Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "You figure it."

  "Yeah," he said slowly, "I can figure it, all right. But I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

  "And Colly?' I said. "You think he liked it?"

  Eberhardt turned abruptly, went to the telephone. He spoke to someone at the Hall of Justice, then someone else. When he hung up, he was already shrugging out of his bathrobe.

  He gave me a grim look. "I hope you're wrong, you know that."

  "I hope I'm not," I said.

  I was sitting in my flat, reading one of the pulps from my collection of several thousand issues, when the telephone rang just before eleven o'clock. It was Eberhardt, and the first thing he said was, "You weren't wrong."

  I didn't say anything, waiting.

  "Avinisi and Carstairs," he said bitterly. "Each of them on the force a little more than two years. The old story: bills, long hours, not enough pay — and greed. They cooked up the idea one night while they were cruising Glen Park, and it worked just fine until two nights ago. Who'd figure the cops for it?"

  "You have any trouble with them?"

  "No. I wish they'd given me some so I could have slapped them with a resisting-arrest charge, too."

  "How did it happen with Colly?"

  "It was the other way around," he said. "Babcock was cutting through the alley when he saw them coming out the rear door. He turned to run and they panicked and Avinisi shot him in the back. When they went to check, Carstairs found a note from Babcock's parole officer in one of his pockets, identifying him as an ex-con. That's when they decided to frame him."

  "Look, Eb, I —"

  "Forget it," he said. "I know what you're going to say."

  "You can't help it if a couple of cops turn out that way . . .

  "I said forget it, all right?" And the line went dead.

  I listened to the empty buzzing for a couple of seconds. It's a lousy world, I thought. But sometimes, at least, there is justice.

  Then I called Lucille Babcock and told her why her husband had died.

  They had a nice funeral for Colly.

  The services were held in a small nondenominational church on Monterey Boulevard. There were a lot of flowers, carnations mostly; Lucille said they had been Colly's favorites. Quite a few people came. Tommy Belknap was there, and Sam Biehler and old man Harlin and the rest of them from D. E. O'Mira. Eberhardt, too, which might have seemed surprising unless you knew him. I also saw faces I didn't recognize; the whole thing had gotten a big play in the media.

  Afterward, there was the funeral procession to the cemetery in Colma, where we listened to the minister's final words and watched them put Colly into the ground. When it was done I offered to drive Lucille home, but she said no, there were some arrangements she wanted to make with the caretaker for upkeep of the plot; one of her neighbors would stay with her and see to it she got home all right. Then she held my hand and kissed me on the cheek and told me again how grateful she was.

  I went to where my car was parked. Eberhardt was waiting; he had ridden down with me.

  "I don't like funerals," he said.

  "No," I said.

  We got into the car. "So what are you planning to do when we get back to the city?" Eberhardt asked.

  "I hadn't thought about it."

  "Come over to my place. Dana's gone off to visit her sister, and I've got a refrigerator full of beer."

  "All right."

  "Maybe we'll get drunk," he said.

  I nodded. "Maybe we will at that."

  The Pulp Connection

  The address Eberhardt had given me on the phone was a corner lot in St. Frances Wood, halfway up the western slope of Mt. Davidson. The house there looked like a baronial Spanish villa—a massive two-story stucco affair with black iron trimming, flanked on two sides by evergreens and eucalyptus. It sat on a notch in the slope forty feet above street level, and it commanded an impressive view of Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Even by St. Francis Wood standards—the area is one of San Francisco's moneyed residential sections—it was some place, probably worth half a million dollars or more.

  At four o'clock on an overcast weekday afternoon this kind of neighborhood is usually quiet and semi-deserted; today it was teeming with people and traffic. Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both fronting streets, among them half a dozen police cruisers and unmarked sedans and a television camera truck. Thirty or forty citizens were grouped along the sidewalks, gawking, and I saw four uniformed cops standing watch in front of the gate and on the stairs that led up to the house.

  I didn't know what to make of all this as I drove past and tried to find a place to park. Eberhardt had not said much on the phone, just that he wanted to see me immediately on a police matter at this address. The way it looked, a crime of no small consequence had taken place here today—but why summon me to the scene? I had no idea who lived in the house; I had no rich clients or any clients at all except for an appliance outfit that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of its deadbeat customers.

  Frowning, I wedged my car between two others a block away and walked back down to the corner. The uniformed cop on the gate gave me a sharp look as I came up to him, but when I told him my name his manner changed and he said, "Oh, right, Lieutenant Eberhardt's expecting you. Go on up."

  So I climbed the stairs under a stone arch and past a terraced rock garden to the porch. Another patrolman stationed there took my name and then led me through an archway and inside.

  The interior of the house was dark, and quiet except for the muted sound of voices coming from somewhere in the rear. The foyer and the living room and the hallway we went down were each ordinary enough, furnished in a baroque Spanish style, but the large room the cop ushered me into was anything but ordinary for a place like this. It contained an overstuffed leather chair, a reading lamp, an antique trestle desk-and-chair and no other furniture except for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered every available inch of wall space; there were even library-type stacks along one side. And all the shelves were jammed with paperbacks, some new and some which seemed to date back to the 1940s. As far as I could tell, every one of them was genre—mysteries, Westerns and science fiction.

  Standing in the middle of the room were two men—Eberhardt and an inspector I recognized named Jordan. Eberhardt was puffing away on one of his battered black briars; the air in the room was blue with smoke. Eighteen months ago, when I owned a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the smoke would have started me coughing but also made me hungry for a weed. But I'd gone to a doctor about the cough around that time, and he had found what he was afraid might be a malignant lesion on one lung. I'd had a bad scare for a while; if the lesion had turned out to be malignant, which it hadn't, I would probably be dead or dying by now. There's nothing like a cancer scare and facing your own imminent mortality to make you give up cigarettes for good. I hadn't had one in all those eighteen months, and I would never have one again.

  Both Eberhardt and Jordan turned when I came in. Eb said something to the inspector, who nodded and started out. He gave me a nod on his way past that conveyed uncertainty about whether or not I ought to be there. Which made two of us.

  Eberhardt was wearing a rumpled blue suit and his usual sour look; but the look seemed tempered a little today with something that might have been embarrassment. And that was odd, too, because I had never known him to be embarrassed by anything while he was on the job.

  "You took your time getting here, hotshot," he said.

  "Come on, Eb, it's only been half an hour since you called. You can't drive out here from downtown in much less than that." I glanced around at the bookshelves again. "What's all this?"

  "The Paperback Room," he said.

  "How's that?"

  "You heard me. The Paperback Room. There's also a Hardcover Room, a Radio and Television Room, a Movie Room, A Pulp Room, a Comic Art Room and two or three others I can't remember."

  I just looked at him.

  "This place belongs to Thomas Murray
," he said. "Name mean anything to you?"

  "Not offhand."

  "Media's done features on him in the past—the King of the Popular Culture Collectors."

  The name clicked then in my memory; I had read an article on Murray in one of the Sunday supplements about a year ago. He was a retired manufacturer of electronic components, worth a couple of million dollars, who spent all his time accumulating popular culture—genre books and magazines, prints of television and theatrical films, old radio shows on tape, comic books and strips, original artwork, Sherlockiana and other such items. He was reputed to be one of the foremost experts in the country on these subjects, and regularly provided material and copies of material to other collectors, students and historians for nominal fees.

  I said, "Okay, I know who he is. But I —"

  "Was," Eberhardt said.

  "What?"

  "Who he was. He's dead—murdered."

  "So that's it."

  "Yeah, that's it." His mouth turned down at the corners in a sardonic scowl. "He was found here by his niece shortly before one o'clock. In a locked room."

  "Locked room?"

  "Something the matter with your hearing today?" Eberhardt said irritably. "Yes, a damned locked room. We had to break down the door because it was locked from the inside, and we found Murray lying in his own blood on the carpet. Stabbed under the breastbone with a razor-sharp piece of thin steel, like a splinter." He paused, watching me. I kept my expression stoic and attentive. "We also found what looks like a kind of dying message, if you want to call it that."

  "What sort of message?"

  "You'll see for yourself pretty soon."

  "Me? Look, Eb, just why did you get me out here?"

  "Because I want your help, damn it. And if you say anything cute about this being a big switch, the cops calling in a private eye for help on a murder case, I won't like it much."

  So that was the reason he seemed a little embarrassed. I said, "I wasn't going to make any wisecracks; you know me better than that. If I can help you I'll do it gladly—but I don't know how."

  "You collect pulp magazines yourself, don't you?"

  "Sure. But what does that have to do with —"

  "The homicide took place in the Pulp Room," he said. "And the dying message involves pulp magazines. Okay?"

  I was surprised, and twice as curious now, but I said only, "Okay." Eberhardt is not a man you can prod.

  He said, "Before we go in there, you'd better know a little of the background. Murray lived here alone except for the niece, Paula Thurman, and a housekeeper named Edith Keeler. His wife died a few years ago, and they didn't have any children. Two other people have keys to the house—a cousin, Walter Cox, and Murray's brother David. We managed to round up all four of those people, and we've got them in a room at the rear of the house.

  "None of them claims to know anything about the murder. The housekeeper was out all day; this is the day she does her shopping. The niece is a would-be artist, and she was taking a class at San Francisco State. The cousin was having a long lunch with a girlfriend downtown, and the brother was at Tanforan with another horseplayer. In other words, three of them have got alibis for the probable time of Murray's death, but none of the alibis is what you could call unshakable.

  "And all of them, with the exception of the housekeeper, have strong motives. Murray was worth around three million, and he wasn't exactly generous with his money where his relatives are concerned; he doled out allowances to each of them, but he spent most of his ready cash on his popular-culture collection. They're all in his will—they freely admit that—and each of them stands to inherit a potful now that he's dead.

  "They also freely admit, all of them, that they could use the inheritance. Paula Thurman is a nice-looking blonde, around twenty-five, and she wants to go to Europe and pursue an art career. David Murray is about the same age as his brother, late fifties; if the broken veins in his nose are any indication he's a boozer as well as a horseplayer—a literal loser and going downhill fast. Walter Cox is a mousy little guy who wears glasses about six inches thick; he fancies himself an investments expert but doesn't have the cash to make himself rich—he says—in the stock market. Edith Keeler is around sixty, not too bright, and stands to inherit a token five thousand dollars in Murray's will; that's why she's what your pulp detectives call 'the least likely suspect."

  He paused again. "Lot of details there, but I figured you'd better know as much as possible. You with me so far?"

  I nodded.

  "Okay. Now, Murray was one of these regimented types—did everything the same way day after day. Or at least he did when he wasn't off on buying trips or attending popular-culture conventions. He spent two hours every day in each of his Rooms, starting with the Paperback Room at eight A.M. His time in the Pulp Room was from noon until two P.M. While he was in each of these Rooms he would read or watch films or listen to tapes, and he would also answer correspondence pertaining to whatever that Room contained—pulps, paperbacks, TV and radio shows, and so on. Did all his own secretarial work—and kept all his correspondence segregated by Rooms."

  I remembered these eccentricities of Murray's being mentioned in the article I had read about him. It had seemed to me then, judging from his quoted comments, that they were calculated in order to enhance his image as King of the Popular Culture Collectors. But if so, it no longer mattered; all that mattered now was that he was dead.

  Eberhardt went on, "Three days ago Murray started acting a little strange. He seemed worried about something, but he wouldn't discuss it with anybody; he did tell the housekeeper that he was trying to work out 'a problem.' According to both the niece and the housekeeper, he refused to see either his cousin or his brother during that time; and he also took to locking himself, into each of his Rooms during the day and in his bedroom at night, something he had never done before.

  "You can figure that as well as I can: he suspected that somebody wanted him dead, and he didn't know how to cope with it. He was probably trying to buy time until he could figure out a way to deal with the situation."

  "Only time ran out on him," I said.

  "Yeah. What happened as far as we know it is this: the niece came home at twelve forty-five, went to talk to Murray about getting an advance on her allowance and didn't get any answer when she knocked on the door to the Pulp Room. She got worried, she says, went outside and around back, looked in through the window and saw him lying on the floor. She called us right away.

  "When we got here and broke down the door, we found Murray lying right where she told us. Like I said before, he'd been stabbed with a splinter-like piece of steel several inches long; the outer two inches had been wrapped with adhesive tape—a kind of handle grip, possibly. The weapon was still in the wound, buried around three inches deep."

  I said, "That's not much penetration for a fatal wound."

  "No, but it was enough in Murray's case. He was a scrawny man with a concave chest; there wasn't any fat to help protect his vital organs. The weapon penetrated at an upward angle, and the point of it pierced his heart."

  I nodded and waited for him to go on.

  "We didn't find anything useful when we searched the room," Eberhardt said. "There are two windows, but both of them are nailed shut because Murray was afraid somebody would open one of them and the damp air off the ocean would damage the magazines; the windows hadn't been tampered with. The door hadn't been tampered with either. And there aren't any secret panels or fireplaces with big chimneys or crap like that. Just a dead man alone in a locked room."

  "I'm beginning to see what you're up against."

  "You've got a lot more to see yet," he said. "Come on,"

  He led me out into the hallway and down to the rear. I could still hear the sound of muted voices; otherwise the house was unnaturally still—or maybe my imagination made it seem that way.

  "The coroner's people have already taken the body," Eberhardt said. "And the lab crew finished up half an hour ago.
We'll have the room to ourselves."

  We turned a corner into another corridor, and I saw a uniformed patrolman standing in front of a door that was a foot or so ajar; he moved aside silently as we approached. The door was a heavy oak job with a large, old-fashioned keyhole lock; the wood on the jamb where the bolt slides into a locking plate was splintered as a result of the forced entry. I let Eberhardt push the door inward and then followed him inside.

  The room was large, rectangular—and virtually overflowing with plastic-bagged pulp and digest-sized magazines. Brightly colored spines filled four walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and two rows of library stacks. I had over 6,000 issues of detective and mystery pulps in my Pacific Heights flat, but the collection in this room made mine seem meager in comparison. There must have been at least 15,000 issues here, of every conceivable type of pulp digest, arranged by category but in no other particular order: detective, mystery, horror, weird menace, adventure, Western, science fiction, air-war, hero, love. Then and later I saw what appeared to be complete runs of Black Mask, Dime Detective, Weird Tales, The Shadow and Western Story; of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Manhunt; and of titles I had never even heard of.

  It was an awesome collection, and for a moment it captured all my attention. A collector like me doesn't often see anything this overwhelming; in spite of the circumstances it presented a certain immediate distraction. Or it did until I focused on the wide stain of dried blood on the carpet near the back-wall shelves, and the chalk outline of a body which enclosed it.

  An odd, queasy feeling came into my stomach; rooms where people have died violently have that effect on me. I looked away from the blood and tried to concentrate on the rest of the room. Like the Paperback Room we had been in previously, it contained nothing more in the way of furniture than an overstuffed chair, a reading lamp, a brass-trimmed roll top desk set beneath one of the two windows and a desk chair that had been overturned. Between the chalk outline and the back-wall shelves there was a scattering of magazines which had evidently been pulled or knocked loose from three of the shelves; others were askew in place, tilted forward or backward, as if someone had stumbled or fallen against them.