Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

ignore the doorbell. Give Talbot half a minute, I told myself. If he doesn’t show by then, better get up there.
    Behind me I heard a car door slam. Then a voice yelled, “Hey! You there!”
    I turned. It was the cabbie, a youngish guy, heavy-set, wearing a poplin windbreaker and a pugnacious expression. “You talking to me?”
    “That’s right, buddy. You been following me?”
    Ah Christ, I thought, this is all I need.
    “Thought I spotted a tail when we started up here,” the cabbie said. “What the hell you been following me for?”
    “Nobody’s following you,” I said. I looked up at the house again. Still no sign of Talbot.
    “I figure different,” the cabbie said belligerently. He came away from the taxi, stopped twenty feet from me, and put his hands on his hips. “I don’t stand for shit like that.”
    The thirty seconds were up. I could feel my chest beginning to tighten; sweat formed cold and sticky under my arms. Something going on in that garage. Talbot would have come out by now if there wasn’t.
    “You hear what I said, fatso?”
    Fatso. I gave him a go-to-hell look and started up the drive, hurrying. The cabbie came after me; I could hear his shoes crunching on the gravel. Wind currents swayed the scrub oak and the brownish grass on the hillside above, made faint whispering murmurs in the afternoon stillness. But nothing moved and nothing made a sound anywhere around the house or the garage.
    “Turn around, goddamn it!” the cabbie yelled behind me. “Come on, you son of a bitch!”
    That was enough; I could not afford to let it go any further. I whirled on him, glaring. “I’m here on police business, smart guy,” I lied in a hard tight voice. “You understand? Police business. You want to make trouble, fine, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail for obstruction of justice.”
    He pulled up short and blinked at me. Most of the belligerence faded out of his expression; he began to look uncertain and a little worried.
    “Now go on, get back to your cab,” I said. “And don’t say anything about me to your fare when he comes back. Capici ?”
    “Hey,” he said, “hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know you were a cop—”
    “Move it!”
    I put my back to him, the hell with him, and trotted the rest of the way up onto the flat. The drive made a wide loop there, around and alongside the house; I cut off it at a sharp angle, onto hard-packed earth. When I neared the porch corner, the whole of the garage materialized ahead of me. One of its double doors was standing part-way open and I could see that there were lights on inside; but that was all I could see. Still no sign of—
    And that was when the gun went off.
    The flat cracking sound was unmistakable; I had heard the report of a handgun too many times in my life. I broke into a lumbering run. There was no second shot—no other sounds of any kind from inside the garage. Instinct warned me against barging in there, but I did it anyway: I caught the edge of the closed door half and swung myself around it, through the opening by two steps.
    I was braced to find a dead man lying on the floor, and that was what I found. But what surprised me, what made me stare wide-eyed, was that it was not Martin Talbot.
    The dead man had to be Victor Carding.
    He lay sprawled on his side near a long cluttered workbench, both legs bent up toward his chest as if he had tried to assume a fetal position before he died; there was blood all over the front of his blue workshirt. Three feet away, between Carding and a partly open rear window, Talbot stood looking down at the body. His arms were flat against his sides, and in his right hand was a snub-nosed revolver.
    The light in there came from a drop-cord arrangement suspended from one of the ceiling rafters; the cord and its grilled bulb cage swayed a little, so that there was an eerie shifting movement of light and shadow across Talbot’s face. He looked ghastly: twisted-up expression of sickness and