Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (6 page)

When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, “What’s the idea of messing around over there? You a scavenger or something?”

“No,” I said, “I’m a detective.”

“A what?”

“A detective.” I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Munroe Randall.

He didn’t like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like circlets of onyx. “Who hired you? Northern Development?”

“No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall’s life.”

“So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding.”

“You had a fire here too,” I said.

“Coincidence.”

“Maybe not, Mr. Robideaux.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Northern people supplied them.”

“I’ll bet they did.”

“The list includes an artist named Paul Robideaux.” I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. “I get paid to observe things and make educated guesses.”

Robideaux grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn’t say anything.

I said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the fire.”

“Which fire?”

“This one. Unless you know something about the one in Redding too.”

“I don’t know anything about either one. I wasn’t in Redding when Randall’s place burned. And I wasn’t here when those old shacks went up.”

“No? That isn’t what you told the county sheriffs men. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig the firebreak.”

“Is that so?” Robideaux said. “Well, I had to talk to the law. I don’t have to talk to you.”

“That’s right, you don’t. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?”

His eyes got narrow. “How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?”

“Maybe.”

“What is it?”

“I have to tell that to the law,” I said. “I don’t have to tell it to you.”

He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he’d had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He turned abruptly and stalked around to the driver’s side of the jeep.

Only he didn’t get in right away. Instead he pointed a finger in my direction and said, “You think Randall was murdered, is that it? Well, why don’t you go sniff around those partners of his? One of them killed him if anybody did.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because nobody here did it, that’s why. There’s nothing for you in Musket Creek.”

“Nothing but trouble, you mean?”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

He got into the jeep. Fifteen seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.

I stood staring after him. And wondering, not for the first time in the past two days, if there wasn’t a lot more going on in this business than I’d first thought.

Kerry still hadn’t come back. Between my search of the fire wreckage and my conversation with Robideaux, over an hour had passed since she’d wandered off. I looked over at the ghosts, but there was no sign of her. Now what’s she up to? I wondered. I shed my trenchcoat, locked it and the wax-laden stone cup into the trunk, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.

She wasn’t anywhere on the south side of the street. I crossed over, went down a weed-choked alleyway between two of the derelicts. The grass was high back there, a field of it extending thirty yards or so to the creek. A railed footbridge spanned the shallow but swift-moving stream; on the other side, a pair of half-obliterated ruts led up one of the hillocks to a collapsed building at its crest—what had once been a church or a schoolhouse, judging from the remains of a belltower. Pieces of machinery, the segments of a sluicebox, and other broken and rusted mining equipment littered the grass on both sides of the creek. Some of it was so badly weathered and busted up that you couldn’t tell what it had been used for.

An irregular path led through the grass from the footbridge and intersected another path that paralleled the rear of the buildings. I got onto the parallel one and went along calling Kerry’s name. She finally answered me from inside one of the ghosts—the two-storied hotel or saloon. The back entrance wasn’t boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge; I went inside.

She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated, through chinks where the wall boards had warped away from the studs, to let me see what the room had to offer. Not much. A balcony ran around three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways sans doors opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might topple at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down at this level. The floor looked like what was left of a junk shop that had gone out of business. Some old broken chairs and tables; the rusty skeleton of a sheet-iron stove and its piping; the door to a steel safe, circa 1880, with faded gold lettering on it that said
Diebold, Norris & Co., Chicago;
a native-stone fireplace with most of the stones lying mounded on the hearth; a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a pigeonhole shelf that had collapsed on top of it; and random piles of dirt and other detritus.

“What’d you do?” I asked Kerry. “Bust in here?”

“No. The back door was ajar. Isn’t this place wonderful?”

“If you like dust, decay, and rats.”

“Rats? There aren’t any rats in here.”

“Want to bet?”

Rats didn’t scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, “Somebody lives in this building.”

“What?”

“Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That’s how come the back door isn’t boarded up.”

“How did you find this out?”

“The same way you find things out,” she said. “By snooping around. Come on, I’ll show you.”

She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole shelf. “The door’s got an almost-new latch on it,” she said, pointing. “See? That made me curious, so I opened it to see what was inside.”

She opened it again as she spoke and let
me
see what was inside. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve that had probably been built for the hotel clerk’s use. There was a boarded-up window in the far wall; two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite or fool’s gold, rocks with designs, rocks that gleamed with mica or maybe genuine gold particles, and curious-shaped bits of wood. An army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of
National Geographic
completed the furnishings.

“Pack rats,” I said. “That’s who lives here.”

Kerry frowned at me.

“Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer.”

She said, “Phooey. Where’s your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn’t it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?”

“There aren’t any gold mines up in the hills—not any more. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?”

“To forage for food, maybe.”

“Hah,” I said. “Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we’re trespassing. We’d better go; I’ve got work to do.”

This time she made a face at me. “Sometimes,” she said, “you’re about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny.”

“Kerry, I’m on a job. The fun can come later.”

“Oh, you think so? Maybe not.”

“Is that a threat to withhold your sexual favors?”

“Sexual favors,” she said. “My, how you talk.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It was a dumb question. I don’t answer dumb questions.”

She started back across the hotel lobby, leaving me to shut the door to the pack rat’s nest. Outside, we walked in silence to where the car was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, “Did you find anything?” and she sounded cheerful again.

I sighed a little. Being with Kerry sometimes made me feel as if my head were as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. And that no matter how long I tried, I would never quite get it all sorted out and put where it belonged.

I told her about the melted candle, explaining how I’d found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Robideaux. By the time I was finished with that I had the car nosing up the little hill toward the second cottage near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among her tomato vines.

The woman’s name, according to the intelligence sheets I’d been given, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved here in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He’d never found much of it, evidently, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she’d stayed on following his death eight years ago.

She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, and she had a nose like the blade of her hoe and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of the hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.

I got out of the car, went up to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, “Mrs. Bloom?”

“Who are you?” she said suspiciously.

I gave her my name. “I’m an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Munroe Randall—”

That was as far as I got. The way she reacted, you’d have thought I had told her I intended to rape her and pillage her house. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner’s sword; then she hoisted it again and jabbed it in my direction.

“Get away from here!” she said in a thin, screechy voice. “Go on, get away!”

“Look, Mrs. Bloom, I only want to ask you a couple of questions—”

“I got nothing to say to you or anybody else about
them.
You come into my yard, mister, you’ll regret it. I got a shotgun in the house and I keep it loaded.”

“There’s no need for—”

“You want to see it? By God, I’ll show it to you if that’s what it takes!”

She threw down the hoe and went flying across the yard, up onto a porch decorated with painted milk cans, and inside the house. I hesitated for about two seconds and then moved back to the car. There wasn’t much sense in waiting there for her to come out with her shotgun; she wasn’t going to talk, and for all I knew she was loopy enough to start blasting away at me.

“Christ,” I said when I slid into the car. “That woman’s not playing with a full deck.”

Kerry had heard it all but she wasn’t even ruffled. “I don’t think so. Maybe she’s got a right to act that way.”

“What?”

“If somebody was trying to turn my home into a cheap imitation of Disneyland I’d be pretty mad about it too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you wouldn’t start threatening people for no damn reason.”

“I might, if I were her age.”

“Bah,” I said. But because Mrs. Bloom had reappeared with a bulky twelve-gauge cradled in both hands, I started the car and swung it into a fast U-turn. Kerry might not have been worried, but she’d never been shot at and I had. People with guns make me nervous, no matter who they are.

The cottage on the adjacent hillock was owned by a couple named Brewster, but with Mrs. Bloom and her shotgun nearby, this was not the time to talk to them. The atmosphere in Musket Creek was every bit as hostile as Frank O’Daniel had suggested it would be; bringing Kerry along had definitely not been a good idea. I considered calling it quits for now and heading back to Redding. But if I did, Kerry would never let me hear the end of it—and I couldn’t believe that everybody up here was screwy enough to threaten us. I decided to try interviewing one more resident. If that went as badly as my other attempts had, then the hell with it and I would come back tomorrow alone.

At the fork I took the left branch that led away from town and up into the wooded slopes to the west. The first house we came to belonged to Paul Robideaux; the second, almost a mile farther along, was a free-form cabin that resembled a somewhat lopsided A-frame, built on sloping ground and bordered on three sides by tall redwoods and Douglas fir. It had been pieced together with salvaged lumber, rough-hewn beams, native stone, redwood thatch, and inexpensive plate glass. A woodbutcher’s house, woodbutchers being people who went off to homestead in the wilds because they didn’t like cities, mass-produced housing, or most people.

When I slowed and eased the car off the road next to a parked Land Rover, Kerry asked, “Who lives here?”

“Hugh Penrose. He’s a writer.”

“What does he write?”

“Articles and books on natural history. He used to be a professor at Chico State. Apparently he’s an eccentric.”

“Mmm. How about letting me come with you this time? You don’t seem to be doing too well one-on-one.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea—”

“Phooey,” she said, and got out and went up toward the cabin.

Well, damn! But there was nothing I could do except to follow her, telling myself this was the
last
time I brought her along on an investigation.

We went up a set of curving limb-and-plank stairs to a platform deck. From inside I could hear the sound of a typewriter rattling away. I knocked on the door. The typewriter kept on going for half a minute; then it stopped, and there were footsteps, and pretty soon the door opened.

The guy who looked out at us was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. He was about five and a half feet tall, fat, with a bulbous nose and misshapen ears and cheeks pitted with acne scars, and his bullet-shaped head was as bald as an egg. His eyes were small and mean, but there was more pain in them than anything else. This was a man who had lived more than fifty years, I thought, and who had suffered through every one of them.

He looked at Kerry, looked away from her as if embarrassed, and fixed his gaze on me. “Yes? What is it?”

“Mr. Penrose?”

“Yes?”

Before I could open my mouth again, Kerry said cheerfully, “We’re the Wades, Bill and Kerry. From San Francisco. We’re thinking of moving up here—you know, homesteading. I hope you don’t mind us calling on you like this.”

“How did you know my name?” Penrose asked. He was still looking at me.

“The fellow at the mercantile gave it to us,” Kerry said. “He told us you were a homesteader and we thought we’d come by and look at your place and see how you liked living here.”

I could have kicked her. It was one of those flimsy, spontaneous stories that sound as phony as they are. But she got away with it, by God, at least for the moment. All Penrose said was, “Which fellow at the mercantile?” and he said it without suspicion.

“Mr. Coleclaw.”

“Which Mr. Coleclaw?”

“I didn’t know there was more than one. He was in his twenties and the only one around.” Kerry glanced at me. “Did he give you his first name, dear?”

“Gary,” I said. “Dear.”

“Poor young fool,” Penrose said. “Poor lost lad.”

“Pardon?”

“He has rocks in his head,” Penrose said, and burst out laughing. The laugh went on for maybe three seconds, like the barking of a sea lion, exposing yellowed and badly fitting dentures; then it cut off as if somebody had smacked a hand over his mouth. He looked embarrassed again.

Definitely an oddball, I thought. Musket Creek seemed to be full of them, all right. But Penrose, at least, had my sympathy; the strain of coping with physical deformities like his was enough to throw anybody a little out of whack.

“That was a dreadful pun,” he said. “Gary can’t help it if he’s retarded; I don’t know what makes me so cruel sometimes. I apologize. No one should make fun of others, should they.” It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t wait for a response. He went on, “What else did the boy tell you? Did he say anything about the Northern Development Corporation?”

Kerry simulated a blank look that would have got her thrown out of any acting school in the country. But again, Penrose didn’t notice; he still wasn’t looking at her, except for brief sidelong eye-flicks whenever she spoke. “No,” she said, “he didn’t. Is that something we should know about?”

“Yes. Oh yes. If they have their way you won’t want to move here.” He paused. “But I’m forgetting my manners. I haven’t many visitors, you see. Would you like to come in?”

Kerry said, “Yes, thanks. That would be nice.”

So Penrose stepped aside and we went in. The interior of the cabin—just one big room—was furnished sparsely with mismatched secondhand items and strewn with books. Against the back wall was a long table with a typewriter, a bunch of papers, and an unlit candle on it. The candle caught and held my attention. It was fat, it was stuck inside a wooden bowl, and it was purple—the same color purple as the one I’d found at the burned-out ghosts.

I went over to the table for a closer look. When Kerry finished declining Penrose’s offer of a cup of coffee I said to him, “That’s a nice candle you’ve got there.”

“Candle?” he said blankly.

“I wouldn’t mind having one like it.” I gave Kerry a pointed look. “We collect candles, don’t we, dear.”

“Yes, that’s right. We do.”

“Did you get it locally?” I asked Penrose.

“From a widow lady who lives here, yes.”

“May I ask her name?”

“Ella Bloom. She makes them; it’s her hobby.”

“Just purple ones? Or other colors too?”

“Just purple. Her favorite color.”

“Does she sell them to anyone besides you?”

“Oh, I didn’t buy it from her. She gave it to me. She doesn’t make them to sell.”

“Does she give them away to everyone around here?”

“Yes. Everyone. Maybe she’ll give one to you, if you ask her. Her house is right near the mercantile.”

So much for the purple-candle angle.

I steered Penrose back to the topic of Northern Development, and this time he managed to stay on it without getting sidetracked. He launched into a two-minute diatribe against the developers and what he called “the warped values of modern society.” He didn’t seem quite as militant as Robideaux and Mrs. Bloom, but then he didn’t know I was a detective.

I said, “Isn’t there anything that can be done to stop them, Mr. Penrose?”

“Well, we’ve hired attorneys, you know, and they’ve filed suit to block the sale of the land. There’s nothing else to be done until the suit comes to trial.”

“Have you tried appealing to the Northern people? To get them to modify their plans?”

“Oh yes. They won’t listen to us. Awful people. The head of the company was an insensitive swine.”

“Was?”

“He died a few days ago,” Penrose said, with a hint of relish in his voice. “A tragic accident.”

“What sort of accident?”

“He went to blazes.” Penrose did his barking sea-lion number again. This time he didn’t look quite so embarrassed when the noise stopped. “One shouldn’t speak lightly of the dead, should one,” he said.

“You mean he died in a fire?”

“Yes. In Redding.”

“That’s a coincidence,” I said.

“Coincidence?”

“You had a fire here recently. We noticed the burned-out buildings on the way through.”

“Oh, that. It was only four of the ghosts.”

“Another accident?”

He didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “I told the others they should have let the fire spread, let it purge the other ghosts as well, but they wouldn’t listen. A pity.”

Kerry said, “You wanted all the buildings to burn up?”

“All the ghosts, yes.”

“But why?”

“They’re long dead; cremation is fitting and overdue,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

I said, “Shouldn’t the buildings be preserved for historical reasons? After all, this was once a Gold Rush camp—”

“Definitely not. The past is dead;
requiescat in pace.
Resurrection breeds tourists.” He smiled, rubbed his bulbous nose, and repeated the phrase as if he liked the sound of it: “Resurrection breeds tourists.”

“Does everybody in Musket Creek feel the same way?”

“Oh, yes. Leave us alone, they say. Let us live and let us die, all in good time.”

“So that’s why nobody here ever tried to restore any of the buildings,” Kerry said.

“Just so,” Penrose agreed. “Natural history is relevant; the history of man is often irrelevant. You see?”

I asked, “How do you suppose the fire got started? The one here, I mean.”

“Does it matter, Mr. Wade?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Curiosity kills cats and lays ghosts,” he said, and cut loose with his laugh again. Listening to it, and to his slightly whacky comments, was making me a little uncomfortable. I get just as nervous around unarmed oddballs as I do around those with weapons.

“Is it possible somebody set the fire deliberately?” I asked him. “Somebody who feels as you do about cremating the ghosts?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Penrose’s mean little eyes narrowed, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its friendliness. “I think you’d better leave now. I have work to do.”

Kerry said, “Couldn’t we talk a while longer, Mr. Penrose? I really would like to know more about—”

“No,” he said. “No. Come back and visit me again if you decide to move here. But I don’t think you should; it’s probably too late. Good-bye.”

There was nothing for us to do but leave. We went out onto the platform deck, and Kerry thanked him for talking to us, and he said gruffly, “Not at all,” and banged the door shut behind us.

On the way down the stairs she said, “Why do you always have to be so damned blunt?”

“He was getting on my nerves.”

“We could have found out more if you’d been a little more tactful.”

“We? ‘Bill and Kerry Wade, from San Francisco.’ Christ!”

“It got him to talk to us, didn’t it?”

“All right, so it got him to talk to us.”

“Which is more than you accomplished with your direct approach to Mrs. Bloom,” she said. “You probably blurted out that you’re a detective to Gary Coleclaw and that artist, Robideaux, too. No wonder they wouldn’t tell you anything.”

“Listen, don’t tell me how to do my job.”

“I’m not. I’m only suggesting—”

“Don’t suggest. I didn’t bring you along to do any suggesting.”

“No, I know why you brought me along. Women are only good for one thing, right?”

“Oh for God’s sake, I didn’t mean—”

“You can be a macho jerk sometimes, you know that? You think you know everything.”

She got into the car and sat there with her arms folded, staring straight ahead. I wanted to say something else to her, but I didn’t seem to have any words. The thing was, she was right. I had handled things badly with Penrose, and with Gary Coleclaw and Robideaux and Mrs. Bloom. And with Kerry, too. It was just one of those days when you can’t seem to get the proper handle on how to deal with anybody. But it galled me to have to admit it, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Which was silly and petulant, but it was also a pride thing, however much of a macho jerk it made me. Kerry wasn’t the detective here, damn it;
I
was.

A half-mile farther along there was another homesteader’s cabin, this one owned by a family named Butterfield, but I was in no frame of mind for another Musket Creek interview. I drove back into the valley. When we came to the Coleclaw place I looked it over for some indication that Jack Coleclaw and his wife had returned from Weaverville. There wasn’t any—no automobiles, no people, not even any sign of the fat yapping brown-and-white dog. So there was no point in stopping there either.

I kept on driving up the road and out of Ragged-Ass Gulch.