“You didn’t leave messages after Friday night. You see or talk to him over the weekend, or Monday or Tuesday?”
“No, I told you, he never got back to me.”
“The day before he died,” I said, “he deposited five hundred dollars in his checking account. You know anything about that?”
“How would I know anything about it? No.”
“He also wrote a check for the same amount to an unspecified payee. Wouldn’t have been you, would it?”
“Why would he be writing me a five-hundred-dollar check?”
“Payback of a loan, maybe. I’m asking you.”
“No. He didn’t send me any check.”
“So why no messages after Friday night? You quit on him, Barney?”
He didn’t like that, which probably meant it was true. He drew himself up and slammed his hand down on the desk blotter. “I was busy over the weekend, I had other commitments—”
“Me, too, only mine were up in Creekside.”
That bought me a glower. His lips formed an obscenity but he didn’t give voice to it.
I said, “Exactly why do you think Eb tried to get in touch with me?”
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
“Say it anyway.”
“He was having second thoughts. Wanted you to talk him out of killing himself.”
“Did he? I thought so, too, for a while, but now I’m not so sure. Why me and not you? You’re the one who was still his pal.”
“But I’m not a hand-holder or a bleeding heart. You are.”
“So he turned to me just like that, after four years? Not Bobbie Jean, not Joe, not a suicide hotline — me, the ex-partner he hated and wanted nothing to do with.”
“Maybe he didn’t hate you as much as you think. Maybe he was just ripped up by all the crap you laid on him before the split.”
“He say that to you?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Rivera the Omniscient. Did he mention my name either of the last two times you talked to him? Drunk or sober?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t on his mind.”
Anything was possible with a man in the throes of a suicidal depression. Including a visit to a breed of doctor he’d always distrusted. I asked Rivera, “Did he mention a psychologist named Richard Disney?”
“...No. Why?”
“How about a Dr. Caslon? Night ER resident at S.F. General.”
“No. What do they have to do with Eberhardt?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said. “He made an appointment to see Disney last Tuesday. He didn’t keep it — canceled at the last minute. Dr. Caslon is the one who referred him.”
“An ER resident? What’s the connection?”
“You tell me. Eberhardt say anything about a recent visit to the hospital?”
“No.”
“Involvement in an accident of some kind?”
“No. Drunk and banged up his car, maybe.”
“There wasn’t any damage to his car.”
“Fell down, got in a fight, whatever.”
“Not according to Bobbie Jean.”
“All right, so he met this Caslon some other way. On one of his cases. Or in a damn bar.” Another peppermint disappeared between the chubby lips. “Why does it matter to you? What he did or didn’t do at the end?”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“No.”
“Except where I’m concerned.”
He sucked and chewed and said nothing.
“Well, maybe you don’t care what triggered his suicide,” I said, “but I do. Something had to push him over the edge. I want to know what it was.”
“Maybe it was you,” Rivera said.
“...What?”
“His last resort, last hope, and you didn’t care enough to call him back. You could’ve been the push.”
The skin on my neck and between my shoulder blades seemed to bunch and curl upward. The possibility had never even occurred to me. I said, “Bullshit,” but the denial lacked conviction in my own ears.
Me? For God’s sake, me?
I ate an early dinner, food out of cans that I didn’t really want, alone in my flat. Then I drove to San Francisco General, timing it so I arrived at the emergency room a little before seven o’clock. The time to catch Dr. Caslon, if I could catch him at all, was before he got swept up in ER’s nightly parade of drug overdoses, accident trauma cases, shootings, stabbings, bludgeonings, and other instances of human suffering and human viciousness.
I’d been in the big beige-walled, linoleum-floored waiting room more times than I cared to remember, the last one less than a year ago to deliver a beating victim for treatment. On that night, ER had been experiencing one of its rare lulls; tonight, the staff was busy enough, though it was too early for the heaviest carnage — that usually comes somewhere around the witching hour — and a weeknight besides. A weeping woman cradling an arm swathed in a bloody towel was perched on one bench; on another, an Asian man whose face was a bas-relief of bruises and contusions was being comforted by members of his family; and on a gurney, awaiting transport into one of the examining rooms, lay a black kid about fifteen, his head wrapped in makeshift bandages. Not much business at all, really, for another evening in the urban jungle.
The admissions nurse, closeted behind heavy glass, listened to me tell her why I was there with an air of impassive and remote civility, as if there were several more layers of invisible glass between her world and mine; she’d seen and heard it all, and as long as she was here in this place, she wasn’t letting any of it touch her up close and personal. She would have Dr. Caslon paged, she said, please sit down. I sat down. The page went out over the loudspeaker. I kept on sitting there while the weeping woman was ushered inside by a nurse and an attendant in crisp whites came out and wheeled the black kid away. Nobody paid any attention to the Asian man; he kept sitting there, too, in the bosom of his family, wearing a stunned expression under his mask of lumps.
At the end of ten minutes I went back to the admissions nurse to request another page. No sooner was the doctor’s name out of my mouth than a voice behind me said, “I’m Dr. Caslon. What can I do for you?”
He was an African-American about thirty-five, with one of those rugged faces into which deep lines had already been cut, as if with an etching tool. By the time he was sixty he would resemble one of the Mt. Rushmore heads come to life and sculpted in black granite. Sooner than that, if he kept on working night shift in ER.
I introduced myself and showed him the photostat of my license. Nothing changed in his expression, then or when I said, “I’m here about a man named Eberhardt, Doctor. A former police lieutenant who committed suicide ten days ago.”
“Yes?” he said, but not as if the name or the case meant anything to him.
“It’s possible he was a patient here within the last two or three weeks. And that you may have been the attending physician.”
“I don’t recall the name. What sort of medical emergency?”
“I’m not sure there was one. Probably alcohol-related, if so.”
“Half the cases we get are alcohol-related,” Caslon said. “How did you get my name?”
“You referred him to a psychologist named Richard Disney.”
“Did I? Well, Dr. Disney is an old friend of my father’s; I often refer patients to him... Eberhardt, you said? Two to three weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Caslon did some cudgeling of his memory. No good; he shook his head.
“Maybe if I described him...”
Another headshake. “I see so many people,” he said, and the smile that flashed on and off before he spoke again was bitterly humorless. “I remember wounds more easily than I remember faces.”
“I understand, but this is important to me, Doctor. Could you check the admission records? I know that’s an imposition, but all I want to know is whether or not Eberhardt was admitted, and if he was, when and why.”