I thought: Well, maybe it will all break by tonight and I won’t have to make any decision. I hope that’s the way it is; Christ, I hope that’s the way it is.
San Francisco was blanketed in fog, and as we left the freeway I could feel a coldness settling on my spine despite the warmth of the car’s heater. The shredded gray tendrils of mist recalled last night and its violent chain of events vividly to my mind; I shivered a little, and the pain grew gnawing across my lower belly.
There was a parking space almost directly in front of my building, for a change, and Erika spent three minutes putting the Valiant into it. She came around and took my arm as I got out of the car, holding on to it tightly, and we went up onto the porch. The police and the hospital staff had gathered my personal effects from the blood-soaked ruin of my own clothing. When I used my key on the front door and my apartment door, I was breathing only just a little heavily from the climbing of the single flight of stairs.
Erika let her eyes wander with distaste over the living room as we stepped inside. She said, “My God, how can you stand to live like this?” But there was a lightness to her words, the first she had spoken since we’d left the hospital, that gave the impression of relaxation inside her now. She had finished her brooding, having apparently come to some conclusion or resignation; the tightness was gone from the corners of her mouth, and she was beautiful and soft for me again.
I said, “You say the same thing every time you come here.”
“It doesn’t seem to do any good.”
“Can I help it if I’m a slob at heart?”
“Oh, go lie down, will you?” she said. “I’ll fix you something to eat. Are you hungry?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s a good sign anyway.”
Erika took off her coat and went over and hung it up in the coat closet. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and clicked on the lights and made an exasperated sound and began banging pots and things around. I walked to the couch and swept some newspapers onto the floor and lay down.
There was a package of cigarettes on the coffee table, and I looked at it and thought about having one. But the craving was not at all strong, and I did not want to provoke Erika into any kind of argument. Besides that, I had a running start on quitting them now, the kind of start I would not have again; if I was going to do it at all, this was the right time.
I picked up the copy of Black Mask that I had been reading two nights ago, and began to thumb idly through it. I started to glance over the story I had begun then, without any real hope of being able to concentrate, but the opening gripped me this time and I was ten pages involved in it when Erika came in with a tray a few minutes later.
She put the tray down on the coffee table, clearing away some of the dishes and things. She said, “Don’t you ever tire of reading those silly magazines?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t you ever tire of cleaning up?
“What do you think?”
“You’ll make some guy a good wife anyway.”
“I can give you the names of two guys who wouldn’t agree with that,” she said.
“A hell of a lot they know.”
“Maybe they know best of all.”
“Nuts,” I said. I looked at the tray. There was some beef broth and a fluffy omelette and a dish of applesauce. It wasn’t the kind of stuff I liked to eat as a rule, but I sat up dutifully and put the pulp aside and went to work on the food.
I was halfway through the meal when the telephone rang. I looked up at the sunburst clock over the false fireplace; it was eight-thirty. I said to Erika, “Answer that, will you, honey? If it’s Louis Martinetti, I’ll talk to him. Nobody else.”
She looked at me sharply, and then went into the bedroom and cut off the phone in mid-ring. I heard her tell somebody that I wasn’t available for comment just now, she was sorry, and a moment later she came back into the front room. “Somebody from the Chronicle” she said.
I finished the meal she had prepared, and Erika took the tray away and came back and began to clean up. I lay down again and tried to read some more of the Black Mask story, but it was no good now. I was tense and waiting for Martinetti’s call, because I knew what I was going to tell him; I had known it the instant the telephone rang before and I had thought it might be him.
He called at five to nine.
Erika went in to answer it, and returned with the phone on its long cord. She gave it to me, mouthing Martinetti’s name silently, and went away into the kitchen. I said, “Yes, Mr. Martinetti?”
“There’s nothing yet,” he said, “nothing at all.” Even over the wire, his exhaustion was plainly evident. “I’ve just heard from the District Attorney’s people.”
“Then you still want me to keep working for you?”
“Yes. Will you do it?”
I blew a soft breath away from the mouthpiece. “All right, Mr. Martinetti. I’ll do what I can. But I want you to understand that it probably won’t be much, and that I don’t want any money unless I make some kind of contribution.”
“Whatever you wish,” he said.
“Call me at any time if you have some news. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll know there aren’t any further developments.”
“Yes.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I … I appreciate this. More than I can tell you.”
“Sure,” I said. “I hope I can help, Mr. Martinetti.”
We said goodbye and I replaced the handset in its cradle. I sat there and looked at the phone and I felt better about it all now, having reached a decision. I turned away to lie down again and Erika was standing just behind the couch with the tightness back at the corners of her mouth and her eyes very dark.
I said, “You were listening.”
“Yes, I was listening,” softly, flatly.
“Erika …”
“You damned fool,” she said in sibilant tones, “oh, you poor damned fool. You can’t let it alone, can you? You’ve got to stay right in there until the bitter end.”
“Look,” I said, “you don’t understand …”
“Don’t I? I understand very well, you’d be surprised what I understand. I understand that you’ve got a knife wound in your stomach from this business, this skulking around in the night, and now you want to keep right on with the case. Can’t walk out on a client, isn’t that the way it goes? Well, maybe next time the man with the knife won’t miss. Maybe next time he’ll kill you and you’ll die gloriously in the name of truth and right and justice.”
“For Christ’s sake, Erika …”
“No, you hear me out,” she said. “I’m going to say what’s on my mind, what’s been on my mind for a long time now. I’m fed up, old bear. I’m fed up with waiting around for you to change, for you to grow up. I’m fed up with this private-detective business of yours, this cloak-and-dagger crap, this pointless losing proposition that you cling to so damned tenaciously. You haven’t had ten clients this year, and yet you go down to that musty-dusty office of yours every morning and you sit there and wait for the telephone to ring like some character in one of those pulp magazines you collect.”
I could feel the anger beginning inside me, and my stomach throbbed painfully now. But it was impotent anger, because there was nothing for me to say to her, no way to make her understand.
She kept on with it. She said, “You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go. You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five-years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be. You’re no damned hero, and it hurts you that you’re not, and that’s why you won’t let go of it. And the whole while you’re eating and sleeping and living yesteryear’s dream world, to salve your wounded pride you’re deluding yourself that you’re an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn’t care less one way or the other. You’re nothing but a little boy, and I’m damned if I’ll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year. That’s the reason I wouldn’t and I won’t marry you; I can’t compete with an obsession, I won’t compete with it-”