Bill Pronzini
Illusions
For all the loyal readers
who have helped keep “Nameless” and me
in business for three decades.
1
I have a thing about funerals.
The entire ritual from start to finish strikes me as senseless. You stand in a mortuary reeking of the perfume of already withering flowers and stare down at a wax dummy in a satin-lined box, a dummy with the vague features of someone you once cared for. You sit in a church or synagogue and listen to well-intentioned but hollow eulogies and a lot of words about mortal troubles ended and everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven that have little to do with the departed and everything to do with the living. You stand beside a rectangular hole in the ground, listening to more hollow words, smelling grass and freshly turned earth, and if you’re a man like me, what you think about is not the prospect of a blissful eternity but the futility of man’s earthly existence, living and dying both.
Some people, the fortunate ones who have an unshakable faith, find comfort in all of this; it gives them hope to honor the dead in a formalized ceremony. But as far as I’m concerned there is a better, less painful, just as hopeful way to pay your respects. One that has nothing to do with perching on a cemetery lawn waiting for an object like a half-formed pod creature to be lowered into a hole and covered up with a mound of dirt. Honoring the dead ought to be a personal and private act, like making love. And it ought not to involve a preoccupation with death but rather a celebration of life, of one person’s time on this earth and its interaction with your own — memories of good times shared, days lived with pleasure and purpose.
Kerry says my feelings have to do with mortality itself, that it isn’t really funerals I hate but the concept that everyone and everything must eventually cease to exist. She says this gently, without censure; she doesn’t care for religious ceremony or ground burial any more than I do. We have a pact: no service of any kind for either of us, cremation and the ashes scattered to the winds. Could be she’s right about the way I feel. I’ve seen too much death over the years, too much waste. It doesn’t frighten me, it makes me angry because I can’t seem to come to terms with why it has to be that way. Issues without apparent meaning, questions without answers, frustrate me. It’s the sort of man I am. It’s what makes me good at my work.
So there I stood next to Kerry in the Olivet Memorial Cemetery in Colma, half listening to the minister delivering his graveside incantation, thinking these thoughts and waiting for Eberhardt’s remains to finally be planted and the ordeal to be over. And the irony was, for all I believed in honoring the dead privately and through a celebration of life, I couldn’t seem to dwell on the good memories of my ex-friend and ex-partner. The way he’d died kept intruding, taking over. And what I felt was anger and frustration.
When I’d first heard of his sudden demise, the shock had been like a physical blow. It couldn’t have been suicide; Eberhardt wasn’t the kind of man who took his own life. It must’ve been foul play, or some freak accident. But the circumstances and the police investigation pretty much ruled out any other explanation. It was suicide, all right. And why had I even questioned it? A lot of cops and ex-cops finish themselves off with a bullet, for reasons that all too often involve stress and alcohol. Eating their guns, they call it.
Once I accepted the suicide verdict I not only lost the sense of shock but the feelings of guilt and sadness that had followed it. Friends for thirty-five years and yet I could not seem to feel any grief, any real sense of loss. The fact that he’d killed himself was part of the reason; I’ve always considered suicide to be cheap and selfish, the ultimate act of cowardice. Another part was our estrangement for the past four years — not one word spoken directly to each other in all that time. Still, I should’ve felt something more than the dull anger, the nagging frustration, shouldn’t I? It was Eberhardt lying down there inside the ornate box fitted into that tight little hole... Except that it wasn’t. A damn wax dummy. The real Eberhardt, the man who’d once been my closest friend, had been gone physically for three days now and from a place in my heart and gut a lot longer than that.
Morbid thoughts, making me even twitchier, more impatient. Kerry sensed my discomfort, moved closer and linked her arm through mine. “You okay?” she whispered.
“Yeah. More or less.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
I squeezed her hand, thinking: He’d have hated this, same as me. That’s another little piece of irony. Born Jewish, lost his faith early on; not just nonreligious but a virtual atheist. And here he’s being buried in a sanctioned nondenominational cemetery in a service presided over by a Lutheran minister from Bobbie Jean’s church.
I made an effort to focus on the other mourners. Bobbie Jean standing in a tight little cluster with her two daughters and the married one’s husband, Cliff Hoyt. Thin and pale and shrunken inside a loose-fitting black dress that covered all of her except for face and hands, the hands washing each other constantly as if she were trying to rub out a stain. Dry-eyed and in rigid control; she’d done all her grieving in private. Dana Macklin, Eberhardt’s ex-wife, remarried to the Stanford professor she’d left Eb for ten years ago and now one of the pillars of Palo Alto society, wearing a moist look of bewilderment. Joe DeFalco, once almost as close to Eberhardt as I was, looking rumpled and as ill at ease as I felt. Jack Logan and a handful of other SFPD old-timers — Eberhardt’s cronies from the days when he’d been a detective lieutenant. Barney Rivera, tubby little Barney, popping peppermints on the sly and glancing at his watch the way a man does when he’s worried he’ll be late for an appointment. He caught my eye, scowled, turned aside. He didn’t like me much any more and the feeling was mutual. I’d tried to talk to him shortly after I heard the news; he’d shut me off cold. I knew why and maybe one day I’d confront him about it, get it out into the open. But not today.
Two other men completed the graveside gathering, neither of whom I knew. Cops, probably; or maybe clients Eberhardt had developed over the past four years, or casual drinking buddies. People who cared enough to attend the funeral, but who wouldn’t care long or deeply. Eberhardt hadn’t made friends easily or been close to more than a handful of persons in his sixty years. Dana, Bobbie Jean, Joe, Barney, Jack Logan, me — that was about all. A loner and a workaholic, at least in the old days. Introspective, oversensitive, stubborn and sometimes inflexible, and given to dark moods...
Just like me.
Right. But I had saving qualities he hadn’t: drive, a sense of worth and purpose, an intense desire to create order out of chaos. I also had a woman I loved too much to want to hurt, an agency that was reasonably profitable, and a line of work I found fulfilling. And I cared too much about life to want to give it up so easily and cheaply, or to leave so much pain behind.
The minister finally finished speaking. Time, now, for the first small shovelful of dirt to be tossed onto the coffin, Bobbie Jean’s last good-bye. I couldn’t watch that; I looked away, out over the trees and rolling lawns and jutting monuments. It was a cool, blustery day with a high wind that sent broken clouds rushing inland from the sea. The pale sunlight and the fast movement of the clouds created shadow shapes on the cemetery landscape — an animal running, a tall-masted sailing ship, a gigantic ice cream cone, a zeppelin. Illusions. Like the attitudes we build up toward others and toward ourselves that turn out to be false or distorted, so much vapor and so many tricky shadows.
Why’d you do it, Eb? I thought. Who were you, really?