Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (6 page)

That was enough; I could not afford to let it go any further. I whirled on him, glaring. “I’m here on police business, smart guy,” I lied in a hard tight voice. “You understand? Police business. You want to make trouble, fine, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail for obstruction of justice.”

He pulled up short and blinked at me. Most of the belligerence faded out of his expression; he began to look uncertain and a little worried.

“Now go on, get back to your cab,” I said. “And don’t say anything about me to your fare when he comes back.
Capici
?”

“Hey,” he said, “hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know you were a cop—”

“Move it!”

I put my back to him, the hell with him, and trotted the rest of the way up onto the flat. The drive made a wide loop there, around and alongside the house; I cut off it at a sharp angle, onto hard-packed earth. When I neared the porch corner, the whole of the garage materialized ahead of me. One of its double doors was standing part-way open and I could see that there were lights on inside; but that was all I could see. Still no sign of—

And that was when the gun went off.

The flat cracking sound was unmistakable; I had heard the report of a handgun too many times in my life. I broke into a lumbering run. There was no second shot—no other sounds of any kind from inside the garage. Instinct warned me against barging in there, but I did it anyway: I caught the edge of the closed door half and swung myself around it, through the opening by two steps.

I was braced to find a dead man lying on the floor, and that was what I found. But what surprised me, what made me stare wide-eyed, was that it was not Martin Talbot.

The dead man had to be Victor Carding.

He lay sprawled on his side near a long cluttered workbench, both legs bent up toward his chest as if he had tried to assume a fetal position before he died; there was blood all over the front of his blue workshirt. Three feet away, between Carding and a partly open rear window, Talbot stood looking down at the body. His arms were flat against his sides, and in his right hand was a snub-nosed revolver.

The light in there came from a drop-cord arrangement suspended from one of the ceiling rafters; the cord and its grilled bulb cage swayed a little, so that there was an eerie shifting movement of light and shadow across Talbot’s face. He looked ghastly: twisted-up expression of sickness and torment, eyes popped and unblinking, mouth slacked open like an idiot’s.

The hollow queasy feeling was in my stomach again. And there was a rancid taste in my throat; you can never tell what a man with a gun in his hand will do. But he did not even seem to know I was there. His gaze was half-focused, vacant, and the gun stayed pointed at the floor, loose in his grasp.

I took a couple of cautious steps toward him. He did not move. Three more paces, each one slow and measured, brought me up close on his right. Still no movement. And no resistance when I reached down, closed my hand around the revolver, and eased it out of his cold fingers.

I let out the breath I had been holding and backed off. The gun was a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber; the stubby muzzle was still warm. I dropped it into my coat pocket and sidled around so that the dead man was between Talbot and me. Then I knelt to take a closer look at the body.

No doubt that it was Victor Carding. He matched the description Laura Nichols had given me: thin, gaunt, sallow-faced. He had been shot once in the chest; the blood was coagulating around the wound. There were no other marks on him that I could see, and nothing on the floor near him except a couple of sealed envelopes—PG&E bill, letter from a bank—that might have been jarred out of a pocket when he fell.

When I straightened up Talbot blinked and focused on me for the first time. He said, “I killed him,” in a hoarse empty voice—the kind of voice, if you’ve ever heard it, that can raise the hairs on your scalp.

“Easy, Mr. Talbot.”

“He shouted at me, called me a murderer. Because I killed his wife, you see. Murderer, he said. Murderer, murderer.”

I went over to him again and took his arm. I wanted him out of there; I wanted out of there myself. The mingled smells of oil and dust, cordite and death, were making me a little nauseous.

“I just . . . I couldn’t stand it,” Talbot said. “I lost control of myself. The gun . . . it was on the workbench. I picked it up, just to make him stop, but he lunged at me and it went off. I killed him. He was right, I
am
a murderer. . . .”

Gently I prodded him toward the door. He came along without protest, moving like a sleepwalker. Outside, in the wind and the leaden daylight, I took several deep breaths to clear the death-smell out of my nostrils. Both the cabbie and the hack were gone; he had probably heard the shot and decided he wanted no part of what was going on here. Nobody else seemed to have heard it; the nearest neighbor was across the road and fifty yards down.

I took Talbot around the front of the house, up onto the porch. The door was unlocked. Inside, I sat him down in a chair and then hunted up the telephone.

“I murdered him,” Talbot said again, as I picked up the receiver. “I murdered him.”

No you didn’t, I thought. No way.

Talbot had
not
killed Victor Carding.

It took the local cops exactly fourteen minutes to get there. But it was a long fourteen minutes. Talbot kept staring off into space, dry-washing his hands and muttering over and over the same things he had said in the garage. Watching him and listening to him gave me a creepy, nervous feeling. He was right on the edge of a breakdown—and that was something I was not equipped to handle.

When I finished with my call to the police, I dialed the Nichols’ home in Sea Cliff; I figured Laura Nichols ought to know about this as soon as possible. But there was no answer. I put down the receiver and prowled around the living room with Talbot’s voice grating in my ears. On the mantelpiece was a framed color photograph of Carding, a plain gray-haired woman, and a kid in his twenties wearing a Fu Manchu mustache. The Carding family—and two of them dead in less than a week. I shook my head and took a turn through the rest of the house, not touching anything. The place was cluttered and dusty, and in the kitchen were a couple of empty bourbon bottles and the smell of spilled whiskey. Aside from that, the condition of each of the rooms seemed ordinary enough.

The distant wail of sirens, when they finally came, was a relief. I went out on the porch to wait and breathe more of the fresh air. The sirens grew louder and closer, and pretty soon a pair of Brisbane police cars came speeding along Queen’s Lane, swung up the drive, and plowed to a halt. Three uniformed cops piled out, one of them wearing sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his jacket. The sergeant’s name was Osterman, it turned out, and he was in charge.

I showed him the photostat of my investigator’s license, told him about Talbot being inside, answered preliminary questions, and handed over the gun. Osterman told me to wait there; then, before I could explain why I knew Talbot had not shot Victor Carding, he and one of the other cops headed for the garage. The third cop went inside the house to talk to Talbot.

There was a kind of
deja
vu
in the next thirty minutes; I had been through it all too often before—the last time just two days ago, at the scene of Christine Webster’s murder. More Brisbane police units had arrived and were controlling the inevitable bunch of ghouls that had gathered down on the road. A dark brown Cadillac with MD plates showed up: the doctor I had asked them to send when I called. Then a county ambulance, probably from South San Francisco. Then another car with MD plates, this one containing a harried-looking guy who I assumed was acting coroner for this bailiwick. Then a TV-remote truck that was not permitted up the drive because there was no room; the area in front of the house looked like a parking lot as it was. And while all of this was going on, Osterman went into the house, came back out after ten minutes looking even grimmer than before, and returned to the garage. Neither he nor anyone else said a word to me.

Finally, while I paced back and forth waiting for Osterman to get around to me again, a light-green Ford sedan joined the string of other cars down on Queen’s Lane. A fat man in a rumpled suit got out of it, spoke to one of the cops down there, and was allowed to proceed up the drive on foot. The way he moved, in a waddling gait like a latter-day Oliver Hardy, made me stop pacing and stand looking at him as he approached.

Well, what do you know, I thought. Donleavy.

He recognized me at about the same time, raised an eyebrow and then one hand in greeting. I went forward to meet him.

“How are you, Donleavy?”

“Not too bad,” he said. We shook hands. “Been what—seven, eight years?”

“About that.” I had met him, way back then, during the course of an ugly kidnapping and murder case in Hillsborough—the one on which I had got the knife wound in the belly.

He said, “So what’re you doing here? Mixed up with murder again, are you?”

“I’m afraid so. How about you? Aren’t you still with the DA’s office?”

“Nope. County CID the past four years. Brisbane police don’t have the facilities to handle a homicide investigation, so they ask us to come in whenever they get one. I was over in San Bruno on a routine matter; that’s why I got sent. Lucky me.”

“Lucky you.”

“Where’s the body?”

“In the garage. The coroner’s with it now.”

“Any suspects?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “There’s a man inside the house named Martin Talbot; I found him with the dead man. He had what was probably the death weapon in his hand—a .38 caliber revolver—and he confessed to me that he’d done the shooting. But he didn’t do it. I doubt if anybody did; I think it might be suicide.”

Donleavy studied me. He looked older, grayer, maybe a little fatter, and his eyes seemed even more sleepy than I remembered them. The impression he gave was one of softness and mildness—but that was an illusion. He was shrewd and dedicated, and he could be pretty tough when he had to be.

“You know this Talbot, do you?” he asked.

“I know some things about him. I’m working for his sister.”

“Why would he confess to a murder he didn’t commit?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “You want it now or after you’ve seen the body and talked to Talbot?”

“Make it after.” He clapped me on the arm and waddled off toward the garage.

Another five minutes went away. Then Donleavy returned alone and entered the house. The coroner put in an appearance not long after that, to tell the ambulance attendants that they could have the body. Osterman was with them when they brought it out from the garage; he stood near me, not saying anything, while the attendants loaded the stretcher.

Just as the ambulance started down the drive, the house door opened and everybody inside came out. The local doctor and one of the uniformed cops had Talbot between them, hanging onto his arms; he still moved like a sleepwalker. They put him into the doctor’s Cadillac and wasted no time taking him away in the wake of the ambulance.

Donleavy was still up on the front porch; he gestured to me to join him. I did that, with Osterman behind me, and the three of us filed into the living room.

I asked Donleavy, “Did you talk to Talbot?”

“A little. Doctor wanted to get him to the hospital for observation; he’s in a pretty bad way.”

“He confess to you?”

“Yep, he did.”

“To me, too,” Osterman said. “It’s an open-and-shut case.”

“No,” I said, “it isn’t. He didn’t kill Carding.”

“What?”

Donleavy said, “Go ahead, you can lay it out now.”

“Let me give you the background first.” And I told them about the accident in which Carding’s wife had been killed. About Talbot’s obsessive guilt. About what Laura Nichols had hired me to do. About following Talbot here this afternoon.

“He doesn’t sound like a probable murderer, I’ll admit that,” Donleavy said when I was done. “But he claims he picked up the gun in self-defense, more or less, and it went off by accident. It could have happened that way.”

I shook my head. “There are at least three good reasons why it couldn’t.”

“Which are?”

“One is the time factor,” I said. “I was down at the foot of the drive when he disappeared toward the garage. It was thirty seconds before I started up after him, and another two minutes or so until I heard the shot. Say three minutes, maximum. Talbot would have had to walk to the garage, enter, confront Carding, listen to enough verbal abuse to make him pick up the gun, and then shoot Carding when he lunged forward—all in three minutes or less. If that isn’t impossible, it’s the next thing to it.”

“You sure about the amount of time?”

“Positive.”

“What’s the second reason?”

“Talbot claims Carding shouted at him, shouted accusations. But I didn’t hear any shouting; I didn’t hear anything at all from the garage until the gun went off. A yelling voice would have carried almost as far as the shot, quiet as it is around here. And I heard the shot loud and clear.”