Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Those are the two things I can't figure,” I said. “Unless Bascomb had an accomplice.”

  “Accomplice? Christ, now you're trying to tell me someone else here at the camp is involved in a murder.”

  “The person I saw tonight doesn't have to be staying here.”

  “How the hell could an outsider get in without being seen?”

  “It could be done, Harry. There are ways.”

  He got up and paced around, agitated; then he stopped and turned back to me.

  “I just can't buy it, buddy. Bascomb is a commercial artist, he's not rich, what kind of connection could he have with a man like Terzian and valuable Oriental carpets? Or anybody else here, for that matter? Jerrold is the only one who has any real money, and he's only interested in his ad agency—one hundred percent business, no outside interests at all except for fishing and hunting.”

  “What about Knox and Talesco? They own a freight line.”

  “And most of their money is tied up in it,” Harry said. “Besides, you've met them, talked to them; they're outdoors types, they wouldn't know from rugs and carpets any more than you or I would.”

  “There's Cody, then. You told me his old man is well off.”

  “Yeah, he's well off, he owns a string of small businesses and private residences in Vegas; but he spends most of his time running around Europe, and from what Cody's said about him, he's not the type to collect anything but broads.” His mouth quirked. “Like father, like son.”

  “But you don't know that much about him, or about Cody either. And Vegas is a rich town.”

  “Buddy, you're trying to build mountains out of sand. I tell you, nobody at this camp could be involved in Terzian's death. There has to be some other explanation for Bascomb being gone and what happened up at his cabin tonight.”

  I decided not to push it any farther. Harry had enough on his mind with Jerrold, and the strain of that was making him stubborn and irritable; nothing else I said was going to change his mind, because he did not want to have it changed. For that matter, what did I have to back up my feeling except the feeling itself and a few half-formed speculations? Maybe I was trying to build mountains out of sand.

  I said, “All right, let's drop it. It's not up to us anyway.”

  “I hope to God that's the way it stays,” he said.

  He walked up to my cabin with me, without either of us saying anything about it. There was nobody out in the woods and nobody lurking around the place; but when Harry was gone, I went inside and locked the door, feeling vaguely foolish about doing it but not foolish enough to change my mind. Then I made myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table to drink it.

  The feeling born in Bascomb's cabin would not let go of my mind, mountains out of sand or not. Maybe it was because too damned much had happened in the past two days—and I had never liked strings of coincidences. If it was all part of a single pattern, or at least most of it was, I could cope with it more easily.

  The simplest explanation was still that Bascomb had killed Terzian, panicked, and disappeared with the carpet; the accomplice angle would take care of why his car and his belongings were still here, and he would be back for them later. And yet, the sketch thing kept getting in the way. Assuming Bascomb was somewhere with an accomplice, who had taken the sketch tonight? Or assuming it was the accomplice who had stolen it, where was Bascomb? And the primary question: What significance did the sketch have in the first place?

  Harry had returned the torn corner to me, and I took it out again and stared at it. Still vaguely familiar, still unrecognizable. At length I stowed it away in my wallet and brooded into the coffee cup.

  If Bascomb hadn't been involved in Terzian's death, or with the stolen Daghestan, things became infinitely more complicated. What, if anything, did his apparent disappearance have to do with the fence's murder? Where did the sketch fit in? Who had I chased into the woods tonight? Who else among those staying here—if my hunch had any basis in fact—was guilty of or a party to homicide and the receiving of stolen Orientals?

  Jerrold. On the positive side, he lived in Los Angeles, a place where stolen art objects are bought and sold all the time, a place where Terzian had had some of his previous dealings; he was wealthy enough to afford such a thing as a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old Daghestan; he was unstable and prone to violent reactions. On the negative side, however, he was not the type to be interested in rugs and carpets—a hard-core business executive—and what was tearing him up inside was also the sole focus of his existence, as far as I could see: ambition, and a wife who was undoubtedly cuckolding him left and right.

  Knox. Talesco. Kayabalian had mentioned that another of the places where Terzian had contacts was Fresno, and Fresno was where the two of them were from. A freight line was a pretty good cover and a pretty good means for the transportation of illegal and stolen goods; being a collector did not have anything to do with that kind of operation. There was also the way the two of them had been acting—the rift between them, the odd things Talesco had said to me earlier in the day. But both of them seemed to be plodding, unimaginative, up-front types, the kind that conduct their business in an office or over a drink in the back room—not on a deserted bluff while they were in the middle of a fishing trip; and both of them were strong as bulls, they would each be more likely to use their hands than a tire iron if they wanted to kill somebody.

  Cody. Looking at it one way, he had a rich father who spent a lot of time in Europe, where there was a thriving market among collectors of rare art. Looking at it another way, he was forced to live on remittance, to come to places like this camp that he hated, and he seemed to be the kind of pseudo-smart, cocky kid who might get himself involved in illegal enterprise in order to get out from under his father. He lived in Vegas, too, not only a rich town but one full of Mafia types, if you could believe the media—and you probably could. The Mafia had a hand in everything; why not stolen Orientals? And yet Cody was a coward hiding behind a bluff exterior, and I could not quite imagine him working up the kind of reverse courage it takes to kill another man face to face, even in a blind rage.

  Maybe yes, maybe no, on all of them. Which put me right back at zero.

  Okay then, what about the peacock feather? Did that point to anyone at the camp? But I drew another blank there. I could not make any further connections beyond the house in The Pines, the peacocks, and the feathers inside the fence that anyone using the county road to and from Eden Lake could notice and pick up unobserved.

  I thought about the Daghestan itself, making the assumption that it had been in Terzian's van last evening. If Bascomb was the murderer, and took the carpet, it could be anywhere. But everyone else was and had been accounted for at least most of last night and today; not much chance for any of them to transport it out of the area. It was a pretty big carpet, from Kayabalian's description, too big to hide in places like the trunk of a car, too conspicuous to leave inside a cabin where someone might chance seeing it. And you could not conceal it in the woods or somewhere else out in the open because of the risk of damage. So what could you do with an eight-by-ten-foot carpet in these surroundings? Where could you put it so that you'd be reasonably sure it was safe and well hidden and easily accessible when you wanted it again? Here at the camp? In The Pines? Where?

  It was no good, none of this was getting me anything but a headache. There were too many questions unanswered or unanswerable, too many possibilities and not enough facts. What I had to do was to lay it all in Cloudman's lap tomorrow morning, when I drove into The Pines to see Kayabalian and take care of the other thing, the phone call to Dr. White in San Francisco. Let him work with it and pull it together or toss it out. All I could do myself was what Kayabalian was paying me to do—try to trace the Daghestan to somebody by working backward from the other end, from San Jose and Terzian's associates. And that seemed even more futile now, if I was right with this damned nagging hunch.

  It was getting to be hot in there with the front
door closed, and I got up and cracked the window above the bed. Then I took a lukewarm shower and shut off the lights and stretched out naked to wait for sleep.

  But in the darkness, without the speculations to occupy my mind, it was the fear and the uncertainty—the specter of death—that crept back into me instead. Tomorrow. Tuesday. The day of the big answer: malignant or benign. And I was still no more prepared to accept it than I had been yesterday or last Friday.

  Is life reality? I thought. Or is death reality? Riddle me that, too.

  After a while sleep did come, but it was the same kind of shallow, fitful sleep of the night before and all the nights since I had found out about the lesion. Dreams, waking up from time to time slick with sweat, breathing labored because of the heat. No rest for the weary. No rest for the condemned?

  A long time later, thin hazy light filtered in through the window and pushed at the shadows in the room.

  Tuesday morning coming down…

  Fourteen

  The first thing I did when I left the cabin a few minutes past dawn was to go over to Four and have another look through the screen. Bascomb had not come back during the night, and neither had anyone else; everything was just as it had been before. I went around to the east side and wandered along there and in among the trees, looking for some sign that might point to the identity of the intruder. But there was nothing to find except sections of trampled underbrush. I gave it up finally, not without reluctance, and walked down to the lake.

  Ray Jerrold was out on the pier, kneeling there and holding onto the painter on one of the skiffs while he loaded the bow with fishing tackle.

  I did not like that one bit. I went out there, making myself walk at a leisurely pace, and when he heard me coming he swung his head around and up in a startled way, like a kid caught doing something furtive. The skin across his cheekbones had a waxy, blotched appearance, and there were dark half-moons under both eyes. I could see the eyes clearly today; they were haunted, evasive. A knotted muscle jumped at one corner of his mouth, pulled it up and down in rapid tempo like a mime burlesquing somebody's speech habits. All of it screamed hangover and inner turmoil.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, and watched me warily, as if he thought I might jump him.

  “Going out fishing?”

  “No,” he said, “bear hunting. You're not blind, are you?”

  “Well, I heard you were leaving today, going home.”

  He did not say anything for a moment, and I was afraid he was going to turn ugly again, as he had on Sunday; I could feel myself tensing. But then he shrugged, and one corner of his mouth quirked upward in a smile that was almost sly.

  “That's right,” he said, “we're leaving, both of us,” and the smile seemed to say: So you won't be able to get your hands on Angela any more, none of you will. “I want to get out on the lake one last time, land a couple more bass.”

  I let myself relax. “I can appreciate that,” I said.

  “You heading out too?”

  “I don't think so, not this morning.”

  “Not going to give me any competition, huh?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  He laughed, and it sounded like genuine mirth. He stood up, tugged at the waistband of his shorts; his eyes danced from the skiff to the northern reaches of the lake and then back to me again. “Hold the painter for me, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  I took it from him, held it so that the bow stayed butted up against one of the pilings. Jerrold clambered down into the skiff, got himself settled on the stern seat, and motioned up to me to drop the line. When I had done that he reached forward and opened up his tackle box and hauled out a thermos. It might have had coffee in it, and it might have had something else; I couldn't tell; he unscrewed the top and raised it and drank straight from the mouth.

  “I won't be gone long,” he said then, as though warning me. “Got a lot of things to do today. Police want to see me in Sonora, you were right about that.”

  I nodded, watched him put the top back on the thermos and replace it in the tackle box. And then I threw him a curve to see what he would do with it. “You wouldn't happen to have seen Walt Bascomb around, would you?”

  He did not do anything with it; he heard me all right, but he neither acknowledged the question nor answered it. Without looking at me, he reached around and jerked the outboard into stuttering life.

  “Mr. Jerrold? About Walt—”

  I did not get the rest of it out because he had already hit the throttle and was backing the skiff away from the pier; as far as he was concerned, I was no longer there. Then he hit the throttle again and swung off to the north along the shoreline.

  I stood staring after him until he and the boat blended into a dark speck in the distance, like a smudge on tinted glass. You could make something out of his ignoring the question about Bascomb, or you could chalk it up to simple neurosis. No way of telling which one—no way of telling any damned thing at all, it seemed.

  It's not up to you, I told myself again. The only thing that's up to you right now is seeing to it he goes away from here without trouble.

  I went back along the pier. As I came down off it I noticed that over in the parking circle the rear door of the Rambler wagon was standing open and there was somebody working inside. I started in that direction, saw a bucket of soapy water on the gravel near the door and then Sam Knox's head raise up into view. Cleaning up the vomit, I thought, and grimaced a little—and he pulled back out of the car in that moment, to dip a rag into the bucket, and turned his head and saw me.

  He straightened up away from the door, shoulders jerking slightly, his face closing up in a pained way; but there did not seem to be any tension in him, as there would have been if he were harboring a grudge over what had happened in the hotel bar. I came to a standstill, and we stood looking at each other across thirty feet of ground, Knox twisting the wet rag back and forth in his big hands. I could not think of anything to say to him.

  Ten or twelve seconds went by; then he dropped the rag into the bucket and walked over to me in hesitant stride. The hangover he was suffering was as apparent as Jerrold's—blotchy features, red-veined eyes, cracked lips.

  “How's it going?” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Look, I, uh, I'm sorry about yesterday.” He seemed to have to force the words out; he was not the kind of man to whom apologies came easy. “I was shit-faced, that's all, I didn't know what I was doing.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “It happens.”

  “Yeah, well, I owe you for getting me out of there, keeping me out of trouble with the cops. Talesco told me about that.”

  “You don't owe me anything. It's water under the bridge.”

  He nodded as if relieved at the way I was reacting to his apology. Then, abruptly, he said, “Talesco and I are heading home this afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  “Best thing for both of us—you know?”

  “That mean you've patched it up between you?”

  “Maybe, yeah. We've done some talking.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  He looked past me toward the lake. “Anything I might have said yesterday—it was just drunk talk. We forget that too, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a brief awkward pause. Then he gestured loosely toward the Rambler and said, “Well…”

  I said, “You see anything of Walt Bascomb yesterday morning, or when you went into The Pines?”

  He blinked, but that was all. “Bascomb?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No,” he said. “Last time I saw him was Sunday night.”

  “When Sunday night?”

  “Around dusk. I was down getting a beer and he came back in his car.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Said hello. He stopped to get a beer too.”

  “What did he do then?”

  Knox shrugged. “Dunno. I went back to the cabi
n.”

  “Was anybody else around?”

  “Didn't see anybody else.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He dipped his head again, and paused again, and then put out his hand. When I had taken it and let go of it again, he pivoted and returned to the bucket and the inside of the Rambler.

  I went to Harry's cabin, found him inside making a light breakfast and looking as haggard as the bath-alcove mirror had told me I looked. I accepted his offer of coffee, but declined one of eggs and toast; I had no appetite today, none at all. Even the smell of the eggs frying in the pan made me feel faintly nauseated.

  I said, “Jerrold went out fishing a little while ago. I talked to him for a couple of minutes on the pier.”

  “Fishing? He didn't change his mind about leaving—?”

  “He said no. Just wanted to get a last line out.”

  “Hell, I expected them to be going any time now.”

  “So did I. He claimed he wouldn't be gone long, though.”

  “How did he seem today?”

  “Hung over. But holding it together—maybe.” I sipped at my coffee. “Talesco and Knox are leaving today too, this afternoon.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Knox told me. It's probably for the best.”

  “I suppose so,” he said moodily. “But it's also another couple hundred bucks shot up the ass.”

  “I thought you were going to send them packing anyway.”

  “I need the damned money,” he said. “All right?”

  “Easy. I'm not needling you.”

  He pinched his eyelids with a thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, I know that. I'm just on edge and looking for somebody to take it out on, I guess.”

  I said nothing. The less talking we did the better it would be for both of us.

  When he had finished picking at his eggs we went out onto the porch and sat watching the sun climb and the heat begin to shimmer on the morning air. Pretty soon the sound of an outboard came from the lake; after another minute or so I could see the skiff and Jerrold sitting inside at the tiller. We watched him bring the skiff in, tie it up, shove his fishing gear up onto the pier, and then climb out and hurry away with the stuff at a hard jerky pace. He had been gone a little more than an hour—barely enough time to get a line out. Some last-minute fishing trip.