Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (24 page)

“No. You were working for Webster all along.”

“But I wasn’t,” I said, and took a careful sidestep toward the couch. The gun did not move in her hand. “Christine never contacted me. I never met her or talked to her.”

“You’re lying again. She had your business card. And she
told
me she’d hired you, just before I did it to her.”

That did not surprise me. The reason why Christine had lied was obvious: she had been trying desperately to save her life. And the lie explained how Karen had known I was a detective when I arrived at her house on Wednesday morning. I had only given her my name at the door, not my occupation, and by their own testimony Laura Nichols had not told her daughter of her plans to hire an investigator. Yet the first thing Karen had said to me was, “You’re that private detective.”

“Working for Webster,” she said now, “and then right away going to work for my mother. Don’t you think I know the real reason
she
hired you?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Your mother hired me to watch over your uncle.”

“That was just a lie for my benefit. She hired you to investigate
me
.

“Why would she do that?”

“She hates me, that’s why. She suspected I was gay. She suspected I was in love with Bobbie and wanted to hurt the bitch who killed her. She hired you so you could both work against me.”

Paranoid psychosis, I thought. Everybody out to harm her, including her mother. Especially her mother. She was the one with all the hatred, not Laura Nichols; and those feelings had to be at the root of her persecution complex and her need to strike back.

I took another step toward the couch. My nose was running again, dripping down over my upper lip; I sniffled and just let it drip. No use pressing my luck by reaching into the back pocket where my handkerchief was.

“Your mother didn’t tell me about you and Bobbie,” I said. “She doesn’t know you’re gay.”

“She must have told you. You weren’t surprised when I said it just now. You already knew.”

“Yes. But I found out another way—”

“
She
told you. Stop lying to me.”

Easy, I thought, drop it right there. Because the truth was provocative: it was Karen herself who had told me. On the phone Thursday night she’d said she and some friends had spent the day at Civic Center and I remembered noticing in Friday’s paper that at Civic Center on Thursday there had been a big Gay Rights rally. And when I had talked to her Saturday night from Bodega Bay and asked if she knew Bobbie Reid, she’d said, “No. Who’s she?” Yet Bobbie, or Bobby, is a far more common male name than a female name; the assumption almost everybody makes the first time they hear it is that it’s short for Robert, not Roberta or Barbara. Which indicated Karen
had
known Bobbie Reid. Add those facts together, along with Eberhardt’s news that Bobbie had worked for Arthur Brown, the Nichols’ family attorney, and Steve Farmer’s admission that Bobbie was gay, and the truth became clear enough.

“Well?” she said. “My mother told you, didn’t the?”

“Yes.”

“And you think being gay is terrible, don’t you. Just like she does.”

“No, I don’t think it’s terrible.”

“Are you lying to me again?”

“No. I think every person has the right to be what he wants to be. As long as he doesn’t harm anyone else.”

“Webster harmed Bobbie.
Killed
her, the bitch.”

“How did she do that?”

“With words. Words. Bobbie never told anyone about us; she was confused about being gay. But Webster got it out of her. She told Bobbie it was evil and she was sick and needed help. Kept telling her again and again. Bobbie couldn’t take it. She was a sensitive person and she just . . . she couldn’t take it. She took those pills, and she called me afterward to say she was sorry, she had to do it, she couldn’t cope anymore after what Webster had been telling her. I told her how much I loved her, I begged her not to do it, but she said it was too late. I called the emergency hospital, I drove over there myself, and it was. It was too late. . . . ”

Poor Bobbie Reid: emotionally screwed up, unable to come to terms with her life and her sexuality—a probable suicide in any case. Poor Christine Webster: well-meaning, foolish, always trying to meddle in other people’s lives. Victims, just like Jerry Carding. Poor Karen, too: unbalanced, deluded, filled with paranoid hatred for her domineering mother. She was another victim, and I pitied her a little in that moment. But I pitied Jerry and Christine and Bobbie a great deal more.

Karen seemed to be caught up for the moment in memory and grief; the gun was steady but no longer pointing straight at me. I took another step that brought me up next to the couch. But the movement alerted her, made her blink and swing the weapon back dead-center on my chest.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Why are you moving?”

I stood motionless, watching the gun. “I want to sit down. Is that all right?”

Hesitation. Then, “I don’t care. I’m going to do what I have to pretty soon. Like I did with Webster. I wish I could do it to my mother too. But I can’t. I want to but I . . . can’t. Not yet.”

I eased myself down on the arm of the couch, let my right arm dangle down at my side. The closest of the throw pillows was eight or nine inches away: I would have to lean in that direction in order to reach it.

“How did you do it to Webster?” I said. “How did you get her to meet you at Lake Merced?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I just do. Will you tell me?”

“I called her on the phone, that’s how. Not like the other calls, where I disguised my voice. I said I knew who was threatening her, but I didn’t want to say anything on the phone and I was afraid to come to her apartment because the person might be watching her. I asked her to meet me and she said she would. She thought it was a
man
who wanted to hurt her, you see; she wasn’t afraid of me. But I made her afraid. I made her very afraid before I did it to her.”

A feeling of nausea formed inside me: her words, tension, suppressed fear. I tipped my body to the right, moved my arm out away from it—one inch, two, three.

“I thought it was all done with then,” she said. “Webster did it to Bobbie, I did it to Webster. But then you came. And there were all those lies about Uncle Martin. And Victor Carding was murdered. And I found out Jerry Carding was his son and Webster’s boyfriend too. I never knew that before. I never even heard of Jerry Carding. It confused me, I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

Coincidence, that was what had been happening. Martin Talbot and Victor Carding have an accident; Carding’s son is Christine Webster’s fiance; Talbot’s niece is having an affair with Bobbie Reid; Bobbie Reid is a friend of Christine’s and used to date a friend of Jerry Carding’s; Christine finds out Bobbie is gay and admonishes her for it; Bobbie commits suicide; Karen blames Christine and murders her. And Bobbie works in Arthur Brown’s law office; Christine works part-time in the same building ; Brown is Laura Nichols’ attorney; I’ve done some work for Brown and always hand out cards to my clients; Christine gets one of the cards from Brown; Laura Nichols wants to hire a private detective and Brown recommends me. A crazy-quilt of coincidence.

But there was no point in saying any of that to Karen; she would not have believed it. I stayed silent and kept leaning toward the throw pillow. Four inches. Five.

“Then I did understand,” she said. “It was somebody
else
working against me. Not just you and my mother, but Jerry Carding too. He knew I was the one who hurt Webster and he did it to his own father so Uncle Martin would be blamed. That was his way of hurting me back.”

Six. Seven—

Sound out in the hallway.

I froze, listening, staring at Karen. She seemed not to have heard it: a footstep, muffled by the carpeting out there. One of the Madisons, the couple who lived in the other flat on this floor?

“If I knew where Jerry Carding was, I’d do it to him too. I’d make him leave me alone.”

Behind her a crack opened between the door and jamb; she had not closed the door all the way so there was no click of the latch opening, no sound at all. I straightened away from the pillow, leaned forward instead. Every muscle and nerve in my body felt coiled.

“I’ll make everybody leave me alone. I don’t believe you about the police; they don’t know yet. Only you and Mother and Jerry Carding know.”

The crack widened a little more. A head poked around the edge of the door.

Dennis Litchak.

“You first and then Jerry Carding when I can find him. Then my mother someday. Then I’ll be safe—”

The hinges squeaked. She heard the sound this time and her face registered surprise; reflex made her jerk her head around to look behind her, made the gun swing away from me.

I levered up off the couch and threw myself at her.

The damned gun went off, the lamp on the sideboard near the kitchen shattered, the door banged shut, I hit her with my shoulder and sent her reeling back against the wall. She caromed off, crying out in a hurt way, and the gun flew clear of her hand and skittered under the writing desk; she went down and rolled over and lay in a quivering little heap.

I veered away from her, went to one knee beside the desk, and scooped up the gun. When I straightened with it, the tension went out of me all at once, like a balloon deflating, and I had to lean against the desk top to keep from falling down.

Karen stopped quivering and lifted onto her knees. Looked at me with eyes that had gone dull with pain and confusion. “Why did you do that?” she asked, as if she really did not know. “Why did you hurt me?”

When I didn’t say anything she got up slowly, rubbing her arm where I had hit her, and then went over and sat down on the couch. Sat the way she had that first time, in the living room of her mother’s house: knees together, back straight, hands folded in her lap, eyes cast down on her hands. She did not move; she did not even seem to be breathing.

Rapping on the door. And from out in the hallway Litchak yelled my name.

I called back, “You can come in now, Dennis, it’s all over,” and my voice sounded as if it were coming through liquid.

The door opened and he poked his white-maned head around the edge again. Came inside in tentative movements. He looked a little gray and shaken—but not nearly as gray and shaken as I felt.

“God Almighty,” he said. He peered at me through his glasses, glanced over at Karen, looked back at me. “What the
hell
is going on?”

“It’s a long story.” I wanted to push away from the desk, go into the bedroom and get the phone and call Eberhardt; but I did not trust my legs just yet. “Listen, you probably saved my life. Thanks.”

“I did?”

“You did. Why’d you come up? You hear me downstairs? Or was it your flat she buzzed to get in?”

“Neither one. I didn’t even know you were home. I came up to check on the place again, like you asked me to, and saw the door standing open—”

A laugh popped out of me-sudden, humorless, ironic.

Litchak frowned. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s you showing up when you did.”

“Huh?”

“Coincidence, Dennis. Just one more coincidence.”

Four days passed. So did my cold, with some medical assistance from Doctor White and forty-eight hours in bed. And so did the worst of the nightmares about guns and water and death.

A number of things happened in those four days.

Item: Andy Greene was apprehended by Washington state officials trying to cross the border into Canada. In the suitcase he had with him were twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash and the Browning 9 mm automatic he had tried to use on me. He refused to talk to anyone except an attorney and was being held for extradition back to California.

Item: The Alcohol and Firearms investigators discovered a case of illicit whiskey hidden in Gus Kellenbeck’s garage, along with certain evidence—nobody told me what it was—which broke the whole bootlegging operation wide open. The distillery turned out to be located on the British Columbia coast, near Prince Rupert; it was raided by Canadian government agents and six other men were arrested. An eighth arrest was made, by the Federal boys a few miles down the coast from Bodega Bay, of a rancher whose barn had been used by Greene and Kellenbeck for storage. Still more arrests were expected on the trucking and distribution end.

Item: Karen Nichols had been charged with the murder of Christine Webster and the attempted murder of me and was being held in the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General. Neither Eberhardt nor anyone else in the Department had been able to talk to her; she went into a violent paranoid reaction each of the two times they tried.

Item: All charges against Martin Talbot were dropped, but he was still hospitalized for observation and treatment. He had not been told about his niece’s arrest, of course; the doctors were afraid the news would destroy all chance for his recovery. But they were not optimistic anyway, according to Donleavy. Neither was I. Even if he did get better, what would he have to come home to, poor bastard?