Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

Love, Al.

That was the bulk of it. Some of the smaller pieces were still missing, others figured to be somewhat different than I had postulated them, but I was sure all the essentials were right. The full story would have to come from her. Not that the details were vital. Even if she didn’t confess, even if she tried to bluff it through, there should be enough hard evidence to convict her. The fingernail in the barn, for one thing. Dessault, for another; he was the type to sell out his own mother if he thought it would save his ass. She might still have the gun, too. In the end there’d be enough.

It was warm in the car now, too warm: I was sweating again. I turned the heat down halfway. Outside, dusk was settling. It was already dark among the trees; their shadows, and those thrown by the barn and the house, crept out toward me across the yard. Time to go, I thought, and I put the car in gear and swung it into a U-turn that made the weak right side tremble. Time to get the rest of it done.

Time to face the black widow in her nest.

Night had fallen when I turned off South Lake Street, onto the private drive that led up to the Purcell home. The road surface wasn’t as bad here as on the one coming into the Martinez farm, but the car’s front end was substantially looser now; I thought it might go at any time. I drove up the hillside at a crawl.

The parking area at the end of the drive was dark: the half-dozen night lanterns atop the garden wall hadn’t been put on. There were three cars sitting there-the dusty BMW I’d seen on my first visit, Richie Dessault’s white Trans-Am, and a sixties-vintage MG roadster that I didn’t recognize. Through the filigreed gate I could see that the garden was also dark but that light showed at the front of the house, made blurry by the mist that swirled in raggedly from the sea.

I put my car next to the BMW and sat there for a few seconds, listening to a voice inside my head that said, Dessault’s here, that’s all right, but she’s got other company. What’s the sense in bracing her now? What’s the sense in bracing her at all? Let it go, for Christ’s sake. You don’t need any more of this. Then I stopped listening to the voice and got out of the car, into a blustery wind thick with the smells of salt and the offshore kelp beds.

The gate wasn’t shut all the way, so I didn’t have to bother with the bell or the intercom system. I shouldered through the open half, followed the crushed-shell path between the rows of rosebushes. The light at the front of the house was coming through a window and also through a wedge between the door and the jamb. I stopped, looking at the open door. From inside, distantly, there was the sound of music-something classical, something with a lot of stringed instruments. No other sounds filtered out to where I stood.

Frowning, I put the tips of my fingers against the door panel and pushed it inward. Went past its far edge by a couple of steps, into the empty front hall. Nobody in the formal living room that opened off of it, nobody on the carpeted staircase to my right or up on the second-floor landing. I thought about calling out, announcing myself, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything except stand still, listening to the music: it was coming from upstairs, over on the south side.

Something wrong here, I thought.

Something bad here.

After a time I crossed to the staircase and climbed it, slowly, reluctantly. A central hallway went both ways upstairs; I turned left, to the south. Four doors gave on it in that direction, two open, two closed. The open ones showed me a bathroom and what looked to be a spare bedroom; I didn’t pause at either one. At the far end, on the right, a strip of light showed under the bottom of the second closed door; the music seemed to be coming from in there. Bedroom? Her bedroom? I kept moving, and I was only a few feet away when the familiar smell registered on my olfactory nerve.

Cordite. Burnt gunpowder.

My chest got tight and my head began to ache again. I quit walking and leaned against the wall; the palms of my hands were suddenly as wet as if I’d dunked them in water. No more, I thought, I can’t look at any more death today. But I was not the kind of man who could walk away from something like this without knowing. The curse of my existence: the constant, compulsive need to know.

I tried to take a deep breath, to steady myself; the pain in my side turned it into a shallow grunt. I shoved off the wall, a little rubber-legged now, and went ahead to the door. It was shut all the way. Inside, the classical orchestra was playing something sweet and gentle. Violins. Mood music. Music for lovers.

I opened the door and went in.

Bedroom, all right. Death, all right. I felt the impact of it in my stomach, the same sickening pain as when one of the sluggers had kicked me on Sunday night. White room: white walls, white furry carpet, white canopied bed trimmed in white lace. Red room now: red on the sheets, red on the headboard and the canopy and the lace trim, red on the furry carpet. Spent shells on the carpet, too, four of them, ejected from an automatic weapon. Stereo record-changer in one corner playing the violin music. And the acrid smell of cordite strong in here, overpowering the faint musky scent of perfume.

They were both naked, both spattered with blood-both dead, I thought at first. Dessault was lying half on and half off the bed, head down and arms outflung to the carpet, one bare foot hooked around a canopy post; he had been shot twice, once in the small of the back and once under the right shoulder blade. The two bullets that had entered Alicia Purcell’s body, one in the area of the sternum, the other through the upper curve of her right breast, had driven her back against the headboard. She was leaning sideways against it with her legs spread wide-a position made all the more obscene by the torn flesh and the ribbons of blood.

Broken glass on the hardwood floor, broken china plates and cups and saucers, blue-and-white patterned stuff with some of the shards speckled with crimson. And Leonard Purcell crawling away, one hand clawing at the wood, the other crooked under him in a vain effort to stem the flow of bright arterial blood Dragging sounds, crunching sounds: trying to crawl away from death.

Ending as it began for me, in a welter of blood, in a strange house with me looking at the end products of human corruption: wrong place at the wrong time. The same helplessness, the same futility. The same pity. The same pain.

Why? I thought. Why this way?

And I was pretty sure I knew.

There wasn’t anyone else in the room, and the door to the adjoining bath was open, letting me see that it was empty. White drapes were only half drawn across a picture window in the back wall; beyond the glass were trees half-obscured by darkness and fog. I looked out at them until my stomach settled and I felt I could move again without being sick.

Dessault was the closest to me, but I didn’t go to him. There was no way he could still be alive; the one bullet had shattered his spine. Whosoever toucheth her, I thought. I went around on the near side of the bed, still with that rubbery sensation in my legs, and took hold of Alicia Purcell’s wrist, felt for a pulse. Just a formality, an automatic gesture… but it wasn’t. She was alive. Faint pulse, weak and fluttery. Up close this way, I could see that blood was still leaking out of her wounds. She’d lost a lot of it in the few minutes since the shooting; if she lost much more she would be dead.

There was nothing I could do for her, nothing I dared do for her; I was no damn good with first aid and if I tried to move her, to staunch the flow of blood, I was liable to do more harm than good. A door on that side of the room opened on a walk-in closet; I found a blanket inside, shook it out. The position she was in made it difficult to cover her. I did the best I could and then backed off, looking for a telephone.