Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Milo Petrie was waiting for me, standing just inside the park gate, when I came down Wawona off Nineteenth. I made a U-turn alongside the Talbot house, parked where I had yesterday, facing east, and went over to join him.

  “How’d it go, Milo?”

  “Quiet,” he said. He was a lean, hawk-nosed guy in his sixties, bundled up in a heavy car coat, a longshoreman’s cap, and a pair of gloves. Like Bert Thomas, he was a retired patrolman out of the Ingleside station. “And goddamn cold, too. I haven’t been on an early-morning stakeout in twenty years; almost froze my balls off.”

  “Anything happen on Bert’s shift?”

  “He said no. Subject stayed inside and didn’t have any visitors. Lights were on all night, like maybe he didn’t go to bed.”

  “Talbot come out this mourning?

  “Yep. A little after eight. He walked all the way down Nineteenth to the Stonestown shopping center. Gave me a chance for some exercise, anyway.”

  “What did he do in Stonestown?”

  “Nothing much,” Milo said. “Wandered around, sat in the mall for awhile. No contact with anybody. He led me straight back here about thirty minutes ago.”

  I nodded. “Okay. No need for you to hang around; you look like you could use some coffee and hot food.”

  “And a stiff shot of brandy.” He hesitated, glancing over at the house. “This Talbot’s in a pretty bad way, you know? Funny look in his eyes—like he’s half-dead inside.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’ve seen that look before,” Milo said. “Jumper on the Golden Gate Bridge had it back in ’68; I tried to talk him out of going over but he jumped anyway. You ask me, Talbot’s a potential Dutch.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. But his sister doesn’t believe it, and she’s the only one who could have him committed for observation.”

  “If I was her, I’d be a hell of a lot more worried about him knocking himself off than anyone else trying to do it for him.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But the way things are, I don’t see anything we can do except play it her way. And hope for the best.”

  Milo shook his head. “People,” he said.

  When he was gone I went through the gate into the park. There were a few more people around today: a couple of kids throwing a football back and forth, a man walking an Irish setter on a leash, an elderly couple carrying a small silver-flocked Christmas tree that they had probably bought at the lot over on Nineteenth and Sloat. I stood on the park road and watched the kids. The one nearest me missed a catch and the ball rolled to a stop about twenty feet away; when he picked it up I called out for him to peg it to me—just being friendly, trying to pass the time. He threw it back to the other kid instead, grinned at me, and gave me the finger.

  Christmas trees before Thanksgiving. Citizens letting their dogs crap all over a public recreation area. Young kids giving the finger to adults old enough to be their grandfather. And a twenty-year-old girl lying in the morgue with two bullets in her body. And an honest man, a moral man, tearing himself apart with guilt. And a stubborn, narrow-minded woman who would rather believe in an unlikely threat than in the real danger of mental illness.

  People, Milo had said.

  Yeah. People.

  I walked over to the driving range. Came back to the gate. Walked up the park road again. Watched the kids again, staring at the one who had given me the finger until it made him nervous enough to stop playing catch and head down into the grotto with his friend. The cold was beginning to bother me, as it had yesterday, and I was also a little hungry; I had eaten nothing for breakfast except some cereal. Before leaving my flat, though, I had made some sandwiches, and I had bought a thermos near my office and filled it with coffee. Time for lunch, I thought. I turned back for the gate—

  Just in time to see the taxi come gliding along Twenty-first Avenue and pull up in front of the Talbot house.

  The driver blew his horn a couple of times. Immediately the front door opened and Martin Talbot appeared, wearing the same tweed overcoat of yesterday. There seemed to be purpose in his stride as he came down the stairs and crossed to enter the cab.

  I was running by then, out through the gate and around the front of my car. The taxi pulled away, left on Wawona, as I fumbled the door open and slid inside. If the driver had caught the light at Nineteenth, I might have lost them; midday traffic was pretty heavy along there, clogging all three southbound lanes. But the signal was red, and it stayed red long enough for me to swing out and close to within half a block.

  Talbot’s sudden departure by cab was surprising. From what Laura Nichols had told me, he had not gone anywhere since the accident except for those periodic walks around the neighborhood. So why this trip? And why the seeming purpose in his stride?

  The taxi swerved over into the left-turn lane at Nineteenth and Sloat; I managed to do the same. And to make the light with them. They cut over onto Junipero Serra, turned left again at Ocean Avenue, and followed Ocean to the City College. Over the hill to Geneva, then, and straight out past the San Mateo County line and the Cow Palace.

  An uneasiness had begun to grow in me, and it kept on growing when the driver swung right on Bayshore Boulevard and headed up the long sweeping hill beyond. I was pretty sure I knew where Talbot was going, now. And I was right: on the other side of the hill the cab made another right-hand turn and entered Brisbane on Old Country Road.

  My hands were tight around the wheel as I turned in after them. Brisbane was a small town of maybe four thousand people, nestled in the curves and cuts along the eastern slopes of the San Bruno Mountains overlooking the Bay. It had some similarities in appearance and population mix to Sausalito, although it was more of a bedroom community than an artistic one. A place where all sorts of different types lived, from painters and sculptors to business executives to blue collar workers.

  It was also the place, Mrs. Nichols had told me, where Victor Carding lived.

  Why would Talbot be on his way to see Carding? Three possible answers, as far as I could tell. One—he wanted to talk it out with the man, ask forgiveness, seek some sort of relief for his guilt. Two—he was after punishment instead of relief, either verbal or physical. Three—the initiative was Carding’s, not Talbot’s, and Talbot was responding to a telephone summons.

  The first or the second seemed the most probable. The only reason Carding could have for requesting a meeting was that he intended to carry out his threat; but if you’re going to kill a man you don’t invite him to your house to do it. The first answer was the best of the lot, though it could still mean trouble; the second was volatile as hell. Dicey situation any way you looked at it.

  But the big question was, what was I going to do about it?

  I followed the cab up San Bruno Avenue, hanging back a full two blocks. At Glen Parkway it turned right, hooked through the center of town, and then began to climb upward on the network of narrow twisting roads that crisscrossed the slope. Most of the houses up there either clung to the steep hillside below the roads, with carports and entrances at road level, or sat on little knolls or inside man-made cutouts. They ran the spectrum of architectural types and building materials: country cabin, plain frame, box, old Spanish, false Southern Colonial, ultramodern hexagonal and octagonal; brick, redwood, pine, stucco, old gray stone, whitewashed block. The only things they all had in common were balconies and wide picture windows, to take advantage of a panoramic view of the Bay, parts of San Francisco, the East and South Bay cities.

  I lost sight of the taxi half a dozen times as we climbed the rutted, switchbacked roads, almost lost it completely once at a three-way intersection. But I was still behind them when they turned onto Queen’s Lane, near the highest perimeter of the village. The road looped around and through an undeveloped section—vertical hillside on the left, slope on the right wooded with scrub oak and bay and horse chestnut trees—and the taxi disappeared again for eight or ten seconds. When I neared the center of the loop, where a dirt
-faced turnaround had been cut out of the bluff wall, I had them back in sight. And they were just pulling up beyond a gravel driveway seventy-five yards downrange.

  I braked, veered over onto the turnaround. Half a minute later Talbot got out of the cab and stood next to a rural-type mailbox, looking up the driveway; from where I was, I could not see the house there. At length he headed up the drive, walking stiff-backed but with that same sense of purpose, and disappeared from sight. The cab stayed where it was, parked on the verge; Talbot had evidently told the driver to wait.

  Okay, I thought, here we go. Play it one step at a time. I set the emergency brake, got out, and went down the road at a fast trot. The wind slapped at my face; it was strong up here, pungent with the spicy scent of bay leaves. Overhead the sun seemed to be trying to break through the clouds, creating a bright metallic glare that made me squint.

  The house came into view when I was thirty yards from the driveway. It was set on a piece of level ground above the road, its backside close to a notch machine-carved out of the hill—a pretty attractive place for someone Mrs. Nichols had referred to as a “common laborer.” Smallish, square-shaped, made out of brick and brick-colored wood. Wide, roofed porch across the front, decorated with planterboxes full of ferns. Half-hidden on the far side was what looked to be a two-car garage; the driveway bent around in that direction.

  Talbot was up on the porch, just standing there before the door, waiting.

  I slowed to a walk, watching him. Just as I reached the mailbox, he pivoted abruptly and came down off the steps. Nobody home, I thought—but the sense of relief I felt was premature. Talbot stopped after a couple of paces, turned, and stared over toward the garage. A few seconds later he started toward it. And vanished again around the side of the house.

  Maybe Carding was at work or had gone somewhere else; but maybe, too, he was out in the garage and had not heard or had chosen to ignore the doorbell. Give Talbot half a minute, I told myself. If he doesn’t show by then, better get up there.

  Behind me I heard a car door slam. Then a voice yelled, “Hey! You there!”

  I turned. It was the cabbie, a youngish guy, heavy-set, wearing a poplin windbreaker and a pugnacious expression. “You talking to me?”

  “That’s right, buddy. You been following me?”

  Ah Christ, I thought, this is all I need.

  “Thought I spotted a tail when we started up here,” the cabbie said. “What the hell you been following me for?”

  “Nobody’s following you,” I said. I looked up at the house again. Still no sign of Talbot.

  “I figure different,” the cabbie said belligerently. He came away from the taxi, stopped twenty feet from me, and put his hands on his hips. “I don’t stand for shit like that.”

  The thirty seconds were up. I could feel my chest beginning to tighten; sweat formed cold and sticky under my arms. Something going on in that garage. Talbot would have come out by now if there wasn’t.

  “You hear what I said, fatso?”

  Fatso. I gave him a go-to-hell look and started up the drive, hurrying. The cabbie came after me; I could hear his shoes crunching on the gravel. Wind currents swayed the scrub oak and the brownish grass on the hillside above, made faint whispering murmurs in the afternoon stillness. But nothing moved and nothing made a sound anywhere around the house or the garage.

  “Turn around, goddamn it!” the cabbie yelled behind me. “Come on, you son of a bitch!”

  That was enough; I could not afford to let it go any further. I whirled on him, glaring. “I’m here on police business, smart guy,” I lied in a hard tight voice. “You understand? Police business. You want to make trouble, fine, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail for obstruction of justice.”

  He pulled up short and blinked at me. Most of the belligerence faded out of his expression; he began to look uncertain and a little worried.

  “Now go on, get back to your cab,” I said. “And don’t say anything about me to your fare when he comes back. Capici?”

  “Hey,” he said, “hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know you were a cop—”

  “Move it!”

  I put my back to him, the hell with him, and trotted the rest of the way up onto the flat. The drive made a wide loop there, around and alongside the house; I cut off it at a sharp angle, onto hard-packed earth. When I neared the porch corner, the whole of the garage materialized ahead of me. One of its double doors was standing part-way open and I could see that there were lights on inside; but that was all I could see. Still no sign of—

  And that was when the gun went off.

  The flat cracking sound was unmistakable; I had heard the report of a handgun too many times in my life. I broke into a lumbering run. There was no second shot—no other sounds of any kind from inside the garage. Instinct warned me against barging in there, but I did it anyway: I caught the edge of the closed door half and swung myself around it, through the opening by two steps.

  I was braced to find a dead man lying on the floor, and that was what I found. But what surprised me, what made me stare wide-eyed, was that it was not Martin Talbot.

  The dead man had to be Victor Carding.

  He lay sprawled on his side near a long cluttered workbench, both legs bent up toward his chest as if he had tried to assume a fetal position before he died; there was blood all over the front of his blue workshirt. Three feet away, between Carding and a partly open rear window, Talbot stood looking down at the body. His arms were flat against his sides, and in his right hand was a snub-nosed revolver.

  The light in there came from a drop-cord arrangement suspended from one of the ceiling rafters; the cord and its grilled bulb cage swayed a little, so that there was an eerie shifting movement of light and shadow across Talbot’s face. He looked ghastly: twisted-up expression of sickness and torment, eyes popped and unblinking, mouth slacked open like an idiot’s.

  The hollow queasy feeling was in my stomach again. And there was a rancid taste in my throat; you can never tell what a man with a gun in his hand will do. But he did not even seem to know I was there. His gaze was half-focused, vacant, and the gun stayed pointed at the floor, loose in his grasp.

  I took a couple of cautious steps toward him. He did not move. Three more paces, each one slow and measured, brought me up close on his right. Still no movement. And no resistance when I reached down, closed my hand around the revolver, and eased it out of his cold fingers.

  I let out the breath I had been holding and backed off. The gun was a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber; the stubby muzzle was still warm. I dropped it into my coat pocket and sidled around so that the dead man was between Talbot and me. Then I knelt to take a closer look at the body.

  No doubt that it was Victor Carding. He matched the description Laura Nichols had given me: thin, gaunt, sallow-faced. He had been shot once in the chest; the blood was coagulating around the wound. There were no other marks on him that I could see, and nothing on the floor near him except a couple of sealed envelopes—PG&E bill, letter from a bank—that might have been jarred out of a pocket when he fell.

  When I straightened up Talbot blinked and focused on me for the first time. He said, “I killed him,” in a hoarse empty voice—the kind of voice, if you’ve ever heard it, that can raise the hairs on your scalp.

  “Easy, Mr. Talbot.”

  “He shouted at me, called me a murderer. Because I killed his wife, you see. Murderer, he said. Murderer, murderer.”

  I went over to him again and took his arm. I wanted him out of there; I wanted out of there myself. The mingled smells of oil and dust, cordite and death, were making me a little nauseous.

  “I just . . . I couldn’t stand it,” Talbot said. “I lost control of myself. The gun . . . it was on the workbench. I picked it up, just to make him stop, but he lunged at me and it went off. I killed him. He was right, I am a murderer. . . .”

  Gently I prodded him toward the door. He came along without protest, moving like a sleepwalker. Outside, in
the wind and the leaden daylight, I took several deep breaths to clear the death-smell out of my nostrils. Both the cabbie and the hack were gone; he had probably heard the shot and decided he wanted no part of what was going on here. Nobody else seemed to have heard it; the nearest neighbor was across the road and fifty yards down.

  I took Talbot around the front of the house, up onto the porch. The door was unlocked. Inside, I sat him down in a chair and then hunted up the telephone.

  “I murdered him,” Talbot said again, as I picked up the receiver. “I murdered him.”

  No you didn’t, I thought. No way.

  Talbot had not killed Victor Carding.

  SIX

  It took the local cops exactly fourteen minutes to get there. But it was a long fourteen minutes. Talbot kept staring off into space, dry-washing his hands and muttering over and over the same things he had said in the garage. Watching him and listening to him gave me a creepy, nervous feeling. He was right on the edge of a breakdown—and that was something I was not equipped to handle.

  When I finished with my call to the police, I dialed the Nichols’ home in Sea Cliff; I figured Laura Nichols ought to know about this as soon as possible. But there was no answer. I put down the receiver and prowled around the living room with Talbot’s voice grating in my ears. On the mantelpiece was a framed color photograph of Carding, a plain gray-haired woman, and a kid in his twenties wearing a Fu Manchu mustache. The Carding family—and two of them dead in less than a week. I shook my head and took a turn through the rest of the house, not touching anything. The place was cluttered and dusty, and in the kitchen were a couple of empty bourbon bottles and the smell of spilled whiskey. Aside from that, the condition of each of the rooms seemed ordinary enough.

  The distant wail of sirens, when they finally came, was a relief. I went out on the porch to wait and breathe more of the fresh air. The sirens grew louder and closer, and pretty soon a pair of Brisbane police cars came speeding along Queen’s Lane, swung up the drive, and plowed to a halt. Three uniformed cops piled out, one of them wearing sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his jacket. The sergeant’s name was Osterman, it turned out, and he was in charge.