Illusions

2

The rest of the weekend was lost time, empty time. And that’s another thing I have against funerals — they leave you at loose ends, depressed to one degree or another. Everything seems gray for a while afterward; nothing looks or tastes or feels quite right, as if the loss of a friend or loved one has been made even more acute by your attendance at the ceremonial coverup of the remains. Even the time-honored wake — I’ve been to a couple of those, too — has the same hollow, dreary effect, at least on me. The gaiety always seems forced, the party atmosphere faintly repellent and disturbing, as though you were taking part in an ancient pagan rite designed to ward off evil spirits.

Kerry and I spent Saturday afternoon and evening at her condo in Diamond Heights. Neither of us felt like going out; but staying in was a monotonous string of gin rummy games, bad TV programs, reading matter that wasn’t particularly involving, tasteless food, and careful avoidance of mentioning Eberhardt’s name in any context. Shameless, the black-and-tan kitten we’d adopted, sensed our moods and pretty much left us alone, proving that cats can sometimes be wiser than humans. We went to bed early and made love, and in keeping with the rest of the day, it wasn’t very satisfying for either of us. I didn’t sleep well again. Kerry was almost as restless in the early-morning hours.

She had a Sunday brunch with one of Bates and Carpenter’s out-of-town clients — “one of the many perks,” as she put it wryly, “of being Creative Director of a large, aggressive ad agency.” So I left her a little before nine and drove to my Pacific Heights flat. A married couple maintaining separate residences has its drawbacks, but for individuals like Kerry and me, who value and require a certain amount of privacy, it’s an arrangement that has more plusses than minuses. Most of the time I like her condo, but when she’s not there I always feel more like a visitor than a resident. On days such as this one I prefer the old-fashioned, semi-sloppy ambiance of the Laguna Street digs I’ve leased for nearly three decades.

I hadn’t spent much time there lately and the rooms had a musty, closed-in smell. The day was a carbon copy of Saturday, cool and cloudy, so I opened windows in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room bay to air the place out. Then I wandered around trying to find something to occupy both my hands and my mind. Carbon copy of yesterday in that respect, too: nothing appealed, nothing held my interest for more than a few minutes. By noon I was wrapped up hard and tight like an oversize handball, metaphorically bouncing off the walls. I bounced myself out of there finally, into the car and down to Union Street. Sunday crowds made parking all but impossible; both garages where I can usually find space were full. To the Marina then, where I lucked into a curbside spot just off Chestnut. I walked over to Fanucci’s and treated myself to a calzone. Fanucci’s makes the best Italian sausage calzones in the city, but this one did nothing for my mood; for all the enjoyment I got out of it, it might have been a plain burger from the Mickey D’s on Lombard.

After lunch I walked to the Palace of Fine Arts. Clots of noisy tourists drove me away again, back to the car. So then I went driving. Not headed anywhere in particular, just killing time and trying to work through the restless, out-of-sorts mood. That was what I thought at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I was down on the Embarcadero, aimed toward the China Basin Bridge and Third Street, that I admitted to myself I’d had a destination all along, drawing me as surely and inexorably as a magnetic field draws particles of iron.

The alley was off Third, between what used to be Army Street — Cesar Chavez Street now — and the Islais Creek Channel. Bolt Street, it was called. Block-and-a-half long, wide enough for two semis to scrape past each other, walled on one side by a truck storage yard behind a cyclone fence topped with coils of barbed wire, on the other by a string of small industrial warehouses. The building stretched across the upper end, creating a cul-de-sac, was bisected into two halves lengthwise; the half that fronted on Bolt Street belonged to the liquor distributors, O’Hanlon Brothers. A long loading dock with three recessed truck bays ran along the facing wall; the dock and all of the bays were empty on this Sunday afternoon. The entire alley was deserted except for a couple of overflowing Dumpsters next to the storage yard. A gusty wind off the Bay nearby played with scraps of litter, swirling them along the uneven pavement, building little heaps in doorways and crannies. In broad daylight Bolt Street had a desolate feel. At 3 A.M. on a cold, dark, foggy morning, it must have seemed like the back end of nowhere.

Halfway into the abbreviated second block, on the right side, I saw the sign for a solenoid valve company. Its entrance was set back about fifteen feet from the street, the open space in front formed by the ends of two shallow concrete docks; the space was long enough and wide enough for two cars parked parallel, three if they were slanted in diagonally. The docks were high enough so that at night the space would be in heavy shadow — a perfect location for a one-man surveillance stakeout.

This was where Eberhardt had been parked last Wednesday morning. This was where he’d blown the hole in his chest and his life out through the exit wound between his shoulder blades.

I pulled in there, sat for a minute, then got out into the chill wind and stood listening to it whistle and moan through the narrow canyon, looking down at the pavement, around at the empty docks and weathered wooden walls and closed doors and dirt-blinded windows. Waiting to feel something — I wasn’t sure exactly what. Not an emotion like sadness or sorrow; it was too late for any of that. Morbid curiosity wasn’t what had brought me here either. Waiting for some sort of psychic connection, I suppose, as if by standing on the spot where he’d died I could summon up an insight into his reasons why.

Foolish notion.

I felt nothing at all except cold.

Pretty soon I closed myself inside the car again and switched the heater on and then drove ahead to the O’Hanlon Brothers dock and turned around in one of the truck bays. On my way out of Bolt Street I thought that it was easy enough to understand why Eberhardt had picked this place to die in. It wouldn’t take much for a despondent, drink-sodden man sitting here night after night, listening to the wind and staring into the foggy dark, to convince himself that this dead-end alley should be his own dead end. A combination of things had brought him to that point — failure, frustration, lost hope, bitterness, the physical erosions of advancing age. But there also had to be a trigger, some occurrence or revelation or final indignity, to make him go through with it. No matter how mired in despair a man might be, he doesn’t just all of a sudden trade living for dying. Something prods him across the line between thinking about it and actually doing it. Every suicide, every homicide has its trigger.

What was Eberhardt’s? Kerry had been so right — it was what kept bothering me, why I was having trouble sleeping. What had caused the poor sorry son-of-a-bitch to cross the line?

Monday.

I was half an hour late getting to the office, something I seldom allow to happen. For the first time in over a week I’d slept most of a night straight through. A nearly sixty-year-old body like mine can take only so much stress and sleep deprivation, and then it was either release and regenerate or something would give and I’d find myself in the hospital or an ornate box like the one Eberhardt had been planted in. The choice wasn’t a conscious one; my body had made it for me. Good old reliable body. So far, anyway.

The night’s rest had put me in a better frame of mind. Hardly cheerful, but at least the funeral hangover was gone and I could start a new work week without dragging my butt. One day at a time.

Tamara was busy at her computer when I walked in. Wearing an all-green outfit today, and a bright green, new-looking jade heart on a gold chain around her neck. In profile and in concentration her dark, round face had a burnished look, as if it were being lighted from within.

Watching her tap away on the Apple keyboard, I marveled again at the change in her in the short time she’d worked as my part-time assistant. When we’d first met she had been hostile, brimming with the protective cynicism too many African Americans develop by the time they reach college age, the result of constant reminders that the biggest damn lie in America is that ours is no longer a racist society; and her attitude toward the “private eye business” had been one of scornful amusement. Computer hacking was all she cared about; the job with me was nothing more than a way to earn expense money while she pursued a computer science degree at San Francisco State — drudge work, like clerking in a store. But the much-maligned private eye business can be seductive. It isn’t glamorous or exciting, at least not ninety-five percent of the time, but it is challenging; and doing it properly requires intelligence, ingenuity, initiative, and skill at problem-solving. Once Ms. Corbin discovered these truths, her attitude began to change, and before long she’d become a passionate convert. In the past six months she’d dragged me forcibly into the computer age by refining all phases of my “retro operation,” to the point where she was doing a third of the work on her PowerBook in only twenty hours a week and thus rapidly becoming indispensible. If she quit on me today I’d be in a hell of a bind. As an unrepentent technophobe, who wouldn’t know a megabyte from a dog bite, I could not even get into my own files without the aid of someone who was above average in computer literacy. Not much chance of Tamara quitting, though, not for a while yet. She was so thoroughly seduced that she’d admitted to the serious consideration of a new career goal: high-tech investigative work.

She finished typing, read over what was on the screen, smiled at the thing as if it had been a good boy, and turned to give me a once-over. “Yo,” she said. Then, “You look tired and kind of beat up.”

“Thanks so much. Aren’t you going to tell me I’m late, too?”

“You’re late. Twenty-nine minutes.”

“Should we dock my pay?”

I said that jokingly, but she didn’t smile. She said, “Pretty rough, huh? The weekend?”

“Not one of the best.”

“That man Eberhardt’s funeral?”

“Yeah. I hate funerals.”

“Me, too. I had to go to my grandmother’s a couple of years ago. Tore me down for days afterward. You know that book by Jessica Mitford? The American Way of Death?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“She was right on, man. Dying sucks.”

“Amen to that.” Tamara had made the coffee; I went over to the hot plate to pour myself a cup. “You had a good weekend, at least. Romantic one with Horace.”

“...How’d you know that?”

“Deduced it.”

“My boss man, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

“You’re glowing, for one thing. You always have that look after a romantic weekend with Horace. A sort of self-satisfied glow.”

“Hell I do,” she said, and then laughed. “Okay, maybe so. What else?”

“That jade heart you’re wearing. It’s new. Horace gave it to you, right?”

“Could be a present from my family. Or could be I bought it for myself.”

“It isn’t the kind of jewelry you usually wear. And if somebody in your family’d given it to you, chances are you wouldn’t be wearing an all-green outfit — also not your usual color — to show it off. Nothing’s quite so special as a present from a lover.”

“Lawsy, Mistuh Holmes, you sho’ is a caution. Yes you is!”

“Whenever you do Butterfly McQueen, it means I’m right.”

“Mr. Smug. Okay, you’re right.”

“Special occasion? The jade heart.”

“Uh-uh. Man just loves me, that’s all.”

“You going to marry him one of these days?”

“Sure thing. Day he joins the New York Philharmonic and plays his first gig in Carnegie Hall.” Horace was studying to be a concert cellist, so she was only half kidding. “You want to know what I gave him this weekend?”

“No.” I took the coffee to my desk. The mail had already arrived, a meager little pile for a Monday. I shuffled through it.

“No checks,” Tamara said. “I looked.”

“No calls either, I suppose.”

“None on the machine. One about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Client?”

“Man wants to be. Your kind of job, but you won’t like it.”

“Why won’t I like it?”

“He’s looking for his ex-wife. She disappeared three years back in Santa Fe, not too long after they split up. That’s where the man lives, in Santa Fe.”

“So why does he want a detective in San Francisco?”

“He thinks maybe she’s living in this area now. Patterson agency in Santa Fe gave him a list of six investigators here. We were number two.”

“Which probably means number one turned him down.”

“Uh-huh. But we’re hungrier and we try harder.”

“Why does the man want to find his ex-wife after three years.”

“That’s the part you won’t like. Also the part that’ll make you take the job.”

“It’s too early for riddles—”

“Paradoxes.”

“Whatever. Talk to me in plain English.”

“Better hear the details from the man himself. His name’s Erskine, he’s coming in at ten-thirty. I figured that’d be okay since there’s nothing else on the calendar.”

“And when he tells me his troubles, I won’t like them but I’ll take the job anyway.”

“Right.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Not the kind of case you can turn down. Bet you five bucks.”

“No bet. Why is it women all think they know me so well?”

“Could be you’re easier to read than most guys.”

“Like a trashy paperback?”

Tamara laughed. “Easy to read doesn’t mean there’s no substance. Walter Mosley’s easy to read. So’s Mr. Hemingway.”

And James Joyce is hard to read. And so’s Mr. Eberhardt. “Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun,” I said, and then wondered what had prompted me to say it. Because Eberhardt blew his heart apart with a .357 Magnum? No connection, no point.

“What’s your point?” Tamara the Mindreader asked.

I sighed. “None. No point at all.”

She said, “Too early for paradoxes, huh?” and gave her attention to her trusty PowerBook.