Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories Read online

  CASE FILE

  A Collection of Nameless Detective Tales

  Bill Pronzini

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / Bill Pronzini

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the Worst in Mystery Fiction

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  This one is for Thomas L. Dunne of St. Martin's Press, with thanks for his continuing faith in "Nameless."

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  It's a Lousy World

  Death of a Nobody

  One of Those Cases

  Sin Island

  Private Eye Blues

  The Pulp Connection

  Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?

  Dead Man's Slough

  Who's Calling?

  Booktaker

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  "It's a Lousy World." Copyright © 1968 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as "Sometimes There Is Justice." Revised version copyright © 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "Death of a Nobody." Copyright® 1970 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Revised version copyright © 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "One of Those Cases." Copyright © 1972 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as "The Assignment." Revised version copyright © 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "Sin Island." Copyright © 1972 by Renown Publications, Inc. First published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine as "Majorcan Assignment." Revised version copyright 19, 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "Private Eye Blues." Copyright © 1975 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

  "The Pulp Connection." Copyright © 1978 by Bill Pronzini. First published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as "The Private Eye Who Collected Pulps."

  "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" Copyright © 1979 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Expanded version copyright © 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "Dead Man's Slough." Copyright © 1980 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

  "Who's Calling?" Copyright © 1982, 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  "Booktaker." Copyright © 1982, 1983 by Bill Pronzini.

  PREFACE

  Why doesn't he have a name?

  This is the first question readers of the "Nameless Detective" series always ask. Well, I always answer, he's not really nameless; he has a name, just like everybody else, but I don't say what it is. Why not? they ask. Trying to capitalize on Hammett's Continental Op? I tell them no. Trying to establish a hook, a gimmick, to get people to read the stuff? they ask. I tell them no. At which point some of them become annoyed enough to demand: Then why doesn't the damn detective have a name?

  It amazes me that anybody should be bothered by this. It seems to me I've made "Nameless" real enough, with enough unique and interesting character traits to set him apart from any other fictional detective. What's in a name, after all?

  Anyhow, the damn detective doesn't have a name because when I began the series in 1968 I couldn't think of one that suited him. Big, sort of sloppy Italian guy who guzzles beer, smokes too much and collects pulp magazines. What name fits a character like that? Sam Spadini? Philip Marlozzi?

  He stayed nameless through half a dozen stories.

  Then, in 1970, I decided to do a novel. Better give him a name now, I thought. Mike Martello? Lew Archerone? With half the book completed and the character still unnamed, it occurred to me somewhat belatedly (I'm not always quick on the uptake) that I was also a big, sort of sloppy Italian guy who smoked too much, guzzled beer and collected pulp magazines. I was writing about myself, was what I was doing. Me at the age of fifty or so; me as a private eye instead of a professional writer.

  All of the character's beliefs, hang-ups, prejudices, perceptions were pretty much mine. Whatever he did in a given situation, however he reacted, was more or less what I would do and how I would react. Which also explained, psychologically, why I had never been able to think of a suitable name for him. He was me; I was him. And I had no desire, conscious or unconscious, to rename myself.

  Not too many other people figured this out until, in a 1978 collaboration between "Nameless" and Collin Wilcox's Lieutenant Frank Hastings (Twospot), he was publicly and for novelistic reasons given a first name: Bill. Aha! folks said then. The damn detective has the same first name as the writer; ergo, he must have the same last name, too. Right?

  Right. But he has remained officially "Nameless" in subsequent entries in the series and will continue to remain so in future entries. For one very good reason.

  Bill Pronzini may be an okay name for a writer, but it's a lousy name for a private eye.

  The ten stories in this collection were all written for magazine publication - the first eight for U.S. mystery digests, the last two on commission for the Japanese slick magazine Shosetsu Shincho. They span the full length of "Nameless's" career, from his first recorded case in 1968 ("It's a Lousy World") to the present; and I think they reflect the changes and growth in the character and in my own style and plotting technique. (I've revised all of the early ones, to rid them of some youthful mistakes, but conceptually they're the same stories that appeared in the magazines.)

  It should probably be noted that the opening segments of two of the stories, "One of Those Cases" and "Private Eye Blues," were later revised and expanded into the opening chapters of two novels in the series, Undercurrent and Blowback, respectively. A number of other published "Nameless" stories and novelettes, not included here, became the basis for such novels as The Snatch, Blowback, Labyrinth and Scattershot. Some folks don't seem to like this practice. I fail to understand the objection. Expanding one's own published short stories into novels, or splicing two or three together into a novel, has been a common practice among writers for a long time; no less a personage than Raymond Chandler made a habit of "cannibalizing" his early Black Mask stories for his Philip Marlowe novels, and nobody gets upset about that. If doing it makes a good idea better, or creates a good new idea through combination - why not?

  It should also be noted here that the story "Private Eye Blues" was written for a different reason than the others. When it was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1975, and later reprinted in Best Detective Stories of the Year 1976, edited by Edward D. Hoch, it carried a slightly different ending than the one which appears in these pages. A full explanation is included in an afterword to the story.

  One final comment:

  None of these stories (and none of the "Nameless" novels) are intended as pastiches of Hammett
or Chandler or Ross Macdonald or anyone else. They follow a tradition, yes, and contain certain conventions that are consciously exploited (nobody loves the old-fashioned private eye story more than I do), but "Nameless" is not Spade or Marlowe or Archer or any other detective. His vision of the world and of the detecting business is his own.

  Nor were these stories written with any pretensions to "literary merit" or "genre importance"; their only purpose is to entertain. I can only hope that when you've finished reading them, you feel that "Nameless" and I have succeeded in that purpose.

  BILL PRONZINI

  San Francisco, California

  June 1982

  IT'S A LOUSY WORLD

  Colly Babcock was shot to death on the night of September 9, in an alley between Twenty-ninth and Valley streets in the Glen Park District of San Francisco. Two police officers, cruising, spotted him coming out the rear door of Budget Liquors there, carrying a metal box. Colly ran when he saw them. The officers gave chase, calling out for him to halt, but he just kept running; one of the cops fired a warning shot, and when Colly didn't heed it the officer pulled up and fired again. He was aiming low, trying for the legs, but in the half-light of the alley it was a blind shot. The bullet hit Colly in the small of the back and killed him instantly.

  I read about it the following morning over coffee and undercooked eggs in a cafeteria on Taylor Street, a block and a half from my office. The story was on an inside page, concise and dispassionate; they teach that kind of objective writing in the journalism classes. Just the cold facts. A man dies, but he's nothing more than a statistic, a name in black type, a faceless nonentity to be considered and then forgotten along with your breakfast coffee.

  Unless you knew him.

  Unless he was your friend.

  Very carefully I folded the newspaper and put it into my coat pocket. Then I stood from the table, went out to the street. The wind was up, blowing in off the Bay; rubble swirled and eddied in the Tenderloin gutters. The air smelled of salt and dark rain and human pollution.

  I walked into the face of the wind, toward my office.

  "How's the job, Colly?"

  "Oh, fine, just fine."

  "No problems?"

  "No, none at all."

  "Stick with it, Colly."

  "Sure. I'm a new man."

  "Straight all the way?"

  "Straight all the way."

  Inside the lobby of my building, I found an out-of-order sign taped to the closed elevator doors. Yeah, that figured. I went around to the stairs, up to the second floor and along the hallway to my office.

  The door was unlocked, standing open a few inches. I tensed when I saw it like that, and reached out with the tips of my fingers and pushed it all the way open. But there was no trouble.

  The woman sitting in the chair in front of my desk had never been trouble for anyone.

  Colly Babcock's widow.

  I moved inside, shut the door and crossed toward her.

  "Hello, Lucille."

  Her hands were clasped tightly in the lap of a plain black dress. She said, "The man down the hall, the CPA - he let me in. He said you wouldn't mind."

  "I don't mind."

  "You heard, I guess? About Colly?"

  "Yes," I said. "What can I say, Lucille?"

  "You were his friend. You helped him."

  "Maybe I didn't help him enough."

  "He didn't do it," Lucille said. "He didn't steal that money. He didn't do all those robberies like they're saying."

  "Lucille. . ."

  "Colly and I were married thirty-one years," she said. "Don't you think I would have known?"

  I did not say anything.

  "I always knew," she said.

  I sat down, looking at her. She was a big woman, handsome —a strong woman. There was strength in the line of her mouth, and in her eyes, round and gray, tinged with red now from the crying. She had stuck by Colly through two prison terms and twenty-odd years of running, and hiding, and looking over her shoulder. Yes, I thought, she would always have known.

  But I said, "The papers said Colly was coming out the back door of the liquor store carrying a metal box. The police found a hundred and six dollars in the box, and the door jimmied open."

  "I know what the papers said, and I know what the police are saying. But they're wrong. Wrong."

  "He was there, Lucille."

  "I know that," she said. "Colly liked to walk in the evenings. A long walk and then a drink when he came home; it helped him to relax. That was how he came to be there."

  I shifted position on my chair, not speaking.

  Lucille said, "Colly was always nervous when he was doing burglaries. That was one of the ways I could tell. He'd get irritable, and he couldn't sleep."

  "He wasn't like that lately?"

  "You saw him a few weeks ago," she said. "Did he look that way to you?"

  "No," I said, "he didn't."

  "We were happy," Lucille said. "No more running. And no more waiting. We were truly happy."

  My mouth felt dry. "What about his job?"

  "They gave Colly a raise last week. A fifteen-dollar raise. We went to dinner to celebrate, down on the Wharf."

  "You were getting along all right on what he made?" I said. "Nothing came up?"

  "Nothing. We even had a little bank account started." She bit her lower lip. "We were going to Hawaii next year, or the year after. Colly always wanted to go to Hawaii."

  I looked at my hands. They seemed big and awkward resting on the desk top; I took them away and put them in my lap. "These Glen Park robberies started a month and a half ago," I said. "The police estimate the total amount taken at close to five thousand dollars. You could get to Hawaii pretty well on that kind of money."

  "Colly didn't do those robberies," she said.

  What could I say? God knew, and Lucille knew, that Colly had never been a saint; but this time she was convinced he'd been innocent. Nothing, it seemed, was going to change that in her eyes.

  I got a cigarette from my pocket and made a thing of lighting it. The smoke added more dryness to my mouth. Without looking at her, I said, "What do you want me to do, Lucille?"

  "I want you to prove Colly didn't do what they're saying he did."

  "I'd like nothing better, you know that. But how can I do it? The evidence —"

  "Damn the evidence!" Her wide mouth trembled with the sudden emotion. "Colly was innocent, I tell you! I won't have him buried with this last mark against his name. I won't have it."

  "Lucille, listen to me. . ."

  "I won't listen," she said. "Colly was your friend. You stood up for him with the parole board. You helped him find his job. You talked to him, gave him guidance. He was a different man, a new man, and you helped make him that way. Will you sit here and tell me you believe he threw it all away for five thousand dollars?"

  I didn't say anything; I still could not meet her eyes. I stared down at the burning cigarette in my fingers, watching the smoke rise, curling, a gray spiral in the cold air of the office.

  "Or don't you care whether he was innocent or not?" she said.

  "I care, Lucille."

  "Then help me. Find out the truth."

  "All right," I said. Her anger and grief, and her absolute certainty that Colly had been innocent, had finally got through to me; I could not have turned her down now if there had been ten times the evidence there was. "All right, Lucille, I'll see what I can do."

  It was drizzling when I got to the Hall of Justice. Some of the chill had gone out of the air, but the wind was stronger now. The clouds overhead looked black and swollen, ready to burst.

  I parked my car on Bryant Street, went past the sycamores on the narrow front lawn, up the concrete steps and inside. The plainclothes detective division, General Works, was on the fourth floor; I took the elevator. Eberhardt had been promoted to lieutenant not too long ago and had his own private office now, but I caught myself glancing over toward his old desk. Force of habit; it had be
en a while since I'd visited him at the Hall.

  He was in and willing to see me. When I entered his office he was shuffling through some reports and scowling. He was my age, pushing fifty, and he seemed to have been fashioned of an odd contrast of sharp angles and smooth, blunt planes: square forehead, sharp nose and chin, thick and blocky upper body, long legs and angular hands. Today he was wearing a brown suit that hadn't been pressed in a month; his tie was crooked; there was a collar button missing from his shirt. And he had a fat, purplish bruise over his left eye.

  "All right," he said, "make it quick."

  "What happened to your eye?"

  "I bumped into a doorknob."

  "Sure you did."

  "Yeah," he said. "You come here to pass the time of day, or was there something?"

  "I'd like a favor, Eb."

  "Sure. And I'd like three weeks' vacation."

  "I want to look at an Officer's Felony Report."

  "Are you nuts? Get the hell out of here."

  The words didn't mean anything. He was always gruff and grumbly while he was working; and we'd been friends for more years than either of us cared to remember, ever since we went through the Police Academy together after World War II and then joined the force here in the city.

  I said, "There was a shooting last night. Two squad-car cops killed a man running away from the scene of a burglary in Glen Park."

  "So?"

  "The victim was a friend of mine."

  He gave me a look. "Since when do you have burglars for friends?"

  "His name was Colly Babcock," I said. "He did two stretches in San Quentin, both for burglary; I helped send him up the first time. I also helped get him out on parole the second time and into a decent job."

  "Uh-huh. I remember the name. I also heard about the shooting last night. Too bad this pal of yours turned bad again, but then a lot of them do — as if you didn't know."