Hardcase by Bill Pronzini

Author:Bill Pronzini [Pronzini, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781628152722
Published: 1995-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC and a jam in the nearest parking garage made me ten minutes late. The Holiday’s lobby bar was smallish and not quite full when I walked in. This was where the serious drinkers among the guests and after-work business types congregated; the sippers and sightseers went up to the Sherlock Holmes Pub on the thirtieth floor. Chehalis and I connected almost immediately; he’d taken a two-person table near the entrance.

For some reason—I suppose because of the Everson sisters’ interest in him twenty-four years ago—I’d expected Stephen Chehalis to be a good-looking man. He wasn’t. He must have had some attractive qualities in his early twenties, but in his mid-forties he was saggy-jowled, forty pounds overweight, and mostly bald. Features undistinguished, lips too thin, hands big and restless. And a nighttime pallor, as if he took pains to avoid contact with direct sunlight. He wore a wrinkled light-brown business suit, a blue pin-striped shirt, and a tie with too much design and too many primary colors. Except for the pallor, he looked exactly like what he was: a traveling salesman. All that was missing was the quick laugh and the hail-fellow-well-met manner.

An empty martini glass and the twitchy movement of his hands testified to the fact that he was on edge. As soon as I sat down he called the waitress over and ordered another martini. I asked for a light beer.

When she went away to the bar I said, “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

Chehalis shrugged. His eyes were steady enough on mine. “So what’s this all about?”

“It has to do with an incident that happened a long time ago, one you may not want to remember or talk about. But what I have to tell you makes it necessary.”

“What incident?”

“Marlin’s Ferry. March of nineteen seventy-one.”

“Seventy-one?”

“Jody Everson.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“Do I need to go into details?”

“No. You think I’d forget something like that?”

“Some men might be able to.”

“I’m not one of them. But it was half a lifetime ago.... Why would anybody in the Valley dredge it up now?”

“I wasn’t hired by anyone in Marlin’s Ferry.”

“No? Not Jody or her sister?”

“Jody’s dead. She died several years ago.”

“Dead,” Chehalis said. “How did she die?”

I told him about the brain tumor and the rat poison. If they made him feel anything, he didn’t show it.

“The tumor,” he said. “It wasn’t ... I mean, because of what I did . . .”

“No. Evidently it was growing long before that.”

The waitress brought our drinks. Chehalis swallowed half of his second martini while I poured my beer, then he sucked in a breath and blew it out gustily between his thin lips. He seemed less nervous now.

“Poor Jody,” he said. Then he said, “I wish I had an excuse for what happened with her, but I don’t. I was wild in those days, do anything for kicks—booze, pot, sex. I thought I could have any girl I wanted. I thought ... no, hell, I didn’t think. That was what got me into trouble. I just went ahead and did things without thinking, particularly when I was high.

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