Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "Yes. I'm driving down to China Basin as soon as I finish my breakfast. Chances are he spent the night on the boat; he should still be there, this early."

  "And if you can't get anything out of him? What then?"

  "I don't know. I'll just have to play it by ear."

  "All right. But tell him something for me, will you? Tell him if he ever tries to see Lynn again, I'll kill him."

  "Look, Mr. Canale —"

  "Tell him," Canale said, and rang off.

  I didn't want any more toast and coffee; the conversation with Canale had taken away my appetite. I got my coat, went out and picked up my car, and headed crosstown to Third Street and the waterfront.

  China Basin was on the southeast side of the city, at the foot of the Embarcadero and not all that far from Potrero Hill. Back in the 1860s, the long deep-water channel had been the place where the "China Clippers" of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line berthed; that was how it had got its name. Today, incoming and outgoing freighters tied up at the industrial docks there, and there were boatyards and a military shipyard, and a few small waterfront cafés where you could sit at outside tables and watch what was going on in the basin and on the bay beyond.

  The Basin Boatyard was on Channel Street, just down from the Banana Terminal where freighters carrying tropical fruit from South America were once unloaded. There was a good deal of activity in the area; trucks coming and going, strings of freight cars maneuvering on the network of rail tracks. Mornings were always the busiest time along the waterfront. Parking was at a premium, but I managed to find a place to wedge my car—and when I neared the open boatyard gates on foot, I noticed a battered black Triumph TR-3 dwarfed by and half-hidden behind a massive tractor-trailer rig. Travers was here, all right.

  I went in through the open gates. The boatyard was fairly large, cluttered with wooden buildings with corrugated-iron roofs, a rusty-looking crane, a variety of boats in and out of the water, and a couple of employees at their jobs. At the far end was a moorage—a half-dozen slips extending into the basin on either side of a rickety board float. About half of the slips were occupied.

  A beefy guy dressed in paint-stained overalls intercepted me as I started toward the moorage. "Something I can do for you, mister?"

  "I'm looking for Larry Travers," I said.

  "Haven't seen him this morning."

  "His car's out front. Maybe he's still sacked in on the Hidalgo."

  "You a friend of his?"

  "No. I've got business with him."

  The guy shrugged. "Been here before?"

  "Hidalgo's the sloop-rigged center-boarder in the last slip out."

  "Thanks."

  I went the rest of the way to the moorage, out onto the board float. The day was another clear one, not too cold in the sun or in sheltered places; but out here, with the wind gusting in off the bay, it was chilly enough to make me shiver inside my light coat. I bunched the fabric at my throat, hunched my shoulders. Overhead, a seagull cut loose with its screaming laugh, as if mocking me.

  Until I came in sight of the Hidalgo, I had no idea what a "sloop-rigged center-boarder" was. But it wasn't anything exotic—just a thirty-foot, cruise-type sailboat, the kind with an auxiliary inboard engine that makes it capable of an extended ocean passage. It was made out of fiberglass, with aluminum spars, and it had plenty of deck space and a low, squat cabin that would probably sleep four below deck.

  I caught hold of the aluminum side rail and swung onto the deck aft. The fore cabin window was uncurtained, so I could see that the cockpit was empty. I moved around on the companionway that led below. A lamp burned down there; I could make out part of two quarter-berths and not much else.

  "Travers?" I called, and then identified myself. "I want to talk to you."

  No answer.

  I called his name again; the only answer I got this time was another cry from a passing gull. All right, I thought. I went down the companion ladder, into the living quarters below. There was plenty of space, and all of it seemed to be deserted. On the port side, I saw a good-sized galley complete with sink, icebox, and stove, and ample locker space for food and utensils; to starboard opposite, there was an enclosed toilet and a hanging locker. A galley table set up between the two quarter-berths was littered with the remains of a McDonald's fast-food supper, some empty beer bottles and soft drink cans. And up forward, separated from the rest of the cabin by a bulkhead and curtain, were what figured to be the two remaining berths; I couldn't see in there because the curtain was drawn.

  A vague, tingly feeling started up on the back of my neck. It was a sensation I'd had too many times before—a premonitory feeling of wrongness. I stayed where I was for several seconds, but it did not go away.

  "Travers?"

  Silence.

  I took a breath, and my legs worked and carried me over to the forward bulkhead. I was still holding my breath when I swept the curtain aside; then my stomach kicked and the air came out between my teeth in a flat, hissing sound.

  Travers hadn't gone anywhere; he would never go anywhere again. He was lying back-sprawled on the rumpled port-side bunk, one leg hanging off to the deck. Just above his right cheekbone was a blackened hole caked with dried blood. The gun that had evidently killed him was a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson automatic; it was in his right hand, with his fingers lax around it.

  So it looked as though he'd shot himself— maybe because he was the caller who'd been deviling Lynn Canale and his conscience had got the better of him, maybe for some other reason. It looked like a simple case of suicide.

  But I didn't believe it for a minute.

  It was a case of murder, and it wasn't simple at all.

  I called the Hall of Justice from a phone in the boatyard office. The man I asked for was Lieutenant Eberhardt, probably my best friend on or off the force, but it was his day off; I had to settle for potluck. It worked out all right, though, because one of the two Homicide inspectors who showed up was Jack Logan, whom I also knew.

  He listened to my story, more or less sympathetically, and to my speculation that Travers had not died by his own hand:

  "The kid just wasn't the type to kill himself, Jack; he was too arrogant, too wrapped up in himself. And even if he was the type, he wouldn't have bothered to move out of his flat, make all his plans for the trip to San Diego, if he was going to do the Dutch." But Logan was a methodical cop, and he wasn't making any judgments of his own until he had all the facts. Not the least of which, he said, was a nitrate test on Travers' hand to determine whether or not he had fired the .38 automatic.

  Logan had gone back aboard the Hidalgo to confer again with the assistant coroner and the lab boys, and I was standing out on the float, when Jud Canale got there. I had called Canale's office right after notifying the police, and he'd said he would come right down. His only reaction to the news of Travers' death had been to say, grimly, that the circumstances being what they were, he wasn't sorry to hear it.

  The patrolman standing guard at the shore end of the moorage had been given Canale's name and let him pass. I went ahead to meet Canale halfway; I wanted a few words alone with him before he talked to the inspectors.

  "Mr. Canale," I said, "how long did you stay at your daughter's apartment last night?"

  He squinted at me. The wind had picked up and it was sharp enough to make his eyes water. "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "Just answer the question, please."

  "I was there until about six-thirty," he said.

  "Then what?"

  "I went home."

  "You weren't home when I called your house at a quarter to eight."

  "I stopped for a couple of drinks on the way; I felt I needed them."

  He bent toward me, putting his face close to mine, intruding on my space again. "Why do you want to know where I was last night?"

  I did not back away from him this time. "The assistant coroner says rigor mortis has already come and gone in Travers' body; he thinks Travers w
as shot sometime last evening. Before midnight."

  "My God, do you think I shot him? I thought you told me he'd killed himself."

  "I said it looked that way. But it wasn't suicide, Mr. Canale; it was murder."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I don't know it; I suspect it."

  "Why would anyone murder Travers?"

  "You've got a pretty good motive, for one," I said. "You told me this morning to tell him that if he ever went near Lynn again, you'd kill him."

  "I didn't mean that literally. I was angry."

  I just looked at him.

  "Besides, I said that to you this morning. Why would I do that if I'd already shot Travers last night?'

  "Smoke screen, maybe. To make you look innocent."

  Canale made a disgusted sound. "This is ridiculous," he said, and gave me his courtroom stare. "I did not kill Larry Travers. I don't suppose that satisfies you, but it happens to be the truth."

  "The ones you want to satisfy are the police," I said. "They'll be asking you the same questions pretty soon."

  He'd had enough of me for the time being; he sidestepped me and went down to the Hidalgo. I watched him stop abaft of the boat and stand there stiff-backed against the wind, and I wondered if he was guilty after all. There was no question that he had a good motive—but then, he wasn't the only one. Somebody else had the same motive, just as strong and maybe stronger.

  His daughter, the woman Travers had been about to run out on.

  It was a little past noon before Logan gave me permission to leave the boatyard. Canale was still there; I asked him if he wanted me to continue my investigation into the calls, and he said, a little stiffly, that he hadn't decided yet, he wanted to see whether the police turned up anything that might identify Travers as the caller. I told him I would be available if he still wanted me.

  I drove downtown to the building on Taylor Street where I have my office. A cup of coffee seemed like a good idea, so I took the office pot into the little side alcove, filled it from the sink in there, and brought it back and put it on the hot plate.

  While I waited for the water to boil I switched on my answering machine. There had been only one call, but whoever it was had hung up without leaving a message; some people just do not care to talk to machines, not that I blame them much. I shut the thing off and started to go through my mail. Machines . . .

  And then I just sat there. Things had begun to happen inside my head. My mental processes worked that way; if you tossed enough scraps of information, enough impressions and other factors, into my subconscious, sooner or later something would act as a catalyst and they would start to connect up. And pretty soon the answer to whatever case or problem I was working on would emerge.

  It took me fifteen minutes and most of a cup of coffee to get the answer to this one. And when I had it, it turned me cold and a little scared. I told myself that I could be wrong, that I might be misinterpreting the facts. But I wasn't wrong, any more than I was wrong about Larry Travers' death being murder and not suicide.

  I knew who had shot Travers, and I knew who had made all those phone calls to Lynn Canale.

  The proper thing to do was to call the police. But I had no proof; all I had were circumstantial evidence, and supposition, and the burning hunch that I was right. Calling Jack Logan, explaining it all to him, would take time . . . and maybe I didn't have much time. For all I knew—and this was what scared me—I might already be too late.

  I hurried out of the office and out of the building, got my car and took it as fast as I dared out Highway 280 and into Parkmerced. In the foyer of Lynn Canale's building, I punched the doorbell button beside her name. But her voice didn't come over the intercom; nobody answered the bell.

  That made me a little panicky. I pushed the button for 5-E, kept my finger on it. Joel Reeves was home, and when I identified myself and told him to let me in, he obeyed without question.

  I took the stairs to the third floor, half-running, so that I was winded by the time I got to Lynn's door. I tried the knob; locked. Then I banged on the door, loudly, and called Lynn's name. All that got me was a woman poking her head out of a door down the hall and demanding to know what I was doing. I told her I was a cop, to save time, and asked her if she'd seen Lynn today; she said she hadn't.

  I turned back to 3-C. Breaking the door down was an extreme measure; there did not have to be anything wrong inside. It occurred to me that someone on the premises might have a passkey, a building superintendent, somebody like that. I was just about to ask the woman when the door to the stairwell opened and Joel Reeves appeared.

  "I thought this was where you'd gone," he said. "What's going on?"

  "Where's Lynn? Have you seen her?"

  "A little while ago, yes; downstairs in the lobby. I was just coming back from school and she was on the way out. She seemed very upset —"

  "Was she alone?"

  "No. Connie Evans was with her."

  "Did either of them say where they were going?"

  Reeves shook his head. He could see the alarm in my face and he was frowning behind his Ben Franklin glasses. "But Lynn was carrying an overnight case," he said.

  "Where does Connie Evans live?"

  "Somewhere in the Sunset district, I think. Out near the Great Highway. Why are you so upset? Lynn's safe with Connie, isn't she?"

  I ran for the stairwell without answering him. The hell Lynn was safe with Connie; the hell she was.

  Connie Evans was both the anonymous caller and the person who had murdered Larry Travers.

  VIII.

  The directory in a public telephone booth near Lynn's building contained a listing for a C. Evans on Forty-Seventh Avenue. That was the only C. Evans in the Sunset district, and the only Evans near the Great Highway. I had to take the chance that it was the right one; the address was only fifteen minutes from Parkmerced.

  I barreled my car around the edge of the lake and down Sloat Boulevard past the zoo. Despite the fact that Forty-seventh Avenue was the closest residential street to Ocean Beach, it wasn't a particularly desirable neighborhood in which to live; the weather was foggy a good part of the time, and when the sea wind blew heavily it swept sand across the Great Highway, which paralleled the beach for several miles, and slapped it against the building faces. It was like living in a sandblast zone, some days.

  The address for C. Evans was an old-fashioned, shingled cottage tucked back between a two-unit apartment building and a crumbling stucco row house. There was a car parked in front; I pulled up behind it, blocking the row house driveway, and the hell with that. I pushed through a sagging gate, climbed onto a front porch littered with dying plants and rang the bell.

  Nothing happened for several seconds. The palms of my hands were sweaty and my stomach was knotted with tension. I reached out to ring the bell again—and the door opened and Connie Evans stood there looking at me.

  "Oh," she said in a dull voice, "hello. What do you —?”

  I hit the door with my shoulder, not lightly; it smacked into her, sent her backpedaling into the middle of the room. I went in and shut the door and glanced around. Living room. And we were the only two people in it.

  "Where's Lynn?"

  Evans stood rubbing her arm where the door had hit it. Her expression was as dull as her voice had been. Under her eyes were smudges so dark they looked like lampblack smeared on skin that was pale white, almost translucent. There was a zombielike quality about her, as if she had lost some of her grasp on reality.

  I moved up close to her. "Answer me. Where's Lynn?"

  "In the bedroom."

  Two doors led off the living room. One was open and through it I could see part of the kitchen; the other one was closed. I hurried over to the closed one, opened it and went into a short hallway. The bedroom was at the far end, at the rear of the house.

  The drapes had been drawn in there and the room was dim; Lynn Canale was a small, still mound under a quilted comforter on the bed. But she stirred
when I pulled the comforter down and lifted one of her arms to check her pulse; and the pulse was strong and steady. I let out a relieved breath. Lynn moaned softly as I lowered her arm; she rolled onto her back, but she didn't wake up. Her face appeared puffy, the lips dry and cracked.

  I covered her again and returned to the living room. Connie Evans was sitting curled up in an ancient morocco chair, sipping from a can of Coca-Cola. Her eyes were vacant, staring at something only she could see.

  I went around in front of the chair. "What did you give Lynn?"

  She focused on me. "What?"

  "You gave her some kind of drug, didn't you?"

  "Oh. Yes. Some sleeping pills."

  "How many sleeping pills?"

  "Two or three. She was very upset . . . about Larry being dead. She shouldn't have been, though; he wasn't worth it." Evans shook her head, as if she were still a little awed by the fact. "He wasn't worth it."

  "How did Lynn find out about Travers' death? Did you tell her?"

  "No. Her father . . . he called. He said he was coming over to take her home, but she didn't want to see him, she didn't want to go home."

  "So you brought her over here."

  "She asked if she could stay here tonight. It was her idea . . . She drank some more of her Coke. "You know, don't you," she said.

  "Yeah," I said. "I know."

  "Everything?"

  "I think so."

  "How did you find out?" she asked, but not as if it mattered much to her.

  I didn't answer right away. Most of the tension had drained out of me; Lynn was all right and I did not think Evans was going to give me any trouble. I backed away from her, over to where she had fashioned a work space in one corner of the room; I had noticed it when I first came in. There was a desk and a couple of tables, arranged so that they formed a little ell, and on them was a variety of electronic equipment. A bank of stereo components—tape recorder, phonograph, AM-FM radio, VHS videotape deck, even an oscilloscope. An answering machine hooked up to the telephone. A small cassette recorder. And an Apple home computer with an oversized readout screen.