Bill Pronzini - Labyrinth

Christmas trees before Thanksgiving. Citizens letting their dogs crap all over a public recreation area. Young kids giving the finger to adults old enough to be their grandfather. And a twenty-year-old girl lying in the morgue with two bullets in her body. And an honest man, a moral man, tearing himself apart with guilt. And a stubborn, narrow-minded woman who would rather believe in an unlikely threat than in the real danger of mental illness.

People, Milo had said.

Yeah. People.

I walked over to the driving range. Came back to the gate. Walked up the park road again. Watched the kids again, staring at the one who had given me the finger until it made him nervous enough to stop playing catch and head down into the grotto with his friend. The cold was beginning to bother me, as it had yesterday, and I was also a little hungry; I had eaten nothing for breakfast except some cereal. Before leaving my flat, though, I had made some sandwiches, and I had bought a thermos near my office and filled it with coffee. Time for lunch, I thought. I turned back for the gate Just in time to see the taxi come gliding along Twenty-first Avenue and pull up in front of the Talbot house.

The driver blew his horn a couple of times. Immediately the front door opened and Martin Talbot appeared, wearing the same tweed overcoat of yesterday. There seemed to be purpose in his stride as he came down the stairs and crossed to enter the cab.

I was running by then, out through the gate and around the front of my car. The taxi pulled away, left on Wawona, as I fumbled the door open and slid inside. If the driver had caught the light at Nineteenth, I might have lost them; midday traffic was pretty heavy along there, clogging all three southbound lanes. But the signal was red, and it stayed red long enough for me to swing out and close to within half a block.

Talbot’s sudden departure by cab was surprising. From what Laura Nichols had told me, he had not gone anywhere since the accident except for those periodic walks around the neighborhood. So why this trip? And why the seeming purpose in his stride?

The taxi swerved over into the left-turn lane at Nineteenth and Sloat; I managed to do the same. And to make the light with them. They cut over onto Junipero Serra, turned left again at Ocean Avenue, and followed Ocean to the City College. Over the hill to Geneva, then, and straight out past the San Mateo County line and the Cow Palace.

An uneasiness had begun to grow in me, and it kept on growing when the driver swung right on Bayshore Boulevard and headed up the long sweeping hill beyond. I was pretty sure I knew where Talbot was going, now. And I was right: on the other side of the hill the cab made another right-hand turn and entered Brisbane on Old Country Road.

My hands were tight around the wheel as I turned in after them. Brisbane was a small town of maybe four thousand people, nestled in the curves and cuts along the eastern slopes of the San Bruno Mountains overlooking the Bay. It had some similarities in appearance and population mix to Sausalito, although it was more of a bedroom community than an artistic one. A place where all sorts of different types lived, from painters and sculptors to business executives to blue collar workers.

It was also the place, Mrs. Nichols had told me, where Victor Carding lived.

Why would Talbot be on his way to see Carding? Three possible answers, as far as I could tell. One-he wanted to talk it out with the man, ask forgiveness, seek some sort of relief for his guilt. Two-he was after punishment instead of relief, either verbal or physical. Three-the initiative was Carding’s, not Talbot’s, and Talbot was responding to a telephone summons.

The first or the second seemed the most probable. The only reason Carding could have for requesting a meeting was that he intended to carry out his threat; but if you’re going to kill a man you don’t invite him to your house to do it. The first answer was the best of the lot, though it could still mean trouble; the second was volatile as hell. Dicey situation any way you looked at it.

But the big question was, what was I going to do about it?

I followed the cab up San Bruno Avenue, hanging back a full two blocks. At Glen Parkway it turned right, hooked through the center of town, and then began to climb upward on the network of narrow twisting roads that crisscrossed the slope. Most of the houses up there either clung to the steep hillside below the roads, with carports and entrances at road level, or sat on little knolls or inside man-made cutouts. They ran the spectrum of architectural types and building materials: country cabin, plain frame, box, old Spanish, false Southern Colonial, ultramodern hexagonal and octagonal; brick, redwood, pine, stucco, old gray stone, whitewashed block. The only things they all had in common were balconies and wide picture windows, to take advantage of a panoramic view of the Bay, parts of San Francisco, the East and South Bay cities.

I lost sight of the taxi half a dozen times as we climbed the rutted, switchbacked roads, almost lost it completely once at a three-way intersection. But I was still behind them when they turned onto Queen’s Lane, near the highest perimeter of the village. The road looped around and through an undeveloped section-vertical hillside on the left, slope on the right wooded with scrub oak and bay and horse chestnut trees-and the taxi disappeared again for eight or ten seconds. When I neared the center of the loop, where a dirt-faced turnaround had been cut out of the bluff wall, I had them back in sight. And they were just pulling up beyond a gravel driveway seventy-five yards downrange.

I braked, veered over onto the turnaround. Half a minute later Talbot got out of the cab and stood next to a rural-type mailbox, looking up the driveway; from where I was, I could not see the house there. At length he headed up the drive, walking stiff-backed but with that same sense of purpose, and disappeared from sight. The cab stayed where it was, parked on the verge; Talbot had evidently told the driver to wait.

Okay, I thought, here we go. Play it one step at a time. I set the emergency brake, got out, and went down the road at a fast trot. The wind slapped at my face; it was strong up here, pungent with the spicy scent of bay leaves. Overhead the sun seemed to be trying to break through the clouds, creating a bright metallic glare that made me squint.

The house came into view when I was thirty yards from the driveway. It was set on a piece of level ground above the road, its backside close to a notch machine-carved out of the hill-a pretty attractive place for someone Mrs. Nichols had referred to as a “common laborer.” Smallish, square-shaped, made out of brick and brick-colored wood. Wide, roofed porch across the front, decorated with planterboxes full of ferns. Half-hidden on the far side was what looked to be a two-car garage; the driveway bent around in that direction.

Talbot was up on the porch, just standing there before the door, waiting.

I slowed to a walk, watching him. Just as I reached the mailbox, he pivoted abruptly and came down off the steps. Nobody home, I thought-but the sense of relief I felt was premature. Talbot stopped after a couple of paces, turned, and stared over toward the garage. A few seconds later he started toward it. And vanished again around the side of the house.

Maybe Carding was at work or had gone somewhere else; but maybe, too, he was out in the garage and had not heard or had chosen to ignore the doorbell. Give Talbot half a minute, I told myself. If he doesn’t show by then, better get up there.

Behind me I heard a car door slam. Then a voice yelled, “Hey! You there!”

I turned. It was the cabbie, a youngish guy, heavy-set, wearing a poplin windbreaker and a pugnacious expression. “You talking to me?”