Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Well?” she said. “My mother told you, didn’t the?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think being gay is terrible, don’t you. Just like she does.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s terrible.”

  “Are you lying to me again?”

  “No. I think every person has the right to be what he wants to be. As long as he doesn’t harm anyone else.”

  “Webster harmed Bobbie. Killed her, the bitch.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “With words. Words. Bobbie never told anyone about us; she was confused about being gay. But Webster got it out of her. She told Bobbie it was evil and she was sick and needed help. Kept telling her again and again. Bobbie couldn’t take it. She was a sensitive person and she just . . . she couldn’t take it. She took those pills, and she called me afterward to say she was sorry, she had to do it, she couldn’t cope anymore after what Webster had been telling her. I told her how much I loved her, I begged her not to do it, but she said it was too late. I called the emergency hospital, I drove over there myself, and it was. It was too late. . . . ”

  Poor Bobbie Reid: emotionally screwed up, unable to come to terms with her life and her sexuality—a probable suicide in any case. Poor Christine Webster: well-meaning, foolish, always trying to meddle in other people’s lives. Victims, just like Jerry Carding. Poor Karen, too: unbalanced, deluded, filled with paranoid hatred for her domineering mother. She was another victim, and I pitied her a little in that moment. But I pitied Jerry and Christine and Bobbie a great deal more.

  Karen seemed to be caught up for the moment in memory and grief; the gun was steady but no longer pointing straight at me. I took another step that brought me up next to the couch. But the movement alerted her, made her blink and swing the weapon back dead-center on my chest.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Why are you moving?”

  I stood motionless, watching the gun. “I want to sit down. Is that all right?”

  Hesitation. Then, “I don’t care. I’m going to do what I have to pretty soon. Like I did with Webster. I wish I could do it to my mother too. But I can’t. I want to but I . . . can’t. Not yet.”

  I eased myself down on the arm of the couch, let my right arm dangle down at my side. The closest of the throw pillows was eight or nine inches away: I would have to lean in that direction in order to reach it.

  “How did you do it to Webster?” I said. “How did you get her to meet you at Lake Merced?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “I just do. Will you tell me?”

  “I called her on the phone, that’s how. Not like the other calls, where I disguised my voice. I said I knew who was threatening her, but I didn’t want to say anything on the phone and I was afraid to come to her apartment because the person might be watching her. I asked her to meet me and she said she would. She thought it was a man who wanted to hurt her, you see; she wasn’t afraid of me. But I made her afraid. I made her very afraid before I did it to her.”

  A feeling of nausea formed inside me: her words, tension, suppressed fear. I tipped my body to the right, moved my arm out away from it—one inch, two, three.

  “I thought it was all done with then,” she said. “Webster did it to Bobbie, I did it to Webster. But then you came. And there were all those lies about Uncle Martin. And Victor Carding was murdered. And I found out Jerry Carding was his son and Webster’s boyfriend too. I never knew that before. I never even heard of Jerry Carding. It confused me, I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

  Coincidence, that was what had been happening. Martin Talbot and Victor Carding have an accident; Carding’s son is Christine Webster’s fiance; Talbot’s niece is having an affair with Bobbie Reid; Bobbie Reid is a friend of Christine’s and used to date a friend of Jerry Carding’s; Christine finds out Bobbie is gay and admonishes her for it; Bobbie commits suicide; Karen blames Christine and murders her. And Bobbie works in Arthur Brown’s law office; Christine works part-time in the same building ; Brown is Laura Nichols’ attorney; I’ve done some work for Brown and always hand out cards to my clients; Christine gets one of the cards from Brown; Laura Nichols wants to hire a private detective and Brown recommends me. A crazy-quilt of coincidence.

  But there was no point in saying any of that to Karen; she would not have believed it. I stayed silent and kept leaning toward the throw pillow. Four inches. Five.

  “Then I did understand,” she said. “It was somebody else working against me. Not just you and my mother, but Jerry Carding too. He knew I was the one who hurt Webster and he did it to his own father so Uncle Martin would be blamed. That was his way of hurting me back.”

  Six. Seven—

  Sound out in the hallway.

  I froze, listening, staring at Karen. She seemed not to have heard it: a footstep, muffled by the carpeting out there. One of the Madisons, the couple who lived in the other flat on this floor?

  “If I knew where Jerry Carding was, I’d do it to him too. I’d make him leave me alone.”

  Behind her a crack opened between the door and jamb; she had not closed the door all the way so there was no click of the latch opening, no sound at all. I straightened away from the pillow, leaned forward instead. Every muscle and nerve in my body felt coiled.

  “I’ll make everybody leave me alone. I don’t believe you about the police; they don’t know yet. Only you and Mother and Jerry Carding know.”

  The crack widened a little more. A head poked around the edge of the door.

  Dennis Litchak.

  “You first and then Jerry Carding when I can find him. Then my mother someday. Then I’ll be safe—”

  The hinges squeaked. She heard the sound this time and her face registered surprise; reflex made her jerk her head around to look behind her, made the gun swing away from me.

  I levered up off the couch and threw myself at her.

  The damned gun went off, the lamp on the sideboard near the kitchen shattered, the door banged shut, I hit her with my shoulder and sent her reeling back against the wall. She caromed off, crying out in a hurt way, and the gun flew clear of her hand and skittered under the writing desk; she went down and rolled over and lay in a quivering little heap.

  I veered away from her, went to one knee beside the desk, and scooped up the gun. When I straightened with it, the tension went out of me all at once, like a balloon deflating, and I had to lean against the desk top to keep from falling down.

  Karen stopped quivering and lifted onto her knees. Looked at me with eyes that had gone dull with pain and confusion. “Why did you do that?” she asked, as if she really did not know. “Why did you hurt me?”

  When I didn’t say anything she got up slowly, rubbing her arm where I had hit her, and then went over and sat down on the couch. Sat the way she had that first time, in the living room of her mother’s house: knees together, back straight, hands folded in her lap, eyes cast down on her hands. She did not move; she did not even seem to be breathing.

  Rapping on the door. And from out in the hallway Litchak yelled my name.

  I called back, “You can come in now, Dennis, it’s all over,” and my voice sounded as if it were coming through liquid.

  The door opened and he poked his white-maned head around the edge again. Came inside in tentative movements. He looked a little gray and shaken—but not nearly as gray and shaken as I felt.

  “God Almighty,” he said. He peered at me through his glasses, glanced over at Karen, looked back at me. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s a long story.” I wanted to push away from the desk, go into the bedroom and get the phone and call Eberhardt; but I did not trust my legs just yet. “Listen, you probably saved my life. Thanks.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. Why’d you come up? You hear me downstairs? Or was it your flat she buzzed to get in?”

  “Neither one. I didn’t even know you were home. I came up to check on the place again, like yo
u asked me to, and saw the door standing open—”

  A laugh popped out of me-sudden, humorless, ironic.

  Litchak frowned. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s you showing up when you did.”

  “Huh?”

  “Coincidence, Dennis. Just one more coincidence.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Four days passed. So did my cold, with some medical assistance from Doctor White and forty-eight hours in bed. And so did the worst of the nightmares about guns and water and death.

  A number of things happened in those four days.

  Item: Andy Greene was apprehended by Washington state officials trying to cross the border into Canada. In the suitcase he had with him were twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash and the Browning 9 mm automatic he had tried to use on me. He refused to talk to anyone except an attorney and was being held for extradition back to California.

  Item: The Alcohol and Firearms investigators discovered a case of illicit whiskey hidden in Gus Kellenbeck’s garage, along with certain evidence—nobody told me what it was—which broke the whole bootlegging operation wide open. The distillery turned out to be located on the British Columbia coast, near Prince Rupert; it was raided by Canadian government agents and six other men were arrested. An eighth arrest was made, by the Federal boys a few miles down the coast from Bodega Bay, of a rancher whose barn had been used by Greene and Kellenbeck for storage. Still more arrests were expected on the trucking and distribution end.

  Item: Karen Nichols had been charged with the murder of Christine Webster and the attempted murder of me and was being held in the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General. Neither Eberhardt nor anyone else in the Department had been able to talk to her; she went into a violent paranoid reaction each of the two times they tried.

  Item: All charges against Martin Talbot were dropped, but he was still hospitalized for observation and treatment. He had not been told about his niece’s arrest, of course; the doctors were afraid the news would destroy all chance for his recovery. But they were not optimistic anyway, according to Donleavy. Neither was I. Even if he did get better, what would he have to come home to, poor bastard?

  Item: Laura Nichols was reported to be “in seclusion” with friends outside the city. She had made no effort to see her daughter, Eberhardt told me, nor had she gone back to visit her brother. Mourning for herself, probably, for her own shattered existence. Mourning the fact that insanity really did run in her family.

  Item: The media gave me a lot of publicity and the phone rang several times—reporters asking questions and wanting to set-up interviews. One guy said he wanted to do a feature article on me and my pulp collection and what it was like to be a private eye. And would I pose for pictures wearing, you know, a trench-coat and a slouch hat? I told him I would think about it and that I would have my secretary, Eflie Perine, get in touch with him. Literate guy that he was, he said he would look forward to Ms. Perine’s call.

  Item: I ate Thanksgiving dinner with Dennis Litchak and his wife, and the thanks I gave was that I was still alive. Afterward I told him I was going to buy him a case of Scotch for saving my arse as he had. He said hell, that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted. Make it Johnnie Walker Black Label, he said.

  Item: I went down to the office on Friday, my first day out since Tuesday’s visit to Doctor White, and cleaned up the wreckage. Gave the slashed chair to Goodwill, along with the gouged and glue-damaged desk. Ordered replacements from a secondhand office-supply outfit. The place depressed me; it just did not feel the same any more. Maybe my CPA neighbor, Hadley, was right. Maybe it was time to think about moving out and setting up shop somewhere else.

  On Saturday night Eberhardt and Donleavy and I went out for a steak dinner at a restaurant on Van Ness. It was the first chance we had had to get together—and both of them seemed to feel they owed me a meal.

  “There’s one thing that keeps gnawing at me,” Eberhardt said over the first round of beers. “I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. “All the coincidence?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s what happened to those two families after their paths crossed—one of them wiped out completely, the other one just about wiped out in a different way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, Talbot and Victor Carding have an accident and it seems to trigger a chain reaction. Death on the one side, insanity on the other.”

  “It didn’t quite start with the accident,” Donleavy reminded him. “Other things happened before and at the same time.”

  “Sure,” Eberhardt said. “That’s part of it, too. As if . . . hell, I don’t know, as if fate or something was out to get both families. As if all the coincidences weren’t really coincidences at all. You know what I mean?”

  I had never heard him sound so metaphysical; the thing was really bothering him, all right. But he was not alone. It bothered me a little, and Steve Farmer, judging from what he had said to me at Bodega Bay, and maybe Donleavy too.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “So how do you figure it?”

  “You don’t,” Donleavy said. “You don’t even want to try.”

  Silence for a time.

  Eberhardt said finally, “The hell with it,” and drained the last of his beer. “Let’s have another round before we order.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the last of the lone-wolf private eyes said. “Let’s have three or four more rounds.”

  And we did.