Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

I stood off at a distance, not looking at him because I didn’t want to face any more of his grief. Not looking at much of anything, just waiting.

There wasn’t much longer to wait. In less than a minute pulsing red light stained the curtains over the front window and I heard the cars-two of them-come to fast stops out front. The officers made some noise, more than they had to, getting out and coming to the house. Cops don’t show enough respect for death sometimes — the young ones, especially.

I went into the foyer to let them in.

The next couple of hours were bad, although not half as bad for me as they must have been for Tom Washburn. There was a vague sense of surrealism to the events, of deja vu: I had gone through them all before, so many times that they blended together and became the same ordeal relived. Only the surroundings and the faces were different. The routine was the same. And so was the despair.

I didn’t know any of the uniformed cops, but one of them knew me by reputation, so there was no hassle. I answered their preliminary questions. I took them in and showed them what was left of Leonard Purcell. I answered more questions. Washburn had stopped crying at some point and had made an effort to get himself under control; but he stayed seated on the couch with the afghan wrapped tightly around him. I listened to him answer questions in a small, empty voice, but his responses were just words to me, without any real significance. I felt removed from everything, even more so than at other scenes like this because I didn’t know any of the principals, I wasn’t an integral part of it personally or professionally. Just a bystander, that was all-in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only things Washburn said that I could remember later were that he worked in a bank and that he’d gone to a movie tonight, gone alone because it was R-rated and Leonard didn’t approve of graphic violence in films.

The homicide team arrived; so did the assistant coroner and an ambulance and the lab crew. One of the inspectors was Ben Klein. Ben and I went back a long way, back to the days when I’d been on the cops myself; he and I had once shared a black-and-white out of the Taraval station. I repeated to him what had happened here, and answered his questions, and he told me to wait in the kitchen in case he needed to ask me anything else.

But I didn’t wait in the kitchen: I could still smell the blood from in there. I went out into the back yard, but that wasn’t the place for me either. Half a dozen neighbors were grouped in the alleyway, gawking the way they do, and the guy in the bathrobe was again hanging out of his window next door. One of the people in the alley called out to me, “What happened in there? Was somebody killed?”

Yeah, I thought, somebody was killed. I went back inside without answering and found a chair on the laundry porch, near the washer-and-dryer combination, and did my waiting in private.

Nobody bothered me for half an hour or so. Then one of the lab technicians came out and seemed surprised to find me sitting there in the shadows. He located the light switch and flipped it on with a knuckle, so he wouldn’t smudge any prints that might be on it.

I said, “You want me out of the way?”

“Be easier to work.”

“Sure.”

I walked outside again. The guy was gone from the window next door; I’d have bet money he had come outside himself, finally, to see if he could get a better look at things. The other neighbors were still in the alley, but a couple of uniformed officers were questioning them and nobody was paying any attention to me. I went over and stood in the darkness under some kind of puffy shrub; watched rain clouds roll in overhead and smelled the good clean odors of ozone and damp grass and evergreens.

Another of the lab men and the other inspector, a young guy named Tucker, came out together and began poking around the yard with flashlights. I stayed out of their way. Then they went out through the gate and along the alley toward where the car belonging to Leonard Purcell’s assailant had been parked. From under the shrub I watched the play of their light beams, but I couldn’t tell if they found anything.

Pretty soon it began to rain-a misty drizzle at first, then a hard slanting downpour. Everybody beat it out of the alley. I didn’t want to go back inside, but I didn’t want to stand out here and get soaked either. At my age, you worry about things like pneumonia. The laundry porch was empty again, the light shut off, so I sat down on the same chair I’d occupied earlier and waited some more, listening to the heavy beat of the rain on the tile roof.

After what seemed like a long time, Klein called my name from the kitchen. I got up and went in, and he cocked an eyebrow and said, “What were you doing? Sitting back there in the dark?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“No reason. It was just a place to sit, out of the way.”

“You sure you’re all right? You look a little pale.”

“I’m okay. Been a long night.”

“Sure. Well, you might as well go on home. I’ll call you if there’s anything else. Otherwise, come down to the Hall tomorrow sometime, sign your statement.”

I nodded. “How’s Washburn holding up?”

“Not too well, poor guy.”

“He won’t be spending the night here, will he?”

“No. He gave us the name of a friend to call.”

“Listen, you figure him for a suspect?”

“Too soon to tell. Why?”

“I was right there when he saw Purcell’s body,” I said. “He screamed, Ben-the kind of scream you can’t fake. You know what I mean?”

“I guess I do.”

“He didn’t kill Purcell. For what it’s worth.”

“Worth something to me. I’ll keep it in mind.”

I pulled the collar of my coat up around my neck. It had been warm in the kitchen before; now it was cold. I could still smell the blood in the dining room.

“Whoever did do it,” I said, “I hope you nail him for it. Fast and hard.”

He knew what I meant; you couldn’t have been in that dining room and not know. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “So do I.”

The nightmares started as soon as I went to sleep.

I knew they would; they always do after an ugly scene like tonight’s. So I didn’t go to bed right away, after I got home to my flat in Pacific Heights. It was too late to call Kerry or Eberhardt, as much as I wanted to talk to somebody. I opened a beer and turned on the TV and watched an old Edmond O’Brien movie without making sense out of half of it. Then I tried to read for a while-one of the seven thousand pulp magazines on shelves ringing my living room-but the words kept running together like ink under a stream of water. Three A.M., and my eyes just wouldn’t stay open any longer. I was so exhausted it was an effort to drag myself into the bedroom and shuck out of my clothes. Still I fought sleep, lying there listening to the hollow beat of the rain — but not for long. And when I lost the struggle the nightmares came and put a bad end to a bad night.

Blood in them, jetting up bright red out of a fountain in a yard grown high with dead trees and shrubs. A bird on the wing, and I touched it somehow and felt the life leave its body and pass through my fingers, and it fell in a long spiral-a deadfall. Then I was on the floor, crawling, crippled with pain and leaving a trail of blood behind me-but it was the floor of Eberhardt’s house, not Purcell’s, the afternoon Eb and I had been shot by a hired Chinese gunman. And then I was on one knee, looking down at myself, putting a hand on my own shoulder and saying, “Easy, I’m here to help you, you’re going to be okay,” and I shuddered at the lie and felt myself shudder, felt the life go rushing out of my own body this time. And then somebody yelled, a thin wailing cry full of anguish-