Nightshades nd-12 Read online

  Nightshades

  ( Nameless Detective - 12 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Nightshades

  CHAPTER ONE

  Barney Rivera said cheerfully, “The name of the place is Ragged-Ass Gulch.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Well, that was the name it was born with, anyhow,” he said. “Back in the days of the Gold Rush. Nowadays it’s called Musket Creek.”

  “Uh-huh. And nowadays it’s a ghost town?”

  “Sort of. Sixteen people live there.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again. “Where did you say it was?”

  “Trinity County, north of Weaverville.”

  “That’s not Mother Lode country.”

  “Not exactly, no. Everybody thinks the Gold Rush was limited to the Mother Lode, but in the early eighteen-fifties it raged up around Mount Shasta too. Ragged-Ass Gulch was a real boom town in those days.”

  “Why Ragged-Ass Gulch?” I asked him. “The name, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Miners used to give towns names like that back then. You know, colorful. Whiskeytown, Lousy Ravine, Bogus Thunder, Git-Up-And-Git-names like that.”

  “You been doing some homework, huh, Barney?”

  “You know me,” he said. “Conscientious to a fault.”

  Well, I did know him and he was conscientious. I’d thought at first that he might be putting me on a little, because he had a somewhat flaky sense of humor, but what he’d been giving me was straight goods. He had my attention, too, in spite of myself. I had come here out of professional courtesy, with half a mind to turn down whatever job he offered me, no matter what it was; I was planning to leave on vacation tomorrow, Friday. But it takes a different and less romantic type than me not to be interested in a case involving a semi-ghost town with the slightly bawdy name of Ragged-Ass Gulch.

  We were sitting in Barney’s office at the San Francisco branch of Great Western Insurance. The office was on the twenty-ninth floor of one of the buildings in the Embarcadero Center, and through the windowed wall behind his desk you could see all the way across the Bay to Mount Diablo. Or you could have if a thickish haze hadn’t been choking off some of the early May sunshine and obliterating parts of Oakland and the other East Bay cities. It was a nice view, and a nice office, too, as befitted Great Western’s chief claims adjustor.

  Barney himself fit the title just fine; in addition to being conscientious, he was shrewd, tenacious, and healthily skeptical. The only thing wrong with him was that he didn’t look like a chief claims adjustor. Maybe it was just me; maybe I had seen Double Indemnity too many times and I expected all claims adjustors to look like Edward G. Robinson playing Keyes, or at least Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff. But here was Barney, five feet two in his stocking feet, tubby, with a mop of unruly black hair and shiny cheeks he had to shave every other Cinco de Mayo, peering at me doe-eyed from behind his massive desk like a kid playing executive. You wanted to reach over and pat his head and give him a quarter so he could go out and buy himself a Clark Bar. He was so damned cute and cuddly half the women who worked for Great Western felt like bundling him up and taking him home. Some of them did, too, and not for milk and cookies. For a fat little guy in his forties, Barney Rivera got laid pretty often-more than ninety percent of the hot-blooded young three-piecers who prowled the singles bars, anyway. I’d known him ten years and it had been that way the whole decade. A legend in his own time, old Barney.

  He reached out and scooped up a couple of peppermints from the dish on his desk and popped them into his mouth. Peppermints, yet. Keyes would have lighted a cigar or a pipe; Keyes would have sneered a little and shuffled a few papers and said something wise about the detection of insurance fraud. Peppermints. The whole thing just didn’t seem right.

  I said, “How long has Ragged-Ass Gulch been a ghost?”

  “Most of this century,” Barney said. “It flourished for three or four years in the eighteen-fifties; had a population of fifteen hundred at its peak. But then the gold petered out and the miners left for other diggings. There were only a hundred or so people left by eighteen-sixty.”

  “When did it get renamed Musket Creek?”

  “Sometime in the sixties; after the creek that runs through the place. By the turn of the century, only about thirty people were left. Sixteen today, like I said-living up there in virtual isolation.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do they live there? Gold-hunters?”

  “A couple of them, I gather,” Barney said. “But that’s not important. The one thing they all have in common is that they like living in isolation and want to be left alone; and that’s the crux of the problem-they aren’t being left alone.”

  “So who’s bothering them?”

  “A group of developers called the Northern Development Corporation,” Barney said, and went on to lay out the full story for me. It went like this:

  Musket Creek, nee Ragged-Ass Gulch, was some two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco, twenty miles from the nearest town of any size, Weaverville, and at the end of seven miles of unpaved road that snaked through the mountains off State Highway 299. The tourists hadn’t discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track, but that was all about to change if Northern Development had its way.

  Most of the land in the area was government protected-the Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area-but the land on which Musket Creek sat was owned by Trinity County. The Northern people had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Musket Creek into a place the tourists would flock to: widening and paving the access road; restoring the rundown buildings that still stood there, after the fashion of the gaudier Mother Lode towns; adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the wilderness, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.

  The Musket Creek residents were up in arms over this. They didn’t want to live in a tourist trap and they didn’t want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block development and further land sales; to get Musket Creek named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against Northern Development, but the residents were pessimistic; they figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.

  One of them seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town’s abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days ago, including the remains of a “fandango hall”-a saloon-and-gambling house-that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Northern combine thought it was a blatant case of arson, and had put pressure on the county sheriffs department to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as “of unknown origin.”

  Bad feelings were running high by this time, on both sides. And they got worse-much worse. Two days ago, there had been another fire, not in Musket Creek this time but in Redding thirty miles away, where Northern Development had its offices. The home of the president of the corporation, a man named Munroe Randall, who had also been the most outspoken against the citizens of Musket Creek, had gone up in flames shortly before midnight. Randall had gone with it. He was not supposed to be home that night-it was common knowledge that he was going to San Francisco on company business-but he’d put off the trip at the last minute. He had evidently been asleep when the blaze started, and was overcome by smoke before he could get out of the burning house. There was no apparent evi
dence of arson; as far as the local authorities were concerned, his death was accidental.

  But Barney Rivera wasn’t so sure. What made him skeptical was the fact that Great Western carried a $100,000 double indemnity “key man” policy on Randall’s life and on the lives of the two remaining partners, Martin Treacle and Frank O’Daniel. Insurance companies are always skeptical when a heavily insured party dies under unusual circumstances, especially when his business partners are the beneficiaries. Great Western would save $100,000 if Randall’s death turned out to be murder instead of an accident; and they would save $200,000 if it was murder and the other two partners had something to do with it. I was here because Great Western was a small company and did not maintain an investigative staff, preferring to farm out that kind of work to private operatives like me. And I had done a fair amount of work for them over the years.

  “Questions?” Barney said when he was done explaining.

  “Sure. How long has the Northern partnership been in effect?”

  “Seven years. They started small, buying up land in the Redding area and building houses on it. That was back during the big real estate boom, so naturally they made a potful. They started purchasing land for the Musket Creek project a little over a year ago.”

  “Same three partners from the beginning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Equal partners?”

  “No. Randall had forty percent; Treacle and O’Daniel split the other sixty.”

  “Do those two also get Randall’s forty percent, now that he’s dead?”

  “No. But they do get the chance to buy out his share from his estate.”

  “When did they take out the double indemnity policy?”

  “Just after they formed the partnership.”

  “A point in favor of the two survivors,” I said. “Why wait seven years to knock off Randall?”

  “Money-what else? They need it, bad. Northern Development isn’t doing too well these days. Overextended themselves on land purchases and a housing development near Red Bluff, for one thing. And the Musket Creek lawsuit has been a drain on their capital; they had most of their eggs in that basket. There’s a good chance they’ll go under if they don’t get a break pretty soon.”

  “A break like a nice fat chunk of insurance money.”

  “It’d help, that’s for sure,” Barney said. “Obvious motive. Maybe too obvious.”

  “Maybe. How did Randall get along with the other two?”

  “Fine, according to Stan Zemansky, our company rep in Redding. Stan sold them the policy and he knows the three of them fairly well. No business hassles, no personal feuds-at least none that any of them is talking about.”

  “What does Zemansky think about Randall’s death?”

  “Accident, same as everybody else.”

  “How likely is it one of the Musket Creek citizens set the fire that killed him?”

  “Likely enough. The bad feelings between them and Northern Development run deep.”

  “Groups of people like that usually have a leader,” I said. “Who would that be in Musket Creek?”

  “Man named Coleclaw, Jack Coleclaw. Runs the local store. Sort of an unofficial mayor. He and Randall had some run-ins, one of them public.

  “Violence? Or just words?”

  “Just words.”

  I lapsed into silence. I was thinking that if I took the job, it would mean driving up to Trinity County right away and spending some time in Redding and Musket Creek. Which would put the kibosh on my vacation plans. I didn’t like the idea of disappointing Kerry-not only because she had arranged for some time off at the ad agency where she worked, and we had planned a nice quiet ten days together in Santa Barbara, our first real getaway trip in the year we’d known each other; but also because she’d been withdrawn and tired-looking lately. Overwork, she said. I had a feeling there was more to it than that, but she wouldn’t talk about it. All she’d say was that she needed to get out of the city for a while and then she’d feel better.

  And now this-Ragged-Ass Gulch.

  But what could I do? My bank account was not exactly bulging, and Great Western paid well for services rendered and allowed a generous expense sheet. If it were any other time I might have been able to let Eberhardt handle it; but he was already working on a missing-person thing for a well-to-do local family, one of those cases where a rich kid goes off to find the meaning of life, drops out of sight, and usually turns up in a commune or maybe soliciting funds for somebody’s screwball religion. Eberhardt had turned up the job himself, the first major piece of business he’d brought into the agency since I’d taken him on as a partner six months ago. Even if it hadn’t been lucrative work, which it was, I could not very well ask him to drop it and rush up to Trinity County just so I could be free to spend some time in the sun with my lady friend…

  A sharp rapping noise made me blink: Barney was using his knuckles on the desktop. “Hey,” he said, “you still home in there? Or did part of you go out to lunch?”

  I gave him a crooked grin. “I’m still here. Just mentally bemoaning my lot in life. All right, Barney. I’ll get to work right away. Usual rates?”

  “Yup. You going to pad the expense sheet this time?”

  “Hell no. I never padded an expense sheet in my life and you know it.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and it bothers me. You’re too god-damned honest. Couldn’t you at least stick on a couple of beers that you didn’t have? Or an extra dime for the parking meter? It’d restore my faith in the fundamental immorality of mankind.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Try real hard,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable working with a saint.”

  In spite of myself the word “saint” made me think of Jeanne Emerson, a very attractive Chinese photojournalist who had developed an idealized view of me and my job-a sin-eater, she’d called me, only half-jokingly. But that had all been before the night a couple of months ago when I’d finally let her come over to my flat to take some photographs for an article on me she was planning to do. I hadn’t wanted to be alone with her, because it had become obvious that her interest in me wasn’t strictly professional, and I happened to be in love with Kerry; I’d been stalling Jeanne for weeks. But then I’d given in in a weak moment, and Jeanne had come over, and what had happened after that…

  “Hey,” Barney said again, “now what? You look constipated all of a sudden.”

  I stopped thinking. That had always been one of my problems: I thought too damned much about nearly everything. “Only one of us is full of crap, my friend,” I said, “and that’s you. Let’s have the file.”

  He gave it to me, grinning, and I thumbed through it. Lists of names, addresses, personal and background data on the three Northern partners, copies of the Redding police report on Munroe Randall’s death and the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department report on their Musket Creek investigation, other pertinent information-most of it on computer printout sheets. The address of Stan Zemansky’s insurance agency was there too. I tucked the file into the calfskin briefcase Kerry had bought me for Christmas-to upgrade my image a little, she’d said-and then got on my feet.

  Barney stood too, speared another peppermint, and came around his desk. He looked me up and down and shook his head admiringly. “Got to admit it,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

  “You admitted it when I came in, remember?”

  “How much weight have you lost, anyhow?”

  “A little over twenty pounds.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “Three months, about.”

  “What’d you do, just give up eating?”

  “More or less. Plenty of salad and eggs.”

  He pulled a face. “I hate salad and eggs.”

  “Me too.”

  “Took a lot of willpower, huh?”

  “Yeah. I slipped a couple of times at first, but after a while it wasn’t too bad.”

  “So everybody keeps telling
me,” Barney said. He patted his ample midriff. “But I can’t seem to do it myself. I like food too much. Carne asada — that’s my main weakness. Did I ever take you to my cousin Carlos’s place in the Mission? No? You never tasted carne asada the way he makes it. A gallon of sour cream, and those sweet onions he uses… ah Jesus.”

  “I think I better pass.”

  “Willpower,” he said. “I wish I had it.” He gave me another examining look. “Yeah, you look great. Except-”

  “Except what?”

  He snickered. “Just what is that thing on your upper lip?”

  I reached up and touched it; I couldn’t seem to break myself of the habit of doing that every time somebody called attention to it. “It’s a mustache,” I said. “What did you think it was?”

  “It looks like a hooker’s false eyelash stuck on there.”

  “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “Kind of scraggly, isn’t it? Or did you just start growing it?”

  “I’ve had it for a month,” I said defensively. “It looks all right to me. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing a razor won’t fix. How come you grew a mustache at your age?”

  “What am I, a candidate for the old folks’ home?” I could feel myself getting a little miffed. Which was stupid, because Barney was only having some fun with me; but I had taken a lot of ribbing about the mustache in the past month, principally from Eberhardt and Kerry, and I’d had enough. If it hadn’t been for all the ribbing, in fact, I might have shaved the thing off by now. As matters stood, each new crack only made me more determined to keep it. “So I grew a mustache,” I said. “So what’s the big deal?”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you grow it? To impress your lady?”

  “No.”

  “You figured it’d make you look younger?”

  “No.”

  “Because of all the weight you lost?”

  “No! I grew it because I felt like it.”

  “Okay, okay. Kind of touchy on the subject, aren’t you.”