He glanced at his watch. “I don’t have much time...”
“Please, Doctor.”
“This man Eberhardt. A close friend of yours?”
“And my former partner. The suicide note he left is vague and there are so many unanswered questions...”
Caslon was young enough and compassionate enough to still be swayed by that kind of plea. He consulted his watch again and then said, “All right, but we’ll have to make it quick. How do you spell the name?”
I told him. He stepped around me to the window, asked the nurse to check the files.
And thirty seconds later she said, “We have no admission record for anyone named Eberhardt, Doctor.”
Caslon turned to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, spreading his hands palms up.
“But you did refer him to Dr. Disney; Disney’s receptionist was certain of it. How can that be, if he wasn’t a patient of yours?”
“He may have gotten my name somehow and used it without my knowledge. A referral doesn’t always come directly from one doctor to another, you know.”
“You mean Eberhardt could’ve called Disney’s office and used your name and they wouldn’t have checked with you?”
“That’s right. No reason for them to, unless the patient were to give them cause.” Caslon’s eyes shifted once more to his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said again, distractedly this time, and started to move away.
I went after him, pressed one of my business cards into his hand and asked him to please give Eberhardt’s name some more thought when he had free time. He looked at the card blankly, as if it were an unidentifiable object; tucked it into the pocket of his uniform jacket just as the entrance doors thumped open and a team of paramedics wheeled a stretcher inside. An old woman lay on the gurney, an oxygen mask fitted over her nose and mouth. In half a dozen strides Dr. Caslon was beside her, bending and talking to one of the paramedics; he’d forgotten all about me as soon as he saw his first patient of the night.
I’ll never hear from him, I thought.
This finishes it. Now I’ll never know.
13
It was frustration more than anything else that sent me over to the Portola district rather than home to my fiat or Kerry’s condo. Proximity had something to do with it, too — Silliman Street, just north of McLaren Park, is only a few miles from S. F. General and easily reachable by freeway — but I might have gone there even if it had been twenty miles out of the way. Now I’ll never know kept repeating inside my head, a kind of mantra of the perverse. I could not make myself believe it because I didn’t want to believe it; you can deny anything, even the most fundamental truths, if your desire for the opposite is strong enough.
That part of the city is working-class residential, on the downscale side as the result of any number of urban problems, one of them being the drug-infested housing projects on the Visitacion Valley side of McLaren Park. Dowdy row houses dominated the block between Gambier and Harvard; the one owned or rented by Danny Forbes was near the Gambier corner, small and saggy and nondescript. The double garage door under its bay windows was wide open, light from inside spilling out into the street. No other lights showed at the front.
Well, I thought, at least he’s home. I had no idea what I would say to him. Scratch his surfaces, see if there was anything underneath worth burrowing after.
I parked across the street and went to the open door. A beat-up Mercury sedan, twelve to fifteen years old, squatted in one half of the cavelike interior. The other half was either a catchall area for garage-sale junk or a haphazard retreat created by a man who preferred holing up in his garage to occupying his normal living space. Among other items were a couch covered in hideous pseudo-leopard skin, a recliner with a busted footrest, an ancient six-sided poker table with a torn felt top, and a portable TV on a wobbly-looking stand. The TV was turned on; figures that looked as though they were trying to swim through snow made semiarticulate sounds punctuated by gunfire. Nobody was watching them or listening to the noise. For all I could see, the garage was empty.
I stepped inside by three paces for a better look. Next to the chair, I noticed then, was a low table on top of which sat an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses. I was staring at the bottle when wood creaked under descending footsteps and a voice said, “That you, Bert?” and then, explosively, “Hey! The hell you want?”
The stairs were at the rear, beyond the Merc; he came running off the last of the risers, around the front of the car and over to where I stood. Danny Forbes, dressed in a loud plaid sport jacket several years out of fashion and a pair of chocolate-colored slacks. His red hair had been slicked down with a gel whose sweetness assaulted my nostrils as he came up close. His broken nose had healed except for a knot at the bridge and what would probably be a permanent ten-degree list to the left; a scab showed where he’d been cut over one brow. His eyes snapped at me. So did his mouth.
“I don’t know you, man. What the hell’s the idea comin’ in my garage?”
“Door’s wide open. Lights and TV are on.”
“That don’t give you no right to walk in. Who are you? What you want?”
“Few minutes of your time.”
“Whatever you’re selling this time of night, I’m not interested.”
“I’m not selling anything. I’m buying.”
“Yeah? Buying what?” He licked thin lips; his eyes shifted, shifted back to hold on mine again. “I got nothing for sale.”
“How about some information on a dead man named Eberhardt?”
He was the type who couldn’t stand still. He’d been shuffling and bouncing around like one of those mean and hyperactive little dogs, but when I mentioned Eberhardt’s name he froze. Not for long, but long enough. He backed up a step, trying not to look worried, and put another sheen of spit on his lips before he spoke again.
“Who the fuck’s Eberhardt?”
“You know who he was, Danny. Man who killed himself on Bolt Street last week. The detective T. K. hired to find out who’s been stealing from him and Nick.”
“What’s that got to do with me? I don’t know nothing about any of that.” He was dancing again. The eyes flicked to the watch on his wrist, flicked back to my face. “What’re you, another one? T. K. hire you, too?”
“Suppose he did?”
“Suppose you get outta my garage before I throw you out.”
“Something to hide, Danny?”
“Don’t call me Danny. Only my friends call me Danny. I’m telling you, man, get out right now.” Happy feet, and those shifty, shifty eyes. “I mean it.”
“Sure thing, Danny. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Not if I see you first.”
I took my time turning and walking out. He followed me onto the sidewalk, dancing and glaring, and stayed put as I crossed to the car and put myself inside. He was still there, still watching, as I drove off.
I followed Silliman as far as Yale, turned right, turned right again on Felton and came back to Gambier. Halfway along Gambier I shut off my lights and drifted slow toward the Silliman intersection. When I got to where I could see Forbes’s house he was no longer standing in the outspill of light from the garage. Back inside somewhere; about all that was visible from this point was the back half of the Merc.
The last space at the corner was a No Parking zone. I eased the car into it and shut off the engine and sat hunched low in the dark to wait and watch.
It didn’t take long, only about ten minutes. The fifth set of headlights that passed by on Silliman swung into Forbes’s driveway and immediately went dark. The vehicle was a four-by-four of some kind; the light wasn’t bright enough for me to tell the make or model. The man who got out and entered the garage was nobody I’d ever seen before — fat, bald, middle-aged, outfitted in a long leather coat over a pair of baggy pants held up by suspenders.