“I can’t understand how she could have been fathered by a man like you.” The clouds kept on piling up in his face. “My only consolation,” he said, “is that you’ll soon be out of both our lives. Very soon.” “Not if I have anything to say about it.” “But you don’t. I told you that.” “I’ll believe it when I hear it from Kerry.” “Then you’ll believe it tonight.” “Is that what she told you? That she was going to send me packing tonight?”
“She didn’t have to tell me. I know my daughter.”
“You don’t know your ass from your elbow.” “Crude,” he said. “God, you’re crude.” “That’s right. I’m crude and I’m coarse and boorish, and I’m a fat scruffy fifty-three-year-old private detective. And you’re a shit, Wade. You’re the biggest shit I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“Damn you,’” he said. He had begun to shake. Which made two of us; I had been shaking for the past couple of minutes. “I believe those charges against you are true. I believe you’re capable of anything.”
“You want to see what I’m capable of? Hang around here another minute.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think I am.”
“How dare you-”
“Get out of here, Wade.”
“I’m not afraid of you, you know.”
I took a step toward him. “Get out of here,” I said. “Or I’ll throw you out. I’m not kidding.”
He didn’t move for five or six seconds; his eyes cut away at me like knives. But he was only saving face. He could tell by the way I looked that I was dead serious about heaving him out on his ass, and he was not about to get into anything physical with me; I had too much size and weight on him, and too much anger. He wheeled around finally and stalked out. He was not a door slammer; he shut the door quietly behind him, as if he felt by doing that he was getting in the last word.
I went into the kitchen and ripped the tab off a can of Schlitz and took the can into the living room and sat there drinking from it and shaking. It took a good five minutes for the shaking to stop and the anger inside me to ebb into a dull, hot glow. I quit thinking about Wade, but I couldn’t quit thinking about Kerry. Jesus, what if he had got to her? What if she was going to send me packing tonight? I didn’t know what I’d do, and that scared me. Too many things were happening in my life, too many pressures piling up; I just was not equipped to handle this kind of emotional overload.
When I finished the beer I took another shower, a cold one this time. Then I shaved and got dressed. I was strapping on my watch when the telephone bell went off. Even before I answered it, I knew that it had to be Kerry.
“I just talked to my father,” she said. She sounded upset and angry. “What did you do to him?”
So the old bastard had gone right out and telephoned her. I should have known he’d do that; I should have called her myself, explained the flare-up to her before he could give her his own biased version of it.
“I didn’t do anything to him,” I said. “What did he say I did?”
“Called him vulgar names. Threatened him. For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with me? Listen, he showed up here uninvited and started in on me about the Hornback woman’s accusations. Then he said he’d seen you and you weren’t going to marry me. He seemed pretty damned positive.” =J|r “I didn’t tell him that.”
“Then where did he get the idea?”
“I don’t know. He shouldn’t have gone to see you, but that doesn’t excuse your behavior.”
“Maybe not, but he made me mad. I’ve had a rough day, I don’t need that kind of aggravation.”
“So you took it all out on him.”
“No. It’s his fault, not mine. Why do you automatically take his side?”
“He’s my father,” she said. “I don’t like you threatening him or calling him names.”
“You should have heard what he said to me.” “Oh, God, I hate situations like this. Your side, his side-you’re both driving me crazy.”
“Kerry, look, I’m sorry if you’re upset. But I’m upset, too. I don’t know where I stand with you, and that’s driving me crazy. Are you going to marry me or not?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure of what? That I don’t know yet?” She made an exasperated noise. “God!”
“When will you know?”
“I don’t know that either. I need time. Why won’t you accept that?”
“Do you want me to shut up and go away for a while?”
“I want you to shut up. Stop pressuring me.”
“All right, I’ll shut up. But what about your father? Will he shut up?”
“I can handle my father,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you that? You just stay away from any more confrontations.”
“Tell him the same thing,” I said. “He’s the one who came to see me, remember?”
There was one of those silences.
I said, “Kerry?”
“I’m still here.”. “I’m sorry, okay? I won’t let it happen again.”
“Good. You’d better not.”
“Do I still get to come over and eat lasagna?”
Pause. “I don’t feel much like cooking,” she said.
“We could go out somewhere….”
“I don’t think so. Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Maybe. Call me at work.”
“Sure, Fine.”
“Now you sound petulant.”
“I’m not petulant. Just disappointed.”
“Me too,” she said. “I’ll tell my father you apologize for the way you acted. And I’ll see to it that he apologizes to you, too.”
Yippee, I thought. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Damn. Damn! I had been sitting on the bed; I got up and paced into the living room and looked out through the bay window. The fog was so thick that it turned the lights of the bay into indistinct smears in the distance. I moved over to the shelves of pulp magazines and looked at them for a while.
Then I sat down and looked at the walls. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic.
I don’t need this, I thought. I don’t need to mope around here all by myself, watching the walls close in. I ought to go out and get roaring drunk, that’s what I ought to do.
The more I thought about that, the better I liked the idea. It had been a long time since I’d got roaring drunk; maybe that was just what I did need. So I grabbed my coat, said to hell with everything, and went off to drown my sorrows.
I didn’t drown my sorrows and I didn’t get roaring drunk. I sat in a tavern on California Street, drank four beers, talked to nobody, developed a headache, and came home and went to bed cold sober.
It was one of those days you couldn’t win for losing.
THIRTEEN
On Friday morning I got another jolt from the Fourth Estate. I bought a Chronicle on Drumm Street and took it into my office, and there, on page one this time, was a lousy photograph of my phiz that made me look mean and puffy, and a headline that said: PRIVATE EYE INVOLVED IN ANOTHER HOMICIDE.
It was the Xanadu thing, of course. The local press had got wind of it, as I should have realized they would, and the reporter had made a big deal out of what he called my “private eye pyrotechnics.” The thrust of the piece was: Supercop or Shady Angle Player or some sort of Typhoid Mary who bungled into and out of disaster at every turn-which was I? The story was continued on the back page, where I found a second story, this one an account of yesterday’s press interview and including the complete text of my written denial of Edna Hornback’s charges. The reporter didn’t draw any conclusions in either case, but then he didn’t have to. All the sensationalism, and the l