Nightshades (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

Irwin picked up out front, held a brief conversation, and then poked her head back into the office. “Your wife,” she called to O’Daniel.
    “Ah, Christ.” He looked and sounded annoyed. “Tell her I’m busy, I’ll call her back later.”
    “I told her that. She said it’s important and it won’t wait.”
    O’Daniel muttered something profane and plucked up the handset on his phone. “Helen? What’s so damned important it can’t . . . What? Yeah, I know, I know. But I can’t talk about that right now. . . . Because I can’t, that’s why. . . .”
    One of the things that had been knocked off the desk in the fight was a photograph in a silver frame. Miss Irwin had set it facing outward when she’d cleaned up the carpet, and from where I was sitting I could see that it was a color portrait of a woman that was probably Helen O‘Daniel. I gave it my attention while I pretended not to listen to O’Daniel’s end of the phone conversation. She was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, dark-haired, attractive in a snooty, pinch-faced way. Her mouth was smiling but her eyes weren’t: that kind of woman.
    “No, not tonight,” O’Daniel was saying to her. “I told you before, I’m going to spend the weekend on the houseboat. . . . No, I’m not coming home, I’m leaving for the lake straight from here. . . . What? All right, all right. I’ll call you.”
    He rang off without saying good-bye. “Shirley!” he yelled. “Where the hell’s that aspirin?” Then he looked at me and said,
    “Women. They’re a pain in the ass sometimes.”
    I wasn’t ready or willing to discuss women with Frank O’Danie!—particularly not his wife and her possible affair with Munroe Randall. There were less direct, less inoffensive ways to find out whether or not there was any truth to Penny Belson’s intimations.
    I said, “Let’s get back to that threatening letter you received. Do you still have it?”
    “Somewhere in this mess. You want to see it?”
    “If you don’t mind.”
    He shuffled among the papers Miss Irwin had picked up, found an envelope, and handed it over. Plain white dime-store envelope, with O‘Daniel’s name and the company address printed in an exaggerated child’s hand—somebody’s method of disguising his handwriting. No return address, of course. The envelope had been slit at one end; I shook out the single sheet of paper it contained. It had been torn off a ruled yellow pad, and its message had been printed in the same scrawly hand:
    Frank O’Daniel,
    If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you. Look what happened to your partner Randall. Don’t let anything like that happen to you. Get out NOW! OR
    ELSE!
    When I looked up from the paper Miss Irwin was back with some aspirin and another glass of water. I waited until O’Daniel was done swallowing before I asked him, “Have there been other letters like this?”
    “No. This is the first one.”
    “Other threats of any kind?”
    “Well . . . not exactly.”
    “How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
    “There were a bunch of hang-up calls,” he said. “Back when we first started buying up land in Musket Creek. Every time you’d pick up the phone, the bastard on the other end would hang up.”
    “Just here? Or at your home too?”
    “Both. You remember, Shirley? A fucking nuisance.”
    “I remember,” she said.
    “It went on for a couple of weeks,” O’Daniel said. “I had my home number changed finally, unlisted, but we couldn’t do that here.”
    “No other calls since then?”
    “No. They just stopped and that was it.”
    I tucked the anonymous letter back into its envelope, but I didn’t give it back to O’Daniel. “Were either of your partners ever threatened? Letters, calls, in person?”
    “Ray Treacle was. An artist named Robideaux who lives over there threatened him to his face.”
    “Yes, he told me about that. What about Munroe Randall? Was he ever