Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  I blinked at her. A minute ago she'd been haranguing him for being unfeeling and greedy; now she was asking him to have dinner with her. Treacle was just as surprised as I was. He looked at her, looked at me, looked at her again, and said, "Well, I don't know. . ."

  "Go ahead," I told him. "Ms. Wade can be pleasant company. Sometimes."

  "Well, if you're sure you don't mind. .

  "I don't mind. I'll call you later with another report." I glanced at Kerry before I started away. "Enjoy your dinner." She stuck her tongue out at me.

  6.

  It was nearly six-thirty when I came down between the cliffs and back into Cooperville. The sun was dropping behind the wooded slopes to the west; evening shadows had begun to gather among the ghost buildings along the creek. The meadow grass had a warm golden sheen. Cooperville was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't have wanted to live there—not now and especially not after the Munroe Corporation finished with it.

  There was a dark green pickup parked alongside the Cooperville Mercantile, which probably meant that Jack Coleclaw and his wife were back from Weaverville. I wasn't interested in talking to Coleclaw, at least not yet, but when I saw the other cars parked over near the cottage I turned in there on impulse. There were five cars altogether, among them Paul Thatcher's jeep and Hugh Penrose's Land Rover. The way it looked, the residents were having some kind of town meeting.

  I stopped where I had that afternoon, alongside the gas pump. When I got out of the car, the door to the mercantile opened and Gary Coleclaw came out with a can of Coke in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. As soon as he saw me he did an about-face and went right back in again. There was no sign of the fat brown-and-white dog. And nobody else came out of the store.

  I was not about to go over to the cottage; facing the entire population of Cooperville was something I had no desire to do. I started to get back inside the car—and a man came hurrying around the far corner of the mercantile, from the direction of the cottage. He was alone, and he was somebody I had never seen before.

  He stopped two feet away, put his hands on his hips, and stared at me with eyes as cold as winter frost. He was about my age, mid-fifties; dark-complected, powerfully built, with not much neck and not much chin. Running to fat, though. You couldn't see the belt buckle of his Levi's because of the paunch that hung over it.

  "You're the insurance detective," he said.

  "More or less. And you?"

  "Jack Coleclaw. If you're here to talk to me, you wasted the trip. I've got nothing to say to you."

  "Nobody seems to have anything to say to me. Why is that, Mr. Coleclaw?"

  "You're trying to make out one of us killed that Munroe man in Redding, that's why. No one here had anything to do with Randall's death, mister; no one here started any fires. Now suppose you just get back in your car and get the hell out of Cooperville. And don't come back, if you know what's good for you."

  "Is that a threat, Mr. Coleclaw?"

  "Nobody's threatening you."

  "Two people this afternoon made a pretty good imitation of it."

  "Feelings run high around here where Munroe is concerned," he said. "All we want is to be left alone. If we're not…"He didn't finish the sentence.

  "Suppose I go to the county law and tell them I'm being harassed? Do you want that kind of trouble?"

  "You can't prove it. Besides, we cooperated with the county cops when they made their investigation. They didn't find anything; there wasn't anything they could find. The sheriff's department doesn't worry us, mister."

  "Then why should I?"

  "You don't."

  "No? How come the summit meeting, then?"

  He scowled. "What?"

  "It looks like you're entertaining everybody in town tonight," I said. "I figure that's because of me. Or do you all get together regularly for coffee and cake?"

  "What we do of an evening is none of your business," Coleclaw said. "You keep coming around here, you'll get the same you got today—and more of it. Now that's all I got to say. You've been warned."

  I watched him stalk off the way he'd come and disappear around the far corner of the store. I did not like the feeling I had now: bad vibes, a sense that there was more to this business than the idea I had developed back in the motel bar in Weaverville. There was too much hostility here, that was the thing. And it was too intense. But I couldn't seem to get a handle on what lay at the root of it.

  I drove away from the pump, out onto the road again. If anybody was watching me from inside Coleclaw's house, the curtained front windows hid them. I couldn't see anybody anywhere now. The whole damned town might have been a ghost, lying still and crumbling in the golden light of an approaching sunset.

  When I got to the fork I took the branch that led between the abandoned mining-camp buildings. I parked in front of the hotel, got my flashlight from its clip under the dash, and locked the car. Then I went around to the rear, to where the back door still stood hanging open on one hinge. I stepped inside.

  Not much light penetrated now, at this time of day, through the chinks in the outer walls. The place had a murky, eerie look to it, as if there might actually be spooks and specters lying in wait on the shadowed balconies and among the decaying rubble. I switched on the flashlight, crossed the rough whipsawed floor.

  The light picked up the collapsed pigeonhole shelf, the door in the wall behind it. I swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and chunks of rock. I moved over there. Some of the rocks had fossils embedded in them, all right. Bryophyte fossils, just like the ones in the stone cup in the trunk of my car.

  I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral—travertine, Treacle had called it—as the stone cup, and put it into my pocket. Then I swept the rest of the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm my suspicion as to who it was who spent time here. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and the notebook had a name on it, and that was all I needed.

  I put the notebook into the same pocket with the fossil rock. As I started out the light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway

  Something moved to my right, behind the desk.

  That was the only warning I had, and it wasn't enough. He came rushing toward me out of the gloom with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board. He swung it at me in a flat horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.

  The board whacked across the left side of my face and head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.

  7.

  I awoke to pain. And to heat and a whooshing, crackling noise that seemed to come from somewhere close by. And to the acrid smell of smoke.

  Fire!

  The word surged through my mind even before I was fully conscious. It drove me up onto one knee, a movement that sent shooting pain through my head and neck; I was aware that the whole left side of my face was half numb and felt swollen. I had my eyes open, but I couldn't see anything. It was dark wherever I was—dark and hot and filling up with thin clouds of smoke.

  Panic cut away at me; I fought it instinctively, shoved onto my feet, and managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they were made of rubber. I still could not see anything except vague outlines in the blackness. But I could hear the thrumming beat of the fire, a frightening sound that seemed to be growing louder, coming closer.

  The smoke started me coughing. That led to several seconds of dry-retching before I could get my breathing under control. I took a couple of sliding steps with my hands out in front of me like a blind man; my knee hit something, there was a faint scraping sound as the someth
ing yielded, and I almost fell. I bent at the waist, groping with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was still in the room behind the hotel desk.

  Coughing again, fighting the panic, I slid my feet around the cot and kept moving until my fingers brushed against wood, touched rock. The shelving, the collection of junk. I went sideways along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. Found it, found the latch.

  Locked.

  I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly. The wood was old and dry; it gave some, groaning in its frame. I got a grip on myself again and lunged at the door a second time, a third. The wood began to splinter in the middle and around the jamb. The fourth time I slammed into it, the latch gave and so did one of the hinges; the door flew outward and I stumbled through, caught myself against the edge of the hotel desk.

  The whole rear wall and part of the side walls and balcony were sheeted with flame.

  The smoke was so thick in there that each breath I took seared my lungs, made me dizzy and nauseous. I pushed away from the desk, staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced over the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire building went up.

  In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I scrambled to my feet again and ran to the window on the left; a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. I got my fingers in the gap and wrenched one of the boards loose, flung it down, and went after another one. The fire was so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe.

  Sparks were falling around me; two of them landed on my shirt, on the back and on one shoulder, but I was only half-conscious of the burns as I tore the second board loose, hammered at a third with my fist where it was already splintered in the middle.

  When I broke the two pieces outward, the opening was almost wide enough for me to get through. But not quite—Christ, not quite. I clawed frantically at another board, twisting my head and shoulders through the window and out of the choking billows of smoke. More sparks fell on the legs of my trousers, brought stinging pain in four or five places as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving lungsful of the night air; I could hear myself making noises that were half gasps and half broken sobs.

  The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose, and when I wrenched it out of the way I was able to wiggle my hips up onto the sill and through the opening. In the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into hard earth on my shoulders and upper back—outside, free.

  I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building; got up somehow and staggered ten or twelve steps into the middle of the road before I fell down again. Now that I was clear of the fire, I could smell my singed hair, the smoldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, vomit up the beer I'd drunk earlier in Weaverville.

  But I was all right then. My head had cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; inside me was a thin, sharp rage. I got to my feet again, shakily. Pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.

  My car was gone.

  The rage got thinner and sharper. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove it away and hid it somewhere.

  But there was no time now to think about either him or the car. The hotel was coated with flame, like a massive torch, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the starlit sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Soon enough, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.

  I ran along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. Most of my attention was on the fire behind me, so I did not become aware of the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.

  They were standing in the meadow up there—more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.

  No one moved even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting. All they did was stare at me. Paul Thatcher, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack Coleclaw, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch's grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his ugly head and making odd little sounds as though he was trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummers' masks stained red-orange and sooty black.

  "What's the matter with you people?" I yelled at them.

  "What're you standing around here for? You can see the whole town's going to go up!"

  Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. "Let it burn," he said.

  "Ashes to ashes," Penrose said.

  "For Christ's sake, it's liable to spread to some of your homes—"

  "That won't happen," Ella Bloom said. "There's no wind tonight."

  Somebody else said, "Besides, we dug firebreaks."

  "You dug firebreaks—that's terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can't you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn't any of you think of that possibility?"

  "We didn't see your car anywhere," Thatcher said. "We thought you'd left town."

  "Yeah, sure."

  "What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?"

  "No, I didn't start it. But somebody sure as hell did."

  "Is that so?"

  "He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Allan Randall in Redding. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room he used in the hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he torched the building."

  Coleclaw said in a flat, hard voice, "Who you talking about, mister?"

  "The only person who isn't here right now, Mr. Coleclaw, that's who I'm talking about. Your son Gary."

  The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept right on staring at me through their mummers' masks. And none of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, "Gary didn't do any of those things. He didn't."

  "He did them, all right."

  "Why? Why would he?"

  "You know the answer to that. You all hate the Munroe Corporation, so he hates them too. And he decided to do something about it."

  "Gary's slow, mister. You understand that?"

  "I understand it. But being retarded doesn't excuse him setting fires and committing murder and attempted murder. Where is he? Why isn't he here with the rest of you?"

  He didn't answer me.

  "All right," I said, "have it your way. But I'm going to the county sheriff as soon as I find my car. You'll have to turn Gary over to him."

  "No," Coleclaw said.

  "You don't have a choice—"

  "The law won't take him away from me," a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw's wife. "I won't let them. None of us will, you hear?"

  And that was when I understood the rest of it, the whole truth—the source of the bad vibes I had gotten earlier, the source of all the hostility. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something in her face, and in her husband's, and in each of the other faces. Something I had been too distraught to see until now.

  "You knew all along," I said to the pack of them. "All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall. A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence—that's why none of you would talk to me."

  "It was an accident," Mrs. Coleclaw said. "Gary didn't mean to hurt anybody—"

  "Hush up, Clara," her husband told her in a sharp voice. Thatcher said, "No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That's the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming."

  "How a
bout me?" I said. The rage was thick in my throat; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. "Did I have it coming too? You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. But you were going to let him kill me the way he killed Randall."

  "That's not true," Coleclaw said. "We didn't know you were still here. I told you, we thought you'd left town."

  "Even if you didn't know, you could have guessed it. You could have come looking to make sure."

  Silence.

  "Why?" I asked them. "I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, but why the rest of you?"

  "Outsiders like you don't care about us," Ella Bloom said. "But we care about each other; we watch out for our own."

  "More than neighbors, more than friends," Penrose said. "Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I'm ugly."

  I looked at him, at the rest of them, and the skin along my back began to crawl. Thatcher had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands in front of him; one of the men I didn't know had done the same thing. Coleclaw's big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different now in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a faint gathering aura of violence.

  The same aura a lynch mob generates.

  Some of the fear I had known at the hotel came back, diluting my anger. I felt suddenly that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a lynch mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists—out of control. If that happened, I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they'd done, I would be a dead man.

  I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade—not criminals, not a mob; that they would not do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.

  Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me, I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn't see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.