Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

I studied him for a time. He was a handsome guy, lean and fit, with close-cropped black hair and a mustache that was fuller and shapelier than mine and definitely did not look like a hooker’s false eyelash. He wore a dark-blue gabardine suit, nice but not high-priced, with accessories in the same class. He seemed very earnest about everything he said, and there was a kind of hopeful glint in his eyes, as if he wanted very much to make a good impression on me. A salesman, all right. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the time being at least, and assume that he had come here in good faith and that his offer was guileless as well as genuine.

I said, “How did you get my name, Mr. Treacle?”

“A Mr. Rivera at Great Western Insurance gave it to me. I talked to him not more than half an hour ago.”

“Is that why you came down from Redding? To talk to Great Western’s investigators?”

“No, I was here on other business. But I thought it would be a good idea to stay on top of things while I’m in the city.”

“Mm.”

“Frank and I welcome the investigation, we want you to know that. We have nothing to hide.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yes. The sooner Great Western is satisfied,” he said, “the sooner Frank and I collect on our policy. As we’re entitled to. So naturally we want to cooperate to the fullest.”

“Naturally. Is that all you’re interested in?”

“Pardon me?”

“Don’t either of you care about what happened to Randall? If he was murdered, don’t you want to see whoever killed him caught and punished?”

“Well, of course,” Treacle said. “That goes without saying.”

“Even if it costs you the extra hundred thousand double indemnity?”

“Of course. But Frank and I are both convinced that the Redding police are right-Munroe’s death was a tragic accident. It couldn’t have been anything else.”

“Perhaps not. Were you and Randall friends as well as business partners?”

“Good friends, yes.”

“You don’t seem very upset about his death.”

“It came as quite a shock, believe me.”

“But without any lingering grief.”

“I’m not the grieving sort,” Treacle said earnestly. “No, I’m a realist. People live, people die, life goes on.”

A philosopher too, I thought. Aristotle Treacle, the compassionate one. I said, “And you just want what’s yours while it does, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. The fact of the matter is, it’s not Frank and me who need the insurance money-not personally. It’s the company. You may already know this, but we’re not in a stable financial position at present. Haven’t been for some months. And Munroe’s death hasn’t helped matters at all, obviously.”

I asked him, “How did your company get into this financial bind?” to see if his answer would jibe with what Barney Rivera had told me.

It did. “Frankly,” he said, “we’ve made some ill-advised purchases and investments over the past couple of years. We’d be all right if our Musket Creek development package had opened up as planned, but that didn’t happen thanks to the people of Musket Creek and their lawyers. You know about the litigation, of course?”

“I’ve been filled in.”

“Well,” he said, and shrugged, and smiled at me in his hopeful way.

I looked at him some more in silence. I kept trying to dislike him-he was glib, he was materialistic, he didn’t seem to have much of an interior; he was everything that annoyed me in salesmen and the modern business executive-and yet he was so damned earnest that I couldn’t work up much of an antipathy toward him. Maybe if it turned out he was implicated in Munroe Randall’s death, or that he was some kind of crook, I could start detesting him. Right now I would have to settle for being mildly aggrieved at his existence.

I said, “About your partner’s death,” and he paused in the process of unwrapping a long, thin panatela that he’d taken from his inside jacket pocket. “With all the bad blood between the Musket Creek citizens and your company, murder’s not out of the question. Or would you say otherwise?”

“Well… the police seemed sure that the fire was accidental…”

“Still,” I said, pushing him a little, “it could be murder.”

He clipped off the end of his cigar, put the end and the crumpled cellophane carefully into my wastebasket, and used a thin silver lighter to fire up. He didn’t say anything.

So I pushed a little more. “You must know those people in Musket Creek. Did any of them hate Munroe Randall enough to want him dead?”

“They all hated Munroe,” Treacle said with some bitterness. “And Frank and me too.”

“Are any of them capable of murder, in your opinion?”

“They’re probably all capable of it. They’re all loonies, you know.”

“How do you mean that, Mr. Treacle?”

“Strange people-very strange. Clannish, totally withdrawn from the mainstream of society and totally against progressive thinking of any kind.”

It sounded like a set speech, the kind to be delivered to lawyers and judges. I said, “I don’t see that that makes them loonies.”

“Believe me, they are. One of them even threatened me a few weeks ago.”

“Is that so? Which one?”

“A man named Robideaux. An artist-a bad artist, judging from the examples of his work I’ve seen.”

“What were the circumstances of the threat?”

“I was out inspecting one of our Musket Creek parcels. Robideaux came by and started in with the usual nonsense-”

“What nonsense is that?”

“Environmentalist nonsense. Desecration of wilderness land, the evils of free enterprise-that sort of crap.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Well, I ignored him,” Treacle said. “I wasn’t about to be drawn into a pointless argument. That made him even angrier and he said I’d better watch myself around there because someday somebody might decide to shoot at me.”

“Nobody ever did, I take it.”

“I haven’t been back since.”

“Did Robideaux or anyone else from Musket Creek ever threaten Munroe Randall?”

“Not that I know about.”

“I understand he had a public argument with a man named Coleclaw. No threats then?”

“No. It was a shouting match at our attorney’s office; he was taking depositions from Coleclaw and some of the others from out there. Coleclaw called Munroe a liar and a thief, and a few other things, but he didn’t make any threats.”

“How about Frank O’Daniel? Has he been threatened?”

“No. He’d have told me.”

The smoke from Treacle’s cigar was aggravating both my lungs and my sinuses; I used my hand to shred a thick plume of it. I never did like cigars much-or the men who smoke them in somebody else’s office without asking permission. More ammunition for my campaign to dislike Martin Treacle.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d put that out, Mr. Treacle,” because I’d had enough and I didn’t feel like being tolerant any more.

“Out?” he said blankly.

“Your cigar. The smoke is bothering me.”

He looked at the panatela in a surprised way, looked at me again, and said, “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…” Then he looked around the office, probably for an ashtray. There wasn’t one in sight. I keep one in my bottom desk drawer, but I decided I didn’t feel like obliging him with it. So I sat there, waiting, and he looked at me again, a little helplessly this time, hesitated, and then got up trailing smoke and went over to the window that looked out on the blank brick wall next door. He tugged at the sash, couldn’t open it, gave me another helpless glance, tugged again, and finally got it to slide up. He threw the cigar out into the airshaft, without looking to see what was down below-not that there was anything flammable down there or I would have said something about it and stopped him. Then he shut the window and dusted his hands and came back to his chair and said, “I’m sorry,” in a nonplussed sort of way. But he didn’t sit down again. Instead he shot the sleeve of his suit coat and glanced at his watch.