Bill Pronzini - Deadfall

Sugar and spice and everything nice, I thought sourly.

I said, “Melanie Purcell?”

“That’s right. Who’re you?”

I told her my name.

“Cop, huh?” she said.

“No. Private investigator.”

A frown pinched her forehead and pulled her thin little mouth out of shape; the one cockeye seemed to be looking a couple of inches to my left. “You told Richie you were a cop.”

“No I didn’t. He jumped to that conclusion.”

Dessault pushed away from the wall. “You don’t have to talk to him, Mel,” he said to her. “What’s he snooping around for anyway?”

I looked at him. He looked back at me for a while, not too long; then he said, “Ah, shit,” and made a production out of lighting a cigarette-the legal kind that only give you lung cancer.

“What do you want?” Melanie asked me. She sounded sullen and distracted, as if her thoughts were on something else. More fun and games, probably. “Who sent you here?”

“Nobody sent me. I’m investigating your uncle’s death.”

“Leonard? What for?”

She was a sweetheart, all right. “He was murdered,” I said. “Or didn’t anybody tell you?”

“You don’t have to be a smart-ass,” she said, as if she were talking to somebody her own age. “All I’ve done lately is talk to cops. I’m tired of it.”

“You sound real broken up about Leonard’s death.”

“We weren’t close. Besides, he was a damn fag.”

“Uh-huh. And you don’t like fags, right?”

“Right.”

“What would you say if I told you I’m working for Tom Washburn?”

“Him,” she said. “You a fag too?”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. Look, Miss Purcell, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here, believe me. Just answer a few questions and I’ll go away.”

“What questions?”

“About your father and the night he died.”

“Christ,” Dessault said, “not that trip again.”

I looked his way. “What trip is that?”

“That somebody killed Mel’s old man too. Nobody killed him. The old bastard drank too much Scotch and forgot to watch where he was walking, that’s all.”

“You share that opinion, Miss Purcell?”

She shrugged. “Nobody liked Kenneth; he was a prick. I suppose somebody could’ve pushed him but I don’t think so.”

A prick, I thought. Her own father. “You didn’t like him much, I take it.”

“I had plenty of reason not to. The only nice thing he ever did for me was die and leave me some money.”

“A third of his estate.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But that bitch Alicia got the choicest chunk.”

“Probably use it to buy a company that makes dildos,” Dessault said, and they both laughed.

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. So I asked Melanie the same question.

“She collects men,” the girl said. “She’ll fuck anything in pants.”

“Or out of pants,” Dessault said. They both laughed again.

“Was that the case while your father was alive?”

“Well, sure,” she said. “What’d you think, she was a faithful wife or something?”

“Did your father know about her affairs?”

“Sure. He didn’t care. Had plenty of his own.”

“His own affairs?”

“That’s right.”

Nice family. The more I found out about them, the more all-American they looked. “Any woman in particular?”

“Not that I knew about.”

“How about Alicia? Any particular man?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I probably will. You were at the party the night your father died, weren’t you?”

“For a while. I left about eight.”

“Why so early?”

“Those friends of his, those rich pigs, bore me out of my skull.”

“Then why go in the first place?”

“I needed some bread so Richie and I could split for Hawaii. We know some people on the Big Island.” Dessault smirked when she said that. Which probably meant that they had been planning some kind of drug buy; a lot of marijuana is grown in the back-country of Hawaii’s Big Island. “Kenneth wanted me to come to the party, see some snuff box he’d bought, so I went. He wasn’t too hard to deal with when he was in a good mood and you did what he wanted.”

“Why didn’t he invite your boyfriend here?” Dessault’s name had not been on the guest list.

“He didn’t like Richie,” she said. “Didn’t understand him or his poetry.”

Score one for Kenneth.

I said, “You get your money that night?”

“Damn right.”

“So he was in good spirits.”

“Sure he was,” Dessault said. “Kind that come out of a bottle.”

Melanie snickered. I didn’t say anything.

The girl said, “I told you, he’d got this snuff box. One of a kind or something, worth a lot of money. Crap like that made him happy.”

“Did he say where he got the box?”

“No.”

“Do you know anybody who speaks with a Latin accent?”

The abrupt shift in questions seemed to confuse her, throw her off balance. “Latin? You mean Mexican?”

“Mexican, South American-like that.”

Dessault had come away from the wall again and was scowling at me. “How come you want to know that? What does that have to do with anything?”

I ignored him. “Well?” I asked Melanie. “Anybody?”

“No,” she said. “The only person I know with an accent is Alex Ozimas.”

“Who’s he?”

“Filipino fag. He and Kenneth had some business deals.”

“What kind of business?”

“Who knows? I never asked.”

“I thought your father didn’t like homosexuals.”

“He didn’t. But he’d do business with anybody. Alex was at the house a couple of times while I was there. He was there that night, come to think of it.”

“The night Kenneth died?”

“Yeah.”

“His name isn’t on the guest list.”

“Well, he was just leaving when I got there.”

“What time was that?”

“After five. Five-thirty, about.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No.”

“Your father mention him?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know why he was there.”

“No.”

“You have any idea where he lives?”

“In the city someplace, I think.”

“Anything else you can tell me about him?”

“No.”

Dessault punched out his cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray and moved up to stand alongside the girl. He put one hand on the back of her neck, began to rub it, and she shivered visibly and leaned against him. She had it bad, all right. But then, maybe he was what she deserved.

He said, “Listen, we’ve had about enough of this. We’ve got things to do. Haven’t we, Mel?”

She looked up at him; but with the cockeye, it seemed as if she were still looking at me. “Yes,” she said. “Lots of things to do.”

“So why don’t you just get out of here,” he said to me. “Right now.”

I could have pushed it; I felt like pushing it. These two had put me in a foul mood. But I had run out of questions to ask, and besides, the atmosphere of the place was oppressive and I was as sick of them as they were of me.

“Okay,” I said. “But maybe I’ll be back.”

“You’ll talk to yourself if you do. You won’t get in.”

There was nothing more to say. I put my back to them and went to the door. But Dessault followed me, so that when I turned coming out on deck, he was about two feet away.

I couldn’t resist the impulse; I said, “ ‘Gold in the hills and valleys of my mind, the big gold rush.’ That’s real good stuff, Richie. Ferlinghetti would love it.”

“Fuck you,” he said, like the poet he wasn’t, and for the second time in twenty minutes he shut the door in my face.