Free Nightshades (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini

clerk’s use. There was a boarded-up window in the far wall; two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite or fool’s gold, rocks with designs, rocks that gleamed with mica or maybe genuine gold particles, and curious-shaped bits of wood. An army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of National Geographic completed the furnishings.
    “Pack rats,” I said. “That’s who lives here.”
    Kerry frowned at me.
    “Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer.”
    She said, “Phooey. Where’s your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn’t it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?”
    “There aren’t any gold mines up in the hills—not any more. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?”
    “To forage for food, maybe.”
    “Hah,” I said. “Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we’re trespassing. We’d better go; I’ve got work to do.”
    This time she made a face at me. “Sometimes,” she said, “you’re about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny.”
    “Kerry, I’m on a job. The fun can come later.”
    “Oh, you think so? Maybe not.”
    “Is that a threat to withhold your sexual favors?”
    “Sexual favors,” she said. “My, how you talk.”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “It was a dumb question. I don’t answer dumb questions.”
    She started back across the hotel lobby, leaving me to shut the door to the pack rat’s nest. Outside, we walked in silence to where the car was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, “Did you find anything?” and she sounded cheerful again.
    I sighed a little. Being with Kerry sometimes made me feel as if my head were as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. And that no matter how long I tried, I would never quite get it all sorted out and put where it belonged.
    I told her about the melted candle, explaining how I’d found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Robideaux. By the time I was finished with that I had the car nosing up the little hill toward the second cottage near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among her tomato vines.
    The woman’s name, according to the intelligence sheets I’d been given, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved here in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He’d never found much of it, evidently, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she’d stayed on following his death eight years ago.
    She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, and she had a nose like the blade of her hoe and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of the hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.
    I got out of the car, went up to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, “Mrs. Bloom?”
    “Who are you?” she said suspiciously.
    I gave her my name. “I’m an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Munroe Randall—”
    That was as far as I got. The way she reacted, you’d have thought I had told her I intended to rape her and pillage her house. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner’s sword; then she hoisted it