Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (2 page)

For a couple of seconds I leaned hard against the inside of the arch, struggling to get the wall up between what I was seeing and my emotions. It wasn’t much of a wall, it never had been, but when I got it in place it allowed me to function. I took a couple of deep breaths, keeping my throat clamped shut against the bile, and picked my way across the room—avoiding the trail of blood, the shards of glass and china. When I reached the wounded man he was almost to the far archway. I got down on one knee beside him, gripped his shoulder gently and put my mouth close to his ear.

“Easy, I’m here to help you. Don’t move, just lie still while I call an ambulance. You’re going to be okay.”

A lie, that last; he wasn’t going to be okay. Up close like this I could see that his face was gray, pustuled with sweat, already waxlike—stamped with the unmistakable imprint of death. But the lie didn’t matter: shock and pain had deafened him. He kept trying to crawl, not getting anywhere now, just wriggling in place as the strength and the life ebbed out of him. Gut-shot once, maybe twice—I couldn’t tell for sure with all the blood. No exit wounds. And no sign of the gun. Standing in here when he got it, I thought; force of the slug knocked him back into the china cabinet and he pulled it over with him when he fell.

I started to lift up away from him, to go call the ambulance even though he couldn’t have more than a couple of minutes left, but the rattling in his throat stopped me. It formed a word now, a liquidly audible word.

“Deadfall,” he said.

He said it again, not quite as clearly, and kept trying to crawl out from under my hand, away from the grinning skull-face that beckoned him. And then he said, mumbling, delirious words that I had to strain to hear: “So sorry … fall, how could you …” And then he died.

I
felt
him die. I felt him shudder, stiffen; I felt the life force desert him all at once, as if it somehow came winging out
through
my hand. The sensation put racking chills on my back, drove me to my feet, and sent me stumbling back into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink, staring at my left hand, willing the shakes to go away so I could use the telephone.

Deadfall. So sorry … fall, how could you …

There was a stain of blood on my left palm, like a vestige of the life force that had passed through it.

The dead man’s name was Leonard Purcell. He lived in this house and apparently had for some time; he had been forty-four years old and unmarried; he had practiced law out of an office in Stonestown. I got all of that from a billfold—driver’s license with his picture on it, one of several embossed business cards—that had been visible in an inside pocket of the gabardine suit coat draped over the kitchen chair. I used my handkerchief to take it out; I thought it was all right to do that because I needed to know who he was before I called the police, and I also needed to know the exact address without having to go out front and try to find the house number. I did not touch anything else in the kitchen except for the telephone, and I used my handkerchief on that too.

The Ingleside Police Station was not far away, so I put the call in there. The desk sergeant told me to stand by, he’d have officers there in five minutes. He meant uniformed officers; it would take a team of homicide inspectors at least a half hour to make it out from the Hall of Justice downtown. I said I wasn’t going anywhere, and he said fine, and I put the receiver down and held my hand up in front of my face. The shaking had stopped. Outwardly, anyway. Inside I was still churning like an old dryer full of laundry.

I looked around the kitchen again. I did not want to do my waiting in here; the place had a heavy closed-in feel, for one thing, and for another I could smell the blood, all that blood in the dining room. Never mind that blood has no odor: I could smell it just the same. I considered going outside. I was still considering it when I heard the car come thrumming into the driveway.

The police already? Maybe, although black-and-whites usually pulled up on the street, even at a homicide scene. I went through the laundry porch, through the back door. A car door—just one—slammed on the side drive. I hurried over that way, around the corner. The car that had pulled in behind the Chrysler was definitely not a police cruiser. Some kind of sports car, an older model —an MG, maybe. There was no sign of the driver; he must have gone the other way, to the front of the house.

I retraced my steps, back inside. Just as I entered the kitchen, a door I took to be the front door opened and then closed again. A male voice called, “Leonard? I’m home.”

There was a passageway off the near side of the kitchen that appeared to lead up front. It took me into a big tile-floored foyer decorated with multicolored Mexican pottery jars full of pampas grass. The man standing there had his back to me, hanging up a topcoat in a narrow closet that wasn’t much more than a vertical slit in the wall. He said without turning, “What’s going on? Some of the neighbors are looking out their windows.”

I didn’t answer him.

He swung around, saying, “Leonard, I asked you—” and broke off when he saw that I wasn’t Leonard. He stiffened a little, not much, showing more surprise than anything else: he wasn’t the panicky type. “Who are you?”

I told him my name. It didn’t mean anything to him; I would have been surprised myself if it had. He was in his thirties, slight, sandy-haired, with a wispy mustache and gentle blue eyes and lashes that had been shaped and lengthened with mascara. A small circle of gold dangled from his right ear. He was wearing Levi’s, a blue pullover sweater, a pair of beaded moccasins. The way he moved, the way he held himself, the lilt of his voice—all of those suggested a woman trapped in a man’s body. Now I knew why Leonard Purcell was not married.

“Are you a friend of Leonard’s?” he asked.

“No. I’m afraid not.”

“One of his clients?”

“No. Mind telling me
your
name?”

“Tom Washburn, if it’s any of your business. What are you doing in my house?”

“You live here too, then?”

He made an impatient gesture. “Certainly I live here. Now what’s going on? Where’s Leonard?”

I took a breath, let it out slowly. Telling somebody about the death of a friend, a loved one, is never easy. Doesn’t matter if you know the person or not—it’s never easy. I said, “There’s been some trouble here. I’m a detective and I happened in on it. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Trouble? What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

“Your housemate is dead, Mr. Washburn. He was shot a few minutes ago.”

Washburn stood there for a couple of seconds without moving; it took that long for the words to penetrate, to mean anything to him. Then they rocked him, as if some invisible force had struck him a sharp blow. He put a hand up to his mouth and said between the splayed fingers, “Dead? Leonard?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Somebody
shot
him?”

“I’ve already called the police. They’ll be here any minute—”

“Who? Who would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. I heard the shots and I saw the person run out of the house, but I didn’t get a good look at him.”

Washburn still had his hand over his mouth; he was swaying slightly now, with his eyes squeezed shut. I was afraid he might faint, but that didn’t happen. After a time he said in a low, tremulous voice, “Where is he? I want to see him.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I want to see him. I have a right to see him.”

“Mr. Washburn, for your own sake—”

His eyes popped open and he said with sudden savagery, “Goddamn you, I want to see him! You tell me where he is! Tell me or I’ll scratch your fucking eyes out!”

He meant it. Shock and grief and confusion make people irrational. I said, “In the dining room,” and he spun away and ran through a big beam-ceilinged living room, the rear part of which was raised by three steps. I went after him; I did not want him touching anything, by accident or for any other reason. But he didn’t go into the dining room. He stopped when he got to the archway and saw what lay beyond. Stopped, and then screamed —a shrill keening cry full of anguish and horror that put goosebumps on my arms and across my shoulders. He turned blindly, stumbling, his face all twisted up. I caught his arm to keep him from falling. And he made a little whimpering noise and came in against me, threw his arms around my neck and buried his face against my chest and began to weep hysterically.

I didn’t know what to do. For a couple of seconds I just stood awkwardly, letting him hold onto me; there was a lump of something dry and bitter in my throat. Then I put an arm around him, turned him a little so that I could walk with him. He came along without resistance. I could feel the tremors racking him, paroxysm after paroxysm, so that his sobbing breaths came out like hiccups. I got him to a blocky Spanish couch set at an angle away from the arch so that you couldn’t see into the dining room from there, and sat him down on that. There was a quilted afghan draped over the back; I shook the thing open and wrapped it around his shoulders, folded it over the front of him. It didn’t stop his shaking but it seemed to take the chill away, help him get his breathing under control.

I stood off at a distance, not looking at him because I didn’t want to face any more of his grief. Not looking at much of anything, just waiting.

There wasn’t much longer to wait. In less than a minute pulsing red light stained the curtains over the front window and I heard the cars—two of them—come to fast stops out front. The officers made some noise, more than they had to, getting out and coming to the house. Cops don’t show enough respect for death sometimes —the young ones, especially.

I went into the foyer to let them in.

The next couple of hours were bad, although not half as bad for me as they must have been for Tom Washburn. There was a vague sense of surrealism to the events, of déjà vu: I had gone through them all before, so many times that they blended together and became the same ordeal relived. Only the surroundings and the faces were different. The routine was the same. And so was the despair.

I didn’t know any of the uniformed cops, but one of them knew me by reputation, so there was no hassle. I answered their preliminary questions. I took them in and showed them what was left of Leonard Purcell. I answered more questions. Washburn had stopped crying at some point and had made an effort to get himself under control; but he stayed seated on the couch with the afghan wrapped tightly around him. I listened to him answer questions in a small, empty voice, but his responses were just words to me, without any real significance. I felt removed from everything, even more so than at other scenes like this because I didn’t know any of the principals, I wasn’t an integral part of it personally or professionally. Just a bystander, that was all—in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only things Washburn said that I could remember later were that he worked in a bank and that he’d gone to a movie tonight, gone alone because it was R-rated and Leonard didn’t approve of graphic violence in films.

The homicide team arrived; so did the assistant coroner and an ambulance and the lab crew. One of the inspectors was Ben Klein. Ben and I went back a long way, back to the days when I’d been on the cops myself; he and I had once shared a black-and-white out of the Taraval station. I repeated to him what had happened here, and answered his questions, and he told me to wait in the kitchen in case he needed to ask me anything else.

But I didn’t wait in the kitchen: I could still smell the blood from in there. I went out into the back yard, but that wasn’t the place for me either. Half a dozen neighbors were grouped in the alleyway, gawking the way they do, and the guy in the bathrobe was again hanging out of his window next door. One of the people in the alley called out to me, “What happened in there? Was somebody killed?”

Yeah, I thought, somebody was killed. I went back inside without answering and found a chair on the laundry porch, near the washer-and-dryer combination, and did my waiting in private.

Nobody bothered me for half an hour or so. Then one of the lab technicians came out and seemed surprised to find me sitting there in the shadows. He located the light switch and flipped it on with a knuckle, so he wouldn’t smudge any prints that might be on it.

I said, “You want me out of the way?”

“Be easier to work.”

“Sure.”

I walked outside again. The guy was gone from the window next door; I’d have bet money he had come outside himself, finally, to see if he could get a better look at things. The other neighbors were still in the alley, but a couple of uniformed officers were questioning them and nobody was paying any attention to me. I went over and stood in the darkness under some kind of puffy shrub; watched rain clouds roll in overhead and smelled the good clean odors of ozone and damp grass and evergreens.

Another of the lab men and the other inspector, a young guy named Tucker, came out together and began poking around the yard with flashlights. I stayed out of their way. Then they went out through the gate and along the alley toward where the car belonging to Leonard Purcell’s assailant had been parked. From under the shrub I watched the play of their light beams, but I couldn’t tell if they found anything.

Pretty soon it began to rain—a misty drizzle at first, then a hard slanting downpour. Everybody beat it out of the alley. I didn’t want to go back inside, but I didn’t want to stand out here and get soaked either. At my age, you worry about things like pneumonia. The laundry porch was empty again, the light shut off, so I sat down on the same chair I’d occupied earlier and waited some more, listening to the heavy beat of the rain on the tile roof.

After what seemed like a long time, Klein called my name from the kitchen. I got up and went in, and he cocked an eyebrow and said, “What were you doing? Sitting back there in the dark?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“No reason. It was just a place to sit, out of the way.”

“You sure you’re all right? You look a little pale.”

“I’m okay. Been a long night.”

“Sure. Well, you might as well go on home. I’ll call you if there’s anything else. Otherwise, come down to the Hall tomorrow sometime, sign your statement.”

I nodded. “How’s Washburn holding up?”

“Not too well, poor guy.”

“He won’t be spending the night here, will he?”

“No. He gave us the name of a friend to call.”

“Listen, you figure him for a suspect?”

“Too soon to tell. Why?”

“I was right there when he saw Purcell’s body,” I said. “He screamed, Ben—the kind of scream you can’t fake. You know what I mean?”

“I guess I do.”

“He didn’t kill Purcell. For what it’s worth.”

“Worth something to me. I’ll keep it in mind.”

I pulled the collar of my coat up around my neck. It had been warm in the kitchen before; now it was cold. I could still smell the blood in the dining room.

“Whoever did do it,” I said, “I hope you nail him for it. Fast and hard.”

He knew what I meant; you couldn’t have been in that dining room and not know. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “So do I.”

The nightmares started as soon as I went to sleep.

I knew they would; they always do after an ugly scene like tonight’s. So I didn’t go to bed right away, after I got home to my flat in Pacific Heights. It was too late to call Kerry or Eberhardt, as much as I wanted to talk to somebody. I opened a beer and turned on the TV and watched an old Edmond O’Brien movie without making sense out of half of it. Then I tried to read for a while—one of the seven thousand pulp magazines on shelves ringing my living room—but the words kept running together like ink under a stream of water. Three A.M., and my eyes just wouldn’t stay open any longer. I was so exhausted it was an effort to drag myself into the bedroom and shuck out of my clothes. Still I fought sleep, lying there listening to the hollow beat of the rain —but not for long. And when I lost the struggle the nightmares came and put a bad end to a bad night.