Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (16 page)

Irwin was listed in the telephone directory—1478 Codding Street, Redding. If she hadn’t been I don’t know what I would have done. I ran across to the motel office and shocked the woman on duty with my appearance and by demanding to know the fastest way to get to Codding Street. She didn’t waste any time telling me; for all she knew, I was a demented person with dark and awful deeds on his mind. And maybe, right then, I
was.

Codding Street was on the west side of town, near Keswick Dam; I remembered seeing a sign for the dam on my way to and from the O’Daniel house. I charged out of the office and got into the car and went screeching away like Mario Andretti coming out of the pits at the Indy 500.

I drove like him too—too damned fast, taking corners in controlled skids, taking risks. There was little traffic at this hour and I didn’t run afoul of any cops or any other wild drivers; those were the only reasons I reached Codding Street in one piece and without incident. As it was I got lost once, briefly, and used up most of the cuss words I knew before blundering back onto the right track. By the time the right street sign appeared in my headlights I was wired so tight you could have twanged me like a guitar string.

Typical residential street, quiet at this hour, lights still on in one or two of the houses. The houses themselves were smallish—bungalows, old frame jobs—with small yards separated by fences and shrubbery. I barreled along to the 1400 block; switched my headlights to high beam when I got there so I could check house numbers and the cars parked along the curb.

Kerry’s rented Datsun was sitting smack in front of 1478.

I swung over in front of it, trying not to make a lot of noise that would announce my arrival. I shut off the engine and cut the lights and shoved open the door, looking up at the house. Brown-shingled bungalow with an old-fashioned porch across the front; no lights showing along the near side, but a pale yellow glow behind a curtained window to the right of the front door.

Without thinking much I cut across the lawn and went up slow onto the porch, over to the curtained window. But I couldn’t see inside: the curtains were of some thick material and drawn tightly together. I tried listening. That also got me nothing; there wasn’t a sound in there that I could make out.

A bunch of things ran through my head: see if there’s a window open somewhere, maybe the back door, try to pinpoint where they are first. But I didn’t do any of them; I went back to the front door instead, and reached out and took hold of the knob. If it had been locked I would probably have busted the damned thing down with my shoulder or foot. But it wasn’t. The knob turned and I shoved the door open and bulled my way inside, through a narrow little foyer and into a combination living room and dining alcove.

And then I stopped. And stood there huffing and puffing and gawping. I don’t know what I expected to find in here, but what I was looking at wasn’t it. It was not even close.

Kerry was present and accounted for, but she wasn’t lying on the floor in a pool of blood, or tied and gagged in a chair, or even cowering in a corner. She was on her feet at the moment but she’d been sitting at a formica-topped dinette table, and what she’d been doing there was counting money. A whole lot of money. Most of the table was covered with nice crisp bills—twenties and fifties and hundreds in neat stacks.

Shirley Irwin was there too. But she wasn’t doing anything except lying sprawled on a wine-colored couch with her skirt up around her thighs and a big bruise over her left eye. She was out cold.

For the second time that night I felt the sudden release of tension; this time it left me relieved and surprised and very tired. I wanted to grab Kerry and hug her and then shake her until her teeth rattled. Instead I kept on gawping at her, and she kept on gawping right back.

Finally she said, “What are you doing here?” but at the same time I was saying, “What the hell’s been going on?” I started to say something else, and so did she, and I said, “Shit,” and she said, “Your face, your clothes . . . what
happened
to you?”

“Ragged-Ass Gulch burned up tonight. I almost burned up with it.”

“But how. . . ?”

“Gary Coleclaw,” I said. “He torched the old hotel with me in it, just like he torched Munroe Randall’s house.”

“My God! But what’re you doing
here
? How did you know where to find me?”

“Finding people is one of the things I get paid for.” My voice was starting to rise; I yanked it down again. “What did you do to Irwin?”

“She killed Frank O’Daniel,” Kerry said. “And I know how she did it, too.”

“You what?”

“Well, I don’t
know
exactly, but there’s only one reasonable way she could have done it that fits the facts. That ringing you heard must have been an alarm clock going off—one of those old-fashioned portable ones with a wind-up key. And that pop and whoosh just before the explosion . . . it had to have been a flare igniting.”

“Flare?”

“A marine flare,” she said. “Standard equipment on all boats; Ray and I used to have some on ours, and Tom Decker told me O’Daniel definitely kept some on board his. Pop the cap on one end and when the flare ignites it makes a kind of sizzling whoosh. It also shoots out more than enough sparks and heat to exceed the flash point of gasoline.”

Exceed the flash point of gasoline, I thought. I said, “Then the flare had to have been down in the bilges.”

“Probably. Anchored down there, with a piece of heavy string—fishing leader, maybe—attached to the cap. The other end of the string would’ve been attached to the key on the back of the clock, and the clock would’ve also been anchored down. O’Daniel had to have been nearby too, either knocked out or drugged. Anyhow, after the alarm goes off on those old clocks, the bell keeps ringing until the key winds down; you know that. In this case, the key also wound up the string leading to the flare, pulled it taut, and finally jerked the cap to set the flare off. Then—boom.”

“Boom,” I said. But it sounded plausible; it even sounded probable. Damn her, it sounded
right
.

“If you hadn’t been there at just that time,” she said, “no one would’ve heard the alarm; no one would have had any good reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident.”

“There’s still no way to
prove
it wasn’t. All the evidence went up with O’Daniel and the boat.”

“Well, there’s a lot of other evidence against Miss Irwin. More than enough to convict her, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe. Now suppose you tell me what you did to her.”

“Well, she attacked me and I had to hit her.”

“You had to hit her. With what?”

“Fireplace poker. That’s what she tried to hit
me
with.” Very calm, very matter-of-fact. We might have been talking about a bad little girl that momma had to spank. “It only happened about ten minutes ago,” she said. “I’ve already called the police. I thought that’s who you were when I heard you on the porch.”

“Why the bloody hell did you come here by yourself? Why didn’t you wait for me? Or call the police from the motel?”

“Oh, don’t get excited.” Then a pause, a worried frown. “Maybe you’d better sit down. You look awful.”

“I feel awful,” I said, “and part of the reason is you. Answer me—why did you come here?”

“Because I figured out Shirley Irwin had to be O’Daniel’s killer, and I thought there might be some evidence here to prove it. Either that, or I could talk to her and maybe get her to admit something incriminating—you know, manipulate the conversation that way.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She wasn’t home when I got here. I prowled around looking for a way into the house, but all the doors and windows were locked—”

“Christ, you mean you broke in?”

“No, I didn’t break in. I didn’t want to do anything like that. I waited in the car for her to come home, and it wasn’t until eleven that she did. I said there were some things I had to talk over with her about O’Daniel’s death, so she invited me in. Well, she
did
make a slip while we were talking, but she realized it right away. Then she realized I knew the truth. That’s when she attacked me with the poker.”

“She could have killed you,” I said between my teeth.

“But she didn’t,” Kerry said. “Gary Coleclaw could have killed
you
but he didn’t. Survival is what counts.”

I was silent for about ten seconds; then I said, “Where did you find the money?”

“In her bedroom. It was in a briefcase—that briefcase there on the table—sitting on her bedroom dresser. Just sitting there in plain sight. The briefcase has Frank O’Daniel’s name inside it.”

I didn’t say anything at all this time.

“She was the prowler at the O‘Daniel house last night,” Kerry said. “She knew O’Daniel had been embezzling money from Northern Development; I think she was supposed to get a share of it, probably an equal share, but he’d been holding out on her. That’s one of the reasons she killed him—for the money.”

“Oh it is?”

“Sure. You don’t seem surprised about the embezzlement,” she said, as if she were disappointed.

“I’m not surprised. I figured that out just like you did.”

“When?”

“Never mind when,” I said. But it had been back in the motel room, after I’d talked to Tom Decker. And on the way over here. Given all the other facts, it was the one clear-cut explanation for O’Daniel’s recent behavior—the decisions to divorce his wife, to sell out his interest in Northern Development and move away; the failure to confide in his attorney about the latter plan. He hadn’t been worried any more about letting his wife have her half of their community property because he’d accumulated a fat private nest egg. It wouldn’t have been hard for him; he was the company accountant, and he had Shirley Irwin to help him juggle invoices and phony up correspondence. He’d probably started tapping the till when the firm’s downhill slide began, which had accelerated the skid and put them in their present financial hole.

Kerry said, “Miss Irwin’s second reason for killing him has to be an emotional one. They’d been having this affair for months; she used to go up to Mountain Harbor with him, posing as his wife—”

“Yeah, I know. I talked to Decker a while ago myself.”

“But things had cooled down between them; we know that because O’Daniel’d been going up to the lake alone the past month or so. The way I see it . . . ”

The way she saw it was the way I saw it: The break with Irwin had complicated matters for O’Daniel, but he’d figured a way out—or thought he had. He must have stalled her while he made his plans to take off with the whole boodle. After all, what could she do once he was gone? Going to the police would have meant a jail term for her too.

But he’d underestimated her. She had tumbled to what he was up to, arranged to murder him, and then gone and hunted up the money last night. Maybe he’d intimated that it was in his house; maybe he’d also let slip at some point where he kept his valuables at home. In any case she hadn’t had much trouble finding the stash.

Kerry paused for breath. Then she said, “Don’t you want to know what made me suspect Irwin in the first place?”

“All right, what?”

“That anonymous note she wrote to O’Daniel, to begin with. That was stupid of her. She had what should’ve been a perfect plan for murdering him so it looked like an accident; all the note accomplished was to make everybody even more suspicious of foul play. I guess she knew there’d be some suspicion anyway and was trying to divert it to the Musket Creek residents, but it was still a stupid thing to do.”

“All murderers are stupid,” I said. “How did the note make you suspect Irwin?”

“It doesn’t point directly to her, of course. But I knew the minute I saw it that it’d been written by a woman.”

“Yeah? How did you know that?”

“The way it was worded. ‘If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you.’ A man would never write something like ‘wish your mother never had you’; he’d write ‘wish you were never born’ or something. It just isn’t a phrase men use.”

That one had escaped me completely. I sighed and said, “Okay, I see your point. What else?”

“Well, whoever murdered O‘Daniel had to be pretty knowledgeable about boats, right? Otherwise, the explosion couldn’t have been rigged to look like an accident. So who knew about boats besides O’Daniel? Miss Irwin. Remember when we were all standing outside the sheriff’s office yesterday? She said the radio told her the explosion was caused by fuel leaking into the bilges and some kind of spark setting it off. But then she said, ‘Poor Frank must have forgotten to use the blowers.’ The radio wouldn’t have said that. And only somebody who knew boats would know about blowers to get rid of gasoline fumes.

“Then I remembered what you’d told me about Mrs. O‘Daniel not liking boats or water, intimating she’d never even been to Mountain Harbor. And then I remembered you’d also told me O’Daniel used to bring ‘his wife’ up there all the time, according to the Deckers. So I called Tom Decker and asked him to describe O‘Daniel’s ‘wife’ and he—”

“—described Shirley Irwin,” I finished for her. “Yeah. After which you sent Treacle and his bodyguard off to Musket Creek to check on me and came gallivanting over here and almost got yourself knocked off.”