Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

“Yes.”

  He went and got the notebook from his briefcase, handling it carefully as he always did. Not a diary or a journal, just a random collection of notes Mother had made—dates, names, events, impressions, reminders. He was in there, many times until the last few pages. “My sweet baby, Tucker. My handsome boy, Tucker.” His miserable damn father a few times, the sentences bitter and angry. Men she’d dated, casual affairs, you couldn’t blame her for seeking love and comfort after Anthony Noakes abandoned the two of them. And then Lloyd Henderson. Nine entries, right at the end, five happy and hopeful, three infuriating and terrible. Evidence. Irrefutable testimony.

  The notebook opened in his hands, as if by itself, to that last section. Mother’s round, cramped handwriting in faded purple ink. The smeared word at the bottom of the last page: teardrop, tearstain. Mother’s tears.

  He stood next to Henderson, loomed over him, and read the passages aloud again, the same ones in the same order.

  “‘I love Lloyd. More than I ever loved Anthony. I know he’s married and he’s never made any promises, never said he loves me, but I feel his love when we’re in bed. It’s not just sex. He loves me as much as I love him.’

  “‘Went to his camp today, I just needed to see him for a few minutes. But I shouldn’t have. He was there with his friends and he made me leave. He was so angry, like Anthony used to get sometimes. It’s a side to Lloyd I hope I never see again.’

  “‘I’m going to have Lloyd’s baby. Our love child. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was an accident, but he’ll be happy when I tell him. I know he will.’

  “‘He was furious, that awful angry side of him. He said the baby’s not his. He said he doesn’t want to see me anymore, it’s over between us. How can he say that after what we’ve been to each other?’

  “‘I drove down to Los Alegres, I saw his wife, I saw him at his office. He called me a dirty little slut. He said he’d kill me if I told anybody he was the father of my baby. The way he looked at me … like he really did want me dead. God, how could I have been so stupid?’”

  And the last entry, the final damning piece of testimony, written the day before she disappeared. “‘Lloyd drove up this afternoon alone. I saw his truck go by the store. After work tomorrow I’m going to his camp. I don’t care if he doesn’t want me, he has to help me with the baby. He has to. He used me and now he has to pay. I’ll make him pay.’”

  Devries closed the notebook. His eyes were wet again, like hers were when she wrote those last words. “You see?” he said. “You see? She didn’t make him pay, he made her pay. That night, right here. Her and the baby both. Strangled her and then dumped her in the woods for the animals … the animals …”

  “It wasn’t my father. She wasn’t killed here.”

  “She was. I know she was.”

  “Somebody else …”

  “That same night? Attacked her, strangled her, that same night? Coincidence? No, Henderson. No, no, no!”

  “I’ll never believe my father did it. He had an affair with your mother; all right, he wasn’t a saint. But he wasn’t a murderer, either.”

  “He was! He’s dead, I can’t punish him, but I’ve got you and I’ll get your brother, too, devil’s sons, bastards, you’ll both die in his place, right here where he killed my mother and my baby brother or sister!”

  He realized he was screaming. His temples were pounding, his face was hot and running sweat. Control. Don’t lose it now, it’s not finished yet, there’s still the other one, Damon. Take deep breaths. Get a grip.

  “Go ahead then,” Henderson said. “Shoot me, get it over with.”

  “No.”

  “Do it, damn you.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Now he felt dirty all over. Crawly, as if bugs had come up out of the floor, dropped off the ceiling, and were trying to burrow beneath his skin. Scrub them off, get clean for the execution. You had to be clean. For Mother’s sake. She’d drummed that into his head so many times. Be clean, Tucker. Always keep yourself clean.

  He went outside, stood sucking in the chill mountain air until it cooled him and his head quit pounding. He made himself walk slowly around the cabin to the stream. When he knelt down on the bank, he realized he was still holding the gun; he put the safety on, shoved the automatic inside his belt. In the splashes and scrubs of icy water, the bugs shriveled and died and his skin tingled and he was clean again. He stood, dripping, and went around the front of the cabin.

  A man was standing there against the front wall.

  Devries stopped, staring in disbelief. At first he thought he must be hallucinating. But no, no, the man was real. Big, hard-looking, somebody he’d never seen before.

  “Hello, Tucker.”

  He reached for the gun, his fingers, still wet, slipsliding around the handle. But the stranger was already moving, fast. There was a slash of pain at the joining of his neck and shoulder and the entire right side of his body went numb. He stood there bent and swaying, confused. Left hand, get the gun with his left hand … but the gun wasn’t there anymore, the stranger had it now.

  Another cut of pain, all through his left side this time. And all at once he was down on the grass, writhing, numb all over, looking up at the hard face above him through a watery blur. He tried to say something, he wasn’t even sure what it was, but his throat muscles wouldn’t work. The noises he made sounded like a baby’s gurgle.

  The man caught hold of his jacket collar and he felt himself being dragged through the dew-wet grass, pulled up the porch steps, slammed back against a support post. He couldn’t prevent any of it, couldn’t move his arms, could barely feel his legs. Paralyzed. What did he do to me?

  Something cold and hard snapped around one wrist. Through the blur he saw that it was a ring of steel. Handcuff. The other ring clicked around a railing post. Hard footsteps thudded in his ears, across the porch, into the cabin. Voices, then, like noisy fish swimming in the confusion inside his head.

  “Runyon! My God, I’d given up hope—”

  “You all right? He hurt you, burn you?”

  “No, no. Just numb, cramped … Where’s Devries?”

  “Handcuffed outside.”

  “How did you—?”

  “Judo. He won’t give us any trouble.”

  Sounds of tape being torn loose. And the voices, still swimming.

  “I thought for sure I was dead. How’d you know where he took me?”

  “I was here before, three days ago. Figured it out when I remembered the chair and the table over there, the only things he hadn’t wrecked and burned. I had to park down the road so he wouldn’t hear me coming. Wasn’t sure I’d make it in time.”

  “You almost didn’t. He’s crazy … he thinks my father killed his mother. It’s not true. I don’t care what kind of proof he thinks he’s got.”

  It is true, Devries thought. It is, it is. Lloyd Henderson. Dead, and his sons both alive. I’m sorry, Mother. I tried. For you and the baby. I tried so hard but I waited too long.

  Tears in his eyes, deepening the blur. Like her tears that last night, the droplet on the smeared purple ink.

  He felt dirty. He felt as if now, no matter what he did, he would never be clean again.

  27

  Inspectors Yin and Davis weren’t particularly happy to see me—at first.

  It was a quarter past eight and they’d just come on duty. They were having coffee at Yin’s desk, talking over something she’d pulled up on her computer screen. The coffee smelled good—I’d had a quick cup before leaving home and was ready for another—but neither of them offered me any.

  “You again,” Davis said. “What is it this time?”

  “Some things you’re going to want to hear. Question first. Have you given Gregory Pollexfen permission to clean up his library yet?”

  “Later this morning. Get him off our backs about it.”

  “So you’ve still got both keys.”

  Yin said, “We’ve got them. Why?”

&nb
sp; “He killed Jeremy Cullrane,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I know how and why, and I think I can prove it to you.”

  They looked at me, looked at each other, looked at me again. Cop looks: poker-faced skepticism.

  “Give me half an hour in the library, then a few more minutes with Pollexfen. Both of you present, of course. That’s all I ask.”

  “You say you can prove he killed Cullrane,” Yin said. “While he was with you outside in the hallway.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, let’s hear your theory.”

  I told them how I had it figured. Method, motives, and what I expected to find in the library. They listened without interruption. When I was done, they weren’t skeptical anymore. Davis said to his partner, “You know, it could’ve been managed that way. Explains why Pollexfen’s been so anxious to get into the library. It’s a better fit, too. No inconsistencies.”

  “We’ll find out,” Yin said. “Call the man and tell him we’re on our way with his keys.”

  Pollexfen was in a bright, almost smug mood—at first. He must have been surprised to see me with the two inspectors and the patrolman they’d brought along, but he didn’t show it. Still convinced he’d outsmarted and bamboozled everybody concerned. It wasn’t until Yin told him she and Davis and I would be spending some time alone in the library that you could see the arrogance fade a little and the worm of doubt wiggle in.

  “What for?” he said. “You’ve already examined the room, you and your forensics experts.”

  Yin said, “Some things we want to check on.”

  “What things? What are you looking for?”

  “We’ll tell you after we’re done.”

  “I demand to be present. It’s my library, my house—”

  “We’d rather you wait in the living room, Mr. Pollexfen.”

  Blood-rush darkened his face; he bounced the ferrule of his cane hard on the floor. “By God, your superiors will hear about this!”

  Yin ignored that. She directed the patrolman to stay with Pollexfen, and the three of us went down the hallway to the library. The yellow crime scene tape was in place over the door, the police seal and both bolt locks secure. Yin removed the tape, broke the seal, keyed us in. Davis put on the lights.

  The air in there had a stale quality, a faint residue of Wednesday’s violence. Anyone who thinks the odor of death doesn’t linger in a closed space has never been in one. It can and does—for days, even weeks. And you don’t need to be extra sensitive to be aware of it.

  This was my show; Yin and Davis stood off, waiting for my lead. I took a long look around, picturing the room as I’d first seen it after the shooting. The eight books were still on the couch, but the stack wasn’t quite as orderly; the inspectors or the techs must have moved them. The same book was still on top, though. The dried mess inside the fireplace had been sampled and dusted and sprayed—the techs again. In the rows of bookshelves alongside, the blood spatters shone dark and crusty, like rust spots, on the Mylar jacket protectors.

  I went to those shelves first, donning the pair of white latex gloves Yin had given me, and spent a few minutes examining the authors and titles in the affected rows on each side. “The first time Pollexfen showed me around in here,” I said, “every book was arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. The books on these two shelves were N, O, and part of P. Look at them now.”

  Yin and Davis looked. “Out of order,” she said. “Some K’s, L’s, other letters mixed in.”

  “You’ll have to take my word on this, but none of the replacements are particularly valuable. There’s only one reason a meticulous collector like Pollexfen would’ve switched the books around.”

  Davis said, “Get the valuable ones out of the way. Protect them from possible splatter damage.”

  “That’s it. The same reason he arranged the killing so that most of the blood and gore ended up inside the fireplace. He cares more about his first editions than anything else. Once he decided to stage the murder in here, protecting the books that can’t be easily replaced was his number-one priority.”

  I moved over to the stack on the couch, sat down beside it. The book on top, its Mylar cover coated with a fine film of fingerprint powder, was The Talking Clock by Frank Gruber. I’d noted that on Wednesday because Gruber had been a frequent contributor to the pulp magazines in the ’30s and ’40s and I’d read dozens of his stories, one of them The Talking Clock as a magazine serial. With a forefinger, I lifted the front cover and the first couple of pages. Fine condition, but no author signature or inscription.

  I leaned down to look at the spines of the others in the stack. Two were also by Gruber: The Navy Colt and The Hungry Dog. The rest: Bodies Are Where You Find Them, Brett Halliday. Death on the Door Mat, M. V. Heberden. Vivanti, Sydney Horler. The Corpse at the Quill Club, Amelia Reynolds Long. The Mandarin’s Sapphire, Dwight Marfield.

  “Eight more books,” I said, “that we were supposed to think were targeted for theft by Cullrane. The first eight are ultrarare, some one-of-a-kind, the authors and titles recognizable to nonbibliophiles, and worth half a million on the collectors’ market. But these eight are just the opposite—more or less obscure titles by relatively minor writers.” I tapped the copy of The Talking Clock. “I looked this one up on the Internet. In fine condition, without an author inscription, it’s worth a maximum of two hundred dollars. The others here by the same writer can’t be worth any more. I don’t know about the other five, but I’d be surprised if their value is even a thousand dollars combined.”

  Davis said, “Same purpose as the spatter rows. Protecting his valuables.”

  “Right. He figured I wouldn’t notice and that no one on the investigating team would be enough of a bibliophile to tell the difference.”

  “That makes two marks against Mr. Pollexfen,” Yin said.

  Number three coming up: the eight stolen rarities.

  Except that they hadn’t been stolen at all. They were right here in this room and had been all along.

  It took the three of us more than an hour to find all of them. I’d told the inspectors what to look for and it was

  Yin who made the initial discovery, the inscribed first edition of Ellery Queen’s The Roman Hat Mystery. I found the Doyle, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Davis the other Hammett and Chandler’s The Big Sleep; and Yin, Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance and the Cain.

  They were scattered throughout the collection, among the A’s, the E’s, the G’s, the R’s, the T’s, the V’s, the W’s. Mostly on the higher shelves, so they’d be even less easy to spot. Not that there’d been much chance I or anybody else, even a fellow bibliophile, would have found them by accident or on a cursory inspection; you had to know what you were looking for, and you had to examine nearly all of the thousands of books in the library.

  Such a simple trick—a neat little variation on Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” All Pollexfen had done was take off the original dust jackets, wrap the books in different jackets of the exact same size from titles by lesser authors, and set them back on the shelves with the lesser authors’ other books. The Maltese Falcon, for instance, was hidden inside the jacket for The Fires at Fitch’s Folly by Kenneth Whipple. After all eight were hidden, it was easy for Pollexfen to slip the rare dust jackets out of the library in a briefcase and hide them in a safe place. The books by Whipple and the others he’d used were right there on his desk in plain sight—unjacketed copies mixed in with jacketed ones that I’d noticed on my first visit and assumed were new acquisitions. To complete the illusion of theft, Pollexfen had left gaps in the shelves where the “missing” valuables had originally stood.

  “Three marks against him,” Yin said when we had all eight rarities. “You’ve been right on everything so far.”

  Davis said, “Let’s go see if he’s right about the rest of it.”

  Under the watchful eye of the patrolman, Pollexfen was stumping around the living room
with the tip of his cane making hard, angry noises on the rug-covered tiles. He stopped when he saw the three of us come in, started to say something that didn’t get out of his throat. It was the eight books I was carrying, spines outward, that checked him. His brows and his mouth pulled down into a bunched grimace.

  “What have you got there?” he demanded. “How dare you remove books from my library without my permission?”

  I said, “You should be glad to see these. Familiar even from where you’re standing, aren’t they?”

  He came stumping toward me. “Give me those!”

  I said, “No, you don’t,” and Davis stepped between Pollexfen and me to stop his advance. “They’re evidence now.”

  “Evidence—bah! Where are the dust wrappers?”

  “Wherever you hid them.”

  He waved that away. “The books—where did you find them?”

  “Same answer. Where you hid them. Inside jackets by other authors, filed under those authors’ names on the shelves.”

  Another dismissive wave. Brazen it out, that was his style. Contemptuously spin and deny and manipulate to the end. He’d’ve been right at home in the nation’s capital. “Is that what Jeremy did? Hid them right under my nose until he could find a way to remove them later on?”

  “Your scheme, not his. One of several.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Fact. Here’s another: the eight books on the couch Cullrane was supposed to’ve gathered before he was shot. There’s not a highly prized first edition among them.”

  “No? I told you he didn’t know books, didn’t I?”

  “Then how did he happen to pick eight of the most valuable the first time around? Blind luck? No, you chose the second batch because you didn’t want to risk damage to expensive books. The same reason you replaced expensive ones with inexpensive ones on the shelves alongside the fireplace.”

  He glared at me; there was hate in his eyes now, black as midnight. “I did no such thing. If books were moved around in there, Jeremy did it. Or Angelina.”

  “They’d have no reason to. Only you.”