Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (3 page)

“I should be going,” he said. “I’ve got a four o’clock appointment. But if you have more questions . . .”

“Not right now.”

“Well then,” he said, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet. “When will you be going to Redding?”

“Tomorrow, probably.”

“You’ll want to talk to Frank right away, I imagine.”

“Among others.”

“I’ll call him tonight and let him know you’re coming. Is there anything you’ll need, any arrangements he can make for you?”

“Just a list of the Musket Creek residents,” I said. “Plus a little background on each one, if possible.”

“No problem. I’ll tell Miss Irwin to work up something for you.”

“Who’s Miss Irwin?”

“Shirley Irwin, our secretary.” He looked at his watch again. “Well,” he said. Then he paused, looking at me as if he expected me to get up and shake his hand and tell him how much I appreciated his cooperation. I stayed where I was, shaking hands with myself. He said, “Well,” another time, and followed it with, “I’ll be going then. I should be back in Redding myself the day after tomorrow. I expect we’ll see each other again soon.”

“I expect we will, Mr. Treacle,” I said.

He nodded and smiled—earnest and hopeful all the way—and turned for the door. Before he got there, though, it opened and Eberhardt came in looking grumpy. Eb ran into him, and Treacle reacted by hopping awkwardly out of the way like a ruptured jackrabbit. They looked at each other for a couple of seconds. After which Treacle said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” and beat it out through the door.

Eberhardt said to me, “What was that?”

“Martin Treacle. Real estate developer from Redding.”

“Yeah? Him?”

“Minor-league,” I said.

“Client?”

“No. One of the objects of a new case.”

“That’s good. Or is it?”

“I’m not sure yet. Could be.”

“Don’t tell me about it yet,” he said. “I got to sit down first and unwind.”

“Unwind from what?”

“That goddamn drive over to Stinson Beach. I hate that goddamn drive. That road scares me to death.”

I nodded sympathetically. The road scared me to death, too. It wound along the cliffsides for miles of sheer-sided dropoffs to rocks and ocean, and it wasn’t in very good repair.

Eberhardt sat down, put his feet up on his desk, and rubbed the scar behind his ear. The scar was from one of the bullets a gunman had pumped into him last August, putting him into a coma for seventeen days; the same gunman had pumped a bullet into me, too, and laid me up in the hospital for a while, and gave me a bad left arm that didn’t quite work the way it used to. The shooting was also the direct reason—there were several indirect ones—for his taking an early retirement from the San Francisco cops. Things had been bad for him for a while after that, until I gave in out of friendship and a smattering of pity and took him into my agency as a full partner. The partnership had worked out much better than I’d imagined it would. Eb was happy, I was happy, neither of us was starving to death as a result of having to split the profits, and that pirate Sam Crawford was getting his blood booty right on time the first of every month. Everything was just dandy—knock wood.

He sighed and ran a hand over the angles and blunt planes of his face. He was a year younger than my fifty-four and looked his age. Kerry said I didn’t look
my
age now that I’d taken off weight; but she also said the mustache made me look like Brian Keith trying to play Groucho Marx. Kerry has an acid wit sometimes. An off-the-wall wit, too: half the things she thinks are funny I don’t even understand.

“Better,” Eb said, pretty soon. “It’s been a hell of a day.”

“You find your missing heiress?”

“Not yet, but I’m getting close. I found a girlfriend of hers out there at Stinson Beach; the girlfriend lives with a guy who collects driftwood and has hair down to his ass and they put Trudy up for a few days last week. She left on Saturday to go to a retreat up in the Napa Valley.”

“What kind of retreat?”

“What kind you think? It’s called the Temple of Good Karma and Inner Peace, and it’s run by a guru named Mahatma something-or-other—not Gandhi. He’s probably got hair down to
his
ass too.”

“Your prejudices are showing, Eb.”

“Prejudices? Hell, I got nothing against guys with long hair. I got nothing against good karma or inner peace or gurus, either—unless the whole thing’s a scam to bilk money out of rich kids like Trudy Bigelow, which it usually is.”

“I guess. So you’ve pretty much got things wrapped up, then?”

“Maybe. Depends on whether or not she’s still at the retreat; I’ll go up tomorrow and see. If she is I’ll have to call her old man to find out how he wants to handle it.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter? You sound disappointed.”

“Well, I was hoping maybe you could take over this case up in Trinity County. On account of my vacation. But I guess that idea’s out.”

“It is if your case is a hot one.”

“In more ways than one.” I gave him a brief rundown. “So it can’t be put off,” I said. “I’ll have to leave right away. Kerry’s not going to like postponing the vacation—she’s been looking forward to Santa Barbara.”

“Why not take her with you?”

“What?”

“Take her along to Trinity County,” he said. “Nice country up there—Mount Shasta, Shasta Lake, the McCloud River. Good fishing too.”

“Hell, Eb, I can’t do that . . .”

“Why not?”

“Mixing business and pleasure never works out. What’s she going to do while I’m working?”

“Same things you were planning to do in Santa Barbara.”

“Not hardly. We were going to rent a cabin cruiser down there, go out to the Channel Islands. She likes boats; she and her ex-husband used to own one in Santa Monica.”

“They got boats at Shasta Lake,” Eberhardt said. “It’s not the ocean and there aren’t any real islands, but it’s pretty nice anyway. An investigation like this, you should have it in the bag in two or three days. That still gives you a week or so to rent a boat, go up one of the finger lakes and fish and drink beer. Sounds good to me.”

Well, it sounded good to me too, now that I thought about it. But I said, “I dunno, Eb. She probably wouldn’t go for it.”

“You don’t understand women worth a damn, do you? She’ll go for it. Just ask her.”

“Okay, I’ll ask her,” I said. “But I still don’t think she’ll like the idea.”

“Of course I’ll come with you,” Kerry said at dinner that night. “I’ve never been to Shasta Lake.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind? I mean, the job and the last-minute switch in plans . . .”

“I understand about business,” she said. “Don’t you think I understand about things like that?”

“Sure, but—”

“I understand,” she said. “I’m a very understanding person. We’ll go up to Trinity County, I’ll sit around and wait while you do your work, and if there’s any time left we’ll rent a boat and go fishing or whatever. We’ll have a gay old time. Now let’s not talk about it any more.”

I looked at her. Then I sighed inwardly and thought: Give me strength, Lord. It’s going to be a long ten days.

The drive to Redding takes about four hours. We left at eight o’clock on Friday morning and got up there a little past noon.

Redding is the jumping-off point for the Shasta–Trinity National Forest, Shasta Lake and Shasta Dam, and a number of other wilderness and recreation areas in the far northern part of the state. It has a population of around forty thousand, the upper reaches of the Sacramento River runs through it, and so does a main line of the Southern Pacific railroad; and that’s pretty much all you can say about it. A nice enough little city, but without any real distinctive qualities—a place you might decide to live in but that you probably wouldn’t care to visit unless you were on your way someplace else. At least that was how this reluctant visitor felt as I took the downtown exit off Highway 5 and drove across the narrow squiggle of the river. But then, I wasn’t in a particularly charitable mood at the moment.

I said to Kerry, “I guess the first thing we should do is find a motel.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Unless you want to stop and get something to eat.”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“Any preferences for the motel? You can check the Triple-A guide . . .”

“No. Whatever you want.”

That was the way it had been all the way up—four hours of monosyllables and simple declarative sentences. Every time I looked at her, and she caught me at it, she would smile and give me eye contact for a couple of seconds; but then I’d glance at her a few seconds later, and she’d be wearing a blank expression and staring off into space. Something was troubling her, all right. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d taken on this job, or the switch in vacation plans; Kerry was not the type to pout over things like that. A couple of times I’d asked her what was wrong. But she’d said nothing was wrong, and when I pressed her she’d gotten a little snippy, the way women do when they don’t feel like communicating. It was starting to worry me. She was shutting me out and I couldn’t seem to find a way to reach her when she did that. Whatever was bothering her, I wouldn’t get it out of her until she was good and ready to let go of it.

I looked at her again now. That same blank expression and remote stare. The sun slanting in through the windshield gave her auburn hair a fiery cast; her eyes, dark green most of the time, although they seemed to change color according to the fluctuations of her mood, were almost black now. She sat stiff-backed, with her hands folded just under her breasts—a posture that was oddly mannequin-like, as if you could reach over and take her limbs and rearrange them into different positions with no resistance at all.

My throat closed up a little. Something stirred through me, like little puffs of wind among dry leaves. God, how I loved that woman. . . .

I found a motel on North Market Street downtown, the Sportsman’s Rest, that had some shade trees and a big swimming pool. The room we were given was nice enough, except that everything was either bolted or nailed down, including a painting of some dubious-looking fruit that nobody in his right mind would want to steal. It was stuffy in there—the temperature was in the high seventies, unseasonably hot for early May—and after I brought in the bags I went and switched on the air conditioner. Kerry hadn’t said a word since we’d pulled in; and when I asked her if she planned to go swimming, all I got in response was “Maybe.” I decided the thing for me to do was to go away and let her be alone for a while. And that was what I did.

My first stop was the Redding police station. It was only a few blocks away, and the woman in the motel office had given me a city map and directions after I’d checked in. The officer in charge of the Munroe Randall investigation was a sergeant named Betters, who turned out to be a pleasant and cooperative sort. But he didn’t have much to tell me beyond what was in his report.

He and his men had twice sifted through the burned-out remains of the Randall house, without turning up any evidence that suggested arson as the source of the blaze. Nor had the coroner’s post-mortem contributed anything of a suspicious nature. Randall had evidently died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape the burning house; firefighters had found his body sprawled in an areaway leading to the back door. Aside from the fire itself, none of the neighbors had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that night. One of them, who’d known Randall pretty well, stated that he had kept paint thinner and other combustible materials inside the attached garage; and as near as Betters had been able to determine, the garage had been the fire’s point of origin. The official verdict was spontaneous combustion and accidental death.

“There’s no way at all it could have been arson?” I asked him.

“Well, it
could
have been, sure,” Betters said. “You can never be a hundred percent certain in cases like this. But if it was, then the torch is either a topflight professional or a blind-lucky amateur.”

“I take it nobody connected with Randall had anything fire-related in his background?”

“No, nobody. At least not as far as we could determine.”

“Does that include the citizens of Musket Creek?”

“It does. The county sheriffs men ran checks on the Musket Creek residents, went out and talked to a few of them; they all seemed glad to hear that Randall was dead, but you can’t arrest somebody for that.”

“Treacle and O’Daniel checked out clean too?”

“Solid citizens, both of them.”

“And Northern Development? No hint of anything going on behind the scenes?”

“None.”

“Okay,” I said, “I guess that’s about it for now. But I would like to take a look at what’s left of the Randall home.”

“Sure thing. Cleanup hasn’t started yet; it’s all just sitting there waiting.”

“Fenced off or anything like that?”

He shook his head. “You can walk right in.”

I asked him how to get there, and he told me, and I went off to have my look. Randall had lived in a wooded development off Churn Creek Road, east of Highway 5 and five miles or so from downtown Redding. I found the street without too much trouble, and the remains immediately: the place was like a huge black scar on the otherwise serene and affluent face of the neighborhood.

The houses were in the six-figure class, all fairly new, some on two- or three-acre parcels. Randall’s had been one of the smaller places, built on maybe an acre of land, with a line of spruce separating it from the neighbor on one side and a redwood-stake fence forming the boundary on the other. There wasn’t much left of it. Fire had gutted both the house and the attached garage, collapsing all but one wall of the house and a blackened brick column that had once been the fireplace chimney. Most of the rear wall had toppled outward, so that a jumbled fan of charred wood and brick lay over a flagstone terrace, a rectangle of lawn, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool; nobody had bothered to drain the pool and debris floated in it like bones in a black soup. It had been some hot fire, all right. Part of the boundary fence and some of the trees were heavily scorched, and the singed corpse of a fruit tree stood out front like an ugly monument to death.

Wearing an old trenchcoat I’d brought along to protect my clothes from soot, I wandered among the debris and used a stick to poke around here and there. It had all been sifted through pretty thoroughly, as Betters had assured me. I hadn’t expected to find anything, and I didn’t. But you never know. It’s easy enough to overlook something in the remains of a fire like this one.

I gave it up after a while, took off the trenchcoat and stowed it back in the trunk of my car, and went to cover more old territory: Randall’s neighbors. None of them had much to tell me, either—nothing at all that differed from what they’d told Betters and his men. One middle-aged woman, who lived diagonally across the street, allowed as how she had seen a yellow sports car parked just down from Randall’s property around 9:00 P.M. on the night of the fire; but when she’d looked again later, it was gone. I took that for what it was worth: little or nothing, probably.

It was after three when I finished canvassing the neighbors. Time for a couple more stops, at least. According to my map, the street on which Stan Zemansky, the insurance agent, had his office was fairly close by; so I went and hunted it up. I was saving Frank O’Daniel for my last stop, because I wanted to be armed with as much information as possible before I interviewed him.

Zemansky was in and “eager to talk to me,” meaning Barney Rivera had contacted him and given him instructions to cooperate. He was one of these guys who seem to have been turned out on an assembly line, and who ought to have been sent out into the world wearing a sign that said BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. He was about forty, had a nice smile and a friendly manner, and an office that said he was selling a lot of insurance; but you took one look at him and you knew he had never had an original thought in his life. He was a product of the times: you programmed him to perform a useful societal function, wound him up and let him go, and he did exactly what he was supposed to and exactly what he was told to by everybody from the politicians on down to his wife. This was what was left of the American middle class: the manufactured and manipulated man. Batteries not included.

“Terrible tragedy, Munroe’s death,” he said, with the proper amount of gravity in his voice. “He was a prince, he really was. You’d have liked him; everybody did.”

“Except the people in Musket Creek,” I said.

“Well, they’re an odd bunch. Misfits. I mean, you can’t stop the tide of progress, can you?”

“Might be better if you could, sometimes.”

He gave me a blank look. That kind of comment just did not compute for him.

I asked him if Randall had any personal problems that he knew about, and he said, “Munroe? Heck no. Life was his oyster. And the ladies . . . well, he was a swordsman if I ever knew one. Guy who got as much as Munroe did, how could he have problems?”

“Was there any particular woman in his life?”

“No sir. Like I said, Munroe played the field. A real swordsman.”

“His most recent girlfriend, then. Would you know who she was?”

“Well . . . that’d be Penny Belson, I guess. I’m not sure, though. He traded them in pretty fast.”

“Uh-huh. Where can I find Penny Belson?”

“She owns a beauty parlor in the downtown mall,” Zemansky said. “Fancy place, high-priced; my wife goes there sometimes when she thinks we can afford it. Penny’s for Beauty, it’s called. Which is kind of ironic. Because it’s such a high-priced place, I mean.”

I asked him if he thought Randall’s death was an accident, and he said, “Definitely. Couldn’t be anything else. I mean, that’s what the police decided, isn’t it?”

I asked him about Martin Treacle and Frank O’Daniel, and he said, “Princes, both of them. I play golf with Frank; I’m just a duffer, you know, but Frank, he shoots in the eighties. He had back-to-back birdies the last time we were out on the old links.”

I gave it up finally, thanked him for his time, let him pump my hand another time, and got out of there. The Stan Zemanskys of the world made me feel as if I were either very bright and very sane, or edging my way toward a private room in a twitch bin. Not that it mattered much; I liked my perceptions a hell of a lot better than theirs, either way.

“Life was his oyster,” he’d said. “Out on the old links,” he’d said. Jesus Christ!