Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

“Me too.”

“Took a lot of willpower, huh?”

“Yeah. I slipped a couple of times at first, but after a while it wasn’t too bad.”

“So everybody keeps telling me,” Barney said. He patted his ample midriff. “But I can’t seem to do it myself. I like food too much. Carne asada — that’s my main weakness. Did I ever take you to my cousin Carlos’s place in the Mission? No? You never tasted carne asada the way he makes it. A gallon of sour cream, and those sweet onions he uses… ah Jesus.”

“I think I better pass.”

“Willpower,” he said. “I wish I had it.” He gave me another examining look. “Yeah, you look great. Except-”

“Except what?”

He snickered. “Just what is that thing on your upper lip?”

I reached up and touched it; I couldn’t seem to break myself of the habit of doing that every time somebody called attention to it. “It’s a mustache,” I said. “What did you think it was?”

“It looks like a hooker’s false eyelash stuck on there.”

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

“Kind of scraggly, isn’t it? Or did you just start growing it?”

“I’ve had it for a month,” I said defensively. “It looks all right to me. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing a razor won’t fix. How come you grew a mustache at your age?”

“What am I, a candidate for the old folks’ home?” I could feel myself getting a little miffed. Which was stupid, because Barney was only having some fun with me; but I had taken a lot of ribbing about the mustache in the past month, principally from Eberhardt and Kerry, and I’d had enough. If it hadn’t been for all the ribbing, in fact, I might have shaved the thing off by now. As matters stood, each new crack only made me more determined to keep it. “So I grew a mustache,” I said. “So what’s the big deal?”

“Why?” he said.

“Why what?”

“Why did you grow it? To impress your lady?”

“No.”

“You figured it’d make you look younger?”

“No.”

“Because of all the weight you lost?”

“No! I grew it because I felt like it.”

“Okay, okay. Kind of touchy on the subject, aren’t you.”

“No, damn it, I’m not touchy on the goddamn subject!”

Barney grinned. “I still think it looks like a hooker’s false eyelash,” he said.

I suggested a fun thing he could do with himself, caught up my briefcase, told him I’d be in touch, and went out stroking the damn mustache like it was a pet caterpillar. By the time I realized what I was doing, I was halfway across the anteroom. And Barney, the little bastard, was having himself a noisy chuckle behind his closed office door.

The office I shared with Eberhardt was a small, converted third-floor loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, a hop and a skip from Van Ness Avenue’s automobile row. The building was owned by an unconverted slum landlord named Crawford, who looked like a Tammany Hall politician and had the soul and heart of a pirate; he was charging us eight hundred dollars a month for the place, an outrageous price but one that was not far out of line with what other office space was going for in the city these days. San Francisco was full of pirates, it seemed. Pretty soon they would drive everybody else out to the suburbs and then they could start raping and pillaging each other, as the old Caribbean buccaneers used to do in places like Tortuga. It was a thought to keep you warm when the rent came due, anyway.

The door was locked when I got there. When I let myself in the first thing I saw was the light fixture hanging from the ceiling. It looked like nothing so much as an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass. testicles. It was the ugliest light fixture I had ever seen and I hated it and I kept threatening to tear it down one of these days, landlord or no landlord. But I never seemed to get around to doing it. Maybe there was something psychological in that; maybe subconsciously I needed to keep it around in order to have something to take out my nonviolent aggressions on. Or maybe, somewhere down at the bottom of my warped old psyche, I considered the thing to be a fitting symbol of my life and work. Who the hell knew?

I switched it on, leered at it, and went over to my desk. The rest of the office wasn’t such-a-much, either. It was about twenty feet square, and it had beige walls, a beige carpet that we’d recently put down to cover bare wood and paint-stained linoleum, a skylight that a former tenant had cut into the ceiling, three windows and two views-one view of the back end of the Federal Building, the other of a blank brick wall-and that was all it had other than Eberhardt’s and my office equipment. If you needed to use the john, you had to go downstairs to the Slim-Taper Shirt Company, “The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look,” and hop around on one foot until one of their employees unlocked the toilet they had.

There weren’t any calls on my answering machine, nor were there any scrawled messages from Eberhardt on my desk, as there sometimes were. Which meant he probably hadn’t come in at all today. I remembered his telling me he might have to go to Stinson Beach to check a lead on his missing rich girl.

I sat down and looked at the telephone and thought about calling Kerry at the Bates and Carpenter ad agency. But I didn’t do it. Telling her the Santa Barbara vacation would have to be postponed was something best done in person. Tonight I would tell her, when we had dinner. Dinner was all we’d have together tonight, once she heard, but then life is full of disappointments and frustrations. Life, to coin a lyrical phrase, sometimes sucks.

So I got out the Northern Development vs. Ragged-Ass Gulch file Barney Rivera had given me and read through it. About the only things I learned were some sketchy background details on the three partners.

Munroe Randall. Forty-four at the time of his death. Native of Kansas. M.B.A. from some college I’d never heard of in the Midwest; lived in California for eighteen years, in Redding for thirteen. Unmarried. Worked for two large real estate firms in the Redding area before founding Northern Development with his own capital supplemented by cash from the other two partners and bank loans. Excellent credit rating. Numerous personal references.

Frank O’Daniel. Thirty-nine. Born in Idaho, had lived in Redding since his early teens. B.B.A. degree in Accounting from Chico State; he was the company’s pencil pusher and paper shuffler. Worked as a CPA before throwing in with Randall. Married, wife’s name Helen, no children. Credit rating somewhat shaky: he or his wife or both of them liked to spend money even when they were on the shorts. Personal references good.

Martin Treacle. Forty-one. Native of Red Bluff, a few miles south of Redding. Limited college education: a year and a half at a Humboldt County Junior College. Holder of various sales jobs in the Redding /Red Bluff area, all with established firms, at increasingly larger salaries. Similar position with Northern Development-the company’s glad-hander and silver-tongue. Divorced five years, one daughter; ex-wife and the daughter now living in San Diego. Credit rating better than O’Daniel’s but not quite as high as Randall’s. Personal references good.

I had just put down the data sheet on Treacle when the door opened and I had a visitor. And the visitor, it turned out, was Martin Treacle himself.

He came in a little diffidently, poking his head around the door edge first, as if he thought something peculiar might be going on in here. They get ideas like that from bad books and bad TV programs-all the distorted portrayals of the allegedly weird, violent, and alcoholic world of private eyes. It is to laugh. Anyhow, he came all the way in when he saw I was alone and relatively harmless-looking-no gat or top-heavy blonde or quart of Old Panther Piss in sight-and announced who he was and what he wanted. Which was to offer me his and Frank O’Daniel’s full cooperation in my inquiry into the death of Munroe Randall.