The homicide inspectors had found a suicide note in the glove compartment of his car. A few words scrawled on a piece of notepaper that explained nothing: I’ve had enough. I can’t keep hurting anymore. You won’t believe it Bobbie Jean but I love you.
Bobbie Jean’s words to me on the phone three days ago explained nothing either. “All I can tell you,” she’d said, “is that he was deeply depressed and drinking way too much. No, he never mentioned suicide. He didn’t talk about anything that mattered, hadn’t in a long time. He wasn’t the same man, the man I fell in love with five years ago. The last year or so... I was sleeping with a stranger.”
A stranger to Bobbie Jean made him twice one to me. The Eberhardt I’d known, or thought I knew, wasn’t the same man who’d put a .357 Magnum to his chest and blown his heart to shreds. The bottom line was, I hadn’t known Eberhardt at all. I’d been surprised when he ended our partnership and our friendship on such a bitter note; surprised that he’d maintained four years of silence; surprised that he’d suddenly broken it by calling my office last week for an unspecified reason; surprised that an apparently moderate drinker had turned into a depressive alcoholic; and surprised that he’d been capable of killing himself. All the surprises added up to one harsh truth: The Eberhardt I’d thought I knew was an illusion created and solidified through a series of misconceptions. Even my reading of his private demons had been false.
More than once I’d tried to imagine the way it’d been for him that last night. Sitting alone in his car at three A.M., in an alley out near Islais Creek — the fifth straight night he’d been there on a futile stakeout to catch a thief who’d been stealing cases of expensive hooch from a liquor distributor’s warehouse. Brooding because this was the only job he’d had in over a month and his future prospects were just as bleak. Drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, finishing it, throwing it on the floor where the homicide inspectors found it. Taking out the Magnum, a big, deadly piece he’d bought sometime after opening his own one-man agency. Holding the weapon in his hand, peering at the shape of it in the dark, feeling its coldness, nerving himself. And then instead of putting the muzzle in his mouth the way most of them did — pressing it tightly against his chest and squeezing the trigger. I could visualize all of that with no trouble, but the man who’d done those things had no face. He was all shadow and silhouette, the way Eberhardt would be in my memory from now on.
Kerry moved against me and I realized the burial rite was done; the other mourners were already drifting away. We went too. Ahead I saw Joe DeFalco say something to Barney Rivera, who ignored him and hurried on. Joe stopped, frowning, and when Kerry and I reached him, he fell into step alongside me.
“What the hell’s the matter with Barney?” he said. “He acts like the two of us have leprosy.”
“You know the answer to that, Joe.”
“Yeah. But for Christ’s sake, we didn’t have a clue Eb was suicidal. Not a clue.”
“We might’ve if I’d returned Barney’s calls.” Rivera had telephoned my office twice last week.
“You don’t know he was calling about Eberhardt. And even if he was, why the hell didn’t he say something?”
“Maybe he didn’t know how bad the situation was, any more than we did.”
“Then why blame you and me? We’re not miracle workers.”
“I didn’t return Eb’s call either,” I reminded him.
“And he told Barney you didn’t? Yeah, I suppose. Still, Eb’s message to you didn’t say why he wanted to talk. Didn’t have to be that he was looking for help, somebody to keep him from pulling the trigger on himself.”
“Why else, Joe? His message did say it was urgent I contact him by Sunday night. Figures that was his original target date. The fact that it took him another two days to nerve himself up indicates second thoughts.”
“Maybe. So why didn’t he call me when he didn’t hear from you? Or go to Bobbie Jean? Or call the suicide hotline? Why you and nobody else except maybe Barney?”
I had no answer for that. I shook my head.
“Anyhow,” DeFalco said, “it’s not your fault any more than it’s Barney’s or mine. You were two hundred and fifty miles away, up to your ass in white supremacists. I wouldn’t’ve returned personal calls either, in your place. I didn’t get in touch with Eb, for that matter, and I could have. We talked about it on the phone, remember?”
“I remember.”
He blew out a heavy breath. “So what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You’re not shouldering any blame, are you?”
At first I had, a little. No longer. Even if I had talked to Eberhardt and he’d unloaded on me, what could I have done or said from a distance of two hundred and fifty miles and four bitter years? How can you stop a stranger from acting on a death wish you don’t condone and can’t really understand?
“No,” I said.
“I hope not.”
“Let’s drop the subject, okay?”
“Sure. Over and done with anyway, the whole sorry business. I don’t even know why I put myself through today. I should’ve stayed home with Nancy.” Nancy was his wife. DeFalco’s only religion was the newspaper business, but she was a strict Catholic and Catholics consider suicide a cardinal sin.
“We all should’ve stayed home,” I said.
“I can use a drink. How about you? Kerry?”
“Too early for us,” she said.
“I know a place in Daly City, not far from here. You can both have mineral water or something. I feel like company.”
But I didn’t, and it was plain that Kerry felt the same. “Not today, Joe,” I said. “We’d only talk about Eberhardt and I’ve had enough. More than enough.”
In the parking lot DeFalco went off to his car, and as Kerry and I neared mine, Dana came over in hesitant strides. We’d exchanged a few words before the church service; it was the first I’d seen her in several years. She looked trim and fit, her face so smooth and unlined I decided she’d had it lifted not too long ago. The good life in Palo Alto. There was a time when I’d resented her for cheating on Eberhardt, breaking up their marriage, but that had been long ago. I wondered now if she’d woken up one morning to find herself lying next to a stranger, the same as Bobbie Jean had, and if that as much as anything else was what had driven her into the professor’s arms.
She said tentatively, “I wish there was something I could say.”
“Me, too. But there isn’t.”
“I can’t even cry for him. A man I was married to for nearly twenty years.”
“You didn’t know him anymore, Dana. None of us did.”
“Yes, but still... I wish I could shed just one tear. You loved him too, once. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Well.” She produced a pallid smile and said, “Take good care of yourself.” The smile shifted to Kerry. “Take good care of each other.”
I watched her hurry off, thinking that it was the last time I would ever see her and not feeling anything one way or the other. And a few seconds later Bobbie Jean was there, alone, Cliff Hoyt and the two daughters looking on solicitously from a short distance away.
I remembered Bobbie Jean as young-looking, active, high-spirited in a controlled way. In the past few years she had aged visibly: a fine tracery of lines and wrinkles marring her facial skin, the brightness leeched out of her blue eyes, her movements stiff and slow like an old woman’s. The years themselves weren’t responsible, I thought. Eberhardt, the stranger in her bed, and her life with him were to blame.
She said, “Thank you both for being here,” in the formal way of speaking people adopt at funerals. Oddly, her South Carolina accent, which she’d all but lost after more than a decade on the West Coast, had become pronounced again. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd: a yearning, conscious or unconscious, for home and better days.