Blowback

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…