Labyrinth

SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are you, Donleavy?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Lucky you.”

“Where’s the body?”

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

“Any suspects?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He confess to you?”

“Yep, he did.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Which are?”

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

“You sure about the amount of time?”

“Positive.”

“What’s the second reason?”

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

Osterman was frowning. “Maybe Carding didn’t shout after all; maybe he spoke in a normal voice and Talbot, mixed up as he is, remembered him as yelling.”

“Then why would Talbot have picked up the gun in such a hurry? If somebody’s talking to you in a normal or slightly raised voice, even making accusations, you wouldn’t have much cause to fear for your safety. Or to grab a weapon just to shut him up.”

Donleavy said, “Let’s hear the third reason.”

“That’s the clincher. I took a close look at Carding’s body less than five minutes after the shot: the blood around the wound was coagulating. He’d been dead at least fifteen minutes by then, maybe longer.”

“You could be wrong about that,” Osterman said. “You’re not a forensic expert.”

“No, but I’ve seen a lot of blood in my life. Believe me, I can tell the difference between fresh and coagulating.”

Donleavy ruminated for a time. Then he said, “Your theory is that Carding killed himself, right?”

“Right. Probably because he was despondent over the death of his wife.”

“Gun suicides don’t usually shoot themselves in the chest, you know.”

“I know. But it happens once in a while-often enough to take it out of the implausible category.”

Osterman said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why the hell would Talbot shoot off the gun if Carding was already dead? Why would he want to make it look like he’d committed murder?”

“Because he believes he did commit murder,” I said. “And not just one murder-two. Carding’s wife in the accident and now Carding as a result of it.”

“Elaborate on that,” Donleavy said.

“Look at it this way. Talbot’s a man so full of guilt that he can’t live with himself; he wants to be punished for what he did-wants to die but doesn’t quite have the courage or the strength to take his own life. So he decides to confront Carding, either because he hopes to provoke himself into a suicidal state or because he hopes to provoke Carding into carrying out the threat against his life.

“But when he gets here he finds Carding dead in the garage of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For Talbot it’s a pretty terrible irony: He’s the one who wants to be dead, to kill himself, but it’s turned out the other way around. He’s got a double load of guilt to deal with now and he can’t handle it; he really starts to unravel.

“Then he hears the cab driver hassling me out on the drive and realizes somebody’s about to find him there with the body. In his mind he’s already killed Carding; why not just go ahead and make it look like murder? That way he can be arrested and prosecuted; he won’t be dead, but at least he’ll be punished.

“He picks up the gun, either from the floor or from Carding’s hand, and fires a shot into the roof or one of the walls. And when I come in he blurts out his confession. Simple as that in the factual sense; damned complex in the psychological sense. But I’ll bet that’s the way it happened.”

Osterman was unconvinced. “It still sounds screwy to me,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Donleavy said. He hooked his fingers around his coat lapels and rocked back and forth; when he did that he looked more than ever like Oliver Hardy. The resemblance was uncanny sometimes, even without the little toothbrush mustache, and it made me wonder if at least some of the mannerisms were calculated-an act to keep the people he dealt with off guard. “I’ve done some reading in criminal psychology; you should see a few of those case histories.”

“Well-if you say so.”

“Besides which, there’re two empty chambers in the gun and just a single wound in Carding’s body. And Talbot only fired one shot.”

“Carding could have kept one chamber empty,” Osterman said. “Or he could have fired a round days or weeks ago.”

“Yeah, I know. Still, you’d better have your men comb the garage for a bullet hole and a. 38 slug.”

“Whatever you say.”

Osterman gave me a curt nod, as if he were annoyed with me for making waves in what he still considered an open-and-shut case and went on out. When he was gone, Donleavy asked me, “What’s Laura Nichols’ address and telephone number?”

I told him and he wrote the information down in a spiral notebook. “I called her just after I reported the death,” I said. “She wasn’t home.”

“I’ll try her again pretty soon,” he said. “You got a card for yourself? Home and office numbers?”

“Sure.” I handed him one from my wallet.

He said, “I guess that’s it for now; you might as well go on home. I’ll call you later today or tomorrow.”

“Fine.”

We shook hands, and I went out and down the wind-swept drive to Queen’s Lane. There were still half a dozen citizens hanging around the area; one of them, a kid in his late teens, cut over near me as I turned up toward where I’d left my car.

“What happened up there, mister? Was it a suicide?”

“Yeah. Suicide.”

“The old boozehound knocked himself off, huh?” the kid said. “Wow.” And he grinned at me.

People.

It was dusk by the time I got back into downtown San Francisco. I went straight to my office and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I sat down to make some calls.

There was still no answer at the Nichols’ home; either Laura Nichols was still out somewhere or she had returned and Donleavy had got in touch with her, and she’d left again to see her brother. I rang up Bert Thomas and Milo Petrie, told each of them the stakeout was finished and what had happened in Brisbane. My last call was to the Hall of Justice, and this time Eberhardt was in. But “I’m busy right now,” he said. He sounded snippy, the way he does when he’s being overworked. “You planning to be home tonight?”

“I was, yeah.”

“I’ll drop by later, sometime after seven.”

I had nothing more to do in the office after that; I locked up again and drove home to my flat. From there I gave the Nichols number another try, with the same nonresults.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator, put a frozen eggplant parmagiana in the oven, and sat down to look at the house mail. The only thing of interest was a sales list from a pulp dealer in Ohio. The guy’s prices were kind of high, even for the over-inflated pulp market, but he had three issues of Thrilling Detective, one of Mammoth Mystery, and one of FBI Detective that I needed and that I thought I could afford. I wrote him a letter and a check-and wondered as I did so just how much I had spent this year on pulps. Too much, probably; that was one of the reasons why I was always short of money. But then, outside of my work, collecting pulps was the only real passion I had in life. What good was money if not to use to indulge your passions?

The telephone rang while I was eating my supper. A reporter from the Chronicle wanting to know if I had any statement to make concerning the murder of Victor Carding. I said no, politely, and hung up. When I had finished supper and was putting the dirty dishes into the sink with the other dirty dishes the phone rang a second time. Another reporter, this one from one of the TV stations. I told him the party he was looking for had been called to Los Angeles on business and would not be back for a week. Who was I? An associate named Phil Marlowe, I said, and then hung up on him too. Media people bring out the worst in me-I suppose because their business is disseminating sensationalistic crime news and mine relies on avoiding too much lurid publicity. The public eye versus the private eye.

I tried once more to call Laura Nichols. Nobody picked up this time, either. So I plunked myself down in the living room with a 1936 issue of Popular Detective, to read and wait for Eberhardt.

The phone rang again at seven fifteen. Another damned reporter? I went into the bedroom and caught up the receiver and said hello with my finger on the cut-off button.

But it wasn’t a reporter. “This is Donleavy,” his soft sleepy voice said in my ear. “I’ve got some news for you.”

I took my finger off the button. “Good news, I hope.”

“Not from your point of view. I talked to Talbot again; so did a couple of psychologists. He still maintains he’s guilty and nobody can shake him. We’ve got no choice except to charge him with suspicion of homicide.”

“What? Christ, I explained why he couldn’t have done it.”

“Sure you did. But you could be wrong about the time element and the silence in the garage before the shot. And about the blood coagulation, too; coroner wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact time of death. I’m not saying you are wrong, understand. Just that the rest of the evidence indicates you might be.”

“What evidence? Look, didn’t Osterman’s men find a second bullet in the garage?”

“No,” Donleavy said, “they didn’t.”

“But it’s got to be there. Otherwise the whole thing doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes sense the way Talbot tells it.”

“No, it doesn’t. There’s just no way he could have killed Carding. The man committed suicide.”

Donleavy made an audible sighing sound. “You’re a hundred percent wrong about that, my friend,” he said. “Lab boys tested the victim’s hands for nitrate traces and his clothing for powder marks; there weren’t any. He hadn’t fired a gun and he wasn’t shot at point blank range: it couldn’t possibly be suicide. Victor Carding was murdered.”