Blowback

Books by Bill Pronzini

“Nameless Detective” Novels:

The Snatch

The Vanished

Undercurrent

Blow Back

Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

Labyrinth

Hoodwink

Scattershot

Dragonfire

Bindlestiff

Quicksilver

Nightshades

Double (with Marcia Muller)

Bones

Deadfall

Shackles

Jackpot

Breakdown

Blowback

Bill Pronzini

SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

NAPLES, FLORIDA

2011

Blowback

Copyright © 1977 by Bill Pronzini

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

ISBN 978-1-61232-068-7

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

One

Sunday Morning Coming Down …

That's the title of a sad popular song by Kris Kristofferson, about a man with no wife and no children and nowhere to go and not much to look forward to on a quiet Sunday morning. On this quiet Sunday morning, I was that man. Nowhere to go and not much to look forward to.

I carried a cup of coffee into the living room of my flat in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. It was a pretty nice day out, cloudless, a little windy—no sign of the heavy fogs that usually blanket the city during the month of July. The part of the Bay I could see from my front windows was a rippled ultramarine and dotted with sailboats, like a bas-relief map with a lot of small white flags pinned to it.

I moved over to the tier of laminated wood bookshelves that filled the side wall beyond the windows, on which I kept most of my six thousand-odd detective and mystery pulp magazines by title, chronologically. I ran my fingers over some of the spines. Black Mask, Dime Detective, Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Double Detective. I had started collecting them in 1947, and that meant almost three decades of my life were on those shelves—nearly three-fifths of the time I had been on this earth. And next week, next Thursday, I would be fifty years old.

I took one of the Black Masks down and looked at the gaudy thirties illustration, the cover list of authors. Gardner, Nebel, Cain. Old friends that usually I could have passed a quiet Sunday with, that would have lifted me out of most any depressed mood I might happen to be in. But not this Sunday—

The telephone rang.

I keep the thing in the bedroom, and I went in there and lifted up the receiver. It was Eberhardt, a sobersided Lieutenant of Detectives on the San Francisco cops and probably my closest friend for about the same number of years as I had been collecting the pulps.

“Hello, hot stuff,” he said. “Get you out of bed?”

“No. I've been up for hours.”

“You're getting to be an early bird in your dotage.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, Dana is off to Sausalito for the day and I'm getting up a game—Hastings and Friedman from the Squad, maybe Larry Ballard from the Kearny Agency. You interested in a little poker and a lot of beer this afternoon?”

“I don't think so, Eb.”

“You working on something?”

“Not since last Tuesday.”

“Other plans?”

“No. I'm just not in a poker mood today.”

“You sound like you're in a mood, period.”

“Maybe I am, a little.”

“Private-eye blues, huh?”

“Yeah—private-eye blues.”

“Wouldn't happen to have anything to do with your fiftieth next week, would it?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Hell, fifty's the prime of life. I ought to know, tiger; I been there two years now. I haven't had any problem getting it up and neither will you.”

“Getting what up?” I said.

He made chuckling sounds. “You change your mind about the game, come on over around one. Beer's on me.”

“Sure. Ciao, Eb.”

We rang off, and I went back to the living room and looked around at the clutter in there: old newspapers and magazines and pulps, dirty dishes, clothing draped over the furniture; there was even a dust ball under the mahogany secretary in one corner. I had been living in this same Pacific Heights flat for twenty years, with the same furnishings, and for all anyone might have known or cared, the same bachelor's mess. Some of the women I had had relationships with had cleaned it up from time to time, but I had not had a relationship in quite a while now. So there was nobody to clean it up, nobody to care except me, and I was content with it the way it was.

I sipped my coffee and tried not to think about anything. I might as well have tried not to breathe. I got up and paced around for a while, aimlessly.

All at once, the cough started up. I sat down again, handkerchief to my mouth to catch the discharges of bitter gray phlegm from my lungs, and listened to the dry sounds echo through the empty room. I had had that cough for some while now, like an old enemy that came around to bother you now and again. Bronchial trouble, caused by too many cigarettes and air pollution and the cold San Francisco fog. Sure. But lately it had worsened, and the color of the phlegm had changed, and you can only lie to yourself for just so long. Then visceral fear takes over, and even if you have a paranoid reaction to doctors because of the things you saw in field hospitals in the South Pacific during World War II, you know there is no way you can continue to avoid medical attention.

I had come to that decision the past week, and I had gotten the name of a doctor from the retired fire captain who lived downstairs, and I had made an appointment for last Friday—Dr. White, whose appearance and whose offices on Geary downtown were as sterile as his name. There had been a long talk about symptoms and a lot of stern admonitions about the evils of cigarette smoking that did nothing except deepen my fear and bring out a cold sweat under my arms. There had been, finally, a chest x-ray. And then—

“You have a lesion on your left lung,” he said.

What do you say? There is nothing you can say. You sit there and look at him, and you try not to let him see how much your hands are trembling.

“It may not be malignant,” this white Dr. White said. “It could be an adenoma—a benign tumor. We'll have to do a sputum cytology.”

So I coughed up phlegm for him into a sterile container, and he said he would get it over to the pathology lab at San Francisco General right away, but that we could not reasonably expect a report until Tuesday sometime. Meanwhile, I was not supposed to worry and I was not, for God's sake, supposed to smoke any more cigarettes.

Close the barn door, I had thought, the horse is gone. But I had not had a cigarette since then.

And now it was Sunday, Sunday morning coming down, and tomorrow it would be Monday and then it would be Tuesday. And when it was Thursday and I already knew the results of the sputum test, I would be fifty years old. Happy birthday, happy half-century, you have lung cancer.

Jesus, Jesus.

I had wanted to tell Eberhardt on the phone just now; I had wanted to tell someone since Friday. But just as there had been nothing to say to White, there was nothing to say to Eb, not yet. He would only work himself up into a lather—he was a good friend—and there was no sense in that. There was no sense in worrying myself, just as the doctor advised. It would not help matters, it would not change matters. The lesion on my lung was malignant or it was not malignant. I had cancer or I did not have cancer. Simple.

From the beginning it had all been simple, I thought. You start smoking because all the other kids on the block have taken it up and you don't want to be considered a sissy. Then you start to enjoy it, it's a harmless little vice; you like the way a cigarette tastes after a hard day or with a beer or after making love. Later, you listen to all the warnings put out by the Surgeon General's Office, and you shrug, and with stupid blind faith you think that it's not as bad as they make it seem. That it can't do any damage to you. But what you don't think about until maybe it's too late is that you have been burning up an average of two packs a day for thirty-five of your fifty years, which works out to more than half a million butts, to more than ten million lungfuls of tobacco smoke—and maybe the human body is just not equipped to handle that kind of overload.

Simple. Simple to give the things up when you find out about the lesion growing on your lung. Simple to sit here with your morning coffee, coughing, spitting up phlegm, and tell yourself there's no point in worrying, you either have cancer or you don't, and if you're lucky the lesion won't be malignant and everything will work out after all.

What isn't simple is fighting off the craving for a cigarette, just one, just one more cigarette because it always tasted so damned good with that morning coffee.

I got to my feet again: all I seemed to be doing this morning was standing and sitting down. Well, I had to get out of there, that was all, before I became claustrophobic; I had to get my mind off cigarettes and off Tuesday. Go somewhere, do something. Bowling, maybe, some sort of physical activity—

The phone bell went off a second time.

Now who the hell? I thought. The hell with it, there was nobody I wanted to talk to. But I was not one of those people who could let the telephone ring without responding. Too many years of conditioning. The telephone was an integral part of my job and always had been. Reluctantly I went in and answered it.

A voice, vaguely familiar, said my first name. I frowned, and there was one of those awkward pauses where you try to place someone by his voice and can't quite manage it. I said finally, “Yes?”

“This is Harry Burroughs, buddy.”

“Well, Christ,” I said.

Harry Burroughs was a guy I had met in the Pacific theater during the early years of the war, when I was in Military Intelligence and he was attached to a combat supply unit. We had gotten to be friends, had done a good deal of drinking and carousing together, and had come back stateside on the same ship in 1946. Since we were both from California, we had stayed in touch over the years; he owned and operated a small fishing camp up in the Sierra Nevada, on Eden Lake in the southern Mother Lode.

He said the same thing I was thinking, “Been a long time. Too long.”

“Four years at least. You in town, Harry?”

“No, I'm calling from The Pines.” That was a small village not far from Eden Lake. “Listen, buddy, you couldn't get away for a few days, could you? Come up and do a little fishing and kick over old times?”

I hesitated. “Well—I don't know.”

“Be good to see you,” he said. “And the bass are big and hungry this year.”

I've got a lesion on my left lung, I thought. I might have lung cancer. I said, “Maybe I can swing it next week. I'm not sure yet.”

“No chance you could make it right away?”

“You mean today?”

“The sooner the better.”

There was something in his voice that told me he had more on his mind than fishing and kicking over old times. I said as much, and then I said, “You got some sort of problem, Harry?”

“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted.

“Urgent?”

“It could be.”

“You want to tell me about it now?”

“It's a little complicated,” Harry said. “Has to do with some of the people staying at my camp. You'd have to see the situation yourself to get a real handle on it.” He paused. “Hell, I hate to come out of the blue like this after four years and ask a favor, but I don't know anybody else. And it'd be good to see you again anyway, believe that.”

“Harry—look, I just don't know. I'll have to see if I can get away. Can I call back a little later?”

“I'll be here for another hour. That enough time?”

“Maybe. If not, I could leave a message.” There were no telephones at the camp; even though it was less than five miles from The Pines, Harry liked to maintain the illusion of wilderness and isolation.

“Fair enough.” He gave me the number: The Pines General Store. “I hope you can manage it, buddy.”

“I'll call,” I said.

I put the phone down and went out into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. I stood with it, staring down into the sink and its overflow of crusty-looking dishes.

You can't do it, I thought. You've got to go in on Tuesday and find out the results of the sputum test—find out that the lesion is benign.

Or malignant.

I don't want to know the results of that frigging test, I thought.

Tuesday.

You'll go crazy sitting around here, waiting for Tuesday.

Well, you could go up to Eden Lake and you could be back by Tuesday, couldn't you?

Unless Harry's problem took longer than that.

All right, suppose it did. I could always call White from The Pines; I did not necessarily have to go in and see him. Besides, I was in a sorry mental state right now and I needed activity, a place and a direction to concentrate my sensibilities. I had always been motivated by my work, and it was a tried and true antidote for self-pity and depression. So was fishing for lake bass and reliving some of the good moments of the past with an old friend. And I owed Harry a favor because of our friendship, if for no other reason.

Sunday morning coming down.

In the living room again I sat and stared at the walls and listened to the silence. After a while I said aloud, “You're a damned fool.” Then I got up and did what I had known all along I was going to do: I went in and called Harry Burroughs at The Pines General Store and told him I would be up later that day.

Two

The Mother Lode extends one hundred and fifty miles north and south along the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada. In the Southern Mines of Tuolumne County, due east of Modesto where Eden Lake was located, hundreds of thousands of men had used picks, washing pans, rockers, hydraulic rams, sluices, and crude and modern machinery to extract billions of dollars' worth of placer and quartz gold during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some of the towns that had sprung up then had long since died, become ghosts or nothing at all except historical memories. Others remained to the present, carefully preserving their heritage so that tourists could peer at the old brick-and-fieldstone and false-fronted buildings, prowl the nearby abandoned diggings, and study the relics left by those who had come long ago in search of dreams. And maybe a hundred years from now, if the world lasted that long, tourists of that era would come to gape and gawk at what was left of our dreams …

The Pines was one of those towns rich in history, situated in the foothills off the Mono Highway east of Twain Harte and set against a backdrop of forested mountains and snow-capped crags thirteen thousand feet high and more. The surrounding countryside was rolling, hilly grassland and placer-pocked limestone—the town had been built on mining claims—and a spur of the Old Sierra Railroad passed through it and up into the mountains to where lumberjacks still felled trees and cut logs for the sawmills at Standard and Tuolumne.

When I came into The Pines a few minutes before three, the main street was crowded with cars and people. Traffic had been heavy all the way from San Francisco, and especially heavy into and out of Sonora on the Mono Road, mostly transient tourists and vacationers from the resorts at Long Barn and Pine Crest and local families on a Sunday outing. It was very hot, up in the nineties; the hot-metal glare of the sun made the trees on Buck Horn Hill look as though they were aflame. I had my window rolled down, and the air was redolent with the scents of pine and wood smoke and summer dust.

There was not much to the town—a two-story, false-fronted hotel with double porch posts and a sign hanging from the second-floor veranda that said it had been built in 1882; the General Store, a couple of souvenir shops, three restaurants, a simulated Old West saloon that dispensed “genuine sarsparilla” instead of alcoholic beverages, a white frame church, and The Pines Museum—the last nearly dwarfed by a pair of seventy-foot, partially dismantled tailing wheels along its near side. Down the side streets were a few houses, open pasture land, and at least one example of gold-rush architecture that nobody had seen fit to restore—a low square building with a brick front and stone sides and heavy iron doors.

I wedged my car into a space in front of the General Store, between a VW bus and a big Dodge van that seemed curiously out of place in these surroundings because it had the words Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets painted on the side. I bought a fishing license and a few things I would need in the way of groceries: a small jar of instant coffee and a salami and some hard rolls. The place was jammed and the prices were exorbitant and the fat woman who waited on me wore a broad smile; I thought that she was probably the owner.

At the far end of the village was the dirt-and-gravel county road that led to Eden Lake. Nobody seemed to want to go there except me—the road was deserted. It wound upward past cuts of bluish limestone and the ancient, crumbling outbuilding of a pocket mine that lay against the hillside like an old scar that had never healed; then, after three dusty miles, it began to climb sharply into heavy sugar and digger pine. When it finally crested I could see Eden Lake shimmering ice-blue in the sunlight below.

The lake was small, maybe a half-mile wide and a quarter-mile long. Forestland grew to the water's edge in a full half-moon to the north and east; to the west there was a high bluff and a grassy meadow rising in a gentle slope beside it. Harry Burroughs' fishing camp was at the south end, and its buildings were the only ones anywhere on or near the lake. All of the surrounding land was owned by either the state or the county, I couldn't remember which, and through a friend on the real-estate board Harry had managed a long-term lease for the portion on which he had built his camp. One of these days, though, at least some other parts of the lakefront property were going to undergo development—a fact he did not much care to think about.

The first view you had of the camp was when you came down out of the trees and neared the graveled circle that served as a parking area. There were six cabins, set into a rough wide horseshoe shape and sweeping inland from the lake, but the only one visible from here was Harry's, the largest and the one nearest the parking circle; the others were hidden by pines and other forest growth. Extending into the lake fifty yards from Harry's front door was a short narrow pier, and tied to the end of it were two fourteen-foot, oak-hulled skiffs with five-horsepower outboards.

His ten-year-old jeep was parked in the circle, along with four cars: a new dark-brown Cadillac, a dusty Rambler station wagon, a 1972 Ford, and an expensive yellow Italian sports job. I pulled my car in beside the Rambler and got out into the hot, dry mountain air.

Nobody came to meet me, and the camp looked empty for all I could see. I went over to Harry's cabin and up onto the log-railed porch and rapped on the door. There was no response. So I came down again and walked around to the far side, to where there was a large Coca-Cola cooler that I knew he always kept well-stocked with beer and soft drinks. I helped myself to a can of Schlitz, popped the tab, and drank a third of it before I lowered the can. It had been a long drive from San Francisco.

The beer brought on an instant craving for a cigarette, as beer often did with me; I made an effort to blank my mind against it. I had not had any trouble doing that during the drive—I had managed to concentrate enough on the road and on the radio broadcast of the Giants game. My chest felt all right, maybe a little tight; I wondered if the thin mountain air, the summer dust, would have any effect on my lungs.

But I did not want to think about my lungs.

I drank more of the beer and looked around and still did not see anyone. Behind Harry's cabin was a shed with the doors spread open. I wandered over there and looked inside and saw the same things I had seen the last time I was up for a visit: another skiff up on davits, several rolls of heavy canvas for added protection of the boats during the winter months, an uncluttered workbench along one wall, shelves of paint and motor oil and other items neatly stored. Unlike me, Harry had always been a fastidious man.

I finished the beer and turned back toward the lake. A young guy wearing only a pair of gabardine slacks came out of the trees from the direction of the first of the guest cabins. He saw me, paused, and then walked over casually. He was tall and lean, with one of these bronzed beachboy physiques and a lot of shaggy flax-colored hair that covered his ears and curled up on the back of his neck. A thick, stylish mustache right-angled down on either side of his mouth, forming three sides of a frame for the kind of lips some women would call sensuous.

He smiled crookedly as he approached. “Well,” he said, “new blood in no man's land. You joining our happy little group?”

“For a day or two.”

“I wish I could say the same thing. You alone?”

“I'm alone.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and stepped around me to the cooler, lifted the lid, and took out a beer. When he had it open he sipped a little, made a face, and gave me his crooked grin again. “This stuff is rat piss, you know? I like imported beer if I have to drink it at all.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure. I'm Todd Cody. Vegas.”

I told him my name and where I was from. He gave no indication of wanting to shake hands, and that and the beer comment made me decide I was not going to like him much. I said, “Do you know where Harry is?”

“Burroughs? Nope. I've been taking a nap; too damned hot to do anything else.”

“You been here long, have you?”

“Two weeks. With another two to go, unless I can get time off for good behavior.”

“How's that?”

“My old man,” Cody said. “He sends me to places like this periodically, when he thinks I've been getting out of hand. If I don't go, he stops sending checks. So I go. I suffer, but I go.”

So that was the way it was. I said, “It takes all kinds.”

“Sure,” he agreed. He thought I was talking about his old man.

In the hot stillness I heard the distant hum of an outboard, and I turned to look out over the lake. A fourth skiff was just pulling out from the southwest shore, heading across the lake at an angle away from the camp. There were two men in it, the one at the tiller wearing what looked like a jungle helmet; they both appeared good-sized and they were both wearing white T-shirts.

Cody said contemptuously, “Knox and Talesco.”

“Guests here too?”

“Yeah. You're in for a treat when you meet them.”

“Why is that?”

“A couple of machos straight out of Hemingway,” he said. “But wherever you see one, the other's not far away. Closet fags, if you want my opinion.”

I didn't. I said, “Who else is staying here right now?”

“Guy named Bascomb, an artist or something. Spends all his time painting and sketching. A real fun dude.”

“Anyone else?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jerrold,” Cody said. The crooked smile again, with a leer in it this time. “You're also in for a treat when you meet little Angela—a genuine treat. The lady is a fox of the first order, you know what I mean?”

But that question turned out to be rhetorical, because a voice called sharply “Cody! You, Cody!” and turned both our heads toward the rear of Harry's cabin.

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.”

“Did he get physical with her?”

“No.”

“You think he ever does?”

“Not while they've been here, anyway. She walks around half-naked, like I told you, and she'd show marks if he was slapping her around.”

“How about this Knox and Talesco? That's their names?”

“Right, Sam Knox and Karl Talesco. Well, the same is true with them as with Bascomb. But who knows what goes on inside people's heads?”

“Cody said the two of them are practically inseparable.”

“Yeah, they've been good friends for years.”

“You known them long?”

“Ten years. They run a freight line out of Fresno.”

“They been here the same time as the Jerrolds before?”

“No. Ditto Cody. And this is Bascomb's first season.”

“Either or both of them married?”

“Knox used to be. Talesco's like me, an old bach.”

“For what it's worth, Cody thinks they might be closet gays.”

“Oh bullshit,” Harry said. “Guys like Cody give me a pain in the ass. They see two men together a lot, close friends, right away they think there's got to be something sexual between them. Knox and Talesco are as straight as you and me.”

“Fair enough. Now, who's in which cabin?”

“Cody's in Two, Knox and Talesco in Four, Bascomb in Five, the Jerrolds in Six.”

I nodded, and then I said I would spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the camp, seeing what I could see, meeting Mrs. Jerrold and the others. “Will you be at your cabin?”

“Working in the shed, probably,” he said.

“Well, I'll drop down later. If I haven't found out anything, there's always those old times to kick over.”

“Make it around six-thirty,” he said. “I caught three fat bass this morning and I thought I'd fry them for supper.”

“Sounds good.”

When he had disappeared into the trees, I went into the cabin and took off my shirt and washed some of the sweat off with water that was piped in directly from the lake. There was a small sign in the bath alcove, and another over the cabinet sink, that told you this and reminded you not to drink any of it. I took a lightweight knit pullover out of my bag, slipped it on, and recombed my hair; the image the mirror gave back to me looked presentable enough, if a little drawn and a little tired.

Outside again, I made my way through the pines, following the narrow path that wound through the camp. Cabin Four seemed to be deserted; Knox and Talesco were apparently still out on the lake. Cabin Five also appeared deserted, and I would have moved on if, in the stillness, I had not heard the soft sound of a woman's laughter. It came from behind the cabin, and it was followed by the murmur of a man's voice; then there was silence again. I hesitated, because if something was going on back there, I was not sure I wanted to walk in on it. Still, I did not like the idea of circling around through the trees to where I could spy down on the rear of the cabin. Maybe part of the reason I didn't like it was because it was stereotypical; the other part of the reason was that I might make enough noise for them to hear me.

So I went along the side of the cabin, quietly, and stopped before I reached the rear corner and listened again. Silence. A fat green fly drifted lazily through a beam of sunlight; a small brownish-yellow chipmunk stared down at me from a low bough on a lodgepole pine, forepaws tucked under its chin in a way that made it seem to be meditating. High up in one of the other trees, an unseen jay screeched like a whiskey-voiced harridan. Behind the cabin, still nothing. All right, I thought—and I backed off a couple of steps, made enough noise with my feet to send the chipmunk scurrying out of sight, and then walked out to where I could see them.

Only there was not much to see. It was about as innocent a scene as you could imagine. A lanky guy wearing chinos and sneakers and a blue polo shirt was sitting on a pine stump in close to where half a cord of firewood was stacked against the cabin wall; his left arm cradled a large sketchpad and his right hand held a piece of charcoal poised over it. Fifteen feet away from him, sitting tailor-fashion in a patch of bright green grass, was a busty redhead in white flared-bottom slacks and the kind of sleeveless pullover that looks as if half of it is missing and leaves the stomach bare. Both of them were looking toward me, the guy—Bascomb—without much of any expression and Angela Jerrold with guileless interest.

I felt both relief and disappointment and was not sure which of them was the stronger. I put on a smile and said, “Hi. I was just wandering around, getting acquainted with the camp, and I heard voices back here and thought I'd come introduce myself. I hope I'm not intruding.”

“No, that's all right,” Bascomb said, but he did not smile.

Mrs. Jerrold got to her feet, slowly, and whether consciously or unconsciously she made it seem like a showcase number. Nothing overt; it was all subtle suggestion. When she moved toward Bascomb—as I moved toward him from a different angle, like a pair of cops converging on a subject—there was no exaggerated hip-sway or breast-bouncing. Her movements were clean and economical; she knew what kind of body she had, and that it was so ripe already, artifice of any sort would only have spoiled its effect.

She had a smile for me, even if Bascomb didn't. She said, “Are you a new guest?”

I said I was, for a few days at least, and we exchanged names and shook hands all around. Bascomb's was hard and firm, Mrs. Jerrold's soft and firm. He was about forty, good-looking in a smooth, ascetic way, with silvering hair combed into a widow's peak and eyes that were gray, steady, unreadable. She was a couple of years on the fair side of thirty, and she wore her hair in long layered waves that made her look a little like Raquel Welch. Her breasts were very large, too, the type that some men found exciting; I thought they were a little too much of a good thing. Her skin was a rich light-brown color, silky in texture, and her mouth was sensual without being pouty. Up close this way she projected an aura of sexuality that was almost hypnotic; in spite of myself, I could feel the palms of my hands turn moist and I found my eyes settling on her twice as often as they did on Bascomb.

She said, “My husband and I are in Six, the next cabin down. He went out hunting, and so I came up here to bother Walt for a while.”

“Hardly a bother,” Bascomb said dryly.

“I've been trying to get him to sketch me ever since we met,” she said to me. “Walt's an artist, you know.”

“So I see.”

She took the sketchpad from him and held it up so that both of us could look at the charcoal drawing on the open page. It was pretty much finished—a very good likeness of her as she had looked sitting in the plot of grass. But in his portrayal he had taken some of the softness out of her, some of the veneer—if that's all it was—of innocence. Her beauty as he had interpreted it was almost that of a predator.

Mrs. Jerrold seemed not to notice this; or if she did, she did not change expression. She asked me, “What do you think?”

“Nice work,” I said.

“Oh yes. Walt, you must let me have it.”

“Won't your husband mind?”

“Why should he?”

“You can answer that better than I can.”

“He won't mind. He appreciates good artwork.”

“I'm sure he does.”

Bascomb said that last a little stiffly, looked at her for a long moment, and then took the sketchpad back. He tore out the drawing, handed it to her, said “Nice meeting you” to me, and went over and sat on the stump again. Dismissed, both of us. I watched Mrs. Jerrold frown slightly, as though with annoyance, and I thought that if they were putting on an act for my benefit, they were good at it. So far I was buying the whole thing.

Her frown smoothed away after six or seven seconds, and she said, “Well, I should be getting back, I guess. Thank you again for sketching me, Walt; it's been fun.”

“Hasn't it,” Bascomb said without inflection. He was sketching again and he did not look up.

She put her smile on for me. “Are you going down by the lake?”

“I'd planned on that, yes.”

“Good. You can walk me to my cabin, if you like.”

“Sure.”

I said something to Bascomb about seeing him later; he did not answer, but when Mrs. Jerrold and I started away, toward the side of the cabin, I sensed him watching us.

We went down through the trees on the narrow path. She walked close to me, and twice her body touched mine—breasts and hips; it may have been accidental, but then again, it may not have been. Eventually she said, “Why are artistic people always so moody?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I'll bet you're not in the arts.”

“No.”

“You look like a teamster or longshoreman.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, I meant that favorably. I'm not a snob.”

Good for you, I thought. “Actually,” I said, “I've got a mundane white-collar job. What does your husband do, Mrs. Jerrold?”

“Call me Angela, won't you? Well, Ray is in advertising. He owns his own firm, you know; he's devoted his life to building it into what it is today, which is a very successful business, but of course he's not satisfied. He'll do anything to make it even more successful, to bring in more money and bigger clients.”

“He sounds like the American Dream in action.”

That got me a wry look. “If the American Dream is a nervous breakdown or a coronary before the age of fifty, then, yes, I guess he is. He's never learned how to relax; even up here, our one vacation of the year, he spends half of the time in The Pines telephoning Los Angeles on business matters. My God, do you know that the only times we go out at home is when he's wining and dining customers or potential customers?”

She delivered all of this innocuously enough, but if you wanted to do some reading between the lines, you did not have to try very hard to come up with an invitation, real or imagined. And which one was it? I wondered. At fifty, or coming in on fifty, I had a belly from too much beer and too much deli food, and a gray plodding shaggy look. Not much there for someone like Angela Jerrold. Unless she was a nympho, or at least had catholic tastes to go with the old roving eye. The other possibilities were that she was as innocent as she appeared, and frankly personal even with strangers, and too witless or careless to understand what sort of impact she had on men; or that she knew exactly what impact she had on me, and that she was, as Cody had described her earlier, “nothing but a prickteaser.”

Well, the only way I was not going to find out which of these fitted the real Angela Jerrold was by making a pass at her. I might have liked it—a part of my mind had already gone through the kind of fantasy sexual encounter you sometimes have when you meet a woman as sybaritic as this one—but too many things would get in the way. Things like moral attitudes and business ethics and friendship and even the fear of rejection that had lingered on since my youth. Funny how rigidly a man will adhere to the code of conduct that has governed his life, even when that life may soon be ended by something as terrible as lobar carcinoma.

I said, “You must spend a lot of time by yourself.”

“Oh, we have quite a few friends. It could be worse.”

“Sure. Things can always be worse than they are.”

“It's here at the lake that I sometimes get lonely. I mean, with Ray in The Pines so much, or out fishing or hunting with Harry Burroughs, I have to amuse myself. I hate that; I enjoy people.”

“There are the other guests.”

She smiled. “Yes. Thank God for that.”

I would have liked to press it further—she had taken it in each of the three possible directions, and yet in none of them—but before I could say anything else we came out of the trees into the cleared area where Cabin Six was situated. And sitting there on the porch, with his shirt off now and a tumbler of colorless liquid in one hand, was Ray Jerrold.

He did not remain sitting for long. He saw us at about the same time I saw him, and he got up in one quick jerky motion and came down the porch steps as if they were carved out of blocks of ice. That drink he was holding was either gin or vodka, and it was by no means his first. When he reached solid ground he stopped and leaned his left hand back against the porch railing; his face was damp and splotchy, and even from where Mrs. Jerrold and I had come to a standstill thirty feet away I could see the same half-wildness in his eyes that there had been when he braced Cody.

He said, “So you found another one, huh?”

“Another one what?” she said.

“You think I'm blind? That what you think?”

“Ray, you shouldn't drink so much in this heat—”

“Don't tell me how much I can drink.”

“I was only—”

He cut her off. “Where you been?”

“Up visiting Walt Bascomb.”

“Him too,” Jerrold said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Now, honey—”

“Don't give me that honey crap.”

“Ray, for heaven's sake!”

“Get over here. Now, damn it.”

She gave me a look that had embarrassment and apology in it, and maybe just a touch of fright; then she said softly, “Thanks for walking me down, I'll see you again,” and went over to where Jerrold was. He watched her all the way, the fingers of his right hand tight around the tumbler, and when she brushed past him and started up the steps, I tensed a little, leaning forward on the balls of my feet, because I was afraid he might make a grab at her. But he just let her go on past him without moving anything except his head; his eyes followed her all the way into the cabin.

When the screen door banged shut behind her, his head snapped around to me like a doll's on an elastic pivot, and he raised the hand with the glass in it and pointed it in my direction, and the hand shook enough to rattle the ice cubes audibly. “I don't know who you are, mister,” he said, “but I'm telling you this: Stay away from my wife. You and all the rest of them in this place, sniffing around her ass like a pack of dogs in heat. I won't stand for it much longer, you hear?”

“I hear,” I said. If I had said anything else, it would only have provoked him; he was in no condition to listen to what anyone had to say except himself.

I went along the path to where it looped into the trees again and snaked down toward the lake, and he watched me all the way, just as he had watched his wife, without moving any part of his body other than his head. Once I got into the trees I stopped looking back; but when I was far enough into them so that he could no longer see me, I stepped off the path and doubled back slowly and quietly until I had a screened view of the cabin.

Jerrold was still standing there at the foot of the porch steps, still staring off toward the empty path. Watching him stand like that, completely motionless, made me uneasy. Another full minute went by, and then, as if there had been no abnormal time lapse, he raised the tumbler and kept it raised until it was empty. Then he went up the steps and slammed his way inside the cabin.

I waited five more minutes, listening, but there was nothing to hear. Whatever was going on in there, if anything was going on, it was a quiet confrontation.

But I did not like the way this thing was shaping up. It was like watching something bubble and froth in a pot—sooner or later, unless you turned the heat down or off, it was going to boil over, and if that happened, somebody was liable to get hurt. Badly.

Four

I went down to the lake, to a shallow inlet and a small rocky strip in the open center of the horseshoe which Harry's guests could use as a bathing beach if they felt like it. It was deserted, as were the area over by the dock and the jumble of cobbles and outcroppings that marked the shoreline in the other direction. It was nearly five-thirty now, but the day had not cooled off any yet; in the hazy sky to the west the sun looked like the bottom of a brass pot. There was not a whisper of a breeze, and the surface of the lake was perfectly flat and smooth and seemed to have no depth, as if it were a piece of curiously blue-stained flatland stretched out between the foothills.

My clean shirt was already damp with sweat, the back of my neck ran with it, and despite the fact that I had rolled on some deodorant before leaving San Francisco, I could smell myself a little. I dropped down on one knee and ducked a hand in the lake. Icy cold, even on a blistering summer day like this one, because it was fed by underground runoff from snow melting at the higher elevations. Well, I had never minded cold water, and a swim might be nice; I had even remembered to bring a suit with me.

So I returned to my cabin and changed into my trunks and then came right back down again. I passed Six both ways, in the open, but there was no sign of either of the Jerrolds and nothing but silence from inside.

I had my swim, and the water cooled me off all right. But after five minutes and no more than a hundred yards of breaststroking, I started to have trouble with my breathing. I told myself it was just the coldness of the lake—and knew as I did so that that was only a part of it. A small part of it.

It's not malignant, I thought. The lesion is not malignant.

Behold, a pale horse, I thought, and his name that sat on him was Death …

I swam in and dried off with a towel I had brought from the cabin. Then I sat there on a flat rock in the sun, feeding on the heat like Winslow, the old man in Chandler's Black Mask story “The Curtain,” and after a while the chill evaporated from between my shoulder blades. When it got to be too hot—nothing but extremes for me today, it seemed—I decided I would go over to Harry's cabin and help myself to another beer.

While I was getting ready to do that the buzzing of an outboard became audible on the dry air, coming in from the north side of the lake. I looked over in that direction, and a minute or so later I could see the skiff and the two good-sized guys in it, Knox and Talesco. From the angle at which they were traveling, it looked as though they were headed for the pier. I rolled up my towel, put my shirt on, walked over to the pier, and went out along it to where the other skiffs were tied near the end. Then I plunked myself down in front of the outermost boat and tugged at the painter to bring the stern around and pretended an examination of the Johnson outboard while I watched the two of them approach.

When they got close enough for the guy at the tiller to cut off the engine and let them drift in, I stood up and gave them a friendly wave. The one on the bow seat lifted a hand slightly in what might have been a salute, but the other one didn't make any sort of acknowledgment; neither of them looked particularly cheerful, or particularly curious about who I might be.

“Hey,” I called, “need a hand?”

“No thanks,” the guy on the bow seat said, and stood up on pretty good sea legs as the skiff drifted in. He caught hold of one of the pilings and held them off and steady; then he climbed out onto the pier, tied the painter through an iron side ring while the other guy tilted the outboard up out of the water and gathered up their gear—two complete bass outfits and a waterproof tote bag, the kind you use on fishing trips to ice down beer and keep sandwiches fresh. The one who had been at the tiller handed the gear up. They worked together silently and with a good deal of precision and economy, the way two people will who have known each other for some time.

Both of them were big macho types all right, in their early forties and in fine condition, with flat stomachs and good pectoral development indicative of regular weight-lifting programs. Bow Seat had thick curly black hair and one of those fierce Prussian-general mustaches that was so black it shone with bluish highlights in the sun. Humor lines etched the corners of his mouth like hieroglyphics on a chunk of weathered stone. What I could see of Tiller's hair under his jungle helmet was thin and dark brown, and he had long bushy sideburns; his eyes were green, flecked with bits of yellow, and they were not telling you much about what went on behind them. This one looked as if he had not found anything humorous in a long time.

I said to Bow Seat, “You have much luck?”

“Some,” he answered.

“Any particular spot?”

“Nope. Lake's full of bass.”

“I'm anxious to get a line out myself.”

“You just come in today?”

“Yeah. Couple of hours ago.”

I introduced myself, and Bow Seat said he was Karl Talesco and Tiller was Sam Knox, and I shook hands with him. Knox came up out of the skiff and I gave him my hand too. He looked at it for three seconds, and I thought he was not going to take it; then he did, but for all of a heartbeat before he let loose. The green eyes did not look at me, or at Talesco. He said nothing at all.

I sensed an undercurrent of something between the two of them, and I wondered if it could have anything to do with Angela Jerrold. I said, “You're the only other guests I've met so far. Except for Mrs. Jerrold, that is.” I gave them a cocksman's leer that I hoped did not look as phony as it felt. “She's some piece.”

Nothing changed in Talesco's face; but Knox's eyes turned on me, unblinking, still not telling me anything. I had the same odd feeling you get when you're being stared at by a cat. “She's also married,” he said, and his voice sounded rusty, as if he had not used it much recently.

“Well, I know that—”

“If you got any ideas, you better forget them.”

I put the leer away. “No ideas. Just commenting.”

“Sure,” Talesco said. “Thing is, Mrs. Jerrold's old man is a flake. Jealous, very jealous. Sam was just giving you a little friendly warning—weren't you, Sam?”

Knox stopped looking at me again. “Nobody wants trouble in a nice quiet place like Eden Lake.”

“Hell,” I said, “I came up here to fish. That's all.”

“You'll get plenty of that,” Talesco said. He smiled without much humor. “Play poker, by any chance?”

“As often as I can.”

“Well, maybe we can work up a game one of these nights.”

“Any time. I'm in Cabin Three.”

“Okay,” he said, and he gave me that little half-salute again. Then he and Knox bent and hoisted up their stuff and went away along the pier.

I watched their backs all the way up into the trees and tried to analyze the meeting we had just had. But I could not get a handle on anything they had said, or on how they had acted, or on how they had reacted when I gave them the line about Angela Jerrold. It had been an odd conversation, and yet I was unable to define the oddness. The only thing I seemed to have found out in talking to them was that I cared for the situation even less now that I had met everyone involved.

When I came down to Harry's cabin at six-thirty, he was dipping thin bass fillets in a mixture of beaten eggs and lemon juice and then rolling them through a platter of cornflake crumbs. I asked him if there was anything I could do, and he put me to work washing a chilled head of lettuce and breaking it up for a salad. While I did that, and while he began to melt and lightly season butter in a skillet, I told him about my encounters with the balance of his guests and the way I felt about matters—particularly Ray Jerrold.

He said worriedly, “You think it's that bad, then?”

“I'm afraid so, Harry.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Find a way to get rid of the Jerrolds, and fast.”

“Yeah, but how? I told you about the money I owe him. He could just about push me under if he demanded immediate payment of that loan; I just can't afford to antagonize him.”

“Couldn't you soft-talk him, make him realize the only way he can be sure of his wife is by taking her away from all this temptation?”

“I tried that,” Harry said. He laid the breaded fillets into the butter in the skillet “He said the wolves were everywhere, one pack was no different than another, and he wasn't going to let any of them drive him away from a place he wanted to be.”

“And right now he wants to be here.”

“His words exactly.”

“All right, what about talking to her?”

“You mean trying to get her to take him home?”

“It's worth a shot.”

“What angle would I use?”

“You're concerned about his health, you think he ought to see a doctor. Either that, or you give it to her straight—tell her he's so jealous you're afraid he might do something irrational, and you've got your other guests to think about.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I've never been able to talk to her much; suppose I handle it wrong and she lets it get back to Jerrold? He wouldn't like it if he found out I went behind his back. Besides, if she is banging Cody or one of the others, why the hell should she leave on my request? She knows about the loan; she could laugh in my face and there wouldn't be a damned thing I could say or do.”

“I think you're going to have to risk it, Harry.”

“I wish to Christ there was another way.”

“Only one I can see is getting rid of everybody else.”

“I'd be cutting my own throat that way too.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“What if I can't get her to see it my way? Then what?”

“Why don't we cross that bridge if we come to it.”

He stared down into the skillet, brooding. “I don't want him hurting somebody in my camp, but I don't want to lose the camp either. This place is my whole life, buddy.”

I said nothing; there was nothing to say. I sympathized with him, and yet I felt none of the sense of involvement in his problem that I might have had a week ago. It was a sticky situation, and it could become tragic, but Harry would survive it all right; even if he lost the camp he would survive it. This place was not his whole life. That had been a figure of speech, meaningless at the gut level, because no place was anyone's whole life. Life was the continuing ability to function—physical and mental health. No more, no less.

At length he said heavily, “Okay. Okay, you're right I'll talk to her.”

Neither of us seemed to want any more conversation after that, and we finished making supper in silence. The buttery aroma of the frying bass filled the cabin, made me ravenous; I had not eaten anything at all today. So when we finally sat down I put away four of the fillets and two helpings of salad and five slices of French bread and two cans of beer. More than I should have eaten, or even wanted to eat. The past week, since Friday, I seemed either to want nothing at all or to stuff myself compulsively when I did feel hungry. Whatever that meant psychologically, I did not care enough to pursue an answer.

After we had cleaned up the dishes—Harry had barely touched his own food—we went out on the front porch. He fired up one of the thin brown cigars he liked, and I looked away and breathed through my mouth so that I couldn't smell any of the smoke. The sun had slipped down almost to the tops of the pines on the western ridges, and the sky around it was whitish and streaked in three or four shades of red, like a piece of linen stained with wine and lipstick and blood. The glassine surface of the lake looked as though it were on fire. It was a little cooler now, although there was still no breeze; unless the temperature dropped another five to ten degrees, sleeping was going to be uncomfortable tonight.

We had been there five minutes or so when Walt Bascomb put in an appearance. He saw us on the porch as he came past, but he did not say anything to either of us; he just went straight over to the parking circle and got into the '72 Ford. I noticed then that Cody had not returned with his Italian sports job, and that the new Cadillac was also absent.

As Bascomb took the Ford up onto the county road, I said to Harry, “That Caddy I saw when I came in—does it belong to the Jerrolds?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“Well, it's gone now, and I'm wondering if they went out together or one of them alone. He wasn't in much condition for driving, but I'd like it better if he went by himself. If she went, and stays out late, one of us ought to be around to check up when she gets back.”

He nodded grimly. “We could take a walk over to their cabin now and see if anybody's home.”

“That's probably a good idea. If Mrs. Jerrold is there alone, I'll pull an excuse to leave the two of you together and you can get that talk over with.”

But when we got over to Six, there was nothing for either of us to do. The place was deserted.

Harry said as we started back to the lake, “This whole thing is playing hell with my nerves.”

“It'll work out,” I said.

“I'm trying to believe that. Listen, I don't feel like sitting around again, waiting. What do you say we take one of the skiffs for a run around the lake?”

“Sure,” I said, “I'm for that.”

We went out onto the pier and climbed down into a skiff, Harry taking the tiller. I untied the painter and got the bow turned and pushed us out while he cranked up the outboard. Then I sat facing him on the bow seat, and we planed away to the north at quarter speed, running in close to shore.

It was the time of night that is especially fine in mountain country like this. The air was cooler yet on the water—the deep stillness broken only by the hum of the outboard and the occasional buzz of a mosquito. Bass jumped desultorily near the rule grass shoreward; the red colorations had faded out of the sky and been replaced by the kind of peach-hued glow that presages another hot one for tomorrow; night shadows gathered in the denser sections of forest. The air smelled of pine resin and cold fresh water and, faintly, gasoline.

I could feel myself relaxing somewhat as we followed the rim of the lake, north to northwest to west, headed directly toward the falling lip of the sun like moths toward the dying flame of a candle. I put my hand over the side and let it drag through the water and kick up spray, the way kids do. Harry gave me a wan smile, and I gave one back to him, and I thought then of a night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Harry and me and two nurses from Hickam Field out on a borrowed sailboat off Diamond Head a few days after the Japanese surrender, drunk on warm beer and the end of the war, capsizing when a stiff breeze came up and then getting rescued by a Navy patrol boat—and I mentioned all of that, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. He laughed and nodded, and we began to jog our memories aloud, and for a few short minutes it was as if both of us were back in our twenties, those good carefree postwar years.

Only then, suddenly, Harry stopped talking in mid-sentence and jerked a little on his seat and stared past my left shoulder at something behind and above me. He said “Jesus Christ!” and the past lost itself again and I turned on my seat to follow the direction of his gaze, saw instantly what he had seen.

It was a car—no, a van, a big one—and it was up on the bluff that rose off the southwest shore, maybe five hundred yards from where we were in the skiff; but not just on the bluff, coming forward and off the damned thing, coming right off the edge as I looked and sailing out straight as an arrow until its back wheels cleared the earth and then dipping, nose slanting down, falling at a forty-five-degree angle. The front bumper hit the hard bare slope and turned the machine in a loose somersault, and a second later the sound of impact reverberated on the dusky air; then the van crashed down on its top on the water and rule grass at the base of the bluff, spray geysering up twenty feet or more, the sound of that impact carrying hollowly across the lake. Finally it bobbed in the disturbed lake and tilted over on its passenger side and floated there like a badly wounded animal.

Even before the last echoes of the crash died away, Harry had the outboard open full-throttle and we were skimming and bouncing toward the van. I grabbed onto the skiff's gunwales with both hands, glanced back at him and saw his mouth set hard, the same astonishment in his eyes that must have been in mine. The van kept rocking gently back and forth in the swells, but the water looked too shallow at that point for there to be any immediate danger of it sinking. It was floating nearly upright now, and as we came in on it I could see that there was printing on its wet white body.

The printing said Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets: it was the same van beside which I had parked in The Pines that afternoon.

Harry brought the skiff up to it on an angle across the driver's door, cutting power, throttling into reverse to hold us steady. I stood up with my feet spread wide for balance and reached out and caught onto the door handle. When I tugged down on it, nothing happened; it was jam-locked from the fall. The window was rolled up, too, and I had to lean my body forward, bracing it against the door, to get a look inside.

What I saw put tracers of cold between my shoulder blades. There was one person inside the cab—a small nut-brown man with black hair that was dyed now a bright ugly crimson along the top of his skull. He was lying down on the floorboards, wedged between the steering column and the seat, and pressed in against his left shoulder was the upper half of an iron lug wrench.

Behind me Harry said, “Anybody in there?”

“Yeah, one guy.”

“Can we get him out?”

“Door's jammed. But it doesn't matter.”

“Why doesn't it?”

“Because he's dead,” I said.

“Jesus,” Harry said. “You sure?”

“I'm sure.” And I was thinking that both of us had been half-expecting violence to break loose at any time here in the bucolic quiet of Eden Lake; had been as prepared for it as anybody ever is. But neither of us had been prepared for it to come like this, from a totally unexpected, unrelated source, and in a way even more brutal than any we might have anticipated.

“He was dead before the van went off that bluff up there,” I said. “Somebody caved in his head with a lug wrench.”

Five

We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.

I said, “Where does that trail lead?”

“Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”

“Used much?”

“Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”

“But not around this time of day.”

“Not usually, no.”

“So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”

“If he isn't still around here somewhere.”

“Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”

“What the hell could it be about?”

I shook my head.

We walked to the trail and followed it a short way into the woods. The ground there was hard-packed, covered with pine needles, and you could not tell if another vehicle had come along it or parked on it recently. The only indications of human presence—and human folly—seemed to be a scatter of rusting beer cans and the paper wrappings from fast-food chicken and hamburgers and at least two used condoms tied off like deflated carnival balloons. Lots of things lost here, I thought grimly. Virginity, hours and nights, laughter, another unspoiled piece of nature. And now you could add a man's life to the list.

I stopped to listen, but there was still nothing to hear; the area was deserted now, all right. Then my eye caught and held on something multicolored lying on the grassy hump between the ruts a few yards ahead. I went up there and sat on my haunches and looked at the thing without touching it. It was a couple of feet long, iridescent green and gold ornamented with eyelike markings in rich dark blue—and it had no more business being there at Eden Lake than a murdered dealer in Oriental rugs and carpets.

“Peacock feather,” Harry said beside me.

“Yeah.”

“Funny thing to find in a place like this.”

“I was thinking the same.”

“Could it've belonged to whoever did for the guy in the van?”

“Maybe,” I said. I leaned down close to the feather, still not touching it. Free of dust or pine needles or water stains; colors sharp, vane smooth and new-looking. “One thing's sure—it hasn't been here very long.”

Harry frowned as I stood up, “Doesn't make much sense,” he said. “Why would anybody carry around a peacock feather?”

“Yeah,” I said, “why?”

When we came out onto the bluff again, the last reflections of sunset were gone from the lake and the water had turned a dusty gray color. The sky was a velvety purple, studded with hard un-winking stars and the fingernail slice of a gibbous moon. You could tell that it was not going to get any cooler than it was now until the hours just before dawn.

I said, “You'd better take the skiff back and report this to the county sheriff.”

“What about you?”

“I'll stay here and keep watch.”

“You sure? It'll take a couple of hours.”

“I don't mind if you don't.”

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

I went downslope with him and held the skiff while he got in, and then shoved it off. When he jerked the outboard to life, mosquitoes and gnats gliding through the heavy stillness seemed to dart away in all directions, like shards of the suddenly broken quiet. I stood at the water's edge and watched until he had the skiff turned and the throttle opened up; then I sat down in the grass to wait and think a little.

The dead man in the van, and the Oriental rug angle, and the peacock feather, made the whole thing a can of worms—the county sheriff's, not mine or Harry's. Guesswork wouldn't buy me anything, then, and I had enough on my mind as it was: the results of the sputum test, and Harry's troubles at the camp. The thing to do was to stay aloof from what had happened here.

Sure.

At the base of the bluff, fifty yards away, the van sat motionless among the rule reeds, canted forward slightly onto its passenger side; all four wheels were submerged. The white body gleamed cold and pale in the gathering darkness.

Like marble, I thought. Marble slab, marble crypt.

A feeling of uneasiness began to creep over me, and it had nothing much to do with sitting alone in the dark. I could not stop thinking about the small nut-brown man lying over there with the top of his head shattered; in my mind I could still see his face, the staring eyes and the waxy features void of life force.

I had seen death before, too much of it—kids with their bodies torn open and limbs blown off by grenades and mortar shells, a woman with forty-two stab wounds in her face and torso, the living room of a house in San Francisco's Sunset District in which a man had gone berserk and taken an axe to his wife and family. I had never become immune to the sight of it, as some cops did—that was one of the reasons why I had finally resigned from the force—but I had learned how to block it out of my mind after a while, how to keep my attitude totally objective. Death was an abstract, death was a natural phenomenon, death was inevitable; accept it, and don't think about it because it might just interfere with the living of your life. Sound psychology, the only kind that made any sense for a man in my profession.

Only now that I was in its presence again, touched by it, I could not seem to erect the old objective barrier. Death had become personal, an immediate threat, a specter with which I had to deal directly. In what was left of the small nut-brown man I saw myself in a few months, or at best a few years, lying dead somewhere, nothing but an empty shell that had once contained a man.

And what of the soul?

All of us are conditioned from childhood to believe that the souls of the righteous will live on in an afterlife and be given immortality in a corner of some inexplicable non-place called heaven. So you go along for fifty years, calling yourself a Christian even though you don't much hold with organized religion, and you hide behind your objectivity, and you tell yourself that when your time comes you'll be ready. But then the time sneaks up on you, looms suddenly and dismayingly imminent, and you realize you're not ready at all—nor maybe will you ever be ready—because when you come face to face with your own mortality your beliefs no longer seem so simple and strong and certain.

Without the unshakable faith of the True Believer, you begin to wonder. And the prospect of a disembodied, unaware drifting through eternity becomes somehow more haunting and even less appealing than the other alternative—that death is the end, and when you die your soul dies with you. Nothingness is comprehensible; every time you go to sleep you experience some of what nothingness is like. But how can you begin to comprehend the mystical concepts and rewards of the Judeo-Christian ethic?

The uneasiness grew stronger, and I stood up and put my back to the van and walked up onto the bluff again. The sky seemed immense, sentient, an oracle that knew but would never reveal the answers to life and death and infinity. I paced back and forth in the warm darkness, imagining the passage of seconds and minutes, feeling small and alone.

And afraid.

It was two hours and fifteen minutes before Harry returned with the county authorities. I heard them out on the fire road, and I went over onto the trail to meet them when they appeared through the trees, flashlights cutting away at the heavy shadows. The man in charge was the county sheriff, a thin gray man in a khaki uniform whose name was Cloudman. With him were a couple of deputies and the county coroner and a guy in plain clothes carrying a camera and a satchel of forensic equipment.

I gave Cloudman my name, and he asked me a couple of polite questions to corroborate what Harry had told him, and then they all went down to the base of the bluff to have a look at the van and the dead man inside. When they came back up, grim-faced, Cloudman asked Harry and me to wait on the fire road.

We did that, leaning against the side of a cruiser with official markings; a plain blue sedan sat there too, along with an ambulance and a tow truck outfitted with a good-sized winch and two small searchlights. The drivers of the ambulance and the tow truck stood talking in low voices nearby, not paying any attention to us. I wanted a cigarette pretty badly, and I noticed one of them lighting up every now and then; I had to force myself not to go over and ask to bum one.

After a while one of the deputies appeared and told the tow-truck guy that they were ready for him. He took the truck along the trail and out of sight, and pretty soon I could hear the sound of the winch. Bright whitish light from the searchlamps back-lit the screen of trees, silvered their upper boughs so that they looked frosted.

Harry said, “This on top of the mess at the camp—Christ.”

“Everything okay when you got back with the skiff?”

“Seemed to be. I didn't see anybody around.”

“The Jerrolds' Caddy there?”

“No. But I still don't like being away like this.”

“I guess I don't either.”

“How much longer, you think?”

“Depends. Not too long, probably.”

The winch shut down after ten minutes, and there was ten minutes of silence broken only by the low fiddling of crickets, and then it started up again. Shortly after that, Cloudman came out of the woods and signaled to the ambulance driver. When the ambulance had vanished along the trail, he walked over to where Harry and I were at the cruiser.

“Looks like murder, all right,” he said. Even though he was somewhere in his forties, he had a reedy voice with a catch in it now and then, like a kid whose voice is just starting to change at puberty; it made him seem deceptively less authoritative than he was. “Skull crushed with a tire iron, and no way it could have happened accidentally.”

Harry and I had nothing to say.

Cloudman took his hat off and dug at his own scalp with a fingernail, brought the finger down and squinted at it in the darkness, then wiped it on his trousers. “Victim's name is Vahram Terzian, resident of San Jose,” he said. “Armenian, I guess. Either of you know him or ever see him before?”

Harry said, “No.”

I said, “His van was parked in front of the General Store in The Pines this afternoon.”

“What time was that?”

“Around three.”

“You see any sign of Terzian?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Cloudman said to Harry, “You know anybody in the area has an interest in Oriental rugs, Mr. Burroughs?”

“No, nobody.”

“Same goes for the people staying at your fishing camp, I take it.”

Harry nodded.

“Uh-huh. Well, let's see now,” Cloudman said. “You didn't notice anyone on the bluff either before or after the van went off, that right?”

“That's right, yes.”

“Nor hear the sound of another car?”

“No.”

“You touch anything when you came up to have a look?”

I said, “Nothing. But we found a peacock feather on the trail over there; it seemed out of place in these surroundings.”

“I thought so myself. No wild peacocks around here that I ever heard of.”

“You find anything else that might help?” Harry asked.

“Too early to tell.” Which meant they hadn't.

I said, “Was there anything in the back of the van?”

“Nope. Empty.”

“Then it might be a hijacking.”

“Rugs and carpets?”

“Some Orientals can be pretty valuable.”

“I suppose so,” Cloudman said noncommittally. He studied me for a moment. “Hope you don't mind, but I'll have to see some identification. For my report, you know.”

“Sure.”

I got my wallet out and thought about letting him see just my driver's license; but he would probably still ask me what I did for a living, if Harry hadn't already told him. So I gave him the photostat of my investigator's license and watched while he clicked on his flashlight and read it in the beam. Behind the whitish glow, his thin face told me nothing at all of what he was thinking.

When he finished reading the license, he copied information from it into a notebook that he dug out of his jacket pocket. Then he put the notebook and his pen away and gave the photostat back to me. “So you're a private eye,” he said, and there was nothing in his tone, either, that gave me any idea of his reaction to the fact.

“Private detective, yes.”

“Like one of those TV boys, huh?”

“Not hardly. I've never been in a car chase in my life.”

He liked that: it got me a faint smile. “We don't get many private eyes up here. But then, we don't get many Armenian rug peddlers or many homicides either. Mr. Burroughs tells me you're a guest at his camp.”

“Right. I just got in today.”

“Business or pleasure bring you up from Frisco?”

“Pleasure. Harry and I are old friends.”

“We were in the South Pacific together during World War II,” Harry said.

“That so? I tried to enlist for Korea in '49, but they wouldn't take me. Asthma. Hell of a thing, asthma. Still bothers me when the weather turns cool.” He sighed. “Well, I guess that's about all for now. Getting pretty late. I'll have one of the deputies run you back to The Pines.”

“Thanks.”

“Couple of other things tomorrow, though,” Cloudman said. “One is that I'll have to send a deputy around early in the morning—talk to your guests, see if any of them might have seen something.”

Harry looked pained.

“Can't be helped,” Cloudman said. “You're the only people around here for five miles.”

“He understands,” I said. “No problem.”

“Good. Second thing, I'd appreciate it if you fellas would drop over to the courthouse in Sonora sometime after lunch. I'll have statements by then that'll need your signatures.”

“Well be there.”

He nodded and started to turn away; paused, looked at me again, and said as though in afterthought, “You don't happen to pack a gun, do you?”

“No. It's against the law in California for a private citizen to carry a concealed weapon.”

He nodded again, this time in a satisfied way, and let me see another faint smile. “Never been in a car chase, that's pretty good,” he said. “I got to remember that.” He lifted his hand and then went off toward the trail and disappeared into the woods.

Harry said, “You handled that like a politician, buddy.”

“I've had practice. Cloudman seems to be a decent sort, and plenty sharp; you don't buy anything but problems playing games with a man like that.”

“Well, thanks for not saying anything about the trouble at the camp. It would only have complicated things even more.”

“I'd have told him if it was a police matter,” I said. “Or if I thought it had any connection with what happened to Terzian.”

“My God, there's no chance of that.”

“No, I don't see how there could be.”

“Just no chance of it,” he said again, as if to reassure himself. Then, plaintively, “Haven't I got enough on my head without the police coming around?”

I knew that he was worrying about the deputy Cloudman would send out in the morning, having the people at the camp stirred up by questions about a murder, maybe losing a couple of them—and the rental revenue he needed—because they didn't like the idea of continuing their vacations in a place where a homicide had occurred and was being investigated. I said, “There's nothing to be done about it, Harry. It's police routine and out of our hands.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rubbed a hand across his face. “Christ, what next?”

“Nothing next,” I said. “Nothing else is going to happen.”

He looked at me as if he did not quite believe that.

And I wondered if I quite believed it myself …

Six

It was after one when we got back to the camp. The brown Caddy was there, and so were the rest of the cars, and there was nobody out and around. The only visible light came from pole lanterns Harry kept burning near the pier and in back by the shed and at the paths to the cabins.

We took a turn around the camp, just to make sure everything was as peaceful as it seemed. All of the cabins were dark—everybody was presumably in bed, asleep. So we called it a night in front of Number Three, and I went inside and had a shower and did not bother to brush my teeth.

I lay in the darkness and tried to sleep, but it was stifling in there. I had brought a couple of pulp magazines with me, and after a while I turned on the lamp and dug one out, a 1944 Dime Detective that I had just gotten in trade with another collector in Alabama, and started to read a story by Robert Martin. No good, I went over two pages without retaining a word of it. I shut off the light again and stared up at the ceiling and marinated in my own sweat, wide awake.

The image of Vahram Terzian—the image of death—lay vivid in my mind.

You better come to terms with it pretty soon, guy, I thought. Otherwise you're going to wind up no damned good to anybody, least of all yourself.

But how? How do you come to terms with your own mortality?

Time passed emptily. At length my thoughts turned muzzy and the image faded and I slept a little. And dreamed things that had no sense and no continuity. And woke up streaming perspiration, nerves bunched and jangling. And slept again, and dreamed again, and woke up again, and slept and woke up …

At five-thirty I gave it up and got out of bed and went into the bath alcove. I had not slept much since Friday and it was beginning to show; the face that stared back at me in the mirror had pockets under the eyes and deep clefts like a pair of parentheses at the corners of the mouth and a lot of furry gray beard stubble that gave the cheeks a look of cracked leather spotted with mold. Nice metaphor. I did not like looking at the face, and I shaved quickly and turned out of there.

It was still dark outside, but songbirds had already begun to herald the approaching dawn, Monday morning, I thought. And tomorrow—Revelation Tuesday.

I put a pan of bottled water on the hot plate, spooned instant coffee into a mug, and looked into the sack of groceries I had bought yesterday in The Pines. Salami and hard rolls that had already dried out from the heat. I had no particular appetite, but when the coffee was ready I made two sandwiches anyway and sat eating them at the table in my underwear. Bachelor's breakfast, full of nutrition. Who needs eggs and packaged cereals when you can start the day with Italian deli?

When I was finished I pulled on a pair of slacks and got my fishing gear together and went outside, down to the lake. Dawn was breaking by then, and the sky was flushed a deep magenta color. There was an aura of primitive beauty to the smooth water, to the green-black foothills and mountains that surrounded it. I stopped in the verge of the trees and stood taking it in, thinking that there was nothing quite so captivating—so utterly peaceful—as an isolated mountain lake at dawn. You could imagine a sense of oneness with the land when you saw it like this, a sense of communion with the vanished past; and you could imagine, too, if only for a little while, that the nighttime visions of death and nihilism were as insubstantial as a mirage.

I walked onto the rocky beach at the inlet; Mrs. Jerrold was standing alone at the far end, drying herself with a big yellow beach towel. She wore a white two-piece bathing suit and a white rubber bathing cap with yellow daisies on it; her skin glistened silkily in the ruddy morning light. She saw me at the same time, and flashed a smile and waved. I went over to her.

“Hi,” she said. “Going to try your luck?”

“Yep. How's the water?”

“Cold. Wakes you up in a hurry.”

“I'll bet.”

She took off the cap and shook her head and ran her fingers through the tousled layers of red hair. She was something in that bathing suit; and yet the absence of make-up made her look young and fresh and wholesome, like somebody's kid sister. Some kid sister—Eve in the Garden was more to the point.

She said, “You missed all the excitement last night.”

“Excitement?”

“Across the lake. Searchlights and everything. We looked through Karl's binoculars, and there were a lot of policemen and a tow truck and an ambulance on that bluff over there.” She pointed. “They were pulling up a car that had gone into the lake.”

“Karl?” I said.

“Karl Talesco. He's another guest.”

“I've met him, yeah.”

“I hope nobody was seriously hurt,” she said.

I nodded; I did not want to get into it with her. I let a few seconds go by, and then I said, “How's your husband today?”

Her eyes clouded and her mouth pulled into a wry frown. “Still sleeping off his drunk, I suppose,” she said. “He came back positively boiled last night.”

“Did he?”

“Yes.” She came a step closer and touched my arm, let her fingers rest there. It seemed to be the kind of natural, meaningless gesture that certain people make when they're about to express something of a personal nature; but even though her fingers were cold and light on my skin, I could feel a sudden stirring in my loins. Some women do that to you; it's like static electricity. “I think I ought to apologize for the way he acted yesterday. He's such a jealous fool when he drinks.”

“I'd already forgotten about it,” I lied.

“Well, it was embarrassing.”

“Does he usually drink so much?”

“He used to be able to handle it in moderation,” she said. “But the past few months he's been going at it pretty heavily.”

“How come?”

“Overwork,” she said. “He's got himself wound up so tightly with his own ambition that liquor is the only way he can relax—or so he thinks. What it really does is wind him up even tighter. I mean, he never used to have these jealous rages and now he flies into one if another man even looks at me twice. It worries me sometimes.”

“Well,” I said carefully, “maybe he ought to see a doctor.”

“Not Ray; he hates doctors. And he won't touch tranquilizers or anything like that. According to him, no red-blooded American needs to take dope.” She smiled sardonically. “I thought this vacation would do him some good, but it hasn't seemed to so far. I honestly don't know what to do.”

Yeah, I thought, and shifted position slightly so that her fingers slid away from my arm. I said, “Have you seen Harry this morning?”

“No, I haven't seen anyone but you since I came down for my—Oh. Speak of someone and he appears.”

She was looking past me, and I turned and saw Harry approaching from the direction of his cabin. He gave us a falsely cheerful smile as he came up. He looked a little puffy under the eyes; he had not slept much either during the night.

We made small talk for half a minute. Then, because I knew Harry had come over to have his talk with Mrs. Jerrold and wanted to get it done with before anybody else came along, I said, “Well, I'd better get moving. I want to put a line out before sunrise.”

“Try that clover-shaped patch of tules on the north shore,” he said. “Lots of bass in there.”

“I'll do that.”

“Talk to you a little later?”

“Sure. I probably won't stay out long.”

He nodded, and I said something by way of parting to Mrs. Jerrold, and then I left them and went out onto the pier. One of the skiffs was gone; I fired up a second one, swung it in a wide turn past the beach. They were standing in the same place, talking earnestly, Harry making fidgety gestures with one hand. Neither of them glanced out at me.

Fifty yards from the rule patch Harry had mentioned, I shut the outboard down and let the skiff drift languidly on the still water. It took me ten minutes to get my rod unwrapped and screwed together, the reel fitted on and a fly hook tied in place—and the first cast I made was poor enough to get the line snarled in the reeds, so that it took me another fifteen minutes to free it and replace the lost fly. When I finally did get a line out, nothing happened: no bites, not even a nibble.

I reeled in for another cast, but nothing came out of that one either. Hell with it; I tucked the rod between my knees and left it there. I was not enjoying myself much because I could not relax, could not get into the spirit of it. Too many things running around inside my head, and for the first time in my life, a vague distaste for fishing: what kind of pleasure was there in ripping up the mouth of a bass with a sharp hook, killing a living thing solely for sport? Everything had a right to live, didn't it, whether it was a fish or a man?

The sun came up and seemed to climb rapidly, bringing more heat and glaring refractions of light, robbing the air of its early-morning moistness. It was going to be even hotter today than it had been yesterday. Once, after forty-five minutes or so, I heard the buzzing hum of another outboard, saw the second skiff gliding in distantly toward the pier; there was one man in it, but I could not tell who it was. Otherwise, I was alone in absolute quiet.

At the end of an hour I still had not had a bite. I told myself that was just as well, and reeled in and broke the gear down again and cranked up the engine to head back. The excursion had been a bust; I hoped that was not how it had worked out for Harry.

Both he and Mrs. Jerrold were gone from the beach when I came in. I did not see anybody at all. Once I had the skiff tied up I went over to Harry's cabin, started up the porch, and then changed direction when I heard the sound of running water. It was coming from around back, where there was a cement laundry tray and a butcher's block on a wooden platform that Harry provided for fish-cleaning purposes.

The man working there was Karl Talesco. He was using a saw-bladed knife to bone the last of three bigmouth bass, each of them about two pounds, but he was doing it in a savage and methodical way, as if the fish were a hated enemy. Blood and scales spotted the block and his hands and the front of his white T-shirt. His lips were pulled in against his teeth and the cords in his neck bulged with tension each time he hacked down with the knife.

He did not notice me until I came within a couple of feet of him. Then he jerked slightly, snapped his head around, and scowled at me. Beads of sweat clung to his Prussian mustache; his eyes had a hard glazed look, like those on the bass heads that stared up from inside the sink.

“Christ,” he said. “You walk quiet for a big man.”

I said nothing. I was staring at the fresh yellowish bruise along his left jaw and the wide burnlike scrape on the opposite cheek.

“Don't bother asking,” Talesco said. He put the knife down, carefully, and shook himself a little, the way weight lifters do to relax themselves. “It's none of your business.”

“Sure. Harry around?”

“He went somewhere with the kid, Cody.”

“Where, do you know?”

“No.”

He looked away from me and started cleaning up after himself. Man in a hurry now—the last thing he seemed to want was my kind of company. He wrapped the bass fillets in one sheet of newspaper, the heads and tails and bones in another. When the sink was empty, he held his hands under the tap for all of five seconds before shutting off the water and reaching for the tray rack. Only there were no towels there; the rack was empty.

“Shit,” he said. He dried his hands on his Levis.

I said, “How about a poker game tonight?”

“Sorry. I've got other plans.”

“They include your friend Knox?”

That got me a fast sharp look. “No,” he said.

“Maybe you could ask him if he'd like to play—”

“Ask him yourself,” Talesco said, and caught up the newspaper bundles and stalked past me without a parting word or gesture.

I stood looking after him as he went up onto the path beyond the shed. He had obviously been in a fight, and I would have given odds that Knox had been the other one involved. Had the cause of it been Angela Jerrold? Women and money were about the only things that would make two close friends start banging each other around. Jealousy, then? Both wanting her, but only one getting next to her? Then which one? Or was it just one after her, maybe scoring and maybe only trying to, and the other had decided to knock some sense into him? But again, which was which?

Well, any way you looked at it, it spelled more trouble. This thing just seemed to keep on building, degree by degree. Both the Jerrolds had to be gotten away from here as quickly as possible, even if it meant jeopardizing Harry's position on the five-thousand-dollar loan—there just wasn't any other way. The longer we waited, the worse it was likely to get.

Seven

The sky was a glistening blue now, the rising sun laying veins of raw gold across the lake, the odor of dust beginning to permeate the air. My mouth and throat felt abruptly dry. I had not been bothered by the coughing since yesterday, but it started up again, thin and raspy, as I came back along the side of the cabin. I spat out a glob of shiny gray phlegm, scuffed it into the earth with my shoe. The taste of it lingered bitterly even after the coughing subsided.

To get rid of the taste, I went to the Coca-Cola cooler and swung the lid up—but there was no beer left, nothing except half a dozen cans of soda pop. I picked up one of them and looked at the label. It said the contents were an “imitation citrus flavored dietary artificially sweetened carbonated beverage.” I decided I wasn't that desperate and put the can back and sucked on a piece of ice instead.

Then I remembered that there were several stacked cases of Schlitz inside the shed; I got one of those and carried it out and began loading up the cooler while I waited for Harry to return. I was just putting away the last of the cans when Ray Jerrold came walking into view along the edge of the lake.

He was wearing a pair of white seersucker walking shorts and a flowered silk sport shirt. He had his head tilted down and I could not see any of his face under his fisherman's hat. His stride was quick and jerky; one hand made little fluttery gestures in front of him, as if punctuating a conversation only he could hear.

It seemed like a good idea to get a close-up look at him, an idea of his mental state today, so I stepped away from the cooler and moved toward him at an angle, hurrying a little. He did not seem to notice me until I called out, making my voice friendly and relaxed, “Mr. Jerrold—you got a second?”

He stopped then and swung his head around. When I reached him I saw that his eyes had thinned to narrow slits, like embrasures on the tight oval of his face—either in reaction to the sight of me or to the harsh glare of the sun, I could not tell which. Otherwise he looked no better and no worse than he had yesterday, although I could not see enough of his eyes behind those slits to judge how much of the wildness might be there.

He said “What do you want?” in a voice that was hoarse and flat. The odor of gin was sour on his breath, but not stale. He had been at it again today, early as it was.

“Well, I was just wondering if you're planning to go off somewhere this morning.”

“What I'm planning to do is my own business.”

“Sure,” I said carefully. “Only there was some kind of accident across the lake last night, and I understand the police will be sending someone around to talk to all of us here.”

That got me a long, silent stare. Then: “What kind of accident?”

“I'm not sure. But a man was killed.”

“I don't know anything about it.”

“I guess none of us do,” I said. “I just thought you might want to know about—”

“I've got things to do,” he said, “the hell with the police.”

“They'll still want to talk to you, though.”

“Then they can talk to me later,” Jerrold said, and pivoted away from me and went to where the Cadillac was parked and got into it. He hit the accelerator hard enough backing up to slew the Caddy around in a wide half-circle, billowing clouds of dust, nearly slamming it into the side of Bascomb's Ford. He got it braked just in time, shifted into a forward gear. The Caddy bucked, skidded slightly, came back on a point, and sailed up onto the road in a haze of reddish powder and back-spun pebbles. By the time it vanished into the screening trees, the chrome of its rear bumper glinting sharp reflections of sunlight, he had the speed up to forty and climbing.

I stood for a moment, watching dust particles settle like flakes of gold in the glare. Then I shook my head and went over to Harry's porch and sat on the steps, worrying Jerrold around in my mind, not liking the impression I had just gotten of him.

It was another ten minutes before Harry showed up, and he at least did not appear as grim as he had earlier. He gave me a thin smile and leaned against the railing and took off his fatigue cap; his hands were grimy with dirt and flecks of rust.

“You been back long, buddy?” he asked.

“A while.”

“Yeah, well, I'd have been here when you came in except for that bastard Cody. One of the pipes in his cabin sprung a leak and he had a little water on the floor when he woke up. I had to fix it right away to shut him up and get him off my back.”

I said, “How did it go with Mrs. Jerrold?”

“Well,” he said, “she went for it.”

“What did she say?”

“I laid it on the line, as nicely as I could, and she agreed right away that he's getting out of hand. She wasn't admitting any guilt on her part, but I guess it doesn't matter now whether she's been cheating on him or not. The main thing is, she's going to talk to him and get him to take her home either tonight or first thing in the morning.”

“How sure was she of convincing him?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I hope it's going to be that easy,” I said.

“You think he might not listen to her?”

“Might not, or didn't,” I said. “He took out of here a few minutes ago, and he wasn't in a good mood, or in a good condition either. He'd been into the gin already this morning.”

“Christ.”

“If he refuses to leave,” I said, “we'll have to find another way, even if it means ordering him out or putting him out bodily.”

Harry winced but did not say anything. I could tell he was brooding about the five-thousand-dollar loan.

“Got to be done, if it comes to that. The tension around here is getting out of hand.” I told him about Talesco and the fight he'd obviously been in.

“Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Mrs. Jerrold,” he said, but he sounded grim again.

“Maybe. But I don't like the odds.”

He scraped a hand across his face. “Fight explains one thing, anyway—what I found this morning.”

“Found?”

“Over on the edge of the parking area. It's been bothering me ever since, but this is the first chance I've had to mention it.”

He reached into the back pocket of his khakis, came out with a crumpled piece of cloth and handed it over to me. When I shook it open I saw that it was a plain man's handkerchief, once white but heavily stained now with those familiar red-brown streaks that can only be dried blood.

“One of them must have used it after the fight and then lost it,” he said.

I nodded and said “Yeah” and gave it back to him. He stood staring at it, gnawing moodily on his lower lip; I had the feeling he was thinking the same thing I was in that moment

This has got to be all the blood spilled here at the camp, I was thinking. We've got to make sure this is all …

The deputy Cloudman sent out was a young guy with an old-fashioned crew cut and a brisk, serious manner. He arrived a few minutes before nine, and Harry took him around to the cabins, starting with Cody in Number Two. I had no reason to sit in on the questioning, and the deputy made it clear that he felt the same way, so I left them at Cody's cabin and went to my own and got into my swim trunks. Then I lolled around in the lake and on the beach, waiting.

At ten-fifteen Sam Knox came down alone and drove off in the Rambler wagon. I did not see anybody else until Harry and the deputy returned shortly before eleven. I went over to them, but the young guy had nothing to say to me; he told Harry to ask Jerrold and Walt Bascomb to get in touch with the Sheriff's Department in Sonora when they returned—Bascomb had apparently gone off somewhere on foot, since the Ford was still parked in the circle—and then he nodded briskly and went away in his cruiser.

I said to Harry, “How'd it go with the others?”

“Not too bad. Cody made a few snotty remarks, but the rest of them took it all right. I guess there's not going to be any problem there, at least.”

“Nobody had any information, I take it?”

“No,” Harry said. “Hell, we all expected that last night.”

“Sure, but you never know.”

He sighed. “How about a sandwich? We've got a while yet before we're due for Sonora.”

“One, maybe.”

But I ate three, and paid the price for that with heartburn and gas. It was going to be another long day, all right. Another long damned painful day.

Eight

Sonora was an aged and crumbling gold country town beneath a modern façade, like an old lady proudly displaying herself after a face-lift. You got a little of the flavor of the nineteenth-century Mother Lode, but mostly the restored and newly false-fronted buildings gave you the impression of a whimsical, Disneyland kind of village, a replica rather than an authentic landmark. Washington Street was teeming with cars and with tourists dressed in garish clothing and weighted down by camera equipment. I had an idea that the founding miners would have been appalled if they could have seen it this way—but maybe that was just my mood.

The courthouse was another of the carefully modernized structures, not far from the Tuolumne County Historical Society Museum; it was just past one o'clock when Harry parked his jeep in front and we entered the annex that housed the Sheriffs Department. The annex was air-conditioned, but they had it up so high that thirty seconds after we came in the sweat on my body dried cold and clammy, bonding clothes to skin. We gave our names to the deputy on the desk, and waited five minutes before Cloudman came out, greeted us gravely, and then ushered us into a private office.

“Appreciate your coming in,” he said. In the bright artificial light of the office he looked older and thinner than he had last night. His eyes were a light gray, steady and watchful but with that hint of humor you always find in the gaze of a basically happy man.

We sat down in chairs facing the desk, and he gave us typed statements and watched while we read them over and then signed them. When I passed mine over to him I said, “Any new developments on the case?”

“Couple of things, maybe.”

“Confidential?”

Cloudman shrugged. Then he leaned back in his chair and dug a fingernail into his hair and raked it around the way he had at the lake, grimacing. “Scalp infection,” he said. “Itches like hell sometimes.”

Neither Harry nor I had anything to say to that.

Cloudman fished a sheet of paper out of a basket on his desk and studied it for a time. At length he said to me, “Ever do any work for lawyers in San Francisco?”

“Once in a while.”

“Know one named Charles Kayabalian?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“He's heard of you,” Cloudman said. “You got your name in the Frisco papers a few times, I gather.”

“A few times.”

“Well, he seemed kind of interested in you when he showed up here this morning.”

I frowned. “In what way?”

“He didn't say. Just seemed interested, is all.”

“Is he connected with Terzian?”

“Indirectly. He handles the legal affairs of a lot of Armenians in the Bay Area—couple of other rug dealers and a few rug collectors among them. Seems he's been trying to work up a criminal action against Terzian on behalf of these people.”

“What sort of criminal action?”

“Contention is that Terzian was acting as a fence for a ring of Oriental rug and carpet thieves,” Cloudman said. “Kayabalian had ears and eyes on Terzian's operation in San Jose, and as soon as he got word of the murder he drove up.”

“Why would he do that—drive up?”

“He thinks maybe the reason Terzian came to Tuolumne was to deliver a carpet stolen four days ago near Frisco. Something called a Daghestan, worth a lot of money.”

“Does he have any idea who Terzian might have been delivering it to?”

“Not a one, he says.”

“Then why does he figure that's what brought him here?”

“He had somebody watching Terzian's place, like I said. Terzian gave Kayabalian's man the slip Saturday night and disappeared. It adds up, more or less.”

Harry said, “Why would this buyer kill Terzian?”

“We don't know that he did. There's still the hijacking angle, among others.” Cloudman scratched at his scalp again, sighed elaborately, and leaned forward to splay his hands on the desk top. “Well, I won't keep you fellas any longer. You'll hold everything I've told you in confidence, now?”

Harry and I said we would.

“Probably shouldn't have opened up in the first place,” he said in a musing way. “Trouble with me, though, is that I like to talk, like to get other people's ideas on things. Not always a good trait in a police officer, I've been told, but that's how I am.”

Uh-huh, I thought, sure it is.

“Either of you come across anything more, anything at all, you let me know right away,” he said, but he was looking only at me. “I can count on that, can't I?”

He was a wily old fox, all right. He had known exactly what he was doing in opening up to us—to me, really. He wanted to know more about this Kayabalian, and he wanted to know what the lawyer's apparent interest in me was; instead of making demands, the way some cops would have done, he was using friendliness and a certain amount of candor to ensure my cooperation in the event Kayabalian got in touch with me. I admired him for that. It takes a kind of faith in human decency to operate the way he did.

“You can count on it,” I said.

In the jeep on the way out of Sonora, Harry said, “You know, I just can't figure anybody buying stolen Oriental carpets in an area like this. Everybody knows everybody else up here; if there was a rug collector around, I'd have heard about it.”

“That's a sticking point, all right,” I said.

“I can't figure a hijacking either. The odds are pretty high against any of the locals knowing a valuable carpet from a worthless one, even if they could have gotten a look inside Terzian's van.”

I nodded. “And if Terzian shook the lawyer's man in San Jose, it doesn't seem likely anybody else could have followed him up.”

“Yeah. I wouldn't want Cloudman's job on a thing like this.”

“Neither would I.”

I slid lower on the seat and tried to ignore the sour grumbling in my stomach. The sun was westering now, but it seemed even hotter than it had been on the ride in. Heat mirage shimmered liquidly on the highway. The pocked landscape had a sere look, and the high forested summits to the north and east seemed remote, black-edged; above them, a few puffy cumulus clouds appeared to sit as motionless as holograms projected on the stark curve of the sky.

When we finally came down the county road into the parking circle, the camp looked somnolent and peaceful. The only person in sight was Cody, sprawled lazily in one of the chairs on Harry's front porch. And the Cadillac was still gone.

Cody watched us come over from the circle without moving; he had his feet up on the railing, legs spread, a can of beer balanced on his tanned chest. The only thing he wore was a pair of bright blue swim trunks so tight you would have had to be blind to miss noticing that he was hung like a stallion. Sourly, I thought that that was probably fitting, considering he was a horse's ass.

“Hey, dudes,” he said in his snotty voice. “What's happening?”

Harry said, “Something the matter with the front porch on your cabin?”

Cody grinned at him. “No view from up there. Too many trees. That's the trouble with this place—too many trees.”

Harry grunted and looked at me. “Want a beer?”

“I could use one.”

“You can bring me another horn too,” the kid said.

I saw Harry's mouth tighten. “You've got legs.”

“It's too hot to move, man.”

Harry stared at him, and his eyes were sharp with anger; then, abruptly, he turned and stalked around to where the cooler was.

Cody said to me, “Guy was around looking for you a little while ago.”

“What guy?”

“He didn't say.”

“What did he want?”

“Didn't say that either. Left you an envelope, though.”

He waved in the direction of the other chair, and I went up on the porch and found a plain white envelope, sealed, with my name written on the front in a strong masculine hand. The contents turned out to be a single business card. Black embossed printing on one side said Charles Kayabalian, Attorney-at-Law, and there was an address in a building on Sutter Street, near Union Square.

Written on the other side of the card was: May I see you at your earliest convenience regarding the death of Vahram Terzian? A meeting might benefit us both. I've taken a room at The Pines Hotel.

I was hardly surprised, after what Cloudman had told me. I put the card and the envelope in my pocket and went past Cody and down off the steps. Harry appeared just then, carrying three cans of Schlitz; he gave one to me, banged a second one down on the porch railing by the kid's foot.

“Hell,” Cody said, “now I'll get a foam bath.”

Harry ignored him. He said to me, “Let's go over by the lake.”

“Sure.”

We walked across, and Harry said, “Little bastard.”

“He'll get his ears pinned back one of these days.”

“Will he? That kind never does.”

I rolled the icy can back and forth across my forehead before I pulled the tab and had a long swallow. Then I told him about Kayabalian's visit and the business card.

“You going to see him?” Harry asked.

“I might as well.”

“What do you suppose he wants?”

“Hard to tell. But he's got me curious.”

“Well, try not to be gone too long, will you, buddy? I feel a hell of a lot better with you here.”

I finished the beer and then stopped up at my cabin long enough to change into a fresh shirt. I might have saved myself the trouble. The inside of my car was like a sauna, and opening both doors and all the windows did not do much good; the shirt was drenched with sweat before I had driven half a mile along the country road.

The hot, limp stillness was becoming oppressive. Nothing moved anywhere except a hawk and what looked like a pair of ravens gliding in slow, geometric sweeps above the hillside where the old pocket mine was located. The continual flux of sun glare and tree shadows bothered my eyes, even with the dark glasses I was wearing, and I was growing damned weary of that omnipresent red dust.

When I got to the intersection with the road that ran through The Pines, I had to wait for a string of slow-moving cars to pass. And while I was sitting there I became aware of the property directly across the way—a weathered frame house set behind a long split-rail fence; I had noticed it before, coming and going, but without paying any attention to it. In the yard, I saw now, were half a dozen apple trees and an elderly woman wearing a bandanna over her head and working on one of the trees with a small battery-powered saw. But that was not all. Swaggering along the inside of the fence, tail feathers spread in bright magisterial fans, were two fat long-necked birds.

Peacocks.

After the last of the cars had gone past, on impulse, I drove across the road in a wide turn and parked on the shoulder parallel to the fence. I got out and went over and leaned on the top rail, looking at the birds. Neither of them looked back. Thirty feet away on the hard-packed earth a single feather lay glistening iridescently in the sunlight.

Beside the apple tree, the woman had shut off the saw and was standing with a hand shading her eyes, peering in my direction. After a moment she came over to where I was in a long-legged masculine stride. She was in her sixties, sharp-featured and thin-mouthed, all bone and gristle.

“Hello,” she said warily.

“Hello.”

“Something I can do for you?”

“I was just admiring the peacocks.”

“Them? Nasty strutting parasites.”

“If you feel that way, why do you keep them?”

“My late husband fancied 'em.” She smiled without humor. “Come to think of it, they had plenty in common. He was kind of a nasty strutting parasite himself.”

“Do you sell their feathers?”

That got me a narrow look. “What for?”

“Well, some people use them for home decoration.”

“Do they?”

“I think so. Like cattails or pampas grass.”

“You want to buy some?”

“No. I was just wondering if you'd sold any recently.”

“To who?”

“To anyone.”

“I got better things to do than sell peacock feathers.”

I glanced again at the single dropped feather. More to myself than to her I said, “I guess it'd be easy enough for someone to stop and pick a few up. Just reach through or climb over when there was nobody around.”

“You think so, do you?”

“It's possible.”

“Well, you just get that idea right out of your head, mister. I got dogs too. Mean dogs.”

I smiled a little. “Don't worry. I haven't got any plans along those lines.”

“No?”

“No. Sorry to have bothered you, ma'am.”

“Tourists,” the woman said, and stalked off.

I got back into the car. Probably nothing in it, I thought. Why would hijackers or potential murderers take the time to gather peacock feathers? Still, it was an angle, and worth mentioning to Cloudman.

Nine

In the village I found a parking place half a block from The Pines Hotel and made my way back to it along crowded sidewalks. The lobby was dark and mercifully cool, with pegged floors and Victorian furnishings and the largest antique roll-top I had ever seen in a corner behind the hotel desk. Through a rectangular doorway on the left I could see part of a long, narrow bar; a sign above the doorway said in old-style lettering: Gold Rush Room. Clever.

The guy on the desk wore a Western shirt, complete with green sleeve garters, and an air of professional hospitality. I asked him for the number of Charles Kayabalian's room, and he said he would see if Mr. Kayabalian was in and whom should he say was inquiring. When I said my name he smiled as if pleased by the sound of it and went to a small switchboard and plugged in. I heard him announce me; then he listened, said “Yes sir,” turned and indicated an extension phone on the counter. So I picked up the receiver on that, thinking that the attitude of The Pines Hotel was more big-city than old-fashioned Mother Lode. I could have gotten in to see the mayor of San Francisco with less ceremony.

“Mr. Kayabalian?”

One of those deep Melvin Belli voices said, “Yes. Thank you for coming. But you've caught me just out of a shower; can you give me ten minutes?”

“Sure.”

“I'll meet you in the bar if you like.”

“Fine. I'm wearing slacks and a blue knit shirt.”

“Ten minutes,” he said.

I hung up and went over through the rectangle into the bar. The walls were decorated with a lot of gold-rush paraphernalia and memorabilia: sluice pans, hand picks, a red miner's shirt tacked up like a crucifix, kerosene lanterns on iron brackets, frontier handguns in glass cases, old photographs and claim deeds and maps, a wooden grave marker with the inscription Here Lies a Lady Named Charlotte, Born a Virgin and Died a Harlot which may or may not have been authentic. There were three high-backed redwood booths along one wall, only one of which was occupied by two men working on tall glasses of draft beer. The bar itself was deserted except for a man down at the far end, and I was ten paces inside before I realized that I knew him.

Sam Knox.

He was sitting motionless, both arms folded on the bartop, staring sightlessly into a half-empty glass of bourbon or Scotch or Irish whiskey. His face was set in dark, brooding lines, and he had the look of somebody adrift inside himself, the look of a guy who has been doing a considerable amount of solitary drinking. I wondered if he had been here since leaving the camp in midmorning; I had not seen the Rambler wagon on the way to or from Sonora, or when I had driven in a few minutes ago, but he could have had it parked all along on a side street.

I went down there and got up on a stool next to him. He did not move, did not seem to know I was there. His eyes, unblinking, might have been made of dark glass. The bartender came over and asked me what I'd have, and I told him a bottle of Schlitz. I waited until he brought it, and then I made a little noise clinking the bottle against my glass and said to Knox, “Hello, Sam. Good to see you again.”

It took three or four seconds for him to react. Then he blinked once and moved his shoulders and brought his head around. Unlike Talesco, there were no marks on him—or at least none that I could see in the dim lighting. He stared at me blankly, blinked again, and finally his eyes unclouded and recognition seeped into them.

“The hell you want?” he said. The words were distinct, un-slurred, but there was a coarse, raspy quality to them, like a wood file on a piece of bark.

“Not a thing. I just came in for a beer and saw you sitting here.”

“Don't want company.”

“Drinking alone's not much of a pleasure.”

“Pleasure,” Knox said. “Shit.”

“Where's your friend Talesco today?”

“Hell do I know?”

“Well, I haven't seen him around the camp.”

He squinted at me. “No? You see her around?”

“Who? Mrs. Jerrold?”

“Yeah.”

“Not since early this morning.”

“Told him. Warned him, the stupid bastard.”

“About Mrs. Jerrold?”

“All his brains between his legs. Stupid.”

“Why did you warn him about her?”

“Stupid,” Knox said. “Never knew how stupid.”

“Has he been seeing her on the sly—that it?”

But he was not listening to me now. He wrapped one of his big hands around his glass, drained off the whiskey, slammed the glass down again. He mumbled something that I couldn't understand; then: “Stepped aside for him. Best friend, noble gesture. Bullshit.” Mumble. “Good woman, not a bitch, but she wanted him. Him.” Mumble. His face seemed to darken, although it was difficult to tell in that light, and his lips pulled into a crooked, angry slash. “Won't let him get away with it, not any of it. Fix him good this time.”

He was working himself up into a dangerous state; I thought with belated alarm: Christ, I handled it all wrong, I should know better than to provoke somebody who's been drinking the way he has. I put a hand on his arm, gently. “Take it easy, Knox—”

He shrugged my hand off and then pushed back from the bar with such sudden force that the legs of his stool tilted out from under him; the stool fell clattering. Knox staggered, threw out an arm, and I felt fingers like hooked steel prongs bite into my shoulder. He lurched into me, almost knocked me off my own stool. Flecks of saliva and the stale whiskey heat of his breath buffeted my face.

I wedged the left side of my body against the bar, shoved him off with my right shoulder, trying to steady him-but that was a mistake too. He took it as an aggression and leaned back toward me and swung wildly at my head.

And just like that, I was into it.

His fist missed me by a foot, but I could feel the wind of it: he was bull-strong. My groin knotted up and I twisted sideways and came off the stool onto my feet while he was trying to set himself for another swing. Somebody shouted. Knox swayed, made rumbling sounds in his throat, and put his head down and charged me. I side-stepped him easily enough—the liquor had made him reckless but turned his reflexes sluggish—and hit him over the collarbone with the flat of my left hand. He lost his balance, skidded into the bar, caromed off with his head jerking up to look for me, and he was wide open. I did not want to do it, but he had left me no choice; if I let this go on he would tear up the place, and maybe me along with it.

I clipped him on the point of the jaw.

I felt the shock clear into my armpit; the hand went numb for an instant. Knox's knees buckled and his eyes rolled up and he fell in a loose sprawl with his chest heaving like a bellows. But he was out. When you lay in a Sunday punch like that, you almost always put them out.

There was a dull ringing in my ears and I could hear myself breathing in a thick wheezing rhythm. The pit of my stomach felt hollow. The two guys in the booth were on their feet, and the bartender had come around from behind the plank, and the desk clerk was standing aghast in the lobby doorway; all of them were staring at Knox lying there on the pegged floor.

I said to nobody in particular, “I'm sorry it happened. He was just too drunk to know what he was doing.”

“Wasn't your fault,” the bartender said. “Hell, I should have stopped serving him an hour ago.”

The desk clerk said, “Maybe I'd better call the law.”

I shook my head and looked toward the rear of the room, where there was a closed door with lettering on it that said Restrooms. “No, I'll handle it. Have you got a rear entrance through that door?”

The bartender nodded. “Into an alley that cuts through the block.”

“Maybe you could help me carry him out there.”

“You can't just leave him in the alley.”

“I won't.”

He shrugged and came over to where I was. I flexed my right arm to get the last of the tingling numbness out of it; my knuckles had begun to throb, and I saw that two of them were scraped and bloody. I bent down and took Knox by the shoulders, and the bartender got his legs, and one of the guys from the booth went over and opened the rear door for us. We carried Knox down a short corridor and out through another door, into daylight that was blinding after the semidarkness of the bar.

The alley was narrow and unpaved and there was not much in it except weeds and a stack of crates and boxes and half a dozen garbage cans. A lizard sat sunning itself on one of the posts in the fence opposite the door; beyond the fence was a pasture with two horses and a mule grazing in it. We laid Knox down in the dust next to the hotel wall.

I said, “There'll be a man named Kayabalian in asking for me pretty soon—one of your guests. Will you tell him I'll be back as soon as I can?”

“No more trouble?”

“No more trouble.”

“Okay, then.” He went back inside and closed the door.

I knelt beside Knox, fished through his pockets until I came up with a leather key case. When I straightened again, there was a sudden fiery pain in my chest and then an attack of coughing so intense for a few seconds, tears squeezed past the corners of my eyes. I leaned against the wall until it quit.

I'm fifty years old, I thought, I've got a lesion on one lung, what the hell am I doing mixing it up in bars?

I scrubbed my face dry with my handkerchief, went slowly down the alley to one side street and looked around and did not find the Rambler wagon. But when I came back to the other side street, I saw it parked under a locust tree thirty yards down. So I got it and drove it into the alley and managed to drag Knox through one of the rear doors—it was like dragging a side of beef—and lay him across the seat. Then I backed the Rambler out of the alley, parked it where I'd found it under the locust tree. He could sleep it off here as well as anywhere else. But I kept the keys; I did not want him driving when he finally did come around.

For a moment I stood looking in at him. I had not had much time to consider what he'd imparted to me in the bar, but the implications were pretty obvious. It looked as though I had at last gotten my handle on Angela Jerrold, and that made it all the more imperative to get her and Jerrold the hell away from Eden Lake. I had suspected all along it would turn out this way; not many women with that kind of appeal to men are strong enough to resist using their power. The only thing I wondered about now was whether Talesco and Knox were the only ones. For all I knew, she had been playing the siren's song for everybody at the camp and half of The Pines.

Only it was Jerrold, poor bastard, who had listened to it once too often.

Ten

Charles Kayabalian turned out to be a tall thin relaxed-looking guy somewhere in his early forties. He had pronounced Semitic features, jet-black hair worn in a modern shag cut, a small neat mustache, and smooth skin the color of an aged walnut. Round expressive eyes gave him an ingenuous look that was probably an asset when he went up in front of a jury. You got the impression that he wore any kind of clothes as if they had been tailored for him, but that he preferred casual outfits to the more conventional suit and tie; he was dressed now in a patterned silk shirt, beige flare slacks, and suede loafers.

I found him sitting at the bar when I came back into the Gold Rush Room, and after I had introduced myself and we had shaken hands and sized each other up the way you do, he suggested that we take one of the booths; the two guys who had witnessed my brief skirmish with Knox were gone.

When we were settled in the booth he said, “The bartender told me about the fight you had. I trust everything's all right?”

“More or less. It was just one of those things.”

“People should learn to control liquor.” He got a package of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket. “Cigarette?”

Christ yes, I thought. But I said, “No thanks. I gave them up a while ago.”

“I wish I could. You don't mind?”

Politeness made me say, “No, go ahead.”

He lit one with, a gold lighter and blew smoke at the ceiling, and I began to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn't be able to smell it.

“Well,” he said, “you're wondering, of course, about my connection with Vahram Terzian, if perhaps I might have been his attorney—”

I said, “I saw Sheriff Cloudman earlier this afternoon. He told me about you and the people you represent, why you're here.”

“Oh, I see. Then he also explained about the stolen Daghestan carpet.”

“He mentioned it, yes.”

“I'll get right to the point, then. You have a certain involvement in this matter already, by virtue of having discovered Terzian's body, and you also have a rather good reputation as an investigator; I've seen your name in the San Francisco papers on occasion. I'd like to retain you in a professional capacity.”

“Retain me to do what?”

“Help recover the Daghestan.”

I had thought that might be why he'd wanted to see me. I said, “I don't think I can do it, Mr. Kayabalian.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, the Sheriff's Department has a lot of manpower, and a lot better methods at their disposal than I have; if this missing carpet is connected with Terzian's murder they'll likely turn it up. For another, the police don't much like the idea of private cops poking their noses in a homicide investigation, and the last thing I can afford to do is antagonize public officials.”

“There are parallel lines of inquiry,” Kayabalian said, “which a civilian investigator can pursue without overstepping the boundaries of his license. The county sheriff, after all, is only concerned with the murder itself, with what happened here in Tuolumne County. They can't be expected to follow potential leads to the Daghestan in places like San Jose and San Francisco.”

“I understood you already had people investigating Terzian's operation in San Jose.”

“I do, but I'm not particularly satisfied with their efforts. Look, I'm also a servant of the law; I certainly wouldn't expect you to do anything that isn't legal and ethical. Now that Terzian has been dealt a certain grim justice, my primary interest—and my client's primary interest—is the safe recovery of the Daghestan.”

“Who is this client of yours, Mr. Kayabalian?”

“I'm not at liberty to give you his name. But I can tell you he's an influential citizen of Hillsborough, with an unimpeachable reputation. You have my word on that.”

I nodded, brooding a little.

Kayabalian said, “There's something else you ought to know about him. He has authorized me to offer a reward of twenty-five hundred dollars to the person who recovers or provides direct information leading to the recovery of the Daghestan.”

“That's a pretty substantial reward.”

“It is, indeed.”

“Just how valuable is this carpet?”

“To a collector such as my client, depending on how wealthy he is and how much he might want this particular piece, it could bring anywhere from fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“That much?”

“Yes. I take it you know relatively little about Orientals.”

“Almost nothing, I'm afraid.”

“Suppose I give you a little background. I'm something of a collector myself, in a minor way, and I've studied Orientals as a hobby for several years.”

“All right.”

He paused to light another cigarette. He smoked them in short, quick drags, so that his face seemed continually wreathed in curls and wisps of smoke. It was difficult for me to keep my eyes fixed on him; the cigarette and the smoke had a kind of hypnotic effect on me. Like a reforming heroin addict looking at somebody with a nickel bag, I thought. You don't want the damned thing, only you want it so bad you can taste it.

Kayabalian said, “Several hundred years ago Daghestan was a province, under both Armenian and Persian rule, in the area sandwiched between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea—what we refer to today as the Caucasus, currently a part of Russia. Daghestan's Armenian weavers, like those in such provinces as Shirvan in the Caucasus and Isfahan in Persia, were consummate craftsmen; their work is historically among the very finest. But not many Daghestan carpets and Namazlyks—prayer rugs—dating from earlier than 1750 have survived in the Western world, for two reasons: production was small and purely functional and carpets were not made specifically for court use, as they were in Persia. They were instead handed down from generation to generation and treasured as family heirlooms; consequently most have remained in the Caucasus. The Russians, of course, guard them jealously.

“The Daghestan in question here is a beautifully preserved specimen, finished in 1709. We know the exact date because it is woven into the carpet in Arabic numerals from the Mohammedan calendar, which begins with Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina on the sixteenth of July, 622 A.D.—I'm not giving you too much academic history, am I? I tend to get carried away on the subject.”

“No, I'm with you,” I said.

“Well, my client obtained it in the late fifties through a dealer in Europe, who had gotten it from the family of an eighteenth-century British colonialist; until it was stolen, it was one of the few of its kind owned by a private individual in the Western Hemisphere. It measures eight feet three inches by ten feet seven inches and is dark red in color, with fringed edges. The center field is decorated by three beige rectilinear medallions; around the borders are mihrābs—niches of the type built into mosques to indicate the direction of Mecca—and agrabs, or scorpions, done in beige and dark blue. Can you visualize it from that description?”

“Yes.”

“As I said, it is in remarkably fine condition. Quality Orientals become more beautiful with age and gentle wear; they acquire an almost silken sheen. This one has the most brilliant sheen I've ever seen on a carpet or rug outside a museum. It must be treated with the utmost care. Exposure to direct sunlight or rain or fog, even careless folding or storage, would damage it irreparably. This is just another cause for concern by my client, as you can imagine.”

I said I could.

Kayabalian built a pyramid with his fingers and laid his chin on it. He had the look of an art connoisseur outraged by injustices which he took personally, rather than of an attorney expressing impersonal anger on behalf of a client. He said, “I think that's all I can tell you about the Daghestan. Unless you have questions?”

“Just a few related questions.”

“Yes?”

“How sure are you that Terzian actually had possession of it?”

“Reasonably sure. The modus operandi of the thieves who robbed my client is the same as that of the gang who have robbed other dealers and collectors in the Bay Area over the past three years; carpets and prayer rugs from those previous thefts have turned up more than once in the hands of individuals suspected of dealing with Terzian.”

“So you think Terzian was the regular fence for this gang?”

“I do, yes.”

“These individuals he dealt with—where are they located?”

“There are half a dozen we're fairly certain about in New York, Houston, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Los Angeles. And two probables in Fresno and San Diego.”

“Sounds like a pretty large-scale operation.”

“It was, on a one-man basis.”

“Weren't the police able to get anything on him?”

“Nothing concrete. He was arrested twice as a receiver of stolen goods, once in 1970 and once in 1972, but the charges were dropped in both instances for lack of evidence.”

“Do you have any idea at all who he might have been dealing with here in Tuolumne?”

“None at all. I was amazed, in fact, when I learned this was where he had gone from San Jose on Saturday. This hardly seems like the place where someone wealthy enough to afford the Daghestan would be located.”

“Is there any chance he kept records of these transactions of his? That would be the easiest way to get a line on his contact in this area.”

“I doubt it,” Kayabalian said. “Terzian was not the type of man to put anything incriminating on paper. It would be my assumption that he kept it all inside his head, including telephone numbers.”

“Did he have any employees—anybody he might have confided in or let something slip to?”

“He had two people working for him, a clerk and a boy who cleaned rugs, but as far as we've been able to learn, neither of them was involved in his illegal activities. He wasn't married and he had no immediate family.”

“Those employees might still be a place to start.”

“Perhaps. Does that mean you're reconsidering my offer?”

I did not answer immediately, but I was working it around in my head again. He seemed honest and forthright enough, and I had already decided that I liked his manner. And what he had said about observing legal and ethical restrictions made sense. And I damned well could use the job, even if I doubted a realistic shot at the reward he had dangled in front of me. There was still my commitment to Harry to consider, but then, that would end with the leaving—tonight or tomorrow, if everything went all right—of Ray and Angela Jerrold.

What about Dr. White, I thought, and the goddamn lesion on my lung? Suppose I have to have additional tests? Suppose I have to go into the bloody hospital? Suppose—

The hell with that, you can't start turning down jobs on the basis of intangibles. For Christ's sake, man, your work is the one thing keeping your head together.

I said finally, “I'd have to clear it with Cloudman first.”

“Of course.”

“There's another thing too. I probably wouldn't be able to get on it until Wednesday. There are a couple of things that have to be attended to first.”

He worried his lower lip. “You couldn't possibly begin sooner than that?”

“Late tomorrow, maybe, but I can't make any promises right now. I won't know for sure until tomorrow morning.”

“That's acceptable, I think. Do you want to call Cloudman now?”

“Okay.”

Kayabalian nodded and lit another cigarette for himself. So I left him and went out to the lobby and found a pay telephone booth against one of the walls. Cloudman was still in; he came on ten seconds after I told the desk officer who was calling.

I said, “I've just been having a talk with Charles Kayabalian.”

“Have you?” He sounded pleased to hear from me. “What about?”

I told him, skipping some of the details but none of the meat.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, I sort of had the idea he was going to ask you to do some work for him. Like I told you before, he was pretty interested.”

“How do you feel about my taking the job?”

“Oh, I don't have any objections, long as everybody understands his position. The more good men you have working on something, the better your chances of finding what you're looking for.”

“I won't step on your toes,” I said.

“I didn't think you would,” he said mildly. “I guess I'll be the first to hear if you find out anything interesting.”

I said he would be. Then I passed along, for what it was worth, the guesswork I had done about the old woman's peacocks, and we rang off, and I went back into the Gold Rush Room and slid in opposite Kayabalian again.

“Okay,” I said.

“No problems or reservations?”

“None.”

He gave me a wan smile. “Welcome to the hunt.”

“Thanks. How long will you be here at the hotel?”

“Until tomorrow morning; I don't have any reason or inclination to drive back to San Francisco tonight.”

“Will you be leaving before ten, say?”

“I can stay as long as necessary.”

“Well, suppose I come in and see you again around ten-thirty? I should know by then how things stand with my time.”

“Good. I'll give you a retainer check then, if you like. And I'll also have a list of pertinent names and addresses, along with anything else I can think of that you might need.”

We shook hands and said a parting, and I went outside into the dying day. It was after six now, no cooler, still windless; the sky to the west had a bloody look. In front of a restaurant down the block, near where my car was parked, somebody was ringing an old-fashioned dinner bell mounted on a wooden frame, and it was a pretty clever stunt judging by the number of tourists who were heading in that direction. But the thought of food did not appeal to me at all; I still had a touch of heartburn from those noontime sandwiches, and the business with Knox had knocked the rest of my appetite into a dusty corner.

I walked down the side street to where the Rambler wagon was and looked in through one of the windows. Knox was still there and still out; he was lying on his stomach now, with his knees drawn up and one arm hooked across his eyes. His clothing was stained in half a dozen places by dark patches of sweat.

When I turned away a small brown mongrel dog drifted over to the car and sniffed at the rear tire and then lifted a leg and cut loose like a water pistol. I thought that maybe there was a certain small irony in that, but I did not feel much like pursuing it. Wearily, I started through the heat toward the hollow pealing of the dinner bell.

Eleven

When I got back to the camp, Jerrold's Caddy was slewed in at an angle between the jeep and Walt Bascomb's Ford. I went over to it and looked in through the open driver's window, but there was nothing to see except an empty pint bottle of gin lying on the seat The upholstery reeked of alcohol.

Too damned much drinking going on around here, I thought, not for the first time. It's like pouring oil on burning waters.

I walked to Harry's cabin, started to call out for him, and then heard the buzzing of an electric drill cut through the stillness from around where the shed was. Harry was inside there, working over part of an outboard engine clamped in a vise; but he shut the drill off quickly when he saw me. His expression had relief in it, the tentative kind—you think things are going to be okay but you're still not quite certain of it.

He said, “Jerrold agreed to leave; the two of them are packing out in the morning.”

“She tell you that?”

“Yeah. Jerrold came back about an hour ago, and she hit him with it right away; then she came over to tell me.”

“She say what his reaction was, exactly?”

“Just that he seemed to think going back to L.A. was a good idea. She sounded a little surprised herself. I just hope he doesn't change his goddamn mind when he sobers up.”

“You see him when he got back?”

“Just for a minute.”

“Talk to him?”

“I tried, but it didn't do much good.”

“How drunk was he?”

“About as drunk as you can get and still function.”

“Any idea where he was all day?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Where is he now? At their cabin?”

“Sleeping, she says. Meaning passed out.”

“Well, I'd like it better if they were going tonight.”

“So would I, but I couldn't see pushing it.”

“No, I guess not.”

“If he stays passed out, it won't matter.”

“If,” I said. “Everything else all right?”

“Quiet, yeah. Talesco's the only other one around.”

“Talesco's the wrong one to be around,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“She's been playing around with him, Harry.”

He scowled. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“How'd you find this out?”

I explained about my conversation with Knox at The Pines Hotel, about the fight and what I had done with Knox afterward.

“Christ,” he said. “I thought the two of them had more brains than that.”

“Brains doesn't have much to do with a thing like this.”

“Well, I ought to send them packing too.”

“That's up to you.”

“You going to talk to Talesco?”

“Somebody's got to go in after Knox.”

“I mean about Mrs. Jerrold.”

“No. There's no point in it. And I don't think you should either, at least until after the Jerrolds are gone.”

“I won't, don't worry.”

He picked up the drill again, and I left him and went out and up along the path, past my cabin to the one which Talesco and Knox shared. The porch was deserted; I climbed up and knocked on the screen door, and pretty soon Talesco appeared and stared at me through the mesh with narrowed eyes. He did not look particularly happy to see me, and his voice was surly when he said, “What is it?”

I was in no mood for game-playing. I took the keys to the Rambler wagon from my pocket and held them up where he could see them. “Recognize these?”

He opened the door and came out onto the porch. His hair was mussed, as though he had been napping, and he was bare-chested; sweat matted the thick growth on his chest and stomach, put an oily gloss on the muscle-ridged skin of his shoulders. The bruise on his jaw had darkened so that it looked like a blue-black smudge.

He said, “Where the hell did you get my keys?”

“I took them off Knox in The Pines.”

“Took them off him?”

“That's right. He was drunk in the hotel bar and we had a little misunderstanding. I had to clip him.”

Talesco said “You clipped Sam Knox?” as if he could not quite believe it.

“Yeah. I also got him out of there and put him in the Rambler to sleep it off; otherwise he'd probably have been arrested. But I didn't care for the idea of him driving when he came around, so I took the keys.”

You could almost see him revising his opinion of me; something that might have been respect came into his eyes. “What was the misunderstanding about?”

“Suppose you ask Knox.”

“He all right?”

“He was the last time I saw him. If you want, I'll run you in so you can pick him up.”

“Why should you bother to do that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “You want the ride or not?”

“Yeah. Let me get a shirt.”

I waited while he did that, and then we went down and got into my car and I took it up onto the county road. Talesco did not say anything for a long while; he just sat against the passenger door, staring moodily through the windshield. Then, when we were a mile or so from the village, he turned and looked across at me.

“Knox say anything to you before you had the fight?”

“About what?”

“About why he was drinking—about me.”

“What do you think he might have said?”

Talesco shook his head. “We had a punch-out too last night,” he said abruptly. “He's the one gave me these lumps.”

“I gathered as much.”

“Yeah. He kicked the crap out of me.”

“You don't sound very bitter about it.”

“I'm not. I deserved it.”

“Oh?”

He brooded for several seconds. “Man turns forty, he gets set in his ways, he doesn't know how to live his life any different and he doesn't like the idea of having to change it. You know what I mean?”

I frowned slightly. “I suppose I do.”

“Only something happens,” Talesco said, “and he gets himself in a situation where he's got to start living another way pretty soon. It scares him, thinking about it—and all of a sudden he doesn't know what the hell is right or wrong and maybe he does something stupid.”

This was a new tack, and I could not quite tie it up with anything Knox had told me or anything I had surmised from the information. I said, “Like what?”

“Like hurting people he cares about.”

“Knox, you mean?”

“Among others.” Talesco ran fingertips over the bruise on his jaw. “He's a hell of a guy, you know; we been friends and partners for twenty years. That's a long time, twenty years.”

“Too long to let one mistake break it up,” I said.

“I been thinking that all day,” he said.

I decided to prod him a little. “Maybe you ought to think about this change in your life too.”

“I already have, I've done too much goddamn thinking about it. I've got to see it through.”

“At the expense of a friendship?”

“No, because of it. And because I guess I want it that way after all.”

He fell silent again, and I could not think of a way to draw him out short of asking him bluntly for an explanation. So I let it go; there was nothing to be gained in making waves.

When we got into the village and onto the side street I made a U-turn so I could park directly behind the Rambler. Talesco and I stepped out and walked over to look inside. Knox showed no signs of having come around, except for a crust of vomit on his chin and a puddle of it on the floorboards. He was lying on his back, curled up with his knees against his chest.

“Jesus,” Talesco said. He unlocked the driver's door and rolled down the windows to let some of the smell dissipate.

I said, “If you want to follow me back, I'll give you a hand with him at the camp.”

“No. You go ahead, I can handle him.”

“You sure?”

“I can handle him,” he said again.

He seemed a little embarrassed now, as if seeing Knox had made the whole thing too painfully personal to share with an outsider; he dismissed me with a glance, went to the rear and opened the door there and fished out a blanket. I slid back into my car. When I swung out past the Rambler he was leaning inside, doing something with the blanket, and he did not look up.

At Eden Lake, the sun was just settling down behind the trees on the western ridge and the sky in that direction had a smoky brick-colored flush. There was still no sign of a freshening breeze. A jay screamed monotonously somewhere within the camp, and you could hear the sporadic singing of crickets; nothing else disturbed the evening hush.

Harry was no longer working inside the shed; there were lights on inside his cabin, but I did not feel much like company. I took a beer out of the cooler and up to my cabin, and it was stifling inside. Even the mosquitoes and the gnats were better than breathing that thick, stale air; I shed my shirt, turned on the porch light, and sat out there with my beer and one of the pulp magazines I'd brought.

Night shadows had begun to deepen now, and the sky slowly lost its color. Moths fluttered in the orange porch light; a mosquito raised a welt on my left forearm and got itself crushed for the effort. The stillness was so intense that I found myself listening to it—and the more I listened and the darker it got, the more I felt a return of the edginess I had had last night. Unwarranted feeling maybe, but it would not go away.

To occupy my mind, I opened the pulp to the lead novelette and made myself concentrate on the words. The story dealt with a fast-talking, bourbon-guzzling private cop hired by a sexy blonde to get back half a million dollars' worth of stolen jewels, and in the space of five thousand words the Eye committed an act of felonious breaking-and-entering, got slugged, threatened a janitor he believed to be concealing information, withheld evidence in a murder case, insulted two cops, and killed a hired gunman in a shoot-out. I began to get irritated with all of this nonsense, and when the hero left the dead gunman on a city street and went off without reporting the incident, I closed the magazine and put it aside.

I had always gotten a laugh from the antics of pulp detectives, but lately they seemed more silly than engaging. Sexy blondes, withholding evidence, committing felonies, shooting hoods—what did any of that have to do with the verities of a private investigator's life? Verity, for Christ's sake, was a man with his head horribly crushed, and a puddle of vomit on the floorboards of a Rambler wagon, and a thing that might be malignant growing on one of your lungs.

Funny. You grow up reading the pulps, and they fascinate you, you can't get enough of them; the heroes are all larger than life, all champions of the purest form of justice, all invincible. You'd like to emulate them in spirit, you think, and as a result it's only natural that you go into police work and stay with it diligently for twenty years, and then one day you realize for a number of reasons that you can't take it any more and you decide to open up a private practice. So you become, in the end, an Eye just like the fictional Eyes of your youth—a real-life Carmady/Dalmas/Marlowe, a living Spade, a breathing Race Williams, a walking Max Latin and Jim Bennett. You don't have any illusions about living their kind of fantasy lives, of course; you don't expect excitement and thrills and women throwing themselves helter-skelter into your bed. You're aloof from all that. You sit back and smile knowingly. You're superior, because you're dealing with reality, and for the most part reality is pretty dull. The only thing you have in common with your fictional counterparts is a profession and an outlook on life that has turned a little jaded by the things you've been forced to deal with.

Everything goes along smoothly enough until, in your middle forties, you get yourself involved with a woman named Erika Coates. For the first time in your life you think that you might be in love, but of all the people in the world you should not fall in love with, it is Erika. She hates your profession, she considers it shabby and pointless—and worst of all, she begins to tell you that you're living and have been living a lie. Your world doesn't exist, she says, and never did; you're a kid who never outgrew an era twenty-five years dead, a kid dreaming about being a hero but without the guts or the flair to actually be one. You're a little boy, she says, and she can't compete with the obsessions of a little boy.

And then, inevitably, she walks out of your life and leaves you alone again.

But her words linger on, preying on your mind. You begin to ask yourself if maybe she was right, if maybe it all was and is a lie, a lifetime of hollow dreams and childish pursuits, a game without meaning, a fiction of your own creation. You refuse to believe it; you push it away from you and you go on believing as you have for all those years, you tell yourself you can go on that way forever.

Only forever turns out to be tomorrow, and tomorrow might literally bring a sentence of death, and you start wondering again if she might have been right and it all really is such a useless, useless He …

Abruptly I got up and went inside and made a thick sandwich I did not want from the last of the salami and rolls. I stood there eating it, washing down the mouthfuls with slugs of beer, listening to the silence.

Thinking of Erika again for the first night in a long while.

Four years since I had seen her. Where was she now? What was she doing? I had thought about calling her dozens of times during the first year, but I could never quite bring myself to it; and of course she had never called me. Once love dies, there is nothing but ghosts—and even ghosts fade away after enough long nights have passed.

What would she say if she knew about the lesion on my lung? I-told-you-so? She had spent half of our time together trying to get me to give up smoking along with my profession; see a doctor about your cough, you're a middle-aged man and you're susceptible to diseases at your age. Yes—and now she would probably pity me. Nothing but pity, and I had enough of that of my own.

Well, I didn't need Erika or anybody else. I had existed alone for one half of a century, fifty years that were not a goddamn lie, and I could die alone, too, and when I died—

When I died.

Pulp detectives never die, I thought. They live on in the yellowing pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective and a hundred others, in anthologies and collections and on microfilm. As long as there are people who read, Spade and Dalmas and the rest of them are immortal. They'll go on for centuries shooting hoods and laying blondes and breaking laws with total impunity—and was that, Jesus, was that what I had been after all along?

To become by emulation that which never dies?

Dangerous thinking; I could not handle it, not now, not on the night before I was to learn the results of the sputum test. Go do something, damn it, I told myself. Patrol the camp, take a long swim to make yourself tired enough so you can sleep. Shut the mind down, let the body take over. Hang in there, you'll be all right.

Just hang in there.

I threw the last of the sandwich and the empty beer can into the sink, went into the bath alcove, put on my trunks and a shirt, and got out of there.

Twelve

There were lights on in Cabin Four, and the door was open and I could see Talesco moving around inside as I passed. I kept going without pausing. When I came out of the trees near Five, though, I slowed and then stopped because the cabin was dark and the door was closed, and I found myself thinking that I had not seen Bascomb anywhere around the camp since yesterday afternoon, that he had not been here when the deputy came this morning, and yet his Ford had been parked in the same spot through the day. Odd that he wasn't back by now, after dark, if he had gone off somewhere on foot.

But then I shrugged and pushed the thought away. Harry had said Bascomb was something of a loner; maybe he had spent the day painting or sketching, and had decided to stay on to do a moonscape or commune with the stars or whatever. One of the dangers of getting yourself involved in the sordid little dramas of others was a tendency to let your imagination manufacture intrigues where none existed. I had always had too damned much imagination for my own good—and maybe I owed that to the pulps, too.

The porch light was burning on the Jerrolds' cabin, but the interior was dark; the faint whispery strains of radio music drifted out through the screen door. So maybe Jerrold was still sleeping it off, and Mrs. Jerrold with him. And maybe it was going to be a nice peaceful night and everything would work out tomorrow the way Harry and I hoped it would.

I carried that thought with me down to the lake and onto the beach—and lost it when I saw the two people sitting with their heads together like a couple of conspirators, or a couple of lovers, in the shadows up near the trees. There was a flash of white as one of them moved and then a deep lazy rumble of laughter from the other one. Mrs. Jerrold. And Todd Cody.

Well goddamn it, I thought, and veered up toward them. They could see me clearly enough, silhouetted against the lake, but neither of them moved as I approached. I told myself to take it easy, keep things light and affable, but there was a knot of anger in my chest; I slid my hands into my pockets to keep them from clenching.

They were sitting on a flat outcropping of rock, bare shoulders touching, and Mrs. Jerrold had her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms folded under her breasts so that they bunched up like a couple of half-peeled melons inside the white halter top of her bikini. Cody was in that skintight bathing suit of his, a towel draped around his neck. His expression was insolent, and the smile on his mouth had a fox-in-the-henhouse leer to it.

Mrs. Jerrold's smile was more tentative. “The water's lovely,” she said. “We've just been in.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. God, it's muggy, isn't it.”

“Too muggy for anything but swimming.”

She nodded, but Cody took it the way I meant it and let me hear his snotty laugh. “That's not necessarily so,” he said. “Look at that moon, that lake—it's a perfect night for making love.”

“You're a romantic, Todd,” she said.

“Sure. One of the last romantics in a world of cynical pragmatists.”

I said nothing; I did not trust myself to say anything just then.

Mrs. Jerrold shifted slightly on the rock. “Todd's invited me to his cabin for gin and tonic,” she said to me. “Why don't you join us after you've had your swim?”

“He doesn't look like the gin-and-tonic type,” Cody said, and he was mocking me. He was young enough to be my son, and he was sitting there mocking me with another man's wife.

I said tightly, holding onto my temper, “No, I'm not the gin-and-tonic type. I'm the beer-and-pretzels type. And I'm not a romantic, I'm a cynical pragmatist. Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold.”

“Angela—please?”

“Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold,” I said. Then, pointedly, “How's your husband doing tonight?”

“Oh, well, he's … sleeping.”

“That's probably a good idea, don't you think? I understand you're leaving tomorrow; you've got a long drive ahead of you.”

“That's true. But it's so hot…”

“Gin only makes you hotter,” I said.

Cody had stopped smiling; he got up on his feet and narrowed his eyes at me. “If Angela wants a gin and tonic to cool off, man, that's her business.”

“It might be her husband's too,” I said. “He's the jealous type, or haven't you noticed?”

“What the hell are you, her father?”

“Stop it, Todd.” She sighed softly and stood up. “Ray can be awfully jealous, you know, and it is getting late. I'd better get back.”

“Hell, Angela—”

She patted his arm. “It was a nice swim, wasn't it?” she said. “Good night.” Then she gave me a thin, pouty look, but not the good night, and left the two of us alone.

Cody took a step closer to me and shoved his jaw out belligerently. “I don't like people sticking their noses in my life, man,” he said.

“That's too bad, man.”

“Maybe you're jealous yourself, huh? You'd like to make it with her but you haven't got the tools, so you screw it up for somebody who has.”

I brought my hands out of my pockets. “Listen, I've had about all of your mouth I can stand. Suppose you button it the hell up.”

“I don't have to take crap like that from you.”

“All right,” I said, “don't take it.”

But he was not going to get into anything with me, any more than he had wanted to get into anything with Jerrold yesterday. He was all mouth, the kind of guy who goes through life blowing in the wind and then backing away when the blowing threatens to push somebody over on him.

He pulled his lip into a sneer and said, “Another big macho,” and then pivoted away from me. After half a dozen steps I heard him mutter, “Fat old bastard.” He said it louder than he'd intended and he threw a quick, half-furtive look over his shoulder to see if I had heard. I stayed where I was, silent. He lifted the towel from around his neck, walking in a slow swagger, and flicked it back toward me in what was probably supposed to be a gesture of contempt.

I stood there seething. Fat old bastard, I thought. Fat. Old. Bastard. I looked down at myself, at the way my stomach bulged over the waistband of my trunks, at the gray snarls of hair that grew on the bulge. Fat old bastard.

Well all right, I thought then, savagely. I threw my own towel down and took off my shirt and went to the lake and waded out a few steps and dove in. It was plenty cold, cold enough to leave me gasping when I surfaced, but I was not going to let that affect me; I splashed around until I got used to it and finally began swimming in a hard steady crawl—fifty yards out and back, sixty yards and eighty and a hundred. When the complaint in my lungs became too severe, and my legs and arms started to stiffen up, I rolled over and floated on my back and stared up at the curved slice of the moon, resting.

I was still angry.

But not so much at Cody, now, as at Angela Jerrold. What made a woman like that tick? The feeling of power? The need for constant attention? Sex itself? Or was it simply that she was a man-hater—string them along and then sit back and watch them emasculate themselves over her? Whatever it was, she seemed to be the kind who can keep on getting away with it, who foment disaster wittingly or unwittingly and walk away from it untouched.

Well, there was nothing I could do about it. You can't change human nature and you can't live other people's lives; all you can do is turn your back on it at a distance, worry about your own problems. Clichés, every one—but a cliché is really nothing more than a statement of well-known fact. Right? Right, you fat old bastard?

I rolled over again and swam a while longer, but the anger still would not go away, nor the feeling of uneasiness; the only thing that went away was the last of my strength. I paddled in and rubbed myself down with the towel, and wondered if I was tired enough to sleep now, and knew that I wasn't. I sat down on the outcropping of rock and listened to the crickets and swatted mosquitoes.

And wanted a cigarette for the first time since last night. Badly.

Just hang in there…

Despite the heat, I began to feel a little chilled from the iciness of the lake water. Maybe Harry wants to play a few hands of gin rummy, I thought, and got up again and went up the path through the trees. The porch light on the Jerrolds' cabin was out now and the radio was silent. Small favors. I padded on among the dapples of moonlight and shadow.

Fifty yards from Cabin Five, I heard the sharp slap of a screen door closing. It came from Bascomb's cabin, and I thought: So he finally got back—and did not think anything else about it until I came out in front of the place. Then I saw that it was still dark, although the door behind the screen was now standing partially open; the area was wrapped in stillness. I stopped as I had on the way down, frowning, and stood looking over there.

When a man comes back to his cabin, I thought, he turns on a light somewhere, he doesn't just rattle around in the dark or jump straight into bed. So why didn't Bascomb put a light on?

Maybe he hadn't come back at all, maybe he had been inside there all along and decided to go out. But then, why hadn't I seen him or at least heard him on the path? Because he went the other way, deeper into the woods? There was no path back there and the growth was pretty thick for late-night strolling.

I waited another thirty seconds. Silence, darkness. Come on, I told myself, what the hell difference does it make where Bascomb is and what he's doing? He's not with Mrs. Jerrold, that's all that concerns you.

But the edginess had sharpened now inside me, and the stillness seemed unnaturally acute—and I stopped fighting my impulses and walked slowly across the open ground between the path and the cabin. I climbed up onto the porch, not trying to be quiet about it, and put my face close to the screen. Blackness, the vague shapes of furniture; there was nothing else to see.

“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.

If Bascomb hadn't been involved in Terzian's death, or with the stolen Daghestan, things became infinitely more complicated. What, if anything, did his apparent disappearance have to do with the fence's murder? Where did the sketch fit in? Who had I chased into the woods tonight? Who else among those staying here—if my hunch had any basis in fact—was guilty of or a party to homicide and the receiving of stolen Orientals?

Jerrold. On the positive side, he lived in Los Angeles, a place where stolen art objects are bought and sold all the time, a place where Terzian had had some of his previous dealings; he was wealthy enough to afford such a thing as a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old Daghestan; he was unstable and prone to violent reactions. On the negative side, however, he was not the type to be interested in rugs and carpets—a hard-core business executive—and what was tearing him up inside was also the sole focus of his existence, as far as I could see: ambition, and a wife who was undoubtedly cuckolding him left and right.

Knox. Talesco. Kayabalian had mentioned that another of the places where Terzian had contacts was Fresno, and Fresno was where the two of them were from. A freight line was a pretty good cover and a pretty good means for the transportation of illegal and stolen goods; being a collector did not have anything to do with that kind of operation. There was also the way the two of them had been acting—the rift between them, the odd things Talesco had said to me earlier in the day. But both of them seemed to be plodding, unimaginative, up-front types, the kind that conduct their business in an office or over a drink in the back room—not on a deserted bluff while they were in the middle of a fishing trip; and both of them were strong as bulls, they would each be more likely to use their hands than a tire iron if they wanted to kill somebody.

Cody. Looking at it one way, he had a rich father who spent a lot of time in Europe, where there was a thriving market among collectors of rare art. Looking at it another way, he was forced to live on remittance, to come to places like this camp that he hated, and he seemed to be the kind of pseudo-smart, cocky kid who might get himself involved in illegal enterprise in order to get out from under his father. He lived in Vegas, too, not only a rich town but one full of Mafia types, if you could believe the media—and you probably could. The Mafia had a hand in everything; why not stolen Orientals? And yet Cody was a coward hiding behind a bluff exterior, and I could not quite imagine him working up the kind of reverse courage it takes to kill another man face to face, even in a blind rage.

Maybe yes, maybe no, on all of them. Which put me right back at zero.

Okay then, what about the peacock feather? Did that point to anyone at the camp? But I drew another blank there. I could not make any further connections beyond the house in The Pines, the peacocks, and the feathers inside the fence that anyone using the county road to and from Eden Lake could notice and pick up unobserved.

I thought about the Daghestan itself, making the assumption that it had been in Terzian's van last evening. If Bascomb was the murderer, and took the carpet, it could be anywhere. But everyone else was and had been accounted for at least most of last night and today; not much chance for any of them to transport it out of the area. It was a pretty big carpet, from Kayabalian's description, too big to hide in places like the trunk of a car, too conspicuous to leave inside a cabin where someone might chance seeing it. And you could not conceal it in the woods or somewhere else out in the open because of the risk of damage. So what could you do with an eight-by-ten-foot carpet in these surroundings? Where could you put it so that you'd be reasonably sure it was safe and well hidden and easily accessible when you wanted it again? Here at the camp? In The Pines? Where?

It was no good, none of this was getting me anything but a headache. There were too many questions unanswered or unanswerable, too many possibilities and not enough facts. What I had to do was to lay it all in Cloudman's lap tomorrow morning, when I drove into The Pines to see Kayabalian and take care of the other thing, the phone call to Dr. White in San Francisco. Let him work with it and pull it together or toss it out. All I could do myself was what Kayabalian was paying me to do—try to trace the Daghestan to somebody by working backward from the other end, from San Jose and Terzian's associates. And that seemed even more futile now, if I was right with this damned nagging hunch.

It was getting to be hot in there with the front door closed, and I got up and cracked the window above the bed. Then I took a lukewarm shower and shut off the lights and stretched out naked to wait for sleep.

But in the darkness, without the speculations to occupy my mind, it was the fear and the uncertainty—the specter of death—that crept back into me instead. Tomorrow. Tuesday. The day of the big answer: malignant or benign. And I was still no more prepared to accept it than I had been yesterday or last Friday.

Is life reality? I thought. Or is death reality? Riddle me that, too.

After a while sleep did come, but it was the same kind of shallow, fitful sleep of the night before and all the nights since I had found out about the lesion. Dreams, waking up from time to time slick with sweat, breathing labored because of the heat. No rest for the weary. No rest for the condemned?

A long time later, thin hazy light filtered in through the window and pushed at the shadows in the room.

Tuesday morning coming down…

Fourteen

The first thing I did when I left the cabin a few minutes past dawn was to go over to Four and have another look through the screen. Bascomb had not come back during the night, and neither had anyone else; everything was just as it had been before. I went around to the east side and wandered along there and in among the trees, looking for some sign that might point to the identity of the intruder. But there was nothing to find except sections of trampled underbrush. I gave it up finally, not without reluctance, and walked down to the lake.

Ray Jerrold was out on the pier, kneeling there and holding onto the painter on one of the skiffs while he loaded the bow with fishing tackle.

I did not like that one bit. I went out there, making myself walk at a leisurely pace, and when he heard me coming he swung his head around and up in a startled way, like a kid caught doing something furtive. The skin across his cheekbones had a waxy, blotched appearance, and there were dark half-moons under both eyes. I could see the eyes clearly today; they were haunted, evasive. A knotted muscle jumped at one corner of his mouth, pulled it up and down in rapid tempo like a mime burlesquing somebody's speech habits. All of it screamed hangover and inner turmoil.

“Morning,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, and watched me warily, as if he thought I might jump him.

“Going out fishing?”

“No,” he said, “bear hunting. You're not blind, are you?”

“Well, I heard you were leaving today, going home.”

He did not say anything for a moment, and I was afraid he was going to turn ugly again, as he had on Sunday; I could feel myself tensing. But then he shrugged, and one corner of his mouth quirked upward in a smile that was almost sly.

“That's right,” he said, “we're leaving, both of us,” and the smile seemed to say: So you won't be able to get your hands on Angela any more, none of you will. “I want to get out on the lake one last time, land a couple more bass.”

I let myself relax. “I can appreciate that,” I said.

“You heading out too?”

“I don't think so, not this morning.”

“Not going to give me any competition, huh?”

“Not me,” I said.

He laughed, and it sounded like genuine mirth. He stood up, tugged at the waistband of his shorts; his eyes danced from the skiff to the northern reaches of the lake and then back to me again. “Hold the painter for me, will you?”

“Sure.”

I took it from him, held it so that the bow stayed butted up against one of the pilings. Jerrold clambered down into the skiff, got himself settled on the stern seat, and motioned up to me to drop the line. When I had done that he reached forward and opened up his tackle box and hauled out a thermos. It might have had coffee in it, and it might have had something else; I couldn't tell; he unscrewed the top and raised it and drank straight from the mouth.

“I won't be gone long,” he said then, as though warning me. “Got a lot of things to do today. Police want to see me in Sonora, you were right about that.”

I nodded, watched him put the top back on the thermos and replace it in the tackle box. And then I threw him a curve to see what he would do with it. “You wouldn't happen to have seen Walt Bascomb around, would you?”

He did not do anything with it; he heard me all right, but he neither acknowledged the question nor answered it. Without looking at me, he reached around and jerked the outboard into stuttering life.

“Mr. Jerrold? About Walt—”

I did not get the rest of it out because he had already hit the throttle and was backing the skiff away from the pier; as far as he was concerned, I was no longer there. Then he hit the throttle again and swung off to the north along the shoreline.

I stood staring after him until he and the boat blended into a dark speck in the distance, like a smudge on tinted glass. You could make something out of his ignoring the question about Bascomb, or you could chalk it up to simple neurosis. No way of telling which one—no way of telling any damned thing at all, it seemed.

It's not up to you, I told myself again. The only thing that's up to you right now is seeing to it he goes away from here without trouble.

I went back along the pier. As I came down off it I noticed that over in the parking circle the rear door of the Rambler wagon was standing open and there was somebody working inside. I started in that direction, saw a bucket of soapy water on the gravel near the door and then Sam Knox's head raise up into view. Cleaning up the vomit, I thought, and grimaced a little—and he pulled back out of the car in that moment, to dip a rag into the bucket, and turned his head and saw me.

He straightened up away from the door, shoulders jerking slightly, his face closing up in a pained way; but there did not seem to be any tension in him, as there would have been if he were harboring a grudge over what had happened in the hotel bar. I came to a standstill, and we stood looking at each other across thirty feet of ground, Knox twisting the wet rag back and forth in his big hands. I could not think of anything to say to him.

Ten or twelve seconds went by; then he dropped the rag into the bucket and walked over to me in hesitant stride. The hangover he was suffering was as apparent as Jerrold's—blotchy features, red-veined eyes, cracked lips.

“How's it going?” he said.

“All right.”

“Look, I, uh, I'm sorry about yesterday.” He seemed to have to force the words out; he was not the kind of man to whom apologies came easy. “I was shit-faced, that's all, I didn't know what I was doing.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It happens.”

“Yeah, well, I owe you for getting me out of there, keeping me out of trouble with the cops. Talesco told me about that.”

“You don't owe me anything. It's water under the bridge.”

He nodded as if relieved at the way I was reacting to his apology. Then, abruptly, he said, “Talesco and I are heading home this afternoon.”

“Oh?”

“Best thing for both of us—you know?”

“That mean you've patched it up between you?”

“Maybe, yeah. We've done some talking.”

“Glad to hear it.”

He looked past me toward the lake. “Anything I might have said yesterday—it was just drunk talk. We forget that too, huh?”

“Sure.”

There was a brief awkward pause. Then he gestured loosely toward the Rambler and said, “Well…”

I said, “You see anything of Walt Bascomb yesterday morning, or when you went into The Pines?”

He blinked, but that was all. “Bascomb?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No,” he said. “Last time I saw him was Sunday night.”

“When Sunday night?”

“Around dusk. I was down getting a beer and he came back in his car.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Said hello. He stopped to get a beer too.”

“What did he do then?”

Knox shrugged. “Dunno. I went back to the cabin.”

“Was anybody else around?”

“Didn't see anybody else.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

He dipped his head again, and paused again, and then put out his hand. When I had taken it and let go of it again, he pivoted and returned to the bucket and the inside of the Rambler.

I went to Harry's cabin, found him inside making a light breakfast and looking as haggard as the bath-alcove mirror had told me I looked. I accepted his offer of coffee, but declined one of eggs and toast; I had no appetite today, none at all. Even the smell of the eggs frying in the pan made me feel faintly nauseated.

I said, “Jerrold went out fishing a little while ago. I talked to him for a couple of minutes on the pier.”

“Fishing? He didn't change his mind about leaving—?”

“He said no. Just wanted to get a last line out.”

“Hell, I expected them to be going any time now.”

“So did I. He claimed he wouldn't be gone long, though.”

“How did he seem today?”

“Hung over. But holding it together—maybe.” I sipped at my coffee. “Talesco and Knox are leaving today too, this afternoon.”

“How do you know that?”

“Knox told me. It's probably for the best.”

“I suppose so,” he said moodily. “But it's also another couple hundred bucks shot up the ass.”

“I thought you were going to send them packing anyway.”

“I need the damned money,” he said. “All right?”

“Easy. I'm not needling you.”

He pinched his eyelids with a thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, I know that. I'm just on edge and looking for somebody to take it out on, I guess.”

I said nothing. The less talking we did the better it would be for both of us.

When he had finished picking at his eggs we went out onto the porch and sat watching the sun climb and the heat begin to shimmer on the morning air. Pretty soon the sound of an outboard came from the lake; after another minute or so I could see the skiff and Jerrold sitting inside at the tiller. We watched him bring the skiff in, tie it up, shove his fishing gear up onto the pier, and then climb out and hurry away with the stuff at a hard jerky pace. He had been gone a little more than an hour—barely enough time to get a line out. Some last-minute fishing trip.

Harry lighted one of his little cigars. “Now it gets hairy again,” he said.

“Maybe not.”

“Sure,” he said grimly. “Maybe not.”

Time dragged on. Eight o'clock, eight-fifteen, eight-thirty. Jerrold did not show up again. The air began to swelter, making sweat flow thinly under my arms; the sky had a hard glazed-blue look, like something made out of polished turquoise.

Harry said finally, “Maybe I ought to go over and ask him straight out when they're planning to leave.”

“If you can do it without pushing.”

“I won't push him, don't worry.”

He started down off the porch, but before he had gone three steps Mrs. Jerrold appeared on the beach, walking in our direction. Harry stopped, glanced back at me. I made a small gesture for him to stay where he was so I could hear what she had to say when she came up.

She had her hair tied in a bun today, and the sun made it shine with glossy red highlights, the same color as burgundy wine. She wore a pair of loose-fitting shorts and another one of those sleeveless, abbreviated blouses, and she was carrying a small woven-straw handbag. The glance she gave me was cursory, as if she was embarrassed—or annoyed—at what had happened on the beach last night; she gave her attention to Harry.

He said, “About ready to head off, Mrs. Jerrold?”

“No, not just yet.” She did not sound either pleased or displeased. It didn't seem to make much difference to her either way. “Ray has some things he wants to do in Sonora first. I imagine it will be early afternoon before we can get on our way—around one o'clock. You don't mind if we stay the morning, do you?”

“Not at all,” Harry lied. “No problem.”

“Ray wants to know if you'll help with the luggage.”

“Sure. I can get it now if you want.”

“Well, we're not packed yet.” She opened the handbag and handed him what looked to be a check. “He asked me to give you this.”

Harry took it and tucked it into his shirt pocket without looking at it. “Thanks. Just let me know when you're ready.”

She smiled at him, transferred the smile to me for all of a second, and moved back the way she had come.

Harry came up beside me. “Jesus, one o'clock.”

“I don't care for it either,” I said. “But if he's going to be off in Sonora, it won't be so bad. I've got to go into The Pines myself around ten.”

“What for?”

“I have to make a couple of phone calls, and I've got to see Kayabalian again. He hired me yesterday to help find the missing carpet, working backward from San Jose—I didn't tell you that.”

“How long'll you be?”

“An hour or so. I'll be back well before one.”

“You have to go in this morning?”

“Kayabalian's leaving before noon,” I said. “I need the money too, Harry.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He went inside and got a deck of cards, and we made a halfhearted attempt 1:0 play gin rummy. Seconds and minutes crawled away, and my nerves started to fray badly—but it was not Jerrold, it was the telephone call I would have to make from The Pines to Dr. White, and the results of the sputum test. Malignant or benign. Benign or malignant. The answer was just an hour or two away now, I was standing right up against it, and there was no denying the fact that I was as gut-scared as I had ever been in my life.

At nine-fifteen Jerrold came hurrying alone across the beach. When he passed in front of us, he had nothing to say, did not even look in our direction. He got into the Caddy and wheeled it around and took it away, not driving as fast or as recklessly as he had yesterday.

Harry let out a long, heavy breath. “Man,” he said.

I had nothing to say.

The hands on my watch crept forward sluggishly. Nine twenty-five. Nine-thirty. Nine thirty-five. Cody came down from his cabin and spread out a towel on the beach and then lay down there in the sun. I liked him better lying out where he could be seen, especially now that Jerrold was gone and Mrs. Jerrold was alone in Cabin Six.

Nine-forty.

And nine forty-five.

I don't want to go, I thought, I don't want to make that goddamn call.

“I'd better get into The Pines,” I said.

“By noon, huh, buddy? Just be back by noon.”

“Sure. Hang in there.”

Just hang in there.

And I left him on the porch and got into my car and drove onto the country road, and the throbbing sound of the engine was like a litany in my ears: malignant, benign, malignant, benign, malignant malignant malignant…

Fifteen

There was a big Concord-type stagecoach and a team of horses drawn up in front of The Pines General Store, and a couple of hundred kids and adults crowding the sidewalks and spilling out into the street around it. All of them were clapping their hands in time to the raucous music created by a pair of fiddlers up on the second-story veranda, and watching another guy and a girl in Western garb perform a high-stepping dance routine on top of the coach. A banner draped over the veranda railing said: Hangtown Stage Depot • Historic Tours of the Gold Country • Passengers Board Here.

Traffic was backed up on both sides of the coach, because there was barely enough room for two cars to squeeze past it and each other, and because everybody was rubbernecking. You could not park anywhere in that block; and all the other slots looked to be filled. I turned off onto one of the side streets and hunted around for five minutes before I found a place three blocks away.

I walked back up to the main street, crossed it and made my way toward the hotel. The fiddlers quit playing when I was abreast of the stage, and the dancers bowed to the crowd, and there was a burst of cheering and applause. When it died down the guy on the coach launched into a pitch about visiting a gold mine and a ghost town, seeing the Mother Lode as the forty-niners saw it because this was an authentic replica of the old Hangtown Stagecoach-only three bucks a head. The kids whooped it up and their fathers reached for wallets and billfolds, and while the fiddlers started up again with “Turkey in the Straw,” the guy got down and began collecting money and passing out tickets.

The whole thing had a taint of phoniness about it, of sleaziness wrapped in a veneer of gaiety, like a carnival sideshow. The “authentic replica” had a railed platform tacked onto the back, where the boot should have been, so more people could ride and more three-dollar tickets could be sold; the red and yellow and gold floral designs on the coach panels were pasted-on decals; the wheels were painted a gaudy red, white and blue in honor of the bicentennial; and the springs were made of undisguised steel. They'd take the kids out for an hour and point out a couple of landmarks and bring them back full of half-truths and puffed-up legends. Cheap entertainment and an ersatz history lesson on the one hand, unabashed commercialism on the other—and who the hell cared if a distorted mockery was made of the lives and times of a million dead pioneers? Now was all that mattered; live it up, make a buck, and pretend to care about things like heritage and human endeavor. That was the modern way, all right. You used yesterday and you lived for today and you seldom thought about tomorrow.

Until, maybe, you ran out of tomorrows.

Until you faced the prospect of becoming a forgotten piece of history yourself.

I went into the hotel and shut the door against the noise and the music and the phoniness. The lobby was deserted except for the same clerk behind the desk. He recognized me and gave me a wary nod, as if he thought I might stir up more trouble. The hell with you, I thought, and looked over at the telephone booth, and took a couple of deep breaths, and then walked to the booth and shut myself inside it.

Cloudman first. I found a dime in my pocket, dialed the Sheriffs Department in Sonora. But the deputy who came on said that Cloudman was out and didn't know when he'd be back, did I want to leave a message? It was hot in the booth and sweat had popped out on my face; I could taste it on my upper lip as I gave the deputy my name, asked him to tell Cloudman I had called and would call back again later today.

When I rang off I got the rest of my change out and laid it on the little shelf under the phone; then I opened my address book to the W's and stared at the number of Dr. White's office in San Francisco. And kept on staring at it, just standing there, feeling my heart begin to pump at a faster tempo and my chest tighten up until there was a dull, hollow pain in the center of it. Wetness trickled down my cheeks, my throat was dry and scratchy—and the cough came on thinly, dragging up bitter phlegm. The sound of it seemed to fill the cubicle with small echoes, like whispers half-heard through the walls of a room.

I opened the door a few inches and leaned against the jamb until my lungs quieted. In my mind, then, I seemed to hear White's smooth professional voice: “I'm sorry, I'm afraid I have bad news for you …”

And then I heard it say, “You have nothing to worry about, the sputum cytology was negative; the lesion is benign…”

Bad news. Nothing to worry about.

Malignant.

Benign—

I shook myself and felt my lips flatten in against my teeth as I lifted the receiver again, caught up a dime and dropped it in the slot. The clatter of the coin falling, the buzz of the dial tone and then the ratchet of the dial when I spun the O all sounded too loud in my ears, as though my hearing had suddenly grown sensitized. I dialed the 415 area code and the first two digits of White's number, put my finger in the hole of the third digit.

And my hand began to shake and I could not stop it, it might have belonged to someone else, and the other hand too when it reached out convulsively and slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

Malignant, benign, malignant, benign, malignant…

I could not do it, I could not make the call.

Goddamn you, you goddamn coward, you've got to face it sooner or later. What's the sense in putting it off any longer? Make the call!

But my legs turned me around and my hands shoved me out of the booth, and I groped my way to one of the lobby chairs and sat in it with the sweat streaming out of me. I had steeled myself for this moment for days now, and I had been functioning all right, even with the fear and the doubts—but now that the time had come my nerve had deserted me. I took out my handkerchief and mopped away the wetness, and realized as I did so that the desk clerk had come out and was standing three feet in front of me, looking nervously worried.

He said, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yeah, I'm all right.”

“You look pale as a ghost. You're not having some sort of attack, are you?”

“I'm not going to die in your lobby, if that's what you think.”

His mouth turned prim. “I was only trying to help, sir.”

“Sure,” I said. “It's okay—everything is fine.”

“Do you want a glass of water… ?”

“No. I just want to sit here a minute.”

He hesitated, and then went away reluctantly; but when he got behind the desk again he made a pretense of sorting a batch of mail while he watched me with up-from-under glances.

I thought: Maybe I can't do it because it's too cold and impersonal this way. Long-distance telephone, you can't look at his face and he can't look at yours, there's nothing to hang onto but the words themselves. “Hello, Doctor, I'm calling from Tuolumne County to find out if I'm going to die pretty soon.” No, not that way—there's no dignity to it. A man should have a little dignity in a thing like this, a little human contact. A doctor's office, yes, that was the place for death sentences or reprieves; not a phone booth in a hotel lobby, with fiddlers playing outside and kids squealing for a ride on an authentic replica of the Hangtown Stagecoach.

All right, then. Try to get away from here as soon as possible, drive straight to White's office if you can get back before close of business; otherwise, first thing tomorrow morning. You can do it that way, can't you? You won't lose your nerve again?

I can do it that way, I thought, and knew that I was not lying to myself. This was not something you could run away from, or postpone for more than a few long hours. If you tried it, the not-knowing would become unbearable, and you would still have the answer to face eventually.

I began to feel a little better; I had myself under control again. After a time I got: up and found the restroom and washed my face with cold water, opened my shirt and used a wet paper towel to sponge off the drying perspiration on my chest and under my arms. The face in the mirror looked pale, all right. Pouches under the eyes, puffiness at the cheekbones and around the mouth. Old bear, Erika had called me, and I had thought then that it was a cute little pet name; I wouldn't have liked it at all now.

When I came back into the lobby and looked over at the desk clerk, I had a small twinge of embarrassment at the way I had treated him. I walked over there and said, “Look, I'm sorry if I snapped at you a while ago. I guess the heat is starting to get to me; I felt pretty dizzy there for a minute.”

“No need to apologize, sir,” he said, but there was still an injured stiffness in his tone. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Well, you can get me Charles Kayabalian on the phone.”

“Certainly.”

We went through the switchboard-and-extension-phone routine, and Kayabalian was in and ready to see me in his room. So I climbed the stairs to the second floor, found the number he had given me, knocked, and went in when he called out that the door was unlocked.

He was wearing a sports jacket today, no tie, and he looked cool and rested. He could hardly have missed noticing the way I looked, but he had the grace not to say anything about it. Instead he motioned me to a chair and said, “I've got that list of names and addresses for you.”

“Right.”

The chair was one of those lumpy pseudo-Victorians, made for people with better posture than I had; I sat on it gingerly and watched Kayabalian open a briefcase that was sitting on a writing desk, take out two sheets of paper. He brought them to me and stood there while I glanced over them. Most of the addresses were in San Jose, but there were two in San Francisco and one in Fresno. Under each one he had written out a paragraph of information on the individual: occupation, connection with Terzian, relevant personal data.

I asked him a couple of questions, made a note or two of my own, and said finally that I guessed I had everything I would need for the time being.

He asked, “Would you like an advance against your fee and expenses?”

“That's not necessary,” I said. Under other circumstances I would have taken his check, but even though I kept telling myself I would follow through for him no matter what Dr. White had to tell me, I could not make myself forget the frightening possibility of things like hospitals and further tests and maybe even an urgent need for surgery. “We can take care of a retainer after I get to work.”

He nodded. “Do you know yet how you stand with your time?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I'll let you know later today or early tomorrow, if that's all right.”

“Yes. You can reach me at my office, or at home after seven.”

He gave me another business card, this one with his telephone number written on the back. We said a few more things to each other, and then he got his briefcase and a small overnight bag—he was ready to check out—and we went downstairs together and shook hands and said good-by in the lobby.

Outside, the Hangtown Stagecoach had gone off with its first load of kids, but the fiddlers were still working on the veranda and there was still a crowd in front of the General Store. A guy in buckskins and an Indian headdress was circulating there, selling balloons and souvenirs—a red-haired guy with freckles. Nobody seemed to think it odd, or if they did, none of them cared.

And people wondered why native Amerinds were so angry these days…

I got my car and fought the main street traffic until the county road intersection; I was the only one who turned off. The temperature had picked up another few degrees, but there were clouds massing above the peaks to the east, restless and soiled-looking, and the sky in that direction had a kind of dull silvery sheen, like an old dime. If the high-altitude winds blew those clouds down here, it would rain later in the day. I wished it would rain right now—break the heat and clear the dryness out of the air and settle that damned red dust.

When I came around one of the turns two miles from the camp, driving mechanically, half my mind on the road and half of it brooding about the abortive telephone call, a deer bounded out of the undergrowth thirty yards in front of me and darted across the road. I said something in alarm and jammed my foot down on the brake; the car slewed to the left and for an instant I thought it was going off into the trees. But when I pulled the wheel around and eased up on the brake pedal, the rear tires held traction and the thing settled on a point and came to a sharp stop. The deer had vanished into the woods on the other side.

I sat there for a minute and thought that that would have been all I needed, an accident with the car. Once I started moving again, I drove more slowly, watched the road ahead more carefully—and I was more aware of my surroundings than I might have been otherwise.

Ahead on the light, around another turn, was the bare hillside and the abandoned pocket mine partway up. High to the left of the mine were a few trees, and below the trees was the crumbling outbuilding, its roof sagging a little to the left. The hillside directly behind the building was bare, rocky—

I hit the brakes again, not quite so hard this time, and the car bucked to a halt in another swirl of dust. I shoved the shift lever into park and got out and stared up toward the mine. Then I opened my wallet, took out the folded triangle from Bascomb's sketchpad. Not much of the roof in the sketch showed, but it might have been canted to the left like the one up there. The trees and the rocky hillside looked about right too.

A few hundred feet farther along, at the side of the road, there was a short slope and then a flattish limestone shelf. A man could sit up on that shelf, and he'd have a good clear view of the mine entrance and the rotting building; it was the kind of thing, the kind of angle of perception, that might appeal to an artist like Bascomb. I had seen it from this angle myself half a dozen times since Sunday, and that would explain why that small part of the sketch had seemed familiar last night—something you saw without really thinking about, an image tucked away at the back of your mind.

All right. The sketch might have been of the abandoned mine. But what made it worth stealing and/or destroying? Something to do with the mine itself?

I stood motionless in the hot sun, peering at the hillside. Then I glanced at my watch, and the time was eleven twenty-five; still an hour and a half before the Jerrolds were due to leave Eden Lake. I hesitated for another fifteen or twenty seconds, but there was not any doubt about what I was going to do, not this time.

I got back into the car and went looking for the way up there.

Sixteen

A little ways beyond the shelf was a circular area, like a roadside turnaround, and then a steepening rise; between a series of outcroppings on one side and a man-made limestone cutbank on the other—if you looked closely—the eroded and grass-choked remains of a wagon road wound upward in a loose S. I swung the car onto the circular area and took it up to the cutbank. The road looked passable enough; some of the brown grass and underbrush had a crushed appearance, as though another car had come up it not too long ago.

I put the transmission into low gear and went up the trail at a crawl, tires thudding into deep ruts, springs complaining. The road ended pretty soon at a shallow, natural fiat. The weather-beaten building sat there, off on my left, and the mine entrance was at the far end and fifty feet above on sloping ground, like a broken doorway into the hillside. The rusted ruins of what had once been a steel-railed ore track came out of the shaft and down to the right, at a sharp angle, and terminated at the edge of the flat; there had at one time been a cut or incline below there, but it was filled now with tailings from the mine, half-reclaimed already by the forest

I let the car drift to a stop near the building and shut off the ignition and stepped out. The sun's glare up here was intense; mica particles glittered and winked in the rocks, almost blindingly in some places, and every piece of shade seemed to have a knife edge. It was so still I found myself straining to hear some kind of sound.

The palms of my hands were damp, and I wiped them on my trouser legs as I walked away from the car and alongside the building. Decaying timbers and strips of iron banding littered patches of grass and Indian paintbrush. There were huge gaps in the structure's walls, a jagged hole near the back where a window might once have been. I picked my way carefully up to the hole and peered inside. More debris, eerily displayed in a mosaic of dusky sunlight and shadow; from the look of it, the place had been a combination workroom and living quarters. One of the crossbeams for the roof hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and I thought that it would not be long before the whole thing collapsed. This, maybe, was the last summer of its existence.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, and I turned away finally and walked a few more paces. Another building squatted behind the larger one—a shed of some kind, probably, hidden from sight of the wagon trail and the county road below. One side of it had folded in, giving it an oddly triangular shape, like a partially collapsed house of cards. I made a circle of it, looked inside along the one wall still erect. Nothing to see there either.

Turning, I looked up the slope at the mine entrance. Then I ran my tongue over dry Lips and went back to the car and got my flashlight out of the glove compartment. I crossed to the slope, climbed it past the skeletal remains of an ore cart—shoes sliding on the hard rock, stirring up small puffs of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind me, mistlike. When I got up in front of the entrance I stopped and stared at a large metal sign that somebody had wired to one of the framing timbers. It said: WARNING! DANGEROUS PREMISES—DO NOT ENTER.

I hesitated, and then moved forward cautiously until I was standing just outside the entrance. The wood frame was rotted and insect-ridden, one of the vertical supports half-splintered out in the middle so that the horizontal beam above was canted at a lopsided angle. When I extended my arm inside and clicked on the flashlight, the beam penetrated far enough to let me see small mounds of fallen earth and rock, two or three collapsed timbers scattered across the floor. Ceiling supports tilted downward in places, a wall support leaned drunkenly toward the tunnel's center.

Unsafe, all right, I thought. You're a damned fool if you go in there.

But I kept on standing where I was, moving the flashlight up and down, from side to side. Bits of mica—or maybe bits of gold—gleamed dully in the rock. Within the range of my light, I saw nothing you would not expect to find in an abandoned mine shaft.

And yet there was an odd sour musty smell in there; part of it was dust and dry rot and animal or bird droppings, but there was something else, too, that I could not quite define. I dried my palms again, switching the flash from hand to hand.

Somewhere nearby, a bird made a sudden whickering cry, and it was loud enough in the heavy stillness to jerk my head around and up. At first I did not see anything in the glazed sky; then, off to my right, a hawk came wheeling down across the flat, made a long gliding loop as though reconning the area, whickered a second time and then vanished. Silence resettled, and the emptiness seemed so complete again that it was as if the hawk had never been there at all, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Hawk, I thought.

And all at once I was thinking of the hawk I had seen yesterday circling up here above the mine—the hawk and the two ravens. I felt myself frowning, and there was a tickling sensation at the edge of my mind. Unusual to see birds like that in the same vicinity at the same time, now that I considered it. Unless …

Jesus.

The hair went up on my neck, and I could feel my stomach knot up in an empty, hollow sort of way. I tasted bile on the back of my tongue.

Jesus!

I swiveled my gaze to the mine entrance, rubbed a forearm across my eyes. I had to go in there now, no choice in the matter. Even though I was abruptly and painfully certain of what I was going to find, I wanted to be wrong—and I had to know.

Another moment of hesitation; then I stepped through the entrance and made my way forward heel-and-toe, swaying the light in front of me, not touching anything with my body, stepping over the mounds of rock and earth, avoiding the fallen and leaning timbers. The deeper into the shaft I went, the sharper the smell became—and I could recognize it now, and I began to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

The ore track rails were intact here, extending into the blackness ahead like a pair of brownish-red ribs. Shadows wavered at the perimeter of the flash beam; timbers and the head of a pick and another toppled ore cart seemed to leap into the cone of light. A chunk of rock the size of a beach ball glittered briefly with squares of yellow metal: iron pyrites, fool's gold. Thirty feet in, the latticework of support timbers appeared to be in a more stable condition, and there was less rock, less debris, spread across the rough stone floor. The ceiling, more than seven feet high to that point, sloped abruptly downward until it was only a couple of inches above my head. I bent a little at the waist, shuffling-stepping; sweat matted my shirt to my torso, the sultry air put the tightness back into my chest.

When I had taken another half-dozen steps, the light picked up a turning in the shaft, hard to the left. The smell was so bad here that I had to pinch my nostrils shut with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I clenched my teeth, went forward to the turn.

I was halfway through it when I saw the body.

The beam flicked over it at the lower extremities: lying supine, one leg crooked under the other. Near the bent foot were two bloody towels and a sixteen-inch pipe wrench; the head of the wrench was faintly smeared with dried blood, as though it had been wiped off in a haphazard way. I stopped and planted my feet, and then pulled the light back and moved it over and put it on his face.

Only he did not have much of a face any more. The side of his skull was brutally crushed, and the goddamn hawks and ravens—carrion feeders—had sought him out all the way in here and pecked out his eyes.

But there was no mistaking who he was; his clothing told me that, if nothing else.

Walt Bascomb.

I turned sharply, and my stomach convulsed and I dry-retched a couple of times. Then the retching became a series of hard coughs, and finally nothing at all. And all the while my mind kept trying to sort facts and speculations, kept trying to open memory cells and drag out scraps of things seen and heard and perceived—as if I knew enough now, subconsciously, to piece the whole thing together, to identify not only Bascomb's killer but Vahram Terzian's as well. But I could not concentrate in there, with the stench and the ugly thing on the tunnel floor behind me. I needed to get out into clean air, sunlight, the inside of my car where I could let my mind work slowly in familiar surroundings. It would come together then: I could sense it grimly, as I had sensed such insights in the past.

Without looking at Bascomb again, I stepped out of the turn and started toward the dusty yellow rectangle that marked the entrance.

Thud!

The sound, sudden and explosive, came from up at the tunnel mouth, sent echoes rolling like hollow thunder through the shaft. I pulled up, muscles bunching in alarm, a chill sliding along my back. The sound came again, and close to the entrance thick puffs of dust burst down from the ceiling, turned the light there hazy, shimmering. The concussive noise came a third time, wood on wood or stone on wood; there were more plumes of dust, and the creaking of timbers and the bouncing clatter of rocks, and through the haze I saw movement, a man-shape without recognizable features, and then the shape shifted position and seemed to swing something at the rotted wood frame of the entrance—

Thud!

Panic climbed inside me, and I shouted “No, for God's sake!” and started to run.

Thud!

Thud!

The cry of my voice was lost in the reverberations, in the gathering rumble of loosened rock and earth and wooden supports. Dust obliterated the opening now, spiraled back toward me in smoke-like billows that cut my visibility with the flashlight to less than fifteen feet. I could not see clearly where I was running, and my foot stubbed against one of the rails, sent me lurching into a wall, off it and hard against a loose timber; the timber gave and I went down, jarring on knees and forearms, pain slicing up into my left armpit and the flash spinning free and winking out and rocks like sharp-edged hailstones buffeting my back and buttocks and legs. The tunnel was filled with a rage of sound now, with upheaval and suffocating grayness.

I tried to get up, gagging, choking, but I could not pull my legs under me. I crawled instead and kept on crawling until I came up against a miniature avalanche of earth and limestone, until something that felt like a collapsed support struck a glancing blow across the backs of my legs. Then I flung my hands over my head in blind sick terror—

And the entire front of the shaft seemed to cave in around me.

Seventeen

It might have lasted seconds or minutes; I was suspended in time, lost inside myself. Falling things pummeled my body, made me jerk and squirm in agony, and I kept waiting with a kind of wild fatalism for a heavy chunk of rock or wood to shatter my spine, my neck, the back of my skull. A slide of pebbly earth threatened to bury my head; I twisted fetally so I could keep my nose and mouth free, but they were already clogged with hot dust, the taste of it like cinders and mold. My lungs felt as though they had been set aflame.

The echoing, banging roar reached a crescendo, and then ebbed so rapidly into a vacuumlike stillness that I believed at first I had gone deaf. There was pressing weight the length of my body—but I could no longer feel the bite of assaulting objects. A thought took shape in my mind: It's over. Is it over?

All around me, the upheaval seemed to have ended; I could sense a restless settling. I moved my arms away and raised my head a little and opened my eyes. Gray-black, faintly mobile; a rivulet of earth that I could not see sifted down inches from my right cheek. I wanted to raise up, get up off my belly, but the feeling of fatalism was still with me; if I moved, it would start all over again, maybe it hadn't really stopped, there was still a rock or a timber ready to come crashing down on me—

A wash of pain in my chest cut through that. Then my ears popped and the false deafness vanished, and I could hear myself gasping; I realized like someone coming out of heavy sedation that there was no air where I was lying, there was only a stagnant graininess all but void of oxygen. Breathing was impossible—like trying to draw solid matter into my lungs.

Panic clawed at me again, forced me to struggle under the weight along my back and hips and legs, push up and turn into a sitting position with earth and rocks sliding off me—man rising up out of his own grave. My shoulder brushed against the splintered edge of a timber, and I jerked it away reflexively, hunching, and twisted over and around until I was on hands and knees. Blood hammered in my ears, there were flashes and shimmers of yellow-white behind my eyes and a sudden slow, spinning dizziness. I was close to blacking out; if I didn't get air I would suffocate. But the entrance was blocked, I knew it was blocked. Back into the shaft then. If I could gut to where Bascomb's body was, if that part of the tunnel had not caved in too, there would not be so much dust and the air would still have oxygen.

I started to crawl, but immediately a part of my mind said: No, get on your feet, get your head close to the ceiling; air's clearer, you might even be able to breathe a little up there. Half coughing, half retching, I pulled one foot under me and then shoved up, staggered forward a step and caught myself without touching anything around me. I stood swaying, and it was not quite so bad nearer the ceiling, all right. I forced my mouth open wide, craning my head back; my lungs heaved, dragged in a series of shallow breaths. The coughing slacked off and the giddiness eased—not much, just enough so that I could make my body work with some control.

The tunnel floor was strewn with debris, but it didn't seem as bad going backward as it must have been the other way. I located one of the cart rails with my foot, because I had to keep myself at the center of the shaft; I did not dare touch either of the walls. Then I moved forward a step at a time along the rail, stop and go, hands probing in front of me in the clotted dark. My legs had a liquidy weakness at the knees, there was a thin pain in the left one every time I put weight on it. Five steps, ten—and my forehead banged into a hanging ceiling support that I had missed with my hands. I stumbled, toppled to one knee and then broke the fall skiddingly with both palms. Above me the timber made a groaning noise that built into a low rumbling. Earth fluttered down, then a piece of rock that narrowly missed my head as I scuttled forward and kept on scuttling until I butted up against a mound of rubble.

The timber did not fall and the shaft grew still again.

I crawled over the mound, bumped into something round and metallic that my fingertips told me was a wheel on the broken ore cart, and detoured around that. When I relocated the track, I stood up again so I could lift my head above that stifling pall of dust.

It was another ten steps before the congealing graininess began to thin out; the floor around and between the rails seemed clear of debris. I moved with a little more speed, felt the track begin to curve to the left and knew I was coming into the turn where Bascomb's body lay. The jellied feeling in my knees was so strong now it forced me down into a sitting position on one rail, legs out at an angle and head thrown back. The air here was foul and oppressive, smoky, but at least I could breathe it, it was like pure oxygen after the forward section of the tunnel.

Pretty soon the last of the dizziness went away, and some of the fire in my chest with it; my mind began to function more or less normally. I was aware of a dozen separate aches, of a stickiness on my left forearm that had to be blood from a gash or smaller cut. Fear tugged at me. Suppose the entrance was so badly blocked I could not dig my way out? Nobody knew I was in here except the man who had caused the cave-in, the man who had killed Terzian and Bascomb—and how many hours of breathable air could there be? A dozen? Less than that?

I fought down another surge of panic, got a tight hold on myself. One thing at a time, one minute at a time. Let the dust settle, that was the first priority. Then go back up there and check out the extent of the blockage and start digging, it might all just be loose rock and earth and timbers—

Check it out how? I thought.

I had not been able to see anything earlier and I could not see anything now except blackness. Unless the dust had helped to obscure light, the entrance was completely closed off. How would I know where to dig, what to watch out for? The flashlight was gone, probably buried, and even if I could find it in the dark it had to be damaged and useless. I had no matches—and wasn't that a goddamn nice piece of irony for you? If I had not given up smoking, if I did not have a lesion on one lung, I would have had a pocketful of matches, I would have had the one thing now that I needed desperately.

And then I thought: Bascomb. Christ, Bascomb.

Convulsively, I pushed off the rail and went forward on all fours until I came up next to the body. The smell of it flared my nostrils, made me gag again. I reached out, touched it, felt an arm mushy soft and yielding and jerked my hand up across the front of his shirt, groping for the pocket.

It was empty.

I brought the hand down and fumbled at one trouser pocket, dug inside it; keys and coins, nothing else. I leaned forward, touched the second pocket—and there was something rectangular in there, crinkling sound, cigarette package? I dragged it out with shaking fingers. Cigarette package, yes, Bascomb had been a smoker.

Tucked inside the cellophane wrapping was a booklet of paper matches.

I fished it free, opened the cover. Three-quarters full. I held it tightly in clenched fingers, slid around away from the corpse and crawled back through the turn and sat down on the rail again. Sweat streamed on my body, slick and gritty like oil mixed with dirt. A sudden spasm of coughing left me panting; I tried not to think of what that dust was doing to my lungs, to the lesion that might already be malignant.

How long before the dust settled?

Ten minutes? Fifteen?

I held my left wrist up to my ear and listened to my watch and heard it ticking; somehow it had escaped damage in the cave-in. When I looked at the luminescent hands I saw that they read twelve-fifteen. I put the arm behind me, to keep from staring at the watch, and tried to make myself concentrate on the things I knew that would identify the son of a bitch who had murdered Terzian and Bascomb and sealed me in here. Bascomb's sketch, the wrench, the bloody towels, the Daghestan carpet—all of those things, yes, but how did they fit together? Other things too, dancing out of reach. Round and round, round and round, but none of them quite joining with each other to make a whole or part of a whole…

I had to give it up finally. The tension was too intense, the edge of panic too close to the surface of feeling; learning the name of the man would not matter at all unless I got out of here. I looked at the watch then, and nine minutes had passed. I used a forefinger to clean grit out of my nostrils, wiped away sweat, made an effort to work up saliva to rid my mouth of dust and dryness.

Another three minutes gone.

I stood and stared into the blackness, trying to tell if the air along the shaft was any less clogged with powder, trying to make out a ray or glimmer of light. There was nothing but dark up there, but if I could trust my senses the air did not seem to be as dusty, as abrasive in my throat and lungs.

I could not wait any longer, I had reached the limit of passive endurance. I started to walk along the rail, willing myself to go slowly and cautiously, and when I came up to the mound of rubble beyond the ore cart I opened the matchbook and struck the first match. The flare of light half blinded me; I had to look away and then back before I was able to see anything. In the eerie flickering glow, the walls and ceiling had a pocked look where the rock had given way; most of the support timbers were still holding. Five feet ahead I could just make out the hanging timber I had run into during my retreat.

When the heat of the match flame touched my fingertips, I shook it out and went ahead five paces, ducked down and walked another couple of steps until I was certain I had gone beyond the suspended beam. Then I lit a second match. The amount of rubble was greater now, and the holes in the tunnel walls looked larger, the wood latticework less stable. Sections of wood jutted up from the floor at odd angles, like broken bones. Another half-dozen steps. Match. Half-dozen steps. Match. The poisonous clouds of dust had finally dissipated, but the air was still thick, stifling; I began to have trouble breathing again. Six paces. Match. And I was back near the place where I had lain—I could see marks on the floor and among the debris.

But I still could not see any sign of daylight ahead.

Eight feet farther on, the jumble of rock and wood and earth rose as high as three and four feet across the width of the tunnel. I held another match up over my head so I could judge the condition of the ceiling. Still intact, not too deeply pitted, half the supports holding in place; most of the rubble seemed to have come from the walls. But I had no way of telling yet how bad it would be near the entrance. I leaned down into one of the mounds and started to inch my way along, pulling larger rocks and lengths of wood aside gingerly with both hands—aware all the while of the danger of new slides, of upsetting the balance of the mass around me and getting myself buried as a result. Every yard or so I stopped to check my position and the configuration of debris by matchlight. I could hear myself wheezing in a kind of constant counterpoint to the rattling of rocks, the small sounds of movement; I was soaked with sweat. Panic stayed close to the surface, and now I had a growing sense of claustrophobia. The urge to scream was strong inside me: tension, fear and tension.

I'm going to get out, I thought. I'm not going to die in here, not in here, I'm going to get out.

The mounds became steadily larger, more tightly packed, and the hollows between them grew shallower. Inevitably, after ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, I reached the end of the line—a solid blockage sloping upward from floor to ceiling.

Not as much oxygen here, the air still clogged with particles of dust; the burning sensation was back in my chest, and the feeling of giddiness had returned to make my thoughts sluggish—but that helped to keep the panic at bay. I struck a new match and held it up. Most of the ceiling had collapsed here. Not even a chink of daylight showed through.

Think, remember. How far had I been from the entrance when the cave-in forced me off my feet? Less than ten yards maybe, and I had crawled another two or three. How far had I come from that place where I had lain? Difficult to judge, but it might have been as much as fifteen feet. That left … what? A minimum of five feet to the outside? Five feet of compressed earth and rock and all I had to dig with was my hands and as soon as I started to do that the rest of the ceiling might give way—

No. I'm going to get out of here.

I am going to get out of here.

I clenched the matchbook between my teeth and pulled myself up the slope on knees and hooked fingers. Earth slid away beneath me, a dislodged rock thumped down against my thigh and brought a stinging slash of pain. When one of my hands touched the edge of a timber, I anchored my body and managed to get a match free and flaming. Near the top, now, the ceiling was a foot over my head, scarred by a deep trough. The timber was edged at an angle into the trough, half-buried in the rubble, and on top of it was a huge oblong of broken limestone.

I eased away from there, laterally to my right, and used another match—not many left now, have to ration them. Just rock and earth here, no shattered supports within a three-foot radius of what looked to be the sealed juncture of ceiling and debris. Dig at this spot, then—hurry! Air running out, time running out…

I scraped at the earth, dug rocks loose and let them slide down past my body. Dust misted around me, and the dizziness got worse, and my thoughts seemed to break up into disjointed fragments; I could feel myself slipping back again into that timeless emptiness, conscious of little but the movement of my hands and the overwhelming need to get free.

Depression opening up, widening into a kind of tunnel—tunnel within a tunnel. Use a match. No air for a match. And my hands digging, digging, body wiggling forward, if the ceiling is going to collapse, let it be now or let me get out, shifting earth, rocks thumping, can't breathe, oh God please don't let me black out—

Light.

I heaved a rock out of the way and there was a blinding dusty ray of it two feet beyond my head.

The illusion of timelessness vanished in a flood of wild relief, each of my senses heightened, I heard myself begin whimpering like a child just starting to awaken from a nightmare. My hands tore at the earth in a kind of controlled frenzy, and the light grew larger, larger, I could smell clean air, I could breathe, and my head came out into the air and the light, I wedged my shoulders free, and then I lunged and scrabbled the rest of my body through the opening and down the outside wall of the slide, felt it shift and grumble under my skidding weight, and lost my balance and rolled over twice amid a clattering of rock and finally came up on my hands and knees at the edge of the slope.

Inside the mine there was a low-pitched rumbling; dust spewed out through the hole I had made, cut off again as the hole disappeared under a cascade of rock. The rumbling went on for ten seconds—and it was quiet again, I was wrapped in silence and heat and light and sweet fresh air.

A little awed, I thought: I did it, I got out.

I knelt there with the sun hot on my back, breath rasping in my throat. Then I pulled back on my knees, saw the torn and filthy fronts of my shirt and trousers, a thin cut on my left forearm matted with dirt and dried blood, the broken-nailed, bruised fingers on both hands. Reaction set in; tremors shook my body, left me weak and nauseated. The ordeal in the mine shaft seemed to recede in my memory, as if it were a surreal dream, as if it had happened only within the spaces in my mind.

What if he's still out here somewhere?

The thought came with alarming suddenness, cementing reality. I pulled my head around and pawed at the sweat blurring my eyes, got them focused on my surroundings. But there was nobody in sight; the flat and the crumbling outbuildings were still shrouded in heavy stillness, my car gleamed with bright reflections where I had parked it.

Gone, long gone.

Who, damn it? Who?

Anger seeped into me, a good sharp purging fury that enabled me to move, to function. I got to my feet, swaying, but I was going to be able to walk all right, I would not fall down again. I went down the slope, feeding on the rage, using it to pull my thoughts into logical patterns. The sunlight faded, disappeared altogether for a moment as I crossed the flat in a stumbling run; the clouds I had seen massing above the high peaks had started to flow westward.

I dragged the car door open, slid onto the sun-heated Naugahyde. And sat there fidgeting, going over it, going over it, while I stared sightlessly through the windshield. It began to come together, as I had known inside the mine it would—slowly at first and then rapidly, all of it clicking into place like bits of colored tile in a mosaic.

I knew who he was then.

Oh God yes, I Knew who he was.

The back of my neck prickled; urgency made me reach out immediately to twist the key in the ignition. Into The Pines to call Cloudman? No, it had to be the camp, I had to know if he was there now. And if he was, I had to get Harry to help me put him under citizen's arrest. Not because it had become a personal thing, I could not let myself think that way; because he had killed two men and almost made me number three, and he was capable of anything at any minute—any damned thing at all. There was just no time to waste taking myself out of it and letting the authorities handle him.

I jammed the gear lever into drive, not looking at myself in the rear-view mirror, because I did not want to see what I looked like just yet, and spun the car into a turn and took it bouncing down the wagon trail to the county road.

Eighteen

The need for urgency made me drive too fast, and my arms began to ache from fighting the wheel in and out of turns. I did not have much strength left. Far back in my mind was the thought that once I stopped functioning on tension, all the little hurts and the weakened condition of my lungs might lead to a serious collapse; but I held it away, kept my attention hard on the road and on what lay ahead.

When I came finally out of the trees on the last long incline, to where I had a clear look at the gravel circle, I saw that all the cars were parked within it—all of them. There was something else drawn up there too, off on one side: a covered U-Haul trailer. So that's how he planned to get the Daghestan out, I thought. Wait until the time was right, make sure there was nobody around, and then carry it from its hiding place to the U-Haul…

Somebody was walking along the beach toward the pier—Harry, it looked like—and he broke into a trot as soon as he saw me. I brought the car skidding into the circle, jerked on the emergency brake, and swung out before it quit rocking. Harry came running up; he stopped abruptly when he got a good look at me. His eyes widened into an incredulous stare.

“Good God,” he said, “what happened to you?”

“Never mind that now. Where's Jerrold?”

“But you look—”

“Come on, Harry, where the hell is Jerrold?”

“I don't know. At his cabin, maybe. He just came back twenty minutes ago with that U-Haul trailer, and I've been on edge ever since; he looked in pretty bad shape—”

“He's in bad shape, all right,” I said grimly. “He's killed two people in the past three days.”

“What!”

“You heard me. Jerrold is the one who murdered Terzian, and he did for Bascomb the same way.”

Harry looked numb; his face had lost some of its color. “Bascomb's dead?”

“Yeah. Listen, we've got to find him and put him under wraps—quick. He's a dangerous lunatic, there's no telling what he might do next.”

“You sure of all this?”

“Dead sure.”

“Oh my God,” he said, “I never thought…”

“It'll take the two of us,” I said. “We'll get one of the others to go in and call Cloudman. I don't like it, but it's got to be that way. You with me?”

He passed a hand across his face. His eyes had the kind of sick, pained look that comes with the acceptance of an ugly truth. “Yeah,” he said, “I'm with you.”

“All right. We'd better be armed when we brace him.”

“Rifles in my cabin,” he said.

We ran across to it and up onto the porch and inside. Harry dragged the .22 rifle down, handed it to me, and then took the Marlin lever-action for himself. There was ammunition in a drawer at the bottom of the rack; we stood there feeding shells into the guns. The .22 felt awkward and alien in my hands; I had not handled firearms much since quitting the cops, and I had never cared for the things anyway because I had seen too often and too graphically what they were capable of doing to the human body.

I said, “If Mrs. Jerrold is with him, we get her out of the way first. Same goes for anybody else that might be around. We carry the weapons muzzle down, we don't do or say a thing until he's alone and vulnerable. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And no shooing if it can be avoided. There's been enough killing around here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Let me handle it. You follow my lead.”

He nodded jerkily, snapped and locked the Marlin.

Outside again, we went along the lakefront at a fast walk. The clouds had blanketed the sky now, and the afternoon light had a bright grayish, metallic tint. The air smelled of ozone; that, too, seemed faintly metallic. The stillness had a breathless quality; you could not even hear the cry of a bird.

When we came up through the woods near the Jerrolds' cabin, I led Harry off the path and through the trees to where we had a screened look at the front of it. The door was open and two packed suitcases were sitting side by side at the top of the porch steps, but there was nobody in sight.

Harry said, “What now?”

“One of us goes over to see if he's there, or if she is. Jerrold thinks I'm dead—never mind why for now—so if he sees me too soon, he might panic. It had better be you, then; I'll cover you from here.”

“What do I do?”

“Get him out and down off the porch. Alone and unarmed. Tell him you want to talk to him about the loan, something like that.”

A quick dip of his head, and he made his way out of the woods and crossed toward the front of the cabin. I moved closer to the perimeter, to where I could lean against the bole of a spruce and get a clear angle on the entire width of the place. Tension made taut ropes of the muscles in my shoulders and back; the taste in my mouth was metallic—it felt the way the sky looked and the air smelled.

I watched Harry climb slowly onto the porch, holding his Marlin vertically at his side. He hesitated, and then peered in. Seconds later he turned and came down the steps and moved briefly around to the rear. Then he hurried back toward where I was, motioning for me to come out.

He said as I joined him, “Nobody there.”

“Any idea where he could have gone?”

He shook his head.

“What about Mrs. Jerrold?”

“No. She was down by the lake a little earlier.”

“Was anybody else there?”

“Cody, I think.”

“Did Jerrold see them together?”

“I don't know, he might have. You don't think—”

“He's a madman, Harry, you bet that's what I'm thinking.”

We ran back to the path and up through the trees past Cabin Four. When we came out in front of Five, Knox and Talesco were piling their gear at the foot of the steps, making preparations to leave. As soon as they saw us—the rifles, the condition I was in—they both came hurrying over.

Knox said, “What's going on?”

I said, “Ray Jerrold—you see him in the past few minutes?”

“Yeah, not long ago,” Talesco said. “Looked like he was going hunting.”

“What?”

“He had a shotgun with him.”

Harry made a sound between his teeth.

Talesco said, scowling, “Hey, what the hell is—?”

He did not finish the sentence; he did not finish it because in that same instant there was a sudden low booming explosion, a sound so ominous on the dead-still air that my skin crawled and my stomach heaved in convulsive reaction.

And I was running again, without thinking, just running up the path full speed while I dragged the rifle up across my chest. I could hear Harry at my heels, Knox and Talesco pounding after us. We raced past my cabin, raced through the woods toward Cabin Two; my ears strained for more sounds, something to give me an idea of what to expect, but it was quiet again, a quiet so intense it was like a scream just beyond the range of human hearing.

The moment I ran around a hook in the path and saw Cody's cabin, I could also see two people standing off to one side of it at the rear, looking up along a steep incline to the near side. It was Cody and Mrs. Jerrold, and they were just standing there, the kid with a drink in his hand, neither of them looking frightened or excited—just curious, a little confused.

They either heard or saw us corning, and turned. Cody said, “You hear that noise? It—” He stopped short, staring at the rifle in my hands, at my face, as I barreled up to him.

I said, “It came from up that slope?”

Cody blinked at me. Harry was there now, and Talesco and Knox: all of us grouped on the grass, tension crackling among us as tangibly as raw electricity.

“Where did it come from, damn you!”

Mrs. Jerrold's face had gone suddenly pale, and there was the beginnings of fright in her eyes. She said, “Up there, yes, it came from up there,” and pointed at the incline.

I ran up the slope, shoving my way through underbrush, trampling a high patch of ferns, holding the rifle up and ready; the rest of them followed. Two-thirds of the way up, I could see a small flattened-out area, a kind of curving glade surrounded by the high boughs of spruce and lodgepole pine. It was dark in there, but you could see well enough.

Yeah, you could see well enough.

I stopped at the edge of the glade—stopped and turned, looking for Mrs. Jerrold, reaching for her when I realized she was close by. But I was too late; she had gotten to where she could see what lay in there. She made a horrified whimpering noise, and her eyes rolled up and she staggered, started to go down. Harry caught her, turned her immediately and pulled her away down the slope.

Cody and Knox and Talesco and I stared mutely at what was left of Ray Jerrold. He lay stiffly on his back, arms flung out; his face and head and the entire upper third of his body were covered with black scorch marks and ribbons of blood, and the head itself was nearly severed. Beside him on the grass was the shotgun he had been carrying the first time I'd seen him, its barrel curled back into blackened strips. The air was foul with the stench of cordite, of charred metal.

Beside me Knox said softly, “Blowback.”

“Yeah,” I said. Blowback is what happens when somebody fires a weapon like Jerrold's with a solid blockage of the barrel. The unreleased load causes the thing to explode, splitting and peeling the barrel, and the shooter takes the full charge in his face and upper body. It happens to hunters sometimes, when they're not careful and they let the muzzle nose down into thick mud or clay. The stuff dries and expands and seals the barrel: blowback.

There might have been a certain terrible irony in the way Jerrold had died, but if there was, I could not pursue it now. The anger had drained out of me, and I felt empty, a little sick; fatigue was seeping into every corner of my body. I could not seem to think clearly any longer.

Cody, standing white-faced on my left, made a gagging sound and jerked his head away. He said in a shrill, shaken voice, “What … what was he doing up here? What was he going to shoot up here?”

I looked at him, and then I looked down the incline, gauging a trajectory from where Jerrold lay. You could see the backside of Cody's cabin without obstruction, less than forty yards away, and there were two chairs set up there in the shade of a young oak.

He followed my gaze. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, as if it were undergoing some sort of paroxysm. “Angela and me?” he said disbelievingly. “He was shooting at us, at me?”

I did not say anything.

“No,” Cody said. “No, listen …”

But I did not listen. I spun around and shoved past him and made my way down the slope. When I got around to the front of the cabin, I saw that Harry was sitting there on the steps, one arm draped awkwardly around Angela Jerrold's shoulders. She was sobbing in a broken way, and she did not look beautiful or alluring any more, not any more. I had no sympathy for her; it was what she was, to a greater or lesser degree, that had been the catalyst for all this blood and pain and horror.

Harry looked up at me with dull eyes, and I said, “I'm not up to a drive into The Pines right now. You want to take care of calling Cloudman?”

“All right,” he said.

He stood up, got Mrs. Jerrold on her feet, and then did not seem to know what to do with her. I motioned to the cabin door, put the .22 down—the feel of it in my hands was like something unclean—and took one of her arms even though I did not want to touch her. Together we guided her inside and down onto Cody's rumpled bed. I pulled a sheet over her, watched her curl herself up and lie there making those sobbing sounds. Then I got out of there, Harry right behind me.

Neither of us had anything to say to each other; he moved away to the path. Cody had come down from the glade. I saw him walk shakily to the rear of the cabin, heard the clink of glass on glass a moment later. Knox and Talesco had come down too, and they were standing around as if they had momentarily lost all purpose and direction, like people in a daze.

I walked past them and straight to my cabin. Even with the fatigue, the loss of tension, I still seemed to be in no immediate danger of a collapse; I was coughing again, though only in a thinly sporadic way. Inside the cabin, I stripped off my filthy clothing, took a long shower alternately hot and cold, brushed my teeth and ran a comb through my hair without looking at myself in the mirror, and put on the stuff I had worn yesterday because I did not have any more clean clothes. I did it all mechanically, mindlessly.

Then I went out and down to Harry's cabin, but not to the front of it—around to the rear and inside the shed there. I stood for a moment next to the skiff that was up on davits, letting my eyes adjust, scanning the interior. And finally I crossed to the rolls of heavy canvas at the rear and knelt in front of them and began to tug at each one in turn.

The Daghestan carpet, bound with cord in a long tight cylinder, was hidden inside a fold of the third roll.

I did not untie it, or even touch it; it was Cloudman's baby—and Kayabalian's. I thought briefly of the twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward that was probably going to be mine. A lot of money, more money than I had seen in one chunk in a long time. And yet it did not mean anything to me at that moment; it was an abstract, and it was tainted with the blood of three men.

I used the canvas to re-cover the Daghestan, straightened up, and went outside again and got a beer from the cooler and sat on Harry's front steps to drink it and wait for Cloudman.

Nineteen

While I waited, the sky got darker overhead and the wind picked up and eventually a few drops of rain started to fall. I watched them make tiny ripples on the steel-colored surface of the lake, darken the reddish hue of the earth. It did not get any cooler, though; if anything, the air took on a damp sultriness that was even more oppressive than the dry heat of the past few days. Here and there I could see patches of blue between rifts in the lowering clouds, and I knew that the rain would not last long, that the sky would probably be clear again by nightfall.

After thirty minutes Sam Knox came around the corner and stopped when he saw me sitting there. Then, slowly, he stepped over and leaned a hip against the railing post, and his eyes were shocked and grave. “Hell of a thing that happened up there,” he said. “Awful thing.”

“Yeah.” I did not want to talk to anyone but Cloudman.

“Always the wrong one that gets it,” Knox said. “It should have been her.”

“It shouldn't have been anybody,” I said.

“No, but if it had to be someone, it should've been her. Talesco was goddamn lucky she held him off. It could have been him Jerrold was shooting at.”

“I thought Talesco scored with her. I thought you were trying to score with her.”

“No, Christ no.”

“Then what was your fight with him about?”

“Him making a play for her,” Knox said. “He's getting married next month, he's marrying this girl in Fresno, and I won't see her hurt …” He broke off. “Look, I don't want to get into that, okay?”

I shrugged. But he had gotten into it enough to tell me I had misinterpreted his drunken mutterings in the hotel bar, and that was why Talesco's comments to me later had not seemed to make any sense. Just a simple case of one man being in love with a girl, and stepping aside for his best friend, and then finding out the best friend was trying to make it with another woman as a kind of last fling. Talesco was lucky Mrs. Jerrold had backed him off, all right. In more ways than one.

Knox said, “What happened to you have anything to do with Jerrold? I mean, the way you looked, all banged up and covered with dirt, and you and Burroughs with those rifles…”

“It doesn't matter now, does it?”

“Talesco and me, we were wondering, is all.”

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

“Sure,” he said reluctantly, “that's how you feel.”

“That's how I feel.”

He seemed disinclined to leave, but I quit looking at him and did not say anything for a couple of minutes, and the message finally got through. “I guess the cops'll want to talk to us too,” he said. “We'll be up at the cabin.” Then, when I nodded, he turned and shuffled away and left me alone again.

It was another twenty minutes before the parade of vehicles came streaming down into the parking circle, Harry's jeep leading the pack. I stood up and went over there. Cloudman, looking solemn, stepped out of the first of two county cars and fixed me with a long probing look that I could not read. Harry and three deputies and the forensic plainclothesman, and a guy from the ambulance wearing a white uniform and carrying a medical satchel, came up and stood around on either side of us. The misty drizzle had a hot feel on my neck, like a spray of water from a simmering pan.

Cloudman said mildly, “Getting to be a habit, you people calling to report homicides.”

“Some habit,” I said.

“I understand there's a third man dead too, a Walt Bascomb.”

“That's right. Jerrold killed him on Sunday night, not long after Terzian. But it won't be easy getting to his body.”

“No? Why not?”

I told him why not—everything that had happened up at the abandoned mine.

He said without changing expression, “Pretty rough.”

“About as rough as it can get.”

“You look kind of rocky. Feel okay?”

“I'll make it.” For the time being, anyway.

He asked Harry to show his men where Jerrold's body was, and the intern where Mrs. Jerrold was, and Harry nodded and led part of the group away. One of the deputies stayed there with Cloudman and me. Cloudman took off his hat and dug tiredly at his scalp. I still could not gauge how he was taking all of this, if his feelings toward me had undergone any kind of change.

He said, “You got anything to back up your claim that Jerrold murdered Terzian and this Bascomb?”

“Some fairly sound theories. And the stolen carpet.”

One of his eyebrows lifted. “You found that too?”

“I found it.”

“Where?”

“Right here in the camp. I'll show you.”

I took him around to the shed and uncovered the rolled Daghes-tan and watched while he got down and peeled back an edge of it. Then he nodded and said, “Jerrold put it here?”

“Uh-huh. You want me to go into it now?”

“Not just yet.” He stood up. “We'll have to take it along as the evidence when we; leave. You want me to notify Kayabalian, or you want to handle that yourself, you working for him and all?”

“You can notify him. I'll get in touch with him later. Tomorrow probably.”

We went outside, and I said, “If you're going up to see the body, I'd like to stay here. I've looked at enough death—too damned much of it.”

“I guess we all have,” he agreed, “the business we're in.”

So I showed him the path that led up to Cody's cabin, and after he and the deputy went up there I came back to Harry's and sat on the porch this time, out of the drizzle. I let myself think now, arranging my thoughts so I could lay it all out for Cloudman when the time came.

The white-uniformed intern came back first and said that Cloudman had told him he'd better have a look at me. That made me feel a little more sure of Cloudman's attitude; it was probably going to be all right between us. The intern peered at the cut on my forearm and the abrasions on my hands, and swabbed some antiseptic on them; then felt my ribs and asked me a few questions about sore spots and dizziness and double vision. I was not coughing now, and I did not say anything about my lungs; their condition was between me and Dr. White and the pathology lab at San Francisco General.

He had just finished telling me to get into bed and get some rest when Cloudman and Harry and the one deputy reappeared. At Cloudman's instructions, the intern went off to supervise the removal of Jerrold's remains. The rest of us were pretty cramped on the small porch, and it was starting to rain harder; we trouped inside the cabin and found places to sit, all except Cloudman. He stood with his back against the mantelpiece, worrying his scalp and grimacing. The rain made a soft, oddly lonely sound on the roof.

“Okay,” Cloudman said to me, “you can tell it now.”

I nodded. “Maybe I'd better give you a little background on Jerrold first,” I said, and I told him why Harry had asked me to come up and what had happened here at the camp since Sunday—Jerrold's wild jealousy, his wife's flirtations and probable infidelity, his deteriorating state of mind. Cloudman did not interrupt; the only sounds in the room were my voice and the pattering rain and the scratch of the deputy's pencil on the pages of a notebook.

When I was done, there was a moment of silence. Then, quietly, Cloudman said, “Two of you should have told me about this Sunday night or Monday afternoon.”

“I guess we should have,” I said. “But neither of us figured a connection then between Terzian's death and Jerrold. His instability seemed to be a product of his wife's actions and business pressures, nothing else. Error in judgment that was mostly mine; I'll take the responsibility for it.”

“All right, go on.”

“I didn't really begin to tie up Terzian's murder with somebody here at the camp until last night, when I discovered that Bascomb had disappeared.” I explained about the incident at Cabin Five. “But it was still only speculation; I didn't have anything more than a hunch, I hadn't tumbled yet to the things that pointed to Jerrold.”

“When did you tumble?”

“Not until this afternoon, up at the mine.”

“Why'd you leave the call for me this morning?”

“To tell you about Bascomb's disappearance and the possible tie-up with Terzian. I was on my way back from The Pines when I noticed the mine and realized it was what was on the missing sketch.”

“What was Jerrold's relationship with Terzian?” he asked. “Burroughs here told us he didn't know anyone who collected Oriental rugs and carpets.”

“That's right, buddy,” Harry said. He was sitting forward in his chair with his hands on his knees, and he still looked a little stunned. “Jerrold liked to talk about himself, he would have mentioned something like that before.”

“I don't think he was a collector,” I said. “I think he was buying stolen Orientals for one of his big advertising clients—the kind of client who won't buy stolen goods directly but doesn't mind getting them through a middleman, no questions asked. It's just an assumption, no facts to back it up, but it makes sense. Mrs. Jerrold told me he was a fanatic when it came to business, that he'd do anything to bring larger clients into his agency. Which means he'd do anything, too, to keep the ones he already had. Advertising people have contacts in all kinds of places; it wouldn't have been too difficult for him to connect with a man like Terzian.”

“I'll buy it for now,” Cloudman said, nodding. “What about these things that pointed to Jerrold?”

“There's the peacock feather, for one.”

His brow wrinkled. “You're coming at me out of left field.”

“Not really. You figured the feather came out of the killer's car and got dropped accidentally; the only question was why anyone would have it in his car in the first place. Well, Jerrold had been wearing this fisherman's hat off and on, decorated with all kinds of things—buttons, flies, patches, bits of colored felt. Any man who would put all that stuff on a hat might also get the idea of adding part of a peacock feather. That's pretty flimsy, I know—but it adds up.”

“You've got to have more than that.”

“There's a process of elimination,” I said. “On Sunday night, while Terzian was being murdered, Mrs. Jerrold and Karl Talesco were together over here on the lakefront; she intimated that to me the following morning. Also, the Rambler wagon that belongs to Talesco and Sam Knox was parked outside when Harry and I left in one of the skiffs—hardly any time for one of them to get over to the bluff and kill Terzian. And Knox volunteered the information today that he'd talked to Bascomb around dusk Sunday, an admission a man guilty of Bascomb's murder wouldn't make. That narrowed it down to the kid, Cody, and Jerrold, both of whom had gone off in their cars late Sunday afternoon. The pattern of Bascomb's death and the stealing of the mine sketch laid it on Jerrold.”

“How so?”

“They weren't wholly rational acts,” I said. “They suggested an unstable personality.”

“Spell it out.”

“Let me give it all to you, starting with Terzian's murder.”

“Go ahead,” Cloudman said.

“Assume Jerrold made arrangements with Terzian to come up here from San Jose and then to meet over on the bluff. My guess is that he wanted to get a look at the carpet and maybe make a partial payment on it, after which Terzian would deliver it to some place in the Los Angeles area. During the meeting, something set Jerrold off—an argument over money, Christ knows now. He grabbed up a lug wrench and settled the argument by bashing in Terzian's skull. Then, in a panic, he transferred the carpet to his car, wedged down the gas pedal in the van, and sent it over the edge—another irrational act, because the water at the foot of the bluff is shallow. A reasoning man couldn't expect the van to sink out of sight; why not just hide it back in the trees somewhere?”

I paused to clear my throat; my voice sounded thick, rusty. At length I went on: “After Jerrold was through with the van, he'd have realized he also had a problem with the carpet. He couldn't hide it in the trunk of his car because of its size, and he couldn't leave it out in the open somewhere because of its fragile nature; and for some reason—guilt, fear of discovery through a prolonged absence—he didn't want to drive it down to Los Angeles right away. So his decision was to bring it back here and hide it for the time being.”

Harry said, “Here at the camp?”

“Yeah. Inside your shed in those rolls of canvas.”

“That's where it was all along?”

“That's where it was and still is,” I said. “He planned to take it away with him today, which is the reason for the U-Haul trailer he brought back from Sonora. He'd get you to help with his luggage, make sure no one else was around, and then drag the carpet out and put it inside the trailer.”

“I'm beginning to follow now,” Cloudman said. “When Jerrold got back here Sunday night, he ran into Bascomb—that it?”

“I make it that way. He didn't see anybody in the immediate vicinity when he arrived, so he carried the carpet from his car to the shed. Only Bascomb happened to be having a beer from the cooler on the other side of this cabin—that was where he was when Knox last saw him—and noticed Jerrold and probably went over to ask him what he was doing. Jerrold panicked again and murdered Bascomb with a wrench. Which left him with another body on his hands and nowhere to get rid of it easily.

“Maybe he thought of the pocket mine then, or maybe he just covered Bascomb's bloody head with towels from the fish-cleaning sink back there, then dragged the body into his car and started driving and hit on the mine that way. He took the wrench with him too. Harry found a bloody handkerchief nearby early Monday, and we both thought it belonged to either Knox or Talesco because they'd gotten into a fight; but there was a lot of blood on it, and neither ore of them was cut very badly. So it figures the handkerchief was Jerrold's, and he'd used it to wipe the wrench off and then dropped it accidentally, just like the peacock feather. He had to have been in a frenzy by that time.”

Cloudman asked, “Where does the sketch fit in?”

“Jerrold was deteriorating rapidly, probably plagued with paranoid guilt, and anything connected with the mine must have seemed like a potential threat to him. It could be Bascomb showed Jerrold his sketch of the mine, or showed it to Mrs. Jerrold and she told him about it; anyway, he remembered it twenty-four hours later, and went after it, tore it out of the pad and destroyed it. That was where I came in—and I guess he might have crushed my skull, too, with that tree limb he was carrying, if I hadn't heard him in time and scared him off.”

I lapsed into silence for a moment, fighting down the need to cough; I did not want them to hear me and watch me having an attack. The deputy's pencil still scratched, but that was the only sound now and I realized the rain had stopped. It was stuffy in the room: I got up to turn on Harry's fan.

I had one more thing to say, and as if reading my thoughts, Cloudman provided the question: “Why did Jerrold go back to the mine today? He couldn't have known you'd be there, could he?”

“No,” I said, “he couldn't have known.”

“Then?”

“It was probably because he'd been going back there off and on since Sunday night. I can't know that for certain, but that's how it looks. He was gone all day yesterday, and his car wasn't anywhere in The Pines; he'd been drinking too heavily to have just been driving around.”

“If you're right, what was he doing there?”

“Watching the body,” I said wearily. “Sitting in or around the mine shaft and drinking gin out of a bottle and guarding it in case anybody came.”

“Jesus,” Harry said. “Sweet Jesus Christ.”

Twenty

It was after seven o'clock before the last of it was finished and Cloudman left, taking his deputies and the Daghestan carpet with him, to have a look at the pocket mine and determine what could be done about Bascomb's body; the ambulance had gone a few minutes prior to that, Mrs. Jerrold sitting up in the front seat and snuffling into a handkerchief. Cloudman's final words to me were a request to stay on until tomorrow, so I could come in and sign another statement, but I was prepared to do that anyway because I was in no shape to drive a hundred miles. Creeping lassitude made my motor responses jerky and dulled my thoughts again. I felt that if I did not get to bed pretty soon I was going to suffer that collapse I had been worrying about.

I asked Harry for a glass of milk and something else light to put in my stomach, since I had not eaten all day and I was bothered by hunger pangs on top of the rest of it. He found half a melon to go with the milk, and stood watching me while I ate it. Neither of us said much; I sensed that he wanted to be alone as badly as I did. Exposure to horror has a way of driving a temporary wedge between even the closest of friends—you need time to get over the aftershock of it, time to blot out its effects inside yourself.

Back at my cabin, I undressed and crawled into bed. Sleep came before long, and with it a jumbled dream of falling things and blood and faces without eyes and voices screaming behind a sloping wall of darkness. I half-awoke, bathed in perspiration and with the bedclothes bunched around my ankles, and then drifted off again. Only this time I was in a coffin and I could not get out, I kept tearing at the satin lining with my fingers, whimpering, choking because there was no air in there and I could feel myself slowly suffocating, and all the while a voice whispered beyond the lid, “I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, the lesion is malignant …”

I came out of that one convulsively, swinging my legs down to the floor, my chest swelling and deflating in a rapid tempo. When the dream remnants slid away, I realized that it was dark outside, that the room was sultry, thick with stagnant air. I got up and went into the bath alcove on sore, stiff legs and splashed my face with icy water, and that brought me fully awake. But I felt logy, temples throbbing in a dull way, eyes sore and gritty in their sockets. And restless too, jittery. Dark things moved across my mind like running shadows.

I lay down on the bed again and tried to recapture sleep, but it was pointless. I did not want any more of those dreams, and with the hot motionless air I sensed they would come again as soon as I dropped off. The restlessness would not go away either, and the dark things continued to flit around as though looking for light, as though wanting to make themselves seen and perceived.

At the end of ten minutes I got up and pulled on shirt and trousers and went outside—in and out of that cabin endlessly since Sunday, back and forth between it and the lake. All the clouds were gone now, and the sky was brilliant with stars and the slice of moon; but there was a breeze tonight, like a residue of the brief drizzly rain, and it cut into the heat and made breathing a little less uncomfortable.

I walked aimlessly along the beach, found myself at the edge of the pier, and passed through the fan of light from the pole there and out to the end. I sat with my legs dangling down, looking over the water. A bass jumped off on the right, spreading shiny ripples, and my nerves jumped with it. The dark things ran and ran—and one of them danced into my awareness and I saw that it was Jerrold, Jerrold lying up there in the glade with his head nearly severed and the blackened shotgun at his side.

Then the rest of them came out, one by one, like a parade of actors onto a stage, and I sat very still and stared at them. All the heat seemed to fade out of the night; the breath of wind seemed suddenly cold—cold.

Ah no, I thought. Ah God, no.

Yes.

Yes, damn it to hell, yes.

Emotions churned inside me; I felt sick to my stomach. This was the final horror, the final ugliness, the absolute bottom-line truth buried under a sea of lies and half-truths and partial resolutions; the real ending and the real beginning. This was what I had to face, this bitter truth, on top of all the other things physical and mental.

I sat there a moment longer, and then I got up and turned and took one step, And stopped and went rigid, and the only emotion in me was a kind of revulsion.

He was walking toward the pier, coming at a slow tired pace to the pool of fight.

I started toward him, watched him pause to wait for me, half in and half out of darkness. He said heavily, “I saw you sitting out here; I couldn't sleep either—” but he cut it off as I reached him, when he saw my face and the way my hands were knotted into fists.

“Harry, you son of a bitch,” I said. The words were hard and ugly in my ears. “You sick cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

“Hey,” he said, “what…”

“Jerrold's death was no goddamn accident,” I said. “You killed him—you and Mrs. Jerrold.”

He took an involuntary step backward so that he was full in the light. My friend, the man I had known for thirty years, the man I had shared so many memories with—was a stranger, a total stranger. Because it was all there in his face, it had all been there from the moment I came back to the camp and told him that Jerrold had murdered Terzian and Bascomb; I had been too wrapped up in the tenseness of the situation, too blinded by my own reactions, to see it for what it was—the ravished face of guilt.

“It was the two of you all along,” I said, “you're the one who's been screwing her, not Talesco or Knox or Cody or anybody else. Screwing her and plotting Jerrold's death, driving him right over the edge so he'd do the job for you with a shotgun you'd sealed the barrel on.”

He did not say anything, but I saw his shoulders slump and his mouth twist into a grimace of pain. There would be no denials, I realized then, no more lies—and that was good because I could not have stood lies and denials, I think I would have lost control of myself and slammed them back down his throat.

But I wanted to hurt him anyway, with words if not with my hands. I said, “Only you got more than you bargained for. The two of you turned him into a psychotic, all right, but you did such a bang-up job of it that he started killing other people before you were ready for him to kill himself. Jerrold may have been the one who crushed Terzian's and Bascomb's skulls, but you're twice as guilty because you pulled the strings. You killed them all, Harry, goddamn you, you murdered three men instead of just one.”

He put up a hand like a man warding off blows. “Buddy …”

“Don't call me that,” I said, “I'm not your buddy any more. You used me just like you used all the rest of them, you son of a bitch, you used me to help you get away with murder. Whose idea was it to bring me in? Hers? Yeah, it would have been; you're not devious enough for that. Maybe the whole thing was her idea, maybe she planned it from the start and you just went along for the ride. You want to cop out that way, Harry? Put all the blame on her?”

“Shut up,” he said, but there was no malice in it. “Shut the fucking hell up, can't you?”

“No.” Relentless now, hating myself and hating him more. “So damned clever, the whole scheme. Work on his jealousy, make it look like she was playing around with every guy in sight, while you pretended to be his confidant and stiffed him up every chance you got with a load of crap about what you'd seen or heard or suspected. How long did it take the two of you to turn him into a lunatic? Weeks, months, a year or more?”

Headshake. His eyes held mine as though each pair was a magnet.

“Yeah, clever,” I said. “Too clever—too elaborate. A simple hunting accident wasn't good enough, you had to get fancy; that's where people like you always screw up, so that people like me can eventually figure the truth. You get fancy and you make mistakes, you either leave little holes unplugged or you overdo things. Like the way you worked it after I got here: Jerrold's sudden convenient attack on Cody Sunday, when the kid and I happened to be together and I'd be sure to see right away what kind of shape he was in; you always keeping the pressure on—a little too worried, a little too uptight; the phony twosomes Angela Jerrold kept arranging between herself and Talesco and Bascomb and Cody so I couldn't help but stumble in on a few of them; the personal things she told me about Jerrold to cement the picture of him as an obsessive; her immediate agreement to get him to go home, the apparent concern for him, and then in spite of that, continuing to see Cody without trying to hide it.

“But the way Jerrold died was where you really blew it. He was an outdoors type and knew his way around guns; a man like that is too cautious to let the muzzle of a shotgun nose into mud or clay. And where would there be any mud or clay around here in the first place? The lake bottom is rocky in close to shore; there hasn't been any rain before today in quite a while and that damned red dust is everywhere.

“How did Jerrold know she and Cody were together at Cody's cabin? And why was he up in that glade? Why didn't he just confront the two of them and blast off at point-blank range? He had to have been programmed, that's the only answer—and you're the only one who could have done it. You said you didn't know where he was when I showed up, but you were coming back along the lakefront, and there's nothing else over past the beach except the path up to Cabin Six. You were there, all right, and you told him about her and Cody, and then you talked him into using the shotgun, gave him the idea of going up into the glade because you didn't want him anywhere near her when the blowback got him. It probably wasn't hard; he was ready for anything by then, he'd just come back from sealing me into the mine. What'd you say to him? ‘Oh, you don't want to kill them, Ray, just throw a little scare into them, just a warning shot or two.’ That about the way it went, Harry?”

He backed up another couple of steps and leaned heavily against the light pole. The bones in his face seemed to have collapsed; the skin looked shrunken, gouged with deep hollows. I stood staring at him, silent now. I had run out of words and run out of the desire to make him suffer—and run out of hate too. Emotion seemed to have deserted me entirely.

After a long time he said, “You don't know what it's like to fall in love with a woman like Angela. She gets inside you, you can't think and you can't sleep, she takes over your world. Nothing else matters. I didn't want to do any of it, you've got to understand that. I didn't want to drag you into it or to kill anybody.”

“So it was her then, right? Lay it on her.”

“No. She's not like that. We did it together, we did all of it together. It wasn't her and it wasn't me. We're one person.”

“Sure. One person.”

“We had to do it, there was no other way.”

“Think about Jerrold sitting up in the mine shaft, guarding Bascomb's corpse, and tell me that again.”

A shudder racked him; genuine pain. And yet he said, “I've got Angela now, that's all I'm letting myself think about.”

“You won't have her for long.”

“Yes,” he said, “oh yes.”

“I'm going into Sonora and get hold of Cloudman as soon as I can gather up my things. I'm going to tell him the whole story, every lousy bit of it.”

He straightened slightly and pushed away from the pole.

“Unless you want to kill me too,” I said. “You've got three on your conscience, what's another one? You think you've got the guts to do it? You'll have to try if you want to stop me.”

“I couldn't kill you.”

“Then you're going to jail, both of you.”

“No,” he said.

“For the rest of your rotten lives.”

“No,” he said again, and he seemed to draw himself together. “You've got no proof, no evidence, against Angela and me. Jerrold died accidentally by his own hand, nobody can ever prove different.”

He was right, I knew he was right.

“They'll break you,” I said, “or they'll break her.”

That brought a faint smile to his mouth—terrible, eviscerated. “No chance, old buddy. We're one person, I told you that; we're too strong. Too strong.”

I just looked at him.

“We love each other,” he said.

I kept on looking at him a moment longer, and then I shoved past him and went up to Cabin Three and threw my clothing and gear together. The restlessness was gone now, and I felt oddly calm, oddly unburdened. In a way I could not yet understand, I seemed to have been purged not only of emotion but of doubt and the specter of death—if only for a little while.

When I came back down, Harry was standing in front of his cabin with his hands at his sides and one of those thin cigars trailing smoke from a corner of his mouth. I did not look at him as I passed, and he did not move. He still had not moved when I got the car started and turned around and took one final glance at him in the rear-view mirror.

Twenty-one

I came back across the Bay Bridge, into San Francisco, at three-thirty Wednesday afternoon.

At the western edge of the Bay, billows of fog were drifting in through the Golden Gate; I could just see the tips of the towers over mere, orange-red buried in gray. A wall of it was massing up above Twin Peaks too. I smiled a little. After the heat and dust of Tuolumne County, that fog was like coming home to a meal after a three-day fast.

I was still pretty tired, stiff and sore and in need of a good deal more sleep. I had spent part of the night in Cloudman's office in Sonora—a deputy had summoned him from his home after listening to what I had to say—and the rest of the night in a motel nearby. This morning I had gone back to the Sheriff's Department and signed more statements and listened to Cloudman tell me that he had had sessions with Harry and with Angela Jerrold, and had not been able to pressure through their stories. He seemed to think he might still have a case, might still break them down given enough time, but I did not agree.

They were going to get away with it, all right.

They had committed the perfect murder.

And yet, they were not going to get away with it in another sense, at least not Harry. It was eating him up inside, and how long would he be able to go on fighting off the guilt with only a warped love and the companionship of a hellish bitch like Angela Jerrold to console him? Not long. A man like Harry, a man with a conscience—not long. One of these days it was all going to blow back into his face like the blocked shotgun had blown back into Jerrold's, and it would destroy him and maybe her too, and then justice would be served after all.

I had done a lot of thinking, clear and mostly unemotional, lying awake last night and driving back today. The doubts and the specter of death had not come back, and I had reached an understanding of why I was purged of it, why I had felt purged after those few minutes with Harry on the pier. As a result, and at long last, I had come to something else too.

Terms with my own mortality.

A thing like that is not easy to translate into words, but it was as if the confrontation with Harry had taken the form of a final battle in a long series of battles with death—inside my head, and outside it with Terzian and Bascomb and Jerrold and the ordeal in the mine shaft. And death had lost, I had beaten it, because it had let me get too close, let me see it too vividly in that brief and awful glimpse into Hairy Burroughs' soul.

Death was a state of mind as well as a physical fact; you could be dead while you were still alive, or you could be dying and too full of life to let death inside you. What Harry had allowed to happen to himself—what I had been allowing to happen to myself in a different way—was the true essence of death, far more terrible than any potential void, any uncertain afterlife. Terminal lung cancer or not, I could not and would not wrap my own soul in that kind of blackness.

I took the Fremont exit off the bridge, and the Embarcadero Freeway, and got off at Front Street. Traffic was thick in the Financial District, and when I crawled past Sansome Street on my way to Grant I found myself thinking of Erika, who had been working in a building on Sansome the last time I saw her five years ago.

Erika. I remembered again her sharp words, her claim that the life and the profession I had chosen for myself were a lie. But I had reached an understanding with myself about that too.

Maybe I was not much of a detective, and maybe my work and my life had no real importance or significance in the scheme of things, and maybe I had patterned myself in the mold of fictional creations who were far greater in their world than I could ever be in mine—but none of that was a lie. A lie was something that hurt other people, like Harry's love and Harry's friendship, or had a conscious basis in pain or deceit or hypocrisy; there was none of that kind of blackness in my soul either. If I was a pulp private eye, at least in spirit, then so be it. It was nothing to apologize for, nothing to feel ashamed about, because it was an honest thing to be, and a decent one.

I wish I'd been able to tell all that to Erika, I thought.

Then I thought: I wonder if she's still here in San Francisco, still free of attachments? And if she is, would she want to see me after all these years? Well, it might be worth the effort to find out. I've got the perfect reason to call her, after all—tomorrow I'll be fifty years old, and no man should have to spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

Maybe I would try to call her, then. Maybe I would.

And I turned off Grant onto Geary, parked illegally in a bus zone in front of the building where Dr. White had his offices, and went in to find out at last if the lesion was malignant or benign …

Table of Contents

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Thirteen

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Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

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Twenty-one