Illusions

17

I ran the garbage container over against the wall, twisted back to snatch up my jacket. There was just enough time for me to get it on before the car reached the top of the drive. Muddy brown Chrysler about ten years old, two people visible behind the windshield. When the driver saw me walking away from the garage he stood on the brakes hard enough for the front wheels to lock and the car to pull a quarter turn to the left before it stopped. I kept walking toward it, my hands in plain sight.

Five, six, seven seconds and then both doors flew open simultaneously. The driver was out first, moving fast — a burly guy in a corduroy jacket and Levi’s. The passenger was Gail Kendall; she called out sharply, “Vic!” and swung around the open door, but the burly guy didn’t slow or look back. His eyes were fixed on me and from the angry set of his mouth he already knew who I was.

I recognized him, too: the workman on the forklift I’d spoken to at the winery last Thursday. He plowed to a halt in front of me, blocking my way, and said heatedly, “What the hell’re you doing here, man?”

I made the mistake of ignoring him, changing direction to bypass him on his left. He jumped over to block me again just as Kendall, running toward us, yelled his name a second time. I saw his arm swing up, but not in time to take evasive action; his fist smacked into my cheek, mashed my upper lip against my teeth. Pain erupted, my vision went cockeyed, and the next thing I knew I was down on my butt on the macadam with him standing over me, a kind of stolid elation on his face like a heavyweight who’d just fattened his ego on a tired old sparring partner.

Kendall loomed up at his side. “Vic, for God’s sake, what’s the matter with you? What did you hit him for?”

“He had it coming.”

“What if he charges you with assault?”

“He’s trespassing, ain’t he?”

I was on one knee by this time. An incisor had sliced partway through the inside of my upper lip; I tasted blood, felt it trickling from a corner of my mouth. The punch had been solid enough but not square on or I’d have a worse cut and a couple of broken teeth. I shoved up onto my feet, spat out a gob of blood, smeared more of it off my mouth and over the back of one hand before I looked at Kendall and the burly guy again. He was still angry and she was halfway between anger and anxiety. Funny thing, but the knockdown hadn’t built any rage in me. In a way, Vic was right: I’d had it coming.

“Okay,” I said to him, “you win the round. But that’s all it’s going to be. One punch, one round.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You come at me again, I’ll break something of yours.”

“Tough talk for an old man.”

“Come at me and we’ll see how old I am.”

Part of him wanted to push it; part of him didn’t. The part with whatever sense he owned won out. He stood with his legs spread and his hands folding and unfolding at his sides, but he didn’t do anything except glare at me. I let him maul me that way and turned my attention to Gail Kendall.

She said, “What’re you doing on my property?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why? What do you want this time?”

“Nothing much. A little talk.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Not to me, maybe.”

“...What does that mean?”

“Ira Erskine,” I said.

Her anger was all but dead now, suffocating under the growing weight of anxiety. She wet her lips; her gaze wouldn’t quite hold mine, as if she were afraid she might betray something through steady eye contact.

Vic said, still with heat, “He was in your garage, babe.” The term of endearment stirred my memory and I heard him saying at the winery that he was Sondra Nelson’s “best friend’s main man.” So Kendall wasn’t a man-hater, just an abuse-hater.

“Is that right?” she said to me. “Were you in the garage?”

“No. Just looking around.”

“For what?”

“Just looking around.”

“Why don’t we call the sheriff?” Vic said. “Trespassing’s a crime, ain’t it?”

“Why don’t you shut up?” I said. “I’m talking to Ms. Kendall.”

“Listen—”

“He’s right, Vic. Be quiet.” Then, to me, “I could do that. Call the county sheriff’s office.”

“Go ahead. Get Lieutenant Battle out here and the three of us will have a nice chat. About Erskine and the way he died.”

“For God’s sake,” she said, almost plaintively, “why can’t you just leave it alone? Leave Sandy alone. It was an accident—”

“Was it?”

“An accident. He was a miserable son-of-a-bitch, he hurt her badly and he would’ve killed her. He deserved what he got—”

“Like your husband nine years ago?”

Fresh anger darkened her eyes, bunched her face into a tight grimace. “You bastard,” she said.

And all at once, looking at her, at Vic standing combatively at her side, I felt bad and sorry and sour about this whole business. It was as complicated, as hurtful to the survivors as Eberhardt’s suicide was to its survivors, and here I was playing tough little mind games with a woman who’d suffered a kind of mental and physical anguish no man can fully understand. Never mind that she was almost certainly a co-conspirator in a premeditated homicide. She was also a victim, and who the hell was I to judge her anyway? Or Sondra Nelson or any other victim? I almost wished Vic would take another poke at me; if he did, I’d let him get away with that one, too. I was back to not liking myself again.

My mouth had started to hurt, the lip already to swell. I spat and wiped away more blood. “I’m sorry for that crack,” I said to Kendall. “It was uncalled for.”

“You’re still a dirty bastard,” Vic said.

“Yeah. All right.”

She said, “You think I had something to do with it, don’t you? Erskine’s death. That’s why you’re sucking around.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think what you want to about me, I don’t care, but you leave Sandy alone. You hear me? You just let that poor woman try to pick up the pieces. She didn’t have anything to do with him dying.”

“Better leave Gail alone, too,” Vic said, “or by Christ you and me’ll tangle again.”

Empty voices blowing in the wind. Silently I moved around past the two of them, walked slow along the drive and across to my car. There was a first-aid kit in the trunk, but I wouldn’t treat my cut mouth here. Not here. I got in and started the engine and backed up and drove away without another glance at Gail Kendall and her boyfriend.

Sometimes you just can’t look back.

Sometimes being right is a hell of a lot worse than being wrong.

I might’ve stopped at the Sonoma County courthouse on my way back through Santa Rosa, even though it was almost four o’clock, except that blood had dripped onto the front of my shirt and the sleeve of my jacket and by then my lip was swollen to double size. On the best of days my face has the appearance of a chunk of old limestone; in its present state it would frighten kids and old ladies, and make just about any county employee turn a deaf ear to the questions I needed answering.

Monday was soon enough. And the way I felt now, I was not even sure I wanted to come back then.

But I would. Like it or not.

The one thing I can never do, no matter what my personal feelings, is to turn my back on a problem before it’s resolved one way or another.

I was sitting in my chair in Kerry’s condo, cleaned up and more or less presentable, trying not to dribble beer onto Shameless who was curled up purring on my chest, when she arrived a little past seven. She said something flip about the prodigal returning, came over to give me a kiss. Bending, she spotted the fat lip, stared at it for a three-beat, and straightened again without touching me.

“Aren’t you a little old to be getting into fights?” she said.

“Beginning to think I’m too old for a lot of things.”

“Not one that comes to mind, thank God. What happened?”

“Nothing much. One-punch affair.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with Eberhardt, did it?”

“No. I was someplace I probably shouldn’t’ve been and a guy didn’t like it. Not his fault. He was defending his woman.”

“From advances by you?”

“You know better than that.”

“Uh-huh. Want to talk about it?”

“Yes, but not now. Not just yet.”

“At your service, whenever. Does that lip need doctoring?”

“All taken care of. I could use another beer, though.”

She went to the kitchen, came back with a can of Bud Light for me and a glass of white wine for herself. She kicked off her shoes, shed her suit jacket, and curled up on the couch. The cat eyed her, decided equal time was called for, made a happy burbling sound in his throat, jumped off my lap and bounded up onto hers.

She said, “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you.”

“You talking to me or Shameless?”

“You. He hasn’t been absent for two-plus days.”

“You ought to be happy I wasn’t around. I haven’t been fit company for anybody, including myself.”

“Eberhardt,” she said, and this time it wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

I couldn’t bring myself to talk about Eberhardt’s shakedown of Danny Forbes, his corruption. Eventually I’d tell her, as I told her everything of any importance, but not just yet. I said, “I thought I had something with that ER doctor, Caslon, but it fizzled on me.”

“Still no idea of what made him do it?”

“Faint glimmer, that’s all.”

“Maybe what you need is some time off,” she said. “Eberhardt on top of what you went through in Creekside — circuit overload.”

“Probably,” I admitted. “Working too hard and not too well. I figured I’d try to drive Eberhardt out of my head by chasing another case, and all that got me was this fat lip and a dose of self-disgust. You want to hear me tell you again what a lousy profession I’m in?”

“No. How about this weekend?”

“How about what this weekend?”

“A short getaway, just the two of us. You don’t have anything important on, do you?”

“Uh-uh. Free until Monday.”

“Me, too. Sound good?”

“Very good. Where’ll we go?”

“Up or down the coast. You choose.”

“I’d rather you chose. Some romantic hideaway.”

“Well... remember that little inn north of Gualala? Rocky headland, sea lions on the rocks, the beach with all the driftwood...”

“And the big fireplace in the room. I remember.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“That was some night, wasn’t it?”

“Medicine for melancholy,” she said. “Shall I call the inn, see if they have a room available for tomorrow?”

“If they do, try to get the same one as last time.”

They did and she did. And I began to look forward to the trip. And to think that we really ought to do more of that kind of thing — not just overnight and two- or three-day getaways, but a week or ten days here, another week or ten days there. Actual vacations of the sort normal people take. We always had a good time, off somewhere alone together; and I was getting too old for the type of workaholic lifestyle I’d followed most of my life. Eberhardt’s demise may have been self-generated, but a death from any cause is still a death. When people your own age, people you’ve known for decades, begin to die off it’s time to step back a little, take a look at your own fragile existence. Time to start doing more to fill the years you have left than wallowing in pools of other people’s misery. In the short and long runs both, that was the most effective of all the medicines for melancholy.