Nightshades (Nameless Detective) Read Online Free Page A

window and dusted his hands and came back to his chair and said, “I’m sorry,” in a nonplussed sort of way. But he didn’t sit down again. Instead he shot the sleeve of his suit coat and glanced at his watch.
    “I should be going,” he said. “I’ve got a four o’clock appointment. But if you have more questions . . .”
    “Not right now.”
    “Well then,” he said, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet. “When will you be going to Redding?”
    “Tomorrow, probably.”
    “You’ll want to talk to Frank right away, I imagine.”
    “Among others.”
    “I’ll call him tonight and let him know you’re coming. Is there anything you’ll need, any arrangements he can make for you?”
    “Just a list of the Musket Creek residents,” I said. “Plus a little background on each one, if possible.”
    “No problem. I’ll tell Miss Irwin to work up something for you.”
    “Who’s Miss Irwin?”
    “Shirley Irwin, our secretary.” He looked at his watch again. “Well,” he said. Then he paused, looking at me as if he expected me to get up and shake his hand and tell him how much I appreciated his cooperation. I stayed where I was, shaking hands with myself. He said, “Well,” another time, and followed it with, “I’ll be going then. I should be back in Redding myself the day after tomorrow. I expect we’ll see each other again soon.”
    “I expect we will, Mr. Treacle,” I said.
    He nodded and smiled—earnest and hopeful all the way—and turned for the door. Before he got there, though, it opened and Eberhardt came in looking grumpy. Eb ran into him, and Treacle reacted by hopping awkwardly out of the way like a ruptured jackrabbit. They looked at each other for a couple of seconds. After which Treacle said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” and beat it out through the door.
    Eberhardt said to me, “What was that?”
    “Martin Treacle. Real estate developer from Redding.”
    “Yeah? Him?”
    “Minor-league,” I said.
    “Client?”
    “No. One of the objects of a new case.”
    “That’s good. Or is it?”
    “I’m not sure yet. Could be.”
    “Don’t tell me about it yet,” he said. “I got to sit down first and unwind.”
    “Unwind from what?”
    “That goddamn drive over to Stinson Beach. I hate that goddamn drive. That road scares me to death.”
    I nodded sympathetically. The road scared me to death, too. It wound along the cliffsides for miles of sheer-sided dropoffs to rocks and ocean, and it wasn’t in very good repair.
    Eberhardt sat down, put his feet up on his desk, and rubbed the scar behind his ear. The scar was from one of the bullets a gunman had pumped into him last August, putting him into a coma for seventeen days; the same gunman had pumped a bullet into me, too, and laid me up in the hospital for a while, and gave me a bad left arm that didn’t quite work the way it used to. The shooting was also the direct reason—there were several indirect ones—for his taking an early retirement from the San Francisco cops. Things had been bad for him for a while after that, until I gave in out of friendship and a smattering of pity and took him into my agency as a full partner. The partnership had worked out much better than I’d imagined it would. Eb was happy, I was happy, neither of us was starving to death as a result of having to split the profits, and that pirate Sam Crawford was getting his blood booty right on time the first of every month. Everything was just dandy—knock wood.
    He sighed and ran a hand over the angles and blunt planes of his face. He was a year younger than my fifty-four and looked his age. Kerry said I didn’t look my age now that I’d taken off weight; but she also said the mustache made me look like Brian Keith trying to play Groucho Marx. Kerry has an acid wit sometimes. An off-the-wall wit, too: half the things she thinks are funny I don’t even understand.
    “Better,” Eb said, pretty soon. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
    “You find