Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

The woman was so pleased to see a potential customer that she either didn’t notice or ignored my impolite stare. “Hello,” she said through a not very bright smile. “May I help you, sir?”

I dragged my gaze away from the creature and fixed it on a pair of squinty brown eyes. “I hope so,” I said. “I’m looking for Marie Seldon.”

The question turned her smile upside down, produced a half-resigned, half-annoyed sigh. “Oh. Well. You wouldn’t be a friend or relative of hers, would you?”

“No. It’s a business matter.”

“Uh-huh. Well, she doesn’t work here any longer. She quit. All of a sudden, not even a single day’s notice.”

“When was that?”

“Last night, when she closed up. On the phone, for lord’s sake, didn’t even have the decency to come and tell me to my face. I couldn’t find anybody to replace her on short notice. I shouldn’t have opened at all today, I suppose, this rain and all.” Then, not so irrelevantly, “I have varicose veins.”

“Did she say why she was quitting?”

“Moving away. She didn’t say where and I didn’t ask.”

One more piece to fill out the pattern. “Leaving right away?”

“I suppose so. She didn’t tell me that, either.” Another breathy sigh. “I’ll tell you this: I won’t miss her in the long run. She wasn’t the best employee I’ve ever had. Not dishonest, like some, but snotty and snappish to the customers sometimes. Late opening up, too, I had more than one complaint about that. But you take what help you can get these days. I suppose she owes somebody money?”

“... Money?”

“Why you want to see her. The business matter you spoke of.”

I said, “She owes somebody something, that’s for sure,” and left the woman frowning and running a hand through her hair as if she was petting the black-pelt thing.

The rain had slackened into a misty drizzle when I reached the bridge that spans the river near Monte Rio. The wide sandy beach below it on either side was a popular swimming and picnicking spot during the summer months; not much of it was visible now, with the water level up from the recent rains. Once you crossed the bridge, the main road looped to the right into and through the village center, but that was not the way I went. I’d programmed Marie Seldon’s address into the GPS, and the disembodied voice I still found vaguely annoying directed me past the turning and onto Old Wood Road, a narrow strip of pitted asphalt that stretched east along the river.

As soon as I made the turn I remembered that I’d been down this road once before, on an exploratory drive with Kerry and Emily one long-ago Sunday, and had forgotten its name. It ran for half a mile or so before dead-ending and was lined with a mixed bag of dwellings, most of them on high grassy banks crowded with pine and rock maple and wild grape that overlooked the river. Rustic cottages large and small, summer homes behind fences and screens of shrubbery, a small, closed resort that had once served food and hosted dances. The area’s old-time atmosphere had been palpable enough on a sunny summer day; winter desertion and the gloomy weather created the fanciful impression that I had passed through a time warp into the 1950s.

Marie Seldon’s residence was not on the riverfront, but one of a short, staggered row of small cottages at the edge of a pine forest on the inland side. They were all identical in old age, size, and design — resort cottages, probably, that had been turned into rental units. The one that bore her number was partially coated with thick twists of ivy along one side. And it looked as though I’d gotten lucky: a car, an elderly yellow four-door Ford Focus hatchback with the hatch raised, was backed up close in front on an unpaved driveway. If the vehicle was hers, then she was still here.

Right. I had confirmation five seconds after I pulled over onto the grassy verge. The front door opened and out she came, a somewhat chunky blonde in a black windbreaker, toting a large cardboard box.

Her attention was on loading the carton into the back of the Ford; she didn’t notice me until I was a third of the way up along the edge of the muddy lane. When she did see me she froze, one hand up on the hatchback lid as if she’d been about to close it. The nearer I got to her, the surer she was that she’d never seen me before and the surer I was that she did not want anything to do with a stranger. Her stance was rigid, her broad mouth set tight, her stare both hostile and wary.

“Who’re you? What do you want?”

She flung the words at me when I reached the Ford’s nose, but I kept on going to where she stood before I answered. The car’s rear seats had been folded down, I saw, and the space behind the front seats was packed with suitcases, cartons, clothing on hangers.

“Marie Seldon?”

“So what if I am?” She had a hard, abrasive voice. Her face was hard, too, pinched, her eyes like flat brown stones — the face of a not very smart woman who had been kicked around and done her share of kicking back. Some men might have found her attractive, in large part because of oversized breasts that bulged the front of the sweater beneath her open windbreaker, but I was not one of them. There was no softness in her, no vulnerability, no indication that she was capable of either compassion or love.

I nodded toward the car. “Moving out?”

“None of your business. What do you want?”

“Some conversation.”

“Why? What about? Listen, mister—”

“Ray Fentress,” I said.

The name plainly jolted her. “I don’t know anybody named Fentress.”

“I think you do. I think you met with him in San Francisco last week to discuss something that happened in June of 2014.”

“Who the hell are you?” Snapping the words, almost snarling them. “If you’re a cop, let me see your ID.”

I gave her a close-up look at the photostat of my license. She sneered at it. “Private cop,” she said, as if mouthing an obscenity. “Go away; get out of here. I got nothing to say to you.”

“Floyd Mears,” I said. “Melanie Joy Holloway.”

What color there was in Marie’s pale face drained away; the rain-damp skin across her cheekbones tightened visibly. But she hung on to her cool; the fact that she was a cold number by nature helped her manage it. “You keep throwing out names of people I never heard of. You better get out of here before I call the real cops, tell ’em you’re hassling me with a lot of bullshit I don’t know anything about.”

“Go ahead, call them.”

“You think I won’t? Wait around and see.”

She slammed the hatchback shut, spun around, and stalked back to the cottage. I had two choices, follow her or leave. If I left, she’d be on the road five minutes after I was gone. I couldn’t hang around and then trail her for an extended length of time — only a quarter tank of gas left in my car after the long drive from the city, for one thing — and I did not have enough on her to convince the law to pick her up before she fled the state. I doubted she would carry out her threat to sic sheriff’s deputies on me, and I had the idea that if I prodded her a little more she might crack enough to let something incriminating leak through. So I followed her.

She stomped up onto the low porch, yanked the door open. Stopped and half-turned, saw me coming, said something that sounded like, “Bastard!” Then she went in, but she didn’t shut the door behind her.

I went up and stood in the open doorway. She was across a small musty living room by then, next to a table that held a brown suede purse. There was a cell phone in her left hand, but she wasn’t doing anything with it. The room was mostly empty except for a few sticks of mismatched furniture; she’d finished packing and loading the Ford, and if I had gotten here five minutes later she’d have been gone.