Blowback

Twenty-one

I came back across the Bay Bridge, into San Francisco, at three-thirty Wednesday afternoon.

At the western edge of the Bay, billows of fog were drifting in through the Golden Gate; I could just see the tips of the towers over mere, orange-red buried in gray. A wall of it was massing up above Twin Peaks too. I smiled a little. After the heat and dust of Tuolumne County, that fog was like coming home to a meal after a three-day fast.

I was still pretty tired, stiff and sore and in need of a good deal more sleep. I had spent part of the night in Cloudman's office in Sonora-a deputy had summoned him from his home after listening to what I had to say-and the rest of the night in a motel nearby. This morning I had gone back to the Sheriff's Department and signed more statements and listened to Cloudman tell me that he had had sessions with Harry and with Angela Jerrold, and had not been able to pressure through their stories. He seemed to think he might still have a case, might still break them down given enough time, but I did not agree.

They were going to get away with it, all right.

They had committed the perfect murder.

And yet, they were not going to get away with it in another sense, at least not Harry. It was eating him up inside, and how long would he be able to go on fighting off the guilt with only a warped love and the companionship of a hellish bitch like Angela Jerrold to console him? Not long. A man like Harry, a man with a conscience-not long. One of these days it was all going to blow back into his face like the blocked shotgun had blown back into Jerrold's, and it would destroy him and maybe her too, and then justice would be served after all.

I had done a lot of thinking, clear and mostly unemotional, lying awake last night and driving back today. The doubts and the specter of death had not come back, and I had reached an understanding of why I was purged of it, why I had felt purged after those few minutes with Harry on the pier. As a result, and at long last, I had come to something else too.

Terms with my own mortality.

A thing like that is not easy to translate into words, but it was as if the confrontation with Harry had taken the form of a final battle in a long series of battles with death-inside my head, and outside it with Terzian and Bascomb and Jerrold and the ordeal in the mine shaft. And death had lost, I had beaten it, because it had let me get too close, let me see it too vividly in that brief and awful glimpse into Hairy Burroughs' soul.

Death was a state of mind as well as a physical fact; you could be dead while you were still alive, or you could be dying and too full of life to let death inside you. What Harry had allowed to happen to himself-what I had been allowing to happen to myself in a different way-was the true essence of death, far more terrible than any potential void, any uncertain afterlife. Terminal lung cancer or not, I could not and would not wrap my own soul in that kind of blackness.

I took the Fremont exit off the bridge, and the Embarcadero Freeway, and got off at Front Street. Traffic was thick in the Financial District, and when I crawled past Sansome Street on my way to Grant I found myself thinking of Erika, who had been working in a building on Sansome the last time I saw her five years ago.

Erika. I remembered again her sharp words, her claim that the life and the profession I had chosen for myself were a lie. But I had reached an understanding with myself about that too.

Maybe I was not much of a detective, and maybe my work and my life had no real importance or significance in the scheme of things, and maybe I had patterned myself in the mold of fictional creations who were far greater in their world than I could ever be in mine-but none of that was a lie. A lie was something that hurt other people, like Harry's love and Harry's friendship, or had a conscious basis in pain or deceit or hypocrisy; there was none of that kind of blackness in my soul either. If I was a pulp private eye, at least in spirit, then so be it. It was nothing to apologize for, nothing to feel ashamed about, because it was an honest thing to be, and a decent one.

I wish I'd been able to tell all that to Erika, I thought.

Then I thought: I wonder if she's still here in San Francisco, still free of attachments? And if she is, would she want to see me after all these years? Well, it might be worth the effort to find out. I've got the perfect reason to call her, after all-tomorrow I'll be fifty years old, and no man should have to spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

Maybe I would try to call her, then. Maybe I would.

And I turned off Grant onto Geary, parked illegally in a bus zone in front of the building where Dr. White had his offices, and went in to find out at last if the lesion was malignant or benign…