“Oh goody, I like to be useful.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant-ah Christ. Look, we won’t stay long, and afterward we can go for a drive or something…”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve got some work to do this afternoon that I’ve been putting off.”
“But-”
“I’ll just change your bandage and be on my way.”
What could I say? There wasn’t anything you could say to her when she was in one of her moods; all I could do was weather it until it passed.
Twenty minutes later, I was alone with a new bandage on my skull and a new headache inside it. I looked at the four walls for a while. Then I sighed and put on a shirt, put on a coat, and went out and got into my car.
And the old sin-eater headed over to Eberhardt’s place to scarf up some more sin on his long and wearying journey into sainthood.
Chapter 16
Eberhardt lived in Noe Valley, in an old two-storied house that had belonged to a bootlegger during Prohibition. Or so Eberhardt had told me once; he’d had a lot of beer at the time and he might have been putting me on. He’d lived there for nearly three decades, since a few months after his marriage to Dana. And he had almost died there six weeks ago.
I found a place to park in front and went up onto the porch and rang the bell. It took him a while to answer the door, and when he did I was struck again by how much he’d changed since the bribe thing and the shooting. There was so much gray in his hair now that it looked as though it had been dusted with snow. His face, once a smooth, chiseled mixture of sharp angles and blunt planes, had a slackness to it-the beginnings of an old man’s jowliness-that made him look a dozen years older than he was. He had lost weight, too, at least fifteen pounds; he looked bony and gaunt, and the slacks and pullover he wore hung on him like old clothes on a scarecrow. When I’d asked him about the weight loss the last time I stopped by he’d tried to make a joke out of it by saying, “It’s nothing, I just been off my feed a little lately.” But that was pretty much the way it was. He just wasn’t eating the way he should, if he was eating much at all.
“Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I was on the phone.”
“Anybody important?”
“No,” he said. “It was Dana.”
I went inside and he shut the door. This was the living room, where the shooting had happened; Eb had got it right in front of the door, and I had been scorched when I came running in through the swing door from the kitchen. He’d put throw rugs over the carpet where the two of us had lain, because the rug-cleaning people hadn’t been able to get out all of the bloodstains. He was going to buy a new carpet one of these days, he’d told me, as soon as he could afford it.
The room, the memories of that Sunday afternoon and its aftermath, made me feel uneasy all over again. I had been here four times since the shooting-it had been the same each time. I wondered if Eberhardt was plagued by the same specters, and if he was, how he could go on living here with them. And with the ghosts of his dead marriage.
I said, “Dana called? How come?”
“Her sister’s husband had a heart attack, he’s in intensive care over in Marin General. She thought I’d want to know. Hell, what for? My ex-brother-in-law’s an asshole; we never got along. I never heard a word out of him or Dana’s sister the whole time I was in the frigging hospital.”
I had nothing to say.
“She didn’t sound too good,” Eberhardt said. “Dana, I mean. And not just because of the heart attack. I think she’s having trouble with her boyfriend.”
Dana was living with a Stanford University law professor in Palo Alto. The professor may have been the reason she’d left Eb, or he may have come into her life afterward; in any event, she’d told me in the hospital right after the gun job that she loved him.
I said, “Why do you think that? She didn’t say anything along those lines, did she?”
“No. But she wanted to talk; and she did some hinting around.” He made a bitter noise that was not quite a laugh. “Could be she’ll want to come crawling back one of these days.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. Dana was proud, stubborn, and independent; she was not the kind to come crawling back if her relationship ended. But I said, “Would you take her back?”
“Hell, no. I’d kick her out on her ass.”
“I thought you still cared for her…”
“Not any more. I hate her guts.”
He’d changed inside, too, that was the thing. He was harder now, colder, emptier. The toughness used to be tempered by compassion, but every time I talked to him these days I got the feeling he no longer cared about anybody, not even himself. Dana was part of it, but the biggest part was that bribe. He’d lost his self-respect, and he was floundering around in a sewer of guilt and shame and self-pity.
But maybe I could haul him out. Give him a sense of purpose again; give him back his self-respect. Give him the partnership…
You’re not Eberhardt’s keeper, Kerry had said to me. And You didn’t have anything to do with him being where he is now. And Isn’t what you want the important thing? She was right on all three counts. She also didn’t think it would work out; she was likely right about that too. What was the sense in giving Eberhardt the partnership if it didn’t do either of us any good?
Back and forth, back and forth. Make up your mind, damn it, I thought. Why can’t you make up your mind?
We went into the kitchen. Eberhardt said, “You thirsty? I got some beer in the box.”
“I guess I could use one.”
He opened the refrigerator and took out a couple of bottles of Henry Weinhard’s. “I’m not supposed to drink anything alcoholic yet,” he said. “Bad for my insides, the doc says, because they’re still on the mend. The hell with him, too.”
“It’s your funeral, Eb.”
“Damn right it is.” He gave me one of the bottles, twisted the cap off his. “Let’s go out in the yard. Not too much sun lately; might as well take advantage of it while we got it.”
It was a small yard, enclosed by a board fence, with a Japanese elm and a barbecue pit and some bushes and a couple of pieces of outdoor furniture. We’d been out here just before the shooting, drinking beer, talking, getting ready to cook a couple of steaks; it made me faintly uneasy to be back in the yard, too.
We sat on the outdoor furniture and drank our beers and talked about nothing much for a while. Then Eberhardt asked me about Charles Bradford and Lester Raymond, so I told him the way it had been-all the details, the stuff that hadn’t got into the papers.
When I was done he said, “You’re a hell of a detective; I always said that. But your problem is, you don’t know when to quit.”
“I’ve been a cop too long, I guess. I always want to know all the answers.”
“You need somebody to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Before you get killed or thrown in jail. Or they take your license away permanently.”
“Eb…”
“Yeah, I know. I’m pushing about you taking me into your agency. And you haven’t decided yet, right?”
“Not yet, no.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “Listen,” he said, “all I want is a chance. Just a chance. I’ll go nuts if I sit around here doing nothing much longer.”
“What about one of the bigger agencies? You could hook up with the Pinks, with your background. They’d have more for you to do, you’d make more money…”
“Yeah, pulling crappy guard duty somewhere. I don’t want that kind of job.”
