Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  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.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.” She came a step closer and touched my arm, let her fingers rest there. It seemed to be the kind of natural, meaningless gesture that certain people make when they're about to express something of a personal nature; but even though her fingers were cold and light on my skin, I could feel a sudden stirring in my loins. Some women do that to you; it's like static electricity. “I think I ought to apologize for the way he acted yesterday. He's such a jealous fool when he drinks.”

  “I'd already forgotten about it,” I lied.

  “Well, it was embarrassing.”

  “Does he usually drink so much?”

  “He used to be able to handle it in moderation,” she said. “But the past few months he's been going at it pretty heavily.”

  “How come?”

  “Overwork,” she said. “He's got himself wound up so tightly with his own ambition that liquor is the only way he can relax—or so he thinks. What it really does is wind him up even tighter. I mean, he never used to have these jealous rages and now he flies into one if another man even looks at me twice. It worries me sometimes.”

  “Well,” I said carefully, “maybe he ought to see a doctor.”

  “Not Ray; he hates doctors. And he won't touch tranquilizers or anything like that. According to him, no red-blooded American needs to take dope.” She smiled sardonically. “I thought this vacation would do him some good, but it hasn't seemed to so far. I honestly don't know what to do.”

  Yeah, I thought, and shifted position slightly so that her fingers slid away from my arm. I said, “Have you seen Harry this morning?”

  “No, I haven't seen anyone but you since I came down for my—Oh. Speak of someone and he appears.”

  She was looking past me, and I turned and saw Harry approaching from the direction of his cabin. He gave us a falsely cheerful smile as he came up. He looked a little puffy under the eyes; he had not slept much either during the night.

  We made small talk for half a minute. Then, because I knew Harry had come over to have his talk with Mrs. Jerrold and wanted to get it done with before anybody else came along, I said, “Well, I'd better get moving. I want to put a line out before sunrise.”

  “Try that clover-shaped patch of tules on the north shore,” he said. “Lots of bass in there.”

  “I'll do that.”

  “Talk to you a little later?”

  “Sure. I probably won't stay out long.”

  He nodded, and I said something by way of parting to Mrs. Jerrold, and then I left them and went out onto the pier. One of the skiffs was gone; I fired up a second one, swung it in a wide turn past the beach. They were standing in the same place, talking earnestly, Harry making fidgety gestures with one hand. Neither of them glanced out at me.

  Fifty yards from the rule patch Harry had mentioned, I shut the outboard down and let the skiff drift languidly on the still water. It took me ten minutes to get my rod unwrapped and screwed together, the reel fitted on and a fly hook tied in place—and the first cast I made was poor enough to get the line snarled in the reeds, so that it took me another fifteen minutes to free it and replace the lost fly. When I finally did get a line out, nothing happened: no bites, not even a nibble.

  I reeled in for another cast, but nothing came out of that one either. Hell with it; I tucked the rod between my knees and left it there. I was not enjoying myself much because I could not relax, could not get into the spirit of it. Too many things running around inside my head, and for the first time in my life, a vague distaste for fishing: what kind of pleasure was there in ripping up the mouth of a bass with a sharp hook, killing a living thing solely for sport? Everything had a right to live, didn't it, whether it was a fish or a man?

  The sun came up and seemed to climb rapidly, bringing more heat and glaring refractions of light, robbing the air of its early-morning moistness. It was going to be even hotter today than it had been yesterday. Once, after forty-five minutes or so, I heard the buzzing hum of another outboard, saw the second skiff gliding in distantly toward the pier; there was one man in it, but I could not tell who it was. Otherwise, I was alone in absolute quiet.

  At the end of an hour I still had not had a bite. I told myself that was just as well, and reeled in and broke the gear down again and cranked up the engine to head back. The excursion had been a bust; I hoped that was not how it had worked out for Harry.

  Both he and Mrs. Jerrold were gone from the beach when I came in. I did not see anybody at all. Once I had the skiff tied up I went over to Harry's cabin, started up the porch, and then changed direction when I heard the sound of running water. It was coming from around back, where there was a cement laundry tray and a butcher's block on a wooden platform that Harry provided for fish-cleaning purposes.

  The man working there was Karl Talesco. He was using a saw-bladed knife to bone the last of three bigmouth bass, each of them about two pounds, but he was doing it in a savage and methodical way, as if the fish were a hated enemy. Blood and scales spotted the block and his hands and the front of his white T-shirt. His lips were pulled in against his teeth and the cords in his neck bulged with tension each time he hacked down with the knife.

  He did not notice me until I came within a couple of feet of him. Then he jerked slightly, snapped his head around, and scowled at me. Beads of sweat clung to his Prussian mustache; his eyes had a hard glazed look, like those on the bass heads that stared up from inside the sink.

  “Christ,” he said. “You walk quiet for a big man.”

  I said nothing. I was staring at the fresh yellowish bruise along his left jaw and the wide burnlike scrape on the opposite cheek.

  “Don't bother asking,” Talesco said. He put the knife down, carefully, and shook himself a little, the way weight lifters do to relax themselves. “It's none of your business.”

  “Sure. Harry around?”

  “He went somewhere with the kid, Cody.”

  “Where, do you know?”

  “No.”

  He looked away from me and started cleaning up after himself. Man in a hurry now—the last thing he seemed to want was my kind of company. He wrapped the bass fillets in one sheet of newspaper, the heads and tails and bones in another. When the sink was empty, he held his hands under the tap for all of five seconds before shutting off the water and reaching for the tray rack. Only
there were no towels there; the rack was empty.

  “Shit,” he said. He dried his hands on his Levis.

  I said, “How about a poker game tonight?”

  “Sorry. I've got other plans.”

  “They include your friend Knox?”

  That got me a fast sharp look. “No,” he said.

  “Maybe you could ask him if he'd like to play—”

  “Ask him yourself,” Talesco said, and caught up the newspaper bundles and stalked past me without a parting word or gesture.

  I stood looking after him as he went up onto the path beyond the shed. He had obviously been in a fight, and I would have given odds that Knox had been the other one involved. Had the cause of it been Angela Jerrold? Women and money were about the only things that would make two close friends start banging each other around. Jealousy, then? Both wanting her, but only one getting next to her? Then which one? Or was it just one after her, maybe scoring and maybe only trying to, and the other had decided to knock some sense into him? But again, which was which?

  Well, any way you looked at it, it spelled more trouble. This thing just seemed to keep on building, degree by degree. Both the Jerrolds had to be gotten away from here as quickly as possible, even if it meant jeopardizing Harry's position on the five-thousand-dollar loan—there just wasn't any other way. The longer we waited, the worse it was likely to get.

  Seven

  The sky was a glistening blue now, the rising sun laying veins of raw gold across the lake, the odor of dust beginning to permeate the air. My mouth and throat felt abruptly dry. I had not been bothered by the coughing since yesterday, but it started up again, thin and raspy, as I came back along the side of the cabin. I spat out a glob of shiny gray phlegm, scuffed it into the earth with my shoe. The taste of it lingered bitterly even after the coughing subsided.

  To get rid of the taste, I went to the Coca-Cola cooler and swung the lid up—but there was no beer left, nothing except half a dozen cans of soda pop. I picked up one of them and looked at the label. It said the contents were an “imitation citrus flavored dietary artificially sweetened carbonated beverage.” I decided I wasn't that desperate and put the can back and sucked on a piece of ice instead.

  Then I remembered that there were several stacked cases of Schlitz inside the shed; I got one of those and carried it out and began loading up the cooler while I waited for Harry to return. I was just putting away the last of the cans when Ray Jerrold came walking into view along the edge of the lake.

  He was wearing a pair of white seersucker walking shorts and a flowered silk sport shirt. He had his head tilted down and I could not see any of his face under his fisherman's hat. His stride was quick and jerky; one hand made little fluttery gestures in front of him, as if punctuating a conversation only he could hear.

  It seemed like a good idea to get a close-up look at him, an idea of his mental state today, so I stepped away from the cooler and moved toward him at an angle, hurrying a little. He did not seem to notice me until I called out, making my voice friendly and relaxed, “Mr. Jerrold—you got a second?”

  He stopped then and swung his head around. When I reached him I saw that his eyes had thinned to narrow slits, like embrasures on the tight oval of his face—either in reaction to the sight of me or to the harsh glare of the sun, I could not tell which. Otherwise he looked no better and no worse than he had yesterday, although I could not see enough of his eyes behind those slits to judge how much of the wildness might be there.

  He said “What do you want?” in a voice that was hoarse and flat. The odor of gin was sour on his breath, but not stale. He had been at it again today, early as it was.

  “Well, I was just wondering if you're planning to go off somewhere this morning.”

  “What I'm planning to do is my own business.”

  “Sure,” I said carefully. “Only there was some kind of accident across the lake last night, and I understand the police will be sending someone around to talk to all of us here.”

  That got me a long, silent stare. Then: “What kind of accident?”

  “I'm not sure. But a man was killed.”

  “I don't know anything about it.”

  “I guess none of us do,” I said. “I just thought you might want to know about—”

  “I've got things to do,” he said, “the hell with the police.”

  “They'll still want to talk to you, though.”

  “Then they can talk to me later,” Jerrold said, and pivoted away from me and went to where the Cadillac was parked and got into it. He hit the accelerator hard enough backing up to slew the Caddy around in a wide half-circle, billowing clouds of dust, nearly slamming it into the side of Bascomb's Ford. He got it braked just in time, shifted into a forward gear. The Caddy bucked, skidded slightly, came back on a point, and sailed up onto the road in a haze of reddish powder and back-spun pebbles. By the time it vanished into the screening trees, the chrome of its rear bumper glinting sharp reflections of sunlight, he had the speed up to forty and climbing.

  I stood for a moment, watching dust particles settle like flakes of gold in the glare. Then I shook my head and went over to Harry's porch and sat on the steps, worrying Jerrold around in my mind, not liking the impression I had just gotten of him.

  It was another ten minutes before Harry showed up, and he at least did not appear as grim as he had earlier. He gave me a thin smile and leaned against the railing and took off his fatigue cap; his hands were grimy with dirt and flecks of rust.

  “You been back long, buddy?” he asked.

  “A while.”

  “Yeah, well, I'd have been here when you came in except for that bastard Cody. One of the pipes in his cabin sprung a leak and he had a little water on the floor when he woke up. I had to fix it right away to shut him up and get him off my back.”

  I said, “How did it go with Mrs. Jerrold?”

  “Well,” he said, “she went for it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I laid it on the line, as nicely as I could, and she agreed right away that he's getting out of hand. She wasn't admitting any guilt on her part, but I guess it doesn't matter now whether she's been cheating on him or not. The main thing is, she's going to talk to him and get him to take her home either tonight or first thing in the morning.”

  “How sure was she of convincing him?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “I hope it's going to be that easy,” I said.

  “You think he might not listen to her?”

  “Might not, or didn't,” I said. “He took out of here a few minutes ago, and he wasn't in a good mood, or in a good condition either. He'd been into the gin already this morning.”

  “Christ.”

  “If he refuses to leave,” I said, “we'll have to find another way, even if it means ordering him out or putting him out bodily.”

  Harry winced but did not say anything. I could tell he was brooding about the five-thousand-dollar loan.

  “Got to be done, if it comes to that. The tension around here is getting out of hand.” I told him about Talesco and the fight he'd obviously been in.

  “Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Mrs. Jerrold,” he said, but he sounded grim again.

  “Maybe. But I don't like the odds.”

  He scraped a hand across his face. “Fight explains one thing, anyway—what I found this morning.”

  “Found?”

  “Over on the edge of the parking area. It's been bothering me ever since, but this is the first chance I've had to mention it.”

  He reached into the back pocket of his khakis, came out with a crumpled piece of cloth and handed it over to me. When I shook it open I saw that it was a plain man's handkerchief, once white but heavily stained now with those familiar red-brown streaks that can only be dried blood.

  “One of them must have used it after the fight and then lost it,” he said.

  I nodded and said “Yeah” and gave it back to him. He stood staring at it, g
nawing moodily on his lower lip; I had the feeling he was thinking the same thing I was in that moment

  This has got to be all the blood spilled here at the camp, I was thinking. We've got to make sure this is all …

  The deputy Cloudman sent out was a young guy with an old-fashioned crew cut and a brisk, serious manner. He arrived a few minutes before nine, and Harry took him around to the cabins, starting with Cody in Number Two. I had no reason to sit in on the questioning, and the deputy made it clear that he felt the same way, so I left them at Cody's cabin and went to my own and got into my swim trunks. Then I lolled around in the lake and on the beach, waiting.

  At ten-fifteen Sam Knox came down alone and drove off in the Rambler wagon. I did not see anybody else until Harry and the deputy returned shortly before eleven. I went over to them, but the young guy had nothing to say to me; he told Harry to ask Jerrold and Walt Bascomb to get in touch with the Sheriff's Department in Sonora when they returned—Bascomb had apparently gone off somewhere on foot, since the Ford was still parked in the circle—and then he nodded briskly and went away in his cruiser.

  I said to Harry, “How'd it go with the others?”

  “Not too bad. Cody made a few snotty remarks, but the rest of them took it all right. I guess there's not going to be any problem there, at least.”

  “Nobody had any information, I take it?”

  “No,” Harry said. “Hell, we all expected that last night.”

  “Sure, but you never know.”

  He sighed. “How about a sandwich? We've got a while yet before we're due for Sonora.”

  “One, maybe.”

  But I ate three, and paid the price for that with heartburn and gas. It was going to be another long day, all right. Another long damned painful day.

  Eight

  Sonora was an aged and crumbling gold country town beneath a modern façade, like an old lady proudly displaying herself after a face-lift. You got a little of the flavor of the nineteenth-century Mother Lode, but mostly the restored and newly false-fronted buildings gave you the impression of a whimsical, Disneyland kind of village, a replica rather than an authentic landmark. Washington Street was teeming with cars and with tourists dressed in garish clothing and weighted down by camera equipment. I had an idea that the founding miners would have been appalled if they could have seen it this way—but maybe that was just my mood.