Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (4 page)

From the outside, Penny’s for Beauty didn’t look like much—just another storefront, except that its front window was curtained instead of open for display, in the middle of an attractive new downtown mall that covered several blocks. But the reception room inside was pretty ritzy: walls painted in cool blues and greens, lots of potted plants and latticework and white wrought-iron furniture. There were half a dozen women in it, five occupying various pieces of wrought-iron and the sixth ensconced behind a reception table with a telephone and an appointment book on it.

All of the women looked at me when I came in. I felt like an idiot standing there under their scrutiny; I always felt like an idiot in places like this, the more or less exclusive domain of women. I also felt myself grinning fatuously at the six females, none of whom grinned back. The smells of shampoo and other beauty salon concoctions were in the air, a mixture that was vaguely reminiscent of disinfectant; it made my nose twitch and I wanted to sneeze. I got that under control, wiped off the stupid grin, and went over to the reception desk.

The woman behind it was a well-groomed blonde, dressed in an outfit that matched the blue-and-green color scheme; she was about forty and made up to look thirty, and you were supposed to believe that her secret was in the various bottles and tubes and decanters on the display shelves at her back, and in whatever was going on—buzzings, clickings, murmurings—beyond a lattice-bordered archway to one side. She gave me the same kind of look a bum might get if he wandered in off the street for a handout, and asked, snootily, if there was anything she could do for me.

I wasn’t in a mood to tolerate being sneered at, so I leaned over in front of her and said, “I’m a detective, here to see Penny Belson,” in a tough-guy voice. “If she’s in, sister, trot her out here so we can talk. Pronto.” Philip Marlowe, circa 1940.

But the blonde wasn’t a Chandler fan; she blinked at me a couple of times, gnawed her underlip a couple of times, asked my name in a much more polite tone, and then used her telephone to talk to somebody I assumed was Penny Belson. When she put the receiver down she said, “Miss Belson will be right out.” Then she sat stiff-backed and stared at me.

The waiting customers were staring at me too; they’d overheard my exchange with the receptionist. But the stares were of a different kind now and I felt better about the whole thing. I put on a little more tough-guy for them, in the form of a glower, and it would have worked out fine if the damned salon smell hadn’t been so strong in there. I sneezed right in the middle of the glower, none too quietly, and scared hell out of them and me both.

Another blonde came through the latticed archway, this one about the same age as the receptionist and just as attractive and well-groomed. But she had more poise, a kind of icy self-possession; and her eyes were an odd, striking gray accented by makeup. A very sexy number, if you like them chipped and chiseled and sharp around the eyes and mouth. She was wearing a sort of tailored smock in the same colors as the reception room and the receptionist. She was also wearing an expression as unrevealing as a snowfield in a blizzard. I wouldn’t have liked to play poker with her. Or anything else with her, for that matter.

She looked at me and said, “I’m Penny Belson. Come with me, please.” That was all; no fuss of any kind. It was in deference to the customers, no doubt—never make a scene in front of customers—but she handled it with aplomb.

So I went through the arch into another room full of women, this batch evidently being tortured in various ways. Most of them were sitting under big hair dryers that looked like hunched, helmeted aliens devouring their heads; a few of these were reading magazines like
Vogue,
a few were having their nails done by manicurists, and a few were either asleep or dead. None of them paid any attention to me as I followed Penny Belson on a course to another door at the far end.

This one led to La Belson’s private office, a room in marked contrast to the other two. Flat white decor, a mostly bare desk, some file cabinets, three chairs, a bowl of cut flowers on a small side table, and a still life on one wall. Sterile. No frills, no nonsense. A room where business was transacted and the take was counted assiduously at the end of each day.

She shut the door, went to the desk, sat down behind it, waited for me to take a chair uninvited, and said, “Now then. You’re with the Redding police?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The county sheriffs department?”

“No. Actually, I’m a private investigator.”

That got me a flat, contemplative look. “You told Miss Adley that you were a policeman,” she said.

“No, ma’am. I told her I was a detective and that’s what I am.”

“I see.” She smiled faintly and wryly, without humor. “I suppose you’re here about Munroe Randall.”

“Yes. I’m working for his insurance company.” I had my wallet out, for the purpose of showing her my ID, but she made a dismissive gesture. I put the wallet away again.

“You’re wasting your time and mine,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything about his death. As I’ve already explained to the police, I hadn’t seen him for over a month before he died.”

“Oh? Why is that, Miss Belson?”

“If you’d known Munroe, you wouldn’t have to ask that question. He liked women—lots of different women. He got bored very easily.”

“Does that mean he’d broken off your relationship?”

“That’s what it means.”

“Suddenly?”

“Very. But I wasn’t surprised.”

“Were you upset?”

“Not particularly.”

“Meaning you no longer cared for him either?”

“Meaning I also get bored easily.”

Uh-huh, I thought. I said, “Do you know who he began seeing after he ended things with you?”

“Who he began seeing
before
he ended things with me, you mean.”

“Do you know the woman’s name?”

“I didn’t at the time,” she said.

“But you do now?”

She hesitated. Then she said, “A beauty parlor is a great place for gossip. You’d be amazed at the things a person can find out here.”

“I can imagine.”

“No you can’t. Not really. The damnedest secrets come out, no matter how well hidden they’re intended to be.”

“Was Randall’s new affair a secret?”

“Yes. A big one.”

“Why?”

Again she hesitated, as if weighing things in her mind. One shoulder lifted and fell in a delicate shrug and she said, “He made a mistake. He decided to start playing in his own backyard.”

“I’m not sure I understand that, Miss Belson.”

“You’re a detective. You ought to be able to figure it out.”

“A married woman? The wife of someone he knew?”

She didn’t say anything. But there was a malicious little glint in her eyes.

“The wife of one of his business partners?” I asked.

“Only one of his business partners is married,” she said.

“Frank O’Daniel’s wife?”

“Little Helen,” La Belson said. The malice was in her voice now.

“You know her, then?”

“Helen? Oh yes, she used to be one of my customers.”

“Used to be?”

“She decided to try another salon in town. About six weeks ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Because she’d started an affair with Randall?”

The delicate shrug again. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Cute stuff—playing games, telling me what I wanted to know without actually saying it. Maybe. It could be a lie, too; for all I knew she had something against Helen O‘Daniel and wanted to do her dirt. That might explain the coyness: if she didn’t come right out and accuse Mrs. O’Daniel of anything illicit, she couldn’t get herself sued for slander.

On the other hand, it might be the truth. Not that an affair between Randall and Mrs. O’Daniel had to mean anything sinister. I just didn’t know enough yet about the principals involved to form much of an opinion either way.

I tried prying more information out of La Belson, but she wasn’t about to give me more than she already had. I asked her a few other questions, also without finding out anything new, and got up to leave.

She said, “All these questions—you don’t honestly believe Munroe’s death was anything but an accident, do you?”

“I’ve got an open mind. What’s your opinion, Miss Belson?”

“Munroe was a careless man. With women, with everything else in his life. Including flammable materials around his house.” Another shrug. “Accidents happen,” she said.

“So do murders,” I said.

I left her and managed to run the gauntlet of hair dryers and fat women without disgracing myself. Along with the receptionist, Miss Adley, there were only two customers waiting out front now. I went straight on out, minding my own business, and just as I was shutting the door behind me I heard Miss Adley say in a stage whisper, “Cops. They’re all assholes.”

Penny’s for Beauty was quite a place. And what made it so special was the beautiful people who worked there.

The address I had for the Northern Development offices turned out to be a stone-and-brick commercial building on Yuba and California streets, not far from the mall. The directory in the lobby sent me up to the second floor, where I found a pebbled-glass door with some fancy gilt lettering on it that said:

Very impressive. And what was on the other side of the door was impressive, too—a nice front for a company wobbling on the edge of Chapter Eleven. The anteroom was about twenty feet square, paneled in blond wood and outfitted with chrome-pipe furniture covered in some kind of black-and-white cloth. Behind a desk directly opposite was a slender woman in her thirties; but she wasn’t sitting down, she was standing up near one of two unmarked doors in a pose that suggested she’d been eavesdropping on what was going on behind it. Which was an argument between two men, apparently, because both voices were raised and had an angry buzz to them, like disturbed bees. What they were saying to each other wasn’t quite distinguishable.

The woman turned away from the door, but not as if it mattered much to her that I’d caught her with her ears flapping. She had tawny hair cut short, brown eyes, the kind of nose that is called patrician, a nice body encased in a green shift, and a secretarial air of cool efficiency. One of those little metal-and-wood nameplates on her desk identified her as Shirley Irwin.

She said, “Yes, may I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. O’Daniel.”

“Have you an appointment?”

“More or less. He’s expecting me.”

“Your name, please?”

I told her my name. She recognized it, but it didn’t impress her much; I didn’t impress her much either. The only thing about me that interested her seemed to be my mustache. At least, that was what her gaze kept fastening on.

“Mr. O’Daniel is in conference at the moment,” she said. “Will you wait?”

“Some conference,” I said, smiling.

“I beg your pardon?”

“All that shouting.” I realized I was stroking the mustache and quit that; but Miss Irwin kept right on staring at it. The voices in the other room seemed to be getting louder and angrier.

“Will you wait, sir?”

“Sure. But would you mind letting Mr. O’Daniel know I’m here?”

“Mr. O’Daniel asked that he not be disturbed.”

“I see. It makes me look like Groucho Marx, right?”

“What?”

“The mustache. Groucho Marx.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You keep staring at it. It’s not that bad, is it?”

“I couldn’t care less about your facial hair,” she said in a voice you could have used to chill beer.

I caught myself starting to stroke it again—and one of the men behind the door said distinctly, “I don’t have to take that kind of crap from you! By God, I don’t!”

I looked at the door; so did Miss Irwin. I could feel the skin across my neck pull tight.

The other man yelled, “Get away from me! Goddamn you, get away—!”

“I’ll fix you once and for all, you son of a bitch!”

There was a sharp thudding sound: and there were thrashing noises, and the second man let out a half-strangled cry.

“Help! Help!”

Some of Miss Irwin’s coolly efficient facade had melted and she had her hand up to her mouth. She said, “Frank!” and started for the door, but I got there ahead of her, yanked it open, and went barreling into Frank O’Daniel’s private office like Fearless Fosdick to the rescue.

They were over at a big executive’s desk set in front of a sunlit window. One of them, bigger by fifty pounds, wearing Levi’s and a denim shirt, had the other sprawled backward across the desk and was choking him and whacking his head against the glass top. The desk chair had been upended, a scatter of dislodged papers and paraphernalia and the remains of a glass water pitcher were on the carpet, and the telephone receiver dangled free over the desk’s side. The one getting himself choked, a little guy in a white linen suit, kept trying to catch hold of the receiver, to use it as a weapon; he kept trying to kick and punch the big one too. But he couldn’t get enough leverage to do any damage in return. His eyes bulged and his face had begun to mottle. He made terrified squawking sounds, like a mauled chicken.

I kept moving while I took all of this in. The heavy guy heard me coming and jerked his head around, but even when I got to him and caught hold of his shoulder, he didn’t let go of the little man’s neck. Instead he tried to shrug me off the way you’d rid yourself of a pesky insect; his eyes were full of blind fury. I hung onto him one-handed, got a grip on his shirt with my other hand, set myself, and used all my weight and strength to break his hold and wrench him aside. He staggered halfway across the room, ran into a chair, and fell over it. When he hit the floor it was like a small building collapsing.

The little guy squirmed around on the desk, holding his throat and squawking some more. Miss Irwin ran over to him; hauled him into a sitting position and tugged his hand away so she could check on how much damage had been done. I took her actions to mean that he was Frank O’Daniel—not that I’d had much doubt of it.

I kept my attention on the big man. He was up on all fours now, shaking his head, looking dazed; there wasn’t any way to tell yet what he might do next. He was around fifty, powerfully built, going bald on top, with not much neck and not much chin. Running to fat, though. Even when he was on his feet, his paunch would hide the belt buckle on his Levi’s.

I said to Miss Irwin, “Your boss okay?”

“He’s bruised but he’ll be all right.”

“He need a doctor?”

“I don’t think so.”

“This man here—you know him?”

“Yes. His name is Coleclaw.”

“Jack Coleclaw? From Musket Creek?”

“Yes.”

“Why the attack? Any idea?”

She shook her head, looking at O’Daniel again. His squawks had tapered off into a series of heavy panting breaths: hyperventilation. Miss Irwin got him up off the desk and helped him over to the window and hoisted the sash to let in some fresh air. She held him steady, saying, “Breathe deeply and slowly. That’s right. Deeply and slowly.”

The big guy, Coleclaw, was upright now, but there wasn’t going to be any more trouble. The fury had been jarred out of him; he wore a stunned expression, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just tried to do to O’Daniel. He looked over at the developer, looked at me, and said in a hollow voice, “Christ. I didn’t mean . . . I wouldn’t have . . .” Then he clamped his mouth shut, rolled his eyes, pivoted, and lumbered out of there.

I thought about trying to stop him, but I didn’t feel like any more roughhousing. Besides, we all knew his name and where he lived. So I let him go. A couple of seconds later the outer door banged shut, and as soon as it did O’Daniel got his breath back and started making noise.

“He tried to strangle me! You saw it, Shirley—he tried to
murder
me! He’s crazy! They’re all madmen out there!”

I said, “Take it easy, Mr. O’Daniel.”

He managed to get his eyes focused on me. “You saved my life,” he said. “I could be dead now if you hadn’t come running in.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t have gone that far.”

“He damned near crushed my windpipe,” O’Daniel said. Then he frowned and said, “Who are you, anyway? I don’t know you.”

I told him who I was. He said, “Oh. Sure. Well, I’m glad you showed up when you did. That Coleclaw—I tell you, he’s a lunatic.”

“Then maybe you’d better call the police.”

“The police? No, absolutely not.”

“Why not? Coleclaw attacked you, didn’t he? If he is a lunatic he ought to be locked up.”

“No police,” O’Daniel said. He had his composure back now. “My God, we’ve had enough bad publicity as it is. We can’t afford any more notoriety.”

Miss Irwin said, “But what if he comes back?” She was sitting on her heels, gathering up the stuff that had been swept off the desk during the struggle.

He shook his head at her. “I’m not going to worry about that right now. Shirley . . . get me a glass of water and a shot of brandy, will you? My throat feels raw.”

She straightened, put the papers and things on the desk, hung up the telephone receiver, and then went to a set of cabinet doors in one wall and opened them to reveal a wet bar. While she was getting his drinks I righted O’Daniel’s desk chair and pushed it over to him. He sat down in it, wincing. He was the bantam type—five and a half feet tall, maybe a hundred and forty pounds. He had bushy brown hair going gray at the temples, bright feral eyes, and a mouth like an ax chip in a piece of light-grained wood. There was a fancy silver ring on the little finger of his left hand. He sat there plucking and fussing at his rumpled silk shirt and his white linen suit coat. He didn’t look like any accountant I had ever seen before.

I said, “You mind telling me why Coleclaw attacked you?”

“Why? I told you, he’s crazy.”

“Well, something must have provoked him.”

O’Daniel hesitated. Then he grimaced and sighed a little and said, “Oh, what the hell. It was that fucking letter.”

“Letter?”

“It came this morning. I’m just not going to stand for shit like that.”

“A threatening letter?”

“Yes.”

“Anonymous?”

“What else.”

“And you accused Coleclaw of writing it?”

“Him or one of those other buggers in Musket Creek. It was postmarked in Weaverville, the nearest town with a post office.”

“Coleclaw denied it, I suppose.”

“Sure he denied it. He blew up, and I blew up, and the next thing I knew the son of a bitch was strangling me.”

I sat down in one of the visitors’ chairs, a twin of the chrome jobs out in the anteroom. “Why did Coleclaw come here in the first place?” I asked.

“He wanted to talk about our development plans for the Musket Creek area. Try to work out a compromise of some kind, he said. He showed up out of the blue—no appointment or anything. I should’ve known better than to see him.”

“What sort of compromise did he have in mind?”

“Something he and his crazy friends drew up. A list of restrictions as to what we could and couldn’t develop, things they want to preserve in their goddamn natural state. If we agreed to it, they’d quit fighting us.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I told him to go to hell,” O’Daniel said. “That list of his was as long as your arm. It’d cost thousands to revamp our plans, and for what? Just to satisfy the whims of a bunch of backwoods cretins.”

Miss Irwin brought him his water and his brandy. He drank the water first, gargling it a little and rubbing his throat while it went down. Then he tossed off the brandy. “Better,” he said. “My head still hurts, though. You got any aspirin, Shirley?”

“I’ll see.”

He watched her walk out of the office. In a smarmy undertone he said to me, “Some ass, huh?”

So are you, I thought.

The telephone rang. Miss Irwin picked up out front, held a brief conversation, and then poked her head back into the office. “Your wife,” she called to O’Daniel.

“Ah, Christ.” He looked and sounded annoyed. “Tell her I’m busy, I’ll call her back later.”

“I told her that. She said it’s important and it won’t wait.”

O’Daniel muttered something profane and plucked up the handset on his phone. “Helen? What’s so damned important it can’t . . . What? Yeah, I know, I know. But I can’t talk about that right now. . . . Because I can’t, that’s why. . . .”

One of the things that had been knocked off the desk in the fight was a photograph in a silver frame. Miss Irwin had set it facing outward when she’d cleaned up the carpet, and from where I was sitting I could see that it was a color portrait of a woman that was probably Helen O‘Daniel. I gave it my attention while I pretended not to listen to O’Daniel’s end of the phone conversation. She was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, dark-haired, attractive in a snooty, pinch-faced way. Her mouth was smiling but her eyes weren’t: that kind of woman.

“No, not tonight,” O’Daniel was saying to her. “I told you before, I’m going to spend the weekend on the houseboat. . . . No, I’m not coming home, I’m leaving for the lake straight from here. . . . What? All right, all right. I’ll call you.”

He rang off without saying good-bye. “Shirley!” he yelled. “Where the hell’s that aspirin?” Then he looked at me and said,

“Women. They’re a pain in the ass sometimes.”

I wasn’t ready or willing to discuss women with Frank O’Danie!—particularly not his wife and her possible affair with Munroe Randall. There were less direct, less inoffensive ways to find out whether or not there was any truth to Penny Belson’s intimations.

I said, “Let’s get back to that threatening letter you received. Do you still have it?”

“Somewhere in this mess. You want to see it?”

“If you don’t mind.”

He shuffled among the papers Miss Irwin had picked up, found an envelope, and handed it over. Plain white dime-store envelope, with O‘Daniel’s name and the company address printed in an exaggerated child’s hand—somebody’s method of disguising his handwriting. No return address, of course. The envelope had been slit at one end; I shook out the single sheet of paper it contained. It had been torn off a ruled yellow pad, and its message had been printed in the same scrawly hand:

When I looked up from the paper Miss Irwin was back with some aspirin and another glass of water. I waited until O’Daniel was done swallowing before I asked him, “Have there been other letters like this?”

“No. This is the first one.”

“Other threats of any kind?”

“Well . . . not exactly.”

“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“There were a bunch of hang-up calls,” he said. “Back when we first started buying up land in Musket Creek. Every time you’d pick up the phone, the bastard on the other end would hang up.”

“Just here? Or at your home too?”

“Both. You remember, Shirley? A fucking nuisance.”

“I remember,” she said.

“It went on for a couple of weeks,” O’Daniel said. “I had my home number changed finally, unlisted, but we couldn’t do that here.”

“No other calls since then?”

“No. They just stopped and that was it.”

I tucked the anonymous letter back into its envelope, but I didn’t give it back to O’Daniel. “Were either of your partners ever threatened? Letters, calls, in person?”

“Ray Treacle was. An artist named Robideaux who lives over there threatened him to his face.”

“Yes, he told me about that. What about Munroe Randall? Was
he
ever threatened?”

“Not that he mentioned to me.”

I said bluntly, “Do you think he was murdered, Mr. O’Daniel?”

“Munroe? Hell, I don’t know what to think.”

“This letter you just got hints that maybe he was.”

O’Daniel didn’t say anything for a time. You could see the wheels turning inside his head: thinking about that hundred-thousand dollar double indemnity payoff, probably. “The police say it was an accident,” he said at length. “They ought to know, shouldn’t they?”

“The police overlook things sometimes. Everybody does.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But that note—it could just be a crank thing. I mean, whoever wrote it might
want
me to think Munroe was murdered. You know, trying to take advantage of the accident. That could be it.”

“It could be,” I admitted. “But I’d like to keep the note anyway, if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

I put the envelope into my coat pocket. “Let’s assume that Jack Coleclaw didn’t write it,” I said. “Any other candidates?”

“Anybody in Musket Creek, just about.”

“The letter’s fairly literate. Whoever wrote it has a pretty fair grasp of English fundamentals.”

“Well . . . Penrose, maybe.”

“Who’s Penrose?”

“A writer. Writes stuff on natural history. All writers are nuts, but that one is a real fruitcake. You’ll see what I mean when you talk to him.”

“That should be pretty soon,” I said. “I’m going out there tomorrow .”

“If I were you,” O’Daniel said, “I’d take along a couple of cops. They don’t like strangers, particularly strangers asking questions that have anything to do with Northern Development.”