Blowback (The Nameless Detective) (10 page)

The hot, limp stillness was becoming oppressive. Nothing moved anywhere except a hawk and what looked like a pair of ravens gliding in slow, geometric sweeps above the hillside where the old pocket mine was located. The continual flux of sun glare and tree shadows bothered my eyes, even with the dark glasses I was wearing, and I was growing damned weary of that omnipresent red dust.

When I got to the intersection with the road that ran through The Pines, I had to wait for a string of slow-moving cars to pass. And while I was sitting there I became aware of the property directly across the way—a weathered frame house set behind a long split-rail fence; I had noticed it before, coming and going, but without paying any attention to it. In the yard, I saw now, were half a dozen apple trees and an elderly woman wearing a bandanna over her head and working on one of the trees with a small battery-powered saw. But that was not all. Swaggering along the inside of the fence, tail feathers spread in bright magisterial fans, were two fat long-necked birds.

Peacocks.

After the last of the cars had gone past, on impulse, I drove across the road in a wide turn and parked on the shoulder parallel to the fence. I got out and went over and leaned on the top rail, looking at the birds. Neither of them looked back. Thirty feet away on the hard-packed earth a single feather lay glistening iridescently in the sunlight.

Beside the apple tree, the woman had shut off the saw and was standing with a hand shading her eyes, peering in my direction. After a moment she came over to where I was in a long-legged masculine stride. She was in her sixties, sharp-featured and thin-mouthed, all bone and gristle.

“Hello,” she said warily.

“Hello.”

“Something I can do for you?”

“I was just admiring the peacocks.”

“Them? Nasty strutting parasites.”

“If you feel that way, why do you keep them?”

“My late husband fancied 'em.” She smiled without humor. “Come to think of it, they had plenty in common. He was kind of a nasty strutting parasite himself.”

“Do you sell their feathers?”

That got me a narrow look. “What for?”

“Well, some people use them for home decoration.”

“Do they?”

“I think so. Like cattails or pampas grass.”

“You want to buy some?”

“No. I was just wondering if you'd sold any recently.”

“To who?”

“To anyone.”

“I got better things to do than sell peacock feathers.”

I glanced again at the single dropped feather. More to myself than to her I said, “I guess it'd be easy enough for someone to stop and pick a few up. Just reach through or climb over when there was nobody around.”

“You think so, do you?”

“It's possible.”

“Well, you just get that idea right out of your head, mister. I got dogs too.
Mean
dogs.”

I smiled a little. “Don't worry. I haven't got any plans along those lines.”

“No?”

“No. Sorry to have bothered you, ma'am.”

“Tourists,” the woman said, and stalked off.

I got back into the car. Probably nothing in it, I thought. Why would hijackers or potential murderers take the time to gather peacock feathers? Still, it was an angle, and worth mentioning to Cloudman.

Nine

In the village I found a parking place half a block from The Pines Hotel and made my way back to it along crowded sidewalks. The lobby was dark and mercifully cool, with pegged floors and Victorian furnishings and the largest antique roll-top I had ever seen in a corner behind the hotel desk. Through a rectangular doorway on the left I could see part of a long, narrow bar; a sign above the doorway said in old-style lettering:
Gold Rush Room
. Clever.

The guy on the desk wore a Western shirt, complete with green sleeve garters, and an air of professional hospitality. I asked him for the number of Charles Kayabalian's room, and he said he would see if Mr. Kayabalian was in and whom should he say was inquiring. When I said my name he smiled as if pleased by the sound of it and went to a small switchboard and plugged in. I heard him announce me; then he listened, said “Yes sir,” turned and indicated an extension phone on the counter. So I picked up the receiver on that, thinking that the attitude of The Pines Hotel was more big-city than old-fashioned Mother Lode. I could have gotten in to see the mayor of San Francisco with less ceremony.

“Mr. Kayabalian?”

One of those deep Melvin Belli voices said, “Yes. Thank you for coming. But you've caught me just out of a shower; can you give me ten minutes?”

“Sure.”

“I'll meet you in the bar if you like.”

“Fine. I'm wearing slacks and a blue knit shirt.”

“Ten minutes,” he said.

I hung up and went over through the rectangle into the bar. The walls were decorated with a lot of gold-rush paraphernalia and memorabilia: sluice pans, hand picks, a red miner's shirt tacked up like a crucifix, kerosene lanterns on iron brackets, frontier handguns in glass cases, old photographs and claim deeds and maps, a wooden grave marker with the inscription
Here Lies a Lady Named Charlotte, Born a Virgin and Died a Harlot
which may or may not have been authentic. There were three high-backed redwood booths along one wall, only one of which was occupied by two men working on tall glasses of draft beer. The bar itself was deserted except for a man down at the far end, and I was ten paces inside before I realized that I knew him.

Sam Knox.

He was sitting motionless, both arms folded on the bartop, staring sightlessly into a half-empty glass of bourbon or Scotch or Irish whiskey. His face was set in dark, brooding lines, and he had the look of somebody adrift inside himself, the look of a guy who has been doing a considerable amount of solitary drinking. I wondered if he had been here since leaving the camp in midmorning; I had not seen the Rambler wagon on the way to or from Sonora, or when I had driven in a few minutes ago, but he could have had it parked all along on a side street.

I went down there and got up on a stool next to him. He did not move, did not seem to know I was there. His eyes, unblinking, might have been made of dark glass. The bartender came over and asked me what I'd have, and I told him a bottle of Schlitz. I waited until he brought it, and then I made a little noise clinking the bottle against my glass and said to Knox, “Hello, Sam. Good to see you again.”

It took three or four seconds for him to react. Then he blinked once and moved his shoulders and brought his head around. Unlike Talesco, there were no marks on him—or at least none that I could see in the dim lighting. He stared at me blankly, blinked again, and finally his eyes unclouded and recognition seeped into them.

“The hell you want?” he said. The words were distinct, un-slurred, but there was a coarse, raspy quality to them, like a wood file on a piece of bark.

“Not a thing. I just came in for a beer and saw you sitting here.”

“Don't want company.”

“Drinking alone's not much of a pleasure.”

“Pleasure,” Knox said. “Shit.”

“Where's your friend Talesco today?”

“Hell do I know?”

“Well, I haven't seen him around the camp.”

He squinted at me. “No? You see her around?”

“Who? Mrs. Jerrold?”

“Yeah.”

“Not since early this morning.”

“Told him. Warned him, the stupid bastard.”

“About Mrs. Jerrold?”

“All his brains between his legs. Stupid.”

“Why did you warn him about her?”

“Stupid,” Knox said. “Never knew
how
stupid.”

“Has he been seeing her on the sly—that it?”

But he was not listening to me now. He wrapped one of his big hands around his glass, drained off the whiskey, slammed the glass down again. He mumbled something that I couldn't understand; then: “Stepped aside for him. Best friend, noble gesture. Bullshit.” Mumble. “Good woman, not a bitch, but she wanted him. Him.” Mumble. His face seemed to darken, although it was difficult to tell in that light, and his lips pulled into a crooked, angry slash. “Won't let him get away with it, not any of it. Fix him good this time.”

He was working himself up into a dangerous state; I thought with belated alarm: Christ, I handled it all wrong, I should know better than to provoke somebody who's been drinking the way he has. I put a hand on his arm, gently. “Take it easy, Knox—”

He shrugged my hand off and then pushed back from the bar with such sudden force that the legs of his stool tilted out from under him; the stool fell clattering. Knox staggered, threw out an arm, and I felt fingers like hooked steel prongs bite into my shoulder. He lurched into me, almost knocked me off my own stool. Flecks of saliva and the stale whiskey heat of his breath buffeted my face.

I wedged the left side of my body against the bar, shoved him off with my right shoulder, trying to steady him-but that was a mistake too. He took it as an aggression and leaned back toward me and swung wildly at my head.

And just like that, I was into it.

His fist missed me by a foot, but I could feel the wind of it: he was bull-strong. My groin knotted up and I twisted sideways and came off the stool onto my feet while he was trying to set himself for another swing. Somebody shouted. Knox swayed, made rumbling sounds in his throat, and put his head down and charged me. I side-stepped him easily enough—the liquor had made him reckless but turned his reflexes sluggish—and hit him over the collarbone with the flat of my left hand. He lost his balance, skidded into the bar, caromed off with his head jerking up to look for me, and he was wide open. I did not want to do it, but he had left me no choice; if I let this go on he would tear up the place, and maybe me along with it.

I clipped him on the point of the jaw.

I felt the shock clear into my armpit; the hand went numb for an instant. Knox's knees buckled and his eyes rolled up and he fell in a loose sprawl with his chest heaving like a bellows. But he was out. When you lay in a Sunday punch like that, you almost always put them out.

There was a dull ringing in my ears and I could hear myself breathing in a thick wheezing rhythm. The pit of my stomach felt hollow. The two guys in the booth were on their feet, and the bartender had come around from behind the plank, and the desk clerk was standing aghast in the lobby doorway; all of them were staring at Knox lying there on the pegged floor.

I said to nobody in particular, “I'm sorry it happened. He was just too drunk to know what he was doing.”

“Wasn't your fault,” the bartender said. “Hell, I should have stopped serving him an hour ago.”

The desk clerk said, “Maybe I'd better call the law.”

I shook my head and looked toward the rear of the room, where there was a closed door with lettering on it that said
Restrooms
. “No, I'll handle it. Have you got a rear entrance through that door?”

The bartender nodded. “Into an alley that cuts through the block.”

“Maybe you could help me carry him out there.”

“You can't just leave him in the alley.”

“I won't.”

He shrugged and came over to where I was. I flexed my right arm to get the last of the tingling numbness out of it; my knuckles had begun to throb, and I saw that two of them were scraped and bloody. I bent down and took Knox by the shoulders, and the bartender got his legs, and one of the guys from the booth went over and opened the rear door for us. We carried Knox down a short corridor and out through another door, into daylight that was blinding after the semidarkness of the bar.

The alley was narrow and unpaved and there was not much in it except weeds and a stack of crates and boxes and half a dozen garbage cans. A lizard sat sunning itself on one of the posts in the fence opposite the door; beyond the fence was a pasture with two horses and a mule grazing in it. We laid Knox down in the dust next to the hotel wall.

I said, “There'll be a man named Kayabalian in asking for me pretty soon—one of your guests. Will you tell him I'll be back as soon as I can?”

“No more trouble?”

“No more trouble.”

“Okay, then.” He went back inside and closed the door.

I knelt beside Knox, fished through his pockets until I came up with a leather key case. When I straightened again, there was a sudden fiery pain in my chest and then an attack of coughing so intense for a few seconds, tears squeezed past the corners of my eyes. I leaned against the wall until it quit.

I'm fifty years old, I thought, I've got a lesion on one lung, what the hell am I doing mixing it up in bars?

I scrubbed my face dry with my handkerchief, went slowly down the alley to one side street and looked around and did not find the Rambler wagon. But when I came back to the other side street, I saw it parked under a locust tree thirty yards down. So I got it and drove it into the alley and managed to drag Knox through one of the rear doors—it was like dragging a side of beef—and lay him across the seat. Then I backed the Rambler out of the alley, parked it where I'd found it under the locust tree. He could sleep it off here as well as anywhere else. But I kept the keys; I did not want him driving when he finally did come around.