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

looking a couple of inches to my left. “You told Richie you were a cop.”
    “No I didn’t. He jumped to that conclusion.”
    Dessault pushed away from the wall. “You don’t have to talk to him, Mel,” he said to her. “What’s he snooping around for anyway?”
    I looked at him. He looked back at me for a while, not too long; then he said, “Ah, shit,” and made a production out of lighting a cigarette—the legal kind that only give you lung cancer.
    “What do you want?” Melanie asked me. She sounded sullen and distracted, as if her thoughts were on something else. More fun and games, probably. “Who sent you here?”
    “Nobody sent me. I’m investigating your uncle’s death.”
    “Leonard? What for?”
    She was a sweetheart, all right. “He was murdered,” I said. “Or didn’t anybody tell you?”
    “You don’t have to be a smart-ass,” she said, as if she were talking to somebody her own age. “All I’ve done lately is talk to cops. I’m tired of it.”
    “You sound real broken up about Leonard’s death.”
    “We weren’t close. Besides, he was a damn fag.”
    “Uh-huh. And you don’t like fags, right?”
    “Right.”
    “What would you say if I told you I’m working for Tom Washburn?”
    “Him,” she said. “You a fag too?”
    “That’s what I thought you’d say. Look, Miss Purcell, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here, believe me. Just answer a few questions and I’ll go away.”
    “What questions?”
    “About your father and the night he died.”
    “Christ,” Dessault said, “not that trip again.”
    I looked his way. “What trip is that?”
    “That somebody killed Mel’s old man too. Nobody killed him. The old bastard drank too much Scotch and forgot to watch where he was walking, that’s all.”
    “You share that opinion, Miss Purcell?”
    She shrugged. “Nobody liked Kenneth; he was a prick. I suppose somebody could’ve pushed him but I don’t think so.”
    A prick, I thought. Her own father. “You didn’t like him much, I take it.”
    “I had plenty of reason not to. The only nice thing he ever did for me was die and leave me some money.”
    “A third of his estate.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “But that bitch Alicia got the choicest chunk.”
    “Probably use it to buy a company that makes dildos,” Dessault said, and they both laughed.
    “What does that mean?” I asked him.
    He didn’t answer. So I asked Melanie the same question.
    “She collects men,” the girl said. “She’ll fuck anything in pants.”
    “Or out of pants,” Dessault said. They both laughed again.
    “Was that the case while your father was alive?”
    “Well, sure,” she said. “What’d you think, she was a faithful wife or something?”
    “Did your father know about her affairs?”
    “Sure. He didn’t care. Had plenty of his own.”
    “His own affairs?”
    “That’s right.”
    Nice family. The more I found out about them, the more all-American they looked. “Any woman in particular?”
    “Not that I knew about.”
    “How about Alicia? Any particular man?”
    “Why don’t you ask her?”
    “I probably will. You were at the party the night your father died, weren’t you?”
    “For a while. I left about eight.”
    “Why so early?”
    “Those friends of his, those rich pigs, bore me out of my skull.”
    “Then why go in the first place?”
    “I needed some bread so Richie and I could split for Hawaii. We know some people on the Big Island.” Dessault smirked when she said that. Which probably meant that they had been planning some kind of drug buy; a lot of marijuana is grown in the back-country of Hawaii’s Big Island. “Kenneth wanted me to come to the party, see some snuff box he’d bought, so I went. He wasn’t too hard to deal with when he was in a good mood and you did what he wanted.”
    “Why didn’t he invite your boyfriend here?” Dessault’s name had not been on the guest list.
    “He didn’t like Richie,” she said.