Nightshades (Nameless Detective) Read Free Page B

Munroe Randall.
    I studied him for a time. He was a handsome guy, lean and fit, with close-cropped black hair and a mustache that was fuller and shapelier than mine and definitely did not look like a hooker’s false eyelash. He wore a dark-blue gabardine suit, nice but not high-priced, with accessories in the same class. He seemed very earnest about everything he said, and there was a kind of hopeful glint in his eyes, as if he wanted very much to make a good impression on me. A salesman, all right. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the time being at least, and assume that he had come here in good faith and that his offer was guileless as well as genuine.
    I said, “How did you get my name, Mr. Treacle?”
    “A Mr. Rivera at Great Western Insurance gave it to me. I talked to him not more than half an hour ago.”
    “Is that why you came down from Redding? To talk to Great Western’s investigators?”
    “No, I was here on other business. But I thought it would be a good idea to stay on top of things while I’m in the city.”
    “Mm.”
    “Frank and I welcome the investigation, we want you to know that. We have nothing to hide.”
    “I’m glad to hear it.”
    “Yes. The sooner Great Western is satisfied,” he said, “the sooner Frank and I collect on our policy. As we’re entitled to. So naturally we want to cooperate to the fullest.”
    “Naturally. Is that all you’re interested in?”
    “Pardon me?”
    “Don’t either of you care about what happened to Randall? If he was murdered, don’t you want to see whoever killed him caught and punished?”
    “Well, of course,” Treacle said. “That goes without saying.”
    “Even if it costs you the extra hundred thousand double indemnity?”
    “Of course. But Frank and I are both convinced that the Redding police are right—Munroe’s death was a tragic accident. It couldn’t have been anything else.”
    “Perhaps not. Were you and Randall friends as well as business partners?”
    “Good friends, yes.”
    “You don’t seem very upset about his death.”
    “It came as quite a shock, believe me.”
    “But without any lingering grief.”
    “I’m not the grieving sort,” Treacle said earnestly. “No, I’m a realist. People live, people die, life goes on.”
    A philosopher too, I thought. Aristotle Treacle, the compassionate one. I said, “And you just want what’s yours while it does, right?”
    “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. The fact of the matter is, it’s not Frank and me who need the insurance money—not personally. It’s the company. You may already know this, but we’re not in a stable financial position at present. Haven’t been for some months. And Munroe’s death hasn’t helped matters at all, obviously.”
    I asked him, “How did your company get into this financial bind?” to see if his answer would jibe with what Barney Rivera had told me.
    It did. “Frankly,” he said, “we’ve made some ill-advised purchases and investments over the past couple of years. We’d be all right if our Musket Creek development package had opened up as planned, but that didn’t happen thanks to the people of Musket Creek and their lawyers. You know about the litigation, of course?”
    “I’ve been filled in.”
    “Well,” he said, and shrugged, and smiled at me in his hopeful way.
    I looked at him some more in silence. I kept trying to dislike him—he was glib, he was materialistic, he didn’t seem to have much of an interior; he was everything that annoyed me in salesmen and the modern business executive—and yet he was so damned earnest that I couldn’t work up much of an antipathy toward him. Maybe if it turned out he was implicated in Munroe Randall’s death, or that he was some kind of crook, I could start detesting him. Right now I would have to settle for being mildly aggrieved at his existence.
    I said, “About your partner’s death,” and he paused in the process of unwrapping a long, thin