Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (2 page)

In spite of myself the word “saint” made me think of Jeanne Emerson, a very attractive Chinese photojournalist who had developed an idealized view of me and my job—a sin-eater, she’d called me, only half-jokingly. But that had all been before the night a couple of months ago when I’d finally let her come over to my flat to take some photographs for an article on me she was planning to do. I hadn’t wanted to be alone with her, because it had become obvious that her interest in me wasn’t strictly professional, and I happened to be in love with Kerry; I’d been stalling Jeanne for weeks. But then I’d given in in a weak moment, and Jeanne had come over, and what had happened after that . . .

“Hey,” Barney said again, “now what? You look constipated all of a sudden.”

I stopped thinking. That had always been one of my problems: I thought too damned much about nearly everything. “Only one of us is full of crap, my friend,” I said, “and that’s you. Let’s have the file.”

He gave it to me, grinning, and I thumbed through it. Lists of names, addresses, personal and background data on the three Northern partners, copies of the Redding police report on Munroe Randall’s death and the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department report on their Musket Creek investigation, other pertinent information—most of it on computer printout sheets. The address of Stan Zemansky’s insurance agency was there too. I tucked the file into the calfskin briefcase Kerry had bought me for Christmas—to upgrade my image a little, she’d said—and then got on my feet.

Barney stood too, speared another peppermint, and came around his desk. He looked me up and down and shook his head admiringly. “Got to admit it,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

“You admitted it when I came in, remember?”

“How much weight have you lost, anyhow?”

“A little over twenty pounds.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Three months, about.”

“What’d you do, just give up eating?”

“More or less. Plenty of salad and eggs.”

He pulled a face. “I hate salad and eggs.”

“Me too.”

“Took a lot of willpower, huh?”

“Yeah. I slipped a couple of times at first, but after a while it wasn’t too bad.”

“So everybody keeps telling me,” Barney said. He patted his ample midriff. “But I can’t seem to do it myself. I like food too much.
Carne asada
—that’s my main weakness. Did I ever take you to my cousin Carlos’s place in the Mission? No? You never tasted
carne asada
the way he makes it. A gallon of sour cream, and those sweet onions he uses . . . ah Jesus.”

“I think I better pass.”

“Willpower,” he said. “I wish I had it.” He gave me another examining look. “Yeah, you look great. Except—”

“Except what?”

He snickered. “Just what is that thing on your upper lip?”

I reached up and touched it; I couldn’t seem to break myself of the habit of doing that every time somebody called attention to it. “It’s a mustache,” I said. “What did you think it was?”

“It looks like a hooker’s false eyelash stuck on there.”

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

“Kind of scraggly, isn’t it? Or did you just start growing it?”

“I’ve had it for a month,” I said defensively. “It looks all right to
me.
What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing a razor won’t fix. How come you grew a mustache at your age?”

“What am I, a candidate for the old folks’ home?” I could feel myself getting a little miffed. Which was stupid, because Barney was only having some fun with me; but I had taken a lot of ribbing about the mustache in the past month, principally from Eberhardt and Kerry, and I’d had enough. If it hadn’t been for all the ribbing, in fact, I might have shaved the thing off by now. As matters stood, each new crack only made me more determined to keep it. “So I grew a mustache,” I said. “So what’s the big deal?”

“Why?” he said.

“Why what?”

“Why did you grow it? To impress your lady?”

“No.”

“You figured it’d make you look younger?”

“No.”

“Because of all the weight you lost?”

“No! I grew it because I felt like it.”

“Okay, okay. Kind of touchy on the subject, aren’t you.”

“No, damn it, I’m not touchy on the goddamn subject!”

Barney grinned. “I still think it looks like a hooker’s false eyelash,” he said.

I suggested a fun thing he could do with himself, caught up my briefcase, told him I’d be in touch, and went out stroking the damn mustache like it was a pet caterpillar. By the time I realized what I was doing, I was halfway across the anteroom. And Barney, the little bastard, was having himself a noisy chuckle behind his closed office door.

The office I shared with Eberhardt was a small, converted third-floor loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, a hop and a skip from Van Ness Avenue’s automobile row. The building was owned by an unconverted slum landlord named Crawford, who looked like a Tammany Hall politician and had the soul and heart of a pirate; he was charging us eight hundred dollars a month for the place, an outrageous price but one that was not far out of line with what other office space was going for in the city these days. San Francisco was full of pirates, it seemed. Pretty soon they would drive everybody else out to the suburbs and then they could start raping and pillaging each other, as the old Caribbean buccaneers used to do in places like Tortuga. It was a thought to keep you warm when the rent came due, anyway.

The door was locked when I got there. When I let myself in the first thing I saw was the light fixture hanging from the ceiling. It looked like nothing so much as an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass. testicles. It was the ugliest light fixture I had ever seen and I hated it and I kept threatening to tear it down one of these days, landlord or no landlord. But I never seemed to get around to doing it. Maybe there was something psychological in that; maybe subconsciously I needed to keep it around in order to have something to take out my nonviolent aggressions on. Or maybe, somewhere down at the bottom of my warped old psyche, I considered the thing to be a fitting symbol of my life and work. Who the hell knew?

I switched it on, leered at it, and went over to my desk. The rest of the office wasn’t such-a-much, either. It was about twenty feet square, and it had beige walls, a beige carpet that we’d recently put down to cover bare wood and paint-stained linoleum, a skylight that a former tenant had cut into the ceiling, three windows and two views—one view of the back end of the Federal Building, the other of a blank brick wall—and that was all it had other than Eberhardt’s and my office equipment. If you needed to use the john, you had to go downstairs to the Slim-Taper Shirt Company, “The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look,” and hop around on one foot until one of their employees unlocked the toilet
they
had.

There weren’t any calls on my answering machine, nor were there any scrawled messages from Eberhardt on my desk, as there sometimes were. Which meant he probably hadn’t come in at all today. I remembered his telling me he might have to go to Stinson Beach to check a lead on his missing rich girl.

I sat down and looked at the telephone and thought about calling Kerry at the Bates and Carpenter ad agency. But I didn’t do it. Telling her the Santa Barbara vacation would have to be postponed was something best done in person. Tonight I would tell her, when we had dinner. Dinner was all we’d have together tonight, once she heard, but then life is full of disappointments and frustrations. Life, to coin a lyrical phrase, sometimes sucks.

So I got out the
Northern Development vs. Ragged-Ass Gulch
file Barney Rivera had given me and read through it. About the only things I learned were some sketchy background details on the three partners.

Munroe Randall. Forty-four at the time of his death. Native of Kansas. M.B.A. from some college I’d never heard of in the Midwest; lived in California for eighteen years, in Redding for thirteen. Unmarried. Worked for two large real estate firms in the Redding area before founding Northern Development with his own capital supplemented by cash from the other two partners and bank loans. Excellent credit rating. Numerous personal references.

Frank O’Daniel. Thirty-nine. Born in Idaho, had lived in Redding since his early teens. B.B.A. degree in Accounting from Chico State; he was the company’s pencil pusher and paper shuffler. Worked as a CPA before throwing in with Randall. Married, wife’s name Helen, no children. Credit rating somewhat shaky: he or his wife or both of them liked to spend money even when they were on the shorts. Personal references good.

Martin Treacle. Forty-one. Native of Red Bluff, a few miles south of Redding. Limited college education: a year and a half at a Humboldt County Junior College. Holder of various sales jobs in the Redding /Red Bluff area, all with established firms, at increasingly larger salaries. Similar position with Northern Development—the company’s glad-hander and silver-tongue. Divorced five years, one daughter; ex-wife and the daughter now living in San Diego. Credit rating better than O’Daniel’s but not quite as high as Randall’s. Personal references good.

I had just put down the data sheet on Treacle when the door opened and I had a visitor. And the visitor, it turned out, was Martin Treacle himself.

He came in a little diffidently, poking his head around the door edge first, as if he thought something peculiar might be going on in here. They get ideas like that from bad books and bad TV programs—all the distorted portrayals of the allegedly weird, violent, and alcoholic world of private eyes. It is to laugh. Anyhow, he came all the way in when he saw I was alone and relatively harmless-looking—no gat or top-heavy blonde or quart of Old Panther Piss in sight—and announced who he was and what he wanted. Which was to offer me his and Frank O’Daniel’s full cooperation in my inquiry into the death of Munroe Randall.

I studied him for a time. He was a handsome guy, lean and fit, with close-cropped black hair and a mustache that was fuller and shapelier than mine and definitely did not look like a hooker’s false eyelash. He wore a dark-blue gabardine suit, nice but not high-priced, with accessories in the same class. He seemed very earnest about everything he said, and there was a kind of hopeful glint in his eyes, as if he wanted very much to make a good impression on me. A salesman, all right. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the time being at least, and assume that he had come here in good faith and that his offer was guileless as well as genuine.

I said, “How did you get my name, Mr. Treacle?”

“A Mr. Rivera at Great Western Insurance gave it to me. I talked to him not more than half an hour ago.”

“Is that why you came down from Redding? To talk to Great Western’s investigators?”

“No, I was here on other business. But I thought it would be a good idea to stay on top of things while I’m in the city.”

“Mm.”

“Frank and I welcome the investigation, we want you to know that. We have nothing to hide.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yes. The sooner Great Western is satisfied,” he said, “the sooner Frank and I collect on our policy. As we’re entitled to. So naturally we want to cooperate to the fullest.”

“Naturally. Is that all you’re interested in?”

“Pardon me?”

“Don’t either of you care about what happened to Randall? If he was murdered, don’t you want to see whoever killed him caught and punished?”

“Well, of course,” Treacle said. “That goes without saying.”

“Even if it costs you the extra hundred thousand double indemnity?”

“Of course. But Frank and I are both convinced that the Redding police are right—Munroe’s death was a tragic accident. It couldn’t have been anything else.”

“Perhaps not. Were you and Randall friends as well as business partners?”

“Good friends, yes.”

“You don’t seem very upset about his death.”

“It came as quite a shock, believe me.”

“But without any lingering grief.”

“I’m not the grieving sort,” Treacle said earnestly. “No, I’m a realist. People live, people die, life goes on.”

A philosopher too, I thought. Aristotle Treacle, the compassionate one. I said, “And you just want what’s yours while it does, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. The fact of the matter is, it’s not Frank and me who need the insurance money—not personally. It’s the company. You may already know this, but we’re not in a stable financial position at present. Haven’t been for some months. And Munroe’s death hasn’t helped matters at all, obviously.”

I asked him, “How did your company get into this financial bind?” to see if his answer would jibe with what Barney Rivera had told me.

It did. “Frankly,” he said, “we’ve made some ill-advised purchases and investments over the past couple of years. We’d be all right if our Musket Creek development package had opened up as planned, but that didn’t happen thanks to the people of Musket Creek and their lawyers. You know about the litigation, of course?”

“I’ve been filled in.”

“Well,” he said, and shrugged, and smiled at me in his hopeful way.

I looked at him some more in silence. I kept trying to dislike him—he was glib, he was materialistic, he didn’t seem to have much of an interior; he was everything that annoyed me in salesmen and the modern business executive—and yet he was so damned
earnest
that I couldn’t work up much of an antipathy toward him. Maybe if it turned out he was implicated in Munroe Randall’s death, or that he was
some
kind of crook, I could start detesting him. Right now I would have to settle for being mildly aggrieved at his existence.

I said, “About your partner’s death,” and he paused in the process of unwrapping a long, thin panatela that he’d taken from his inside jacket pocket. “With all the bad blood between the Musket Creek citizens and your company, murder’s not out of the question. Or would you say otherwise?”

“Well . . . the police seemed sure that the fire was accidental. . . .”

“Still,” I said, pushing him a little, “it
could
be murder.”

He clipped off the end of his cigar, put the end and the crumpled cellophane carefully into my wastebasket, and used a thin silver lighter to fire up. He didn’t say anything.

So I pushed a little more. “You must know those people in Musket Creek. Did any of them hate Munroe Randall enough to want him dead?”

“They all hated Munroe,” Treacle said with some bitterness. “And Frank and me too.”

“Are any of them capable of murder, in your opinion?”

“They’re probably all capable of it. They’re all loonies, you know.”

“How do you mean that, Mr. Treacle?”

“Strange people—very strange. Clannish, totally withdrawn from the mainstream of society and totally against progressive thinking of any kind.”

It sounded like a set speech, the kind to be delivered to lawyers and judges. I said, “I don’t see that that makes them loonies.”

“Believe me, they are. One of them even threatened
me
a few weeks ago.”

“Is that so? Which one?”

“A man named Robideaux. An artist—a bad artist, judging from the examples of his work I’ve seen.”

“What were the circumstances of the threat?”

“I was out inspecting one of our Musket Creek parcels. Robideaux came by and started in with the usual nonsense—”

“What nonsense is that?”

“Environmentalist nonsense. Desecration of wilderness land, the evils of free enterprise—that sort of crap.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Well, I ignored him,” Treacle said. “I wasn’t about to be drawn into a pointless argument. That made him even angrier and he said I’d better watch myself around there because someday somebody might decide to shoot at me.”

“Nobody ever did, I take it.”

“I haven’t been back since.”

“Did Robideaux or anyone else from Musket Creek ever threaten Munroe Randall?”

“Not that I know about.”

“I understand he had a public argument with a man named Coleclaw. No threats then?”

“No. It was a shouting match at our attorney’s office; he was taking depositions from Coleclaw and some of the others from out there. Coleclaw called Munroe a liar and a thief, and a few other things, but he didn’t make any threats.”

“How about Frank O’Daniel? Has
he
been threatened?”

“No. He’d have told me.”

The smoke from Treacle’s cigar was aggravating both my lungs and my sinuses; I used my hand to shred a thick plume of it. I never did like cigars much—or the men who smoke them in somebody else’s office without asking permission. More ammunition for my campaign to dislike Martin Treacle.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d put that out, Mr. Treacle,” because I’d had enough and I didn’t feel like being tolerant any more.

“Out?” he said blankly.

“Your cigar. The smoke is bothering me.”

He looked at the panatela in a surprised way, looked at me again, and said, “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize . . .” Then he looked around the office, probably for an ashtray. There wasn’t one in sight. I keep one in my bottom desk drawer, but I decided I didn’t feel like obliging him with it. So I sat there, waiting, and he looked at me again, a little helplessly this time, hesitated, and then got up trailing smoke and went over to the window that looked out on the blank brick wall next door. He tugged at the sash, couldn’t open it, gave me another helpless glance, tugged again, and finally got it to slide up. He threw the cigar out into the airshaft, without looking to see what was down below—not that there was anything flammable down there or I would have said something about it and stopped him. Then he shut the window and dusted his hands and came back to his chair and said, “I’m sorry,” in a nonplussed sort of way. But he didn’t sit down again. Instead he shot the sleeve of his suit coat and glanced at his watch.