Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I had to have proof, damn it. Something solid to back up my theories. And I knew where I might be able to find it. . . .

  No, I thought then. Uh-uh. You don’t break laws, remember? Or go skulking around in the night like the pulp private eyes. You want to get your license revoked?

  You want a murderer to maybe go unpunished?

  Call up Eberhardt. Lay it in his lap.

  Not without proof. You could try to get it; go there, see how things look. At least make the effort.

  I spent another couple of minutes arguing with myself. But it was no contest: I started the car and went away to skulk in the night.

  The Kellenbeck Fish Company was still dark and so wrapped in fog now that it had a two-dimensional look, like a shape cut from heavy black paper. I drove on past it by a hundred yards, parked off the road alongside a jumble of shoreline rocks. From under the dash I unclipped the flashlight I keep there and dropped it into my coat pocket. Blurred yellow headlight beams brightened the road behind me; I waited until the car hissed past and disappeared into the mist before I got out and hurried back toward the building.

  The night had an eerie muffled stillness, marred only by the ringing of fog bells out on the channel buoys and the faint lapping of the bay water against the pilings; the crunch of my footfalls seemed unnaturally loud as I crossed the gravel parking area. When I got to the shedlike enclosure I paused in the shadows to test the door there. Locked—and so secure in its frame that it did not rattle when I tugged on the knob. If I was going to get in at all, it would have to be at the rear.

  I crossed to the catwalk. It was pitch-black along there; I stayed in close to the building wall, feeling my way along it until I came out onto the dock. The writhing fog created vague spectral shadows among the stacks of crab pots, brushed my face with a spidery wetness. Visibility was no more than two hundred yards. Even the lights on Bodega Head were swaddled, hidden inside the fogbanks.

  The padlock on the corrugated doors was an old Yale with a heavy base and a thick steel loop. You would need a hacksaw and an hour’s work to cut through it, and I was not about to try such shenanigans anyway. I felt nervous enough as it was. Cold sweat had formed under my arms, the palms of my hands were damp, sticky. Maybe the pulp detectives were good at this sort of thing; maybe Jim Garner was on “The Rockford Files.” Not me.

  I moved to the far side of the doors. In the wall there, near where the crab pots were, was a window made opaque by an accumulation of grime. When I stepped up close to it I could see it was the kind with two sashes, one overlapping the other vertically. I put the heel of my hand against the frame of the lower piece and shoved upward. Latched at the middle but not at the bottom. And a loose latch at that because it rose a quarter of an inch before binding with a creaky sound. It could probably be forced without too much trouble.

  Which brought me to the moment of reckoning. The only way I was going to get inside was through this window; so I either forced it or gave the whole idea up. All I was guilty of so far was trespassing. But if I forced the window it was felony breaking-and-entering—a crime that would cost me my license and maybe put me in prison if anybody found out about it.

  If anybody found out, I thought. Who was going to find out? If I discovered what I expected to, I could tell Eberhardt I came by it in a legal fashion. A little white lie. And Kellenbeck’s arrest and conviction for murder would go a long way toward appeasing my conscience.

  I wiped moisture off my face, hunched my shoulders against the wind blowing in across the water, and laid both hands on the sash frame. Bent my knees and heaved upward. The lock creaked again; the window pane rattled. I dipped lower, locked my elbows, heaved a second time. A third. A fourth—

  There was a loud groaning noise, then a sudden snapping, and the sash wobbled upward.

  The noise made me jerk my head around and look furtively around the empty dock. A seagull screeched somewhere in the fog—a cry that sounded almost mocking. I took a couple of deep breaths; my heart was pounding as if I had just run the quarter-mile. Then I eased the sash up as far as it would go, swung my leg over the sill. And ducked under and up into blackness heavy with the odors of fish and brine.

  With my back to the window, I got the flashlight out, shielded the lens with my hand, and switched it on. Shellfish tanks, a massive refrigeration unit that gave off palpable waves of cold. Beyond, where Kellenbeck’s office was, the bank of machinery and conveyor belts formed a mass of shadowy outlines.

  I shuffled away from the window and around the nearest of the tanks, holding the flash pointed downward at thigh level. The light glistened over the fish scales speckling the floor, picked out a stack of crates just in time to keep me from plowing into them. My mouth was dry; I worked saliva through it as I stepped off to the left, lifted the flash and unshielded it long enough to make a single horizontal sweep. Open floor past the crates, except for the machinery and four big weighing scales set side by side like a row of deactivated robots. In the gloom ahead there was a dullish reflection of the beam: the window in the office cubicle.

  Following the light, I made my way over there. The closer I got to it, the more hushed the warehouse became; I could no longer hear even the muffled ringing of the fog bells. The scraping of my shoes on the slick floor was the only sound.

  The door to the office was closed. Locked? No; it opened silently when I rotated the knob. I stepped inside, leaving the door open, and let the light flicker over Kellenbeck’s desk. Same clutter of papers and junk that I had seen yesterday. Except for one thing. And I found that right away, in the bottom desk drawer where I had watched Kellenbeck put it.

  The bottle of Canadian whiskey.

  The evidence.

  I hauled it out by its cap so I would not smear any clear fingerprints on the glass. Shined the flash on it. The label carried the name of a popular brand and was brown with a black-lined square around the edges—the same colors, the same pattern, that was on the torn corner from Jerry Carding’s room. Which was part of what I had remembered earlier. The first thing, the one that had been itching at the back of my mind, was the way Kellenbeck had kept looking at the bottle while I was talking to him, the way he had caught it up so quickly by its bare neck and put it away inside the drawer. I had already seen him drinking from it during business hours; why hide it unless there was something about it he did not want me to notice. Something I had noticed, but without realizing it at the time.

  The bare neck: it had no tax stamp.

  And the label would be counterfeit.

  Bootleg liquor.

  That was where Kellenbeck’s profits were coming from and that was what Jerry Carding had found out: Kellenbeck was an illicit-whiskey distributor.

  Most people think of bootlegging as something that went out with Prohibition; but the fact is, it’s still a multimillion dollar business in the United States. And not just in the South. It goes on along the West Coast too, just as it used to in the days of the Volstead Act when ships outfitted as distilleries—big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey—were brought down from Canada and anchored twenty-five miles offshore. Nowadays the stuff was probably made at some isolated spot across the border and carried down the coast by freighter or large fishing boat. But it would still be handled in pretty much the same way: picked up by small craft, stored somewhere nearby until it could be trucked out to customers throughout the state.

  Kellenbeck’s big mistake was committing murder to keep his activities a secret; his little mistake was drinking his own hooch instead of the genuine stuff. Maybe he liked it because it packed a heftier wallop. Yeah, well, it was going to help wallop him right into San Quentin.

  I made a hurried check through the rest of the desk and through the papers on top of it. Everything seemed to pertain to the fish company operations, as did everything in the single file cabinet. But I did find two more bottles of bootleg tucked away inside a small storage closet. On impulse I took
one of them and wedged it out of sight behind the file cabinet. Just in case the bottle missing from his desk made Kellenbeck suspicious and he decided to get rid of the rest of it. In a sense I was tampering with evidence, but that was a technicality and the hell with it; I was in pretty deep as it was. And it would insure that the Justice Department investigators found something incriminating when they showed up with search warrants.

  Time for me to get out of here, I thought. Past time: I had been in the building for half an hour—I was more nervous than ever now, and sweating like the proverbial pig. I caught up the desk bottle, swept the flash over the office once more: everything looked as I had found it. Then I went out, closed the door behind me, shielded the flash beam again and trailed it back across the warehouse.

  When I reached the window the cold air from the refrigeration unit and the icy wind blowing in from outside made me shiver. I hunched my shoulders, switched off the flash. Out on the dock fog swirled around the crab pots, giving them an insubstantial, surreal look in the darkness. Quickly I lifted one leg over the sill, straddled it, and started to swing out.

  Movement behind the nearest of the crab pots.

  A board creaked.

  Somebody there—

  Blinding white light errupted out of the mist, pinned me, made me recoil and crack the back of my head against the window sash.

  “Stay where you are, asshole,” a harsh voice said behind the glare. “I’ve got a gun; I’ll blow you away if you move.”

  But it was not Gus Kellenbeck.

  The voice belonged to Andy Greene.

  EIGHTEEN

  I stayed frozen, half in and half out of the window, the damned bottle in my right hand and hanging out where Greene could see it. Fear climbed up into my throat and lodged there like a glob of bitter mucus. The light burned against my eyes; I squeezed the lids down to slits.

  “All right,” he said. “Let go the bottle.”

  “Listen, Greene—”

  “Now, goddamn it!”

  I released the bottle, heard it clatter on the dock and roll back in against the wall. At the same time I turned my head a little so I was no longer looking directly into the glare. Tendrils of fog curled through the beam, capered at its edges like will-o’-thewisps. And gave Greene, behind it, a dark ectoplasmic look, as if he were something only half-materialized. The wet touch of the mist against my face made my skin crawl.

  “Back inside,” Greene said. “Nice and slow. Then turn around and walk away from the window.”

  The muscles in my arms and legs were cramped with tension; the joints did not seem to want to bend, so that when I forced myself back off the sill it was in awkward, mannequin-stiff movements. The jet of light dipped lower, came forward through the opening. I pivoted away from it, blinking, licking at the gun-metal taste in my mouth. And then began to pace toward the shellfish tanks.

  Behind me Greene made scraping sounds as he climbed through the window. The skin on my back was still crawling; it was bad enough to face a man with a gun, even when you couldn’t see him, but to have him behind you in the dark was twice as unnerving.

  When I reached the first of the tanks, ten paces away, Greene’s voice said, “That’s far enough.” I stopped, made a careful three-quarters turn back toward him. He was moving laterally to his left, along the inner wall; the flash beam stayed centered on me, flickering a little with his movements. Then he came to a standstill, and seconds later there were a series of faint clicks. The darkness shrank into random pockets of shadow as high-wattage bulbs strung along the rafters winked on.

  I did some more blinking. Greene shut off a big four-cell flashlight, jammed it into the pocket of a blue pea jacket; then he motioned me over toward the locked entrance doors, where there was nothing for me to get my hands on, and halved the distance between us when I got there. His face was expressionless. But the deep-sunk eyes looked as cold and flat and deadly as the Browning 9 mm automatic in his right hand.

  Looking at him, I felt swirls of black rage under the fear. Rage at him, at Kellenbeck, at what had been done to Jerry Carding and his father. And rage at myself for coming here like a damned fool, breaking the law, getting caught up this way. Stupid. Stupid.

  We stood watching each other for eight or ten seconds. Then I said, “What happens now, Greene?” My voice had sounded cracked when I started to speak at the window, but these words came out in the same hard monotone he had been using.

  “What do you think happens?”

  “You call up Kellenbeck. He calls up the county police and has me arrested for breaking-and-entering.”

  Greene showed me his teeth. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he said.

  “Why should I like it?”

  “Go ahead, play dumb if you want. But you don’t bluff your way out of this.”

  “Neither do you,” I said. “Not any more.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I’m not the only one who’s onto you.”

  “Bullshit. Cops knew anything, they’d be here, not you.”

  “They’ll be here before long. Count on it.”

  “Not tonight. Not while you’re still around—”

  There was a sudden banging sound in the front part of the building, where the tacked-on shed was. Greene tensed. I half turned, looking up toward a closed door adjacent to the bank of machinery—but the glimmer of hope inside me died in the next second when the door opened and Gus Kellenbeck came shambling through.

  “Andy? I saw the lights, I—” He quit talking and pulled up short, gaping at me and at the gun in Greene’s hand. His eyes had a glassy look and there was a slackness to his mouth; he seemed to sway a little. “Jesus, Andy,” he said in a different voice. “Jesus.”

  I moved sideways a couple of steps, carefully, so I could see both of them without swiveling my head back and forth. The Browning moved with me.

  When Greene looked at Kellenbeck again his upper lip flattened in against his teeth. “You goddamn drunk,” he said, and that told me all I needed to know about how things stood between the two of them. Maybe the bootlegging had been Kellenbeck’s scam in the beginning, and he had brought Greene in for the use of his boat; but whether or not that was it, Greene was the one running the show now.

  “I only had a few,” Kellenbeck said, “I lost track of the time.” He slid a hand across gray-stubbled cheeks, across his slacked mouth. “What’s he doing here, Andy? Why’d you bring him here?”

  “I didn’t bring him here. I saw him snooping around your house and decided to follow him, see what he was up to. Good thing I did. He came straight here, busted in, and searched your office; I nailed him on the way out.”

  Damned fool, I thought again. It must have been Greene in that low-slung sports job in Carmet. And him again in the car that passed after I parked down the highway; I had been too intent on getting into the building, on playing the souped-up detective, to notice it was the same car both times.

  “He knows, then,” Kellenbeck said. He sounded sick and frightened.

  “Sure he knows. What’s the matter with you?”

  “How did he find out?”

  “How do you think? You and that fucking hooch. I told you not to keep any of it around.”

  Kellenbeck moved forward a couple of steps. A belch came out of him; he wiped his mouth again. “Andy,” he said, “Andy . . . ”

  “Shut up.”

  “Let him say it, Greene,” I said. The rage was stronger, blacker, inside me now—and that was good because it smothered the fear. Blood made a surflike pounding in my temples.

  “You shut up too.”

  I looked at Kellenbeck. “He’s planning to kill me, all right. Is that what you want? Another murder on your conscience?”

  “Andy, for Christ’s sake. . . .”

  “Killing me won’t get you off the hook,” I said. “What do you think will happen if I disappear like Jerry Carding—two disappearances within a week? The cops will be all over th
is place. And they’ll find out, Kellenbeck, just like I did—”

  “One more word,” Greene said, “I’ll blow you away right now.”

  He meant it; I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes when I faced him. I locked my teeth together, made myself stand still. Made myself not think about dying, because if I did the rage and the thin edge of panic would prod me into doing something crazy, like trying to jump him for the gun.

  “He’s right, Andy,” Kellenbeck said. His face had a collapsing look, as if all the muscles had loosened at once. “You know he is.”

  “The hell he’s right. We can cover this one too.”

  “How?”

  “Get rid of any more hooch you’ve got stashed, stay out of touch with the people up north. Let the cops come around; there won’t be anything for them to find.”

  “But suppose he’s told somebody something?”

  “He hasn’t told anybody anything. He’s just a smart-guy private dick, that’s all. Working on his own.”

  “I don’t know, Andy. Another killing . . . I don’t know if I can handle it, face the cops again, all those questions. . . .”

  “Sure you can, Gus. You’ll be fine, baby.”

  There was something in the way Green said that, something in his voice that jarred an insight into my mind. Kellenbeck was a drunk and he was coming apart; it was a good bet he would let something slip to the police, maybe even blurt out a confession, when the pressure got too heavy. And Greene knew that as well as I did.

  He was planning to kill Kellenbeck too.