Bill Pronzini - Deadfall

“Lawsuit?” he said. “Trial?” he said.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? If I can get the right lawyer-and I’m sure I can-we’ll ask as much as, oh, ten million dollars in punitive damages. We’ll settle for less, of course. It all depends on the church’s assets at the time.”

Daybreak got jerkily to his feet; the look on his face was one of pure horror. He seemed to realize that, because he wiped it off and then turned his back to us and stood staring out through the venetian blinds, his hands washing each other just above his tailbone.

I looked at Kerry and mouthed the words You’re terrific. She wrinkled her nose at me, snuffled, and sneezed again.

For about two minutes it was very quiet in there. Then Daybreak turned around, slowly, and looked at Kerry; I might not have been there anymore. He had the mask of serenity in place again. He even managed to work up a faint nervous smile as he said, “You’d go through with it, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Dunston-everything you said?”

“Yes, Reverend, I would. And my name is Wade, not Dunston — Kerry Wade. Please remember that.”

“As you wish.”

“As it is. ”

“What do you want from me, Ms. Wade?” “I want you to have a nice long talk with my ex-husband. I want you to tell him to leave me and my friend alone from now on. I want you to explain to him exactly what will happen if he doesn’t.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, do you?”

“I will speak to Reverend Dunston,” he said.

“Immediately?”

“Immediately.”

“Good.” She stood, and I bounced right up alongside her. “I do hope you can make him understand,” she said, smiling. “If not… well, I’ll have no choice but to pack my bags and move right in.” He smiled back at her-there wasn’t a trace of humor in his smile-and she said, “Goodbye, Reverend Daybreak,” and went to the door and I followed her out like a puppy.

Neither of us said anything until we were clear of the now-deserted church grounds. I said then, “You amaze me sometimes, lady. Where did you get all of that stuff in there?”

“It just came to me.”

“Good thing it did. I wasn’t doing too well.”

“No, you weren’t. Another thirty seconds and you’d have been calling him a crook and a charlatan.”

“He is a crook and a charlatan.”

“Maybe. But he doesn’t think so.”

“I thought you’d gone nuts at first. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing.”

“Women’s wiles, my dear.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that put an end to it; you hit him right where he lives. We won’t have any more trouble with Dunston.”

“Lord,” she said fervently, “I hope not. I would hate to have to follow up on all those threats.”

“You don’t mean you’d actually move down here?”

She gave me an enigmatic smile, and then sneezed in the middle of it. “What do you think?” she said as we reached the car. “You old fornicator, you.”

It was after two when we got back to San Francisco. I was pretty hungry by then, but there was no time to even grab a sandwich; I would be cutting it close as it was, getting to the Fairmont in time for my three o’clock appointment with Margaret Prine. I dropped Kerry off at her apartment and hurried downtown and up onto Nob Hill and parked more or less legally on Taylor Street, opposite Grace Cathedral and around the corner from Mrs. Prine’s fancy apartment house. I was exactly one minute late when I walked into the hotel.

The Fairmont has been a San Francisco landmark for close to eighty years and is still one of its finest luxury hotels. It has posh bars and restaurants and shops, a couple of suites that would cost you a grand a day if you had the right pedigree, a twenty-nine-story tower addition built in the early sixties, and a lobby notable for its late-Victorian elegance: dark, brownish marble pillars and staircases, ornate wood-paneled ceiling and walls, antique furnishings. If you’re wearing a hat when you walk in there you invariably find yourself taking it off. It has that effect even on lowbrows like me.

The lobby was moderately crowded at the moment; I walked the length of it, feeling out of place and looking for an elderly woman with a gold-headed cane. There were plenty of elderly women and even a couple of canes, but none of the latter had a gold head. I made another circuit and then decided I ought to sit down somewhere, before one of the security people spotted me and took me for an undesirable. There was some plush maroon furniture near the entrance to the Squire Restaurant, opposite the hotel’s main entrance off Mason Street. I parked myself on an overstuffed couch and watched people move in and out, back and forth. And waited.

At 3:20 I was still waiting. Maybe Ozimas didn’t go to Big Sur after all, I thought. Maybe she got hold of him and he told her he didn’t know any dealer in antique miniatures named Charles Eberhardt, and that made her balk at keeping our appointment.

I was fretting with that possibility when I saw her. She came in through the main entrance and stopped and held her cane up in front of her in a discreet away, so that the gold head was visible. I got off the couch and went her way, taking my time so I could size her up. From a distance she looked small and frail in a bulky fur coat, like somebody’s nice old white-haired grandmother-one who happened to have a couple of million dollars or so. Up close there was no mistaking the toughness in her seamed and rouged face and her shrewd gray eyes, the imperiousness of her bearing. Or the fact that she was a woman who knew what she wanted and usually got it, one way or another.

“Mrs. Prine? I’m Charles Eberhardt.”

She looked me up and down, once, as if she were examining a curious artifact. If the artifact made any impression on her she didn’t show it. She said, “How do you do, Mr. Eberhardt. I apologize for being tardy; I was unavoidably detained.”

Sure you were, I thought. She’d been late on purpose-I understood that now. A double-edged ploy, no doubt, designed to test Mr. Eberhardt’s sincerity and to froth up his eagerness to sell her a Cosway snuff box.

I said, “No apology necessary, Mrs. Prine.”

“You’ve bought the Cosway?”

I smiled at her. “Shall we go into the lounge, where it’s more private?”

“No. It’s too dark in there. I’ll want to examine the piece, of course.”

“Of course.” I gestured toward where I’d been sitting before; none of the furniture there was occupied. “Over this way?”

She nodded and we went that way and took opposite ends of the same lumpy couch. She said, “Now then, Mr. Eberhardt, the Cosway.”

I said pleasantly, “Now then, Mrs. Prine, my name isn’t Eberhardt and I don’t have any Cosway box.” I told her what my name was and that I was the private detective she wouldn’t talk to last week. I also offered her one of my business cards.

She didn’t take the card; she looked at it as if it were something unclean. Looked at me the same way, with a sprinkling of contempt and malice thrown in. “I do not care to be lied to,” she said in a chilly voice, and started to get up.

“I think you’d better stay a while,” I said. “I know you’ve got Kenneth Purcell’s Hainelin snuff box; I know you paid Eldon Summerhayes seventy-five thousand dollars for it four months ago.”

She went rigid. She seemed to pale a little, too; at any rate the rouge on her cheeks appeared redder now. The look she gave me this time was one of hatred. She said in a biting whisper, “Blackmail.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Prine. I don’t want anything from you except the answers to some questions.”