Blowback (The Nameless Detective) (14 page)

“Bascomb?” I called softly.

No answer.

I rapped on the wall beside the door, but that got me nothing either. A faint prickling cold settled between my shoulder blades. I reached out compulsively and tugged the screen door open, pushed the inner door wide with the tips of my fingers. Hot, stale air stirred sluggishly against my face, thick with the smell of dust.

“Bascomb?”

Only the dull echo of my own voice.

I slid my left hand around the jamb and along the wall until I located the light switch. Flipped it up and blinked against the sudden pale glare from the ceiling bulb. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out audibly as I scanned the room, the bath alcove beyond the open door at the far end.

Empty.

That stagnant air was the kind that accumulated when a place was shut up during the summer for a day or more. But Bascomb could not have closed himself in here all that time, half-suffocating, because Harry and the sheriff's deputy had not found him in this morning. Then where had he been and where was he now?

And who had been in here a few minutes ago?

I looked over at the bed. It was rumpled, blankets sleep-kicked into a tangle at the foot On the table was a plate with two pieces of bologna curled up and dried out like dead insects, and a glass half-filled with what looked to be flat beer. A pair of corduroy trousers was draped across the back of one chair, and on another, near the bed, was an open suitcase that contained several items of neatly folded clothing. Against the left-hand wall were two small oil paintings, one of them mounted on an easel, both of them done in bright bold colors that depicted Eden Lake at dawn and in the late afternoon. And on the floor next to the easel, lying with its pages fanned out at opposing angles like a collapsed tent, was Bascomb's sketchpad.

The sketchpad was the only thing out of place. It should not have been on the floor and it should not have been so carelessly positioned. Artists don't treat their work that way, and there was nothing in the immediate area off which it could have fallen by accident. It looked as if it had been thrown there.

I hesitated, struggling with myself because I wanted to go in and have a look at that pad, but if I did it I would be trespassing and invading privacy. Just another pulp detective, despite all my mental ramblings earlier. Well, maybe that's just what I was, and Erika had nailed it square on the head that day four years ago. A derivative chunk of pulp.

I stepped inside and let the screen close softly behind me.

Feeling furtive, I crossed to the easel and bent and hauled up the pad. Some of the pages were creased and some of them had smudge marks where the charcoal had been touched by heedless fingers. And one of them had been torn out, but hurriedly or angrily because a three-inch triangle remained at the upper left corner. Part of a sketch was visible on the triangle. When I held it up to the light I could make out the tops of trees and what might have been part of a hill and something else in the lower angle that looked like the peak of a roof.

There was not enough there to tell me much, and yet just that little bit had a vaguely familiar aspect. I stared at it, concentrating, searching my memory. No good. Vaguely familiar, nothing more.

If Bascomb wasn't the one who tore out the sketch, I thought, that leaves the somebody else who was in here a little while ago. But why? What possible significance could a sketch have that would lead someone to steal it or destroy it?

A lot of other questions and speculations began to crowd the back of my mind, all of them dark and ominous. I tore off the triangle, folded it carefully and tucked it into my shirt pocket; then I went over and put the pad on the table and had another standing look around the cabin. Everything seemed normal and in its place; no sign of a search or anything else intimidating. All right. I pivoted abruptly and moved to the screen door, pulled it open and took a step across the threshold.

Something made a rustling sound in the trees beyond the east wall.

I froze for a moment, half in and half out of the doorway, the hairs rising along the back of my scalp. Silence, heavy and pregnant. I stepped out all the way and eased the screen shut and stood tensed on the porch, listening.

Almost immediately another sound came, closer this time, a sound that might have been footsteps sliding on dry pine needles.

My reaction then was instinctive: I ran down the stairs and straight ahead for a dozen steps, turning my body, looking over at the east corner. That put me fully into pale silver starlight, unshad-owed and exposed, but it also surrounded me with open space and gave me room to maneuver. I changed direction and went diagonally toward the corner, running in a half-crouch now, hands out away from my body.

There was a dark shape hunched in the shadows beyond it, a long thick object upraised in one hand.

I could not see who it was, or even if it was a man or a woman. I opened my mouth to yell, but I did not get anything out; the figure had seen me coming, and it wheeled around and dropped the long thick object and plunged away to the rear.

By the time I got to the front corner and swung around, the figure was just disappearing into the trees again; I could hear it crashing and stumbling through the undergrowth. I ran along the side of the cabin, slowed, and finally came to a halt near the back—leaned against the wall there. No point in my going into those woods; I was not about to find anybody in all that vegetation and darkness, and I would be running the risk of an ambush if I tried it.

The sounds of flight diminished and the silence resettled again, still heavy and charged with tension. I turned and came back to the front, watching my flank, and located the thing the figure had dropped. Three feet of dead tree limb, as big around as my forearm. Jesus Christ. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, and thought of what it could do to a man's head. Then I thought: Suppose it had been a gun, a rifle? He could have drawn a bead and shot me dead in all mat starlight.

Some detective—some pulp detective.

My breath was raspy in my throat, and the inside of my mouth was dry; I worked saliva through the dryness, went out again into the open space and over to the path. The shadows there seemed now to have taken on a malevolent cast, like nocturnal creatures crouched and waiting. Imagination. The incident, whatever its meaning, was finished.

But when I started slowly back toward the lake, I carried the tree limb with me, poised across my body, just in case.

Thirteen

Nothing else happened; I made it through the woods and along the lakefront to Harry's cabin without seeing or hearing anybody. I put the limb down against the porch steps and went up, and he was sitting inside with his feet propped on a stool, reading a fish-and-game magazine. He looked up when I knocked, gestured for me to come in.

“How goes it, buddy?” he asked.

“Pretty damned lousy,” I said.

His forehead wrinkled and he sat up. “Something happen?”

“Yeah, but I don't know what it means.” I sat down on the second of the Naugahyde chairs. “When was the last time you saw Walt Bascomb?”

“Bascomb? Hell, I don't know. Why?”

“You see him today at any time?”

“If I did, I don't remember it.”

“Well, he's not in his cabin now and the way it looks, he hasn't been there since yesterday. But his car hasn't been moved.”

“Maybe he went somewhere with somebody…”

“Sure, maybe. But why hasn't he been back in better than a day? Why are all his belongings still at his cabin? Same questions if he went off by himself on foot.”

Harry ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, how come all this sudden interest in Bascomb? I don't see what you're leading into.”

“This, for one thing,” I said, and fished the torn corner of the sketch out of my pocket and handed it over to him. “Can you tell what it depicts?”

He studied it for a moment and then shook his head. “No, there's not much of it here.”

“It looks vaguely familiar to me.”

“I suppose so, yeah. Where'd you get it?”

“Off Bascomb's sketchpad. Somebody—probably not Bascomb—tore the sketch out, but they overlooked this much of it.”

“Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

“I don't know.”

“How'd you happen across it?”

“That's the thing that happened,” I said.

When I finished telling him about the incident, he looked grimly confused. “It doesn't make any sense,” he said. “You don't have any idea who it was you saw?”

“No. It was too dark, and it all came down pretty fast.”

“You really think he'd have come after you with that limb?”

“I can't be sure of that either. He ran off damned quick when I started after him.”

“It doesn't make any sense,” he said again.

“Remote as it might seem,” I said slowly, “I can think of one possibility. And you're not going to like it any more than I do.”

“What possibility?”

“That Bascomb's disappearance and the missing sketch tie in somehow with Terzian's murder last night.”

He stared at me. “You can't be serious…”

“I'm serious, all right.”

“Are you saying
Bascomb
killed Terzian?”

“I'm not saying anything, I'm only speculating. But that's a workable theory; it would explain his disappearance, and what happened to the stolen Oriental carpet.”

“How could he have disappeared with the carpet if his car is still here? And where does the sketch come in?”

“Those are the two things I can't figure,” I said. “Unless Bascomb had an accomplice.”

“Accomplice? Christ, now you're trying to tell me someone else here at the camp is involved in a murder.”

“The person I saw tonight doesn't have to be staying here.”

“How the hell could an outsider get in without being seen?”

“It could be done, Harry. There are ways.”

He got up and paced around, agitated; then he stopped and turned back to me.

“I just can't buy it, buddy. Bascomb is a commercial artist, he's not rich, what kind of connection could he have with a man like Terzian and valuable Oriental carpets? Or anybody else here, for that matter? Jerrold is the only one who has any real money, and he's only interested in his ad agency—one hundred percent business, no outside interests at all except for fishing and hunting.”

“What about Knox and Talesco? They own a freight line.”

“And most of their money is tied up in it,” Harry said. “Besides, you've met them, talked to them; they're outdoors types, they wouldn't know from rugs and carpets any more than you or I would.”

“There's Cody, then. You told me his old man is well off.”

“Yeah, he's well off, he owns a string of small businesses and private residences in Vegas; but he spends most of his time running around Europe, and from what Cody's said about him, he's not the type to collect anything but broads.” His mouth quirked. “Like father, like son.”

“But you don't know that much about him, or about Cody either. And Vegas is a rich town.”

“Buddy, you're trying to build mountains out of sand. I tell you, nobody at this camp could be involved in Terzian's death. There has to be some other explanation for Bascomb being gone and what happened up at his cabin tonight.”

I decided not to push it any farther. Harry had enough on his mind with Jerrold, and the strain of that was making him stubborn and irritable; nothing else I said was going to change his mind, because he did not want to have it changed. For that matter, what did I have to back up my feeling except the feeling itself and a few half-formed speculations? Maybe I
was
trying to build mountains out of sand.

I said, “All right, let's drop it. It's not up to us anyway.”

“I hope to God that's the way it stays,” he said.

He walked up to my cabin with me, without either of us saying anything about it. There was nobody out in the woods and nobody lurking around the place; but when Harry was gone, I went inside and locked the door, feeling vaguely foolish about doing it but not foolish enough to change my mind. Then I made myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table to drink it.

The feeling born in Bascomb's cabin would not let go of my mind, mountains out of sand or not. Maybe it was because too damned much had happened in the past two days—and I had never liked strings of coincidences. If it was all part of a single pattern, or at least most of it was, I could cope with it more easily.

The simplest explanation was still that Bascomb had killed Terzian, panicked, and disappeared with the carpet; the accomplice angle would take care of why his car and his belongings were still here, and he would be back for them later. And yet, the sketch thing kept getting in the way. Assuming Bascomb was somewhere with an accomplice, who had taken the sketch tonight? Or assuming it was the accomplice who had stolen it, where was Bascomb? And the primary question: What significance did the sketch have in the first place?

Harry had returned the torn corner to me, and I took it out again and stared at it. Still vaguely familiar, still unrecognizable. At length I stowed it away in my wallet and brooded into the coffee cup.