Blowback (The Nameless Detective) (3 page)

There were two men on the narrow, irregular path that came down out of the woods to the immediate right of the shed. One was several steps in front of the other, moving with purpose and what appeared to be anger. I didn't know him, but the second man was Harry Burroughs.

The grim-looking guy came up to where Cody and I were and stopped and planted his feet. He wore beige corduroy slacks and a thin cotton pullover and a fisherman's hat festooned with flies, patches, bits of felt, and buttons that said things like
You Should Have Seen the One That Got Away
; held easily in the crook of his right arm was a Winchester automatic shotgun. He was big and heavy-chested, with a tangle of unruly black hair and penetrating gray eyes that looked a little wild just now. White ridges of muscle made half-crescents at the corners of his clamped mouth; his face was glossy with beads and runnels of sweat.

He looked straight at Cody, and I was not even there. “All right,” he said thickly, “where's Angela?”

Cody seemed amused. “How would I know, Jerrold?”

“You haven't seen her, is that it?”

“Not since yesterday.”

“You're a goddamn liar.”

“Hey, now wait a minute …”

Harry came up, glanced at me in a disturbed way, and put a hand on this Jerrold's arm. “Take it slow, Ray. Cool down.”

“The hell I will. This—”

“Ray, ease off now.”

“Big man,” Cody said to Jerrold. He tried to curl his Up like Bogart used to do, but it only came out looking silly. “If you don't trust your wife, or me, or any of the others, why'd you go off hunting or whatever with Burroughs? You hand out plenty of freedom, and then you come in playing the outraged husband—”

Jerrold said “You son of a bitch!” and took a step forward with his free hand balling into a fist. Cody flinched, backed away, but Harry tightened his fingers on Jerrold's arm and pulled him back.

“Let it alone, Ray, come on. Go on over to your cabin, Angela's probably there waiting for you.”

Jerrold stood there with those half-wild eyes cutting away at Cody's face like sharp-pointed sticks. Cody took it all right now, but the amusement was gone and his eyes were wary. I was afraid for a moment that Jerrold would erupt again; you don't like to see a man that strung out, that near some kind of breaking point—and you particularly don't like to see it when he's carrying a shotgun that is sure to be loaded.

But nothing happened. Fifteen or twenty seconds passed, and then Jerrold said “You'll get yours, boy,” and wheeled away and stalked down along the lakeshore.

Harry said to Cody, “You'd better not push him. You can push a man just so far.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means.”

“Why don't you mind your own business?”

“What happens at this camp
is
my business.”

“Listen,” Cody said, “this Angela is nothing but a prickteaser. You think I'm going to mess with a fox like that?”

“You tell me.”

“Shit. Why doesn't Jerrold pick on one of the other dudes—Bascomb, for instance? She's always after him to paint her.”

“Maybe Bascomb doesn't look or act like a guy on the make.”

“Shit,” the kid said again, a little petulantly this time. Then, abruptly, he went off around the front of the cabin.

Harry gave me a faint wry smile, and we shook hands. Compact and sinuous, he had pale green eyes and a long jaw and sun-weathered features, and he was wearing his standard all-season outfit: khakis and an army fatigue cap over clipped brown hair. The weapon he was carrying was an eight-shot .22 rifle.

“Good to see you, buddy,” he said. “I'm just sorry it has to be under these circumstances. You been waiting long?”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “Is Jerrold the problem you've been having?”

“Both of the Jerrolds. And Cody. And maybe one or more of the other three guys I've got staying here.”

Over in the parking circle a car engine started up, revved a couple of times, roared at seven or eight thousand rpms for several seconds, and settled into a throbbing rumble. The Italian sports job, I thought. It and Cody were a natural for each other. The engine howled again, tires spun gravel, and away he went up the county road.

Harry took off his cap and sighed and rubbed sweat from his forehead with the back of his free hand. “I've got a fan inside. Why don't we get a couple of beers and talk in there.”

“Suits me,” I said.

Harry's cabin was essentially one large room with exposed crisscrossing beams, unvarnished knotty-pine walls, and a pair of curtained-off alcoves that served as bedroom and bathroom. It had a massive fieldstone fireplace, a handmade gun rack that contained an old Marlin lever-action rifle and a Mossberg .410-gauge pump gun, a floor-to-ceiling cabinet filled with fishing gear and an assortment of intricate flies I knew he had tied himself, orderly stacks of outdoor books and magazines on a handmade bookshelf, an old mohair sofa, two overstuffed Naugahyde chairs, a dining table made out of heavy pine with benches instead of chairs, and kitchen facilities along part of the back wall. It was a warm, comfortable, masculine room—exactly the kind you would expect a confirmed bachelor and woodsman like Harry to build for himself.

After we entered he fitted the .22 rifle onto the gun rack, put a portable electric fan on the floor in front of the hearth, and indicated the two overstuffed chairs. We sat in them, facing the fan, and sipped at the beer. Harry wore a brooding expression; his face seemed more lined than I remembered it. But then, maybe mine did to him too.

I said, “So let's have it. What's going on here?”

He sighed heavily this time. “I'm not sure. At least, I'm not sure of part of what's going on, if anything is. The only part I'm positive about is that Jerrold is functioning on the ragged edge of a breakdown. He's been coming up here for two weeks each of the past four summers, and he's always been nervous and excitable; but not nearly as bad as this year. He's in advertising in L.A., one of these live-for-business guys.”

“I take it he's also the jealous type.”

“In spades. The kind of husband who thinks every guy is making a pass at his wife behind his back, and that she might be catching one here and there. Possessive and obsessive, and getting worse every day, the way it looks.”

“Has he got any cause here?”

“I don't know,” Harry said. “Mrs. Jerrold is a looker, goes around about half-naked most of the time; she's also the open, friendly sort. I just haven't been able to tell if it stops there.”

“She's the only woman in camp?”

He nodded. “And that just makes it worse.”

“Any trouble with her and guests in the past?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“All right, so she may or may not be playing around. But the point is, Jerrold thinks she might be, and you're afraid of what he might do if it turns out he's right.”

“That's it.”

“Well, Christ, why don't you just send the two of them packing?”

“It's not that simple.”

“Why isn't it?”

“Because I owe Ray Jerrold five thousand dollars,” he said. “I was having some problems the second year he came up here, and we got to talking, and it turned out he was willing to make a long-term loan that I couldn't get from any bank. I borrowed seventy-five hundred, and so far I've paid back twenty-five hundred. But if I throw him out, he's the kind who'd demand the rest of the money as his pound of flesh—and I just don't have it. I don't have anywhere near that much.”

I swallowed some of my beer. The fan was not doing much for the heat in there, and not doing much for me except clammily drying the sweat under my arms. “Okay then,” I said, “I can understand your position. What did you think I could do?”

“Keep an eye on things, watch Mrs. Jerrold and the rest of them and see if there really is something going on.”

“And if it turns out there is?”

“Then I send the guy packing immediately, no matter who he is. But I've got to know for sure first.”

“That part of it is all right,” I said. “What I don't care for at all is Jerrold. You said yourself he's close to a breakdown. Suppose he goes over the edge? Suppose he decides he doesn't need proof and gets it into his head to just go and let loose at his wife or Cody or some of the rest of us? That kind of thing has happened before, it can happen again.”

“Maybe it's not that bad.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Okay,” he admitted, “okay, maybe it is. That's the other reason why I want you here. I can't call in the cops and I'm not sure I can handle a serious crisis on my own. I need a man with professional experience, professional training.”

“Some favor,” I said.

“I'd pay you if I could afford it—”

“I wouldn't take your money, Harry.”

“Will you do it?”

I did not like any of it much, but I liked even less the prospect of driving back into San Francisco and waiting there for Tuesday and the pathologist's findings from the sputum test. There was really not much difference, I thought, in facing a potential metastasizing tumor or a potential psychotic—and yet, forced up against it, I would take the psychotic every time. I wondered if other men would feel the same way; I wondered if, despite more than twenty years of military service and city police duty that had involved no small amount of personal danger, I was in some ways a coward.

And the hell with that. In some ways we're all cowards.

“Yeah, I'll do it,” I said. “But I don't know how long I can stay. I've got to take care of some … business in San Francisco fairly soon.”

“The Jerrolds are supposed to leave for home on Saturday,” Harry said. “Could you stick it that long?”

You can call Dr. White from here, I thought, don't forget that. Call him on Tuesday afternoon. Then—

No. Worry about
then
when the time comes.

“I'll stick it as long as I can, Harry.”

He nodded. “Thanks, buddy,” he said. “I won't ask for any more than that.”

Three

The cabin Harry gave me was Number Three, well up into the trees toward the center of the camp and positioned back into a kind of niche that had been hollowed out of the slopeside. You could not see any of the lake from there. It was shady, a little cooler, very quiet except for the natural sounds of birds and squirrels and summer insects. Random shafts of sunlight slanted down to the needled ground, hard and yellow and solid-looking, like spires of pure quartz gold.

Inside, the cabin had an old blackened wood-burning stove, twin rollaway beds, a table and two wooden chairs, a rattan settee and a rattan captain's chair, a standing water cooler in one corner, and a heavy insulating mat rug on the floor. Against one wall was a cabinet sink and a two-burner kerosene cookstove; a closed door at the rear led to the shower and toilet facilities. Short on luxury, long on simple comfort. I could have lived there the year-round with no trouble at all.

I had packed a single bag with a few things before leaving my flat, and I put it down on one of the beds, along with my fishing gear. Harry set the bag of groceries he'd insisted on carrying on the side of the cabinet sink. Then we went out again and sat down together on the porch steps.

I said, “I'm going to need to know a few more things.”

“Whatever I can tell you,” he said.

“How long has this thing been building with the Jerrolds?”

“Ever since they came in a week ago yesterday.”

“He was strung out when they got here?”

“It looked like it to me.”

“Were all your other guests here then?”

“All except Walt Bascomb. He came on Sunday.”

“Okay. If Angela Jerrold
is
playing around, would Cody be the most likely candidate?”

“Probably. He's the kind of pretty boy a lot of women go for, and he can be damned charming when he feels like it. He'd be liable to make a pass at her out of sheer boredom, if nothing else. He doesn't like it here—not even a little bit.”

“So I gathered.”

“He tell you about himself?”

“Enough. So why do you let him stay?”

“His old man is good for three hundred a week if I keep him here and keep an eye on him. I need the money, buddy, it's as simple as that. The old mercenary ethic.”

“What about the others?”

“Well, Bascomb is a commercial artist, from your town, and a decent enough guy. Keeps to himself mostly—paints a little, fishes a little. He split up with his wife not long ago; one of the reasons he's here, I think, is to get himself over it. He doesn't strike me as the type to initiate a pass, particularly now, with a married woman; but then again, I'm not sure he'd shy away from one thrown at him. If Mrs. Jerrold wanted him badly enough, she could probably have him.”

“Considered opinion, Harry:
Is
she on the make?”

“All I can do is guess. You'll be able to draw your own conclusions when you meet her.”

“I'll take yours for now.”

“Then the answer is yes, but she's choosy about it. I guess maybe I don't blame her, with a man like Jerrold for a husband. I've seen him go after her the way he went after Cody a little while ago, right out of the blue, no provocation or warning signs.”