Bill Pronzini - Labyrinth

“That’s right, buddy. You been following me?”

Ah Christ, I thought, this is all I need.

“Thought I spotted a tail when we started up here,” the cabbie said. “What the hell you been following me for?”

“Nobody’s following you,” I said. I looked up at the house again. Still no sign of Talbot.

“I figure different,” the cabbie said belligerently. He came away from the taxi, stopped twenty feet from me, and put his hands on his hips. “I don’t stand for shit like that.”

The thirty seconds were up. I could feel my chest beginning to tighten; sweat formed cold and sticky under my arms. Something going on in that garage. Talbot would have come out by now if there wasn’t.

“You hear what I said, fatso?”

Fatso. I gave him a go-to-hell look and started up the drive, hurrying. The cabbie came after me; I could hear his shoes crunching on the gravel. Wind currents swayed the scrub oak and the brownish grass on the hillside above, made faint whispering murmurs in the afternoon stillness. But nothing moved and nothing made a sound anywhere around the house or the garage.

“Turn around, goddamn it!” the cabbie yelled behind me. “Come on, you son of a bitch!”

That was enough; I could not afford to let it go any further. I whirled on him, glaring. “I’m here on police business, smart guy,” I lied in a hard tight voice. “You understand? Police business. You want to make trouble, fine, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail for obstruction of justice.”

He pulled up short and blinked at me. Most of the belligerence faded out of his expression; he began to look uncertain and a little worried.

“Now go on, get back to your cab,” I said. “And don’t say anything about me to your fare when he comes back. Capici?”

“Hey,” he said, “hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know you were a cop-”

“Move it!”

I put my back to him, the hell with him, and trotted the rest of the way up onto the flat. The drive made a wide loop there, around and alongside the house; I cut off it at a sharp angle, onto hard-packed earth. When I neared the porch corner, the whole of the garage materialized ahead of me. One of its double doors was standing part-way open and I could see that there were lights on inside; but that was all I could see. Still no sign of And that was when the gun went off.

The flat cracking sound was unmistakable; I had heard the report of a handgun too many times in my life. I broke into a lumbering run. There was no second shot-no other sounds of any kind from inside the garage. Instinct warned me against barging in there, but I did it anyway: I caught the edge of the closed door half and swung myself around it, through the opening by two steps.

I was braced to find a dead man lying on the floor, and that was what I found. But what surprised me, what made me stare wide-eyed, was that it was not Martin Talbot.

The dead man had to be Victor Carding.

He lay sprawled on his side near a long cluttered workbench, both legs bent up toward his chest as if he had tried to assume a fetal position before he died; there was blood all over the front of his blue workshirt. Three feet away, between Carding and a partly open rear window, Talbot stood looking down at the body. His arms were flat against his sides, and in his right hand was a snub-nosed revolver.

The light in there came from a drop-cord arrangement suspended from one of the ceiling rafters; the cord and its grilled bulb cage swayed a little, so that there was an eerie shifting movement of light and shadow across Talbot’s face. He looked ghastly: twisted-up expression of sickness and torment, eyes popped and unblinking, mouth slacked open like an idiot’s.

The hollow queasy feeling was in my stomach again. And there was a rancid taste in my throat; you can never tell what a man with a gun in his hand will do. But he did not even seem to know I was there. His gaze was half-focused, vacant, and the gun stayed pointed at the floor, loose in his grasp.

I took a couple of cautious steps toward him. He did not move. Three more paces, each one slow and measured, brought me up close on his right. Still no movement. And no resistance when I reached down, closed my hand around the revolver, and eased it out of his cold fingers.

I let out the breath I had been holding and backed off. The gun was a Smith and Wesson. 38 caliber; the stubby muzzle was still warm. I dropped it into my coat pocket and sidled around so that the dead man was between Talbot and me. Then I knelt to take a closer look at the body.

No doubt that it was Victor Carding. He matched the description Laura Nichols had given me: thin, gaunt, sallow-faced. He had been shot once in the chest; the blood was coagulating around the wound. There were no other marks on him that I could see, and nothing on the floor near him except a couple of sealed envelopes-PG amp;E bill, letter from a bank-that might have been jarred out of a pocket when he fell.

When I straightened up Talbot blinked and focused on me for the first time. He said, “I killed him,” in a hoarse empty voice-the kind of voice, if you’ve ever heard it, that can raise the hairs on your scalp.

“Easy, Mr. Talbot.”

“He shouted at me, called me a murderer. Because I killed his wife, you see. Murderer, he said. Murderer, murderer.”

I went over to him again and took his arm. I wanted him out of there; I wanted out of there myself. The mingled smells of oil and dust, cordite and death, were making me a little nauseous.

“I just… I couldn’t stand it,” Talbot said. “I lost control of myself. The gun… it was on the workbench. I picked it up, just to make him stop, but he lunged at me and it went off. I killed him. He was right, I am a murderer…”

Gently I prodded him toward the door. He came along without protest, moving like a sleepwalker. Outside, in the wind and the leaden daylight, I took several deep breaths to clear the death-smell out of my nostrils. Both the cabbie and the hack were gone; he had probably heard the shot and decided he wanted no part of what was going on here. Nobody else seemed to have heard it; the nearest neighbor was across the road and fifty yards down.

I took Talbot around the front of the house, up onto the porch. The door was unlocked. Inside, I sat him down in a chair and then hunted up the telephone.

“I murdered him,” Talbot said again, as I picked up the receiver. “I murdered him.”

No you didn’t, I thought. No way.

Talbot had not killed Victor Carding.

It took the local cops exactly fourteen minutes to get there. But it was a long fourteen minutes. Talbot kept staring off into space, dry-washing his hands and muttering over and over the same things he had said in the garage. Watching him and listening to him gave me a creepy, nervous feeling. He was right on the edge of a breakdown-and that was something I was not equipped to handle.

When I finished with my call to the police, I dialed the Nichols’ home in Sea Cliff; I figured Laura Nichols ought to know about this as soon as possible. But there was no answer. I put down the receiver and prowled around the living room with Talbot’s voice grating in my ears. On the mantelpiece was a framed color photograph of Carding, a plain gray-haired woman, and a kid in his twenties wearing a Fu Manchu mustache. The Carding family-and two of them dead in less than a week. I shook my head and took a turn through the rest of the house, not touching anything. The place was cluttered and dusty, and in the kitchen were a couple of empty bourbon bottles and the smell of spilled whiskey. Aside from that, the condition of each of the rooms seemed ordinary enough.

The distant wail of sirens, when they finally came, was a relief. I went out on the porch to wait and breathe more of the fresh air. The sirens grew louder and closer, and pretty soon a pair of Brisbane police cars came speeding along Queen’s Lane, swung up the drive, and plowed to a halt. Three uniformed cops piled out, one of them wearing sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his jacket. The sergeant’s name was Osterman, it turned out, and he was in charge.