Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Fair. Better than I ought to.”

  “No after effects?”

  “None I want to talk about.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Guy in the Highway Patrol office up there told me where you were. According to him, no word on Greene yet.”

  “I know. Fitzpatrick came by a few minutes ago.”

  “You wouldn’t be planning to stick around up there until he’s caught?”

  “Hell no. I’ll be home as soon as they’re done with me.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “Sometime this afternoon, I guess. I’ve got to go sign a statement. And see a couple of Federal agents before that.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I just got off the phone with one of the Alcohol and Firearms boys.”

  “Have you talked to Donleavy?”

  “Little while ago.”

  “Is he dropping the charges against Martin Talbot?”

  “That’s what he says. But the Carding murder is still officially open until Greene turns up. Or some kind of incriminating evidence does.” He paused. “The Christine Webster case is still open too, damn it.”

  “Greene didn’t kill her, Eb,” I said.

  “So you managed to tell me last night. You’re probably right—but I’d like it better if you weren’t.”

  “I would too. But there’s just no motive for him to’ve shot the girl. Jerry Carding only had two copies of his article the night he was killed; there wasn’t a third he could have mailed to Christine.”

  “Greene might have been afraid he’d told her something,” Eberhardt said, “and went after her for that reason.”

  “It doesn’t add up. Why would Greene be more worried about Christine than, say, Steve Farmer or Sharon Darden—people right here at Bodega Bay? And if he had wanted to kill her, why wait until Tuesday night to do it? And why shoot her with a .32 instead of the .38 he used on Carding or the Browning automatic he tried to use on me?”

  Eberhardt sighed. “I can’t argue with any of that,” he said. “All right, Greene didn’t kill Christine. But then who did? And why? Where’s the connection?”

  “Maybe there isn’t one. Not a direct one, anyway.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “I don’t like coincidences worth a damn.”

  “Neither do I, usually. But they do happen, Eb. They even happen in bunches sometimes.”

  “Bunches?”

  “I’m starting to wonder,” I said, “if maybe there aren’t a lot of coincidences in these two cases.”

  “Meaning what? You got another theory?”

  “No. Just a feeling so far. Did you dig up anything on Bobbie Reid, by the way?”

  “Not much. She was the private type: no close friends, kept pretty much to herself. Her parents live in Red Bluff and they’re the ones who claimed the body; neither of them had much contact with Bobbie in the past year, said they didn’t know why she committed suicide. Didn’t seem too broken up about it, either. Nice folks.”

  “What about the people where she worked?”

  “Same thing. She was a legal secretary in a law office downtown ; none of her coworkers knew her very well. Her boss, Arthur Brown, says he’d been thinking about firing her just before her death—late for work on a regular basis, withdrawn, moody, fouled up an important brief. . . . Pause. “Hold on a second, will you?” He covered the mouthpiece but I could hear muffled voices in the background. A few seconds later he came back on. “I’ve got to go; the Alcohol and Firearms people are here. Call me when you get back to the city.”

  “I may call you sooner than that,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe inside an hour.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll get back to you when I am.”

  I rang off and went over and stood looking out through the bayside window. More fog today, swirling heavily over the ruf fled surface of the bay. Like the thoughts swirling over the surface of my mind. Facts, memory scraps, additions and subtractions—all swirling and then beginning to coalesce into the missing part of the blueprint.

  For the first time, then, I could see the complete design of the labyrinth. And it only had three connecting sides. The open end, the missing side, was nothing but coincidence—multiple coincidence.

  Our stubborn refusal to accept that, particularly on this kind of Grand Guignol basis, was what had been hanging us up all along. Part of everything had begun with accidental occurrence and some of the complications had been built on it: a car driven by Martin Talbot crashing into one driven by Victor Carding; Christine Webster having my business card and Laura Nichols deciding she needed a private detective; Talbot and me arriving at the Carding house just after Carding’s murder; all the suicides real and attempted and bogus; interrelationships among the people involved; even things like Greene showing up at Kellenbeck’s house just in time to spot me last night. Three parts connective tissue to one part coincidence.

  I thought I knew now who had killed Christine and I had a hunch as to why. But I needed the answer to one more question before I could be sure. Just one more question.

  I put on Muhlheim’s coat again, went out and down across the parking lot. The cold wind made my eyes water and started my nose running; my chest still felt badly congested. If I was smart I would make an appointment tomorrow with Doctor White. The shape my lungs were in, pneumonia was a threat I could not afford to overlook.

  Inside The Tides Wharf I walked around into the warehouse area behind the fish market. Deserted. I came back out to the counter where a balding guy in a white apron was fileting salmon and asked him if Steve Farmer had reported for work today. The guy said yes, he was in the restaurant on his break.

  So I crossed over there and stepped inside. Farmer was sitting at one of the tables near the windows; he was alone and seemed to be brooding into a cup of coffee. When I went to him and said, “Hello, Steve,” he looked up at me with pained and listless eyes.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

  I sat down. “I guess you know about Jerry.”

  “I heard this morning. It’s all people are talking about.”

  “I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.”

  “Sure.” He stared into the cup. “Jerry too,” he said. “All of them—just like I was afraid it would be.”

  Yeah, I thought, all of them. But I said, “I need the answer to a question, Steve. You’re the only person who can give it to me.”

  “What question?”

  “Why did Bobbie Reid commit suicide?”

  His face started to close up again, the way it had before, but this time it did not quite make it—as if Jerry Carding’s death had taken the edge off his feelings about everything else. He rested an elbow on the table, cocked the hand against his forehead like a visor. “Why do you have to keep bugging me about Bobbie? It’s all finished now, for God’s sake. Her suicide doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.”

  “Yes it does. It’s got everything to do with Christine Webster’s murder.”

  He gave me an anguished look from under the visored hand. “But I thought Andy Greene and Gus Kellenbeck—?”

  “No. They killed Jerry and his father, yes. But not Christine.” I paused and then asked him again, in a gentler tone: “Why did Bobbie commit suicide?”

  “I don’t know, not for sure. She had hangups. . . .”

  “What hangups? Steve, why did you break up with her?”

  “I didn’t. She broke up with me; she . . . found somebody else. . . .”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody else, that’s all.”

  “Another man?”

  His shoulders sagged; he dropped both forearms to the table edge and slumped over them with his head bent. “No,” he said, “not another man. She was making it with a woman. I loved her and she turned gay on me, she turned into a lesbian. . . . ”

 
Bingo.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I called Eberhardt back ten minutes later and laid it all out for him: who I believed had shot Christine Webster and why. He said it sounded reasonable but he would need proof, not speculation and hearsay, before he could make an arrest; but he agreed with me that he would not have too much trouble finding it. With luck he could have the whole ugly business wrapped up by the end of the day.

  The Justice Department investigators showed up not long afterward, and I spent two hours making another statement and answering an endless string of questions. When they were finally done with me I had a headache and an achey feeling in my joints; but I also had their permission to go back to San Francisco. Twelve minutes after they left I was on my way to the Highway Patrol substation. And twenty minutes after that I was on my way home—sniffling and hacking up phlegm with the heater on full blast.

  It was a few minutes past three when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog there was as thick as it had been up the coast; you could not see the bridge towers or much of Alcatraz or Angel Island, and the hills and buildings of the city had a gray distorted look. But that was all right. I liked the fog more than ever now, because without it I would not have survived last night’s ordeal with Greene.

  I drove down Lombard, straight up Laguna. Predictably, the closest parking space to my building turned out to be two blocks away. My joints ached even more now and I had developed a scratchy throat; the two-block walk in the cold did me no good at all.

  I gathered up my mail and let myself in. When I got up to my door I felt a twinge of apprehension, remembering what I had found at my office on Friday. But both locks were secure and nothing had been disturbed inside: the pulps were still on their shelves, the bachelor’s mess on the furniture and floor was just as I had left it.

  Brew up some tea, I thought, take another cold pill, and get into bed. So I threw Muhlheim’s coat on the couch—I would have to remember to get the coat and the rest of his clothing cleaned and shipped back to him pretty soon—and headed toward the kitchen.

  On the way I shuffled through the mail. And one of the envelopes made me stop in the doorway. It was plain-white and business-sized, with no return address. And the “r” in my name was chipped, the “a” in the street address tilted.

  Christ. I tore it open, pulled out a single sheet of white paper, and unfolded it. My name was typed there, too, and below it three lines:

  You’d better leave me alone. If you don’t, I’ll do something to YOU next time, not just your office. I mean that. Leave me ALONE.

  I held up the envelope and looked at the postmark. Mailed Saturday night. Sure, that figured. She must have written it right after my call—

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  Frowning, I turned to look over there. Dennis Litchak, probably, because the downstairs door buzzer had not sounded; he must have seen or heard me enter and come up to talk. Well, I was in no mood or condition for company right now. I went to the door, thinking that I would get rid of old Dennis in five seconds flat, and opened up.

  Karen Nichols stood in the hallway outside.

  “I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she said. “Waiting and waiting for you. I thought you’d never come home.”

  In her right hand was a .32 caliber revolver.

  The muscles in my stomach and groin contracted; I could feel heat come into my cheeks and a shaking start up inside. This was the second time in eighteen hours that a gun had been pointed at me, that I had tasted sudden fear and come up against sudden death. It had been bad enough with Greene, but this was worse because I was sick and exhausted and because it meant coping all over again, trying to beat the odds twice in a row.

  I still had hold of the door and I considered throwing it shut, diving out of the way. But I would have had to step back to do that, to get the door in front of my body and my reflexes were shaky and not to be trusted. She had already moved forward to the threshold, too, and her finger was tight against the trigger. Too risky. Stay calm, I told myself, find another way. Don’t do anything to make her shoot.

  “Back up and let me in,” she said. “Somebody might come.”

  I let go of the door, retreated in slow careful steps. She came inside and pushed the door almost shut behind her with her free hand. Her face was so pale that I could see the fine tracery of veins beneath the skin, but there was nothing in her expression or in the wide amber eyes to indicate how unbalanced she was. She looked normal, in full control of herself, and that scared me even more than if she’d been wild-eyed and gibbering. She could errupt into violence at any second, on the slightest provocation—the way she must have when she destroyed my office.

  She said, “You got my letter,” and I realized I still had it and the envelope and the rest of the mail in my left hand.

  “Yes. I got it.”

  “I shouldn’t have sent it. I shouldn’t have sent any of the letters to that Webster bitch either. They didn’t do any good. Nothing does any good. Except this.” She raised the gun slightly and looked at it as if it were a new-found friend, an ally. “This is the only way.”

  “You don’t want to shoot me, Karen,” I said.

  “Yes I do. I have to. You won’t leave me alone. I thought if I went to your office last week and talked to you . . . but you weren’t there, and I thought if I went in and did things to it, it would hurt you enough to make you go away. But you didn’t, you just kept on and on. When you asked me about Bobbie on Saturday night I knew what I had to do. I knew this was the only way. I waited for you all afternoon and all evening. And all day today. Why didn’t you come home?”

  Without moving my head much I looked left, right—but I was standing in the middle of the carpet and there was nothing in a five-foot radius that I could use to disarm her. The nearest piece of furniture was the couch, three paces to my right. And nothing on it except the overcoat, a pulp magazine, a couple of throw pillows.

  “Karen, listen to me—”

  “No. I don’t want to listen. I just want to do what I have to before it’s too late.”

  Throw pillows. Throw pillow?

  “It’s already too late,” I said. “The police know the truth.”

  Her forehead puckered; she bit her lip. “I don’t believe you.”

  Long odds. Even if I could get over to the couch, pick up one of the pillows, it would take a perfect toss to hit the gun before she fired, throw her off-balance long enough for me to rush her. But what other choice did I have? It seemed to be either that or try to jump her cold.

  I said, “It’s true, Karen. The police have been out to your house today, they’ve matched the typing on the letters with the typewriter in your living room; they know you wrote them to Christine.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said again.

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  “Because you want to hurt me. Along with my mother and that Webster bitch. Won’t go away, won’t stop hurting me . . .”

  Her jaw trembled a little and her eyes were brighter; you could see the violence rippling like a dark current just beneath the surface of her face. The knotted feeling in my groin intensified. Keep her talking, for God’s sake, I thought. But don’t say anything to provoke her.

  “I never wanted to hurt you, Karen. I only wanted to help your uncle.”

  “No. You were working for Webster all along.”

  “But I wasn’t,” I said, and took a careful sidestep toward the couch. The gun did not move in her hand. “Christine never contacted me. I never met her or talked to her.”

  “You’re lying again. She had your business card. And she told me she’d hired you, just before I did it to her.”

  That did not surprise me. The reason why Christine had lied was obvious: she had been trying desperately to save her life. And the lie explained how Karen had known I was a detective when I arrived at her house on Wednesday morning. I had only given her my name at the door, not my occupation, and by their own testimony Laura Nichols h
ad not told her daughter of her plans to hire an investigator. Yet the first thing Karen had said to me was, “You’re that private detective.”

  “Working for Webster,” she said now, “and then right away going to work for my mother. Don’t you think I know the real reason she hired you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Your mother hired me to watch over your uncle.”

  “That was just a lie for my benefit. She hired you to investigate me.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She hates me, that’s why. She suspected I was gay. She suspected I was in love with Bobbie and wanted to hurt the bitch who killed her. She hired you so you could both work against me.”

  Paranoid psychosis, I thought. Everybody out to harm her, including her mother. Especially her mother. She was the one with all the hatred, not Laura Nichols; and those feelings had to be at the root of her persecution complex and her need to strike back.

  I took another step toward the couch. My nose was running again, dripping down over my upper lip; I sniffled and just let it drip. No use pressing my luck by reaching into the back pocket where my handkerchief was.

  “Your mother didn’t tell me about you and Bobbie,” I said. “She doesn’t know you’re gay.”

  “She must have told you. You weren’t surprised when I said it just now. You already knew.”

  “Yes. But I found out another way—”

  “She told you. Stop lying to me.”

  Easy, I thought, drop it right there. Because the truth was provocative: it was Karen herself who had told me. On the phone Thursday night she’d said she and some friends had spent the day at Civic Center and I remembered noticing in Friday’s paper that at Civic Center on Thursday there had been a big Gay Rights rally. And when I had talked to her Saturday night from Bodega Bay and asked if she knew Bobbie Reid, she’d said, “No. Who’s she?” Yet Bobbie, or Bobby, is a far more common male name than a female name; the assumption almost everybody makes the first time they hear it is that it’s short for Robert, not Roberta or Barbara. Which indicated Karen had known Bobbie Reid. Add those facts together, along with Eberhardt’s news that Bobbie had worked for Arthur Brown, the Nichols’ family attorney, and Steve Farmer’s admission that Bobbie was gay, and the truth became clear enough.