His bluntness nettled me, even though he was probably right. I held down a sharp retort, handed him the sheet of company stationery containing the list of names and addresses. “Did you give this to Eberhardt? I found it in his files.”
“Yeah. He asked for it first thing, people I had any reason to suspect. Former employees, most of ’em.”
“Who circled that one name? You or him?”
“Wasn’t me. Forbes, eh? I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“If Danny Forbes is the thief? Why do you say that?”
“We got twenty people working for us, a dozen in the warehouse. I’d lay odds seventeen, eighteen are either stone honest or too timid to steal from us. I figure maybe three guys still on the payroll have the balls to do it. Forbes is one.
“Why him specifically?”
“Why?” O’Hanlon thought about it. “He’s got an attitude, that’s one reason. Little guy, good worker but always acting tough, like it’ll make him bigger than he is. Got in a fight with a teamster on the loading dock once, man almost twice his size — nearly had his head torn off. Got the crap beat out of him the weekend those last seven cases disappeared, too.”
“Oh? Here, you mean?”
“In some bar near where he lives. Showed up on Monday morning with his nose bent out of shape and a cut over one eye. Guy shoved him, he shoved back, boom! he’s on his ass and breathing sawdust. That kind never learns.”
“Does he have a key to this place?”
“Key? Him? Hell, no. Nick and me are the only ones have keys. New locks. I had ’em changed when the thefts started, not that I expected it’d do much good.”
“Why not?”
“Too easy to get in and out, if you been working here long enough. Old doors, old windows, and too many for tight security. Guy like Forbes could figure ways in and out without too much trouble. Only real way for us to safeguard the inventory is to have all new doors and windows or an alarm system installed, and either one’d cost us five times as much as we been losing on the stolen liquor.”
“Why don’t you just fire Forbes and the other two?”
“You think I wouldn’t like to? I’d kick ‘em out in a New York minute if it wasn’t for their union. Nick and me, we treat our people right and we have good relations with all the unions, can’t afford to get ’em down on our necks, but sometimes the rules are a pain in the hinder... Ah, hell, why bitch about something you can’t do anything about?”
“You single out Forbes when you first talked to Eberhardt?”
“Not exactly. Just told him what I told you — Forbes and Barnes and King are the three still working for us that’re capable of it.”
But Eberhardt hadn’t circled Barnes or King; he’d circled Forbes. Why? If he’d found out anything incriminating against the man, there was no indication of it in his file...
O’Hanlon had turned to the glass wall and was surveying his domain. Pretty soon he motioned to me, and when I joined him he said, “See that guy over there by the liqueur bins? On your right there. That’s Forbes.”
Danny Forbes was a little guy, all right — thin, sinewy, with a mop of red hair and the kind of face that would contract into a belligerent glare three times as often as it would open up into a smile. He was stacking cases in a row of floor bins, working at a steady pace.
“If he is the one,” O’Hanlon said, “I’ll be the next man to knock him on his skinny ass. And it won’t be long, either. Another big shipment’s coming in next week and Nick and me got plans to stake out the place ourselves. Catch the son-of-a-bitch red-handed.”
“Suppose he lays off this one?”
“He better not. We haven’t got time to stake out every new shipment comes in. Bastard does lay off, maybe I’ll be in the market for another private eye after all. How much you charge by the day?”
“More than you’d be willing to pay. Not interested, T. K.”
“Too bad. I like you, the way you handle yourself — real professional. Too bad I didn’t pick you out of the phone book instead of that lush Eberhardt. We’d’ve got along fine, you and me.”
I doubted it. But I managed to get out of there without telling him so and lowering his already less-than-exalted opinion of private detectives.
On the way back downtown I detoured by the Hall of Justice to see Jack Logan. Jack is a lieutenant in General Works, Eberhardt’s old rank and detail. The two of them had worked together for a lot of years, been good friends before Eberhardt took his early retirement. But their friendship, too, had faded with the years. After the end of the regular poker game that had included the three of us, Joe DeFalco, and Barney Rivera, they’d seen little of each other. Jack hadn’t had any contact with him at all, he’d told me, in ten months.
He was in but busy, so I had to wait fifteen minutes before he called me into his office. He said he couldn’t give me much time; I said I didn’t need much, and told him briefly why I was there. A few more creases appeared in his lined face; he lifted a hand to rumple his already rumpled gray hair.
He said, “What makes you think this Danny Forbes might be involved in Eb’s death?”
“I don’t think that. I’m just poking around, trying to make sense of what happened. You know me, Jack.”
“Oh, yeah, I know you.” He punched up the file on his computer, studied the screen. “Nothing there at all. Forbes is a bowler, bowls Tuesday nights in a mixed doubles league in Daly City. He was in bed with one of the women in the league, her apartment in D.C., when Eb died.”
“That kind of alibi is never too solid.”
“In this case, it is.”
“Does Forbes have a record?”
He checked the file. “No felony arrests.”
“What about the alleged bar fight he got into two weekends ago?”
“What about it? Happened days before Eb shot himself.” Jack leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his paunch. He’s nearing retirement and tends now and then to adopt an avuncular pose, even with someone his own age. “You can’t make a murder case out of this.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Aren’t you? It was suicide and no mistake. Everything says so: his drinking, his mental state, the circumstances, the note in the glove box, the fact that it was his gun and only his prints were on it—”
“Three-fifty-seven Magnum,” I said. “That’s a big piece. Take some effort to angle it against your own chest. And why do it that way? Why not in the mouth, or against the temple?”
“For Chrissake, man, who knows what goes through a suicide’s mind in those last seconds? Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to eat the bullet. Maybe he was too drunk to be thinking much at all. A chest shot takes some maneuvering but it’s not uncommon. Powder burns on his shirt, nitrate traces on his hand — he fired the round.”
“All right.”
“Suicide. Period. The investigating inspectors know it and I know it and you know it, too. Nobody likes it when a cop, a friend, blows himself away, but it happens and it happened in this case. Why don’t you give yourself a break and accept it, put it behind you like the rest of us are trying to do?”
“Yeah,” I said, as much to myself as to Logan. “Why the hell don’t I?”
8
Elizabeth Street, climbing one of the hillsides in the upper reaches of Noe Valley, is old residential San Francisco — quiet, middle-class, single-family houses on good-size lots and the neighborhood not much changed since Eberhardt and Dana bought their house shortly after they were married forty years ago. It was a large two-story frame with an open front yard and an attached garage — the one joint possession he’d insisted on keeping as part of the divorce settlement. Until four years ago he’d maintained the property well enough, but he seemed not to have bothered much since. Its green-and-brown paint job was flaked and peeling, one of the porch railings had been broken and left unrepaired, weeds and untrimmed shrubbery made a jungly nest of the yard.