Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

“She wasn’t home when I got here. I prowled around looking for a way into the house, but all the doors and windows were locked-”

“Christ, you mean you broke in?”

“No, I didn’t break in. I didn’t want to do anything like that. I waited in the car for her to come home, and it wasn’t until eleven that she did. I said there were some things I had to talk over with her about O’Daniel’s death, so she invited me in. Well, she did make a slip while we were talking, but she realized it right away. Then she realized I knew the truth. That’s when she attacked me with the poker.”

“She could have killed you,” I said between my teeth.

“But she didn’t,” Kerry said. “Gary Coleclaw could have killed you but he didn’t. Survival is what counts.”

I was silent for about ten seconds; then I said, “Where did you find the money?”

“In her bedroom. It was in a briefcase-that briefcase there on the table-sitting on her bedroom dresser. Just sitting there in plain sight. The briefcase has Frank O’Daniel’s name inside it.”

I didn’t say anything at all this time.

“She was the prowler at the O‘Daniel house last night,” Kerry said. “She knew O’Daniel had been embezzling money from Northern Development; I think she was supposed to get a share of it, probably an equal share, but he’d been holding out on her. That’s one of the reasons she killed him-for the money.”

“Oh it is?”

“Sure. You don’t seem surprised about the embezzlement,” she said, as if she were disappointed.

“I’m not surprised. I figured that out just like you did.”

“When?”

“Never mind when,” I said. But it had been back in the motel room, after I’d talked to Tom Decker. And on the way over here. Given all the other facts, it was the one clear-cut explanation for O’Daniel’s recent behavior-the decisions to divorce his wife, to sell out his interest in Northern Development and move away; the failure to confide in his attorney about the latter plan. He hadn’t been worried any more about letting his wife have her half of their community property because he’d accumulated a fat private nest egg. It wouldn’t have been hard for him; he was the company accountant, and he had Shirley Irwin to help him juggle invoices and phony up correspondence. He’d probably started tapping the till when the firm’s downhill slide began, which had accelerated the skid and put them in their present financial hole.

Kerry said, “Miss Irwin’s second reason for killing him has to be an emotional one. They’d been having this affair for months; she used to go up to Mountain Harbor with him, posing as his wife-”

“Yeah, I know. I talked to Decker a while ago myself.”

“But things had cooled down between them; we know that because O’Daniel’d been going up to the lake alone the past month or so. The way I see it… ”

The way she saw it was the way I saw it: The break with Irwin had complicated matters for O’Daniel, but he’d figured a way out-or thought he had. He must have stalled her while he made his plans to take off with the whole boodle. After all, what could she do once he was gone? Going to the police would have meant a jail term for her too.

But he’d underestimated her. She had tumbled to what he was up to, arranged to murder him, and then gone and hunted up the money last night. Maybe he’d intimated that it was in his house; maybe he’d also let slip at some point where he kept his valuables at home. In any case she hadn’t had much trouble finding the stash.

Kerry paused for breath. Then she said, “Don’t you want to know what made me suspect Irwin in the first place?”

“All right, what?”

“That anonymous note she wrote to O’Daniel, to begin with. That was stupid of her. She had what should’ve been a perfect plan for murdering him so it looked like an accident; all the note accomplished was to make everybody even more suspicious of foul play. I guess she knew there’d be some suspicion anyway and was trying to divert it to the Musket Creek residents, but it was still a stupid thing to do.”

“All murderers are stupid,” I said. “How did the note make you suspect Irwin?”

“It doesn’t point directly to her, of course. But I knew the minute I saw it that it’d been written by a woman.”

“Yeah? How did you know that?”

“The way it was worded. ‘If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you.’ A man would never write something like ‘wish your mother never had you’; he’d write ‘wish you were never born’ or something. It just isn’t a phrase men use.”

That one had escaped me completely. I sighed and said, “Okay, I see your point. What else?”

“Well, whoever murdered O‘Daniel had to be pretty knowledgeable about boats, right? Otherwise, the explosion couldn’t have been rigged to look like an accident. So who knew about boats besides O’Daniel? Miss Irwin. Remember when we were all standing outside the sheriff’s office yesterday? She said the radio told her the explosion was caused by fuel leaking into the bilges and some kind of spark setting it off. But then she said, ‘Poor Frank must have forgotten to use the blowers.’ The radio wouldn’t have said that. And only somebody who knew boats would know about blowers to get rid of gasoline fumes.

“Then I remembered what you’d told me about Mrs. O‘Daniel not liking boats or water, intimating she’d never even been to Mountain Harbor. And then I remembered you’d also told me O’Daniel used to bring ‘his wife’ up there all the time, according to the Deckers. So I called Tom Decker and asked him to describe O‘Daniel’s ‘wife’ and he-”

“-described Shirley Irwin,” I finished for her. “Yeah. After which you sent Treacle and his bodyguard off to Musket Creek to check on me and came gallivanting over here and almost got yourself knocked off.”

“So did you,” she said. “Almost get yourself knocked off, I mean.”

“That’s part of my job. I’m a detective.”

“Are you mad because I didn’t come out to Musket Creek myself? Well, I would have if Treacle and that policeman hadn’t shown up when they did. But I thought if you needed help, they’d be able to provide it better than I could. Did they?”

“Did they what?”

“Help you. ”

“Yeah, they helped me. Maybe they saved my life. Ah Christ, maybe you saved my life by sending them.”

She smiled wanly. “You came here to save my life, didn’t you. You thought I was in danger and you came charging over here like a white knight.”

“White knight,” I said. “Bah.”

Another smile, tender this time. “Why don’t you sit down? You look pretty wobbly.”

“No,” I said.

“All right, be stubborn. Tell me what happened in Musket Creek, then.”

“No,” I said, and I went over and eased myself onto a chair near the couch. I was pretty wobbly, damn it, and I didn’t want to fall on my face.

Kerry followed, all solicitous now, and peered at me up close and made clucking noises. “You sit still,” she said. “I’ll see if there’s anything around here for your wounds.” She hurried out of the room.

I sat there. Irwin was still out cold, showing no signs of reviving. I wished I was out cold too; consciousness was not too pleasant at the moment-my face hurt and so did my head where Gary Coleclaw had whacked me with the board-and she looked kind of peaceful lying there.

Cars began arriving out front. Doors slammed and people clumped up onto the porch. Somebody started banging on the door, and somebody called out, “This is the police!”

I stayed where I was. On one wall, a clock commenced to make bonging noises to accompany the racket outside. I looked over at it. Midnight.