Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  So I returned to my cabin and changed into my trunks and then came right back down again. I passed Six both ways, in the open, but there was no sign of either of the Jerrolds and nothing but silence from inside.

  I had my swim, and the water cooled me off all right. But after five minutes and no more than a hundred yards of breaststroking, I started to have trouble with my breathing. I told myself it was just the coldness of the lake—and knew as I did so that that was only a part of it. A small part of it.

  It's not malignant, I thought. The lesion is not malignant.

  Behold, a pale horse, I thought, and his name that sat on him was Death …

  I swam in and dried off with a towel I had brought from the cabin. Then I sat there on a flat rock in the sun, feeding on the heat like Winslow, the old man in Chandler's Black Mask story “The Curtain,” and after a while the chill evaporated from between my shoulder blades. When it got to be too hot—nothing but extremes for me today, it seemed—I decided I would go over to Harry's cabin and help myself to another beer.

  While I was getting ready to do that the buzzing of an outboard became audible on the dry air, coming in from the north side of the lake. I looked over in that direction, and a minute or so later I could see the skiff and the two good-sized guys in it, Knox and Talesco. From the angle at which they were traveling, it looked as though they were headed for the pier. I rolled up my towel, put my shirt on, walked over to the pier, and went out along it to where the other skiffs were tied near the end. Then I plunked myself down in front of the outermost boat and tugged at the painter to bring the stern around and pretended an examination of the Johnson outboard while I watched the two of them approach.

  When they got close enough for the guy at the tiller to cut off the engine and let them drift in, I stood up and gave them a friendly wave. The one on the bow seat lifted a hand slightly in what might have been a salute, but the other one didn't make any sort of acknowledgment; neither of them looked particularly cheerful, or particularly curious about who I might be.

  “Hey,” I called, “need a hand?”

  “No thanks,” the guy on the bow seat said, and stood up on pretty good sea legs as the skiff drifted in. He caught hold of one of the pilings and held them off and steady; then he climbed out onto the pier, tied the painter through an iron side ring while the other guy tilted the outboard up out of the water and gathered up their gear—two complete bass outfits and a waterproof tote bag, the kind you use on fishing trips to ice down beer and keep sandwiches fresh. The one who had been at the tiller handed the gear up. They worked together silently and with a good deal of precision and economy, the way two people will who have known each other for some time.

  Both of them were big macho types all right, in their early forties and in fine condition, with flat stomachs and good pectoral development indicative of regular weight-lifting programs. Bow Seat had thick curly black hair and one of those fierce Prussian-general mustaches that was so black it shone with bluish highlights in the sun. Humor lines etched the corners of his mouth like hieroglyphics on a chunk of weathered stone. What I could see of Tiller's hair under his jungle helmet was thin and dark brown, and he had long bushy sideburns; his eyes were green, flecked with bits of yellow, and they were not telling you much about what went on behind them. This one looked as if he had not found anything humorous in a long time.

  I said to Bow Seat, “You have much luck?”

  “Some,” he answered.

  “Any particular spot?”

  “Nope. Lake's full of bass.”

  “I'm anxious to get a line out myself.”

  “You just come in today?”

  “Yeah. Couple of hours ago.”

  I introduced myself, and Bow Seat said he was Karl Talesco and Tiller was Sam Knox, and I shook hands with him. Knox came up out of the skiff and I gave him my hand too. He looked at it for three seconds, and I thought he was not going to take it; then he did, but for all of a heartbeat before he let loose. The green eyes did not look at me, or at Talesco. He said nothing at all.

  I sensed an undercurrent of something between the two of them, and I wondered if it could have anything to do with Angela Jerrold. I said, “You're the only other guests I've met so far. Except for Mrs. Jerrold, that is.” I gave them a cocksman's leer that I hoped did not look as phony as it felt. “She's some piece.”

  Nothing changed in Talesco's face; but Knox's eyes turned on me, unblinking, still not telling me anything. I had the same odd feeling you get when you're being stared at by a cat. “She's also married,” he said, and his voice sounded rusty, as if he had not used it much recently.

  “Well, I know that—”

  “If you got any ideas, you better forget them.”

  I put the leer away. “No ideas. Just commenting.”

  “Sure,” Talesco said. “Thing is, Mrs. Jerrold's old man is a flake. Jealous, very jealous. Sam was just giving you a little friendly warning—weren't you, Sam?”

  Knox stopped looking at me again. “Nobody wants trouble in a nice quiet place like Eden Lake.”

  “Hell,” I said, “I came up here to fish. That's all.”

  “You'll get plenty of that,” Talesco said. He smiled without much humor. “Play poker, by any chance?”

  “As often as I can.”

  “Well, maybe we can work up a game one of these nights.”

  “Any time. I'm in Cabin Three.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he gave me that little half-salute again. Then he and Knox bent and hoisted up their stuff and went away along the pier.

  I watched their backs all the way up into the trees and tried to analyze the meeting we had just had. But I could not get a handle on anything they had said, or on how they had acted, or on how they had reacted when I gave them the line about Angela Jerrold. It had been an odd conversation, and yet I was unable to define the oddness. The only thing I seemed to have found out in talking to them was that I cared for the situation even less now that I had met everyone involved.

  When I came down to Harry's cabin at six-thirty, he was dipping thin bass fillets in a mixture of beaten eggs and lemon juice and then rolling them through a platter of cornflake crumbs. I asked him if there was anything I could do, and he put me to work washing a chilled head of lettuce and breaking it up for a salad. While I did that, and while he began to melt and lightly season butter in a skillet, I told him about my encounters with the balance of his guests and the way I felt about matters—particularly Ray Jerrold.

  He said worriedly, “You think it's that bad, then?”

  “I'm afraid so, Harry.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Find a way to get rid of the Jerrolds, and fast.”

  “Yeah, but how? I told you about the money I owe him. He could just about push me under if he demanded immediate payment of that loan; I just can't afford to antagonize him.”

  “Couldn't you soft-talk him, make him realize the only way he can be sure of his wife is by taking her away from all this temptation?”

  “I tried that,” Harry said. He laid the breaded fillets into the butter in the skillet “He said the wolves were everywhere, one pack was no different than another, and he wasn't going to let any of them drive him away from a place he wanted to be.”

  “And right now he wants to be here.”

  “His words exactly.”

  “All right, what about talking to her?”

  “You mean trying to get her to take him home?”

  “It's worth a shot.”

  “What angle would I use?”

  “You're concerned about his health, you think he ought to see a doctor. Either that, or you give it to her straight—tell her he's so jealous you're afraid he might do something irrational, and you've got your other guests to think about.”

  “I don't know,” he said. “I've never been able to talk to her much; suppose I handle it wrong and she lets it get back to Jerrold? He wouldn't like it if he found out I went behind his bac
k. Besides, if she is banging Cody or one of the others, why the hell should she leave on my request? She knows about the loan; she could laugh in my face and there wouldn't be a damned thing I could say or do.”

  “I think you're going to have to risk it, Harry.”

  “I wish to Christ there was another way.”

  “Only one I can see is getting rid of everybody else.”

  “I'd be cutting my own throat that way too.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “What if I can't get her to see it my way? Then what?”

  “Why don't we cross that bridge if we come to it.”

  He stared down into the skillet, brooding. “I don't want him hurting somebody in my camp, but I don't want to lose the camp either. This place is my whole life, buddy.”

  I said nothing; there was nothing to say. I sympathized with him, and yet I felt none of the sense of involvement in his problem that I might have had a week ago. It was a sticky situation, and it could become tragic, but Harry would survive it all right; even if he lost the camp he would survive it. This place was not his whole life. That had been a figure of speech, meaningless at the gut level, because no place was anyone's whole life. Life was the continuing ability to function—physical and mental health. No more, no less.

  At length he said heavily, “Okay. Okay, you're right I'll talk to her.”

  Neither of us seemed to want any more conversation after that, and we finished making supper in silence. The buttery aroma of the frying bass filled the cabin, made me ravenous; I had not eaten anything at all today. So when we finally sat down I put away four of the fillets and two helpings of salad and five slices of French bread and two cans of beer. More than I should have eaten, or even wanted to eat. The past week, since Friday, I seemed either to want nothing at all or to stuff myself compulsively when I did feel hungry. Whatever that meant psychologically, I did not care enough to pursue an answer.

  After we had cleaned up the dishes—Harry had barely touched his own food—we went out on the front porch. He fired up one of the thin brown cigars he liked, and I looked away and breathed through my mouth so that I couldn't smell any of the smoke. The sun had slipped down almost to the tops of the pines on the western ridges, and the sky around it was whitish and streaked in three or four shades of red, like a piece of linen stained with wine and lipstick and blood. The glassine surface of the lake looked as though it were on fire. It was a little cooler now, although there was still no breeze; unless the temperature dropped another five to ten degrees, sleeping was going to be uncomfortable tonight.

  We had been there five minutes or so when Walt Bascomb put in an appearance. He saw us on the porch as he came past, but he did not say anything to either of us; he just went straight over to the parking circle and got into the '72 Ford. I noticed then that Cody had not returned with his Italian sports job, and that the new Cadillac was also absent.

  As Bascomb took the Ford up onto the county road, I said to Harry, “That Caddy I saw when I came in—does it belong to the Jerrolds?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “Well, it's gone now, and I'm wondering if they went out together or one of them alone. He wasn't in much condition for driving, but I'd like it better if he went by himself. If she went, and stays out late, one of us ought to be around to check up when she gets back.”

  He nodded grimly. “We could take a walk over to their cabin now and see if anybody's home.”

  “That's probably a good idea. If Mrs. Jerrold is there alone, I'll pull an excuse to leave the two of you together and you can get that talk over with.”

  But when we got over to Six, there was nothing for either of us to do. The place was deserted.

  Harry said as we started back to the lake, “This whole thing is playing hell with my nerves.”

  “It'll work out,” I said.

  “I'm trying to believe that. Listen, I don't feel like sitting around again, waiting. What do you say we take one of the skiffs for a run around the lake?”

  “Sure,” I said, “I'm for that.”

  We went out onto the pier and climbed down into a skiff, Harry taking the tiller. I untied the painter and got the bow turned and pushed us out while he cranked up the outboard. Then I sat facing him on the bow seat, and we planed away to the north at quarter speed, running in close to shore.

  It was the time of night that is especially fine in mountain country like this. The air was cooler yet on the water—the deep stillness broken only by the hum of the outboard and the occasional buzz of a mosquito. Bass jumped desultorily near the rule grass shoreward; the red colorations had faded out of the sky and been replaced by the kind of peach-hued glow that presages another hot one for tomorrow; night shadows gathered in the denser sections of forest. The air smelled of pine resin and cold fresh water and, faintly, gasoline.

  I could feel myself relaxing somewhat as we followed the rim of the lake, north to northwest to west, headed directly toward the falling lip of the sun like moths toward the dying flame of a candle. I put my hand over the side and let it drag through the water and kick up spray, the way kids do. Harry gave me a wan smile, and I gave one back to him, and I thought then of a night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Harry and me and two nurses from Hickam Field out on a borrowed sailboat off Diamond Head a few days after the Japanese surrender, drunk on warm beer and the end of the war, capsizing when a stiff breeze came up and then getting rescued by a Navy patrol boat—and I mentioned all of that, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. He laughed and nodded, and we began to jog our memories aloud, and for a few short minutes it was as if both of us were back in our twenties, those good carefree postwar years.

  Only then, suddenly, Harry stopped talking in mid-sentence and jerked a little on his seat and stared past my left shoulder at something behind and above me. He said “Jesus Christ!” and the past lost itself again and I turned on my seat to follow the direction of his gaze, saw instantly what he had seen.

  It was a car—no, a van, a big one—and it was up on the bluff that rose off the southwest shore, maybe five hundred yards from where we were in the skiff; but not just on the bluff, coming forward and off the damned thing, coming right off the edge as I looked and sailing out straight as an arrow until its back wheels cleared the earth and then dipping, nose slanting down, falling at a forty-five-degree angle. The front bumper hit the hard bare slope and turned the machine in a loose somersault, and a second later the sound of impact reverberated on the dusky air; then the van crashed down on its top on the water and rule grass at the base of the bluff, spray geysering up twenty feet or more, the sound of that impact carrying hollowly across the lake. Finally it bobbed in the disturbed lake and tilted over on its passenger side and floated there like a badly wounded animal.

  Even before the last echoes of the crash died away, Harry had the outboard open full-throttle and we were skimming and bouncing toward the van. I grabbed onto the skiff's gunwales with both hands, glanced back at him and saw his mouth set hard, the same astonishment in his eyes that must have been in mine. The van kept rocking gently back and forth in the swells, but the water looked too shallow at that point for there to be any immediate danger of it sinking. It was floating nearly upright now, and as we came in on it I could see that there was printing on its wet white body.

  The printing said Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets: it was the same van beside which I had parked in The Pines that afternoon.

  Harry brought the skiff up to it on an angle across the driver's door, cutting power, throttling into reverse to hold us steady. I stood up with my feet spread wide for balance and reached out and caught onto the door handle. When I tugged down on it, nothing happened; it was jam-locked from the fall. The window was rolled up, too, and I had to lean my body forward, bracing it against the door, to get a look inside.

  What I saw put tracers of cold between my shoulder blades. There was one person inside the cab—a small nut-brown man with black hair that was
dyed now a bright ugly crimson along the top of his skull. He was lying down on the floorboards, wedged between the steering column and the seat, and pressed in against his left shoulder was the upper half of an iron lug wrench.

  Behind me Harry said, “Anybody in there?”

  “Yeah, one guy.”

  “Can we get him out?”

  “Door's jammed. But it doesn't matter.”

  “Why doesn't it?”

  “Because he's dead,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Harry said. “You sure?”

  “I'm sure.” And I was thinking that both of us had been half-expecting violence to break loose at any time here in the bucolic quiet of Eden Lake; had been as prepared for it as anybody ever is. But neither of us had been prepared for it to come like this, from a totally unexpected, unrelated source, and in a way even more brutal than any we might have anticipated.

  “He was dead before the van went off that bluff up there,” I said. “Somebody caved in his head with a lug wrench.”

  Five

  We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.

  I said, “Where does that trail lead?”

  “Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”

  “Used much?”

  “Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”

  “But not around this time of day.”

  “Not usually, no.”

  “So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”

  “If he isn't still around here somewhere.”

  “Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”

  “What the hell could it be about?”

  I shook my head.