Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

I said to Kerry, “I guess the first thing we should do is find a motel.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Unless you want to stop and get something to eat.”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“Any preferences for the motel? You can check the Triple-A guide..”

“No. Whatever you want.”

That was the way it had been all the way up-four hours of monosyllables and simple declarative sentences. Every time I looked at her, and she caught me at it, she would smile and give me eye contact for a couple of seconds; but then I’d glance at her a few seconds later, and she’d be wearing a blank expression and staring off into space. Something was troubling her, all right. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d taken on this job, or the switch in vacation plans; Kerry was not the type to pout over things like that. A couple of times I’d asked her what was wrong. But she’d said nothing was wrong, and when I pressed her she’d gotten a little snippy, the way women do when they don’t feel like communicating. It was starting to worry me. She was shutting me out and I couldn’t seem to find a way to reach her when she did that. Whatever was bothering her, I wouldn’t get it out of her until she was good and ready to let go of it.

I looked at her again now. That same blank expression and remote stare. The sun slanting in through the windshield gave her auburn hair a fiery cast; her eyes, dark green most of the time, although they seemed to change color according to the fluctuations of her mood, were almost black now. She sat stiff-backed, with her hands folded just under her breasts-a posture that was oddly mannequin-like, as if you could reach over and take her limbs and rearrange them into different positions with no resistance at all.

My throat closed up a little. Something stirred through me, like little puffs of wind among dry leaves. God, how I loved that woman…

I found a motel on North Market Street downtown, the Sportsman’s Rest, that had some shade trees and a big swimming pool. The room we were given was nice enough, except that everything was either bolted or nailed down, including a painting of some dubious-looking fruit that nobody in his right mind would want to steal. It was stuffy in there-the temperature was in the high seventies, unseasonably hot for early May-and after I brought in the bags I went and switched on the air conditioner. Kerry hadn’t said a word since we’d pulled in; and when I asked her if she planned to go swimming, all I got in response was “Maybe.” I decided the thing for me to do was to go away and let her be alone for a while. And that was what I did.

My first stop was the Redding police station. It was only a few blocks away, and the woman in the motel office had given me a city map and directions after I’d checked in. The officer in charge of the Munroe Randall investigation was a sergeant named Betters, who turned out to be a pleasant and cooperative sort. But he didn’t have much to tell me beyond what was in his report.

He and his men had twice sifted through the burned-out remains of the Randall house, without turning up any evidence that suggested arson as the source of the blaze. Nor had the coroner’s post-mortem contributed anything of a suspicious nature. Randall had evidently died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape the burning house; firefighters had found his body sprawled in an areaway leading to the back door. Aside from the fire itself, none of the neighbors had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that night. One of them, who’d known Randall pretty well, stated that he had kept paint thinner and other combustible materials inside the attached garage; and as near as Betters had been able to determine, the garage had been the fire’s point of origin. The official verdict was spontaneous combustion and accidental death.

“There’s no way at all it could have been arson?” I asked him.

“Well, it could have been, sure,” Betters said. “You can never be a hundred percent certain in cases like this. But if it was, then the torch is either a topflight professional or a blind-lucky amateur.”

“I take it nobody connected with Randall had anything fire-related in his background?”

“No, nobody. At least not as far as we could determine.”

“Does that include the citizens of Musket Creek?”

“It does. The county sheriffs men ran checks on the Musket Creek residents, went out and talked to a few of them; they all seemed glad to hear that Randall was dead, but you can’t arrest somebody for that.”

“Treacle and O’Daniel checked out clean too?”

“Solid citizens, both of them.”

“And Northern Development? No hint of anything going on behind the scenes?”

“None.”

“Okay,” I said, “I guess that’s about it for now. But I would like to take a look at what’s left of the Randall home.”

“Sure thing. Cleanup hasn’t started yet; it’s all just sitting there waiting.”

“Fenced off or anything like that?”

He shook his head. “You can walk right in.”

I asked him how to get there, and he told me, and I went off to have my look. Randall had lived in a wooded development off Churn Creek Road, east of Highway 5 and five miles or so from downtown Redding. I found the street without too much trouble, and the remains immediately: the place was like a huge black scar on the otherwise serene and affluent face of the neighborhood.

The houses were in the six-figure class, all fairly new, some on two- or three-acre parcels. Randall’s had been one of the smaller places, built on maybe an acre of land, with a line of spruce separating it from the neighbor on one side and a redwood-stake fence forming the boundary on the other. There wasn’t much left of it. Fire had gutted both the house and the attached garage, collapsing all but one wall of the house and a blackened brick column that had once been the fireplace chimney. Most of the rear wall had toppled outward, so that a jumbled fan of charred wood and brick lay over a flagstone terrace, a rectangle of lawn, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool; nobody had bothered to drain the pool and debris floated in it like bones in a black soup. It had been some hot fire, all right. Part of the boundary fence and some of the trees were heavily scorched, and the singed corpse of a fruit tree stood out front like an ugly monument to death.

Wearing an old trenchcoat I’d brought along to protect my clothes from soot, I wandered among the debris and used a stick to poke around here and there. It had all been sifted through pretty thoroughly, as Betters had assured me. I hadn’t expected to find anything, and I didn’t. But you never know. It’s easy enough to overlook something in the remains of a fire like this one.

I gave it up after a while, took off the trenchcoat and stowed it back in the trunk of my car, and went to cover more old territory: Randall’s neighbors. None of them had much to tell me, either-nothing at all that differed from what they’d told Betters and his men. One middle-aged woman, who lived diagonally across the street, allowed as how she had seen a yellow sports car parked just down from Randall’s property around 9:00 P.M. on the night of the fire; but when she’d looked again later, it was gone. I took that for what it was worth: little or nothing, probably.

It was after three when I finished canvassing the neighbors. Time for a couple more stops, at least. According to my map, the street on which Stan Zemansky, the insurance agent, had his office was fairly close by; so I went and hunted it up. I was saving Frank O’Daniel for my last stop, because I wanted to be armed with as much information as possible before I interviewed him.

Zemansky was in and “eager to talk to me,” meaning Barney Rivera had contacted him and given him instructions to cooperate. He was one of these guys who seem to have been turned out on an assembly line, and who ought to have been sent out into the world wearing a sign that said BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. He was about forty, had a nice smile and a friendly manner, and an office that said he was selling a lot of insurance; but you took one look at him and you knew he had never had an original thought in his life. He was a product of the times: you programmed him to perform a useful societal function, wound him up and let him go, and he did exactly what he was supposed to and exactly what he was told to by everybody from the politicians on down to his wife. This was what was left of the American middle class: the manufactured and manipulated man. Batteries not included.