Nightshades (Nameless Detective) Read Free Page A

warped old psyche, I considered the thing to be a fitting symbol of my life and work. Who the hell knew?
    I switched it on, leered at it, and went over to my desk. The rest of the office wasn’t such-a-much, either. It was about twenty feet square, and it had beige walls, a beige carpet that we’d recently put down to cover bare wood and paint-stained linoleum, a skylight that a former tenant had cut into the ceiling, three windows and two views—one view of the back end of the Federal Building, the other of a blank brick wall—and that was all it had other than Eberhardt’s and my office equipment. If you needed to use the john, you had to go downstairs to the Slim-Taper Shirt Company, “The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look,” and hop around on one foot until one of their employees unlocked the toilet they had.
    There weren’t any calls on my answering machine, nor were there any scrawled messages from Eberhardt on my desk, as there sometimes were. Which meant he probably hadn’t come in at all today. I remembered his telling me he might have to go to Stinson Beach to check a lead on his missing rich girl.
    I sat down and looked at the telephone and thought about calling Kerry at the Bates and Carpenter ad agency. But I didn’t do it. Telling her the Santa Barbara vacation would have to be postponed was something best done in person. Tonight I would tell her, when we had dinner. Dinner was all we’d have together tonight, once she heard, but then life is full of disappointments and frustrations. Life, to coin a lyrical phrase, sometimes sucks.
    So I got out the Northern Development vs. Ragged-Ass Gulch file Barney Rivera had given me and read through it. About the only things I learned were some sketchy background details on the three partners.
    Munroe Randall. Forty-four at the time of his death. Native of Kansas. M.B.A. from some college I’d never heard of in the Midwest; lived in California for eighteen years, in Redding for thirteen. Unmarried. Worked for two large real estate firms in the Redding area before founding Northern Development with his own capital supplemented by cash from the other two partners and bank loans. Excellent credit rating. Numerous personal references.
    Frank O’Daniel. Thirty-nine. Born in Idaho, had lived in Redding since his early teens. B.B.A. degree in Accounting from Chico State; he was the company’s pencil pusher and paper shuffler. Worked as a CPA before throwing in with Randall. Married, wife’s name Helen, no children. Credit rating somewhat shaky: he or his wife or both of them liked to spend money even when they were on the shorts. Personal references good.
    Martin Treacle. Forty-one. Native of Red Bluff, a few miles south of Redding. Limited college education: a year and a half at a Humboldt County Junior College. Holder of various sales jobs in the Redding /Red Bluff area, all with established firms, at increasingly larger salaries. Similar position with Northern Development—the company’s glad-hander and silver-tongue. Divorced five years, one daughter; ex-wife and the daughter now living in San Diego. Credit rating better than O’Daniel’s but not quite as high as Randall’s. Personal references good.
    I had just put down the data sheet on Treacle when the door opened and I had a visitor. And the visitor, it turned out, was Martin Treacle himself.
    He came in a little diffidently, poking his head around the door edge first, as if he thought something peculiar might be going on in here. They get ideas like that from bad books and bad TV programs—all the distorted portrayals of the allegedly weird, violent, and alcoholic world of private eyes. It is to laugh. Anyhow, he came all the way in when he saw I was alone and relatively harmless-looking—no gat or top-heavy blonde or quart of Old Panther Piss in sight—and announced who he was and what he wanted. Which was to offer me his and Frank O’Daniel’s full cooperation in my inquiry into the death of