out to me, “What happened in there? Was somebody killed?”
Yeah, I thought, somebody was killed. I went back inside without answering and found a chair on the laundry porch, near the washer-and-dryer combination, and did my waiting in private.
Nobody bothered me for half an hour or so. Then one of the lab technicians came out and seemed surprised to find me sitting there in the shadows. He located the light switch and flipped it on with a knuckle, so he wouldn’t smudge any prints that might be on it.
I said, “You want me out of the way?”
“Be easier to work.”
“Sure.”
I walked outside again. The guy was gone from the window next door; I’d have bet money he had come outside himself, finally, to see if he could get a better look at things. The other neighbors were still in the alley, but a couple of uniformed officers were questioning them and nobody was paying any attention to me. I went over and stood in the darkness under some kind of puffy shrub; watched rain clouds roll in overhead and smelled the good clean odors of ozone and damp grass and evergreens.
Another of the lab men and the other inspector, a young guy named Tucker, came out together and began poking around the yard with flashlights. I stayed out of their way. Then they went out through the gate and along the alley toward where the car belonging to Leonard Purcell’s assailant had been parked. From under the shrub I watched the play of their light beams, but I couldn’t tell if they found anything.
Pretty soon it began to rain-a misty drizzle at first, then a hard slanting downpour. Everybody beat it out of the alley. I didn’t want to go back inside, but I didn’t want to stand out here and get soaked either. At my age, you worry about things like pneumonia. The laundry porch was empty again, the light shut off, so I sat down on the same chair I’d occupied earlier and waited some more, listening to the heavy beat of the rain on the tile roof.
After what seemed like a long time, Klein called my name from the kitchen. I got up and went in, and he cocked an eyebrow and said, “What were you doing? Sitting back there in the dark?”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
“No reason. It was just a place to sit, out of the way.”
“You sure you’re all right? You look a little pale.”
“I’m okay. Been a long night.”
“Sure. Well, you might as well go on home. I’ll call you if there’s anything else. Otherwise, come down to the Hall tomorrow sometime, sign your statement.”
I nodded. “How’s Washburn holding up?”
“Not too well, poor guy.”
“He won’t be spending the night here, will he?”
“No. He gave us the name of a friend to call.”
“Listen, you figure him for a suspect?”
“Too soon to tell. Why?”
“I was right there when he saw Purcell’s body,” I said. “He screamed, Ben-the kind of scream you can’t fake. You know what I mean?”
“I guess I do.”
“He didn’t kill Purcell. For what it’s worth.”
“Worth something to me. I’ll keep it in mind.”
I pulled the collar of my coat up around my neck. It had been warm in the kitchen before; now it was cold. I could still smell the blood in the dining room.
“Whoever did do it,” I said, “I hope you nail him for it. Fast and hard.”
He knew what I meant; you couldn’t have been in that dining room and not know. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “So do I.”
The nightmares started as soon as I went to sleep.
I knew they would; they always do after an ugly scene like tonight’s. So I didn’t go to bed right away, after I got home to my flat in Pacific Heights. It was too late to call Kerry or Eberhardt, as much as I wanted to talk to somebody. I opened a beer and turned on the TV and watched an old Edmond O’Brien movie without making sense out of half of it. Then I tried to read for a while-one of the seven thousand pulp magazines on shelves ringing my living room-but the words kept running together like ink under a stream of water. Three A.M., and my eyes just wouldn’t stay open any longer. I was so exhausted it was an effort to drag myself into the bedroom and shuck out of my clothes. Still I fought sleep, lying there listening to the hollow beat of the rain — but not for long. And when I lost the struggle the nightmares came and put a bad end to a bad night.
Blood in them, jetting up bright red out of a fountain in a yard grown high with dead trees and shrubs. A bird on the wing, and I touched it somehow and felt the life leave its body and pass through my fingers, and it fell in a long spiral-a deadfall. Then I was on the floor, crawling, crippled with pain and leaving a trail of blood behind me- but it was the floor of Eberhardt’s house, not Purcell’s, the afternoon Eb and I had been shot by a hired Chinese gunman. And then I was on one knee, looking down at myself, putting a hand on my own shoulder and saying, “Easy, I’m here to help you, you’re going to be okay,” and I shuddered at the lie and felt myself shudder, felt the life go rushing out of my own body this time. And then somebody yelled, a thin wailing cry full of anguish-
— and I woke myself up, because it was me doing the yelling.
Chapter Three
Nothing much happened over the next week. I avoid reading the newspapers most of the time, but I had a look at the Chronicle twice during that week; I also called Ben Klein at the Hall and talked with him. But there just weren’t any developments in the Leonard Purcell case. Or at least none that the police were admitting to. According to Klein, Tom Washburn had been unable to attach any particular significance to Purcell’s dying words, except as an obscure reference to Leonard’s brother, Kenneth Purcell, who had died in a fall this past May. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything useful. No solid motive had surfaced. There were no suspects. Possible leads were still being checked, Klein said, but he didn’t sound confident that they would point him anywhere.
I had no real stake in the case, yet I could not keep it out of my head. You don’t watch a man die- feel a man die-and then just forget about it as if it never happened. Especially not with reruns of those nightmares every couple of nights. So I read the newspaper stories, and talked to Klein and a few other people, and found out some things about Leonard Purcell and his brother. Eberhardt thought this was morbid and a waste of time, and maybe it was. But Eberhardt has thicker skin than I do; after more than thirty years on the San Francisco cops, it’s just a job to him. Sometimes I wish it was just a job to me, too. Sometimes.
The fact that Leonard was the second member of the Purcell family to die within six months might not have interested me if his brother’s death hadn’t been the result of a fall and hadn’t also been on the odd side. Kenneth Purcell, a wealthy real estate broker and art collector, had lost his life during a Thursday-night party at his Moss Beach home. There had been a lot of drinking at this party, evidently-Kenneth had thrown it to show off a valuable antique snuff box he’d acquired-and he had done the lion’s share of it. Sometime between nine-thirty and ten he had disappeared; he hadn’t been missed until ten, by his wife Alicia. When a search of the house and immediate grounds failed to turn him up, the wife and a couple of the guests had gone out to check the cliffs at the rear of the property. His body had been caught on the rocks a hundred feet below.
There had been no witnesses to his fall. And no evidence of foul play, although Kenneth hadn’t been well liked and there were rumors that some of his real estate brokerings were of the quasi-legal variety. The official theory was that he had wandered out onto the cliffs to clear his head-it had been a cold, windy, but clear night-and lost his footing somehow. The valuable snuff box, which Kenneth had had on his person earlier, had not been found on the body; his coat pocket had been torn in the fall and presumably the box had been lost in the ocean. County coroner’s verdict: accidental death.
Klein didn’t think there was any connection between the deaths of the two brothers. Tom Washburn, on the other hand, did think so-apparently for more reasons than just those half-delirious words I had heard Leonard speak before he died. Klein hadn’t wanted to go into Washburn’s reasons but did say he’d had them checked out
