No one else who knew Crane had any better guesses to make. He had been closemouthed about whatever was troubling him, and evidently confided in no one at all. As far as anyone knew, his reasons for embracing death had died with him.
So how was I supposed to find out what they were, thirty-five years later? What did it matter, really, why he had knocked himself off? We all die sooner or later, some with cause, some without. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and who the hell cares in the long run?
Amanda Crane cared. Michael Kiskadon cared. And maybe I cared too, a little: there's always some damn fool like me to care about things that don't matter in the long run.
I left the library, picked up my car and the overtime parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper, said a few words out loud about the way the city of San Francisco treats its citizens, and drove back up Van Ness to O'Farrell Street. The office I share with Eberhardt is on O'Farrell, not far from Van Ness, and in the next block is a parking garage that by comparison with the garages farther downtown offers a dirt-cheap monthly rate. I put the car in my alloted space on the ground floor and walked back to my building.
The place doesn't look like much from the outside: bland and respectable in a shabby sort of way. It doesn't look like much on the inside either. The ground floor belongs to a real estate company, the second floor belongs to an outfit that makes custom shirts (“The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look”), and the third and top floor belongs to Eberhardt and me. That floor is a converted loft that once housed an art school, which is why it has a skylight in the ceiling. Very classy, an office with a skylight-except when it rains. Then the noise the rain makes beating down on the glass is so loud you have to yell when you're talking on the telephone.
Eberhardt was talking on the telephone when I came in-settled back in his chair with his feet up on his desk-but he wasn't yelling; he was crooning and cooing into the receiver like a constipated dove. Which meant that he was talking to Wanda. He always crooned and cooed when he talked to Wanda-a man fifty-five years old, divorced, a tough ex-cop. It was pretty disgusting to see and hear.
But he was in love, or thought he was. Wanda Jaworski, an employee of the downtown branch of Macy's-the footwear department. They had met in a supermarket a couple of months ago, when he dropped a package of chicken parts on her foot. This highly romantic beginning had evolved into a whirlwind courtship and a (probably drunken) proposal of marriage. They hadn't set a definite date yet; Wanda was still assembling her trousseau. Or “truss-o,” as she put it, which sounded like some kind of device for people with hernias. Wanda was not long on brains. Nor was Wanda long on sophistication; Wanda, in fact, was coarse, silly, and an incessant babbler. Nor was she long on looks, unless you happen to covet overweight forty-five-year-old women with double chins and big behinds and the kind of bright yellow hair that looks as if it belongs on a Raggedy Ann doll. What Wanda was long on was chest. She had the biggest chest I have ever seen, a chest that would have dwarfed Mamie Van Doren's, a chest that would have shamed Dolly Parton's, a chest among chests.
It was Kerry's considered opinion that Eberhardt was not in love with Wanda so much as he was in love with Wanda's chest. He was fascinated by it-or them. Whenever he and Wanda were together he seemed unable to take his eyes off it-or them. It was also Kerry's considered opinion that if he married her, he would be making a monumental mistake.
“What he's doing,” she'd said to me in her typically caustic way on the occasion of our first meeting Wanda, “is making a molehill out of a couple of mountains.”
I tended to agree, but there wasn't much I could do about it. You don't tell your business partner, your best friend for more than thirty years, that he is contemplating marriage to a pea-brained twit. You don't tell him that he can't see the forest for the chest. You don't tell him anything; you just keep your mouth shut and hope that he comes to his senses before it's too late.
He waggled a hand at me as I crossed to my desk. I didn't feel like doing any waggling in return, so I nodded at him and then made a slight detour when I saw that he had a pot of coffee on the hot plate. I poured myself a cup and sat down with it and tried calling Stephen Porter's number again. Still no answer. So then I just sat there, sipping coffee and waiting for Eberhardt to come back to the real world.
The office was big, about twenty feet square; otherwise it wasn't anything to get excited about. The walls and the carpet we'd put down ourselves were a funny beige color that clashed with some hideous mustard yellow fiberboard file cabinets Eberhardt had bought on a whim and refused to repaint. The furnishings consisted of our two desks, some chairs, my file cabinets and his, and an old-fashioned water cooler with a bottle of Alhambra on it that we used to make the coffee. And suspended from the middle of the ceiling was a light fixture that resembled nothing so much as a bunch of brass testicles soldered onto a grappling hook, which someday I was going to tear down and hurl out a window. Not the window behind Eberhardt's desk, which looked out on the blank brick wall of the building next door; the one behind my desk, which had a splendid view of the backside of the Federal Building down on Golden Gate Avenue, not to metion the green copper dome of City Hall further downhill at Civic Center.
Spade and Archer, I thought, circa 1929. Only there was no black bird and no Joel Cairo or Caspar Gutman or Brigid O'Shaughnessy in our lives. There was only Wanda the Footwear Queen, and some poor bastard of a writer who had gotten into the Christmas spirit one December night three and a half decades ago by putting a bullet through his brain.
Eberhardt muttered something into the telephone receiver, cupped his hand over it, and poked his jowly, graying head in my direction. “Hey, paisan,” he said, “you got anything on for tomorrow night?”
“I don't know, I don't think so. Why?”
“How about the four of us going out to dinner? Wanda knows this great little out-of-the-way place.”
I hesitated. The last thing I wanted to do tomorrow night was to have dinner with Wanda. The last thing Kerry would want to do ever was to have dinner with Wanda; Kerry disliked the Footwear Queen even more than I did, and was not always careful to hide her feelings. The four of us had had dinner together once, not long after Eberhardt had found true love via a package of Foster Farms drumsticks, and it had not been a memorable evening. “The only thing bigger than that woman's tits,” Kerry had said later, “is her mouth. I wonder if she talks the whole time they're in bed together too?” Which was something I still didn't want to think about.
I said lamely, “Uh, well, I don't know, Eb…”
“Kerry's free, isn't she?”
“Well, I'm not sure…”
“You said last Friday she'd be free all this week. How about it, paisan? We'll make a night of it.”
A night of it, I thought. I said No, no, no! inside my head, but my mouth said, “Sure, okay, if Kerry's not doing anything.” It was a mistake; I knew it was a mistake and that I would pay for it when I told Kerry, but I hadn't wanted to offend him. He got grumpy when he was offended and there was something I needed him to do for me.
He said, “All set, then,” and did a little more crooning and cooing to Wanda. I half expected him to play kissy-face with her when the coversation finally ended, a spectacle that would have made me throw up, but it didn't happen. I think he said, “Bye-bye, sugar,” which was bad enough. Then he took his feet down and gave me a sappy, lovestruck grin.
“That was Wanda,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What a peach,” he said.
What a pair, I thought. Wanda's chest and him. I asked him, “Anything happen today?”
“Nah, it's been quiet. Some woman called for you; wouldn't leave her name, wouldn't say what she wanted. Said it was a private matter and she'd call back.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Only other call was from that asshole runs the credit company out in Daly City.”
“Dennison? What did he want?”
“Another repo job. A new Jaguar, can you believe it?”
“I can believe it. You take the job?”
“Sure I took it.”
“That's good.”
“I never drove a Jag before,” he said. “That's the only reason.” He shook his head. “Repossesing cars. For Christ's sake, what kind of job is that for a detective?”
“The bread-and-butter kind.”
