Deadfall (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Alicia Purcell had survived the shooting, at least so far. She was in critical condition; the doctors gave her no better than an even chance. Ben Klein had talked to her briefly, as had the San Mateo County authorities, but she hadn’t told them much—almost nothing, in fact. Maybe she would never tell them anything. That might bother them, but it didn’t bother me. What did it matter if I had doped out some of the details incorrectly or not at all? What mattered was that a lot of people were dead—nasty people but people just the same.

  Dead people. That was the crux of everything. My life, my job, was full of dead people; my memory and my dreams were full of dead people. How many more could I bury in my own private graveyard? Not many. Maybe none. I was too old, too tired; I no longer had the resistence or the resiliency to deal with so much ugliness. All I wanted, now, was peace, quiet, freedom from the sordid side of mankind.

  I kept thinking about retirement.

  The idea scared me a little. I couldn’t imagine myself not working; I remembered the way I’d felt, the emptiness and purposelessness, when I’d lost my license for a few months a couple of years ago. And yet I kept thinking about retirement. It didn’t have to be a full retirement—just from the field. Turn that part of it over to Eberhardt, maybe hire somebody to help him out when we had extra work. Go to the office one or two days a week, do the paperwork, help plan procedure, offer advice if it was needed. Draw half-salary; I could just about live on that, with Kerry helping to share expenses—something we did already. She made a very good salary. I hadn’t talked it over with her, but I knew she wouldn’t mind; she’d welcome the idea, in fact; it would erase the worry, the vestiges of fear, that had been in her face the past week. We could live like normal people. I could learn to enjoy life again.

  It might work. It might.

  I kept thinking about it.

  The movie we’d been watching—an old Cary Grant farce, Bringing Up Baby—ended and Kerry got up to stop the machine, push the rewind button. “That’s the last tape,” she said. “We can watch some TV, if you want. Or are you hungry?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How about a beer?”

  “Okay. It’s about that time.”

  She went off into the kitchen. Came back in a while with a bottle of Bud Light for me and a glass of something clear and sparkly for herself. I pointed at the glass and asked, “What’s that?”

  “Mineral water.”

  “Since when do you drink mineral water?”

  “Since last week. You know, for a detective you’re not very observant sometimes. I must have gone through two cartons of this stuff the past three days.”

  “How come no more wine?”

  She shrugged and gave me a solemn look. “I decided you were right, I’d been drinking too much.”

  “What made you decide?”

  “I don’t know, I guess I just got tired of waking up in the morning with a headache and a fuzzy mouth.”

  I smiled at her, touched her cheek with the back of my hand. “You did it for me,” I said, “for my sake.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say.”

  “Don’t be so damn sure of yourself—”

  “I love you, Kerry,” I said.

  Her expression softened and she leaned over and kissed me, gently, not putting her hands on me. “I love you, too. If you were in better shape I’d prove it to you.”

  “I’m not so sore today. Hardly any pain from the ribs. We could do something mildly exotic.”

  “Like what?”

  I told her like what.

  “That might hurt you,” she said dubiously. “Let me think about it.”

  The videotape had finished rewinding. She got up and shut it off, but the TV kept running; I picked up the remote control unit. “While you’re thinking,” I said, “I’ll see what’s on the tube. Might be something on I like better than sex.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. I punched the channel selector button on the remote; Kerry had cable, so I had a lot of channels to go through. After five or six I didn’t pay much attention to the flickering images, because I really wasn’t interested in watching anything else.

  Kerry said suddenly, with surprise in her voice, “Hey, wait. Back up one.”

  I backed up one and she said, “Wow, look.”

  I looked. It was one of those religious cable stations, the kind where evangelists of one stripe or another try to spread the gospel according to their interpretation and every few minutes handsome young guys and wholesomely pretty girls sing rousing gospel songs that are supposed to stir your sense of Christian duty to the point where you’ll call in and pledge a generous donation. Right now a guy in a three-piece, dark-blue suit was talking about Sodom and Gomorrah and all the terrible things that went on there, drawing an analogy to all the terrible things that were going on today, right under our very noses, not only in massage parlors and porno movie houses, but in wicked old Hollywood and in New York publishing houses whose editors persisted in “inundating our society with a floodtide of trash”—which struck me as a mixed metaphor—“that uses the printed word to spread a pagan message of filth and perversion.”

  The guy was the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak, and he was wearing a big blue-and-white button on his lapel that said THE MORAL CRUSADE.

  “Looks like he finally got himself a TV show,” Kerry said. “I wonder how much it cost him?”

  “You sound as cynical as me.”

  “He’s pretty good, though, isn’t he?”

  “If you’re into pagan messages of filth and perversion.”

  “I wonder—” she said, and the telephone rang.

  “If that’s for me,” I said, “I’m not here.”

  “It’s probably Cybil. Sunday’s her day to call.”

  She got up and went to answer the phone. I watched Clyde T. Daybreak fulminate in his quiet, forceful way, and I didn’t find him amusing. What he was advocating was censorship, something I consider even more vile than crusading fundamentalists who use God’s name to foment intolerance and to coerce money out of gullible citizens. Pretty soon, mercifully, he quit babbling and the camera pulled back and panned around, letting me see part of his entourage, all of whom were smiling and nodding like marionettes whose strings had just been pulled. I was leaning forward, peering at the faces, when Kerry came back.

  “There’s Reverend Holloway,” I said, pointing. “Most of the Holy Mission mavens are there, looks like, except for—”

  “—the Reverend Dunston,” she said grimly. “I know. That was him on the phone.”

  “What? What did he want?”

  “Me. He acted as if nothing had happened, as if Daybreak never even talked to him.”

  “But Daybreak must have.” I didn’t want to look at the Right Reverend or his congregation any longer; I shut off the television. “You put the fear of lawsuit into him last week.”

  “Well, if he did, then Ray’s defying him. What if he comes here again? What if he starts bothering you again? What if—”

  “Hey,” I said, “easy. Don’t worry, we’ll deal with it.”

  “But after all we’ve been through—”

  “After all we’ve been through,” I said, “Dunston isn’t important. He just doesn’t matter.” I pulled her down beside me. “What’s important is us.”

  She let me hold her for a time. Then she drew back a little and said, “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “About what?”

  “About your suggestion. The mildly exotic one. I still think it’ll hurt you, but if you’re game so am I.”

  “I’m game,” I said.

  She was right, as it turned out: it hurt me. But not much, and I didn’t care. All I cared about was her. Being with her, loving her. Living a sane and normal life with her.

  I kept thinking about retiring …

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  Bill Pronzini, Deadfall (Nameless Detective)