Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  Moving slowly, cautiously, I entered the trees and made my way to the south, parallel to where the pickup was parked.

  Beyond the second of two deadfalls I had a glimpse of it through the wind-bent boughs, maybe forty yards away. The cab was dark and seemed to be empty; faint light shone at the rear of the camper, faint enough to tell me that both door windows were now draped.

  I crossed toward the pickup, stopped to listen when I was less than ten yards from it and hidden in shadow along the bole of a bishop pine. There was nothing to hear except the cry of the wind and the faint murmuring of surf in the distance. I stared in at the cab. Empty, all right. Then I studied the ground along the near side of the pickup: no gravel, just earth and needles that would muffle approaching footsteps.

  One careful pace at a time, I went from the pine to the side of the pickup. Near the end of the camper I stopped and leaned in close and pressed my ear against the cold metal, put my right index finger in the other ear to shut out the wind. At first, for a full thirty seconds, there were faint sounds of movement inside but no conversation. Then, muffled but distinguishable, one of them spoke—the one who didn't belong.

  "Hurry up with those sandwiches."

  "I'm almost finished," another voice said nervously.

  "And I'm damned hungry—but I don't want to sit around here any longer than we have to. You understand?"

  "It's a public campground. The state park people won't bother us, if that's what —"

  "Shut up! I told both of you before, no comments and no trouble if you don't want a bullet in the head. Do I have to tell you again?"

  "No."

  "Then keep your mouth closed and get those sandwiches ready. We got a lot of driving left to do before we get to Mexico."

  That exchange told me as much as I needed to know about the situation, and it was worse than I had expected. Kidnapping, probably, and God knew what other felonies. It was time to take myself out of it, to file a report with the closest Highway Patrol office—Olema or Point Reyes. You can take private detection just so far, and then you're a fool unless you turn things over to a public law-enforcement agency. I pulled back, half-turned and started to retreat into the trees.

  In that moment, the way things happen sometimes—unexpectedly, coincidentally—the wind gusted and blew a limb from one of the deadfalls nearby, sent it banging against the metal side of the camper.

  From inside, in immediate response, there was a scraping and a crashing of something upended. I was still backing away, but it was too late then for running. The camper's doors rattled open and one of them came lurching out and into my vision, saw me and shouted, "Hold it, you! Hold it!" In one extended hand was something long and black, something that could only be a gun. I held it.

  The figure was the one who didn't belong, of course—and the one who didn't belong was the girl.

  Only he wasn't a girl.

  He stood there with his feet spread, crouching slightly, holding the gun in both hands; nervous, scared, dangerous. He was not wearing the wig or the bandanna now; his hair was clipped close to his scalp, and it was light-colored, almost white in the darkness. Except for his pale, girlish face, his hairless hands—physical quirks of nature—there was nothing at all effeminate about him.

  "Move up this way," he said.

  I hesitated, and then I did what he told me. He backed away quickly, into position to cover both me and the rear of the camper. When I was three long strides from him I stopped, and I could see the other two standing between the open doors, silhouetted in the light from inside. They were motionless, eyes flicking between me and the one holding the gun.

  "What the hell?" the guy with the gun said. He had recognized me. "You followed us."

  I did not say anything.

  "Why? Who are you, man?"

  I watched him for a moment; then, stretching the truth a little because I wanted to see his reaction, I said, "I'm a cop."

  He didn't like that. A tic started up on the left side of his mouth and he made a swaying motion with the gun, as if he could not quite keep his hands steady. He wasn't at all chary about using the weapon, I was pretty sure of that—on me or on the two scared kids by the camper. You get so you can gauge the depths of a man, how far he'll go, what he's capable of; this one was capable of murder, all right, and in his agitated state it would not take much to push him into it.

  He said finally, "That's your problem," and made a sound that might have been a grunt or a skittish laugh. "You don't seem surprised that I'm not a female."

  "No."

  "What put you onto me?"

  "Three things," I said. "One was the way you blew your nose back there in the parking area. You took your handkerchief out and snapped it open in front of you; that's a man's gesture, not a woman's. Second thing was the way you walked. Long, hard strides—masculine movements, same as the other two kids. Third thing, you weren't carrying a purse or a handbag, and there wasn't one inside the camper or cab. I never knew a girl yet who didn't have some kind of handbag within easy reach at all times."

  He rubbed the back of his free hand across his nose. "I'll have to watch those things from now on," he said. "You're pretty sharp, old man."

  Old man, I thought. I said, "Yeah, pretty sharp."

  The redheaded kid said, "What are you going to do?" in a shaky voice.

  The guy with the gun did not answer immediately; he was staring at me, mouth still twitching. I watched him think it over, making up his mind. Then he said to the other two, "You got rope or anything inside there?"

  "Some clothesline," the dark one answered.

  "Get it. We'll tie the cop up and take him with us."

  Anger started up inside me. You let him tie you up, I told myself, you stand a good chance of dying that way, helpless; you and those two kids, dead by the side of the road somewhere. I said, "Why not shoot me right here and be done with it? Here or someplace else, what difference does it make?"

  His face darkened. "Shut up, you!"

  I took a measured step toward him.

  "Stand still!" He made a convulsive stabbing motion with the gun. "I'm warning you, old man. I'll shoot if you don't stop."

  "Sure you will," I said, and jumped him.

  The gun went off a foot in front of my face. Flame and powder seared my skin, half-blinded me, and I felt the heat of the bullet past my right cheek. The roar of the shot was deafening, but I got my left hand on his wrist, coming in close to him, and twisted the arm away before he could fire again. I hit him twice with my right—short, hard blows to the stomach and chest. Breath spilled out of his mouth; he staggered, off balance. I kicked his legs out from under him, wrenched the gun free as he fell and then went down on top of him. When I hit him again, on the lower jaw, I felt him go limp. He was out of it.

  I pulled back on one knee, stood up holding the gun laxly at my side. My cheek was sore and inflamed, and my eyes stung, watered, but that was all the damage I'd suffered. Except for a liquidy feeling in my legs, I did not seem to have any delayed reaction to what I had just done.

  The redhead and the dark guy moved forward jerkily, the way people will after a release of tension; their faces, stark and white, were animated with a kind of deliverance.

  "Okay," I said to them, "you'd better get that clothesline now."

  We used my car to deliver the one who didn't belong, whose name turned out to be Cullen, to the Highway Patrol office in Point Reyes. On the way, the other two—Tony Piper and Ed Holmberg—gave me an account of what had been for them a twelve-hour ordeal.

  They were students at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and they had set out from there early this morning for a two-day camping trip along the Rogue River. Near Coos Bay they had made the mistake of stopping to offer a ride to what they thought was a girl hitchhiker. Cullen pulled the gun and forced them to drive down the coast into California. He wanted to go to Mexico, he'd told them, and because he did not know how to drive himself, they were elected to be his chauffeurs a
ll the way.

  He had also told them that he'd escaped from the local county jail, where he had been held on one count of armed robbery and two of attempted murder after an abortive savings-and-loan holdup. Following his escape, with a statewide alert out on him, he had broken into an empty house looking for clothing and money. The house apparently belonged to a spinster, since there hadn't been any male clothing around, but there had been a couple of wigs and plenty of female apparel of Cullen's size. That was when he had gotten the idea to disguise himself as a woman.

  When we arrived at the Highway Patrol office, Cullen was still unconscious. Piper and Holmberg told their story again to an officer named Maxfield, the man in charge. I gave a terse account of my part in it, but they insisted on embellishing that, making me out, in their gratitude, to be some sort of hero.

  Maxfield and I were alone in his private office when I showed him the photostat of my license. He gave me a cynically amused smile. "A private eye, huh? Well, the way you disarmed Cullen was private eye stuff, all right. Just like on TV."

  "Sure," I said. "Just like on TV."

  "You've got a lot of guts, that's all I can say."

  "No, I don't have a lot of guts. I've never done anything like that before in my life. I just couldn't let those kids be hurt, if I could help it. Cullen might have killed them, sooner or later, and they've got plenty of living left to do."

  "He almost killed you, my friend," Maxfield said.

  "I didn't much care about that. Just the kids."

  "The selfless op, right?"

  "Wrong."

  "Then why didn't you care what happened to you?"

  I did not say anything for a time. Then, because I had kept it inside me long enough: "All right, I'll tell you. In fact, you'll be the first person I've been able to tell. My best friend doesn't even know."

  "Know what?"

  I went over to the window and looked out so I would not have to face Maxfield's reaction. "I've got a lesion on one of my lungs," I said, "and my doctor thinks it might be malignant. If it is, I've got maybe eighteen months to live."

  AFTERWORD

  When this story was first published in 1975, the last two sentences were not as they appear above. In the original version, they read: "'Unless something of a minor miracle takes place, the doctors give me maybe eighteen months to live,' I said. 'I've got terminal lung cancer.'"

  "Private Eye Blues," you see, was intended at the time to be the last entry in the "Nameless" series. Some bad advice, not a little of it self-inflicted, and delusions of grandeur had convinced me that I ought to concentrate on writing "big commercial novels" instead of detective stories. So, because I dislike series which end without some sort of resolution, I determined to kill poor "Nameless" off in this rather unpleasant, but appropriate, fashion.

  Several months after the story was published, however, I began to have second thoughts. Big commercial novels are all well and good, but if they were that easy to write and sell, everybody in the business would be rich and famous; and besides which, detective stories in general, and "Nameless" stories in particular, had been fun to write. Once I realized what a mistake I had made, I set out to rectify it by doing a novel, Blowback, in which "Nameless" faces the threat of lung cancer and comes to terms with his own mortality. And, of course, it turns out later that the lesion on his lung is not malignant after all.

  As a result of his ordeal, I not only wanted "Nameless" to give up smoking (which he does) but to change his outlook and to develop in a somewhat different direction. You'll find in the remaining five stories that he's mellower, more cheerful (usually) and shows more of his sense of humor. And you'll also find that the types of cases he becomes involved in are somewhat different, too; that they're a bit more, um, puzzling than his straightforward investigations during the pre-lesion period. I think I made the right decision in keeping "Nameless" around. You're the final judge as to whether or not I made the right decision in his character development and inhis new casefile.

  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 o
n, 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."