I hadn’t spent much time there lately and the rooms had a musty, closed-in smell. The day was a carbon copy of Saturday, cool and cloudy, so I opened windows in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room bay to air the place out. Then I wandered around trying to find something to occupy both my hands and my mind. Carbon copy of yesterday in that respect, too: nothing appealed, nothing held my interest for more than a few minutes. By noon I was wrapped up hard and tight like an oversize handball, metaphorically bouncing off the walls. I bounced myself out of there finally, into the car and down to Union Street. Sunday crowds made parking all but impossible; both garages where I can usually find space were full. To the Marina then, where I lucked into a curbside spot just off Chestnut. I walked over to Fanucci’s and treated myself to a calzone. Fanucci’s makes the best Italian sausage calzones in the city, but this one did nothing for my mood; for all the enjoyment I got out of it, it might have been a plain burger from the Mickey D’s on Lombard.
After lunch I walked to the Palace of Fine Arts. Clots of noisy tourists drove me away again, back to the car. So then I went driving. Not headed anywhere in particular, just killing time and trying to work through the restless, out-of-sorts mood. That was what I thought at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I was down on the Embarcadero, aimed toward the China Basin Bridge and Third Street, that I admitted to myself I’d had a destination all along, drawing me as surely and inexorably as a magnetic field draws particles of iron.
The alley was off Third, between what used to be Army Street — Cesar Chavez Street now — and the Islais Creek Channel. Bolt Street, it was called. Block-and-a-half long, wide enough for two semis to scrape past each other, walled on one side by a truck storage yard behind a cyclone fence topped with coils of barbed wire, on the other by a string of small industrial warehouses. The building stretched across the upper end, creating a cul-de-sac, was bisected into two halves lengthwise; the half that fronted on Bolt Street belonged to the liquor distributors, O’Hanlon Brothers. A long loading dock with three recessed truck bays ran along the facing wall; the dock and all of the bays were empty on this Sunday afternoon. The entire alley was deserted except for a couple of overflowing Dumpsters next to the storage yard. A gusty wind off the Bay nearby played with scraps of litter, swirling them along the uneven pavement, building little heaps in doorways and crannies. In broad daylight Bolt Street had a desolate feel. At 3 A.M. on a cold, dark, foggy morning, it must have seemed like the back end of nowhere.
Halfway into the abbreviated second block, on the right side, I saw the sign for a solenoid valve company. Its entrance was set back about fifteen feet from the street, the open space in front formed by the ends of two shallow concrete docks; the space was long enough and wide enough for two cars parked parallel, three if they were slanted in diagonally. The docks were high enough so that at night the space would be in heavy shadow — a perfect location for a one-man surveillance stakeout.
This was where Eberhardt had been parked last Wednesday morning. This was where he’d blown the hole in his chest and his life out through the exit wound between his shoulder blades.
I pulled in there, sat for a minute, then got out into the chill wind and stood listening to it whistle and moan through the narrow canyon, looking down at the pavement, around at the empty docks and weathered wooden walls and closed doors and dirt-blinded windows. Waiting to feel something — I wasn’t sure exactly what. Not an emotion like sadness or sorrow; it was too late for any of that. Morbid curiosity wasn’t what had brought me here either. Waiting for some sort of psychic connection, I suppose, as if by standing on the spot where he’d died I could summon up an insight into his reasons why.
Foolish notion.
I felt nothing at all except cold.
Pretty soon I closed myself inside the car again and switched the heater on and then drove ahead to the O’Hanlon Brothers dock and turned around in one of the truck bays. On my way out of Bolt Street I thought that it was easy enough to understand why Eberhardt had picked this place to die in. It wouldn’t take much for a despondent, drink-sodden man sitting here night after night, listening to the wind and staring into the foggy dark, to convince himself that this dead-end alley should be his own dead end. A combination of things had brought him to that point — failure, frustration, lost hope, bitterness, the physical erosions of advancing age. But there also had to be a trigger, some occurrence or revelation or final indignity, to make him go through with it. No matter how mired in despair a man might be, he doesn’t just all of a sudden trade living for dying. Something prods him across the line between thinking about it and actually doing it. Every suicide, every homicide has its trigger.
What was Eberhardt’s? Kerry had been so right — it was what kept bothering me, why I was having trouble sleeping. What had caused the poor sorry son-of-a-bitch to cross the line?
Monday.
I was half an hour late getting to the office, something I seldom allow to happen. For the first time in over a week I’d slept most of a night straight through. A nearly sixty-year-old body like mine can take only so much stress and sleep deprivation, and then it was either release and regenerate or something would give and I’d find myself in the hospital or an ornate box like the one Eberhardt had been planted in. The choice wasn’t a conscious one; my body had made it for me. Good old reliable body. So far, anyway.
The night’s rest had put me in a better frame of mind. Hardly cheerful, but at least the funeral hangover was gone and I could start a new work week without dragging my butt. One day at a time.
Tamara was busy at her computer when I walked in. Wearing an all-green outfit today, and a bright green, new-looking jade heart on a gold chain around her neck. In profile and in concentration her dark, round face had a burnished look, as if it were being lighted from within.
Watching her tap away on the Apple keyboard, I marveled again at the change in her in the short time she’d worked as my part-time assistant. When we’d first met she had been hostile, brimming with the protective cynicism too many African Americans develop by the time they reach college age, the result of constant reminders that the biggest damn lie in America is that ours is no longer a racist society; and her attitude toward the “private eye business” had been one of scornful amusement. Computer hacking was all she cared about; the job with me was nothing more than a way to earn expense money while she pursued a computer science degree at San Francisco State — drudge work, like clerking in a store. But the much-maligned private eye business can be seductive. It isn’t glamorous or exciting, at least not ninety-five percent of the time, but it is challenging; and doing it properly requires intelligence, ingenuity, initiative, and skill at problem-solving. Once Ms. Corbin discovered these truths, her attitude began to change, and before long she’d become a passionate convert. In the past six months she’d dragged me forcibly into the computer age by refining all phases of my “retro operation,” to the point where she was doing a third of the work on her PowerBook in only twenty hours a week and thus rapidly becoming indispensible. If she quit on me today I’d be in a hell of a bind. As an unrepentent technophobe, who wouldn’t know a megabyte from a dog bite, I could not even get into my own files without the aid of someone who was above average in computer literacy. Not much chance of Tamara quitting, though, not for a while yet. She was so thoroughly seduced that she’d admitted to the serious consideration of a new career goaclass="underline" high-tech investigative work.