Deadfall nd-15 Read online

  The police already? Maybe, although black-and-whites usually pulled up on the street, even at a homicide scene. I went through the laundry porch, through the back door. A car door-just one-slammed on the side drive. I hurried over that way, around the corner. The car that had pulled in behind the Chrysler was definitely not a police cruiser. Some kind of sports car, an older model — an MG, maybe. There was no sign of the driver; he must have gone the other way, to the front of the house.

  I retraced my steps, back inside. Just as I entered the kitchen, a door I took to be the front door opened and then closed again. A male voice called, “Leonard? I’m home.”

  There was a passageway off the near side of the kitchen that appeared to lead up front. It took me into a big tile-floored foyer decorated with multicolored Mexican pottery jars full of pampas grass. The man standing there had his back to me, hanging up a topcoat in a narrow closet that wasn’t much more than a vertical slit in the wall. He said without turning, “What’s going on? Some of the neighbors are looking out their windows.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  He swung around, saying, “Leonard, I asked you-” and broke off when he saw that I wasn’t Leonard. He stiffened a little, not much, showing more surprise than anything else: he wasn’t the panicky type. “Who are you?”

  I told him my name. It didn’t mean anything to him; I would have been surprised myself if it had. He was in his thirties, slight, sandy-haired, with a wispy mustache and gentle blue eyes and lashes that had been shaped and lengthened with mascara. A small circle of gold dangled from his right ear. He was wearing Levi’s, a blue pullover sweater, a pair of beaded moccasins. The way he moved, the way he held himself, the lilt of his voice-all of those suggested a woman trapped in a man’s body. Now I knew why Leonard Purcell was not married.

  “Are you a friend of Leonard’s?” he asked.

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “One of his clients?”

  “No. Mind telling me your name?”

  “Tom Washburn, if it’s any of your business. What are you doing in my house?”

  “You live here too, then?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “Certainly I live here. Now what’s going on? Where’s Leonard?”

  I took a breath, let it out slowly. Telling somebody about the death of a friend, a loved one, is never easy. Doesn’t matter if you know the person or not-it’s never easy. I said, “There’s been some trouble here. I’m a detective and I happened in on it. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Trouble? What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

  “Your housemate is dead, Mr. Washburn. He was shot a few minutes ago.”

  Washburn stood there for a couple of seconds without moving; it took that long for the words to penetrate, to mean anything to him. Then they rocked him, as if some invisible force had struck him a sharp blow. He put a hand up to his mouth and said between the splayed fingers, “Dead? Leonard?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Somebody shot him?”

  “I’ve already called the police. They’ll be here any minute-”

  “Who? Who would do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. I heard the shots and I saw the person run out of the house, but I didn’t get a good look at him.”

  Washburn still had his hand over his mouth; he was swaying slightly now, with his eyes squeezed shut. I was afraid he might faint, but that didn’t happen. After a time he said in a low, tremulous voice, “Where is he? I want to see him.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I want to see him. I have a right to see him.”

  “Mr. Washburn, for your own sake-”

  His eyes popped open and he said with sudden savagery, “Goddamn you, I want to see him! You tell me where he is! Tell me or I’ll scratch your fucking eyes out!”

  He meant it. Shock and grief and confusion make people irrational. I said, “In the dining room,” and he spun away and ran through a big beam-ceilinged living room, the rear part of which was raised by three steps. I went after him; I did not want him touching anything, by accident or for any other reason. But he didn’t go into the dining room. He stopped when he got to the archway and saw what lay beyond. Stopped, and then screamed — a shrill keening cry full of anguish and horror that put goosebumps on my arms and across my shoulders. He turned blindly, stumbling, his face all twisted up. I caught his arm to keep him from falling. And he made a little whimpering noise and came in against me, threw his arms around my neck and buried his face against my chest and began to weep hysterically.

  I didn’t know what to do. For a couple of seconds I just stood awkwardly, letting him hold onto me; there was a lump of something dry and bitter in my throat. Then I put an arm around him, turned him a little so that I could walk with him. He came along without resistance. I could feel the tremors racking him, paroxysm after paroxysm, so that his sobbing breaths came out like hiccups. I got him to a blocky Spanish couch set at an angle away from the arch so that you couldn’t see into the dining room from there, and sat him down on that. There was a quilted afghan draped over the back; I shook the thing open and wrapped it around his shoulders, folded it over the front of him. It didn’t stop his shaking but it seemed to take the chill away, help him get his breathing under control.

  I stood off at a distance, not looking at him because I didn’t want to face any more of his grief. Not looking at much of anything, just waiting.

  There wasn’t much longer to wait. In less than a minute pulsing red light stained the curtains over the front window and I heard the cars-two of them-come to fast stops out front. The officers made some noise, more than they had to, getting out and coming to the house. Cops don’t show enough respect for death sometimes — the young ones, especially.

  I went into the foyer to let them in.

  The next couple of hours were bad, although not half as bad for me as they must have been for Tom Washburn. There was a vague sense of surrealism to the events, of deja vu: I had gone through them all before, so many times that they blended together and became the same ordeal relived. Only the surroundings and the faces were different. The routine was the same. And so was the despair.

  I didn’t know any of the uniformed cops, but one of them knew me by reputation, so there was no hassle. I answered their preliminary questions. I took them in and showed them what was left of Leonard Purcell. I answered more questions. Washburn had stopped crying at some point and had made an effort to get himself under control; but he stayed seated on the couch with the afghan wrapped tightly around him. I listened to him answer questions in a small, empty voice, but his responses were just words to me, without any real significance. I felt removed from everything, even more so than at other scenes like this because I didn’t know any of the principals, I wasn’t an integral part of it personally or professionally. Just a bystander, that was all-in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only things Washburn said that I could remember later were that he worked in a bank and that he’d gone to a movie tonight, gone alone because it was R-rated and Leonard didn’t approve of graphic violence in films.

  The homicide team arrived; so did the assistant coroner and an ambulance and the lab crew. One of the inspectors was Ben Klein. Ben and I went back a long way, back to the days when I’d been on the cops myself; he and I had once shared a black-and-white out of the Taraval station. I repeated to him what had happened here, and answered his questions, and he told me to wait in the kitchen in case he needed to ask me anything else.

  But I didn’t wait in the kitchen: I could still smell the blood from in there. I went out into the back yard, but that wasn’t the place for me either. Half a dozen neighbors were grouped in the alleyway, gawking the way they do, and the guy in the bathrobe was again hanging out of his window next door. One of the people in the alley called out to me, “What happened in there? Was somebody killed?”

  Yeah, I thought, somebody was killed. I went back inside without answering and found a c
hair on the laundry porch, near the washer-and-dryer combination, and did my waiting in private.

  Nobody bothered me for half an hour or so. Then one of the lab technicians came out and seemed surprised to find me sitting there in the shadows. He located the light switch and flipped it on with a knuckle, so he wouldn’t smudge any prints that might be on it.

  I said, “You want me out of the way?”

  “Be easier to work.”

  “Sure.”

  I walked outside again. The guy was gone from the window next door; I’d have bet money he had come outside himself, finally, to see if he could get a better look at things. The other neighbors were still in the alley, but a couple of uniformed officers were questioning them and nobody was paying any attention to me. I went over and stood in the darkness under some kind of puffy shrub; watched rain clouds roll in overhead and smelled the good clean odors of ozone and damp grass and evergreens.

  Another of the lab men and the other inspector, a young guy named Tucker, came out together and began poking around the yard with flashlights. I stayed out of their way. Then they went out through the gate and along the alley toward where the car belonging to Leonard Purcell’s assailant had been parked. From under the shrub I watched the play of their light beams, but I couldn’t tell if they found anything.

  Pretty soon it began to rain-a misty drizzle at first, then a hard slanting downpour. Everybody beat it out of the alley. I didn’t want to go back inside, but I didn’t want to stand out here and get soaked either. At my age, you worry about things like pneumonia. The laundry porch was empty again, the light shut off, so I sat down on the same chair I’d occupied earlier and waited some more, listening to the heavy beat of the rain on the tile roof.

  After what seemed like a long time, Klein called my name from the kitchen. I got up and went in, and he cocked an eyebrow and said, “What were you doing? Sitting back there in the dark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “No reason. It was just a place to sit, out of the way.”

  “You sure you’re all right? You look a little pale.”

  “I’m okay. Been a long night.”

  “Sure. Well, you might as well go on home. I’ll call you if there’s anything else. Otherwise, come down to the Hall tomorrow sometime, sign your statement.”

  I nodded. “How’s Washburn holding up?”

  “Not too well, poor guy.”

  “He won’t be spending the night here, will he?”

  “No. He gave us the name of a friend to call.”

  “Listen, you figure him for a suspect?”

  “Too soon to tell. Why?”

  “I was right there when he saw Purcell’s body,” I said. “He screamed, Ben-the kind of scream you can’t fake. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “He didn’t kill Purcell. For what it’s worth.”

  “Worth something to me. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  I pulled the collar of my coat up around my neck. It had been warm in the kitchen before; now it was cold. I could still smell the blood in the dining room.

  “Whoever did do it,” I said, “I hope you nail him for it. Fast and hard.”

  He knew what I meant; you couldn’t have been in that dining room and not know. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “So do I.”

  The nightmares started as soon as I went to sleep.

  I knew they would; they always do after an ugly scene like tonight’s. So I didn’t go to bed right away, after I got home to my flat in Pacific Heights. It was too late to call Kerry or Eberhardt, as much as I wanted to talk to somebody. I opened a beer and turned on the TV and watched an old Edmond O’Brien movie without making sense out of half of it. Then I tried to read for a while-one of the seven thousand pulp magazines on shelves ringing my living room-but the words kept running together like ink under a stream of water. Three A.M., and my eyes just wouldn’t stay open any longer. I was so exhausted it was an effort to drag myself into the bedroom and shuck out of my clothes. Still I fought sleep, lying there listening to the hollow beat of the rain — but not for long. And when I lost the struggle the nightmares came and put a bad end to a bad night.

  Blood in them, jetting up bright red out of a fountain in a yard grown high with dead trees and shrubs. A bird on the wing, and I touched it somehow and felt the life leave its body and pass through my fingers, and it fell in a long spiral-a deadfall. Then I was on the floor, crawling, crippled with pain and leaving a trail of blood behind me-but it was the floor of Eberhardt’s house, not Purcell’s, the afternoon Eb and I had been shot by a hired Chinese gunman. And then I was on one knee, looking down at myself, putting a hand on my own shoulder and saying, “Easy, I’m here to help you, you’re going to be okay,” and I shuddered at the lie and felt myself shudder, felt the life go rushing out of my own body this time. And then somebody yelled, a thin wailing cry full of anguish-

  — and I woke myself up, because it was me doing the yelling.

  Chapter Three

  Nothing much happened over the next week. I avoid reading the newspapers most of the time, but I had a look at the Chronicle twice during that week; I also called Ben Klein at the Hall and talked with him. But there just weren’t any developments in the Leonard Purcell case. Or at least none that the police were admitting to. According to Klein, Tom Washburn had been unable to attach any particular significance to Purcell’s dying words, except as an obscure reference to Leonard’s brother, Kenneth Purcell, who had died in a fall this past May. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything useful. No solid motive had surfaced. There were no suspects. Possible leads were still being checked, Klein said, but he didn’t sound confident that they would point him anywhere.

  I had no real stake in the case, yet I could not keep it out of my head. You don’t watch a man die- feel a man die-and then just forget about it as if it never happened. Especially not with reruns of those nightmares every couple of nights. So I read the newspaper stories, and talked to Klein and a few other people, and found out some things about Leonard Purcell and his brother. Eberhardt thought this was morbid and a waste of time, and maybe it was. But Eberhardt has thicker skin than I do; after more than thirty years on the San Francisco cops, it’s just a job to him. Sometimes I wish it was just a job to me, too. Sometimes.

  The fact that Leonard was the second member of the Purcell family to die within six months might not have interested me if his brother’s death hadn’t been the result of a fall and hadn’t also been on the odd side. Kenneth Purcell, a wealthy real estate broker and art collector, had lost his life during a Thursday-night party at his Moss Beach home. There had been a lot of drinking at this party, evidently-Kenneth had thrown it to show off a valuable antique snuff box he’d acquired-and he had done the lion’s share of it. Sometime between nine-thirty and ten he had disappeared; he hadn’t been missed until ten, by his wife Alicia. When a search of the house and immediate grounds failed to turn him up, the wife and a couple of the guests had gone out to check the cliffs at the rear of the property. His body had been caught on the rocks a hundred feet below.

  There had been no witnesses to his fall. And no evidence of foul play, although Kenneth hadn’t been well liked and there were rumors that some of his real estate brokerings were of the quasi-legal variety. The official theory was that he had wandered out onto the cliffs to clear his head-it had been a cold, windy, but clear night-and lost his footing somehow. The valuable snuff box, which Kenneth had had on his person earlier, had not been found on the body; his coat pocket had been torn in the fall and presumably the box had been lost in the ocean. County coroner’s verdict: accidental death.

  Klein didn’t think there was any connection between the deaths of the two brothers. Tom Washburn, on the other hand, did think so-apparently for more reasons than just those half-delirious words I had heard Leonard speak before he died. Klein hadn’t wanted to go into Washburn’s reasons but did say he’d had them checked o
ut thoroughly. He’d also checked out Leonard thoroughly. And was satisfied that Leonard had had no violent old enemies, hadn’t professionally or personally offended or antagonized any individual or group of individuals in recent weeks, was not in serious debt to anyone, had no ties to any criminal element. His law practice had been small but thriving, with a mixed client list of gays and straights; and he was financially well off. The official police theory in his case was that he had been shot by an intruder on the hunt for money or valuables.

  That was the way things stood-more or less in limbo-when I got to the office at nine o’clock on a Thursday morning, one week after the shooting. Eberhardt wasn’t in yet; he likes to keep executive hours, a habit that irritates me sometimes because the agency is mine, not his, and he wouldn’t be a part of it if I hadn’t felt sorry for him after his early retirement from the SFPD a couple of years ago and taken him in as a full partner. Still, coming in late most mornings was a minor annoyance. He was a good man to work with where and when it counted-a good friend. All things considered, the partnership had turned out much better than I’d expected it would.

  I got coffee brewing on the hot plate and wished there were some way to turn the heat up; it was cold and drizzly outside and chilly in here. But no, the landlord-Sam Crawford, a cigar-smoking fat cat who owned buildings in every slum and depressed neighborhood in the city and referred to his tenants as “my people” — had decreed that the cost of heating this building was much too high. And to insure that the real estate outfit on the first floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor, and us on the third floor didn’t try to countermand his dictates, he kept the furnace turned on just twelve hours each day, as required by San Francisco law, and had it regulated so that just enough heat reached the radiators to maintain a sixty-degree maximum, no matter what the weather was like outside. Consequently, on mornings like this you had to either wear heavy sweaters or keep your overcoat on while you worked. The only reason Eberhardt and I were still here was that office space was at a premium in the city these days; we couldn’t have found a place as large as this, anywhere in the general downtown area where we needed to be, for less than the eight hundred a month we were paying Crawford. The son of a bitch knew that as well as we did. If you’d asked him he would have said he was taking care of “my people” by regulating the heat instead of raising the rent. He was a cutey, he was. About as cute as a vulture on a fence post.