Bill Pronzini - With an Extreme Burning

“Patch? Oh, the nicotine patch.”

“You know anybody who's quit with it?”

“Not personally. But it's supposed to be effective.”

“Only trouble is, you need to see a doctor to get it.”

“Is that a problem?”

“With me it is. I hate doctors, too.” Elliot glanced at his watch. “Listen, Dix, I just wanted you to know you've got a friend if you need one. Sympathetic ear, somebody to get drunk with if you think that might help … whatever I can do.”

“I appreciate that, Elliot.”

“Don't just appreciate it. Take me up on the offer. Balboa may not be much of a university, but we take care of our own.”

He had three classes that day; Tuesdays and Thursdays were the heaviest in his schedule. His ten o'clock was 453, The Age of Jackson. He got through that one quickly. Orientation lecture—what the students could expect to learn in the class, what was required of them, which textbooks they would need—and then an early dismissal. The new young faces that stared back at him were just that, faces; he didn't even try, as he usually did on the first day, to identify the few among them who were the most alert, the history majors and probable honor students, and to learn their names first.

An hour in his office afterward, trying to concentrate on his syllabus. The same old questions kept intruding: Who? Why? It wasn't Sid Garstein; Sid and Helen had spent all of Saturday with their daughter and her family in San Francisco. It apparently wasn't George Flores or Jerry Whittington; George had been with a client in Santa Rosa and Jerry had taken Margaret Allen on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley. Only Owen Gregory and Tom Birnam had no one to vouch for their whereabouts. Owen claimed he'd spent Saturday alone working in his darkroom and watching tapes of old movies. Tom had spent the morning at Better Lands and then claimed to have driven down to the Black Point marina and taken his sailboat out on San Pablo Bay—alone. He hadn't gotten home until eight-thirty, late for dinner. A problem with one of the boat's sails was his explanation.

Owen or Tom, narrowed down to those two. Or was it? Dix kept worrying that he and Cecca were making a huge mistake in focusing on their close friends. The tormentor could be someone else they knew. Someone here at the university, for instance—

I knew Ted Harrell. He mentioned you a couple of times. Hell of a thing, a freak accident like that .

Elliot?

Strange guy in some ways. Loner, chased women, had a high opinion of himself, held attitudes that were just a little off center. Could he have seduced Katy? Maybe. Glib, good-looking in a bearish way—the combination of intelligence and animal maleness might have appealed to her. Did he know Cecca? Yes, probably; it was Better Lands that was selling his house for him, wasn't it? Had he ever been inside her house? Could have been invited at some point, for some reason.

But none of that meant a damned thing without a motive. What possible reason could Elliot Messner have to want to murder people he knew only casually? It kept coming back to motive in every case, though. Owen, Tom, Elliot, all the men he knew … there was simply no imaginable motive for any of them. And yet it was happening, so there had to be one.

Just before noon he walked over to the cafeteria on the Commons. He felt he should eat, even though he wasn't hungry, but he would have been better off staying in his office. Four professors, two TAs, and one of his spring-semester honor students took the opportunity to flood him with condolences on the loss of his wife. He fled back to Guiterrez Hall with his roast beef platter barely touched.

Civil War and Reconstruction at one o'clock, an aimless tramp around campus, and then American Social History at three. Brief orientation lectures and early dismissal in each of those classes, too. And finally back to his office to gather his papers and briefcase before leaving. He felt wilted, headachey, as if he'd been teaching or writing intensively for hours without a break. He couldn't go on like this day after day. The strain would—

His telephone jangled. St. John, he thought; word on Louise Kanvitz, maybe. He lifted the receiver, spoke his name.

The filtered voice of the tormentor said, “You're next, Dix.”

The Agbergs, dressed as if they were on their way to a social event, showed up at Better Lands at nine-thirty that morning. Unexpectedly, surprising Cecca; she had all but written them off. They had checked and rechecked their finances, Mr. Agberg told her, weighed their present options against their future ones, and come to the conclusion that they could afford the Morrison property, that they liked Los Alegres better than Walnut Creek, and that he could commute to his job in San Francisco just as easily from here. They did want to look at the property one more time, though, before they made the final commitment to purchase. Just to make certain they hadn't forgotten or overlooked anything vital. “We're very methodical people,” Mrs. Agberg said with some pride.

Really? Cecca thought. I never would have guessed.

She took them up to the Ridge and endured an hour and a half of poking and prodding and rehashing of various aspects of the contractor's and termite inspector's reports. If they change their minds after all of this, she thought, I will probably lose it and tell them what I think of dull, plodding people who get dressed up to go buy a house. But they didn't change their minds. At Better Lands they spent another half-hour reexamining the disclosure statement and counteroffer sheet and satisfying themselves that the Morrisons' counteroffer was absolutely firm and that the Morrisons wouldn't renege on paying for all termite damage repairs and a couple of minor structural repairs; then, finally, they affixed their signatures and Mr. Agberg wrote a check to cover the full amount of the down payment. By the time Cecca had answered a dozen “final” questions about close of escrow and other matters, and the Agbergs went on their merry way, it was after one and she was hungry and all but out of patience.

She went out for a tasteless sandwich. Ten minutes after she returned, a family named Hagopian walked in: father and mother in their late twenties, a little boy about five, a little girl about two. They were from Kansas and they were relocating in the area—Mr. Hagopian had gotten a job with a small manufacturing company in Los Alegres—and they were interested in buying a house, “something nice with at least three bedrooms and a large yard, good neighborhood, close to schools, for around $250,000.” Better Lands had two possibles in that price range, one in an East Valley tract and the other Elliot Messner's house in Brookside Park. Cecca showed them the prospecti and photographs of both. They didn't care for the East Valley property; the well-landscaped Messner place elicited a much more positive response, even though it was listed at $279,000. Mrs. Hagopian said it looked “charming,” a word Cecca wouldn't have applied to any structure in Brookside Park, including those that made up the Balboa State campus.

So she drove them up to Brookside Park, taking a route that brought them past Parkside Elementary School. They liked the school and they liked Brookside Park; their faces would have told Cecca that even if they hadn't said so. The house was deserted: Elliot was still at the university, which was probably just as well. She wondered, not for the first time today, how Dix was bearing up on his first day of school. She got the key out of the lockbox and took the Hagopians in, after warning them that the owner was a divorced man living alone and inclined to be a poor housekeeper.

She needn't have bothered with the warning. The clutter didn't faze the Hagopians; they were far more decisive and imaginative people than the Agbergs and they saw the house not as it was but as it could be if they owned it. The living room was large and had all the right elements (“Look at that fireplace, honey, it's enormous”), the three bedrooms were large, and the master had a walk-in closet that Mrs. Hagopian exclaimed over, the kitchen was perfect (“I just love island stoves, don't you?”), and the backyard so excited the little boy that he ran around it twice, yelling his pleasure at the top of his voice.