Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (7 page)

Osterman was frowning. “Maybe Carding didn’t shout after all; maybe he spoke in a normal voice and Talbot, mixed up as he is, remembered him as yelling.”

“Then why would Talbot have picked up the gun in such a hurry? If somebody’s talking to you in a normal or slightly raised voice, even making accusations, you wouldn’t have much cause to fear for your safety. Or to grab a weapon just to shut him up.”

Donleavy said, “Let’s hear the third reason.”

“That’s the clincher. I took a close look at Carding’s body less than five minutes after the shot: the blood around the wound was coagulating. He’d been dead at least fifteen minutes by then, maybe longer.”

“You could be wrong about that,” Osterman said. “You’re not a forensic expert.”

“No, but I’ve seen a lot of blood in my life. Believe me, I can tell the difference between fresh and coagulating.”

Donleavy ruminated for a time. Then he said, “Your theory is that Carding killed himself, right?”

“Right. Probably because he was despondent over the death of his wife.”

“Gun suicides don’t usually shoot themselves in the chest, you know.”

“I know. But it happens once in a while—often enough to take it out of the implausible category.”

Osterman said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why the hell would Talbot shoot off the gun if Carding was already dead? Why would he want to make it look like he’d committed murder?”

“Because he believes he
did
commit murder,” I said. “And not just one murder—two. Carding’s wife in the accident and now Carding as a result of it.”

“Elaborate on that,” Donleavy said.

“Look at it this way. Talbot’s a man so full of guilt that he can’t live with himself; he wants to be punished for what he did—wants to die but doesn’t quite have the courage or the strength to take his own life. So he decides to confront Carding, either because he hopes to provoke himself into a suicidal state or because he hopes to provoke Carding into carrying out the threat against his life.

“But when he gets here he finds Carding dead in the garage of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For Talbot it’s a pretty terrible irony: He’s the one who wants to be dead, to kill himself, but it’s turned out the other way around. He’s got a double load of guilt to deal with now and he can’t handle it; he really starts to unravel.

“Then he hears the cab driver hassling me out on the drive and realizes somebody’s about to find him there with the body. In his mind he’s already killed Carding; why not just go ahead and make it look like murder? That way he can be arrested and prosecuted; he won’t be dead, but at least he’ll be punished.

“He picks up the gun, either from the floor or from Carding’s hand, and fires a shot into the roof or one of the walls. And when I come in he blurts out his confession. Simple as that in the factual sense; damned complex in the psychological sense. But I’ll bet that’s the way it happened.”

Osterman was unconvinced. “It still sounds screwy to me,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Donleavy said. He hooked his fingers around his coat lapels and rocked back and forth; when he did that he looked more than ever like Oliver Hardy. The resemblance was uncanny sometimes, even without the little toothbrush mustache, and it made me wonder if at least some of the mannerisms were calculated—an act to keep the people he dealt with off guard. “I’ve done some reading in criminal psychology; you should see a few of those case histories.”

“Well—if you say so.”

“Besides which, there’re two empty chambers in the gun and just a single wound in Carding’s body. And Talbot only fired one shot.”

“Carding could have kept one chamber empty,” Osterman said. “Or he could have fired a round days or weeks ago.”

“Yeah, I know. Still, you’d better have your men comb the garage for a bullet hole and a .38 slug.”

“Whatever you say.”

Osterman gave me a curt nod, as if he were annoyed with me for making waves in what he still considered an open-and-shut case and went on out. When he was gone, Donleavy asked me, “What’s Laura Nichols’ address and telephone number?”

I told him and he wrote the information down in a spiral notebook. “I called her just after I reported the death,” I said. “She wasn’t home.”

“I’ll try her again pretty soon,” he said. “You got a card for yourself ? Home and office numbers?”

“Sure.” I handed him one from my wallet.

He said, “I guess that’s it for now; you might as well go on home. I’ll call you later today or tomorrow.”

“Fine.”

We shook hands, and I went out and down the wind-swept drive to Queen’s Lane. There were still half a dozen citizens hanging around the area; one of them, a kid in his late teens, cut over near me as I turned up toward where I’d left my car.

“What happened up there, mister? Was it a suicide?”

“Yeah. Suicide.”

“The old boozehound knocked himself off, huh?” the kid said. “Wow.” And he grinned at me.

People.

It was dusk by the time I got back into downtown San Francisco. I went straight to my office and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I sat down to make some calls.

There was still no answer at the Nichols’ home; either Laura Nichols was still out somewhere or she had returned and Donleavy had got in touch with her, and she’d left again to see her brother. I rang up Bert Thomas and Milo Petrie, told each of them the stakeout was finished and what had happened in Brisbane. My last call was to the Hall of Justice, and this time Eberhardt was in. But—

“I’m busy right now,” he said. He sounded snippy, the way he does when he’s being overworked. “You planning to be home tonight?”

“I was, yeah.”

“I’ll drop by later, sometime after seven.”

I had nothing more to do in the office after that; I locked up again and drove home to my flat. From there I gave the Nichols number another try, with the same nonresults.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator, put a frozen eggplant parmagiana in the oven, and sat down to look at the house mail. The only thing of interest was a sales list from a pulp dealer in Ohio. The guy’s prices were kind of high, even for the over-inflated pulp market, but he had three issues of
Thrilling Detective,
one of
Mammoth Mystery
, and one of
FBI Detective
that I needed and that I thought I could afford. I wrote him a letter and a check—and wondered as I did so just how much I had spent this year on pulps. Too much, probably; that was one of the reasons why I was always short of money. But then, outside of my work, collecting pulps was the only real passion I had in life. What good was money if not to use to indulge your passions?

The telephone rang while I was eating my supper. A reporter from the
Chronicle
wanting to know if I had any statement to make concerning the murder of Victor Carding. I said no, politely, and hung up. When I had finished supper and was putting the dirty dishes into the sink with the other dirty dishes the phone rang a second time. Another reporter, this one from one of the TV stations. I told him the party he was looking for had been called to Los Angeles on business and would not be back for a week. Who was I? An associate named Phil Marlowe, I said, and then hung up on him too. Media people bring out the worst in me—I suppose because their business is disseminating sensationalistic crime news and mine relies on avoiding too much lurid publicity. The public eye versus the private eye.

I tried once more to call Laura Nichols. Nobody picked up this time, either. So I plunked myself down in the living room with a 1936 issue of
Popular Detective,
to read and wait for Eberhardt.

The phone rang again at seven fifteen. Another damned reporter? I went into the bedroom and caught up the receiver and said hello with my finger on the cut-off button.

But it wasn’t a reporter. “This is Donleavy,” his soft sleepy voice said in my ear. “I’ve got some news for you.”

I took my finger off the button. “Good news, I hope.”

“Not from your point of view. I talked to Talbot again; so did a couple of psychologists. He still maintains he’s guilty and nobody can shake him. We’ve got no choice except to charge him with suspicion of homicide.”

“What? Christ, I explained why he couldn’t have done it.”

“Sure you did. But you
could
be wrong about the time element and the silence in the garage before the shot. And about the blood coagulation, too; coroner wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact time of death. I’m not saying you are wrong, understand. Just that the rest of the evidence indicates you might be.”

“What evidence? Look, didn’t Osterman’s men find a second bullet in the garage?”

“No,” Donleavy said, “they didn’t.”

“But it’s got to be there. Otherwise the whole thing doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes sense the way Talbot tells it.”

“No, it doesn’t. There’s just no way he could have killed Carding. The man committed suicide.”

Donleavy made an audible sighing sound. “You’re a hundred percent wrong about that, my friend,” he said. “Lab boys tested the victim’s hands for nitrate traces and his clothing for powder marks; there weren’t any. He hadn’t fired a gun and he wasn’t shot at point blank range: it couldn’t possibly be suicide. Victor Carding
was
murdered.”

When Donleavy rang off I went into the kitchen, got out another bottle of beer, and sat brooding with it at the table. I had been so positive I was right about the day’s events in Brisbane—and I still thought so, damn it, at least where Martin Talbot’s actions and motivations were concerned. No way could I have been mistaken about the time element
and
the silence before the shot
and
the coagulating blood; I had been sharply conscious of time, I had been listening for sounds of any kind, I knew well enough when blood was coagulating and when it was fresh. So it added up the same way as before: Talbot had found Carding dead, picked up the gun, and fired a harmless shot—because he believed, just as I had believed, that Carding committed suicide, and because of a double-dose of guilt and a desire for punishment.

But then where the hell was the second bullet? It had to be in the garage; why hadn’t Osterman’s men found it?

The real surprise, though, was the fact that Carding was not a suicide but a murder victim. A man whose wife has just died in an automobile accident seems an unlikely candidate for homicide; you would think that old enemies, for instance, would consider the tragic loss of a loved one retribution enough. It could have been one of those random thrill killings—but that kind of psychopathic personality usually ties up his victims or slays them execution-style, and in addition almost never leaves his weapon behind. It could have been a burglar whom Carding surprised in the act—but as messy as the house was, it had not been searched for valuables; and burglars, like psychotics, seldom leave weapons behind. Anyway, what would a burglar be doing in the garage in the first place? It could have been a drinking companion of Carding’s, and the shooting a result of a drunken argument—but the body had not smelled of alcohol when I examined it, nor were there any whiskey bottles that I could remember seeing in the garage. So again, why would Carding have been shot there instead of inside the house?

Speculation was not going to get me anywhere, I decided. There were just too many things I did not know. About Victor Carding: What kind of man had he been? What kind of life had he led, who were his friends and his enemies? And also about the gun: Did it belong to Carding? If not, was it registered to anyone else? Or traceable in any other way?

Maybe the answers to one or more of those questions would point up the truth. Or maybe Donleavy and Osterman would get lucky and find a neighbor who had seen the killer leave and could identify him. Talbot and the cabbie and I would have seen him ourselves if we had arrived just a short time earlier; Carding could not have been dead more than a few minutes when I found him.

Well, in any case Donleavy was a first-rate cop and it was a good bet that he would get to the bottom of things sooner or later. Which was enough for me—but what about Laura Nichols? How was she taking it? Assuming she knew by now: I had neglected to ask Donleavy, in the wake of his revelations, if he had got in touch with her.

I stood and returned to the bedroom and redialed the Nichols number. This time, on the fourth ring, there was an answering click; Karen Nichols’ voice said a moment later, “Yes? Hello?”

“Is your mother there, Karen?” I asked when I had identified myself.

“No. She left hours ago.”

“Do you know what happened today?”

“Yes. Some friends and I were at Civic Center all afternoon; I just found out a few minutes ago. Mother left me a note to call her at the hospital. God, it’s just terrible. I still can’t believe it.”

“Your uncle didn’t kill Victor Carding,” I said.

“I know that. He couldn’t hurt anyone. But the police think he did, in spite of what mother says you told them. They have him under arrest at the hospital.”

“They’ll change their minds when they’ve had a chance to investigate further.”