Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (13 page)

Somebody.

Why?

The beeping from the disabled phone penetrated and sent me wading through the debris on the floor, around to the far side of the desk. The phone was lying there in two pieces, the receiver hooked over one of the chair legs. I picked it up and put it back together and set it down on the slashed chair seat. The answering machine was upside-down under the window; I picked that up too and laid it on top of the typewriter.

I dialed the Hall of Justice and asked for Eberhardt. Got him half a minute later. “It’s me again,” I said.

“Now what? I was just on my way home.”

I told him what now. There was a silence. Then he said, “Christ, can’t you stay out of trouble for one day?” but he no longer sounded annoyed or irascible.

“Lecture me some other time, will you? This isn’t my fault.”

“Bad, huh?”

“It couldn’t be much worse.”

“You think it’s connected with the Webster and Carding cases?”

“I don’t know what to think. Maybe.”

“All right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Bring a couple of lab boys with you. There might be prints.”

“Twenty minutes.”

I hung up and fiddled with the switches on the answering machine. It seemed to be working okay—and there was a message on it, from Donleavy. His voice said I should call him at his office in Redwood City and then proceeded to give the number.

The message told me something else, too: my office had been vandalized sometime today, during business hours. If it had happened last night Donleavy would not have been able to reach me because of the disabled phone.

I dialed his number right away; it was better to be doing something constructive than brooding at what was left of this place. And it turned out that he was also still in.

“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I had a couple of my men make another search of the Carding garage and the grounds around it; they found the second bullet.”

“Good. Where?”

“Outside the garage window, in a bush.”

“So that’s what happened to it. Sure, the window was part way open, now that I think about it; I should have remembered that before. You going to withdraw the charges against Talbot now?”

“Not yet. Chances are he fired the bullet through the open window, considering where it was found and a Ballistics report confirming that it came from the murder weapon; but there’s no way of proving he did. Carding could have fired it himself, sometime prior to his death.”

“But you do believe Talbot is innocent?”

Donleavy made a sighing sound. “What I believe doesn’t seem to hold much water around here. The DA’s still planning to prosecute.”

“Has Talbot’s condition changed any?”

“Status quo. He’s been under sedation most of the day. That’s a preliminary treatment in cases of suicidal depression, the doctors tell me.”

“No other developments, I guess?”

“Nope. How about with you? I talked to Laura Nichols this afternoon at the hospital; she said she’d hired you to do some investigating of your own.”

“Yeah. I was going to call you about that tonight. You mind?”

“Your buddy Eberhardt doesn’t mind. Why should I?”

I told him about Bobbie Reid and her connection with Christine Webster and Jerry Carding. “Might be something in that, at least where the Webster case is concerned; I’ll pass it along to Eberhardt. I don’t see how it could tie in with the Carding homicide, though.”

“Neither do I,” Donleavy said. “Anything else?”

“My office was vandalized today. Torn apart. I’m standing here in the wreckage right now, waiting for Eberhardt.”

“Rough. Any idea who did it?”

“No. But I’m not so sure it’s coincidence.”

“How come?”

“Nothing stolen, for one thing. What time did you leave your message on my machine?”

“About eleven. Why?”

“Whoever did it knocked the phone off the hook,” I said. “So it had to have happened sometime between your call and when I got here a little after five. Which pretty much lets out street kids; they don’t vandalize business offices in broad daylight.”

“So you think it ties in with the two homicide cases?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

After we rang off I looked around at the destruction again, in spite of myself. My gaze settled on the shredded
Black Mask
poster. It was no special loss; I could get another one made from the magazine cover. But it made me think of my collection of pulps. The damage here would amount to no more than a few hundred dollars—but what if the same kind of thing happened at my flat? Those six thousand pulps had to be worth more than thirty thousand dollars at the current market prices; most were irreplacable, at least where I was concerned, and I had damned little personal property insurance. The thought of them being demolished started me shaking all over again.

I got on the horn to Dennis Litchak, a retired fire captain who lives below me, and asked him to go upstairs and check on my flat; we had exchanged keys sometime ago, as a general precaution between neighbors. He was gone the better part of ten minutes and I did a lot of fidgeting while I waited. But when he came on again he said, “Everything’s okay. You didn’t have any visitors.”

I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dennis.”

“What’s up, anyhow?”

“I’ll tell you about it later.”

I went over to the window and stood looking down at the misty lights along Taylor Street. The pulps were still in my mind. My flat was not nearly so easy to get into as this office, but it was a long way from being impregnable; sooner or later, somebody could get inside and destroy or even steal those magazines. That was a fact and I had damned well better pay attention to it. Have another lock put on the front door and the back door. And increase my personal property insurance right away, no matter how much it cost for the premiums. And then just hope to God I did not come home someday to find what I had found here.

A couple of minutes passed. Then two cars pulled up at the curb below—Eberhardt’s Dodge and an unmarked police sedan—and Eb and two other guys got out and entered the building. I returned to the desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it, where there were none of the drying worms of white glue. Pretty soon I heard the grinding of the elevator, then their steps in the hall, and the door opened and they came in.

Eberhardt took one long look at the office and said, “Jesus Christ.”

“I told you it was bad.”

“Looks like a psycho job,” one of the other guys said. He had a field-lab case in one hand. “Somebody doesn’t like you worth a damn.”

“Yeah.”

While the lab boys went to work, picking their way through the mess on the floor, I stepped into the hall with Eberhardt. He said then, “Hell of a thing to walk into. You okay,
paisan?
”

“More or less.”

“Don’t make a grudge deal out of it, huh?”

“You know me better than that, Eb. Besides, if anybody finds out who did it, it’ll be you. Or Donleavy, maybe.”

“If there’s a connection.”

“The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”

“We’ll see.”

“Did your man find out anything new in Bodega?”

“Nothing positive,” he said. “The Carding kid left all of his belongings behind when he disappeared, but that may not mean much; none of what little stuff there is is worth anything. And if anybody up there knows where he is or why he left, they’re not talking. Friend of his, Steve Farmer, did say that he’d been kind of secretive for a few days. Maybe writing an article of some kind; that’s what Farmer thinks.”

I remembered Lainey Madden saying that Jerry had not come down to San Francisco last weekend for that same apparent reason. I said, “Farmer didn’t have any idea what this article might be about?”

“No. There wasn’t any sign of it among Jerry’s effects, either.”

“Well, I’m going up there tomorrow myself. Maybe I can nose up something. Okay with you?”

“Go ahead. But it’ll probably be a waste of time.”

“I know. One thing I can do, though, is ask Farmer about a girl named Bobbie Reid. He used to date her, and she was also a friend of Christine Webster’s. She committed suicide about a month ago, because of some sort of personal problem.”

Eberhardt cocked an eyebrow. “You find all that out today?”

“Yes. From Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax.”

“You can be a pretty good cop when you set your mind to it,” he said without irony. “What else do you know about this Reid girl?”

I filled him in on what few other details I had learned. “The suicide report ought to tell you her next-of-kin,” I said, “and maybe who some of her other friends were.”

“I’ll have Klein check it out.”

It was another fifteen minutes before one of the lab guys put his head out and said they were finished. Eberhardt and I went back inside. Most of the file papers and folders had been gathered up into loose stacks, and the rest of the wreckage had been stirred around in a methodical sort of way; the desk and chairs and file cabinets and a few other things had a fine dusting of fingerprint powder on them.

“We found two dominant sets of latents,” one of the lab boys said, “but one set is bound to be yours. Are your prints on file with the Department?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We’ll just have to hope the other set is on file too—somewhere. And that they belong to whoever laid into this place.”

“How long will it take to run a check?”

“Not too long, local and state. If we have to go to the FBI,” he said wryly, “it could take days.”

Eberhardt said, “Call him at home later tonight or first thing in the morning, either way. I’ll give you the number.”

“Right.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much,” the other guy said. “Lock on the door wasn’t jimmied; probably picked with a credit card or something. Smudges on a couple of the papers that seem to be oxblood shoe polish. No help in that, though, unless it’s a rare brand that can be traced to certain dealers.” He shrugged. “And that’s it.”

The three of them left not long afterward. When they were gone I spent some time scraping the dried glue off the desktop, putting things back into the drawers. But my heart wasn’t in it. It would take me at least a day to sweep up the floors, scrub the walls and furniture, sort out the files, get somebody to cart away the slashed chair and somebody else to bring in a new one. Next week—when some of the pain and anger had dulled and I could face the task with a sense of detachment.

I got out of there at eight-thirty. And home a little before nine. I forced myself to eat a sandwich I did not want and thought about calling Laura Nichols; but I had nothing of substance to report and no desire to talk to her in any event. I did call Dennis Litchak again, to tell him I would be away tomorrow and to ask him to check on the flat for me from time to time. He said he would.

At a quarter of ten, just as I was about to head into the shower, the phone rang. It was one of the lab guys: they had run the second set of latent prints through the state and local computers. No card match, no ID. Whoever the prints belonged to had never been fingerprinted in the state of California.

Terrific.

So I took my shower and went to bed and eventually to sleep. And had a nightmare about coming home, opening the front door, and being inundated by toppling stacks of pulp magazines, all of which had been ripped to pieces. Voices kept screaming accusations at me, saying things like, “Look what you’ve done to us! You’re supposed to be the last of the lone-wolf private eyes; why didn’t you protect your own kind?” Then the voices became eyes, thousands of eyes that glared balefully at me while I fought to keep from drowning in a sea of shredded pulp paper.

It was absurd stuff, of course, with comic overtones. But it scared hell out of me just the same.

Until the early sixties Bodega Bay had been a quiet and old-fashioned commercial fishermen’s province. People from the bigger Sonoma County towns like Santa Rosa and Petaluma went there to buy fresh crabs and other seafood, or to use one of the nearby beaches, and families came up from San Francisco once in a while to take in the scenic beauty of the Sonoma coastline; otherwise the natives had the place pretty much to themselves.

But then Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie,
The Birds
, on and around the bay, at the village of Bodega close by, and at the complex of bayfront buildings called The Tides and that resulted in a good deal of publicity and national prominence. Before long Bodega Bay became something of an “in” place to visit or even to live at, and it began to change accordingly. Along with streams of sightseers in the spring and summer months, artists of one type or another, enterprising merchants, retired couples, sport fishermen after salmon or sea bass all flocked there; land developers built a couple of fancy motels and at least one expensive community of homes, called Bodega Bay Harbor; antique and souvenir shops sprang up everywhere. Today, less than two decades later, it was a different place. The rugged coastline was still the same, and most of the old buildings and landmarks along Highway 1 were still there, but all the charm and attractiveness seemed to be gone. The impression you got was one of creeping suburbia: another twenty years and all the hills and cliffs and beaches would probably be covered with houses, fast-food franchises, shopping centers.