“Not completely. But she will be. All I got to do is keep thinking about what she called me.”
“What did she call you?”
“Never mind.” He lit his pipe and puffed up enough smoke to make the office look and smell like a grass fire.
“Come on, Eb, what did she call you?”
“I said never mind. I don't want to talk about her anymore, all right?”
I let it drop. But a while later, as I was getting ready to leave for San Rafael, Eberhardt said out of the gray of his pipe smoke, “Tits aren't everything, for Christ's sake.”
“What?”
“Tits. They're not everything.”
“Uh, no, they're not.”
“Man is attracted by more than that in a woman. Man looks for somebody he can be comfortable with, somebody he can talk to. You know what I mean?”
“Sure I do.”
“She said I was a piss-poor excuse for a man because all I cared about were her tits. Said I was a baby-a tit wallower. How the hell do you like that?”
“The nerve of the woman,” I said, straightfaced.
I managed to make it out of the door and over to the stairs before I burst out laughing.
Kerry laughed, too, when I told her about it that night. In fact, she thought “tit wallower” was the funniest expression she'd heard in months. She kept repeating it and then sailing off into whoops and snorts.
When she calmed down I said, “So now you're vindicated, lady.”
“Vindicated?”
“The Great Spaghetti Assault. It was a damned stupid thing to do, but it got all the right results.”
“Mmm,” she said. Her eyes were bright with reminiscence; she really did hate Wanda a lot. “And I'd do it again, too, if I got drunk enough.”
“I'll bet you would.”
“For Eberhardt's sake.”
“Right.”
“God, what a relief she's out of his life. The idea of having to attend their wedding gave me nightmares. She probably would have worn white, too.”
“Probably.”
“And Eberhardt would have been in a tuxedo. He'd have looked like a big bird, I'll bet. A black-winged, white-breasted tit wallower,” she said and off she went into more whoops and snorts.
I sighed and picked up her empty wineglass and went into the kitchen to refill it. We were in her apartment tonight, because the weather was still good and the view from her living room window is slightly spectacular on clear nights. When I came back she had herself under control again. “I'll be good,” she said when I handed her the wine.
“Uh-huh.”
“No, I will. I'll be serious. You're in a serious mood tonight, aren't you?”
“More or less.”
“Michael Kiskadon?”
“Yeah. He's been on my mind all day.”
“Have you heard anything more about his wife?”
“Some. I talked to Jack Logan at the Hall; she's still in custody, still holding up all right.”
“Is the D.A. going to prosecute her?”
“Probably not. She didn't murder her husband; all she did was try to cover up her part in the accident. Any competent lawyer could get her off without half trying.”
“Lawyers,” Kerry said, and made a face.
“Yeah.”
“Yankowski-what about him? He's not going to get off, is he?”
“That's the way it looks,” I said. “DeKalb went to see him today, after we talked, and he didn't get any further than I did. The law can't touch him for what he did in 1949. And there's just no proof that he killed Bertolucci. Unless DeKalb can find out who did the repair work and paint job on his Cadillac, there's nothing at all to tie him and Bertolucci together.”
Kerry seemed to have grown as sobersided as I felt. She scowled into her wineglass. “It's not right,” she said. “He's a cold-blooded murderer. He can't get away with it.”
“Can't he? A lot of things aren't right in the world these days, babe. Who says there has to be justice?”
“I'd like to believe there is.”
“So would I,” I said. “But I'm afraid there isn't.”
EPILOGUE
Well, maybe there is. Sometimes.
Eight days later, at 6:20 in the evening, Thomas J. Yankowski suffered a fatal heart attack while watching the news on TV. He didn't die immediately; he died forty minutes later, in an ambulance on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital. He had a history of heart trouble-he'd had a mild attack a few years ago, as Eberhardt had mentioned to me-but I like to think the seizure was the direct result of the stress and strain of having committed one crime too many. I also like to think he was coherent during the last forty minutes of his life, that he believed the attack was punishment for his sins and perhaps he faced an even greater punishment to come.
Not that any of that matters, of course. What matters is the simple fact that he was dead, just as Kate Bertolucci and Harmon Crane and Angelo Bertolucci and Michael Kiskadon were dead; and now the pathetic little drama they had enacted was over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A few insignificant bones scattered and lost in the graveyard of time.
It makes you wonder. Sometimes there is justice, yes. But does that matter, either, in the larger scheme of things-whatever that scheme may be?
Maybe it does.
Like love, like compassion and caring and friendship-maybe it does.
