I gave Tamara today’s handful of expenses; she entered them and prepared and printed out a final bill. Erskine signed over another batch of checks, thanked Tamara, thanked me and shook my hand again, and was gone.
“Tell you something,” Tamara said, “I’m not sorry to see the back end of that dude for good.”
“That makes two of us.”
“You got the strange hit off him, too, huh? This time?”
I shrugged. “Too much weighing on him,” I said. “His emotions are all out of whack.”
“Yeah. But no matter what he said, he cares more about seeing his ex again than about his kid dying and he’s not gonna just talk to her once and leave her alone. Man’s carrying a torch big as a house.”
I didn’t answer, but I was thinking the same thing. And wishing now, too late and despite their son’s terminal illness, that I hadn’t found Sondra Nelson and sent Erskine on his way to the Alexander Valley.
7
I spent the evening alone in my flat, going through Eberhardt’s paper files. It was cheerless work, as much for what they told me about his deteriorating mental state as for the cold, bleak facts they contained. When I was done I had a pretty good idea of the shape and substance of his professional life over the past four years, and of how it had contributed to his suicide. But with the exception of a couple of small question marks that may or may not have had any significance, I could find nothing past or present that pointed to the trigger.
He’d never been a very conscientious report-maker or record-keeper; during our partnership days, all his paperwork — client reports, expense accountings, research data — tended to be sloppily organized and incomplete. But in the first year or so of Eberhardt Investigative Services he’d made an obvious effort to be more painstaking. You could see a kind of stolid enthusiasm in his early transcripts and correspondence, his detailed financial records. I’d speculated once that opening his own agency was his way of taking charge of what remained of his life, recapturing both his dignity and a self-worth that had been badly eroded by a combination of factors, among them a dependance on me and an inability to forgive himself for the one huge mistake that had ended his police career. Those first-year documents intimated that I’d pretty much been right. He’d tried the best way he knew how to make a success of his new venture. Taken a strictly professional approach in everything he did, to the point of buying and learning to use a computer.
And still he’d failed. Not immediately, but inevitably. The fault wasn’t his; the fault was competition, the stack of problems faced by every small businessman just starting out, the tenor of the times. There’d been a small flurry of activity in the beginning — friends and associates like Barney Rivera tossing bones to help him out. He’d done the work capably enough, but even when you build a string of repeat clients, as I had over a quarter of a century as an independent contractor, jobs are often sporadic. The big agencies, the ones with manpower and financial backing and technological know-how, get the cream; the rest of us have to scramble for the leavings. Eberhardt couldn’t compete. I’d gotten work that might have gone to him, even though he knew the clients as well as I did, because of my experience and success rate; the same was true of other established contractors. He’d got through the first year and a half all right, mostly on handouts, low-end divorce work, and one profitable three-week stint as an investigator for the defense in a felony trial. Even so, there were two stretches of more than two weeks each when he hadn’t worked at all, and his total gross income for the first five and a half months was only $13,800, the first full year just $23,000 and change.
His second full year he’d had a quarter fewer jobs and made six thousand less than the first. The third year: $9,987.00. And for the first four months of this year: $1,150.00.
The quality and quantity of his record-keeping reflected the downward spiral. The stolid enthusiasm disappeared after fifteen months or so; the reports grew thinner, less detailed, and if it was plain enough to me that he’d begun expending less effort on the skip-traces and insurance claims and divorce work, it had to’ve been just as plain to the clients. The professionalism had crumbled in other ways, too. By the beginning of last year he was cutting corners. There were indications that he overbilled on the number of hours it took him to finish a job. And I was pretty sure in two cases, both new corporate clients, that he’d done some expense-account padding — and none too creatively, since neither of the clients brought him repeat business.
This year, from January first to the last week in April, he’d had just three jobs: a personal background check, a Great Western claims investigation that he’d done a poor job on, and the liquor distributor’s theft stakeout. The first two had taken him eight days total, and he’d spent five days and nights on the O’Hanlon Brothers job. Thirteen days of work in four months. And the rest of the time? Drinking, brooding, building his own private gallows day by day, board by board. No clients, no prospects, no money. He’d never been much of a saver; as far as I knew, he’d had no more than a few thousand in the bank when he busted up our relationship. Most of that would’ve been spent in setting up his agency and the rest would’ve disappeared by the second year. The bank statements on his business account showed a balance at the end of last month of $36.18; they also showed periodic charges for overdrawn checks, nearly a dozen of them, and over the past eighteen months more than a dozen small deposits of between $100 and $300. So he and Bobbie Jean had been living on her salary at least that long and probably longer, and she’d also been feeding him enough cash so he could keep his office rent and utilities and other expenses more or less current. And her job at a San Rafael real estate brokerage company couldn’t have brought in much more than $35,000 a year gross. The Elizabeth Street house was paid for, but city property taxes are high and so are utilities; they must’ve been just squeaking by. More blows to Eberhardt’s pride. Another few boards for the gallows.
I took a close look at the three jobs he’d had this year. An item in the CURRENT file flagged my attention: one of the sheets of stationery headed “O’Hanlon Bros., Distributors” contained a list of eleven names and addresses. Employees or former employees of the firm? Possible suspects in the liquor thefts? A single name on the list had been heavily circled in felt-tip pen: Danny Forbes, with an address on Silliman Street in the Portola district. The circled name interested me enough to pull the sheet and set it aside.
Eberhardt’s appointment calendar had no notations for the week before his death and only one for last week. That one was for the day prior, his last full day on this earth: Disney, 2:00, Tues. The name was unfamiliar and I couldn’t find it in his address book.
The book had about twenty-five entries, a couple of which were scratched out — one, a bail bondsman I’d worked for a few times, with such apparent anger that the pen he’d used had ripped through the paper. Only five of the names were unknown to me, all of which appeared to be businesses of one kind and another. But he hadn’t dealt with any of them recently, judging from his phone bills and copies of his correspondence.
The most recent phone bills were among the handful of envelopes I’d lifted from the mailbox. No long-distance or toll calls from his office number; whatever calls he’d made from there had been local and Pac Bell doesn’t list those on its statements. The other bill was from Cellular One, which does list all outgoing cell phone calls. Why Eberhardt had continued to pay high mobile-phone rates, when he and Bobbie Jean were living hand to mouth, escaped me — unless a cell phone had been some sort of symbol to him, an independence lifeline that hadn’t done him a bit of good. He’d given up his life before he’d given up his portable phone. In any event, that bill listed a total of six outgoing calls over the ten days prior to his death: the first and last to his home number, the one to my office, one to Barney Rivera at Great Western, one that I matched to O’Hanlon Brothers, and one that I was unable to match to any in his address book or elsewhere. That one had been made at 1:07 last Tuesday afternoon, and had lasted a minute or less. A connection to the two o’clock appointment with Disney, whoever Disney was? I wrote the name and number down in my notebook.