Hardcase

by Bill Pronzini

  Other Books by Bill Pronzini

  The Hangings

  Firewind

  With an Extreme Burning

  Snowbound

  The Stalker

  Lighthouse (with Marcia Muller)

  Games

  “Nameless Detective” Novels by Bill Pronzini

  The Snatch

  The Vanished

  Undercurrent

  Blowback

  Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

  Labyrinth

  Hoodwink

  Scattershot

  Dragonfire

  Bindlestiff

  Quicksilver

  Nightshades

  Double (with Marcia Muller)

  Bones

  Deadfall

  Shackles

  Jackpot

  Breakdown

  Quarry

  Epitaphs

  Demons

  Hardcase

  Sentinels

  Illusions

  Boobytrap

  Crazybone

  Bleeders

  Spook

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2015

  Hardcase

  Copyright © 1995 by Bill Pronzini

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781628152722

  For more exciting

  Books, eBooks, Audiobooks and more visit us at

  www.speakingvolumes.us

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  For Gene Zombolas and Arthur Hackathorn

  Friends and fellow collectors

  of the good old stuff

  Chapter One

  I WAS SWEATING.

  My whole body felt damp, sticky. The palms of my hands leaked and itched. My head might have been stuffed with oily cotton. My stomach kept doing a rhythmic bump-and-grind. My throat felt as if it were lined with sandpaper.

  What’s the matter with you? I thought. You’re not a kid; you’re almost sixty years old. You’ve faced guns, knives, all sorts of weapons in your life. Lived for three months chained to a cabin wall. This is nothing. This is a piece of cake. This is good, you damn foot—the one thing you’ve wanted more than any other the past ten years.

  I kept right on sweating.

  Why was it so hot in here? Not even November yet, sun shining outside, and they had the heat turned up as if it were midwinter. Damn nest of city hall spiders!

  I glanced at Kerry. She wasn’t sweating; she was calm, so calm she seemed almost serene. I looked at Cybil, Kerry’s mother. She was calm. I looked at Joe DeFalco and his wife, Nancy. Both calm, him smirkily so. I looked at the judge in his black robes. He was the calmest of all. Sure he was. He’d probably done this several thousand times....

  “... be your lawful wedded husband, to love, honor, and cherish, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”

  “I will,” Kerry said.

  The judge’s gaze shifted to me. Oh, Lord, I thought.

  “And will you take Kerry to be your lawful wedded wife, to love, honor, and cherish, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”

  I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

  The sweat had gotten into my eyes; the judge’s moon face was a watery blur. A pressure seemed to be building in my chest. I couldn’t take in enough air. Heart attack? I could be the first poor bastard to drop dead in the middle of his wedding vows—

  Kerry poked me in the ribs, not too gently. I grunted, blinked, sucked in air—and my vocal cords lost their paralysis and the words “I will” rumbled out.

  Kerry sighed. Nancy DeFalco sighed. Cybil sighed and snuffled. The judge asked me, “Will there be rings?”

  “Uh?”

  “Rings. Will you and Kerry be exchanging rings?”

  “Rings,” I said, “right.” The plain white-gold one I’d bought for Kerry was in my jacket pocket. I managed to get it out without dropping it; to slip it on her finger without scraping any skin off her knuckle. That was the easy part. The hard part was her sliding my ring on my finger, which seemed to have swollen up like a sausage. She pushed and twisted, and I fumbled to help her, and finally, after scraping skin from my knuckle, it went on.

  The judge beamed and said, “By the power vested in me by the sovereign state of California, I pronounce you husband and wife.” Then he said to me, “Congratulations. You may kiss your bride.”

  “Uh?”

  “Your bride. You may kiss her.”

  “Right,” I said, and turned toward Kerry and caught hold of her arms and aimed my mouth in the general direction of hers. But I did all of that too fast, with about as much grace as a rhino wading through a bog. The result was, our lips didn’t meet.

  They didn’t meet because I stepped on her foot.

  She let out a little yelp, did a hop-step to free herself, at the same time pushing out at me with her hands. The push made me hop-step, which caused my feet to get tangled together on the carpet, which led to a lurching, backward stumble. I would have righted myself in a couple of steps, except that I didn’t have room to take a couple of steps, one of the chambers’ paneled walls being very close behind me. It was the wall that halted my momentum, hard enough to rattle it and me. And to dislodge something that was hanging there. I heard the something fall. Then I heard the ominous sound of glass breaking.

  Then I heard silence.

  I looked down at my feet. The something was a framed diploma—the judge’s law school diploma. Automatically I reached down to pick it up. But I didn’t pick it up because a sliver of glass sliced into my finger and the sting jerked me upright again. The finger was bleeding. I put it into my mouth.

  They were all staring at me, I saw then. Kerry, Cybil, the DeFalcos, the judge . . . each as still as a statue, staring at me. Nobody made a sound. But I knew what they were thinking. I was thinking the same thing myself.

  I took the bloody finger out of my mouth.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Clumsy,” I said.

  Horse’s ass, I thought.

  KERRY SAID, “For heaven’s sake, will you stop apologizing? I’m not upset. I don’t see why you should be.”

  “But the way I behaved . . .”

  “You were just being you, my love.”

  “That’s reassuring. Thanks a lot.”

  The five of us were in Stars on Golden Gate, one of San Francisco’s better restaurants, for what was supposed to be a festive wedding lunch. But I couldn’t seem to get into the spirit of it. I was still wearing my embarrassment like a hair shirt.

  “Other people get married,” I said, “thousands of people every day, and things like that don’t happen to them. They have simple, dignified ceremonies. But ours? Oh, no. No dignity at all.”

  “That’s because you’re a klutz,” DeFalco said.

  “I was nervous, sure, I admit that. I couldn’t help it. But stepping on Kerry’s foot . . . it was a c
razy fluke thing. I’m not that clumsy, for God’s sake.”

  “If you ask me,” DeFalco said, “you’d have made a great foil for the Marx Brothers.”

  “Shut up, Joe,” his wife said.

  “Shut up, Joe,” I said.

  “Maybe I ought to write it up for the Chronicle,” he said. “PRIVATE EYE WREAKS HAVOC AT OWN NUPTIALS. What do you think?”

  “I think I wish I’d asked somebody other than a smart-ass reporter to stand up for me.”

  Cybil said, “Well, I thought the judge was very nice about it. Didn’t you?”

  “Sure he was,” DeFalco agreed. “With the fifty bucks our blushing groom slipped him, he can replace the busted frame and then take his missus out for a steak dinner.”

  “Shut up, Joe,” Nancy said.

  “Shut up, Joe,” I said.

  Kerry said, “I’m starving. Is anybody else starving?”

  “Not me. I don’t have any appetite.”

  “You’d better eat, tiger.” She winked at me. “Keep your strength up.”

  “He’ll need more than lunch for that,” the smart-ass said. “You two aren’t going anywhere for the weekend? No honeymoon?”

  “Not right away,” Kerry told him. “Too much work for both of us. We’re planning a few days the weekend after next.”

  “Hawaii? Baja? Caribbean cruise?”

  “Cazadero,” I said.

  “Cazadero? You mean that little village up near the Russian River?”

  “Only Cazadero I know about.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  I glowered at him. “Do I sound like I’m kidding? What’s wrong with Cazadero?”

  “Nothing. It’s just not a place I’d pick for a honeymoon.”

  “Right,” Nancy said. “We went to Pismo Beach.”

  “A client of Bates and Carpenter’s has a cabin up there,” Kerry explained. “When I mentioned to him we were getting married he offered it for as long as we wanted, no charge.”

  “Ah,” DeFalco said, “now I see the appeal.”

  “The hell you do, Joe,” I said. “You have about as much romance in your soul as a maggot.”

  Cybil said, “Speaking of which, I believe I’ll have the roast beef sandwich,” and broke us all up.

  I wasn’t hungry until the food came; then I was ravenous. I don’t usually drink anything stronger than beer and an occasional glass of red wine, but when DeFalco insisted on buying a bottle of champagne, and then a second bottle, I quaffed three full glasses. By the time lunch was over, I was as cheerful as I’d been before the ceremony.

  Outside the restaurant, while we were waiting for the women to come out of the rest room, DeFalco said, “Mind if I ask a personal question?”

  “That depends on how personal it is.”

  “Well, it’s not about Kerry.”

  “Uh-huh. You want to know if I invited Eberhardt to join us. And if I did, if he turned me down.”

  “Sometimes you astound me, Holmes. Did you?”

  “I bit the bullet and called him last week. He wasn’t home, so I left a message on his machine. He didn’t call back.”

  “So neither did you.”

  “No. He obviously wasn’t interested and I don’t beg.”

  “Stubborn as hell, both of you.”

  I ignored that. “Kerry talked to Bobbie Jean, asked her to come even if Eb wouldn’t. She begged off with a lame excuse. He’s finally got her looking at me through his eyes, I guess.”

  “Well, if you ask me it’s a damn shame. I hate to see old friends on the outs, especially at a time like this.”

  “Better get used to it,” I said. “We’re on the outs for good, looks like. And right now I couldn’t care less.”

  KERRY AND I DROVE Cybil home to her seniors complex in Larkspur. She had a cake there for us, and a couple of wedding presents. One of the presents was an antique Gorham silver tea service that had been in her family for three generations. It meant a lot to Kerry; she cried when she unwrapped it. I was happy that she was happy. But my private opinion was that it was the ugliest rococo monstrosity I’d ever laid eyes on.

  Pleasant relaxed afternoon, all in all, but I was glad when five o’clock rolled around—the time we’d agreed to leave.

  By then I had Wedding Night on my mind.

  ALONE TOGETHER AT LAST, in Kerry’s condo on Diamond Heights. We built a cedarwood fire. We drank some more champagne that she’d bought and ate cracked crab and sourdough French bread. We snuggled a little. And then she said, “Wanna consummate?” and I said, “I love it when you talk dirty,” and we went to bed.

  We left the bedside lamp on and we weren’t in any hurry. The way to have good sex, I’ve always believed, is to approach it the same way you approach a big Italian meal—slowly, savoring each course in turn. Antipasto first. Then a little soup, a little pasta. And finally the entrée. Some terrific entrée ours was turning out to be, too: halfway through it, heading toward dessert, I was certain that what we had here was a Consummation Supreme.

  Instead it turned into a Chef’s Surprise.

  We were all tangled up with each other and the sheets and the pillows, in one of those awkward positions you get into sometimes, and my left leg had got bent at a funny angle. When I tried to shift position to unbend it, the cramp started. It started small, just a thin tightness in back of the knee. I tried to do two things at once, the second one being to ease the tightness by stretching the leg out and shaking it. But I couldn’t free it from the bedclothes, at least not enough to stretch it all the way out and shake it with any authority.

  The muscle spasmed and the cramp got worse. I quit attempting to do two things at once and concentrated on the cramp. Too late. There was another spasm, then a series of spasms. And suddenly the whole leg stiffened and erupted in fiery pain.

  I yelled. I shoved and twisted, almost dislodging Kerry from the bed, and heaved myself up on the other knee. She cried, “My God, what is it, what’s the matter?” as if she thought I might be having a coronary. I would have answered her except that the pain was excruciating; I lunged off the bed instead. And hopped around on one foot, appendages quivering every which way, cussing and howling and struggling to get the foot down flat on the carpet.

  It took a good ten seconds to jam the heel down and unlock the leg, and another ten seconds to massage the pain out of the muscle. I stood there limp and panting, aware that Kerry was staring at me with her eyes popped wide and both hands covering her mouth.

  “Cramp,” I said.

  A choking sound came from behind her hands. At first I thought she was having some kind of attack; then I realized that she was laughing. Gargling and choking, by God, on a throatful of mirth.

  “What the hell’s so funny?” I demanded.

  She couldn’t hold it in any longer. She took her hands away from her mouth and the laughter came pouring out in whoops. Her face grew bright red. Tears leaked out of her eyes. She rolled over onto her stomach and pounded the mattress with her fists and whooped into her pillow.

  I limped over and slapped her on the fanny, not as hard as I should have. She flopped onto her back again but she didn’t stop laughing. Between whoops she said, “You should’ve seen yourself! Hopping around with your . . . with that thing . . . oh, Lord!”

  “Ha-ha,” I said.

  I got back into bed. Pretty soon Kerry’s little fit subsided, and when she had her breath back she said, “I’m sorry I laughed at you. But you really did look funny.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

  “The cramp gone now?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Good.” She snuggled up again. “Then why don’t we finish what we started?”

  “I don’t know if I can. Or if I want to, now.”

  “You can,” she said. “And you want to.”

  Right on both counts. She seemed not to have lost any of her enthusiasm, although she might have been faking it; but for me, at least, the zip was gone. What should have been a m
eal among meals, on a night among nights, had become just another quick and not very satisfying supper. It wasn’t me I felt bad for, either. It was Kerry.

  After a while I said, “You married a loser, you know that? I wanted our wedding day and our wedding night to be special. Instead I managed to turn both into disasters.”

  Kerry lifted herself onto an elbow. “What’re you talking about? Today and tonight were special. Very special.”

  “Oh, sure. First I practically trash the judge’s chambers, then I can’t even make love to you without doing an X-rated Bugs Bunny imitation in the middle of it. I’m a buffoon, that’s what I am.”

  “Nonsense. You’re the nicest man I know.”

  “Uh-huh. And the clumsiest.”

  “Well, I won’t dispute that.”

  “You’re not sorry you married me?”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

  “You forgive me?”

  “For what? I meant it when I said today and tonight were special. In fact, they were wonderful. You couldn’t have planned a wedding day or a wedding night I’d treasure more.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I really mean it.”

  “You’re nuts, you know that?”

  “So are you.” Then she laughed and said, “X-rated Bugs Bunny,” and laughed some more. Then she stopped laughing and things got quiet for a time. But not as long as either of us expected.

  “What’s up, Doc?” she said.

  Chapter Two

  MONDAY MORNING. BACK TO WORK.

  Five seconds after I keyed open the door to my office, the telephone started to ring. It was just nine o’clock, the time my business cards and ad in the Yellow Pages say I open for business. Somebody eager for my services, I thought. Marriage had made an optimist out of me, at least temporarily.

  Prospective client, all right. The caller identified herself as Melanie Ann Aldrich, with an odd little hesitation between the given names and the surname. She said I’d been recommended to her as a competent private investigator, and would it be possible to discuss a personal matter with me this morning. She sounded young. Brisk and businesslike, though. I asked if she was calling from the city; she was. Would ten o’clock be convenient? Ten o’clock would be fine, she said, and rang off before I could ask who had given her my name. “Competent private investigator.” Some glowing recommendation.