Bill Pronzini: Bones

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.”

“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.”