Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "Let's see. Eleven-thirty or so, I think."

  Fifteen minutes before Colly had been shot in an alley three and a half blocks away. "Do you remember what he bought?"

  "Bourbon — a pint. Medium price."

  "Kesslers"

  "Yeah, I think it was."

  "Okay, good. What's your name?"

  "My name? Hey, wait a minute, I don't want to get involved in anything . . ."

  "Don't worry, it's not what you're thinking."

  It took a little more convincing, but he gave me his name finally and I wrote it down in my notebook. And thanked him and hurried out of there.

  I had something more than an idea now.

  Eberhardt said, "I ought to knock you flat on your ass."

  He had just come out of his bedroom, eyes foggy with sleep, hair standing straight up, wearing a wine-colored bathrobe. Dana stood beside him looking fretful.

  "I'm sorry I woke you up, Eb," I said. "But I didn't think you'd be in bed this early. It's only six o'clock."

  He said something I didn't hear, but that Dana heard. She cracked him on the arm to show her disapproval, then turned and left us alone.

  Eberhardt went over and sat on the couch and glared at me. "I've had about six hours' sleep in the past forty-eight," he said. "I got called out last night after you left, I didn't get home until three A.M., I was up at seven, I worked all goddamn day and knocked off early so I could get some sleep, and what happens? I'm in bed ten minutes and you show up."

  "Eb, it's important."

  "What is?"

  "Colly Babcock."

  "Ah, Christ, you don't give up, do you?"

  "Sometimes I do, but not this time. Not now." I told him what I had learned from the guy at Tay's Liquors.

  "So Babcock bought a bottle there," Eberhardt said. "So what?"

  "If he was planning to burglarize a liquor store, do you think he'd have bothered to buy a bottle fifteen minutes before?"

  "Hell, the job might have been spur-of-the-moment."

  "Colly didn't work that way. When he was pulling them, they were all carefully planned well in advance. Always."

  "He was getting old," Eberhardt said. "People change."

  "You didn't know Colly. Besides, there are a few other things."

  "Such as?"

  "The burglaries themselves. They were all done the same way — back door jimmied, marks on the jamb and lock made with a hand bar or something." I paused. "They didn't find any tool like that on Colly. Or inside the store either."

  "Maybe he got rid of it."

  "When did he have time? They caught him coming out the door,"

  Eberhardt scowled. I had his interest now. "Go ahead," he said.

  "The pattern of the burglaries, like I was saying, is doors jimmied, drawers rifled, papers and things strewn about. No fingerprints, but it smacks of amateurism. Or somebody trying to make it look like amateurism."

  "And Babcock was a professional."

  "He could have done the book," I said. "He used lock picks and glass cutters to get into a place, never anything like a hand bar. He didn't ransack; he always knew exactly what he was after. He never deviated from that, Eb. Not once."

  Eberhardt got to his feet and paced around for a time. Then he stopped in front of me and said, "So what do you think, then?"

  "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."

  DEATH OF A NOBODY

  His name was Nello.

  Whether this was his given name, or his surname or a sobriquet he had picked up sometime during the span of his fifty-odd years — I never found out. I doubt if even Nello himself knew any longer. He was what sociologists call "an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity or himself." And what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as "a Skid Row wino."

  He came into my office just before ten o'clock on one of San Francisco's bitter-cold autumn mornings. He had been a lawyer once, in a small town up near the Oregon border, and there were still signs of intelligence, of manners and education, in his gaunt face. I had first encountered him more than twenty years ago, when a police lieutenant named Eberhardt and I had been patrolmen working south of the Slot. I didn't know — and had never asked — what private hell had led him from small-town respectability to the oblivion of the city's Skid Row.

  He stood just inside the door, his small hands nervously rolling and unrolling the brim of a shapeless brown fedora. His thin, almost emaciated body was encased in a pair of oncebrown slacks and a tweed jacket that had worn through at both elbows, and
his faded blue eyes had that tangible filminess that comes from too many nights with too many bottles of cheap wine. But he was sober this morning — cold and painfully sober.

  I said, "It's been a long time, Nello."

  "A long time," he agreed in a vague way.

  "Some coffee?"

  "No. No, thanks."

  I finished pouring myself a cup from the pot I keep on an old two-burner on top of my filing cabinet. "What can I do for you?"

  He cleared his throat, his lips moving as if he were tasting something by memory. But then he seemed to change his mind. He took a step backward, hall-turned toward the door. "Maybe I shouldn't have come," he said to the floor. "Maybe I'd better go."

  "Wait, now. What is it, Nello?"

  "Chaucer," he said. "It's Chaucer."

  I recognized the name. Chaucer was another habitué of the Row, like Nello an educated man who had lost part of himself sometime, somewhere, somehow; he had once taught English Literature at a high school in Kansas or Nebraska, and that was where his nickname had come from. He and Nello had been companions on the Row for a long time.

  I said, "What about him?"

  "He's dead," Nello said dully. "I just heard about it a little while ago. The cops found him early this morning in an alley off Hubbell Street, near the railroad yards. He was beaten to death."

  "Christ. Do they know who did it?"

  Nello shook his head. "But I think I might know the reason he was killed."

  "Have you gone to the police?"

  I didn't need to ask why not. Noninvolvement with the law was one of the codes by which the Row people lived—even when one of their own died by violence. But I said, "If you have some information that might help find Chaucer's killer, you'd better take it to them."

  "What good would it do? The cops don't care about a man like Chaucer — a wino, a bum, a nobody. Why should they bother when one of us is murdered?"

  "Some cops feel that way, sure. But not all of them."

  "Enough," Nello said. "Too many."

  "Then why did you come to me? I was a cop once, remember; in a way I'm still a cop. If you don't think the police will care, what made you think I would?"

  "I don't know," he said. "You were always decent to me, and you're not on the force anymore. I thought . . . Look, maybe I just better go."

  "It's up to you."

  He hesitated. There was a struggle going on inside him between an almost forgotten sense of duty and the adopted attitudes of the Row. This time, duty — given strength by his friendship with Chaucer — won out; he moved forward in a ponderous way and sat in one of the clients' chairs. He put the hat on his knee, looked at the veined backs of his hands.

  "I can't pay you anything, you know," he said.

  "Never mind that. About the only thing I can do is take whatever you tell me to the police and see that it gets into the proper hands."

  He took a breath, coughed and wiped at his mouth with the palm of one hand. When he began talking, his voice was low, almost monotonous. "Three weeks ago, Chaucer and I were sharing a bottle in a doorway on Fifth down near Folsom. It was after midnight, not much traffic on the streets. Old Jenny — you know her?"

  I shook my head.

  "One of us. A bag lady," Nello said. "She was standing on the corner across the street, waiting for the light to change, and when it did she stepped down and started to cross. She was right out in the middle when the car hit her. It came racing up Fifth, right through a red light; knocked her thirty feet into the wall of a building. Wasn't time for Chaucer or me to yell a warning. Wasn't time for anything. The car slowed after it hit her, but then it speeded up again and made a fast turn left on Howard. There wasn't anything we could do for Old Jenny, not the way she'd been thrown into that building, so we beat it out of there before the cops came."

  Again, the code of noninvolvement. Nello rubbed a hand over his face, as if the length of his explanation had left him momentarily drained. I waited without speaking, and pretty soon he went on.

  "Last weekend, Chaucer was panhandling up by the Hilton and saw the hit-and-run car parked on O'Farrell Street. It had been repaired, had a fresh paint job. He told me about it later."

  I said, "How did he know it was the same car?"

  "He got the license number when the driver slowed after hitting Old Jenny. Even with two bottles of port in him, he had an eye like a camera."

  "Did he tell you what the number was?"

  "No," Nello said. "He didn't tell me he found out the owner's name from the registration last weekend either, but that's what I think he did. I saw him yesterday afternoon, early; he looked excited. Said he had to take care of some business, that if it worked out the way he hoped he'd look me up later and we'd go celebrate. I never saw him again."

  "Uh-huh. So you figure he went to see the owner of the hit-and-run car and tried to shake him down. And got himself killed instead."

  He nodded.

  "Chaucer didn't mention the make and model of the car?"

  "No."

  "Or where the owner lived?"

  "No."

  "Did he say anything that might lead to either the car or the owner?"

  "No," Nello said. "I told you everything he told me."

  I got my cigarettes out and lit one. Nello's bloodshot eyes were hungry as he watched me. I thought: What the hell, he made the effort to come here, didn't he? and tossed him the half-full package. He swiped at it, dropped it, picked it up and put it into the pocket of his coat. His eyes thanked me, even if he couldn't make his mouth say the words.

  "All right," I said, "I'll see what I can do. As soon as anything turns up, I'll let you know."

  He nodded again, listlessly this time, and got to his feet. It was plain to see, as he shuffled out, that he didn't believe anything would turn up at all.

  Eberhardt was in conference with some people when I got down to the Hall of Justice, so I sat in the squad room and smoked a couple of cigarettes out of a new pack and discussed the political situation with an inspector named Branislaus, whom I knew slightly. After half an hour three men in business suits, two of them carrying briefcases, came out of Eberhardt's office. They marched out of the squad room in single-file cadence, like Army recruits on a parade field.

  Branislaus announced me over the intercom, but it was another five minutes before Eberhardt decided to let me see him. He was cleaning out the bowl of his pipe with a penknife when I went in, not being particularly careful about it; bits of dottle were scattered across the paper-littered surface of his desk. He said without looking up, "So what the hell do you want?"

  "How about a kind word?"

  "You see those three guys who just left?"

  "I saw them, sure."

  "They're with the state attorney general's office," Eberhardt said, "and they've been giving me a hard time for a week on a certain matter. I haven't seen Dana in two days, and I haven't eaten since eleven o'clock yesterday morning. On top of all that, I think I've got an abscessed tooth. So whatever it is you came for, the answer is no."

  I said, "Okay, Eb. But it has to do with a homicide last night."

  He frowned. "Which homicide?"

  "A guy from Skid Row called Chaucer."

  "What do you know about that?"

  "I can tell it to whichever team of inspectors is handling the investigation -"

  "You can tell it to me," he said. "Sit down."

  I sat down. And got my cigarettes out and lit one.

  Eberhardt said, "You smoke too damned much, you know that?"

  "Sure," I said. "You remember a guy named Nello? Friend of Chaucer's on the Row?"

  "I remember him."

  "He came to see me this morning," I said, and outlined for him what Nello had told me.

  Eberhardt put the cold pipe between his teeth, took it out again, scowled at it and set it in his ashtray. "There might be a connection, all right. Why didn't Nello come down himself with this?"

  "You know the answer to that, Eb."
<
br />   "Yeah, I guess I do." He sighed. "Well, I was reading the preliminary report a little while ago, before those state clowns came in. I recognized Chaucer's name. There's not much in it."

  "Nello said he was beaten to death."

  "That's right. Lab boys found blood on the wall of one of the buildings in the alley; way it looks, his head was batted against the wall until it cracked. There were other marks on him, too — facial and body bruises."

  "What was the approximate time of death?"

  "Coroner figures it at between midnight and two A.M."

  "Was there anything in the alley?"

  "In the way of evidence, you mean? No. And nobody saw or heard anything; that area round the Southern Pacific yards is like a mausoleum after midnight."

  "Did Chaucer have anything in his pockets?"

  "A pint of scotch and thirty-eight dollars, plus some change."

  "That's a lot of money, and pretty fancy liquor, for a wino to be carrying around."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Gives credence to Nello's theory, wouldn't you say?"

  "Maybe. But if this hit-and-run guy killed Chaucer, why would he give him the money first?"

  "Could be that Chaucer asked for a hell of a lot more than what he had in his pockets," I said. "The guy could have given him that as a down payment, then arranged to meet him last night with the rest."

  "And gave him a different kind of payoff instead," Eberhardt said. "Well, it could have happened like that."

  "Look, Eb, I'd like to poke into this thing myself if you don't mind."

  "I was wondering when you'd get around to that. What's your big interest in Chaucer's death?"

  "I told you, Nello came to see me this morning."

  "But not to hire you. I don't believe that."

  "No," I admitted.

  "Then who's going to pay your fee?"

  "Maybe I'll do the job gratis. I'm not working on anything else right now."

  "You feel sorry for Nello, is that it?"

  "Some, yes. You know what he thinks? He thinks the cops don't give a damn about finding Chaucer's killer. Chaucer was a nobody, just another bum. Who cares, Nello said, if some wino gets knocked off."

  Eberhardt sighed again and got wearily to his feet. "I think I can spare a couple of minutes," he said. "Come on, we'll go down to Traffic. See what Hit-and-Run has on Old Jenny."