Bill Pronzini: Blowback

“What was Jerrold's relationship with Terzian?” he asked. “Burroughs here told us he didn't know anyone who collected Oriental rugs and carpets.”

“That's right, buddy,” Harry said. He was sitting forward in his chair with his hands on his knees, and he still looked a little stunned. “Jerrold liked to talk about himself, he would have mentioned something like that before.”

“I don't think he was a collector,” I said. “I think he was buying stolen Orientals for one of his big advertising clients-the kind of client who won't buy stolen goods directly but doesn't mind getting them through a middleman, no questions asked. It's just an assumption, no facts to back it up, but it makes sense. Mrs. Jerrold told me he was a fanatic when it came to business, that he'd do anything to bring larger clients into his agency. Which means he'd do anything, too, to keep the ones he already had. Advertising people have contacts in all kinds of places; it wouldn't have been too difficult for him to connect with a man like Terzian.”

“I'll buy it for now,” Cloudman said, nodding. “What about these things that pointed to Jerrold?”

“There's the peacock feather, for one.”

His brow wrinkled. “You're coming at me out of left field.”

“Not really. You figured the feather came out of the killer's car and got dropped accidentally; the only question was why anyone would have it in his car in the first place. Well, Jerrold had been wearing this fisherman's hat off and on, decorated with all kinds of things-buttons, flies, patches, bits of colored felt. Any man who would put all that stuff on a hat might also get the idea of adding part of a peacock feather. That's pretty flimsy, I know-but it adds up.”

“You've got to have more than that.”

“There's a process of elimination,” I said. “On Sunday night, while Terzian was being murdered, Mrs. Jerrold and Karl Talesco were together over here on the lakefront; she intimated that to me the following morning. Also, the Rambler wagon that belongs to Talesco and Sam Knox was parked outside when Harry and I left in one of the skiffs-hardly any time for one of them to get over to the bluff and kill Terzian. And Knox volunteered the information today that he'd talked to Bascomb around dusk Sunday, an admission a man guilty of Bascomb's murder wouldn't make. That narrowed it down to the kid, Cody, and Jerrold, both of whom had gone off in their cars late Sunday afternoon. The pattern of Bascomb's death and the stealing of the mine sketch laid it on Jerrold.”

“How so?”

“They weren't wholly rational acts,” I said. “They suggested an unstable personality.”

“Spell it out.”

“Let me give it all to you, starting with Terzian's murder.”

“Go ahead,” Cloudman said.

“Assume Jerrold made arrangements with Terzian to come up here from San Jose and then to meet over on the bluff. My guess is that he wanted to get a look at the carpet and maybe make a partial payment on it, after which Terzian would deliver it to some place in the Los Angeles area. During the meeting, something set Jerrold off-an argument over money, Christ knows now. He grabbed up a lug wrench and settled the argument by bashing in Terzian's skull. Then, in a panic, he transferred the carpet to his car, wedged down the gas pedal in the van, and sent it over the edge-another irrational act, because the water at the foot of the bluff is shallow. A reasoning man couldn't expect the van to sink out of sight; why not just hide it back in the trees somewhere?”

I paused to clear my throat; my voice sounded thick, rusty. At length I went on: “After Jerrold was through with the van, he'd have realized he also had a problem with the carpet. He couldn't hide it in the trunk of his car because of its size, and he couldn't leave it out in the open somewhere because of its fragile nature; and for some reason-guilt, fear of discovery through a prolonged absence-he didn't want to drive it down to Los Angeles right away. So his decision was to bring it back here and hide it for the time being.”

Harry said, “Here at the camp?”

“Yeah. Inside your shed in those rolls of canvas.”

“That's where it was all along?”

“That's where it was and still is,” I said. “He planned to take it away with him today, which is the reason for the U-Haul trailer he brought back from Sonora. He'd get you to help with his luggage, make sure no one else was around, and then drag the carpet out and put it inside the trailer.”

“I'm beginning to follow now,” Cloudman said. “When Jerrold got back here Sunday night, he ran into Bascomb-that it?”

“I make it that way. He didn't see anybody in the immediate vicinity when he arrived, so he carried the carpet from his car to the shed. Only Bascomb happened to be having a beer from the cooler on the other side of this cabin-that was where he was when Knox last saw him-and noticed Jerrold and probably went over to ask him what he was doing. Jerrold panicked again and murdered Bascomb with a wrench. Which left him with another body on his hands and nowhere to get rid of it easily.

“Maybe he thought of the pocket mine then, or maybe he just covered Bascomb's bloody head with towels from the fish-cleaning sink back there, then dragged the body into his car and started driving and hit on the mine that way. He took the wrench with him too. Harry found a bloody handkerchief nearby early Monday, and we both thought it belonged to either Knox or Talesco because they'd gotten into a fight; but there was a lot of blood on it, and neither ore of them was cut very badly. So it figures the handkerchief was Jerrold's, and he'd used it to wipe the wrench off and then dropped it accidentally, just like the peacock feather. He had to have been in a frenzy by that time.”

Cloudman asked, “Where does the sketch fit in?”

“Jerrold was deteriorating rapidly, probably plagued with paranoid guilt, and anything connected with the mine must have seemed like a potential threat to him. It could be Bascomb showed Jerrold his sketch of the mine, or showed it to Mrs. Jerrold and she told him about it; anyway, he remembered it twenty-four hours later, and went after it, tore it out of the pad and destroyed it. That was where I came in-and I guess he might have crushed my skull, too, with that tree limb he was carrying, if I hadn't heard him in time and scared him off.”

I lapsed into silence for a moment, fighting down the need to cough; I did not want them to hear me and watch me having an attack. The deputy's pencil still scratched, but that was the only sound now and I realized the rain had stopped. It was stuffy in the room: I got up to turn on Harry's fan.

I had one more thing to say, and as if reading my thoughts, Cloudman provided the question: “Why did Jerrold go back to the mine today? He couldn't have known you'd be there, could he?”

“No,” I said, “he couldn't have known.”

“Then?”

“It was probably because he'd been going back there off and on since Sunday night. I can't know that for certain, but that's how it looks. He was gone all day yesterday, and his car wasn't anywhere in The Pines; he'd been drinking too heavily to have just been driving around.”

“If you're right, what was he doing there?”

“Watching the body,” I said wearily. “Sitting in or around the mine shaft and drinking gin out of a bottle and guarding it in case anybody came.”

“Jesus,” Harry said. “Sweet Jesus Christ.”

It was after seven o'clock before the last of it was finished and Cloudman left, taking his deputies and the Daghestan carpet with him, to have a look at the pocket mine and determine what could be done about Bascomb's body; the ambulance had gone a few minutes prior to that, Mrs. Jerrold sitting up in the front seat and snuffling into a handkerchief. Cloudman's final words to me were a request to stay on until tomorrow, so I could come in and sign another statement, but I was prepared to do that anyway because I was in no shape to drive a hundred miles. Creeping lassitude made my motor responses jerky and dulled my thoughts again. I felt that if I did not get to bed pretty soon I was going to suffer that collapse I had been worrying about.