Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

  Seems like I always get the cuties in my profession, too. Different kinds than Keegan’s, but cuties nonetheless. Only they’re not my favorite meat by any stretch. Give me a simple skip-trace, insurance claim investigation, employee background check, or any of the other routine jobs that make up the bulk of the agency’s caseload. But for some reason, we seem to draw more than our fair share of the cuties, and even though I’m semiretired now, they usually fall into my lap. Screwball stuff. Like the one where a successful and seemingly rational businessman suddenly began attending the funerals of strangers for no apparent reason. Or the one I’d had recently that started off with the allegedly impossible theft of some rare and valuable mystery novels and ended up with cold-blooded murder in a locked room. Keegan would have loved that.

  Or the one that had walked into the agency offices this morning.

  A new cutie with seriocomic overtones, no less. A little of this and a little of that all mixed together into what was bound to be a not very appetizing stew. City bureaucracy, real estate squabbles, nocturnal prowlings, petty vandalism, threatening phone calls, poisoned cats, and, ah yes, one more ingredient that had been left out of the recitation of the original recipe . . .

  Young man,” Mrs. Abbott said to me, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  The “young man” surprised me almost as much as the question. But then, when you’re eighty-five, a man in his early sixties can seem relatively young.

  I said politely, “Ghosts?”

  “Poltergeists, malevolent spirits?”

  “Well, let’s say I’m skeptical.”

  “Loved ones from the Other Side?”

  “Likewise.”

  “I’ve always been skeptical myself. But I can’t help wondering if it might be a ghost who is responsible for all that has happened.”

  Beside me on the sofa, my client, Helen Alvarez, age seventy and likewise a widow, sighed and rolled her eyes in my direction. She hadn’t mentioned ghosts in my office; this was the ingredient that made the cutie even cuter.

  She smiled tolerantly across at Mrs. Abbott in her Boston rocker. “Nonsense. When did that notion come into your head?”

  “Last night. I’ve been reading a book.”

  “A book? What book?”

  “About spirit manifestations and the like. It’s quite a fascinating concept.”

  “It’s a load of crap,” Mrs. Alvarez said.

  “I can’t imagine why a poltergeist would suddenly invade my home. Carl, on the other hand . . . well, that does seem possible.”

  I said, “Carl?”

  “My late husband. His shade, you see.”

  Mrs. Alvarez emitted an unladylike snorting sound.

  “Don’t you think it’s possible, Helen?”

  “No, I certainly don’t. Carl has been gone ten years, for heaven’s sake. Why would his spirit come back now?”

  “It could be he’s been angry with me since he passed over.”

  “Why would he be angry with you?”

  “I’m not sure I did all I could for him when he was ill. He may blame me for his death—he had a nasty temper, you know, and a tendency to hold a grudge. And surely the dead know when the living’s time is near. Suppose he has crossed over to give me a sample of what our reunion on the Other Side will be like?”

  There was a small silence.

  Mrs. Alvarez, who was Margaret Abbott’s neighbor, friend, watchdog, and benefactor, shifted her long, lean body and said patiently, “Margaret, ghosts can’t ring the telephone in the middle of the night. Or break windows. Or dig up rosebushes.”

  “How do we know what spirits can or can’t do? Perhaps if they’re motivated enough . . .”

  “Not under any circumstances. They can’t put poison in cat food, either. Now you know they can’t do that.”

  “Poor Spike,” Mrs. Abbott said. “Carl wasn’t fond of cats. He used to throw rocks at them.”

  “It wasn’t Carl or his spirit or anybody else’s spirit. Living people are behind this deviltry and you and I both know who they are.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course we do. The Pattersons.”

  “Who, dear?”

  “The Pattersons. Those real estate people.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Why would they poison Spike?”

  “Because they’re vermin. They’re greedy swine.”

  “Helen, dear, don’t be silly. People can’t be vermin or swine.”

  “Can’t they?” Mrs. Alvarez said. “Can’t they just?”

  I put my cup and saucer down on the coffee table, just hard enough to rattle one against the other, and cleared my throat. The three of us had been sitting here for about ten minutes, in the pleasantly old-fashioned living room of Margaret Abbott’s Parkside home, drinking coffee and dancing round the issue that had brought us together. All the dancing was making me uncomfortable; it was time for me to take a firm grip on the proceedings.

  “Ladies,” I said, “suppose we concern ourselves with the facts. That’ll make my job a whole lot easier.”

  “I already told you the facts,” Mrs. Alvarez said.

  “I’d like to hear them from Mrs. Abbott as well. I want to make sure I have everything clear.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  I asked Mrs. Abbott, “This late-night harassment started two weeks ago, is that right? On a Saturday night?”

  “Saturday morning, actually,” she said. “It was just three a.m. when the phone rang. I know because I looked at my bedside clock.” She was tiny and frail and she couldn’t get around very well without a walker, and Mrs. Alvarez had warned me that Mrs. Abbott was inclined to confusion, forgetfulness, and occasional flights of fancy. At least there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her memory today. “I thought someone must have died. That is usually why the telephone rings at such an hour.”

  “But no one was on the line.”

  “Well, someone was breathing.”

  “Whoever it was didn’t say anything.”

  “No. I said hello several times and he hung up.”

  “The other three calls came at the same hour?”

  “More or less, yes. Four mornings in a row.”

  “And he didn’t say a word until the last one.”

  “Two words. I heard them clearly.”

  “ ‘Drop dead,’ ” Mrs. Alvarez said.

  “Yes. It sounds silly, but it wasn’t. It was very disturbing.”

  “Can you remember anything distinctive about the voice?” I asked.

  “Well, it was a man’s voice. I’m certain of that.”

  “But you didn’t recognize it.”

  “No. It was as if it were coming from . . . well, the Other Side.”

  Helen Alvarez started to say something, but I got words out first. “A long way off, you mean? Indistinct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Muffled. Disguised. “Then the calls stopped and two days later somebody broke the back porch window. Late at night again.”

  “With a rock,” Mrs. Abbott said, nodding. “Charley came and fixed it.”

  “Charley?”

  “My nephew. Charley Doyle. Fixing windows is his business, you see. He’s a glazier.”

  “And after that, someone spray-painted the back and side walls of your house.”

  “Filthy words, dozens of them. It was a terrible mess. Helen and Leonard cleaned it up.”

  “Leonard is my brother,” Mrs. Alvarez said, purse-lipped. “It took us an entire day.”

  “Then my rosebushes . . . oh, I cried when I saw what had been done to them. I loved my roses. Pink floribundas and dark red and orange tears.” Mrs. Abbott wagged her white head sadly. “He didn’t like roses any more than he did cats.”

  “Who didn’t?” I asked.

  “Carl. My late husband. And he sometimes had a foul mouth. He knew all those words that were painted on the house.”

  “It wasn’t Carl,” Helen Alvarez said firmly. “There are no such things a
s ghosts; there simply aren’t.”

  “Well, all right. But I do wonder, dear. I really do.”

  “About the poison incident,” I said. “That was the most recent happening, two nights ago?”

  “Poor Spike almost died,” Mrs. Abbott said. “If Helen and Leonard hadn’t rushed him to the vet, he would have.”

  “Arsenic,” Helen Alvarez said. “That’s what the vet said it was. Arsenic in Spike’s food bowl.”

  “Which is kept inside or outside the house?”

  “Oh, inside,” Mrs. Abbott said. “On the back porch. Spike isn’t allowed outside. Not the way people drive their cars nowadays.”

  “So whoever put the poison in the cat’s bowl had to get inside the house to do it.”

  “Breaking and entering,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “That’s a felony, not a misdemeanor. I looked it up.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Not to mention the final straw. That’s when I decided it was time to hire an investigator. The police weren’t doing a thing, not a thing.”

  She’d told me all that before. I nodded patiently and asked, “Were there any signs of forced entry?”

  “Not that Leonard and I could find.”

  Mrs. Abbott said abruptly, “Oh, there he is now. He must have heard us talking about him. He’s very sensitive that way.”

  I looked where she was looking, off to one side and behind where I was sitting. There was nobody there. I almost said, You don’t mean your dead husband’s ghost, but changed it at the last second to, “Who?”

  “Spike,” she said. “Spike, dear, come and meet the nice man Helen brought to help us.”

  The cat that came sauntering around the sofa was a rotund and middle-aged orange tabby, with wicked amber eyes and a great swaying underbelly that brushed the carpet as he moved. He plunked himself down five feet from where I was sitting, paying no attention to any of us, and began to lick his shoulder. For a cat that had been sick as a dog two days ago, he looked pretty fit.

  “Mrs. Abbott,” I said, “who has a key to this house?”

  She blinked at me behind her granny glasses. “Key?”

  “Besides you and Mrs. Alvarez, I mean.”

  “Why, Charley has one, of course.”

  “Any other member of your family?”

  “Charley is my only living relative.”

  “Is there anyone else who—uff!”

  An orange blur had come flying through the air and a pair of meaty forepaws nearly destroyed what was left of my manly pride. The pain made me writhe a little, but the movement didn’t dislodge Spike; he had all four claws anchored to various portions of my lap. I thought an evil thought involving retribution, but it died when he commenced a noisy purring. Like a fool I put forth a tentative hand and petted him. He tolerated that for all of five seconds. Then he bit me on the soft webbing between my thumb and forefinger, jumped down, and streaked wildly out of the room.

  “He likes you,” Mrs. Abbott said, smiling.

  I looked at her.

  “Oh, he does,” she said. “It’s just his way with strangers. When Spike nips you, it’s a sign of affection.”

  I looked down at my hand.

  The sign of affection was bleeding.

  One of those cases, all right. A bigger cutie, in fact, than I’d anticipated after Helen Alvarez started laying it out for me in my office. I’d tried to avoid taking it on, but Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez had been out on other business and Tamara was sympathetic to Mrs. Alvarez, so I had no backup. No backbone, either, when it comes to this kind of case. How do you turn down a determined seventy-year-old widow with a problem neither the police nor most other private agencies will touch?

  Mrs. Alvarez was not someone who listened to “no” when she wanted to hear “yes.” She pleaded; she cajoled; she gave me the kind of sad, anxious, worried, reproving looks elderly women cultivate to an art form—the kind calculated to make you feel heartless and ashamed of yourself and to melt your resistance faster than fire melts wax.

  I hung in there for a while, waffling, but Tamara put an end to my resistance. She’d established, with my blessings, an agency policy of taking on pro bono cases for individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford our fees—a worthwhile public service designed mainly for the benefit of ethnic minorities. Helen Alvarez was not really a minority, being an Angla married to a deceased Latino, and not exactly indigent, but that didn’t make any difference to Tamara. She said we’d take the case, in a no-nonsense voice, and that took care of that. She’d been in a grumpy, distant mood for the past couple of weeks, snapping and growling when something went wrong or she didn’t get her way, and arguing with her when she was like that was useless. The Good Tamara was on vacation. The Bad Tamara who sometimes replaced her was a pain in the ass.

  So I’d listened to Helen Alvarez’s tale and written down all the salient facts and agreed to interview Margaret Abbott. Mrs. Abbott’s woes had begun three months ago, when Allan and Doris Patterson and the City of San Francisco had contrived to steal her house and property. The word “steal” was Mrs. Alvarez’s, not mine.

  It seemed the Pattersons, who owned a real estate firm in the Outer Richmond, had bought the Abbott property at a city-held auction where it was being sold for nonpayment of property taxes dating back to the death of Mrs. Abbott’s husband in 2000. She refused to vacate the premises, so they’d sought to have her legally evicted. Sheriff’s deputies declined to carry out the eviction notice, however, after a Sheriff’s Department administrator went out to talk to her and concluded that she was the innocent victim of circumstances and cold-hearted bureaucracy.

  Margaret Abbott’s husband had always handled the couple’s finances; she was an old-fashioned sheltered housewife who knew nothing at all about such matters as property taxes. She hadn’t heeded notices of delinquency mailed to her by the city tax collector because she didn’t understand what they were and hadn’t sought to find out from her nephew or Mrs. Alvarez or anyone else. When the tax collector received no response from Mrs. Abbott, he ordered her property put up for auction without first making an effort to contact her personally. House and property were subsequently sold to the Pattersons for $286,000, about a third of what they were worth on the current real estate market. Mrs. Abbott hadn’t even been told that an auction was being held.

  Armed with this information, the Sheriff’s Department administrator went to the mayor and to the local newspapers on her behalf. The mayor got the Board of Supervisors to approve city funds to reimburse the Pattersons, so as to allow Mrs. Abbott to keep her home. But the Pattersons refused to accept the reimbursement; they wanted the property and the fat killing they’d make when they sold it.

  They hired an attorney, which prompted Helen Alvarez to step in and enlist the help of lawyers from Legal Aid for the Elderly. A stay of the eviction order was obtained and the matter was put before a superior court judge, who ruled in favor of Margaret Abbott. She was entitled not only to her property, he decided, but also to a tax waiver from the city because she lived on a fixed income. The Pattersons might have tried to take the case to a higher court, except for the fact that negative media attention was harming their business. So, Mrs. Alvarez said, they “crawled back into the woodwork. But if you ask me, they’ve come crawling right back out again.”

  It was her contention that the Pattersons were responsible for the nocturnal “reign of terror” against Mrs. Abbott out of “just plain vindictive meanness. And maybe because they think that if they drive Margaret out of her mind or straight into her grave, they can get their greedy claws on her property after all.” How could they hope to do that? I’d asked. Mrs. Alvarez didn’t know, but if there was a way, “those two slime-balls have figured it out.”

  That explanation didn’t make much sense to me. But based on what I’d been told so far, I couldn’t think of a better one. Margaret Abbott lived on a quiet street in a quiet residential neighborhood; she seldom left the house anymore, got on well with her nei
ghbors and her nephew, hadn’t an enemy in the world or any money or valuables other than her house and property that anybody could be after. If not the Pattersons, then who would want to bedevil a harmless old woman? And why?

  Well, I could probably rule out Spike the psychotic cat and the malevolent spirit of Mrs. Abbott’s late husband. If old Carl’s shade really was lurking around here somewhere, Helen Alvarez would just have to get herself another detective.

  I don’t do ghosts. I definitely do not do ghosts.

  3

  Helen Alvarez and I left Mrs. Abbott in her Boston rocker and went to have a look around the premises. Starting with the rear porch.

  A close-up examination of the back door revealed no marks on the locking plate or any other indication of forced entry. But the lock itself was of the unsafe push-button variety: anybody with half an ounce of ingenuity and a minimum of strength could pop it open in less than a minute. The cat’s three bowls—water, dry food, wet food—were over next to the washer and dryer, ten feet from the door. Easy enough for someone to slip in here late at night, dose one of the bowls with poison, and slip out again after resetting the lock button.

  From there Mrs. Alvarez and I went out into the rear yard. It was a cloudy day, with a biting wind off the Pacific—the kind of March day that made you wonder how much longer winter was going to hang around before spring finally kicked it out. The daffodils and some other flowers in narrow beds that ringed a small patch of lawn didn’t know spring was a slow arrival this year; they gave the yard some color under the gloomy sky. The beds and the lawn were neatly kept—Mrs. Alvarez’s brother Leonard’s doing, now that age and frail health had forced Margaret Abbott to give up gardening.

  The yard itself was enclosed by fences, no gate in any of them; neighboring houses crowded in close on both flanks. But beyond the back fence, which was less than six feet high and easily climbable, was a kids’ playground. I went across the lawn, around on the north side of the house, and found another trespasser’s delight: a brick path that was open all the way to the street.