Blowback nd-4

by Bill Pronzini

  Too damned much drinking going on around here, I thought, not for the first time. It's like pouring oil on burning waters.

  I walked to Harry's cabin, started to call out for him, and then heard the buzzing of an electric drill cut through the stillness from around where the shed was. Harry was inside there, working over part of an outboard engine clamped in a vise; but he shut the drill off quickly when he saw me. His expression had relief in it, the tentative kind-you think things are going to be okay but you're still not quite certain of it.

  He said, “Jerrold agreed to leave; the two of them are packing out in the morning.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Jerrold came back about an hour ago, and she hit him with it right away; then she came over to tell me.”

  “She say what his reaction was, exactly?”

  “Just that he seemed to think going back to L.A. was a good idea. She sounded a little surprised herself. I just hope he doesn't change his goddamn mind when he sobers up.”

  “You see him when he got back?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Talk to him?”

  “I tried, but it didn't do much good.”

  “How drunk was he?”

  “About as drunk as you can get and still function.”

  “Any idea where he was all day?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Where is he now? At their cabin?”

  “Sleeping, she says. Meaning passed out.”

  “Well, I'd like it better if they were going tonight.”

  “So would I, but I couldn't see pushing it.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “If he stays passed out, it won't matter.”

  “If,” I said. “Everything else all right?”

  “Quiet, yeah. Talesco's the only other one around.”

  “Talesco's the wrong one to be around,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She's been playing around with him, Harry.”

  He scowled. “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “How'd you find this out?”

  I explained about my conversation with Knox at The Pines Hotel, about the fight and what I had done with Knox afterward.

  “Christ,” he said. “I thought the two of them had more brains than that.”

  “Brains doesn't have much to do with a thing like this.”

  “Well, I ought to send them packing too.”

  “That's up to you.”

  “You going to talk to Talesco?”

  “Somebody's got to go in after Knox.”

  “I mean about Mrs. Jerrold.”

  “No. There's no point in it. And I don't think you should either, at least until after the Jerrolds are gone.”

  “I won't, don't worry.”

  He picked up the drill again, and I left him and went out and up along the path, past my cabin to the one which Talesco and Knox shared. The porch was deserted; I climbed up and knocked on the screen door, and pretty soon Talesco appeared and stared at me through the mesh with narrowed eyes. He did not look particularly happy to see me, and his voice was surly when he said, “What is it?”

  I was in no mood for game-playing. I took the keys to the Rambler wagon from my pocket and held them up where he could see them. “Recognize these?”

  He opened the door and came out onto the porch. His hair was mussed, as though he had been napping, and he was bare-chested; sweat matted the thick growth on his chest and stomach, put an oily gloss on the muscle-ridged skin of his shoulders. The bruise on his jaw had darkened so that it looked like a blue-black smudge.

  He said, “Where the hell did you get my keys?”

  “I took them off Knox in The Pines.”

  “Took them off him?”

  “That's right. He was drunk in the hotel bar and we had a little misunderstanding. I had to clip him.”

  Talesco said “You clipped Sam Knox?” as if he could not quite believe it.

  “Yeah. I also got him out of there and put him in the Rambler to sleep it off; otherwise he'd probably have been arrested. But I didn't care for the idea of him driving when he came around, so I took the keys.”

  You could almost see him revising his opinion of me; something that might have been respect came into his eyes. “What was the misunderstanding about?”

  “Suppose you ask Knox.”

  “He all right?”

  “He was the last time I saw him. If you want, I'll run you in so you can pick him up.”

  “Why should you bother to do that?”

  “I don't know,” I said. “You want the ride or not?”

  “Yeah. Let me get a shirt.”

  I waited while he did that, and then we went down and got into my car and I took it up onto the county road. Talesco did not say anything for a long while; he just sat against the passenger door, staring moodily through the windshield. Then, when we were a mile or so from the village, he turned and looked across at me.

  “Knox say anything to you before you had the fight?”

  “About what?”

  “About why he was drinking-about me.”

  “What do you think he might have said?”

  Talesco shook his head. “We had a punch-out too last night,” he said abruptly. “He's the one gave me these lumps.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  “Yeah. He kicked the crap out of me.”

  “You don't sound very bitter about it.”

  “I'm not. I deserved it.”

  “Oh?”

  He brooded for several seconds. “Man turns forty, he gets set in his ways, he doesn't know how to live his life any different and he doesn't like the idea of having to change it. You know what I mean?”

  I frowned slightly. “I suppose I do.”

  “Only something happens,” Talesco said, “and he gets himself in a situation where he's got to start living another way pretty soon. It scares him, thinking about it-and all of a sudden he doesn't know what the hell is right or wrong and maybe he does something stupid.”

  This was a new tack, and I could not quite tie it up with anything Knox had told me or anything I had surmised from the information. I said, “Like what?”

  “Like hurting people he cares about.”

  “Knox, you mean?”

  “Among others.” Talesco ran fingertips over the bruise on his jaw. “He's a hell of a guy, you know; we been friends and partners for twenty years. That's a long time, twenty years.”

  “Too long to let one mistake break it up,” I said.

  “I been thinking that all day,” he said.

  I decided to prod him a little. “Maybe you ought to think about this change in your life too.”

  “I already have, I've done too much goddamn thinking about it. I've got to see it through.”

  “At the expense of a friendship?”

  “No, because of it. And because I guess I want it that way after all.”

  He fell silent again, and I could not think of a way to draw him out short of asking him bluntly for an explanation. So I let it go; there was nothing to be gained in making waves.

  When we got into the village and onto the side street I made a U-turn so I could park directly behind the Rambler. Talesco and I stepped out and walked over to look inside. Knox showed no signs of having come around, except for a crust of vomit on his chin and a puddle of it on the floorboards. He was lying on his back, curled up with his knees against his chest.

  “Jesus,” Talesco said. He unlocked the driver's door and rolled down the windows to let some of the smell dissipate.

  I said, “If you want to follow me back, I'll give you a hand with him at the camp.”

  “No. You go ahead, I can handle him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I can handle him,” he said again.

  He seemed a little embarrassed now, as if seeing Knox had made the whole thing too painfully personal to share with an outsider; he dismis
sed me with a glance, went to the rear and opened the door there and fished out a blanket. I slid back into my car. When I swung out past the Rambler he was leaning inside, doing something with the blanket, and he did not look up.

  At Eden Lake, the sun was just settling down behind the trees on the western ridge and the sky in that direction had a smoky brick-colored flush. There was still no sign of a freshening breeze. A jay screamed monotonously somewhere within the camp, and you could hear the sporadic singing of crickets; nothing else disturbed the evening hush.

  Harry was no longer working inside the shed; there were lights on inside his cabin, but I did not feel much like company. I took a beer out of the cooler and up to my cabin, and it was stifling inside. Even the mosquitoes and the gnats were better than breathing that thick, stale air; I shed my shirt, turned on the porch light, and sat out there with my beer and one of the pulp magazines I'd brought.

  Night shadows had begun to deepen now, and the sky slowly lost its color. Moths fluttered in the orange porch light; a mosquito raised a welt on my left forearm and got itself crushed for the effort. The stillness was so intense that I found myself listening to it-and the more I listened and the darker it got, the more I felt a return of the edginess I had had last night. Unwarranted feeling maybe, but it would not go away.

  To occupy my mind, I opened the pulp to the lead novelette and made myself concentrate on the words. The story dealt with a fast-talking, bourbon-guzzling private cop hired by a sexy blonde to get back half a million dollars' worth of stolen jewels, and in the space of five thousand words the Eye committed an act of felonious breaking-and-entering, got slugged, threatened a janitor he believed to be concealing information, withheld evidence in a murder case, insulted two cops, and killed a hired gunman in a shoot-out. I began to get irritated with all of this nonsense, and when the hero left the dead gunman on a city street and went off without reporting the incident, I closed the magazine and put it aside.

  I had always gotten a laugh from the antics of pulp detectives, but lately they seemed more silly than engaging. Sexy blondes, withholding evidence, committing felonies, shooting hoods-what did any of that have to do with the verities of a private investigator's life? Verity, for Christ's sake, was a man with his head horribly crushed, and a puddle of vomit on the floorboards of a Rambler wagon, and a thing that might be malignant growing on one of your lungs.

  Funny. You grow up reading the pulps, and they fascinate you, you can't get enough of them; the heroes are all larger than life, all champions of the purest form of justice, all invincible. You'd like to emulate them in spirit, you think, and as a result it's only natural that you go into police work and stay with it diligently for twenty years, and then one day you realize for a number of reasons that you can't take it any more and you decide to open up a private practice. So you become, in the end, an Eye just like the fictional Eyes of your youth-a real-life Carmady/Dalmas/Marlowe, a living Spade, a breathing Race Williams, a walking Max Latin and Jim Bennett. You don't have any illusions about living their kind of fantasy lives, of course; you don't expect excitement and thrills and women throwing themselves helter-skelter into your bed. You're aloof from all that. You sit back and smile knowingly. You're superior, because you're dealing with reality, and for the most part reality is pretty dull. The only thing you have in common with your fictional counterparts is a profession and an outlook on life that has turned a little jaded by the things you've been forced to deal with.

  Everything goes along smoothly enough until, in your middle forties, you get yourself involved with a woman named Erika Coates. For the first time in your life you think that you might be in love, but of all the people in the world you should not fall in love with, it is Erika. She hates your profession, she considers it shabby and pointless-and worst of all, she begins to tell you that you're living and have been living a lie. Your world doesn't exist, she says, and never did; you're a kid who never outgrew an era twenty-five years dead, a kid dreaming about being a hero but without the guts or the flair to actually be one. You're a little boy, she says, and she can't compete with the obsessions of a little boy.

  And then, inevitably, she walks out of your life and leaves you alone again.

  But her words linger on, preying on your mind. You begin to ask yourself if maybe she was right, if maybe it all was and is a lie, a lifetime of hollow dreams and childish pursuits, a game without meaning, a fiction of your own creation. You refuse to believe it; you push it away from you and you go on believing as you have for all those years, you tell yourself you can go on that way forever.

  Only forever turns out to be tomorrow, and tomorrow might literally bring a sentence of death, and you start wondering again if she might have been right and it all really is such a useless, useless He…

  Abruptly I got up and went inside and made a thick sandwich I did not want from the last of the salami and rolls. I stood there eating it, washing down the mouthfuls with slugs of beer, listening to the silence.

  Thinking of Erika again for the first night in a long while.

  Four years since I had seen her. Where was she now? What was she doing? I had thought about calling her dozens of times during the first year, but I could never quite bring myself to it; and of course she had never called me. Once love dies, there is nothing but ghosts-and even ghosts fade away after enough long nights have passed.

  What would she say if she knew about the lesion on my lung? I-told-you-so? She had spent half of our time together trying to get me to give up smoking along with my profession; see a doctor about your cough, you're a middle-aged man and you're susceptible to diseases at your age. Yes-and now she would probably pity me. Nothing but pity, and I had enough of that of my own.

  Well, I didn't need Erika or anybody else. I had existed alone for one half of a century, fifty years that were not a goddamn lie, and I could die alone, too, and when I died When I died.

  Pulp detectives never die, I thought. They live on in the yellowing pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective and a hundred others, in anthologies and collections and on microfilm. As long as there are people who read, Spade and Dalmas and the rest of them are immortal. They'll go on for centuries shooting hoods and laying blondes and breaking laws with total impunity-and was that, Jesus, was that what I had been after all along?

  To become by emulation that which never dies?

  Dangerous thinking; I could not handle it, not now, not on the night before I was to learn the results of the sputum test. Go do something, damn it, I told myself. Patrol the camp, take a long swim to make yourself tired enough so you can sleep. Shut the mind down, let the body take over. Hang in there, you'll be all right.

  Just hang in there.

  I threw the last of the sandwich and the empty beer can into the sink, went into the bath alcove, put on my trunks and a shirt, and got out of there.

  Twelve

  There were lights on in Cabin Four, and the door was open and I could see Talesco moving around inside as I passed. I kept going without pausing. When I came out of the trees near Five, though, I slowed and then stopped because the cabin was dark and the door was closed, and I found myself thinking that I had not seen Bascomb anywhere around the camp since yesterday afternoon, that he had not been here when the deputy came this morning, and yet his Ford had been parked in the same spot through the day. Odd that he wasn't back by now, after dark, if he had gone off somewhere on foot.

  But then I shrugged and pushed the thought away. Harry had said Bascomb was something of a loner; maybe he had spent the day painting or sketching, and had decided to stay on to do a moonscape or commune with the stars or whatever. One of the dangers of getting yourself involved in the sordid little dramas of others was a tendency to let your imagination manufacture intrigues where none existed. I had always had too damned much imagination for my own good-and maybe I owed that to the pulps, too.

  The porch light was burning on the Jerrolds' cabin, but the interior was dark; the faint whispery strains of radi
o music drifted out through the screen door. So maybe Jerrold was still sleeping it off, and Mrs. Jerrold with him. And maybe it was going to be a nice peaceful night and everything would work out tomorrow the way Harry and I hoped it would.

  I carried that thought with me down to the lake and onto the beach-and lost it when I saw the two people sitting with their heads together like a couple of conspirators, or a couple of lovers, in the shadows up near the trees. There was a flash of white as one of them moved and then a deep lazy rumble of laughter from the other one. Mrs. Jerrold. And Todd Cody.

  Well goddamn it, I thought, and veered up toward them. They could see me clearly enough, silhouetted against the lake, but neither of them moved as I approached. I told myself to take it easy, keep things light and affable, but there was a knot of anger in my chest; I slid my hands into my pockets to keep them from clenching.

  They were sitting on a flat outcropping of rock, bare shoulders touching, and Mrs. Jerrold had her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms folded under her breasts so that they bunched up like a couple of half-peeled melons inside the white halter top of her bikini. Cody was in that skintight bathing suit of his, a towel draped around his neck. His expression was insolent, and the smile on his mouth had a fox-in-the-henhouse leer to it.

  Mrs. Jerrold's smile was more tentative. “The water's lovely,” she said. “We've just been in.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes. God, it's muggy, isn't it.”

  “Too muggy for anything but swimming.”

  She nodded, but Cody took it the way I meant it and let me hear his snotty laugh. “That's not necessarily so,” he said. “Look at that moon, that lake-it's a perfect night for making love.”

  “You're a romantic, Todd,” she said.

  “Sure. One of the last romantics in a world of cynical pragmatists.”

  I said nothing; I did not trust myself to say anything just then.