Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Harry said, “Here at the camp?”

  “Yeah. Inside your shed in those rolls of canvas.”

  “That's where it was all along?”

  “That's where it was and still is,” I said. “He planned to take it away with him today, which is the reason for the U-Haul trailer he brought back from Sonora. He'd get you to help with his luggage, make sure no one else was around, and then drag the carpet out and put it inside the trailer.”

  “I'm beginning to follow now,” Cloudman said. “When Jerrold got back here Sunday night, he ran into Bascomb—that it?”

  “I make it that way. He didn't see anybody in the immediate vicinity when he arrived, so he carried the carpet from his car to the shed. Only Bascomb happened to be having a beer from the cooler on the other side of this cabin—that was where he was when Knox last saw him—and noticed Jerrold and probably went over to ask him what he was doing. Jerrold panicked again and murdered Bascomb with a wrench. Which left him with another body on his hands and nowhere to get rid of it easily.

  “Maybe he thought of the pocket mine then, or maybe he just covered Bascomb's bloody head with towels from the fish-cleaning sink back there, then dragged the body into his car and started driving and hit on the mine that way. He took the wrench with him too. Harry found a bloody handkerchief nearby early Monday, and we both thought it belonged to either Knox or Talesco because they'd gotten into a fight; but there was a lot of blood on it, and neither ore of them was cut very badly. So it figures the handkerchief was Jerrold's, and he'd used it to wipe the wrench off and then dropped it accidentally, just like the peacock feather. He had to have been in a frenzy by that time.”

  Cloudman asked, “Where does the sketch fit in?”

  “Jerrold was deteriorating rapidly, probably plagued with paranoid guilt, and anything connected with the mine must have seemed like a potential threat to him. It could be Bascomb showed Jerrold his sketch of the mine, or showed it to Mrs. Jerrold and she told him about it; anyway, he remembered it twenty-four hours later, and went after it, tore it out of the pad and destroyed it. That was where I came in—and I guess he might have crushed my skull, too, with that tree limb he was carrying, if I hadn't heard him in time and scared him off.”

  I lapsed into silence for a moment, fighting down the need to cough; I did not want them to hear me and watch me having an attack. The deputy's pencil still scratched, but that was the only sound now and I realized the rain had stopped. It was stuffy in the room: I got up to turn on Harry's fan.

  I had one more thing to say, and as if reading my thoughts, Cloudman provided the question: “Why did Jerrold go back to the mine today? He couldn't have known you'd be there, could he?”

  “No,” I said, “he couldn't have known.”

  “Then?”

  “It was probably because he'd been going back there off and on since Sunday night. I can't know that for certain, but that's how it looks. He was gone all day yesterday, and his car wasn't anywhere in The Pines; he'd been drinking too heavily to have just been driving around.”

  “If you're right, what was he doing there?”

  “Watching the body,” I said wearily. “Sitting in or around the mine shaft and drinking gin out of a bottle and guarding it in case anybody came.”

  “Jesus,” Harry said. “Sweet Jesus Christ.”

  Twenty

  It was after seven o'clock before the last of it was finished and Cloudman left, taking his deputies and the Daghestan carpet with him, to have a look at the pocket mine and determine what could be done about Bascomb's body; the ambulance had gone a few minutes prior to that, Mrs. Jerrold sitting up in the front seat and snuffling into a handkerchief. Cloudman's final words to me were a request to stay on until tomorrow, so I could come in and sign another statement, but I was prepared to do that anyway because I was in no shape to drive a hundred miles. Creeping lassitude made my motor responses jerky and dulled my thoughts again. I felt that if I did not get to bed pretty soon I was going to suffer that collapse I had been worrying about.

  I asked Harry for a glass of milk and something else light to put in my stomach, since I had not eaten all day and I was bothered by hunger pangs on top of the rest of it. He found half a melon to go with the milk, and stood watching me while I ate it. Neither of us said much; I sensed that he wanted to be alone as badly as I did. Exposure to horror has a way of driving a temporary wedge between even the closest of friends—you need time to get over the aftershock of it, time to blot out its effects inside yourself.

  Back at my cabin, I undressed and crawled into bed. Sleep came before long, and with it a jumbled dream of falling things and blood and faces without eyes and voices screaming behind a sloping wall of darkness. I half-awoke, bathed in perspiration and with the bedclothes bunched around my ankles, and then drifted off again. Only this time I was in a coffin and I could not get out, I kept tearing at the satin lining with my fingers, whimpering, choking because there was no air in there and I could feel myself slowly suffocating, and all the while a voice whispered beyond the lid, “I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, the lesion is malignant …”

  I came out of that one convulsively, swinging my legs down to the floor, my chest swelling and deflating in a rapid tempo. When the dream remnants slid away, I realized that it was dark outside, that the room was sultry, thick with stagnant air. I got up and went into the bath alcove on sore, stiff legs and splashed my face with icy water, and that brought me fully awake. But I felt logy, temples throbbing in a dull way, eyes sore and gritty in their sockets. And restless too, jittery. Dark things moved across my mind like running shadows.

  I lay down on the bed again and tried to recapture sleep, but it was pointless. I did not want any more of those dreams, and with the hot motionless air I sensed they would come again as soon as I dropped off. The restlessness would not go away either, and the dark things continued to flit around as though looking for light, as though wanting to make themselves seen and perceived.

  At the end of ten minutes I got up and pulled on shirt and trousers and went outside—in and out of that cabin endlessly since Sunday, back and forth between it and the lake. All the clouds were gone now, and the sky was brilliant with stars and the slice of moon; but there was a breeze tonight, like a residue of the brief drizzly rain, and it cut into the heat and made breathing a little less uncomfortable.

  I walked aimlessly along the beach, found myself at the edge of the pier, and passed through the fan of light from the pole there and out to the end. I sat with my legs dangling down, looking over the water. A bass jumped off on the right, spreading shiny ripples, and my nerves jumped with it. The dark things ran and ran—and one of them danced into my awareness and I saw that it was Jerrold, Jerrold lying up there in the glade with his head nearly severed and the blackened shotgun at his side.

  Then the rest of them came out, one by one, like a parade of actors onto a stage, and I sat very still and stared at them. All the heat seemed to fade out of the night; the breath of wind seemed suddenly cold—cold.

  Ah no, I thought. Ah God, no.

  Yes.

  Yes, damn it to hell, yes.

  Emotions churned inside me; I felt sick to my stomach. This was the final horror, the final ugliness, the absolute bottom-line truth buried under a sea of lies and half-truths and partial resolutions; the real ending and the real beginning. This was what I had to face, this bitter truth, on top of all the other things physical and mental.

  I sat there a moment longer, and then I got up and turned and took one step, And stopped and went rigid, and the only emotion in me was a kind of revulsion.

  He was walking toward the pier, coming at a slow tired pace to the pool of fight.

  I started toward him, watched him pause to wait for me, half in and half out of darkness. He said heavily, “I saw you sitting out here; I couldn't sleep either—” but he cut it off as I reached him, when he saw my face and the way my hands were knotted into fists.

  “Harry,
you son of a bitch,” I said. The words were hard and ugly in my ears. “You sick cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

  “Hey,” he said, “what…”

  “Jerrold's death was no goddamn accident,” I said. “You killed him—you and Mrs. Jerrold.”

  He took an involuntary step backward so that he was full in the light. My friend, the man I had known for thirty years, the man I had shared so many memories with—was a stranger, a total stranger. Because it was all there in his face, it had all been there from the moment I came back to the camp and told him that Jerrold had murdered Terzian and Bascomb; I had been too wrapped up in the tenseness of the situation, too blinded by my own reactions, to see it for what it was—the ravished face of guilt.

  “It was the two of you all along,” I said, “you're the one who's been screwing her, not Talesco or Knox or Cody or anybody else. Screwing her and plotting Jerrold's death, driving him right over the edge so he'd do the job for you with a shotgun you'd sealed the barrel on.”

  He did not say anything, but I saw his shoulders slump and his mouth twist into a grimace of pain. There would be no denials, I realized then, no more lies—and that was good because I could not have stood lies and denials, I think I would have lost control of myself and slammed them back down his throat.

  But I wanted to hurt him anyway, with words if not with my hands. I said, “Only you got more than you bargained for. The two of you turned him into a psychotic, all right, but you did such a bang-up job of it that he started killing other people before you were ready for him to kill himself. Jerrold may have been the one who crushed Terzian's and Bascomb's skulls, but you're twice as guilty because you pulled the strings. You killed them all, Harry, goddamn you, you murdered three men instead of just one.”

  He put up a hand like a man warding off blows. “Buddy …”

  “Don't call me that,” I said, “I'm not your buddy any more. You used me just like you used all the rest of them, you son of a bitch, you used me to help you get away with murder. Whose idea was it to bring me in? Hers? Yeah, it would have been; you're not devious enough for that. Maybe the whole thing was her idea, maybe she planned it from the start and you just went along for the ride. You want to cop out that way, Harry? Put all the blame on her?”

  “Shut up,” he said, but there was no malice in it. “Shut the fucking hell up, can't you?”

  “No.” Relentless now, hating myself and hating him more. “So damned clever, the whole scheme. Work on his jealousy, make it look like she was playing around with every guy in sight, while you pretended to be his confidant and stiffed him up every chance you got with a load of crap about what you'd seen or heard or suspected. How long did it take the two of you to turn him into a lunatic? Weeks, months, a year or more?”

  Headshake. His eyes held mine as though each pair was a magnet.

  “Yeah, clever,” I said. “Too clever—too elaborate. A simple hunting accident wasn't good enough, you had to get fancy; that's where people like you always screw up, so that people like me can eventually figure the truth. You get fancy and you make mistakes, you either leave little holes unplugged or you overdo things. Like the way you worked it after I got here: Jerrold's sudden convenient attack on Cody Sunday, when the kid and I happened to be together and I'd be sure to see right away what kind of shape he was in; you always keeping the pressure on—a little too worried, a little too uptight; the phony twosomes Angela Jerrold kept arranging between herself and Talesco and Bascomb and Cody so I couldn't help but stumble in on a few of them; the personal things she told me about Jerrold to cement the picture of him as an obsessive; her immediate agreement to get him to go home, the apparent concern for him, and then in spite of that, continuing to see Cody without trying to hide it.

  “But the way Jerrold died was where you really blew it. He was an outdoors type and knew his way around guns; a man like that is too cautious to let the muzzle of a shotgun nose into mud or clay. And where would there be any mud or clay around here in the first place? The lake bottom is rocky in close to shore; there hasn't been any rain before today in quite a while and that damned red dust is everywhere.

  “How did Jerrold know she and Cody were together at Cody's cabin? And why was he up in that glade? Why didn't he just confront the two of them and blast off at point-blank range? He had to have been programmed, that's the only answer—and you're the only one who could have done it. You said you didn't know where he was when I showed up, but you were coming back along the lakefront, and there's nothing else over past the beach except the path up to Cabin Six. You were there, all right, and you told him about her and Cody, and then you talked him into using the shotgun, gave him the idea of going up into the glade because you didn't want him anywhere near her when the blowback got him. It probably wasn't hard; he was ready for anything by then, he'd just come back from sealing me into the mine. What'd you say to him? ‘Oh, you don't want to kill them, Ray, just throw a little scare into them, just a warning shot or two.’ That about the way it went, Harry?”

  He backed up another couple of steps and leaned heavily against the light pole. The bones in his face seemed to have collapsed; the skin looked shrunken, gouged with deep hollows. I stood staring at him, silent now. I had run out of words and run out of the desire to make him suffer—and run out of hate too. Emotion seemed to have deserted me entirely.

  After a long time he said, “You don't know what it's like to fall in love with a woman like Angela. She gets inside you, you can't think and you can't sleep, she takes over your world. Nothing else matters. I didn't want to do any of it, you've got to understand that. I didn't want to drag you into it or to kill anybody.”

  “So it was her then, right? Lay it on her.”

  “No. She's not like that. We did it together, we did all of it together. It wasn't her and it wasn't me. We're one person.”

  “Sure. One person.”

  “We had to do it, there was no other way.”

  “Think about Jerrold sitting up in the mine shaft, guarding Bascomb's corpse, and tell me that again.”

  A shudder racked him; genuine pain. And yet he said, “I've got Angela now, that's all I'm letting myself think about.”

  “You won't have her for long.”

  “Yes,” he said, “oh yes.”

  “I'm going into Sonora and get hold of Cloudman as soon as I can gather up my things. I'm going to tell him the whole story, every lousy bit of it.”

  He straightened slightly and pushed away from the pole.

  “Unless you want to kill me too,” I said. “You've got three on your conscience, what's another one? You think you've got the guts to do it? You'll have to try if you want to stop me.”

  “I couldn't kill you.”

  “Then you're going to jail, both of you.”

  “No,” he said.

  “For the rest of your rotten lives.”

  “No,” he said again, and he seemed to draw himself together. “You've got no proof, no evidence, against Angela and me. Jerrold died accidentally by his own hand, nobody can ever prove different.”

  He was right, I knew he was right.

  “They'll break you,” I said, “or they'll break her.”

  That brought a faint smile to his mouth—terrible, eviscerated. “No chance, old buddy. We're one person, I told you that; we're too strong. Too strong.”

  I just looked at him.

  “We love each other,” he said.

  I kept on looking at him a moment longer, and then I shoved past him and went up to Cabin Three and threw my clothing and gear together. The restlessness was gone now, and I felt oddly calm, oddly unburdened. In a way I could not yet understand, I seemed to have been purged not only of emotion but of doubt and the specter of death—if only for a little while.

  When I came back down, Harry was standing in front of his cabin with his hands at his sides and one of those thin cigars trailing smoke from a corner of his mouth. I did not look at him as I passed, and he did not move. He still had n
ot moved when I got the car started and turned around and took one final glance at him in the rear-view mirror.

  Twenty-one

  I came back across the Bay Bridge, into San Francisco, at three-thirty Wednesday afternoon.

  At the western edge of the Bay, billows of fog were drifting in through the Golden Gate; I could just see the tips of the towers over mere, orange-red buried in gray. A wall of it was massing up above Twin Peaks too. I smiled a little. After the heat and dust of Tuolumne County, that fog was like coming home to a meal after a three-day fast.

  I was still pretty tired, stiff and sore and in need of a good deal more sleep. I had spent part of the night in Cloudman's office in Sonora—a deputy had summoned him from his home after listening to what I had to say—and the rest of the night in a motel nearby. This morning I had gone back to the Sheriff's Department and signed more statements and listened to Cloudman tell me that he had had sessions with Harry and with Angela Jerrold, and had not been able to pressure through their stories. He seemed to think he might still have a case, might still break them down given enough time, but I did not agree.

  They were going to get away with it, all right.

  They had committed the perfect murder.

  And yet, they were not going to get away with it in another sense, at least not Harry. It was eating him up inside, and how long would he be able to go on fighting off the guilt with only a warped love and the companionship of a hellish bitch like Angela Jerrold to console him? Not long. A man like Harry, a man with a conscience—not long. One of these days it was all going to blow back into his face like the blocked shotgun had blown back into Jerrold's, and it would destroy him and maybe her too, and then justice would be served after all.

  I had done a lot of thinking, clear and mostly unemotional, lying awake last night and driving back today. The doubts and the specter of death had not come back, and I had reached an understanding of why I was purged of it, why I had felt purged after those few minutes with Harry on the pier. As a result, and at long last, I had come to something else too.