Scenarios nd-29

by Bill Pronzini

  As near as I could tell, the candle had been made of purple-colored tallow. Which told me nothing much; purple candles were not uncommon. It had probably been anchored inside the cup-shaped stone to keep it from toppling over and starting the fire before it was intended to.

  I was peering at the stone, and it wasn't telling me much, when I heard and then saw the jeep come up. It rattled to a stop behind my car, and a guy about six-four unfolded from behind the wheel and plunked himself down on the road.

  He stared over at me for a couple of seconds, shading his eyes against the sun; then he yelled, "Hey! You there! What do you think you're doing?"

  I saw no point in yelling back at him. Instead I put the stone into my trench coat pocket, swatted some of the soot off my hands, and then made my way through the rubble and across to where the guy stood alongside his jeep. He was in his forties, beanpole thin, with a shock of fiery red hair and a belligerent expression. Behind him in the jeep I could see a folded easel, a couple of blank three-foot-square canvases, and a box that would probably contain oil paints.

  When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, "What's the idea of messing around in that debris? You a scavenger or something?"

  "No," I said, "I'm a detective."

  "A what?"

  "A detective." I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Allan Randall.

  He didn't like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like pieces of onyx. "Who hired you? Those Munroe bastards?"

  "No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall's life."

  "So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding."

  "You had a fire here too," I said.

  "Coincidence."

  "Maybe not, Mr. Thatcher."

  "How do you know my name?"

  "I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Munroe people supplied them."

  "I'll bet they did."

  "The list includes one Paul Thatcher, an artist who works primarily in oils." I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. "I get paid to observe things and to make educated guesses."

  Thatcher grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn't say anything.

  I said, "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the fire, if you don't mind."

  "Which fire?"

  "The one here. Unless you know something about the one in Redding, too."

  "I don't know anything about either one. I wasn't in Redding when Randall's place burned. And I wasn't here when those old shacks went up."

  "No? That isn't what you told the county sheriff's investigators. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig that firebreak to keep the blaze from spreading."

  "Is that so," Thatcher said. "Well, I had to talk to the law. I don't have to talk to you."

  "That's right, you don't. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?"

  His eyes narrowed down to slits. "How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?"

  "Maybe."

  "What was it?"

  "I have to tell that to the law," I said. "I don't have to tell it to you."

  He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he'd had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He said something under his breath that sounded like "The hell with you," and turned and stalked around to the driver's side of the jeep. Thirty seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.

  Mr. Thatcher, I thought, the hell with you, too.

  3

  When I looked back at the ghost town there was still no sign of Kerry. I wondered where she was. Between my search of the burned-out buildings and my conversation with Thatcher, some forty-five minutes had passed since she'd wandered off. I shed my blackened trench coat, locked it and the waxy stone cup in the trunk of the car, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.

  It took me another ten minutes to find her. She was at the two-story hotel or saloon building; the back entrance wasn't boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge, and when I called her name she answered me from inside. So I went in to see what she was up to.

  She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated through cracks in the outer walls to let me see a balcony on three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might collapse at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down here. As far as I could tell, the only things the room itself contained were a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a fallen pigeonhole shelf, and piles of dirt and splintered wood and other detritus on the whipsawed floor.

  "What'd you do?" I asked Kerry. "Bust in here?"

  "No. The back door was ajar. Isn't this place wonderful?"

  "Uh-huh. If you like dust, decay, and rats."

  "Rats? There aren't any rats in here."

  "Want to bet?"

  Rats didn't scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, "Somebody lives in this building."

  "What?"

  "Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That's how come the back door isn't boarded up."

  "How did you find this out?"

  "The same way you find things out," she said. "By snooping around. Come on, I'll show you."

  She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole shelf. "The door's got a new latch on it," she said, pointing. "See? That made me curious, so I opened it to see what was inside."

  She opened it again as she spoke and let me see what was inside. There wasn't much. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve, with a boarded-up window in the far wall. Two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long, six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite-fool's gold-and other rocks, and curious-shaped redwood buns. An Army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of National Geographic completed the room's furnishings.

  "Packrats," I said. "That's who lives here."

  Kerry wrinkled her nose at me.

  "Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer."

  She said, "Phooey. Where's your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn't it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?"

  "There aren't any more gold mines up in the hills. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?"

  "To forage for food, maybe."

  "Uh-huh," I said. "Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we're trespassing. We'd better go; I've got work to do."

  This time she made a face at me. "Sometimes," she said, "you're about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny, you know that?"

  "Kerry, I'm on a job. The fun can come later."

  "Oh, you think so? Maybe not."

  "Is that another threat to withhold your sexual favors?"

  "Sexual favors," she said. "My, how you talk."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "It was a dumb question. I don't answer dumb questions."

  "You're still mad at me, right?"

  "I'm not sure if I am or not. It could go either way."

  She started back across the floor, leaving me to shut the door to the packrat's nest. And to chase after her then like a damned puppy. Outside, we walked in silence to where the c
ar was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, "Did you find anything?" and she sounded both interested and cheerful again.

  Maybe she kept changing moods on purpose, I thought, just to get my goat. Or maybe when it came to women, my head was as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. Which was probable, considering my track record. I could study women for another hundred years and I still wouldn't know what went on inside their heads.

  I told Kerry about the melted candle, explaining how I'd found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Thatcher. By the time I was finished with that, I had the car nosing up in front of the second of the two cottages near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among the tomato vines in the front yard.

  The woman's name, according to the information I'd been given by Raymond Treacle, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved to Cooperville in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He'd never found much of it, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she'd stayed on after his death eight years ago.

  She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, had a nose like the blade of a paring knife and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of a hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for a witch.

  I got out of the car, went over to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, "Mrs. Bloom?"

  "Who are you?" she said suspiciously.

  I gave her my name. "I'm an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Allan Randall-"

  That was as far as I got. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner's sword; then she hoisted it again and pointed it at me. "Get away from here!" she said in a thin, reedy voice. "Go on, get away!"

  "Look, Mrs. Bloom, I only want to ask you a couple of questions-"

  "I got nothing to say to you or anybody else about Munroe. You come into my yard, mister, you'll regret it. I got a shotgun in the house and I keep it loaded."

  "There's no need for-"

  "You want to see it? By God, I'll show it to you if that's what it takes!"

  She threw down the hoe and went flying across the yard, up onto the porch and inside the house. I hesitated for about two seconds and then moved back to the car. There wasn't much sense in waiting there for her to come out with her shotgun; she wasn't going to talk, and for all I knew she was loopy enough to start blasting away at me.

  "Christ," I said when I slid in under the wheel. "The woman's a lunatic."

  Kerry wasn't even ruffled. "Maybe she's got a right."

  "What?"

  "If somebody was trying to turn my home into a gold-country Disneyland, I'd be pretty mad about it too."

  "Yeah," I said, "but you wouldn't start threatening people for no damn reason."

  "I might, if I was her age."

  "Bah," I said. But because Mrs. Bloom had reappeared with a bulky twelve-gauge cradled in both hands, I started the car and swung it into a fast U-turn. Kerry might not have been worried, but she'd never been shot at and I had. People with guns make me nervous, no matter who they are.

  4

  Brewster, but with Mrs. Bloom and her shotgun nearby, I decided talking to them could wait. The atmosphere in Cooperville was a lot more hostile than I'd anticipated; I was beginning to regret bringing Kerry with me. I considered calling it quits for the day and heading back to the motel we'd taken in Weaverville. But if I did that, Kerry would never let me hear the end of it; and I couldn't believe that everybody up here was screwy enough to threaten us with guns. I decided to try interviewing one more resident. If that went down as badly as the other attempts had, then the hell with it and I would come back alone tomorrow.

  At the fork, I took the branch that led away from town and up onto the wooded slopes to the west. The first dwelling we came to belonged to Paul Thatcher; the second, almost a mile farther along, was a free-form cabin that resembled a somewhat lopsided A-frame, built on sloping ground and bordered on three sides by tall redwoods and Douglas fir. It had been pieced together with salvaged lumber, rough-hewn beams, native stone, redwood thatch, and inexpensive plate glass. A wood butcher's house, wood butchers being people who went off to homestead in the wilds because they didn't like cities, mass-produced housing, or most other people.

  When I slowed and eased the car off the road behind a parked Land Rover, Kerry asked, "Who lives here?"

  "Man named Hugh Penrose," I said. "He's a writer, so I was told."

  "What does he write?"

  "Articles and books on natural history. He used to be a professor at Chico State. Treacle says he's an eccentric, to put it mildly."

  "He sounds interesting," she said. "How about letting me come with you this time? You don't seem to be doing too well one-on-one."

  "I don't think that's a good idea-"

  "Phooey," she said, and got out and headed for the cabin.

  I caught up with her and we climbed a set of curving limb and-plank stairs to a platform deck. From inside, I could hear the sound of a typewriter rattling away. I knocked on the door. The typewriter kept on going for half a minute; then it stopped, and there were footsteps, and pretty soon the door opened.

  The guy who looked out at us was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. He was about five and a half feet tall, he was fat, he had a bulbous nose and misshapen ears and cheeks pitted with acne scars, and he was as bald as an egg. His eyes were small and mean, but there was more pain in them than anything else. He was a man who had lived more than fifty years, I thought, and who had suffered through every one of them.

  He looked at Kerry, looked away from her as if embarrassed, and fixed his gaze on me. "Yes? What is it?"

  "Mr. Penrose?"

  "Yes?"

  Before I could open my mouth again, Kerry said cheerfully, "We're the Wades, Bill and Kerry. From San Francisco. We're thinking of moving up here-you know, homesteading. I hope you don't mind us calling on you like this."

  "How did you know my name?" Penrose asked. He was still looking at me.

  "The fellow at the store in town gave it to us," Kerry said. "He told us you were a homesteader and we thought we'd come by and look at your place and see how you liked living here."

  I could have kicked her. It was one of those flimsy, spontaneous stories that sound as phony as they are; there were a half dozen ways Penrose could have caught her out on the lie.

  But she got away with it, by God, at least for the time being. All Penrose said was, "Which fellow at the store?" and he said it without suspicion.

  "Mr. Coleclaw."

  "Which Mr. Coleclaw?"

  "I didn't know there was more than one. He was in his twenties, I guess, and the only one there." Kerry glanced at me. "Did he give you his first name, dear?"

  "Gary," I said. "Dear."

  "What else did he tell you?" Penrose asked. "Did he say anything about the Munroe Corporation?"

  Kerry simulated a blank look that would have got her thrown out of any acting school in the country. But again,

  Penrose didn't notice; he still wasn't looking at her, except in brief sidelong eye-flicks whenever she spoke. "No," she said, "he didn't. What's the Munroe Corporation?"

  "Poor young fool," Penrose said. "Poor lost lad."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "He has rocks in his head," Penrose said, and burst out laughing. The laugh went on for maybe three seconds, like the barking of a sea lion, exposing yellowed and badly fitting dentures; then it cut off as if somebody had smacked a hand over his mouth. He looked embarrassed again.

  Another fruitcake, I thought. Cooperville was full of them. But Penrose, at least, had my sympathy; the strain of coping
with physical deformities like his was enough to unhinge anybody.

  "That was a dreadful pun," he said. "Gary can't help it if he's retarded; I don't know what makes me so cruel sometimes. I apologize. No one should make fun of others."

  I said, "You mentioned the Munroe Corporation, Mr. Penrose. Is that something we should know about?"

  "Yes, definitely. If they have their way, you won't want to move here." He paused. "But I'm forgetting my manners. I haven't many visitors, you see. Would you like to come in?"

  "Yes, thanks," Kerry said. "That would be nice."

  So Penrose stepped aside and we went in. The interior of the cabin was a spacious single room, furnished sparsely with mismatched secondhand items. Against the back wall was a big table with a typewriter, a bunch of papers, and an unlit candle on it. The candle caught and held my attention. It was fat, it was stuck inside a wooden bowl, and it was purple-the same color purple as the wax I'd found at the burned-out buildings in town.

  I went over to the table for a closer look. When Kerry finished declining Penrose's offer of a cup of coffee I said to him, "That's a nice candle you've got there, Mr. Penrose."

  "Candle?" he said blankly.

  "I wouldn't mind having one like it." I gave Kerry a look. "We collect candles, don't we, dear?"

  "Yes, that's right. We do."

  I asked Penrose where he'd bought it.

  "From a widow lady who lives in town. Ella Bloom. She makes them; it's her hobby."

  "Does she just make purple ones?"

  "Yes. Purple is her favorite color."

  "Does she also sell them to other residents?"

  "I don't know. Why don't you ask her? Gary Coleclaw will tell you which house is hers."

  "We'll do that," I said. But I was thinking that with that shotgun of hers and her hostile attitude, it would have to be somebody else in Cooperville that I asked. If she sold her purple candles to others, the arsonist could be anybody who lived here. But if it was only herself and Penrose who used them…

  I steered Penrose back to the topic of the Munroe Corporation, and this time he managed to stay on it without getting sidetracked. He launched into a two-minute diatribe against the developers and what he called "the warped values of modern society." He didn't seem quite as militant as Thatcher and Mrs. Bloom, but then he didn't know I was a detective.