Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Maybe you can’t beat them any way, I thought bitterly. They’re a system within a system, and everybody knows you can’t beat the system.

  So what was I going to do about Welker? Nothing. Except to keep on swimming in his waters, and try not to let myself get swallowed while I was there.

  The exercises helped a little, not much. When I quit doing them the room felt even closer; if I stayed here much longer, I would become claustrophobic. I needed space around me, people, but I didn’t feel like driving any distance, not after the long ride to and from Tahoe and not through unfamiliar territory. Someplace close by, someplace crowded-

  The telephone rang.

  The sudden eruption of the bell made me jump. Christ, my nerves were scraped raw. I looked at the phone, listened to it ring a second time—and I was not going to answer it. Then I thought: Come on, that’s childish. On the third ring I reached over and picked up.

  “Hi,” Kerry’s voice said cheerfully. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be in or not. How’s it going?”

  I was glad to hear from her, I truly was—she was a bright light in the dark places of my life—but I was not ready to talk to her or anyone else. I tried to make my voice as cheerful as hers when I said, “Fine, fine,” but I couldn’t hide the strain. She had known me too long; she knew me too well.

  “Something’s the matter,” she said. “What is it? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I had a bad afternoon, that’s all.”

  “Anxiety attack?”

  “Not exactly. I’m okay now. Getting there, anyway.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Not right now.”

  “... All right. Can I ask if you found Jerry Polhemus?”

  “Not yet. He’s still among the missing.”

  “Then you haven’t learned anything more?”

  “Not much. A little.”

  “I wouldn’t ask but Allyn has been after me. She says she hasn’t heard from you since Saturday.”

  “I should have called her, I guess. But I don’t know enough yet. And what I do know she’s not going to want to hear.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough. Her brother wasn’t what she thinks he was, not by a long shot.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Kerry said. “She’s so fragile right now ... I hate the idea of her being hurt even more.”

  “So do I. Karen Salter, too. I shouldn’t have taken this thing on. They’d both be better off not knowing the truth.”

  “Is it too late for you to call it off?”

  “Yes.” I was on my feet, pacing in a tight little circle, feeling damp and twitchy. The room was very close now. “Babe, listen, I’ve got to hang up. There’s something I have to do. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? In the morning?”

  “Okay. You sure you’re all right?”

  “I will be.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  I said, “I love you too,” and when I put the receiver down the palms of my hands were wet.

  Immediately I went outside and walked around in the cool night, taking deep, slow breaths, until the sweat dried and the closed-in feeling was gone and I felt able to drive. Then I got into the car and took myself up to Bally’s, the closest place where there would be plenty of people, plenty of distractions.

  It was a floodlit, neoned island in a sea of parking spaces: casino, resort hotel, two-thousand-seat theater, convention facilities, even a bowling center. The casino was the only one left in Reno that catered to a wealthy, exclusive clientele. Crystal chandeliers, fancy decor, plenty of glitz and glitter—all of which added up to high prices and five-dollar minimum bets on most of the gaming tables.

  Crowded tonight; noisy, festive, thick with smoke and the smell of money. Just what I needed. I walked around for a while, watching some of the high rollers work the crap and baccarat tables, making myself an anonymous cell in the rippling crowd body. I bought five dollars’ worth of quarters and waited until somebody vacated a twenty-five-cent slot and then fed the machine and yanked the handle in monotonous rhythm like any other sucker, winning just enough small line payoffs to play for twenty minutes before I used up the last coin. I went into one of the lounges for a beer. I found the coffee shop and forced myself to eat a sandwich.

  Nine o’clock by then. And the edginess had finally dulled away. I felt in control again, able to be alone with myself again.

  Out of the casino, into my car, away from Bally’s. Too late to make a house call? I decided it wasn’t and drove over to the Virginia Lake apartment complex where Alice Cardeen lived.

  Wasted trip. Her apartment was dark and there was no answer when I rang the bell.

  On the path nearby was a night-light on a pole. I stood under it and wrote on the back of one of my business cards: Please call Starburst Motel, #8, before midnite or by 10 a.m. 5/22. Urgent. After which I returned to Alice Cardeen’s door and wedged the card into the jamb so that it covered the lock. She couldn’t fail to find it there.

  MIDNIGHT CAME AND WENT. No call from Alice Cardeen. I lay in the dark and waited for sleep.

  I DREAMED I was running uphill with a gun in my hand, toward the big modernistic house on the rise. It was dark but there were lights all around me, flashlight beams like tracer fire crisscrossing the night. I ran and ran and finally reached the house and then ran around to the rear. Arthur Welker was there, standing on the water in the swimming pool, pointing his finger at me and saying, “Little fish, little fish.” I lifted the gun but I couldn’t pull the trigger, and Carl and Jimmy came out from behind two of the flashlight beams and shot me instead. I felt the bullets go into my chest, into my arms and legs and neck, but there was no pain when I fell down. I lay on cold stone and their faces floated above me, disembodied, and Welker’s face said, “Take this back where you found it.” Hands lifted me, carried me down and away into cold dark; laid me on something dank and clammy. I said, “This isn’t where you found me.” Somebody laughed, and a long way off I heard Welker say in a voice that came as a hollow echo, “How do you like it down there in my belly, Jonah?” And there was more laughter, shrill and loon-crazy, swelling and swelling until I began to swell with it like a bladder pumped too full of air—

  I woke up shaking, my face hot, my mouth dry.

  It was an hour before I slept again.

  Chapter 17

  ALICE CARDEEN CALLED AT 9:00 A.M., just as I was thinking that maybe I ought to try calling her.

  I’d been up and dressed since seven-thirty. Except for ten minutes around that time when I had called Kerry to reassure her, I had been sitting on the bed drinking coffee—there was one of those little portable coffee-makers in the room—and watching mindless early-morning TV to keep from thinking too much. I was working on my fourth cup when the phone rang—two cups too many. Combined with the dream-haunted night, the caffeine had me feeling jittery. But it wasn’t the same kind of jitteriness as last night. There were none of the sharp edges in me this morning, that grating sensation as of bone splinters rubbing together just under the skin; none of the shadow shapes and no feeling of being closed in. This was not going to be one of the bad days. Not starting out, anyway.

  When I picked up the receiver Alice Cardeen identified herself and then said in wary tones, “I have your card. What on earth would a private detective want with me?”

  “My business doesn’t concern you directly, Ms. Cardeen. It’s a friend of yours I’m interested in—Janine Wovoka.”

  “Janine? Why? Has she done something?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” I said. “Would you mind if I explained in person? Be easier that way.”

  “Well ...”

  “I can be at your apartment in fifteen minutes. Or you could come here or we could meet somewhere—whatever you prefer. I won’t take more than a few minutes of your time.”

  Small silence: she was thinking it over. I didn’t blame her for her caution; in fact, I admired it. She was a young woman evidently living alon
e now, and I was a stranger, and the way things were nowadays any young woman who wasn’t leery of strange men, even in broad daylight, was begging for trouble. But I’d had to ask her. You never get as much information out of somebody over the phone as you can in person. Nor can you properly gauge just how much of what you’re told is the truth.

  At length she said, briskly now, “There’s a coffee shop on Virginia Street not far from here—the Copper Urn. I could meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Do you know what I look like?”

  I smiled a little; she was still being wary. “No, I don’t.”

  “What do you look like?”

  “Big, graying hair, late fifties. Brown suit, no tie.”

  “In fifteen minutes, then,” she said, very businesslike, and rang off.

  THE COPPER URN was another of the neutral-decor, indifferent food-and-service “family restaurants” that proliferate under a hundred different names in every city and small town in the United States. The color scheme here was dark brown and a sort of faded tangerine; that was the only physical difference between this place and the one near the Starburst. Most of the customers wore the unmistakable stamp of coffee shop people. The kind who always eat in this type of establishment, at home or on the road; who have seldom—in some cases, never—taken a meal in a quality restaurant because the atmosphere makes them feel uncomfortable, the prices are too high, and the management won’t let “kids be kids,” which is to say noisy and uncontrolled; whose idea of gourmet cuisine is any dish that comes with cornbread, mashed potatoes, and country gravy; whose taste buds have been so conditioned to mediocrity that a genuine gourmet meal would elicit the comment, “This is okay, but the food’s just as good where we usually eat.” Walk into any coffee shop, anywhere, and you can pick them out as easily as if they were wearing signs. And that includes children under the age of twelve.

  I stood in the entryway, looking around, but none of the women customers showed any interest in me. There were several empty booths in the no-smoking section; I claimed one near the entrance. And waited close to ten minutes, without being acknowledged by any of the four waitresses, before Alice Cardeen showed up.

  We spotted each other at the same time. Before she approached she used up thirty seconds or so giving me the once-over—as if you can get an accurate reading of somebody across thirty feet of floor space. When she finally did come over, and we confirmed identities, she sat as far away from me in the booth as it was possible for her to get. She was edging into her late twenties, tall, dark-haired, wearing a cherry-red suit and a pale yellow blouse. Not attractive until she smiled; she had a nice smile and it softened the severe, angular lines of her face. She sat erect, eyes steady on my face—self-contained and as sensible and businesslike as she’d seemed on the phone.

  A waitress finally put in an appearance. Alice Cardeen ordered a cup of herb tea. I ordered a glass of grapefruit juice; I’d had enough coffee. The waitress went away.

  “Now then,” Ms. Cardeen said, in what I imagined was the same tone of voice she used to sell cosmetics, “why are you investigating Janine?”

  “I’m not investigating her. I’m trying to find her.”

  “Oh, so that’s it.”

  “What is?”

  “Her father hired you, didn’t he.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He’s been after her ever since she left the reservation to move back. I suppose she didn’t tell him where she was moving to this time and that’s why he went to you.”

  “Do you know where she moved to?”

  “No. I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Janine doesn’t want to go back to Pyramid Lake. It’s her life; why doesn’t her father just leave her alone?”

  “I suppose because he loves her.”

  “Love,” Ms. Cardeen said, as if she were repeating an indecent word. “He wants to control her. Not that she couldn’t stand to rein herself in, but that should be her choice.”

  “Have you known her long?”

  “We met at the university here.”

  “And you’ve been close friends since?”

  “Hardly. Janine and I have never been close.”

  “Then how did you happen to room together?”

  “I ran into her six months ago and we got to talking. She was looking for a place to live and I ... well, my former roommate had moved out and I wasn’t doing as well professionally as I am now. We decided to share expenses.” She made a rueful moue. “Frankly, it was a mistake.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Janine and I have different life-styles.”

  “How would you describe hers?”

  “She’s a party animal,” Ms. Cardeen said flatly.

  “Late nights, drinking?”

  “Yes. And she was always having men stay over. I’m not a prude but my God, two and three different men in one week?”

  “Was one of them Jerry Polhemus?”

  The name inspired another little grimace. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t like Polhemus, I take it.”

  “Not at all. Loud, crude, drunk half the time ... that sort.”

  “How about David Burnett? Was he like that too?”

  “Worse. Why Janine wanted to hang out with those two and that slutty friend of hers from Tahoe ... I just don’t understand the appeal of people like that.”

  The waitress picked that moment to deliver Ms. Cardeen’s tea and my grapefruit juice. When she was gone again I said, “The friend from Tahoe—Wendy Oliver?”

  “A little slut if ever there was one.”

  “How well do they know each other?”

  “Quite well. They used to work together in one of the clubs in Carson City.”

  Did they now, I thought. So why did Wendy lie to me about her relationship with Janine?

  Ms. Cardeen was eyeing me speculatively over the rim of her teacup. “Why are you asking so many questions about those three? Does Janine’s father think she ran off with Jerry Polhemus?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not working for Janine’s father.”

  “But you said—”

  “No, Ms. Cardeen, you said it.”

  I told her who I was working for and why. The news of David Burnett’s suicide surprised her; so did the fact that Burnett had gotten his hands on such a large sum of cash. Janine had told her nothing about any of that, she said. Nor offered any reason behind the loss of her job at the Coliseum Club.

  What Janine had told her was that she’d come into a little money herself, not long before she was fired. “She was thinking of buying a new car,” Ms. Cardeen said. “That’s why she mentioned it—because she had enough for a down payment.”

  “Did she say how much?”

  “No. But I don’t think it was a great deal.”

  “No hints as to where she got it?”

  “None. She was secretive about it.”

  “Have you had any contact with her since she moved out?”

  “No. I told you, we weren’t close.”

  “Or heard from Jerry Polhemus in the past few days?”

  “Of course not. Why should I hear from him?”

  “I just thought he might have called looking for Janine.”

  “Well, he didn’t. If you want to know the truth, I’m glad Janine is out of my life. If she hadn’t moved, I probably would have asked her to leave. I’d had all I could stand of her wild partying and men like Polhemus. I’m much better off living alone.”

  I had no doubt of that.

  I drank my grapefruit juice in a swallow, caught up the check the waitress had left, and slid out of the booth. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Cardeen. You’ve been a big help.”

  “I have?” she said. “How?”

  “I think you told me how to find Janine.”

  “But I don’t have any idea where she is....”

  No, I thought, but I’ll bet Wendy Oliver does. I smiled at Ms. Cardeen and left her sit
ting there with her businesslike reserve slightly askew. There are some people whose feathers you like to ruffle a little, for perverse reasons. Ms. Alice Cardeen was one of them.

  WENDY OLIVER wasn’t home.

  Neither the Toyota Tercel with the dented rear fender nor the primer-patched old Porsche was parked under the carport. And nobody came to the trailer door in response to my knock.

  I got back into the car and drove down to Lake Tahoe Boulevard and along it beyond the wye junction. Traffic was heavier in South Lake Tahoe today: more gamblers and funseekers filtering in as the weekend approached. It was cooler here than it had been in Reno—mid-seventies—and there were nonthreatening clouds piled up like meringue above the snow-draped shoulders of Mount Tallac to the west. Enough of a breeze had sprung up to invite a few sailboats out onto the lake with the power and excursion boats.

  I hadn’t eaten all day and my stomach was giving me hell; it was almost one o’clock. I was weary of coffee shop atmosphere, coffee shop food, and coffee shop people, but there didn’t seem to be anyplace else to get lunch along the strip. And I didn’t feel like driving all the way back over to the Nevada side and bucking the casino trade. So I pulled in at the next “family restaurant” I saw.

  Like a lot of things, coffee shops are a lottery: every now and then you can pick a small winner, but mostly you come up empty. This one had better service than the two in Reno and lousier food than most. The booth I was given faced the lake to the north, which reminded me again that somewhere over there, hidden by distance and trees and landmass, was Arthur Welker’s fortress.

  Driving in earlier on Highway 50, I’d promised myself one thing where Welker was concerned. And I reaffirmed that promise again now. I was not going to stand for any more humiliation at his hands, any more of his bullshit. If he sent people after me again, I would do my damnedest to make him regret it.

  I lingered in the coffee shop, killing time, so that it was two o’clock when I again pulled up in front of Wendy Oliver’s trailer on Tata Lane. The wasted minutes hadn’t bought me anything, though: the carport was still empty and my knock on the door still produced no response.