Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery)

Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online
Authors: Bill Pronzini
really am sorry, Russ. I should’ve gotten in touch, I should’ve been a better friend.”
    No answer. He lay still, his eyes shut now, his breathing a little less raspy in repose. I thought he might have drifted off, hadn’t heard what I’d said. But he was awake and he’d heard.And he answered me as I turned away from the bed and parted the curtains.
    “No tengo,”
he said. “Goddamnit to hell.”
    T he rooming house where Dancer had lived the past two decades was an ancient, two-story Victorian on Stambaugh Street, off Broadway and fairly close to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Downscale neighborhood that looked about the same as it had on my last, long-ago visit. The block-long thrift store where Dancer had gathered his reading material was still there; so was Mama Luz’s Pink Flamingo Tavern a half block to the west. Not much had changed, in fact, except that there were a couple of empty storefronts and more graffiti on the building walls. The Victorian had had a coat of paint slapped on it in the interim, but it hadn’t done much to dispel the seedy aspect; its turrets and gables were still in need of repair, its brick chimneys still unstable-looking. One of the two scraggly palm trees in the front yard had died and been cut down; the broken picket fence that had enclosed the yard had been replaced by an even uglier Cyclone job. How long before urban renewal caught up with this little patch of decay? A few years at the most. Its days were numbered in any case, and Dancer had been a perfect fit: old and blighted and dying a little more every day.
    Even though I had Dancer’s keys, I thought I’d better check with the manager. One of the mailboxes on the creaky porch identified C. Holloway as having that dubious distinction. I rang C. Holloway’s bell. Ten years ago the manager had been a woman with a face like a gargoyle, but she was gone now; the new one was male, forty-five or so, with a milky cataract in one eye and the disposition of a scorpion. He wouldn’t let mecome in when I told him who I was and why I was there; I had to bribe him with a brace of dollar bills and show him my ID. He didn’t ask how Dancer was, didn’t seem to care. Inside he pointed me toward the basement stairs and said before he left me, “Don’t touch none of the other lockers down there. I’ll call the cops on you if I find out you did.”
    The basement was musty and cold and threaded with spider-webs. The storage lockers were arranged along one wall—narrow cages made out of wood and chicken wire. The padlocks on each door were a joke; you could have torn through that thin wire with your bare hands and a minimum of effort. Room numbers were stenciled on the doors. Number 6, Dancer’s room, had the fewest items of any of the occupied cages: a couple of cheap suitcases, half a dozen open cartons of mint but dust-covered paperback books, and a beat-up paste-board trunk.
    The package with Cybil’s name on it was in the trunk, on top of a jumble of old clothing. Nine-by-twelve padded mailing bag, fairly thick and heavy, sealed with filament tape. I tucked it under my arm.
    Before I locked up the cage again, I took a quick look through a couple of the boxes of books. Multiple copies of a variety of lurid titles—
Raw Day in Hell, Mistress of Bleak House, Gun Fury in Crucifix Canyon, Black Avenger #7: Slaughter Train
. Author’s copies of some of Dancer’s pseudonymous novels. On impulse I picked out half a dozen at random, tucked them into my coat pocket. Why not? They represented little pieces of the man’s life, imagination, talent. Somebody ought to care about them, just a little.
    Upstairs, there was no sign of C. Holloway in the lobby. So I climbed the rickety staircase to the second floor—impulseagain—and used the other key on the ring to let myself into Dancer’s room. It seemed no different than it had a decade ago. Bed, nightstand, dresser, writing table. Empty half-gallon jug of cheap bourbon on the

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