Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

“Fine, thanks. And you? Kerry, is it?”

“Kerry Wade. I’m just dandy.”

They smiled at each other in that overly pleasant, calculating way women have in situations like this. It made me nervous. I wanted to say something else, but anything I was liable to toss out between them would only make matters worse. I kept my mouth shut.

Kerry said at length, “We were going to have breakfast. Won’t you join us, Ms. Emerson?”

“No, thanks. I’ve already had my breakfast. Some other time, perhaps.”

“I’m sure I’d enjoy it.”

“I’m sure I would, too.” Jeanne went to the coffee table and scooped up her portfolio case. “I’ll leave these glossies here for you to look at,” she said to me. “In a day or two I’ll call you and we’ll set a time to begin shooting.”

“Well, uh…”

“Good-bye, Ms. Wade,” she said to Kerry. “Nice meeting you.”

“The same here, Ms. Emerson.”

When she was gone, Kerry looked at me for a time without saying anything. I felt like a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Except that I hadn’t been. Thinking about something doesn’t mean you intend to do anything about it.

“She came by unexpectedly,” I said. “What could I do? Tell her not to come in?”

“Did I say anything?”

“No. I’m just trying to explain…”

“Why do you think you have to explain?”

“Kerry, I told you before about Jeanne Emerson. I told you about that magazine article she wants to do…”

“You didn’t tell me you were such good friends.”

“We’re not good friends.”

“It looked like you were getting to be when I came in.”

“Nuts,” I said. “Let’s not talk about Jeanne Emerson, okay? Let’s have breakfast.”

So we had breakfast and we didn’t talk about Jeanne Emerson. We didn’t talk about much of anything. Kerry was as overly pleasant to me as she’d been to Jeanne, which meant that there was a storm of unknown magnitude brewing inside her. I wished she would let it come out; I wished she would cloud up and rain all over me, as they used to say. But that didn’t happen. All I got was the saccharine and the moody silence.

Over coffee in the living room, I said, “Eberhardt called after you did; he wants me to stop over for a while this afternoon. Why don’t you come along? That’ll keep him from pestering me about the partnership thing.”

“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.

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?