I no longer had any purpose in life, no reason for my existence. It wasn’t a suicidal frame of mind; just an emptiness, a vacuum in which I seemed to be drifting. If I’d had Kerry, if things had been the way they were for us in the beginning, I could have weathered the suspension and found a way to go on. As it was I had nothing to hang on to, no enthusiasm for anything. It was as if all meaning had been cut out of me and the operation had turned me into an emotional vegetable.
At the barbecue Eberhardt said, “You got any job prospects lined up yet?”
“No. I haven’t been looking.”
“Why not?”
“What the hell am I going to do, Eb? Being an investigator is the only thing I’m qualified for.”
“There must be something else you can do.”
“Sure. Wash dishes, run errands, become a clerk in a cigar store. I’m too damned old for anything like that.”
“You got to eat.”
“I still have some savings left.”
“Sure. How much?”
“Enough to last me another month.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
“You could sell off some of those pulps of yours.”
“Last resort,” I said. “If it gets to that I might as well throw in the towel.”
He put down the poker he’d been using and came over to stand next to me at the fence. “You give up your office yet?”
“Not yet. Rent’s paid until the end of this month.”
“What about the furniture and stuff?”
“I guess I’ll sell it. Or give it away to the Salvation Army. I can’t afford to put it into storage, that’s for sure. And even if I could, why bother? I’ll never need office furniture again.”
“You don’t know that,” he said. “The State Board promised a review in six months, didn’t they?”
“Sure. A review. Even if they lift the suspension, which they won’t, how do I pick up the pieces? All my steady clients are gone and they wouldn’t come back. And where do I get new ones? Nobody’s going to want to hire a private detective who’s had his license suspended and been raked over the media coals the way I was.”
“People forget. New people come into the city all the time. You could build up business again.”
“Maybe. But I’d starve to death in the meantime.”
“You’re going to starve as it is.”
“Look, forget it. It’s not going to happen anyway. I’ll never be given a license again in California.”
“You could try getting one in another state.”
“With this hanging over me here? They’d turn me down flat, you know that, no matter where I went.”
“It’s still worth a try.”
“So maybe I will,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t. I could not afford to move somewhere else and start over; it just wasn’t in me even if I could swing it.
Eberhardt finished half of his beer; his eyes were starting to take on a faintly glassy sheen. “What’re you doing with your days, if you’re not out looking for work?”
“Not much. Reading, moping around, drinking beer.”
“I guess I know all about that.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. He tilted the can to his mouth again.
A maudlin indignation seemed to be creeping through me. I said, “It’s so goddamned unfair, Eb. What the hell did I do to deserve a suspension? Got mixed up in some things that weren’t my fault, did my job in each case, resolved them all. They took away my license because I’m good at what I do.”
“Too good. You couldn’t stay out of hot water.”
“For Christ’s sake, none of it was my fault.”
And none of it was. During that crazy week in July I had taken on what looked to be three simple cases; and all three had turned into bizarre felonies — two murders involving the theft of a large sum of money and an extortion plot, and the robbery of a diamond ring. One of my clients, the lunatic wife of the first homicide victim, had publicly accused me of criminal negligence and threatened a lawsuit; that had only made things worse. The media had had a field day. First I was a possibly shady character, and then I was a kind of Typhoid Mary who left a wake of disaster everywhere I went, and then, after I managed to come up with solutions in all three cases, I was a supersleuth, Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes all wrapped up in one package.
As a result, the chief had claimed I was upstaging the police, interfering with the Department’s public image, attracting too much crime and too much publicity; it was a matter of public relations, he’d said. And so he had thrown me to the wolves on the State Board, and the wolves had agreed with his view and gobbled up my license. Never mind my unblemished record as a police officer and private investigator for over thirty years; never mind that I had always worked carefully within the law; never mind that I had to eat and had no other means of support. Indefinite suspension. End of hearing, end of reputation, end of career.
Eberhardt clapped me on the shoulder. “Coals are ready,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go get the steaks.”
“I’m not hungry, Eb.”
“Me neither. But we got to eat. Otherwise we’ll both get shitfaced and start bawling on each other.”
“We could quit drinking instead.”
“I don’t want to quit drinking. I just want to put some food in my belly along with the rest of the beer I plan to swill down.”
“All right. I guess it’s a good idea.”
We went into the kitchen and Eberhardt took the steaks out of the fridge and put them on a plate. Then he got a couple of potatoes, cut them open, smeared them with butter. He was wrapping them in tinfoil, and I was opening two more beers, when the doorbell rang.
“Now who the hell is that?” he said.
“You could answer it and find out.”
“One of the neighbors, probably. I got sympathetic neighbors since Dana walked out. I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time.”
He went through the swing door that led into the living room. I finished opening the beer, drained what was left in my previous can, and tasted the fresh one. At the front of the house I could hear Eb opening the door.
Then I heard him say, loudly and clearly, “What the hell—?”
And then there were two sharp echoing reports — gunshots, they could only have been gunshots.
Sudden fear and confusion jerked me around; I went cold all over. In the other room there was the dull sound of something hitting the floor. I slammed the beer can down on the counter, banged the swing door with my shoulder, and charged through into the living room without thinking what I might be letting myself in for.
It was like running onto a Hollywood sound stage where a scene from a gangster movie was being filmed; all sense of reality vanished instantly. Eberhardt was lying on the floor ten feet from the open front door, there was a bleeding hole in his belly, blood all over him, blood on his head, and framed in the doorway was a man standing in a shooter’s crouch with a big revolver extended in both hands; I couldn’t see much of his face, because the sun was setting on that side of the house and he was just a looming silhouette backlit by its glare, but I had the impression he was Chinese.
I had just enough time to think: Oh my God! before he shot me.
He swung the gun in my direction, I saw him do that and I started to throw myself toward the sofa on my left, and all in the same space of time the bullet jarred into the upper part of my chest and I heard the gun crack and the force of impact knocked me sprawling across the carpet. Momentum skidded me behind the sofa; I was aware of burning sensations along my cheek and forearm where they bit into the rough carpet fibers. There was another shot, the metallic whine of a ricochet, the sound of something shattering. A long way off footsteps began to pound on wood, diminishing, gone.