Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I got on the horn to Dennis Litchak, a retired fire captain who lives below me, and asked him to go upstairs and check on my flat; we had exchanged keys sometime ago, as a general precaution between neighbors. He was gone the better part of ten minutes and I did a lot of fidgeting while I waited. But when he came on again he said, “Everything’s okay. You didn’t have any visitors.”

  I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dennis.”

  “What’s up, anyhow?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  I went over to the window and stood looking down at the misty lights along Taylor Street. The pulps were still in my mind. My flat was not nearly so easy to get into as this office, but it was a long way from being impregnable; sooner or later, somebody could get inside and destroy or even steal those magazines. That was a fact and I had damned well better pay attention to it. Have another lock put on the front door and the back door. And increase my personal property insurance right away, no matter how much it cost for the premiums. And then just hope to God I did not come home someday to find what I had found here.

  A couple of minutes passed. Then two cars pulled up at the curb below—Eberhardt’s Dodge and an unmarked police sedan—and Eb and two other guys got out and entered the building. I returned to the desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it, where there were none of the drying worms of white glue. Pretty soon I heard the grinding of the elevator, then their steps in the hall, and the door opened and they came in.

  Eberhardt took one long look at the office and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  “I told you it was bad.”

  “Looks like a psycho job,” one of the other guys said. He had a field-lab case in one hand. “Somebody doesn’t like you worth a damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  While the lab boys went to work, picking their way through the mess on the floor, I stepped into the hall with Eberhardt. He said then, “Hell of a thing to walk into. You okay, paisan?”

  “More or less.”

  “Don’t make a grudge deal out of it, huh?”

  “You know me better than that, Eb. Besides, if anybody finds out who did it, it’ll be you. Or Donleavy, maybe.”

  “If there’s a connection.”

  “The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Did your man find out anything new in Bodega?”

  “Nothing positive,” he said. “The Carding kid left all of his belongings behind when he disappeared, but that may not mean much; none of what little stuff there is is worth anything. And if anybody up there knows where he is or why he left, they’re not talking. Friend of his, Steve Farmer, did say that he’d been kind of secretive for a few days. Maybe writing an article of some kind; that’s what Farmer thinks.”

  I remembered Lainey Madden saying that Jerry had not come down to San Francisco last weekend for that same apparent reason. I said, “Farmer didn’t have any idea what this article might be about?”

  “No. There wasn’t any sign of it among Jerry’s effects, either.”

  “Well, I’m going up there tomorrow myself. Maybe I can nose up something. Okay with you?”

  “Go ahead. But it’ll probably be a waste of time.”

  “I know. One thing I can do, though, is ask Farmer about a girl named Bobbie Reid. He used to date her, and she was also a friend of Christine Webster’s. She committed suicide about a month ago, because of some sort of personal problem.”

  Eberhardt cocked an eyebrow. “You find all that out today?”

  “Yes. From Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax.”

  “You can be a pretty good cop when you set your mind to it,” he said without irony. “What else do you know about this Reid girl?”

  I filled him in on what few other details I had learned. “The suicide report ought to tell you her next-of-kin,” I said, “and maybe who some of her other friends were.”

  “I’ll have Klein check it out.”

  It was another fifteen minutes before one of the lab guys put his head out and said they were finished. Eberhardt and I went back inside. Most of the file papers and folders had been gathered up into loose stacks, and the rest of the wreckage had been stirred around in a methodical sort of way; the desk and chairs and file cabinets and a few other things had a fine dusting of fingerprint powder on them.

  “We found two dominant sets of latents,” one of the lab boys said, “but one set is bound to be yours. Are your prints on file with the Department?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. We’ll just have to hope the other set is on file too—somewhere. And that they belong to whoever laid into this place.”

  “How long will it take to run a check?”

  “Not too long, local and state. If we have to go to the FBI,” he said wryly, “it could take days.”

  Eberhardt said, “Call him at home later tonight or first thing in the morning, either way. I’ll give you the number.”

  “Right.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not much,” the other guy said. “Lock on the door wasn’t jimmied; probably picked with a credit card or something. Smudges on a couple of the papers that seem to be oxblood shoe polish. No help in that, though, unless it’s a rare brand that can be traced to certain dealers.” He shrugged. “And that’s it.”

  The three of them left not long afterward. When they were gone I spent some time scraping the dried glue off the desktop, putting things back into the drawers. But my heart wasn’t in it. It would take me at least a day to sweep up the floors, scrub the walls and furniture, sort out the files, get somebody to cart away the slashed chair and somebody else to bring in a new one. Next week—when some of the pain and anger had dulled and I could face the task with a sense of detachment.

  I got out of there at eight-thirty. And home a little before nine. I forced myself to eat a sandwich I did not want and thought about calling Laura Nichols; but I had nothing of substance to report and no desire to talk to her in any event. I did call Dennis Litchak again, to tell him I would be away tomorrow and to ask him to check on the flat for me from time to time. He said he would.

  At a quarter of ten, just as I was about to head into the shower, the phone rang. It was one of the lab guys: they had run the second set of latent prints through the state and local computers. No card match, no ID. Whoever the prints belonged to had never been fingerprinted in the state of California.

  Terrific.

  So I took my shower and went to bed and eventually to sleep. And had a nightmare about coming home, opening the front door, and being inundated by toppling stacks of pulp magazines, all of which had been ripped to pieces. Voices kept screaming accusations at me, saying things like, “Look what you’ve done to us! You’re supposed to be the last of the lone-wolf private eyes; why didn’t you protect your own kind?” Then the voices became eyes, thousands of eyes that glared balefully at me while I fought to keep from drowning in a sea of shredded pulp paper.

  It was absurd stuff, of course, with comic overtones. But it scared hell out of me just the same.

  THIRTEEN

  Until the early sixties Bodega Bay had been a quiet and old-fashioned commercial fishermen’s province. People from the bigger Sonoma County towns like Santa Rosa and Petaluma went there to buy fresh crabs and other seafood, or to use one of the nearby beaches, and families came up from San Francisco once in a while to take in the scenic beauty of the Sonoma coastline; otherwise the natives had the place pretty much to themselves.

  But then Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie, The Birds, on and around the bay, at the village of Bodega close by, and at the complex of bayfront buildings called The Tides and that resulted in a good deal of publicity and national prominence. Before long Bodega Bay became something of an “in” place to visit or even to live at, and it began to change accordingly. Along with streams of sightseers in the spring and summer months, artists of one type or another, enterprising merchants, retired couples, sport fishermen af
ter salmon or sea bass all flocked there; land developers built a couple of fancy motels and at least one expensive community of homes, called Bodega Bay Harbor; antique and souvenir shops sprang up everywhere. Today, less than two decades later, it was a different place. The rugged coastline was still the same, and most of the old buildings and landmarks along Highway 1 were still there, but all the charm and attractiveness seemed to be gone. The impression you got was one of creeping suburbia: another twenty years and all the hills and cliffs and beaches would probably be covered with houses, fast-food franchises, shopping centers.

  That was the feeling I had, anyway, when I got up there a few minutes past noon on Saturday—my first visit to Bodega Bay since a Sunday outing with Erika Coates eight years ago, in the good days before the breakup of our relationship. But then, maybe part of the feeling was my mood, and part of it, too, the heavy low-hanging fog that shrouded the coast and gave everything new and old a cheerless aspect. The mist was so thick it was almost like rain; I had to use my windshield wipers since passing through Valley Ford ten miles back.

  I turned off the highway into the parking lot around which The Tides was built. There were only three other cars in the lot and nobody out and around that I could see; even the road was more or less deserted. I parked in front of the Wharf Bar and Restaurant and got out into the fog and an icy wind.

  This place, at least, did not appear to have changed much. All the same buildings—The Tides Motel, the small ice house, the Union 76 dock, the barber shop and souvenir shop—and all of them still painted white with garish orange roofs and trim. Even the weathered signs on the front of The Tides Wharf, a long low structure that housed the restaurant and a fresh-fish market, looked to be the same.

  I went over and onto the pier that led around and along the Wharf’s backside. The bay was an oily grayish-black color, windrumpled into whitecaps; the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel and three high-masted fishing boats, anchored downwind, rocked in the swells. You could not see much of Bodega Head across the bay, and the narrows that led into the ocean at the southern end, bounded by a pair of rock jetties, were all but obliterated. The sea air smelled sharply of salt and dark rain: another storm building somewhere out on the Pacific.

  An archway opened off the pier into the warehouse area where fish-market employees weighed, cleaned, and packaged catches brought in by the commercial boats. On my right as I walked through were round concrete tanks used to keep shellfish fresh; the long room to my left was lined with wooden benches and cluttered with large carts on oversized metal wheels, small dollies, stacks of wooden pallets, rows of storage lockers, a Toledo weighing scale, and two big refrigeration units.

  At the far end a young guy dressed in a sweatshirt and Levi’s was hosing down the concrete floor. As I approached he turned and then released the hand shut-off on the hose. He had intense brown eyes, a square flattish face, and a mop of light-brown hair parted in the middle and swept back over his ears. Across the front of his sweatshirt, in maroon letters, were the words San Francisco State College.

  “Steve Farmer?” I asked him.

  He gave me a somewhat wary look. “That’s right.”

  I told him my name. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Jerry Carding, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re that private detective, aren’t you. The one in the papers.

  “Yes.”

  The wariness went away; his eyes took on a worried, unhappy look. He dropped the hose, ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “Well, I can’t help you much. I don’t know what happened to Jerry; I’ve already told the police that. But one thing’s sure: he didn’t disappear because Chris got pregnant or because he had anything to do with her murder. He loved her; they were planning to get married. And he’s a nonviolent person. He couldn’t harm another human being, not for any reason.”

  I nodded. “Everyone I’ve talked to says essentially the same thing.”

  “Don’t you believe it?”

  “I’d like to. When did you last talk to Jerry?”

  Farmer sighed. “The day before he disappeared. Last Saturday. We had a beer together after work.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing much. He was in a hurry to get home.”

  “Home?”

  “I mean the Darden house over in Bodega. That was where he was living.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No. Just that he had some work to do.”

  “The article you told the police about?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did he ever hint as to what it might be about?”

  “Never. But he seemed to think it was important.”

  “How long had he been working on it?”

  “I don’t know. He’d been kind of excited for three or four days, though.”

  “Excited in what way? Nervous? Eager?”

  “Eager,” Farmer said. “When I asked him about it he said it was a secret and I’d find out when everybody else did.”

  “Who’re his other friends here? Anyone he might have talked to about what he was writing?”

  “Just Sharon Darden, I guess. Her mother owns the house where Jerry lived; she rents out one of her rooms. But I talked to Sharon after Jerry vanished; she doesn’t know anything more than I do.”

  “How close were she and Jerry?”

  “If you mean were they making it together, the answer is no. I told you, Jerry was in love with Chris. He’s not the kind of guy who screws around on his lady.”

  “I just wondered if they were good friends.”

  “Pretty good. If Jerry’d told her anything, she’d have mentioned it to me or the police. She wouldn’t have any reason to keep it to herself.”

  “When did you first find out Jerry was missing?”

  “Monday morning. Gus Kellenbeck called me because Jerry hadn’t reported for work.”

  “Kellenbeck?”

  “He owns the Kellenbeck Fish Company,” Farmer said. “Jerry did odd jobs for him.”

  “Oh? I thought he worked as a deckhand.”

  “He did, off and on. But he couldn’t make enough money doing that, so he went to work for Kellenbeck.”

  “This fish company is where?”

  “A little ways north of here, on the highway.”

  “Is it open on Saturdays?”

  “Yeah. Every day but Sunday.”

  “Which boat did Jerry work on?”

  “The Kingfisher. Andy Greene’s troller.”

  “And where would I find Greene?”

  “Over at the marina, probably. On the other side of the bay. He lives on board the Kingfisher.”

  I asked him about Victor Carding, and got a replay of the unenlightening answers Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax had given me. Then Farmer paused, frowned, and asked: “Do the police think Jerry had something to do with what happened to his old man? Is that why you’re asking about him?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Not to me, it isn’t. I thought they arrested the guy who shot Mr. Carding; that’s what the papers said.”

  “Martin Talbot isn’t guilty,” I said.

  “He confessed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But he’s not guilty. There are psychological reasons why somebody would confess to a crime he didn’t commit.”

  Farmer half-turned and stared over at one of the refrigerator units. After a time he said, “How can anything like this happen?” but he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. “Jerry’s mother dead in an accident, his father murdered, Chris murdered—everybody he cared about just . . . wiped out. What if he’s dead too?”

  Yeah, I thought. What if he’s dead too?

  He faced me again. “Jerry’s not a killer, he’s a victim. You understand? He’s a victim whether he’s all right or not.”

  “I understand, son.”

  He seemed suddenly a little embarrassed, as if he felt he had displayed too much emotion in front of a stranger. �
�Look, I, uh, I’ve got work to do. Is there anything else?”

  “Just a couple of things. Is Martin Talbot’s name familiar to you?”

  “No. I never heard of him until yesterday.”

  “How about Laura Nichols? Karen Nichols?”

  “No.”

  “About Christine—did she have any enemies you might know about?”

  “You mean somebody who’d make those threats the paper said she’d been getting?” He shook his head. “No. Whoever that crazy bastard is, he must be the one who killed her.”

  “So it would seem,” I said. And then asked him the question I had been saving for last: “What can you tell me about Bobbie Reid?”

  His reaction was immediate: he jerked slightly, as if I had swatted him one, and his face closed up and something flickered in his eyes that might have been pain. “What does Bobbie have to do with any of this?”

  “I don’t know that she has anything to do with it. But she and Chris were friends.”

  “The hell they were.”

  “You didn’t know that? It’s true, Steve.”

  “Bobbie’s dead,” he said stiffly. “She killed herself more than a month ago.”

  “So I’ve been told. Do you know why?”

  “No.” But he said the word a little too fast, it seemed to me. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about Bobbie, okay?”

  “You’ll have to talk to somebody about her sooner or later. If not me, then the police.”

  “She couldn’t have anything to do with what happened to Chris. How could she? No—I’ve got enough dead people to think about as it is.”

  I wanted to press him further, but it would not have done any good; his expression said that he was not going to do any more talking no matter what I said. “All right, Steve. Have it your own way. Thanks for your time.”