Bill Pronzini: Blowback

After thirty minutes Sam Knox came around the corner and stopped when he saw me sitting there. Then, slowly, he stepped over and leaned a hip against the railing post, and his eyes were shocked and grave. “Hell of a thing that happened up there,” he said. “Awful thing.”

“Yeah.” I did not want to talk to anyone but Cloudman.

“Always the wrong one that gets it,” Knox said. “It should have been her.”

“It shouldn't have been anybody,” I said.

“No, but if it had to be someone, it should've been her. Talesco was goddamn lucky she held him off. It could have been him Jerrold was shooting at.”

“I thought Talesco scored with her. I thought you were trying to score with her.”

“No, Christ no.”

“Then what was your fight with him about?”

“Him making a play for her,” Knox said. “He's getting married next month, he's marrying this girl in Fresno, and I won't see her hurt…” He broke off. “Look, I don't want to get into that, okay?”

I shrugged. But he had gotten into it enough to tell me I had misinterpreted his drunken mutterings in the hotel bar, and that was why Talesco's comments to me later had not seemed to make any sense. Just a simple case of one man being in love with a girl, and stepping aside for his best friend, and then finding out the best friend was trying to make it with another woman as a kind of last fling. Talesco was lucky Mrs. Jerrold had backed him off, all right. In more ways than one.

Knox said, “What happened to you have anything to do with Jerrold? I mean, the way you looked, all banged up and covered with dirt, and you and Burroughs with those rifles…”

“It doesn't matter now, does it?”

“Talesco and me, we were wondering, is all.”

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

“Sure,” he said reluctantly, “that's how you feel.”

“That's how I feel.”

He seemed disinclined to leave, but I quit looking at him and did not say anything for a couple of minutes, and the message finally got through. “I guess the cops'll want to talk to us too,” he said. “We'll be up at the cabin.” Then, when I nodded, he turned and shuffled away and left me alone again.

It was another twenty minutes before the parade of vehicles came streaming down into the parking circle, Harry's jeep leading the pack. I stood up and went over there. Cloudman, looking solemn, stepped out of the first of two county cars and fixed me with a long probing look that I could not read. Harry and three deputies and the forensic plainclothesman, and a guy from the ambulance wearing a white uniform and carrying a medical satchel, came up and stood around on either side of us. The misty drizzle had a hot feel on my neck, like a spray of water from a simmering pan.

Cloudman said mildly, “Getting to be a habit, you people calling to report homicides.”

“Some habit,” I said.

“I understand there's a third man dead too, a Walt Bascomb.”

“That's right. Jerrold killed him on Sunday night, not long after Terzian. But it won't be easy getting to his body.”

“No? Why not?”

I told him why not-everything that had happened up at the abandoned mine.

He said without changing expression, “Pretty rough.”

“About as rough as it can get.”

“You look kind of rocky. Feel okay?”

“I'll make it.” For the time being, anyway.

He asked Harry to show his men where Jerrold's body was, and the intern where Mrs. Jerrold was, and Harry nodded and led part of the group away. One of the deputies stayed there with Cloudman and me. Cloudman took off his hat and dug tiredly at his scalp. I still could not gauge how he was taking all of this, if his feelings toward me had undergone any kind of change.

He said, “You got anything to back up your claim that Jerrold murdered Terzian and this Bascomb?”

“Some fairly sound theories. And the stolen carpet.”

One of his eyebrows lifted. “You found that too?”

“I found it.”

“Where?”

“Right here in the camp. I'll show you.”

I took him around to the shed and uncovered the rolled Daghes-tan and watched while he got down and peeled back an edge of it. Then he nodded and said, “Jerrold put it here?”

“Uh-huh. You want me to go into it now?”

“Not just yet.” He stood up. “We'll have to take it along as the evidence when we; leave. You want me to notify Kayabalian, or you want to handle that yourself, you working for him and all?”

“You can notify him. I'll get in touch with him later. Tomorrow probably.”

We went outside, and I said, “If you're going up to see the body, I'd like to stay here. I've looked at enough death-too damned much of it.”

“I guess we all have,” he agreed, “the business we're in.”

So I showed him the path that led up to Cody's cabin, and after he and the deputy went up there I came back to Harry's and sat on the porch this time, out of the drizzle. I let myself think now, arranging my thoughts so I could lay it all out for Cloudman when the time came.

The white-uniformed intern came back first and said that Cloudman had told him he'd better have a look at me. That made me feel a little more sure of Cloudman's attitude; it was probably going to be all right between us. The intern peered at the cut on my forearm and the abrasions on my hands, and swabbed some antiseptic on them; then felt my ribs and asked me a few questions about sore spots and dizziness and double vision. I was not coughing now, and I did not say anything about my lungs; their condition was between me and Dr. White and the pathology lab at San Francisco General.

He had just finished telling me to get into bed and get some rest when Cloudman and Harry and the one deputy reappeared. At Cloudman's instructions, the intern went off to supervise the removal of Jerrold's remains. The rest of us were pretty cramped on the small porch, and it was starting to rain harder; we trouped inside the cabin and found places to sit, all except Cloudman. He stood with his back against the mantelpiece, worrying his scalp and grimacing. The rain made a soft, oddly lonely sound on the roof.

“Okay,” Cloudman said to me, “you can tell it now.”

I nodded. “Maybe I'd better give you a little background on Jerrold first,” I said, and I told him why Harry had asked me to come up and what had happened here at the camp since Sunday-Jerrold's wild jealousy, his wife's flirtations and probable infidelity, his deteriorating state of mind. Cloudman did not interrupt; the only sounds in the room were my voice and the pattering rain and the scratch of the deputy's pencil on the pages of a notebook.

When I was done, there was a moment of silence. Then, quietly, Cloudman said, “Two of you should have told me about this Sunday night or Monday afternoon.”

“I guess we should have,” I said. “But neither of us figured a connection then between Terzian's death and Jerrold. His instability seemed to be a product of his wife's actions and business pressures, nothing else. Error in judgment that was mostly mine; I'll take the responsibility for it.”

“All right, go on.”

“I didn't really begin to tie up Terzian's murder with somebody here at the camp until last night, when I discovered that Bascomb had disappeared.” I explained about the incident at Cabin Five. “But it was still only speculation; I didn't have anything more than a hunch, I hadn't tumbled yet to the things that pointed to Jerrold.”

“When did you tumble?”

“Not until this afternoon, up at the mine.”

“Why'd you leave the call for me this morning?”

“To tell you about Bascomb's disappearance and the possible tie-up with Terzian. I was on my way back from The Pines when I noticed the mine and realized it was what was on the missing sketch.”