Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories Read Online Free Page B

some so I could have slapped them with a resisting-arrest charge, too."
    "How did it happen with Colly?"
    "It was the other way around," he said. "Babcock was cutting through the alley when he saw them coming out the rear door. He turned to run and they panicked and Avinisi shot him in the back. When they went to check, Carstairs found a note from Babcock's parole officer in one of his pockets, identifying him as an ex-con. That's when they decided to frame him."
    "Look, Eb, I —"
    "Forget it," he said. "I know what you're going to say."
    "You can't help it if a couple of cops turn out that way . . .
    "I said forget it, all right?" And the line went dead.
    I listened to the empty buzzing for a couple of seconds. It's a lousy world, I thought. But sometimes, at least, there is justice.
    Then I called Lucille Babcock and told her why her husband had died.
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    T hey had a nice funeral for Colly.
    The services were held in a small nondenominational church on Monterey Boulevard. There were a lot of flowers, carnations mostly; Lucille said they had been Colly's favorites. Quite a few people came. Tommy Belknap was there, and Sam Biehler and old man Harlin and the rest of them from D. E. O'Mira. Eberhardt, too, which might have seemed surprising unless you knew him. I also saw faces I didn't recognize; the whole thing had gotten a big play in the media.
    Afterward, there was the funeral procession to the cemetery in Colma, where we listened to the minister's final words and watched them put Colly into the ground. When it was done I offered to drive Lucille home, but she said no, there were some arrangements she wanted to make with the caretaker for upkeep of the plot; one of her neighbors would stay with her and see to it she got home all right. Then she held my hand and kissed me on the cheek and told me again how grateful she was.
    I went to where my car was parked. Eberhardt was waiting; he had ridden down with me.
    "I don't like funerals," he said.
    "No," I said.
    We got into the car. "So what are you planning to do when we get back to the city?" Eberhardt asked.
    "I hadn't thought about it."
    "Come over to my place. Dana's gone off to visit her sister, and I've got a refrigerator full of beer."
    "All right."
    "Maybe we'll get drunk," he said.
    I nodded. "Maybe we will at that."

DEATH OF A NOBODY
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    H is name was Nello.
    Whether this was his given name, or his surname or a sobriquet he had picked up sometime during the span of his fifty-odd years — I never found out. I doubt if even Nello himself knew any longer. He was what sociologists call "an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity or himself." And what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as "a Skid Row wino."
    He came into my office just before ten o'clock on one of San Francisco's bitter-cold autumn mornings. He had been a lawyer once, in a small town up near the Oregon border, and there were still signs of intelligence, of manners and education, in his gaunt face. I had first encountered him more than twenty years ago, when a police lieutenant named Eberhardt and I had been patrolmen working south of the Slot. I didn't know — and had never asked — what private hell had led him from small-town respectability to the oblivion of the city's Skid Row.
    He stood just inside the door, his small hands nervously rolling and unrolling the brim of a shapeless brown fedora. His thin, almost emaciated body was encased in a pair of once brown slacks and a tweed jacket that had worn through at both elbows, and his faded blue eyes had that tangible filminess that comes from too many nights with too many bottles of cheap wine. But he was sober this morning — cold and painfully sober.
    I said, "It's been a long time, Nello."
    "A long time," he agreed in a vague way.
    "Some coffee?"
    "No. No, thanks."
    I finished pouring myself a cup from the pot I keep on an old two-burner on top of my filing cabinet. "What can I do for