Weaver had been watching me read. When I looked up from the clipping he said, “They never caught him. Traced him to Indianapolis, but then he disappeared for good. All these years, twenty-seven years, and I come across him here in San Francisco. Coincidence. Or maybe it was supposed to happen that way. The hand of the Lord guides us all, and we don’t always understand the whys and wherefores.”
“Mr. Weaver, what did that bombing massacre have to do with you?”
“One of the people he blew up was my youngest daughter. Twenty-two that year. Went to that flower shop to pick out an arrangement for her wedding. I saw her after it happened, I saw what his bomb did to her...”
He broke off again; his strong voice trembled a little now. But his eyes were dry. He’d cried once, he’d cried many times, but that had been long ago. There were no tears left any more.
I got slowly to my feet. The heat and the sweetish tobacco scent were making me feel sick to my stomach. And the grayness, the aura of age and hopelessness and tragedy were like an oppressive weight.
I said, “I’ll be going now.”
“Going?” he said. “Telephone’s right over there.”
“I won’t be calling the police, Mr. Weaver. From here or from anywhere else.”
“What’s that? But... you know I killed him...”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I don’t even remember coming here today.”
I left him quickly, before he could say anything else, and went downstairs and out to O’Farrell Street. Wind-hurled rain buffeted me, icy and stinging, but the feel and smell of it was a relief. I pulled up the collar on my overcoat and hurried next door.
Upstairs in the office I took Irv Feinberg’s two hundred dollars out of the lock box in the desk and slipped the envelope into my coat pocket. He wouldn’t like getting it back; he wouldn’t like my calling it quits on the investigation, just as the police had done. But that didn’t matter. Let the dead lie still, and the dying find what little peace they had left. The judgment was out of human hands anyway.
I tried not to think about Nick Damiano any more, but it was too soon and I couldn’t blot him out yet. Harmless old Nick, the happy whack. Jesus Christ. Seven people — he had slaughtered seven people that day in 1957. And for what? For a lost woman; for a lost love. No wonder he’d gone batty and developed an obsession for skeletons. He had lived with them, seven of them, all those years, heard them clattering and clacking all those thousands of nights. And now, pretty soon, he would be one himself.
Skeleton rattle your mouldy leg.
All men’s lovers come to this.
Sanctuary
A “Nameless Detective” Story
We were still twenty miles from Paradise when the skies opened up on us.
It was 7:30 on a Sunday evening in late October and Kerry and I had spent the afternoon driving around in the Sierra Nevada up near Lake Almanor. The sun had been shining when we’d started out from Paradise just before noon, but the sky had begun to cloud up in mid-afternoon and the first rain had begun falling at half-past four. We’d have started back before that, and been in Paradise long since — literally and maybe figuratively, too — except for the tire that had got punctured by some litterbug’s broken beer bottle and the damned spare that had turned up just as flat. We’d had to wait for a good Samaritan to come along and take us into Almanor, and then to ride back out with a Triple-A truck and a new tire. The whole episode had cost us well over two hours and neither of us was in a very good mood. So then the rain had to change from a drizzle to a deluge so heavy the windshield wipers couldn’t get rid of the water fast enough. Straining to see, I had to slow to less than twenty-five or run the risk of losing the car on one of the sharp turns in the two-lane mountain road.
Kerry said, “Oh God, just what we need. Can you see? It’s just a blur out there to me.”
“Ditto.”
“Maybe we’d better pull over until it lets up.”
“No place to go.”
“The first place we come to, then.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll be all right.”
“Some Sunday,” she said irritably. “Some terrific weekend.”
I didn’t say anything. My temper was as short as hers and I did not want us to start bickering; the road and that silver curtain of rain took all my attention. But the truth was, it hadn’t been such a bad weekend until this afternoon. I’d had half a day’s worth of wrap-up business in Chico on Friday, on a civil case I was working for a San Francisco attorney, and I had taken Kerry along because my job fascinated her — she fancied herself as having latent detective abilities — and because the timing was right for a three-day mini-vacation after my business was finished. That night we’d driven up to Paradise, a resort and retirement community in the Sierra foothills a dozen miles northeast of Chico, and taken a room in a first-class motel. The weather was good, with no early snow on the ground; it was the off-season so there weren’t many other tourists in the area; and we’d been having a pretty nice time eating out, exploring, and making love.
Now we were paying for it.
The rain seemed to be coming down harder, if that were possible. It was like trying to drive under and through a seemingly endless waterfall. Close on both sides of the road, pine forest loomed black and indistinct; there wasn’t even a turnout where I could pull off. I let our speed slacken to under twenty, little more than a crawl. At least there wasn’t any other traffic: we hadn’t seen another car traveling in either direction in the past five minutes.
The night was pitch black except for the shimmer of our headlights against the rain. Or it was until we came around another curve. Kerry said, “Up ahead, look! It’s some kind of roadside business place.”
Through the downpour I could make out the reds and blues of a neon sign, the squat shape of a single log-and-shake-roofed building set back at the edge of a narrow clearing. There were lights in one of the front windows, and more neon that materialized as beer advertisements. The big sign on the roof said liquidly: Kern’s Woodland Tavern and Cafe.
I eased the car off the highway, onto a deserted gravel parking area that fronted the building. There was nothing behind the place except more trees and an empty access road that vanished in among them. Directly in front were a pair of gas pumps: I stopped the car between them and the entrance to the tavern half, the part that was lighted. The other half, the cafe, had a Closed sign in its darkened window.
“The bar’s open, at least,” Kerry said. “Why don’t we go in? I can use something hot to drink.”
“Might as well. It’s better than sitting here.”
We ran to the tavern entrance, a distance of maybe ten feet; but we were both half-drenched by the time we pushed inside. Some hard rain, the kind you only get in the mountains and that might last anywhere from three minutes to thirty.
The tavern was one of those rustic country types, full of rough-hewn furniture and deer heads; this one also had a big American flag stretched out across the wall that bisected the building, one made before Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union because it only had forty-eight stars. A three-log, fire blazed hotly in a native-stone fireplace. Near the window was a musicians’ dais, empty now, and a scattering of maybe a dozen tables. Opposite was the bar, rough-hewn like the furnishings; on the wall behind it were a lot of little burnt-wood plaques that had dumb sayings on them like If You Don’t Ask Us for Credit, We Won’t Double the Price of Your Drinks.