Shackles

by Bill Pronzini

  “You stayed with him last October, in his apartment in Sacramento.”

  “Yes, well, I’d just been released from Folsom and I needed a place. I didn’t know Midge then.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “My ex-wife,” he said bitterly. “She divorced me after I went to prison. My father disowned me at the same time. Not a bloody word from either of them since.”

  “Why did you stay with Tucker, if you hate him so much?”

  Vining smiled again—a dark, unreadable smile this time. “I had my reasons,” he said.

  “Such as establishing an address so you could rent this cabin.”

  “That’s one.”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “Oh, I had a bit put away.”

  From selling the rare books and other items he’d stolen from John Rothman, probably. I remembered that not all of the money he’d received had been recovered. At his trial he’d claimed to have spent it and refused to budge from that story.

  I said, “Is that what you’ve been living on since you got out? Or are you in on Rix’s loan-sharking and pornography scams too?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Rix.”

  “You gave him as a personal reference to the real estate outfit in Carmichael.”

  “Did I? Yes, that’s right—Tucker’s friend. I asked Tucker for the name of someone who would lie for me and he provided this fellow Rix. He also provided the gun I used to abduct you. He was very accommodating, Tucker was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me, is he involved in those scams you mentioned?”

  “He was. He won’t be much longer. Neither will Rix.”

  “You’ve put the police on them?”

  “That’s right.”

  The dark smile again. “Quite the detective. Quite the fucking detective.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But you didn’t put the police on me,” Vining said. “Instead you followed me up here. I suppose you intend to kill me?”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t care, you know,” he said. “I really don’t, not anymore.” A thought seemed to occur to him then; he frowned, and the timbre of his voice had changed slightly when he said, “I do care about Midge, though. She had nothing to do with any of this. She knows nothing about it.”

  “I didn’t think she did.”

  “Not a bloody thing.”

  Are you worried about her? Of course you are. You’re afraid I’ll do something to Ms. Wade. His words, on the way up here that first night. The irony was sharp, and yet it gave me no satisfaction, no desire to remind him of it and goad him with it. Maybe because I was so tired and wired, wired and tired, and I just wanted to get this done, the rest of the questions and then the other thing, so I could rest. Or maybe because other of his words that first night had also come back to me: I could torture you with the idea. Make you think I intend to harm your woman. It’s tempting, I’ll admit … but I don’t think I’ll do it. No need for it, really. There’s such a thing as overkill, after all.

  “I told her nothing about me,” he was saying, “not even … nothing. She never asked. Knew me only a week when she invited me to move in with her, share expenses—into her house, not her bed. That’s the way she is, trusting. Leave her alone, will you? She’s been hurt enough in her life.”

  “I won’t go near her.”

  “… No, no you won’t. I believe you.”

  “This is just between you and me.”

  “Yes. Well, then, one other thing before you shoot: Did you suffer? During the time you were chained here?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Tell me how much.”

  “No, goddamn you.”

  “Why not? Dying man’s last request.” Another of those dark, unreadable smiles. “The provisions for thirteen weeks—was that maddening too? Thirteen instead of twelve or sixteen?”

  I stared at him. “The number doesn’t mean anything. You set that up along with the rest.”

  “Of course. I knew you’d try to find meaning in it. Such a smart detective. But a good red herring will fool even the best, eh?”

  “Why, Vining? Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do it, all of it? Why do you hate me so much?”

  “Don’t you know? You seem to know everything else.”

  “No, I don’t know. It can’t be just because I had a hand in sending you to prison—”

  “Had a hand in it? That’s a bloody laugh. You were totally responsible. If it hadn’t been for you …” The words seemed to choke him up; he coughed his throat clear. “You destroyed me, destroyed my life!”

  “For Christ’s sake, you only served five years.”

  “Five years! You think that’s all there is to it? If you only … all right, then. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to but I will.” His eyes glittered and glistened again. “Eleven days after I was admitted to Folsom, I was gang-raped by four other cons. Have you ever been homosexually assaulted? No, of course you haven’t, so you can’t even begin to understand what it was like. You have to experience it to know. And that wasn’t the only time, no. Some of the cons … well, they covet chaps like me. Young, slender, oh yes, we’re prime meat. I was raped three more times before one of them, a lovely fellow named Abbot, turned me out. Do you know what punk means in prison slang?”

  I knew but I didn’t say it.

  “A homosexual lover,” he said. “Private property, for the exclusive use of one man. I was Abbot’s punk for two years, until he was released. Then I became Frank Tucker’s punk—I was Tucker’s punk until he was released last year, six months before I was. Now do you understand why I despise him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Ah, but you still don’t understand why I went to him after I got out. Why I would subject myself to more of his abuse. Aren’t you wondering that? I could have got the help I needed elsewhere, couldn’t I? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  His voice had risen shrilly, almost hysterically. The look in his eyes … it was the same kind of look I had seen in mine that day in the Carder A-frame. Only worse, more tormented—the most terrible look I have ever seen in the eyes of another human being. It put a chill on my back, a metallic taste in my mouth.

  “Here’s something else for you to think about,” Vining said, “I thought about it, you know. After I brought you up here and chloroformed you the second time and dragged you in here. I thought about raping you as those cons raped me. I wanted to do it, I truly did, but I … couldn’t. I’m not a faggot, I never participated willingly—I couldn’t do that even to you. Besides, there was no way to be sure you’d catch it and I couldn’t wait long enough to find out, the doctors said I might have to be hospitalized within a few months, I didn’t have enough time to make you die that way.”

  Chills up and down my body now, because now I understood, I knew his motive, I knew what he was going to say before he spoke the words—

  “That’s right,” he said, “I have AIDS, I’m dying of AIDS, they gave me AIDS in prison but you put me there, damn you, you’re the one who destroyed me!”

  He came lunging up off the cot, charged me, struck wildly at my face. But he was no fighter; he hadn’t been able to defend himself in prison against bigger, stronger men, and he had no chance with me either. I fended him off with my left arm, hit him under the right eye with the flattish surface of the .22—not half as hard as I had hit Frank Tucker with the piece of driftwood—and knocked him down.

  He got up on his knees, holding his head, moaning a little. There was blood on his lower lip where he’d bitten through it. “Go ahead,” he said, “shoot me, kill me, get it over with. Do it, you bloody bastard. Do it do it do it!”

  But I couldn’t.

  I could not shoot him.

  Something seemed to tear loose inside me. The room went out of focus for an instant, came back into focus with a sudden sharp clarity. Ninety d
ays in this place, a week on the move, all the hate and all the rationalizations and all the shoring up of my resolve … and I couldn’t do it.

  He saw that in my face and got off the floor, rushed me again, screaming, “Kill me, damn you, kill me!” I hit him another time, nothing else to do, hit him with a little more force and put him down again and this time he didn’t get up. He groaned, rolled over, lay pulled up into himself gasping for breath, sobbing. Not a diabolical lunatic, not a mad dog—just a weak and broken man, sick and tormented and dying. Just another victim.

  My knees had gone shaky; I made it to the cot, sank down on it, and sat there looking at the floor. The hate was still inside me but it was dying too, now—as if it had burned too hot for too long and consumed itself. Glowing embers that in a short while would become ashes … cooling ashes, then dead ashes. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if he had been someone else, if he had had another motive, if he were not dying from the horror of AIDS; maybe then my hate would still be as white-hot as his and I would have been able to go through with it.

  And maybe not.

  Either way, I would never know for sure.

  Sitting there, I became aware of the smell in the room: sour stench of fear, corruption, human misery. And part of it was mine. It came wafting up from the cot, from the canvas that had absorbed it from my body, and it seeped in through my nostrils, seemed to swell my head like a noxious gas. Gagging, I pushed onto my feet and stumbled to the door and pulled it open to let the night in.

  But I didn’t go out into it yet. I leaned against the jamb, taking in cold clean air until I could breathe normally. The .22 was still in my hand; I shoved it into my jacket pocket. Then I went over to where Vining lay, hunkered down beside him.

  He was quiet now; I turned him enough to tell that he had passed out. There was a ring of keys in his pants pocket. I took that to where the leg iron rested at the end of its chain, over near the bathroom. Only four keys on the ring, and the first one I tried opened the padlock. I brought chain and iron and padlock back to where Vining lay, looped the iron around his left calf, adjusted it to a tight fit, locked it in place. Then I straightened and put my back to him and went out of there, away from him, away from my prison for the last time.

  I walked along the access lane, not fast and not slow. Walked with the night wrapped around me, the wind cold in my face, the sky immense and lunar-bright and frosted with stars. And I felt … free. It was a different feeling from the one last week, after I had squeezed out of the leg iron—as if that sense of freedom had been false, illusory, because it was incomplete. As if for the past seven days I had been dragging around another set of shackles, an invisible set whose binding weight had drawn me down inside myself, made me see things the way you see them through distorted glass, made me believe things the way you believe them in a dream or a delirium.

  If I had shot him in there I would never have thrown off those shackles. I would have carried them until the day I died, and they would have grown heavier and more restricting until the burden of lugging them around became unbearable. Vining’s revelations and my own internal makeup had weakened the links, and by not killing him, by not being able to kill him, I had burst them. That was what the feeling of something tearing loose inside had been: the last set of shackles coming off, setting me free.

  Now it was over, finally over.

  Now I could go home.

  * * *

  Epilogue

  Coming Home

  * * *

  I returned to San Francisco at eight P.M. on Thursday, March 10—seventeen hours after I had left the Deer Run cabin for the last time.

  Not much happened in those seventeen hours; it was all anti-climax. I had driven to the Calaveras county sheriff’s office in San Andreas and told my story to the night deputy in charge, a man named Newell: who I was, what had happened to me, how I had tracked down Neal Vining, and that I had left him chained inside the cabin. The only things I omitted were my original purpose in going after him, and my breaking and entering and thefts from the Carder A-frame. Those were things I would never tell anyone, not even Kerry; they were private crosses for me to bear alone. I had locked the .22 in the trunk of the Toyota, and it would stay there until I could pack it in a box with a couple of hundred dollars in cash and mail it anonymously to Tom and Elsie Carder in Stockton.

  Newell sent a couple of deputies up to Deer Run to take Vining into custody. He also notified the sheriff, who came down and listened to me tell my story a second time and then agreed to my request for a twenty-four-hour grace period before any of it was made public, so I could tell Kerry and Eberhardt myself, in person, instead of them hearing it through the media. I repeated the story a third time into the microphone of a tape recorder. After that they gave me a place to sleep, and I was unconscious until midafternoon. When I woke up I shaved off the beard, had something to eat, received permission to leave the area, picked up the Toyota, and spent two and a half hours driving due west to San Francisco.

  And now here I was, coming into the city off the Bay Bridge. It was a cold, clear night, the same kind of night my last one here had been. The skyline struck me much the same way it had then: new and clean and bright, real and yet not real, as if it was some kind of elaborate stage set. Not San Francisco, San Francisco Land. But there was a difference in the illusion this time. Ninety-seven days ago, it had had a pleasurable, magical connotation. Tonight it was merely strange, as if I were entering a familiar place that had changed in subtle ways while I had been away. The strangeness was in me, however, in my perceptions; it was I, not the city, that had been altered in subtle ways. Yet even though I understood that, I could not quite make the city come alive for me.

  I was home, but I wasn’t home. Not yet.

  I took 101 south to the Army Street exit, Army to Diamond, then went on up into Diamond Heights. The cityscape, the gaudily lit bridges and the East Bay, had the same odd aspect from this vantage point. There was even a vague peculiarity to Kerry’s street and its usual lack of parking spaces.

  For ten minutes I hunted for a place to put the Toyota, finally found one downhill two blocks away. Walking up the steep sidewalk to her building, as I had so many times before, I passed the spot where I’d left my car on that last night—and caught myself looking for it among those angled in against the curb. Long gone, of course. Where? What had Kerry done with it? What had she done with my flat? So many questions I had to ask her. So many questions to ask Eberhardt, too—about the agency, about his relationship with Bobbie Jean. And so many things I had to tell both of them.

  It had occurred to me on the long drive from San Andreas that Kerry might not be home when I got there. It was a weekday night, but women sometimes went out on week nights—to the movies, to visit friends. A single woman who believed that her boyfriend must be dead might even have gone out on a date. Or she might still be working at Bates and Carpenter; she was a workaholic and she often stayed late at the office. But no sooner than I’d thought of these possibilities, I rejected them. She would be home, and she would be alone. I knew that, intuited it with the same certainty and inevitability that I had intuited Neal Vining’s destination last night.

  I smiled when I reached her building, because there was a light on behind the drawn curtains in her bedroom. I let myself into the foyer with my key, climbed the stairs, and went down the hallway to her door. Stood there for a time, preparing myself. And then rang the bell, rather than using my key here too, because it would be easier for her that way.

  Footsteps inside. She would look through the peephole; she always looked through the peephole. I heard her gasp when she did, even with the thickness of the door between us. The chain rattled, the lock clicked, the door jerked open.

  And there she was.

  At least five pounds thinner, a gauntness to her face, the skin drawn tight across her cheekbones and pale now, very pale. Shock in her green eyes, and relief and joy crowding up close behind it, pushing through.

 
“Kerry,” I said.

  And she said, “Oh, thank God!” and came into my arms.

  I held her tight, I stroked her hair, I kissed the softness of her neck, and she cried and I cried with her—and nothing was strange anymore, everything was familiar, everything was real. Now I was home.

  And holding her, crying, I thought: It’s going to be all right. It may take some time, I may need some help, but it’s going to be all right.

  * * *

  About the Author

  * * *

  Bill Pronzini (1943 - ) has was born in California and has been resident in that state for much of his life, although in his 20’s he lived in Furstenfeldbruck, Germany and Majorca. His first novel, THE STALKER, a suspense narrative of an old crime and its consequences through the lives of both victims and criminals, was published in 1971 and was a finalist for the MWA Best First Novel Edgar. His second novel, THE SNATCH (1971, an expansion of a story of the same title published by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) introduced the Nameless Detective who became the narrator of twenty-five subsequent novels published over more than three decades, surely one of the most extensive and extended of all the mystery series.

  Asked why Nameless had no name and why the author had taken that approach (just as Robert B. Parker has often been asked the first name of his series detective known only as “Spenser”) Pronzini has said that this character is so close in many ways to Pronzini’s own personality and interests that the name should be obvious. (He has also noted that the character is in fact named once, offhandedly, in his collaborative novel with Marcia Muller, DOUBLE.) Nameless’s spiritual odyssey has in many ways parallelled the author’s one, Pronzini has said, and to know the character or author is really to know them both.

  As a mainstream novelist, Pronzini has published novels such as SNOWBOUND, MASQUES and BLUE LONESOME which have shown great technical range and detail; he has also published many science fiction stories as well as one science fiction novel, PROSE BOWL, in collaboration with Barry N. Malzberg. With his wife, the successful mystery novelist Marcia Muller, Pronzini now lives in his town of birth, Petaluma, California.