Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

“Here’s the rest of what I pulled up on her,” Tamara said. “Born in San Diego, family moved to Milpitas when she was twelve. Father deceased, mother still living. No siblings. Never married. Drama major at S.J.S., wanted to be an actress like about twenty million other kids her age. Small parts in two school plays. Dropped out after a year and a half — lack of funds. Family set up a college fund for her when she was little, but it wasn’t substantial enough to carry her through. She wasn’t doing well anyway. Not enough talent or ambition and likely poor study habits.”

“Any sort of police record?”

“Arrested once for shoplifting a bottle of perfume when she was eighteen. That’s all.”

“Where does she live?”

“Palo Alto. Expensive apartment building. And her ride is a BMW Z4 sports car. Even secondhand, those babies don’t come cheap, and she’s had it less than a year.” Tamara chuckled and said sardonically, “Erskine must be paying her a pretty hefty salary for sitting around that half-dead office of his. I wonder why.”

What she’d turned up on the Leno brothers was not particularly illuminating. Harvey Leno had a minor record — arrested twice, once for public drunkenness, once for aggravated assault, both more than a dozen years past. Married briefly and divorced in the late nineties, no children, no living relatives other than his brother. Floyd Leno was a bachelor with no brushes with the law of any kind. More or less model citizens, on the surface. Paid their bills and taxes on time, made a modest but steady living out of their painting company. Not a whisper of any trafficking with Satanists or other illegal or dubious activities.

Definite dead end there. If I continued my investigation, I would need to scrounge up another lead. If I continued it. The way things were shaping up now, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.

After Tamara and I rang off, I went out onto the balcony — it was a warmish night, clear, myriad lights twinkling in the city panorama spread out below — to do some hard thinking.

So Peter Erskine was a business failure with financial troubles and a sick wife who held tight to the purse strings and kept him on a short leash. What I’d have liked to know were the terms of her will, whether or not he stood to inherit all or some of her fortune if she predeceased him. But as with the conditions of their prenup, there was no legal way to find out. Except from her, in answer to a direct question — an unlikely prospect.

The more I thought the more convinced I was that Erskine had a hidden agenda of the nastiest sort. The facts Tamara and I had come up with, the inferences to be drawn from them and from the lies he’d told me, all pointed to it. Some of the details were hazy yet, but the overall design was clear enough. Vengeance vows, Satanic covenants, black masses and black hosts, evil spirits in human form... none of that mattered anymore if I was right.

But it was all just speculation at this point, without a foundation of proof to support it. If I went to the police with uncorroborated suspicions about a bizarre plot with supernatural overtones, I’d come across as a head case in spite of my long-standing reputation as a reliable investigator.

The only other way to proceed was problematic. I’m always leery of stepping into a volatile situation without hard evidence, but in this case, where it might well mean saving a woman’s life, it was my moral duty to run the risk. And do it quick. But I had to be careful. Very careful. Sticking my oar in could backfire on me and on the agency — leave us wide open to legal action for harassment and defamation of character. We’d been on the receiving end of a similar kind of lawsuit once before, unjustly and maliciously, and if it hadn’t been for the plaintiff’s sudden demise before the case went to court the judgment could have gone against us and put us out of business.

All right, then. Tomorrow I would find a way to have a private face-to-face with Marian Erskine, then another with her husband.

I did not have those face-to-face meetings. By then it was too late — too damn late.

Marian Erskine was already dead, of a massive heart attack suffered at her home that same night.

It was Tamara who gave me the news when I came into the agency in the morning. She’d decided to see if she could pull up anything more on the Erskines, and there it was. Nothing happens of any newsworthy interest in this world today that isn’t reported and disseminated almost immediately on the Internet, and Marian Erskine had been a prominent figure in the Atherton community as well as a major contributor to charitable causes. One more example of the two-edged sword of modern technology: good for business purposes, disastrous for privacy.

People with weak hearts die suddenly all the time. The fatal attacks don’t have to be induced by external means, and even when they are there is no way to prove it without witnesses and/or some sort of physical evidence. Marian Erskine had reportedly been alone when she suffered her coronary, her “bereaved” husband away at a business dinner in Palo Alto. She hadn’t died at the Atherton home; she’d been found on the rear terrace alive and unconscious — by none other than Melanie Vinson, who’d made the 911 call — and taken to Peninsula General Hospital, where she succumbed at 10:06 P.M. Tragic death by natural causes.

I didn’t believe it.

Marian Erskine had been murdered. Cleverly and cold-bloodedly, with malice aforethought.

I said as much to Tamara. And to Jake Runyon, who had arrived a few minutes before I did and been briefed on the situation.

Tamara said, “So you figure the whole thing was a setup by Erskine to scare his wife into a fatal attack.”

“Everything except Vok’s shenanigans in the hospital; the revenge vow was genuine enough. Erskine built his plan on that, hatched it after she had her first coronary and barely survived. She might’ve had another attack as suddenly as the first, but she might also have lived for years. Seems pretty obvious he married her for her money and that he didn’t want to wait any longer to gain control of it.”

“Assuming she made him beneficiary in her will and didn’t write him out after she caught him cheating.”

“Sole or major beneficiary, right,” I said. “Has to be that way. As far as the plan goes, her credulous belief in the supernatural made it easy for him. A little research was all he needed to manufacture an imitation black host, create the rest of the revenant illusion. I’d be willing to bet he encouraged her cognac drinking, too, whenever the two of them were alone — to weaken her heart even more. Then it was just a matter of escalating the threat. Whatever he arranged to happen last night terrified her enough to do the job.”

“Adds up that way for me, too. Jake?”

Runyon nodded his agreement. He’s a good man and a good detective, formerly with the Seattle PD and one of the Pacific Northwest’s larger private security firms before he went to work for us. He’d moved to San Francisco after his second wife’s cancer death, to try to reconcile with his estranged son by his first wife, but the reconciliation hadn’t worked out. His way of dealing with lingering grief and loneliness was to throw himself into his work; he put in more hours on the job than even Tamara did.

“But there’s one thing I don’t get,” she said. “Why did Erskine want to hire a detective?”

I said, “I don’t think he did.”

“You mean it was his wife’s idea?”

“That’s right. Dominant decision maker, holder of the purse strings — she’d have insisted on it to try to disprove the supernatural explanation. He couldn’t talk her out of it without arousing her suspicions, so he pretended it was his idea. And tried his lying best to misdirect me, keep me focused on Vok’s alleged connection to a devil cult.”