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

torment, eyes popped and unblinking, mouth slacked open like an idiot’s.
    The hollow queasy feeling was in my stomach again. And there was a rancid taste in my throat; you can never tell what a man with a gun in his hand will do. But he did not even seem to know I was there. His gaze was half-focused, vacant, and the gun stayed pointed at the floor, loose in his grasp.
    I took a couple of cautious steps toward him. He did not move. Three more paces, each one slow and measured, brought me up close on his right. Still no movement. And no resistance when I reached down, closed my hand around the revolver, and eased it out of his cold fingers.
    I let out the breath I had been holding and backed off. The gun was a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber; the stubby muzzle was still warm. I dropped it into my coat pocket and sidled around so that the dead man was between Talbot and me. Then I knelt to take a closer look at the body.
    No doubt that it was Victor Carding. He matched the description Laura Nichols had given me: thin, gaunt, sallow-faced. He had been shot once in the chest; the blood was coagulating around the wound. There were no other marks on him that I could see, and nothing on the floor near him except a couple of sealed envelopes—PG&E bill, letter from a bank—that might have been jarred out of a pocket when he fell.
    When I straightened up Talbot blinked and focused on me for the first time. He said, “I killed him,” in a hoarse empty voice—the kind of voice, if you’ve ever heard it, that can raise the hairs on your scalp.
    “Easy, Mr. Talbot.”
    “He shouted at me, called me a murderer. Because I killed his wife, you see. Murderer, he said. Murderer, murderer.”
    I went over to him again and took his arm. I wanted him out of there; I wanted out of there myself. The mingled smells of oil and dust, cordite and death, were making me a little nauseous.
    “I just . . . I couldn’t stand it,” Talbot said. “I lost control of myself. The gun . . . it was on the workbench. I picked it up, just to make him stop, but he lunged at me and it went off. I killed him. He was right, I am a murderer. . . .”
    Gently I prodded him toward the door. He came along without protest, moving like a sleepwalker. Outside, in the wind and the leaden daylight, I took several deep breaths to clear the death-smell out of my nostrils. Both the cabbie and the hack were gone; he had probably heard the shot and decided he wanted no part of what was going on here. Nobody else seemed to have heard it; the nearest neighbor was across the road and fifty yards down.
    I took Talbot around the front of the house, up onto the porch. The door was unlocked. Inside, I sat him down in a chair and then hunted up the telephone.
    “I murdered him,” Talbot said again, as I picked up the receiver. “I murdered him.”
    No you didn’t, I thought. No way.
    Talbot had not killed Victor Carding.

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