Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  So much for Herb Jackson, I thought then. Now I could start worrying about the red-haired man again.

  What I had said about being afraid he'd drowned was a lie. But he was not a ghost and he had not pulled any magical vanishing act; he was still here, and I was pretty sure he was still alive. It was just that Jackson and I had overlooked something—and it had not occurred to me what it was until Jackson said there was nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees. That was not quite true. There was something else on the islet, and it made one place we had failed to search; that was where the man had to be.

  I went straight to it, hurrying, and when I got there I said my name again in a loud voice and added that I was a detective from San Francisco.

  Then I said, "He's gone now; there's nobody around but me. You're safe."

  Nothing happened for fifteen seconds. Then there were sounds and struggling movement, and I waded in quickly to help him with some careful lifting and pushing.

  And there he was, burrowing free of a depression in the soft mud, out from under my rented skiff just above the waterline where I had beached the forward half of it.

  When he was clear of the boat I released my grip on the gunwale and eased him up on his feet. He kept trying to talk, but he was in no shape for that yet; most of what he said was gibberish. I got him into the skiff, wrapped him in a square of canvas from the stern—he was shivering so badly you could almost hear his bones clicking together—and cleaned some of the mud off him. The area behind his right ear was pulpy and badly lacerated, but if he was lucky he didn't have anything worse than a concussion.

  While I was doing that he calmed down enough to be coherent, and the first thing he said was, "He tried to kill me. He tried to murder me."

  "I figured as much. What happened?"

  "We were in his boat; we'd just put in to the island because he said there was something wrong with the ignition. He asked me to take a look, so I pulled off my coat and leaned down under the wheel. Then my head seemed to explode. The next thing I knew, I was floundering in the south-side channel."

  "He hit you with that fishing rod of his, probably," I said. "The current carried you along after he dumped you overboard and the cold water brought you around. Why does he want you dead?"

  "It must be the insurance. We own a company in Sacramento and we have a partnership policy—double indemnity for accidental death. I knew Frank was in debt, but I never thought he'd go this far."

  "Frank? Then his name isn't Herb Jackson?"

  "No. It's Saunders, Frank Saunders. Mine's Rusty McGuinn." Irish, I thought. Like O'Farrell. That figures.

  I got out again to slide the skiff off the beach and into the slough. When I clambered back in, McGuinn said, "You knew he was after me, didn't you? That's why you didn't give me away when the two of you were together."

  "Not exactly." I started the engine and got us under way at a good clip upstream. "I didn't have any idea who you were or where you'd come from until I looked inside Jackson's—or Saunders'- boat. He told me he was alone and he'd put in after crayfish. But he was carrying one rod and there were two more casting outfits in the boat; you don't need all that stuff for crayfish; and no fisherman alone is likely to carry three outfits for any reason. There was a heavy sheepskin jacket there, too, draped over the seat; but he was already wearing a heavy mackinaw, and I remembered you only had on a short-sleeved jacket when you came out of the water. It all began to add up then. I talked him into leaving as soon as I could."

  "How did you do that?"

  "By telling him what he wanted to hear—that you must be dead."

  "But how did you know where I was hiding?"

  I explained how Saunders had triggered the answer for me. "I also tried to put myself in your place. You were hurt and scared; your first thought would be to get away as fast as possible. Which meant by boat, not by swimming. So it figured you hid nearby until I was far enough away and then slipped back to the skiff.

  "But this boat—like Saunders'—starts with a key, and I had it with me. You could have set yourself adrift, but then Saunders might have seen you and come chasing in his boat. In your condition it made sense you might burrow under the skiff, with a little space clear at one side so you could breathe."

  "Well, I owe you a debt," McGuinn said. "You saved my life."

  "Forget it," I said, a little ruefully. Because the truth was I had almost got him killed. I had told Saunders he was on the island and insisted on a two-man search party; and I had failed to tumble to who and what Saunders was until it was almost too late. If McGuinn hadn't been so well hidden, if we'd found him, Saunders would probably have jumped me and I might not have been able to handle him; McGuinn and I could both be dead now. I'm not a bad detective, usually; other times, though, I'm a near bust.

  The channel that led to Whiskey Island loomed ahead. Cheer up, I told myself—the important thing is that this time, 120 years after the first one, the red-haired Irish bludgeon victim is being brought out alive and the man who assaulted him is sure to wind up in prison. The ghost of O'Farrell, the Gold Rush miner, won't have any company when it goes prowling and swearing vengeance on those foggy nights in Dead Man's Slough.

  WHO'S CALLING?

  I.

  Wednesday morning, late January.

  The weather was good, clear and mostly warm, but with a nip in the air that reminded you there was still some icy wind and rain between now and spring. Nearly everybody on the streets was smiling, even the men cleaning up the last of the broken bottles, confetti and other litter from the celebration on Sunday and the victory parade to City Hall on Monday. About the only person who wasn't smiling was me.

  The reason everybody was so cheerful was not the weather; it was the same reason there had been a two-day celebration on Sunday and Monday. The Forty-niners had just won the ultimate prize in professional football, the Super Bowl—San Francisco's first-ever national championship in any sport. I had watched the game myself on TV, and done some smiling and mild celebrating of my own when it was over. But I had celebrated alone, inside my Pacific Heights flat, instead of out on the streets where hordes of other people congregated.

  I don't like crowds much, particularly the kind of crowd that keeps fueling itself on alcohol. Ninety-nine percent of the people are all right, even in a riotous mass of merrymakers. It's the other 1 percent you have to worry about. That 1 percent is made up of troublemakers and vandals, criminals looking for a chance to pick pockets or loot stores or commit armed robbery, and just plain loonies. Several people had been hurt during the festivities; dozens more had been arrested.

  Well, any city of substantial size has its criminal element and its lunatic fringe; San Francisco was no exception. In a sense, the outlaws kept me in business—not that I was grateful to them for the privilege. I did not mind the crooks so much; for the most part they acted in predictable ways, and if you knew what you were doing, you could deal with them all right. It was the crazies who bothered me. I didn't often get a job that involved a crazy, and for that I was grateful. But every now and then, such a job comes along. And sometimes, in spite of my better judgment, I decided to take it on.

  A job involving a crazy had come along this morning. I was probably going to take it on, too, because I needed the money. At least I had agreed to go and talk to the man who wanted to hire me, an attorney named Jud Canale.

  And that was why, on this clear and mostly warm Wednesday morning three days after the Forty-niners had won the Super Bowl, I wasn't smiling along with everybody else.

  The corporate law firm of Tellmark, Graham, Canale and Isaacs was located in one of the newer high-rise office buildings on Montgomery Street, in the financial district. It occupied most of the fifteenth floor, and judging from the reception room the firm was doing very well, thank you. Oak-paneled walls, matching oak furniture covered in autumn-colored fabric, rust-brown carpeting and a decorative young lady behind the reception desk. The lady had auburn hair to match the mo
tif; I wondered, a little cynically if that was why she'd been hired.

  Jud Canale's office turned out to be similarly appointed, though his secretary was a little less decorative and had blond hair; the room was windowed on two sides, with the other two walls taken up with shelves of law books. Canale himself looked to be about my age, early fifties, and he had iron-gray hair and penetrating gray eyes. The three-piece pinstripe suit he wore, combined with that gray hair, gave him a dignified appearance. He was standing behind his somewhat cluttered desk when the secretary showed me in; beyond him, through the windows, I could see more than I cared to of the Transamerica Pyramid—a high-rise building that resembled an ice-cream cone turned upside down, as a local newspaper columnist had once aptly described it.

  Canale came around the desk as I approached, stopped with his face a few inches from mine and said in grave tones, "Thank you for coming."

  "Not at all, Mr. Canale."

  We shook hands. He was still standing close to me—one of those people who had a penchant, conscious or unconscious, for intruding on other people's space—and I could see the worry in his eyes; the skin across his cheekbones had a stretched look. I let go of his hand and backed up a step. My space was my own, and I did not want anyone else occupying it. Nor did I want to stand that close to another man's fear.

  Canale nodded toward the nearest of two leather visitors' chairs, waited until I had seated myself, and then went around and plunked himself down in his own chair. He leaned forward with his hands flat on the desk blotter and looked at me as if I were a witness on the stand in court.

  "There's been another call," he said.

  "When?"

  "Last night, late. I called Lynn after I spoke to you, and she admitted it."

  "Same sort of thing?"

  "Yes. She wouldn't go into details."

  "How is she?"

  "She says she's all right, but I don't believe her. A thing like this . . ." He shook his head. "She's only twenty," he said.

  "She's not alone today, is she?"

  "No. One of her girlfriends is staying with her at her apartment."

  I was silent a couple of seconds before I said, "Mr. Canale, are you sure you want to go through with this—hiring me? As I told you on the phone, I don't know that there's much I can do in a case like this. The police department and the telephone company investigate hundreds of complaints about obscene calls every year —"

  "I know that —"

  "— but even with the manpower and facilities at their disposal, they aren't able to catch or even identify more than a handful of the callers. Besides, almost none of these crazies ever molest the women they call up. They're talkers, usually, not doers; according to psychological profiles, most of them are afraid of women. What they do is pick names out of the telephone directory, at random —"

  "I know that, too," Canale said; "the police told me the same thing when I contacted them two days ago. But the man who keeps harassing Lynn is not a random caller. I think he knows her, and she knows him. In fact, I'm sure of it." He held up a hand as I started to speak. "I know what I said to you on the phone; I said it was a possibility that ought to be explored, and that was why I wanted to hire a detective. But now I'm convinced that's the case."

  "What convinced you?"

  "That call to Lynn last night. She had her number changed yesterday afternoon, at my insistence. Her new number is unlisted."

  I said slowly, "I see."

  "Yes. How could some anonymous crank find out a person's brand-new unlisted telephone number in less than twelve hours?"

  "I doubt if one could. Unless he worked for the phone company, or knew someone who did."

  "That strikes me as unlikely," Canale said. "No, it's someone Lynn knows well enough to have given her new number to. Or someone who got the number secondhand from one of her friends."

  "Do you have any idea who it might be?"

  "No. "

  "What does your daughter say?"

  "She refuses to believe it's anyone she knows."

  "Did she tell you who she'd given the number to?"

  "No. She wouldn't talk about it, at least not to me."

  "Why not to you?"

  Canale smiled sardonically, without humor. "We haven't been close in the past couple of months," he said. "Ever since she became engaged to a young man named Larry Travers."

  "You don't approve of this Travers?"

  "No. And of course Lynn rebelled when I made my feelings clear to her."

  "Is there any particular reason you don't like him?"

  "I don't think he'll be good for her. Besides, she's too young to marry." He made a small suffering sound in his throat. "Father-daughter relationships can be difficult sometimes," he said. "Particularly when the father is the only parent. My wife and I were divorced when Lynn was a year old; neither Lynn nor I have seen her since."

  I was not qualified to comment on any of that, never having been either a husband or a father, so I remained silent.

  Canale watched me for a moment. "So. Am I correct in assuming you'll investigate the matter for me?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. "As long as you understand that there's only a limited chance of success on my part. All I can guarantee you is my time and an honest effort."

  "That's all I ask of any man." He leaned back in his chair. "I expect you'll want to talk to Lynn right away."

  "Yes."

  "Good. I told her when I talked to her that I was hiring a detective, and I gave her your name as the probable man. She'll be expecting you."

  He wrote me a retainer check, and I told him I would be in touch as soon as I had anything to report, and he showed me out. The check was for two hundred dollars, my daily rate; I took it out and looked at it again in the elevator on the way down. It made me feel a little more cheerful than I was when I got there.

  II.

  Lynn Canale lived in one of the apartment buildings in Parkmerced, near the San Francisco State College campus where she was a student. She had moved out of her father's house in the Forest Hill district two years ago, when she first entered school; Canale had told me on the phone earlier that she was strong-willed and self-sufficient, and that she had insisted on being on her own, rather than living at home, while she pursued a bachelor's degree in history. He had tried to talk her into moving back home with him when he found out about the calls, but she had refused. Stubbornness and a highly developed sense of pride were two other facets of her personality, Canale had said. I suspected she'd inherited them from him.

  She had received the first call two weeks ago. There had been two others the first week, and since then she'd been getting them almost daily. She hadn't told her father about the calls until three days ago and then reluctantly, when he pressed her because she seemed tense and nervous at a family dinner. She hadn't offered any details of what the caller said to her; all she would say was that he made lewd suggestions and that his tone of voice frightened her.

  I parked my car on Grijalva Drive, just down the street from Lynn's building. She lived in 3-C, and she buzzed me in immediately when I identified myself on the intercom above her mailbox in the entrance alcove. When I went upstairs to 3-C I found that she was a slim, graceful girl with the fine-boned face that attracts fashion photographers and portrait painters. She had thick brown hair, worn long and straight, and brownish gold eyes under long natural lashes; the eyes told me she was as worried as her father, even though she was trying not to show it. She wore white slacks and a dark blue tunic.

  The living room she led me into was small and over-furnished, so that it had a cramped feel. The window drapes were open, and the room was brightly lit by sunshine and by a hammered-brass curio lamp. Books and papers were scattered on a writing desk and on an old mohair sofa that looked as though it had come out of somebody's attic.

  A little apologetically, she said, "I hope you don't mind the mess. I've been trying to study."

  I thought about my flat, with the dirty dishes and the pulp m
agazines I collect strewn around, the dust-mice under the furniture; her apartment, compared to the home of a slob like me, was immaculate. "Not at all," I said. "Are you alone, Miss Canale? Your father said someone was staying with you."

  "Someone is. Connie Evans, a friend from school. But she had a ten o'clock class, and this is the week final exams start for the fall semester."

  "Will she be coming back?"

  "Yes." She gave me a faintly defiant look. "I don't mind being alone, you know."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Well," she said. "Sit down, won't you?"

  I sat in an armchair opposite the sofa; it was not very comfortable, but it was better than the only other places to sit—a couple of beanbag chairs. Lynn asked me if I wanted some coffee, and I said no, nothing. Then she sat on the sofa, tucked her legs under her and regarded me solemnly.

  "I'm not sure this is a good idea," she said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "My father hiring a detective. I mean, lots of women get obscene telephone calls, don't they?"

  "Yes," I said. "But in most cases, the calls don't keep coming as frequently as you've been receiving them."

  "I'm not afraid," she said. "He's just a crank."

  "Are you certain of that?"

  She averted her eyes. "Oh, God, I wish he'd just go away and leave me alone."

  "Maybe I can see to it that he does. Will you tell me about the calls?"

  "Not what he says, no. I won't repeat that filth."

  "Sexual suggestions, that sort of thing?"

  "Yes. In great detail. It made my skin crawl, the first time I heard it."

  "Has he threatened you at any time?"

  "Not in so many words."

  "Implied threats?"

  "Yes. The things he wanted to do to me . . . well, they involved pain. You know, S and M stuff."

  "Yeah," I said. "I know."

  "He's an animal. Just . . . an animal."

  "Is his voice at all familiar to you?"

  "No. "