“They were young when they thought it up.”
“Pulp writers,” he said. “And private eyes. Bah.”
“Eb, will you tell me how the alibis break down?”
“No. Listen, I’ve had enough of your questions.”
“If none of them is airtight, somebody could have slipped away for a few minutes. Or somebody could be lying to protect somebody else-”
“Don’t you hear good?”
“Look, Eb, I’m only-”
“I said that’s enough!” He slapped the pipe down on his desk; ashes and half-burned tobacco sprayed out over the litter of papers. “Your time’s up. Get the hell out of here. And don’t come sucking around again for free information. I’m sick of looking at your goddamn wop face.”
There were still some things I wanted to know about besides the alibi breakdown: the typewriter that had been found in Colodny’s hotel room; the bottle of rye whiskey in Dancer’s room. But he was pretty upset, face all blood-dark, and provoking him would only get me upset too. His cutting remarks had already begun to fray the edges of my temper-the one about my “goddamn wop face” in particular. We had traded ethnic insults for thirty years, but this was the first time either of us had ever put malice into one.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going. Maybe you’ll decide to be a human being again one of these days. Not to mention a friend. Let me know if that happens.”
I shoved up out of the chair, pivoted around it, and went over to the door. I had my hand on the knob when he said, “Wait a minute,” in a much quieter voice.
I came around. “What?”
The anger had drained out of his face; he was sitting slump-shouldered now, and all of a sudden he seemed old and tired and wasted-looking. He had let down his defenses finally-and what I was looking at was naked anguish.
“Dana left me,” he said.
It was a flat statement, without inflection, but there was so much emotion wrapped up in it that I could feel the skin ripple along my back. “Ah Jesus, Eb …”
“Last Sunday. Week ago today. I went out to Candlestick to watch the Giants play, I came home, she had all her bags packed.”
“Why!” “Twenty-eight years we’ve been married. Not all of them good, but most of them. I thought it was a good marriage. I thought I was a decent husband.” He let out a heavy breath, picked up the apple briar and stared at it blindly. “I think she’s been having an affair,” he said.
I tried not to wince. “Is that what she told you?”
“Not in so many words. But there’ve been signs, little things, little signals for three or four months. And she wouldn’t tell me where she was going. All she’d say was that the marriage wasn’t working, she was going to file for divorce-‘I’m sorry, Eb,’ she said, and out the door. Twenty-eight years, and ‘I’m sorry, Eb,’ and out the door.”
“Do you… have any idea who it is?”
“No. Does it matter? I figured, okay, she’s hav ing a fling. I didn’t like it but I could accept it. I had a couple of things in my time, I never told you about them but I did. So did Dana, once, a long time ago. She told me about that one, everything, and I forgave her, and I told her about it both times I strayed, too. It was a good marriage, goddamn it. It was.”
“Maybe she’ll change her mind, come back …”
“Not this time. She’s gone. It’s over, finished, she’s gone. But I still love her, you know? I still love the bitch.”
I did not say anything. What can you say?
He looked up at me-big, stolid, tough Eberhardt, the original Rock of Gibraltar. And in his eyes there was some of the same mute appeal that I had seen in Dancer’s eyes only a little while ago.
“What am I going to do?” he said. “What the hell am I going to do?”
THIRTEEN
It was one o’clock when I got out of that hot smoky office and out of the Hall of Justice into the cold afternoon wind. I picked up my car and took it over to Sixth and turned uptown toward the Hotel Continental. The heat and the pipe smoke had combined to give me a headache, and what Eberhardt had told me only made me feel worse. A kind of grayness moved through me, thick and heavy like the fog roiling overhead. It had been some while since I had felt this low down.
Eb and Dana. Christ, I had been best man at their wedding. I had spent hundreds of hours with them over the years. I had suffered through Dana’s good-natured attempts to fix me up with various women and get me married off. I had watched them banter with each other and share the cooking duties at Sunday afternoon barbecues and walk hand in hand at Ocean Beach, Kezar Stadium, Golden Gate Park. Twenty-eight years. Half a lifetime, almost. They had been my friends all that time, and I had thought I knew them; I had thought that if ever there was a perfect marriage, two people made for each other, this was it. Yet all the while they’d been having problems, they’d strayed from each other in more ways than one.
Standing up there in Eberhardt’s office, listening to him talk about it, I had felt shocked and sad and painfully awkward. And aware of a bitter irony: I had heard it all before, from dozens of clients and prospective clients, men and women both. The same old story-the age-old story. They approach a private detective the way they approach a priest; they make you into a kind of father-confessor, and they tell you everything. And then they ask you to help them do this or do that to repair their shattered lives. Or they say, as Eberhardt had said, “What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?”
I never knew what to say to all those others, and I had not known what to say to Eberhardt. I had no answers for him; I couldn’t do anything for him except to be around if he needed somebody to talk to or somebody to get drunk with. You had to get through it by yourself. It was a little like dying: ultimately you had to face it alone.
But the trouble with me was, I empathized too much with Eberhardt and all the rest of them: I knew too much about that quality of aloneness. They hurt, so I hurt. The feeling private eye, the tough guy riddled with Weltschmerz-the fictional stereotype. And the hell with those who thought in terms of stereotype rather than in terms of humanity. I cared, that was all. I was me, not any other detective, pulp or otherwise. I was me, and Eb and Dana had split up, and I hurt for both of them.
I had worked myself into a funk by the time I parked my car and walked down to the Continental. One of those moods where cynicism keeps vying with melancholy and you feel like going off somewhere by yourself to brood. But I had made a commitment to Dancer. I would have to deal with people today whether I felt like it or not.
There was no one in the lobby I knew. I went over and took a look along the corridor where the convention tables had been set up; they were gone. So much for the first annual Western Pulp Con. I tried the Garden Bistro, didn’t find any familiar faces among the late-lunch trade, and tried the Continental Bar next. That was where I found Jim Bohannon and Ivan and Cybil Wade.
They were sitting at a table near the Queen Anne fireplace, working on what appeared to be Ramos fizzes. Bohannon gave me a solemn smile as I came up, and Cybil let me have one that was not solemn at all. What I got from Ivan Wade was a blank stare. It was dark in there and I couldn’t see his eyes clearly, but I thought that they showed hostility. Because of my relationship with Kerry? I wondered. Or for some other reason?
Bohannon said, “Didn’t expect to see you today.
Rest of the convention’s been cancelled, you know.”
“So I gathered.”
“Haven’t you had enough of pulp writers?” Wade said. His tone was the same one he had used on Dancer at the party Thursday night: quiet, even, but with an overcoating of venom. “Not to mention their offspring.”
Cybil said, “Ivan, please.”
The mood I was in made me bristle a little. But I was not going to get anywhere, or do myself any good, by indulging Wade and making a scene. I said to Cybil, “All right if I join you for a bit?”