Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

Irwin was listed in the telephone directory-1478 Codding Street, Redding. If she hadn’t been I don’t know what I would have done. I ran across to the motel office and shocked the woman on duty with my appearance and by demanding to know the fastest way to get to Codding Street. She didn’t waste any time telling me; for all she knew, I was a demented person with dark and awful deeds on his mind. And maybe, right then, I was.

Codding Street was on the west side of town, near Keswick Dam; I remembered seeing a sign for the dam on my way to and from the O’Daniel house. I charged out of the office and got into the car and went screeching away like Mario Andretti coming out of the pits at the Indy 500.

I drove like him too-too damned fast, taking corners in controlled skids, taking risks. There was little traffic at this hour and I didn’t run afoul of any cops or any other wild drivers; those were the only reasons I reached Codding Street in one piece and without incident. As it was I got lost once, briefly, and used up most of the cuss words I knew before blundering back onto the right track. By the time the right street sign appeared in my headlights I was wired so tight you could have twanged me like a guitar string.

Typical residential street, quiet at this hour, lights still on in one or two of the houses. The houses themselves were smallish-bungalows, old frame jobs-with small yards separated by fences and shrubbery. I barreled along to the 1400 block; switched my headlights to high beam when I got there so I could check house numbers and the cars parked along the curb.

Kerry’s rented Datsun was sitting smack in front of 1478.

I swung over in front of it, trying not to make a lot of noise that would announce my arrival. I shut off the engine and cut the lights and shoved open the door, looking up at the house. Brown-shingled bungalow with an old-fashioned porch across the front; no lights showing along the near side, but a pale yellow glow behind a curtained window to the right of the front door.

Without thinking much I cut across the lawn and went up slow onto the porch, over to the curtained window. But I couldn’t see inside: the curtains were of some thick material and drawn tightly together. I tried listening. That also got me nothing; there wasn’t a sound in there that I could make out.

A bunch of things ran through my head: see if there’s a window open somewhere, maybe the back door, try to pinpoint where they are first. But I didn’t do any of them; I went back to the front door instead, and reached out and took hold of the knob. If it had been locked I would probably have busted the damned thing down with my shoulder or foot. But it wasn’t. The knob turned and I shoved the door open and bulled my way inside, through a narrow little foyer and into a combination living room and dining alcove.

And then I stopped. And stood there huffing and puffing and gawping. I don’t know what I expected to find in here, but what I was looking at wasn’t it. It was not even close.

Kerry was present and accounted for, but she wasn’t lying on the floor in a pool of blood, or tied and gagged in a chair, or even cowering in a corner. She was on her feet at the moment but she’d been sitting at a formica-topped dinette table, and what she’d been doing there was counting money. A whole lot of money. Most of the table was covered with nice crisp bills-twenties and fifties and hundreds in neat stacks.

Shirley Irwin was there too. But she wasn’t doing anything except lying sprawled on a wine-colored couch with her skirt up around her thighs and a big bruise over her left eye. She was out cold.

For the second time that night I felt the sudden release of tension; this time it left me relieved and surprised and very tired. I wanted to grab Kerry and hug her and then shake her until her teeth rattled. Instead I kept on gawping at her, and she kept on gawping right back.

Finally she said, “What are you doing here?” but at the same time I was saying, “What the hell’s been going on?” I started to say something else, and so did she, and I said, “Shit,” and she said, “Your face, your clothes… what happened to you?”

“Ragged-Ass Gulch burned up tonight. I almost burned up with it.”

“But how…?”

“Gary Coleclaw,” I said. “He torched the old hotel with me in it, just like he torched Munroe Randall’s house.”

“My God! But what’re you doing here? How did you know where to find me?”

“Finding people is one of the things I get paid for.” My voice was starting to rise; I yanked it down again. “What did you do to Irwin?”

“She killed Frank O’Daniel,” Kerry said. “And I know how she did it, too.”

“You what?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, but there’s only one reasonable way she could have done it that fits the facts. That ringing you heard must have been an alarm clock going off-one of those old-fashioned portable ones with a wind-up key. And that pop and whoosh just before the explosion… it had to have been a flare igniting.”

“Flare?”

“A marine flare,” she said. “Standard equipment on all boats; Ray and I used to have some on ours, and Tom Decker told me O’Daniel definitely kept some on board his. Pop the cap on one end and when the flare ignites it makes a kind of sizzling whoosh. It also shoots out more than enough sparks and heat to exceed the flash point of gasoline.”

Exceed the flash point of gasoline, I thought. I said, “Then the flare had to have been down in the bilges.”

“Probably. Anchored down there, with a piece of heavy string-fishing leader, maybe-attached to the cap. The other end of the string would’ve been attached to the key on the back of the clock, and the clock would’ve also been anchored down. O’Daniel had to have been nearby too, either knocked out or drugged. Anyhow, after the alarm goes off on those old clocks, the bell keeps ringing until the key winds down; you know that. In this case, the key also wound up the string leading to the flare, pulled it taut, and finally jerked the cap to set the flare off. Then-boom.”

“Boom,” I said. But it sounded plausible; it even sounded probable. Damn her, it sounded right.

“If you hadn’t been there at just that time,” she said, “no one would’ve heard the alarm; no one would have had any good reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident.”

“There’s still no way to prove it wasn’t. All the evidence went up with O’Daniel and the boat.”

“Well, there’s a lot of other evidence against Miss Irwin. More than enough to convict her, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe. Now suppose you tell me what you did to her.”

“Well, she attacked me and I had to hit her.”

“You had to hit her. With what?”

“Fireplace poker. That’s what she tried to hit me with.” Very calm, very matter-of-fact. We might have been talking about a bad little girl that momma had to spank. “It only happened about ten minutes ago,” she said. “I’ve already called the police. I thought that’s who you were when I heard you on the porch.”

“Why the bloody hell did you come here by yourself? Why didn’t you wait for me? Or call the police from the motel?”

“Oh, don’t get excited.” Then a pause, a worried frown. “Maybe you’d better sit down. You look awful.”

“I feel awful,” I said, “and part of the reason is you. Answer me-why did you come here?”

“Because I figured out Shirley Irwin had to be O’Daniel’s killer, and I thought there might be some evidence here to prove it. Either that, or I could talk to her and maybe get her to admit something incriminating-you know, manipulate the conversation that way.”

“Yeah,” I said.