Deadfall (Nameless Detective) Read online

  “Yes. She’s his second wife.”

  “What happened to the first one?”

  “They were divorced.”

  “Where would I find Alicia?”

  “Well, I think she’s still living at the house.”

  “In Moss Beach, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Leonard handle his brother’s legal affairs?”

  “No. He didn’t feel it was proper.”

  “Who did?”

  “An attorney here in the city. I don’t remember his name.”

  “I can get it from the police. Did Kenneth leave a will?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Who inherited the bulk of his estate?”

  “Alicia, Melanie, and Leonard.”

  “How much was the estate worth?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Quite a lot.”

  “What was Leonard’s share?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Washburn said. “Talking about it was so painful for him; I tried not to pry.”

  “Do you know if the will has cleared probate yet? If the inheritance has been paid?”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t. I’d know if it had been.”

  “Let’s assume Kenneth was pushed off that cliff,” I said. “Who do you think did the pushing?”

  He spread his hands. “I just have no idea. Someone he was involved with on one of his real estate deals, possibly.”

  “Quasi-legitimate, some of those deals, according to the papers.”

  “Yes. So I understand.”

  “In what way?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “Did Leonard know?”

  “I suppose he did.”

  “But he wouldn’t discuss it?”

  “No. He didn’t approve, I can tell you that.”

  “Did Leonard happen to say anything about his brother’s missing snuff box?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Kenneth collected snuff boxes, didn’t he?”

  “Snuff bottles, too,” Washburn said. “And humidors, cigarette boxes—anything rare and valuable connected with tobacco.”

  I made a note on the pad in front of me; I had been making notes right along. While I was doing that Eberhardt burst in. He doesn’t just walk into a room, like most people; he barrels in as if he’s one of the vanguards in a raiding party. Washburn, looking startled, swung around on his chair. I got up, saying, “Just my partner,” and introduced them.

  Eberhardt wanted to know if he was intruding; I said no, Washburn’s and my business was about finished. He nodded, muttered something about it being like an icebox in here, poured himself some coffee, and went to his desk and picked up his phone.

  I said to Washburn, “So your theory is both Kenneth and Leonard were killed by the same person—Leonard so he wouldn’t expose the truth about his brother’s death.”

  Washburn nodded. He seemed a little ill at ease now that someone else was in the room.

  “But why didn’t Leonard expose the truth? Why contact the murderer instead of the police? Why let him or her know that the crime against Kenneth had been found out?”

  “Leonard might have been trying to make him admit something incriminating, just so he could be sure. He had to’ve known the person; he must not have believed his own life was in danger.”

  Plausible answers—up to a point. But it still didn’t quite add up for me. I said as much to Washburn. I also pointed out to him that Leonard’s murderer didn’t have to be the same person who had pushed Kenneth to his death—if Kenneth had been pushed. It could just as easily have been the man on the telephone.

  “But what motive would he have? Leonard must have paid him the two thousand dollars; the police didn’t find it in his office and it certainly isn’t in the house.”

  “Maybe he didn’t give Leonard the name once he had the payoff,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t have a name; it could have been a straight extortion ploy, no truth to it at all. And maybe he demanded another payoff and went to the house to collect it. Leonard refused, the man threatened him with a gun, something happened to make him use it …”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. But I don’t really care who it was, or why; I just want him caught and put in the gas chamber.” He folded his pale, delicate hands together again. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “I never believed in capital punishment until now. Now I want to go to San Quentin when the time comes and watch that motherfucker die. ”

  I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to that.

  “You will work for me?” he said. “Do what you can to find him?”

  I kept silent a while longer. The thing was, I felt sorry for him. He was so small and alone, sitting there, so empty; and I kept seeing him the way he’d been last Thursday night, after he had looked into the dining room and seen what was left of his lover. I couldn’t turn him down. How could I turn him down?

  “If the police have no objections,” I said finally, “yes, I’ll investigate what you’ve told me. But you have to understand that if they don’t think Kenneth was murdered, or that there’s any connection between his death and Leonard’s, chances are they’re right and I won’t find out anything.”

  “I understand. But they’re not right, I know they’re not.”

  “Also I don’t come cheap,” I said. “I get two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Money doesn’t matter. I have enough.”

  “All right then.” I got one of the agency contracts out of the desk and filled it in and had him sign it. Then I asked, “Where can I reach you? You’re not staying at the house?”

  “No. I couldn’t spend a night there, not any more. It was all I could do to make myself go back last Friday to take inventory for the police. I’m staying with a friend.” He gave me a name and an address on upper Market, on the fringe of the Castro district, and said that he would be there days as well as nights, at least until next Monday: he had taken a leave of absence from his job at Bank of America. He also gave me a check for a thousand dollars and insisted I let him know when I wanted more.

  When all of that was done I went with him to the door, and shook his hand, and watched him walk away to the stairs. And I thought: It’s not just for him. It’s for Leonard, no matter what kind of man he was—and for me, too. Because I saw Leonard crawling in his own blood in that dining room; because I was there with my hand on him when he died.

  Chapter Four

  My second visitor of the morning showed up fifteen minutes after Tom Washburn left. And if I had been surprised to see Washburn, I was literally struck dumb by the appearance of this one.

  I might have been gone when he came in—I had plenty of things to do, now, outside the office—but Eberhardt insisted on telling me a couple of jokes he’d heard at some party in Noe Valley the night before. Eb is a social animal, a party-goer, whereas I prefer Kerry’s company whenever possible, or a pulp magazine’s if I can’t have hers. He was forever trying to drag me to this or that shindig, large and small, stag and co-ed. The first time I’d weakened and given in, I had been bored and uncomfortable. The second and last time, I had gotten sick on somebody’s lousy fish canapes that turned out to be loaded with salmonella. Eberhardt’s circle of friends does not include any gourmet cooks.

  Anyhow, he’d heard these two jokes and thought they were hilarious. The first one had to do with a beautiful blonde, a well-endowed Texan, a copy of the Kama Sutra, and a billy goat; it was long and involved and had a punchline that was not worth waiting for and that I promptly forgot, along with the rest of the joke. The second story was much shorter and somewhat funnier, not that it was exactly a tickler of ribs or a splitter of sides.

  “So this guy goes into a drugstore one night. He’s just been married, it’s his wedding night, and he’s kind of nervous. He tells this to the druggist and then he says his new wife doesn’t want to get pregnant on their honeymoon so she sent him in to buy some protection. He
doesn’t know much about stuff like that, he says —he’s still a virgin, see—so could the druggist show him what to buy.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “So the druggist shows him a rack of condoms, right? The guy looks ‘em over, picks a brand, and asks how much. The druggist say,̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒̒‘Two dollars plus tax.’ The guy turns pale. ‘Tacks?’ he says. ‘Jeez, I thought those things were supposed to stay on by themselves.’ ”

  Eberhardt was laughing uproariously, and I was chuckling a little, when the door opened and the second visitor walked in. I had never seen him before and as it turned out, neither had Eberhardt; but one look at him and both of us quit laughing. He was that kind of guy. Mid-forties, six-two or so, lank brown hair, handsome in a saturnine sort of way; stiff-backed and solemn-eyed and pinch-mouthed. Wearing a three-piece charcoal-gray suit, a slender blue-checked tie, and black shoes polished to a high gloss. He reminded me of an undertaker. You just knew, looking at him, that there wasn’t a funny bone in his body. If he’d come in in time to hear either of Eberhardt’s jokes he wouldn’t have cracked a smile. He might not even know how to crack a smile.

  He stood just inside the door, looking around in a disapproving way, like an investigator for the Board of Health. He studied Eberhardt; he studied me. Then he nodded once, strictly to himself, and came my way and stopped in front of my desk.

  I said, “May I help you?”

  He said, “Fornication is a sin, sayeth the Lord.”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “You’re a fornicator—you lust after men’s wives. You stand on the brink of eternal damnation.”

  I couldn’t have said anything then if my life depended on it. I just gawped at him.

  “ ‘Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity,’ ”he said, “‘and sin as it were with a cart rope.’ The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, five: eighteen.”

  “Listen,” I said, and then stopped because the word came out like a frog croaking. I tried again. “Listen, uh …”

  “ ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ Galatians, six: seven.”

  I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Eberhardt’s was hanging open like a Venus’s-flytrap.

  The guy reached inside his suit coat. I thought for a second that he was going after a weapon of some kind and got ready to launch myself at him; but all he came out with was a business card. He put the card down in front of me. Then he folded his arms and waited stoically.

  I looked at the card. And then stared at it. In blue letters on a virginal white background it said:

  THE REVEREND RAYMOND P. DUNSTON

  Church of the Holy Mission

  THE MORAL CRUSADE

  1243 Langford Street San Jose, CA. 95190

  I put my eyes back on him and said, “Jesus Christ!”

  “No,” he said, “merely one of His servants. You know who I am.”

  I knew who he was, all right. Ray Dunston, Kerry’s whackoid ex-husband. What I had trouble believing was that he was standing here in my office, looking and talking the way he was. Five years ago, when Kerry had divorced him, he had been a woman-chasing, small-time criminal lawyer in Los Angeles. Two years ago he had taken a dive off the deep end: given up his practice and any number of normal activities, including sex, and joined one of those off-the-wall Southern California cults, where he had shaved his head and worn robes and spent his days chanting things like “Om mani padme hum.” Now here he was, wearing a three-piece suit again and with his hair grown back, calling himself the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston of the Church of the Holy Mission, involved in something called the Moral Crusade, quoting scripture and accusing me of being a fornicator. If that wasn’t enough to boggle a reasonably sane man’s mind I did not want to find out what was.

  I said, “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to claim what is mine.”

  “I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”

  “Of course you do. My wife.”

  “Your … you mean Kerry?”

  “Kerry Anne Dunston.”

  “For God’s sake, she divorced you five years ago!”

  “For God’s sake,” he said piously, “she did not. Divorce is a pernicious invention of man. God does not recognize divorce.”

  “He doesn’t, huh? Did He tell you that Himself?”

  “Yes, He did.”

  “He … what?”

  “He told me so. We speak often, God and I.”

  Oh boy. He had clear brown eyes that met mine steadily, all full of righteousness and calm reason, but behind them he was as mad as a hatter. I shifted uneasily in my chair and pushed back from the desk. I had figured him for a loony when Kerry first told me about the cult, and I had figured there might be trouble with him when she confessed that he’d been bothering her, trying to talk her into remarrying him and joining in a life of wholesome chanting in the commune. She had managed to keep him at a distance, and after a while he seemed to have given up and gone away for good: she hadn’t heard anything more from or about him in months. Or she said she hadn’t, anyway. What he’d been doing in the interim, obviously, was climbing another rung on the ladder of lunacy, and now he’d come in person to claim his soul mate. No commune this time, though. No sir. This time he expected her to live with him in San Jose, if not in the Church of the Holy Mission; to join him on the Moral Crusade, whatever that was; and to sit in on his fireside chats with God.

  I stood up. He didn’t look violent, but with loonies you never know. God might have told him that if reason didn’t work, it was all right to murder fornicators.

  “Have you talked to Kerry about this?” I asked him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Eberhardt was also on his feet. His mouth was still hanging open; he looked like a man trying to wake up from a confusing dream.

  Dunston said, “No. She refuses to listen to the Voice of Truth. You’ve cast some sort of spell over her.”

  “Spell?” I said. “What do you think I am, a witch?”

  “Warlock,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She was never like this before you seduced her,” he said. “She always listened to me, obeyed me. But you enticed her, bewitched her, made her lie down in your bed.”

  “I didn’t even know her when she divorced you!”

  “ ‘How shall I pardon thee for this? Thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses. They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.’ Jeremiah, five: seven and eight.”

  “Look, Dunston—”

  “The Reverend Dunston. I am ordained.”

  “Sure you are. Ordained.”

  “But I do pardon thee, just as God will if you seek Him out. I forgive your sins and I forgive hers. I hold no animosity. I mean only to have her back.”

  “She won’t go back to you.”

  “She will. Yes, she will. God has decreed it.”

  “He told you that too, did He?”

  “Yes. That too.” Dunston turned abruptly and went to the door, opened it. At which point he looked at me again and said, “ ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.’ The Song of Solomon, eight: seven. Those whom God has joined together, no man can put asunder.” And he was gone.

  I stood there. Eberhardt stood there. Neither of us moved or said anything for at least fifteen seconds. Then Eb blew out his breath gustily and said with awe in his voice, “Now I’ve seen it all.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I thought he was in some kind of commune. The Hare Krishnas or something.”

  “Yeah. Or something.”

  Eberhardt came over to my desk and picked up Dunston’s card. “Church of the Holy Mission. The Moral Crusade.” He flicked a fingernail against the card and said, “From the
Hare Krishnas to Jerry Falwell—that’s some leap.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  “You ever hear of either one, the church or the crusade?”

  “No. You?”

  “No. I can check ’em out, if you want.”

  “I want. Thanks, Eb.”

  He went back to his desk. I picked up the phone and dialed the number of Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where Kerry worked as a chief copywriter. The switchboard put me through to her secretary, who said that Kerry was in conference, could she call me back in about an hour? I said, “No, she can’t call me back in about an hour. I don’t care what she’s doing, I want to talk to her now. Tell her it’s an emergency.” There was something in my voice that made the secretary decide not to argue; she went away meekly. I waited. A full minute went by. Then there was a clattering noise, followed by another clattering noise, as if the phone had been dropped, and Kerry came on sounding out of breath.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  “That depends on your definition of all right. Your ex-husband just showed up here at the office.”

  “What!”

  “We had a nice chat,” I said. “He called me a fornicator and a witch, or maybe it was a warlock, and accused me of seducing you and then casting a spell on you to keep you from going back to him.”

  Silence for three or four seconds. Then she said, “Oh my God.”

  “But that’s not the best part. No more commune for old Ray; no more shaved heads and robes and chants. He’s back to wearing three-piece suits, he lives in San Jose, and he’s an ordained minister—he says—in something called the Church of the Holy Mission.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “God, right,” I said. “I almost forgot. He talks to God now. Personally.”

  “Talks to …” She made a funny little strangled noise.

  “Yes indeed,” I said. “And God told him divorce is a pernicious invention of man, so as far as he’s concerned the two of you are still married.” I waited a while, and when she stayed silent I said, “He wants me to give you up. He said if I don’t I’m going to hell.”