Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

— and I woke myself up, because it was me doing the yelling.

Nothing much happened over the next week. I avoid reading the newspapers most of the time, but I had a look at the Chronicle twice during that week; I also called Ben Klein at the Hall and talked with him. But there just weren’t any developments in the Leonard Purcell case. Or at least none that the police were admitting to. According to Klein, Tom Washburn had been unable to attach any particular significance to Purcell’s dying words, except as an obscure reference to Leonard’s brother, Kenneth Purcell, who had died in a fall this past May. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything useful. No solid motive had surfaced. There were no suspects. Possible leads were still being checked, Klein said, but he didn’t sound confident that they would point him anywhere.

I had no real stake in the case, yet I could not keep it out of my head. You don’t watch a man die- feel a man die-and then just forget about it as if it never happened. Especially not with reruns of those nightmares every couple of nights. So I read the newspaper stories, and talked to Klein and a few other people, and found out some things about Leonard Purcell and his brother. Eberhardt thought this was morbid and a waste of time, and maybe it was. But Eberhardt has thicker skin than I do; after more than thirty years on the San Francisco cops, it’s just a job to him. Sometimes I wish it was just a job to me, too. Sometimes.

The fact that Leonard was the second member of the Purcell family to die within six months might not have interested me if his brother’s death hadn’t been the result of a fall and hadn’t also been on the odd side. Kenneth Purcell, a wealthy real estate broker and art collector, had lost his life during a Thursday-night party at his Moss Beach home. There had been a lot of drinking at this party, evidently-Kenneth had thrown it to show off a valuable antique snuff box he’d acquired-and he had done the lion’s share of it. Sometime between nine-thirty and ten he had disappeared; he hadn’t been missed until ten, by his wife Alicia. When a search of the house and immediate grounds failed to turn him up, the wife and a couple of the guests had gone out to check the cliffs at the rear of the property. His body had been caught on the rocks a hundred feet below.

There had been no witnesses to his fall. And no evidence of foul play, although Kenneth hadn’t been well liked and there were rumors that some of his real estate brokerings were of the quasi-legal variety. The official theory was that he had wandered out onto the cliffs to clear his head-it had been a cold, windy, but clear night-and lost his footing somehow. The valuable snuff box, which Kenneth had had on his person earlier, had not been found on the body; his coat pocket had been torn in the fall and presumably the box had been lost in the ocean. County coroner’s verdict: accidental death.

Klein didn’t think there was any connection between the deaths of the two brothers. Tom Washburn, on the other hand, did think so-apparently for more reasons than just those half-delirious words I had heard Leonard speak before he died. Klein hadn’t wanted to go into Washburn’s reasons but did say he’d had them checked out thoroughly. He’d also checked out Leonard thoroughly. And was satisfied that Leonard had had no violent old enemies, hadn’t professionally or personally offended or antagonized any individual or group of individuals in recent weeks, was not in serious debt to anyone, had no ties to any criminal element. His law practice had been small but thriving, with a mixed client list of gays and straights; and he was financially well off. The official police theory in his case was that he had been shot by an intruder on the hunt for money or valuables.

That was the way things stood-more or less in limbo-when I got to the office at nine o’clock on a Thursday morning, one week after the shooting. Eberhardt wasn’t in yet; he likes to keep executive hours, a habit that irritates me sometimes because the agency is mine, not his, and he wouldn’t be a part of it if I hadn’t felt sorry for him after his early retirement from the SFPD a couple of years ago and taken him in as a full partner. Still, coming in late most mornings was a minor annoyance. He was a good man to work with where and when it counted-a good friend. All things considered, the partnership had turned out much better than I’d expected it would.

I got coffee brewing on the hot plate and wished there were some way to turn the heat up; it was cold and drizzly outside and chilly in here. But no, the landlord-Sam Crawford, a cigar-smoking fat cat who owned buildings in every slum and depressed neighborhood in the city and referred to his tenants as “my people” — had decreed that the cost of heating this building was much too high. And to insure that the real estate outfit on the first floor, the Slim-Taper Shirt Company on the second floor, and us on the third floor didn’t try to countermand his dictates, he kept the furnace turned on just twelve hours each day, as required by San Francisco law, and had it regulated so that just enough heat reached the radiators to maintain a sixty-degree maximum, no matter what the weather was like outside. Consequently, on mornings like this you had to either wear heavy sweaters or keep your overcoat on while you worked. The only reason Eberhardt and I were still here was that office space was at a premium in the city these days; we couldn’t have found a place as large as this, anywhere in the general downtown area where we needed to be, for less than the eight hundred a month we were paying Crawford. The son of a bitch knew that as well as we did. If you’d asked him he would have said he was taking care of “my people” by regulating the heat instead of raising the rent. He was a cutey, he was. About as cute as a vulture on a fence post.

Without taking off my coat I sat down and poked through the papers on my desk. Not much there; things were a little lean at the moment. I had wrapped up some work for the plaintiff in a civil case yesterday, a simple skip-trace two days before that; and last Saturday I’d had the matter of Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr., and his unpaid-for Mercedes XL wrapped up for me.

The reason Alfred Henry and his lady friend, Eileen Kyner, hadn’t shown up at her house was that they’d been on a gambling and boozing spree in Nevada. At approximately four A.M. on Saturday, they had staggered out of a casino in downtown Reno, gotten into the Mercedes parked in a nearby lot, and Alfred Henry had gunned it out into the street. Unfortunately for him, the street happened to be occupied at the time by a Reno police car on patrol. The cops up there take a dim view of drunks running into them at four A.M., particularly deadbeat drunks from California, so Alfred Henry was still in the slammer. Eileen Kyner had bailed herself out and come home; she had not bailed Alfred Henry out because, she had told the police, he (a) had lost a thousand dollars of her money playing blackjack; (b) had made a drunken pass at one of the lady blackjack dealers when he thought she’d gone off to the potty; (c) was lousy in bed anyway; and (d) deserved to rot in jail, schmuck that he was, for doing something so monumentally stupid as mating his Mercedes with a police car. The Burlingame auto dealer who actually owned the Mercedes was not amused, considering that Alfred Henry’s monumental stupidity had caused several hundred dollars’ damage to the front end of said Mercedes. Once the damage was repaired he’d either have somebody drive it back from Reno or sell it up there at a loss, just to be rid of it. As for me I got paid for my time even though I hadn’t managed to repossess the Mercedes; it wasn’t my fault Alfred Henry was a drunken schmuck as well as a deadbeat.