“Nickels and dimes, you mean. Hell, I don't want Wanda to have to work after we're married. I want to buy her the kind of things she deserves.”
Like a tent for her chest and a sack for her face, I thought, and immediately felt guilty. He was in love with her, after all. Maybe she had her good points. Maybe underneath all that chest there beat a heart of pure gold.
Maybe the Pope is Jewish, I thought.
Eberhardt said, “So how'd it go with you? The guy up on Twelfth Avenue?”
“I took him on,” I said, and explained what kind of job it was and what I'd been doing all day.
“A nut case,” he said, grimacing. “You better make sure his check doesn't bounce before you do any more work.”
“It won't bounce.”
“It's the pulp angle, right? That's why you took it on.”
“In the beginning. Now it's more than that.”
“It always is with you.” Another headshake. “Nut cases and car repos-what a hell of a glamorous business we got going for us here.”
“You want glamour? Go to work for the Pinkertons.”
“Yeah, sure, and wind up a security guard in a bank.”
“Then don't bitch.”
He sighed, rummaged around among the clutter on his desk, found one of his pipes, took it apart, and ran a pipe cleaner through the stem. “Old Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski,” he said musingly. “What a miserable son of a bitch he was, in and out of court.”
“He probably still is.”
“You ever have dealings with him?”
“Some.”
“Me too. A goddamn bloodsucker. You know, I thought he was dead. Didn't he have a heart attack or something a couple of years ago?”
“I don't know, did he?”
“Seems I heard he did. Too bad he survived.”
“Bad karma, Eb.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Listen, how far back do the Department's files go? Would they still have the inspector's report on a routine suicide in 1949?”
“Probably. Never get rid of anything-that was the policy before I retired.” Eb had taken an early retirement from the cops less than a year ago-he was a year older than me, fifty-five-and he'd been my partner for about six months. He still had plenty of friends in the Department, plenty of old favors to call in; there wasn't much going on at the Hall of Justice that he didn't know about and nothing much in the way of official documentation that he couldn't lay hands on. “I suppose you want a look at the Crane report.”
“Right.”
“Why bother? It won't tell you any more than the newspaper stories.”
“It might. Could be something in it, some hint of Crane's motive, that the reporters didn't get.”
He shrugged. “Okay, I'll get it for you-if it hasn't been lost, stolen, or misfiled. Thirty-five years is a long time.”
“Don't I know it. How soon?”
“Tomorrow sometime.”
I nodded. My watch said it was almost four-thirty; I finished my coffee and lifted myself out of the chair. “I'd better get moving. You mind hanging around until five and locking up?”
“No problem. Where you off to?”
“A talk with Yank-'Em-Out, if he's home by now. And then dinner with Kerry.”
“Dinner, yeah,” he said. “Don't forget tomorrow night.”
“I won't forget,” I said. “Kerry won't let me.”
And that was the truth in more ways than one.
FOUR
This time when I rang the bell at the Yankowski house, there was somebody home besides the fire-breathing jabberwock. The thing started up in there again, whiffling and burbling, but the noise came distantly, from the back of the place, and never got any closer. Pretty soon the door opened on a chain and a white female face topped by frizzy gray hair appeared in the opening. It said suspiciously, “Yes? What is it?”
“I'd like to see Mr. Yankowski.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No, but I think he'll see me. Just tell him it concerns Harmon Crane and his son.”
“Your name?”
I held up one of my business cards. A chubby white arm slithered out through the door opening, snatched the card, and then disappeared with it. The face said, “Wait, please,” after which it, too, disappeared and the door snicked shut.
I stood there. A thin breeze off the ocean carried the smells of eucalyptus and jasmine; it was that kind of early evening. Inside the house, the jabberwock continued to make a lot of distant noise, including a couple of thumps and a faint hollow crash. Probably eating some furniture, I thought. Or maybe eating the housekeeper, if that was who owned the white face and the white arm and the frizzy gray hair; as far as I knew, Yankowski had never been married.
But no, the door opened again finally, still on its chain, and there she was. She said, “He'll see you. You can go on around back.”
“Around back?”
“He's in the garden.”
There were some stepping stones that led away from the tile porch, through jasmine shrubs and dwarf cypress pruned into eccentric shapes. All the windows of the house had iron bars bolted across them, I noticed: an added precaution to ease the usual city dweller's paranoia. In Yankowski's case, though, there was probably more to it than that. There must have been a couple of thousand people in the Bay Area with just cause to break into his house and murder him in his bed.
At the rear I found a high fence with a gate in it. From the top of the fence, another six feet or so of clear molded plastic curved up and then back to the house wall; the effect was of a kind of bubble that would enclose and also secure the garden within. I tried the gate latch, found it unlocked, and walked in.
The garden contained a twenty-foot square of well-barbered lawn, bordered on three sides by rose bushes and on the fourth by the rear staircase and a path leading from it to the gate. On the lawn were a Weber barbecue and some pieces of redwood outdoor furniture. And on one of the chairs was old Yank-'Em-Out himself, sitting comfortably with his legs crossed, a drink in one hand and a fat green cigar in the other.
“Flip the lock on the gate when you close it,” he said. “I unlocked it for you.”
Yeah, I thought, paranoia. I shut the gate, flipped the lock, and went to where he was sitting. The rear of the house faced west and the sun was starting to set now over the Pacific; the glare of it coming through that plastic bubble overhead gave the enclosure an odd reddish tinge, as if it were artificially lighted. The glow made Yankowski look gnomish and feral, like a retired troll who had moved out from under his bridge to a house in the city. Which was a fanciful thought, but one that pleased me just the same.
My business card lay all by itself on a redwood table next to him; he tapped it with a crooked forefinger, not quite hard enough to knock the long gray ash off his cigar. “I'm honored,” he said. “It isn't every day a famous private eye comes calling on me.”
There was no irony or sarcasm in his voice. I didn't let any come into mine, either, when I said, “It isn't every day that I get to pay a call on a distinguished member of the legal profession.”
“An honor for both of us, then. But we've met before, haven't we? I seem to recall that you worked for me
