Labyrinth nd-6 Read online

  Labyrinth

  ( Nameless Detective - 6 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Labyrinth

  ONE

  The dead girl lay in a twisted sprawl, like something broken and carelessly discarded, among the reeds and bushes that grew along the edge of Lake Merced.

  I could see her from where I stood alone on the embankment thirty feet above, and I could watch the movements of the half-dozen Homicide cops and forensic people who were down there with her. One of the cops was Eberhardt. He knew I was waiting up here, but he had not paid any attention to me since my arrival a couple of minutes ago; he wasn’t ready yet to tell me why I had been summoned out of a sound sleep at seven A.M. to the place where a young girl had died.

  It was a cold gray Wednesday morning in November, and the wind blowing in across Skyline carried the heavy smells of salt and rain. Pockets of mist clung to the reeds and trees and underbrush around the lake shore, giving the concrete pedestrian causeway at the south end an oddly insubstantial look, like an optical illusion. The whole area seemed desolate at this hour, but that was illusion too: Lake Merced sits in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, not far from the ocean, and is surrounded by public and private golf courses, upper-and middle-class residential areas, San Francisco State College, and the Fleishhacker Zoo.

  It had been awhile since my last trip out here. But when I was on the cops a number of years ago I had come to the lake at least once a month, sometimes with Eberhardt, because the police pistol range was nearby to the west. Another inspector had had a small sailboat in those days, moored over at the Harding Boat House, and if the weather was good the three of us would take it out on Saturdays or Sundays. Lake Merced is bigger than you would expect an in-city body of water to be, and because of its location, removed from the tourist areas downtown and along the Bay, it’s a recreation area pretty much reserved for the natives.

  Behind me I heard another vehicle come wheeling in off Lake Merced Boulevard. I turned, saw that it was a city ambulance, and watched it maneuver to a stop among the blue-and-whites and unmarked police sedans-and my car-that were strewn across the wide dirt parking area opposite Brotherhood Way. Two attendants in white uniforms got out and opened up the rear doors. While they were doing that, a coroner’s car swung in and joined the pack; the guy who stepped out of it, carrying a medical bag, came over and stopped beside me.

  “Where is it?” he said, as if he were asking about a tree stump or a piece of machinery. He seemed to think I was one of the Homicide inspectors. “Down there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Down there.”

  “Sorry I’m late.” But he did not sound sorry; he only sounded aggrieved. “Goddamn car wouldn’t start.”

  I had nothing to say to that. He shrugged, pulled a face, gave me a short nod, and began to make his way down to where the dead girl was.

  I looked away again. The knots of people along the bicycle paths that flanked the parking area-college kids from S.F. State, residents of the lakeview townhouses down the way, reporters and TV-remote crews-seemed to be getting larger; cars crawled along Lake Merced Boulevard, filled wih eager gawking faces. Ghouls, all of them. There were half a dozen uniformed patrolmen working crowd control in the area, but the cops knew and I knew that the crowds would not be dispersed until after the body was taken away.

  The cold bite of the wind was making my eyes water. I rubbed at them with the back of one hand, reburied the hand in my topcoat pocket, and bunched the material tight around me. Filaments of black, like veins, had started to form in the overcast sky; we were going to have rain pretty soon. I considered waiting inside my car, where I could use the heater to chase some of the morning chill-but before I could make up my mind to do that, Eberhardt’s voice called my name from below.

  I stepped back to the edge of the embankment and saw him peering up at me, beckoning. “Okay,” he said, “you can come on down.”

  So I let out a breath and picked my way along the slope, using the vegetation there to keep my balance on the wet grass. When I got to where Eberhardt was, he turned without saying anything and led me to the girl’s body.

  “Take a look,” he said then, “tell me if you recognize her.”

  She was lying on her stomach, but her head was canted around so that most of her face was visible toward the lake. There was one hole on the left side of her forehead, black-edged and caked with dried blood, and a second just below the collarbone. Shot twice, with what was probably a small caliber weapon judging from the size of the entry wounds and because there did not seem to be any exit wounds. She had been young, maybe still in her teens, and she had been attractive; you could tell that even with her features blanked and frozen in death. Long dark hair, pug nose, sprinkling of freckles across her cheekbones. Wearing a suede coat, tennis shoes, jeans, and one of those football-type jerseys, red and white, with the number forty-nine on it.

  I had never seen her before.

  My stomach coiled up as I looked at her. After a couple of seconds I swung around and stood staring out over the wind-wrinkled surface of the lake. I had seen death before-too much death, too many bodies torn and ravaged by violence-but each time was like the first: a hollow feeling under the breastbone, the taste of bile, a sense of sadness and awe. I had never learned to inure myself to it, never become jaded or detached enough, the way some cops did, to treat it as an abstract.

  But this time I felt something else, too-a kind of dull empty rage. A young girl like that, robbed of life before she had much of a chance to live it. Why? Where was the sense in such a brutal act? No matter what she might have done to someone, no matter what she might have been, she could not have deserved to die this way.

  Beside me Eberhardt said, “Well?” His voice was sharp and gruff, and I knew him well enough after thirty years to understand that the girl’s death had touched him too.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know her, Eb.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right. We’ll talk up top. I’m finished here.”

  He asked the assistant coroner if he could release the body, got an affirmative nod, and the two of us climbed back up to the parking area. I watched him gesture to the ambulance attendants and then take out one of his flame-blackened briar pipes and clamp it between his teeth. He was my age, fifty-two, and 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. His usual expression was one of sourness and cynicism-a false reflection of what he was like inside-but now his face had a dark, brooding cast. I wondered if he were thinking about his niece, the one who was not much older than the dead girl by the lake.

  When the ambulance attendants came past us with the stretcher and disappeared below, Eberhardt said to me, “Her name was Christine Webster. Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “We found her purse in one of those bushes on the slope,” he said. “Address on her driver’s license is Edgewood Avenue, up by the U.C. Med Center. She was twenty years old and a student at S.F. State; student I.D. card in her wallet, along with the license.”

  “None of that rings any bells,” I said.

  “You working on anything connected with the college?”

  “No. I’m not working on anything at all right now.”

  “You know anybody up around the Med Center?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Look, Eb-”

  “Not much else in her purse. Except one thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “One of your business cards,” he said.

  “So that’s it.”

  “That’s it. Kind of funny for a girl that young to be carrying around
a private eye’s business card, don’t you think?”

  “I think. Christ.”

  “But you’re positive you never saw or heard from her?”

  “I’d remember if I had.”

  “What about phone calls or letters from unidentified women. Anything like that recently?”

  “No. I’m sorry, no.”

  “You hand out many of those cards?”

  “A fair amount, sure,” I said. “Insurance companies, lawyers, bail bondsmen, skip-trace clients, friends, casual acquaintances-hell, I must have distributed a thousand or more over the past few years.”

  There were sounds on the slope behind us, and we both turned to look as the ambulance attendants struggled up with the stretcher. When they got to the top and started past us, a ripple of movement and sound passed through the watchers along Lake Merced Boulevard. You could almost see them all leaning forward for a better look, even though the shell of Christine Webster was just a small shapeless mound beneath the sheet and restraining straps.

  Eberhardt said, “Bastards.”

  “Yeah.”

  He got a little box of wooden matches out of his pocket, hunched over to shield his hands from the wind, and used four of the matches to get his pipe lighted. “Okay,” he said then. “She picked up your card somehow, and maybe she was planning to contact you, but for whatever reason she never did. The point is, is there a connection between that and her death?”

  I had been wondering the same thing. The idea of it bothered me; I had not known the girl existed until this morning, when she no longer did exist, and yet the fact that she’d had my business card was a thread linking her life and mine. If there was a connection, and if she had come to me about her problem, could I have done anything to prevent her murder? But that kind of thinking never got you anywhere. I had allowed myself to indulge in it in the past and I had promised myself, for a number of reasons, that I was not going to do it anymore.

  For the sake of argument I said, “It could be she had the card as a gag. You know, the way kids do-flash it on her friends, make up some kind of story to go with it.”

  “Maybe.”

  I stared over at where the attendants were loading her body into the ambulance. “Could it have been robbery?” I asked. “Or attempted rape?”

  “It wasn’t robbery,” Eberhardt said. “There’re thirty-three dollars in her wallet and a gold engagement ring on one of her fingers. And it doesn’t figure to be rape; she wasn’t molested or otherwise abused.”

  “Street shooting?”

  “Possible but not likely. She lived way the hell up on Edgewood, and with Thanksgiving coming up there won’t be any night classes at the college for the next couple of weeks. Seems doubtful she’d have been wandering around here alone at night. Coroner’s rough estimate as to time of death is between nine P.M. and midnight.”

  “She could have been killed somewhere else,” I said. “Or picked up somewhere else and forced into a car and brought here.”

  “Uh-uh. See that old blue Mustang down at the end there? Belongs to Christine Webster. Lab boys have been over it already; no bloodstains or anything else that figures to be important. The way it looks, she either drove here to meet someone or came willingly with the person who shot her.”

  “Anything in the area that might point to the killer?”

  “Nothing. She was shot at close range with a small caliber handgun-. 25 or. 32, probably. Then she either fell down the slope or was rolled down it after she was dead. College kid out jogging at six-thirty spotted the body and called us. That’s all we know for sure so far.”

  The ambulance started up and eased out onto the street. The rubberneckers all turned to watch it fade out of sight toward the campus. End of show. They began to drift away singly and in small groups.

  Eberhardt said, “So that’s that for now. You can take off, paisan. I’ll let you know if we turn up anything definite.”

  “Do that, huh? A thing like this…”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Go on, get out of here. I’ll be in touch.”

  I went over to my car and managed to get inside and away from there without being hassled by the media types that were still hanging around. The sky had grown darker; droplets of rain began to spatter against the windshield. I could still feel the chill of the wind and I turned the heater up as high as it would go.

  Twenty years old, I thought, and somebody shot her dead. My business card in her purse and somebody shot her dead.

  I stayed cold all the way downtown.

  TWO

  It was after nine when I reached the Tenderloin and parked my car in the Taylor and Eddy lot, not far from where I have my office. I thought about going into a nearby greasy spoon for some breakfast, but I had no appetite; the image of the dead girl was still sharp in my mind. Instead I locked the car and hustled straight up the hill on Taylor.

  The rain kept on coming down, alternating between a drizzle and a fine mist, and the wind was gusty enough to slap the coattails around my legs. At this hour and in this weather the streets were pretty much empty. The dark wet sky made them and the old buildings look dingier and more unappealing than usual. Even the faint pervading smell of garbage seemed stronger.

  The Tenderloin used to be, and on the surface still was, a section of lunchrooms and seedy bars and secondhand bookstores; of low-rent apartment buildings and cheap hotels inhabited by transients, senior citizens with small pensions, nonviolent drifters and the Runyonesque street characters that were as much an institution in San Francisco as they once were in New York. It used to have character, the way Broadway-Times Square did in the old days, and you could walk its streets in relative safety. But in the past couple of decades it had changed-had lost all of its flavor and taken on instead a kind of desperate sleaziness. The transients and senior citizens were still there, but the street characters had been replaced by drug addicts and drug pushers, small-time thugs, fancy-dressed pimps and hard-eyed whores. You walked on Eddy or Mason or Turk or lower Taylor these days, and you saw porno bookstores and movie houses spread out like garish weeds; you saw men and women openly buying and selling smack, coke, any other kind of drug you can name; you saw spaced-out kids, drunks sleeping it off in doorways, elderly people with frightened eyes watchful for purse-snatchers and muggers because the Tenderloin has the highest crime rate in the city.

  I asked myself again why I didn’t, for Christ’s sake, move my office to a better neighborhood. Business had not been all that good recently, and maybe part of the reason was my location. Who wants to put his trust in a private investigator with an office on the fringe of the Tenderloin?

  Moving made good sense-but the problem was, I couldn’t really afford to move. The rent in my building was reasonable enough, even though the landlord was making noises about kicking it up again; the price of an office in a more respectable area was beyond my means. Besides which, I had occupied this one ever since I left the cops and went out on my own fourteen years ago; I liked it there, I felt comfortable there.

  So I was not going to move and that was that. Just keep on toughing it out, I told myself. Hell, you’ve had plenty of practice at toughing things out, right? Particularly in the past year and a half.

  When I entered my building and started across to the elevator I noticed the white of an envelope showing inside my mailbox. There were envelopes inside all the other boxes, too. Uh-oh, I thought, because it was too early for the mail; and there was only one other person with access to the boxes. I opened mine up and took out the envelope: my name hand-written on the front, the building owner’s name and address rubber-stamped in the upper left-hand corner. Greetings from your friendly landlord.

  I said something under my breath, stuffed the envelope into my coat pocket, and took the elevator up to the third floor. My office was cold; and it still seemed to retain the faint smell of stale cigarettes. I had not smoked a cigarette in seventeen months, ever since finding out about the lesion on my left lung, but I had averaged
two packs a day before that. Maybe the walls and furnishings had permanently absorbed the smoke odor. But probably it was just a ghost smell-a similar kind of thing to the imagined sensations an amputee feels once he has lost an arm or a leg. When you live with something for most or all of your life you never quite adjust to the fact that it’s gone.

  The first thing I did was to check my answering machine. Up until the beginning of this year, I had subscribed to a regular service; but then inflation had forced them to raise their rates, and that in turn had forced me to go out and buy the machine. It was something I should have done years ago, maybe, except that I had an old-fashioned outlook on the conventions of the private detecting business.-I suppose because I identified strongly with the fictional eyes and cops in the pulp magazines I had read and collected for more than thirty years. I had always wanted to emulate the Spades and Marlowes and Race Williamses, and if that was childish and self-deluding, as a woman named Erika Coates had once claimed, then so be it. It was my life and the only person I had to justify my feelings to was myself.

  I did not expect to find anything on the machine: I list my home number on my cards and in the phone book in case anybody decides on the weekend that he needs a private investigator, reasonable rates, strict confidence at all times. But I had had at least one call because the little window on one corner had a round white spot in it. I worked the controls and listened to my voice play back the message I had recorded. Then a woman’s businesslike voice said, “Yes, this is Mrs. Laura Nichols. Would you please call me as soon as possible?” She gave a number, repeated it-and that was all.

  I wrote the name and number down on a pad. Then I went over and fiddled with the steam radiator until the pipes began banging and thumping. Took my coffeepot into the alcove, emptied out the dregs of last Friday’s coffee, filled it with fresh water from the sink tap in there, and put it on the hotplate to heat. Morning ritual.