Bill Pronzini
Dragonfire
This one is for Sharon McCone, the best of
the lady private eyes, and for her creator,
Marcia Muller
One
Welcome to hard times...
Sunday afternoon, mid-August. Eberhardt and I were sitting in the backyard of his house in Noe Valley, drinking beer and getting a little tight. It was a nice day — bright sunlight, warm, just a hint of breeze. The smell of burning charcoal was in the air; Eb had started the coals in the brick barbecue pit he’d built some years back and we were going to have steaks pretty soon. In one of the other yards beyond his fence, somebody was mowing his lawn; you could hear the faint ratchety whir of a hand-powered mower.
It was all nice and pleasant: one of those lazy days of summer, a Sunday rite like thousands of others in San Francisco. The only problem with it was, neither of us was enjoying it. Eberhardt’s wife Dana had left him for another man three months ago, after nearly three decades of marriage, and he was lonely and bitter and rattled around in his house like a marble in a box. And I was even worse off. I had also lost a woman I loved, for different reasons — or it seemed I’d lost her from all indications the past month. Eberhardt, at least, had his job — he was a lieutenant on the San Francisco cops — and could bury himself in his work. But I no longer had mine. That was something else I’d lost a month ago: the only profession I had had for the past thirty years. My private investigator’s license had been suspended indefinitely by the State Board of Licenses, on recommendation of the chief of police.
We had been sitting there guzzling beer for about three hours. Eberhardt had invited me over and I’d accepted for similar reasons; misery loves company and it was always easier to drown your sorrows with a friend and fellow sufferer. Neither of us had mentioned our respective troubles so far, but I knew that wasn’t going to last. And it didn’t.
Eberhardt was over poking around in the barbecue pit. When he came back and plunked himself down again in his chaise longue he said, “Another twenty minutes should do it.” Then he drank some beer and said, “You seen Kerry lately?”
“Yeah, I saw her. Last week.”
“How’d it go?”
“Strained,” I said. “We had lunch in a place out at China Basin.”
“So what did she say?”
“She still hasn’t made up her mind. Hasn’t had enough time yet. My situation isn’t making it any easier for her, I guess.”
“She still getting flack from her old man?”
“She didn’t say. But you can bet she is; he’s a relentless bugger, Wade is.”
“When’re you seeing her again?”
“Who knows?”
“You talking to her regularly?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“You call or does she?”
“She does, for the most part,” I said. “I don’t want to put any more pressure on her. She’s worried about me so she calls to find out how I’m holding up.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Okay. Getting through.”
We both fell silent. I watched him load tobacco into one of his pipes, a thing carved in the shape of a head that he had taken a liking to. The talk about Kerry made memories of her lie heavy on my mind. I’d met her back in May, at a pulp writers’ convention that had evolved into a double homicide case; her parents, Cybil and Ivan Wade, were both ex-pulp writers. We had established both an emotional and physical rapport almost immediately, and I’d fallen in love with her, and not long after that I’d asked her to marry me. That was when the problems started. Her father, Ivan the Terrible, as I called him, thought I was too old for her because I was fifty-three and she was thirty-eight; he didn’t like the fact that I was a private detective and he didn’t like me. So he’d started pressuring her. And then I’d started pressuring her too, and it became a kind of tug-of-war with Kerry in the middle.
It had all come to a head during a crazy week in July — the worst week of my life because it contained a whole slew of other events that combined to bring about the suspension of my investigator’s license. I developed a stupid streak of jealousy and all but accused Kerry of fooling around with one of the owners of the advertising agency where she worked; we’d had words about that. Then her old man showed up at my flat and I had words with him too, angry words, and wound up threatening him and throwing him out. Kerry hadn’t liked that, either.
Toward the end of that week we’d gone out to dinner, and the evening degenerated into a fight. She said we didn’t know each other as well as we thought we did; she said I had old-fashioned macho tendencies and couldn’t deal with a relationship unless it was on my terms; she said that maybe I wanted her just because her parents were pulp writers and the pulps were a central part of my life. A few days later she’d come to my office on Drumm Street and told me she needed time to make up her mind, a sense of freedom, and it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a while. That had more or less finished things. In the month since that day, I had spoken to her maybe eight times on the phone and seen her twice. And it just wasn’t the same between us; it wasn’t even close. I did not see how it could ever be again.
Eberhardt had his pipe going and was making fierce sucking noises on the stem. His face, with its odd mix of angles and blunt planes, had a dark broody look. He seemed to be in the same kind of grim mood I was in today.
I said, “How’re things with you, Eb?”
“Lousy. Too much on my mind.”
“Heavy work load?”
“Yeah. I hate my goddamn job sometimes. It’s a hell of a thing being a cop, you know that?”
“Somebody’s got to do it. And you’re one of the best.”
“Am I? I don’t know about that.”
“Anything wrong?”
He gave me a look. “Why do you think anything’s wrong?”
“I don’t think it. I was just asking.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right. Sure.”
He scowled at his pipe and put it down. “Then there’s Dana,” he said. “My ever-loving whore of a wife.”
“She’s not a whore, Eb.”
“The hell she’s not. Don’t tell me about whores; I know all about whores.”
“Have you talked to her recently?”
“Not in weeks. Last time she called, she wanted a couple of things — furniture for her new apartment. She didn’t even ask me how I was.”
“Where’s she living?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t give me her phone number, either.”
“You think she’s living alone?”
“Hell, no. Moved in somewhere with her boyfriend.”
“You ever find out who he is?”
“No. And I hope I never do. If I did...”
“What?”
“I don’t know what. Shoot the bastard, maybe. Her too. Blow both of them away.”
“Come on, Eb.”
“You think I’m kidding?”
“You’ve been a cop too long for a thing like that.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. You don’t know what I’m liable to do; neither do I. Bastards like that deserve to get shot. So do whores. Whores are better off dead anyway. Who cares about a damned whore?”
I didn’t say anything; the subject was depressing and I wanted to get off it. I finished my beer. “You ready for another one of these?”
“Yeah.”
I went into the kitchen and got two more cans out of the refrigerator. When I came back out he was at the barbecue pit again, poking the charcoal around; most of the briquettes were already glowing and white. I gave him his fresh beer and wandered over and leaned against his board fence, in the shade of a Japanese elm. I was feeling the effects of the beer, but it wasn’t a good kind of high; it made me melancholy and added to the lost, empty, aimless state I had been mired in for the past month.