Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) Page 8

  This line of questioning was not getting me anywhere. And it was making me feel awkward and uncomfortable because of the tears it had put in Lainey’s eyes. I went on to something else.

  “Did you know Jerry’s father?”

  “No, I never met him.”

  “Had Christine met him?”

  “Yes. A couple of times.”

  “Did they get along?”

  “I think so. Chris said he drank a lot, but she seemed to like him anyway.”

  “Did Jerry ever talk about him?”

  “Talk about him?”

  “What kind of relationship they had, like that?”

  “Not that I can remember,” Lainey said. A pair of angular creases like an inverted V formed above the bridge of her nose. “Do you think there’s some sort of connection between Chris’ murder and Mr. Carding’s? Is that why you’re asking about him?”

  “It’s possible, yes.”

  “But I thought Martin Talbot killed Jerry’s father. I mean, the papers said he confessed. . . . ”

  “He did confess,” I said, “but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’s a sick man. But he’s not a murderer.”

  The frown creases deepened. “You can’t believe Jerry did it? Not just to Chris but his own father? That’s crazy. He’d have to be some kind of monster and he’s not, he’s just not.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. Which was not the whole truth—I didn’t disbelieve it yet, either—but it was what she wanted to hear. “Still, it’s a fact that both his fiancee and his father were murdered within two days of each other. And that he’s disappeared. ”

  She shook her head in a numb way and hugged herself, as though she felt chilled.

  I asked gently, “Had you ever heard of Martin Talbot before you read his name in the papers this morning?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Do the names Laura Nichols or Karen Nichols mean anything to you?”

  “Nichols? No, nothing.” Another headshake. “I just can’t understand any of this. It seemed so obvious who’d killed Chris, and now . . . ”

  “Obvious who’d killed hear?”

  “Yes. She’d been getting threatening calls and letters for more than two weeks. Did you know about that?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I thought it was him, the motherfucker.”

  The last word made me blink. I had more or less grown used to hearing women young and old use street language, the way a lot of them did these days, but the expletive was jarring and a little incongruous coming out of Lainey Madden. I wondered if she even realized she’d said it, as confused and angry and wrought up as she was.

  “Maybe it was,” I said. “What can you tell me about the threats?”

  “Not very much. Chris couldn’t imagine who was making them and neither could I. We thought it was one of those, you know, creeps who get their kicks from scaring women.”

  “It was a man who made the calls?”

  “I think so. I listened in once on the bedroom extension; the voice was sort of muffled, but it sounded like a man.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just a lot of crazy stuff about getting Chris, making her pay for what she’d done to him. He never said what it was supposed to be that she’d done.”

  “The letters said the same kind of thing?”

  “Pretty much. Do you want to see one of them?”

  “You still have one? I understood you’d given them all to the police.”

  “I thought I had,” she said. “But I found one I’d overlooked after they were gone. It’s just like the others.”

  Lainey stood and disappeared through a doorway on the far side of the room. Half a minute later she came back and handed me a single sheet of inexpensive white paper business-folded into thirds.

  I unfolded it. Typed in its approximate center was a sort of salutation and four short sentences; no signature of any kind. The typeface was pica and I could tell from the look of it that it belonged to a machine with a standard ribbon, rather than one of those newer carbon jobs. I could also tell that the typewriter was probably an older model: the “a” was tilted at a drunken angle and the upper curve of the “r” was chipped off at the top.

  It read:

  Ms. Christine Webster,

  You are going to pay for what you did. One way or another, I promise you that. You bitch, I’ll hurt you worse than you hurt me. I’ll HURT you.

  Creepy stuff, all right. The product of a sick mind. I refolded it and put it down on the coffee table. Lainey left it where it lay; she seemed not to want to touch it any more.

  I said, “How many of these were there?”

  “Six. They came about every other day.”

  “Where were they postmarked?”

  “Here in the city.”

  “Did Christine contact the police about them?”

  “Yes. But they said there wasn’t anything they could do because he hadn’t tried to do anything to her. Well, maybe he did do something to her,” she said bitterly. “And now it’s too late.”

  “Did she tell Jerry about the threats?”

  “No. He would have quit his job and come down here to be with her, and she didn’t want that; he couldn’t be with her twenty-four hours a day. But she was going to tell him if they kept on much longer.”

  “You told the police she was thinking about seeing a private detective,” I said. “When did she decide that?”

  “Last week.”

  “Was my name mentioned at all?”

  “No. And I don’t know where she got your business card; I didn’t even know she had it until the policemen asked me about it.”

  “Do you have any idea why she didn’t get in touch with me?”

  “I guess because she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I told her seeing a detective was a good idea, but she thought it would cost too much; she didn’t have much money.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered to me, I thought. I would have tried to help if she’d come to me; I take jobs for the money but I don’t turn them down, not this kind, because of a lack of it. God, why didn’t she come to me?

  Useless thinking again. I pushed the thoughts away and asked Lainey, “You’re sure Christine had no personal enemies? Old boyfriends she’d broken up with, men she’d turned down, people she might have offended in some way?”

  “I’m as sure as Chris was. Do you think her killer is someone she knew?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Unless she’d have gone out to Lake Merced at night to meet a stranger.”

  “I guess she probably wouldn’t have. But she was a pretty trusting person, you know. And a kind person, too.” Lainey shook her head. “She never hurt anybody, that’s the thing. Oh, she was forever trying to tell people how to run their lives—but in a nice way, just trying to help them. She never hurt anybody.”

  “Had anything unusual happened to her recently, before the threats started? Anything she might have done or been involved in?”

  Lainey gave that some thought. “No, I’m sure there wasn’t,” she said at length. “A girl she knew did commit suicide a little over a month ago, but that didn’t have anything to do with Chris.”

  Suicide again. “What girl was that?”

  “Her name was Bobbie Reid. She worked in the same building Chris did downtown—Chris had a part-time job with the Kittredge Advertising Agency—and they got to know each other.”

  “Were they close friends?”

  “No. Chris didn’t see her socially as far as I know.”

  “Why did Bobbie take her own life?”

  “Chris said she was depressed about some sort of personal problem. One night she just swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills.”

  “Did Chris know what this personal problem was?”

  “I think she did, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She said Bobbie was dead and there was no use talking about the dead—” Lainey winced: Here we were talking about Christine and Christine herself was dead. “She could
be kind of close-mouthed at times. Like she didn’t tell me or Jerry she was pregnant until after she’d known it herself for weeks.”

  “Do you have any idea who Bobbie worked for?”

  “No. The Kittredge Agency is in a big building in the Financial District and it must have at least a hundred offices in it.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “That’s all I know. Is it really important? I just don’t see how her suicide could be connected with Chris’ murder.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “But it’s something that ought to be checked out, just in case. Did you tell the police about Bobbie Reid?”

  “No, I don’t think I did. It didn’t occur to me then; I was pretty upset.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  She nodded. And from outside, in the direction of the Medical Center, there was the faint shriek of a siren. Lainey cocked her head, listening to it—and shivered and hugged herself again. “Is it cold in here?” she said. “It feels cold.”

  “A little,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “I think I’d better be going. I don’t have any more questions.”

  “All right. Will you let me know if you find out anything?”

  “Of course.”

  “I won’t be home for the weekend, though. I’m flying down to San Diego tonight. That’s where Chris’ parents live, you see, and the funeral is tomorrow.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. “I hope a lot of people come,” she said. “Chris liked people.”

  The siren kept on wailing in the distance, like a discordant note in a dirge.

  Or the scream of a young girl dying.

  ELEVEN

  I stopped for lunch at a cafe on Irving Street. Not because I wanted food; I had no appetite after the interview with Lainey Madden. But I had not eaten breakfast and my stomach was kicking up hunger pangs. It was already a quarter of one, and it seemed like an intelligent idea to give the digestive juices something to work on.

  Over a tasteless hamburger and a cup of coffee I took my first look at what the Chronicle had to say about the murders. Both stories—a news report on the Carding homicide and an update on the death of Christine Webster—were on page two, the front page being given over to reports of trouble in the Middle East and a big Gay Rights march through Civic Center. There was suggestion of a possible link between the two cases and some attention was paid to Jerry Carding’s mysterious disappearance from Bodega Bay; otherwise it was pretty straightforward stuff, no open speculation, just the basic facts. Martin Talbot was said to have confessed to the Carding murder, but the police were still investigating. My name was mentioned three or four times. There was even a paragraph on my career background in which I was referred to as “something of a Sam Spade type, the last of San Francisco’s lone-wolf private eyes.”

  When I finished forcing down my hamburger I took the paper outside and deposited it in a trash receptacle. Then the last of San Francisco’s lone-wolf private eyes got into his car and drove through the cold gray fog to S.F. State College.

  There was no street parking near the Nineteenth Avenue entrance, so I turned into Park Merced and left the car in front of an apartment building on Cardenas. The woodsy campus, when I finally got onto it, was crowded but relatively quiet. It had not always been that way. I remembered the television footage from back in 1968: a student strike protesting the war in Vietnam and demanding a Third World Studies department and an open admissions policy; disruption and cancellation of classes, rock-throwing incidents; and our present U.S. senator, S.I. Hayakawa—then president of S.F. State—calling in the police riot squad to bust a few heads. Sad times back then. Ugly times. And all because of a war that we should have stayed the hell out of in the first place.

  Well, things change—even for the better sometimes. The kids still looked the same, though, at least to my crusty old private eye: long hair and frizzed hair and Afros, beards, the kind of clothing my generation would have called Bohemian. Whatever happened to suits and ties and girls in winter outfits and summer dresses? The question made me smile mockingly at myself. Pining away for your lost youth, huh? I thought. You Sam Spade type, you. Come on, who cares what college students wear as long as they’re happy and getting themselves an education? And most of these kids looked happy enough—maybe because it was Friday and they had the weekend and Thanksgiving vacation to look forward to, or because, for now anyway, all was right in their world.

  But then I remembered that Christine Webster had been one of them not too long ago, and I stopped smiling. She had no world anymore—not this one, at least. And neither did her unborn child.

  I bypassed the Administration Building; I had already decided that there was no point in trying to locate Dave Brodnax through the Registrar’s Office. College administrators are chary these days of giving out any information on students, including class schedules, and the fact that I was a detective would carry no weight at all. Lainey had said Brodnax was on the football team; I thought that maybe I would be able to get to him through the coach or somebody else in the Physical Education department.

  As it turned out, finding Brodnax was easier than I had anticipated. The first young guy I stopped for directions told me the football team had just begun its daily practice in Cox Stadium; the last game of the season was tomorrow afternoon. He explained how to get to the stadium, over on the north side of the campus, and I made my way in that direction. Halfway there, I heard voices yelling the way football players do. They led me straight to the backside of a press box and an open gate in a cyclone fence.

  Cox Stadium was laid out below in a kind of grotto, surrounded by wooded slopes, with more trees and undergrowth beyond the north end zone. Picturesque. The stands were made out of concrete and had rows of wooden benches; I was on the home side. I went through the gate and down fifty or sixty steps toward the field. The players, about four dozen of them in pads and practice jerseys and maroon helmets, were spread out across the turf running plays and banging into tackling dummies and doing wind sprints. The grass was pretty chewed up and deep furrows striped it where the yardlines were. It was not getting as much care as it should, probably because of maintenance cutbacks by the college when Proposition 13 limited their tax revenue.

  I left the stands and crossed the track that ovaled the field and went to the sideline benches. A dark guy in his thirties was standing there, writing something on a clipboard. He wore a maroon windbreaker and had a whistle strung around his neck; I thought that he must be one of the coaches.

  He glanced up as I approached him. It was cold down there and his cheeks had a brick-colored tinge. “Something I can do for you?”

  “I’d like to see Dave Brodnax, if that’s okay.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes, sir, it is. Just tell him it’s about Jerry Carding and Christine Webster.”

  The names seemed not to mean anything to him; maybe he only read the sports sections in the daily papers. But he said, “All right, I’ll send him over,” and moved away toward where a group of beefy-looking kids were just starting to practice the recovery of fumbles.

  I watched him pick one out of the group, say something to him. The kid looked over at me, nodded at the coach, and then came trotting over. He took off his helmet just before he got to me, and I saw that he had a wild shock of reddish hair and two or three hundred freckles. He was at least four inches over six feet and would weigh in at around 240—some big kid. The knuckles on his hands looked as large as walnuts.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m Dave Brodnax.” His voice was surprisingly soft for someone his size, and it matched the look in his eyes: grave, troubled. “You another policeman?”

  “Not exactly.” I introduced myself. He knew my name from the newspapers and seemed willing enough to answer questions when I explained to him why I was investigating.

  “But there’s not much I can tell you,” he said. “I don’t have any idea who could’ve killed Christine or what h
appened to Jerry.”

  “The last time you talked to Jerry was when?”

  “About a month ago when he and Steve came down from Bodega Bay for the weekend.”

  “Steve Farmer?”

  “Right. Steve lives up there now, but his folks are here in the city. He brought Jerry down a few times, so he could visit them while Jerry was seeing Chris.”

  “Jerry doesn’t have a car?”

  “No. He did have one until last spring, but he sold it because he needed money to finish out the semester here at State.”

  “How did he get to San Francisco when Farmer didn’t bring him?”

  “Borrowed Steve’s car or took the bus.”

  “Uh-huh. What was the job he had up there?”

  “Deckhand on one of the commercial salmon boats,” Brodnax said. “I don’t know which one.”

  “Did he like doing that?”

  “He thought it was okay. But it was just a way for him to make enough money so he could come back to school. He wants to be a writer, you know. One of those investigative reporters, like Woodward and Bernstein.”

  “Then as far as you know, he wasn’t having any problems in Bodega Bay? Nothing that would make him drop out of sight as suddenly as he did?”

  “Not as far as I know. I guess Steve could tell you if he was.”

  “Where does Farmer work?”

  “At a place called The Tides. As a tally clerk and warehouseman at the fish market there.”

  I asked him about Jerry Carding’s relationship with his father. His answers were pretty much the same as the ones Lainey Madden had given me: they’d got along fine, no major disagreements that Jerry had ever mentioned. Brodnax had met Victor Carding on a couple of occasions and professed a general liking for him, although “he was into booze kind of heavy and made some slurs about blacks once.” And if he had disapproved of Christine for any reason, Brodnax did not know about it.

  “I understand you introduced Jerry and Christine,” I said then. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. She was in my psych class during the spring semester and I took her out a couple of times. But the vibes weren’t right for anything heavy between us. She and Jerry connected right from the first; it seemed to be the real thing for both of them.”