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Authors: Bill Pronzini

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BOOK: Blowback (The Nameless Detective)
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“How sure was she of convincing him?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I hope it's going to be that easy,” I said.

“You think he might not listen to her?”

“Might not, or didn't,” I said. “He took out of here a few minutes ago, and he wasn't in a good mood, or in a good condition either. He'd been into the gin already this morning.”

“Christ.”

“If he refuses to leave,” I said, “we'll have to find another way, even if it means ordering him out or putting him out bodily.”

Harry winced but did not say anything. I could tell he was brooding about the five-thousand-dollar loan.

“Got to be done, if it comes to that. The tension around here is getting out of hand.” I told him about Talesco and the fight he'd obviously been in.

“Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Mrs. Jerrold,” he said, but he sounded grim again.

“Maybe. But I don't like the odds.”

He scraped a hand across his face. “Fight explains one thing, anyway—what I found this morning.”

“Found?”

“Over on the edge of the parking area. It's been bothering me ever since, but this is the first chance I've had to mention it.”

He reached into the back pocket of his khakis, came out with a crumpled piece of cloth and handed it over to me. When I shook it open I saw that it was a plain man's handkerchief, once white but heavily stained now with those familiar red-brown streaks that can only be dried blood.

“One of them must have used it after the fight and then lost it,” he said.

I nodded and said “Yeah” and gave it back to him. He stood staring at it, gnawing moodily on his lower lip; I had the feeling he was thinking the same thing I was in that moment

This has got to be all the blood spilled here at the camp, I was thinking. We've got to make sure this is all …

The deputy Cloudman sent out was a young guy with an old-fashioned crew cut and a brisk, serious manner. He arrived a few minutes before nine, and Harry took him around to the cabins, starting with Cody in Number Two. I had no reason to sit in on the questioning, and the deputy made it clear that he felt the same way, so I left them at Cody's cabin and went to my own and got into my swim trunks. Then I lolled around in the lake and on the beach, waiting.

At ten-fifteen Sam Knox came down alone and drove off in the Rambler wagon. I did not see anybody else until Harry and the deputy returned shortly before eleven. I went over to them, but the young guy had nothing to say to me; he told Harry to ask Jerrold and Walt Bascomb to get in touch with the Sheriff's Department in Sonora when they returned—Bascomb had apparently gone off somewhere on foot, since the Ford was still parked in the circle—and then he nodded briskly and went away in his cruiser.

I said to Harry, “How'd it go with the others?”

“Not too bad. Cody made a few snotty remarks, but the rest of them took it all right. I guess there's not going to be any problem there, at least.”

“Nobody had any information, I take it?”

“No,” Harry said. “Hell, we all expected that last night.”

“Sure, but you never know.”

He sighed. “How about a sandwich? We've got a while yet before we're due for Sonora.”

“One, maybe.”

But I ate three, and paid the price for that with heartburn and gas. It was going to be another long day, all right. Another long damned painful day.

Eight

 

Sonora was an aged and crumbling gold country town beneath a modern façade, like an old lady proudly displaying herself after a face-lift. You got a little of the flavor of the nineteenth-century Mother Lode, but mostly the restored and newly false-fronted buildings gave you the impression of a whimsical, Disneyland kind of village, a replica rather than an authentic landmark. Washington Street was teeming with cars and with tourists dressed in garish clothing and weighted down by camera equipment. I had an idea that the founding miners would have been appalled if they could have seen it this way—but maybe that was just my mood.

The courthouse was another of the carefully modernized structures, not far from the Tuolumne County Historical Society Museum; it was just past one o'clock when Harry parked his jeep in front and we entered the annex that housed the Sheriffs Department. The annex was air-conditioned, but they had it up so high that thirty seconds after we came in the sweat on my body dried cold and clammy, bonding clothes to skin. We gave our names to the deputy on the desk, and waited five minutes before Cloudman came out, greeted us gravely, and then ushered us into a private office.

“Appreciate your coming in,” he said. In the bright artificial light of the office he looked older and thinner than he had last night. His eyes were a light gray, steady and watchful but with that hint of humor you always find in the gaze of a basically happy man.

We sat down in chairs facing the desk, and he gave us typed statements and watched while we read them over and then signed them. When I passed mine over to him I said, “Any new developments on the case?”

“Couple of things, maybe.”

“Confidential?”

Cloudman shrugged. Then he leaned back in his chair and dug a fingernail into his hair and raked it around the way he had at the lake, grimacing. “Scalp infection,” he said. “Itches like hell sometimes.”

Neither Harry nor I had anything to say to that.

Cloudman fished a sheet of paper out of a basket on his desk and studied it for a time. At length he said to me, “Ever do any work for lawyers in San Francisco?”

“Once in a while.”

“Know one named Charles Kayabalian?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“He's heard of you,” Cloudman said. “You got your name in the Frisco papers a few times, I gather.”

“A few times.”

“Well, he seemed kind of interested in you when he showed up here this morning.”

I frowned. “In what way?”

“He didn't say. Just seemed interested, is all.”

“Is he connected with Terzian?”

“Indirectly. He handles the legal affairs of a lot of Armenians in the Bay Area—couple of other rug dealers and a few rug collectors among them. Seems he's been trying to work up a criminal action against Terzian on behalf of these people.”

“What sort of criminal action?”

“Contention is that Terzian was acting as a fence for a ring of Oriental rug and carpet thieves,” Cloudman said. “Kayabalian had ears and eyes on Terzian's operation in San Jose, and as soon as he got word of the murder he drove up.”

“Why would he do that—drive up?”

“He thinks maybe the reason Terzian came to Tuolumne was to deliver a carpet stolen four days ago near Frisco. Something called a Daghestan, worth a lot of money.”

“Does he have any idea who Terzian might have been delivering it to?”

“Not a one, he says.”

“Then why does he figure that's what brought him here?”

“He had somebody watching Terzian's place, like I said. Terzian gave Kayabalian's man the slip Saturday night and disappeared. It adds up, more or less.”

Harry said, “Why would this buyer kill Terzian?”

“We don't know that he did. There's still the hijacking angle, among others.” Cloudman scratched at his scalp again, sighed elaborately, and leaned forward to splay his hands on the desk top. “Well, I won't keep you fellas any longer. You'll hold everything I've told you in confidence, now?”

Harry and I said we would.

“Probably shouldn't have opened up in the first place,” he said in a musing way. “Trouble with me, though, is that I like to talk, like to get other people's ideas on things. Not always a good trait in a police officer, I've been told, but that's how I am.”

Uh-huh, I thought, sure it is.

“Either of you come across anything more, anything at all, you let me know right away,” he said, but he was looking only at me. “I can count on that, can't I?”

He was a wily old fox, all right. He had known exactly what he was doing in opening up to us—to me, really. He wanted to know more about this Kayabalian, and he wanted to know what the lawyer's apparent interest in me was; instead of making demands, the way some cops would have done, he was using friendliness and a certain amount of candor to ensure my cooperation in the event Kayabalian got in touch with me. I admired him for that. It takes a kind of faith in human decency to operate the way he did.

“You can count on it,” I said.

In the jeep on the way out of Sonora, Harry said, “You know, I just can't figure anybody buying stolen Oriental carpets in an area like this. Everybody knows everybody else up here; if there was a rug collector around, I'd have heard about it.”

“That's a sticking point, all right,” I said.

“I can't figure a hijacking either. The odds are pretty high against any of the locals knowing a valuable carpet from a worthless one, even if they could have gotten a look inside Terzian's van.”

I nodded. “And if Terzian shook the lawyer's man in San Jose, it doesn't seem likely anybody else could have followed him up.”

“Yeah. I wouldn't want Cloudman's job on a thing like this.”

“Neither would I.”

I slid lower on the seat and tried to ignore the sour grumbling in my stomach. The sun was westering now, but it seemed even hotter than it had been on the ride in. Heat mirage shimmered liquidly on the highway. The pocked landscape had a sere look, and the high forested summits to the north and east seemed remote, black-edged; above them, a few puffy cumulus clouds appeared to sit as motionless as holograms projected on the stark curve of the sky.

When we finally came down the county road into the parking circle, the camp looked somnolent and peaceful. The only person in sight was Cody, sprawled lazily in one of the chairs on Harry's front porch. And the Cadillac was still gone.

Cody watched us come over from the circle without moving; he had his feet up on the railing, legs spread, a can of beer balanced on his tanned chest. The only thing he wore was a pair of bright blue swim trunks so tight you would have had to be blind to miss noticing that he was hung like a stallion. Sourly, I thought that that was probably fitting, considering he was a horse's ass.

“Hey, dudes,” he said in his snotty voice. “What's happening?”

Harry said, “Something the matter with the front porch on your cabin?”

Cody grinned at him. “No view from up there. Too many trees. That's the trouble with this place—too many trees.”

Harry grunted and looked at me. “Want a beer?”

“I could use one.”

“You can bring me another horn too,” the kid said.

I saw Harry's mouth tighten. “You've got legs.”

“It's too hot to move, man.”

Harry stared at him, and his eyes were sharp with anger; then, abruptly, he turned and stalked around to where the cooler was.

Cody said to me, “Guy was around looking for you a little while ago.”

“What guy?”

“He didn't say.”

“What did he want?”

“Didn't say that either. Left you an envelope, though.”

He waved in the direction of the other chair, and I went up on the porch and found a plain white envelope, sealed, with my name written on the front in a strong masculine hand. The contents turned out to be a single business card. Black embossed printing on one side said
Charles Kayabalian, Attorney-at-Law
, and there was an address in a building on Sutter Street, near Union Square.

Written on the other side of the card was:
May I see you at your earliest convenience regarding the death of Vahram Terzian? A meeting might benefit us both. I've taken a room at The Pines Hotel
.

I was hardly surprised, after what Cloudman had told me. I put the card and the envelope in my pocket and went past Cody and down off the steps. Harry appeared just then, carrying three cans of Schlitz; he gave one to me, banged a second one down on the porch railing by the kid's foot.

“Hell,” Cody said, “now I'll get a foam bath.”

Harry ignored him. He said to me, “Let's go over by the lake.”

“Sure.”

We walked across, and Harry said, “Little bastard.”

“He'll get his ears pinned back one of these days.”

“Will he? That kind never does.”

I rolled the icy can back and forth across my forehead before I pulled the tab and had a long swallow. Then I told him about Kayabalian's visit and the business card.

“You going to see him?” Harry asked.

“I might as well.”

“What do you suppose he wants?”

“Hard to tell. But he's got me curious.”

“Well, try not to be gone too long, will you, buddy? I feel a hell of a lot better with you here.”

I finished the beer and then stopped up at my cabin long enough to change into a fresh shirt. I might have saved myself the trouble. The inside of my car was like a sauna, and opening both doors and all the windows did not do much good; the shirt was drenched with sweat before I had driven half a mile along the country road.

BOOK: Blowback (The Nameless Detective)
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