Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Where did it come from, damn you!”

  Mrs. Jerrold's face had gone suddenly pale, and there was the beginnings of fright in her eyes. She said, “Up there, yes, it came from up there,” and pointed at the incline.

  I ran up the slope, shoving my way through underbrush, trampling a high patch of ferns, holding the rifle up and ready; the rest of them followed. Two-thirds of the way up, I could see a small flattened-out area, a kind of curving glade surrounded by the high boughs of spruce and lodgepole pine. It was dark in there, but you could see well enough.

  Yeah, you could see well enough.

  I stopped at the edge of the glade—stopped and turned, looking for Mrs. Jerrold, reaching for her when I realized she was close by. But I was too late; she had gotten to where she could see what lay in there. She made a horrified whimpering noise, and her eyes rolled up and she staggered, started to go down. Harry caught her, turned her immediately and pulled her away down the slope.

  Cody and Knox and Talesco and I stared mutely at what was left of Ray Jerrold. He lay stiffly on his back, arms flung out; his face and head and the entire upper third of his body were covered with black scorch marks and ribbons of blood, and the head itself was nearly severed. Beside him on the grass was the shotgun he had been carrying the first time I'd seen him, its barrel curled back into blackened strips. The air was foul with the stench of cordite, of charred metal.

  Beside me Knox said softly, “Blowback.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Blowback is what happens when somebody fires a weapon like Jerrold's with a solid blockage of the barrel. The unreleased load causes the thing to explode, splitting and peeling the barrel, and the shooter takes the full charge in his face and upper body. It happens to hunters sometimes, when they're not careful and they let the muzzle nose down into thick mud or clay. The stuff dries and expands and seals the barrel: blowback.

  There might have been a certain terrible irony in the way Jerrold had died, but if there was, I could not pursue it now. The anger had drained out of me, and I felt empty, a little sick; fatigue was seeping into every corner of my body. I could not seem to think clearly any longer.

  Cody, standing white-faced on my left, made a gagging sound and jerked his head away. He said in a shrill, shaken voice, “What … what was he doing up here? What was he going to shoot up here?”

  I looked at him, and then I looked down the incline, gauging a trajectory from where Jerrold lay. You could see the backside of Cody's cabin without obstruction, less than forty yards away, and there were two chairs set up there in the shade of a young oak.

  He followed my gaze. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, as if it were undergoing some sort of paroxysm. “Angela and me?” he said disbelievingly. “He was shooting at us, at me?”

  I did not say anything.

  “No,” Cody said. “No, listen …”

  But I did not listen. I spun around and shoved past him and made my way down the slope. When I got around to the front of the cabin, I saw that Harry was sitting there on the steps, one arm draped awkwardly around Angela Jerrold's shoulders. She was sobbing in a broken way, and she did not look beautiful or alluring any more, not any more. I had no sympathy for her; it was what she was, to a greater or lesser degree, that had been the catalyst for all this blood and pain and horror.

  Harry looked up at me with dull eyes, and I said, “I'm not up to a drive into The Pines right now. You want to take care of calling Cloudman?”

  “All right,” he said.

  He stood up, got Mrs. Jerrold on her feet, and then did not seem to know what to do with her. I motioned to the cabin door, put the .22 down—the feel of it in my hands was like something unclean—and took one of her arms even though I did not want to touch her. Together we guided her inside and down onto Cody's rumpled bed. I pulled a sheet over her, watched her curl herself up and lie there making those sobbing sounds. Then I got out of there, Harry right behind me.

  Neither of us had anything to say to each other; he moved away to the path. Cody had come down from the glade. I saw him walk shakily to the rear of the cabin, heard the clink of glass on glass a moment later. Knox and Talesco had come down too, and they were standing around as if they had momentarily lost all purpose and direction, like people in a daze.

  I walked past them and straight to my cabin. Even with the fatigue, the loss of tension, I still seemed to be in no immediate danger of a collapse; I was coughing again, though only in a thinly sporadic way. Inside the cabin, I stripped off my filthy clothing, took a long shower alternately hot and cold, brushed my teeth and ran a comb through my hair without looking at myself in the mirror, and put on the stuff I had worn yesterday because I did not have any more clean clothes. I did it all mechanically, mindlessly.

  Then I went out and down to Harry's cabin, but not to the front of it—around to the rear and inside the shed there. I stood for a moment next to the skiff that was up on davits, letting my eyes adjust, scanning the interior. And finally I crossed to the rolls of heavy canvas at the rear and knelt in front of them and began to tug at each one in turn.

  The Daghestan carpet, bound with cord in a long tight cylinder, was hidden inside a fold of the third roll.

  I did not untie it, or even touch it; it was Cloudman's baby—and Kayabalian's. I thought briefly of the twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward that was probably going to be mine. A lot of money, more money than I had seen in one chunk in a long time. And yet it did not mean anything to me at that moment; it was an abstract, and it was tainted with the blood of three men.

  I used the canvas to re-cover the Daghestan, straightened up, and went outside again and got a beer from the cooler and sat on Harry's front steps to drink it and wait for Cloudman.

  Nineteen

  While I waited, the sky got darker overhead and the wind picked up and eventually a few drops of rain started to fall. I watched them make tiny ripples on the steel-colored surface of the lake, darken the reddish hue of the earth. It did not get any cooler, though; if anything, the air took on a damp sultriness that was even more oppressive than the dry heat of the past few days. Here and there I could see patches of blue between rifts in the lowering clouds, and I knew that the rain would not last long, that the sky would probably be clear again by nightfall.

  After thirty minutes Sam Knox came around the corner and stopped when he saw me sitting there. Then, slowly, he stepped over and leaned a hip against the railing post, and his eyes were shocked and grave. “Hell of a thing that happened up there,” he said. “Awful thing.”

  “Yeah.” I did not want to talk to anyone but Cloudman.

  “Always the wrong one that gets it,” Knox said. “It should have been her.”

  “It shouldn't have been anybody,” I said.

  “No, but if it had to be someone, it should've been her. Talesco was goddamn lucky she held him off. It could have been him Jerrold was shooting at.”

  “I thought Talesco scored with her. I thought you were trying to score with her.”

  “No, Christ no.”

  “Then what was your fight with him about?”

  “Him making a play for her,” Knox said. “He's getting married next month, he's marrying this girl in Fresno, and I won't see her hurt …” He broke off. “Look, I don't want to get into that, okay?”

  I shrugged. But he had gotten into it enough to tell me I had misinterpreted his drunken mutterings in the hotel bar, and that was why Talesco's comments to me later had not seemed to make any sense. Just a simple case of one man being in love with a girl, and stepping aside for his best friend, and then finding out the best friend was trying to make it with another woman as a kind of last fling. Talesco was lucky Mrs. Jerrold had backed him off, all right. In more ways than one.

  Knox said, “What happened to you have anything to do with Jerrold? I mean, the way you looked, all banged up and covered with dirt, and you and Burroughs with those rifles…”

  “It doesn't matter now, does it?”

&
nbsp; “Talesco and me, we were wondering, is all.”

  “I'd rather not talk about it.”

  “Sure,” he said reluctantly, “that's how you feel.”

  “That's how I feel.”

  He seemed disinclined to leave, but I quit looking at him and did not say anything for a couple of minutes, and the message finally got through. “I guess the cops'll want to talk to us too,” he said. “We'll be up at the cabin.” Then, when I nodded, he turned and shuffled away and left me alone again.

  It was another twenty minutes before the parade of vehicles came streaming down into the parking circle, Harry's jeep leading the pack. I stood up and went over there. Cloudman, looking solemn, stepped out of the first of two county cars and fixed me with a long probing look that I could not read. Harry and three deputies and the forensic plainclothesman, and a guy from the ambulance wearing a white uniform and carrying a medical satchel, came up and stood around on either side of us. The misty drizzle had a hot feel on my neck, like a spray of water from a simmering pan.

  Cloudman said mildly, “Getting to be a habit, you people calling to report homicides.”

  “Some habit,” I said.

  “I understand there's a third man dead too, a Walt Bascomb.”

  “That's right. Jerrold killed him on Sunday night, not long after Terzian. But it won't be easy getting to his body.”

  “No? Why not?”

  I told him why not—everything that had happened up at the abandoned mine.

  He said without changing expression, “Pretty rough.”

  “About as rough as it can get.”

  “You look kind of rocky. Feel okay?”

  “I'll make it.” For the time being, anyway.

  He asked Harry to show his men where Jerrold's body was, and the intern where Mrs. Jerrold was, and Harry nodded and led part of the group away. One of the deputies stayed there with Cloudman and me. Cloudman took off his hat and dug tiredly at his scalp. I still could not gauge how he was taking all of this, if his feelings toward me had undergone any kind of change.

  He said, “You got anything to back up your claim that Jerrold murdered Terzian and this Bascomb?”

  “Some fairly sound theories. And the stolen carpet.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted. “You found that too?”

  “I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here in the camp. I'll show you.”

  I took him around to the shed and uncovered the rolled Daghes-tan and watched while he got down and peeled back an edge of it. Then he nodded and said, “Jerrold put it here?”

  “Uh-huh. You want me to go into it now?”

  “Not just yet.” He stood up. “We'll have to take it along as the evidence when we; leave. You want me to notify Kayabalian, or you want to handle that yourself, you working for him and all?”

  “You can notify him. I'll get in touch with him later. Tomorrow probably.”

  We went outside, and I said, “If you're going up to see the body, I'd like to stay here. I've looked at enough death—too damned much of it.”

  “I guess we all have,” he agreed, “the business we're in.”

  So I showed him the path that led up to Cody's cabin, and after he and the deputy went up there I came back to Harry's and sat on the porch this time, out of the drizzle. I let myself think now, arranging my thoughts so I could lay it all out for Cloudman when the time came.

  The white-uniformed intern came back first and said that Cloudman had told him he'd better have a look at me. That made me feel a little more sure of Cloudman's attitude; it was probably going to be all right between us. The intern peered at the cut on my forearm and the abrasions on my hands, and swabbed some antiseptic on them; then felt my ribs and asked me a few questions about sore spots and dizziness and double vision. I was not coughing now, and I did not say anything about my lungs; their condition was between me and Dr. White and the pathology lab at San Francisco General.

  He had just finished telling me to get into bed and get some rest when Cloudman and Harry and the one deputy reappeared. At Cloudman's instructions, the intern went off to supervise the removal of Jerrold's remains. The rest of us were pretty cramped on the small porch, and it was starting to rain harder; we trouped inside the cabin and found places to sit, all except Cloudman. He stood with his back against the mantelpiece, worrying his scalp and grimacing. The rain made a soft, oddly lonely sound on the roof.

  “Okay,” Cloudman said to me, “you can tell it now.”

  I nodded. “Maybe I'd better give you a little background on Jerrold first,” I said, and I told him why Harry had asked me to come up and what had happened here at the camp since Sunday—Jerrold's wild jealousy, his wife's flirtations and probable infidelity, his deteriorating state of mind. Cloudman did not interrupt; the only sounds in the room were my voice and the pattering rain and the scratch of the deputy's pencil on the pages of a notebook.

  When I was done, there was a moment of silence. Then, quietly, Cloudman said, “Two of you should have told me about this Sunday night or Monday afternoon.”

  “I guess we should have,” I said. “But neither of us figured a connection then between Terzian's death and Jerrold. His instability seemed to be a product of his wife's actions and business pressures, nothing else. Error in judgment that was mostly mine; I'll take the responsibility for it.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “I didn't really begin to tie up Terzian's murder with somebody here at the camp until last night, when I discovered that Bascomb had disappeared.” I explained about the incident at Cabin Five. “But it was still only speculation; I didn't have anything more than a hunch, I hadn't tumbled yet to the things that pointed to Jerrold.”

  “When did you tumble?”

  “Not until this afternoon, up at the mine.”

  “Why'd you leave the call for me this morning?”

  “To tell you about Bascomb's disappearance and the possible tie-up with Terzian. I was on my way back from The Pines when I noticed the mine and realized it was what was on the missing sketch.”

  “What was Jerrold's relationship with Terzian?” he asked. “Burroughs here told us he didn't know anyone who collected Oriental rugs and carpets.”

  “That's right, buddy,” Harry said. He was sitting forward in his chair with his hands on his knees, and he still looked a little stunned. “Jerrold liked to talk about himself, he would have mentioned something like that before.”

  “I don't think he was a collector,” I said. “I think he was buying stolen Orientals for one of his big advertising clients—the kind of client who won't buy stolen goods directly but doesn't mind getting them through a middleman, no questions asked. It's just an assumption, no facts to back it up, but it makes sense. Mrs. Jerrold told me he was a fanatic when it came to business, that he'd do anything to bring larger clients into his agency. Which means he'd do anything, too, to keep the ones he already had. Advertising people have contacts in all kinds of places; it wouldn't have been too difficult for him to connect with a man like Terzian.”

  “I'll buy it for now,” Cloudman said, nodding. “What about these things that pointed to Jerrold?”

  “There's the peacock feather, for one.”

  His brow wrinkled. “You're coming at me out of left field.”

  “Not really. You figured the feather came out of the killer's car and got dropped accidentally; the only question was why anyone would have it in his car in the first place. Well, Jerrold had been wearing this fisherman's hat off and on, decorated with all kinds of things—buttons, flies, patches, bits of colored felt. Any man who would put all that stuff on a hat might also get the idea of adding part of a peacock feather. That's pretty flimsy, I know—but it adds up.”

  “You've got to have more than that.”

  “There's a process of elimination,” I said. “On Sunday night, while Terzian was being murdered, Mrs. Jerrold and Karl Talesco were together over here on the lakefront; she intimated th
at to me the following morning. Also, the Rambler wagon that belongs to Talesco and Sam Knox was parked outside when Harry and I left in one of the skiffs—hardly any time for one of them to get over to the bluff and kill Terzian. And Knox volunteered the information today that he'd talked to Bascomb around dusk Sunday, an admission a man guilty of Bascomb's murder wouldn't make. That narrowed it down to the kid, Cody, and Jerrold, both of whom had gone off in their cars late Sunday afternoon. The pattern of Bascomb's death and the stealing of the mine sketch laid it on Jerrold.”

  “How so?”

  “They weren't wholly rational acts,” I said. “They suggested an unstable personality.”

  “Spell it out.”

  “Let me give it all to you, starting with Terzian's murder.”

  “Go ahead,” Cloudman said.

  “Assume Jerrold made arrangements with Terzian to come up here from San Jose and then to meet over on the bluff. My guess is that he wanted to get a look at the carpet and maybe make a partial payment on it, after which Terzian would deliver it to some place in the Los Angeles area. During the meeting, something set Jerrold off—an argument over money, Christ knows now. He grabbed up a lug wrench and settled the argument by bashing in Terzian's skull. Then, in a panic, he transferred the carpet to his car, wedged down the gas pedal in the van, and sent it over the edge—another irrational act, because the water at the foot of the bluff is shallow. A reasoning man couldn't expect the van to sink out of sight; why not just hide it back in the trees somewhere?”

  I paused to clear my throat; my voice sounded thick, rusty. At length I went on: “After Jerrold was through with the van, he'd have realized he also had a problem with the carpet. He couldn't hide it in the trunk of his car because of its size, and he couldn't leave it out in the open somewhere because of its fragile nature; and for some reason—guilt, fear of discovery through a prolonged absence—he didn't want to drive it down to Los Angeles right away. So his decision was to bring it back here and hide it for the time being.”