“Home in bed, taking care of myself. It’s where I’ll be all weekend. Come over tomorrow or Sunday and see for yourself. I’d ask you to come tonight, but I’m still catching up on my sleep.”
“I don’t know if I want to see you.”
“I’m not a stranger anymore, Kerry. Maybe not the person I used to be, but not a stranger. Come on over tomorrow and we’ll talk; you’ll see.”
“I might be busy,” she said. “I just don’t know yet.”
She came at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. I thought she would, but I was relieved when the doorbell rang and I heard her voice over the intercom from downstairs. More sleep and the antibiotics had got rid of my cold; my shoulder was better too. Only the stiffness in my arm seemed as bad as it had been before.
There was still some distance between us, but it was tolerable. We talked, and she fixed me some lunch and changed the sheets on the bed, and when she left at four she kissed me. I said, “I’ll call you pretty soon,” and she said, “Or I’ll call you.” All in all, it was a promising time.
She had brought me the morning paper, and after she was gone I took it back to bed and read through it. On an inside page there was a short article that said Carl Emerson, a prominent local businessman, had been found dead at his Mendocino ranch by sheriff’s deputies investigating a call from business associates who had been unable to reach him. The cause of death, according to the Mendocino County coroner, was an accidental fall.
On Sunday, Jeanne Emerson called. She’d also seen the article in the paper, and the first thing she said to me was, “Did Carl really die in an accident?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“It wouldn’t matter if it was something else. I was just wondering. Was he involved in the shooting, as you thought?”
“I guess he was. But it’s finished now, as far as I’m concerned; how about if we just leave it that way?”
“Whatever you say,” she said. “I’m not sorry he’s dead, though.”
“Neither am I.”
“About that photojournalism piece on you I suggested — I’d still like to do it, if you’re willing.”
“One of these days, maybe. Not right now.”
“I’ll call you in a few weeks, then. All right?”
“All right,” I said.
On Monday, I went in to see Doctor Abrams. The wound in my shoulder was healing satisfactorily now, he said, and I seemed to be in reasonably good health. The continuing stiffness in my arm and hand was another matter. He said that therapy might correct the problem and that I ought to consult a specialist. If therapy didn’t do it, I might have to have an operation.
I did not have to ask him what would happen if an operation didn’t do it either.
And on Wednesday, after seventeen days in a coma, Eberhardt finally regained consciousness.
I knew he would sooner or later — there had never been any question in my mind — but it was a relief when Ben Klein called late that afternoon to tell me the news. I said, “How is he? Coherent?”
“Yeah, thank God.”
“No memory damage?”
“None. He remembers everything that happened.”
“Then you’ve talked to him?”
“Just for a couple of minutes, about an hour ago.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. Asked if we found who did the shooting, if we had any idea why. I hated to have to tell him no.”
“Is that all he said?”
“Well, he asked about you. Wants to see you whenever the doctors’ll allow it. Tomorrow sometime, probably.”
I rang up S.F. General early Thursday morning and got through to Abrams. He said I could come in at eleven. I was there at ten-thirty, pacing up and down in the visitor’s waiting area, trying not to think about what was coming. I just wanted to get it over with.
They let me go in right at eleven. It was a private room, and Eberhardt was lying cranked up in the bed with his head swathed in bandages. A tube led down out of a suspended bottle into another bandage on his arm; they were still feeding him intravenously. He looked shrunken and gray and old... old.
I pulled one of the metal chairs over next to the bed and sat down. He said in somebody else’s voice, wan and thin, “Don’t ask me how I feel. I feel lousy.”
“You’ll get better.”
“Yeah. So they tell me. How’s your arm?”
“Not too bad. Still need the sling, though.”
“You going to have full use of it?”
“Sure. Never mind about my arm. You just came out of two and a half weeks in a coma.”
“Been better if I’d never come out of it at all,” he said. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have got shot.”
“I know,” I said.
“You know? What do you know?”
“All of it, Eb. Who shot us, who hired it done. And why.”
The room seemed to get very still. Pain flickered across his face, and guilt, and remorse. He could not look at me anymore; he averted his eyes. It was several seconds before he spoke again.
“How did you find out?”
“Kam Fong called me after I got home from the hospital,” I said. “He gave me a name — Mau Yee, a Chinese body-washer — and said the shooting had to do with some kind of bribe. I went to your place and opened your safe and found the stock-transfer form. The rest of it was detective work.”
“You always were a hell of a detective,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell the Department?”
“Because I didn’t believe it at first. Because I’d been shot too and I was angry and I wanted to know the truth.”
“And now you do.”
“Now I do.”
“This Mau Yee... is he still on the loose?”
“No. He’s dead. Carl Emerson killed him.”
A tic started up on the left side of his face; it took him a few seconds to get it under control. “Why did Emerson kill him?”
I told him why. I told him all of it, straight through to my abduction of Lee Chuck from his gambling parlor; how I’d found out about Emerson, how I’d pieced the whole thing together.
He said, “You crazy bastard. You could have got yourself killed, messing with a Chinatown tong.”
“But that didn’t happen. I’m still here.”
“And Emerson? What did you do about him?”
“I didn’t do anything about him. He’s dead, too.”
“Christ. How?”
I explained that, omitting Tedescu’s name; I just said it was somebody who knew Emerson who’d been the catalyst in his accidental death.
“So nobody’s left,” Eberhardt said, “nobody knows the full story except you and me. And you still didn’t go to the Department.”
“I was waiting to talk to you,” I said.
“Suppose I hadn’t come out of it. Then what?”
“I never doubted that you’d come out of it.”
“But if I hadn’t?”
“I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have done anything.”
“Why not? Why shield a cop you figure’s gone dirty?”
“Did you go dirty, Eb?”
Silence for a time. Then he said, “You think I been taking all along? One of the graft boys?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’re right. I never took anything in thirty years — not a nickel, not even a cup of coffee. Tempted a couple of times; who doesn’t get tempted? But I never gave in. I didn’t think it was in me to give in...”
He fell silent again. I waited. He was getting around to it; it was something he had to tell in his own way, maybe the hardest thing he’d ever had to tell anybody.
“But things happen,” he said. “Some things you prepare for, like you get old and you get tired. Some things you don’t prepare for, because you never figure they can happen. Like your wife walking out on you, taking up with some other guy. Taking the guts right out of your life. You understand what that can do to a man?”