Sleuths

1

That Sunday, the day before she died, I went down to Aquatic Park to watch the old men play bocce. I do that sometimes on weekends when I’m not working, when Kerry and I have nothing planned. More often than I used to, out of nostalgia and compassion and maybe just a touch of guilt, because in San Francisco bocce is a dying sport.

Only one of the courts was in use. Time was, all six were packed throughout the day and there were spectators and waiting players lined two and three deep at courtside and up along the fence on Van Ness. No more. Most of the city’s older Italians, to whom bocce was more a religion than a sport, have died off. The once large and close-knit North Beach Italian community has been steadily losing its identity since the fifties — families moving to the suburbs, the expansion of Chinatown and the gobbling up of North Beach real estate by wealthy Chinese — and even though there has been a small new wave of immigrants from Italy in recent years, they’re mostly young and upscale. Young, upscale Italians don’t play bocce much, if at all; their interests lie in soccer, in the American sports where money and fame and power have replaced a love of the game itself. The Di Massimo bocce courts at the North Beach Playground are mostly closed now; the only place you can find a game every Saturday and Sunday is on the one Aquatic Park court. And the players get older, and sadder, and fewer each year.

There were maybe fifteen players and watchers on this Sunday, almost all of them older than my fifty-eight. The two courts nearest the street are covered by a high, pillar-supported roof, so that contests can be held even in wet weather; and there are wooden benches set between the pillars. I parked myself on one of the benches midway along. The only other seated spectator was Pietro Lombardi, in a patch of warm May sunlight at the far end, and this surprised me. Even though Pietro was in his seventies, he was one of the best and spryest of the regulars, and also one of the most social. To see him sitting alone, shoulders slumped and head bowed, was puzzling.

Pining away for the old days, maybe, I thought as I had just been doing. And a phrase popped into my head, a line from Dante that one of my uncles was fond of quoting when I was growing up in the Outer Mission: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.

Pietro and his woes didn’t occupy my attention for long. The game in progress was spirited and voluble, as only a game of bocce played by elderly ’paesanos can be, and I was soon caught up in it.

Bocce is simple — deceptively simple. You play it on a long, narrow packed-earth pit with low wooden sides. A wooden marker ball the size of a walnut is rolled to one end; the players stand at the opposite end and in turn roll eight larger, heavier balls, grapefruit-sized, in the direction of the marker, the object being to see who can put his bocce ball closest to it. One of the required skills is slow-rolling the ball, usually in a curving trajectory, so that it kisses the marker and then lies up against it — the perfect shot — or else stops an inch or two away. The other required skill is knocking an opponent’s ball away from any such close lie without disturbing the marker. The best players, like Pietro Lombardi, can do this two out of three times on the fly — no mean feat from a distance of fifty feet. They can also do it by caroming the ball off the pit walls, with topspin or reverse spin after the fashion of pool-shooters.

Nobody paid much attention to me until after the game in progress had been decided. Then I was acknowledged with hand gestures and a few words — the tolerant acceptance accorded to known spectators and occasional players. Unknowns got no greeting at all; these men still clung to the old ways, and one of the old ways was clannishness.

Only one of the group, Dominick Marra, came over to where I was sitting. And that was because he had something on his mind. He was in his mid-seventies, white-haired, white-mustached; a bantamweight in baggy trousers held up by galluses. He and Pietro Lombardi had been close friends for most of their lives. Born in the same town — Agropoli, a village on the Gulf of Salerno not far from Naples; moved to San Francisco with their families a year apart, in the late twenties; married cousins, raised large families, were widowed at almost the same time a few years ago. The kind of friendship that is almost a blood tie. Dominick had been a baker; Pietro had owned a North Beach trattoria that now belonged to one of his daughters.

What Dominick had on his mind was Pietro. “You see how he sits over there, hah? He’s got trouble — la miseria.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“His granddaughter. Gianna Fornessi.”

“Something happen to her?”

“She’s maybe go to jail,” Dominick said.

“What for?”

“Stealing money.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. How much money?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

“Who did she steal it from?”

“Che?”

“Who did she steal the money from?”

Dominick gave me a disgusted look. “She don’t steal it. Why you think Pietro he’s got la miseria, hah?”

I knew what was coming now; I should have known it the instant Dominick starting confiding to me about Pietro’s problem. I said, “You want me to help him and his granddaughter.”

“Sure. You a detective.”

“A busy detective.”

“You got no time for old man and young girl? Compaesani?”

I sighed, but not so he could hear me do it. “All right, I’ll talk to Pietro. See if he wants my help, if there’s anything I can do.”

“Sure he wants your help. He just don’t know it yet.”

We went to where Pietro was sitting alone in the sun. He was taller than Dominick, heavier, balder. And he had a fondness for Toscanas, those little twisted black Italian cigars; one protruded now from a corner of his mouth. He didn’t want to talk at first but Dominick launched into a monologue in Italian that changed his mind and put a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. Even though I’ve lost a lot of the language over the years, I can understand enough to follow most conversations. The gist of Dominick’s monologue was that I was not just a detective but a miracle worker, a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the messiah. Italians are given to hyperbole in times of excitement or stress, and there isn’t much you can do to counteract it — especially when you’re one of the compaesani yourself.

“My Gianna, she’s good girl,” Pietro said. “Never give trouble, even when she’s little one. La bellezza delle bellezze, you understand?”

The beauty of beauties. His favorite grandchild, probably. I said, “I understand. Tell me about the money, Pietro.”

“She don’t steal it,” he said. “Una ladra, my Gianna? No, no, it’s all big lie.”

“Did the police arrest her?”

“They got no evidence to arrest her.”

“But somebody filed charges, is that it?”

“Charges,” Pietro said. “Bah,” he said and spat.

“Who made the complaint?”

Dominick said, “Ferry,” as if the name were an obscenity.

“Who’s Ferry?”

He tapped his skull. “Caga di testa, this man.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“He live where she live. Same apartment building.”

“And he says Gianna stole two thousand dollars from him.”

“Liar,” Pietro said. “He lies.”

“Stole it how? Broke in or what?”

“She don’t break in nowhere, not my Gianna. This Ferry, this bastardo, he says she take the money when she’s come to pay rent and he’s talk on telephone. But how she knows where he keep his money? Hah? How she knows he have two thousand dollars in his desk?”

“Maybe he told her.”

“Sure, that’s what he says to police,” Dominick said.

“Maybe he told her,” he says. “He don’t tell her nothing.”

“Is that what Gianna claims?”

Pietro nodded. Threw down what was left of his Toscana and ground in into the dirt with his shoe — a gesture of anger and frustration. “She don’t steal that money,” he said. “What she need to steal money for? She got good job, she live good, she don’t have to steal.”

“What kind of job does she have?”

“She sell drapes, curtains. In... what you call that business, Dominick?”

“Interior decorating business,” Dominick said.

“Si. In interior decorating business.”

“Where does she live?” I asked.

“Chestnut Street.”

“Where on Chestnut Street? What number?”

“Seventy-two fifty.”

“You make that Ferry tell the truth, hah?” Dominick said to me. “You fix it up for Gianna and her goombah?”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Va bene. Then you come tell Pietro right away.”

“If Pietro will tell me where he lives—”

There was a sharp whacking sound as one of the bocce balls caromed off the side wall near us, then a softer clicking of ball meeting ball, and a shout went up from the players at the far end: another game won and lost. When I looked back at Dominick and Pietro they were both on their feet. Dominick said, “You find Pietro okay, good detective like you,” and Pietro said, “Grazie, mi amico,” and before I could say anything else the two of them were off arm in arm to join the others.

Now I was the one sitting alone in the sun, holding up a burden. Primed and ready to do a job I didn’t want to do, probably couldn’t do, and would not be paid well for if at all. Maybe this man Ferry wasn’t the only one involved who had caga di testa — shit for brains. Maybe I did too.

2

The building at 725 °Chestnut Street was an old three-storied, brown-shingled job, set high in the shadow of Coit Tower and across from the retaining wall where Telegraph Hill falls off steeply toward the Embarcadero. From each of the apartments, especially the ones on the third floor, you’d have quite a view of the bay, the East Bay, and both bridges. Prime North Beach address, this. The rent would be well in excess of two thousand a month.

A man in a tan trenchcoat was coming out of the building as I started up the steps to the vestibule. I called out to him to hold the door for me — it’s easier to get apartment dwellers to talk to you once you’re inside the building — but either he didn’t hear me or he chose to ignore me. He came hurrying down without a glance my way as he passed. City-bred paranoia, I thought. It was everywhere these days, rich and poor neighborhoods both, like a nasty strain of social disease. Bumper sticker for the nineties: Fear Lives.

There were six mailboxes in the foyer, each with Dymo-Label stickers identifying the tenants. Gianna Fornessi’s name was under box #4, along with a second name: Ashley Hansen. It figured that she’d have a roommate; salespersons working in the interior design trade are well but not extravagantly paid. Box #1 bore the name George Ferry and that was the bell I pushed. He was the one I wanted to talk to first.

A minute died away, while I listened to the wind that was savaging the trees on the hillside below. Out on the bay hundreds of sailboats formed a mosaic of white on blue. Somewhere among them a ship’s horn sounded — to me, a sad false note. Shipping was all but dead on this side of the bay, thanks to wholesale mismanagement of the port over the past few decades.

The intercom crackled finally and a male voice said, “Who is it?” in wary tones.

I asked if he was George Ferry, and he admitted it, even more guardedly. I gave him my name, said that I was there to ask him a few questions about his complaint against Gianna Fornessi. He said, “Oh Christ.” There was a pause, and then, “I called you people yesterday, I told Inspector Cullen I was dropping the charges. Isn’t that enough?”

He thought I was a cop. I could have told him I wasn’t; I could have let the whole thing drop right there, since what he’d just said was a perfect escape clause from my commitment to Pietro Lombardi. But I have too much curiosity to let go of something, once I’ve got a piece of it, without knowing the particulars. So I said, “I won’t keep you long, Mr. Ferry. Just a few questions.”

Another pause. “Is it really necessary?”

“I think it is, yes,”

An even longer pause. But then he didn’t argue, didn’t say anything else — just buzzed me in.

His apartment was on the left, beyond a carpeted, dark-wood staircase. He opened the door as I approached it. Mid-forties, short, rotund, with a nose like a blob of putty and a Friar Tuck fringe of reddish hair. And a bruise on his left cheekbone, a cut along the right corner of his mouth. The marks weren’t fresh, but then they weren’t very old either. Twenty-four hours, maybe less.

He didn’t ask to see a police ID; if he had I would have told him immediately that I was a private detective, because nothing can lose you a California investigator’s license faster than impersonating a police officer. On the other hand, you can’t be held accountable for somebody’s false assumption. Ferry gave me a nervous once-over, holding his head tilted downward as if that would keep me from seeing his bruise and cut, then stood aside to let me come in.

The front room was neat, furnished in a self-consciously masculine fashion: dark woods, leather, expensive sporting prints. It reeked of leather, dust, and his lime-scented cologne.

As soon as he shut the door Ferry went straight to a liquor cabinet and poured himself three fingers of Jack Daniels, no water or mix, no ice. Just holding the drink seemed to give him courage. He said, “So. What is it you want to know?”

“Why you dropped your complaint against Gianna Fornessi.”

“I explained to Inspector Cullen...”

“Explain to me, if you don’t mind.”

He had some of the sour mash. “Well, it was all a mistake... just a silly mistake. She didn’t take the money after all.”

“You know who did take it, then?”

“Nobody took it. I... misplaced it.”

“Misplaced it. Uh-huh.”

“I thought it was in my desk,” Ferry said. “That’s where I usually keep the cash I bring home. But I’d put it in my safe deposit box along with some other papers, without realizing it. It was in an envelope, you see, and the envelope got mixed up with the other papers.”

“Two thousand dollars is a lot of cash to keep at home. You make a habit of that sort of thing?”

“In my business...” The rest of the sentence seemed to hang up in his throat; he oiled the route with the rest of his drink. “In my business I need to keep a certain amount of cash on hand, both here and at the office. The amount I keep here isn’t usually as large as two thousand dollars, but I—”

“What business are you in, Mr. Ferry?”

“I run a temp employment agency for domestics.”

“Temp?”

“Short for temporary,” he said. “I supply domestics for part-time work in offices and private homes. A lot of them are poor, don’t have checking accounts, so they prefer to be paid in cash. Most come to the office, but a few—”

“Why did you think Gianna Fornessi had stolen the two thousand dollars?”

“...What?”

“Why Gianna Fornessi? Why not somebody else?”

“She’s the only one who was here. Before I thought the money was missing, I mean. I had no other visitors for two days and there wasn’t any evidence of a break-in.”

“You and she are good friends, then?”

“Well... no, not really. She’s a lot younger...”

“Then why was she here?”

“The rent,” Ferry said. “She was paying her rent for the month. I’m the building manager, I collect for the owner. Before I could write out a receipt I had a call, I was on the phone for quite a while and she... I didn’t pay any attention to her and I thought she must have... you see why I thought she’d taken the money?”

I was silent.

He looked at me, looked at his empty glass, licked his lips, and went to commune with Jack Daniels again.

While he was pouring I asked him, “What happened to your face, Mr. Ferry?”

His hand twitched enough to clink bottle against glass. He had himself another taste before he turned back to me. “Clumsy,” he said, “I’m clumsy as hell. I fell down the stairs, the front stairs, yesterday morning.” He tried a laugh that didn’t come off. “Fog makes the steps slippery. I just wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Looks to me like somebody hit you.”

“Hit me? No, I told you... I fell down the stairs.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why would I lie about it?”

That was a good question. Why would he lie about that, and about all the rest of it too? There was about as much truth in what he’d told me as there is value in a chunk of fool’s gold.

3

The young woman who opened the door of apartment #4 was not Gianna Fornessi. She was blonde, with the kind of fresh-faced Nordic features you see on models for Norwegian ski wear. Tall and slender in a pair of green silk lounging pajamas; arms decorated with hammered gold bracelets, ears with dangly gold triangles. Judging from the expression in her pale eyes, there wasn’t much going on behind them. But then, with her physical attributes, not many men would care if her entire brain had been surgically removed.

“Well,” she said, “hello.”

“Ashley Hansen?”

“That’s me. Who’re you?”

When I told her my name her smile brightened, as if I’d said something amusing or clever. Or maybe she just liked the sound of it.

“I knew right away you were Italian,” she said. “Are you a friend of Jack’s?”

“Jack?”

“Jack Bisconte.” The smile dulled a little. “You are, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I’m a friend of Pietro Lombardi.”

“Who?”

“Your roommate’s grandfather. I’d like to talk to Gianna, if she’s home.”

Ashley Hansen’s smile was gone now; her whole demeanor had changed, become less self-assured. She nibbled at a corner of her lower lip, ran a hand through her hair, fiddled with one of her bracelets. Finally she said, “Gianna isn’t here.”

“When will she be back?”

“She didn’t say.”

“You know where I can find her?”

“No. What do you want to talk to her about?”

“The complaint George Ferry filed against her.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That’s all been taken care of.”

“I know. I just talked to Ferry.”

“He’s a creepy little prick, isn’t he?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Gianna didn’t take his money. He was just trying to hassle her, that’s all.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Well, why do you think?”

I shrugged. “Suppose you tell me.”

“He wanted her to do things.”

“You mean go to bed with him?”

“Things,” she said. “Kinky crap, real kinky.”

“And she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

“No way, Jose. What a creep.”

“So he made up the story about the stolen money to get back at her, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“What made him change his mind, drop the charges?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Who knows?” She laughed. “Maybe he got religion.”

“Or a couple of smacks in the face.”

“Huh?”

“Somebody worked him over yesterday,” I said. “Bruised his cheek and cut his mouth. You have any idea who?”

“Not me, mister. How come you’re so interested, anyway?”

“I told you, I’m a friend of Gianna’s grandfather.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Gianna have a boyfriend, does she?”

“...Why do you want to know that?”

“Jack Bisconte, maybe? Or is he yours?”

“He’s just somebody I know.” She nibbled at her lip again, did some more fiddling with her bracelets. “Look, I’ve got to go. You want me to tell Gianna you were here?”

“Yes.” I handed her one of my business cards. “Give her this and ask her to call me.”

She looked at the card; blinked at it and then blinked at me.

“You... you’re a detective?”

“That’s right.”

“My God,” she said, and backed off, and shut the door in my face.

I stood there for a few seconds, remembering her eyes — the sudden fear in her eyes when she’d realized she had been talking to a detective.

What the hell?

4

North Beach used to be the place you went when you wanted pasta fino, espresso and biscotti, conversation about la dolce vita and Il patria d’Italia. Not anymore. There are still plenty of Italians in North Beach, and you can still get the good food and some of the good conversation; but their turf continues to shrink a little more each year, and despite the best efforts of the entrepreneurial new immigrants, the vitality and most of the Old World atmosphere are just memories.

The Chinese are partly responsible, not that you can blame them for buying available North Beach real estate when Chinatown, to the west, began to burst its boundaries. Another culprit is the Bohemian element that took over upper Grant Avenue in the fifties, paving the way for the hippies and the introduction of hard drugs in the sixties, which in turn paved the way for the jolly current mix of motorcycle toughs, aging hippies, coke and crack dealers, and the pimps and small-time crooks who work the flesh palaces along lower Broadway. Those “Silicone Alley” nightclubs, made famous by Carol Doda in the late sixties, also share responsibility: they added a smutty leer to the gaiety of North Beach, turned the heart of it into a ghetto.

Parts of the neighborhood, particularly those up around Coit Tower where Gianna Fornessi lived, are still prime city real estate; and the area around Washington Square Park, il giardino to the original immigrants, is where the city’s literati now congregates. Here and there, too, you can still get a sense of what it was like in the old days. But most of the landmarks are gone — Enrico’s, Vanessi’s, The Bocce Ball where you could hear mustachioed waiters in gondolier costumes singing arias from operas by Verdi and Puccini — and so is most of the flavor. North Beach is oddly tasteless now, like a week-old mostaccioli made without good spices or garlic. And that is another thing that is all but gone: twenty-five years ago you could not get within a thousand yards of North Beach without picking up the fine, rich fragrance of garlic. Nowadays you’re much more likely to smell fried egg roll and the sour stench of somebody’s garbage.

Parking in the Beach is the worst in the city; on weekends you can drive around its hilly streets for hours without finding a legal parking space. So today, in the perverse way of things, I found a spot waiting for me when I came down Stockton.

In a public telephone booth near Washington Square Park I discovered a second minor miracle: a directory that had yet to be either stolen or mutilated. The only Bisconte listed was Bisconte Florist Shop, with an address on upper Grant a few blocks away. I took myself off in that direction, through the usual good-weather Sunday crowds of locals and gawking sightseers and drifting homeless.

Upper Grant, like the rest of the area, has changed drastically over the past few decades. Once a rock-ribbed Little Italy, it has become an ethnic mixed bag: Italian markets, trattorias, pizza parlors, bakeries cheek by jowl with Chinese sewing-machine sweat shops, food and herb vendors, and fortune-cookie companies. But most of the faces on the streets are Asian and most of the apartments in the vicinity are occupied by Chinese.

The Bisconte Florist Shop was a hole-in-the-wall near Filbert, sandwiched between an Italian saloon and the Sip Hing Herb Company. It was open for business, not surprisingly on a Sunday in this neighborhood: tourists buy flowers too, given the opportunity.

The front part of the shop was cramped and jungly with cut flowers, ferns, plants in pots and hanging baskets. A small glass-fronted cooler contained a variety of roses and orchids. There was nobody in sight, but a bell had gone off when I entered and a male voice from beyond a rear doorway called, “Be right with you.” I shut the door, went up near the counter. Some people like florist shops; I don’t. All of them have the same damp, cloyingly sweet smell that reminds me of funeral parlors; of my mother in her casket at the Figlia Brothers Mortuary in Daly City nearly forty years ago. That day, with all its smells, all its painful images, is as clear to me now as if it were yesterday.

I had been waiting about a minute when the voice’s owner came out of the back room. Late thirties, dark, on the beefy side; wearing a professional smile and a floral patterned apron that should have been ludicrous on a man of his size and coloring but wasn’t. We had a good look at each other before he said, “Sorry to keep you waiting — I was putting up an arrangement. What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Bisconte? Jack Bisconte?”

“That’s me. Something for the wife maybe?”

“I’m not here for flowers. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

The smile didn’t waver. “Oh? What about?”

“Gianna Fornessi.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know her?”

“Name’s not familiar, no.”

“She lives up on Chestnut with Ashley Hansen.”

“Ashley Hansen... I don’t know that name either.”

“She knows you. Young, blonde, looks Norwegian.”

“Well, I know a lot of young blondes,” Bisconte said. He winked at me. “I’m a bachelor and I get around pretty good, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lot of bars and clubs in North Beach, lot of women to pick and choose from.” He shrugged. “So how come you’re asking about these two?”

“Not both of them. Just Gianna Fornessi.”

“That so? You a friend of hers?”

“Of her grandfather’s. She’s had a little trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Manager of her building accused her of stealing some money. But somebody convinced him to drop the charges.”

“That so?” Bisconte said again, but not as if he cared.

“Leaned on him to do it. Scared the hell out of him.”

“You don’t think it was me, do you? I told you, I don’t know anybody named Gianna Fornessi.”

“So you did.”

“What’s the big deal anyway?” he said. “I mean, if the guy dropped the charges, then this Gianna is off the hook, right?”

“Right.”

“Then why all the questions?”

“Curiosity,” I said. “Mine and her grandfather’s.”

Another shrug. “I’d like to help you, pal, but like I said, I don’t know the lady. Sorry.”

“Sure.”

“Come back any time you need flowers,” Bisconte said. He gave me a little salute, waited for me to turn and then did the same himself. He was hidden away again in the back room when I let myself out.

Today was my day for liars. Liars and puzzles.

He hadn’t asked me who I was or what I did for a living; that was because he already knew. And the way he knew, I thought, was that Ashley Hansen had gotten on the horn after I left and told him about me. He knew Gianna Fornessi pretty well too, and exactly where the two women lived.

He was the man in the tan trench coat I’d seen earlier, the one who wouldn’t hold the door for me at 725 °Chestnut.

5

I treated myself to a plate of linguine and fresh clams at a ristorante off Washington Square and then drove back over to Aquatic Park. Now, in mid-afternoon, with fog seeping in through the Gate and the temperature dropping sharply, the number of bocce players and kibitzers had thinned by half. Pietro Lombardi was one of those remaining; Dominick Marra was another. Bocce may be dying easy in the city but not in men like them. They cling to it and to the other old ways as tenaciously as they cling to life itself.

I told Pietro — and Dominick, who wasn’t about to let us talk in private — what I’d learned so far. He was relieved that Ferry had dropped his complaint, but just as curious as I was about the Jack Bisconte connection.

“Do you know Bisconte?” I asked him.

“No. I see his shop but I never go inside.”

“Know anything about him?”

“Niente.”

“How about you, Dominick?”

He shook his head. “He’s too old for Gianna, hah? Almost forty, you say — that’s too old for girl twenty-three.”

“If that’s their relationship,” I said.

“Men almost forty they go after young woman, they only got one reason. Fatto ’na bella chiavata. You remember, eh, Pietro?”

“Pazzo! You think I forget ’na bella chiavata?”

I asked Pietro, “You know anything about Gianna’s roommate?”

“Only once I meet her,” he said. “Pretty, but not so pretty like my Gianna, la bellezza delle bellezze. I don’t like her too much.”

“Why not?”

“She don’t have respect like she should.”

“What does she do for a living, do you know?”

“No. She don’t say and Gianna don’t tell me.”

“How long have they been sharing the apartment?”

“Eight, nine months.”

“Did they know each other long before they moved in together?”

He shrugged. “Gianna and me, we don’t talk much like when she’s little girl,” he said sadly. “Young people now, they got no time for la familia.” Another shrug, a sigh. “Ognuno pensa per sè,” he said. Everybody thinks only of himself.

Dominick gripped his shoulder. Then he said to me, “You find out what’s happen with Bisconte and Ferry and those girls. Then you see they don’t bother them no more. Hah?”

“If I can, Dominick. If I can.”

The fog was coming in thickly now and the other players were making noises about ending the day’s tournament. Dominick got into an argument with one of them; he wanted to play another game or two. He was outvoted, but he was still pleading his case when I left. Their Sunday was almost over. So was mine.

I went home to my flat in Pacific Heights. And Kerry came over later on and we had dinner and listened to some jazz. I thought maybe Gianna Fornessi might call but she didn’t. No one called. Good thing, too. I would not have been pleased to hear the phone ring after eight o’clock; I was busy then.

Men in their late fifties are just as interested in ’na bella chiavata. Women in their early forties, too.

6

At the office in the morning I called TRW for credit checks on Jack Bisconte, George Ferry, Gianna Fornessi, and Ashley Hansen. I also asked my partner, Eberhardt, who has been off the cops just a few years and who still has plenty of cronies sprinkled throughout the SFPD, to find out what Inspector Cullen and the Robbery Detail had on Ferry’s theft complaint, and to have the four names run through R&I for any local arrest record.

The report out of Robbery told me nothing much. Ferry’s complaint had been filed on Friday morning; Cullen had gone to investigate, talked to the two principals, and determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to take Gianna Fornessi into custody. Thirty hours later Ferry had called in and withdrawn the complaint, giving the same flimsy reason he’d handed me. As far as Cullen and the department were concerned, it was all very minor and routine.

The TRW and R&I checks took a little longer to come through, but I had the information by noon. It went like this:

Jack Bisconte. Good credit rating. Owner and sole operator, Bisconte Florist Shop, since 1978; lived on upper Greenwich Street, in a rented apartment, same length of time. No listing of previous jobs held or previous local addresses. No felony or misdemeanor arrests.

George Ferry. Excellent credit rating. Owner and principal operator, Ferry Temporary Employment Agency, since 1972. Resident of 725 °Chestnut since 1980. No felony arrests; one DWI arrest and conviction following a minor traffic accident in May of 1981, sentenced to ninety days in jail (suspended), driver’s license revoked for six months.

Gianna Fornessi. Fair to good credit rating. Employed by Home Draperies, Showplace Square, as a sales representative since 1988. Resident of 725 °Chestnut for eight months; address prior to that, her parents’ home in Daly City. No felony or misdemeanor arrests.

Ashley Hansen. No credit rating. No felony or misdemeanor arrests.

There wasn’t much in any of that, either, except for the fact that TRW had no listing on Ashley Hansen. Almost everybody uses credit cards these days, establishes some kind of credit — especially a young woman whose income is substantial enough to afford an apartment in one of the city’s best neighborhoods. Why not Ashley Hansen?

She was one person who could tell me; another was Gianna Fornessi. I had yet to talk to Pietro’s granddaughter and I thought it was high time. I left the office in Eberhardt’s care, picked up my car, and drove south of Market to Showplace Square.

The Square is a newish complex of manufacturer’s showrooms for the interior decorating trade — carpets, draperies, lighting fixtures, and other types of home furnishings. It’s not open to the public, but I showed the Photostat of my license to one of the security men at the door and talked him into calling the Home Draperies showroom and asking them to send Gianna Fornessi out to talk to me.

They sent somebody out but it wasn’t Gianna Fornessi. It was a fluffy looking little man in his forties named Lundquist, who said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Fornessi is no longer employed by us.”

“Oh? When did she leave?”

“Eight months ago”

“Eight months?”

“At the end of September.”

“Quit or terminated?”

“Quit. Rather abruptly, too.”

“To take another job?”

“I don’t know. She gave no adequate reason.”

“No one called afterward for a reference?”

“No one,” Lundquist said.

“She worked for you two years, is that right?”

“About two years, yes.”

“As a sales representative?”

“That’s correct.”

“May I ask her salary?”

“I really couldn’t tell you that...”

“Just this, then: Was hers a high-salaried position? In excess of thirty thousand a year, say?”

Lundquist smiled a faint, fluffy smile. “Hardly,” he said.

“Were her skills such that she could have taken another, better paying job in the industry?”

Another fluffy smile. And another “Hardly.”

So why had she quit Home Draperies so suddenly eight months ago, at just about the same time she moved into the Chestnut Street apartment with Ashley Hansen? And what was she doing to pay her share of the rent?

7

There was an appliance store delivery truck double-parked in front of 725 °Chestnut, and when I went up the stairs I found the entrance door wedged wide open. Nobody was in the vestibule or lobby, but the murmur of voices filtered down from the third floor. If I’d been a burglar I would have rubbed my hands together in glee. As it was, I walked in as if I belonged there and climbed the inside staircase to the second floor.

When I swung off the stairs I came face to face with Jack Bisconte.

He was hurrying toward me from the direction of apartment #4, something small and red and rectangular clutched in the fingers of his left hand. He broke stride when he saw me; and then recognition made him do a jerky double-take and he came to a halt. I stopped, too, with maybe fifteen feet separating us. That was close enough, and the hallway was well-lighted enough, for me to get a good look at his face. It was pinched, sweat-slicked, the eyes wide and shiny — the face of a man on the cutting edge of panic.

Frozen time, maybe five seconds of it, while we stood staring at each other. There was nobody else in the hall; no audible sounds on this floor except for the quick rasp of Bisconte’s breathing. Then we both moved at the same time — Bisconte in the same jerky fashion of his double-take, shoving the red object into his coat pocket as he came forward. And then, when we had closed the gap between us by half, we both stopped again as if on cue. It might have been a mildly amusing little pantomime if you’d been a disinterested observer. It wasn’t amusing to me. Or to Bisconte, from the look of him.

I said, “Fancy meeting you here. I thought you didn’t know Gianna Fornessi or Ashley Hansen.”

“Get out of my way.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“Get out of my way. I mean it.” The edge of panic had cut into his voice; it was thick, liquidy, as if it were bleeding.

“What did you put in your pocket, the red thing?”

He said, “Christ!” and tried to lunge past me.

I blocked his way, getting my hands up between us to push him back. He made a noise in his throat and swung at me. It was a clumsy shot; I ducked away from it without much effort, so that his knuckles just grazed my neck. But then the son of a bitch kicked me, hard, on the left shinbone. I yelled and went down. He kicked out again, this time at my head; didn’t connect because I was already rolling away. I fetched up tight against the wall and by the time I got myself twisted back around he was pelting toward the stairs.

I shoved up the wall to my feet, almost fell again when I put weight on the leg he’d kicked. Hobbling, wiping pain-wet out of my eyes, I went after him. People were piling down from the third floor; the one in the lead was George Ferry. He called something that I didn’t listen to as I started to descend. Bisconte, damn him, had already crossed the lobby and was running out through the open front door.

Hop, hop, hop down the stairs like a contestant in a one-legged race, using the railing for support. By the time I reached the lobby, some of the sting had gone out of my shinbone and I could put more weight on the leg. Out into the vestibule, half running and half hobbling now, looking for him. He was across the Street and down a ways, fumbling with a set of keys at the driver’s door of a new silver Mercedes.

But he didn’t stay there long. He was too wrought up to get the right key into the lock, and when he saw me pounding across the Street in his direction, the panic goosed him and he ran again. Around behind the Mercedes, onto the sidewalk, up and over the concrete retaining wall. And gone.

I heard him go sliding or tumbling through the undergrowth below. I staggered up to the wall, leaned over it. The slope down there was steep, covered with trees and brush, strewn with the leavings of semi-humans who had used it for a dumping ground. Bisconte was on his buttocks, digging hands and heels into the ground to slow his momentum. For a few seconds I thought he was going to turn into a one-man avalanche and plummet over the edge where the slope ended in a sheer bluff face. But then he managed to catch hold of one of the tree trunks and swing himself away from the bluff, in among a tangle of bushes where I couldn’t see him anymore. I could hear him — and then I couldn’t. He’d found purchase, I thought, and was easing himself down to where the backside of another apartment building leaned in against the cliff.

There was no way I was going down there after him. I turned and went to the Mercedes.

It had a vanity plate, the kind that makes you wonder why somebody would pay $25 extra to the DMV to put it on his car: BISFLWR. If the Mercedes had had an external hood release I would have popped it and disabled the engine; but it didn’t, and all four doors were locked. All right. Chances were, he wouldn’t risk coming back soon — and even if he ran the risk, it would take him a good long while to get here.

I limped back to 7250. Four people were clustered in the vestibule, staring at me — Ferry and a couple of uniformed deliverymen and a fat woman in her forties. Ferry said as I came up the steps, “What happened, what’s going on?” I didn’t answer him. There was a bad feeling in me now; or maybe it had been there since I’d first seen the look on Bisconte’s face. I pushed through the cluster — none of them tried to stop me — and crossed the lobby and went up to the second floor.

Nobody answered the bell at apartment #4. I tried the door, and it was unlocked, and I opened it and walked in and shut it again and locked it behind me.

She was lying on the floor in the living room, sprawled and bent on her back near a heavy teak coffee table, peach-colored dressing gown hiked up over her knees; head twisted at an off-angle, blood and a deep triangular puncture wound on her left temple. The blood was still wet and clotting. She hadn’t been dead much more than an hour.

In the sunlight that spilled in through the undraped windows, the blood had a kind of shimmery radiance. So did her hair — her long gold-blonde hair.

Goodbye Ashley Hansen.

8

I called the Hall of Justice and talked to a Homicide inspector I knew slightly named Craddock. I told him what I’d found, and about my little skirmish with Jack Bisconte, and said that yes, I would wait right here and no, I wouldn’t touch anything. He didn’t tell me not to look around and I didn’t say that I wouldn’t.

Somebody had started banging on the door. Ferry, probably. I went the other way, into one of the bedrooms. Ashley Hansen’s: there was a photograph of her prominently displayed on the dresser, and lots of mirrors to give her a live image of herself. A narcissist, among other things. On one nightstand was a telephone and an answering machine. On the unmade bed, tipped on its side with some of the contents spilled out, was a fancy leather purse. I used the backs of my two index fingers to stir around among the spilled items and the stuff inside. Everything you’d expect to find in a woman’s purse — and one thing that should have been there and wasn’t.

Gianna Fornessi’s bedroom was across the hall. She also had a telephone and an answering machine; the number on the telephone dial was different from her roommate’s. I hesitated for maybe five seconds, and then I went to the answering machine and pushed the button marked “playback calls” and listened to two old messages before I stopped the tape and rewound it. One message would have been enough.

Back into the living room. The knocking was still going on. I started over there; stopped after a few feet and stood sniffing the air. I thought I smelled something — a faint lingering acrid odor. Or maybe I was just imagining it...

Bang, bang, bang. And Ferry’s voice: “What’s going on in there?”

I moved ahead to the door, threw the bolt lock, yanked the door open. “Quit making so damned much noise.”

Ferry blinked and backed off a step; he didn’t know whether to be afraid of me or not. Behind and to one side of him, the two deliverymen and the fat woman looked on with hungry eyes. They would have liked seeing what lay inside; blood attracts some people, the gawkers, the insensitive ones, the same way it attracts flies.

“What’s happened?” Ferry asked nervously.

“Come in and see for yourself. Just you.”

I opened up a little wider and he came in past me, showing reluctance. I shut and locked the door again behind him. And when I turned he said, “Oh my God,” in a sickened voice. He was staring at the body on the floor, one hand pressed up under his breastbone. “Is she...?”

“Very.”

“Gianna... is she here?”

“No.”

“Somebody did that to Ashley? It wasn’t an accident?”

“What do you think?”

“Who? Who did it?”

“You know who, Ferry. You saw me chase him out of here.”

“I... don’t know who he is. I never saw him before.”

“The hell you never saw him. He’s the one put those cuts and bruises on your face.”

“No,” Ferry said, “that’s not true.” He looked and sounded even sicker now. “I told you how that happened...”

“You told me lies. Bisconte roughed you up so you’d drop your complaint against Gianna. He did it because Gianna and Ashley Hansen have been working as call girls and he’s their pimp and he didn’t want the cops digging into her background and finding out the truth.”

Ferry leaned unsteadily against the wall, facing away from what was left of the Hansen woman. He didn’t speak.

“Nice quiet little operation they had,” I said, “until you got wind of it. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? You found out and you wanted some of what Gianna’s been selling.”

Nothing for ten seconds. Then, softly, “It wasn’t like that, not at first. I... loved her.”

“Sure you did.”

“I did. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

“So then you offered to pay her.”

“...Yes. Whatever she charged.”

“Only you wanted kinky sex and she wouldn’t play.”

“No! I never asked for anything except a night with her one night. She pretended to be insulted; she denied that she’s been selling herself to men. She... she said she’d never go to bed with a man as... ugly...” He moved against the wall — a writhing movement, as if he were in pain.

“That was when you decided to get even with her.”

“I wanted to hurt her, the way she’d hurt me. It was stupid, I know that, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just wanted to hurt her...”

“Well, you succeeded,” I said. “But the one you really hurt is Ashley Hansen. If it hadn’t been for you, she’d still be alive.”

He started to say something but the words were lost in the sudden summons of the doorbell.

“That’ll be the police,” I said.

“The police? But... I thought you were...”

“I know you did. I never told you I was, did I?”

I left him holding up the wall and went to buzz them in.

9

I spent more than two hours in the company of the law, alternately answering questions and waiting around. I told Inspector Craddock how I happened to be there. I told him how I’d come to realize that Gianna Fornessi and Ashley Hansen were call girls, and how George Ferry and Jack Bisconte figured into it. I told him about the small red rectangular object I’d seen Bisconte shove into his pocket — an address book, no doubt, with the names of some of Hansen’s johns. That was the common item that was missing from her purse.

Craddock seemed satisfied. I wished I was.

When he finally let me go I drove back to the office. But I didn’t stay long; it was late afternoon, Eberhardt had already gone for the day, and I felt too restless to tackle the stack of routine paperwork on my desk. I went out to Ocean Beach and walked on the sand, as I sometimes do when an edginess is on me. It helped a little — not much.

I ate an early dinner out, and when I got home I put in a call to the Hall of Justice to ask if Jack Bisconte had been picked up yet. But Craddock was off duty and the inspector I spoke to wouldn’t tell me anything.

The edginess stayed with me all evening, and kept me awake past midnight. I knew what was causing it, all right; and I knew what to do to get rid of it. Only I wasn’t ready to do it yet.

In the morning, after eight, I called the Hall again. Craddock came on duty at eight, I’d been told. He was there and willing to talk, but what he had to tell me was not what I wanted to hear. Bisconte was in custody but not because he’d been apprehended. At eight-thirty Monday night he’d walked into the North Beach precinct station with his lawyer in tow and given himself up. He’d confessed to being a pimp for the two women; he’d confessed to working over George Ferry; he’d confessed to being in the women’s apartment just prior to his tussle with me. But he swore up and down that he hadn’t killed Ashley Hansen. He’d never had any trouble with her, he said; in fact he’d been half in love with her. The cops had Gianna Fornessi in custody too by this time, and she’d confirmed that there had never been any rough stuff or bad feelings between her roommate and Bisconte.

Hansen had been dead when he got to the apartment, Bisconte said. Fear that he’d be blamed had pushed him into a panic. He’d taken the address book out of her purse — he hadn’t thought about the answering machine tapes or he’d have erased the messages left by eager johns — and when he’d encountered me in the hallway he’d lost his head completely. Later, after he’d had time to calm down, he’d gone to the lawyer, who had advised him to turn himself in. Craddock wasn’t so sure Bisconte was telling the truth, but I was. I knew who had been responsible for Ashley Hansen’s death; I’d known it a few minutes after I found her body. I just hadn’t wanted it to be that way.

I didn’t tell Craddock any of this. When he heard the truth it would not be over the phone. And it would not be from me.

10

It did not take me long to track him down. He wasn’t home but a woman in his building said that in nice weather he liked to sit in Washington Square Park with his cronies. That was where I found him, in the park. Not in the company of anyone; just sitting alone on a bench across from the Saints Peter and Paul Catholic church, in the same slump-shouldered, bowed-head posture as when I’d first seen him on Sunday — the posture of la miseria.

I sat down beside him. He didn’t look at me, not even when I said, “Buorz giorno, Pietro.”

He took out one of his twisted black cigars and lit it carefully with a kitchen match. Its odor was acrid on the warm morning air — the same odor that had been in his granddaughter’s apartment, that I’d pretended to myself I was imagining. Nothing smells like a Toscana; nothing. And only old men like Pietro smoke Toscanas these days. They don’t even have to smoke one in a closed room for the smell to linger after them; it gets into and comes off the heavy user’s clothing.

“It’s time for us to talk,” I said.

“Che sopra?”

“Ashley Hansen. How she died.”

A little silence. Then he sighed and said, “You already know, hah, good detective like you? How you find out?”

“Does it matter?”

“It don’t matter. You tell police yet?”

“It’ll be better if you tell them.”

More silence, while he smoked his little cigar.

I said, “But first tell me. Exactly what happened.”

He shut his eyes; he didn’t want to relive what had happened.

“It was me telling you about Bisconte that started it,” I said to prod him. “After you got home Sunday night you called Gianna and asked her about him. Or she called you.”

“...I call her,” he said. “She’s angry, she tell me mind my own business. Never before she talks to her goombah this way.”

“Because of me. Because she was afraid of what I’d find out about her and Ashley Hansen and Bisconte.”

“Bisconte.” He spat the name, as if ridding his mouth of something foul.

“So this morning you asked around the neighborhood about him. And somebody told you he wasn’t just a florist, about his little sideline. Then you got on a bus and went to see your granddaughter.”

“I don’t believe it, not about Gianna. I want her tell me it’s not true. But she’s not there. Only the other one, the bionda.”

“And then?”

“She don’t want to let me in, that one. I go in anyway. I ask if she and Gianna are... if they sell themselves for money. She laugh. In my face she laugh, this girl what have no respect. She says what difference it make? She says I am old man — dinosaur, she says. But she pat my cheek like I am little boy or big joke. Then she... ah, Cristo, she come up close to me and she say you want some, old man, I give you some. To me she says this. Me.” Pietro shook his head; there were tears in his eyes now. “I push her away. I feel feroce, like when I am young man and somebody he make trouble with me. I push her too hard and she fall, her head hit the table and I see blood and she don’t move... ah, mio Dio! She was wicked, that one, but I don’t mean to hurt her...”

“I know you didn’t, Pietro.”

“I think, call doctor quick. But she is dead. And I hurt here, inside” — he tapped his chest — “and I think, what if Gianna she come home? I don’t want to see Gianna. You understand? Never again I want to see her.”

“I understand,” I said. And I thought: Funny — I’ve never laid eyes on her, not even a photograph of her. I don’t know what she looks like; now I don’t want to know. I never want to see her either.

Pietro finished his cigar. Then he straightened on the bench, seemed to compose himself. His eyes had dried; they were clear and sad.. He looked past me, across at the looming Romanesque pile of the church. “I make confession to priest,” he said, “little while before you come. Now we go to police and I make confession to them.”

“Yes.”

“You think they put me in gas chamber?”

“I doubt they’ll put you in prison at all. It was an accident. Just a bad accident.”

Another silence. On Pietro’s face was an expression of the deepest pain. “This thing, this accident, she shouldn’t have happen. Once... ah, once...” Pause. “Morto,” he said.

He didn’t mean the death of Ashley Hansen. He meant the death of the old days, the days when families were tightly knit and there was respect for elders, the days when bocce was king of his world and that world was a far simpler and better place. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days...

We sat there in the pale sun. And pretty soon he said, in a voice so low I barely heard the words, “La bellezza delle bellezze.” Twice before he had used that phrase in my presence and both times he had been referring to his granddaughter. This time I knew he was not.

“Si, ’paesano,” I said. “La bellezza delle bellezze.”