Deadfall (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ Galatians, six: seven.”
    I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Eberhardt’s was hanging open like a Venus’s-flytrap.
    The guy reached inside his suit coat. I thought for a second that he was going after a weapon of some kind and got ready to launch myself at him; but all he came out with was a business card. He put the card down in front of me. Then he folded his arms and waited stoically.
    I looked at the card. And then stared at it. In blue letters on a virginal white background it said:
    THE REVEREND RAYMOND P. DUNSTON
    Church of the Holy Mission
    THE MORAL CRUSADE
    1243 Langford Street San Jose, CA. 95190
    I put my eyes back on him and said, “Jesus Christ!”
    “No,” he said, “merely one of His servants. You know who I am.”
    I knew who he was, all right. Ray Dunston, Kerry’s whackoid ex-husband. What I had trouble believing was that he was standing here in my office, looking and talking the way he was. Five years ago, when Kerry had divorced him, he had been a woman-chasing, small-time criminal lawyer in Los Angeles. Two years ago he had taken a dive off the deep end: given up his practice and any number of normal activities, including sex, and joined one of those off-the-wall Southern California cults, where he had shaved his head and worn robes and spent his days chanting things like “Om mani padme hum.” Now here he was, wearing a three-piece suit again and with his hair grown back, calling himself the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston of the Church of the Holy Mission, involved in something called the Moral Crusade, quoting scripture and accusing me of being a fornicator. If that wasn’t enough to boggle a reasonably sane man’s mind I did not want to find out what was.
    I said, “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
    “I’ve come to claim what is mine.”
    “I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
    “Of course you do. My wife.”
    “Your … you mean Kerry?”
    “Kerry Anne Dunston.”
    “For God’s sake, she divorced you five years ago!”
    “For God’s sake,” he said piously, “she did not. Divorce is a pernicious invention of man. God does not recognize divorce.”
    “He doesn’t, huh? Did He tell you that Himself?”
    “Yes, He did.”
    “He … what?”
    “He told me so. We speak often, God and I.”
    Oh boy. He had clear brown eyes that met mine steadily, all full of righteousness and calm reason, but behind them he was as mad as a hatter. I shifted uneasily in my chair and pushed back from the desk. I had figured him for a loony when Kerry first told me about the cult, and I had figured there might be trouble with him when she confessed that he’d been bothering her, trying to talk her into remarrying him and joining in a life of wholesome chanting in the commune. She had managed to keep him at a distance, and after a while he seemed to have given up and gone away for good: she hadn’t heard anything more from or about him in months. Or she said she hadn’t, anyway. What he’d been doing in the interim, obviously, was climbing another rung on the ladder of lunacy, and now he’d come in person to claim his soul mate. No commune this time, though. No sir. This time he expected her to live with him in San Jose, if not in the Church of the Holy Mission; to join him on the Moral Crusade, whatever that was; and to sit in on his fireside chats with God.
    I stood up. He didn’t look violent, but with loonies you never know. God might have told him that if reason didn’t work, it was all right to murder fornicators.
    “Have you talked to Kerry about this?” I asked him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Eberhardt was also on his feet. His mouth was still hanging open; he looked like a man trying to wake up from a confusing dream.
    Dunston said, “No. She refuses to listen to the Voice of Truth. You’ve cast some sort of spell over her.”
    “Spell?” I