Dragonfire

Four

Tuesday.

Greg Marcus came to see me in the morning, alone this time. He still looked haggard and he hadn’t bothered to shave the blond stubble off his cheeks. But he had no news, no fresh leads; he only wanted me to go over things again, on the chance that I had forgotten or overlooked something. Grabbing at straws. The police were dead-ended and he knew I knew it. He did not even try to pretend otherwise.

A couple of reporters tried to get in to see me, but I told Abrams and the nurses that I didn’t want to talk to them.

Kerry came again in the afternoon. There was less strain between us this time, mainly because she did not try to cheer me up. She just sat and held my hand and endured the protracted silences between the words we said to each other. I was glad when she was there — she was the only person I wanted to see, except for Marcus or Klein with some word on the gunman — but I was just as glad when she was gone and I was alone again.

The nurses fed me three meals and let me get up twice to use the toilet. The rest of the time I slept or stared at the walls. I didn’t even make an effort to read the pulp magazines Kerry had brought; I had no interest in reading, no interest in fictional crime or fictional detectives.

Eberhardt was still in a coma, still in critical condition.

And I was still angry.

Wednesday.

I asked for the Chronicle and Examiner for the past three days and read all the news stories on the shooting and the police investigation. No facts that I didn’t already know. But a lot of crap about my background, the loss of my license; I was hot news again and the journalists were making the most of it. I threw the papers on the floor when I was done with them.

Two visitors showed up. One was Litchak, the retired fire inspector who lived in the flat below mine in Pacific Heights. The other was Kerry. I couldn’t seem to find much to say to either of them and they didn’t stay long.

No change in Eberhardt’s condition. Or in mine.

Thursday.

They let me get up and stay up for a while, with my left arm in a sling. As long as I didn’t make any sudden moves, I felt almost no pain in my shoulder. But the arm was still stiff; I kept having to make an effort to straighten out all but the little finger on that hand.

Kerry didn’t come. She called the head nurse, who passed along a message that she had business obligations at her ad agency and she would come again tomorrow. It mattered that she couldn’t make it, and yet it did not matter. I was better off by myself.

Two other guys I knew came to see me. One of them worked on the Examiner and the main reason he paid his visit was to get himself an exclusive interview; I threw him out verbally after five minutes.

Eberhardt remained the same. And the police remained stymied: the gunman was still unidentified and still at large.

Friday.

Abrams removed half the stitches and allowed as how the wound seemed to be healing satisfactorily. I asked him when I could get out of there. Tomorrow morning, he said.

Kerry came in the afternoon, very chipper, and made a conspiratorial thing out of giving me a pastrami sandwich she had hidden away in her purse. It was a nice gesture. I told her I was starved for some real food and would wolf the sandwich down after she left, but that was a lie; I had no appetite. I said I would be going home tomorrow, and she said she would drive me and offered to stop by my flat again to pick up some clothes.

Everything else was status quo.

Saturday.

Ben Klein showed up at ten o’clock. Nothing to report. The investigation was not going well, he admitted; nobody in Chinatown was talking, R&I hadn’t turned up any possibles on their computer checks, there weren’t any leads in Eberhardt’s case file or past history or personal effects. He offered to keep a police guard on me for a few more days, but I told him I didn’t want that.

After Klein left, Abrams came around with a bunch of instructions on how to care for myself, what I should and shouldn’t do, when to come back to have the rest of the stitches taken out. He also gave me some Empirin-and-codeine pills to take if I was bothered by pain.

At eleven-thirty, Kerry arrived with my clothes. I had some trouble getting into the shirt; she had to help me, and afterward she tied on the sling.

And at twelve-fifteen I walked out of the hospital with Kerry hanging on to my good arm. We left through the emergency entrance to avoid any reporters who might be lurking around out front. It was a gray day, foggy and cold, and that was good. I was gray inside, shading toward black; sunshine would only have fueled my anger by reminding me of the Chinese gunman backlit and half-invisible in the doorway of Eberhardt’s house.

Kerry kept up a running stream of chatter on the way crosstown. She had had one of her friends pick up my car, she said, and take it up near my flat; she told me where it was parked. I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of what she said.

She had also cleaned up the flat. The dustballs and dirty dishes were gone; the furniture gleamed with polish; the place smelled of lemon-scented air freshener. It didn’t look or feel right and it annoyed me. It was like walking into another hospital room — too neat, too antiseptic.

I said, “Why did you clean the place?”

“Well, it was pretty messy...”

“I like it messy. It makes me feel at home.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you’d be pleased.”

She sounded uncertain and a little hurt. I did not want to be angry at her, of all people; I tightened the wraps on myself and managed a small smile. “It’s all right. I’m glad you were concerned.”

She came over to kiss me on the cheek. “Are you hungry? I can make something...”

“No. I don’t want any food.”

“Some coffee?”

“Okay. Some coffee.”

She went out into the kitchen. I crossed to the pseudo-Hepplewhite secretary that serves as my desk, rummaged around in one of the drawers with my good hand, and came up with the envelope of old photographs. Eberhardt and me on a fishing trip at Black Point. Eberhardt and Dana in his backyard, with their arms around each other, grinning at the camera. Eberhardt, looking awkward and festive, trimming a tree in his living room one Christmas. A tightness formed in my chest; I put the photographs back into the envelope and the envelope away in the drawer. Taking them out had been a morbid thing to do. I was not even sure why I had done it.

Kerry came in with the coffee and we sat on the couch and looked at each other. She said, “Do you want to talk?”

“About what?”

“About what’s bothering you.”

“You know what’s bothering me.”

“Yes, but it’s doing things to you I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand them myself,” I said.

“So you don’t want to talk?”

“No. Not now.”

“It’s just that I feel—”

“What?”

“That you’re shutting me out. Shutting everybody out, withdrawing into yourself. It scares me.”

“You said that on Monday.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve felt that way all week.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.

“But I do.”

“I’ll be fine. When Eberhardt wakes up, when the bastard who shot us is locked away... then I’ll be just dandy.”

“What if either or both of those things don’t happen?”

“They’ll happen.”

“But what if they don’t?”

“They’ll happen,” I said again. “Let’s drop the subject, okay? I’m not in any mood for it.”

We were quiet for a time. Then she said, “Do you want me to stay here with you?”

“For a while, yes.”

“I meant tonight. For a few days.”

“I wouldn’t be much good to you with this arm.”

“I wasn’t talking about sex. Is that what you thought?”

“I didn’t think anything.”

“What kind of person would I be if that’s all I had to offer you?”

“All right. Let it go.”

“I don’t think you should be alone,” she said.

“No? Why not?”

“Because you’ll brood. I know you that well; when you’re alone and upset, you brood.”

“I won’t brood.”

“Then you don’t want me to stay?”

“No. I need to be alone.”

“Just tonight? Or don’t you want to see me at all?”

“I didn’t say that. You said that six weeks ago, remember?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice, “I remember.”

I felt bad for her again. “Kerry, look, I’m not shutting you out. I’m glad you care for me, I’m glad you want to be with me; maybe there’s still something for us after all. But too much has happened to me, too fast. I’ve got to come to terms with it and I’ve got to do it my own way. You’ve already given me what I need from you — being there, caring. Keep on being there, okay?”

“I will,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But it didn’t happen. Her face smoothed and she put on a smile. Then she took my good hand, held it in both of hers; her fingers were very strong and very cold.

We did not say much to each other after that, but it was a good kind of silence. She left at four, saying she would call tomorrow, come by if I wanted her to. When she was gone I felt relieved and sorry at the same time, the way I had each time she’d left my room at the hospital.

I sat and stared at the walls. Made myself some more coffee. Stared at the walls again until the room itself began to bother me. It was just too neat, too clean; I hated it this way, it wasn’t mine any longer. I got up and went into the bedroom and took some clothes out of the dresser and scattered them around in there and in the living room. I took a handful of pulps off the shelves that flanked the bay window, scattered those around. I found some mildewed cheese in the refrigerator, put it on a plate and put the plate on the coffee table next to the dirty cups. I was breathing heavily when I was finished. The place looked better then, it looked all right. Familiar. Mine again.

The phone rang at seven o’clock. Newspaper reporter, wanting an interview; I banged the receiver down in the middle of his pitch, so hard I almost knocked the thing off the nightstand.

The anger was still there an hour later, when I struggled out of my clothes and got into bed. It was always there now; it had not left me for a minute since Monday. Living and growing in my body, sometimes burning hot and sometimes banked, clinging to me and making me cling to it — a symbiotic thing that was both friend and enemy.

Sunday.

I was awake before dawn, with pain pulsing in my shoulder because I had shifted somehow in my sleep and wrenched the arm. I got up and took one of the pills Abrams had given me. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Beard stubble, but not enough to make me want to shave again; I had shaved yesterday before leaving the hospital. My eyes looked dark, sunken. But the anger was not visible in them, at least not to me. Windows with the blinds drawn tight behind them.

When the pain diminished I took my left arm out of the sling and spent several minutes trying to flex it. I could not quite get it straightened out all the way; the pain came back, sharp stabs of it, whenever I tried to lock the elbow. The fingers moved all right, unbent into horizontal planes, but when I went to pick up a glass I couldn’t close them around it.

The whole time I kept thinking about Eberhardt. He had been in a coma one week, seven days, 160 hours. How long could he hang on that way, balanced on the thin edge between life and death? Weeks, months? Years? I had heard of cases where people lay in a coma for two, three, four years, little more than vegetables kept breathing by life-support equipment. If that happened to Eberhardt...

Restlessly, I went back into the bedroom and called the Hall of Justice. Neither Marcus nor Klein was in, and nobody else would tell me anything, even when I explained who I was. I ended the call by jamming down the handset. Damn the cops; I was beginning to hate the Department. A few individuals like Klein and Marcus were all right, but it was not being run the way it had been in the old days. The damn brass all seemed to have political ties and ambitions; they went around yelling about public relations, the police image, the war on crime. And yet they were also close-mouthed, secretive, unyielding, like a bunch of neo-fascists. The chief had yanked my license because I was too good a cop myself, because I made waves and showed them up and undercut their authority. A victim of a goddamn fascist purge, that was what I was when you boiled it down.

Out in the kitchen I banged some pots and pans around, making coffee and frying a couple of eggs for breakfast. It was awkward trying to cook with one hand; I spilled coffee on the counter, broke both egg yolks, spattered hot butter on myself. By the time I scooped the eggs out onto a plate, I was growling again and spewing blasphemy all over the kitchen.

The telephone rang. I went and hauled up the receiver and barked a hello. A whiny male voice said my name questioningly, and as soon as I heard it my hand went tight around the receiver.

It was an Oriental voice — Chinese.

I said, “Yes. What is it?”

“I having something to tell you. About shooting, you and Lieutenant Eb-hardt.”

I eased down on the bed. “Who is this?”

“No. Not giving my name.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“Man who do shooting — Mau Yee.”

“Mau Yee? That’s his name?”

“No. Mau Yee.”

“I don’t understand...”

“You finding out. Mau Yee. That’s all.”

I thought he was going to hang up. “Wait a minute! Why call me about this? Why didn’t you call the police?”

“No police,” he said.

“Why not? If you have information...”

“No police. You lieutenant’s friend, you getting shot too. Maybe you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Reason for shooting.”

“No. Why did this Mau Yee shoot Eberhardt?”

“You not knowing?”

“I’m asking you, man. Why?”

Hesitation. And then he said, “Bribe. Big bribe.”

“What!”

“Yes. Big bribe. You understand now?”

“Hell, no, I don’t understand. Are you trying to tell me Eberhardt was taking bribes from somebody in Chinatown?”

“Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.”

“That’s a frigging lie!”

“No lie. You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.”

“Goddamn it, who are you? What do you know? Talk to me!”

The line clicked and went dead.

I sat holding the receiver, shaking a little. Then I cradled it, carefully, to keep the impulse for violence bottled up, and went out into the living room and took a couple of hard turns around it.

No, I thought, not Eberhardt. Dirty? Him? No. He was an honest cop; I’d known him for thirty years, I’d worked with him, I’d listened to the hatred in his voice when he talked about police officers on the take. He wasn’t dirty, he couldn’t be.

Crank call, I thought. But it hadn’t sounded like a crank call. And Chinese weren’t prone to that kind of thing; of all the cranks who annoyed police and other people, almost none of them were Orientals.

Mau Yee, I thought. Who the hell is Mau Yee?

And who the hell is the man on the phone?

Big bribe. Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.

It just wasn’t possible that Eberhardt was taking. And yet he’d been shot by a Chinese gunman, and the caller had been Chinese, and Mau Yee was a Chinese name or phrase. All of that fit together; why would the man have lied about the other thing?

You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.

I stopped pacing. Without even thinking about it, I crossed to the closet and got my overcoat out and shrugged it over my shoulders. When I had it buttoned I hunted around until I found where Kerry had put my car keys, on top of the mantelpiece.

Yeah, I thought then, grimly. I’ll find out, all right.

I’ll find out.