Bill Pronzini: Scenarios

When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, "What's the idea of messing around in that debris? You a scavenger or something?"

"No," I said, "I'm a detective."

"A what?"

"A detective." I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Allan Randall.

He didn't like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like pieces of onyx. "Who hired you? Those Munroe bastards?"

"No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall's life."

"So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding."

"You had a fire here too," I said.

"Coincidence."

"Maybe not, Mr. Thatcher."

"How do you know my name?"

"I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Munroe people supplied them."

"I'll bet they did."

"The list includes one Paul Thatcher, an artist who works primarily in oils." I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. "I get paid to observe things and to make educated guesses."

Thatcher grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn't say anything.

I said, "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the fire, if you don't mind."

"Which fire?"

"The one here. Unless you know something about the one in Redding, too."

"I don't know anything about either one. I wasn't in Redding when Randall's place burned. And I wasn't here when those old shacks went up."

"No? That isn't what you told the county sheriff's investigators. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig that firebreak to keep the blaze from spreading."

"Is that so," Thatcher said. "Well, I had to talk to the law. I don't have to talk to you."

"That's right, you don't. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?"

His eyes narrowed down to slits. "How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?"

"Maybe."

"What was it?"

"I have to tell that to the law," I said. "I don't have to tell it to you."

He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he'd had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He said something under his breath that sounded like "The hell with you," and turned and stalked around to the driver's side of the jeep. Thirty seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.

Mr. Thatcher, I thought, the hell with you, too.

When I looked back at the ghost town there was still no sign of Kerry. I wondered where she was. Between my search of the burned-out buildings and my conversation with Thatcher, some forty-five minutes had passed since she'd wandered off. I shed my blackened trench coat, locked it and the waxy stone cup in the trunk of the car, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.

It took me another ten minutes to find her. She was at the two-story hotel or saloon building; the back entrance wasn't boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge, and when I called her name she answered me from inside. So I went in to see what she was up to.

She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated through cracks in the outer walls to let me see a balcony on three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might collapse at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down here. As far as I could tell, the only things the room itself contained were a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a fallen pigeonhole shelf, and piles of dirt and splintered wood and other detritus on the whipsawed floor.

"What'd you do?" I asked Kerry. "Bust in here?"

"No. The back door was ajar. Isn't this place wonderful?"

"Uh-huh. If you like dust, decay, and rats."

"Rats? There aren't any rats in here."

"Want to bet?"

Rats didn't scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, "Somebody lives in this building."

"What?"

"Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That's how come the back door isn't boarded up."

"How did you find this out?"

"The same way you find things out," she said. "By snooping around. Come on, I'll show you."

She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole shelf. "The door's got a new latch on it," she said, pointing. "See? That made me curious, so I opened it to see what was inside."

She opened it again as she spoke and let me see what was inside. There wasn't much. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve, with a boarded-up window in the far wall. Two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long, six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite-fool's gold-and other rocks, and curious-shaped redwood buns. An Army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of National Geographic completed the room's furnishings.

"Packrats," I said. "That's who lives here."

Kerry wrinkled her nose at me.

"Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer."

She said, "Phooey. Where's your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn't it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?"

"There aren't any more gold mines up in the hills. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?"

"To forage for food, maybe."

"Uh-huh," I said. "Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we're trespassing. We'd better go; I've got work to do."

This time she made a face at me. "Sometimes," she said, "you're about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny, you know that?"

"Kerry, I'm on a job. The fun can come later."

"Oh, you think so? Maybe not."

"Is that another threat to withhold your sexual favors?"

"Sexual favors," she said. "My, how you talk."

"You didn't answer my question."

"It was a dumb question. I don't answer dumb questions."

"You're still mad at me, right?"

"I'm not sure if I am or not. It could go either way."

She started back across the floor, leaving me to shut the door to the packrat's nest. And to chase after her then like a damned puppy. Outside, we walked in silence to where the car was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, "Did you find anything?" and she sounded both interested and cheerful again.

Maybe she kept changing moods on purpose, I thought, just to get my goat. Or maybe when it came to women, my head was as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. Which was probable, considering my track record. I could study women for another hundred years and I still wouldn't know what went on inside their heads.

I told Kerry about the melted candle, explaining how I'd found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Thatcher. By the time I was finished with that, I had the car nosing up in front of the second of the two cottages near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among the tomato vines in the front yard.

The woman's name, according to the information I'd been given by Raymond Treacle, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved to Cooperville in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He'd never found much of it, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she'd stayed on after his death eight years ago.