrane died. And you were the one who used the keys to get into the library. The old man couldn’t have done it, now could he?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it. I don’t suppose there was anything unusual on the weapon—scratches, marks, some kind of attachment that didn’t belong?”

  “Nothing,” Davis said. “Good condition, clean, oiled. What’re you thinking? Fix an antique shotgun to fire by some trick? Can’t be done.”

  “No,” I said, “I guess it can’t.”

  At the agency I asked Tamara to find out what she could about the aviation company business five or six years ago, and about the drug clonazepam. It didn’t take her long in either case.

  The aviation company turned out to be a Bay Area outfit, Greenfield Aeronautics. Hostile takeover by a larger outfit, Drexel Aviation. Head of Drexel’s board of directors: Gregory Pollexfen. Hints of bribery and coercion, but nothing proven and no criminal charges or lawsuits filed. Cullrane must have had some documentary evidence against Pollexfen to make the blackmail work. Had Pollexfen found out where it was hidden? Another possibility: whatever the crime, the statute of limitations had run out and he couldn’t be prosecuted for it any longer. And another: his hatred for Cullrane had grown powerful enough to outweigh any concern over the consequences of his illegal business actions. In any event, the information gave substance to Angelina Pollexfen’s claim.

  As for clonazepam—

  “It’s a benzodiazepine drug,” Tamara said, reading from her computer screen. “Used to treat epilepsy, anxiety disorders, panic attacks and night terrors, chronic fatigue syndrome, a few other things. Stimulates the action of gamma-aminobutyric acid on the central nervous system.”

  “Sure it does,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Says here clonazepam is a highly potent variety of benzodiazepine because of strong anxiolytic properties and euphoric side effects. Use of alcohol while taking it intensifies these side effects.”

  “Which are?”

  “Impaired motor function, impaired coordination and balance, disorientation, something called anterograde amnesia.”

  “Short-term memory loss, probably.”

  “Add all that together and you got one mother of a hangover. You’d have to be crazy to mix up clonazepam and martinis on purpose.”

  “Unless you weren’t planning to drink them yourself. Unless you had a good reason for serving them to two other people.”

  I sat closed inside my office, brooding. Pollexfen, not his wife—my gut said it and my head said it. But how could he have arranged the murder? There had to be some angle none of us had thought of yet. It wouldn’t be fancy or complicated, either. Simple. The kind of thing that’s obvious once you put all the facts together and look at them in the right way.

  Yeah. Simple, obvious.

  Except that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with any plausible explanation.

  21

  JAKE RUNYON

  Los Alegres, early afternoon.

  Duty and obligation dictated he take what he’d found out straight to the local police, but he was reluctant to do that just yet. He’d dealt often enough with small-town cops, been on the job himself for enough years, to know what kind of reception he’d get. The lieutenant, St. John, would be skeptical, tell him he didn’t have enough hard evidence against Tucker Devries to warrant a BOLO, much less an APB. Plus he’d have to withhold some of what he’d found out because it had been obtained through a technically illegal search. If he could locate Devries first, he’d have a stronger case. Maybe not strong enough for the law to act immediately, but enough to get them moving. And to give himself a couple of options, if he wanted to pursue them. Confront Devries, try to prod him into an admission of guilt. Or put him under surveillance, stop him before he did any more damage to the Henderson brothers.

  There were half a dozen motels in Los Alegres and vicinity, another couple of dozen within a fifteen-mile radius. Runyon began the canvass as soon as he’d made a list from the Yellow Pages in the county directory. The odds were only fair that Devries had decided to hole up in a motel somewhere around here rather than drive back and forth to Vacaville. He could be sleeping in that van of his, or c
rashing with somebody who didn’t know what he was up to. But there were no other leads to follow. A motel search was the only proactive idea Runyon could come up with.

  The places in Los Alegres first, and those drew blanks. North, then, to a stretch of motels at or near freeway interchanges. He skipped the more expensive chain places. Given the kind of work Devries did and the apartment building he lived in, he wouldn’t have much money to spend on lodging. Or much interest in where he stayed beyond its proximity to Los Alegres; his whole focus was on his private vendetta. If he’d rented a motel room anywhere, it would be the cheap variety.

  Two hours, nine stops—nine more blanks. Number ten was outside a little town eight miles northeast of Los Alegres, a twelve-unit, no-frills place built in a half square around a lumpy macadam parking lot. Twin Palms Court. But there was only one palm on the property and it looked ripe for a chain saw. Owner with a sense of humor or a substandard IQ.

  The office was a tiny room bisected by a counter and presided over by a thin wisp of a man with gray hair just as wispy; a goiterlike growth on one side of his neck gave his head a misshapen cast. His smile was as thin as the rest of him. The bored, indifferent type.

  Runyon had used the same opening so often he repeated the words by rote: “I’m looking for a young man, late twenties, dark blond hair, drives a white Dodge Caravan. You have a guest in the past week or so who fits that description?”