Finished, I sat looking at all the papers piled on my desk and on the living-room floor. Nearly four years of a man’s professional life, and every damn bit of it would go into the trash. Not a single scrap of paper worth saving. And all I knew now that I hadn’t known when I started was that Eberhardt’s four-year descent had been a little worse than I’d originally believed. He hadn’t just been a despondent drunk; he’d turned into a careless and pettily deceitful drunk. If he’d set out to recapture his dignity and self-worth, he’d wound up trampling on what was left of both.
Sad, pathetic. And one more piece of proof that the real Eberhardt had been hidden from me all along, that the one I’d called my friend for thirty-some years had been shadow and silhouette, sham and mirage.
From the office Friday morning I called the number I’d copied into my notebook. A recorded voice came on after three rings. “You have reached the offices of Richard H. Disney, Ph.D. If you would like to make an appointment, or if you have other business, please leave your name and number at the tone. Office hours are Monday through Thursday, nine-thirty to four-thirty...”
I hung up without waiting for the rest. The Ph.D. after the man’s name could mean a few different things, but the one I thought of first was head doctor. I dragged out and consulted the city’s yellow pages. And under Psychologists I found Richard H. Disney, Ph.D., with an address on Church Street.
So Eberhardt had been seeing a shrink. The combination of booze and depression must have driven him to it. And yet unburdening himself to another person, and a psychologist at that, didn’t seem to be something he would’ve done; he’d always expressed distrust of and contempt for “brain pickers.” That was one facet of the man I felt pretty sure I was right about. No way could I picture him in a psychologist’s office, admitting he was a drunk and a failure and that he’d lost his will to live.
Bolt Street was a hive of activity early on a Friday afternoon. Semis, trailers, pickups, forklifts, workmen, engine noise, and a miasma of diesel clogged its dead-end half block so thoroughly that I didn’t even try to penetrate it. I turned onto the cross street and found parking there instead. And at that, walking the alley was more hazardous than driving it: a reckless jitney driver nearly mowed me down before I reached the O’Hanlon Brothers’ loading dock.
Two of the three bays were occupied, and half a dozen men wheeled hand trucks back and forth between the open maw of the warehouse and the yawning backsides of two big trailers. I asked one of the men where I might find T. K. O’Hanlon; according to Eberhardt’s CURRENT file, that was the brother who’d hired him. “In his office, probably,” the guy said, and pointed out a tunnellike walkway that led through the warehouse to an office area at the rear. I did some more talking there and was eventually granted an audience with T. K. O’Hanlon in his private sanctum. Which turned out not to be very private: one entire wall was made of glass and looked out into the cavernous warehouse with its crates and cartons and pallets and bins and shelves of enough varieties of booze to make Andrew Volstead and Elliot Ness revolve in their graves.
O’Hanlon cut an impressive figure, in the sense that a large and crudely crafted outdoor sculpture is impressive. He looked as though he’d been assembled out of a bunch of different-size square blocks tightly fitted together: square head on top of square shoulders on top of a square torso. Even his hips seemed square, his legs and arms squarish elongations. The face block had gouges for eyes, a crooked slash for a mouth, and a knob for a nose, and was surmounted by a colorless bristle like dried-up moss on a rock. The eyes were quick and shrewd, though. Anyone who formed an opinion about T. K. O’Hanlon based solely on his appearance would be making a serious error in judgment.
He sized me up, too, as we shook hands, and evidently I passed muster. His tone was cordial enough when he said, “Friend of Eberhardt’s, eh? Hell of a thing, him bumping himself off out there on the street. We had cops in here asking questions and getting in the way most of the morning after it happened.”
I had no comment to make on that.
He said, “So what brings you here now? I’m not in the market for any more private cops, if that’s it. Not yet anyhow.”
“That’s not it, Mr. O’Hanlon. I—”
“T. K.,” he said. “Everybody calls me T. K.”
“All right, T. K. I’m not looking for business, I’m looking for answers. To why he killed himself.”
“Little late for that, isn’t it?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
O’Hanlon shrugged. “You were his friend and you don’t have any idea, how should I? Drunks do crazy things. I should’ve known better than to hire a drunk. Like hiring a fat woman to catch a thief in a candy factory.”
“If you knew he had a drinking problem going in, why did you hire him?”
“He worked cheap, that’s why. My brother and I can’t afford to pay what some of you guys charge. I called around, I got some estimates, he gave me the one we could afford. You get what you pay for, like they say.”
I let that pass, too.
“No offense,” O’Hanlon said. “He’s dead, it’s a hell of a thing, but facts are facts. One thing T. K. O’Hanlon doesn’t trade in and that’s bullshit. My wife says I got as much tact as a rolling pin.”
“About the job you hired Eberhardt to do, T. K.”
“Find out which one of our employees been ripping us off, yeah. More than a hundred cases the past few months — single-malt Scotch, sour-mash bourbon, Napoleon brandy. Ten, eleven thousand bucks’ worth, and the insurance don’t even begin to make up for it.”
“Was he getting anywhere?”
“Nope. I ask what he’s finding out, he tells me he’s working on it, these things take time. Far as I could tell, he mostly just sat out there on the street nights hoping for something to fall into his lap. And he wasn’t there all the time he said he was.”
“How do you know he wasn’t?”
“I came in last Saturday night about eleven, doing a favor for a friend. He wasn’t on the street then. Chances are he wasn’t there part of Sunday night, either.”
“No?”
“Nick and me got ripped off again that weekend. Nick’s my kid brother. Played pro ball with the Detroit Lions in the seventies, maybe you remember him? Three years, linebacker and special teams before he screwed up his knee.”
“I remember him,” I lied. “How much was stolen that time?”
“Five cases of Glenlivet and two of sour mash, part of a special order for a customer. Shipment came in on Saturday morning — we work half days on Saturdays — and the inventory was short on Monday.”
“What did Eberhardt say when you told him about it?”
“Admitted he was gone part of Saturday night. Hour or so, he said, to get something to eat. Buy more booze for himself is more like it. Said he was here all of Sunday night. You know what I think? If he was here Saturday and Sunday, he was passed out in his car both nights. Whole squadron of thieves could’ve emptied the warehouse, carried everything out right past him and he wouldn’t’ve noticed.”