A poor tired one, I thought. “I did what you asked me to, Mrs. Hornback.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, What took place on the lookout was beyond my control.”
“You just sat there and did nothing,” she said. “That’s what the police told me.”
“If I’d known something was going on-”
“I don’t want excuses. I want to know what happened to Lewis; I want the money he stole from me.”
“I can’t help you on either score,” I said. “If I could, I would.”
“That bitch of his is mixed up in this,” she said. “He was up on Twin Peaks to meet her; he must have been.”
“I can’t confirm that, Mrs. Hornback. He didn’t meet any woman while I was following him-”
“That what you say. You’re so observant, you let something happen to him right under your nose.” She took a deep breath and let me have her best shot. “This is all your fault, you bum.”
“Look, Mrs. Hornback-”
“If my husband isn’t found, and if I don’t recover my money, you’ll hear from my attorney. You can count on that.” There was a clattering sound, and the line began to buzz.
Nice lady. A real princess.
I lay back down. I was still half groggy, and pretty soon I went back to sleep. And then the damned phone went off again, sat me up the way it had before. I focused on the clock: 7:40. Conspiracy against my sleep, I thought, not altogether coherently, and fumbled up the handset.
“Wake you up, hotshot?” a familiar voice said with some relish. Eberhardt.
“What do you think?”
“Sorry about that. I’ve got news for you.”
“What news?”
“Abut that funny business up on Twin Peaks last night.”
“What about it?”
“Your boy Hornback’s been found.”
I stopped feeling sleepy; the fuzziness cleared out of my head. “Where?” I said. “Is he all right?”
“In Golden Gate Park,” Eberhardt said. “And no, he’s not all right. He’s dead, been dead since last night sometime. Stabbed in the chest with what was probably a butcher knife.”
SIX
I got down to the Hall of Justice at nine-fifteen- showered, shaved, and full of coffee. It was another nice day, clear skies, a little windy. The sunshine softened the austere gray lines of the Hall, made it look less grim than usual. But none of the people on the front steps or in the lobby seemed to be smiling. And neither was I as I rode the elevator up to General Works.
Eberhardt was in his office, gnawing on one of his briar pipes and looking his usual sour self. He was a big, somewhat awkward man, my age, with the general appearance of having been put together with a lot of spare parts, half of them angles and half of them blunt planes. His close-cropped hair was turning gray, and a lot more silver had come into it in the past month. His wife, Dana, had left him for another man, after twenty-eight years of marriage, not long before I’d met Kerry. He had taken it hard and he was still taking it hard; he was not the kind of man who got over things easily.
He avoided my eyes when I came in, as he’d done on each of the half-dozen occasions I had seen him the past few weeks. A week after Dana moved out of their Noe Valley house, he had shown up drunk and disheveled at my flat at 6:00 A.M., after having picked up a woman in a bar and taken her home for the night, and he’d confided that he hadn’t been able to perform sexually. It was no major crisis, from a psychological point of view, but for a man like Eberhardt, that kind of failure and that kind of admission had been profound. He wouldn’t have told me sober, and I knew he kept brooding about it, and so he had let a certain reserve build up between us. I could not seem to break through it, to get our friendship back to what it had always been.
Looking at him now, I saw that his eyes were bloodshot and his hands just a little unsteady. I wondered if he was still drinking. The last time I’d seen him, two weeks ago, he had told me he was off the booze and coping. But I had my doubts.
He waved me to a chair. “You want some coffee?”
“No. I had some before I left home.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ve been rereading Klein’s report. You do get mixed up in the damnedest cases.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“One of these days you’re going to get in over your head. And you’ll wake up some morning with your tail in a sling.”
“I play by the rules, Eb, you know that.”
“Just the same, you better watch yourself.”
“All right.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I let a small silence build. Then I said, “What have you got on Hornback?”
“Nothing much. Guy out jogging found the body at six-forty, in a clump of bushes along JFK Drive. Stabbed in the chest, like I told you on the phone; single wound that penetrated the heart, probable weapon a butcher knife. ME says death was instantaneous. That takes care of your suicide theory.”
“I guess it does.”
“No other marks on the body,” he said. “Except for a few small scratches on the hands and on one cheek.”
“What kind of scratches?”
“Just scratches. The kind you get crawling around in the woods or underbrush-or the kind a body gets if it’s been dragged through the same type of terrain. The ME will know more on that when he finishes his postmortem.”
“What was the condition of Hornback’s clothes?”
“Dirty, torn in a couple of places. Same thing applies.”
“Anything among his effects?”
“No. The usual stuff-wallet, handkerchief, change, a pack of cigarettes, and a box of matches. Eighty-three dollars in the wallet and a bunch of credit cards. That seems to rule out a robbery motive.”
I said, “I don’t suppose there was any evidence where he was found.”
“None. Killed somewhere else and then dumped in the park.”
“Like up on that Twin Peaks lookout,’ I said.
“So it would seem. Hornback’s blood type was AO; it matches the blood on the front seat of his car.”
I watched him break his briar in half and run a pipe cleaner through the stem. The room was too hot; a portable heater rumbled and glowed in one corner. He seemed to crave heat lately, as if he could not get warm-some sort of psychological reaction to his domestic troubles. I could feel sweat forming on my neck and under my arms.
“Hornback’s wife thinks you’re a bum,” he said.
“Yeah, I know. She called me this morning.”
“Klein got back a little while ago from breaking the news to her. He says she blames you for her husband’s death. He also says she made some thinly veiled accusations.”
“What kind of accusations?”
“That maybe you killed Hornback.”
“What!” “On account of you wanted the money he allegedly stole for yourself. She thinks maybe you’ve got it right now.”
“She’s crazy,” I said. “Christ!”
“Maybe so. But that kind of woman can stir up a lot of trouble. That’s what I meant about your waking up some morning with your tail in a sling.”
“She can’t do anything to me.”
“No? Your story is pretty screwy, you know.”
“I can’t help that. It’s the truth.”
“Sure. But it’s still screwy, and there’s still no explanation for what happened to Hornback. If I didn’t know you, hotshot, I’d be taking a pretty close look at you myself right now.”
“Come on, Eb. Quit putting the needle in me.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Ah, go on, get out of here. I got work to do. But listen-keep yourself available. Just in case there are any new developments.”
“I’m always available,” I said.
“Sure you are. Always.”
I stood up, went to the door. When I got there I stopped and turned around. Eberhardt was tamping tobacco into his briar from an oilskin pouch, scowling as he did it.