Illusions

14

So Eberhardt had been much dirtier than I’d imagined. Corrupt his whole life, maybe, down deep at the core; sure as hell rotten at the end. My partner the crook. My pal the stranger. Shaking down a two-bit thief for five hundred dollars and a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel’s. So far gone, so lost, that even his final act of corruption had been weak, petty.

Was that the trigger, then? Disgust, self-loathing at how low he’d sunk?

Part of it, possibly — but there had to be more, some other factor. Who had been the recipient of that five-hundred-dollar check? And what was it in payment for? Key questions that still had no answers. I’d know the answers when the check finally cleared, unless for some reason it wasn’t cashed at all; but even if I knew that much, I might never get at the whole truth. Right now, with the foul taste of Eberhardt’s dishonesty in my mouth, the prospect didn’t bother me as much as it had before. I was no longer sure I cared to find out any more than I already had.

I went to my flat because I needed to be alone tonight. Too late to call Kerry; it was nearly eleven-thirty. But she’d understand when I explained it all to her. Our marriage worked because we were sensitive to each other’s needs: when one of us had to have space, the space was allowed without fuss or question. There for each other even when we weren’t together, in spirit and by tacit agreement.

I rummaged around in the fridge, found a can of Bud Light. It did nothing for the sour taste; in fact the smell and the first sip built a faint nausea that spread upward into my throat. I poured the beer into the sink, returned to the living room and put all the lights on and some moody jazz on my old turntable. Then, in spite of what I’d been thinking in the car, in spite of myself, I sat at the desk and went through Eberhardt’s papers again item by item.

Waste of time, just jerking myself around. It was all dead matter in every sense of the term. And yet when I was done, an hour or so later, I had the feeling I’d missed something, that something important had been staring me in the face twice now and I’d overlooked it both times. It was like smoke in my mind; I’d reach for it, almost grasp it, and it would break up, drift away.

Bed. But no sleep. And lying there, I wondered if I had after all been jerking my own chain; if the smoke was imaginary, just one more illusion among the many...

Dark place, narrow and chill, sometimes moving and sometimes stationary, an alley or tunnel or train whispering through a tunnel, and I was running walking stumbling toward a dot or spot of white, yellow, white glow, light glow, growing larger and then smaller and then it winked out and I was in clinging satin blackness and somewhere a voice said, “Join me for a midnight snack?” and all at once I was frightened and I tried to stop turn around run away but the walls bound in closer and the train whispered faster and the voice said, “Corner ahead, just come around the corner,” and I ran walked ran and the corner was there, I felt it with my hands, cold cold cold as death, and dragged myself around it and a door loomed up huge and I caught its handle and yanked the door open and I was in a car, sliding into a car, and Eberhardt was sitting behind the wheel with the Magnum in his mouth like an obscene lollipop and he mumbled something around the muzzle, “Quit looking for Trigger buddy boy Roy Rogers already had him stuffed,” and then he laughed and laughed, a madman’s laugh, and I yelled No! and he said, “Let’s eat” and the gun went off with a deafening roar but the hole and the blood appeared in his chest not his head and his blood spattered on me on me all over me...

I was awake for good or bad at five-thirty, up by six, climbing the walls by seven-fifteen, out of there and down to O’Farrell and into the office before eight. Cinder-eyed and headachey from lack of sleep, the remnants of the nightmare still adhering like dirty strands of spider silk to the corners of my mind. I made coffee, sloshed three cups on top of the two I’d had at the flat. All the caffeine worsened the headache, darkened my mood even more.

Tamara showed up promptly at nine, too cheerful and with a mischievous glint in her eyes. The glint faded some when she got a good look at me. “All beat up again,” she said. “Something happen last night?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Walks like a man, growls like a bear.” She hung up her coat, and when I glanced at her again she was standing midway between her desk and mine, grinning at me. “Never guess where me and Horace be going on Saturday.”

“Horace and I,” I said automatically. “Are going.”

“Not in my hizzy, man. You never heard of Ebonics?”

“I’m not in the mood for Ebonics. Or guessing games.”

She didn’t argue; she was leading up to something else. “We’re going out to Concord,” she said. “Horace’s brother’s part owner of a kennel out there. I ever tell you that?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Yeah. Zeke and his partner raise purebred Lhasa apsos, mostly sell ’em to dog-show people. You know what I’m saying? So some males they keep for stud, but one had a problem and they had to have him fixed. Mr. Mighty.”

“Stupid name for a dog.”

“Bitches didn’t think so,” she said. “So anyway, on Saturday we be hangin’ with Zeke while Mr. Mighty gets him a brand-new set of balls.”

My reaction to that — a blank stare — disappointed her. So did my verbal response. “Is that some kind of joke?”

“No joke,” she said. “Polypropylene.”

“What?”

“That’s what they’re made of. Polypropylene.”

“Tamara, what the hell’re you talking about?”

“Balls,” she said. “See, it’s this new process vets have for neutered male dogs, give ’em imitation balls that look and feel like the real thing. Supposed to build up their confidence. The dogs and their owners, not the vets.”

“Come on,” I said.

“No lie. It’s called CTI.”

“Which stands for what?”

“Canine Testicular Implants. Neuticles.”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s what they’re called. Also the name of the company that makes ’em.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it either, first time I heard about it.” She fished a sheet of paper out of the huge raggedy purse she carries and plopped it in front of me. “Look at this flyer.”

I looked. Neuticles. CTI–Canine Testicular Implant. Replicates the canine testicle in size, shape, and weight. Lets any-size dog look and feel the same as it did before neutering.

“How do they know, huh?” Tamara said.

“How do they know what?”

“That the new balls feel the same to the dog? Zeke says Neuticles feel the same to a human — you know, when you poke or squeeze one.”

“Tamara.”

“Hey, that’s what Zeke says. Show-dog owners always doing stuff like that. At one show Horace went to with Zeke, the owner of a puli... You know what a puli is? No? Hungarian sheep-herding dog, long ropy black hair. Anyway, one of this puli’s testicles got drawn up inside because the dog was nervous or something and there’s a rule that male show dogs not only can’t be neutered but have to have both their balls, so when the judge could only find one and was gonna disqualify the dog, the owner—”

“Tamara.”

“—the owner reached up and felt around and found the missing ball and yanked it—”

“Tamara!”

“Well, Horace swears it’s true and he don’t lie.”

“Go to work,” I said.

“Polypropylene testicles for dogs. Man. What’ll they think of next, huh? I’d still like to know—”

“For Christ’s sake stop babbling and do your job.”

The words sounded as harsh to me as they must have to Tamara. Both her grin and her good humor died; anger flared in the brown eyes, tightened the edges of her mouth. For a few seconds I thought she would snap back at me in kind. But the anger died, too, and some of the old, hard cynicism reshaped her expression.

“Yassuh, boss. ’Scuse me, boss.”

“Tamara...”

“Serious work bein’ done ‘round here. Ain’t no time for jokin’ and laughin’.” Then she dropped the dialect and said in her normal voice, “Balls.” She stalked to her desk and banged her purse on the floor, her behind down on the chair, and made more noise than was necessary hooking up her PowerBook.

I wanted to apologize to her but I had no words. The only ones in my head were a paraphrase of what she’d said a minute ago: What’ll we find out next? The question and the memory it’d triggered: Eberhardt and me, right here in this room, a year or two before the bust-up. Bobbie Jean had found an article in some magazine, called “You Broke Your What?” and documenting a number of actual cases of human penile fracture. Neither of us had ever heard of this phenomenon, and it had led to some speculation of one kind and another, and I’d made a joke out of the idea of a man having his broken member in a cast, all his friends coming around to sign it. But Eberhardt hadn’t seen the humor. Dead serious issue to him. How would you like it if it happened to you, wise guy? Serious work bein’ done ‘round here. Ain’t no time for jokin’ and laughin’.

Damn! Everything reminded me of him lately, everything I did seemed to be colored by my relationship with him and my reaction to his descent into suicide. Beating myself up with all the memories large and small, taking out my frustrations on others like Tamara who didn’t deserve such shabby treatment. The problem was mine, mine and Eberhardt’s. The two of us wrapped up so tightly together that it was no longer easy to establish separation or perspective. Too often I looked at him and saw myself. And when you look at yourself in the reflected light of truth and insight, sometimes you don’t like what you see. Don’t like yourself much at all. And you begin to realize that there is sham and fantasy in your self-perceptions too...

I tried to make myself concentrate on preliminary work on the suspicious accident-insurance claim. No good. I thought about calling Bobbie Jean again, but I didn’t do it. It would be cruel to keep bugging her the way I was bugging myself. She’d told me she would talk to the bank again about the five-hundred-dollar check; if and when it was cashed, I’d hear from her.

Another few minutes crawled away to the accompaniment of machine noise — the PowerBook’s peckety keyboard and then the rattle and clatter of the printer. For Christ’s sake, I thought, why keep on sitting here like this, letting a wall build for no good reason? Your fault; make it right. I stood and went to Tamara’s desk. She didn’t look up, so I cleared my throat. She still didn’t look up.

“Tamara, I’m sorry. I had no cause to take out my crappy mood on you. It won’t happen again...”

She wasn’t listening. Not because she was still peeved, I thought, but because she was staring at what was coming out of the printer. The thing quit clattering and she reached over, tore off the sheet. “Yeah, interesting,” she said, and wheeled around and cocked an eye at me. The eye was free of both cynicism and anger; either she’d forgotten I’d snapped at her or had heard my apology and decided to accept it without comment. Letting me off easy.

“What’s interesting?”

“News story I just downloaded from the Santa Rosa paper.”

“Something to do with the Arco skip-trace?”

“No. I finished that last night. Erskine case. All the stuff you told me kept dancing around in my head, so I figured I’d do some cruising on the information highway, see could I pull up anything new.”

I said, “No point in it, with the client dead.”

“So now I’m the only one with doubts about how he got that way?”

“Okay. What’d you find out?”

“Nothing much about Erskine, or Nelson or Woolfox. But Gail Kendall... here, take a look.”

I read through the printout. The news story was nine years old and had made the front page of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. An out-of-work architect with a history of domestic violence, one Eugene Finley, had gone on an early-morning shooting rampage in Glen Ellen, wounding one of his neighbors and killing another’s dog with a shotgun; then he’d taken his wife captive and barricaded the two of them inside their house, threatening to kill her and then himself. The local police had called in the county SWAT team and hostage negotiator, and after a five-hour standoff Finley had agreed to give himself up. He’d released his wife, but as soon as she was out the front door he’d come into the doorway with the shotgun and tried to blow her head off. He’d missed, but one of the SWAT marksmen hadn’t; Finley had died instantly with a bullet in his brain. The wife who had narrowly escaped harm was Gail Kendall Finley, “a noted Sonoma Valley wine chemist.”

Tamara said when I was done reading, “No surprise Nelson and Kendall got to be friends. Went through the same kind of shit, had their scars in common. Sisters.”

“But not necessarily partners in crime.”

“Makes a big coincidence even bigger, though, right? Erskine shows up after four years and a few days later he’s dead meat. And now we find out the ex and her best bud are battered women and Kendall’s old man died from lead in the head, even if it was a SWAT cop who put it there.”

“It’s still circumstantial,” I said. “No proof of a connection or any kind of collusion.”

“So there isn’t one? You believe that?”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“Feels like murder, doesn’t it? Feels that way to me.”

“Tamara, what it feels like to the two of us isn’t relevent. There’s nothing I could do even if I wanted to. It’s a police matter, out of my hands.”

“Didn’t stop you some other times I know about.”

“You know too much. I’m finished with the Erskine shooting and so are you from now on. Clear?”

Her mouth said, “You the boss man.” Her too-wise smile said the only person I was fooling here was myself.

Another night alone in my flat. Another session with the paper remnants of Eberhardt’s final months. And the same zero as last night, the numbers and words all blurring together into an unrecognizable mass like a stew cooked so long you couldn’t tell one ingredient from another. Yet I had the same nagging feeling I was missing something — and the same worry that the feeling was imaginary. My subconscious playing games with me, creating shimmery apparitions and then daring me to catch one before it faded away?

Another night alone in bed, watching the dark, then entering the dark place...

...Narrow and chill, sometimes moving and sometimes stationary, an alley or tunnel or train whispering through a tunnel, running walking stumbling toward a dot or spot of white, yellow, white glow, light glow, growing larger and then smaller and then it winked out and I was in clinging satin blackness and somewhere a voice said, “Join me for a midnight snack?”...

Cracking up a little.

That was how I felt in the morning, as if there were tiny fissures forming and spreading inside my head and if I didn’t do something to stop the process, and soon, the fissures would deepen and widen and eventually split me into ragged eggshell halves. And what would pop out like a mutated baby chick was a core thing, a kind of capering and gibbering Id that would run around in mad circles until it collapsed and died of sheer frustrated exhaustion. There was a horrifically funny edge to that, but I didn’t laugh. This was not a good time to be treating anything lightly, least of all my own dark side.

What I needed to do, I thought as I showered, was to get my mind into something besides Eberhardt’s life, Eberhardt’s death. And keep it there until I regained some perspective. Another case, one that required physical as well as mental activity; I’d spent too much time sitting around the office lately. Fine, except that the only case I had working was the supermarket accident claim, and that was routine and would likely require a lengthy stakeout before I wrapped it up — the worst possible inactivity I could indulge in right now.

What else? Nothing else.

Just Ira Erskine.

No, I thought. I’d meant what I said to Tamara, never mind her too-wise smile. If a private investigator doesn’t have a paying client, he can’t legally conduct an investigation — and that goes double in a police matter involving a fatality. I’d be inviting any number of hassles if I tried to stick my nose into what would almost surely go down as an accidental shooting, even if it wasn’t.

Airtight alibis and a man shot to death in a closed-up motel room... how could it be homicide? How and who? Tough nut, and plenty of activity needed in trying to crack it. Something to do, whether or not I got anywhere.

Mistake. Potentially a big one.

Sure.

Out of it and staying out.

Sure.

I thought I had myself convinced by the time I left the flat. Three and a half hours later I was on my way across the Golden Gate Bridge, headed for Sonoma County.