Deadfall nd-15

by Bill Pronzini

  “Well, he seldom spoke of her.”

  “When he did, what did he say?”

  “He said she was cheap. He couldn’t understand why Kenneth married her.”

  “Did he ever call her ‘Al’ instead of ‘Alicia’?”

  “No. Never.” Washburn paused. “Perhaps it was Kenneth who gave him the photo, for some reason.”

  “Can you think of one?”

  “No, I can’t. If only Leonard hadn’t been so private…”

  “I’ll find out, Mr. Washburn,” I said. “I should be back on the job in a day or two.”

  “So soon? But your partner said you had cracked ribs and a concussion…”

  “They’re healing.”

  “Aren’t you… I mean, you’re not afraid they’ll try to hurt you again?”

  Yes, I thought, I’m afraid. You’re always a little afraid in this business-more than a little when something like Sunday night happens. But you learn to live with it. And right now what I was feeling was a great deal more rage and determination than fear.

  I didn’t say any of that to Washburn; it was not the kind of thing I can articulate. I said only, “Don’t worry about that. You hired me to do a job; I intend to finish doing it.”

  Kerry wasn’t in the living room when I went out there again. I heard her in the kitchen, bustling around, and I smelled meat frying. It made me hungry-much hungrier than I’d been earlier in the day. I took that as a positive sign. If I could eat with appetite I was capable of putting my pants on and facing the world again.

  We had hamburger-“It’s about time you ate some solid food,” she said-and a spinach salad, and I drank a little beer with it. Afterward we sat in the living room and talked about neutral topics. At ten o’clock I chased her out. And when she was gone I was sorry about it, yet relieved at the same time. I wanted to be alone; I didn’t want to be alone. Ambivalence.

  Christ, I thought, I need to get out of here.

  Tomorrow, I thought. If I can walk in the morning I’m gone.

  I went to bed. I was afraid I might have difficulty getting to sleep, because I had done so much sleeping the past three days, but it didn’t happen that way. I put the light out and I went out with it.

  Dreams.

  Faces, places-the same as before. And some new ones too: Alicia Purcell in the slinky, low-cut black gown, smiling. Danny Martinez’s son Roberto, smiling.

  Voices, old and new. “Deadfall so sorry love Al once bitten whosoever toucheth fall how could you…”

  All through the night, dreams.

  Morning.

  A little after seven, by the nightstand clock.

  I lay in bed remembering the dreams and the voices, and I knew I was close. Don’t try to force it; it’ll come. I got up, donned my robe, went into the bathroom and had another look at myself.

  Not too bad. The swelling was completely gone from my right eye and the lemon-brown discoloration around it had begun to fade; I could see as well as ever, except for a faint blurriness at the far periphery of my vision. Two other bruises were fading even more rapidly. The face might draw some looks, but nobody was going to be startled or frightened by it.

  I flexed my body a little, testing my ribs. Still some of that tearing pain; I would have to be careful how I moved. My head didn’t hurt at all, but that might be a false sign. Head wounds, concussions, could be tricky. Still, my mind seemed perfectly clear… clear enough, anyhow.

  Yeah, I thought, I’m ready.

  But not right this minute; it was too early to expect to get anything done. I went into the kitchen, made some coffee and a couple of soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast; ate at the table in there. Went back to bed with a second cup of coffee, to wait and to do some more thinking. Tried to sit up, but my ribs felt more constricted that way, so I stretched out and pulled the blankets over me.

  Went to sleep again.

  It was an odd sleep-deep and dreamless for a long while, then shallow and restless and heavy with more dreams, and finally not quite sleep at all, just that kind of drifting doze where you’re poised on the edge of wakefulness and dreams and reality intermingle.

  Photographs, I thought or dreamed.

  Love, Al.

  His name is Roberto, he’s a nice little boy.

  Photographs.

  Deadfall.

  So sorry.

  Fall how could you…

  Love, Al.

  Photographs.

  Danny Martinez.

  Crucifixes.

  Roberto.

  Lumber, remember the lumber?

  I woke up. Sat up so fast that pain ripped through my side and I had to jam my teeth together to keep from crying out. I was soaked in sweat, panting as if I had run a long distance-and in a way, that was just what I’d done.

  I had it now… some of it, maybe even most of it. And I knew where to look for the rest. Bad, worse than I’d thought, uglier than I’d thought. Simpler than I’d thought, too. That was why it had taken me this long to figure it out. Too many complications, and most of them false trails, miscalculations, red herrings. The forest for the trees.

  What time was it? I looked at the clock, and the hands read 1:03. I stared at them; I had slept another five hours, slept away half of the day. Thursday-another Thursday. Everything of any magnitude on this case seemed to happen on Thursday, including its beginning and now maybe its ending.

  I got out of bed, stripped off my pajamas in the bathroom-they smelled medicinal and sweaty, and so did I-and took a careful shower. Then I got dressed, went back to the bedroom. My notebook was on the dresser; Kerry had rescued it from what was left of the suit jacket I’d been wearing Sunday night. My car keys were there too, thanks to her and Eberhardt having retrieved the car. When I checked through the notebook I found that I hadn’t copied down Claudia Mitchell’s telephone number. I could call the office, get it from Eberhardt if he was in, but I did not want to talk to Eberhardt right now. So I dialed 411 instead. There was only one Claudia Mitchell listed-the right one, as it turned out.

  Her sister wasn’t there, but she gave me a number where Ruth Mitchell could be reached. The former Mrs. Leonard Purcell did not want to talk to me at first, not about anything so personal as what I was asking; but I convinced her it was important, that it would help bring Leonard’s murderer to justice. She answered my questions finally. And they were the right answers, the ones I had expected to hear.

  One more thing to check out, one very important thing. I did not have to go do it myself, I did not want to go do it myself; it would require work, the kind I was in no shape for-hard work, bad work. Call Ben Klein, I thought, lay it out for him, let him take it from here. But I couldn’t do that. It was my case now, mine to finish unraveling, mine to put an end to one way or another. Personally.

  You sound like Mike Hammer, for Christ’s sake, I thought. What’s the matter with you?

  I watched a man die, I thought, I felt him die. And they beat me up, they hurt me bad. That’s what’s the matter with me.

  I got the car keys off the dresser, put on my old tweed overcoat to guard against a chill, and went out. Wishing I owned a gun to take with me, and damned glad I didn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The car didn’t handle right. When the trap car rammed it on Sunday night the impact had done more than just cave in part of the right front fender; it had screwed up the steering gear somehow, so that that side felt loose on turns and shimmied badly at speeds above thirty-five. I didn’t like driving it this way, but at the moment I had no choice. I held my speed down and put blind trust in the thing hanging together for another sixty miles or so.

  I drove straight down the coast on Highway 1, taking it very slow through the bad snaky stretch at Devil’s Slide. The weather had turned poor again-heavily overcast, gusty winds, mist sailing in ragged streamers along the edge of the sea. There was not much traffic. I kept my mind blank as I drove; I did not want to think about what lay ahead. Time enough for thinking when I finishe
d what I was on my way to do.

  When I got to Moss Beach it was a little after three. I turned inland through the village, went out Sunshine Valley Road, picked up Elm Street a little while later. And a little while after that I was again looking at the deserted expanse of the Martinez farm.

  I parked where I had the first time, in the middle of the dusty yard, and got out in slow, careful movements. Driving hadn’t bothered me too much, except for the jouncing of the car as I crawled over the rutted access lane; that had made my side and my head hurt. My joints ached, too, as I stepped away from the car. Old, I thought. Old and badly used.

  The wind blew hard and cold here, made pained moaning noises in the surrounding woods, fiapped a loose shutter at one of the house windows, spun a rowel on a rusty weathervane atop the barn; I was glad I had thought to put on the overcoat. I stood looking around for a time. Everything seemed as it had been nearly a week ago. But looks can be deceiving; I ought to have remembered that little homily before, saved myself a lot of grief. They might have been here in the interim, one or the other or both of them. It depended on how secure they felt… no, on how secure she felt.

  Without thinking about where I was going I crossed to the house, climbed the porch stairs. Delaying tactic, but so what? The front door was still closed, as I had left it last Friday. I turned the knob and it opened and I went inside.

  Nothing different about the front parlor; the dark-wood crucifix was still there on one wall. I moved through the kitchen, the dining area, the child’s room, into the bedroom Danny Martinez had shared with his common-law wife. Nothing different there either. The bronze, silver-trimmed crucifix still hung above the bed. And the photo of young, laughing Roberto Martinez was still wedged between the frame and the glass of the oval mirror.

  Crucifixes.

  Photographs.

  Man packs up all his belongings, clothes and things, crap from the bathroom medicine cabinet, loads up his old pickup truck and clears out for Mexico-that’s the way it’s supposed to look. But he’s a religious man; why would he leave the crucifixes behind, particularly the one in here? Even if the break-up of his family had soured him on his faith, this crucifix was an expensive piece of craftsmanship and he had been a poor man all his life. No reason for him to leave it behind, none at all.

  No reason for him not to have taken the photo of his son, either. You could understand a man not taking the other photo, the one of the three of them: he might not want to keep anything with the woman’s image on it. But two different people had told me Danny Martinez doted on Roberto. And the photograph there on the mirror was a fine one, little boy laughing, nobody in it but him-the kind of photo no loving father could bear to leave behind.

  Photographs and crucifixes. And I was a damned poor detective for not having realized these things before.

  Back through the house, down the stairs, over to the car. I leaned inside, unclipped the flashlight from under the dash. And then hesitated, feeling tired and sore and a little sick to my stomach. The wind slapped at me, and I shivered-but it was more than just the cold that put the tremor on my body. Get it over with, I thought. But it was another minute or so before I could make myself move toward the barn.

  The one door was still open, canted at an angle on its weak hinges. I went through the opening. The sour odor was the same — or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was stronger. I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell it. The shadows in the corners, under the hayloft, up around the eaves seemed denser today because of the heavy overcast outside. I switched on the flashlight and played its powerful beam over the stack of lumber, the carpentering tools scattered nearby. Then, slowly, I made my way toward the rear, to where the horse stalls were.

  The second stack of lumber still stood in the one on the far left. I moved that way, put the light on the two-by-fours and sheets of plywood piled haphazardly along the back wall. Not much, really. Just enough to cover about a third of the packed-earth floor.

  What was it doing here? That was the question I should have asked myself last Friday, just as I should have asked myself why the crucifixes and the photograph of Roberto were still in the house. Nothing back here but the otherwise empty stalls; nothing that needed repair; nothing that would warrant lugging two-by-fours and plywood sheets from the front of the barn all the way back here.

  Only one reason for the lumber in this stall, then: to hide something underneath it.

  I let the light slither over the bare earth. It was marked, chewed up here and there by shoes or boots, by pieces of lumber, maybe by a tool of some kind. Yeah. But the marks and gouges didn’t look fresh. Nor did the lumber seem to have been disturbed since my first visit. They hadn’t been back in here; that seemed certain.

  I had no stomach for the rest of it, and I was afraid of the exertion. But I had to do it, I had to be sure. I wedged the flash into a crack in the boards separating the stall from its neighbor, positioning it so that it illuminated the lumber. There were three of the plywood sheets on top; I tackled those first, carried them out one at a time and dropped them back a ways. The two-by-fours were next: same thing, one at a time. The first few trips weren’t too bad, but then I lifted one of the pieces wrong, even though I was bending and lifting in slow motion. The pain cut through my side, made it difficult for me to breathe for a few seconds. Started my head aching again, too. I rested for a time, but the pain lingered and so did the shortness of breath. Live with it, I told myself, you’ve lived with worse. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.

  It took me more than twenty minutes to clear the stall, double the time it would have taken if I’d been healthy. Wrapped in the heavy overcoat, I was drenched in oily sweat by the time I finished; but I hadn’t dared take the coat off, not as cold as it was in here. My knees felt shaky and I had to sit down for a couple of minutes before I did anything else. But not there in the stall; not anywhere close to it. Not with the smell that came from the spaded-up earth under the last two sections of plywood.

  There was an old three-legged kitchen stool near the workbench; I sat on that, breathing through my mouth, not thinking about anything. When my legs felt all right I got up again, found a shovel among the tools near the main stack of lumber, took it back to the stall. And began to dig.

  The earth was soft, moist; the work would not have been hard except for the constant bending and straightening that aggravated each stiffened joint, worsened the pain in my side and the dull pounding in my head. During the next ten minutes I had to stop and rest three times. If the body had been down deep I might have had to give up the job altogether. But it wasn’t down deep; it was buried a little more than twelve inches below the surface.

  The shovel blade bit into something yielding and the poisonous, gaseous stench of decay spurted up at me. I recoiled, gagging. When I turned back finally, reluctantly, I was looking at an arm — a man’s bloated arm, blackened fingers acrawl with bugs, bulging out of the remnants of a blue chambray shirt.

  I had finally found Danny Martinez.

  I could not have faced any more digging, even if it had been necessary; the stench was sickening enough as it was. Ben Klein on the phone last Friday: We didn’t even get a smell of this guy Martinez. Jesus Christ!

  Shaking a little, I threw the shovel down and pulled the flashlight out of the crack in the boards. The beam slithered sideways, made something gleam in the mound of dirt I’d created-something red and shiny. I leaned over that way, trying not to gag again, and held the light on it up close.

  Part of a fingernail, torn raggedly on one end: a woman’s long fingernail painted a bright crimson.

  I left it where it was; no point in removing incriminating evidence. I had to get out of there. The stench was so bad it made me feel as if I were suffocating. I followed the light across the barn, shut it off when I got outside. Stood in the chill wind with my head back, sucking air until my chest cleared and the nausea was gone. Then I went to the car and got inside and started the engine and s
at huddled and shivering, waiting for the heater to fill up the space with warm air. Thinking again. Remembering.

  Elisabeth Summerhayes: I hate women who mark men, the ones with claws like cats. She had been talking about Alicia Purcell. But Mrs. Purcell had short fingernails now, short and painted a bright bloody crimson. Why would a woman who habitually wore her nails long cut them short? A whim, maybe. Or maybe she’d had no other choice; maybe she’d torn one of them off, damaged others, doing manual labor of some kind. Like digging. Like burying the body of a man she’d just murdered.

  You don’t like to think about women having the physical and mental capacity for digging graves, for lugging heavy plywood sheets and two-by-fours to cover one up; you can get so mired in the weak-sex-fair-sex myth that you lose sight of the fact that a woman, given the proper impetus, can pretty much do any job a man can do. Alicia Purcell was wiry, strong. And determined. And as cold-blooded as any black widow spider making dinner out of one of her mates.

  She’d killed and buried Danny Martinez, all right. The broken fingernail in there proved that. She hadn’t had any help with that part of it; the help had come later, in making it look as though Martinez had pulled up stakes and disappeared to parts unknown. She’d needed somebody to pack up all his belongings, load them into Martinez’s pickup, drive the truck away somewhere and get rid of it. That was where Richie Dessault came in.

  It had to be Dessault. From all indications he hadn’t known Martinez personally; so how had he known it was Martinez I was talking about-I hadn’t even known it myself at the time-when I asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent? My visit last Thursday, my investigation, was what had sent him out here the following afternoon. He’d come skulking through the woods because he hadn’t wanted to be seen driving into the farm, hadn’t wanted his car out in plain sight if anybody showed up. His purpose: either to make sure he hadn’t left any traces of himself when he’d done Alicia’s bidding, or to see if he could find out just what had been going on between her and Martinez. She wouldn’t have told him about the murder, the body buried in the barn, any of the rest of it; she was cunning and he wasn’t and she would not have left herself wide open to any more blackmail. No, she’d have made up some plausible-sounding story, something quasi-legitimate at the worst, to explain the need to get rid of Martinez’s belongings and truck. Dessault hadn’t questioned her at that point, if he’d ever questioned her. She’d have had him hooked by then, with sex as the bait. She’d have seduced him just as she had Summerhayes and countless others.