Deadfall (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Ending as it began for me, in a welter of blood, in a strange house with me looking at the end products of human corruption: wrong place at the wrong time. The same helplessness, the same futility. The same pity. The same pain.

  Why? I thought. Why this way?

  And I was pretty sure I knew.

  There wasn’t anyone else in the room, and the door to the adjoining bath was open, letting me see that it was empty. White drapes were only half drawn across a picture window in the back wall; beyond the glass were trees half-obscured by darkness and fog. I looked out at them until my stomach settled and I felt I could move again without being sick.

  Dessault was the closest to me, but I didn’t go to him. There was no way he could still be alive; the one bullet had shattered his spine. Whosoever toucheth her, I thought. I went around on the near side of the bed, still with that rubbery sensation in my legs, and took hold of Alicia Purcell’s wrist, felt for a pulse. Just a formality, an automatic gesture… but it wasn’t. She was alive. Faint pulse, weak and fluttery. Up close this way, I could see that blood was still leaking out of her wounds. She’d lost a lot of it in the few minutes since the shooting; if she lost much more she would be dead.

  There was nothing I could do for her, nothing I dared do for her; I was no damn good with first aid and if I tried to move her, to staunch the flow of blood, I was liable to do more harm than good. A door on that side of the room opened on a walk-in closet; I found a blanket inside, shook it out. The position she was in made it difficult to cover her. I did the best I could and then backed off, looking for a telephone.

  No phone in there. I went out and down the hall, down the stairs, hurrying in spite of the hurt in my side. No phone in the living room, either, where did they keep the goddamn telephones? Out of the living room, down the hall toward the rear… the kitchen. I turned in there, looking left and right, and on one wall was one of those antique wooden things, the kind with the two exposed bells and the fake crank. I went to it, caught up the bell-shaped receiver, heard the dial tone.

  Heard a voice say behind me, “Put it down. Don’t call anybody, I don’t want you to call anybody.”

  It was as if a door had been opened and the cold wind let in from outside: the words put a tremor on my neck, freckled my skin with goosebumps under its layer of sweat. I took the receiver away from my ear, slowly, and replaced it on the wall unit. Put my arms out away from my body and turned, slowly, to face her.

  She was standing just inside the kitchen doorway; she must have been somewhere at the back of the house, hiding, waiting. The gun in her hand was an automatic, what looked to be a .38 Smith & Wesson wadcutter—not a big gun but big in her tiny hands. She was holding it in both of them, to keep it steady; the muzzle was about on a level with my chest. But it wasn’t the gun itself that frightened me. It was those vulpine eyes of hers. They were bright, glassy, on the wild side so that the cocked one seemed even more erratic. It was not just emotion that had made them that way. She was on something—coke, probably. And cocaine made a person’s behavior unpredictable, volatile if that person was worked up to begin with.

  “You saw them, didn’t you,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “They’re dead, both of them. I shot them.”

  “Your stepmother’s still alive, Melanie.”

  “Is she? I thought she was dead. Richie’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God,” she said, and I thought she was going to cry. She’d been crying before: her acne-blotched cheeks were stained with drying tears. But then she shook her head and her mouth firmed and she said, “No, I’m glad he’s dead. He deserved to die.”

  “She’ll die too if I don’t call a doctor pretty soon.”

  “I don’t care. I want her to die.” Her nose was running; she took her left hand away from the .38 and swiped at it. “You know what they were doing when I walked in on them? You want me to tell you what they were doing?”

  “No,” I said.

  “They weren’t just fucking, oh no, they were … they …” She broke off, as if she couldn’t articulate the thing she’d witnessed. “I loved him,” she said. “I loved him and he was doing that with her. With her!”

  I didn’t say anything this time. She was still holding the gun with just the one hand, still pawing at her runny nose with the other.

  “I knew he was seeing somebody,” she said. “Staying out all night, five nights in three weeks, lying to me, I knew he was getting it on with somebody else. I asked him and he said no, he wasn’t … lies, lies. I had to know who it was. You understand? I had to know. That’s why I followed him this afternoon. I couldn’t believe it when he came here. I thought, it’s not her, it can’t be her, he’s here for some other reason. I waited out in the car. I waited and waited, but he didn’t come out so I went in and I heard them, they were laughing, God they were laughing and she said, ‘Come on, Richie,’ she said, ‘Do it just like I tell you, Richie,’ she said … I couldn’t listen anymore. I wanted to hurt them, I hated them both, I wanted to kill them … this is my father’s gun, did you know that? He taught me how to shoot, did you know that?”

  I stood unmoving, silent, watching the gun, watching her finger slide back and forth over the surface of the trigger.

  “He always kept it in his study,” she said, “in a box in the bookcase. It was still there, she hadn’t moved it. I got it and I went up there to her bedroom and they were naked … they were … it made me sick and I shot him and she screamed and I shot her I shot them both I killed them …”

  Her face was screwed up and there was wetness leaking out of those bright, glassy eyes again; she looked old and gnomish, as if she had fallen prey to some rapid aging disease—a pathetic, tragic figure, an ugly duckling torn apart by love and hate. But I couldn’t feel anything for her, not yet, not while she had that gun in her hand.

  “Melanie,” I said gently, “you’re not going to shoot me, too?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to shoot me, too?”

  “No,” she said. “Not if you leave me alone.”

  “If I promise to leave you alone, will you put the gun down?”

  “No. Promises are lies. I don’t want to hear any more lies.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Melanie.”

  “Yes you will. Everybody lies to me. All my life, lies, lies and bullshit. Don’t you think I know what I am? Don’t you think I look in mirrors and see what I am?”

  “Melanie, please put the gun down.”

  “No. I’ve got to get out of here, I don’t want to stay here any more. I hate this house. You won’t let me go if I put the gun down.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Just away from here.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the police sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be better to do it now?”

  “Fuck the police. You think I’m afraid of them?”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of them.”

  “Well I’m not. I don’t care what they do to me. I don’t care about anything anymore.”

  “Not even who killed your father and your uncle?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. Leonard was responsible for your father’s death. Alicia helped him cover it up. She’s the one who shot Leonard. She killed Danny Martinez, too.”

  It was too much for her to comprehend all at once. She shook her head, said, “What?” and shook her head another time. The gun wavered a little in her hand—a little but not enough.

  “It’s true, Melanie,” I said. “She murdered two people in cold blood. And she got Richie to help her cover up what she did to Martinez. Don’t you want to know the full story? Why she did all those things?”

  “Kenneth? She killed him?”

  “No. It was Leonard.”

  “Why would Leonard do that?”

  “Put the gun down and we’ll talk about it.”

  “No. You said Richie helped her.”

 
; “Helped her cover up the Martinez murder. But he didn’t know it was a murder.”

  Another headshake. Another swipe at her runny nose. The longer she stayed confused, the better my chances were of talking that gun out of her hand. “Your face,” she said, “Richie did that. He beat you up.”

  “He arranged for it, yes.”

  “He made me call you,” she said. “He said they were only going to scare you, make you leave us alone. More lies. I didn’t know they were going to beat you.”

  “It’s all right, Melanie.”

  “It’s not all right. He did it for her, didn’t he.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did everything for her, killed my father …”

  “No, it was Leonard who did that. Richie didn’t kill anyone; he didn’t know Alicia had killed anyone. He just made it look like Danny Martinez had run away—”

  “I don’t know anybody named Danny Martinez. What are you talking about?”

  “Martinez delivered groceries here, the night your father was killed. I told you about that at Blanche’s, remember?”

  “No.” Her headshake was violent this time. “You’re confusing me,” she said. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Why don’t we sit down at the table over there? I’ll explain it all to you from the beginning—”

  “No! Shut up, why don’t you just shut up?”

  I shut up. The automatic wasn’t steady in her hand, but her finger was tight now on the trigger.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. The bright stare shifted away from me for an instant, over to the side door that led outside; but the cockeye seemed still to be fixed on my face. “I can’t breathe, you’re not letting me breathe!”

  I wasn’t breathing either. I might have confused her too much; the look on her face now was one of burgeoning paranoia, the kind that can explode into violence at any time. I stood rigid, poised, ready to throw myself at her. She could get a shot off before I reached her but the sudden movement might cause her to shy, to miss. It was the only chance I had if she decided to shoot and telegraphed her intent. If she didn’t telegraph it …

  She didn’t decide to shoot. She said, “Get out, get out, ” talking to herself, not to me, and took a couple of herky-jerky steps sideways into the kitchen: parallel to me, toward the side door. Then she stopped, and bit her lower lip, and rubbed at her nose; and then she moved again, crossed to the door in that same herky-jerky way. Fumbled for the knob, got the door open. “Don’t come after me, I’ll kill you if you do.” And she was gone.

  Some of the tension went out of me, just enough to loosen the rigidity of my body and let me move, too—without hesitation. I couldn’t let her go, the shape she was in, no matter what the risk to me; if she tried to drive she was liable to kill somebody else, an innocent party, with that MG of hers. And if my calculations were right, she only had one bullet left in the automatic’s clip. A Smith & Wesson .38 wadcutter held five rounds; she’d fired four into Dessault and her stepmother, and in her condition she probably wouldn’t have thought to reload.

  I got to the door, yanked it all the way open, stumbled through. She was thirty feet away, out from under the portico, half-running toward the front of the house. I yelled her name and the sound of my voice brought her up short, brought her around to face me. I saw her arm go up and I ducked instinctively, dodging sideways; the gun cracked, glass shattered somewhere to my right, and I banged into one of the metal garbage cans, upset it, almost fell over it with pain tearing in my side.

  “Melanie!”

  It came out like the ghost-echo of a shout, low and strangulated; I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs as I righted myself. She was still standing a few feet away, the gun extended at arm’s length—pulling the trigger frantically now, the hammer making audible clicks as it fell on the empty chamber. I staggered toward her, and she threw the gun at me, just the way you see them do it on television, and turned and ran. But not toward the front garden this time; to the north, away from the house, into the black tangle of the woods.

  I ran after her, with one thought boiling in my head: The cliffs, Christ, the cliffs! The trees swallowed her, but I saw through a blur of sweat where she went into them—the path, she was on the path. My side and my head were on fire when I got there and I was sucking air with my mouth wide open, still not getting enough; it felt as if something hot and dry was being forced down my throat, into my lungs. I plunged ahead, let the woods swallow me. Couldn’t see anything except grayness far ahead, the vague shape of her like something impaled against it, the tree trunks like prison bars in a nightmare. I tripped over something, fell, got up. I couldn’t run anymore because I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe; I had to feel my way along, blundering off the trail, back onto it, one hand up in front of my face to fend off low-hanging branches. The dark pressed in on me, added to the feeling of suffocation, so that I had to fend off the cutting edge of panic as well.

  I heard her somewhere ahead, or thought I did; then all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears … no, it was the boom of wind-roiled surf, colliding with the rocks at the base of the cliff. Jog in the path—I almost ran into a tree before I realized it. And there she was, twenty yards away, out beyond where the trees thinned. Standing at the edge of the cliff, stiff and still against the fog like a condemned prisoner against a crumbling gray wall.

  Melanie!

  I yelled the word but only inside my head: I had no voice. I lurched to my left, threw an arm around one of the slender tree trunks just before my legs gave out. Clung there gasping, trying to clear the dizziness out of my head.

  Melanie might have been some kind of alfresco statue, both arms down at her sides, unmoving. I couldn’t see her face clearly, couldn’t tell what was written on it. But she didn’t move, didn’t move, didn’t move—and my throat opened up, my lungs worked, the feeling of suffocation faded and strength came back into my arms, my legs. My mind was clear again. I let go of the tree and took a slow step toward her, still deep in the tree shadows so that she couldn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me, either, because of the wind and the surfs hissing cannonade.

  Another step. Another—

  And she moved, turned to her right abruptly and took a couple of small shuffling sidewise paces toward the edge. Leaned out a ways, with the wind whipping her frizzed hair, swaying her thin gangly body. Looked down, I saw her look down. Then she straightened again, and either saw or heard me somehow because she swiveled her head in my direction.

  “I’m going to jump,” she said.

  The wind caught the words, tore them apart almost instantly. But I heard them, the awful dull resignation in them. There was no doubt she meant it.

  I yelled at her, “No, Melanie!” Hoarse croak: the words couldn’t have carried to her. I yelled them again, took another step.

  “I have to,” she said, “I have to jump. Richie … Richie … I killed him. Oh God, I killed him!”

  Coming down off the coke high, that was it. The full implications of what she’d done settling in on her, the weight of it building a suicidal depression. I took another step. She didn’t move. Another step, and I was at the edge of the clearing. No more than ten feet separating us. The twisted shape of the cypress growing up from the cliff face gyrated nearby … too far away from both of us for it to be of any use. Nothing anywhere near her except me. And the restless fog. And the black emptiness, waiting out there like something sentient, whispering to her, beckoning to her.

  “Melanie, listen to me …”

  “You can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m going to do it. I don’t have anything to live for now. I don’t want to live. He’s dead, I killed him. I loved him and I killed him.”

  “Please, Melanie, please …”

  She put her back to me, put her arms out at her sides like a bird about to take flight, and looked down, looked down … and I ran at her, full of terror that was as much for me as for her because this was a high p
lace, because of my vertigo, and I reached her, clawed a hold on her sweater with my good hand

  and she jumped

  oh Jesus God she jumped with my hand on her

  and the sweater tore, I couldn’t hold on, and she

  she was gone, tumbling over and over, screaming, gone, and I

  I staggered, teetered at the edge windmilling my arms

  Deadfall!

  and somehow I managed to pitch my body backward and to one side … breath jarred out of me when I hit the ground … and I was sliding, I felt my legs go over the edge, I clutched frenziedly at the rough surface and caught onto something, a rock, something, and I wasn’t sliding anymore, I was pulling myself up and away from the edge …

  Safe.

  I lay with my head buried in my arms, my cheek against the rough sandstone, listening to the hungry feeding of the surf far below, crying a little. But not for Melanie. Not for Melanie, not for anyone in her God-damned family, not for Danny Martinez, not for any of them.

  For me. The one I was crying for was me.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Sunday afternoon, three days later.

  Kerry’s apartment.

  We had spent a quiet day there, reading, watching tapes of old comedy films on her VCR. It was almost five o’clock and getting dark outside. I leaned over and turned on the end-table lamp. I didn’t like the darkness much right now; it made me uneasy. Beside me on the couch, Kerry was silent. She understood.

  The past three days had been bad, worse than the three days after my beating: psychic damage was much harder to deal with than the physical kind. Thursday night had been the worst. Police, ambulances, sirens, questions, more questions; floodlights and winches on the cliff, men milling about, working at the retrieval of Melanie’s broken body from the rocks; exhaustion, half-sleep, nightmares—always the nightmares, like a preview of hell seen over and over but only vaguely perceived. Friday had been bad, too, but Kerry had been there at my flat, and Eberhardt for a while, and they had made it tolerable. Saturday had been a little better. And today better still. Time would fade it all, blend it with all the other similar episodes, all the other views of pain and death, and make it indistinguishable from them. Scar tissue added to scar tissue, hidden away inside.