Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (25 page)

Item: Laura Nichols was reported to be “in seclusion” with friends outside the city. She had made no effort to see her daughter, Eberhardt told me, nor had she gone back to visit her brother. Mourning for herself, probably, for her own shattered existence. Mourning the fact that insanity really did run in her family.

Item: The media gave me a lot of publicity and the phone rang several times—reporters asking questions and wanting to set-up interviews. One guy said he wanted to do a feature article on me and my pulp collection and what it was like to be a private eye. And would I pose for pictures wearing, you know, a trench-coat and a slouch hat? I told him I would think about it and that I would have my secretary, Eflie Perine, get in touch with him. Literate guy that he was, he said he would look forward to Ms. Perine’s call.

Item: I ate Thanksgiving dinner with Dennis Litchak and his wife, and the thanks I gave was that I was still alive. Afterward I told him I was going to buy him a case of Scotch for saving my arse as he had. He said hell, that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted. Make it Johnnie Walker Black Label, he said.

Item: I went down to the office on Friday, my first day out since Tuesday’s visit to Doctor White, and cleaned up the wreckage. Gave the slashed chair to Goodwill, along with the gouged and glue-damaged desk. Ordered replacements from a secondhand office-supply outfit. The place depressed me; it just did not feel the same any more. Maybe my CPA neighbor, Hadley, was right. Maybe it
was
time to think about moving out and setting up shop somewhere else.

On Saturday night Eberhardt and Donleavy and I went out for a steak dinner at a restaurant on Van Ness. It was the first chance we had had to get together—and both of them seemed to feel they owed me a meal.

“There’s one thing that keeps gnawing at me,” Eberhardt said over the first round of beers. “I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.”

“What’s that?” I asked. “All the coincidence?”

“No, not exactly. It’s what happened to those two families after their paths crossed—one of them wiped out completely, the other one just about wiped out in a different way.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, Talbot and Victor Carding have an accident and it seems to trigger a chain reaction. Death on the one side, insanity on the other.”

“It didn’t quite start with the accident,” Donleavy reminded him. “Other things happened before and at the same time.”

“Sure,” Eberhardt said. “That’s part of it, too. As if . . . hell, I don’t know, as if fate or something was out to get both families. As if all the coincidences weren’t really coincidences at all. You know what I mean?”

I had never heard him sound so metaphysical; the thing was really bothering him, all right. But he was not alone. It bothered me a little, and Steve Farmer, judging from what he had said to me at Bodega Bay, and maybe Donleavy too.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“So how do you figure it?”

“You don’t,” Donleavy said. “You don’t even want to try.”

Silence for a time.

Eberhardt said finally, “The hell with it,” and drained the last of his beer. “Let’s have another round before we order.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” the last of the lone-wolf private eyes said. “Let’s have three or four more rounds.”

And we did.