Nightshades nd-12 Page 3

  “Your prejudices are showing, Eb.”

  “Prejudices? Hell, I got nothing against guys with long hair. I got nothing against good karma or inner peace or gurus, either-unless the whole thing’s a scam to bilk money out of rich kids like Trudy Bigelow, which it usually is.”

  “I guess. So you’ve pretty much got things wrapped up, then?”

  “Maybe. Depends on whether or not she’s still at the retreat; I’ll go up tomorrow and see. If she is I’ll have to call her old man to find out how he wants to handle it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the matter? You sound disappointed.”

  “Well, I was hoping maybe you could take over this case up in Trinity County. On account of my vacation. But I guess that idea’s out.”

  “It is if your case is a hot one.”

  “In more ways than one.” I gave him a brief rundown. “So it can’t be put off,” I said. “I’ll have to leave right away. Kerry’s not going to like postponing the vacation-she’s been looking forward to Santa Barbara.”

  “Why not take her with you?”

  “What?”

  “Take her along to Trinity County,” he said. “Nice country up there-Mount Shasta, Shasta Lake, the McCloud River. Good fishing too.”

  “Hell, Eb, I can’t do that…”

  “Why not?”

  “Mixing business and pleasure never works out. What’s she going to do while I’m working?”

  “Same things you were planning to do in Santa Barbara.”

  “Not hardly. We were going to rent a cabin cruiser down there, go out to the Channel Islands. She likes boats; she and her ex-husband used to own one in Santa Monica.”

  “They got boats at Shasta Lake,” Eberhardt said. “It’s not the ocean and there aren’t any real islands, but it’s pretty nice anyway. An investigation like this, you should have it in the bag in two or three days. That still gives you a week or so to rent a boat, go up one of the finger lakes and fish and drink beer. Sounds good to me.”

  Well, it sounded good to me too, now that I thought about it. But I said, “I dunno, Eb. She probably wouldn’t go for it.”

  “You don’t understand women worth a damn, do you? She’ll go for it. Just ask her.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask her,” I said. “But I still don’t think she’ll like the idea.”

  “Of course I’ll come with you,” Kerry said at dinner that night. “I’ve never been to Shasta Lake.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind? I mean, the job and the last-minute switch in plans…”

  “I understand about business,” she said. “Don’t you think I understand about things like that?”

  “Sure, but-”

  “I understand,” she said. “I’m a very understanding person. We’ll go up to Trinity County, I’ll sit around and wait while you do your work, and if there’s any time left we’ll rent a boat and go fishing or whatever. We’ll have a gay old time. Now let’s not talk about it any more.”

  I looked at her. Then I sighed inwardly and thought: Give me strength, Lord. It’s going to be a long ten days.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The drive to Redding takes about four hours. We left at eight o’clock on Friday morning and got up there a little past noon.

  Redding is the jumping-off point for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Shasta Lake and Shasta Dam, and a number of other wilderness and recreation areas in the far northern part of the state. It has a population of around forty thousand, the upper reaches of the Sacramento River runs through it, and so does a main line of the Southern Pacific railroad; and that’s pretty much all you can say about it. A nice enough little city, but without any real distinctive qualities-a place you might decide to live in but that you probably wouldn’t care to visit unless you were on your way someplace else. At least that was how this reluctant visitor felt as I took the downtown exit off Highway 5 and drove across the narrow squiggle of the river. But then, I wasn’t in a particularly charitable mood at the moment.

  I said to Kerry, “I guess the first thing we should do is find a motel.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Unless you want to stop and get something to eat.”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “Any preferences for the motel? You can check the Triple-A guide..”

  “No. Whatever you want.”

  That was the way it had been all the way up-four hours of monosyllables and simple declarative sentences. Every time I looked at her, and she caught me at it, she would smile and give me eye contact for a couple of seconds; but then I’d glance at her a few seconds later, and she’d be wearing a blank expression and staring off into space. Something was troubling her, all right. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d taken on this job, or the switch in vacation plans; Kerry was not the type to pout over things like that. A couple of times I’d asked her what was wrong. But she’d said nothing was wrong, and when I pressed her she’d gotten a little snippy, the way women do when they don’t feel like communicating. It was starting to worry me. She was shutting me out and I couldn’t seem to find a way to reach her when she did that. Whatever was bothering her, I wouldn’t get it out of her until she was good and ready to let go of it.

  I looked at her again now. That same blank expression and remote stare. The sun slanting in through the windshield gave her auburn hair a fiery cast; her eyes, dark green most of the time, although they seemed to change color according to the fluctuations of her mood, were almost black now. She sat stiff-backed, with her hands folded just under her breasts-a posture that was oddly mannequin-like, as if you could reach over and take her limbs and rearrange them into different positions with no resistance at all.

  My throat closed up a little. Something stirred through me, like little puffs of wind among dry leaves. God, how I loved that woman…

  I found a motel on North Market Street downtown, the Sportsman’s Rest, that had some shade trees and a big swimming pool. The room we were given was nice enough, except that everything was either bolted or nailed down, including a painting of some dubious-looking fruit that nobody in his right mind would want to steal. It was stuffy in there-the temperature was in the high seventies, unseasonably hot for early May-and after I brought in the bags I went and switched on the air conditioner. Kerry hadn’t said a word since we’d pulled in; and when I asked her if she planned to go swimming, all I got in response was “Maybe.” I decided the thing for me to do was to go away and let her be alone for a while. And that was what I did.

  My first stop was the Redding police station. It was only a few blocks away, and the woman in the motel office had given me a city map and directions after I’d checked in. The officer in charge of the Munroe Randall investigation was a sergeant named Betters, who turned out to be a pleasant and cooperative sort. But he didn’t have much to tell me beyond what was in his report.

  He and his men had twice sifted through the burned-out remains of the Randall house, without turning up any evidence that suggested arson as the source of the blaze. Nor had the coroner’s post-mortem contributed anything of a suspicious nature. Randall had evidently died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape the burning house; firefighters had found his body sprawled in an areaway leading to the back door. Aside from the fire itself, none of the neighbors had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that night. One of them, who’d known Randall pretty well, stated that he had kept paint thinner and other combustible materials inside the attached garage; and as near as Betters had been able to determine, the garage had been the fire’s point of origin. The official verdict was spontaneous combustion and accidental death.

  “There’s no way at all it could have been arson?” I asked him.

  “Well, it could have been, sure,” Betters said. “You can never be a hundred percent certain in cases like this. But if it was, then the torch is either a topflight professional or a blind-lucky amateur.”

  “I take it nobody connected with Randall had anything fi
re-related in his background?”

  “No, nobody. At least not as far as we could determine.”

  “Does that include the citizens of Musket Creek?”

  “It does. The county sheriffs men ran checks on the Musket Creek residents, went out and talked to a few of them; they all seemed glad to hear that Randall was dead, but you can’t arrest somebody for that.”

  “Treacle and O’Daniel checked out clean too?”

  “Solid citizens, both of them.”

  “And Northern Development? No hint of anything going on behind the scenes?”

  “None.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess that’s about it for now. But I would like to take a look at what’s left of the Randall home.”

  “Sure thing. Cleanup hasn’t started yet; it’s all just sitting there waiting.”

  “Fenced off or anything like that?”

  He shook his head. “You can walk right in.”

  I asked him how to get there, and he told me, and I went off to have my look. Randall had lived in a wooded development off Churn Creek Road, east of Highway 5 and five miles or so from downtown Redding. I found the street without too much trouble, and the remains immediately: the place was like a huge black scar on the otherwise serene and affluent face of the neighborhood.

  The houses were in the six-figure class, all fairly new, some on two- or three-acre parcels. Randall’s had been one of the smaller places, built on maybe an acre of land, with a line of spruce separating it from the neighbor on one side and a redwood-stake fence forming the boundary on the other. There wasn’t much left of it. Fire had gutted both the house and the attached garage, collapsing all but one wall of the house and a blackened brick column that had once been the fireplace chimney. Most of the rear wall had toppled outward, so that a jumbled fan of charred wood and brick lay over a flagstone terrace, a rectangle of lawn, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool; nobody had bothered to drain the pool and debris floated in it like bones in a black soup. It had been some hot fire, all right. Part of the boundary fence and some of the trees were heavily scorched, and the singed corpse of a fruit tree stood out front like an ugly monument to death.

  Wearing an old trenchcoat I’d brought along to protect my clothes from soot, I wandered among the debris and used a stick to poke around here and there. It had all been sifted through pretty thoroughly, as Betters had assured me. I hadn’t expected to find anything, and I didn’t. But you never know. It’s easy enough to overlook something in the remains of a fire like this one.

  I gave it up after a while, took off the trenchcoat and stowed it back in the trunk of my car, and went to cover more old territory: Randall’s neighbors. None of them had much to tell me, either-nothing at all that differed from what they’d told Betters and his men. One middle-aged woman, who lived diagonally across the street, allowed as how she had seen a yellow sports car parked just down from Randall’s property around 9:00 P.M. on the night of the fire; but when she’d looked again later, it was gone. I took that for what it was worth: little or nothing, probably.

  It was after three when I finished canvassing the neighbors. Time for a couple more stops, at least. According to my map, the street on which Stan Zemansky, the insurance agent, had his office was fairly close by; so I went and hunted it up. I was saving Frank O’Daniel for my last stop, because I wanted to be armed with as much information as possible before I interviewed him.

  Zemansky was in and “eager to talk to me,” meaning Barney Rivera had contacted him and given him instructions to cooperate. He was one of these guys who seem to have been turned out on an assembly line, and who ought to have been sent out into the world wearing a sign that said BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. He was about forty, had a nice smile and a friendly manner, and an office that said he was selling a lot of insurance; but you took one look at him and you knew he had never had an original thought in his life. He was a product of the times: you programmed him to perform a useful societal function, wound him up and let him go, and he did exactly what he was supposed to and exactly what he was told to by everybody from the politicians on down to his wife. This was what was left of the American middle class: the manufactured and manipulated man. Batteries not included.

  “Terrible tragedy, Munroe’s death,” he said, with the proper amount of gravity in his voice. “He was a prince, he really was. You’d have liked him; everybody did.”

  “Except the people in Musket Creek,” I said.

  “Well, they’re an odd bunch. Misfits. I mean, you can’t stop the tide of progress, can you?”

  “Might be better if you could, sometimes.”

  He gave me a blank look. That kind of comment just did not compute for him.

  I asked him if Randall had any personal problems that he knew about, and he said, “Munroe? Heck no. Life was his oyster. And the ladies… well, he was a swordsman if I ever knew one. Guy who got as much as Munroe did, how could he have problems?”

  “Was there any particular woman in his life?”

  “No sir. Like I said, Munroe played the field. A real swordsman.”

  “His most recent girlfriend, then. Would you know who she was?”

  “Well… that’d be Penny Belson, I guess. I’m not sure, though. He traded them in pretty fast.”

  “Uh-huh. Where can I find Penny Belson?”

  “She owns a beauty parlor in the downtown mall,” Zemansky said. “Fancy place, high-priced; my wife goes there sometimes when she thinks we can afford it. Penny’s for Beauty, it’s called. Which is kind of ironic. Because it’s such a high-priced place, I mean.”

  I asked him if he thought Randall’s death was an accident, and he said, “Definitely. Couldn’t be anything else. I mean, that’s what the police decided, isn’t it?”

  I asked him about Martin Treacle and Frank O’Daniel, and he said, “Princes, both of them. I play golf with Frank; I’m just a duffer, you know, but Frank, he shoots in the eighties. He had back-to-back birdies the last time we were out on the old links.”

  I gave it up finally, thanked him for his time, let him pump my hand another time, and got out of there. The Stan Zemanskys of the world made me feel as if I were either very bright and very sane, or edging my way toward a private room in a twitch bin. Not that it mattered much; I liked my perceptions a hell of a lot better than theirs, either way.

  “Life was his oyster,” he’d said. “Out on the old links,” he’d said. Jesus Christ!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  From the outside, Penny’s for Beauty didn’t look like much-just another storefront, except that its front window was curtained instead of open for display, in the middle of an attractive new downtown mall that covered several blocks. But the reception room inside was pretty ritzy: walls painted in cool blues and greens, lots of potted plants and latticework and white wrought-iron furniture. There were half a dozen women in it, five occupying various pieces of wrought-iron and the sixth ensconced behind a reception table with a telephone and an appointment book on it.

  All of the women looked at me when I came in. I felt like an idiot standing there under their scrutiny; I always felt like an idiot in places like this, the more or less exclusive domain of women. I also felt myself grinning fatuously at the six females, none of whom grinned back. The smells of shampoo and other beauty salon concoctions were in the air, a mixture that was vaguely reminiscent of disinfectant; it made my nose twitch and I wanted to sneeze. I got that under control, wiped off the stupid grin, and went over to the reception desk.

  The woman behind it was a well-groomed blonde, dressed in an outfit that matched the blue-and-green color scheme; she was about forty and made up to look thirty, and you were supposed to believe that her secret was in the various bottles and tubes and decanters on the display shelves at her back, and in whatever was going on-buzzings, clickings, murmurings-beyond a lattice-bordered archway to one side. She gave me the same kind of look a bum might get if he wandered in off the street for a handout, and asked, snootily, if there was any
thing she could do for me.

  I wasn’t in a mood to tolerate being sneered at, so I leaned over in front of her and said, “I’m a detective, here to see Penny Belson,” in a tough-guy voice. “If she’s in, sister, trot her out here so we can talk. Pronto.” Philip Marlowe, circa 1940.

  But the blonde wasn’t a Chandler fan; she blinked at me a couple of times, gnawed her underlip a couple of times, asked my name in a much more polite tone, and then used her telephone to talk to somebody I assumed was Penny Belson. When she put the receiver down she said, “Miss Belson will be right out.” Then she sat stiff-backed and stared at me.

  The waiting customers were staring at me too; they’d overheard my exchange with the receptionist. But the stares were of a different kind now and I felt better about the whole thing. I put on a little more tough-guy for them, in the form of a glower, and it would have worked out fine if the damned salon smell hadn’t been so strong in there. I sneezed right in the middle of the glower, none too quietly, and scared hell out of them and me both.

  Another blonde came through the latticed archway, this one about the same age as the receptionist and just as attractive and well-groomed. But she had more poise, a kind of icy self-possession; and her eyes were an odd, striking gray accented by makeup. A very sexy number, if you like them chipped and chiseled and sharp around the eyes and mouth. She was wearing a sort of tailored smock in the same colors as the reception room and the receptionist. She was also wearing an expression as unrevealing as a snowfield in a blizzard. I wouldn’t have liked to play poker with her. Or anything else with her, for that matter.

  She looked at me and said, “I’m Penny Belson. Come with me, please.” That was all; no fuss of any kind. It was in deference to the customers, no doubt-never make a scene in front of customers-but she handled it with aplomb.

  So I went through the arch into another room full of women, this batch evidently being tortured in various ways. Most of them were sitting under big hair dryers that looked like hunched, helmeted aliens devouring their heads; a few of these were reading magazines like Vogue, a few were having their nails done by manicurists, and a few were either asleep or dead. None of them paid any attention to me as I followed Penny Belson on a course to another door at the far end.