Blowback nd-4

by Bill Pronzini

  I said, “You'd better take the skiff back and report this to the county sheriff.”

  “What about you?”

  “I'll stay here and keep watch.”

  “You sure? It'll take a couple of hours.”

  “I don't mind if you don't.”

  “Whatever you say, buddy.”

  I went downslope with him and held the skiff while he got in, and then shoved it off. When he jerked the outboard to life, mosquitoes and gnats gliding through the heavy stillness seemed to dart away in all directions, like shards of the suddenly broken quiet. I stood at the water's edge and watched until he had the skiff turned and the throttle opened up; then I sat down in the grass to wait and think a little.

  The dead man in the van, and the Oriental rug angle, and the peacock feather, made the whole thing a can of worms-the county sheriff's, not mine or Harry's. Guesswork wouldn't buy me anything, then, and I had enough on my mind as it was: the results of the sputum test, and Harry's troubles at the camp. The thing to do was to stay aloof from what had happened here.

  Sure.

  At the base of the bluff, fifty yards away, the van sat motionless among the rule reeds, canted forward slightly onto its passenger side; all four wheels were submerged. The white body gleamed cold and pale in the gathering darkness.

  Like marble, I thought. Marble slab, marble crypt.

  A feeling of uneasiness began to creep over me, and it had nothing much to do with sitting alone in the dark. I could not stop thinking about the small nut-brown man lying over there with the top of his head shattered; in my mind I could still see his face, the staring eyes and the waxy features void of life force.

  I had seen death before, too much of it-kids with their bodies torn open and limbs blown off by grenades and mortar shells, a woman with forty-two stab wounds in her face and torso, the living room of a house in San Francisco's Sunset District in which a man had gone berserk and taken an axe to his wife and family. I had never become immune to the sight of it, as some cops did-that was one of the reasons why I had finally resigned from the force-but I had learned how to block it out of my mind after a while, how to keep my attitude totally objective. Death was an abstract, death was a natural phenomenon, death was inevitable; accept it, and don't think about it because it might just interfere with the living of your life. Sound psychology, the only kind that made any sense for a man in my profession.

  Only now that I was in its presence again, touched by it, I could not seem to erect the old objective barrier. Death had become personal, an immediate threat, a specter with which I had to deal directly. In what was left of the small nut-brown man I saw myself in a few months, or at best a few years, lying dead somewhere, nothing but an empty shell that had once contained a man.

  And what of the soul?

  All of us are conditioned from childhood to believe that the souls of the righteous will live on in an afterlife and be given immortality in a corner of some inexplicable non-place called heaven. So you go along for fifty years, calling yourself a Christian even though you don't much hold with organized religion, and you hide behind your objectivity, and you tell yourself that when your time comes you'll be ready. But then the time sneaks up on you, looms suddenly and dismayingly imminent, and you realize you're not ready at all-nor maybe will you ever be ready-because when you come face to face with your own mortality your beliefs no longer seem so simple and strong and certain.

  Without the unshakable faith of the True Believer, you begin to wonder. And the prospect of a disembodied, unaware drifting through eternity becomes somehow more haunting and even less appealing than the other alternative-that death is the end, and when you die your soul dies with you. Nothingness is comprehensible; every time you go to sleep you experience some of what nothingness is like. But how can you begin to comprehend the mystical concepts and rewards of the Judeo-Christian ethic?

  The uneasiness grew stronger, and I stood up and put my back to the van and walked up onto the bluff again. The sky seemed immense, sentient, an oracle that knew but would never reveal the answers to life and death and infinity. I paced back and forth in the warm darkness, imagining the passage of seconds and minutes, feeling small and alone.

  And afraid.

  It was two hours and fifteen minutes before Harry returned with the county authorities. I heard them out on the fire road, and I went over onto the trail to meet them when they appeared through the trees, flashlights cutting away at the heavy shadows. The man in charge was the county sheriff, a thin gray man in a khaki uniform whose name was Cloudman. With him were a couple of deputies and the county coroner and a guy in plain clothes carrying a camera and a satchel of forensic equipment.

  I gave Cloudman my name, and he asked me a couple of polite questions to corroborate what Harry had told him, and then they all went down to the base of the bluff to have a look at the van and the dead man inside. When they came back up, grim-faced, Cloudman asked Harry and me to wait on the fire road.

  We did that, leaning against the side of a cruiser with official markings; a plain blue sedan sat there too, along with an ambulance and a tow truck outfitted with a good-sized winch and two small searchlights. The drivers of the ambulance and the tow truck stood talking in low voices nearby, not paying any attention to us. I wanted a cigarette pretty badly, and I noticed one of them lighting up every now and then; I had to force myself not to go over and ask to bum one.

  After a while one of the deputies appeared and told the tow-truck guy that they were ready for him. He took the truck along the trail and out of sight, and pretty soon I could hear the sound of the winch. Bright whitish light from the searchlamps back-lit the screen of trees, silvered their upper boughs so that they looked frosted.

  Harry said, “This on top of the mess at the camp-Christ.”

  “Everything okay when you got back with the skiff?”

  “Seemed to be. I didn't see anybody around.”

  “The Jerrolds' Caddy there?”

  “No. But I still don't like being away like this.”

  “I guess I don't either.”

  “How much longer, you think?”

  “Depends. Not too long, probably.”

  The winch shut down after ten minutes, and there was ten minutes of silence broken only by the low fiddling of crickets, and then it started up again. Shortly after that, Cloudman came out of the woods and signaled to the ambulance driver. When the ambulance had vanished along the trail, he walked over to where Harry and I were at the cruiser.

  “Looks like murder, all right,” he said. Even though he was somewhere in his forties, he had a reedy voice with a catch in it now and then, like a kid whose voice is just starting to change at puberty; it made him seem deceptively less authoritative than he was. “Skull crushed with a tire iron, and no way it could have happened accidentally.”

  Harry and I had nothing to say.

  Cloudman took his hat off and dug at his own scalp with a fingernail, brought the finger down and squinted at it in the darkness, then wiped it on his trousers. “Victim's name is Vahram Terzian, resident of San Jose,” he said. “Armenian, I guess. Either of you know him or ever see him before?”

  Harry said, “No.”

  I said, “His van was parked in front of the General Store in The Pines this afternoon.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around three.”

  “You see any sign of Terzian?”

  “I'm afraid not.”

  Cloudman said to Harry, “You know anybody in the area has an interest in Oriental rugs, Mr. Burroughs?”

  “No, nobody.”

  “Same goes for the people staying at your fishing camp, I take it.”

  Harry nodded.

  “Uh-huh. Well, let's see now,” Cloudman said. “You didn't notice anyone on the bluff either before or after the van went off, that right?”

  “That's right, yes.”

  “Nor hear the sound of another car?”

  “No.”

&n
bsp; “You touch anything when you came up to have a look?”

  I said, “Nothing. But we found a peacock feather on the trail over there; it seemed out of place in these surroundings.”

  “I thought so myself. No wild peacocks around here that I ever heard of.”

  “You find anything else that might help?” Harry asked.

  “Too early to tell.” Which meant they hadn't.

  I said, “Was there anything in the back of the van?”

  “Nope. Empty.”

  “Then it might be a hijacking.”

  “Rugs and carpets?”

  “Some Orientals can be pretty valuable.”

  “I suppose so,” Cloudman said noncommittally. He studied me for a moment. “Hope you don't mind, but I'll have to see some identification. For my report, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  I got my wallet out and thought about letting him see just my driver's license; but he would probably still ask me what I did for a living, if Harry hadn't already told him. So I gave him the photostat of my investigator's license and watched while he clicked on his flashlight and read it in the beam. Behind the whitish glow, his thin face told me nothing at all of what he was thinking.

  When he finished reading the license, he copied information from it into a notebook that he dug out of his jacket pocket. Then he put the notebook and his pen away and gave the photostat back to me. “So you're a private eye,” he said, and there was nothing in his tone, either, that gave me any idea of his reaction to the fact.

  “Private detective, yes.”

  “Like one of those TV boys, huh?”

  “Not hardly. I've never been in a car chase in my life.”

  He liked that: it got me a faint smile. “We don't get many private eyes up here. But then, we don't get many Armenian rug peddlers or many homicides either. Mr. Burroughs tells me you're a guest at his camp.”

  “Right. I just got in today.”

  “Business or pleasure bring you up from Frisco?”

  “Pleasure. Harry and I are old friends.”

  “We were in the South Pacific together during World War II,” Harry said.

  “That so? I tried to enlist for Korea in '49, but they wouldn't take me. Asthma. Hell of a thing, asthma. Still bothers me when the weather turns cool.” He sighed. “Well, I guess that's about all for now. Getting pretty late. I'll have one of the deputies run you back to The Pines.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Couple of other things tomorrow, though,” Cloudman said. “One is that I'll have to send a deputy around early in the morning-talk to your guests, see if any of them might have seen something.”

  Harry looked pained.

  “Can't be helped,” Cloudman said. “You're the only people around here for five miles.”

  “He understands,” I said. “No problem.”

  “Good. Second thing, I'd appreciate it if you fellas would drop over to the courthouse in Sonora sometime after lunch. I'll have statements by then that'll need your signatures.”

  “Well be there.”

  He nodded and started to turn away; paused, looked at me again, and said as though in afterthought, “You don't happen to pack a gun, do you?”

  “No. It's against the law in California for a private citizen to carry a concealed weapon.”

  He nodded again, this time in a satisfied way, and let me see another faint smile. “Never been in a car chase, that's pretty good,” he said. “I got to remember that.” He lifted his hand and then went off toward the trail and disappeared into the woods.

  Harry said, “You handled that like a politician, buddy.”

  “I've had practice. Cloudman seems to be a decent sort, and plenty sharp; you don't buy anything but problems playing games with a man like that.”

  “Well, thanks for not saying anything about the trouble at the camp. It would only have complicated things even more.”

  “I'd have told him if it was a police matter,” I said. “Or if I thought it had any connection with what happened to Terzian.”

  “My God, there's no chance of that.”

  “No, I don't see how there could be.”

  “Just no chance of it,” he said again, as if to reassure himself. Then, plaintively, “Haven't I got enough on my head without the police coming around?”

  I knew that he was worrying about the deputy Cloudman would send out in the morning, having the people at the camp stirred up by questions about a murder, maybe losing a couple of them-and the rental revenue he needed-because they didn't like the idea of continuing their vacations in a place where a homicide had occurred and was being investigated. I said, “There's nothing to be done about it, Harry. It's police routine and out of our hands.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He rubbed a hand across his face. “Christ, what next?”

  “Nothing next,” I said. “Nothing else is going to happen.”

  He looked at me as if he did not quite believe that.

  And I wondered if I quite believed it myself…

  Six

  It was after one when we got back to the camp. The brown Caddy was there, and so were the rest of the cars, and there was nobody out and around. The only visible light came from pole lanterns Harry kept burning near the pier and in back by the shed and at the paths to the cabins.

  We took a turn around the camp, just to make sure everything was as peaceful as it seemed. All of the cabins were dark-everybody was presumably in bed, asleep. So we called it a night in front of Number Three, and I went inside and had a shower and did not bother to brush my teeth.

  I lay in the darkness and tried to sleep, but it was stifling in there. I had brought a couple of pulp magazines with me, and after a while I turned on the lamp and dug one out, a 1944 Dime Detective that I had just gotten in trade with another collector in Alabama, and started to read a story by Robert Martin. No good, I went over two pages without retaining a word of it. I shut off the light again and stared up at the ceiling and marinated in my own sweat, wide awake.

  The image of Vahram Terzian-the image of death-lay vivid in my mind.

  You better come to terms with it pretty soon, guy, I thought. Otherwise you're going to wind up no damned good to anybody, least of all yourself.

  But how? How do you come to terms with your own mortality?

  Time passed emptily. At length my thoughts turned muzzy and the image faded and I slept a little. And dreamed things that had no sense and no continuity. And woke up streaming perspiration, nerves bunched and jangling. And slept again, and dreamed again, and woke up again, and slept and woke up…

  At five-thirty I gave it up and got out of bed and went into the bath alcove. I had not slept much since Friday and it was beginning to show; the face that stared back at me in the mirror had pockets under the eyes and deep clefts like a pair of parentheses at the corners of the mouth and a lot of furry gray beard stubble that gave the cheeks a look of cracked leather spotted with mold. Nice metaphor. I did not like looking at the face, and I shaved quickly and turned out of there.

  It was still dark outside, but songbirds had already begun to herald the approaching dawn, Monday morning, I thought. And tomorrow-Revelation Tuesday.

  I put a pan of bottled water on the hot plate, spooned instant coffee into a mug, and looked into the sack of groceries I had bought yesterday in The Pines. Salami and hard rolls that had already dried out from the heat. I had no particular appetite, but when the coffee was ready I made two sandwiches anyway and sat eating them at the table in my underwear. Bachelor's breakfast, full of nutrition. Who needs eggs and packaged cereals when you can start the day with Italian deli?

  When I was finished I pulled on a pair of slacks and got my fishing gear together and went outside, down to the lake. Dawn was breaking by then, and the sky was flushed a deep magenta color. There was an aura of primitive beauty to the smooth water, to the green-black foothills and mountains that surrounded it. I stopped in the verge of the trees and stood taking it in, thinking that there w
as nothing quite so captivating-so utterly peaceful-as an isolated mountain lake at dawn. You could imagine a sense of oneness with the land when you saw it like this, a sense of communion with the vanished past; and you could imagine, too, if only for a little while, that the nighttime visions of death and nihilism were as insubstantial as a mirage.

  I walked onto the rocky beach at the inlet; Mrs. Jerrold was standing alone at the far end, drying herself with a big yellow beach towel. She wore a white two-piece bathing suit and a white rubber bathing cap with yellow daisies on it; her skin glistened silkily in the ruddy morning light. She saw me at the same time, and flashed a smile and waved. I went over to her.

  “Hi,” she said. “Going to try your luck?”

  “Yep. How's the water?”

  “Cold. Wakes you up in a hurry.”

  “I'll bet.”

  She took off the cap and shook her head and ran her fingers through the tousled layers of red hair. She was something in that bathing suit; and yet the absence of make-up made her look young and fresh and wholesome, like somebody's kid sister. Some kid sister-Eve in the Garden was more to the point.

  She said, “You missed all the excitement last night.”

  “Excitement?”

  “Across the lake. Searchlights and everything. We looked through Karl's binoculars, and there were a lot of policemen and a tow truck and an ambulance on that bluff over there.” She pointed. “They were pulling up a car that had gone into the lake.”

  “Karl?” I said.

  “Karl Talesco. He's another guest.”

  “I've met him, yeah.”

  “I hope nobody was seriously hurt,” she said.

  I nodded; I did not want to get into it with her. I let a few seconds go by, and then I said, “How's your husband today?”

  Her eyes clouded and her mouth pulled into a wry frown. “Still sleeping off his drunk, I suppose,” she said. “He came back positively boiled last night.”