Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  From there I said, "Yesterday, when Lynn got the threatening call while the three of us were together and I took the phone away from her, I heard the connection being broken. A whirring click. It didn't mean anything to me at the time, but it should have. There's always a click on the line when somebody hangs up, but you only get the whirring when a machine is involved. An answering machine, for example. I called Lynn's father last night; he wasn't home and I got his answering machine and there was the whirring click when it came on. The same thing happened when I checked my office answering machine this afternoon. That was what finally started me thinking and remembering."

  I paused, but Evans had nothing to say. She just sat there looking at me, sipping from that damned can of Coke.

  "There's another kind of machine that makes a whirring click," I said. "A machine that can deliver messages, not just take them—a cassette recorder like this one here. If you've got the right equipment and some knowledge of electronics, you can tape a message on a cassette, hook up the recorder to the phone and to a home computer, and program the computer to make a call whenever you want it to. Isn't that right, Connie?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Sure. The computer opens the line at a preset time, 'dials' a programmed number and switches on the recorder so it can play the message you've taped. As soon as the message ends, the computer shuts everything off and breaks the connection . . . with a little whirring click." I tapped the recorder on the table. "What would I hear if I played this cassette? Or did you already erase the tape?"

  "No." Another sip. "You know what you'd hear."

  "Was yesterday the first time you used a tape to make one of those calls to Lynn?"

  "Yes."

  "Why? Because she told you her father had hired a private detective who was coming over to see her, and you thought that if you timed a call to come in while you were there, the detective would never suspect the truth? Or was it just that you wanted to see Lynn's face when you told her on the tape you were going to kill her?"

  Sip. Sip.

  But it didn't really matter. The facts were, she had timed the call for one o'clock, probably before she'd gone to her ten o'clock class to take her exam, but the exam had lasted longer than she'd anticipated, and on the way to Lynn's from the college she'd realized her watch had stopped. That was why she had asked Lynn what time it was the moment she arrived. It wasn't a soap opera program on TV she had been afraid she'd missed; it was the programmed call.

  "I wasn't going to do it," Evans said after a time. "Kill her, I mean."

  "No? Then why did you threaten her?"

  "I wanted to hurt her even more. Inside, the way she'd hurt me."

  "How did she hurt you?"

  "She took Larry away from me. We were going together; I loved him and he said he loved me. We were going to get married. Then Lynn came along."

  It was about what I had expected, but that didn't make it any easier to listen to. I quit looking at Connie Evans and looked out through the front window instead. You could see across the Great Highway to the beach and the Pacific beyond, and because it was a clear day the shapes of the Farallone Islands were outlined against the horizon. They were a long way from here, thirty-two miles west of the Golden Gate, and I wished I was a long way from here, too.

  She said, "I tried to get Larry back, but he wouldn't have anything more to do with me. And I kept seeing Lynn around school, always around. I hated her, but I couldn't get her out of my mind. So I started talking to her, I got to know her; she thought we were friends."

  "Why the obscene calls? Why pretend to be a man?"

  "She told me once she hated that kind of thing, some man she didn't know talking to her like that. She said it scared her more than anything. I thought . . . I don't know what I thought. One night I just picked up the phone and called her, that's all."

  And it hadn't been difficult for her to disguise her voice, I thought, or to make it sound masculine. She'd had at least some actor's training; Jud Canale had told me the Drama Club was where she and Lynn had gone yesterday evening.

  I said, "Everything changed last night. Why?"

  Sip. "It was Lynn's father. I was there when he came to see her. He asked me to step into the bedroom, but I listened anyway. He told her about Larry leaving her, going to San Diego; he called Larry a lot of bad names. At first I couldn't believe Larry would do something like that. Then I hoped it was true. I thought maybe I could talk him into taking me back, letting me go to San Diego with him."

  "Is that why you went to the boatyard?"

  She nodded; her head bobbed as if it were on a spring, like one of those little toys you see on the dashboards of cars. "Mr. Canale said the name of the place. I went to Larry's flat first, but he wasn't there; then I went to the boatyard. It was closed up and I couldn't get in. But Larry drove up just as I was about to leave. He let me in, and we went and sat in the boat. He had a Big Mac and some fries that he'd bought, but he didn't offer me any. He just sat there eating and drinking beer. I had to go out to a machine by the office to get some Coke for myself."

  I remembered the empty bottles and cans on the galley table. Two people, Joel Reeves and the bartender at Elrod's, had told me how fond Travers was of beer; so the empty bottles on the table figured to be his. But beer drinkers never mix beer and soda pop, which meant the soft drink cans had to belong to whoever killed him. And Connie Evans was as fond of Coke as Travers had been of beer.

  "We talked for a while," she said, "and then he wanted to go to bed. So we did. Afterward I asked him to let me go to San Diego with him, but he said no. I begged him, I told him how much I loved him; he just laughed. Then I saw how he'd used me, how wrong I'd been about him and about Lynn. He was running out on her just like he'd run out on me, and he would keep on doing the same thing to other women if somebody didn't stop him. I felt so ashamed. And I hated him."

  Sip. "The gun . . . it was in one of the lockers. I saw it when I first came on the boat; Larry told me it was for shooting sharks. So I got it while he was getting dressed and I pointed it at him. 'This gun is for shooting sharks, Larry,' I said. 'Isn't that what you told me?' Then I shot him. I don't know why I put the gun in his hand afterward. I don't remember much about what happened after he was dead."

  Her voice was still as emotionless as when she'd started speaking; nothing had changed in her expression either. She took one last sip of the Coke and then put the can down carefully on the carpet beside her chair.

  "I guess that's all," she said. "Except that I wouldn't have hurt Lynn anymore. I really wouldn't have." She folded her hands in her lap. "Are you going to call the police now?"

  "Yes."

  "That's all right. I don't care."

  "They'll get you some help, Connie," I said.

  "I don't care about that either. I hated him but I loved him so much longer. He's dead and so am I."

  I looked away from her again, away from the emptiness in her voice and in her eyes. There was no anger left in me, not toward her; there was only pity and sadness. She wasn't to blame for all of this. Neither was Larry Travers, when you stripped it all to the bottom line. Blame it on the kind of animals we poor humans are, the things that drive us and obsess us. Blame it on a cosmos that might not be so benevolent after all.

  I picked up the telephone receiver and called Jack Logan at the Hall of Justice.

  IX.

  Friday morning, late January.

  The weather was still good, clear and mostly warm. And people on the streets, I saw as I drove to my office, were still smiling over San Francisco's surprising Super Bowl victory on Sunday. But Lynn Canale, in seclusion at her father's home, wasn't smiling; and Jud Canale wasn't smiling; and neither was Connie Evans in her new home in a prison hospital. Death, like life, goes on—and so do mental breakdowns, and aberrant behavior, and pain and tragedy and grief—even in the midst of a week-long, city-wide celebration as jubilant as any San Francisco has ever known.

  And that was why, on this c
lear and mostly warm Friday morning five days after the Forty-niners had won the Super Bowl, I still wasn't smiling along with everybody else.

  BOOKTAKER

  It was a Thursday afternoon in late May, and it was gloomy and raining outside, and I was sitting in my brand-new offices on Drumm Street wishing I were somewhere else. Specifically, over at Kerry's apartment on Diamond Heights, snuggling up with her in front of her nice big fireplace. Thoughts like that seemed to come into my head all the time lately. I had known Kerry Wade only a couple of weeks, but it had already developed into a pretty intense relationship. For me, anyhow.

  But I was not going to get to snuggle up with her tonight. Or tomorrow night either. She worked as a copywriter for Bates and Carpenter, a San Francisco advertising agency, and when I'd called her this morning she'd said she was in the middle of an important presentation; she was going to have to work late both nights in order to finish it to deadline. How about Saturday night? I said. Okay, she said. So I had a promise, which was better than nothing, but Saturday was two long days away. The prospect of spending the next forty-eight hours alone, cooped up here and in my Pacific Heights flat, made me feel as gloomy as the weather.

  My flat wasn't so bad, but these shiny new offices left a great deal to be desired. They consisted of two rooms, one waiting area and one private office, with pastel walls, beige carpeting, some chrome chairs with beige corduroy cushions and venetian blinds on the windows. The bright yellow phone somebody in the telephone company had seen fit to give me looked out of place on my battered old desk. The desk looked out of place, too, in the sterile surroundings. And so did I: big hulking guy, overweight, shaggy-looking, with a face some people thought homely and other people—me included, when I was in a good mood—thought of as possessing character. Sort of like the late actor Richard Boone.

  I didn't belong in a place like this. It had no character, this place; it was just a two-room office in a newly renovated building down near the waterfront. It could have been anybody's office, in just about any profession. My old office, on the other hand, the one I had occupied for better than twenty years before moving here two weeks ago, had had too much character, which was the main reason I had made up my mind to leave it. It had been located in a frumpy old building on the fringe of the Tenderloin, one of the city's high-crime areas, and with the neighborhood worsening, I had finally accepted the fact that prospective clients wouldn't be too keen about hiring a private investigator with that sort of address.

  This place had been the best I could find for what I could afford. And so here I was, all decked out with a new image, and the phone still didn't ring and clients still didn't line up outside my door. So much for transitioning upscale and all the rest of that crap. So much for detective work in general.

  I was starting to depress myself. What I needed was to get out of here the rest of today and all day tomorrow; what I needed was work. So why doesn't somebody come in? I thought. I looked out across the anteroom to the access door. Well? I thought. Come on in, somebody.

  And the door opened and somebody came in.

  I blinked, startled. It was enough to make you wonder if maybe there was something after all to the theory of solipsism. My visitor was a man, and I was on my feet when he limped through my private office and stopped in front of the desk. "I don't know if you remember me," he said. "I'm John Rothman."

  "Yes, sir, sure I do. It's good to see you again, Mr. Rothman."

  I had recognized him immediately even though I hadn't seen him in more than a year; I have a cop's memory for faces. He was the owner of San Francisco's largest secondhand bookshop—an entire building over on Golden Gate Avenue near the Federal Building, three floors and a basement full of every kind of used book, from reading copies of popular fiction and nonfiction to antiquarian books, prints and the like. I had first met him several years ago, when pulp magazines were still reasonably cheap and there were only a few serious collectors like myself around; he had acquired, through an estate sale, about a thousand near-mint issues of Black Mask, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Thrilling Detective and other pulps from the thirties and forties, and because I happened to be fairly solvent at the time, I'd been able to buy the entire lot at not much more than a dollar an issue. Those same thousand copies today would cost more than I made most years.

  On four or five occasions since then, whenever a new batch of pulps came his way, Rothman had contacted me. I hadn't bought much from him, what with escalating prices, but I had purchased enough to keep my name in his files and in his memory.

  But it wasn't his profession that had brought him here today; it was mine. "I've got a serious problem at the bookshop," he said, "and I'd like to hire you to get to the bottom of it."

  "If I can help, I'll be glad to do what I can."

  I waited until he was seated in one of the two clients' chairs and then sat down again myself. He was in his fifties, tall and aristocratic-looking, with silvering hair and cheekbones so pronounced they were like sharp little ridges. His limp was the result of some sort of childhood disease or accident—he had once made a vague reference to it—and he needed the use of a cane; the one he hooked over the arm of the chair was thick and gnarled and black, with a knobby handle. Its color matched the three-piece suit he wore.

  "I'll get right to the point," he said. "I've been plagued by thefts the past few months, and I'm damned if I can find out who's responsible or how they're being done."

  "What is it that's been stolen?"

  "Valuable antiquarian items. Rare books at first; more recently, etchings, prints and old maps. The total value so far exceeds twenty thousand dollars."

  I raised an eyebrow. "That's a lot of money."

  "It is, and my insurance doesn't cover it all. I've been to the police, but there doesn't seem to be much they can do, under the circumstances. There seldom is in cases like this."

  "You mean book thefts are a common occurrence?"

  "Oh, yes," Rothman said. "Thieves are a thorn in the side of every bookseller. I lose hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of stock to them each year. No matter how closely we watch our customers, the experienced thief can always find a way to slip a book into a concealed pocket or inside his clothing, or to wrap a print or an old map around himself under a coat. A few years ago an elderly gentleman, very distinguished, managed to steal a first edition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, even though I can still swear I had my eyes on him the whole time."

  "Do these people steal for profit—to resell the items?"

  "Sometimes," he said. "Others are collectors who don't have the money or the inclination to pay for something they desperately want. A much smaller percentage are kleptomaniacs. But this is an unusual case because of the number and value of the thefts, and because of the circumstances surrounding them, and I'm fairly certain the motive is resale for profit. Not to other dealers, but to unscrupulous private collectors who don't care how the items were obtained and who don't ask questions when they're offered."

  "Then you think the thief is a professional?"

  "No. I think he's one of my employees."

  "Oh? Why is that?"

  "For several reasons. All of the items were taken from the Antiquarian Room on the third floor; a room that is kept locked at all times. I have a key and so do—or did—two of my employees; no customer has ever been allowed inside without one of us present. And after the first two thefts—a fine copy of T.S. Arthur's temperance novel, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, and an uncommon children's book, Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life—I ordered the Antiquarian Room out of bounds to customers unless they were personally known to me. I also had a sensor alarm installed on the front entrance. You know what that is, of course?"

  I nodded. It was an electronic gateway, similar to the metal detectors used in airports, through which customers had to pass on their way out. Any purchases they made were cleared by rubbing the items across a sensor strip. If someone tried to leave the premises with something that had
n't been paid for and cleared, an alarm would sound. A lot of bookstores used the device these days; so did most libraries.

  "Three weeks later," Rothman said, "a sixteenth-century religious etching attributed to one of the pioneers of printmaking, Albrecht Dürer, disappeared. It was one of two I had recently purchased, and extremely valuable; if it had been authenticated, it would be priceless. Even so, I was in the process of realizing several thousand dollars from a collector in Hillsborough when it vanished." He paused. "The point is, I checked the Antiquarian Room that morning, before I went out to lunch, as I regularly do; the Dürer was still there at that time. But it had vanished when I checked the room again late that afternoon—and no customer had been permitted inside in the interim, nor had the door lock been tampered with."

  "Did you take any further precautions after that theft?"

  "Yes. I confiscated the other two keys to the Antiquarian Room. But that didn't stop him either. There have been four other thefts since then, at increasingly frequent intervals—all of them between eleven and two o'clock, evidently when I was away from the shop. The second Dürer etching, two seventeenth-century Japanese color prints and a rare map of the Orient; the map disappeared two days ago."

  "The thief could have had a duplicate key made before you confiscated the originals," I suggested.

  "I know; I thought of that, too. Any of my four employees could have had a duplicate made, in fact, not just the two who had keys previously. On occasion those two gave their keys to the other two, when they needed something from the Antiquarian Room and were too busy to get it themselves."

  "Did you consider changing the lock?"

  "I did, yes. But I decided against it."

  "As clever as the thief is," Rothman said, "I suspect he'd have found a way to circumvent that obstacle, too. And I don't just want to stop the thefts; I want the person responsible caught and punished, and I want to know how he's getting the stolen items out of the shop so I can take steps to prevent it from ever happening again. The how of it bothers me almost as much as the thefts themselves."