Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (3 page)

Blood in them, jetting up bright red out of a fountain in a yard grown high with dead trees and shrubs. A bird on the wing, and I touched it somehow and felt the life leave its body and pass through my fingers, and it fell in a long spiral—a deadfall. Then I was on the floor, crawling, crippled with pain and leaving a trail of blood behind me—but it was the floor of Eberhardt’s house, not Purcell’s, the afternoon Eb and I had been shot by a hired Chinese gunman. And then I was on one knee, looking down at myself, putting a hand on my own shoulder and saying, “Easy, I’m here to help you, you’re going to be okay,” and I shuddered at the lie and felt myself shudder, felt the life go rushing out of my own body this time. And then somebody yelled, a thin wailing cry full of anguish—

—and I woke myself up, because it was me doing the yelling.

Nothing much happened over the next week. I avoid reading the newspapers most of the time, but I had a look at the
Chronicle
twice during that week; I also called Ben Klein at the Hall and talked with him. But there just weren’t any developments in the Leonard Purcell case. Or at least none that the police were admitting to. According to Klein, Tom Washburn had been unable to attach any particular significance to Purcell’s dying words, except as an obscure reference to Leonard’s brother, Kenneth Purcell, who had died in a fall this past May. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything useful. No solid motive had surfaced. There were no suspects. Possible leads were still being checked, Klein said, but he didn’t sound confident that they would point him anywhere.

I had no real stake in the case, yet I could not keep it out of my head. You don’t watch a man die—
feel
a man die—and then just forget about it as if it never happened. Especially not with reruns of those nightmares every couple of nights. So I read the newspaper stories, and talked to Klein and a few other people, and found out some things about Leonard Purcell and his brother. Eberhardt thought this was morbid and a waste of time, and maybe it was. But Eberhardt has thicker skin than I do; after more than thirty years on the San Francisco cops, it’s just a job to him. Sometimes I wish it was just a job to me, too. Sometimes.

The fact that Leonard was the second member of the Purcell family to die within six months might not have interested me if his brother’s death hadn’t been the result of a fall and hadn’t also been on the odd side. Kenneth Purcell, a wealthy real estate broker and art collector, had lost his life during a Thursday-night party at his Moss Beach home. There had been a lot of drinking at this party, evidently—Kenneth had thrown it to show off a valuable antique snuff box he’d acquired—and he had done the lion’s share of it. Sometime between nine-thirty and ten he had disappeared; he hadn’t been missed until ten, by his wife Alicia. When a search of the house and immediate grounds failed to turn him up, the wife and a couple of the guests had gone out to check the cliffs at the rear of the property. His body had been caught on the rocks a hundred feet below.

There had been no witnesses to his fall. And no evidence of foul play, although Kenneth hadn’t been well liked and there were rumors that some of his real estate brokerings were of the quasi-legal variety. The official theory was that he had wandered out onto the cliffs to clear his head—it had been a cold, windy, but clear night—and lost his footing somehow. The valuable snuff box, which Kenneth had had on his person earlier, had not been found on the body; his coat pocket had been torn in the fall and presumably the box had been lost in the ocean. County coroner’s verdict: accidental death.

Klein didn’t think there was any connection between the deaths of the two brothers. Tom Washburn, on the other hand, did think so—apparently for more reasons than just those half-delirious words I had heard Leonard speak before he died. Klein hadn’t wanted to go into Washburn’s reasons but did say he’d had them checked out thoroughly. He’d also checked out Leonard thoroughly. And was satisfied that Leonard had had no violent old enemies, hadn’t professionally or personally offended or antagonized any individual or group of individuals in recent weeks, was not in serious debt to anyone, had no ties to any criminal element. His law practice had been small but thriving, with a mixed client list of gays and straights; and he was financially well off. The official police theory in his case was that he had been shot by an intruder on the hunt for money or valuables.

That was the way things stood—more or less in limbo—when I got to the office at nine o’clock on a Thursday morning, one week after the shooting. Eberhardt wasn’t in yet; he likes to keep executive hours, a habit that irritates me sometimes because the agency is mine, not his, and he wouldn’t be a part of it if I hadn’t felt sorry for him after his early retirement from the SFPD a couple of years ago and taken him in as a full partner. Still, coming in late most mornings was a minor annoyance. He was a good man to work with where and when it counted—a good friend. All things considered, the partnership had turned out much better than I’d expected it would.

I got coffee brewing on the hot plate and wished there were some way to turn the heat up; it was cold and drizzly outside and chilly in here. But no, the landlord—Sam Crawford, a cigar-smoking fat cat who owned buildings in every slum and depressed neighborhood in the city and referred to his tenants as “my people” —had decreed that the cost of heating
this
building was much too high. And to insure that the real estate outfit on the first floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor, and us on the third floor didn’t try to countermand his dictates, he kept the furnace turned on just twelve hours each day, as required by San Francisco law, and had it regulated so that just enough heat reached the radiators to maintain a sixty-degree maximum, no matter what the weather was like outside. Consequently, on mornings like this you had to either wear heavy sweaters or keep your overcoat on while you worked. The only reason Eberhardt and I were still here was that office space was at a premium in the city these days; we couldn’t have found a place as large as this, anywhere in the general downtown area where we needed to be, for less than the eight hundred a month we were paying Crawford. The son of a bitch knew that as well as we did. If you’d asked him he would have said he was taking care of “my people” by regulating the heat instead of raising the rent. He was a cutey, he was. About as cute as a vulture on a fence post.

Without taking off my coat I sat down and poked through the papers on my desk. Not much there; things were a little lean at the moment. I had wrapped up some work for the plaintiff in a civil case yesterday, a simple skip-trace two days before that; and last Saturday I’d had the matter of Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr., and his unpaid-for Mercedes XL wrapped up for me.

The reason Alfred Henry and his lady friend, Eileen Kyner, hadn’t shown up at her house was that they’d been on a gambling and boozing spree in Nevada. At approximately four A.M. on Saturday, they had staggered out of a casino in downtown Reno, gotten into the Mercedes parked in a nearby lot, and Alfred Henry had gunned it out into the street. Unfortunately for him, the street happened to be occupied at the time by a Reno police car on patrol. The cops up there take a dim view of drunks running into them at four A.M., particularly deadbeat drunks from California, so Alfred Henry was still in the slammer. Eileen Kyner had bailed herself out and come home; she had not bailed Alfred Henry out because, she had told the police, he (a) had lost a thousand dollars of her money playing blackjack; (b) had made a drunken pass at one of the lady blackjack dealers when he thought she’d gone off to the potty; (c) was lousy in bed anyway; and (d) deserved to rot in jail, schmuck that he was, for doing something so monumentally stupid as mating his Mercedes with a police car. The Burlingame auto dealer who actually owned the Mercedes was not amused, considering that Alfred Henry’s monumental stupidity had caused several hundred dollars’ damage to the front end of said Mercedes. Once the damage was repaired he’d either have somebody drive it back from Reno or sell it up there at a loss, just to be rid of it. As for me I got paid for my time even though I hadn’t managed to repossess the Mercedes; it wasn’t
my
fault Alfred Henry was a drunken schmuck as well as a deadbeat.

All I had working now was a background investigation on a guy in San Rafael who had applied to Great Western Insurance for a very large double indemnity policy on his life. Insurance companies get edgy when private individuals apply for such policies. Skeptics and cynics all, they worry that maybe there is some ulterior motive behind the application. Fraud, for instance. Such as an intention to commit suicide under the guise of a fatal accident. My job was to gather as much background material on the individual as possible and turn it over to the insurance people; I could also provide a recommendation, if I was so inclined, but they were the ones who made a final decision as to whether or not to issue a policy. If they did issue it and they got burned, they couldn’t put the onus on me. Not legally, anyhow. There were a couple of companies in the Bay Area who
had
got burned and who
had
refused to hire me anymore because of it. But I didn’t have to worry about that happening with Great Western: their chief claims adjustor, Barney Rivera, had been a poker buddy for years. He threw a good deal of business my way, and I handed it back with plenty of care.

I was looking through the application and the other papers Barney had given me yesterday when I heard the door open. I glanced up, expecting to see Eberhardt, but instead I was looking at somebody I had never expected to see again: Tom Washburn.

He said formally, “Good morning. I’d like to talk to you, if you have the time.”

“Of course, Mr. Washburn.”

He shut the door, looked briefly around the office before he came ahead to my desk. The place didn’t seem to make much of an impression on him, but that was all right: it had never impressed me either. It had once been an art studio and the owner of the studio had got permission to put in a skylight; the skylight was the place’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was just a big room full of furniture, a couple of pieces of which—Eberhardt’s mustard-yellow fiberboard file cabinets—were pretty hideous to look at. Also hideous to look at was a hanging light fixture that just missed being obscene, intentionally on the part of its manufacturer or otherwise.

Washburn sat stiff-backed on one of the clients’ chairs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He was wearing black shoes, black slacks, a black shirt, and a black leather coat—a typical getup for some gays in the city. But it didn’t look right on him, and the thought struck me that it was a mourning outfit. There was no question that the death of his lover had affected him profoundly: his face was pale, haggard, with discolored pouches under his eyes; and the eyes themselves had a tragic, haunted look. I felt a sharp twinge of pity for him. I understood what he was going through, because I had known too many others who had suffered the same kind of pain. It was what I would have been going through myself if I had lost Kerry the way he had lost Leonard.

I said, “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

He didn’t answer for a time. Then he seemed to shiver slightly and said, “Yes, all right. It’s cold in here.”

“The landlord’s a jerk. He won’t allow the heat turned up past sixty.”

I got up and poured two cups of coffee. When I asked him if he took anything in his he said no, just black. I gave him his cup, took mine around the desk, and reoccupied my chair. He sat holding the cup between both hands, as if they were cold; they were pale hands, delicate-looking, the skin almost translucent, so that you could see the fine blue tracery of veins running through them.

At length he said, “I came here because I want to hire you. I don’t know what else to do, who else to turn to. You were kind the night Leonard … the night it happened, and I thought …” He let the words run out and looked down into his cup, as if he might find more words in there.

“Hire me to do what, Mr. Washburn?”

“Find the man who killed Leonard.”

“There’s nothing I can do that the police aren’t doing,” I said gently. “Give them enough time and they—”

His head jerked up. “Enough time? My God, they’ve had a week, haven’t they? They haven’t found him yet. They
won’t
find him, damn them, because they won’t listen to me. They simply won’t
listen
. ”

“Listen to you about what?”

“About the phone call and the missing money,” he said. “About Leonard’s brother, Kenneth. I can’t make them believe me!”

“Take it easy,” I said, “slow down a little. You think there’s a connection between Kenneth’s death and Leonard’s?”

“I don’t think there is, I
know
there is.”

“How do you know it? Leonard’s last words aren’t really much to—”

“No, not that. The call last week, three days before Leonard was shot. The man on the phone.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know. A stranger—a voice I didn’t recognize.”

“He called you, this stranger?”

“No, he was calling Leonard. He thought I was Leonard.” Washburn quit talking, gave me a muddled sort of frown, shook himself like a cat, and then said, “Am I making any sense?”

“You’re starting to. Just go slow. This man on the phone mistook you for Leonard?”

“Yes. I’d just come home from work; Leonard wasn’t in yet. I said hello and this man’s voice said, ‘Mr. Purcell?’ Then he went right on talking before I could tell him I wasn’t.”

“What did he say?”

“I can quote his exact words. He said, ‘Your brother didn’t fall off the cliff that night, Mr. Purcell. He was pushed. And I know who pushed him.’ ”

“That’s all?”

“Not quite. I was shocked; I said, ‘Who is this? What do you want?’ He said, ‘Money, Mr. Purcell, that’s what I want.’ I heard Leonard’s car just then, and I was so upset I blurted out that I
wasn’t
Mr. Purcell, that Mr. Purcell had just come home and would take the call. He hung up without another word.”

“Did you tell Leonard all this when he came in?”

“Of course.”

“How did he take it?”

“He said the man must have been a crank. He said Kenneth’s death had been an accident, there was no question of that.” Washburn’s mouth quirked bitterly. “The same things the police said. But Leonard was as upset as I was. I knew him so well—I could always tell when he was upset. He and his brother were very close; he just hadn’t been himself since Kenneth’s death. If there was even a remote chance Kenneth’s fall wasn’t an accident, Leonard would have pursued it.”