Bill Pronzini - Blowback

“You been back long, buddy?” he asked.

“A while.”

“Yeah, well, I'd have been here when you came in except for that bastard Cody. One of the pipes in his cabin sprung a leak and he had a little water on the floor when he woke up. I had to fix it right away to shut him up and get him off my back.”

I said, “How did it go with Mrs. Jerrold?”

“Well,” he said, “she went for it.”

“What did she say?”

“I laid it on the line, as nicely as I could, and she agreed right away that he's getting out of hand. She wasn't admitting any guilt on her part, but I guess it doesn't matter now whether she's been cheating on him or not. The main thing is, she's going to talk to him and get him to take her home either tonight or first thing in the morning.”

“How sure was she of convincing him?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I hope it's going to be that easy,” I said.

“You think he might not listen to her?”

“Might not, or didn't,” I said. “He took out of here a few minutes ago, and he wasn't in a good mood, or in a good condition either. He'd been into the gin already this morning.”

“Christ.”

“If he refuses to leave,” I said, “we'll have to find another way, even if it means ordering him out or putting him out bodily.”

Harry winced but did not say anything. I could tell he was brooding about the five-thousand-dollar loan.

“Got to be done, if it comes to that. The tension around here is getting out of hand.” I told him about Talesco and the fight he'd obviously been in.

“Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Mrs. Jerrold,” he said, but he sounded grim again.

“Maybe. But I don't like the odds.”

He scraped a hand across his face. “Fight explains one thing, anyway-what I found this morning.”

“Found?”

“Over on the edge of the parking area. It's been bothering me ever since, but this is the first chance I've had to mention it.”

He reached into the back pocket of his khakis, came out with a crumpled piece of cloth and handed it over to me. When I shook it open I saw that it was a plain man's handkerchief, once white but heavily stained now with those familiar red-brown streaks that can only be dried blood.

“One of them must have used it after the fight and then lost it,” he said.

I nodded and said “Yeah” and gave it back to him. He stood staring at it, gnawing moodily on his lower lip; I had the feeling he was thinking the same thing I was in that moment

This has got to be all the blood spilled here at the camp, I was thinking. We've got to make sure this is all…

The deputy Cloudman sent out was a young guy with an old-fashioned crew cut and a brisk, serious manner. He arrived a few minutes before nine, and Harry took him around to the cabins, starting with Cody in Number Two. I had no reason to sit in on the questioning, and the deputy made it clear that he felt the same way, so I left them at Cody's cabin and went to my own and got into my swim trunks. Then I lolled around in the lake and on the beach, waiting.

At ten-fifteen Sam Knox came down alone and drove off in the Rambler wagon. I did not see anybody else until Harry and the deputy returned shortly before eleven. I went over to them, but the young guy had nothing to say to me; he told Harry to ask Jerrold and Walt Bascomb to get in touch with the Sheriff's Department in Sonora when they returned-Bascomb had apparently gone off somewhere on foot, since the Ford was still parked in the circle-and then he nodded briskly and went away in his cruiser.

I said to Harry, “How'd it go with the others?”

“Not too bad. Cody made a few snotty remarks, but the rest of them took it all right. I guess there's not going to be any problem there, at least.”

“Nobody had any information, I take it?”

“No,” Harry said. “Hell, we all expected that last night.”

“Sure, but you never know.”

He sighed. “How about a sandwich? We've got a while yet before we're due for Sonora.”

“One, maybe.”

But I ate three, and paid the price for that with heartburn and gas. It was going to be another long day, all right. Another long damned painful day.

Sonora was an aged and crumbling gold country town beneath a modern facade, like an old lady proudly displaying herself after a face-lift. You got a little of the flavor of the nineteenth-century Mother Lode, but mostly the restored and newly false-fronted buildings gave you the impression of a whimsical, Disneyland kind of village, a replica rather than an authentic landmark. Washington Street was teeming with cars and with tourists dressed in garish clothing and weighted down by camera equipment. I had an idea that the founding miners would have been appalled if they could have seen it this way-but maybe that was just my mood.

The courthouse was another of the carefully modernized structures, not far from the Tuolumne County Historical Society Museum; it was just past one o'clock when Harry parked his jeep in front and we entered the annex that housed the Sheriffs Department. The annex was air-conditioned, but they had it up so high that thirty seconds after we came in the sweat on my body dried cold and clammy, bonding clothes to skin. We gave our names to the deputy on the desk, and waited five minutes before Cloudman came out, greeted us gravely, and then ushered us into a private office.

“Appreciate your coming in,” he said. In the bright artificial light of the office he looked older and thinner than he had last night. His eyes were a light gray, steady and watchful but with that hint of humor you always find in the gaze of a basically happy man.

We sat down in chairs facing the desk, and he gave us typed statements and watched while we read them over and then signed them. When I passed mine over to him I said, “Any new developments on the case?”

“Couple of things, maybe.”

“Confidential?”

Cloudman shrugged. Then he leaned back in his chair and dug a fingernail into his hair and raked it around the way he had at the lake, grimacing. “Scalp infection,” he said. “Itches like hell sometimes.”

Neither Harry nor I had anything to say to that.

Cloudman fished a sheet of paper out of a basket on his desk and studied it for a time. At length he said to me, “Ever do any work for lawyers in San Francisco?”

“Once in a while.”

“Know one named Charles Kayabalian?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“He's heard of you,” Cloudman said. “You got your name in the Frisco papers a few times, I gather.”

“A few times.”

“Well, he seemed kind of interested in you when he showed up here this morning.”

I frowned. “In what way?”

“He didn't say. Just seemed interested, is all.”

“Is he connected with Terzian?”

“Indirectly. He handles the legal affairs of a lot of Armenians in the Bay Area-couple of other rug dealers and a few rug collectors among them. Seems he's been trying to work up a criminal action against Terzian on behalf of these people.”

“What sort of criminal action?”

“Contention is that Terzian was acting as a fence for a ring of Oriental rug and carpet thieves,” Cloudman said. “Kayabalian had ears and eyes on Terzian's operation in San Jose, and as soon as he got word of the murder he drove up.”

“Why would he do that-drive up?”

“He thinks maybe the reason Terzian came to Tuolumne was to deliver a carpet stolen four days ago near Frisco. Something called a Daghestan, worth a lot of money.”

“Does he have any idea who Terzian might have been delivering it to?”

“Not a one, he says.”

“Then why does he figure that's what brought him here?”