Damn! Everything reminded me of him lately, everything I did seemed to be colored by my relationship with him and my reaction to his descent into suicide. Beating myself up with all the memories large and small, taking out my frustrations on others like Tamara who didn’t deserve such shabby treatment. The problem was mine, mine and Eberhardt’s. The two of us wrapped up so tightly together that it was no longer easy to establish separation or perspective. Too often I looked at him and saw myself. And when you look at yourself in the reflected light of truth and insight, sometimes you don’t like what you see. Don’t like yourself much at all. And you begin to realize that there is sham and fantasy in your self-perceptions too...
I tried to make myself concentrate on preliminary work on the suspicious accident-insurance claim. No good. I thought about calling Bobbie Jean again, but I didn’t do it. It would be cruel to keep bugging her the way I was bugging myself. She’d told me she would talk to the bank again about the five-hundred-dollar check; if and when it was cashed, I’d hear from her.
Another few minutes crawled away to the accompaniment of machine noise — the PowerBook’s peckety keyboard and then the rattle and clatter of the printer. For Christ’s sake, I thought, why keep on sitting here like this, letting a wall build for no good reason? Your fault; make it right. I stood and went to Tamara’s desk. She didn’t look up, so I cleared my throat. She still didn’t look up.
“Tamara, I’m sorry. I had no cause to take out my crappy mood on you. It won’t happen again...”
She wasn’t listening. Not because she was still peeved, I thought, but because she was staring at what was coming out of the printer. The thing quit clattering and she reached over, tore off the sheet. “Yeah, interesting,” she said, and wheeled around and cocked an eye at me. The eye was free of both cynicism and anger; either she’d forgotten I’d snapped at her or had heard my apology and decided to accept it without comment. Letting me off easy.
“What’s interesting?”
“News story I just downloaded from the Santa Rosa paper.”
“Something to do with the Arco skip-trace?”
“No. I finished that last night. Erskine case. All the stuff you told me kept dancing around in my head, so I figured I’d do some cruising on the information highway, see could I pull up anything new.”
I said, “No point in it, with the client dead.”
“So now I’m the only one with doubts about how he got that way?”
“Okay. What’d you find out?”
“Nothing much about Erskine, or Nelson or Woolfox. But Gail Kendall... here, take a look.”
I read through the printout. The news story was nine years old and had made the front page of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. An out-of-work architect with a history of domestic violence, one Eugene Finley, had gone on an early-morning shooting rampage in Glen Ellen, wounding one of his neighbors and killing another’s dog with a shotgun; then he’d taken his wife captive and barricaded the two of them inside their house, threatening to kill her and then himself. The local police had called in the county SWAT team and hostage negotiator, and after a five-hour standoff Finley had agreed to give himself up. He’d released his wife, but as soon as she was out the front door he’d come into the doorway with the shotgun and tried to blow her head off. He’d missed, but one of the SWAT marksmen hadn’t; Finley had died instantly with a bullet in his brain. The wife who had narrowly escaped harm was Gail Kendall Finley, “a noted Sonoma Valley wine chemist.”
Tamara said when I was done reading, “No surprise Nelson and Kendall got to be friends. Went through the same kind of shit, had their scars in common. Sisters.”
“But not necessarily partners in crime.”
“Makes a big coincidence even bigger, though, right? Erskine shows up after four years and a few days later he’s dead meat. And now we find out the ex and her best bud are battered women and Kendall’s old man died from lead in the head, even if it was a SWAT cop who put it there.”
“It’s still circumstantial,” I said. “No proof of a connection or any kind of collusion.”
“So there isn’t one? You believe that?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“Feels like murder, doesn’t it? Feels that way to me.”
“Tamara, what it feels like to the two of us isn’t relevent. There’s nothing I could do even if I wanted to. It’s a police matter, out of my hands.”
“Didn’t stop you some other times I know about.”
“You know too much. I’m finished with the Erskine shooting and so are you from now on. Clear?”
Her mouth said, “You the boss man.” Her too-wise smile said the only person I was fooling here was myself.
Another night alone in my flat. Another session with the paper remnants of Eberhardt’s final months. And the same zero as last night, the numbers and words all blurring together into an unrecognizable mass like a stew cooked so long you couldn’t tell one ingredient from another. Yet I had the same nagging feeling I was missing something — and the same worry that the feeling was imaginary. My subconscious playing games with me, creating shimmery apparitions and then daring me to catch one before it faded away?
Another night alone in bed, watching the dark, then entering the dark place...
...Narrow and chill, sometimes moving and sometimes stationary, an alley or tunnel or train whispering through a tunnel, running walking stumbling toward a dot or spot of white, yellow, white glow, light glow, growing larger and then smaller and then it winked out and I was in clinging satin blackness and somewhere a voice said, “Join me for a midnight snack?”...
Cracking up a little.
That was how I felt in the morning, as if there were tiny fissures forming and spreading inside my head and if I didn’t do something to stop the process, and soon, the fissures would deepen and widen and eventually split me into ragged eggshell halves. And what would pop out like a mutated baby chick was a core thing, a kind of capering and gibbering Id that would run around in mad circles until it collapsed and died of sheer frustrated exhaustion. There was a horrifically funny edge to that, but I didn’t laugh. This was not a good time to be treating anything lightly, least of all my own dark side.
What I needed to do, I thought as I showered, was to get my mind into something besides Eberhardt’s life, Eberhardt’s death. And keep it there until I regained some perspective. Another case, one that required physical as well as mental activity; I’d spent too much time sitting around the office lately. Fine, except that the only case I had working was the supermarket accident claim, and that was routine and would likely require a lengthy stakeout before I wrapped it up — the worst possible inactivity I could indulge in right now.
What else? Nothing else.
Just Ira Erskine.